Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith | Spencer Klavan | EP 489

At a much deeper level, what he does is he shatters the barrier between the sublunar and the super lunar spheres, because now showing an underlying Unity. Right here's the three rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky but the descent of an apple from a tree. Why did Newton have any right to expect that he could do that? Why were people working on that problem at that time? It's because of the assumptions that you're describing, that when we see math, we think we're looking at something universally valid, and that's something that not only hangs together in our brains but will also send a rocket ship to Mars one day.

So, I had the opportunity today to speak with Spencer Claven. I met Spencer partly through my connections with The Daily Wire, but also more specifically we filmed a documentary together for the Foundations of the West series that's now available on The Daily Wire. You could take a look at it there. There's a series of dinner meetings that go along with that as well that expand out the ideas that we analyzed. The more proximal reason for speaking with Spencer today was that he has a new book coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which is available in mid-October 2024, just a couple of weeks after this episode in particular was taped.

We walk through his book, which is an analysis of what would you say of the development of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and an examination of their relationship to the religious ideas that still surround them and that constitute their metaphysical basis, but also an analysis of the dynamic relationship between those systems, those ideas, religion versus science, let's say, as those ideas progressed through time since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. For me, during the conversation, time flew by very rapidly, and Spencer said he had the same experience. So, we're hoping that that spirit of timelessness that encompasses you when you are investigating honestly things that you believe to be true will also surround you as you watch this discussion.

So, welcome to that. So, Spencer, the last time we had any real opportunity to speak together was in Athens, that's right, in front of the Acropolis, which now got the Arizona mountains in the background. But it's a bit of a change, yeah?

Well, it was a good deal to meet in Athens. And that was part, for everybody watching and listening, that was part of the Foundations of the West documentary series, which has been recently released on The Daily Wire Plus platform. So, I did a series of documentaries, two in Jerusalem, one with Ben Shapiro and one with Jonathan Pacho, one in Rome with Bishop Barron and one in Athens with Spencer Claven, and so that was fun.

So what's been the consequence for you or for The Daily Wire as far as, you know, the release of the Foundations of the West? Well, it's really fascinating. And first of all, you know, just looking back at that series when I got to rewatch it as it came out, to think what an honor and a privilege we had to be there together, just a gift. And it was a while back that we filmed that show and I was really struck by the fact that the logic of our conversation at dinner took us to this discussion of anti-Semitism, as you called it, the spirit of Cain. And we sort of arrived at, before the October 7th massacre, before all of the horrors that have unfolded since we had that talk, we kind of arrived at the spirit of the age that's moving. So on one level, it's very sorrowful to look back and see how true that was what we were talking about.

On the other hand, it's sort of a confirmation that these ideas, these issues are so vital now. You know, these things that are supposedly so antiquated, it's ancient history and we're chasing it out of the academy because it's white and it's evil or supremacist or whatever. In fact, the ideas of the West and the principles of the West are so deeply under threat that they become ever more vital by the day. So it's been wonderful to hear from people that this has given them a kind of grounding in where they come from, because we feel so alone in time these days. We feel so cut off from our ancestry, and we've been told that everything basically before sometime in the middle of the 19th century is just backwards nonsense, if that.

And now this leaves people without kind of any means in these extremely turbulent times. So I think, you know, besides just the joy of doing it ourselves and the wonderful conversation we had, it's great to know that we're giving people something, and that is grounding in history and a connection to the past. It was really good of the editors; the editors did a very good job in linking together the conversations within each documentary section in a manner that produced a coherent conversation because it was a very spontaneous enterprise.

And then also across all four, and then part of that, of course, was the dinners that we had afterward in remarkably beautiful locations, crazily beautiful locations, I mean. And those turned out to be very coherent as well, and I think one of the things that made the documentary different from others of its type, let's say, is that we concentrated more on the meaning of the ideas than on the facts of the historical progression, the significance of the historical ideas rather than the nature of the ideas themselves or the historical events.

And so that's also, I think, emblematic of this different conceptualization of the world that's starting to emerge in a way on the ashes of the Enlightenment. So one of the things that I've been writing about and thinking about, and I believe this strikes right to the heart of the issue, is that the postmodern types were correct in one way—not uniquely correct, but still correct even a stopped clock; they're well right. But to give the devil his due, like, it's very interesting and worthy of consideration that a small group of essentially literary critics have upended the world: Foucault, for example, Derrida.

And that act of upending is at the bottom of the culture wars. Something like that doesn’t happen by accident, and what the postmodernists got right in their suspicions was that we cannot see the world merely in consequence of apprehending the dead facts. Yes, it's not possible. You know, and I've been looking into that a lot. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons it's not possible. I mean, the first reason is, there's way too many facts—there's a fact per phenomenon or a fact per combination of phenomena, right? So there’s an infinite number of facts, and so you drown in facts alone; you have to prioritize them; you have to funnel; you have to have some sort of organizing principle.

Yeah, you have to. No, just to look, you have to have some organizing principle because, and this is where the science starts to reflect it as well, the strict empiricist types act as if what presents itself to you are unquestionable sensations, right? That the sensations themselves, the perceptions, have truth as part and parcel of their nature—yes, self-evident truth. It's not true. And the reason it's not true is because you cannot separate perception physiologically from action.

Yes, so it's particularly interesting if you think about how your eyes work. Because when you're looking at something, so you say, “Well, there it is right in front of me,” it's like no. To actually understand how vision works, it's better to think about it the way you might think about touch for a blind person. So when you're using your fingers if you're blind, you have to move them, and then you map out the contours of the thing that you're perceiving, and you aggregate those individual perceptions, let's say micro perceptions, into a whole. Yes, and even if you're blind, the whole manifests itself as a unity in your imagination.

So the idea that blind people don't see is wrong; they don't see light, but they perceive shape. Otherwise, they couldn't orient themselves in the world. You do the same with your eyes: you're feeling your way out with your eyes by moving your eyes; you're exploring, and you piece the world together that way, and you cannot do that without intent, without aim. So even to focus your eyes, you know, because I could look at you and focus there, or I could look, you know, 30 feet away and focus there. Just the choice of focus is goal-directed and value-predicated.

So perception itself is saturated by value, and the postmodernists figured this out. They figured out, and they were right, that there are two ways of looking at it: either we see the world through a story—that's one way of thinking about it—or a descriptor of the value structure through which we see the world is a story. It is a story, okay. So they were right. Now robotics engineers figured this out, and cognitive scientists figured it out, and neuropsychologists figured it out. There are multiple disciplines converged on this, where the postmodernists went wrong, and this is a serious error, was they said, “Well, we see the world through a story; there's no uniting story.”

