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 a 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

mind. Quick summary of the ads, two new amazing sponsors, Sunbasket and PowerDot. Please consider

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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 and 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,

fission 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? Sure. 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 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, 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 a chemical reaction like that, or the burning of 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 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

heart 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 sticks just fizzle out,

that's not, the reason they fizzle out is that, yes, they were burning, 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. But 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 in a star because we need temperatures of order,

tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order for the reactions to go fast enough

to generate enough electricity 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,

plastic or glass, it would be gone in milliseconds. So you have to have some nonmaterial mechanism of

confining the plasma. In the case of stars, that nonmaterial 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. Well,

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,

okay? 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 tachymarch is?

The Russian acronym from which the word tachymarch 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, okay? And so it's the meat of the doughnut, okay? That's the torus.

And it's got a magnetic field. So that's really all tachymarch 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

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 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. Like to make sure it stays on track. Well, what that does is makes the field lines

themselves into much bigger helices. And for reasons that are too complicated to explain,

that clinches the confinement of the particles, at least in terms of their single particle orbits,

so they don't leave the chamber. So when the particles are flying along this

donut, the inside of the donut, 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 deuterons 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

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 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?

I'm getting this thing to be something that actually works to generate energy. Well,

there have been experiments that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear powers in the

vicinity of a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds. So that's 10 megajoules. That's not

much energy. It's a few donuts worth of energy. Literal donuts. But we have studied how well

tachymex can confine 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 tachymex 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 ETA, ITER,

which means the way or just means the International Tachymex 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 ETA 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 ETA. And whether I'm alive or not, I don't know, but I certainly will be well included

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.

I hope 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.

You've got to have 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 that keep

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, now again, the concern is that there's a very popular HBO show on 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, yeah, I mean, nuclear disasters, is that, 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, okay? 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 no,

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 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 15,000 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. I mean, 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 though 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. Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen and

the 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. So I can't betray any secrets about weapons because I've never

been a party to them because I know a lot about this problem. I can guess and sets off fusion

reactions in the middle. So that's basically 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 tochimac 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

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

they're all it's all over with before the thing flies apart. Wow. And that's what we're going to

do to heat it up really fast. That is inertial fusion. Okay. Is that useful for energy generation

for outside? 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 around 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, you know, 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. 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, if we 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. I know many people are suffering, but it's better than it

could have been. So now we're talking about nuclear weapons. In terms of existential threats to us,

as 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. Robots, yeah. Do you think in those existential terms,

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 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

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. Is there a way to, like, 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,

okay, 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 is 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, has to go down to 1% of what it is

now, okay? 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 is 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, okay? 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, 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.

Concurrently. That's a very poetic way of putting it. But yes, I would accept that.

I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University.

I had gone to a school in which there was religion, was part of the society. There were

prayers at the daily 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

aggressive or blind. It just sort of was there. But I didn't believe it.

That 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 the most important influence on me that here were

two people who were really smart like me. I'm giving you my

impressions of it the way I felt at the time. And they thought Christianity made sense and

testified to its significance in their lives. So that was a very important influence on me.

And ultimately, I didn't see Christianity as some kind of great evil the way it's

sometimes portrayed by the radical atheists of this century. I mean, I think that's nonsense.

So I think there were certain attractive things. If you go to a university like Cambridge,

you're surrounded by Western culture from about the 15th century onwards.

And that's saturated with Christian art and architecture and so forth. And so it's hard

not to recognize that Christianity is, in fact, the foundation of Western society in Western

culture, Western civilization. So 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 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 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 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 younger. And that thought became

attractive to me. I mean, I think most people find the person of Christ

and his teachings 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?

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 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 that God spoke to me, I don't mean necessarily

orally in words, but 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, I'm going to pray for

someone. In this two way communication, is there a way for you 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 the 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 we were 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, and 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, you know, 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, you know, 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,

or 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,

this 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 they've worked

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 skills. Those powerful, though they are for finding out

about the world, 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. The uniqueness is anyway, unique events.

