340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

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 uh 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 of 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 um 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.

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