So that's skepticism of meta narratives, yes, but power rules everything. They slipped into a kind of Marxism, right? So it's contradictory. Okay, extremely remarkable. Your thoughts on this subject are really dovetailing with something that I've been tangling with as well recently. You know, I've got this book that's coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Right, Light of the Mind, Light of the World that's coming out—this is October 5th today, October 15th, so it's coming out October 15th, yes.

So with a couple weeks, ESS, and it's the subtitle is Illuminating Science through Faith. So the book is effectively a new history of the scientific enterprise told as if the question of spiritual matters is not yet resolved, because we have—sort of begun—with this idea, or I at least grew up with this idea that if you wanted to believe in anything religious, you basically had to throw your reason out the door, especially, right? So there's an implicit description of the nature of reality there which you alluded to earlier, which is that we were in the Dark Ages until the scientific method emerged, and then we stepped into the light and the scientific method is antithetical to the religious and vice versa.

Yes, it has to do with exactly this separation that you're talking about between what I think we would now call the subjective and the objective world and this kind of myth that there exist these bare facts out in the world with no interpreting mode available. You can just look at the world without any kind of human interpretation. And that's what the rationalists objected to when they were objecting to the presumptions of the empiricists. Right? They didn't like the idea of self-evident sense data. They knew that we imposed something like an a priori structure on the world, but they didn't—they didn't, what would you say? They didn't take the step to think about that in an interpretive framework, and maybe this is mostly the Greek influence as something that was rational, but it doesn't seem to be rational; it seems to be narrative.

Yes, it's during the Scientific Revolution, in fact. It's Galileo who for the first time draws this division between what will come to be called primary and secondary qualities. And the primary qualities, you may know, are things like quantity, mass, position—these quantifiable things. So primary qualities are actually quantities, and they're therefore supposed to be completely mind-independent, which, if you think about it for a second, is a remarkable claim that numbers have nothing to do with the human mind.

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And finally, join me on a Journey Through Time, Foundations of the West. The work I'm doing with The Daily Wire brings the spirit of adventure forward. Join us on Daily Wire Plus today. Right, well mathematicians themselves differ on that interpretation because some of them believe that the mathematical realm is an independent reality that human beings discover, and others think, well, it's a subjective construction that bears some correspondence to the world; there's much to be said on both sides of those arguments. No, but merely presuming that, as you pointed out, that numbers are self-evident and have nothing to do with the psyche, right? Right? The way we structure things.

And so there was this hope, this very exciting hope at the time that you could draw a picture of the world from no human standpoint; that the world effectively could be reduced to this machine that operates entirely independently of our participation in it. And the secondary qualities—things like color and sound and all of those tactile sensations that you're describing and the way that we build our momentary impressions up into a picture of the world—all of that was secondary. In other words, more subjective. Right? And gradually over time, as the scientific method demonstrated such enormous power, it began to seem as if that picture of the world, the primary qualities picture of the world, was all that was really real because everything else seemed so—everything could be reduced to that, exact, yeah.

Well, it's funny because those so-called primary qualities are something like what everything has in common. And so there is something foundational about them. But you know how the brain handles that to some degree is quite interesting. So if you look at the visual system, your primary cortex extracts out from the visual field some things that you might regard as primary edges, for example. And you could think of edges—edge detection—as one of the primary constituent elements of visual perception.

And then that information so moves from the retina, say, to the first level of visual processing, and then it moves up a hierarchy of visual processing toward perception. Now, at the highest level, perception itself involves motor movement. So for example, when I look at this glass, although I don't know it, when I look at the glass, the grip I would use to grip that glass is activated by the perception. So part of what I perceive as the glass is a grippable object of a certain dimension that I could lift in this manner, and that's activated by the perception without me thinking about it; it's part of the perception.

Now, there's one other thing that's relevant, okay? So you could imagine that when people first started to talk about the visual system, they thought, well, there are basic perceptions and they feed upward to the realm of emotion, motivation, thought, action—one way upward. But the way the system is actually constructed is that all the different levels of the visual system feed back to one another. So even at the level of primary perception, yes, most of what you see when you see something familiar isn't the object; it's your memory of the object, right? So you start to substitute—that's part of what gives you that feeling of familiarity; I've seen this before.

Yes, it's also weirdly enough one of the things that obscures the wonder of the world because as your perception automatizes as a consequence of repeated familiarity with something, instead of seeing the thing in itself, whatever that is, you start to see the memory of your perception of the thing. Now, that's super efficient. Here's a good way of thinking about it. You know, once you're literate, you can't look at a word without hearing it in your imagination, okay? You hear it because your eyes—the part of the brain that's devoted to visual perception and the part that's devoted to auditory perception in the cortex overlap. So your eyes are actually working as ears.

Wow, yeah, and it's so cool. A synthetic—that's right. But once you've established that circuitry, you can't look at a word without seeing the word, right? It's part of the perception. Well, you know, is the word on a page there as an objective entity? Well, yes, the answer is yes and no. So anyway, the problem with the primary and secondary model neurophysiologically speaking is that because there's feedback loops from every level to every other level, it isn't—the idea of a one-way step process towards a higher level of perceptions just isn't right. There's so much top-down constraint, even on the primary perceptions, that it's almost impossible to disentangle the subjective from the objective in perception.

And Francis Bacon worried about this, actually, because his whole effort was to get back to what the Greeks would have called amperia, right? Direct experience. And this was going to be the touchstone of truth, and you were supposed to clear away every preconceived theory that you had before you arrived at the hard data; then you could apply your theories. But there's a passage where Bacon says, “The mind is like a pair of glasses,” or rather like a notepad upon which you're writing. You can't clear something old away until you've written in something new. In other words, there's always that lens.

Yeah, that's a—that's a major it. It also implies that you almost never learn anything without subjecting something previous to a death, right? Which this is partly what makes a revelatory conversation or realization painful. Is that—yeah. And so here's another neurophysiological and sociological problem with the idea of primary perception. You’re constituted so that—it in your embodiment—the fact of skepticism about direct sense data is built in. Here's why. Well, you could see something and assume it was real.

Yes. Well, then why don't we just have one sense? And you might say, well, because things happen behind you, let's say, which you can't see. Well, then why don't you have eyes all the way around your head? Okay? And why, more profoundly, is like, why vision plus hearing plus touch plus taste plus smell, and then proprioception as well? And the answer is because the data coming in from any given single sensory source is not determinative. It's sufficiently flawed so that if you relied on only that, you'd die.

But it's worse than that; it's worse than that because we have five dimensions that we use to triangulate, so to speak, on reality. But that's even—it's not reliable enough, even five qualitatively distinct sources of input, the senses, which are very different from one another, right? If they all report the same thing, we think it's there, but no we don't. We think maybe it's there, and then we ask other people. Right, have you seen it? And then not only do we ask other people, yeah, but we refer to tradition. And then not only do we ask other people and refer to tradition, we also—this is something the Scientific Revolution really did produce, and Francis Bacon in particular, of course, Bacon and Descartes together determined that there were ways that we could approach the problem of what was real that would be more rigorous.

