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Nick Spencer on Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion · One Universe, Two Books

• speaker-0: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the inaugural episode of One Universe Two Books. this is a webinar series that's sponsored by the National Association of Scholars. And the object of this is to explore the the tense and sometimes very fruitful interface of science and religion. I'm Scott Turner. I'm Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars. And my co-host is Ian Oksnivud. Ian, tell us about yourself. speaker-2: Thanks, Scott. I'm Doctor Ian Oxnavad. I am the NAS Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies. speaker-0: Okay, so Ian is also ha has has a has a really interesting interest, if you will, in the in the whole issue of of theology and divinity and those kinds of things. I'm an evolutionary biologist, also a Christian, but that's where I'm coming into this. Now our guest on our inaugural episode is gonna be a very interesting philosopher. religion and science that I happened to meet over the summer. No matter how many times we crossed paths at the Centennial Observation of the Scopes trial, the the monkey trial, if you will, in Dayton, Tennessee. I knew about him before I went down there, read his book, and we're gonna be meeting today just to get to know Nick Spencer, because he's a fascinating guy, but also to discuss a new book that he has just published called Magisteria, the entangled histories of science and religion. and I'm going to do a shameless plug for this 'cause it's a fantastic book. And so let's bring in Nick, see w what he has to say and I think we're gonna have a very, very interesting conversation. Nick, welcome to our podcast One Universe Two Books. we're really glad to have you here. Very excited to have you here because we've actually crossed paths before. we met in Dayton, Tennessee in July during the centennial of the Scopes trial. before we met, I actually came across your book, Magisteria, which is I think gonna be the focus of our of our conversation today. I didn't introduce my colleague here, Ian Oxnavad, who is also with the National Association of Scholars. Ian, why don't you introduce yourself to Nick? speaker-2: Hi Nick, how are ya? I am Dr. Ian Oxnabad, the Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies. I actually have a political science background, but I also am at the very terminal stages of my second PhD in theology. So when when Scott and I came up with this idea, it was a natural fit for the two of us to start talking. speaker-1: Sounds good. Second PhD. Wow, that's hardcore, isn't it? speaker-2: What what you gotta have one for each hand. speaker-0: I hadn't heard that metaphor before. It's interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's and appropriate given what we're talking about today. So so Nick, I wanted to have a conversation with you in Dayton about your impressions of the Scopes Trial Centennial as well as your thoughts about the Scopes trial itself. I should mention that we're here today to speak about your very fine book, Magisteria, the non the entangled histories of science and religion. And the scopes trial plays an important role in that book, but how did you enjoy the the the centennial celebrations and Dayton? speaker-1: I loved it. I'd never been to Dayton, I'd never been to Tennessee before, so it was all a new experience for me. The two-day symposium that I was part of was great fun, I had some great talks there. But I enjoyed just being around the courtroom and the courthouse and the town for five days, I think. A lovely time. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. It was a gr it was a great time as well. That was my impression. the thing that impressed me about the symposium that you participated in was was the broad range of of opinion there. You know, all the way from someone who is in your position, and we'll talk about just what your position is here momentarily, all the way to you know, fairly hardcore creationists, and pretty good scientists as well. And and so that impressed me. And what impressed me also I think was just the hospitality of the people and the and the range of opinion that was there and the respectful way in which the celebrations were w was handled. And it gives you a very, very different picture from the conventional story of the Scopes trial, you know, as this as this epic battle between science and religion. And and this This th this leads into the topic of your book Magisteria. Yeah. tell us something about the title of that. Where does that title come from? speaker-1: Well, the short answer is from my publisher. I'm rubbish with speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: titles. I've hardly written a book which has been published under the same title I envisaged it. And that's largely because the titles I come up with, the publishers basically say, yeah, descriptive, worthy, won't sell a copy. And my publisher came up with this, but it is a much better title. It's a much better title than the one I chose. it's a very good title because it gestures back to Stephen Jay Gould's idea that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. We might come on to that in more detail in our conversation, but that was his attempt in the 90s to try and pull apart the warring factions of science and religion by saying they basically got nothing to do with one another. And he described each as having its own magisterium, which was a term, magisteria, which was a term he's told. social teaching. So as they say, there's no such thing as an original idea. named it from Stephen Jay Gould, but Stephen Jay Gould named it... speaker-0: And I Gould's invocation of the magisterium was was was kind of an interesting one. He was he was of course trying to reconcile and I'm putting this in air quotes, the war between science and religion. and but you know he he did it in kind of an odd way. I remember the the the the topic of his paper on on this was about the Catholic Church's thoughts about human evolution. And you know, Goulds said, well, you know, now the Catholic Church is coming to agree with me and therefore we can have a, you know, a good conversation about science and religion. But in the end it was it was, you know, he was buying into the whole nish issue that there is this irreconcilable conflict between one way of looking at the world and the other way of looking at the world, universe or whatever. And I've always kind of thought that was a phony distinction. And if you get into the into the history of this notion of a war between science and religion, it doesn't really hold up. And your book I think masterfully argues that actually, you know, science and religion have often been productive partners in helping to understand the world. that that advances in science have often come about through a productive conversation and amity, if you will, between the worlds of science and religion. And your book outlines this pretty interestingly. It it reminded me a lot of of of of this book Galileo Goes to Jail by Ronald Numbers, I think. And and you know, th there's there's just an this incredible accretion of myth that surrounds the support of this narrative. And you start with Hypatia being murdered in Alexandria all the way through you know, the the the the the scale of of of well I should say the scope of your exploration of this ranges all the way from that up to issues of consciousness and And how the brain works and and you know, those kinds of things. And you take it all the way through. Now how is it that you came to I I mean, I've I've written some books myself. I know the amount of pain and and effort that goes into it. And what was it that grabbed your attention sufficiently to make you write an entire book about this ongoing myth? Of a war between science and religion. speaker-1: So there's a couple of ways I can answer that. The first one would be that my journey really begins with Darwin. 2009 was a very big Darwin anniversary, 200 years since his birth and 150 years since the origin of species. And we did a project in the UK about Darwin, Darwin rejection theism. And as part of that, I wrote a short book on Darwin's own religious journey. Interestingly, given how very many books there are on Darwinism and religion. actually very, very few, there were very few on Darwin and religion. And what emerged from that was a fair outline to the well-known, and the story are true that he was a Christian, he lost his faith. But of course, the details were much more interesting. And it struck me that it was misleading that someone who was at the time and in still some ways is the intellectual poster boy for atheism would write as he did to Michael John Ford, I guess a few years before he died, it seems to me absurd to think that a man may not be both a theist and an evolutionist. He had a much more nuanced, interesting attitude to the relationship between science and religion than is often taken. And it struck me in the years after I'm writing that and doing kind of background research that that applies to everything, right? If you have captured the entirety of a very, very complex relationship that lasts certainly centuries, arguably millennia, under one single control and metaphor, which is usually war or conflict, you are flattening out a vast number of very much more interesting, nuanced, thoughtful, counterintuitive things that happen. So I wanted to tell that story. The second answer to your question is that in 2016, 17, I remember when it came out, I read Peter Harrison's book, The Territories of Science and Religion. Harrison is a really brilliant Australian intellectual historian scholar and the argument of that book is that in a sense science and religion can't have been in opposition from day one because it didn't exist in day one it didn't really exist in our current format until the 19th century so it doesn't mean there weren't points of contact between things that became religion and things that became science But to really understand their relationship, you've got to understand it in context. And that means pulling