Brian Greene Shares His Surprising Take on Religion and Science

the Joe Rogan experience yeah it's it's interesting to me that that's the thing that we look forward to the most to the average person if they thinks about they think about space they think about intelligent life yeah that that is far more interesting to them than the fact that there's black holes out there that are devouring planets yeah there are sucking stars into its event horizon yeah yeah this infinite point of density that we can't even really begin to imagine with our own little brains yeah yeah and and the fact that all this arose without a guiding intelligence yeah you know that there are black holes and there are active galactic nuclei and there are black holes slamming into each other creating gravitational waves that we can actually detect I mean it is a wonderfully rich reality that we are fortunate to be part of do you experience much pushback or much [Music] conflict from religious people who don't like the fact that you describe things in that way that didn't need an intelligent force yeah intelligent creator - it's an interesting question because the biological community people like Richard Dawkins and the like I think have really borne the brunt of the religious pushback because they're dealing directly with phenomena of life and that's the precious commodity that somehow we want to be sacred and therefore our religious sensibility will push back on it just being the mindless laws of physics and evolution yielding you know life on planet Earth they haven't pushed as hard on the quantum physicists and the cosmologists as they have on the biologists but I have had conversations many of them are respectful as opposed to antagonistic where the view is that I am wrongheaded that I am missing the point and some of these religious folks are fantastically accomplished scientists that's weird yeah I mean I went to a gathering I think I can talk about now his closed-door gathering you weren't meant to describe you know - but yeah that's right I'm really open to myself and and I thought it was it was sign it was called signs in the spiritual quest and it was a bunch scientists that were being brought together and I thought it was going to be an interesting but ultimately OneNote meeting I thought everybody's gonna basically say the same thing there could be a god there's no evidence for a god we've got the laws of physics and we're gonna just press forward under the assumption that physics is all there is until the clouds part and God reveals him or herself or itself to us and at that point we may change our tune it was not one note I was the only person who had that perspective in the room everybody else was coming out religion from a very different way of thinking about the world in fact there's one Nobel laureate in the room who got up and sang Psalms as part of his presentation and I was sitting there and I was like what is happening here this is so unexpected to me and what it really meant was I was so close-minded into the varieties of religious engagement that happened in the world and it opened my eyes and there's one noble Lord in particular I did say to him at the end I said when you look at me and you hear my view what do you think and he kind of put his arm around me in an avuncular what and said you know you're you're a real smart guy and you don't understand the true reality and I think ultimately you will because you're open-minded and you're on a journey and I hope that your journey will finally take it to the place where I have been for for many years that was so unexpected mmm that does Nobel laureate who I respected for his his concrete mathematical and experimental work saw the world completely differently now was there a bactrim of belief yeah absolutely no absolutely but I was the one who was far round one I was the one who were untethered yeah I mean I came in there I was like whoa you know and and and and and and clearly they arranged the meeting to have a spectrum of perspectives I mean this is not something that was randomly designed and it just so happened but it was an eye-opener and I and from that I went to read you know William James's book a varieties of religious experience no I mean yeah so it's a book that William James great psychologist wrote in 1902 and it was based on a series of lectures I think he gave in Scotland is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion and science that I think has ever been written and yet most people don't know much about it because what he does is he goes through and he documents through his own research and through reading biographies and interviewing individuals the vastly different ways that people think about religion and why they think about religion and the value that religion has in their lives and and and when you read that book it doesn't convert me I haven't changed my views on whether or not there is a God but it has changed my views on the value of a religious sensibility the role that it plays in people's lives now look it can be you know you talk to people like Sam Harris and and and you know it's it's a destructive force in the world and it has been a destructive force in some ways but that's not the full story a fuller story is that for some individuals it gives a connection to a historical lineage that's deeply valued for some individuals it puts their life in a larger setting that allows them to be in the world in a more productive way so there are a whole range of roles that religious engagement can play the problem is