And so the scientific method came up, and the idea there would be if we're trying to account for something and there's a multiplicity of potential causal pathways, we’ll reduce the causal pathway that's under question to one and then systematically vary it. It's a brilliant thing to do. It's brilliant. And what's so, to me, tragic about the story in the true sense is that there's really no villain in this story. It's just—there's a shadow that follows in the light of this discovery. I think maybe there's the villains of the French Revolution. Well, the French always—we can always blame the French.

And in fact, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was Newton's greatest interpreter in France, who took Newtonian mechanics and applied it marvelously to astrophysics, is if there is a villain of my book, for instance, it's Pierre-Simon Laplace. And that he's the guy who takes this method and these mathematical laws for organizing our observations that is Newtonian mechanics, and he draws out of that this claim that the world itself is exhaustively described in what we would now call purely objective terms—that is, all a bunch of particulate matter moving in these totally mind-independent ways.

And he writes this essay, “Laplace’s Demon,” on probabilities—that if you had a mind, right, that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the world, past, present, and future, it would lay open like a book. So he's describing the mind of God, but attributing to mankind the possibility of finding this sort of knowledge—a zero standpoint. That's such an—it’s such an interesting claim there too because it shows that even in a claim that simple, yes, there's an “if,” which is a proclamation—an a priori proclamation of a certain kind of faith: “If precisely this exists.”

And the problem with Laplace’s Demon, which is supposed to, let's say, be able to track the position and momentum of every micro-particle, is it can't; it can’t. Right? So the whole “if” is wrong, right? So the fundamental axiom of faith upon which the deterministic model of objective reality is predicated is false. And you start to talk about the second law of thermodynamics and why it is that things tend toward entropy, and suddenly you've hit upon a rule of the material world that is nevertheless not strictly speaking a law in the sense of being something that must happen by necessity. And it's that discovery, actually, that's a precursor to the quantum revolution. It's not exactly the same, but the same mode of thought is operative in Boltzmann and Max Planck, who's after whom we name the constant that describes the quantum, and that explosion of the atomistic deterministic idea of the world that reduces everything outside of us, and ultimately us as well, to mere bodies in motion that can somehow be known from a zero standpoint or God's-eye view—that totally upends this way of thinking about the world and starts, I think, to point us back toward what you’re describing.

And I think that what you're describing is, at a very deep and primordial level, also what the Book of Genesis—the first creation story—describes.

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Expressvpn.com/jordan. I mean, the problem with this sort of discussion is that when any pseudo-intellectuals get together to put forward a pseudo-intellectual enterprise, they always pull in some strange element of quantum mechanics rip-off that often very badly misunderstood, and I'm very aware that we could wander into the same territory. But there is the fundamental proclamation of the Book of Genesis, which is echoed in many mythological traditions, mhm, like there's a shared pattern, for example, in the Mesopotamian creation.

Yeah, and it’s a very widespread idea that what gives rise to reality eternally, so at the beginning of time, now and forever in the future is something like an active force of apprehension or conception that interacts not with a deterministic world but with a realm of possibility—a realm of structured possibility—and casts that into being.

Now, to me, that's very reminiscent of what consciousness itself does. Like, consciousness—you’re not conscious of what’s predictable. So this is so cool, right? Because if you think about that La Salle world, it’s deterministic; one thing follows another, it’s rule-like, it can be turned into an algorithm. Yes, okay, anything that you do that can be turned into an algorithm, yeah, vanishes from consciousness, right?

So really what your consciousness does as it operates this neurological reality is it’s an exploratory process that involves generally the activation of large areas of the brain. Yes, if you're learning a new word, for example. When you learn the new word, a fairly widespread pattern of neurological activation will accompany your initial perceptions. Right? If it's a really new word, it's even hard to hear the first couple of times; you might have to have it repeated to you multiple times and then you might have to say it multiple times, right?

Okay, so what you're doing is—you hear it repeatedly and you say it repeatedly—is you reduce the number of neurological operations that are necessary in order to specify that phenomenon—and you build this little machine, yes?

On the left side of your brain, farther back in the brain, this little machine that’s specialized for that now, and then from then on, in when you encounter that phenomenon, you use that little specialized machine, yes?

So, but what consciousness itself is doing is concentrating on what isn’t deterministic yet, what isn’t predictable, what hasn’t been established, right? And then, if it can, it algorithmizes everything that you can predict.

This is so important. Yes. Yes, everything you can predict vanishes from your sight, right? Profound, right? So consciousness actually does seem to be the thing that lives on the edge of the transforming horizon of the future.

And that—the reality—this is what seems to be portrayed in the Book of Genesis with the idea of Tohu Vavohu—is that what your consciousness apprehends is not the deterministic world that can be turned into an algorithm but those elements of the world that are not yet revealed but could be. That’s what you’re contending with.

And I want to return to something you said about sort of pseudo-intellectuals bandying about these scientific ideas, because I think that’s absolutely right. There’s a very dangerous direction of travel here where you end up saying something like science has proved the Book of Genesis, or like that, and that’s actually not what either of us is saying at all, but rather quite the reverse, that the Book of Genesis is describing, here, a pattern and indeed an allegorical template that ramifies out into every possible sphere of life.

So this notion that you have that the world is invested in some sense from the beginning with language, “Vayomer Elohim,” and God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And in Hebrew, “Let there be light” and “and there was light” are almost the exact same words. It’s impossible—almost impossible to capture this in the structures of English, but in Hebrew, because time is factored so differently into the verbal system, when God says “let there be light,” he says “yior,” and then when the text says, “and there was light,” it says “vayior.” It’s the same thing.

So to me, what—and light existed. And God said, “Be light” and “light be”—or something that, you know, if you could say it that way. What this implies, I think, is that the text is describing a situation in which mind invests matter with these implicit structures that you are illuminating from a cognitive and psychological perspective.

And that when man is invited into the garden to name the animals, he's not simply inventing the Hebrew language or coming up with the particular sounds he's going to say; it's much, much deeper than that. His mind is formed in such a way as to draw out these implicit—

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, that’s partly why there's an echo in Genesis where the word is what brings being into reality, and then human beings are said to be made in that image. And then that’s reflected further in the text by God’s granting to Adam the power to name, and God himself in the text brings the animals to Adam to see what he'll name them, right?

Not only that, but you know what he does? He brings them to him each after its form and kind, so he’s not bringing a cat; he’s bringing “cat” as a category, which is a very different sort of thing. You know, the text is quite explicit that what’s being presented to Adam is not any particulate entity so much as entities as members of the classes that we use to categorize our perceptions and to draw them into that form.

