A very interesting and erudite discussion, and an awful lot that could be unpacked from what was covered within such a short space of time – just over half an hour.
I’ll comment in just one respect. Positing “science” as a knowledge-system is fundamentally wrong, and if you start from that point, as Spencer Klavan seems to do (he speaks of the etymology of the term “science”) then you’re going to come up with the intellectually overwrought outcomes he suggests.
It’s wrong because that’s not what science is about. Science is a method, a continual process of refinement which implicitly accepts that there can be no such thing as perfect knowledge or “truth”, only the willingness to pursue that method. There can be no room for faith within this process: the two are inimical.
Further, in citing Fauci’s claims during Covid and using them as the basis for somehow “seeing through science” he cites a particularly poor example; in other words, an example of what a so-called scientist should never do, which is to claim to be the source of knowledge, and then make political capital out of it.
I also reject the term “the new atheists” which seems a very convenient way of trying to box people into a package with the intention of making it easier to dismiss them, and Klavan is very dismissive of Dawkins for instance.
Having said all that, these are very interesting times and there’s clearly a battle for civilisation going on. What i’ve come to understand is that telling stories/myths about ourselves to bolster our way of life simply plays into the hands of any other set of religious beliefs. By that, i mean: if Christianity (belief in the Christian god) can be utilised to bolster our civilisation, why not any other version of god? How, or why, is ours “better”? Simply because it allowed the West to flourish, which it now appears not to be doing? Does Klavan think that by returning to the past we can somehow claim, or reclaim, the future?
It’s the very concept, or delusion, of ‘god’ that’s the problem here. What we’re struggling with is the loss of the belief systems of the past – but that doesn’t make them right! And we simply can’t base our future on the kind of spiritual quicksand that we found ourselves floundering in during the 20th century. So where does that leave us? It’s not with materialism, nor “the re-enchantment” concept. It’s imperative instead that we grasp how our psyches interact with what’s outside ourselves: what our brains, our consciousness, has evolved to do. Instead of inventing convenient stories, we should by now be learning to recognise the myth-making – which is what i see Klavan seeking to do afresh – for what it is.
A very interesting comment that raises almost as many questions as the interview.
I originally worked as a chemist/biochemist. I never saw a contradiction between science and religious belief. If you accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god then science is nothing more than exploring God as manifest in physical reality.
Before I quit a science career, I came to the strong belief that life depends on some force we do not yet understand. We have developed a deep understanding of the components of living organisms (down to the molecular level) and how they interact, but the pattern of interactions over time is immensely complex, and, as we develop ever more sophisticated technology to probe living cells, there seems to be no end to the complexity. How does all the complexity balance and coordinate itself, over time, to produce a living cell or organism?
One answer is that we simply haven’t used the scientific method to probe deeply enough yet. But another explanation is there’s a “complexity-regulating principle” that exists beyond the reach of science. We might call it God, or a manifestation of God. I favor this view but I accept opinions will differ.
As an aside, at a rather less abstract level than the issue of God’s existence, this interview is what Unherd used to do so well but which we must now rely on Undercurrents to do. Sadly, Unherd now seems to be becoming a sort of center-right popular culture magazine. We must look elsewhere for cutting-edge discussions.
Well done, E. Jashinsky. Keep the interesting interviews coming.
Yes, Unherd itself seems to be ‘evolving’ and it remains to be seen whether it’ll be for the better, but perhaps it’s the only way to sustain the business model.
I respect you view regarding a “manifestation of God”. If by God you mean an organising or complexity-regulating principle, there may be a way of reaching some understanding of this in the longer term through the scientific method. The problem would be the introduction of faith, which would itself hinder rather than foster the methodological approach.
We see, for instance, how beliefs can influence the debate around climate change. Also, the term “god” itself is problematic since it suggests a “being”, which comes back to the anthropomorphic way in which we create myths. It may not be what you’re suggesting, but would leave open the misinterpretation by others, perhaps for didactic purposes.
Interesting comment. You have raised an issue that has long fascinated me. Where does the complexity of life come from? With all the laws and discoveries of physics and chemistry, we can largely explain how nature works, with one glaring exception. We cannot explain how life arose and evolved from an abiotic universe.
People like Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett think they can explain it. To them natural selection becomes a god of sorts, the creator of all things, with Charles Darwin as its prophet. But the idea that even endless cycles of random variation and natural selection can cause a system to spring into being and then evolve into a more complex system must now be abandoned. It’s not tenable, and provably so.
People at the Santa Fe Institute have taken a hard look at this question but failed to find any answers. A feeble attempt has been made by some to claim that there is a natural law of increasing complexity, but that’s adds nothing to our understanding.
