Transcription
How have your spiritual and religious beliefs evolved throughout the course of your career, based on all that you've come to know about the objective nature of the universe? Has there been an evolution?
It depends on what you mean by evolution. I was raised Catholic.
Yeah.
But we were raised basically in a secular household, even though we would go to church every weekend. What I mean by that is we come home, at no time do either of my parents say, "Don't do that. Jesus is watching. You keep that up, you'll go to hell. Do this because it'll please God." Never was there such a conversation as that in the household. So the household was driven by objective truths or life experience as would be brought from elders to a next generation. Something that was more common in that generation than in the current generation, because now elders don't know anything about anything.
[laughter]
You know, your kid comes up to you and says, "Mommy, daddy, I want to be a YouTube influencer." And you're saying, "What? Go back to school." No. And then they become a YouTube influencer and they out-earn you. So this, the, the divide is greater than ever before between one generation and the next, for sure. But by the time I turned eight, I found that religious teachings less and less convincing. And so by the time I was nine, when I discovered the universe, or really the universe discovered me, a first visit to my local planetarium. So, yeah, I wouldn't call it an evolution, but I will say this. You didn't ask this, but it relates. Before I was more recognized, you know, you'd be on an airplane. "What do you do? What do you do?" Okay, they find out I do astrophysics. Then out come the questions. Okay. "Oh, tell me about black holes, relativity, the Big Bang, uh, aliens." Okay. And it would always land on God. And I used to give pretty straight, unforgiving answers to that question, to that inquiry. But then I thought, that's not fair. There are people whose lives pivot around their religious beliefs and their spirituality. And just because I've been discounting it since I was eight, I shouldn't use that as a force against them. I should at least understand where they're coming from. So I systematically acquired religious books of all kinds. So I have the Torah. I have multiple copies of the Quran. Joseph Smith's account that led to the Mormons. I have, uh, multiple, uh, bits of literature from Jehovah's Witnesses because they'll come to your door and they want to hand you. So I acquired all these books and I mostly read them. I've skimmed all of them and read some of them with a little more intensity than others. All right. On doing so, that enabled me, empowered me to have more meaningful conversations with people who were religious. Much more meaningful and more informed. That's the key. I don't want to speak about a religion unless I know as much as I can about it. As an academic, that should be what would be true of any subject. You're an academic. You care what's true, not what you think is true, what is true, or what people think.
[clears throat]
All right? And there's no doubt that religion has been one of the greatest forces operating on civilization ever since civilization. When you look at it as a source of people's behavior, what they eat, like I said, who they sleep with, where they sleep, where they worship, who they worship, all around the world, from animistic native peoples where there's a spirit energy imbued in the in the mountain, in the brook, in the wind, to, uh, the monotheistic religions, to the polytheistic religions. We don't call them that to put distance between us. But the Greek gods were, it was their religion. We call it mythology. It was their religion. The Greek gods, the Roman gods. So I'm, I'm conversational in all of this. So that when someone says, "How do I feel? What do I think?" I can do that without just being obnoxious.
[laughter]
And so, and it's to have a meaningful conversation.
I haven't done that.
You haven't?
[clears throat]
No, I haven't. I haven't. But it's such a good idea to do that, especially as someone in my position that does a lot of talking with people and asking questions. But my, the first thing that sprung to mind was, there were actually two questions that sprung to mind. The first was, how did that change you, reading all those books, outside of you being able to relate, um, with those? Well, being able to talk to them in a different way. And the second question, because I've watched Cosmos, I've watched it several times. It's my, one of my, me and my partner's favorite things to watch is you, you going from the very beginnings of time through the universe into where we are.
You got to love that calendar too. It's my favorite thing and I try and persuade everybody to watch that. My question was about, because I watched that and I watched, um, how the universe has evolved over time, or at least our understanding of it, and how it came to be, is, did humans evolve at some point to believe? Are we meant to believe?