It's unique events. And that science doesn't like that because it's unique events, but they're very

definition are 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. Okay.

I'm quite sure there are many people who don't believe in God and yet recognize that there are

many different ways of we get knowledge. You know, 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 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. And 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. Okay. 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 sort of another way. My own kind of worldview, maybe you can help by way of therapy, understand.

You know, 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? So I'm sitting here

almost paralyzed by the mystery of it all. And it's not even, when you say there's other ways

of knowing, it feels almost too confident to me because, yeah, when I listen to beautiful music

or C.R., there's something there that's beyond the reach of scientism, I would say. So beyond the

reach of the tools of science. But I don't even feel like that could be an actual tool of knowing.

Yeah, I just don't even know where to begin because it just feels like we know so little.

Like 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.

You know, they'll 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,

if 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, you know, sometimes we're not right. We're wrong, okay, 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.

Yeah, what does faith mean to you? What does it feel like? What does it actually sort of,

how do you carry your faith in terms of the way you see the world?

Well, 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. And faith does have a strand which is to do with

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, 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, you know,

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 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? I mean, 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? So yeah, 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, okay, as well.

And I think that insofar 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 ground 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, okay. And so that's

what 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, okay, 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 ubermitsch, this superior human being, okay. And this was

a different way of trying to ground morality, not a very successful one. You could argue that

he's the 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, so stepping outside of all of 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 converge together

throws 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 a character, it's some kind of TV show that we're living in,

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. 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. It's interesting to me on a sociological level that it's possible to me

whatever the beliefs of religion is, whatever they're actually grounded in, 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 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

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,

you know, 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,

you know, 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, the claimed transcendent 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, you know,

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 a similar

sort of situation. So, suffering is a reality. And 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 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

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 the suffering? I think there are some good answers to that question

in the 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. And so the consistent behavior

of nature is very, very important and 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,

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 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 a

dream for many people is to live forever. But 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. That's the initial feeling, the instinctual feeling,

because 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 in a 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'm of a certain age where my mortality is more pressing or more obvious to me than it once

was. And I don't dread that. I don't see that as, in a certain sense, even the enemy.

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. Like most people, I'm more afraid of pain than I am of death.

So I don't want to put myself forward as some kind of hero that doesn't worry about these

things. That's not true. But I do think, and maybe this is part of my Christian outlook,

that there is life beyond the grave. But I don't think that 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,

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 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

I think that we have sufficient, I feel I have sufficient information, if you like,

in terms of God's revelation to be confident 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 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 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 a place that, again, maybe taking a slight step

outside, we're philosophizing a little bit. Let me ask you about human level or superhuman level

intelligence, the artificial intelligence systems. What do you make 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 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 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 are more modest claims

than are common with the transhumanists and so forth. And, you know, I used to play chess when

I was a kid. I was pretty good at it, okay, won competitions and so on and so forth. And I, when

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 blew big?

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 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 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 accessing

databases and so on and so forth. All of this is outstripped our human intelligence.

I'm not sure the extent to which that is really intelligence in the way that was traditionally

meant, but it's certainly amazingly 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 where 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 a 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, we 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 the 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, 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.

Okay. 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? There's,

there's, there's a, the 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. 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, wetware. 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, 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, 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 reproduced, reducible 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, you know, are in a, are in a sense involved with the brain and within the

mind, but not in a very simple way, like, you know, like the computer analogy in a much more

complicated way. And I, 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 will mean that the mind will vanish as a concept, you know, that will just say,

we're nothing but brains. Okay. 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. Okay. But

it's also something that we have to encounter and take seriously. And so, you know, it's,

it's not the case that it, that the mind is reducible to nothing but physics and chemistry,

even if it's embedded in, you know, continuously into physics and chemistry as I rather suspect it

is. So that, 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, you know, there is something added to humans, but it's not, it's not the mind, it's the spirit.

