Audio log: Conference

Four characters are debating quotes for the island.

## Location

You'll eventually reach the uppermost portion of the cavern, which contains two alcoves, with green and orange tiles of puzzles respectively. The tape is hidden under some planks located between the two alcoves.

## Transcript

... it's just the new teapot beeping. It boils fast but that beep bothers me. Moving on?

So next I want to raise this problem, which is that I think we don't have enough smart representation from materialist atheists, physicalists, anything in that neighborhood of ideas. And I've been trying to do something about that but it's hard. The problem is that most coherent atheist screeds are focused on defeating some specific idea of God or are angry about the historical activities of organized religions - rather than, say, from first principles, making a good case for the impossibility of any concept of God, which would be more like what we're after.

I'm having the same problem. So many justifications of atheism devolve into assertions of the implausibility of Bible stories.
Someone like Bertrand Russell, a very advanced thinker, but his commentary on religion all seems to be like 'Why I am not a Christian', very limited in scope. It is way too small compared to the vision of God in the pieces we're juxtaposing.

Can you - Can you repeat that last part? You dropped out a bit.

Oh, just that it's a very provincial idea of God that's usually advanced in those arguments, sometimes even a straw-man God, and doesn't have much in common with the God visualized by Cusa or Spinoza or the great Sufis, or even Einstein, whoever. So it just doesn't play on the same field.

When people are explicitly pushing materialism they're usually philosophers or writers ... not physicists, not people who actually do the front-line work of understanding the physical world. With the heavy hitters in physics, it's very hard.
It's hard to find good statements that aren't just arguing against straw men. And it's strange because in the modern age a reasonable portion of working physicists are atheists, not all by any means, but a reasonable portion; but it's hard to get strong and articulate statements from that sector.

Yeah, the closest you get is somebody like Feynman, where science gives us a great degree of certainty about certain things, but outside those it's not a good idea to tell ourselves nice stories, and speculate, it is just best to realize we don't know yet about the bigger questions, etc.

But we have a lot of Feynman already.

Paul Dirac was at least a staunch atheist, at one point in his life, but I don't know if he has direct statements on record.

I'll keep an eye out.

Dirac was far from a materialist though - he believed the universe is made out of math. That's an oversimplification of course. He even mentioned God a few times, in an Einstein kind of way. This is all so crazy because among scientifically-educated people ... it's the cultural default, right? If you are a scientist or a computer programmer kind of person, materialism is supposed to be the basic belief - If you're not a materialist you're stupid. But if we can't find anyone who makes a good case for it, how does that happen?

Well, it's easy to be convinced of the absurdity of stories in common Christianity, Judaism, whatever ... so if that's your picture of spiritual beliefs, and you have an aversion to digging too hard into your own worldview, which most of us do, then there you go - anything that seems religious is goofy bible stories, and materialism is anti-religious, and it's the general impression that smart people are materialist, and I want to be smart, so ... case closed!

Also, there are all those so-called spiritual people who will believe basically anything and try to convince everyone ... In addition to goofy bible stories, did I forget to mentionghost stories, astrologers, spoon benders and all kinds of frauds. ... it's a ton of noise, it makes it almost impossible for an outsider looking in to see high-quality thought in the world of spirituality.
If I can even generalize "spirituality" to one thing. So it's easy if you're already leaning toward materialism to see these flaky spiritual people, extrapolate that to \_all\_ spiritual people, and say all that stuff is garbage.
That's how it worked for me. For a while.

Okay. But despite all this there's a large contingent of present day real scientists who believe in some form of atheist materialism and whose beliefs have been carefully considered. So we need to ensure we respect that viewpoint.

I remember there's - It's so frustrating - Sorry.

No, you go.

Oh, I was just going to say, Carl Sagan has a good piece in, umm, Demon-Haunted World?, where he talks about science as a profound source of spirituality. But he doesn't mean mystical spirituality, he means ... this pure dedication to truth, and the development of a wise perspective on our place in the world. It's nice. And it's a picture of atheism that isn't hostile or contemptuous.

Yeah, I read that, and what you're talking about is a beautiful piece, and I tried to get it, but Sagan's people want too much money.

Can't we just pay more?

No, it would trigger a bunch of 'most-favored-nation' clauses, then we have to pay everyone a lot more, and we go broke. So no Sagan for us.

It's a shame since he was such a great thinker, and eloquent too.

## Story implications

This shows us that the group holds meetings in which they discuss their progress and they deal with our sort of everyday problems int he process.

We also see that the more atheist-minded of the group changed his views on this at some point, although it's unclear if that is a result of this project or if that happened earlier in his life.

We also get some insight into the reasons why some of these pieces are the way they are. The group tried to get a nice spread of fundamental thoughts coming from lots of different angles, but didn't want to have reactions or strawmen.

The "most-favored nation" comment might imply that the group is working for a governmental organization of some sort, but that's kind of unclear.
It's possible that these are some of the issues that actualy came up during the making of The Witness and this audio log was a nice way to give a peek behind the curtain.

## Relation to the six themes of the Witness

This audio log relates to Theme 2: Relativism.

This piece focuses on how the search for truth isn't just a single thing. The characters are looking at all possible routes to truth and are discussing looking for fundamental truths and not just reactionary opinions.
We also see the idea that even if something is true, it might not be all that useful.