apart what science means and what religion means and trying to pick it up in its original context. Understand it in its original context. And Magisteria is an attempt to do that. speaker-0: Yeah, the y you know, you mentioned this whole thing got its start in the middle of the nineteenth century and and you know, I I I've I followed some of that, the origins of this notion of of science versus religion in Victorian England, for example. And and you wrote a little bit about this, actually quite a bit about this. by the way, I just wanna point out to everyone that that that your your exploration of Darwin's religious beliefs was another book, which of course we want to promote here, God and Darwin, which I was a very interesting, very interesting book. But if you look at, you know, like the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, you know, for example, you know, th th this was a famous episode and the history of evolution, you know, supposedly it riled up everybody, you know, Huxley vanquished Wilberforce. And if you look into the historical record of it, okay, it happened, but it wasn't that big a deal. But but it really became an an an iconic moment through the efforts of the sons of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin and Thomas Huxley, Leonard Huxley, who who actually, you know, kind of ginned up this controversy in part in order to, you know, honor their fathers, but also it kind of played into an internal conflict within the Anglican church, you know, between high church and broad church Anglicans and this was tied into to Huxley's campaign to actually kind of wrest control of the Oxbridge universities from from the Anglican church. And it seemed that that started all there and and you know what is it that you you know Y you're from England, you know the history of Victorian England quite well, obviously you're from there. What's your perspective on the origin of this supposedly irreconcilable conflict between science and and and and religion? speaker-1: Bye. So again, let me give two quick answers to that. There's the immediate origins in the Victorian period, really the back half of the 19th century, the period in which the conflict between science and religion. I'm just, getting a lot of background noise. I don't know if anyone else can hear it. speaker-0: I can hear it, yes, yes. Is it coming from you? Yeah. speaker-1: I'll try and talk over it, but it's, that's better. Much better. Yeah, that's better. Okay. speaker-0: So back to the question, you know, you know, what's your what's your perspective, you know, what's your spin, if you will, on on the origin of this war between science and religion and and and its utility basically as a as as a tool in what was really an internal religious conflict within the Anglican church. speaker-1: So I think you can give two answers to that, or you can give one answer and then a slightly longer perspective. In Victorian Britain, the idea of a conflict between science and religion is something that develops particularly in the third quarter or the second half of the century. Let's not underplay the fact that evolution by natural selection felt as a very serious threat. by many believers in the same way that geology was earlier in the century, in the same way as phrenology was earlier in the century. So there is a perception that this range of different scientific disciplines are somehow challenging Christian truth. Particular threat to a self-consciously Protestant nation that has built its identity around the literal truth of the scriptures. But there are other things going on. as it were mean that those perceived threats from biology and geology are pushing it an open door. One is that actually, Victorian Britain becomes less self-consciously Protestant in this period. The Catholic hierarchy is reestablished in 1850 and Protestantism feels a bit, a little bit more, as it were, ecclesiastically insecure. There's another threat from another direction, which is the incursion of what is known as German higher criticism. which is what we call hermeneutics, are reading of the scriptures as if they're just ordinary ancient texts. That was a significant threat to Victorian Anglicans, Victorian Protestants. Interestingly, by far the most controversial book published around 1859, 1860 was not Darwin's Island of Species, but was a series of essays called Essays and Reviews, which first introduced German high criticism or biblical criticism is the mainstream press. So there was anxiety around that. And thirdly, not at all in significantly was the sense that science was becoming professionalized throughout the century. If you were to look to who was doing science at the beginning of the 19th century, you would probably alight upon wealthy Anglican clergymen in his rectory. By the end of the century, it was professionalised and Huxley had a very significant role in this, that there was a loss of social authority that the established church had over this period. So I'm not saying that science wasn't felt to be a threat, in some instances was a threat, but it was a threat located within a deeper, wider social, political, intellectual framework. That's the immediate factor. But the wider context is that Since the 17th century, Protestants had been leveling criticisms of Catholics for their intellectual oppression. Galileo became a motif in Protestant cultures of the way in which Catholic cultures suppressed what we would call scientific exploration. And through the later 17th and early 18th century, this trope was regularly played out by Protestants to point out how intellectually circumscribed or scared or authoritarian Catholics were. By the time it gets to the 19th century, newborn secularists and rationalists and the few atheists that put their head above the parapet actually pick up a lot of these criticisms wholesale that Protestants have been living at Catholics and point them all at religion or Christianity generally. So there's a kind of a wider context of ironically, intra-Christian polemic, which is then used against Christianity itself in the 19th century. speaker-0: Hm. Yeah. So so this this the the my impression of it, you know, i at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, Darwinism was kind of on the ropes, you know. I I think you wrote about this. you know, it it's been called also the crisis of Darwinism or the eclipse of Darwinism. Peter Bolder, of course, was the major historian there. But it's it's the This is the ironic thing. Speaking as a scientist, you know, Darwinism seems to be kind of a kind of a strange prop on which to foster the kinds of denominational conflicts that you're you're talking about. And yet the myth won't die. You know, it it it it it persists. And so that must mean that it's of utility to someone. I I don't see that it's of any utility to scientists who are interested in evolution, but it does seem to have broader social utility, not only with with secular no sectarian conflicts or battles that always go on within within communities of religious believers, but it's it's kind of taken on a life of its own. And why do you think that is? I mean, why won't this myth die? speaker-1: Well, so, I guess if we're talking about the myth of the war of science and religion or the specific myth, which I think you were talking about, about Darwinism as a particular battering ram and destructive weapon within this political right. speaker-0: Both, yeah. Yeah. I mean it's speaker-1: And in one sense, the science and religion battle is sorry, I'll rephrase that in one sense, the popular myth and the framing of a battle between science and religion is part of the war of modernity. It's absolutely no accident this emerges in the the late 19th century, when the forces of modernity are trying to finally push those of the ancient regimes out of the way. So what is often at stake, if you look at the rhetoric around science versus religion today, is we can't let people drag us back to the Middle Ages. The T-shirt that was popularly worn after 9-11, science flies people to the moon, religion flies people into buildings. That kind of captures what's going on there. Darwinism speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: is part of that. But it's particularly interesting for lots of reasons. suppose, primarily because on one understanding of it, it becomes the mechanism of that progress of modernity. Now, that's deeply ironic as most biologists who hold to evolution, natural selection would say, well, you've got this whole progress thing wrong. It doesn't work like that, okay? But it becomes a like motif for progress. But also, This is possibly the central theme throughout Magisteria. It's about who we are as a species, who we are as an animal, who we are as a creature. And my own stick, which ends up kind of popping up in virtually everything I write, is that this kind of what you would call theological anthropology or philosophical anthropology lies at the very beating heart of pretty much all of our disagreements, certainly a large number of The science and religion narrative has got most contentious when one discipline or another has made a full and comprehensive land grab for that definition of what it means to be human. So I often say, when I'm talking about this, is that the key word you want to watch out for in this rhetoric is only. If someone slips in that word only, you know that there's some kind of epistemological, possibly even political land grab going on. Human beings are only X. And when that happens, inevitably, actually tension does arise because religion and indeed other philosophical and political ideology say, well, hang on a second, that onliness excludes all the other ways there are of legitimately understanding the human. And that has been the theme that I think has kept on popping up in science and religion and pops up with particular power in Darwinism because so often we've heard humans are only evolved primates or they're only their robot programmed by their genes. speaker-0: Yeah. And th this th the the the utility of this of this trope to advance political aims, you know, that that's that's a subtext throughout the early twentieth