And that takes us beyond the physical, it takes us beyond this universe. But I, but I don't think

that, that consciousness, the mind, et cetera, et cetera, is that thing which is necessarily

added in explicitly. So I'm not emergent in some way. 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, do you have a hope,

a sense that science could help us get it pretty far down the road of understanding?

Oh, we will get much further than we have. And we, it'll be interesting.

I mean, right now our, our methods of diagnosing the human brain are extremely primitive. I mean,

the resolution that we have, you know, that comes out of, 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, at the atomic level. But, you know, 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, compared with what we need to understand the thought, you know. So, so there's

a long way to go and we will get better at it. But I'm, 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, and consciousness are going to vanish because we're going to have,

you know, complete physical, chemical description of the brain in the near future that we're not

going to have that. And secondly, even if we had it, the mind and all these other things aren't

going to vanish because of it. Well, I find kind of compelling that the notion that whoever created

this universe and us did so to understand itself, himself. I mean, there's a, there's a,

there's a powerful self reflection notion to this whole experiment that we're a part of.

Well, 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, 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.

Well, that's been fun to talk about with the computer scientists and so on, which is a,

a kind of thought experiment that proposes that, you know, the entirety of the world around us

is a kind of a 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.

What are your, but it's a, it's a, it feels like a more modern updated version of that.

But what is, what's, what's your sense of this or the simulation hypothesis that you find

interesting, useful to think about to define a ridiculous, and you find it fun. What are your

thoughts? It's fun. And it's been, of course, the subject of various movies that, that some

of which are very well known. You know, 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 of, of, on banks of beds,

having our energy drained away from us and, 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, as you're using it now. But I think that there is a, 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.

Okay. In, in, 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. Okay. I mean, I think

it's almost the same thing. Okay. But I, but I think from, but I think it's important to recognize

that the simulation in that concept, the simulation and the creation or the, or the universe are the

same thing. Okay. In other words, it's a simulation, you know, that is billions of light years across.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, there, there's a sense in which it helps one understand, especially if you're

not religious, that there's something outside of the world that we live in, that there's

something bigger than the world we live in. And that, I mean, it's just another perspective on

that humbles, humbles you. So in that sense, it's a powerful thought experiment.

What's shortcoming of that is, is the following is of the, of the analogy is this, that we think

of a simulation as something take, taking place in the universe. You know, when we, it's, it's

taking place in my computer. Okay. I don't think that's the right analogy for Christian view of

creation. Okay. I don't think it's taking place in some other universe that God has made. Okay.

I think maybe it's taking place in the mind of God. Christians might hypothesize also,

but I, but I think that, that, 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, 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. Does this, is this story meaningful to you? What does the story mean to you?

Yeah, I, it is meaningful to me. I take the, you know, the writings of the Bible very seriously,

and I think that most Christians regard them as having some kind of authoritative

role in their, in their, 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. And 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, you know,

in, in the, in eternity to restore it fully. So that's the really what Christians mean

and gain from the story of Adam and Eve. Of course, lots of people ask the questions about how

sort, how literally should we take these stories of particularly the first few, few chapters of Genesis,

which is an important question. But, but I mean, but we tend to get bogged down with it a bit too

much. I think we should take away the message. And I think the, the, the, what the, what actually

we would have seen if we'd been there, okay, 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,

do you, do you wish that, I think it was Eve first?

Yeah, we'll see if that.

Do you wish that, by the way, it was just a fruit.

It was a fruit.

You said it very carefully.

It was the fruit, the fruit of the tree, right? Do you wish they wouldn't have eaten of the tree?

I mean, this is a, 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, the biggest question, one that you also touched

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. Okay. But it, 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

a, 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, you know, what is the meaning of life? And,

you know, 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, 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 a life are very important and we should emphasize them.

And you, you have said that as the part of the, as the part of that meaning is the part of your

faith, love and loyalty are key parts. So can you try to say what is love and loyalty? Like what,

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 are, you feel compelled by the other. And that,

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. Ian, 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,

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E, just F R I D M A N. And now 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.