The following is a conversation with Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear engineer and plasma
physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics,
including the magnetic confinement of plasmas seeking to enable fusion reactions,
which happens to be the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production.
Current nuclear reactors, by the way, are based on fission as we discuss.
Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science
and religion, arguing in particular against scientism, which is a negative description
of the overreach of the scientific method to questions not amenable to it.
On this latter topic, I recommend two of his books, his new one,
Can A Scientist Believe in Miracles, where he answers more than 200 questions on all aspects
of God and science and his earlier book on scientism called Monopolizing Knowledge.
As you may have seen already, I work hard on having an open mind, always questioning my assumptions,
and in general, marvel at the immense mystery of everything around us and the limitations
of at least my mind. I'm not religious myself in that I don't go to the synagogue, a church,
or mosque, but I see the beautiful bond in the community that religion at its best can create.
I also see both in scientists and religious leaders signs of arrogance, hypocrisy,
greed, and a will to power. We're human. By the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim,
agnostic, or atheist, this podcast is my humble attempt to explore a complicated human nature.
What Stanislav Lem in his book Solaris called Our Own Labyrinth of Dark Passages and Secret
Chambers. I ask that you try to keep an open mind as well and be patient with the limitations of
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20% off on top of the 30-day free trial and to support this podcast. Now, here's my conversation
with Ian Hutchinson.
Maybe it'd be nice to draw a distinction between nuclear physics and plasma physics. What is the
distinction?
Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus. My department, Department of Nuclear
Science and Engineering at MIT, is very concerned about all the interactions and reactions and
consequences of things that go on in the nucleus, including nuclear energy, fish and energy, which
is the nuclear energy that we have already, and fusion energy, which is the energy source of the
sun and stars, which we don't quite know how to turn into practical energy for humankind at the
moment. That's what my research has mostly been aimed at. But plasmas are essentially the fourth
state of matter. So if you think about solid, liquid, gas, plasma is the fourth of those states of
matter. And it's actually the state of matter which one reaches if one raises the temperature.
So cold things like ice are solid, liquids are hotter water, and if you heat water beyond 100
degrees Celsius, it becomes gas. Well, that's true of most substances. And plasma is a state of
matter in which the electrons are unbound from the nuclei. So they become separate from the
nuclei and can move separately. So we have positively charged nuclei. And we have negatively
charged electrons. The net is still electrically neutral. But a plasma conducts electricity,
has all sorts of important properties that are associated with that separation. And that's
what plasmas are all about. And the reason why my department is interested in plasma physics very
strongly is because most things, well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma.
The vast majority of matter in the universe is plasma. But most particularly, stars and the sun
are plasmas because they're very hot. And it's only in very hot states that nuclear fusion reactions
take place. And we want to understand how to implement those kind of phenomena on Earth.
Maybe another distinction we want to try to get at is difference between fission and fusion.
So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction happening in the sun. So what's fission and what's
fusion? Well, fission is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up. And it turns out
that that process of breaking up heavy elements releases energy. What does it mean to be a heavy
element? It means that there are many nuclear particles in the nucleus itself, neutrons and
protons in the nucleus itself. So that in the case of uranium, there are 92 protons in each
nucleus and even more neutrons. So that the total number of nucleons in the nucleus,
nucleons is short for either a proton or a neutron. The total number might be 235. That's
U235 or it might be 238. That's U238. So those are heavy elements. Light elements, by contrast,
have very few nucleons, protons or neutrons in the nucleus. Hydrogen is the lightest nucleus.
It has one proton. They're actually slightly heavier forms of hydrogen, isotopes. Deuterium has
a proton and a neutron. And tritium has a proton and two neutrons. So it has a total of three
nucleons in the nucleus. Well, taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen and not
breaking them up, but actually fusing them together, reacting them together to produce
heavier elements, typically helium, which is helium is a nucleus which has two protons and
two neutrons, that also releases energy. And that and that or reactions like that, making heavier
elements from lighter elements, is what mostly powers the sun and stars. Both fusion and fission
release approximately a million times more energy per unit mass than chemical reactions.
So chemical reaction means take hydrogen, take oxygen, react them together, let's say, and get
water that releases energy. The energy released in the chemical reaction like that or the burning
in coal or on oil or whatever else is about a million times less per unit mass than what is
released in nuclear reactions. So but it's hard to do. It requires very high energy of impact.
And actually, it's very easy to understand why. And that is that those two nuclei, if they're both,
let's say, hydrogen nuclei, one is let's say deuterium and the other is let's say tritium,
they're both electrically charged. And so that and they're positively charged. So they like charges
repel. Everyone knows that, right? So basically, to get them close enough together to react,
you have to overcome the repulsion, the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another.
And you have to get them extremely close to one another in order for the nuclear forces to
overtake the electrical forces and actually form a new nucleus. And so one requires very high
energies of impact in order for reactions to take place. And those high energies of impact
and those high energies of impact correspond to very high temperatures of random motion.
So that's why you can do something like that in the sun. So we can build the sun.
That's one way to do it. But on earth, how do you create a fusion reaction?
Well, nature's fusion reactors are indeed the stars. And they are very hot in the center.
And they reach the point where they release more energy from those reactions than they lose by
radiation and transport to the surface and so forth. And that's a state of ignition. And that's
what we have to achieve to give net energy. It's like lighting a fire. If you have a bundle of
sticks and you hold a match up to it and you see smoke coming from the sticks, but you take the
match away and the and the and the sticks just fizzle out. That's not the reason they fizzle
out is that, yes, they were burning, they were there was smoke coming from them, but they were
not ignited. But if you are able to take the match away and they keep burning and they are
generating enough heat to keep themselves hot and hence keep the reactions going, that's chemical
ignition. Well, what we need to do, what the stars do in order to generate nuclear fusion energy
is they are ignited, they are generated enough energy to keep themselves hot.
And that's what we've got to do on earth if we're going to make fusion work on earth. But it's much
harder to do on earth than it is, you know, in a star because, you know, we need temperatures
of order tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order for the reactions to go fast enough
to generate enough electricity to keep it or enough energy to keep it going. And so
if you've got something that's tens of millions of degrees Celsius, and you want to keep it all
together and keep the heat in long enough to have enough reactions taking place, you can't just
put it in a bottle, you know, plastic or glass, it would be gone, you know, it's in milliseconds.
So you have to have some non-material mechanism of confining the plasma. In the case of stars,
in the case of stars, that non-material force is gravity. So gravity is what holds the star
together, it holds the plasma in long enough for it to react and sustain itself by the fusion
reactions. But on earth, gravity is extremely weak. I mean, I don't mean to say we don't fall,
yes we fall, but the mutual gravitational attraction of small objects is very weak compared
with the electrical repulsion or any other force that you can think about on earth. And so we need
a stronger force to keep the plasma together to confine it. And the predominant attempt at making
fusion work on earth is to use magnetic fields to confine the plasma. And that's what I've worked on
for much, essentially most of my career, is to understand how we can and how best we can
confine these incredibly hot gases, plasmas, using magnetic fields with the ultimate objective
of releasing fusion energy on earth and generating electricity with it and powering our society with
it. A dumb question. So on top of the magnetic fields, do you also need the plastic water bottle
walls or is it purely magnetic fields? Well, actually what we do need walls,
those walls must be kept away from the plasma because otherwise they'd be melted,
or the plasma must be kept away from them inside of them. But the main purpose of the walls
is not to keep the plasma in, it's to keep the atmosphere out. So if we want to do it on earth
where there's air, we want the plasma to consist of hydrogen isotopes or other things, the things
we're trying to react. And by the way, the density of those plasmas, at least in magnetic
confinement fusion, is very low. It's maybe a million times less than the density of air in this room.
So in order for a fusion reactor like that to work, you have to keep all of the air out
and just keep the plasma in. So yes, there are other things, but those are things that are
relatively easy. I mean, making a vacuum these days is technologically quite straightforward.
We know how to do that. What we don't quite know how to do is to make a confinement device that
isolates the plasma well enough so that it's able to keep itself burning with its own reaction.
So maybe can you talk about what a tokamak is? The Russian acronym from which the word
tokamak is built just means toroidal magnetic chamber. So it's a toroidal chamber. A torus is
a geometric shape which is like a doughnut with a hole down the middle. And so it's the meat of
the doughnut. That's the torus. And it's got a magnetic field. So that's really all tokamak
means. But the particular configuration that is very widespread and is the sort of
best prospect in the least in the near term for making fusion energy work is one in which
there's a very strong magnetic field the long way around the doughnut, around the torus.
