Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is philosophized this.
So what's an example of one of these ideologies we were talking about through Giac last episode?
What's an example of an ideology where the people immersed in it see themselves as seekers of the truth
that we're the intellectually honest ones and that are opposite the other?
These are the people that are truly lost in an ideology that they don't see. What's an example of that?
Well, there's dozens we could use here to get this point across, but given that this is a philosophy show,
really want to use this opportunity to give a non-trivial example of an ideology that's likely to be
one people listen this can relate to, whether that's because it's a position you used to hold,
you currently hold, whether you just see it in people around you. What I mean is I want to give an
example of an ideology that isn't obviously an ideology because the Giac, the most powerful
form of ideology is one that operates in the background where the contradictions that are at
the bottom of it are things that the people using it don't even notice despite the fact they form big
parts of their worldview around them. This episode will hopefully be a nice visual example of two
competing ideologies in today's world. Hopefully this can be an example where you can practice
detecting the ideology I'm trying to bring in as I'm still manning all sides of this as we do on
this show. Anyway, if you're Giac, it could be said that some modern philosophers out there,
like Philip Goff, are trying to find a way to preserve the best parts of both of these two
different ideological approaches and find a way to move these conversations forward in a productive
way. And on that note, we also promise to talk about the new book from the philosopher Philip Goff
on this episode. And we will. We'll use it in this investigation of different ideologies.
But I guess it's important to say this in that book. We're going to talk about a little later.
Philip Goff is building off of the work of a philosopher named Thomas Nagel.
Thomas Nagel wrote a book in 2012 called Mind and Cosmos. And when he wrote that book, mind and
cosmos, he was responding to an ideology that he thought was exploding in popularity at the time.
It's an ideology popular among fans of the new atheist movement that was going on at the time.
And it's a position that he thought was also an overall attitude that's taken hold of academia
more generally. What he's fighting against is what's often been referred to as material reductionism,
or the idea that the truth about anything that's worth known about the universe can and should be
understood by studying the materials that things are made out of and the fundamental forces that
govern them. That is where the truth lies. You want to know anything about the universe? Don't
sit around speculating about what the purposes or the meanings of things are like we've done in the
past. We got to stay focused. We got to break things down into their component parts, study them
empirically. That's where you got to look if you want to get to the truth about the sum total
or the whole of those component parts. The truth of the universe can be arrived at through a purely
material explanation. Now somebody can hear that and think, what's so wrong with that? How is that
an ideology? I mean, do we real? That just sounds like someone who's a fan of science.
But again, take the negative connotation off the word ideology for a second when we're trying
to see the world through the eyes of Giecek. Like we talked about last time, instead of seeing
ideology as a bad thing, try to see it instead as a deeply embedded network of tactics and symbols
that are used by people to simplify reality into something coherent, where it's a process that
literally everybody is engaging in no matter who you are. Again, the point to Giecek is not to
hate on people for having an ideology. The point is to examine hours more closely, to have more
self-awareness about the ideologies we're using, how they operate, how exactly they work their way
into people's heads. And since we're coming at this from a place of zero hate, a very humanizing
activity, I think when it comes to trying to understand any ideology people have, is to try to put
yourself in their shoes, try to understand why it makes total sense from their perspective,
that somebody would internalize a particular ideology given the specific culture they live in.
For example, take a pretty common one. We all know someone who fits this profile. Imagine
someone who's born at the end of the 20th century, 1970s onward. And imagine this is the type of
person who is an atheist. They are a very rational person at heart. They are a big fan of science
and the scientific method. And because of these three things, when it comes to what they're going to
believe in about the truth of the universe, they generally lean in a positive its direction,
which is to say, that I'll believe in something as long as it's something that science can prove to me.
If science can prove it, I'll believe it. If it can't, no offense, but when we start getting into
that kind of territory, I don't even know what we're talking about. I mean, beyond a certain point
with no evidence, you can say anything. And it's all just unverifiable speculation if we can't
empirically prove it. Imagine what it's like to be this person. Born into the world, you look
around, you see into the 20th century. And science is the way that we're making sense of all the
mysteries of the universe. I mean, when it comes to other explanations for how the universe might be
the way that it is, they can hear about religion. They can hear about the miracles of the
Bible. Some guy walking on water levitating, you know, shaking hands with the lepers rubbing
Jesus lotion all over their back, moisturizing them. They can hear about 2,000 years ago, and some
miracles that may or may not have happened. But on the other hand, being born when they were,
they can also just look around them and see the miracles of science going on. And the world they
live in, when it comes to science and technology, look, there's sequence in the genome right now.