I mean, you were talking earlier about touching the edge of the cup as a blind person. You think also—one of my favorite examples is hearing, which just at a basic kind of, you know, high school physics kind of level, we know that hearing is a wave, right? That is to say, it’s a pattern of change over time.

And so even before you get to the quality of what you hear, that is, this is a song or this is speech or what have you, if you take a snapshot of every particle in your body—if you could in that La Salle way—at a moment in this conversation where we are discussing—that the sound waves are vibrating between us—nowhere in that snapshot is anything resembling a sound wave because the sound wave involves the pattern of change over time.

And so, in order to create even sound, you need this box into which you can gather and group individual moments of perception that form them together. So everything, that top-down processing that brings things together in unity, this is another one of the weaknesses of the postmodern claim that there’s no transcendent unity, no metanarrative, which is another restatement of the idea of the collapse of the highest—a collapse of the unifying principle—the collapse of God, the death of God.

See, one of the real problems with that hypothesis is that it’s boundless, so there’s no inevitable order, unity. Okay, at what level of analysis are you speaking? Because if I'm going to perceive this as a glass, right, then all of the multitude of things that that glass is—the different molecular positions that the liquid inside it might take—all the different ways that a glass could make itself manifest—all that has to be subsumed into a unity that is the glass.

Yes? Now, I think it’s—I think it’s N; but it might be Monet—I don’t remember—a French impressionist who went out and painted haystacks—a whole series of them under different conditions of illumination, right? And the haystack is the same, but of course it’s not because the colors that constitute the haystack shift dramatically, and that’s what he was investigating.

It’s so interesting because two paintings of the same haystack, really, at the micro level bear nothing in common, right? In common, they’re separate in time; they’re separate in place; the constituent elements are completely different. But there’s an emergent reality, which is the haystack that unifies all those variants in form, yes, and makes the perception possible.

Now the postmodern claim is that there’s no overarching metanarrative. It’s like, if there’s no overarching metanarrative, you can never perceive a unity, right? And they might say, well, there’s a limit to the manifestation of that unity, right?

There's no ultimate unity; it’s like, oh yeah, fine, draw the line, tell me exactly where the unity stops. And then it's worse than that, because let's assume that they’re right, that there is no uniting metanarrative, so no single proper way of looking at the world, right? You can understand that something might be said about that.

Well then, does that mean that the ultimate reality is disunified, that there are various forms of fundamental truth? And if reality itself can’t be unified, because it’s not unified in its essence, then are we destined to conflict between our own motivations even? And how do you and I agree on anything if it doesn’t point towards a unity that’s actually apprehensible and in some way implicit in the world?

This is why this is a huge, huge problem. This is why I was so struck by what you were saying about Foucault and Derrida. I think we can kind of put LaSalle in here too because it mirrors something that happened to me at the end of writing this book. You always come to a few surprises if you’re onto something in a good book, and to me, the biggest surprise was that I understood the postmodernists in a completely new way, and I understood them actually as part of a tradition that probably goes back to Heraclitus, speaking of, right?

But yes, but also runs through people like David Hume and even Bishop Berkeley, who are reacting to this objectivist idea. Yeah, Hume's problem is you cannot compute a pathway forward merely by understanding the terrain, right? You can't get an ought from an is, and the whole thing is inference essentially.

And he’s saying that the only thing that we have in front of us is the fact that the sun has always risen in our experience and all recorded human experience, and it's only on that that we're able to base the idea that the sun's going to rise tomorrow. Shatters this idea of something that remains consistent from day to day.

And that's his scandal of induction, yes, right? That’s the problem the chicken has with the farmer, right? Exactly—no question. The farmer is the chicken’s best friend every day. The farmer brings food until it’s Thanksgiving, in which case the faith the chicken has in the structure of the world as a consequence of induction turns out to be painfully wrong.

Yeah, and the problem is we never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath us, yes, or at what level. Yes. You know, you could even take the sun itself, I’ve thought, because you think, well, there’s nothing more consistent than the sun. It’s like, well, until it emits a solar flare that takes out our entire electrical system, which is a high probability event, right?

In fact, there was a solar flare I think two days ago that’s on its way to Earth, and no one knows what the consequences of that storm will be. Yeah, yeah.

Well, so it seems to me that in reality itself, there are something like levels of predictability that have something to do with statistical regularity. You know, the sun is a fairly predictable entity because of its immense mass and because of its immense mass and size, the transformations that it undergoes can be predicted to some degree at a statistical level reliably, but not entirely.

And I guess that’s also partly—this turns us back to the reason that we evolve consciousness at all. Yes, if we could rely on induction, there’d be no reason for consciousness. Consciousness seems to be the mechanism that corrects for the fact that the world is not fundamentally predictable. Like, seriously, not fundamentally predictable. Irrevocably.

Now, how do you understand, if at all—and this is where we start to wander onto the dangerous territory—one of the things that’s really struck me, and it’s maybe only an analogy—is that the field, the Tohu Vavohu, or the Spirit of God that rests on the water, yes, the—that field, that Spirit interacts with seems to be something like the pool of infinite possibility.

Like it’s represented, for example, in the Mesopotamian stories—Tiamat, yes. Exactly, as a dragon, right? And dragon is an interesting representation because a dragon is something fearsome and predatory, but also something that contains the possibility of treasure.

Yes, and so the underlying metaphor there is that what our consciousness confronts is something infinite in danger and possibility, right? Right? Which seems perfectly reasonable, and that the proper stance to adopt to that is one of something like a heroic endeavor towards fundamental truth.

It’s—and that’s the best way of contending with that. And you see echoes of that in Genesis because God is also periodically characterized as the victor of the battle over Leviathan, for example, which looks like an analog of Tiamat.

And so that’s part of that heroic interaction with reality that characterizes, well, the logos—the spirit of the logos itself, right? The seething ocean.

Okay, so at the quantum level, so what’s being discovered, right? Well, so this—like to approach this through the debates that Niels Bohr used to have with Albert Einstein. So when quantum mechanics was first making itself known, first and foremost to these very men, among others, Bohr and Einstein were two of the great architects of quantum along with Louis de Broglie and any number of—I mean, Max Planck we’ve already mentioned.

But it’s between Einstein and Bohr that this fundamental, irreducible tension emerges in which Bohr, sort of a Koan philosopher, says, “We’re banging up here against the inherently unknowable to the human mind,” right? Right? Yeah, these waves that describe probabilities—this is Schroedinger's, and Heisenberg also kind of managed to mathematically describe probability waves, which tell you where a particle is likely to be but never where it actually is—not because we don’t know—but because in some fundamental sense it isn’t in any of those positions.

