Distant Beliefs in Everyday Life: A Conversation With Helen de Cruz, PhD

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I am the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses. And sitting here in the next Zoom box over to me is Professor Helen de Cruz, who holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University, and who explores questions of philosophy and religion and science and all the complicated questions here. And so, Professor de Cruz, Helen, so nice to be able to be sitting with you here this afternoon.

Helen de Cruz: Thank you, Geoff. Thank you for inviting me.

Geoff Mitelman: I want to start – because you raise a lot of really interesting questions. I’ve been following you on Twitter for the last couple of years. But one of the questions that’s very interesting to me is because we’ve spoken to a bunch of guests about this interplay of religion and science, but most of our guests are in the United States and grew up in the United States, but you grew up in Belgium – you grew up in Europe – where, assuming the conversation is slightly different, there may be some similarities, but the challenges may be a little bit different than what they are in the United States.

So, I’m curious as to what you see as the differences in the religion and science discussion in the United States and in Europe, and maybe even in other parts of the world as well.

Helen de Cruz: It’s a fascinating question, and I am more and more aware you can’t really ask “What is the relationship between science and religion?” You’d almost have to ask “Which science?” and then “Which religion?” and also, “Which context?” So indeed, there’s recent empirical work showing that, in fact, the country context is more important for the discussion between science and religion – and about [whether] people accept science or not, the country context is more important than the religious affiliation.

So, Christians in Belgium, for example – there are various complex reasons for that. So, Belgium is primarily Catholic – well, used to be, like. Now it’s secular, like lots of European countries, although people still baptize their children to some extent. So, it’s mostly secular, but it’s at least nominally Catholic. And so, you don’t have this thing about reading scripture plainly for yourself. And reading about the six days of creation and stuff like that – it just isn’t that important a thing.

And so, the context of creationism and climate science – also, the way that religion interacts with politics – is also different. And as a result of that, the discussion goes very differently. That being said, the United States has a huge influence on how so many debates have gone across different countries, including science and religion.

So you do have, in Europe – and this is a project I’ve worked on in the past with people in Belgium – you have some creationism, and a lot of that ultimately has roots in Evangelical Christians in the United States. So, there is also a sort of cultural imperialism from the United States coming to the discussions on science and religion in other countries.

 

Geoff Mitelman: There was an article in the New York Times earlier this week about how politics is the new religion – at least in the United States – and questions of interfaith relationships. Actually, people are more upset if a Democrat’s going to marry a Republican, or Republican’s going to marry a Democrat, than if a Protestant marries a Catholic.

And I would think that in Europe – where it’s more of a parliamentary system and you’ve got to do more horse trading – that you’re not quite tied down to your political identity as it is in the United States.

Helen de Cruz: Again, interestingly, it depends a bit on which country in Europe. So, before I moved to United States, I lived for three years in the United Kingdom. And the United Kingdom has a majority system like the U.S. […] So, if you, like, win by one vote over the majority, then you get all this representation. So, in the United Kingdom, I did notice too, that there was this very strong allegiance. Like, if you said something like, “My boyfriend is a Tory” – so, Tories are the Conservatives. “Oh, my God. Are you sure? Like, how would you really go out with such a person?” And it’s so striking.

And a friend of mine coined this phrase – I’m not going to appropriate it, but it’s very useful. So, she said in some countries you have “Almost a Manichean opposition between good and evil.” And the political party that you are a part of is obviously the good ones, and then the other ones are the evil ones. So, it’s not surprising that, in such a context, you get this enormous polarization, whereas, if you have more of a parliamentarian system with lots of horse-trading [where] there are always going to be coalitions, it just doesn’t have the potential to become quite that Manichean.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you’ve done some research about the question of identity also, right? Of being able to say, “I am a scientist” or “I am a person who thinks in this way” versus “I’m a religious person.” And it creates this. I think it’s a false dichotomy, but it does create a good versus evil side. And one side is clearly, “My side is the good side and that side is the evil side.” So, how does that play itself out? You know, at least one of the things that we think through at Sinai and Synapses is that the science and religion discussion is actually a proxy for larger and more complicated conversations.

Helen de Cruz: So, indeed, on the one hand, scientific ideas are just sort of factual ideas at one level. For example, I regularly see people ask things like, “Could you say whether the vaccines work against the Delta variant?” And that’s a factual question, right? Either they work or they don’t work. But some questions and scientific ideas also get sort of taken into identity. And the reason for that, as I argue in this article, “Believing to Belong” – which is a riff on so many other things along those lines – is that we want to align our beliefs with people around us. And there’s in fact really interesting research about that that’s going on already for decades – the conformism experiments, where you have these sort of experiments where you have a long line and short line, and then you have all your confederates saying, “Oh, but they’re the same line.” And they’re not actually people who are doing the experiment with you. They are just basically in cahoots with the experimenter.

