Episode 185— Spirituality

[agata 2789]

Do you believe in reincarnation? Tig, David, and Kyle welcome television's Josh Radnor back to the hatch to discuss aging, consciousness, immortality, religion, and karma. Josh goes into his theories about the human need for narrative, the gang talks about the effect of evolution, and Kyle brings the body rap back!

[JaimeGandarilla 85]

Just like with the God episode, I find it tiresome to talk about myths that 50,000 years of human history have proven to be fake...

 

And the guest, LAWLZ

Will a Real Housewife be next?

 

Still love the show xoxo

[NameThatPunky 804]

I can't believe they hired an oboe and trumpet player just to come in at the end of the episode.

 

Hang on, wait. It was just Kyle's body? All of it?

[Kickpuncher 5012]

My new favorite recurring joke is Tig's imitation of body rapping, the entirety of which is *gasp* *gasp* *fart noise*.

[Homer 64]

Kyle actually looks buff as heck in that picture, I would never suspect him of having such tiny baby calves.

[imhatch 271]

pec deck in effect

[EdDykhuizen 20]

Another great episode, both funny and thought-provoking. If I were there (which will never happen), I would have brought up the anthropic principle. I read it in "A Brief History of Time," by Steven Hawking, so that means it's smart.

 

The anthropic principle addresses a few of David's questions, particularly the one about what motivates our genes to keep reproducing. The anthropic principle is basically "it is that way because if it weren't, we wouldn't be here." Hawking applied it to the fact that there is an extremely tiny chance that our world would have just the right percentages of gases and elements to produce life. But even things that have extremely low probabilities do happen sometimes, especially when there are billions of planets. We of course would end up on the planet where that exceedingly unlikely thing happened, because we can't exist on a world that didn't.

 

Similarly, if our genes were not singularly bent on surviving into future generations, we wouldn't be here. It happened randomly, and we are only here to think about it because it did happen randomly. This is often an unacceptable answer for people who are stuck on the notion things can only exist if a sentient being like us created them, this notion that things have to have a big important REASON for existing. I think that's a mental construct that arises from the fact that we humans create and do things for reasons. But that doesn't mean the universe has to create and do things for reasons. The universe is under no obligation to conform to our conceptions of how things occur. It just exists. There really is no "why." The whole notion of there having to be a "why" is a human invention. "Why" applies to things humans do, but it doesn't have to apply to what the universe does. That might not be emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't have to be. The universe doesn't care what people find emotionally satisfying. Anyway, that's my speech.