when you start to pit it against scientific insight then you run into trouble but religion was never developed to give us factual information about the world religion will never give us the electron magnetic moment to nine decimal places that's the purview of scientific investigation and if you can keep these straight in your mind there's a definite and powerful role for a religious sensibility in the world yeah I feel like it gives people in a lot of ways a scaffolding for ethics and morality and allows them with some alleviation of anxiety yeah exactly a feeling of purpose is but like you said as long as it's not conflicting with rigid scientific reality yeah like right scientific provable scientific reality yeah and I gotta tell you this if anything you know Richard Dawkins had him on the program yeah so so you know that his his MO in the world is very anti bruh I think he would agree with me on that I don't want to put words into his mouth but I did a event with him in New York The Beacon Theater I don't know it's maybe a year ago or something like that and it was very interesting because in a one-on-one conversation his views were very similar to mine I fell look we don't agree with in totality but I was saying to him there are times I go around the world and I will do things that are utterly irrational I'll knock on wood for good luck I'll speak to my dead father I know that he's not really there I'll pray to God on occasion if I think that I could use that backup not because I think there's some bearded individual in the sky it's just a behavioural tendency that I find to be comforting and useful and I said this to Richard and he said I totally get it I was like what he was like I totally get he said he said in fact he said I don't like to sleep in a house that has a reputation as being haunted you know and for me it was such a beautiful human moment it was such a beautiful human moment where we were just like being human beings right and and he said and inly said we're both sinners and I agree we are both sinners in that sense because we know how the world works we know this doesn't make any sense and yes it's still part of somehow how we behave in the world and I think there's a value to recognizing that that is what it means to be human you will engage in the world in ways that are not necessarily strictly adhering to some rational perspective of how the scientific world operates I would love to see Richard Dawkins outside of a haunted house not going you know yeah so so you know um it's all just to say yeah that I kind of feel like there are many pathways toward insight in the world there are many ways to live a life there are many ways to come to terms with our own impermanence and it's not as though something is right or something is wrong it's a question of is it useful to you and I think that we have to be very open minded in the kinds of behaviors that that we allow to but in the world you know you know even rob des it's nutty stuff you know but if some of those individuals who go there find that it allows them to live in the world in a more productive way alleviating anxiety feeling like they're on a spiritual quest hmm so be it yeah that's the thing that's something I mean it's hard for people to understand if you're not in that space that headspace it there you don't need this structure but for some people even Scientology or something along those lines it seems loopy on paper can provide them yeah legitimate structure and and benefit their lives yeah in a tangible ways they could describe to you yeah exactly and my feeling is that if there was and I don't know this to be the case maybe some biologists will push back on this but if there was a race of for want of a better word you know Vulcan like individuals who approached the world in a completely rational manner evaluating the data figuring out the most sensible course of action competing against a crazy group of individuals like us who will come up with wild fictional ideas gods in the heavens you know demons haunting the world I think it's the latter group that ultimately would triumph because with that kind of freedom of thought you get novelty you get ingenuity you get creativity and so I feel as though this is part and parcel of who we are and why we have survived and to sort of come at the world with a scientific Club that's meant to smash away anything that disagrees with the scientific worldview is an unfortunate way of looking at the world you know there's something about creativity that it doesn't necessarily have to abide by any laws of logic and it can still be beneficial yeah and and and and that's why it's so stunning right when somebody comes up with something it's like where did that come from it didn't come from a rational approach to working out no Brahms Third Symphony it emerged from the churning emotions of an individual who happens to be made up of trillions of particles guided by physical law responding to the environment which is impinging his senses with an incredible array of influences and through that world emerges the spectacular piece of music hmm that's breathtaking yeah utterly breathtaking yeah and it's amazing what that music can inspire yeah as it reaches out to you know X amount of people and then causes different thoughts in their mind yeah and then that causes in turn another branch of creativity another yeah new line of thinking that they might have never never pursued but yeah and that to me establishes that the notion that language is the only way that we can know about the