Bret Weinstein's Case for Religion

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]There are various versions of this conversation, and they have arbitrary levels of difficulty.

[00:00:06]The easy one is whatever the nature of an ancient religious tradition is, we can be agnostic about whether or not it is divine and somehow outside of the universe that we have easy access to, or whether it is fully the consequence of emergent properties in a material world.

[00:00:28]Whichever that is, one of the functions that religion serves best, and in fact, maybe uniquely or almost uniquely, is solving deep game theory problems.

[00:00:43]So primary among them is the collection of what are called collective action problems, where each individual following their own incentives causes the sum total of the behaviors to reach a suboptimal outcome.

[00:01:00]So the tragedy of the commons is such a puzzle.

[00:01:03]Prisoner's dilemma is such a puzzle.

[00:01:05]But there are many such things where we can say together we would like to leave the world in as good a condition as we found it or better.

[00:01:15]But the problem is each individual is in a position to enhance their own well-being at an expense to the world.

[00:01:26]And if they are morally required to restrain themselves from that, they do not preserve the world.

[00:01:32]What they do is they enable their competitors to succeed.

[00:01:35]And so we are constantly running up against the destruction of the world because of the game theory, not because we don't understand that we shouldn't destroy it or that we can't say it would be great if nobody acted to destroy it, but because it is pointless to hurt yourself in an effort to do something that you yourself have no impact on whether it gets done.

[00:01:54]So I hope that wasn't too complex.

[00:01:55]But the point is, if you have a religion, whether there is an actual God who is looking over us, or that is simply an agreement of how we are to behave as if there is a God, you can say, well, it is not my right to do this thing that destroys the world.

[00:02:14]And to me, in my own framework, there is a profound consequence if I violate my obligation, therefore I will not violate my obligation.

[00:02:22]And as long as everyone is in on that same agreement, it actually works.

[00:02:26]So you can solve the game theory problem.

[00:02:29]The world doesn't get destroyed.

[00:02:31]Problem is everybody has to be in on that agreement.

[00:02:34]And if you have a world in which you have a bunch of people of faith who are resisting the pull of the game theory, and you have a bunch of secular folks who don't think it means anything, then the secular people have a very temporary advantage and everybody pays the cost.

[00:02:51]Right?

[00:02:52]So one of the reasons that I think we have to have this conversation is that that is now happening at every scale.

[00:02:58]Not only do we have a world in which secularism is causing all of the game theory to force the entire world to face the penalties of the liquidation of the well-being that is at our disposal, but we also have a conflict even between religious traditions.

[00:03:16]And so there must be, I think, an overarching structure that includes the values that we should all agree on, that everyone, whatever continent you live on, should agree the world is not ours to destroy.

[00:03:31]We are stewards of it.

[00:03:32]But we don't have that superstructure.

[00:03:36]And as a result, the game theory is haunting us in a way because of our technology that it wouldn't have 300 years ago or a thousand years ago.

[00:03:46]So that's a long-winded way of saying this conversation is a prototype for how do we take a secular materialist, be Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, how do we have a conversation in which we say, well, what do all of these traditions agree on?

[00:04:06]What do they not yet agree on?

[00:04:08]What does this tradition have to learn from that tradition?

[00:04:11]How does that conversation happen?

[00:04:14]Well, I think that in some ways I want to bring it back to, I'm a Christian, and I do believe that Christianity offers, because of the notion of love, I think, is the deepest metaphysical principle.

[00:04:30]This notion also that reality is grounded in self-sacrifice, I think, is ultimately the solution to this problem.

[00:04:37]But I do think that this is something that honestly, the only way that we can get to it is for Christians to live it out.

[00:04:44]It's difficult to, you know, I think that one of the reasons why we're here is because Christians have dropped the ball to some extent, that we've dropped the ball, that we've dropped the ball, that we have not been proper images of what Christ has taught in the world, and therefore we have a faded, you know, kind of thin version of that in reality.

[00:05:06]And so obviously we should have the conversation, but that conversation should be done by people who are shining examples, you know, and that's why it's so much, you know, we kind of need saints, we need people that exemplify it, you know, and the truth is that if you look at, you know, how, let's say, in the early centuries, how people were converted to Christianity, which mostly because of that, they saw the Christians, you know, adopting their abandoned children, they saw the Christians caring for the people that were suffering, and they were like, "Well, what is this thing?

[00:05:37]There's something in me that's telling me that there's, that's not my virtue structure, but there's something telling me that there's something more going on here, I don't know what it is, and that's what kind of led them to seeing that.

