Okay, a couple things. You know, Jerry Coyne's term, faith-yism, in which he's critical of atheists who say, yeah, I don't believe in God, I don't need religion, but the little people need it. So we have to kind of let them have that. That's not what you're doing here. Well, I hope

it's not what I'm doing. So here's a part of the book where I would love to get your opinion, because I think a lot of atheists will feel that I kind of abandon our side here. And maybe they're right. Yesterday I taped a podcast with an atheist guy. said, you know, aren't you kind of throwing in the towel here and giving up on a secular society that can really function in a democracy? And I said, yeah, I guess in a sense I am. But so I am not saying I can't be a Christian, but I'm glad those other dumber people can. I'm in a way, I'm saying the opposite of that. Here's where I thought I might get in trouble with you. So I'm saying that neither the scientific materialist worldview, which is basically where I'm coming from, nor the faith-based worldview is complete in and of itself. they're existential questions, profound questions that only one or the other can answer. So you need them both. And I say that the two core questions that my worldview has grappled with, but has never succeeded in answering in satisfying way are, number one, the question of mortality. Why are we here? Is there any larger meaning to our lives than just being a clump of cells that appeared one briefly and then disappeared? That's a profoundly unsatisfying vision to most people. And the other is morality, which is, what's the difference between right and wrong that transcends just personal preference? This is Nietzsche's great challenge. He says, you know, he doesn't like Christianity, but he realizes without it, people won't have an anchor for right and wrong. They'll have to invent their own morality, and as we know, that doesn't turn out too well. But then on the other hand, the religious side cannot provide two things that my side, the skeptical scientific side, can. And one is a coherent account of the universe that explains the world in a way that does not require random supernatural acts, which make a nonsense of any coherent explanation. And the second thing that religion can't provide is an answer to the problem of evil. Why would a good God allow, you know, childhood leukemia, smallpox, the tsunami that killed, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people, seemingly randomly and cruelly. Religion, no religion has been able really to cope with that, at least none of the monotheistic ones. And the pastors I talk to are kind of honest about that, some of them. And so at this deep fundamental level, I think society and many humans are only comfortable in a world where science and faith can coexist. Because that's a world where there are access to both kinds of answers. And this is where I thought I might get in trouble with someone whose bookshelf says the skeptic right behind her. I'm kind of claiming that we fall short in these two crucial dimensions, and that we need the help of faith to create a complete worldview. Yeah.

Okay, let me kind of riff on that a little bit. I think, so your four elements there, your four Ms, mortality, morality, murder, miracles, just kind of reviewed there. So let's go through those. So first of all, I guess if religions are not making empirical claims, but just like social benefit claims, then I'm okay with that. Like, you know, one of the things that religion does well is it mans the soup kitchens. It helps people that need help. The Mormon Church, you talk about a lot in your book, they're great about this. I I mean, the whole tithing program, I know a lot of Mormons, these are really good people, and they really do make society better, especially in Utah. I mean, they take care of each other, right? I mean, that's the kind of social gospel that I've always respected. The prosperity gospel, you know, God wants me to be rich, you know, not so much. So I think religion's done well on that. You know, the studies showing that religious people give more money, they donate more blood, they donate more time, they live longer, they're healthier. You know, you don't need any supernatural element to explain that. of Putnam's Bowling Alone book and say, yeah, I mean, civic virtues and, you know, organizations that get people together where you have a, you know, social capital and people help each other, you know, and religion's good at that. There's secular versions of this, but, you know, religion has had a long head start on that, and they do it pretty well. You know, so when someone like Aya N. Hirsi Ali says, you know, I'm now a Christian, initially she said, because at least they know what a woman is, and they can stand up to the misogynistic Islamists who do these horrible things to women. But then she kind of shifted from that, more of a sort of a practical benefits of religion, to, and I now accept Jesus as my Savior. And then when pressed on that, she says, not mythically or metaphorically rose from the dead, but literally, right? So for me, this is kind of where the rubber meets the road. If you want to go full Jordan Peterson, Joseph Campbell, you know, the resurrection is a literary story with a deeper kind of psychological truth about human nature and forgiveness and starting over. Okay, fine. You know, why would I ask if the brothers' caramaz ever really existed? That'd be an idiotic question. The story of the novel is the truth behind it. But when I run this past Christians, they're like, no, no, no. There was really a guy named Jesus. He really died. He was dead for three days, not in a coma. He didn't pass out and was in this cold cave, and then they brought him back, and he went off to France and married Mary Magdalene, go full Dan Brown. Or there was that book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the 70s, it was not a novel. It was like, this really happened. Anyway, but they're not buying that. It seems to me that Christians seem to think that these have to be literal, empirical truths. And for me, that's where I get off the train there. It's the difference between literary, mythical, metaphorical truths versus literal. Anyway, that's my first thought on that.