It’s clear that there is a design or structure to life, and design has to come from the top-down, not a bottom-up process like Darwinian evolution. (Though clearly bottom-up processes play an essential role in evolution, they cannot create design.) But even those who proffer an “intelligent design” theory have no explanation for how their designer does its work.
So neither science nor religion seems to have answers to these most fundamental questions in biology: what is life? where did it come from? how does it evolve? And what is worse, few seem to be looking for the answers.
“Where does the complexity of life come from?”
13.5 billion years of interaction between the unquantifiably large number of particles contained in the universe.
The most fundamental law of physics says that entropy increases over time, not order. Indeed, time destroys order. Statistical mechanics shows why.
Yet life is intensely orderly. So where does life come from? What drives the increase in order? Most scientists refuse to admit they haven’t got a clue. And religious people chalk it up as a mystery.
Neither science nor religion can, so far at least, even come up with a hypothesis that survives scrutiny.
Last edited 2 days ago by Carlos Danger
Carlos Danger
4 days ago
The subject of this interview intrigued me. I’m not a religious person, but I do find scientific explanations of the origin and evolution of life to be almost laughingly absurd. People like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett deify Charles Darwin as having explained it all, but his theory of evolution has been soundly discredited, and there is nothing to replace it.
So when I saw that Spencer Klavan would be talking about the subject of science and religion, and had a new book out with a foreward by Stephen Meyer, I went to Amazon and, after taking a look at the blurbs and reviews for the book, ordered a copy. It looked interesting.
Then I listened to this interview, and to a Jordan Peterson interview of Spencer Klavan, and read the first chapter of the book on Amazon. After a little thought, I went back to Amazon and cancelled my book order.
Why? Spencer Klavan is highly educated and erudite, with a PhD in the classics from Oxford and a BA in the same from Yale. If you like to deal with abstract ideas and ancient thinkers, his book might intrigue you. If you want to learn more about the mysteries of the real world we live in, what science and religion both purport to teach us about (but don’t), it won’t.
Last edited 4 days ago by Carlos Danger
Richard Craven
2 days ago
There need be no quarrel between religion and science if both sides simply respect the reason/faith disctinction. As myself an atheist, I accept with perfect equanimity that others have a faith which I happen not to share.
At least religious people acknowledge when they take things on faith. Their creation stories have no proof, but at least they have coherence.
Scientists overwhelmingly believe in Darwinian evolution, but won’t concede that their belief has only faith to support it, not reason. And it’s not even coherent.
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SubscribeA very interesting and erudite discussion, and an awful lot that could be unpacked from what was covered within such a short space of time – just over half an hour.
I’ll comment in just one respect. Positing “science” as a knowledge-system is fundamentally wrong, and if you start from that point, as Spencer Klavan seems to do (he speaks of the etymology of the term “science”) then you’re going to come up with the intellectually overwrought outcomes he suggests.
It’s wrong because that’s not what science is about. Science is a method, a continual process of refinement which implicitly accepts that there can be no such thing as perfect knowledge or “truth”, only the willingness to pursue that method. There can be no room for faith within this process: the two are inimical.
Further, in citing Fauci’s claims during Covid and using them as the basis for somehow “seeing through science” he cites a particularly poor example; in other words, an example of what a so-called scientist should never do, which is to claim to be the source of knowledge, and then make political capital out of it.
I also reject the term “the new atheists” which seems a very convenient way of trying to box people into a package with the intention of making it easier to dismiss them, and Klavan is very dismissive of Dawkins for instance.
Having said all that, these are very interesting times and there’s clearly a battle for civilisation going on. What i’ve come to understand is that telling stories/myths about ourselves to bolster our way of life simply plays into the hands of any other set of religious beliefs. By that, i mean: if Christianity (belief in the Christian god) can be utilised to bolster our civilisation, why not any other version of god? How, or why, is ours “better”? Simply because it allowed the West to flourish, which it now appears not to be doing? Does Klavan think that by returning to the past we can somehow claim, or reclaim, the future?
It’s the very concept, or delusion, of ‘god’ that’s the problem here. What we’re struggling with is the loss of the belief systems of the past – but that doesn’t make them right! And we simply can’t base our future on the kind of spiritual quicksand that we found ourselves floundering in during the 20th century. So where does that leave us? It’s not with materialism, nor “the re-enchantment” concept. It’s imperative instead that we grasp how our psyches interact with what’s outside ourselves: what our brains, our consciousness, has evolved to do. Instead of inventing convenient stories, we should by now be learning to recognise the myth-making – which is what i see Klavan seeking to do afresh – for what it is.
A very interesting comment that raises almost as many questions as the interview.
I originally worked as a chemist/biochemist. I never saw a contradiction between science and religious belief. If you accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god then science is nothing more than exploring God as manifest in physical reality.