This podcast is being delivered to you by invisible waves flying through the sky. I mean,
this stuff to people just a couple generations ago would have seen borderline magical, just saying,
it's understandable why it's something to believe in. And then you got all the great communicators
of this way of making sense of things. The Carl Sagan's, the Richard Dawkins's, all the horsemen
of the atheist apocalypse, the Neil Tyson's. And then imagine as this person gets a little bit older,
maybe they were born into a religious home, maybe they were just forced to go to church a couple
times, but they hear this message every Sunday being delivered to them of fundamental guilt and
redemption through this invisible man sitting up in the sky somewhere. And they say, look, look,
this thing religion doesn't have a monopoly on the truth. Clearly, this is a story that's been
designed in some ways to just control people. And it's led to crusades and it's led to religious
violence. It's just not a good look for me as a thinking person. They decide, I'm going to set
the bar higher for myself when it comes to why I believe what I believe. And these creationists,
these are the people out there that are believing in stories. Okay, I'm not. I'm only proportioning
my belief to the empirical evidence that's in front of me. I'm a truth seeker, not an ideologue.
I mean, honestly, what could be wrong with the position that I'm not going to believe in something
unless if there's evidence to prove that it exists, how could you ever go wrong with that? And because
of this commitment they have to material explanations for things, there's predictable, common lanes that
this type of personal fall into when it comes to their views about non-material things. For example,
consciousness. We don't know exactly how our subjective experience of phenomenal consciousness
emerges out of the brain. Or if it even does, it's a mystery we still got to solve. It's kind of
exciting, actually. But this person might say, understandably, given the culture that they're in,
look, I'm a materialist. Yeah, it's a mystery. How does something that seems non-material come out
of something that's entirely material? But look, I've seen science solve plenty of other mysteries before
in my day. You know, any mystery that may still be there with consciousness is just because we haven't
had enough time to study how the brain works long enough or we don't have the technology yet. And
well, obviously, I don't know for sure. Have a little faith in science. Just give us a few more
years and is it crazy to think science will eventually solve this mystery too? No. Another common
lane this person will fall into is hard determinism. Because if ultimately you think that everything can
be understood by having a deeper and deeper understanding of the atoms that make everything up in
prior events, then what may seem to someone like it's just reality, you know, that you're making
free choices every day of your life, that's actually an illusion to this person. That's going to be
explained by science one day as well. Just again, give us some more time. This stuff isn't done overnight.
See again, this person might say, I'm a truth seeker. Okay, like a real truth seeker. Because I value
only the truth that science can directly verify to me one to one about the world. And because I don't
waste my time on any unverifiable speculation that's outside of that, being a hard determinist
materialist, this may seem counterintuitive when it comes to some explanations about our direct
experience of the world. But to me, these are just the kind of positions that naturally blossom out
of this intellectual honesty that I have. When you actually seek the truth, you sometimes got to
take counterintuitive positions like these. See, I'm not like one of these creationists out there
that are a bunch of ideologues easy to spot the contradictions in the way those morons look at the
world. Look at them cherry pick their scientific data. They're shameless about it. They'll say,
look at all the evidence for God's existence when they can bend the science to fit their narrative.
But the second the science doesn't fit the narrative, they conveniently ignore it. That's a
contradiction. They even do this in their personal lives. Sam Harris gives a great example. They'll say,
oh, look, look, isn't God wonderful for making sure my mom got the bank loan for her house right
when we thought all hope was lost. God is great. They'll say. But then when a natural disaster takes
out 10,000 people in a matter of minutes, they'll say God is mysterious. How can a creationist not see
the contradictions that are grounding their entire worldview? Now, from the perspective of Slavogyshek
listening to all this, this take on creationist ideology, there's a sense in which this person in
their critique is right. He would say there are contradictions at the core of a creationist
ideology. And like we talked about last episode, those contradictions are the fingerprints of them
using ideology to make sense of the complexity of the universe. And yes, the creationist would
probably do well. He thinks to pay attention to the structures of the ideology they're immersed in.
