AS216: The End, with Phil Torres, part 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and this is episode 216. Well, this is, I'm releasing this right with 215 for my patrons, so I don't have an update on those iTunes review on my quest to 500, but I'll just guess that we're at like, by the time Thursday happens, we're, we are at a million. We just had a billion. No. We're probably still short, so please go to iTunes, write a review, and I can do that that bonus episode for everybody as a little goal and reward there. So thanks so much. And nothing more to say because we've got part two with Phil Torres.

Lots of interesting stuff in this one. So I'm so excited to present it to you right now. You mentioned that with these so-called slow motion, what was the slow motion risks or slow motion disasters? I like that term. You mentioned the fact that I'm sure everybody's listening is aware of. A lot of Republicans are just in denial of those. I wonder, what do you think would happen? Let's say we've got our Armageddon situation where somehow we snap a picture of a large looking rock that is coming our way. We're sure scientists are positive this asteroid is headed for Earth. It's catastrophic. It's big enough. It's going to cause serious, serious problems, if not annihilation.

0:01:31 Phil: Yeah yeah

0:02:05 Thomas: I wonder then, you know, would there be, how many religious people would say, yep, all right, let's, no need to do anything like that. You know, I wonder if their money was really where their mouth is in this, you know, would they really, would THEY welcome that? Would they, I'm just curious, thinking, you got me thinking about all these possibilities, you now.

0:02:25 Phil: I think that's a great question I don't feel like I have any special insight about I could sort of imagine, on the one hand, a certain group embracing it.

0:02:37 Phil: I could also imagine another group saying, this isn't supposed to happen. This isn't part of the narrative on our interpretation, so therefore we need to take action.

0:02:31 Thomas: Right, right, right. This is the devil's asteroid. This is not a godly asteroid. Yeah.

0:02:49 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, along these lines, it's perhaps worth pointing out that in these dire moments where people feel, I mean, some scholars of apocalypticism have written some very interesting articles about this, when people feel like they're existentially threatened as a group, as a tradition, whatever, that their dignity is being compromised in some way, or that they're going to lose their identity. Oftentimes this can, you know, there's a lot of violence that's latent in religion.

0:03:23 Thomas: Right.

0:03:24 Phil: And some have argued that that is, has a sort of pacifying effect. You know, You talk about these horrific things like Jesus being crucified and beaten and so on and so on, spiritual warfare happening invisibly all around us. But in these particular situations where society is stressed in some way, there's political instability, there are social upheaval and so forth, oftentimes that latent violence violence morphs into the activism that I was mentioning before, and suddenly you have people who are trying to catalyze, worsen violence in order to hasten, essentially, peace at the end of world history.

0:04:11 Phil: I could imagine, with respect to an asteroid or something, there could be cults that ... I think if you look at history, it's not crazy to say that there could cults would pop up. Up, even with respect to climate change and biodiversity loss. As I mentioned before, there's a sense in which that sort of plays into the eschatological narratives of dispensationalism and even Sunni Islam.

0:04:38 Phil: But even more so, I argue in a forthcoming article for Skeptic magazine that these are are going to create conditions, precisely the sort of conditions in which apocalyptic fanatical movements tend to arise. So not only is the future going to be populated by these doomsday machines from synthetic biology and new technology and even artificial intelligence, but I think there's pretty good argument to make that biodiversity loss, global ecological distress, climate change could could actually foment the rise of even more fervent, passionate, and apocalyptic groups.

0:05:27 Phil: And add to this the fact that according to a Pew poll, which was done just last year, the number of individuals who do not affiliate with any particular religion in the world is dwindling globally. Globally. In the West, we're becoming more secularized. Another study found that within the foreseeable future, religion will be extinct in nine Western European countries.

0:05:53 Phil: Actually, those weren't just Western European. I think it was also New Zealand or something. Of course, in America, the nuns group is expanding as well, but pretty much everywhere else in the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, where birth rates are much higher. You know, religion is... is rapidly growing, in fact, in Africa the belief in in dispensationalism, the rapture and so on is is extremely high, like up to, I don't know, 80 or something. So so you have, I...

0:06:08 Thomas: Yeah, well, that goes into what I was saying earlier, like maybe socioeconomic factors. You know, when your life is just crap, it might be easier to hang on to these stories or maybe more necessary to your own psychology to hang on to these stories.

0:06:21 Phil: Yeah. Precisely. Yeah. Study... Studies show that there's a guy named Phil Zuckerman, uh, who's a sociologist, systems really extraordinary work, uh, we're just basically correlating degrees of religiosity with social conditions, and he finds a pretty strong relationship between social dysfunction and high rates of religious belief. So ultimately, there is a question about causality. Is it the secularism that leads people to be happier and to be wealthier and so on, or is it the wealth, the material abundance and so that leads to people to the ... But I think we could say at the very least that there are certain extreme conditions that that probably very much do feed into, that push people into accepting extreme ideologies in the first place. So I think you touch on something very interesting, and in my view, the future may be in a world with even more religious people, cluttered with doomsday mechanisms, and, in which, there There is environmental problems, unlike, you know, unprecedented in human history. I think there's kind of all the ingredients for a really bad situation for humanity.

