David Eagleman

What is our purpose here, if anything?

What is happening around here?

And the best way to tackle that is with the tools of science, which means anything gets to be on the table at first, and then we use the tools of science to rule out particular things, like that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and we use the tools of science to open up new folds in the possibility space that we hadn't even thought of before.

But the idea is the scientific temperament always allows lots of hypotheses on the table.

And then we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some of those and against others.

And that's what I think we should be doing.

That's what I call possibilianism.

And I actually presented this

in a TEDx talk many years ago.

And I got hundreds of emails right afterwards from people saying, hey, I think I'm a possibility in two.

And it became this worldwide movement.

There were newspapers and articles that people sent me from India, from Uganda, from whatever.

Facebook groups sprang up.

And now, 11 years after this original talk, there's so much activity about possibilityism.

And I'm so...

happy about this because I feel like there wasn't a position that people could take if they happened to feel the way I did about this.

The only thing that was available is to say, okay, either I'm religious and I believe what my parents and my culture told me, or I'm a strict atheist on the other end of the spectrum where I think nothing interesting is going on here.

There's nothing else in the universe for us to understand.

Or you would call yourself an agnostic, which means I don't know.

That's all agnosticism means is not knowing.