But it’s interesting. What people think happens is, “Oh, people will then say, ‘oh, these lines are the same length,’ because they want to align their views with people around them.” But what happens in reality is really messy. So in some cases, people will say, “No, these lines are a different length. I don’t care what everybody else says.” But in other cases, people will say, “These lines are the same length,” just to be in line with other people.

And the person who invented this experiment was Solomon Asch. And he said that it was because people were saying that wine was disappearing because the Prophet Elijah was drinking from it on the Seder table. So, he was really interested in these sorts of dynamics. And he’s done a lot to sort of make us aware that we will sometimes align our beliefs – not always, but sometimes – to just be in line with that of other people. And that’s when a belief can become sort of captured in identity.

So, we still care about having true beliefs, but we also really deeply care about having beliefs that aren’t at odds with other people. And then there’s a further thing that some questions, some beliefs can become what Scott Atran calls “sacred values.” They get a kind of non-negotiable status. Like, “You cannot be a Republican, a Christian, whatever, and not believe this.” And it becomes this non-negotiable thing. And it’s really difficult, because in fact we don’t have – it would be a miracle if I were to say, “Oh, I’m going to align myself with this group and all my beliefs line up with them.” Like, that would be fantastic. But that’s very unlikely.

So, what am I going to do? I’m just going to try to convince myself that those beliefs that that group finds sacred – that those beliefs are the beliefs that I hold. Otherwise, you have this enormous cognitive dissonance, but you can lessen it by saying, yeah, “I’ve thought about it” – and you read, obviously, things that are friendly to that belief – “and I’ve now come to the conclusion climate change is not real,” for example, if you’re a Republican in the U.S. You will see this more and more.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I think what’s interesting, and what’s challenging, is the element of sacred values – like, there are sacred values that we want to hold. And as human beings – we need to be part of a community and a society. And yet, it’s also really complicated to understand how, exactly, does the mechanism of evolution work? How has climate change impacted our world today? And sometimes there’s enough doubt, or there are enough questions, where then it could get pulled apart a little bit. And when this becomes of a sacred value and a sacred identity, then we can sort of offload all those complicated questions and say, “This is the group that I am part of. This is what the group says, and now I don’t have to think about it so much,” which we view sometimes very negatively. But that’s also, in some ways, a very valuable adaptation, to not have to think about absolutely every little detail.

Helen de Cruz: We rely on testimony for so much – like, even the date of your birth, like you did not figure that out for yourself. People told you, and you believed it. And this is the case for so many things – like, about the fact that we’re going around the sun. There’s no way I have the skills – like, apparently people in the 16th century, clever folks like Leonardo da Vinci and the like could sort of look at the shadows cast and say, “Yeah, the earth is going around the sun,” but I can’t do that. And I would reckon maybe you can – I don’t know – if you have a background in mathematics and astronomy, [but] so there’s so much stuff that we offload.

And it’s kind of interesting to see this dynamic that we will trust things that are controversial, and we can end up in a group that holds a wide range of beliefs that are at odds with the perceived signs. And we just rely on testimony. And for some people, like Neil Levy – I have argued with him about this back and forth. So, he thinks it’s purely an epistemic matter, which means you’re just bad luck. You come into a society, or you’re part of a group – let’s say you’re born into a Republican household, and your parents are Evangelical Christians. Well, bad luck, you will believe all sorts of weird stuff about the world being 6,000 years old, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You just think that you get all the same, like, sort of evidence that other people get. Like, you don’t have direct evidence about the age of the earth, but you have indirect evidence about how reliable are the testifiers, and so on.

I think, unlike Neil, that there is next to that, also, this element of belonging. And that’s a motivating force, in addition to just this sort of, like, “Am I having the true beliefs?”

Geoff Mitelman: And there’s a lot of research of, for example, “How do we get people to accept vaccines” – people who are, let’s say, slightly more vaccine-hesitant? And having somebody who is a world-renowned expert, with all these wonderful credentials, coming into a rural church – that’s going to backfire. But, having the preacher say, “Here, look, let me roll up my arm and I got stuck,” that’s actually going to change people’s minds because, again, “this is somebody I trust.” There’s a community that’s here. And that sense of belonging – it can become part of someone’s identity.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, definitely. So, I think that’s why it’s important, even though we do strive for purity in thinking. And it’s interesting that we do this now more than before, and as you were just saying, it’s more like this has become the new religion. Like, people don’t care much about my religious beliefs as much as they do about my political beliefs, which is weird, because I can’t vote here, even. Like, it doesn’t matter what I believe, right?

But it seems to me that that’s indeed the case, that there is a sort of. But the worry, with this purism, is it’s going to play out in different groups, and then you won’t have what you say – the preacher who rolls up his [sleeve]. Like, if this becomes a sacred value thing about “don’t take vaccines,” then you can be assured that lots of people will not take it, just because they happen to be part of churches where they say “don’t take the vaccine.”