But here's the thing. So would that fan of science that's doing all the critiquing. He'd say this
common materialist style of ideology is not harnessing the truth without using contradictions.
It just feels like they are to them because they lack a level of self-awareness about the ideology
that mediates their thinking. For example, what could he possibly be talking about here?
Well, as it's been pointed out in the history of philosophy, in order to even get to that place,
where you make the statement, I'm only going to believe in something if it's empirically verifiable,
in order to do that, you have to smuggle in philosophical assumptions at the bottom that are
themselves not empirically verifiable. For example, that the universe is something that is rationally
coherent to the point that human rationality can be used to study and understand it. That's a
philosophical assumption, not something proven by a science experiment. Or how about the one from
Hume, the problem of induction, that you have to assume there's a continuity to existence where
someone can study individual examples of things using science and then derive general conclusions
from them. Again, another philosophical assumption. Or how about the principles of causality you need
to conduct science or the existence of universal laws? None of these are empirically verifiable.
There's a sense in which if you told a material reductionist that there may be a rational
ordering to things, a teleology, a goal-directed nature to the universe that aims towards rationality,
they would tell you, I'm sorry, but that's unverifiable speculation. We can't prove it. It's dangerous
to speculate about those kind of things. But again, to Gisec and to Kwein and to so many other
philosophers who have looked at this problem, verifiability, science is always value-laden.
No matter how much it seems like it, you are not starting from zero and then receiving a one-to-one
depiction of reality. See, because on another level, the conceptual frameworks we use to make sense
of scientific data matter. You want proof of this, just consider the fact that the same empirical
data can be looked at through different conceptual frameworks and it changes what your whole view of
reality is. Take light as an example. At one point in the history of science, we thought that light
was a collection of photons and that photons are particles, core puzzles as they used to call them.
Little later on, it was believed that light was in fact a wave instead of a particle.
Change the whole way we thought about what light is. Little later than that, as a quantum
physicist in today's world, depending on what kind of operations you want to do, you would view
light as either a particle or as a wave. And thinking of light as some sort of wave-particle duality
is probably the best description we got right now. Now, this is just one example of many from
the history of science. But it illustrates how science gets far from this totally neutral,
valueless enterprise. The conceptual frameworks, the philosophical assumptions,
the ideology that we filter the data through has to be something that we're self-aware of.
And there's a type of person out there who romanticizes science, funny enough, usually people
who are not scientists. And these people position themselves as the opposite to this ideology of
creationism while they view themselves as truth seekers and live in ignorance to the
contradictions that ground the ideology they're immersed in. Now, here's the thing. Does this
mean that every ideology is equally valid? No. Does this mean we throw out science? No. Does this
mean we all invest in Jesus' lotion? No. Am I interviewing myself right now? Well, yes, yes,
I am actually. In all seriousness, does this mean that because we've found contradictions at the
bottom of this one, that now the whole thing, everything about it was false and now it all goes
up and smoke? No. And again, to Giecek, get rid of this idea you're carrying around that you're
ever going to have a worldview that doesn't have contradictions at the bottom of it. This is not a
reason to throw away everything out. There's just a greater level of self-awareness about the game
we're actually playing. It's actually very freeing once you get past the initial feelings of
discomfort. There's this initial stage where you may try to use ideology to find all the ways you're
not actually in contradiction, but to Giecek, we have to be in contradiction at some level.
That said, it also helps to understand the philosophical origins of this type of thinking.