And this is Bohr’s idea, right? It’s possibility; it is possibility. And Heisenberg, at one point, wonderfully compares it to Aristotelian potentia, this ancient—it’s really, oh yes—he has potential, yes. Oh, that’s so important.

So pure right and brings back this old Aristotelian idea that the world is made of potential and the realization of potential. And so this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which basically says there are no holding places in your mind for that which is fundamentally unperceived.

So Bohr is saying, of course, all of our measurements and observations are always going to be expressed in terms of classical mechanics because they’re going to be making contact with our minds, which are shaped like classical mechanics in some way. These categories—like space and time, location and position—these are baked into our minds. This is where you get the contend of it all.

And Einstein wonderfully says, if this is true, then it’s the end of physics, because to him, physics means deterministic. Yes, and well, and it also means that mathematics describes directly a reality that is independent of us entirely, and that the world can be blanketed over completely with these objective mathematical terms that describe whatever is most fundamentally real.

And this dispute and its various tributaries are still going on today, which is one reason why this is such treacherous territory to venture into, because there’s always going to be an alternative possible interpretation. But if you accept something like Bohr's interpretation, which I believe remains the most philosophically coherent way of dealing with these discoveries, then what you have is a situation very much like what you’re describing in Genesis.

Now that doesn’t mean that the author of Genesis was told by God about the Schrodinger equations; that’s sort of—that would be the sort of pseudo-science version of it. But it does mean that the pattern you’re observing shot through Genesis and, as you indicate through the whole Hebrew Bible of God’s mind as the resolver of fundamentally unresolved possibilities casts into order—or—that’s good or very good.

Yes, and the idea of us as essentially—that the image of God in us is essentially—

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Today, let me extend that supposition for a minute. So there’s a field of possibility that lays in front of you, and it, in a way, surrounds and constitutes all the objects. So for example, this is a candle, but not if I throw it at you.

Okay, right? So there’s a nonzero possibility that one of the less probable manifestations of this object will occur. Yes? Okay. So then you might say, well under what conditions does this remain a candle? Okay, okay, well that’s very complicated, yes?

Because if I smash it, let’s say, on the edge here, now it’s a knife, right? And it's just as much a potential knife as it is a continuing candle, just as much. Not quite— Not quite—just as much? Hardly. Because we have established an ethical framework between us, yes? That’s a set of our aims—yes—that define the manner in which we’re going to leave the possibilities of that object as they predictably and non-terrifyingly are.

But that’s entirely dependent on our—it’s so interesting, because it’s dependent—yes—on our ethical aim. You can imagine a situation where you’re in a bar where a beer bottle now becomes a spear or a club. Yes, and so that’s within that realm of possibility.

Now the reason that possibility doesn't or does manifest itself is very much dependent—while partly on the intrinsic possibility of the object, right? But it also depends on the aim of the of the perceivers. If our conversation starts to deteriorate into the depths, and we hit a fundamental place of disagreement, and we regard each other as enemies in consequence, then we’re likely to make some of the unpleasant possibilities that surround us much more likely to be manifest.

And one of the things that indicates is that the manner in which the factual itself reveals itself is inextricably dependent on aim. Now what the biblical texts insist upon in their injunction that we should walk with God is that if we oriented ourselves towards the highest possible aim and we did that consistently and without pride, then the manner in which the world would unfold would be the manner that is good or very good.

And that only when we deviate from that heavenly orientation is it the case that the possibilities of the world tilt towards a more fallen or hellish state manifest themselves. So I’ve been thinking about this with regards to work.

So, you know, when Adam and Eve succumb to the sin of pride, they they want to usurp the highest place, right? Under the temptation of the serpent, yeah, they fall, and God says, well, you’re destined to toil, and the world is going to bring forth obstacles, pricks, thorns, thistles to you.

Yes, well, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot. It’s like, if your effort is toilsome and if the world you inhabit is fallen, how much of that is a consequence of your pride and your misaligned aim and your refusal to walk with God?

See, when Adam—when God calls to Adam in the garden after Adam and Eve fall, yes, Adam hides from God, so he’s alienated from the divine unity at that point, right? And he refuses to habitually walk with God as he had. So his aim is now seriously off, right, tempted as he was by the serpent.

That’s when burdensome toil enters the world, and so one of the things I’ve really been thinking about is this is something Job wrestles with too, is that the degree to which the possibilities of the world make themselves manifest as unjust suffering are in precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim.

And you see that elaborated in the story of Cain and Abel, for example. Like, Cain's aim is misaligned; nothing works for him, right? Can’t get the right sacrifice, he can’t get—here’s something that I’ve been going through that initially will sound like a real crash down from the heights of our conversation but actually I think embodies it almost exactly—it’s suddenly occurred to me that if instead of coming to my work with aspirations to some external reward, such as fame or money or any of these other things (which are good things that we would want, I think, for our friends and all that), but if you leave all of that at the door and you just try—try to love things for the right reasons, that is you try to love the good and invest yourself and your joy in the good of the task before you, everything transforms.

Yeah, well, you know that’s—that’s actually—we can refer back to the neurophysiology. That’s actually literally true. So the way your perceptions work is that you establish an aim, and then the world appears to you as a pathway toward that aim.

Okay, and it’s so subtle. So for example, if I want to walk—if I decide that I want to walk across a room, yes, the fact that you’re in the way now makes you tagged by my emotional systems as negative. The fact that I’ve established the aim of walking behind you makes you an obstacle, and the response to that is negative emotion, right?

So it’s so interesting. So you establish an aim, right? A pathway opens up, okay? And now that pathway is demarcated by obstacles and things that facilitate your movement forward. All the things that facilitate your movement forward are now positive to you; they invite—they fill you with enthusiasm, and everything that’s an obstacle is tagged with negative emotion.

So you can see: obstacle, facilitator, foe, and friend, right? Okay, so what it means is that not only do the phenomena of the world make themselves manifest to you as perceptions, yes, in relation to your aim, yes, but so do your emotions.

Yeah, yeah. So then you think—so that starts to be a question. If you're suffering, how much of that suffering is a consequence of misaligned aim? It’s a seriously open question. Now you talked about work, you know? Yes. Well, how much of your experience of the suffering—because I think that you will still experience what we would categorize as negative emotions, or at least that’s been my own experience—is that in this state of attention toward the good for its own sake, it’s not that all of the experiences we describe as toil, anxiety, disappointment—not that those don’t come—it’s that precisely as you are suggesting, your interpretative framework for them has radically altered the way that they land with you.

Well, it’s—it’s even more subtle than that. I say, well, take this situation of a football player, yeah, who's injured in the important final game, yeah? Okay, well, we have documentation of this; it occurs all the time: people will play with broken ankles, they'll play with broken thumbs. And do they feel the pain? It's like, it’s very complicated, because the emotions are being experienced at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

So at one level, because the digit or the ankle is damaged, there’s interference, there’s obstacle with regards to its local movement, and that’s going to manifest itself as pain. But the overarching pattern of activity, which is to continue with the game, yeah, is directed towards a higher order and important goal, yeah? Okay, that produces positive emotion. That’s incentive, reward—the same physiological response that cocaine produces.