world dicken Stein had this perspective and that the limits of my language limits of my world that seems to me uh turley wrong I mean the experience of music or the experience of cogitating about the world but not trying to overlay a narrative upon it just feeling your way in to reality reveals things about the world that I think are are beyond linguistic you can talk religion with a really intelligent person whose objective who has a belief it's it's such an interesting subject because it's it requires suspension of disbelief in order to absorb some of the stories but there is clearly a history behind this of thousands of years of translations and yeah you trying to get to the what did they mean when they wrote this down yeah how much did they know and what were they trying to do were they just trying to get everybody to calm down and stay in line right or were they trying to find some means of gluing the group together by a sheriff yes or you know their folks who basically say that there are qualities of the human brain that naturally leave it open to a religious sensibilities yeah I mean for instance we have agency detection systems in our brain where we look around the world and we tend to assign agency to things that happen that's useful right because you know if you mistake a windblown for a Jaguar yeah it's fine you thought with Jaguar but it's just a branch but if the reverse happens you think it you know was a Jaguar and you think it's a windblown branch you're gonna get eaten so we tend to over endow agency into the world there is evolutionary value to that so when the wind blows we tend to think there's a mind up there when the river gurgles we tend to think that there's a mind in there and this is sort of the seed for the kinds of perspectives that you find in many of the world's religions so there's there's natural course of events that can lead to the arising of the institution or at least the ideas behind the institution of religion and for students that have never encountered that idea before it can really shake things up and I think in a very valuable way you know so so I think are absolutely right having a conversation with somebody who has a religious perspective is deeply interesting yes to understand where that mine came to the place that it got to and from a personal Sensibility I give you you know I just give you one little anecdote you know my dad died I was 23 years old and unexpectedly I've been visiting home or I was at Harvard at the time I was visiting from Cambridge and we had a nice weekend and by the time I got back to Cambridge on the bus my mom called me said dad's dead it was so so shocking it was like so sudden it was so complete and I remember I went back home and my dad was not a religious man but we knew that he would want to have a religious ceremony and we and we did it and we had you know a minyan of Jews coming to the house to recite the Kaddish prior because we weren't religious we didn't know what we were doing you know and I had no idea what these men were saying but it was deeply comforting in fact I didn't want to know what they were saying to me was just a collection of ancient sounds but this sounds connected me across the generations to a culture that had been extended back 5,000 years and in a moment of crisis that was a very comforting and useful connection to have yeah that that is where I find people get the mo out of religion in in the fact that it brings communities together in this sort of cohesive ritual yeah everybody acts together and everybody you feel like there's completion to it yeah like you're putting someone you know yeah putting someone into perspective and you're doing so with this religious ceremony and when large groups of people get together and engage in a ritual behavior something magical happens you know I've spoken to evolutionary psychologists like Steve Pinker who's a wonderful thinker yeah okay and and you know Steve is skeptical that this kind of ritual behavior can yield the kind of cohesive bonding that some people suggest that it does but you know you probably have but I have on occasion engaged in these ritual behaviors you know mass drumming and movements you know and I gotta tell you you are quickly I find transported to a place where you are now part of a collective and you feel yourself melting into the group and you are one and if you've never had that experience I think it's something that you should have because I think it's a vital part of our heritage it is part of how we got to be who we are yeah there's something about group acceptance and a group of people acting and doing something together that does create this very strange bond yeah it doesn't necessarily exist amongst individuals it's a it's a weird bond is a very weird bond because it has nothing to do with the individuals nothing to do with the personality of Jim or Mary it's it's irrelevant at that point it's somehow joining you together into this massive humanity that's all engaged in the same practice and somehow you feel as though your identity melts into the larger whole I don't know why it happens there's negative aspects to that sort of course with that you know mob mentality of course I give you ever been in a situation where things got chaotic and you really had this feeling like anything can happen in a moment I've seen it happen I've never been part of it but all right weird but I have a feeling in the air yeah I have an this one which is you know my brother is a Hari Krishna well you know and so you know he is 13 years older