0:07:45 Thomas: Wow. So if you had to put your money on it, let's say for one of these man-made disasters, not one of the natural ones, what are you most worried about? Are you worried about ISIS getting nukes, Iran getting nükes, some random madman getting, or a World War III situation where everybody's nuking each other? What do you got your money in? On there.

0:07:53 Phil: Yeah.

0:08:08 Phil: Yeah. Boy, there's a lot to say about that. I mean, just I think yesterday the Russian prime minister said, repeated what many other people have said in the last couple of years, that we're entering a new Cold War. But it's just kind of shocking to hear somebody so high up in the political, the power hierarchy in Russia say it. So I mean, there's, you know, obviously there's North Korea tested a nuclear bomb just the other week or last month or whatever. And oh, well, I think they did detonate a nuclear, right?

0:08:22 Thomas: Hmm.

0:08:40 Thomas: Allegedly. Yeah, it was, there was a question of whether it was like a hydrogen bomb or a, yeah. But yeah, either way, not good.

0:08:46 Phil: Yes. Yeah, exactly. It probably wasn't a hydrogen bomb, as if they thought they could get away with that. This seems silly, but I think there are really two issues here. One is if you're talking about existential risks, the worst of the worst case scenarios that result in some kind of irreversible consequence for humanity, either our extinction or a permanent state of severe stagnation. So that's the essence of an existential risk. I think if you're talking about that, the list probably would put, in my view, and in the view of a lot of other people who study this, I would say superintelligence is the greatest long-term threat to

0:08:52 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Oh, like artificial intelligence or, oh yeah, I've, I'm, I read a little bit about that.

0:09:40 Phil: Us. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think behind that, you'd have nanotechnology and synthetic biology and biotechnology. Technology, and perhaps there's a risk from a technology that currently is hidden below the horizon of our technological imaginations right now. That's entirely possible. Nanotechnology didn't exist 60 years ago. Nobody had even thought about that until Richard Feynman pointed it out. So I think there's that list, and a lot of those, the biggest ultimate threats to our to our long-term survival, are speculative. But more immediately, if the Islamic State were to detonate a nuclear weapon in a U.S. city, which they have explicitly ... One of the last issues of their magazine ...

0:10:21 Thomas: Well, sure.

0:10:34 Phil: I do torture myself by reading most of it, yes. Yes.

0:10:34 Thomas: Are you a subscriber to that? But I like the idea that you get, there's like some nice kind ISIS delivery man that gives you your ISIS magazine every month. Here you go. Here we go, Phil.

0:10:47 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, it would be awkward having explained to my very, very nice neighbors why it is. So, yeah, but, you know, they talk about like smuggling, you Know, Pakistan has a has a history, in fact, of some malfeasance that led to nuclear plans being exchanged with North Korea. There was a guy, Khan is his last name, probably the most famous instance of nuclear secrets being clandestinely exchanged with other countries. So the Islamic State talks about going into Pakistan, getting a nuclear weapon, smuggling through the porous borders of South America and the U.S. I think it would be, Obama has noted, there was a 2009 talk in which he noted that, accurately in my opinion, that even a single nuclear weapon going off anywhere in the world would have, I mean, it would be a watershed moment in human history at this point.

It would inaugurate a new era and perhaps destabilize the global economy. I mean there would be psychological trauma. So I mean even Even just one would be horrific, but it would not be an existential event. So in terms of survivable catastrophes, I would put nuclear weapons way up at the top of the list, along with bioterrorism and things of that nature. In fact, a lot of people who actually study nuclear terrorism, it is genuinely shocking. There's a guy at Harvard named Graham Allison who says within, I think he wrote, in a book he wrote published in 2004, and he said he believes there's 50% chance that within the next 10 years, there would be a nuclear weapon detonated somewhere in the US.

0:10:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:42 Phil: He's more or less stuck to that, and frankly, he's claimed that we've gotten lucky. We flipped the, landed tails instead of heads, and so we don't live in that world right now. But it's ongoing and genuinely, a lot of people are pessimistic about, you know, nuclear terrorism and things of that nature.

0:12:48 Thomas: What about, uh, Amazon's got a lot of drones now. Where are they on your list? Are they some sort of drone rebellion? The great drone rebellion. No. Um, So I what do you think? I mean, this is maybe getting more into like foreign policy questions. I don't know if this is an area of expertise for you or anything. You mentioned you're an autodidact. So I'll just assume everything is your area of expertise.

0:13:12 Phil: Yeah.

0:13:28 Phil: Well, that's not polymath, just to be clear. So, it's just, yeah.

