 Finally, one final point, which is something a little more amorphous, which is when we talk about the future of civilization, and when we talk about secularization and its impact on religion, and when we talk about concepts like truth, one of the things we're trying to find is the way we wish to live. And when we think about how we want to live, I think it's important to include within this whether you're religious or secular. I don't see how anybody can really live without a possibility of transcendence. Now you could ask me what I mean by transcendence, and we could be here for a week. But I don't see how the meaningful life that we all aspire to can be completely lacking in a concept of transcendence. And that's why I think the real battle intellectually, philosophically, the real challenge before us right now really is about the question of materialism. In the West we are living in an intellectual and social environment that seems to me to be unprecedentedly materialistic. And by materialistic I don't just mean shopping, though I also mean shopping, because consumerism is a part of that indifference that I spoke to. I mean most people if you ask them if God exists or not would prefer to go shopping. And that also has an impact about how we live. But I mean the idea that all of human life and all of natural life can be accounted for solely in material terms. Now you can argue about what the material causes are. They can be biological and genetic. They can be the kind of things that you understand. They are. They are, exactly. And they could be economic if you're a Marxist or you do a class analysis, etc., etc., etc. But if you believe that all of life, human and natural, can be accounted for materialistically and by all of human life I mean also the deep experiences of human life, the epiphanies, the experiences of courage and heroism and passion and ecstasy. And I mean the so-called peak experiences which come and go but they exist. If you believe that those experiences can be accounted for in material terms, you are on one side of a line, whatever you call yourself. And if you believe that materialism cannot account for the entirety of human and natural life, in the case of nature, for example, the emergence of consciousness, which is now, you know, the Catholic Church has its mystery, science now has its mystery, which is how on earth the consciousness emerged from matter, right? But if you believe that matter cannot account for all of it, you are on the other side of the line and the company there is very good. Brian, my friend Nietzsche wrote in 8080 in Morgenreuth at the dawn an age of barbarism is about to begin and the science will serve it. Do you agree with him? I don't and, you know, I think it's really worth exploring in answering that question, the issue that Leon raised in such provocative terms. What side of the line are you on? You know, are you on the side where it's materialism or the language that we often use, physicalism, that it's all stuff? Or is there something beyond stuff? And you're right, we don't, as scientists, fully know the answer to that question, but I strongly suspect it is all just stuff, governed by laws that can be quantified. So I'm here to defend a quantitative perspective, and yet I don't think at the end of what I say it will come across that I somehow am squashing or denigrating all of the key qualities like the transcendent that you and I value so firmly. I mean, if we put this in context, right, 13.8 billion years ago, the universe, at least the observable part, began in a rapid swelling of space that was filled with energy that then disintegrated into particles which under the force of gravity collapsed into stars and galaxies and planets and on one particular planet, the detritus left over from that process coalesced into bags of particles that surge with the currents of life and some of those surge with the currents of intelligent life and consciousness. We, I strongly believe, are all just bags of particles governed by physical law. And so will we be able to explain love and hate and jealousy and transcendence using this architecture of mathematics? Maybe one day, I don't think there's anything beyond the particles and the laws, but will that be the most useful explanation? No, I don't think so. If you want to understand the magnetic moment of the electron, we should use quantum field theory. If you want to understand why you have feelings for others in your community or why certain historical events take place, I don't think we're ever going to use the laws of physics to explain the crusades. And yet I don't think there was anything beyond the laws of physics that was in operation. And so you need to have nested stories at the fundamental level, use physics and particles and quantification in order to anchor your understanding or else you're floating in a sea of ideas that you don't know if they are right or they are wrong. The fact that we can calculate the magnetic properties of an electron to 10 decimal places and then do experiments and decimal by decimal show that they are verified, we can anchor our understanding in the quantitative. But I would never use that language to talk about things at the higher levels. I would use the language of ordinary human discourse, the words that we have invented in order to capture these wonderful qualities that we humans can experience. You just said and I repeat it because it's a famous line of you. We are all backs of particles ruled by laws of nature. The human soul, is that one of those mystical things you want to cut out? Say it one more time. The human soul, is that one of those because the human soul cannot be... It's also a back of particles. Look, let's be quite clear. One of the things we're talking about here is truth and that's really where we began. And Leon, you wonderfully noted that there is something called truth and truth means nothing if everyone has their own personal truth. I would say it's slightly different even though I completely agree with that. I would say there's something called objective truth, which science attempts to reveal. There's something else called subjective truth, which are the truths that matter to me as an individual and the things that allow my life to have meaning and purpose. And if an individual finds that the notion of soul is a subjective truth that allows their life to have greater richness and context and meaning and purpose, so be it. As long as they recognize that it is a subjective truth that they don't try then to spread among the objective truth that science is really good at revealing. Do you believe that objective truth can be sought outside the physical sciences? Do historians search for objective truth? No. This definition of objective truth are the base facts of physical reality. And then what we do as coherent collections of particles, we try to build narratives in order that experience both personal and society-wide makes sense. And that's what history is.