Geoff Mitelman: Right. I mean, I think that the sacred values are definitely important, but I think there should be very few of them. And I think that’s become very hard, because if someone violates your sacred values, that ends the conversation – “we’re done.” And whether that’s something scientific or political, as soon as somebody violates a deep, deeply held value, that ends the conversation – “we can’t move forward.”

Helen de Cruz: Yes, definitely. I have spoken to people, so I’ve been part of this project, BioLogos, which just has – as a very narrow aim –  to propagate correct evolutionary thinking to the sort of received view among Evangelical Christians. That’s what they do. They don’t talk about abortion – they talk about politics. They just talk about this one thing.

And there I was so surprised to talk to other people who were part of this – and I’ll just keep them anonymous. But it was this one guy – he was a biologist and he studied evolution, but he’s also a very devout Christian, Evangelical Christian. So, he went to this church, and at some point, it came up, and he said, “Yeah, you know, I study evolution.” And they said, “What?” And they just ran him out of the church – like, they honestly did. When people complain about “cancel culture” on the left, I think of examples like that. It really goes on in no matter what group you are. There is this sort of quest for “We don’t want an evolutionary biologist in our church.”

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you know, one of the things that I know you have done some research on and some writing on is, which is, “How do we understand complicated things?” I think that’s also really challenging – everything from the nuances of high-level mathematics, or evolutionary biology, or climate change, or “Is there a God? How does God act in this world?” These are really abstract, complex questions. And we, as finite human beings with X amount of brain space – we’ve got to simplify things. So, what happens when we take very complex, nuanced kinds of subjects in both science and religion? What happens when they become simplified?

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, this is a really cool question. So, this is something that cognitive scientists are still figuring out. How do people deal with information that they themselves have not researched – that they don’t have the time, energy, et cetera, for?

And it’s interesting how theology and science are very similar in that respect. Like, if you ask the average Jew, the average Christian, to explain to you the theology, you’re going to hear weird stuff, because it’s just really complicated. And it’s interesting to see how do people, “How do people receive that?”

And this actually is an idea that Thomas Aquinas already proposed. Like, he said, “Okay, ordinary people will not understand the Trinity. It’s super complicated. It seems, on the face of it, contradictory.” And Muslims and Jews say it is contradictory, right – you have three gods, or one God. But “No,” Christians say, “No, no, no, it’s just one God. There are three persons” – super complicated. But Aquinas said, “Look, an ordinary person can just accept this on faith” – like, “I don’t quite understand how it works, but experts [can].” And this is how it worked, for the longest of time. Like, if you think about how people used to talk about science, they would say, “Yeah, there are clever people in white lab coats” – the sort of caricature – “who have it all figured out.”

And we get on planes and we get our vaccines, and it’s all very – but nowadays, there is this sort of tendency also for everybody. It’s also just social media, although I’m skeptical to think there’s anything special happening with social media. But I do think [the fact] that we all of a sudden have to be knowledgeable about so many things, and that we have opinions about so many things – all of a sudden, we become more opinionated, but our knowledge hasn’t quite caught up. And you can’t just say, like, you know, in the Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas, like, “I don’t understand the Trinity. But no worries, theologians have figured it all out.” Like, if I said that now, I would just sound ignorant, even though it would be honest. So, there is this dynamic that creates that people will go beyond what they actually know and understand. It happens inevitably.

Geoff Mitelman: Actually, this is linking to a couple of our guests over the last couple of weeks. One was Connor Wood, who’s done a lot of work about interdisciplinary work. And then we talked with Annie Murphy Paul, who has a book about offloading all of our thinking, and how much we think outside of our brains.

And one thing that’s come up on the show a couple times is the flip that happened over the last maybe five or six hundred years, where originally theologians were the experts and scientists were laypeople. And so, in Europe and in America, there wasn’t a specialized scientific knowledge. People like Jefferson and Washington and they were just sort of playing around – Leeuwenhoek – “Oh, this is a cool little thing, let’s see what happens here.”

But people like Aquinas – or Judaism, RamBam and Rashi – they were the ones who had the great expert there, on theology. And then it sort of flipped, I think, as science became more specialized. And now, science is the one where there is an element of specialization and arcane knowledge, and any – for lack of a better word, –any idiot can say anything they want about God.

And it’s a very lay-level piece about [how] Richard Dawkins can talk about God and people say, “Oh, he’s a brilliant theologian.” I’m like, “No, he’s a brilliant biologist. He’s a terrible theologian in my mind.” And I think that’s an interesting shift, of where does the expertise lie, and how much of the knowledge has been democratized over the last several hundred years?

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, this is so cool. You’re right. Like, even just 200 years ago, you could be a gentleman – usually gentleman, sometimes gentlewoman – scholar. And you could just do it – like, Charles Darwin was basically somebody like that. He was just like somebody who did this in his spare time, and lots of people did. But now it’s interesting how it has flipped to the extent that I did a few experimental philosophical works on expertise and philosophy of religion and many people and even reviewers to papers that I’ve published on this. There’s no such thing as being an expert in the existence of God. You know, we’re all, we’re all equally knowledgeable about.