0:13:30 Thomas: Oh, you're right. What? You haven't read everything. Thing. But what do you think, I mean, what do you think about our strategy right now? I mean we're not doing much in terms of Syria and I have read that a lot of people think this sort of proxy wars in Syria and the Middle East are kind of setting the stage for a different kind of war that could be a World War III. I don't really, I don't know. I think that the world is so connected now that I don't know that I would would put much credence in World War III predictions, because it's just the world is not really like what it was. Who knows? I could be wrong. But in terms of ISIS or another group like that getting a nuclear weapon, that seems plausible to me. I mean, what are we doing?

0:14:20 Thomas: Are we doing enough on that? Do you have any thoughts on what we could be doing better?

0:14:27 Phil: I do. So, I think there's another guy named Robert Pape. He's a professor at University of Chicago.

0:14:35 Thomas: Oh, yeah, I know Robert Pink.

0:14:36 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah! So he has the largest database of suicide terrorism records in the world. And he's found that really the one thing that correlates most strongly with suicide terrorism is the presence of an occupying force. So, you know, the Tamil Tigers, it's a secular Marxist group. They have far more suicide bombers than Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. You know, a lot of these Islamic extremist kind of movements. And the way he puts it, it's a very helpful phrase that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon. So, you know, there's what the counter-terrorists call a whack-a-mole strategy, which is just going over and just killing. You know we killed – I mentioned Al-Zarqawi before. He was kind of the founder, the forefather of the Islamic State. And he was an apocalypticist, and his predecessor was al-Masri. We killed them. Now we have Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in power, and perhaps we may kill him, but so what?

0:14:54 Thomas: Right. But

0:15:49 Phil: Something else is going to pop up. So he says it's not a supply-limited phenomenon. It's a demand-driven phenomenon. And often the demand is a product of a powerful foreign occupying force that local people feel is there unjustly. So that

0:16:11 Thomas: I don't think we can, that's nothing we can fix in Iraq, though. I mean, because it's to the point where the whole thing is just a mess. There's no, there's not really, I mean ISIS is the occupying force of Iraq, but I mean if they don't look at it like that, then I don't know what we can do to change their minds on that, you know? We might be, maybe we're past the point of no return on them.

0:16:32 Phil: Is more or less my view, you. I think ultimately the lesson to be learned from this incredible quagmire over there is that the invasion was a horrific, horrible, horrible mistake. And at this point, we've really dug ourselves in so deep that in my view, I think there's actually quite a good argument for saying that this is the beginning of World War III. There was a great article in the New York Times a while back by, I think it was Richard Cohen, where he basically just draws parallels between World War I and this current conflict.

In fact, this situation may be even much harder because you have the NATO forces, Turkey, Russia that's allied with Syria and Iran and Hezbollah, the US that's supporting the Kurds, the Syrian rebels, you know, the Arab states that are also supporting some of the rebels. I mean, it's a tangle of not only states around the world, but non-state actors like Hezbollah, the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, its affiliates, Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, which the government The U.S. government official recently said it was a much greater long-term threat to the region than the Islamic State. You also have this proliferation of apocalyptic Shia militia that are directly connected in some way to Iran, like the Promised Day Brigade is one.

0:18:11 Phil: And there was even, its parent group was called the Mahdi Army, which is, the Mahdis is the Islamic messianic figure. So, I mean, it's a term that is explicitly eschatological in nature. And, in fact, what I would say about this conflict is not only is it this extraordinary tangle of international interests that are in conflict, conflict, and then all of these non-state actors on the ground as well. But there's an eschatological aspect of this that was absent in some past wars.

0:18:51 Phil: It probably wasn't really there at all in World War I, it wasn't as prominent in World War II, although Nazism did have an eschatological component with Hitler's 1,000 year Reich. The Cold War even was driven to some extent, Marxism also has a bit of an eschatological component to it, but not the same sense that the Islamic State believes this is the end.

0:19:20 Phil: God's will, there's no compromising. The Armageddon is about to happen in Northern Syria, followed by the Muslim forces defeating, beating Constantinople and then Jesus returning in Syria to kill the Antichrist in Israel, and, you know, the Shia militia that are apocalyptic as well. I mean, it's it's really, so I, so in my book actually I talk about the clash of eschatologies and how, you know, it's sort of a, it's a reference a bit to, uh, to the the notion of clash of, uh, of civilizations that's, uh, Samuel, forgetting his name, his name just eludes me at the moment, but he's quite a well known kind of conservative Harvard scholar.

0:20:08 Phil: Huntington, I think his name was. So anyways, this sort of clash, it's kind of unfortunately sort of invisible to a lot of people who superficially look at the situation, but you have many groups here that are genuinely motivated by by this belief in an imminent eschaton, including people right here in the US. I mentioned Bush talking to Jacques Chirac and the Palestinian group of individuals. Even going all the way back to the founding of Israel, the Balfour Declaration, which made the intentions of the UK to establish a Jewish state in Palestine explicit. I mean, even that was, you know, Balfour himself grew up in a dispensationalist situation. So I mean going all the way back, there's religious, prophetic beliefs that have shaped that whole extraordinary situation in the Middle East all the the present day.