So you've got to imagine that there's this doughnut shape with an embedded magnetic field just
going round and round the long way. The big advantage of that is that plasma particles
when they're in the presence of a magnetic field feel strong forces from the magnetic field and
those forces make the particles gyrate around the direction of the magnetic field line. So basically
the particles follow helical orbits like following like a spring that's directed along
the magnetic field. Well, if you make the magnetic field go inside this toroidal chamber and just
simply go round and round the chamber, then because of this helical orbit, the particles
can't move fast across the magnetic field, but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field.
And if you have a magnetic field that doesn't leave the chamber, it doesn't matter if they move
along the magnetic field. It doesn't mean they're going to exit the chamber. But if you just had
a straight magnetic field, for example, coming from a Helmholtz coil or a bar magnet, then you'd
have to have ends. It would come to the ends of the chamber somewhere and the particles would hit
and the particles would hit the ends and they would lose their energy. So that's why it's toroidal
and that's why we have a strong magnetic field. It's providing a confinement against motion
in the in the direction that would lead the particles to leave the chamber. It turns out that
here we're getting a little bit technical, but it turns out that a toroidal field alone is not
enough. And so you need more fields to produce true confinement of plasma. And we get those by
passing a current as well through the plasma itself.
I can make sure it stays on track.
Well, what that does is makes the field lines themselves into much bigger helices.
And that's for reasons that are too complicated to explain, that clinches the confinement
of the particles, at least in terms of their single particle orbit. So they don't leave
the chamber.
So when the particles are flying along this, this, this donut, the inside of the donut,
are they what's where's the generation of the energy coming from? Are they smashing
into each other?
Yeah, eventually, I mean, in a fusion reactor, there will be deutrons and tritons and they will
be smashing in, they will be very hot. There'll be 100 million degrees Celsius or something.
So they're moving thermally with very large thermal energies in random directions,
and they will collide with one another and have fusion reactions.
When those fusion reactions take place, energy is released, large amounts of energy is released
in the form of particles. One of the particles that's released is an alpha particle, which is
also charged and it's also confined. And that alpha particle stays in the, in the, in the
donut and heats the other particles that are in that donut. So it transfers its energy to those
and it keeps them hot. There's some leaking of heat all the time, a little bit of radiation,
some transport and so forth. There's also a neutron released from that reaction. The neutron
carries out four-fifths of the fusion energy and that will have to be captured in a blanket
that surrounds the chamber in which we take the energy, drive some kind of electrical generator
from, you know, thermal, thermal engine, gas turbine or something like that and power the
power. You got energy. So where do we stand? Where do we stand? On getting this thing to be
something that actually works to generate energy? Yep. Well, there have been experiments
that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear powers in the vicinity of,
you know, a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds. So that's, you know, 10 megajoules.
That's not much energy. It's a few donuts worth of energy. Okay. Yeah. Literal donut.
Literal donut. That's right. But we have studied how well the Tokamaks can find plasmas and so we
now understand in rather great detail the way they work and we're able to predict what is going to
be required in order to build a Tokamak that becomes self-sustaining, that becomes essentially
ignited or very so close to ignited that it doesn't matter. And at the moment, at least if you use
the modest magnetic field values, still very strong but limited magnetic field values,
you have to build a very big device. And so we are at the moment at worldwide fusion research is
at the moment in the process of building a very big experiment that's located in the south of France.
It's called ITER, I-T-E-R, which means the way or just means the international Tokamak
experimental reactor, if you like. And that experiment is designed to reach this burning
plasma state and to generate about 500 megawatts of fusion power for hundreds of seconds at a time.
It'll still only be an experiment. It won't put electricity on the grid or anything like that.
It's to figure out whether it works and what the remaining engineering challenges are. It's a
scientific experiment. It won't be engineered to run round the clock and so on and so forth,
which ultimately one needs to do in order to make something that's practical for generating
electricity. But it will be the first demonstration on earth of a controlled fusion reaction for
a long time period. Is that exciting to you? It's been an objective that is in many ways
motivated my entire career and the career of many people like me in the field.
I have to admit though that one of the problems with ITER is that it's an extremely big and
expensive and long time to build experiment. And so it won't even come into operation until
about 2025, even though it's been being built for 10 years and it was designed for 30 years before
that. And so that's actually one of the big disappointments of my career in a certain sense,
which is that we won't get to a burning fusion reaction until well past the first operation
of ITER. And whether I'm alive or not, I don't know, but I certainly will be well and truly
retired by the time that happens. And so when I realized maybe some years ago that that was
going to be the case, it was a discouragement to me. Let's put it like that. But if we can try to
look maybe in a ridiculous kind of way, look into 100 years from now, 200 years, 500 years from now,
and we, you know, there's folks like Elon Musk trying to travel outside the solar system.
I mean, the amount of energy we need for some of the exciting things we want to do
in this world, if we look again, 100 years from now, seems to be a very large amount.
So do you think fusion energy will eventually, sometime into your retirement,
will be basically behind most of the things we do?
Look, I absolutely think that fusion research is completely justified. In fact,
we should be spending more time and effort on it than we currently do. But it isn't going to be
a magic bullet that somehow solves all the problems of energy. By the way, that's a generic
statement you could make about any energy source in my view. I think it's a grave mistake to think
that science of any sort is suddenly going to find a magic bullet for meeting all the energy
needs of society or any of the other needs of society, by the way. But, and we can talk about
that later. But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it. And so my disappointment
that I just expressed was in a certain sense a personal disappointment. I do think that fusion
energy is a terrific challenge. It's very difficult to bring the energy source of the sun and stars
down to earth. This does contrast in a certain sense with fusion energy. By contrast, fusion energy,
to build a fusion reactor proved to be amazingly easy. We did it within a few years of discovering
nuclear fusion. People had figured out how to build a reactor and did so during the Second World War.
Which is, by the way, fusion is how the current nuclear power plants work.
Yeah. And so we have nuclear energy today because fusion reactors are relatively easy
to build. What's hard is getting the materials. And that's just as well because if everyone could
get those materials, there would be weapons proliferation and so forth. But it wasn't all
that long after even the discovery of nuclear fusion that fusion reactors were built. And
fusion reactors, of course, operated before we had weapons. So I think nuclear power is obviously
important to meet the energy challenges of our age. It is completely intrinsically, completely
CO2 emissions free. And in fact, the wastes that come from nuclear power, whether it's
fission or fusion for that matter, are so moderate in quantity that we shouldn't really be worried
about them. I mean, yes, fission products are highly radioactive and we need to keep them away
from people. But there's so little of them, it's that keeping them away from people is not
particularly difficult. And so while people complain a lot about the drawbacks of fission
energy, I think most of those complaints are ill-informed. We can talk about the challenges
and the disasters, if you like, of fission reactors. But I think fission in the near term
offers a terrific opportunity for environmentally friendly energy, which in the world as a whole
is rapidly being taken advantage of. China and India and places like that are rapidly building
fission plants. We're not rapidly building fission plants in the US, although we are actually building
two at the moment, two new ones. But we do still get 20% of our electricity from fission energy,
and we could get a lot more. So it's clean energy. So it's clean energy. Now, again,
the concern is that there's a very popular HBO show and just came out on Chernobyl.
There's the Three Mile Island. There's Fukushima. That's the most recent disaster. So there's a
kind of a concern of nuclear disasters. What would you make of that kind of concern,
especially if we look into the future of fission energy-based reactors?
Well, first of all, let me say one or two words about the contrast between fission and fusion,
and then we'll come onto the question of the disasters and so forth.
Fission does have some drawbacks, and they're largely to do with four main areas. One is,
do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels to supply our energy needs for a long time?
The answer to that is we know we have enough uranium to support fission energy worldwide
for thousands of years, but maybe not for millions of years. So that's resources. Secondly, there
are issues to do with wastes. Fission wastes are highly radioactive, and some of them are volatile.