And in a sense, that’s true. Like, it would be quite something if you, you know, being a rabbi would have more expertise about the existence of God. That would be great. I could just ask the experts and see what they say. Right. So that doesn’t work like that. But I do think that, you know, religious experts have expertise on certain ways of thinking about, you know – the existence of God, the relationship of God to humanity, and other things that – if you look on Twitter, like lay theology Twitter, it’s kind of interesting how people keep on reinventing the wheel. Like, you can see these discussions and I really love engaging with people in this way and talk about those different things. But people just keep on coming up with objections and replies and all that all been already considered and that, you know, philosophers of religion, theologians have really good responses to.

So, I think that’s, at any rate, where you could say the expertise still lies. I mean, if you read something like The God Delusion, it’s kind of hair-raising to see. He does it, actually, in a way lay theologians do, but then without any intellectual humility.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. Really, I find Twitter to be, actually, quite interesting. There’s a rabbi, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who’s been called sort of the rabbi of Twitter. And she writes these great interesting questions and threads, and tries to unpack theology in a way that people can understand and appreciate. And when some person who claims that they know everything, they bring up an objection that she’s thought of – because people have been thinking about this for 2,000 years. This is not new – objections that people have had about religion.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So, I think it’s actually pretty cool if people do lay theology and lay exploration of science. There are better and worse ways to do it.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think there are also people who also claim to know a lot about science, and are not particularly knowledgeable. Like, there was one that I saw – and again, I should make sure this is sourced before this is all accurate – but somebody was talking to somebody who claimed that they were anti-vaccine. This was a screenshot that listed a whole bunch of chemicals. And they said, “Which of these do you oppose? Which do these make you uncomfortable?” The person said, “All of them.” And he said, “Really? Because what I just described to you is the chemical composition of an apple.” So, they see all the fancy terms, and they say, “Oh, I’m against it. How dare we get these different scientific pieces in there.” And they don’t really know what the science is saying, and they don’t understand the nuances, because that’s also something where there’s a level of expertise, there’s knowledge, and they can think about what are the potential objections. It’s a slow progression of knowledge, but there’s value in expertise.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, I think, related to that – I do a lot of science communication or philosophy communication. People are genuinely curious – in spite of the whole Manichean stuff and all the partisanship, people genuinely have a desire to know. Like, I asked a while ago, to my developmental psychology people, like, “Do we have empirical evidence? It strikes me as just self-evidence.” So, St. Augustine also said, “The fact that we desire truth” – this is not a literal quote – “is just as obvious as us desiring happiness.” It’s just as foundational to us. And so, I approach interlocutors with the idea that we do have a desire to know. We are curious. I mean, the world is a wondrous place, and I think that we have that awe. Even if you are a young-Earth creationist who is vehemently opposed to evolution, and, you know, even then, you will have that curiosity. I think that’s just something that unites us.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. I mean, I’m remembering when the Muon G–2 experiment was released in the New York Times. We actually spoke with one of the people from Fermilab. That was shared all over social media, and people, including me, were basically, like, “I have no idea what this is, but it sounds so cool,” right? There’s an element of awe and majesty that’s there.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, definitely. So, I think that any sort of these conversations – but science, religion, I think that’s the core, or it should be the core. The core should be this sort of wonder – these epistemic emotions, these emotions that we feel about, like, “I want to know more about this. This is amazing. This is surprising. This is terrifying. This is intriguing.” You know, that sort of thing.

Geoff Mitelman: Do you ever find that there are places where people say, “You know what? I don’t want to ask any more questions. If I push this too hard or if I pull this thread, the whole sweater is going to come apart, so I’m going to just leave this hanging right now”? Have you experienced that? Or are there people where the curiosity is there, but there’s a limit to it?

Helen de Cruz: Off the bat, I cannot remember any conversation that went in that direction. But I have heard people say this – like, particularly, this is a dominant narrative in people that I know who used to be very religious, and then just abandoned religion, or they modified it to something less strict – so, usually Christians. They’d say something like, you know, “I was shocked. I was like, ‘Could my ideas be wrong?’” Because all of a sudden, your whole web of belief starts to unravel – and you need to do this, quietly, calmly, gently. You know, you have to give yourself some grace. But definitely, I’ve heard this so much in personal testimonies of people who grappled with thinking, like, “I have so many false beliefs and I need to recalibrate.”

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and that comes back to this question of belonging. And one thing that – at least from my understanding of predominantly fundamentalist churches, for example, who don’t accept evolution – there is actually no tremendous benefit to them on a day-to-day basis for them to accept evolution, but there is a tremendous cost, right? They will lose their social network; they will lose their community. And so, because understanding, for example, evolution is so complex and nuanced and doesn’t really impact people’s lives on a day-to-day basis, that element of belonging – “I don’t really need to go down that road because this is – when somebody’s sick, this is when somebody brings me the soup that I need.”