0:21:05 Phil: And yeah, so I feel like it's an unfortunate thing that this clash of eschatologies so called isn't, yeah,

0:21:13 Thomas: Yeah, that is an interesting meta way to look at, or maybe it's a more appropriate way to look at. It's really fascinating. I haven't thought of it in those terms, but there's a lot of different, you you know, just different groups with different beliefs about the end of the world that are somehow, and I think you're right that most Americans, since we don't think that way, or at least it seems like most of us don't, or, you know most liberals don't think that way. I mean, we're not really looking at it that way. But a lot of these people do believe these things.

0:21:43 Thomas: I think they do. I think they really do. And I think that any belief in that drastically motivates, changes how you're going to act in the world. I mean, it just has to. If I think, if I die, I'm going someplace, and if the end of the world comes, that's good, because all this stuff's going to happen. And, you know, if I think that, it's drastically different than if I'm going around thinking, well, this is my one shot at life. I better not, you know, do anything too crazy.

0:21:35 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. I think the stakes, in a sense, are much higher for the secular riskologists than they are, you know, for these individuals who are happy to martyr themselves because they care about the otherworldly more than the worldly.

0:22:18 Thomas: Yeah. I can't resist Asking you this, though. Do you, do you really think that the answer is to just have an awful dictator like Saddam Hussein kind of presiding over the whole thing? Like, it was that really better? No, I'm not. I don't know. I mean, I, I the situation now is definitely not good. But what was that? Is that bad? Is that the only way they can do it? Like, what?

0:22:26 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

0:22:49 Thomas: What's going on? This is obviously the impossible question that's facing, you know, foreign policy for the last, I don't know, 50 years or something. But is that the only solution? Just to have some horrible dictator who, as long as he keeps some of the roads working, then people kind of go about their lives or what?

0:23:10 Phil: I don't know. I mean, I am agnostic about this point. On the one hand, Sunnis and Shias have gotten along in the past.

0:23:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:28 Thomas: Oh, they have? When? I don't remember this.

0:23:30 Phil: Yes. There have been long periods during which there wasn't conflict between them.

0:23:37 Thomas: In like the Ottoman Empire or something or what, how far back are we talking?

0:23:41 Phil: I could not off the top of my head provide some specific examples, but I know that it's the case that there hasn't always been this extraordinary sectarian conflict between them. The extent to which there's sectarian violence today is, I believe, a bit historically anomalous.

0:24:07 Thomas: Hmm.

0:24:09 Phil: Again, I would need to look it up just to be sure. But yeah, I don't know. Even if after World War I, the Western forces had cut up the Middle East differently, You still would have had, you know, different sects that would be potentially in conflict at some point. So I really don't know.

0:24:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:40 Phil: I mean, I think it's a good example of –

0:24:41 Thomas: I'm so pessimistic about the whole thing. Oh go ahead.

0:24:44 Phil: Yeah, no, no. Sorry about that.

0:24:46 Thomas: No, it's okay.

0:24:46 Phil: I really feel like it's, you Know, it's an example of why I believe religion is problematic. I mean, there's this in-group, out-group aspect, and especially when it comes to eschatological beliefs, I mean there's nothing more absolutist, there is nothing more uncompromising than these beliefs that you're, you know, we're at the brink of.

0:24:56 Thomas: Yeah, well Well, exactly. One Thing that's amazed me lately, because I've actually, I've been doing a little bit of research into the Middle East. It's just been, I don't know, it's been fascinating me lately. And I don't have quite the mind you do for being able to remember all the different factions and their names and their leaders and stuff. But one thing that has struck me is, yeah, it does go back to World War I. It does go bad. You know, there's some people who think that, you know, under the Ottoman Empire, everything was kind of fine. People got more or less got, it's not really true, but it is true that it was probably more peaceful than it is now, of course.

0:25:42 Thomas: But then the Western powers divvied it up the way they wanted to. And specifically, Britain kind of screwed Iraq over because it didn't give them access to the sea. And so Iraq and Kuwait has always been a big problem because of that. But here's the interesting thing. When we talk about that, you know, like, oh, well, because they didn't get to divide it up the way they wanted to, that's kind of what's caused all this problem. The alternative there, the corollary, as like Hitchens would say, is, so that means in order to have any sort of peace, you have to have a perfectly divided nation exactly by your religion, like you're Sunni or Shia or you're Kurdish, you're, you Know, I understand that It probably helps if the Kurds have their own, you know, state. That would help things. But isn't that also a little bit depressing?

0:25:41 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:26:35 Thomas: Isn't that a sort of a depressing verdict to lay that in order for there to be any chance of peace, and even then, I don't think it's a likely chance, but in order for them to have any chance, they have to be segregated. Like, they half to have separate, almost, maybe not racial, but religious segregation. Segregation, because that doesn't seem any good either, you know? I'm so depressed about the whole thing. It really, like you said, I mean, forming your identity around religion, it just, it creates, especially when it's a bad religion, not very peaceful religion sometimes.