[00:05:48]I don't know, Jordan, it's kind of a, it's a, it's a frustrating answer because it's kind of saying we have to live up to what we believe.

[00:05:55]Well, let's see, let's throw, I'm gonna work backwards to give myself time to get to the big ones as the end.

[00:06:01]So one example that comes to the foreground as you were speaking is, I think around 200, maybe late 100s, there was a purge happening among Christians in southern France, and the Roman governor was being particularly vicious, and one of his peers was sort of defending the Christians, and the Roman governor just sort of turned him and said, you know, "Gaius, I would mistake you to be a Christian," and he goes, "But I am a Christian," at which point he was torn, you know, he was immediately tortured and killed, but the point was the people who were watching that said, "Wow, this guy was willing to live to the Roman virtue of telling the truth, more powerful than the Romans would."

[00:06:43]Like a Roman at that point would have been like, "Yeah, no, I mean, no, I'm just being very, you know, judicious," but the point was he was so committed to the values that he was willing to step directly in, and he wasn't mistaken.

[00:06:53]He knew he was going to get killed when he said it, but he chose to stick to the thing that was right rather than preserve his life.

[00:06:59]Well, let me just point out why that mirrors exactly what I'm saying about game theory.

[00:07:06]If you, again, I have to be agnostic on this point in order for the whole audience to get it.

[00:07:13]It doesn't matter whether the story is literally accurate, or whether the story is simply a metaphor that we take to be accurate, but if you have a belief that there is an infinite reward that comes from behaving according to your values, even when the cost of doing so is not only absolute, the cost of your life, but the cost of dying horribly this instant.

[00:07:40]If you believe that there's something big enough to warrant that, then the point is you don't defect from those values, even when the game theory is blinking red at you, "Hey, do the other thing."

[00:07:51]So a world of people who share the same agreement with respect to how we fix the collective action problems is a much better world than one in which we all get to figure out our own relationship to that game theory and, in fact, give advantage to those who are least prone to self-sacrifice.

[00:08:14]But the question is, where is this better that you mentioned?

[00:08:18]If it's simply a metaphor that it doesn't have a truth in its own right, where does the better come from?

[00:08:26]Where does the perception that this is better?

[00:08:30]Because maybe the best thing to do is to run through the game theory thing and just kill your enemies and your descendants will be the ones that survive, even if it's just you in the end.

[00:08:41]I want to give you what I think is the right analytical answer to that, and I know it is unsatisfying and I think I know why it is, and I know it doesn't land, but maybe we'll get there.

[00:08:51]But human beings are a... we are a creature.

[00:08:58]I believe it is secure that that creature is the product of an evolutionary process.

[00:09:04]We can debate the fine details of that, but I think I can defend that successfully.

[00:09:09]But the consequence of it is that we are structured to be effective.

[00:09:15]We are not structured to be accurate.

[00:09:18]Now sometimes being accurate is the way to be effective, and that's why we have the capability of being accurate.

[00:09:24]But the higher purpose as built by evolution is to do the thing that achieves the evolutionary objective.

[00:09:34]And the consequence of this is that we individuals are persuaded of our own significance in a way that's ridiculous, even evolutionarily.

[00:09:47]You could not possibly affect the fraction of the next generation that contains your genes, no matter how carefully you follow that as your North Star every hour of every day of your life.

[00:10:02]It just... it's a big population.

[00:10:04]You're not going to have an impact on it.

[00:10:06]But the reason that you behave in such a way so as to try to increase the number of your genes in the next generation is because that is the limit of your ability to affect the world in general.

[00:10:19]Historically it has been, right?

[00:10:21]So it might be, you know, a person who has 10 times the average number of children in their lifetime, but where each of the lineages that they have sparked goes extinct 500 years later, their fitness is zero.

[00:10:36]During their life it seems like their fitness is very high.

[00:10:39]So you can behave in a way that seems evolutionarily wise, but if it is self-terminating it is the opposite.

[00:10:47]So my point is our sense of our self and our importance in all of this is built in for practical reasons because our likelihood of affecting things distantly in the future or far away in space is pretty low and our ability to affect things here and now is pretty high.

[00:11:06]So we are over-focused on here and now.

[00:11:08]And so anyway, my point is a religious framework can actually correct the... it's like glasses on a person with eyes that are misformed, right?

[00:11:21]It corrects the vision so that you don't lose track of your role in the deeper evolutionary objective, which is, "Hey, let's do everything we can not to go extinct."