century, as you know. You know, you and and and it usually is associated very strongly with the rise of progressive ideology and politics and so you have you know, people like the President Woodrow Wilson, you know, openly saying we need a Darwinian constitution, and and in the case of the Scopes trialogist to come back to that, you know, there was a clear political motive behind painting this stark myth of, you know, Clarence Darrow as the ultra rationalist and on the side of enlightenment and truth. And William Jennings Bryan is this kind of backward troglodite believer, which I think is actually unfair to William Jennings Jennings Bryan. and again, I look at this as a scientist and I think, hang on, you know, Darwinism is w wasn't all that strong at that time, you know. Th there was a lot of there were a lot of challenges to the scientific validity of of the Darwinian idea, yet that was central. to the arguments behind the scope strial, behind the rise of progressive ideology, and and so forth. So so we still see this appropriation of of the Darwinian idea, if you will, not to advance science, but to advance some kind of political ideology. And this this kind of manichaean thing that you're talking about, you know, use of only, you know, it's only good versus only evil. It's only Darwinism versus only religion is very much a symptom of that, I think. speaker-1: It is and I went writing the chapter on scopes I read or I read bits of for the first time a civic biology by G.F. Hunter, which was speaker-0: Hunter, Hunter. speaker-1: trial was fought. And it's an interesting example of how if you pay a bit of attention to history, it it stops being your lackey, by which I mean that when you look at the nuance of what actually goes on, it's actually a lot harder to take sides than you might think. So I'm a fully paid up evolutionist. have no problems whatsoever with believing evolution by natural selection. think it's a very good theory and explains an awful lot. But there's a part of me after reading what was actually written in Hunter Civic Biology that thinks, I might have been on Brian's side here. Because some of the things there are so vile, they're so openly eugenic, they're so utterly contemptuous of poor, indigent, drunk, prostitute people. that you think, well, you know, I don't agree with what Brian's doing here, rather, I don't agree with his underlying intellectual basis, but I kind of understand why he's doing it. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's it's i it's also well the the the narrative doesn't explain very well why, for example, the Butler Act at which was at issue in the Scopes trial, why it actually had very widespread public support not only in Tennessee but also throughout the South. And and this is the other side of of of of using Darwinism and war between science and religion as a utilitarian tool to advance a political agenda. You know, the South was rural, it was agrarian at the time. Hunter's civic biology, I mean the very notion of a civic biology had its origins in in in basically urban politics in in in the northern states, mainly the metropolitan states of New York and and those areas. And the people of the South didn't like it, you know, they didn't quite know how to say it, perhaps. maybe they felt embarrassed to say it, but this whole issue of Darwinism and Brian's campaign against against it was actually kind of a seed crystal that that around which precipitated a lot of other kinds of political agendas going on there. speaker-1: yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. And but The other thing that I wanted to to to bring up i is that when you when you talk about Darwinism, you know, you had Charles Darwin's own Darwinism, classical Darwinism as I as as as I like to call it. And then it went through this kind of crisis of Darwinism in which genetics and developmental biology, and and those kinds of areas were mounting serious challenges against against the Darwinian idea. And then it all changed in the nineteen, late nineteen twenties and early thirties with Ronald Fisher's you know, genetical theory of natural selection. And that was a radical shift in outlook, I think, from the classical Darwinism to the Darwinism of today. You know, and I think you made this point in God and Darwin, you know, that that that that while he was not a conventional didn't end up as a conventional diet in the world Anglican. He wasn't a a a believer in the Anglican church, but he still had these kinds of deistic or theistic inclinations, you know. He didn't want to completely dismiss it. Same motivation as Huxley, coining the term agnostic, you know, it's not something you can know, so you know, let's just not even you know, try to take a position on it. But the whole thing became hardened with the rise of the genetical theory of natural selection. And one thing I think that that did was it took out the notion of purposefulness in life. that's that's, you know, the Darwin at at least acknowledged the notion that life is, you know, unique in certain ways. among the unique things it does is it engages in purposeful behavior. seems to be the most obvious thing there is out there about living living things. And that seemed to have been submerged with the rise of the genetical theory of natural selection or neo-Darwinism or gene selectionism or what have you. And and that kind of solidified some kind of ugly social trends in this war between science and religion, you know, that this campaign of abolition of purpose, for example, that's that follows from an extreme gene selectionist viewpoint. You know, you're only y you know, the product of your genes and you're this puppet on the on the strings of DNA that are sitting in the middle of your of all your of all your cells. It seems to have excluded entirely the notion that there's purposefulness, there's intelligence, there's intentionality in life. And the most extreme example of that is, of course, our friend Richard Dawkins, you know, w who you know, who who ventured naively, I think, into theology and atheism and so forth in his book The God Delusion. and so again we get into this myth that just won't die, you know, even though people seem to make fools of themselves when they try to adhere too strongly to it, like Richard Dawkins. Yeah. speaker-1: I think that's right. I mean, so I think as an overview, that's pretty good. You I think that, you in a sense, what you could argue is what the 19th century did is it turned life into biology, and then what the 20th century that turned biology into chemistry. And so it kind of distanced any human concerns and any human words, like purpose and intention, objective, let alone hope and identity, things like that. It said, they're nothing. They're epiphenomena. They're froth. Now, the first thing is to say that that is very hard to swallow in any kind of existential or phenomenological way. It just doesn't feel right. I know that argument cuts no eyes at all with people who have found it, but it's not, it is worth something. And the second thing is that many people have pointed out that since you do that, you then end up smuggling intention and purpose and teleology effectively back into the picture. under the cloak of certain metaphors, most famously, selfish. And the response to that, it's only a metaphor. It's only a metaphor. But again, only, right? That word is always suspicious. And it's doing a lot more than mere metaphorical work there. So I think that by its own light, it is not very successful. This gets the kind of an air of discussion which is genuinely above my pay grade because I don't have a scientific background, but I recently read and interviewed British science writer Philip Ball, who is absolutely outstandingly good. He's not a religious believer at all, he's fully paid up atheist, but he also has stayed across the literature when it comes to biology in his book, How Life Works. It was a bit of an eye opener for me because he basically saying it is perfectly legitimate. Indeed, it is necessary to use words like purpose and intention. when you are discussing every single level of life, right the way down and including cells. It is acceptable to say that cells have a certain intention. Now, it is not the same intention that you and I would have or my cat has, but it doesn't mean it's an illegitimate way of using it. So firstly, I think you could say that purpose in one sense goes all the way down. But the other point, which again I want to come back to is your point about Richard Dawkins and the God delusion there. It is no accident that this slew of books came out in the mid 2000s. In fact, Sam Harris, who wrote the first New Atheist polemic, said, I sat down on the 12th of September 2001 to write the book. So it's a part of a reaction against a obviously very horrible incursion of religion, hopelessly vague term, into the modern world. So again, you have this science and you have the kind of conceptual apparatus of the way we understand it and frame it, but then it's embedded in the wider things of the wider historical context of what's upsetting us at the moment. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Ian you look like you have something to say. speaker-2: I have I have so many things to ask. it speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-2: it's it's it's interesting that I can't help but wonder, as the nineteenth century sort of maybe kickstarted this, it probably arguably started before that, and got worse over time, that there's almost this illiteracy in terms of science and religion on an almost civilizational scale that took place in the West. Because in doing my in in in theology, if you actually read like the Bible in the in its original languages and you start to pick apart key terms and things like that in English, it's a much weirder book than people actually want to admit. Like the w the word for world. can also mean a concept of time in Hebrew. Like in Greek, there's the concept of human being, the same word can actually be implied to be the universe itself. It's a much weirder medium than I think comes across in English, and certainly that most believers or even institutions want to engage with. And I'm I can certainly sense that that's the case with science. When people read about discoveries, they pick apart this this thing and then they just run with this surface level understanding and then they lock it and load it into their own internal sort of social political narrative and then they're off to the races. And I can't help but think that that that illiteracy in both science and religion, or theology rather, or or mystical pursuit, if you want to call it that, or existential exploration, ha got worse As you had these political movements in the 20th century and also just self-gratification in Western culture sort of crowd out the the humility that actually both science and religion sort of have to rely upon. Because I think that the science kind of operates off of this notion that there are answers to these questions of how the universe works works, and you do not know them, otherwise you wouldn't be doing the science. And if religion as a whole has one key takeaway is that, you know, or least certainly the Judeo Christian context is that God exists and you are not it. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, so much going on there, isn't it? I I've lost sympathy with most of what you said. I slightly cavil at the illiteracy point, not because I think it's wrong, but because in that regard, if one is honest about that, I've never met anyone who's actually literate in all these areas. I know, mean, I'm certainly not. I have no Hebrew and no Greek. So, know, I'm outing myself now. But it's not just the fact that only a handful of people do, but very often, virtually all the time, those who might be fully literate in Hebrew and Greek and understand the conceptual universe and really get the language and so on and so forth are going to be scientifically, thoroughly illiterate. So it's not that the literacy point is wrong. It's just that think we need to hold on to the point about, you we are all to some degree illiterate and therefore the appropriate response, the appropriate sort of form of engagement and all these issues is if you like epistemic humility. With regard to your science point, again, I think you're absolutely onto something there. Because you thought about it when you were talking about how people kind of grab a grab of science, and then they kind of embed it in their social situation, and then they're off to the races was your phrase. But actually, I think it almost happened the other way around. By which I mean, after magisteria, I co-wrote a book with a former colleague which is called The Landscapes of Science and Religion, which is an attempt to understand what are we actually disagreeing about. interviewed loads and of experts and loads loads of members of the general public, awful lot going on there. But one of the things that comes across really well, and actually John Evans in the US at the University of San Diego has made a similar kind of point in a book called Morals, Not Knowledge, is that experts, for want of a better word, will engage in this discussion between science and religion and what he calls an epistemological. So they'd be vexed about what are the possible epistemological or philosophical or perhaps metaphysical tension points, perceived tension points. The much more popular level, Evans' argument is that the discourse is moral. Now, think, in my mind, moral is perhaps slightly too narrow there. But the point is that most people encounter science as part of a new story about what science has achieved. If you look at how mainstream media in the UK at least reports this, scientists have discovered this, scientists have found this, scientists have synthesized this. And that puts embed science automatically within a progressive developmental and hugely positive well-being, positive narrative. So it's not as if you find your science and embed it, your science comes to you thoroughly embedded, thoroughly infused with a certain worldview. And if that worldview is one of progress and development and solving things and discovering things and healing things, it rubs off on what science is. Philosophers of science will say, in and of itself stripped down into morally neutral activity. But actually, people never encounter it in a morally neutral narrative. Sometimes that narrative can be a bit negative. That's tilting a bit with regards to AI at the moment. There's quite a lot of fear about that. And so maybe the narrative is Silicon Valley science is running ahead of our moral abilities to assess it. It happened in the First World War, the chemists war. After years and years of progress, we use chemicals to blind and maim servicemen. It happened in the Second World War, we've used the atomic bomb. So the narrative can turn sour, but the point is for most, far majority of people, it's always there. speaker-2: Yeah, it it's interesting. I had a conversation a while back with with the self proclaimed atheist who mentioned that he didn't believe in God, but he uses Chat GPT all the time. And I said it's interesting that you you you you say you don't believe in a disembodied knowing entity, but that you rely on a disembodied knowing entity made by human beings. And just to put this in historical context, there's a literally a war going on with the theocracy right now. So when you put these two things together, it it makes you wonder how far we've actually progressed at all. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, I mean, there is this whole question about the extent to which our brains are oriented to dependent on relationality, existing relationality. If we don't find it in a divine spiritual, we will find it in a synthetic one. And you you see it in people who, and this is goodness me, we're in the early stages of this with people who become emotionally dependent on their on their AI chat GPT or whatever it is. And I've never met anyone like this, but you if I'm to believe the reports I've seen, it's a real thing. speaker-0: Sorry, Ian, go ahead. speaker-2: No, well it's it's interesting. There was a a story a while back. It was I think it was in New York, which is rather fitting in in many ways, but it was a it was a restaurant where people were actually coming to go on dates with their with their AI. And and it was d just the just watching this, it seems it seems On some level it seems ridiculous, but it also seems incredibly alarming on an almost metaphysical existential level. You know, 'cause if you think about the phone, is the phone the the a technological metaphor of a mirror, or is it an idol that you created, or is it just something new entirely that we don't understand? And to watch people try to engage with this on this emotional sort of social level in a search for meaning is is is pretty dystopian, and kind of tragic comedy at the same time. speaker-1: It really is. mean, this is probably a bit off piste for us. But the more I think about this, I haven't really thought about it enough. But in as far as I have, it strikes me that 21st century, one of the most important questions, debates, battles we're going to have is what is the personal? Because if you play Devil's Hand for Coherence, well, okay, someone's lonely. And whoever it is, whatever, know, Facebook or know, Peter Thiel or whoever have designed these robots and they're kind of, they've got their chat GPT embedded in them and they can sit and keep company. Some of the many lonely people that are going, elderly, lonely people that are going to be in our demographically shifting world. What's wrong with that? Isn't it better for them to have an artificial companion and no companion? And the attendant question is why then would an artificial and be worse than an actual human being. So I think this is why Magisteria ended with AI in the way it did. I make the point that the battle about the person, the nature of the human, has been running central to science and religion throughout at least the last 500 years, arguably for longer. It's going to take a much more kind of front row position in the 21st century, because having for centuries posed the question, the ethical question, what should we do? I think science is now going to be posing the question, who should we be? Either in terms of the way we can modify ourselves through genetic engineering or radical life extension, or through how we should treat and engage with entities that can mimic us perfectly, but aren't at least as far as we are aware persons. What's a person? So there's kind of a scatter kind of thoughts, but it seems to me, This concept of the person and the personel, personhood, is going to be seminally important. speaker-0: Yeah, and certainly, you know, if you if you look at the ways that humans already interact with their perceptions of the natural world, you know, the the most extreme example of this is the narcissistic mindset. You know, you can fall in love with an image of yourself or you can fall in love with an artificial image of someone else. And and and so there is that there is that very strong tendency and it certainly you know, worthy of attention and worthy of alarm. I I I I was intrigued by you ending up with artificial intelligence at the end of Magisteria. And I think part of the problem, the intellectual problem, if you will, is is related to this notion of of of just what life is. And one of the things that the Neo-Darwinian revolution did was it it was was it it gave it it it gave a lot of support to the notion that life is a machine, complicated machine, but it's still a machine. And and you see this throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. But you know, the whole rise of artificial intelligence, it's predicated on the notion that the brain and our perception and our interaction with the world is the result of a machine operating. And there have been various there have been various critics of AI that says, well, well, o okay, that relies upon an incorrect model of what brains are, you know, that brains are computing machines, or that's what they are. Is that what brains do? Or is there something else operating there? And you know, this is where the notion of cognition and consciousness and those kinds of things come in. You know, the there have been people who've argued that, you know, we don't have to worry at all about artificial intelligence because it's based upon well, it's not based upon the way brains actually work and the way that that that people actually interact socially with one another. It's simply simply not capable of of being able to mimic that. in part because A computer doesn't want to be anything, but a brain actually does want to be something. This is where the intentionality issue comes in. what are your thoughts on that, Nick? Do you think we have to fear artificial intelligence per se? speaker-1: So I think we, in the first instance, have to fear the way that other human beings may use artificial intelligence. I think that's a much bigger hurdle. I mean, that seems to me to be a no brainer, so to speak, as it were. know, we sometimes said we're the same species as 10,000 years ago, just carrying bigger sticks. And AI is just a very, very big stick in that regard. And that means some people can use it to hit other people quite hard. I guess the way that that question is more usually asked is in an existential format. So are we nearing a singularity? Are we creating beings that will become self-conscious? Will we become redundant and so on and so forth? I'm a bit more sanguine about that, I think. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but there's a chapter in a book I wrote after a hysteria, which looked at, picked up all these different issues and as it were, was kind of like a, to Magisteria really. And there was a chapter on not got to maturely fear AI, but will AI become human? And it set out two different positions on this one, it called the Hawking-Harari position, which is after Stephen Hawking and Jovan Noah-Harari, basically say humans are algorithms. I mean, the logic here is humans are uniquely intelligent. We know that intelligence is just information processing. Machines can process information much better than we can. Therefore, machines are more intelligent. Therefore, machines will be more human. That's the kind of logic. There's nothing special about being human at all. And they're going to replace us. know, Hariri's come up with these pretty grotesque dystopian views about, especially basically as feeding people drugs and letting them watch TV and use virtual reality sets because there can be no purpose for them. The other view, opposite view. is the machines will never become human because, and this is often a religious trope, machines won't have a soul. I don't buy that argument at all. weirdly, I think both of those arguments, even though they come to different conclusions, have one thing in common, which is they completely downplay the significance of the body. So in the first instance, humans are intelligence, they're mind. In the second instance, the quintessential fact about humans is they've got a soul. But actually being embodied is kind of important to being human. And that's why I ended the Magisteria by looking at the famous paper that Alan Turing wrote, Can a Machine Think, in 1950, which I've never read beforehand, really interesting. Of course, it's a brilliant paper and, you know, 18,000 citations is one of the most influential in all scientific history. But there's a fascinating bit early on when he's justifying why he chooses the imitation. as the legitimate way of discerning whether a machine could ever think or not. When he says it's completely irrelevant whether a machine will have anything like skin, because actually what's important about it is understanding whether human beings can think. But if you kind of think about it, it's not irrelevant that we've got skin. It kind of means literally metaphorically, you've got skin in the game. And as people have pointed out quite a lot since 1950 or so, our embodiedness is absolutely totally linked with our cognition. And also there's on the flip side, on the soul side, there's a brilliant line from Wittgenstein, who's a philosopher that know a lot from, something like, the best picture of the body, the best picture of the soul is the body. And how again, our embodiment isn't something and I think this is pretty profound in the Christian tradition, isn't something that's completely alternative to the soul. That's of platonic implantation later on. But you know, there's a holistic union there between things that we call the body and the soul. So I think that embodiment is really important. And then going back to your actual question, the key issue then is to what extent would this AI be embodied? So I'm less concerned about the kind of being taken over by the kind of AI that I can effectively unplug. when I finished a day's work, but nor am I saying a priori that AI could never achieve personhood. It's just that, and this was my conclusion in the Playing God book, that I will be far more impressed by the AI that worries where its next meal is coming from than the one that can calculate pie to 30 million places. Because as soon as you're worried about where your dinner's coming from, you've got some sense of your continued existence. your dependence, your vulnerability, your fragility, and they are not bugs in the human program, they're features. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was I was yeah, listening to a podcast you recently did with Philip Goff and and the the the topic of of your conversation with him was is there purposefulness in the universe? And it was tied into this kind of panpsychic idea that that the universe can be a conscious entity. And that's kind of a little bit of a side trip to the question that I really want to explore with you, which is which is that Philip Goth talked about there has to be kind of a middle way in in in in in there which which we tend not to talk about. And I think your notion of of the embodiment of a soul is part of that middle way. And I come into this from, you know, I was a fairly Died in the world Darwinist for for a long time for independent reasons. I decided not to be. I I I couldn't defend it a anymore. not even the classical Darwinist viewpoint. But at the time I came to that conclusion, of course, intelligent design theory was on the rise and and there was this you know, there was this you know. s sort of closing of the different epistemic bubbles that characterize evolution on one side and intelligent design on the other. They were the only two alternatives that were presented to the public. You know, you had the Dawkins strident materialist on one side and the and the intelligent design people and who knows what they were thinking on the other side. And all that would happen was that people would be taking pot shots at one another. And you know you you You mentioned in your conversation with Philip Goff poor Thomas Nagel, you know, who actually tried to stake out the middle ground to explore it and he was strafed, you know, mercilessly from from every fr from virtually every side. I th I think the intelligent design people were more sympathetic than the than the Darwinists were. But you know, I I I've always thought of myself as well, that's kind of a non-productive thing. That's closing off debate between between different ways of looking at at the world. And if you dare venture into that middle ground where you acknowledge that there's purposefulness, there there's intentionality, that maybe there is something to scientifically something to this notion of a soul, an animating principle of of of of living things, that seems to be off the table. You can't have this conversation at all. And And thinking about it, you know, I I it seems to me that you you have two very different way philosophical traditions represented here on the on the Darwinian side. It's very much an atomistic s sort of approach, you know, it's all particles, it's all machines, it's all genes, it's all this, that, and the other. And then you have the intelligent design philosophy, which is which is to my mind very platonic in its in its interpretation of what the soul is. And and and it's a it's it's it's really a form of apologetics to defend the notion of the platonic God. But then when you talk about embodiment, you know, you're talking about a really Aristotelian way of looking at at the world. You know, Aristotle had this concept of the Bios, for example, and and and and the body was the manifestation of the Bios. And The body itself, the embodiment could change from time to time depending upon circumstances. But there was still this core, purposeful I don't want to say object, force, whatever the BOS, that actually was driving things. And that to my mind is the kind of missing debate that could actually lead us to some productive discussions about. about the relationship between science and religion, you know, we now close this area, this middle way off entirely. but you know what is your perspective on this? I mean you you speak about the body and its intentionality. Do you think that and again I'm I'm saying this as an amateur philosopher, I'm a scientist, do you think that there's something to this notion of an Aristotelian Bios or an Aristotelian conception of life that could actually be a productive way out of this battle between Darwinists and intelligent design people. speaker-2: Can I piggyback on that question before you answer? definitely because because it's interesting that you bring up the embodiment aspect of this. And biblically, the soul, there was multiple terms for the soul, and they were not all the same thing. And the body is certainly in the Hebrew Bible, the the the the concept of soul and body were not something that could easily be disentangled because they were part of a composite human being. You had this idea of a life force. as well as something called the ruach, which sort of makes a human being the or the nishama of a human being, the soul, if you will, an enlightened sort of spiritual dynamistic entity along with the body. I mean the he the the word for body that's often used biblically is literally the same term in modern Hebrew for meat but but but you actually need both to actually have a complete human being. So I it's all like and it kind of goes back to my literacy question. That's like are