0:27:15 Thomas: I mean they're all that to some extent, but it really just creates this irreconcilable difference. Difference. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I don'T have a question with that, but that's something that struck me lately.

0:27:15 Phil: Yeah, I don't disagree. I mean, more broadly speaking, the world is divided into these various sects that identify with a particular faith-based ideology, a set of propositions that were privately revealed to some ancient prophet who claimed to have special access to the supernatural. Natural. I mean, it's, yeah.

0:27:34 Thomas: True, yeah.

0:27:50 Thomas: And lucky enough, it happened to be somebody of your nationality or skin, usually, you know, it's like it's your cultural group that got the profit. It's so lucky.

0:27:58 Phil: Or you could always, or you could always change their skin color, you know, and say Jesus was white. You know, it s, there are many options here. But, but I mean, that, that exactly, all of that, is a, is it gestures at the fact that it's about, you know, its, its a kind of tribalism. And it's you know it's unfortunate. We're, we're, you have this, this world with increasingly dire, genuinely, for the first time ever in our history genuinely global problems, and we're divided into these tribes whose worldviews are not properly hinged to reality, and yeah, I think there's plenty of reasons for pessimism.

0:28:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah?

0:28:34 Thomas: Do you have any sympathy for attempts? Now, I know, obviously, Obviously, it's just taken for granted these days that Iraq was a mistake, and I think there's good reason to at least, at the very minimum, say, the way we went about it was terrible and we botched it too much, even if you could make some claim that the intent was good. Do you have any sympathy, given this religious identity problem that I kind of laid out, for trying to export democracy, because it seems like the obvious solution to that, to me, and not that you can get this to happen because you really have to change people's minds, is for them to have more allegiance to some sort of state that has a secular guarantee of religious freedom.

I mean, that would be the picturesque, ideal conclusion is, okay, yes, we're different religions, we are Sunni, we are Shia, or whatever we are. We're even different Sunnis and different Shias. But we all recognize that the best chance is if we sort of lend our support or endorse a state that provides protection for all of us and kind of represents all of it. It's easily said, obviously, but do you then have some sympathy for the idea of trying to enforce that, or is it just something that you can't do for someone else, you know?

0:28:55 Phil: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:30:01 Phil: Yeah, I there are two questions. One is the result of a system being implemented in a certain country amongst a certain nation of people. And then the means by which that's done. It's like encouraging someone to pick up litter with a gun to their head versus an educational program.

0:30:30 Phil: So I feel like the whole approach, I'm also just genuinely not convinced that we cared in the first place, ultimately, about democracy. In 1953, we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran because they weren't cooperating with British petroleum companies or the British Petroleum Company.

0:30:30 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:30:42 Thomas: Well, sure, yeah, that's possible.

0:31:01 Phil: We put in this brutal dictator, the Shah, that lasted all the way up until 1979, which was when there was the Iranian Revolution.

0:31:10 Thomas: Revolution, yeah...

0:31:12 Phil: Yeah, exactly. And incidentally, since we're talking about eschatology, 1979 was also the year that an apocalyptic group snuck into the Grand Mosque, which is the biggest, it's a huge, huge mosque in Mecca, the biggest in the world, and it's genuinely massive in size. And they held, I don't know, I think it was maybe 100,000 people in there for several weeks, claiming to have the Mahdi, the messianic figure of Islam, with them. And ultimately they were killed. Some of the people were captured and then beheaded by the Saudi Arabian government, which is still a form of capital punishment today due to religious beliefs.

0:31:54 Thomas: So, sorry, I missed the connection. That happened as... was this connected to the Iranian Revolution, or just something, that happened at the same time?

0:32:00 Phil: And so it happened at the same time. And what's interesting is, you know, we have the Western calendar, which puts these events both happening happening in 1979, but that corresponds to 1400 in the Islamic calendar. The turn of the century has a kind of eschatological undertones. There's a claim that there would be a renewer for Islam every 100 years, and that's sort of been tied together with this view that ... David Cook, for example, a very well-known known Islamic scholar, has said 2076, which is 1500 of the, we can expect another spike in apocalyptic fervor in certain Islamic communities. So anyways, it's kind of fascinating that the Iranian revolution happened, it was seen as an apocalyptic event.

0:32:14 Thomas: Hmm, right. Oh, yeah but how interesting is it that you see all those, these are memes that I'm not entirely sure how accurate they are, but you see the memes of, oh, I ran before 1979. And it's the, you know, there's people on women in bikinis on beaches and it just looks very modern. And then after that revolution, it All goes to hell. But it's interesting to think that that point in time when there seemed to be a lot of freedom for women and that sort of thing, was that then a result of our putting a dictator in there?

