You may have heard of the book The Reason Driven Life, a rational response to the wildly popular religious book The Purpose-Driven Life. The author of Reason is Robert Price, a professor of theology and a critical thinker. The book examines a lot of religious claims and shows how it’s better to take a rational view of how to live your life.
Inspired by this book, Danny Schade and Mikyle Lockwood created The Reason-Driven Podcast, where they interview various critical thinkers, and each ‘cast centers on one chapter of the book.
They interviewed me about Chapter 7, “The Mystery of Everything” (some NSFW language in the intro), and we discuss the most basic of ontological questions: why is there something rather than nothing? I am not a philosopher by trade, but like any rational person I’ve spent some time thinking about it.
The interview is about 45 minutes long, and we cover a wide range of topics from fine-tuning the Universe for life (bzzzzzt!) to the idea that there are multiple Universes, and how we can look for evidence of them. I also talk a bit about faith versus trust – my own take on how you should make decisions based on evidence or the lack thereof. This is a really important topic to me when it comes to being a skeptic, obviously, since our society stresses having faith so strongly (specifically during this time of the year). I’m not a big fan of it myself, though I understand that a lot of people feel that they need it. Still, I prefer evidence myself, especially when it comes to discussing evidence for or against a particular religious belief. We spend some time on that in the interview as well.
Danny and Mikyle sent me that one chapter from Reason, and I point out in the interview that I don’t agree with everything I read in it (I wish I had remembered to discuss his characterization of why people believe, which I think is pretty far off the mark). But what I did read has piqued my curiosity, so I’ll probably be picking up a copy of the book soon. It should make for interesting reading over the holidays.