And this is where Thomas Nagel and his book Mind and Cosmos can help us. He would start by saying
that if we just go back far enough, back during the time of Aristotle, for example, assuming the
tealogies of things or the goals or the purposes of things was not a controversial position to take
at the time. People would look at the eyes or the teeth of an animal, for example, and they would
look at how something like the eye, with all of its intricate parts, in our scientific language,
we'd say you have the retina and the cornea and the optic nerves, and these people would look at all
the parts of the eye working together in unison, and they would see the eye as something that obviously
has a clear purpose for a creature. It's obviously part of a larger system where these things allow
the creature to see and navigate its environment. And if you were living at that time, and you wanted
to doubt that there was some sort of teleology or goal intrinsic to these sorts of things, if you
wanted to doubt that, much like the atheist who makes fun of the religious person in today's world,
people back then might be like, look, go ahead and doubt all you want. But at a certain point,
I don't even know what it is we're talking about. Clearly, there's a purpose at work here,
and that purpose may extend to the overall creatures themselves, that purpose may extend into human life.
It's not crazy to think this may extend to the way we structure our societies. You know,
what's the purpose or the function of a society, and how do we design one that will fulfill that
purpose for us? And as we know, looking at history, people took this obvious purpose that must be
embedded into everything, and they ran with it. They ran so far with it. Forest gumps got nothing
on these people. Turns out, as narrative creatures, we can get a little carried away with the
assumptions we're making about what the obvious purpose of all this stuff is. And as Nagel says,
a couple thousand years later, right around the beginning of the modern scientific revolution,
there were some thinkers at the time that had enough of it and came up with a great idea.
There were several of them, Francis Bacon, building off of the work of Descartes,
Galileo, Isaac Newton, many others at the time. But these great thinkers looked around them,
and they saw a bunch of people who were pretty distracted, all things considered. They were doing
science with an Aristotelian scientific method, assuming the purposes to things. They saw people
around them studying alchemy, believing that certain metals had spiritual properties that we just
couldn't see. They look at all this stuff. Themselves embedded into it, by the way. I mean,
Newton spent a lot of his life on alchemy, but they look at it, and eventually there's this idea,
like, okay, all this non-material stuff out there, this has become a distraction, people. We're not
making as much progress as we could be making on the quantifiable side of things, because we're too
busy focusing on all this stuff that we can't measure. So how about this? How about we take all this
other non-material stuff that today we'd call consciousness cognition, qualities, purposes,
value, and all the rest of it? And let's bracket that stuff off as the domain that science doesn't
tread a study, and let's instead see what happens if we stay in the realm of the three dimensions,
material reality. Let's do that, and see if anything changes. Well, that happened,
and now we're sequencing the genome, and this podcast is being delivered to you by invisible
waves that are flying through the sky. Yeah, turned out to be a pretty good thing on the
quantifiable side of things. But the point is, what started with these thinkers? As a very conscious
choice to bracket off certain aspects of reality to clear the way for studying the physical side of
things better, meaning they knew good and well that they weren't harnessing all of reality.
What started is that, with all the progress being made in the sciences. To Thomas Nagel,
over the years this turned into an overall attitude in academia. Not just that material explanations
are what we should be aiming for, but instead further, that if something can't be explained by
studying the materials that it's made out of, it's either in illusion, it doesn't really exist,
or it's a delusion, or it's scientific ignorance where there must be some kind of material
explanation that's possible. But we're just essentially a bunch of monkeys rattling their cages
frustrated we haven't done enough science yet to fully understand it. As Philip Goff says,
over the years you can see this attitude start to crop up in different places, Nietzsche famously
declaring God is dead, Mark saying that religions the opiate of the masses, Freud saying that a
belief in God is ultimately a longing for daddy. And what all this leads to is a more common
ideological attitude amongst people living at the beginning of the 20th century,
that science is the way that we arrive at the truth, and that anything that isn't understandable
by studying the materials that something's made out of is likely to be religious nonsense.
And what this leads to is an overall skepticism in people of non-material explanations for things
overall. Hence the views on consciousness, where no matter how non-material it may seem,
it's got to be in the brain somewhere hidden from us. We just need more time,
or with hard determinism. No matter how much it seems like we make free choices,
God will ultimately be predictable with the atoms in the prior events in some way.
Or that morality is at best something that's completely subjective, or argue about it forever.
And at worst it's a total delusion, purely relative, just monkeys rattling their cage.