0:33:02 Phil: Right. Yeah. Yeah, he was definitely friendly with the West, for sure. We had put him in there on purpose due to his, you know, his favorability amongst leaders and companies in the US. I really don't know in detail, but I know he was considered one of the most brutal dictators in the region. But I also don't doubt that he probably was westernized quite a bit during that time. So yeah

0:33:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's so difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:34:03 Thomas: It is a mess. It is a fascinating thing to me, though, just the history of... and you are absolutely right, we have so many... we have a terrible, terrible history in the Middle East, the United States, of trying to back one. I mean, who knows how much of it maybe was good intentions? Certainly, certainly a lot of it is demonstrably not.

0:34:21 Thomas: It's just, it's a mess. But who knows? I mean, I really don't, that's the funny thing to me, funny in just a weird kind of way, is even if you could pick whatever solution you wanted, I don't know that it would be a solution. Like, it just genuinely is irreconcilable unless people, I guess the only chance is if you can somehow, if the idea, not even by us, because I think one of the biggest problems with the Iraq War, personally, my view is, even if it might have been a good idea, ultimately, we overestimated, and Bush and others overestimated, or at least didn't account for the fact that they just don't want foreign occupiers in there. They don't Want white people, you know, trying to help them out, even If it is ultimately, you

0:34:12 Phil: Yeah yeah right yeah yeah you

0:35:08 Thomas: Know, hypothetically, in order to help them build a democracy and all that. They just don't respond well to that.

0:35:12 Phil: Know the irony of that is that he said you know bin Laden believed that he was at war long before to 2001 and he one of his biggest complaints was the fact that after the the 1990 Gulf War you know we We left troops more or less permanently on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. So that's Muslim territory, and he was livid about that. What are they doing there?

0:35:47 Phil: I mean, exactly, if we had Saudi Arab troops right down the road from us, we'd probably be a little weirded out by that. So, you know, it was precisely that sort of, I mean, it wasn't an occupation, but it was Western forces in the Middle East at the time that was sort of the impetus behind the horrific terrorist attack of 9-11. And then, of course, our response was to send more people in. And since then, what's happened? Well, we've had a far more brutal and frankly dangerous. And we had the biggest terrorist organization in human history, the Islamic State, arise.

So I mean, you could see, if you just take a step back, you can see that something very wrong about our sort of, you hit me, I'm going to strike back with much greater military might, it's not been ... And of course, the way religion ties into that is oftentimes when you have people being bombed, and Bush himself admitted, I think it was in 2005, 2005 that there were, and there's a video of this online, people can look it up, that his guest, somebody asked him how many civilian deaths do you think there are, and he was like, ah, 30,000 maybe.

So, I mean, when you're living in a situation where there's death all around, and some extraordinary drone videos recently, with high definition of Syrian towns that have been obliterated, and I'm sure you could find some of Iraq as well, you look around and the world looks like it's ending.

0:35:47 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:37:14 Phil: And it's going to lead some religiously inclined people to to adopt even more extreme beliefs, and once you adopt these ideologies, as Sam Harris points out, they can uh significantly determine or uh influence your behavior. So there's this feedback cycle where, you know, you're in a desperate situation, you know, eschatology is very appealing, you know, it promises that things are going to end soon and they're going to be good for you, and then once you adapt that, it can it can lead you to to, to ultimately perpetuate, uh, you know, violence and, and perhaps catastrophic violence, you know?

0:37:38 Thomas: That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing with some drones and some weapons and some bombs. You can make your own Armageddon-type, like you said, end-of-the-world-looking place, and that'll certainly help set the scene and motivate people to do some crazy things.

0:37:53 Phil: So yeah, yeah, Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

0:38:14 Thomas: Apologies for going off on the foreign policy tangent. I found it very fascinating. I know it's not directly, you know, part of your book, but thanks for indulging me in that discussion. I really liked it.

0:38:25 Phil: I don't, I don' mind at all. And in fact, I think it's really helpful that you pointed that out, that there really is what seemed like some kind of insoluble geopolitical predicaments out there today. And, and again, sort of, I mean, I do do mention, you know, I talk a lot about the Middle East in the book, moving forward, you know, with the new Cold War, with North Korea, and so on and so On, you know, what sort of world can we expect in the future, with all these advanced technologies, increasingly powerful, increasingly accessible?

0:38:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:38:58 Phil: I don't think I mean, a lot of the strategies that I that I offer for mitigating existential risks, they are really big picture, because Because I don't see a lot of lower level, so to speak, diplomatic, like, what are we doing in Syria? I don't know at this point. All I can say is we shouldn' t have gone in there. I have no other advice or insight or anything. But ultimately, the bigger picture things are genuinely like space colonization. That's something NASA' s talked about it. Elon Musk has talked about. It' s transhumanism is another possibility.

0:39:30 Thomas: What's your solution in the Middle East? Well, space. Space. Yeah, yeah.

0:39:36 Phil: Re-engineering the human form, perhaps there's a way of re-engaging the ...