And so, for example, in Fukushima, the problem was that some fraction of the fission wastes
were volatilized and went out as a cloud and polluted areas with cesium-137, strontium-90,
and things like that. So that's a challenge of fission. There's a problem of safety
beyond that, and that is that in fission, it's hard to turn the reactor off. When you stop the
nuclear reactions, there is still a lot of heat being liberated from the fission products. And
that is actually what the problem was at Fukushima. The Fukushima reactors were shut down the moment
that the earthquake took place, and they were shut down safely. What then happened after that,
Fukushima, was there was this enormous tidal wave many tens of meters high that came through
and destroyed the electricity grid feed to the Fukushima reactors, and their cooling
was then turned off. And it was the after heat of the turned off reactors that eventually caused
the problems that led to release. And so that's a safety concern. And then finally, there's a
problem of proliferation, and that is that fission reactors need fissile fuel, and the technologies
for producing and enriching and so forth, the fuels, can be used by bad actors to generate
the materials needed for a nuclear weapon, and that's a very serious concern. So those are the
four problems. Fusion has major advantages in respect of all of those problems. It has more
longer term fuel resources. It has far more benign waste issues. The radioactivity from fusion
reactions is at least 100 times less than it is from fission reactions. It has essentially
none of this after heat problem, because it doesn't produce fission products that are highly radioactive
and generating their own heat when it's turned off. In fact, the hard part of fusion is turning it
on, not turning it off. And finally, you don't need the same fission technology to make fusion
work. And so it's got terrific advantages from the point of view of proliferation control.
So those are the four main issues which make fusion seem attractive technologically,
because they address some of the problems of fission energy. I don't mean to say that fission
energy is overwhelmingly problematic, but clearly there have been catastrophes associated
with fission reactors. Fukushima actually is, I think in many ways, often overstated as a disaster,
because after all, nobody was killed by the reactors, essentially, zero. And that's in the
context of a disaster tsunami that killed between 15 and 20,000 people, more or less,
instantaneously. So in the scale of risks, one should take the view that in my estimation,
that fission energy came out of that looking pretty good. Of course, that's not the popular
conception. With a lot of things that threaten our well-being, we seem to be very bad users of data.
We seem to be very scared of shock attacks and not at all scared of car accidents and
this kind of miscalculation. And I think from everything I understand, nuclear energy,
fission-based energy goes into that category. It's one of the safest, one of the cleanest forms
of energy, and yet whoever does the PR for nuclear energy has a hard job ahead of them
at the moment. Well, I think part of that is their association with nuclear weapons,
because when you say the word nuclear, people don't instantly think about nuclear energy,
they think about nuclear weapons. And so there is perhaps a natural tendency to do that. But yes,
I agree with you, people are very poor at estimating risks and they react emotionally,
not rationally in most of these situations. Can we talk about nuclear weapons just
for a little bit? So fission is the kind of reaction that's central to the nuclear weapons
we have today? That's what sets them off. That's what sets them off. So if we look at
the hydrogen bomb, maybe you can say how these different weapons work. So the earliest nuclear
weapons, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan, etc., etc., were pure fission weapons.
They used enriched uranium or plutonium, and their energy is essentially entirely derived from
fission reactions. But it was early realized that more energy was available if one could somehow
combine a fission bomb with fusion reactions, because the fusion reactions give more energy per
unit mass than fission reactions. And this was called the super. You might have heard of the
expression the super, or more simply hydrogen bombs, okay? Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen
and fusion reactions associated with them. Like you said, it's hard to turn on. It's hard to turn
on because you need very high temperatures and you need confinement of that long enough for the
reactions to take place. And so a bomb, actually a thermonuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb,
has essentially a chemical implosion, which then sets off a fission
explosion, which then sets off and compresses hydrogen isotopes and other things,
which I don't know because I've never had a security clearance, okay? So I can't betray any
secrets about weapons because I've never been a party to them, but because I know a lot about
this problem, I can guess, okay? And sets off fusion reactions in the middle, okay? So that's
basically, it's that sequence of things which produce these enormous multi-megaton bombs
that have very large yields. And so fusion alone can't get you there. It is actually possible
to set off or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone without the surrounding
fission explosion. And that is what is called laser fusion. So another approach to fusion,
which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex, the national labs and so forth,
because it's more associated with the technologies of weapons, is inertial fusion. So if you decide
instead of trying to make your plasma just sit there in this torus in the tokamak and be controlled
steady state with a magnetic field, if you're willing to accept that I'll just set off an explosion,
okay? And then I'll gather the energy from that somehow. I don't quite know how, but let's not
ask that question too much. Then it is possible to imagine generating fusion alone
explosions. And the way you do it is you take some small amount of deuterium tritium fuel,
you bombard it with energy from all sides, and this is what the lasers are used for,
extremely powerful at lasers, which compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it, it compresses it to
such a high density and temperature that the reactions take place very, very quickly. And
in fact, they can take place so quickly that it's all over with before the thing flies apart.
Wow. And that is heated up really fast. That is inertial fusion, okay? Is that useful for
energy generation? Not yet. I mean, there are those people who think it will be, but you may
have heard of the big experiment called the National Ignition Facility, which was built at
Livermore starting in the late 1990s and has been in operation since round about 2010. It was
designed with the claim that it would reach ignition, fusion ignition, in this pulsed form
where the reactions are got over with so quickly before the whole thing flies apart. It didn't
actually reach ignition and it doesn't look as if it will, although we never know. Maybe people
figure out how to make it work better. But the answer is, in principle, it seems possible
to reach ignition in this way, maybe not with that particular laser facility.
Are you surprised that we humans haven't destroyed ourselves given that we've invented
such powerful tools of destruction? Like, what do you make of the fact that for many decades
we've had nuclear weapons now? Speaking about estimating risk, at least to me, it's exceptionally
surprising. I was born in the Soviet Union that big egos of the big leaders when rubbing up against
each other have not created the kind of destruction everybody was afraid of for decades.
Well, I must say I'm extremely thankful that it hasn't. I don't know whether I'm surprised about
it. I've never thought about it from the point of view of, is it surprising that we've avoided it?
I'm just very thankful that we have. I think that there is a sense in which cooler heads
have prevailed at crucial moments. I think there is also a sense in which mutually assured destruction
has, in fact, worked as a policy to restrain the great powers from going to war.
And in fact, the fact that we haven't had a world war since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable
to nuclear weapons in a kind of strange and peculiar way. But I think humans are deeply
flawed and sinful people. And I certainly don't feel that we're guaranteed that it's going to go
on like this. And we'll talk about the biggest picture view of it all. But let me just ask,
in terms of your worries of the look 100 years from now, we're in the middle of what is now a
natural pandemic that, from the looks of it, fortunately, is not as bad as it could possibly
been. If you look at the Spanish flu, if you look at the history of pandemics, if you look at all
the possible pandemics that could have been that folks like Bill Gates are exceptionally terrified
about, we've, I know many people are suffering, but it's better than it could have been.
And now we're talking about nuclear weapons. In terms of existential threats to us,
sinful humans, what worries you the most? Is it nuclear weapons? Is it natural pandemics,
engineered pandemics, nanotechnology in my field of artificial intelligence? Some people
are afraid of killer robots and robots. Yeah. Is there, do you think in those existential terms,
and do any aspect, do any of those things worry you?
I am certainly not confident that my children and grandchildren will experience the benefits of
civilization that I have enjoyed. I think it's possible for our civilizations to break down
catastrophically. I also think that it's possible for our civilizations to break down
progressively. And I think they will if we continue to have the explosion of population on the planet
that we currently have. I mean, it's quite, it's quite wrong to think of our problems as mostly
being CO2. If we can just solve CO2, then we can go on having this continually expanding economy
everywhere in the world. Of course you can't do that. I mean, there is a finite,
bearing capacity of our planet. On the resources of our planet.
On the resources of our planet. And we can't continue to do that. So I think there are lots
of technical reasons why a continually expanding economy and civilization is impossible. And
therefore, actually, I'm as much nervous about the fact that our population is 8 billion or
something right now worldwide, as I am about the fact that a few million people would be
killed, would be killed by COVID-19. I mean, I don't want to be callous about this, but from the
big picture, it seems like that's much more of a problem over population. People not dying is
ultimately more of a problem than people dying. So that probably sounds incredibly callous to
your listeners, but I think it's simply a sober assessment of the situation.
Is there ways from the way those 8 billion or 7 billion or whatever the number is live
that could make it sustainable? Because you've kind of implied there's a kind of,
we have, especially in the West, this kind of capitalist view of really consuming a lot of
resources. If you could change one thing or a few things, what would you change to make this
life, make it more likely that your grandchildren have a better life than you?