Helen de Cruz: That’s right. I think that many people will just not want to take a stand on certain things, as well, or just say, “I don’t want to even investigate this any further.” So within the philosophy community, at the height of lockdowns and so on – which, hopefully we can safely leave behind – there was such a whole discussion about like whether we should do that, whether we should do it, even, even assuming that they help somewhat, you know, because the cost is so great, the cost is so great for, for people who can’t afford to social distance, the cost of the economy, etc, etc.

And honestly at that point I think – “Look, I don’t have to have an opinion about everything. I can see both sides to this.” And if you take a stand, you’re going to make a lot of enemies either way. So, I don’t know – sometimes, yeah, in the case of evolution, you might even just say, “I’m not even going to look into it, because what if I feel convinced? What if I think, ‘yeah,’ then all of a sudden my whole social network falls to pieces?” I mean, in a sense, I think a lot of people who do science communication underestimate the huge cost of accepting some scientific beliefs – the huge social cost.

Geoff Mitelman: I’d love for you to talk a little more about the role of science communication – and I think, also, by the way, religious communication, because one of the things that we were trained in [in] our rabbinical school is that “The only reason you have any right to say anything is because you’ve been trained, and you’ve studied texts, and you have a level of expertise. The only reason anyone’s going to listen to you is because of the relationships that you build.” Right? I can say whatever I want, but if nobody’s listening, that’s not communication. And I think that’s also a challenge for science and scientists as well. They can have all of the degrees and expertise as a whole, but if they’re screaming into the wind and getting a resistant audience, that means that the communication needs to shift – how they’re interacting with their audience.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, it’s very difficult. I think, on the one hand, you have a few prominent people with a big platform – and I’m not just thinking about Dawkins and the like. There are also more junior people on Instagram and TikTok and Twitch and whatever. They have these big followings and they have a lot of scope.

But most, I’d say the vast majority, of scientists just don’t have that. My sister is a climate scientist, and she works on models to, to look at ocean warming. – and, you know, she does know almost no [media appearances], like, a few radio interviews here and there. And one of the reasons is just that the platform is not there.

So, this is also, I think in part, on the newspapers, the radio programs. They’ll just wonder, “Hmm, who can we ask?” And they just always take the same names. Like, you could just take an ordinary bread-and-butter scientist, working at some department, having findings – you might have really interesting things.

So, we need a better way to link up a broad range of scientists, because it’s good that we don’t just have a few “super-influencers.” I think it’s really good if we have a diversity of voices. Scientists don’t always agree with each other on everything – and I think that’s also an important thing to get across. Like now, there’s something like “the science says this” – super unhelpful. Also now with the coronavirus, it’s always like “the science says this,” whereas I know, for a matter of fact, scientists – and you know too, if you follow a few of these – these are virologists and epidemiologists. And obviously they do agree on many things, but they disagree about many other things.

And I think that science communication can improve if we have just more voices, if we don’t always have like the same influencers – I hate that word. If we have a variety of different people, and we get a variety of different perspectives, then people also get a sense of, “Science is fallible, science is revisable” – [they] get more of an idea of the nature of science, which is important to really understand it.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s valuable. I think the challenge, though, is for someone like me, who is not a scientist and not an epidemiologist, for the last however many months, even now, as we’re taping this in June of 2021 – on some level, I don’t want to have to make the decisions myself. I don’t know what’s safe and what’s not safe. And I think it would be helpful to be able to say, “Here are the risks and here are the trade-offs.” But still, I can’t 60% go outside, right? I can’t 70% go to a restaurant. I think that was a real challenge over the last year-plus, everyone having to make every single individual decision. And I think what’s been challenging is that the science has changed in a lot of ways

Helen de Cruz: Yeah – from no masks, to masks, to maybe double masks, or better-grade masks. I mean, so many different things.

But in fact, here I’m frustrated, because already, since the 1950s, you’ve had Carl Hempel and other philosophers of science who’ve talked about inductive risk in science. Like, if you have an experiment and the experiment shows X, then you have a risk that you’ve got it wrong. Your experiment could have gone wrong; your measurements could have gone wrong. The way you set up the experiment could have gone wrong. The things that you did in the experiment – the people, for instance, that you gave the intervention to – are not representative… so many things. But then you communicate that. And so already people like Hempel, and then later also people like Heather Douglas, have argued there is a certain risk in that.