These positions are logical conclusions if you're starting from the ideology of material
reductionism, as well as the conclusions that life is completely meaningless, that it's obvious
we live in a totally disinterested, absurd universe and that nothing really matters. That's a
hallmark of the times as well. But I want to paint a picture of a what if scenario that Thomas
Nagel and Philip Goff would want us to consider. Philosophies this everybody, I believe I
ever used to do that. What if in 500 years people look back on the time we're living in right now?
And they see the ways that we were thinking about science and materialism, and they say,
look, I think I get it. I think I get where they were coming from. These people knew their religious
history. They knew how they used to project meanings onto things that were fake. They didn't want to
do that again. These people saw the miracles of science going on all around them. They were living
in the wake of some of the greatest scientific discoveries the world had ever seen at the time.
They had mad respect for science. But because they were living in this precise historical moment,
because it was understandable to commit yourself to materialism in this extreme of a way,
these people ignored the obvious purpose in order to the universe that was staring them in the face
the whole time. That anybody 500 years before or after just assumes is obvious as one of those
necessary philosophical assumptions we have to smuggle in to be capable of doing good science,
something on the level of induction or rational coherence. What if that's how this time ends up
being seen? Well, let's consider it for a second. Is there any guarantee that the current scientific
theoretical model is the model that's going to be able to explain everything? The people that created
it knew they were bracketing off large sections of reality. Is it time we start talking about
parsimonious assumptions we could additionally bring in to fill in some of these gaps?
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back to the podcast. Is there any guarantee that the current scientific theoretical model is the
model that's going to be able to explain everything? The people that created it knew they were bracketing
off large sections of reality. Is it time we start talking about parsimonious assumptions we could
additionally bring in to fill in some of these gaps? What gaps though? There are no gaps. We'll see
that's the thing to somebody like Thomas Nagle. A fan of the new atheist movement will be quick to
attack a creationist for using what they call a god of the gaps argument. We've all heard this one
before to bring back our example of the eye. The creationists will say, look, you scientists out
there may be able to explain all the parts of the eye and how it was naturally selected to refract
light and produce vision. But none of you can explain how that eye was created in the first place.
And where you guys can't explain things with their science, I'm going to say that God did it.
Again, wherever there's a gap in scientific explanation so far, God must have done it, the God of
the gaps. But Nagle says there's another type of trap you can fall into when the other side of
that as well. When someone is so committed to materialism that they won't see outside the borders
of it for any alternative explanation of reality, they can start to give what he calls the evolution
of the gaps argument that if something isn't explained by the current theoretical model fully,
well, it couldn't be that maybe the model itself needs some work. Any gap in our understanding of
things will eventually be filled by science. We just need a couple more thousand years of doing
science the exact same way we are right now. But history is filled with changes to the theoretical
models that we use to understand reality. Maybe you've heard of Aristotle's four causes from back
when he was doing his work. Aristotle lived during a time where he obviously didn't have all the
access to scientific knowledge we do. And partially because of that, he was interested in a much
larger question that's interesting to think about. He wondered what is it to have a full understanding
of something? Like, of course, there's having a partial understanding of something and there's all
different kinds of knowledge about any one particular thing. But if we wanted to say that we understood
something fully, what would that require? Take the example of a chair. Modern science primarily
focuses on understanding the materials that the chair is made out of and the process or the sequence
of events that led to that chair being the way that it is. But is this having a full understanding
of all things chair? Aristotle would say no. Having a full understanding of any one particular thing
requires knowing its four different causes or explanations. There's the material cause, what
it's made out of. There's the efficient cause, the maker or process that created that chair.