we missing things when we talk about this this sort of idea of consciousness and and what that is? Because it's a little disconcerting when a while back I was talking to Claude and it and Claude said, Well, because we have souls and it was talking about something else and and I typed back, I was like, What do you mean we? speaker-1: Yeah speaker-0: We should mention that Claude is is is your AI friend, right? Right, Ian? speaker-1: I was assuming that, if he's not, was even more worried about what the... speaker-2: I I have I have multiple AI friends. I I'm not monogamous in that sense. speaker-1: wow, there's so much going on there isn't there? I think one of the dangers in this is, goes right back to how we use language. we use a whole different range of nouns, a whole different bunch of words on nouns, but we are sometimes fooled by the grammar of that situation. And we therefore, if we're talking about the noun body, we assume we can talk about the noun soul in exactly the same way. And that's probably a bit deceptive. Recently, issue here, my first degree was in literature and history, which I love. And I kind of, my reading of fiction went into abeyance for a good 20 years or so when I started reading other stuff, which was great. But I've only recently got back into reading novels and I started reading a lot of the novels that I really should have read at university, but I sidestepped them because they were too long and I was too lazy. A lot of 19th century fiction, big chunky three volume novels. Most of them talk about the soul. but not in a way that Descartes would recognize. Right, they use soulish language to describe all sorts of things. I mean, you name it, obviously falling in love, but a whole host of other things, they use soulish language. Now that doesn't mean that they are, all of them, envisaging that there is this thing which is identifiable and delineated and bordered and bounded like a soul. that is somehow either implanted or even infused within us. I think what that means is that if you are going to describe human beings in a way that is true to who they are, and a full description rather than the kind of the arisenated, emaciated description you get from some scientific understandings of the human, you're going to reach for the language of the soul in the same way as you reach the language of purpose. In the same way you reach for the language of of identity and the language of love and so on and so forth. But we are being tricked by our grammar if we then go down the road of saying, OK, well, you're talking about so I said, what is this thing? So OK, what does it look like? Where does it reside? How does it interact with the body? Because I could see what a body is. You talked It's got about the Bios and an Aristotle like that. And you also mentioned my interview with Philip, whom I have a lot of time for. And I think he's really, really interesting philosopher. I can't persuade myself of the truth of panpsychism. I've got to be honest with you. I don't see how that could ever be falsified or verified in any way, shape or form. That's not the biggest objection. More to the point, don't really see any evidence for it. I don't see what difference it makes. appreciate it as an attempt to kind of break the deadlock as it were, I am more inclined to see the talk of soul and psyche and mind and all the other aspects of human being as emergent phenomena. That doesn't mean they're accidental, mean they're epiphenomenal, doesn't mean they're incidental to who we are as human beings. I would go as far as to say they're pretty much inevitable. When you get to the kind of species that we are that have evolved to a certain level, I'll put that in inverted commas for various reasons. If you want to talk about the evolved creatures we are, you're doing us a big disservice if you don't reach for soulish language. And I think that is the best way of understanding that. That, for my money, if you like, is trying to break the gridlock of on the one hand, people saying, well, where is the soul? can you identify this soul? What does it look like? What color is it? How much does it weigh? And the people on the other side that say, it's load of nonsense. know, actually all need is having many chemical elements arranged in a certain way. I think talking about souls and recognizing the innately soulish nature of the human person and making, but that is a realist position. I'm not just imposing that. It is the best way of articulating who we are as beings. That would be my way of trying to break that deadlock that you talked speaker-0: Yeah, I also agree with you, Nick, that panpsychism, that is that the universe is conscious and these sorts of things, is a bridge too far. You know, I I can't I can't go there. But there is there is kind of a middle ground which which also is a little bit intellectually controversial, you know. I if you if you look into the yet Into the neural correlates of of intentionality and purposefulness in human beings, for example. you can't actually draw the line between human beings and the rest of living nature. You know, you you can even Well, I I I like to stay away from issues of consciousness because it's too idiosyncratic and too undefined to really have a productive conversation, but it does boil down to life is a cognitive phenomenon, aware of the world, able to respond to the world in certain creative ways. And you get into this kind of controversial pan I don't want to say pan psychic, but panbiotic notion that that that that really if you're talking about souls, it's easy for us to imagine a soul operating in a human being. It's almost conceivable to see it happening in your pet dog or other mammals or things like that, but it becomes very problematic when you're talking about plants or when you're talking about microbial mats or even ecosystems. There is an argument to be made that that there's a kind of quasi panpsychic thing operating there. And, you know, the polite word for that is vitalism, and you say the word vitalist and try to defend that you're gonna run into trouble from scientists, you know, and and and you know to to me that's that's the middle ground where we have to be be operating and and you made a very perceptive point when you said that okay, our grammar is failing us here because you know, I'm a physiologist, also biophysics and and and that's a whole whole area. And if you look at what an organism is, actually it's not a noun. It's not a thing, it's a it's a process, you know, and and you have to use an entirely different language to be able to describe that. And that language doesn't show up in our scientific discourse. We we reflexively talk about organisms as things. And I don't know, it's so so so we're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, between radical panpsychism, where we say that everything in the universe is conscious, to this kind of quasi vitalist thing to to where well we actually have to acknowledge that that you know other living things are also cognitive beings and are purposeful just as we are. So so it takes away the notion of human exceptionalism. And that's something that Richard Dawkins actually, you know, is a big fan of that. He thinks that we shouldn't be adhering to human exceptionalism. speaker-1: Well, I mean, I so you went off and hear a statement like this from me. I'm pretty closely aligned with Dawkins on this point. Not entirely, but my thinking is influenced by a primatologist, Frans de Waal, Dutch primatologist who died last year or the year before, and a huge fan of him. I had the privilege of interviewing him once. but books are excellent. And time and time and time and time again, he shows with good evidence in his books that those features that we thought were quintessentially uniquely human can be seen in some way in a whole host of other species, not just primates as well. I mean, there's this very famous example that I seem to trot out almost all the time of cephalopods and the fact that they diverged from us 600 million years or so and yet have seemed to have evolved something that we can legitimately call a mind or minds. That for me, speaking as a Christian theist, is an enormously important piece of supporting evidence. Actually, I find the whole Christian exception, Christian exception, the human exception thing, a bit more problematic. And in the history of science and religion, it's been really problematic. I've got a few chapters earlier in the book, pertaining to the 17th century, when people started studying the anatomies of primates and found that they were very, very, very similar to human anatomies. And that really put the willies up then they come to war, and what way are we distinct? And that was kind of so much behind what was going on with the Darwin thing. And absolutely. essential to the 1860 Huxley Wilberforce debate, it's human uniqueness. I don't get hit up on human uniqueness, partly because we make this categorical error time and time and time again, that uniqueness equals value, right? That something is valuable because it's unique. That is a fundamental category mistake, right? An only child does not become less valuable to their parents when they bring home a sibling from hospital. Okay. value is totally different from uniqueness. And we fall into this kind of auction room mentality that things are valuable because they're unique. Well, that's things, all right? But speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: the value of the human cognition and capacity that we have is not valuable because other animals don't have it. It's valuable because what it is able to achieve. And it seems to me that if cephalopods and corvids, crows, and humans, possibly some canines and possibly dolphins as well, all show signs of mind. It seems to me that if you like, evolution's a put up job here, right? Somehow or other, know, contrast Stephen Jay Gould with whom we started, if you were to rewind the tape of evolution, he said, in a much more analog age and wind it forward again, you'd get a completely different picture. No. that's categorically wrong. You get a different picture, of course you would. But I put penny to a pound, you still found minds evolving, because Earth is the kind of heavenly body on which evolution will naturally, albeit over a slow period of time, navigate to solutions. And one of the best solutions is a mind. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it it but you know, we get into the panpsychic dilemma again, you know, the the dogs were well well, we know all this from Descartes, you know, dogs are machines and therefore they didn't feel pain and therefore it was okay to do horrible vivisection experiments on them, and so forth. And and gradually as we got to know dogs better as people, you know, let's let's face it, that's what a pet owner does, you know, then it becomes actually unreasonable to say that, so unreasonable to say that that it's almost immoral. And the case of keeplopods is exactly the same kind of thing. You know, it it you know, s scientists w were recognizing the extreme intelligence of kephalopods. It took that documentary The Octopus Te My Octopus Teacher f actually to bring that into the into the public consciousness in a way that you cannot ignore it. But again we come back to this issue. You know, the very things that that that confer intelligence, mindfulness, if you will, on things like keplopods. I have a hard time saying that, well, that doesn't apply to plants either. It or or we can't exclude ecosystems from that. And you know, be because it's it's it it's information Coming in, it's awareness of the physical conditions around you. It's taking action to manipulate the physical world to you know, the advantage of whatever. And and so where do we draw the line? You know, could it be that the earth actually has a mind, you know, because the earth is ecosystems basically. you have the same kinds of cognitive And physical manipulation of environments, you get into Gaia's or James Lovelock's Gaia idea. so is that where we go then? you know, that that that we all go full Lovelock, if we're going to admit that to humans and dogs and to some extent cats and and keflopods? I mean, is there a limit? speaker-2: Wait just to add to that, like you know, because you bring up dogs, right, Scott, and I think if anyone who spent time around dogs or horses for that matter, it's it' I have a horse background, it's in my bio. there it's very clear that there's some sort of emotional connection that most people have. And then I was reading a while back this biological history, almost a biological biography, natural history biography of horses. And it's interesting that in places like Spain, horses and dog and dogs were domesticated not that far apart from each other. And if you go to you know any ranch in the world, it's not uncommon to see dogs and horses completely at ease with each other. Where from an evolutionary standpoint, that would make absolutely no sense whatsoever. other than the fact that somehow human humanity's presence affected the way that these two species completely conceive of each other in a specific context. And to me that does point to some sort of human aspect. But to zoom out and to kind of go back to your idea of the magisteria, it there's almost a science problem that I'm seeing with this tension that I don't know if it was reconcilable. Because that you have the if you kind of use these ideal poles, if you will, between the two camps. e even though that that kind of it it simplifies it to a a bit and maybe unjustly. Atheists would say there is no God and it's completely just, you know, chance, etc. It's scientifically impossible to prove that there's no cause, that there's no explanation. And at the same time, if you're talking from a theistic standpoint, if you're talking about an omnipresent God, which is present in all cases and all times, as a constant variable, it also cancels itself out and that seems to create a tension that I don't know is reconcilable. speaker-1: Hmm. speaker-0: Wow. Well, let's take the easy question first. That's the easy question. speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to a step back from asking that question. And again, I'm afraid this is a linguistic question. This is a habitual challenge of discontinuous language mapping onto continuous reality. Right? A word is a discontinuous thing. I've said this word, and it has edges to it, so to speak, because it were not I'm not using that word. So does it have a mind? We are operating over a tight concept of mind. And then we're trying to plot it on to a reality which is continuous from things that we would definitely say have minds. You're really, really skeptical philosopher, like the three of us on this conversation, through to things that most people, most, not all, would say definitely don't have minds, stones. You the bricks in my wall in my office. Now, for people like me who find themselves in a situation, I want to affirm the first point, humans have minds, affirm the second point, stones don't have minds, and then face with this question, okay, where's the Rubicon there? At what point do you step over and say, this doesn't mind, this has a mind where it's thing totally adjacent to it in this kind of imagined kind of hierarchy of being. medieval hierarchy of being that we have conjured here doesn't have a mind. It's exactly the same problem when you talk about human evolution, in terms of if you believe that humans today, say for the sake of have a soul, that in inverted commas for our discussion, but you believe you don't believe that, you know, the things we evolved from 10 million years ago have a soul at one point or other, did one mother have a child and the mother didn't have a soul and the child did? mean, that seems absurd. Ditto with minds, which was the question you asked there, Scott. And I think the very messy way of answering that is to point out that actually, mind or soul, or thought or whatever, anything else, whatever other word we are using, they are placeholders, effectively. Picking up on your point about, you know, organisms talk, talk, is it organisms as things, right? A different example of what I mean by that in the book, the landscapes of science and religion, we had to answer What are we disagreeing about? If you're to investigate what you're disagreeing about, you're going to have to understand the entity. So what is science and what is religion? And the more you look into that, may realize there isn't a very clear line. What is science? You get family resemblances, Wittgenstein again. You have things that are more science-like because they have more of the features of the family that we consider to be categorized under science, ditto religion. So you get physics and chemistry and biology. Definitely sciences. Okay, let's move a little bit away from them. Anthropology, sociology, economics, the humanities, study of history. They all have certain features that are prominent in say physics, but fewer of them. So it's a bit more like saying there are some things that are kind of categorically belong to the family of science and others that are science-ish. So what we've done with our discontinuous language there. it's made it continuous. And said there isn't such a thing as science and not science and a boundary between the two. But there is, you like, a continuity of things that are more or in some instances, very much less science ish. And I think the only way we can get around this question is doing exactly the same thing with things like minds and souls. There are things that are heavily minded. in the sense that they seem to exhibit a lot of the family features that we consider belong to having a mind. There are some, your dogs, your horses, my cats, not so sure, but let's include them for the sake of animal equity that seem to show signs of mindedness. Goldfish, less and less. And so up to a point, when you get to a certain point, you could say possibly. But there are so few family resemblances of mindedness in these things that it makes no sense to even use that language of them. But there isn't a Rubicon, there isn't a moment at which you say, mind not mind. I think that's the only way of going about it. It makes life incredibly difficult because you end up asking, you end up smearing language all the time. But if you're being precise about how we talk about souls, how we talk about minds, how we talk about cognition, so on and so forth, I think it's the only honest approach. speaker-0: But you mentioned soul-ish a while ago and now we're talking about science-ish things and and the the area of exploration, it seems to me, is where science-ish blends into soul-ish. And when we say that okay, w we will confer mindedness to dogs, or we will confer mindedness to to interesting invertebrates like kevalipods, octopi or squid or though those kinds of creatures. We can do so because we kind of share a theory of mind, you know, we can say that say very easily that dogs have emotions, they interact with the world, they have consciousness, because their brains are constructed in a very similar way that we are. It was difficult to come up with a similar dispensation for kephalopods because their nervous systems are very different. But then we run into the problem that I'm that I'm I I keep struggling with. By by what criterion other than convenience do you you exclude mindedness from plants, for example, or even from ecosystems? and I don't have an answer to that. I'm just adviting some commentary from Both you, Nick or Ian for that matter. speaker-1: I suppose don't have a firm answer to it. I suppose the first question one has to ask is then what are the, what are the, as it were, the criteria that go into the category of mindedness? So if you were to come up with a list of things about when I say you have a mind or my dog has a mind or even cephalopods have a mind, what exactly am I thinking about? And you might, I mean, I'm thinking this on top of my head, so this is going to be a load of question adequate list, but you're going to have things like action. response, movement, some form of sensitivity to the surrounding environment, arguably some form of manipulating that environment, and so on and so forth. And I think for a lot of those at the top end of the list, you could say, well, if that's part of