So at one level of analysis, you've still got the pain, but at another level, the fact that the activity that’s causing pain is linked to a distal valuable goal produces a pharmacological counterposition to the pain. And so what you have then, I think—that’s what we experience when we say something like that was difficult. Yes, painful, let's say anxiety provoking, sure, but it was certainly worth it.

So it’s like proximately, yes pain; distally, no, it was a pre—this is kind of what Job decides in the Book of Job. Job makes the case that he will not allow his proximal suffering to demolish his essential faith in himself or his essential faith in the goodness of the spirit that underlies reality. And it’s a—it’s a call to courage.

What the story of Job indicates, I believe at least in part, is that no matter what happens to you in your life, no matter how deep the suffering is, your best stance is one of—one that helps you maintain your faith, your optimism in the essential goodness of yourself as a human being; and Job is portrayed as a good man in the text; your essential faith in humanity itself and your distal faith in the ultimate benevolence of reality.

Now, it seems to me also that without that, we wouldn't be able to move forward in difficult times, right? They would just stop us. Yes. So, and it's also the case that if you lose that faith, so let's say you’re suffering and even unjustly as— as occurred with Job, so you’re being tortured and you don’t know why and it’s hurting your faith, let's say you do lose faith in yourself and you lose faith in God. You do what Job's wife tells him to do, which is to curse God and die.

Right, right? It seems to me indisputable that all that does is open up a new hell under the one that you’re already suffering, and it would be because you're already in pain and things are going badly for you, and now you demolish your faith in that distal goal. Yes, well, then all of that pharmacological remediation that would go along with your sense that this is hard but worth it vanishes and there’s nothing left but the theater of pain.

I mean that condition that you describe, that underneath you is a new hell deeper than the one you’re in—that’s exactly the condition of Satan in Milton’s right. That exactly, which flies as hell, am hell, and under that another hell opens up, right? And, in fact, that’s his pride—his pride and desire to usurp produces that, right.

Unwillingness to change in the face of that—to bring a mind unchanged by time and place. Right? And that is one of the things that Milton shares actually with Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Mephistopheles says, do you think—thinks thou that I who saw the face of God can go anywhere now without pain? That having turned away from that distal goal you’re describing, everything—even things that we would count as pleasures—becomes sort of more—that’s what happens to Cain, I think, is that Cain in killing Abel—in consequence of resentment, right, which is not the only way to respond to the failure of Cain’s life.

Right, he chooses that. God accuses him of choosing that, that he invites sin in to have its way with him. Yeah. Cain decides to kill his ideal, right? Because Cain is bitter because he’s not able, yes? And so then he kills Abel and then he says to God, my suffering is more than I can bear. It’s like, well, obviously it’s more than you can bear because now you’ve demolished the very thing upon which your redemption, your salvation, your enthusiasm, your shielding from pain depends, right?

And he also is destined to become a wanderer, right? So interesting. He’s destined to become a wanderer, a vagabond, in the land of Nod. It’s so cool because he’s a wanderer for the same reason that psychopaths are itinerant, is that once you violate the implicit moral order, you have to seek out new victims because your reputation precedes you and no one will play with you. So you have to be a wanderer—that's the classic literary trope of the itinerant bad guy. He has to move from place to place.

Okay? And then it’s—he’s a wanderer in the land of Nod, which Robert Louis Stevenson associated with sleep and unconsciousness. It’s like, well of course, because the way that people react to the evidence of their own criminality is to degenerate into unconsciousness. They allow themselves to become willfully blind. So he’s an un—he’s a psychopathic wanderer in the land of unconsciousness with nothing but pain as his companion.

That’s very reminiscent of the figure of Satan in the Miltonic story, and yes, you see that in Dante too. The image of the Inferno, there’s a hell, yes, but underneath that there’s another hell, and then underneath that there’s another hell. And then in Dante, you do get to the bottom of things; it’s betrayal which I think is quite brilliant, right? That’s the—that’s what Dante identified as the cardinal malevolence of Satan.

It’s brilliant because betrayal inverts trust, right? And civilization depends on trust, right? Like love depends on trust, family depends on trust, trust—your relationship with yourself depends on trust. And so people often become traumatized by a profound betrayal of trust. And so Dante got that right. But the idea that there are these descending levels of suffering with something ultimately malevolent at the bottom—that is a vision of hell and it’s, I think, it’s right.

You know, in my clinical practice now and then, I would encounter people who had the deepest of existential problems, like there were murderous impulses afoot in their household for multiple generations, brutal situations, and in those situations completely contaminated by thousands of lies, thousands of lies, we would get to the bottom of something terrible as that was. And then something new would open up that showed that where we had got was nowhere near the bottom yet, like an infinite landscape of faithless pain, terrible, wow, terrible, terrible thing to see.

And the—I mean unimaginable, it’s—you see this when in relationships like, yeah, people often won’t communicate with their wife or husband because they don’t want to start an argument, and what happens is there’s a surface disagreement, yes? Right? And that produces a certain amount of emotional tension, right? And then maybe you start to talk about it, and you find that under that, there’s a slightly more profound disagreement, right?

And you investigate that, and underneath that, there’s a slightly more profound disagreement, and people stop the inquiry when they hit the point of depth that they can no longer tolerate. Right? So here’s a way of thinking about it: so imagine that your wife has had a history of a certain amount of abuse at the hands of men. That’s a very common situation, and even more common, becoming even more common all the time, yeah.

I believe that you don’t know how much of whatever proximal disagreement you have is a consequence of some fundamental betrayal in her history, or even I would say the history of her mother, her aunts. You know, people talk, you know, and these spirits of betrayal lurk and haunt across generations. And it’s terrible to go down into the substructure of a specific disagreement because to solve it, you have to take a journey down to the depths.

And you often discover a profound betrayal. You know, you know how when you hash something out with someone you’re close to, yeah? Sometime during that process, it’s very likely, if the conversation is sincere and deep, that someone will break into tears. Right? They—right, yeah, exactly— that’s a dissolution of their perceptions, right? And a potential restructuring.

I think that’s what tears signify anyways, that is a descent into the abyss. And Dante has so much to say here too with what he does with what we would call gravity and the direction of gravity. So what happens when you get down to the bottom of the Inferno past Judas in the mouth of Satan is that the world flips upside down, and we move from Inferno to Purgetario.

