30. Dr. Ralph Lewis — Finding Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2018

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this wide-ranging conversation Michael Shermer talks with the author of the new book Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even if the Universe Doesn’t, Dr. Ralph Lewis. Dr. Lewis is a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto who works with cancer patients and others facing death. They often face existential crises, so Dr. Lewis—himself an atheist—has developed techniques to help people cope that do not depend on any one religion. His new book is about how human purpose and caring, like consciousness and absolutely everything else in existence, could plausibly have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous universe. He and Shermer discuss how a random world is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. Drawing on years of wide-ranging, intensive clinical experience as a psychiatrist, and his own family experience with cancer, Dr. Lewis helps listeners understand how people cope with random adversity without relying on supernatural belief. In fact, as he explains, although coming to terms with randomness is often frightening, it can be liberating and empowering too.

This remote Science Salon was recorded on July 2, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science A Lot, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
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0:30.0	or a monthly pledge at patreon.com slash skeptic.
0:35.0	Your ongoing patronage is vital to our organization's mission
0:39.1	to promote science and critical thinking.
0:41.7	Your new book, showing it here,
0:44.0	finding purpose in a godless universe,
0:47.0	why we care, even if the universe doesn't.
0:49.0	What?
0:50.0	Ralph,
0:52.6	congratulations on the new book.
0:53.9	When we post this, it'll be the week that the book comes out on July 17th from Prometheus books.
0:59.6	It's a terrific work and of course I wrote the forward so I read this I don't know maybe about a year ago and so in
1:05.8	re-reading it the last couple of days it I really reminded of what an important book it is
1:11.8	it's a it's really dealing with the most important subjects
1:16.1	that there are.
1:18.2	But before we get into that, let me just give you
1:21.4	a proper introduction, and then I'd like you to kind of walk us through your background and how you arrive at this place on your life pathway at this point in time.
1:30.0	So you are a medical doctor, you're a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto,
	...

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