Hello everyone, welcome to the Binescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Several years ago, when I wrote my book The Big Picture,

its idea was to describe and defend, articulate,

naturalism, right? The idea that the world is a fundamentally natural thing,

no supernatural aspects or anything like that.

And it's a weird task because you have to both say, well, here's what we have learned,

here's what we know, but also when it comes to the things we don't yet know,

our best future understandings are going to continue to be naturalistic.

And so that's the case that I tried to make.

But as you might expect within naturalism,

people disagree with each other about very important things.

So the particular line I took was that the universe, the physical world,

it just is. It exists, it obeys its rules,

it has its stuff that obeys the laws of physics and so forth,

but it doesn't judge you, it doesn't care, it doesn't evaluate you.

This is a moral, anti-realist position.

There is no set of rules out there given to us by the universe

that helps us differentiate between right and wrong, good and bad, things like that.

The universe in some sense doesn't care about us human beings,

but that's not a reason to be nihilistic or depressed or anything like that

because we human beings care about we human beings.

So it's not that there is no such thing as right and wrong or meaning to life

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