0:39:40 Thomas: Oh, that's an interesting question. What about once we can essentially sort of be robots? I mean, there's got to be a time. I don't know when, but that's got to be possible eventually, right? I means, we could be at least, either we supplement our bodies with robotics or whatever, or we, you know, insert our minds into a robot or something. Once that happens, that really changes the picture, right, because we're We're not going to be as susceptible to some of these risks. Or am I being a crazy sci-fi?

0:39:41 Phil: No, no, I don't think that's ... I really ... I mean, there are very serious scholars who have talked about the possibility of ... I think cyborgization, the creation of human technology hybrids, is a process that goes all the way back to the first human form homo habilis, which in in the fossil record, is more or less determinist with the first stone tools. So, I mean, from the very beginning...

0:40:38 Thomas: Oh, I thought you were going to say they had like robot hands or something that we didn't know about.

0:40:41 Phil: So, they haven't discovered any, you know, any devices of that sort. But, I meantime, what is a stone tool? But it's a way of augmenting the human... So, today we wear clothes, we have glasses. I store half of my memory on Wikipedia. I know exactly where to go. So, you know, I may have

0:40:50 Thomas: Right, right. Sure. Yeah. Half? Jeez, that's impressive. I store 99.999999% of my memory on Wikipedia. Wikipedia. My brain is running a bare bones operating system that just knows how to look stuff up on Wikipedia. I have some hard programmed RAM that just kind of knows how to boot up, wake up in the morning, and go on the internet. That's all I've got. I don't have any memory banks.

0:41:08 Phil: Absolutely misspoke there. Yeah, yeah. For a lot of people, some people have described, like, losing their smartphone as a kind of brain damage. You know, right now we access Wikipedia, you Know, perceptually, you Now, with, you Know, exercising our muscles to manipulate the mouse and whatnot, and then we visually really imbibe the information. It's entirely possible that in the foreseeable future we'll have brain-machine interfaces where you can access it in a hands-free manner just by thinking. There are many extraordinary examples in North Carolina right down the road at Duke University. There's a guy, Miguel Nicolelis, who's created these brain machine interfaces that are connected to robotic arms and had, I think it was rhesus monkeys, just control them just by thought alone. And they could feed themselves with these robotic arms. So I mean, I mean I think cyborgization goes way back and I think we're sort of on the cusp of, yeah.

0:41:28 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sure, sure.

0:42:29 Thomas: Is that our best bet? I mean, you mentioned space. Space space is just impossible, though. I think I would put my money, if it were my funding, if it Were my billions, I'd go with, personally, I go with cyborgization. Because once you do that, then space becomes easier, too. But just trying to get these feeble human, you know, organ sacks to survive in space, it's so difficult. I don't know. Have you seen Apollo 13?

0:42:55 Phil: I don't disagree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't disagree. There is, there is, um, I mean, a lot of people have talked about the best, um sort of chronology of technological development, you know? So, so, you Know, if we, if, we colonize the, the, you, the galaxy right now, how might that help with, with, uh, the creation of cognitive enhancement technologies that can increase our, our mental capacities? Probably not. I mean off the top of my head, I don't see any obvious way. But what you just said, the reverse of that, is absolutely right.

0:43:30 Thomas: Yeah, well.

0:43:31 Phil: You know, some philosophers are talking about, you know, if you increase the IQ of a whole scientific community by one point, each individual by one points, it would hardly be noticeable in that individual scientist. But the output, the productivity, the ingenuity of the whole community could be, significantly greater. So it might not take even a huge tweak to change. So the other thing about cyborgization, it's really messy and I think a lot of people are kind of hopeful that there could be maybe some kind of pharmaceutical called a nootropic, brain enhancing pharmaceutical brain machine interface, or maybe even there's some genetic engineering engineering techniques that we could use to, to, uh, to make us smarter than we are or more compassionate or something like that. But it's also, it doesn't seem, it hasn't strike me as, uh, super promising. So, you know, I don't know, but, but that's, yes,

0:44:38 Thomas: Then there's a whole separate set of questions that results from that, you know, who gets it, is it based, you know, how, uh, who gets access to this stuff, who, you know, it's it's crazy, there, there's, it branches off into all kinds of things. But yeah.

0:44:48 Phil: I totally agree. And those Those are extraordinary moral questions that, you know, could solve, yes, yes.

0:44:52 Thomas: And and fantastic Sci-fi premises.

0:45:02 Phil: So, yeah, I mean, sort of bracketing all those issues, even if those were solved, even if those really, really serious ethical issues were completely taken care of, there still would be, you now, like, well, how do we, you kno, in my judgment, human history reveals that our psychology makes us particularly susceptible to certain kinds of delusions. You know, belief in supernatural agents that intermingle with the world. Even the long history of apocalyptic groups, I mean, it's really extraordinary. Few people, few Christians understand just how many people in the past believed that this is the last generation.