Before I quit a science career, I came to the strong belief that life depends on some force we do not yet understand. We have developed a deep understanding of the components of living organisms (down to the molecular level) and how they interact, but the pattern of interactions over time is immensely complex, and, as we develop ever more sophisticated technology to probe living cells, there seems to be no end to the complexity. How does all the complexity balance and coordinate itself, over time, to produce a living cell or organism?
One answer is that we simply haven’t used the scientific method to probe deeply enough yet. But another explanation is there’s a “complexity-regulating principle” that exists beyond the reach of science. We might call it God, or a manifestation of God. I favor this view but I accept opinions will differ.
As an aside, at a rather less abstract level than the issue of God’s existence, this interview is what Unherd used to do so well but which we must now rely on Undercurrents to do. Sadly, Unherd now seems to be becoming a sort of center-right popular culture magazine. We must look elsewhere for cutting-edge discussions.
Well done, E. Jashinsky. Keep the interesting interviews coming.
Yes, Unherd itself seems to be ‘evolving’ and it remains to be seen whether it’ll be for the better, but perhaps it’s the only way to sustain the business model.
I respect you view regarding a “manifestation of God”. If by God you mean an organising or complexity-regulating principle, there may be a way of reaching some understanding of this in the longer term through the scientific method. The problem would be the introduction of faith, which would itself hinder rather than foster the methodological approach.
We see, for instance, how beliefs can influence the debate around climate change. Also, the term “god” itself is problematic since it suggests a “being”, which comes back to the anthropomorphic way in which we create myths. It may not be what you’re suggesting, but would leave open the misinterpretation by others, perhaps for didactic purposes.
Interesting comment. You have raised an issue that has long fascinated me. Where does the complexity of life come from? With all the laws and discoveries of physics and chemistry, we can largely explain how nature works, with one glaring exception. We cannot explain how life arose and evolved from an abiotic universe.
People like Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett think they can explain it. To them natural selection becomes a god of sorts, the creator of all things, with Charles Darwin as its prophet. But the idea that even endless cycles of random variation and natural selection can cause a system to spring into being and then evolve into a more complex system must now be abandoned. It’s not tenable, and provably so.
People at the Santa Fe Institute have taken a hard look at this question but failed to find any answers. A feeble attempt has been made by some to claim that there is a natural law of increasing complexity, but that’s adds nothing to our understanding.
It’s clear that there is a design or structure to life, and design has to come from the top-down, not a bottom-up process like Darwinian evolution. (Though clearly bottom-up processes play an essential role in evolution, they cannot create design.) But even those who proffer an “intelligent design” theory have no explanation for how their designer does its work.
So neither science nor religion seems to have answers to these most fundamental questions in biology: what is life? where did it come from? how does it evolve? And what is worse, few seem to be looking for the answers.
“Where does the complexity of life come from?”
13.5 billion years of interaction between the unquantifiably large number of particles contained in the universe.
The most fundamental law of physics says that entropy increases over time, not order. Indeed, time destroys order. Statistical mechanics shows why.
Yet life is intensely orderly. So where does life come from? What drives the increase in order? Most scientists refuse to admit they haven’t got a clue. And religious people chalk it up as a mystery.
Neither science nor religion can, so far at least, even come up with a hypothesis that survives scrutiny.
The subject of this interview intrigued me. I’m not a religious person, but I do find scientific explanations of the origin and evolution of life to be almost laughingly absurd. People like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett deify Charles Darwin as having explained it all, but his theory of evolution has been soundly discredited, and there is nothing to replace it.
So when I saw that Spencer Klavan would be talking about the subject of science and religion, and had a new book out with a foreward by Stephen Meyer, I went to Amazon and, after taking a look at the blurbs and reviews for the book, ordered a copy. It looked interesting.
Then I listened to this interview, and to a Jordan Peterson interview of Spencer Klavan, and read the first chapter of the book on Amazon. After a little thought, I went back to Amazon and cancelled my book order.
Why? Spencer Klavan is highly educated and erudite, with a PhD in the classics from Oxford and a BA in the same from Yale. If you like to deal with abstract ideas and ancient thinkers, his book might intrigue you. If you want to learn more about the mysteries of the real world we live in, what science and religion both purport to teach us about (but don’t), it won’t.
There need be no quarrel between religion and science if both sides simply respect the reason/faith disctinction. As myself an atheist, I accept with perfect equanimity that others have a faith which I happen not to share.
At least religious people acknowledge when they take things on faith. Their creation stories have no proof, but at least they have coherence.
Scientists overwhelmingly believe in Darwinian evolution, but won’t concede that their belief has only faith to support it, not reason. And it’s not even coherent.