David Eagleman

To my mind, the best way to tackle these mysteries is the scientific method.

And this is so new for humans.

I mean, this is really just the last few hundred years that we've kind of gotten this right, essentially since the Renaissance.

about doing science, which is just, it's nothing but a method of saying, okay, we're going to lay out our hypotheses on the table and we're going to do careful experiments.

We're not going to fool ourselves into believing something unless there's evidence that supports it.

And so to my mind, that's the way to tackle it.

Now, the issue is we have a world

There are 2,000 different religions on this little planet that we're on.

And the part that's always struck me as crazy is that people are willing to fight and die for their version of their religion.

There's a real lack of intellectual humility there.

Um, obviously if one religion were true, we might expect that it spreads around the world.

Uh, and everyone says, oh yeah, that one seems pretty right.

But obviously they're all made up.

And when you look at stuff like, you know, Judeo-Christian Islamic religion, you know, it has this idea that the earth is 6,000 years old.

Well, um,

you know, I mean, the Japanese were making pottery 7,000 years ago and people were writing on caves 30,000 years ago and so on.

So you'd have to explain how they got there before the, anyway, it's so, it's so goofy.

This idea of like Adam and Eve and creation and so on is so clearly incorrect that there's absolutely no reason to believe in, uh, in this religious story.

But,

I have felt that it's difficult to say, given the amount of mystery that we face, to say, okay, well, we've got this all figured out, and so it's a cold universe and there's nothing but deterministic physics and so on.