0:45:06 Thomas: Sure.

0:45:27 Thomas: Makes sense.

0:45:44 Thomas: Yeah,

0:45:45 Phil: I mean, from Isaac Newton, you know, did a lot of work on apocalyptic stuff, you know, Martin Luther believed the Pope was the Antichrist. Jesus himself, as you mentioned early in this conversation, you know, most scholars in North America and in Europe today, New Testament scholars, believe that Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet. So, you know, we seem particularly susceptible to this, delusions of this sort, and what What would it take to modify the computer behind our eyes, in between our ears, to make us, inoculate us against these sorts of beliefs, which in the past have been harmful enough. In the future, when we're surrounded by levers that if we were to pull them could obliterate society, you know, this is more important than any other time in the past to sort of control these. But what would it takes? I don't know. It's...

0:45:45 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. That's my view.

0:46:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:41 Phil: It's a tricky problem, sort of modifying human psychology that way.

0:46:43 Thomas: Well, Phil, the book is The End, What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse. You've given, the author is Phil Torres, so much to think about, so many interesting questions. Thank you so much for joining me. I really enjoyed this, and believe me, I have about a hundred more questions for you, but I think, I think, yeah, so at, but I think I've taken enough of your time and I really appreciate you coming on here.

0:47:02 Phil: Well, so do I. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. I mean, I really, really also had a lot of fun.

0:47:13 Thomas: Yeah, me too.

0:47:14 Phil: Thank you.

0:47:14 Thomas: I, it Was, it was awesome. I, so many more questions about like, you know, like you said, inoculating your, our brains against that, against the, those reprogramming us to be able to, to resist religion. But I, but would it be that, or would it be, do we need to just make sure we're not exposed to these bad ideas in the first place that sort of prime your brain at a young age to be able to accept these premises. Because I've found in arguing with theists that, I mean, really most of it is just your prior assumptions.

Like you just, if you have a background assumption of, you know, I know there's a God or I feel there's God or whatever, if have all that, you can look at the same evidence and just have a different conclusion and there's just nothing you can say to really argue them out of it. But anyway, okay, so there's plenty more that we could talk about, but I think I'm going to call it because we've taken a lot of your time and it was a lot of fun. Thank you so much. I encourage everyone to buy it. I'm gonna grab this book. It's not out yet. It's out as

0:47:45 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

0:48:15 Phil: The 16th.

0:48:15 Thomas: Of this, the 16th, February 16th. I'm sure, what's the best place, Amazon or is there a better place?

0:48:18 Phil: Yeah. Amazon, it also should be in Barnes & Noble, but probably Amazon is the best. Yeah. So

0:48:23 Thomas: Oh, okay. Cool. And is there any place you want to point people to find your work, to follow you, Twitter, anything like that?

0:48:31 Phil: I do a lot of writing for Salon and various websites like that. So if you go to risksandreligion.org, you can find publications. And there's sort of an organization I'm trying to build up to study these issues, basically the intersection of existential risk studies and new atheism. So that's where people can go.

0:48:53 Thomas: Wow. Wow. That's another thing we could talk to. Well, maybe we can do this again sometime. I certainly wish you luck with the book. I encourage, again, encourage people to check it out because there's so much there. And thank you for joining me. And yeah, I'll hope to talk to you again sometime soon.

0:49:11 Phil: Yeah, thanks so much. It was a real pleasure.

0:49:19 Thomas: Well, that doesn't, I hated to end that interview, I could have talked to Phil for a long time, and maybe we can find an excuse to get him back again sometime, hopefully, we don't have to wait till he writes another book, I'm sure if there's a topic that comes up that he would be, have some expertise on, I'll invite him back on, because he was fun to talk to, really liked it. So that nothing much else to say this week except thank you to some new patrons who I'm sure enjoyed this content early. That's uh, not the Bad MS, not sure what that name is, but that's okay. And Mark, Mark Johnson, thank you for pledging, much appreciated. It every little bit helps and it supports the show and I'm happy to give you guys early content if you'd like to pledge, go to patreon.com/atheist. And of course I need to thank my all-time pledgers because I try to do that every Thursday.

0:50:05 Thomas: That's Kaile Riser, Zimu Zinu, Adrian Borschoff, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Bangs Naughty Bits, Christian Jaeh, Peter Skelton, Brian Garefort, Dale, Matt, Garrett, Lizzie, and Samantha with the honorable mention. Of course, if you want to be mentioned every Thursday and thanked every Thursday for the very kind person you are, you just have to pledge $5 or above. So those are those super amazing patrons who I thank every single Thursday. Day. All right. Well, that's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for another great week of the show. I've Got Ina. Ina Nice Mangoes. Lots of stuff going on with her and Sam Harris and Twitter exchanges, all kinds of stuff that we're going to talk about. And I can't wait to bring you her episodes next week. So look forward to that and I'll talk to you then. Oh, and please review me on iTunes, okay, that's it, see ya.,