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Interviews on the meaning of life
Wow, I’ve just found a whole series of videos of scientists and other people involved in the discussion on evolution. Best of all, the late John Maynard Smith. The Maynard Smith interview covers his loss of faith, game theory and ethology, frequency dependent selection (and gender) and other things.
Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, talks about the relation between science and religion / spirituality, her father, ‘religious naturalism’, ‘ecospirituality’, the Gaia hypothesis, morality and transcendence, meaning-seeking and all sorts of other stuff. Having only read Richard Dawkins vituperative comments on Goodenough’s book, she seemed very much down to earth and rather sensible - despite her suggestion that atheists have a belief (atheism isn’t strong atheism, though the latter is a form of the former). In a similar vein, Robert Pollack is a biology professor and religious anti-realist who has become religious in spite of the evidence. His book is The Faith of Biology & The Biology of Faith (Amazon UK).
Bearded philosopher Daniel Dennett talks about The Brights, the meaning of atheism and God, the psychological nature of religion and much more. It’s a slightly more rowdy interview than some of the others, and the interviewer is often talking at cross purposes with Dennett. There’s also been some controversy in the interpretation of some of Dennett’s remarks in the video, which seems to be a sideshow. Even the best of us can flounder around on video tape.
On the theological side, there’s interviews with Arthur Peacocke, John Haught, Keith Ward and John Polkinghorne. Also, there are interviews of Stephen Pinker, Brian Swimme, Francis Fukuyama, Huston Smith, Joseph Goldstein, Andrew Newberg, Owen Gingerich, Freeman Dyson, Sharon Salzberg and Omid Safi. Full details and other videos are at Meaningoflife.tv. What an interesting collection of interviews. This sort of depth rarely gets any airtime in the MSM.