But then there's the formal cause, the form or design of the chair, and the final cause,
the purpose or function of the chair. And Aristotle, until you have all four of these,
you don't have a full understanding of what that chair is, or whatever it is, whether it's a chair,
the human brain, or the universe. Well, Thomas Nagle gives an example of this in his book,
Mind and Cosmos. He says, picture a pocket calculator. Now, you can type in the keys
five plus three equals. And there will be a little pixelized eight that comes up on the calculator,
telling you the answer to the problem. Now, in terms of what just went on there,
there's one type of explanation. You can give a purely material account of what just went on
by describing the plastic that the buttons are made out of, the solar power, the electricity going
through all the different microchips and circuits. And if you did that, what you would have is a great
material explanation. But what you would also have is an incomplete explanation of what it was that
just went on. Because outside of anything material that's going on, there's also this non-material
understanding of a mathematical system that you need to even be able to grasp the relevance of
the problem that was just solved, or whether it was the right answer. There's a teleological
understanding that's needed, or else we're always potentially cutting our own legs off with our
own theoretical model. So take neo-Darwinian evolution as a theory. As a fan of science, you may
see this as an incredible explanation for the efficient cause, or for how something like the
eye of a creature came about because of certain environmental conditions. But no matter how much
you think that explains the how, it does nothing to explain the why. There's a difference between a
cause and an explanation. There's a difference between having a sequence of events that led to
something and an explanation. There's a sense in which we need more holistic explanations for the
purposes of these things within a larger system to be able to get a full understanding of them.
But it also seems to be true to Nagle that at a certain point, a purely materialist neo-Darwinian
accountability cannot get us there, at the very least when it comes to consciousness, cognition,
and value. As Nagle says, if life forms that have rich experiences of mental life are not anomalies,
but are as they seem to be just normal parts of nature, then if that's the case, biology as a field
cannot be a purely physical science. What are we missing in our understanding of these life forms?
Aristotle would definitely think it's something important. The goal again is not to destroy the
sciences here, but to ask how can we incorporate all the great science that we've done into a more
broad, meaningful picture of what reality is. And to be clear here, neither Thomas Nagle or
Philip Gofford saying that because a materialist neo-Darwinian accountability doesn't have all the
answers, that there must be some guy sitting up in the clouds with a plan for everybody. Again,
an ideology doesn't always have to be replaced by its opposite. In fact, quick aside here,
in many ways, what these two modern philosophers are trying to do here? From the perspective of
someone like Slava Gisek, is that they're trying to find a resolution between these two sides that
supposedly are opposites. This is Hagel's dialectic in action, Tse Gisek. This is how social progress
is made. There's two ideologies, positioned on either side of an argument, and both these positions
are necessary and inevitable, and both of them contain partial truths about reality, as well as
containing their own contradictions. And it's through battling it out in this form of ideas that both
sides end up resolving the contradictions that are at the bottom of their worldview. To Hagel,
this is the dialectical way that ideas progress, and it's not just ideas to him, it's material
reality, it's identity, it's so many other things that we talked about on the Hagel series.
Now, Gisek slightly disagrees with Hagel here. He doesn't think that we're resolving
contradictions through this process, but really just understanding our own contradictions better
and getting more clarity about the issue overall. We'll talk more about that next episode when we
talk about Gisek and ideological progress, but again, this debate between material reductionists
on the one hand and creationists on the other, with Thomas Nagel and Philip Goff sitting somewhere
in the middle trying to preserve the best of both worlds, this can serve as a pretty good visual
for the type of ideological battle that Gisek thinks is going on everywhere. And that's what matters
to a philosopher like Philip Goff. How do we answer these fundamental questions about the purposes
of things and value in the universe without sacrificing anything that's great about science as
it's currently done? The title of Philip Goff's new book, Retrace to Explore Some Answers to This,
is called Why, the Purpose of the Universe. And before we talk about how purpose in the universe
may make sense without there being some sort of supernatural man with a staff, I want to follow
up on that what if scenario that we gave before? If we are living in a particular moment in history
where we're obsessed with materialism in more ways than one, then that must mean that there's
evidence that the universe has a purpose all around me, and I'm just either not seeing it,
or I'm reframing it through my own biases in a way where I just can't see it. Where is that evidence
if it's there? Chapter 2 of Philip Goff's book is called Why Science Points to Purpose. He starts
by saying that for a long time there wasn't good evidence to point to if you wanted to believe in
purpose, over a hundred years without good evidence. But all that has changed to him in just the last
few decades. What he's referring to is, I mean as he may already be aware of, scientists that study
the nature of reality look at reality through what's known as the standard model. And among other
things, this standard model includes certain constants, certain fixed numbers that we got to plug into
the equations about reality in order for the equations to work. These constants include things like
the masses of fundamental particles and the exact strength of the forces that are governing them.
