Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.

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I want to talk today about the relationship between scientific and religious world views,

but especially through the lens of emotions and metaphor.

And to do that, I'm going to draw on some of my favorite thinkers,

the neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio DiMasio,

the philosopher and linguist George Lackov,

Stanford psychology professor and a very widely read author Robert Sapolsky,

and my personal favorite neurologist, Professor Bill Lienur Ramachandran.

For episode 75, I interviewed philosopher of science Lee McIntyre

about his book How to Talk to a Science Denier.

In hindsight, I realized that this book and our conversation really centered on the relationship between two types of rationality,

epistemic rationality or using science and reason to understand the world on the one hand,

and instrumental rationality on the other,

which we could describe as the method of figuring out how to achieve goals in the world,

in a rational way, in a way that will be more likely to be successful than if we did it otherwise.

And in this case, instrumental rationality with regards to his book How to Talk to a Science Denier

refers to how to communicate, for example, the science of vaccines or climate change to others.

And this second topic instrumental rationality is, as it turns out,

...