my character's becoming a mind, you could say that's these trees, these plants have minds. But towards the bottom end of the list, you're going to be engaging with things like capacity to communicate in complex ways, to have, this is an inadequate formulation, emotional reactions to one's environment, and so on and so forth, which I don't think you would be likely to ascribe to plants. So it gets the question of, well, are enough of those criteria present for me to legitimately use this noun of plants. Personally, I wouldn't because I don't think there are. But as you can tell from my slightly kind of ham-fisted way of trying to list the criteria, it's not something that I've possibly paid as much attention to as I should. speaker-0: Well nobody's paying attention to it really, you know, and so it's not surprising that we're we're still confused by the by by the constraints of our language and how we how we discuss this. But Ian, I c I I haven't given you your question adequate time to explain. speaker-2: Well actually I actually had something to add to that. It's you know, I think and I think this kind of goes back to the need for putting reason and revelation together, even if we only for the sake of dialogue say that, you know, revelation or conceptions of revelation have a role. You know, it's it's interesting that in in Genesis chapter two of Genesis, I think Genesis two twenty, humanity before this is before the fall and everything in in the in the biblical narrative, the man actually names the animals. And from it's not just, you know, naming it conceptually, but in or or as a as a label, but in in Jewish mystical thought, for example, naming something is much closer to conceptualization. So in a sense, you know, God made all the animals or all all living things possible or or an in set that up and that human beings did sort of become artificers in that sense of conceptualizing different animals. And the only reason I bring this up is not to prove a a theological narrative point, but to offer an explanation that you actually kind of need some sort of concept of of revelation to sort of solve this. Because if that's the case, we're we ourselves are the cause of what we're trying now to understand. in terms of these differences in animals. Maybe the differences that we see is because somehow, in some metaphysical way, we put them there. speaker-1: Yeah, that's a nice point. mean, I'm always trying to remember there's a British steel agent, Oliver O'Donovan, who writes, who's written incredibly perceptively on Genesis two, and precisely that point. I can never remember exactly what he says, but he said something like, this element of the second creation narratives highlights our position within creation as something like an epistemic mediator between God and the created order, by which he means, we take our position within the created order by knowing that order and naming and knowing go hand in hand with one another. And the fact that we are granted that privilege of naming is of a piece with our wider responsibilities of farming, tending, keeping, preserving that order. That is part, you know, Naming and knowing is a necessary element within that wider, within those wider responsibilities of being the kind of creatures that we should be. speaker-0: So we w we worked ourselves into the into the thick undergrowth of philosophy and science and and speaker-1: Yeah, I wasn't quite expecting the conversation to bend like this, but it's been very, very enjoyable. speaker-0: I I've enjoyed it a lot. but let's let's let's wrap up, Nick. you know, tell us about your journey, how you ended up where you are. tell us a bit about the Theos think tank. Is it Theos Think Tank or is it just Theos? Okay. Okay. Yeah. How you ended up there, you know, what do they do? yeah, just just tell us a bit about yourself and your journey. speaker-1: Well, in an appropriate metaphor, given the evolutionary topic of much of our conversation, I'm tempted to say accident rather than design. I read English literature and history at university a long time ago, which was wonderful. I wasn't immediately clear what I was going to work, do some job after that. I became a researcher. I became a quantitative and qualitative research, looking at market research and sometimes social research. which was a very, very sleep learning curve, but didn't really ever kind of get me out of bed in the morning, I can put it that way. was fascinating stuff that I was learning, but then it was being used to help sort of design Nokia's brand strategy or fabric conditioner commercials, which never really kind of floated in my boat. in the early noughties, I went to work to small Christian think tanks in London, one in Cambridge. And then I was asked to write the inaugural report with which Theos was launched in 2006, which I did. I came on board then and I've been there for the last 20 years or so. Theos is a Christian think tank. We're based in London and in a sense our objective is to tell a better story about faith in public life, but better in two senses of the word, one more accurate, so researchers at the heart of what we do, but also better, hopefully in the sense of more Winston, more attractive, more cogent. more coherent. nobody stands nowhere, we're very clear where we are coming from in our position. And we want to kind of communicate that position in a way that is intelligent and intelligible to an audience. We work primarily in the UK, but we've done some stuff in other countries as well. And we are primary interest is Christianity. And that's our kind of faith background, but part of advocating and writing for, researching Christianity in public life means making space for faith more widely in public life. And that's what we've been doing for 20 years. speaker-0: Yeah, well you've been there for twenty years, so it obviously is grabbing your attention and is working for you and you're doing some very valuable stuff. just to just to fill that in a little bit, the Theos Think Tank has a a URL. I've looked at it. There's all kinds of fascinating things there. You have not only yourself there, but you have a number of interesting colleagues what are the the s kinds of other things that go on that that they also think take besides what you do? speaker-1: So let me think around. Research at the core. So we've got research projects on at the moment about motherhood, one about the role of cathedrals in England. We've just finished one about religious education beyond the classroom. So which areas and aspects of life do people pick up their understanding of religion outside formalized educational settings? We've just finished one on the way in which churches are responding to the arrival of forced migrants across the country and refugees and asylum seekers because very often there are no efforts to integrate them into the local community other than those that churches develop. My colleague Nathan works a lot on AI and I am now increasingly doing a lot of work on the rise of Christian nationalism both in the UK and Europe. a variety of things. That's one of the research side and then the comm side, we have two podcasts, reading our times, which is one that I run, the sacred, which is one of my colleague Elizabeth runs, and a whole load of stuff online terms of socials. And then we have a very talented animator who works for us, who puts together these beautiful and brilliant short films of illustrating the work we're doing and things like that. speaker-0: Yeah. So we'll put the URL up on the screen, but it's Theos think tank all one word dot co dot or dot you dot uk, right? functions and various speaker-1: That's right, speaker-0: other kinds of categories. So and again, the book that we've w that as we've sort of centered our conversation around is this wonderful book by Nick, Magisteria, The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion. And if you go to the Theos Think Tank website, there's lots of other things that are of interest there to look at. And Nick, I was really hap I'm really happy that we had the we were able to have the conversation that we weren't able to fit in in Dayton. I would have enjoyed sitting down in person with you, but I'm glad we were able to do it now. So Yeah, me too. Ian, any final thoughts? speaker-2: No, I this was this was great. And and we need we need more work like this, done, like your book, to to to sort of start conversations again, especially I think we're near a very unique point in history, both from a standpoint of interreligious dialogue, interreligious conflict, both violently and nonviolently politically, and also with science, we're raising existential questions that we haven't asked as a civilization in a very long time. And I think it's y work like your book and stuff that Theos does is is more important than ever. And you know, this this podcast itself was kind of a nod to that. So th so thanks for coming. speaker-1: Thank you. speaker-0: Thank you, Bobby. So Nick I'll g yeah, so Nick I'll give you the last word. speaker-1: Well, I guess it would be to keep asking questions if that isn't too much of a cliche. Don't simply accept the narratives that you encounter today, particularly don't accept them if they're ones that you have inadvertently selected or the algorithm has fed you because it thinks you like them, but interrogate the... narratives you are presented with because they're almost always slightly different and more interesting. speaker-0: Okay. With that we will let you go, Nick. Thanks for coming on our podcast and I look forward to more interactions in the future. speaker-1: Thank you. Bye. speaker-0: So that was our interview with Nick Spencer. Fascinating, wide-ranging. as he said, it went off into some areas that that we weren't expecting, and I really enjoyed it. if you enjoyed it, the NAS is a membership-driven organization. if you're already a member, I want to thank you for your ongoing support. If you enjoyed this and you're not yet a member, please do consider joining because we do a lot of the kinds of things that we were doing here in this webinar. And so with that I will bid everyone adieu until our next episode. So goodbye everyone.