Well, as Goff says, once we figured out what these fixed values were, people got a little curious
and started running computer simulations wondering what the universe would be like if these fixed
values were just a little different. And what they found was that the overwhelming majority of
the possible universes that are out there were completely incompatible with the existence of life.
And not just carbon-based life like we know about, but any kind of chemical complexity, what so
ever. The periodic table of elements, as we know it, doesn't exist in most of these worlds.
For example, the strong nuclear force, the force that binds together the elements in a nucleus of
an atom, the fixed value of that can be represented, Goff says, by the number 0.007.
Now, just as an example here, if that number had been 0.006 or less, the universe would have
contained nothing but hydrogen. If it had been 0.008 or higher, almost all the hydrogen would have
burned off in the Big Bang and water would have never existed. Chemical complexity would have never
existed. And this extends to the physical properties of things, he says. If the mass of a
downcork had been greater by a factor of three, the universe would have contained only hydrogen.
If electrons had been bigger by a factor of 2.5, the universe would contain only neutrons.
Contrast that with the more than 60 million chemical compounds we know about in our universe, he says.
Now, combine all this with the discovery of the value of the cosmological constant, or the
amount of dark energy that's in empty space. And consider the fact that this number is so small
and so precise, that if I even wanted to read you, the number of trillions here, that it is
precise to tell you about it, even that would be a chore. And then know that if the cosmological
constant were even slightly bigger, things would have shot apart too quickly in the universe for
gravity to clump them together into stars and planets. And if it was slightly smaller, then the
universe would have collapsed back in on itself. When you consider all of this, and the very specific
way that our universe is, to fill up golf, you're left with the choice. You can accept all this as
a wild coincidence, which you may, or you can consider what he calls the value selection hypothesis,
or the idea that the numbers we see in the fine tuning of physics like this are the way they are
because they allow for a universe containing great value. As he says, quote, a universe where there
is life in all its richness, including people who can fall in love, experience great beauty,
and contemplate their own existence. And quote, now the value selection hypothesis is just one
position of many that Philip Gough explores in the book, but it doesn't just have to be value
selection. To him, this is one subcomponent of a much larger discussion that's neglected in his
eyes of the possibility of cosmic purpose in the universe that exists without some sort of omnigod
that must have created it much more on that in a second, but it would be important to Philip Gough
here to pause and speak to some of the people out there that would be perfectly fine seeing what
he calls overwhelming evidence for purpose as just a coincidence. Like common response back to
hearing this from Philip Gough could be a, okay, I'm not against it, but how about the fact that
coincidence has happened, Philip Gough? It's not that I can't see how this could be possible. What I'm
saying is in my world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or how about the
multiverse theory? Haven't quantum physicists already explained how all this is possible, and it
ultimately doesn't mean anything? Well, he gets responses to all these questions and even more in
the book. I want to be respectful and not cannibalized too much of it here on my podcast, but I will
say this that when it comes to the multiverse and this other conversation we're having right now
about ideology with Giac, notice how the theory of the multiverse could easily be a point that a
materialist has popping up in their head instantly when they start to hear all this from Philip Gough.
Like, yeah, it's highly unlikely we'd get a universe fine tune for life, one in 10 to the 136, in fact.
But with the multiverse theory, there's 10 to the 136 universes, far more universes than that,
and this is just the one we landed on. It makes total sense. In light of the other conversation,
notice how this is an entirely non-material theoretical explanation to ground their worldview
that ironically needs to always be grounded in material evidence. Again, ideology can be something
that's so powerful to Giac. This type of person who is otherwise rational, a thinking person,
but someone who's romanticizing science, they will say these kinds of things not even thinking
about the contradiction that may be there. To Giac, it's almost like it lies in the subconscious
of people. Again, some more food for thought and preparation for next episode. How about the more
general question someone might ask Philip Gough here? What if this is just a coincidence? I mean,
forget ideology. I'm not trying to defend a worldview here. Couldn't it just be a coincidence,
Philip Gough? And he'd say it's possible, I guess. But again, look, part of the way we model our
understanding of the world around us in the sciences and otherwise is by using probabilities.
And just given the evidence we have now, filtered through a very standard Bayesian probability
equation that we use to model a lot of other ways we see reality. To Philip Gough.