Well, so the best way to ask that is, let's go back to the earliest humans we have fossil records of. And we can go back to Neanderthal, for example. Neanderthal is a branch, uh, hominids that went extinct. Basically, there's some crossbreeding and there's Neanderthal DNA in many humans today, but as a, as a branch of, of the hominids, they, they went extinct. So, Neanderthal, then there's Cro-Magnon. Uh, we're Homo sapiens coming after Cro-Magnon. And so when you look at burial grounds, the Neanderthal buried their dead with things, with parts of their life, of the person who died. Now, why would you do that unless you had some belief that there was something more to come for that person? I mean, that probably the people who took it to the limit were the Egyptians. All right. For the Egyptian royalty, I mean, they bury you with all kinds of stuff.
[laughter]
And in fact, in Greece, I read this. It's not that I researched it, and I'm not a scholar in this, but that when they buried you, they put a coin in your mouth or in your hand, somewhere on your body, so that when you got into Hades, you could tip the ferryboat driver to cross the river Styx to get into Hades. You might even say that's the beginning of what it was to be human, when people started thinking that way about dying.
I mean, might even re-invert the question and say it's not when did we start. It's we existed in all the ways we know our, know what ourselves to be when that ritual came upon our ancestors.
And the survival benefit in believing. I don't know.
Really?
Yeah, I, I don't know. We, we're pretty sure there's a survival benefit of group think, and religion is group think, if there ever was. It was, we will all believe this in this way and we will behave in that way on those occasions, and you will not deviate from it. Yes.
And part of that package of beliefs includes statements about the afterlife and how you should behave in this life. Otherwise, you don't go to heaven, you go to hell. I don't think Judaism has a hell, but you, you're not as rewarded as you'd otherwise be. Now, that forms a, a corpus of beliefs that can be highly binding of a people. And especially if some other people come up and they do other things and you don't understand it, you don't know what it is, and they're, they're a threat, and so you keep them out. You, you do whatever you can to preserve your traditions relative to theirs. Ultimately, the worst that, in its worst manifestation, is all-out war. You just kill people who don't believe the way you do. So, so maybe religion is kind of what defined humans in the fossil record. I mean, like I said, that's an interesting inversion of that question, not when did humans begin being religious.
You define who we are as humans as when religion showed up in the, in the burial grounds of, of cavemen. You just talked about as being bound there by certain shared beliefs and ideas. Yes.
And I think, I think ritual is one of the strongest binding forces of society that we have.
And I, I think that people are maybe unbinding. You can, if you look at the narrative in society, it's about be your own boss, stand on your own two feet. More people are lonely, living alone, um, having less kids, are working freelance and remotely. So it feels like in a weird way, we're becoming more independent, and there's a somewhat of a cost to that. And actually, my friends that are struggling the most in their lives are those that have the least dependence on a village. So I always wonder if people, we need to ladder up to the universe, i.e., me, my family, maybe my village, maybe my country, the planet, the universe.
In the metaverse.
Yeah. [laughter] And like God.
The multiverse. Yeah. So let me just react to that.
[clears throat]
There have been studies about the psychological effects of this kind of life. Basically, the, the social media too early in one's life, uh, force that operates. But I, so I don't know. I don't want to be the person who says, "In my day, we did it right, and you young 'uns don't know what you're doing and you're all going to..." I mean, I've seen the films of people, officials smashing pinball machines with sledgehammers saying it will be the death of the next generation because it's, they're not studying. They're, they're it's gambling. I've seen, you've seen people burning rock and roll records.
You've seen. We've seen this, and I, I'm not, I don't want to be that guy. I'd rather be the person that says, they're going to create a whole other reality that was not my reality growing up. And I don't know that I can or should value judge that.
When they come up in the ranks, they'll be mature adults. They'll figure out what the rhythms are of that world. And I will say, however, that if you go far enough back, no one ever traveled anywhere. You, you'd spend your whole life not going more than 30 miles from your hometown. Two, a couple hundred years back. So.
[snorts]
Now people do actually communicate with countless thousands of people around the world. So that's, it's different. I'm, again, I'm not value judging it, but it's different. And you're exposed to different ideas. Maybe it tribalizes you more, or maybe it softens you. It has the power to do both. What concerns me is because when I post to social media, I've learned the art of not expressing an opinion because I don't care what your opinion is. I don't care that you have my opinion. What I care about as an educator and as especially as a scientist is that your opinion is based on objective reality, objective truths. If you have an opinion where the foundation of it is what do you, what, then you're just floating. There's no. And then if you rise to power of laws and legislation and then you shape a society based on what you think is true or want to be true rather than what is objectively true, that's a recipe for the unraveling of civilization as we know it. So this loneliness bit, I, I don't know how to comment on that. I don't have the expertise, but I do know that I don't want to be the person on the rocking chair, "Get off my lawn!" You know.