Well, okay, so let's talk a bit about energy because that's something I know a lot about,
having thought about it most of my career. In order to reach a steady state CO2 level,
that's acceptable in terms of global climate change and so on and so forth,
we need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least a factor of 10 worldwide.
What's more, the average energy consumption and hence CO2 emission of people in the world
is less than a tenth of what we per capita of than what we have in the West, in America,
in Europe and so forth. So if you have in mind some utopia in the future where we've reached
a sustainable use of energy, and we've also reached a situation in which there's far less
inequity in the world in the sense that people have shared the energy resources more uniformly,
then what that is equivalent to would be to reduce the CO2 emissions in Western economies,
not by a factor of 10, but by a factor of 100. In other words, it has to go down to 1% of what
it is now. So when people talk about, let's use natural gas because maybe it only uses 60% of
the energy of coal. It's complete nonsense. That's not even scratching the surface of what we would
need to do. So is that going to be feasible? I very much doubt it. And therefore, I actually
doubt that we can reach a level of energy, of fossil energy use that is 1% of the current
use in the West without totally dramatic changes either in our society, our use of energy and so
forth, which actually, of course, as much of that energy is used for producing food and so on and
so forth. So it's actually not so obvious that we can cut down our energy usage by that factor,
or we've got to reduce the human population. Population. So you run up against that number,
that's increasing still. And you don't think that could be depressing. No, it's not depressing.
It's difficult, like many truths are. Do you have a hope that there could be a technological
solution? In short, no. There is no technological solution to, for example, for population control.
I mean, we have the technology just to prevent ourselves bearing children. That's not a problem.
Technology's in, solved. The challenge is society, the challenge is human choices,
the challenge is almost entirely human and sociological, not technology. And when people
talk about energy, they think that there's some kind of technological magic bullet for this,
but there isn't. And there isn't for the reasons I just mentioned. Not because it's obvious there
isn't, but actually there isn't. And in any case, that it's true of energy, it's true of pollution,
it's true of human population, it's true of most of the big challenges in our society are not
scientific or technological challenges. They're human sociological challenges. And that's why
I think it's a terrible mistake, even for folks like me who work at, you know, well, the high
temple of science and technology in America and maybe in the galaxy. I mean, you know, it's-
MIT. It's at MIT. Best university in the world. It's a terrible mistake if we give the impression
that technology is going to solve it all. Technology will make tremendous contributions.
And I think it's worth working on it. But it's a disaster if you think it's going to solve all of
our problems. And actually, you know, I've written a whole book about the question of
scientism and the over emphasis on science, both as a way of solving problems through technology,
but also as a way of gaining knowledge. I think it's not all of the knowledge there is either.
Yeah. I think that book and your journey there is fascinating. So maybe you can go there. Can you
tell me about your- on a personal side, your- the personal journey of your faith, of Christianity
and your relationship with God, with religion in general? Yeah. In my latest book,
Can A Scientist Believe in Miracles, I give a first- I devote most of the first chapter to
telling how I became a Christian, why I became a Christian. I didn't grow up as a Christian.
Which is fascinating. I mean, you didn't grow up as a Christian. So you've discovered the beauty
of God and physics at the same time. Concurrent. That's a very poetic way of putting it. Yes,
I would accept that. I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University.
I had, you know, I had gone to a school in which there was religion kind of was part of the society.
There were prayers and at the daily, you know, gathering of the students, the assembly of the
students. But I didn't really believe it. I just sort of went along with it and it wasn't particularly,
you know, aggressive or, you know, blind. It just sort of was there. But I didn't believe it.
I didn't make much sense to me. But I came across Christians from time to time. And when I went to
Cambridge University, two of my closest friends turned out were Christians. And I think it was
that was the most important influence on me, that that here were two people who were really smart,
like me. I'm giving you my, my impressions. The way I felt at the time.
And, and they thought Christianity made sense and, and, you know,
testified to its significance in their lives. And so that was a very important influence on me.
And I, and ultimately, I mean, the reason I, I hadn't, I hadn't, I didn't see Christianity as
some kind of great evil, the way it's sometimes portrayed by the, by the radical atheists of
this century. I mean, I think that's nonsense. But, but I, so I think there were certain attractive
things. If you go to a university like Cambridge, you know, you're surrounded by, by, by Western
culture, you know, from, from about, you know, the 15th century onwards, and that saturated with
Christian art and architecture and so forth. And so it's hard, it's hard not to recognize
is that Christianity is, in fact, the foundation of Western society in Western culture, Western
civilization. So, so I, I mean, maybe I was in that sense favorably disposed towards
Christianity as a religion, but as a personal faith, it didn't mean anything to me. But I became
convinced really of two things. One is that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ
is actually rather good. I mean, it's not a proof, it's not kind of some, some kind of scientific
demonstrate or mathematical demonstration, but it's actually extremely good. It's not scientific
evidence by and large, it's historical evidence. Historical evidence, yeah. So that was one thing.
And the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge, it became clear that
Christianity ultimately is not, you know, some kind of moral
theory or philosophy or something like that. It is, or at least it claims to be,
a personal relationship with God, which is made possible, you know, by what Jesus did on the cross
and his life and his teaching. And it's a personal call to a relationship with God.
And that had, I'd never really thought of it in those terms when I was, you know,
when I was younger. And that thought became attractive to me. I mean, I think most people
find the person of Christ and just teachings, you know, compelling in a certain sense.
What do you mean by personal? Do you mean personal for you, like a relationship, like
it's a meditative, like you specifically, you, Ian, have a connection with God. And then the
other side, you say personal with the actual body, the person of Jesus Christ. So all of those
things, what do you mean by personal connection and why that was me?
Well, so as a Christian, I believe that I have a relationship with God,
which is best expressed by saying that it's personal. And that comes about because,
you know, Jesus through his acts has reconciled me with God, me a sinner, me someone full of
sins, of failings, of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals, let alone the
ideals of a holy God have been reconciled to the Creator of everything. And so Christians, myself
included, believe that prayer is, in a certain sense, a connection with God. And there are times
when I felt, you know, that God spoke to me, I don't mean necessarily orally in words, but
that showed me things or enlightened me or inspired me in ways that I attribute to him.
So I see it as a two-way relationship in a certain sense. Of course, it's a very
asymmetrical relationship. But nevertheless, Christians think that it's a two-way,
it's a two-way street. We're not just talking into the air when we say we are going to pray for
someone. In this two-way communication, is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast?
What is God like in your view? If you try to describe, is it a force? Is it for you intellectually,
is it a set of metaphors that you use to reason about the world? Is it kind of a computer that
does some computation, that's an infinitely powerful computer? Or is it like Santa Claus,
a guy with a beard on the cloud? I don't mean what God actually is. I mean, in your limited
cognitive capacity as a human, what do you find helpful for thinking of what God actually looks
like? What is God? Well, let me start by saying none of the above, okay? Clearly, God, the Christian
God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, etc., is not any of those things because all of those
things you just mentioned are phenomena or entities in the created world. And the most
fundamental thing about monotheism as Abraham and Moses and so forth handed it down is that God is
not an entity within the creation, within the universe, that God is the creator of it all.
And that's what Genesis, first two chapters of Genesis is really about. It's not about telling
us how God created the world, it's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created
the world, okay? And that therefore he is not simply an entity within it. On the other hand,
our finite minds have a pretty hard time encompassing that. So one has to therefore work in terms of
metaphors and images and so forth. And I think we would know very little about who God is if it
was simply left to our own devices. If we were just, here you are, you're in the universe,
try to figure out who made it and so forth. Well, philosophers think they can do a little bit of
that maybe. Theologians think that they can do a little bit more. But Christians think that God
has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself. And we say that he's revealed himself
supremely in the person of Jesus Christ. And so when Jesus says to his disciples,
if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, then that is in a certain sense a watchword for answering
this question for Christians. It is that supremely, if we want to help ourselves understand who God
really is, we look to Jesus, we look to what he did, we look to what he said and so forth. And
we believe that he is one with the Father. And that's why we believe in the Trinity. I mean,
it's basically because that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching.
