Who Needs Miracles? On Nature and the Miraculous (with Alan Lightman)

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🗓️ 11 November 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

How can we cultivate a sense of awe in our lives? Easy, says physicist and author Alan Lightman: Pay more attention. When we take the time to examine the world around us, from shooting stars to soap bubbles to everything in between, we can feel a sense of wonder and appreciation akin to spirituality. And the best part is, you can take your scientific worldview with you on your awe-inducing journey. Join Lightman and EconTalk's Russ Roberts as they discover that discovering the science behind things can be a truly miraculous experience.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is September 24th, 2020, and my guest is physicist and author Alan Lightman.
0:44.4	This is Alan's third appearance on Econ Talk.
0:46.8	He was last here in April 2020 talking about stardust, meaning religion and science.
0:52.9	His latest book and the topic for today's discussion is,
0:56.0	The Miraculous from the Material, Understanding the Wonders of Nature. Alan, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:04.0	Nice to be back on your show, Russ.
1:06.0	Now, you write that you don't believe in miracles, but you do believe in the miraculous, and that's in your title, The Miraculous from the Material.
1:15.2	It's a lovely title.
1:17.1	Explain that difference for you between miracles and miraculous.
1:21.9	Well, for me, a miracle is something that contradicts the laws of nature as we understand them.
1:31.3	Generally, people who talk about miracles refer to the intervention of God in the physical world or some supernatural being, the intervention into the
1:46.7	physical world. And of course, the word supernatural by itself already means beyond the natural
1:53.7	or beyond anything that's that human beings can explain. So that's what I mean by a miracle, and I don't believe in miracles.
2:03.5	But by the miraculous, I mean the experience of awe, the beauty that we see in the world,
2:16.3	the tremendous order, and in particular, visually extraordinary phenomena,
2:29.5	which is what I talk about in the book. And I feel that I, and most of us are, are open to these, to experiencing these extraordinary phenomena.
2:45.4	And that's what I mean by the miraculous.
	...

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