So they go past the pit of hell and begin to climb upwards toward Paradise. But there’s two stages to that, right? There’s the stage where the weight, the gravity of the situation you’re describing, that betrayal that has basically ripped the ground out from underneath you—that’s still pulling you downward, and so everything is toil and exertion. It’s kind of our condition that you work your way—you know, there’s a reason I think that you call what you do “doing the work” or “work,” you know? When you sit with people and kind of hash these things out, by the time you get down to the bottom of it, your journey can begin, right?

Then you start to climb your way out, yes? And once, yeah, well that’s a symbolic death and rebirth too, right? Right? And then beautifully, magnificently, once you reach the pinnacle of purgatory, then we move to the third of this sort of triptych that Dante is giving us. And that’s Paradise, where Beatrice descends to lift Dante up, and they start to move of their own accord at light speed up toward the heavens, toward the planets.

And she says to him wonderfully, “This is what it looks like to your human perception, but really this is an allegory of what’s going on with us, with us spiritually.” She says, “This is the force—the same force that carries fire up toward the stars, is now carrying us up toward God,” because there’s one love. The last line of the poem, “The love that moves the sun and other stars.” There’s one motive force in the universe, right? A monotheistic claim united with that the notion that the fundamental unity is something positive and benevolent, yes, right?

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One of the things I hashed out with Dawkins to some degree was the fact that in my estimation—and I think in his—the metaphysic that made science itself possible has been demolished. So, okay, so then I was thinking now he tends to lose in—he knows that—but he tends to lose interest in what that metaphysical demolition constitutes. So one of the things I’ve been trying to lay out is what is the metaphysics; what’s the narrative frame of science itself?

Now Jung tried to figure this out, right? That’s why Jung was so interested in alchemy. So Jung’s idea was that there was an unconscious fantasy emerged in counterposition to the spiritualization of Christianity that highlighted a lurking possibility that still exists in the material world that hadn’t been explored. And so that would be something like the call of the—of the transmutation. That there’s a substance, a material substance that could give us—make us healthy, right?

That could grant us immortality and that would transmute everything base into what was highest—lead into gold, okay? So there’s a potential in the material world that has that as its promise—that’s the treasure prime, right? Which is prima materia, which is exactly the thing with no qualities—it’s the thing stripped bare of everything.

So his proposition was that there had to be a fantasy, very widely distributed, that there was something of immense value still lurking in the material world before the scientific enterprise could get started. Yeah. You need a motivation for spending your whole life analyzing the mating habits of fruit flies because it isn’t something that has obvious immediate motivational or emotional significance. It has to be linked to something else, okay? So what’s it linked to?

Well, here, tell me what you think about this, and this is also why I think that science—which is another problem Jung was trying to solve—why did science emerge in Europe? Yes, and once. Right. Right. What were the preconditions? Okay, so let’s lay this out. Tell me what you think. The cosmos has a logos, so it has an order. Yes, okay? Fair enough.

The order is intelligible to the mind of man. Yes, okay? The order is good, such that understanding it better makes things better, not worse, contrary, let’s say, to the story of Frankenstein, right? Right? You’re not going to uncover man-made horrors beyond your comprehending, or that’s right, or you build a technological enterprise like Prometheus that dooms you. That can happen, right? Okay?

The idea would be that wouldn’t happen if your aim was true, okay? And then the final piece of the puzzle is that through the dedicated submission to that logos, you can explore in a manner that reveals it and that will be redemptive to you as a scientist but also broadly beneficial.

Okay, those look to me like the necessary metaphysical foundations of science because—and none of them, those are starting points. They’re game rules. Like, you can’t get to those within the scientific enterprise. They have to be laid down. Now, I think they were laid down fundamentally in the Judeo-Christian system, right?

Is that there is a logos to the world? Mhm. That logos is apprehensible to man, that it’s fundamentally good, that you can approach it in the proper spirit, and if you do, that’ll be redemptive. Yes. This is why, although I don’t think Dawkins knows, and I tried to push him on this, I think this is why he found himself compelled to say relatively recently that he was a cultural Christian.

And I pushed him on that, I said, okay, well, that implies that the Christians got something right. What? Like, we got nowhere with that. We got with that.

So, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the three body problem, the—not the Chinese science fiction novel made a big splash as a Netflix series recently—but it’s the novels that really grapple with what you are talking about. And what’s so remarkable about this series to me is that unlike a lot of American science fiction, you’ve got Star Trek, Star Wars, which kind of give you this misty secular pseudo-science where it’s the midichlorians that hold things together, or it’s our humanist values in Star Trek.

In this trilogy of novels, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the first book is named after famously an unresolvable problem in astrophysics, a Newtonian mechanics: if you have three bodies mutually attracting each other, it’s impossible to lay out a logos—exactly what you’re describing— that is a consistent system that can be reduced to abstract principles comprehended by the human mind and then used to fly outer space to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in.

And the reason that Shi Shen Liu named—began with this is because he is genuinely peering into the abyss of what science looks like once you pull the rug of those five principles out from underneath us. That there—you might hit a point at which actually the whole structure of reality simply scrambles your monkey brain; it just doesn’t compute inside of us because we no longer have this conviction that the imprint on our brain is effectively the hand of God.

And so that’s the same imprint that writ large is pressed across the whole universe. When Newton came up with his laws, there was a widespread belief derived from Aristotle that there were two sets of rules for the physical world. It was called the superlunary and the sublunary spheres, and that they was named that because the barrier was supposed to be at the Moon, where the moon’s orbit is there starts to obtain a whole new set of laws.

And the reason people thought this is quite reasonable is that you look at the stars, and they’re following these very regular patterns that we can chart and know more and more through observations. You look at things around here; they don’t move like that kind of clockwork. Surely you get stones falling to the Earth; you get fire moving up into the air, and so people thought, they’re just a different—so Christians would say fallen order down here and there is a pristine music of the spheres, yes? Operating, even perhaps the angels are pushing them around, whatever—and what, as opposed to forces?

As opposed to exactly. Yes, this is a big—in my book I call them ghosts in exile, the forces, because, right? And this idea is what when Newton comes out with the Principia for the first time we now think, oh, he discovered gravity. Yes, of course, he outlines the way of calculating the force of gravity between two masses.

But at a much, much deeper level, what he does is he shatters the barrier between the sublunar and the super lunar spheres because now showing underlying Unity. Right here’s the three rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky but the descent of an apple from a tree. Why did Newton have any right to expect that he could do that? Why were people working on that problem at that time? It’s because of the assumptions that you’re describing that the world is not only organized according to a logos, which is sort of the pagan claim that we talked about in gree, but also that that logos is answerable to the patterns that are in our minds, however they came about. You talk about evolution; you talk about whatever, but we now have—and this is what we experience them as.

