Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Some of you might know that back in 2012, I put together a small symposium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, called Moving Naturalism Forward. The idea being that naturalism is as opposed to theism, naturalism being the view that the universe is just stuff, obeying the laws of physics,

that there's no extra supernatural deities or demigods or evil spirits or good spirits, pushing us around and affecting our lives or giving us guidance or anything like that.

The reason why I wanted to have a symposium on moving naturalism forward is that especially

at that time, 2012, there was still a lot of public discussion about atheism versus religion.

And the public discussion was, it took different forms from different directions, but a lot of it was, you know, the

atheistic side, the naturalistic side, just explaining how bad religion was in various ways.

And I was on that side, but I always felt that that was the easy part of the whole discussion

to have. We needed to not only discuss why the world is naturalistic

at heart, but all of the problems with naturalism, all the not reasons to disbelieve it,

but the unanswered questions that we really needed to address. Indeed, I now teach a

philosophy course at Hopkins on philosophical naturalism, which every week we discuss a different question, puzzle issue that naturalism has to think about.

So we got a lot of great people together there.

You can look it up online if you want the full roster of participants.

It was a high-powered group, including a number of former Mindscape guests like Alex Rosenberg,

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, who else? Simon De Deo was there, David Pupple, a bunch of people

whose names you would recognize, Jan 11. And one of the best, most important, I thought, participants,

is today's guest. Rebecca Newberger

Goldstein was there. And the reason why Rebecca was so great in that particular environment,

where we're just having casual conversations about deep and important ideas, is that she,

as we'll mention in this podcast, sort of started out her college career wanting to be a physicist,

later realized that being a philosopher was an even better fit for what she cared about,

and then even later than that, realized that she actually wanted to be a novelist,

...