David Eagleman

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.

So there's a real lack of intellectual humility there.

Obviously, if one religion were true, we might expect that it spreads around the world and everyone says, oh yeah, that one seems pretty right.

But obviously they're all made up.

And when you look at stuff like

Judeo-Christian Islamic religion, you know, has this idea that the earth is 6,000 years old.

Well, 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 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 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.

We just don't know enough to say that.

That may well be the case.

We just don't know enough to pretend that science has it all figured out.

And so I call myself a possibility.

And that means I'm interested in the possibility space.

In other words, this is the scientific temperament is saying,

What could be going on here?

How did we get here?