It’s dishonest, I think, to describe our experience of these principles as anything else. When we see math, we think we’re looking at something universally valid, and that something that not only hangs together in our brains but will also send a rocket ship to Mars one day, and that’s because of this faith, and that is something like—a transposed monotheistic faith, it’s the notion that yes, at the foundation or at the pinnacle there is an ultimate unity in which resides all things in the absence of contradiction.

Yes? So now we’re up against—we wouldn’t recognize it this way, but we’re up against another super lunary sublunary barrier, and that is the puzzle of how to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics. And I know that you’ve talked to scientists about this on your podcast, and I would—I would say, of course, that like I am not going to be the person that resolves this puzzle, but from the outside, as a scholar of the history of science and also a classicist, I can see that this is the exact same issue.

This is two realms that answer to two different and contradictory sets of apparently contradictory laws, and scientists are currently hammering away—some of them working in string theory, others in other versions of, you know, quantum gravity and so forth—are hammering away at that barrier, right, under the presumption that the fact breaks through.

Yes, exactly; that the fact that they can’t detect the unity is actually a consequence of their ignorance, not of the fact that reality itself is disjointed, that there’s a seam in the fabric that we will never bring back together, or alternatively that there’s a seam in our minds that we can never reconcile. That there’s something—you need both of these convictions, and I think that anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions even if outwardly, they would deny it.

Well, if the hypothesis of Jung is true in the broad sense—and that you see it implies something very interesting that I also saw as a practicing scientist. So, I was involved, still am, in a lot of research enterprises, right? The production of approximately the equivalent of 30 PhDs, something like that. And I watched scientists who were genuine scientists and scientists who were careerists and charlatans, and I watched how they operate.

And it's so interesting because the scientists that actually discover something of value and I would say the ones that have the deepest careers and the best relations with their students—the ones that are on the right path—they’re suffused by a religious ethos, and it’s very deep. So I spent a lot of time—I wouldn’t say mastering statistics because I’m no statistical genius, but understanding how to conduct a statistical analysis well enough so that I could do it and actually do it and actually understand it.

And one of the things that I realized was like if you have a spreadsheet that’s full of data, 100,000 data points, let’s say, there is an indefinite number of ways that you can apprehend that matrix that you can see it, right? There are all the possible combinations of the numbers in the matrix, right? Okay?

So then out of that, you can draw a discovery, let’s say, that’s revealed in the patterns, but you cannot do that if your orientation to the spreadsheet is the progression of your career. The pathways that make themselves manifest in the numbers will be those that further your career. So this is part of the problem of replicability; you can do an infinite number of correlational analyses, and if you do a hundred of them, five of them will be statistically significant.

Well, you can just ignore the fact that 95% of them weren’t and report on those 5%. And the thing is there’s a profound appeal to do that because in any given experiment you might have devoted two years of your life for a graduate student, the success of the analysis might determine whether or not they get their PhD. Like, there’s a lot at stake, and so then you might say, well, why not just discover within the matrix of numbers the pathway that furthers your career?

Yeah. And the answer to that is, well, that’s a complicated problem. It’s like, is there anything other than self-promotion? Well, I told my students if you allow your careerist interests to determine the decisions you make when you’re conducting your statistics—which will be well hidden from everyone else but also from yourself—one of the negative consequences is that, well, you betray the spirit of science, and so you pull the rug out from underneath yourself, but you also convince yourself of the existence of a delusion that you might then chase for the rest of your life.

Right? One, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, so it’s so interesting. And this is something that scientists don’t really concentrate on—it’s like, how do you inculcate in the scientific investigator the ethos that produces the desire to search for truth and not career success, let’s say, at every micro level of the scientific endeavor?

And I think that once the scientific endeavor becomes sufficiently dissociated from its underlying Judeo-Christian narrative, there is no protection against that. And I also think that’s why the scientific enterprise is corrupting so rapidly. Well, what is the greatest example of the phenomenon you’re describing that’s recently been in the public eye? I would argue it’s Katanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court saying citing a study that black babies have better health outcomes when they're in danger if they go to black doctors, and she cites this in defense of all sorts of things like affirmative action and race-conscious preferences in hiring and so forth.

Now, I doubt—I rather doubt that Katanji Brown Jackson realizes this, but that’s a junk study, and it’s a junk study for exactly the reason that you’re describing, which is that there’s a hidden variable, and the hidden variable is birth weight. So when babies have a low or dangerous birth weight, they are more likely to be taken to white doctors, whatever the reason for that is.

And so in that case, they’ll have worse outcomes because you’re dealing more—the specialists are white; yes, that’s why. Well, that’s so much of medical science and social science is corrupted by the fact of specious correlations. Yes, and the authors of the study were aware of this variable, and as were the reviewers, and discounted it purposely.

So it’s an instance of exactly the sort of thing that you are describing, of filtering out that data. And yes, in that context of course, real science, the handmaiden of knowledge, one of the most ancient and beautiful human practices, is going to become the science, capital T, capital S, and endorse Kamala Harris in Scientific America, because then you’ve got to serve something, right? You’ve got to attach this enterprise to some sort of purpose.

So then you might ask as a mentor to scientists, well, I’m telling you to do something difficult. I’m saying that if the data reveals, for example, that your study is flawed—yeah, fatally, yeah—you’re going to have to accept that. If the study indicates that the hypothesis upon which you’ve staked your reputation is wrong, yeah, you’re going to have to admit that, and you’re going to have to suffer the consequences of both of those.

Maybe you won’t get your PhD; maybe you’ll have to do another series of studies; maybe your career won’t advance properly; maybe you’ll be humiliated as a consequence of your previous claims.

So then you might say, well, if that’s the cost, then why not just falsify? This is the temptation of the lie constantly; why not just falsify? And I would say on the positive side, the negative side is well, that’s wrong, and maybe you’ll get caught, and that’ll be a catastrophe, and the abyss is there and all of that. But you could say, well, I don’t care, like Raskolnikov says in Crime and Punishment: I’m not going to get caught, so we’re not worried about that.

And if I can lie to further my career, then so be it, okay? So then you might say, well, why—not do that? Because I think the question isn’t ever why lie; the question always is why not lie? And in the scientific realm, what you sacrifice if you deceive yourself and others in the service of your career is the discovery of the concordance between your soul and the logos of the world, because there isn’t anything more enthusiasm-provoking than actually discovering something new.

And it’s because you get a sense of the eternal harmony between things. You think, oh that realization, which is a new form of truth, is of so much value that the price I paid for that—sacrificed my old presumptions that my career has taken a strange path as I pursue the truth—that’s irrelevant in comparison to the profundity of—I think it’s the establishment of that harmony between soul and cosmos.

It’s something like that. It’s raw joy. I mean, that’s the treasure in the field, the man sells that; that’s the pearl of great price. That’s exactly right. And one of the most striking things you said to me in Athens was you told the story of realizing that most of what you said early on