than me and and left college in the 60s which was a tumultuous time and and went to Europe and ultimately joined into what many people think of as some kind of cultish activity yeah and and so but but he's not a cult thinker he's an original thinker he's a brilliant thinker and yet within this group mentality you can imagine a certain kind of groupthink can take over these people imagine that this happens so yes it has positive aspects and it can have negative aspects but in the end I think there is a long lineage in which those of our forebears who survived were the ones who could join together into these more potent these more powerful groups and that way were able to triumph over other groups you know in the ancestral environment you know there there's different readings of the archaeological record whether it was a dangerous place in the hunter-gatherer past or a sort of placid place but one reading says it was a very dangerous place and therefore those groups that survived were the ones who were able to establish this kind of allegiance to the whole yes and certainly I think this kind of ritual behavior may have been part of that bond together through shared experience yes yeah and belief yeah and if you're all believing in the same supernatural entity that's a powerful and principled powerful glue do you find that there's I mean I don't want to say in arrogance in some academics maybe that's not the right word but this being too quick to dismiss any positive benefit at all about religion yes it's the knee-jerk reaction you know among a certain group of academics and it feels deeply unfortunate to me it almost feels like a religion of its own sort when it's just the response as opposed to a careful thoughtful heartfelt analysis of the situation I frankly wish that more people would read William James's book because I do think that it's the kind of because here's a psycho scientist right a deeply thoughtful scientist who knows how to analyze data knows how to rationally engage with the world who was plumbing the depths of religion in a very very meaningful and sensitive way you know and by the end of these lectures that I think is lecture number twenty or something he describes religion as this as something that helps the journey toward the the terror and the beauty of phenomenon he describes it as the the voice of the Thunder the gentleness of the summer rain he described it in terms of the sublimity of the stars and this kind of transcendent approach to the religious experience I think brings it out of the academic guise that is often thrown upon it which is something that is contravening everything we know about the world it's causing people to think in ways that are irrational I mean this whole trope that you hear it's not that there isn't some truth to that but it's an incomplete truth and if you're willing to approach religion in a way where you discard the pieces that offend you throw away the parts that you think are utter nonsense only keep those aspects that are useful to you in your life then there is a place for it I think therein lies the problem with a lot of people they're not willing to do that Rice's this need for suspension of disbelief troubles them so much that they feel like fools if they buy into something right and we're also dealing with all religions except the ones that are super questionable like Scientology or Mormonism right that are very old and the idea of maybe it would be better if we came up with something that we could all agree on in 2020 right maybe it would be wonderful if we have something that maybe has science in it maybe something that has our a genuine understanding of how human beings react and what would the benefits of community yeah and having these in environments were loving conscious people communicate with each other in a very positive way that this could be a new form of this thing that we seem to desire so greatly yeah and I agree and I have to say I'd make this point in because the point that I make there is that to truly engage with the world you have to use a variety of stories we're fundamentally storytellers that's what human beings are now there's the reduction of story that physicists are well-equipped to talk about with particles and laws of physics on top of that you've got the chemists story the complex molecules you got the biologist story that begins to talk about cells in life you got the psychological story the neurophysiological story that brings a mind in consciousness and within that you then have all of the activities that conscious beings undertake which includes religion and includes telling other kinds of stories and includes creative expression you need them all and to sort of say that the scientific account is the only account by which you're ever going to gain true qualities of the world is a very in my view limited description of what truth is there is objective truth in the world that we can measure that we can describe the equations of so forth but there's also internal truth spiritual truth that you get to by self-examination it's real in the sense that you are understanding how you respond to the world and that is something which is deeply personal but utterly real and whether it's through psychedelics whether it's through ayahuasca whether it's through a spiritual journey whether it's through religion regardless all of this adds color to the story of what it means to be a human being [Applause]

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Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020