So in that sense, through Jesus, that's kind of a historical moment that's profound,
that's really powerful. Do you also think that God makes himself seen in less obvious ways
in our world today? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's certainly been
the outlook of Jews and Christians throughout history that God is seen in the creation. When
we look at the creation, we see to some extent the wonder, the majesty, the might of the person,
the entity, but the person who created it. And that's a way in which scientists particularly
have over the ages, and certainly over most of the last five centuries since the scientific
revolution, scientists have seen in a certain sense the hand of God in creation. I mean,
leads us perhaps to a different discussion, but I mean, it's remarkable to me how influential
Christianity and religion in generally has been in science. Yeah, most of the scientists
through history, as you described, I mean, God has been a very big part of their life,
and the war certainly up until the beginning of the 20th century, that was the case.
So maybe this is a good time to, can you tell me what scientism is?
Yeah, I mean, the short answer is that by scientism, we mean the belief that science
is all the real knowledge there is. That's a shorthand, there are lots of different facets
of it, which one can explore. And the book in which I explored it most thoroughly was actually
an earlier book called Monopolizing Knowledge. And the purpose of that title is to draw attention
to the fact that in our society as a whole, particularly in the West today, we have grown
so reliant on science that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things.
And so, of course, at MIT, we are focused on science and we do focus on it very much. But
the truth is that there are many ways of getting to know things in our world,
know things reliably in our world, and a lot of them are not science. So scientism, in my view,
is a terrible intellectual era. It's the belief that somehow the methods of science as we've
developed them with experiments and in the end, it relies particularly upon reproducibility in
the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and related types of
of skills. Those powerful, though they are for finding out about the world, are not all the
knowledge, do not give us all the knowledge we have. And there's many other forms of knowledge.
And the illustration that I usually use to try to help people to think about this is to say,
well, look, let's think about human history. I mean, to what extent can human history be
discovered scientifically? The answer is, essentially, it can't. And the reason is because
human history is not reproducible. You can't do reproducible experiments or observations and
go back and try it over again. It's a one-off thing. History is full of unique events.
And so you can't hope to do history using the methods of science.
Yeah. I mean, in some sense, history is a story of miracles. I mean, they don't have to do with
God. It's just what one... The uniqueness is anyway, unique events. That's true.
Unique events. And that science doesn't like that because it's unique events, but they're
very definition and not reproducible. Can I ask sort of a tricky question? I don't even know what
atheist or atheism is, but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and avoid
slipping into scientism? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, these are two separate things.
I'm quite sure there are many people who don't believe in God and yet recognize that there are
many different ways we get knowledge. Some is history, some is sociology, economics, politics,
philosophy, art history, language, literature, et cetera, et cetera. There are many people who
recognize those disciplines as having their own approaches to epistemology and to get how we get
knowledge and valuing them very highly. I don't mean to say that everyone who's an atheist
automatically subscribes to the scientific viewpoint. That's not true. But it's certainly
the case that many of the arguments, in fact, most of the arguments of the aggressive atheists
of this century, people are sometimes called new atheists, although they're actually rather old.
Most of their arguments are rather old, are drawing heavily on scientism. So when they say
things like, there's no evidence to support Christianity. What they are really focusing
on is to say is saying that Christianity isn't proved or the evidence for Christianity is not
science. Science doesn't prove it. If you read their books, that's what you find they really mean,
is science doesn't lead you necessarily to believe in a creator God or into it in any particular
religion. I accept that. That's not a problem to me, because I don't think that science is all
the knowledge there is. And I think there are other important ways of getting to know things.
And one of them is historical, for example, and I mentioned earlier that I became persuaded and I
still am persuaded that the historical evidence for the resurrection is very persuasive. Again,
it's not proof or anything like that, but it's pretty good evidence.
Yeah, I talked to Richard Dawkins on this podcast and I saw you debate with Sean Carroll.
So I understand this world. It makes me very curious. Maybe let me ask you another way.
My own kind of worldview, maybe you can help by way of therapy, I understand.
Because you've kind of said that there's other ways of knowing. What about if I kind of sit here
and am cognizant of the fact that I almost don't know anything? I'm sitting here almost paralyzed
by the mystery of it all. And when you say there's other ways of knowing,
it feels almost too confident to me. Because when I listen to beautiful music or C-art,
there's something there that's beyond the reach of the tools of science. But I don't even feel like
that could be an actual tool of knowing. I just don't even know where to begin. Because it just
feels like we know so little. If we look even 100 years from now, when people look back to this
time, humans look back to this time, they'll probably laugh at how little we knew. Even 100
years from now. And if we look at 1,000 years from now, hopefully we're still alive or AI versions
of ourselves are still alive. They will certainly laugh at the absurdity of our beliefs.
So you don't seem to be as paralyzed by how little we know. You confidently push on forward.
But what do you make of that sense of just not knowing of the mystery?
First of all, we need to be modest or humble even about what we know. I accept that. And I
certainly think that's true. Not simply because in the future we'll know more science and there
will be more powerful ways of finding out about things, but simply because sometimes we're not
right. We're wrong in what we think we know. So that's crucial. But it's also a very
Christian outlook. That kind of humility is what Jesus taught. So I don't know whether this was
in the back of your mind when you were thinking about this, but it's often the case that
people of religious faith are accused of being dogmatists. And there is a sense in which dogma
teaching, accepted teaching, is part of religions. But I don't think that necessarily
that leads one to blind dogmatism. And I certainly don't think that faith, we can talk about this
later if you like, but I certainly don't think that faith means thinking you know something and
not listening to counter-arguments, for example. So I think that's crucial.
What does faith mean to you? What does it feel like? How do you carry your faith
in terms of the way you see the world? I think faith is very often misunderstood
in our society at the moment. Because it's often portrayed as being nothing other than
believing things you know ain't true. Or believing things that are not proven.
Okay. And faith does have a strand which is to do with you know basically believing
in concepts or propositions. But actually the word faith is much broader than that.
Faith also means you know trusting in something, trusting in a person, or trusting in a thing,
or the reliability of some technology, for example. That's equally part of the meaning
of the word faith. And there's a third strand to the meaning of the word as well. And that is
loyalty. So you know I have faith in my wife and I try to act in faith towards her. And that's a
kind of loyalty. And so those three strands are the most important strands of the meaning of faith.
Yes, belief in propositions that we might not have full proof about, or maybe we have very little
proof about. But it's also trust and loyalty. And actually in terms of the Christian faith,
Christians are far more called to trust and loyalty than they are to belief in things they don't
you know don't have proof of, okay. But the critics of religion generally
tend to emphasize the first one and say well you know you believe things for which you have no
evidence, okay. That's what they think faith is. Well yeah there is a sense in which everybody
has to live their lives. Believing or making decisions in situations when they don't have all
the proof or evidence or knowledge that enables you to make a completely rational or well-informed
or prudent decision. You know we do this all the time. You know my drive down here I nearly took
a wrong turning and I thought which way do I go? Do I keep going straight on? And so my
voice came out and I think go straight, okay. So you have to make decisions and sometimes
you know you don't have a navigation system telling you what to do. You just have to make
that decision with no with insufficient evidence. And you're doing it all the time as a human and
that's part of being sentient. And so that kind of action and belief on the basis of incomplete
evidence is not something that I feel uncomfortable doing or that I feel that somehow my Christian
commitments have forced me to do when I wouldn't have had to have done it otherwise. I would have
had to do it anyway. And so you know there's a sense in which I think it's important to see
the breadth of meaning of faith and to recognize that certainly in the case of Christianity
it's trust and loyalty that the key themes that we're called to.
And I mean another interesting extension of that that you speak to is kind of loyalty
is referring to a connection with something outside of yourself. So I think you've spoken
about like existentialism or even just atheism in general as leading naturally to an individualism
as a focus on the self. And ideas that maybe the Christian faith can instill in you is allowing
you to sort of look outside of yourself. So connection, I mean loyalty fundamentally is about
other beings and other beings. I mean I think I don't know what it is in me but I'm very much
drawn to that idea. And I think humans in general are drawn to that idea. You can make all kinds
of evolutionary arguments, all that kind of stuff. But people always kind of tease me
because I talk about love a lot. And I mean there's a lot of non-scientific things about love,
right? Like what the heck is that thing? Why do we even need that thing? It seems to be an annoying
burden that we get so much joy in life from a connection with other human beings, deep
lasting connections with human beings. Same thing with loyalty. Why do we get so much value and
pleasure and strength and meaning from loyalty, from a connection with somebody else, going through
thick and thin with somebody else, going through some hard times. Some of the closest friends
I have is going through some rough times together and that seems to make life deeply meaningful.