So, there’s the inductive risk. As a scientist, and only a scientist who does the experiment properly can gauge the risk involved, and needs to be very careful in their communication of these things. Like, suppose, indeed, that you say, “Masks don’t work. Here’s a study.” So it could be that you’re right and they don’t work, or they negligibly work. Nevertheless – yeah, you have to think about, like, “Wat if they did work? What if they don’t work?” So, there are risks involved in these communications. And I feel like, with the whole coronavirus pandemic, it’s almost like philosophers of science haven’t been thinking about this for many decades, because it just didn’t come up. And instead, people were just left to their own devices, make their own highly individualized decisions about “What level of risk are you comfortable with?”

And it’s kind of weird. Like, I’ve seen these articles in the New York Times – like, particularly before there were vaccines, like, “here’s how dangerous this and this and this” in levels of…

and then you can see “How risk-averse am I?”

But as a society, you know, it’s a disease that spreads through contact, through aerosols, and, you know, other ways. It’s not going to work like that. So, there is a downside to doing it this way, but we’ve decided as a society to do it that way.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and it’s interesting, in Ohio (and there’s been some pushback on this, and I’m curious) – I don’t know what the numbers are, but people were making fun of Ohio of having people – they could win a certain amount of the lottery if they get vaccinated. And people are like, “Oh my God, why shouldn’t they just go get vaccinated?” But it’s actually a brilliant behavioral psychology tack, because people don’t understand the numbers here, but they think, “Ooh, I might be able to win something. And, okay, I’ll go be able to…” [and it will] incentivize people. There are some who are going to say, “I want to get vaccinated because that’s the best thing.” But then there are people who are hesitant. How do you tap into what human nature is actually looking for here?

Helen de Cruz: People also are just so messy – our motivations are messy. Like you say, “Oh, but it’s actually irrational if I spell that out to say, ‘Actually I’m afraid because maybe something might go wrong with these vaccines, but also I get coffee and a donut, so let’s do it.’” And yet, this is what happened in some people’s minds. This is concretely what happens. It’s kind of mind-boggling, I think.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I think that’s some of your work, also. How do we translate these abstract concepts into something that’s more concrete – and being able to say, like, “This is something that I can hold onto?” And that can be really, really helpful, to be able to think about these really high-level conversations and concepts that we’re just not really equipped to be able to grapple with as human beings.

Helen de Cruz: Science communication is so interesting. I have just recently read a few really early works. So, there’s a work by what’s his name, de Fontenelle, Bernard de Fontenelle, and it’s called On The Plurality of Worlds. And this was written in 1686, so heliocentrism was fairly new. And actually, once you accept heliocentrism – once you start saying, “Oh, yeah, the sun is at the center,” then you say, “The sun at the center – what with all these other stars?” Once you get heliocentrism, you very quickly get that our stars are just one among many, many stars. And so, this book was written as a series of dialogues between a philosopher and a marquise – so, a female, a noblewoman. And he explains to her these things, and she asks really intelligent questions.

And then they talk about, you know, like, “Oh, imagine that we’re just one planet, of the millions of inhabitable planets.” And she says, “I’m just, you know, frightened by all this,” sort of the infinite spaces, you know, the sort of Pascal-like thing. And he says, “No, it makes me feel free. I didn’t feel frightened at all.”

That book was so successful. This went through hundreds of printings. This was published in many languages. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book; I hadn’t heard of the book until a few months ago. But it was a hugely influential piece of science communication.

And there are other such books, like Mary Somerville‘s Connection of the Physical Sciences. So, she was a female science communicator in the 19th century, and she wrote this big overview about, like, “This is all the sciences, and this is how they hang together.” And in fact, Whewell coined the term “scientist” based on her work. Like, “What’s she describing?” Because before scientists were called natural philosophers. But then Whewell said, “Look, the people that she’s describing, how shall we call them? Call them scientists.” So, that’s actually when science as a concept also [began].

So, science has always been linked to – that’s at least my thinking – to the popularization of it. Like, science cannot just be separate from – it’s never been this thing about, “Oh, you’ve got guys – mostly guys – in white coats doing stuff, and the rest of us just sort of deal with it.” No, it’s always been in dialogue with people. It’s always been a form of outreach and communication. This has always been the case. So even though it’s abstract and difficult, I think scientists should continue to reach out. They will sometimes mess up, but it’s just an integral part of science, I think.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, it’s actually happening right now. The AAAS is having their 25th anniversary of their Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion. And that’s so much of what they aim to be able to do, which is not “let’s do the research here,” but also, “How do we communicate that and impact policy?” And the reason that the AAAS started the DoSER program and the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion, because these are live questions that we grapple with. And trying to excise the religion or excise the ethical – that’s actually kind of useless. These are questions where, if we’re going to impact individuals in society, we need to recognize: How much does religion influence our decision making, how does it influence our society? What are the ethical questions? And we can’t just have scientists and we can’t just have, by the way, religious leaders making ethical questions. We need to have multiple different voices from multiple different perspectives as well to be able to grapple with these questions.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, I think AAAS is doing such a brilliant job in doing that. Like, in the 1950s, you briefly had what was called the freedom of science movement. And you can imagine – this was after the Hiroshima bombings, and all the sorts of things… I think that World War II really pushed down to people were like how really horrible science can be if applied – like, the the fruits of science Like, you could bomb, like millions of people, and innocent civilians, to boot. But the freedom of science people said, “Look, it’s not our responsibility. We can just purely pursue the truth, and then it’s up to other people.”