And I, I, I guess I've been trying to figure out if we, if I need to make, try and make sure my life ladders upwards.
Oh. Oh, let me get back to that. So, it may be that the most important role of church wasn't to give a specific recipe for how you pray, again, who you pray to, or when you. Maybe that's, maybe that wasn't its greatest value. Maybe its greatest value was the community that it created.
Mhm.
[clears throat]
Everyone comes together and they're all in one room at the same time. That's not happening today. Like you said, there's a, people are less religious today than ever before. Uh, there are many people who were once religious would today, statistically, would today say they're spiritual, which means they're separated from the rules and regulations that that typically, um, dictate how you behave within a religion. But the fact is, you're talking about going upwards. So you have your, your city, your community, your neighbors, and your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your, your temple, whatever is the, the place where you gather with some frequency. Uh, that surely has value because we need each other. I'm jealous when I, you know, you drive down the country road and there's a deer just walking around, and I'm thinking, you know, society collapsed. That deer is just fine.
[laughter]
The deer was born in the woods, is finding food, has grown up, whereas I need other people to survive in this world. I don't know how to hunt. I don't know how to skin game. I don't know. You know, I'd like knowing that there's a quart of milk waiting for me on the grocery store and, you know, ready-to-eat cereals. That's, we have an interdependence as never before.
And how do we maintain that without scattering to the winds?
You said you lost both your parents in the last five years.
Yeah. As someone that knows so much about the universe and objective truth and reality, how do you, how do you contend with grief in that scenario? But also, how does that, does that change you in any way?
It did a little bit. Not as much as I thought it might have. My father was 89 when he died. That was five years ago. My mother was two days shy of her 95th birthday. So that's what. So I'm putting myself like right between them in my life expectancy. I think I'll get to 92. It's, it's the average of those two, you know. So when you die at that age, it's sad, but it's not tragic.
So I, that's an important distinction for me. A tragic life is a life that could have been lived, but through act of war or negligence, or negligence of the person or of others, the life is cut short. Then that's tragic. It's a life not fully lived. But if you lived a full life, they were married 50-something years. Uh, it's sad, but it's not tragic. In fact, it's not even sad. It's something to celebrate. And so I miss them. I, I miss them more than I thought I would because they carried quite a bit of wisdom with them. My father was active in the civil rights movement. My mother, uh, was a gerontologist. So they both cared very deeply about the plight of others. And I'm their son, the astrophysicist. But so I go off with my head in the sky. But I was anchored into the human condition and anchored to think about it, to care about it. And when I encountered things in modern life, it's, I wonder what my mother would say about that. I wonder what insights my father. And they're not there. I don't have them for that. So the way it's changed me is it has put a greater expectation of me on myself to make sure I have wisdom that I can share with my kids, my two kids. The kind of wisdom that I glean from my parents. So that, again, this is not wisdom of what car to buy or what job to have, because they have other values. They have other expectations of society, but in terms of human-to-human interaction, in terms of love, in terms of challenges in life and overcoming them. Some of those are timeless. Some of those are, you know, how to, how to navigate difficult people, how to appreciate nature so you don't take it for granted. Uh, one of the things I liked about Joyce Kilmer's poem "On a Tree" is about a tree. And we've all seen trees. So why does this matter? Because it takes an artist, a poet, a writer, a sculptor, a painter. For me, the artist's job is to encourage us, stimulate us to pay attention to things we might otherwise take for granted. Because so much of life is what you might just walk by and not even give it any thought. And so I don't walk by trees without thinking something about that poem.
What is the poem?
[clears throat]
"I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet, flowering breast. A tree that looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray. A tree that may in summer wear a nest of robins in her hair. Upon whose bosom snow has lain, who ultimately lives with rain? Poems are made by fools like me. But only God can make a tree."
[laughter]
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