What is that? That resonates with me and obviously I would affirm it.
I think just to correct the implication that you made, I don't think it's necessarily
the consequence of atheism that we lose track of those kinds of things. I mean,
I think that atheists can be loyal, okay, if you like. The question more often comes up in the context
of where does morality come from? And loyalty, I think, and duty are related to one another.
If we have loyalty to someone, then we have a duty to them as well. And I think that in so far as
we see ourselves as having any kinds of duties or moral compulsions with respect to our relationships
to other people, I think it's a question that always arises, well, where do these come from?
And there are various approaches that people have towards deciding what makes ethics or
morality moral, okay? But I do think it's the case that it's very hard to ground morality
in any kind of absolute way or persuasive way in mere human relationships. And so it's certainly
the case that in Christianity, there is a sense in which morality and the morality of morals
comes from a transcendent place, from a transcendent deity, and that we
that we ground are the compelling force of morals on God more than we do on individuals.
Because after all, if you've got nothing but other people, why should you treat your neighbor
well? Why shouldn't you defraud your neighbor if it's good for you? Well, you can construct
all kinds of arguments and some of them are obviously arguments that are commonplace in
religion too. You should do as you would be done by and all this kind of thing. But none of that
seems any more than mere pragmatism to most people. And so that's one of the things that
Nietzsche, amongst others, really identified. If God is dead, if the idea of God is grounding our
moral behavior is no longer viable in the West, which Nietzsche thought that it wasn't, then
what does ground it? And he had no good answer for it. In fact, he claimed there was no answer,
but then he couldn't live with that. And so he invented the idea of the ubermensch,
this superior human being. And this was a different way of trying to ground morality,
not a very successful one. You could argue that it's a forerunner of the sort of
racism of Hitler's regime and so forth that we've, in the West, thankfully, shied away from
in the past half or three quarters of a century. But I think it is the case that
Christianity gives me a basis for my moral beliefs that is more than mere pragmatism.
Yeah, but there is a stepping outside of all that. There does seem to be a powerful,
stabilizing, like we humans are able to hold ideas together, like in a distributed way,
outside of whether God exists or not, or that just our ability to kind of converse together
towards a set of beliefs into sometimes into tribes. It's kind of, I don't know if it's inherent to
being human beings. I hope not, because now if I look on Twitter, and there's the red team
and the blue team, right? It's almost like it's some kind of TV show that we're living in,
and that people get into these tribes and they hold a set of beliefs that sometimes don't,
I mean, they are beliefs for the sake of holding those beliefs, and we get this
intimate connection between each other for sharing those beliefs. And we spoke to the
things about loyalty and love, and that's the thing that people feel inside the tribe.
And it seems very human that within that tribe, those beliefs don't necessarily always have to be
connected to anything. It's just the fact that, you know, I've did sports my whole life,
and whenever you're on a team, the bond you get with other people on the team is incredible.
And the actual sport is often the silliest. I mean, I don't play ball sports anymore,
but the ball, when I play like soccer or tennis, I mean, all those sports are silly, right? You're
playing with a little ball, but there's the bond you get is so deeply meaningful. So I just,
it's interesting to me on the sociological level that it's possible to me whatever the beliefs
of religion is, whatever they're actually grounded in, they might be, they might have a power in
themselves. I think there is tribalism everywhere. And I think tribalism in the US at the moment is
rather difficult to bear from my point of view. And it's, I think, fed by the internet and social
media and so forth. But it's, but historically, tribalism has been a trait and remains a trait
in humans. The genius of Christianity is that it supersedes tribalism. I mean,
yes, when the Hebrews thought about Yahweh, initially they thought about him as their tribal
deity, just like the tribal deities round about them. And yet from early on in Hebrew history,
the crucial thing that Yahweh came to mean or I would say revealed of himself to them was that
he wasn't just a tribal deity. He was the God that created the whole thing. And if he is the God of
the whole thing, then he's not just the God of the Hebrews or in the case of Americans,
God is not just the God of Americans, he's the God of everybody. And that is in a way the most
amazing transcending of tribal loyalties. And one of the crucial occasions in the New Testament
when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, the apostles and the disciples speak in other tongues
and there are people from all the countries round about, hear them in their own languages. And so
whether you take that as factual or not, that is a statement of the transcendent
aspects of Christianity or the claimed transcended aspects of Christianity that it transcends culture.
And that's certainly something which I find appealing.
When I kind of touch on this topic in my own mind, one of the hardest questions is
why is there suffering in the world? Do you have a good answer?
Well, I have some answers, but you're right that it is one of the toughest questions. The problem
of pain or the problem of suffering or the problem of theodicy, as theologians call it,
is probably one of the toughest. I think it's important to say that there are certain types
of answers to this question, but there are aspects of this question to which there is no
intellectual answer that is going to satisfy. And the fact of the matter is, when I'm speaking to
an audience, let's say at some kind of lecture, I can be sure that there are people in that audience
who are either personally suffering, they've got illness, they've got pains, maybe they're facing
death, or someone in their family is in similar sorts of situations. So suffering is a reality.
There is nothing that I can say that is going to solve their feeling of agony and angst and
maybe despair in those types of situations. There is really only one thing that I think humans can
do for one another in those kinds of situations, and that is simply to be there, to be there
alongside your friend or your colleague or whoever it, family member or whoever it might be.
And that's the only really sense in which we can give comfort. If we try to give intellectual
solutions to these problems, we're going to be like the comforters that were in the book of Job,
in the Bible, who brought no comfort to Job himself with their intellectual answers. But if
they had been there and some of them were there, they sat alongside, that is some level of comfort.
And after all, that's the meaning of the word compassion. It means to suffer alongside of
somebody. And I would say, first off, what does a Christian say about suffering? The first thing
a Christian should say is, compassion is all that really counts. And what's more, we say
we say that God has acted in compassion towards us. That is to say, he has suffered with us
in the person of Jesus Christ. And when we see the passion of Jesus, we recognize that God
takes suffering deadly seriously, has taken it so seriously that he's been willing to come
and be a part of his creation in the person of Jesus Christ and suffer death, the most horrible
death on the cross for our benefit. So that's one side of suffering. But the philosophical
question remains, surely if God is good and God is omnipotent, benevolent, why doesn't he
take away all the suffering? Why doesn't he cause miracles to occur that will take away all this
suffering? I think there are some good answers to that question in the following sense, that we
live in a world where the consistency of the world is an absolutely crucial part of it. The fact
that our world behaves reproducibly in the main is absolutely essential for the integrity of our
lives. Without it, we wouldn't exist. And so there is a sense in which the integrity of creation
calls for there being consistent behavior, which these days we think of as being the laws of nature.
Okay. And so the consistent behavior of nature is very, very important, and it's what enables
us to be what we are. And if you're calling upon God in your critique of why isn't this
benevolent creator fixing things, one answer is he's fixed things in a certain sense to have
an integrity in them. And that integrity is the best thing. It's the way we have our existence.
It's the way we live and move and have our being. And if you want something different,
you've got to show that there is a way in which you could invent a world that is better,
that it has the integrity that we need to exist and to be able to think and love and be, but you
are going to do it better. And the atheists think that maybe they have got a better idea, but if
they thought about it a bit more carefully, they'd realize no one has put forward a better idea.
Okay. So another way to say that is that suffering is an integral part of a consistent
existence. In a philosophical sense, the full richness and the beauty of our experience would
not be as beautiful, would not be as rich if there was no suffering in the world. Is that possible?
Well, I think you said two different things that aren't exactly the same. One is that suffering is
an integral part of our experience. That might be considered a challenge to certain types of
Christian theology or even Jewish theology. In other words, Christians talk about the fall and
talk about Adam and Eve in the garden and have a vision of there being some kind of perception
from or perfection from which we have fallen. And I think there is a perfection from which we've
fallen, but I don't think that perfection is some kind of physical perfection. In other words,
I don't subscribe personally to the view that some Christians do, that there was some state
prior to the fall in which death did not occur. I don't think that that's consistent with science,
as we know it. And I think that death, for example, has been part of the biological world and the
universe as a whole from billions of years ago. So just to be clear about that, on the other hand,
I do think, so if that's the case, then certainly in that sense, at the very least,
suffering or at least death is part of the biological existence. And that probably seems
so completely obvious to somebody who, you know, is au fait with science, whether they're a scientist
or not. And I apologize if I'm interrupting, but it's the obvious reality of our life today.