But it just doesn’t work that well because, for one thing, scientists – of course, they’re not clairvoyant, but they are best positioned to know what potential things can happen to the things that they make out. And they’re in the best position to also communicate and advocate for certain ways. So, it’s really important for scientists to have a moral compass, to be engaged with the rest of society. You know, we have democracy in so many things. And, you know, as a pragmatist would say, democracy is not just us going every four years to the voting booth. It is an ongoing process – a process whereby people are empowered, people get an idea about what’s all going on, and make decisions based on that, and communicate about that. So, I think that how scientists do things, and how they communicate, is actually part of the democratic process.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, one thing that I’d love to explore for a couple minutes is something that you mentioned when we were emailing back and forth, which is the role of awe and majesty. And I’m very influenced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. And one thing that I’ve really come to believe is that questions of – and you brought it up, too – of awe and curiosity are ways to actually have constructive conversations about religion and science – because you’re not going to evolution and creation, you’re not going to climate change, you’re not going to the hot-button issues. But, both scientists and religious people can talk about, “Here’s a moment of awe that I felt.” So where do you see the role of awe in the conversation about religion and science?

Helen de Cruz: So, my thinking is that awe and wonder also – so, Heschel has this idea about – you have awe, you have wonder, which is like the first feelings of awe. And then you have awe, which is like, almost like a fear of God. And he makes this comparison about how it’s almost the same etymological route. “… and then you have wisdom.” Like, it’s very interesting how it goes straight to wisdom, like, “No, and then you have science and religion”– that’s what I would spontaneously think. So, my thinking is you have those feelings, those epistemic emotions, and they then are the kind of burning fire under all our [endeavors].

And here I want to make a link to Aristotle. So, in the beginning of the Metaphysics, it’s such a beautiful beginning and it’s such a really sprawling work, the Metaphysics. But he says that “All human beings” – and uses a genderless term for “human beings” – “They have this desire to know and they wonder at things.” And he says they wonder at the stars, and they wonder at everyday phenomena. Like, you open your oven and you say, “My bread didn’t rise. Why didn’t it? (Certainly, a thought I’ve had the past few months.)

So, you have ordinary phenomena, but then you go towards more and more like weird phenomena like the stars. Like, what are these things? He says that everybody is also a myth lover, because religion also tries to deal with these things. Like it’s not, it’s not the way that New Atheists sketch, like – “Oh, religious people tell themselves comforting stories about ‘I’m going to heaven, I’m at the right side of history.’” I think that in fact, religion has a lot of uncomfortable things in it, but it’s driven by this sense of awe. I think, definitely, Heschel is right about that.

And I think similarly, science is driven by that. So, I think, if you take away those emotions, that purely the instrumental part of science is not going to get there.

And I can think, for instance, about one of the inventors of the MRNA vaccines, Katalin Karikó. And she was so driven by, like, “How does it work? How can you synthesize mRNA?” People told her, “Stop your career, you’re committing career suicide.” And in fact, she got demoted, and

then she had to go to the private sector because nobody wanted to give her any money, because everybody thought, “There’s no money in that. It can’t be done.” But she just kept on thinking, “There’s something about this,” like, mRNA. And there was this kind of interest in the thing itself, loose even from empirical applicability – although, of course, when she went to the pharmaceutical industry, she said, “Look, here are some potential things.” And Pfizer said, “Great. Welcome.”

So, there is this kind of interplay. But I think that is a really useful starting point. I think in the best science, communicators – Carl Sagan, Mary Somerville, too – the way they evoke the sense of awe… Like, you can read Carl Sagan, he has this thing about “You have an apple, but in order to properly describe the apple, you need to describe the universe.” And, you know, so, like, you have this kind of sense of – “Wow, this is just the…” And this is the essence of awe, in a sense.”  And I think that’s also how Heschel sees it. It’s something that’s ordinary and everyday, but then you look at it again, and you see it’s really amazing. It’s not all like – you have just become accustomed [and] you’ve just stopped seeing the thing in all its beauty and complexity.