Should I come in now, or is there more where that came from? So I think one of the reasons I'm not a person who says, well, I don't believe, but I'm glad other people do, is that I think the only good reason to believe in a religion is because you think it's true, not because you think it'll help you in society or it's a good way to meet people and get dates. And that's always been the obstacle for me, as it has been for you, that I don't believe that it is even theoretically possible that the molecules of a person's, a human's body, could defy the second law of thermodynamics. The decomposition of the body begins in minutes after death. All those amino acids and everything, they start to fall apart. And running that process backwards would mean totally revising all the known laws of the universe and making a nonsense of everything we know. And I'm, as a methodological matter, as an epistemological matter, not just empirically, I am unwilling to throw away all the laws of the universe in order to believe this one thing. so here's the challenge for me, Michael. I got to know a man by the name of Francis Collins. Yeah. And so you know who Francis Collins is. He's one of the great scientists of our time. He's the guy who decoded the genome. They don't come any more brilliant than he is. He's smarter than I am. He may even be smarter than you are. He is. He knows his way around a laboratory, and he would never go to work in his laboratory and look for a miracle to cure cancer. And if anybody proposed doing that when he was director of the NIH, he would say, no, you can't do that yet. Okay, here's the part, the bridge I can't cross that other people can, that he has crossed. I said to him one day, I was trying to work this out, I said, well, Dr. Collins, you're a Christian, but I guess that doesn't, in your case, mean you believe that Christ literally rose from the dead and those molecules magically reassemble themselves. You believe in the teachings, right? And he said, no, no, no, you can't be a Christian if you did not believe that that happened, and I believe it did. So here you have a way of thinking that somehow cordons off the miracles in one part of their reasoning in their life from their completely unaffected ability to do all the work as a scientist that you or I'm doing. I don't have that capacity, but I came to realize, this is where I may lose you, but tell me, that if someone has a mind that can encompass faith on the one hand, and encompass scientific materialism, and function in both worlds, that they're better off than I am, because they have answers to both kinds of questions. They have this abiding faith, this transcendent sense of the world. They're alive to maybe a kind of richer sort of explanation for things, that my worldview is maybe kind of two-dimensional or shallow by comparison. And I'm not saying I'm unhappy or want to be any different than I am. I'm just saying it seems like there is a way of thinking that most people are capable of that I and maybe you are not. So now have I lost you? No, no.

Well, so this, you know, in a way this is similar to Fideism, which is William James's idea, that was embraced by Martin Gardner. I don't know if you knew Martin, but he was, you know, one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, one of the founders of the other skeptic magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, along with James Randi and Paul Kurtz and Ray Hyman and the other hardcore skeptics and atheists. But he was not an atheist. He was a Fadias. And his argument was that there are certain questions in life that if they cannot be answered by science and rationality, and they're important, and the two main ones are free will and determinism, and then the other one is God's existence and the afterlife. And that, you know, science cannot tell us one way or the other for sure. I mean, the determinists have really good arguments, but so do the compatibilists and some of the free will people, you know? And it's just, I feel like I have free will. It works better for me if I assume I do. It works better for society if we assume people are making volitional choices, because we have to hold them morally accountable. You can't prove otherwise. You can have arguments, but ultimately it just comes down to sort of a pragmatic, you make the leap or not. Does it work for you? And Martin said, I believe in God and the afterlife. And of course, people like James Randy are like, what? And he's like, listen, I'm not claiming I can prove it, and I'm not trying to convince you of anything. This is just my belief, right? And so I think there is room for something like that if it works for you, not in a condescending way, it's just, you know, it's one of those big life questions, and, you know, something, and then a second thought on that. Maybe these religious truths are different from empirical truths, but not just in the metaphorical sense. Maybe, like, there's political truths, like, what's the right percentage of immigration we should allow? There's no right answer. It's not like, know, we're going to run an experiment, go there, 14.5% immigrants per year, whatever. There's no right answer. Or, you know, what's the correct percentage of upper income tax bracket? You know, should it be, you know, 70% or 35% or now Trump wants to lower it to like 20% or whatever. There's no right answer. It's just, you know, what do you want? And what does the populace want? And it's just sort of a power game. Sometimes I think religion's a little bit like that. You know, like, because if the resurrection was literally true, and Christians claim they have good arguments, you know, there's massive books, you know, here's why you should believe the resurrection. You know, the empty tomb, the three women that went there, the post-death apparitions, you know, to the disciples. Disciples went to their deaths believing in this, and on and on and on they go. If the arguments are so good, why don't Jews believe it? You know, they believe in the same God as you, they believe in the same book, at least the Old Testament, and they even think there is a Messiah to come. They just don't think it was the carpenter from Nazareth, that's all, and they don't think your arguments are all that good. And to Christians, theologians, I say, you can't say that these Jewish rabbis just don't understand the arguments. Of course they do. These are smart cookies, right? I mean, they know what's going on. They just don't think the argument's very good. So why not just take it as a literal truth or like a political truth, something like that? And so there, again, I just think it comes down to you just make that leap or not. And you and I don't, but others do. And Francis Collins, I think, is one of those. At the end of Language of God, he talks about that experience of the frozen waterfall, you know, where he got down on his knees and had the experience of communicating with God or Jesus. I forget what it was. And I think some people just have powerful experiences like that, enough to move them in that direction, like Martin Gardner said, hey, look, I'm just going to believe it. And the same way, last story, Ken Miller did this on stage. I've told this story a bunch of times on this podcast, so sorry for the redundancy, but, you know, where Dawkins and me and Ken Miller, the microbiologist who debunked all the intelligent design creationism about the flagellum and all that stuff. But at the end of his book, he says, by the way, I'm a Catholic, and I believe in Jesus as my Savior. So, of course, Richard goes for the jugular. Okay, Ken, let's say we found a piece of the true cross, and on the piece of the true cross was a little bit of flesh, and we could extract the DNA of Jesus, you know, because he's virgin-born, you know, the whole thing. And Ken could see where Richard was going with this, and he's like, Richard, I'm not claiming I can prove any of this. I'm just a Catholic. We accept Jesus as our Savior. That's it, full stop. And it was like, oh, okay. You know, sort of the end of the conversation, right? And Ken Miller is a brilliant scientist. I think some people just do that, and others just don't, and whatever works for you, I guess. So

do you feel like you and I miss out on something by not having this capacity for faith and living

on both sides of the line?