But there's a lot of people, I think it's currently in vogue. I've talked to quite a few folks who
kind of see as the goal of many of our pursuits as to extend life indefinitely, a sort of,
you know, a dream for many people is to live forever in the technological world, in the
engineering world, in the scientific world. I mean, that's the big dream. To me, it feels like
that's not a dream. I certainly would like to live forever. Like that's the initial feeling,
the instinctual feeling. Because, you know, life is so amazing. But then, if you actually kind of
like you've presented it, if you actually lived that kind of life, you would realize that that's
actually a step backwards. That's a step down from the experience of this life. In my sense,
that death is an essential part of life, about essential part of this experience,
death of all things. So the fact that things end somehow, and the scarcity of things,
somehow create the beauty of this experience that we have.
Yeah, transhumanism doesn't look very attractive to me either. But it also doesn't look very feasible.
But that's a whole big topic that I'm not exactly an expert. But I'll say, but I, but,
you know, I'm of a certain age where my mortality is more pressing or more obvious to me than it
once was, okay? And I don't dread that. I don't see that as, in a certain sense, even the enemy,
okay? You're not afraid of death? Well, I'm afraid of lots of things in a conceptual way,
but it doesn't keep me awake at night, okay? I think, like most people, I'm more afraid of
pain than I am of death. So I don't want to put myself forward to some kind of hero that doesn't
worry about these things. That's not true. But I do think, and then maybe this is part of my
Christian outlook, that there is life beyond the grave. But I don't think that it's life in this
universe, or in this, certainly not in this body, and maybe not in a certain sense in this mind.
I mean, you know, Christian belief in the afterlife is that we will be resurrected. We will be in a
certain sense be with God. I don't know what that means. And I don't think anybody else really quite
knows what that means. But there are lots of ways that over history, people, artists and, and, and
writers and so forth have pictured it. And these are all perhaps some of them helpful ways of thinking
about it. Do you think it's possible to know what happens after we die?
I don't think we find out by near-death experiences or those kinds of things. But,
but I think that, you know, that we have sufficient, I feel I have sufficient information,
if you like, in terms of God's revelation to be confident that, that I will go somewhere else,
okay? But it won't be here. And I, to me, the aspirations of transhumanism are horrific.
I mean, I think it would be a nightmare, not a dream, a nightmare, you know, to be somehow
downloaded into a computer and live one's life like that, because it completely discounts the
the integrity of our bodies as well as our minds. I mean, we aren't just disembodied minds.
It would not be me that was in the computer. It would be something else if, if that kind
of download were possible. Of course, it isn't possible. And it's very long way from being
possible. But, you know, amazing things happen. So we shouldn't be too certain.
So this is, this is a place that, again, maybe taking a slight step outside wherever philosophizing
a little bit. Let me ask you about human level or super human level intelligence,
the artificial intelligence systems. What do you make from, from almost a religious or a
perspective that we've been talking about of the special aspect of human nature, of us creating
intelligence systems that exhibit some elements of that human nature? Is that something, again,
like we were talking about with transhumanism, there's a feasibility question of how hard is it
to actually build machines that are human level intelligence, or have something like consciousness,
or have all those kinds of human qualities? And then there's the, do we want to do that kind of
thing? So on both of those directions, what do you think? Well, okay, so, you know, since your
podcast is called AI, I don't want to offend too many of your listeners out there. But I,
but I think one should be a little bit more modest about one's claims for AI than have
typically been the case. I think that actually a lot of people in AI are somewhat chastened.
And so there, there are more modest claims than are common with the transhumanists and,
yes, and, and so forth. And, you know, I used to play chess when I was a kid, I was pretty good
at it, okay, and won competitions and so on and so forth. And I, when I, and I'm talking about
when I was in high school, I thought it was pretty unlikely that a computer would be able to become
good at chess, but I was dead wrong. Okay. And so, you know, how did that make you feel, by the way,
when, do you blue pick? I stopped playing chess seriously when I, when I encountered computers
that could beat me. Okay. I still play with my grandchildren a little bit, but, but, but, but
yeah, it seemed like in a certain sense, it became a solved problem when AI was able to do it better
than I could. So I think that there are ways in which today we've seen computers do things which
historically were regarded as being very characteristic of human intelligence. And in that
sense, there, there is some success to AI. I also think that, you know, there, there are certain
things which one might think of as being AI, which are, you know, completely widespread in our
society, I'm thinking about the internet search engines, and so forth, which are enormously
influential and obviously do things more powerfully than any individual human, or even any combination
of humans could do much faster and, and, and accessing databases and so on and so forth is all
of this is outstripped our human intelligence. I'm not sure the extent though, to which that is
really intelligence in the way that was traditionally meant, but it's certainly amazingly
a facile and it, it multiplies our ability to access human knowledge and, and data and so
forth. So is that something, is that, is that enter the realm of something we should be concerned
about? So in the realm of religion, you talk about what is good, what is evil, what is right,
what is wrong, you have set of morals, set of beliefs. And when you have an entity come into
the picture that, that has quite a bit of power, if we potentially look into the future and
intelligence and capability, do you think there's something that religion can say about
artificial intelligence? Or is that something you shouldn't worry about until it arrives,
you think, just like with the chess program? You know, religious writers have thought about
this for centuries. You know, there's been a long debate about what is, what is historically
called a plurality of worlds. And it was actually more about whether there are places where other
intelligent creatures live than it was about us creating them. But, but I think it's largely the
same question. It's almost like aliens, like other intelligence. So if there is other intelligent
life in the universe, what is its relationship to God? Okay, that is in a certain sense, the puzzle
that religious thinkers and writers have thought about for a long time. And there's a whole range
of, of different opinions about that. I mean, personally, you know, I think it's, it's an
interesting question, but it's not a very pressing question at the moment. And I think the same way
about the question of what happens if we're able to build a sentient robot, for example. I think
it's an interesting question and we'll have to think about it when that happens. But I think
we're still quite a ways away from that. And so I don't have a good answer. But I think there's a
literature that you, one could tap to think about. Do you want to start early on the question? Well,
let me ask you another impossible question from a religious or from a personal perspective. What
do you think is consciousness, this, this subjective experience that we seem to be having?
Does this, there's a Christian religion have something to say about consciousness? Does your
own, when you look in the mirror, do you have a sense of what is consciousness?
I think the Bible doesn't have much in the way of answers about that directly in the sense that
you're perhaps asking it, which is more like, I think you're asking for some kind of scientific,
quasi-scientific or maybe indeed scientific description of consciousness.
That's really looking for one, yes. I think that, I think that there, it's an interesting question.
I think it's actually, it's a jump too far. I think we have, we don't even know the answer to
the question, what is the mind to let alone consciousness? So if you distinguish between
those two things, I think the question that's being addressed more directly, scientifically,
as well as in other ways, it is what is the mind. And that is certainly a very
topical question, even in places like MIT, which is not historically involved with
philosophical questions, you know, that people are doing neuroscience and so forth.
I think it's a very important question. And I think that we're going to find that we are not
computers. In other words, I think the commonplace theory of what mind is, is generally speaking
by analogy that we are basically wet, wet-wear, okay? That we're some computer-like
entity and that the analogy to digital computers is a pretty decent one. I mean, that's of course
a viewpoint which, you know, which drives the aspirations of the transhumanists. I mean,
they so much believe that our minds are nothing other than, you know, in a certain sense,
some kind of implementation of software in biology that they say to themselves, well,
of course we're going to be able to download it into a digital computer. I don't think that's true.
I think it's most likely that quantum mechanics is very important in the brain.
It seems most unlikely that it's not to me. I know that that's contrary to the opinions of
many people, but that's my view. And it's also a view, for example, of people like Roger Penrose
and people like that who've written about it rather extensively. And if that's the case,
then really my mind is not reproducible to some kind of software which can be considered to be
portable. It is so connected to the hardware of my body that the two are inseparable. Okay.