Geoff Mitelman: My favorite part of the morning liturgy in Judaism is a section called the Nissim B’chol Yom, which translates as “the miracles of the everyday.” And it’s designed to be able to sort of reawaken that sense of awe and wonder, which is, every morning, “Oh, my goodness, I woke up. Holy cow, my arm works. Look at this. I’ve got clothes. Oh, my God, I can walk,” right? And so, there’s a blessing that it’s not just the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea, or Elijah at the Seder table – or, for Christians, you know, there’s obviously the miracle of the resurrection. Every religion has these wonderful miracles. But in Judaism, it’s the miracles of the everyday. And it’s such a wonderful contradiction that we sometimes forget.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah, definitely. I think that that’s just a great starting point. I think that, you know, many people – and I think particularly now, with this very difficult year that we’ve had, that we kind of crave (actually, it’s already there), all these special, unique, beautiful, wondrous things already there. They’re actually closer than we thought, and I think we now realized it. Like, I don’t want to go the route of, “Oh, the pandemic has really shown me how great everyday life – my back garden is wonderful…” I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that we know that a lot of the things that our society says are important are actually not that important. And it’s also something Heschel says the whole time. Like, you know, it’s easy to fall into things. And what he thinks is – and you will know, but I read this – the problem is not so much science versus religion, but instrumentality versus loving something or admiring something for its own sake. If you’re starting to instrumentalize things, then very quickly, your sense of awe goes away, because everything now becomes a goal to an end. And the end is what? Like, the end is maybe to become super-wealthy or super-attractive or… it’s a kind of fakeness that I feel that the pandemic has revealed in us, how fake it is. So, there is this thirst for the authentic and the wondrous,

Geoff Mitelman: And being able to strip away what’s not needed, to be able to hold on to what’s core.

Helen de Cruz: Yes, yes, definitely. And I think it’s just hard. So, Heschel sees this as a kind of bad effect of modernity. So, you have modern life, and in modern life, people instrumentalize things, and they want to measure things, and they want to put things in boxes. And maybe he’s right that that’s a modern thing. But I think next to that, that’s just like – if you have your everyday life where you want to make money and you want to make sure that your kids can go to college, and it’s easy to fall into these traps of, you know, instrumentalizing things. I think it’s just like a pull in human nature – you know, “Let’s be pragmatic and get things done.” But next to that, this curiosity is also important, not only because it serves a purpose, but because I think it’s part of the good life. Like, if you genuinely weren’t curious about things, if you genuinely didn’t enjoy finding something out for its own sake, then I think you’re just missing something fundamental about what it’s like to be human.

Geoff Mitelman: Right. And I mean, that’s the core of philosophy and science and religion, of what can we find that, in Hebrew, would be “for L’ishma,” you know, “for its own sake.” Sometimes there are wonderful things that come out of the studying for its own sake. But being able to say “this is something has value in and of itself” – and it’s not necessarily that it’s giving me happiness, but it’s giving me meaning, it’s giving me connection, it’s elevating myself – it’s something transcendent.

Helen de Cruz: Yeah. I think that elevating yourself is very important. So, I find a lot of the discussions – I mean, very sadly, lots of philosophy departments are closing. I know so many people, particularly this year, who have tenured positions in small colleges who are being fired because their departments are closing, because the idea is that we don’t need philosophy, that we just as fine with STEM – you know, like we can do stuff with STEM, but we can’t do stuff with philosophy.

But I think, ultimately that sort of negates part of – if you’re going to be saying, “Yes, the only thing that really matters is material well-being, and STEM is the only thing” (and that’s already a big controversial thing, because I think the best science has humanities and philosophy in it, and it has helped, has added), but even if you go with that, I think it just doesn’t work. Like, this is not all there is to being human. And it’s so weird that you have, particularly conservative, legislators who sort of have this weird neo-Darwinian view that “all that matters is that we reproduce and that we become” – you know, that we survive. Like, there’s so much else. We are not like other animals. We, we have these sorts of questions that we ask ourselves. We want to do things more than just sort of trying to get by in an animal existence.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and that’s why the work that you’re doing is so interesting and so important, of trying to figure out, “How do we elevate who we are, and engage in some of the big questions of life?” So, thank you so much for taking the time here this afternoon to explore the fascinating work that you’re doing, and exploring some of these huge questions that we didn’t solve, but we’re never going to be able to solve them.

Helen de Cruz: It’s okay. People have been looking at this for thousands of years, and I think it’s okay that we can just look at them again with our eyes of today.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s what makes philosophy so wonderful. Now, people can follow you on Twitter @HelenReflects, correct? That’s the handle.

Helen de Cruz: That’s right. That’s the handle. You’re welcome to follow me…

Geoff Mitelman: And engage. She has great conversations and questions, so encourage you to be able to follow Professor de Cruz on Twitter @HelenReflects. You can follow me – I’m @RabbiMitelman – or at @SinaiSynapses. We’re Sinai and Synapses and we have this conversation every week at 2pm Eastern time. Next week we’re going to be talking with Megan Powell Cuzzolino, who is one of our Sinai and Synapses Fellows, who does work on questions of awe and wonder, particularly with young children, and how do they think about philosophy as young children?

So, this will be a wonderful link to this conversation here. So, thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Professor de Cruz, and we will see you again very soon.

Helen de Cruz: Thank you, Geoff. And thank you, listeners.