And so if that is in fact what we find, as I suspect will be the case, then the aspirations
of the transhumanists will be very long in coming, if at all. So I think that actually
physics and chemistry are, in a sense, involved with the brain and within the mind,
but not in a very simple way like the computer analogy in a much more complicated way.
And I also think that it's philosophically ignorant to speak as if when and if the actions
of the brain are understood at the physical and chemical level, that the mind will vanish as a
concept that we'll just say, we're nothing but brains. Of course it won't. I mean, it may well
be that our mind is an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the physics and chemistry and biology.
But it's also something that we have to encounter and take seriously. And so it's not the case
that the mind is reducible to nothing but physics and chemistry, even if it's embedded in continuously
into physics and chemistry, as I rather suspect it is. So that's my own view. I mean,
another way of putting it is that the mind or the soul is not something added into humans,
as might have been the viewpoint historically. I do think there is something added to humans,
but it's not the mind, it's the spirit. And that takes us beyond the physical,
it takes us beyond this universe. But I don't think that consciousness, the mind, etc, etc,
is that thing which is necessarily added in. So I'm not a substance dualist in that sense,
okay, if you want to put it philosophically. I mean, but your sense is, so the mind and
the intelligence and consciousness can be these emergent things. Do you have a hope,
a sense that science could help us get pretty far down the road of understanding?
We will get much further than we have. And it'll be interesting.
I mean, right now our methods of diagnosing the human brain are extremely primitive. I mean,
the resolution that we have that comes out of NMR and brain scans and so forth
is miserable compared with what we need in order to understand the brain at the cellular level,
let alone at the atomic level. But we're making progress, it's relatively slow progress,
but it's progress and people are working on it and we're going to get better at it. And
we will find out very interesting things as we do. The time resolution is also completely
hopeless compared with what we need to understand other thought. So there's a long way to go and
we will get better at it. But I'm not at all worried, as some people are, and some people
speak as if it's a good thing, that somehow the concepts of humanity and the mind and religion
and consciousness are going to vanish because we're going to have complete
physicochemical description of the brain in the near future. We're not going to have that.
And secondly, even if you had it, the mind and all these other things aren't going to vanish
because of it. Well, I find kind of compelling the notion that whoever created this universe
and us did so to understand itself, himself. I mean, there's a powerful self-reflection
notion to this whole experiment that we're a part of. I certainly think that God takes
delight in His creation and that it was created for that delight as much as it was
for any other reason. And that, you know, that therefore there's reason to be hopeful and
awestruck by the creation, whether it's on the very small or on the very large.
I'm not sure if you're familiar. There's something called the simulation hypothesis
that's been fun to talk about with computer scientists and so on, which is a kind of
thought experiment that proposes that, you know, the entirety of the world around us
is a kind of computer program. That's a simulation and then we're living inside it.
I think there's, I think from a certain perspective, that could be consistent with
a religious view of the world. I mean, you could just use different terms, basically.
But it feels like a more modern, updated version of that. But what's your sense of this
or the simulation hypothesis? Do you find it interesting, useful to think about? Do you find
it ridiculous? Do you find it fun? What are your thoughts? It's fun and it's been, of course,
the subject of various movies that some of which are very well known.
I don't think it makes sense to think of it as a simulation hypothesis in the sense that we're
really lying in banks on banks of beds having our energy drained away from us
and the simulation is going on in our individual brains. That makes no sense to me at all.
I don't think that's what's meant by the simulation hypothesis as you're using it now.
But I think that there is very little distinction between saying that an intelligent creator
has set up the universe according to his will and his plan and set it in motion and is allowing it
to run out. Maybe, as Christians say, he's sustaining it actually by his word of power,
it says in the book, the letter to Hebrews. In this amazingly consistent and integrated way,
I don't think there's very much difference between saying that and saying that it's a simulation.
I think it's almost the same thing. But I think it's important to recognize that
that the simulation in that concept, the simulation and the creation of the universe are the same
thing. In other words, it's a simulation that is billions of light years across.
There's a sense in which it helps one understand, especially if you're not religious, that there
is something outside of the world that we live in, that there is something bigger than the world
we live in. I mean, it's just another perspective that humbles you. In that sense, it's a powerful
thought experiment. One shortcoming of that is the following of the analogy is this,
that we think of a simulation as something taking place in the universe. It's taking
place in my computer. I don't think that's the right analogy for a Christian view of creation.
I don't think it's taking place in some other universe that God has made. I think maybe it's
taking place in the mind of God. Christians might hypothesize also. But I think that it's
important to recognize that Christian theology at any rate is that God is not one of the entities in
the universe and presumably therefore is very different from a simulation that we might run on
a computer. Let me ask you, Adam and Eve, even Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil. Is this story meaningful to you? What does the story mean to you?
Yeah, it is meaningful to me. I take the writings of the Bible very seriously and I think that
most Christians regard them as having some kind of authoritative role in their faith.
What do I get from it? I mean, I think the most important thing that Christians get from the
story of Adam and Eve and eating the apple and so forth is that the relationship between humans
and God is broken, has been broken by man's disobedience. That's what the story of Adam and
Eve and the apple is all about. That broken relationship is, for Christians, what Jesus came
to redeem, came to overcome that brokenness and restore that relationship with God to some
extent at any rate on earth and ultimately in eternity to restore it fully. That's
really what Christians mean and gain from the story of Adam and Eve. Of course, lots of people
ask the questions about how literally should we take these stories of particularly the first few
chapters of Genesis, which is an important question, but we tend to get bogged down with it a bit too
much. I think we should take away the message and I think what actually we would have seen if we'd
been there is something which is a matter of speculation and it's certainly not terribly
important from the point of view of Christian theology. But it seems like a very important
moment. As a man of faith, do you wish that, I think it was Eve first? Yeah, we'll see if that
was an apple, by the way, it was just a fruit. You said it very carefully. It was the fruit of
the tree, right? Do you wish they wouldn't have eaten of the tree? This is back to our discussion
of suffering. Was that like an essential thing that needed to happen? You're going to have to
read Paradise Lost to get your answer to that. Beautifully put. Okay. Well, let me ask the biggest
question, one that you also touch in your book, but one that I asked every once in a while is,
what is the meaning of life? The meaning of my life is many different things. But they are all
kind of centered around relationships. I mean, for a Christian, one's relationship with God is
a crucial part of the meaning of life. But one's relationship with one's family,
wives, wife, parents, children, grandchildren, in my case, and so forth. Those are crucially important.
These are all the places where people, whether they're religious or not, find meaning.
But ultimately, I think a person who has faith in a creator,
who we think has an intention or many intentions, but a will in respect of the world as a whole,
that's a crucial part of meaning. And the idea that my life might have some small significance
in the plan of that creator is an amazingly powerful idea that brings meaning. I tell a story in my
book that when I was a student before I became a Christian, I read a philosophy book whose
approximate title was, what is the meaning of life? And that book basically said,
there is no meaning to life, you have to make up the meaning as you go along.
And I think that's probably the predominant secular view is these days that there is no
real meaning, but you can make up a meaning and that will give you meaning into your life.
I don't subscribe to that view anymore. I think there is more meaning than that. But I do think
that those things which give meaning to our life are very important and we should emphasize them.
And you have said that as the part of that meaning, as the part of your faith,
love and loyalty are key parts. So can you try to say what is love and loyalty?
What does it mean to you? What does it look like? If you were to give advice to your
children and grandchildren of what to look for in looking for loyalty and love,
what would you try to say? Well, I think it's something like yielding your will or desire to
another. It's valuing others more highly or at least as highly as yourself. But that's just
the start of it because true love, you reach a point where you feel compelled by the other.
I think to some people sounds very scary, but actually it's terrifically liberating.
And I think that love then brings you into service towards another. And I'm reminded of
the phrase from the Anglican prayer book where it talks about Jesus whose service
is perfect freedom. In other words, for us Christians to serve God is what perfects our
freedom. And I think there is an amazing love is in part captivity, but in a kind of paradoxical
sense. It's also an amazing freedom. Love is freedom. I don't think there's a better way to
end it. We started with fusion energy and ending on love. And there's a huge honor to talk to you.
Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks. It was a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ian Hutchinson. And thank you to our sponsors,
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let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke. Finally, I would like to assure my many
Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion
which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind. And often as Western medical
science now reluctantly admits to your physical well being, perhaps it is better to be unsane
and happy than sane and unhappy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our
descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may
well decide whether we have any future. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.