Brian Green: Why Christians Must Prevent Nuclear War

Nuclear War

May 19

Summary:

In this episode, we speak to Brian Green. Brian holds a doctorate degree in ethics and is currently the Director of Technology Ethics at the Markulla Center for Applied Ethics, at Santa Clara University in California. His work is focused on the ethics of emerging technology.

Some things we touch on in this episode:

The relationship between Christianity, technology, and existential risks.
Why we should be concerned about nuclear war as Christians.
What it might look like if there was some kind of nuclear catastrophe or exchange.
What do you and I need to do to prevent nuclear war.
Careers people need to fill in order to promote non-proliferation.

Articles, organizations, and other media discussed in this episode

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps is an organization of lay volunteers who volunteer one year or more to community service with poor communities.
CRISPR/Cas9 edits genes by precisely cutting DNA and then letting natural DNA repair processes to take over.
The Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of eight private independent American theological schools and eleven centers and affiliates that brings together scholars of the world's diverse religions.
Space Ethics by Brian Green provides a comprehensive introduction to ethics as it applies to space exploration and use.

Episode Highlights:

You have to actually be really careful about how you put things together and implement them

[00.02.35] “All those things need to have very careful kind of thinking done around how to actually apply them and make them to actually do something good. It's not just a matter of wanting things. All the good intentions in the world are not going to get you to actually have a positive impact. You have to actually be really careful about how you put things together and implement them.”

This lack of interest is no longer tenable

[00.15.35] “Christian theology has been remarkably uninterested in the subject of technology. This lack of interest is no longer tenable. Scholars of religion and theologians should seriously engage with technology because it is empowering humanity in ways that were previously reserved only for gods.”

I think that we should be particularly concerned about these issues because if we have the capacity

[00:23:39] “Yeah, I think as Christians who have a sense of sin and human shortcomings and limitations, I think that we should be particularly concerned about these issues because if we have the capacity, it's only a matter of making that capacity either engage intentionally or unintentionally. There's always the intentional let's blow up the world. Anybody who has the capacity to do that could try to make that happen. But there's also the accidental side of things because humans also fundamentally make mistakes…We are human beings, and there's always going to be imperfection in whatever we do, but better and worse…And so we always need to be trying our best to do the best job that we can”

We shouldn’t have these weapons

[00:40:52] “So I think the Catholic Church's position now can be described as advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons, which I think is a great theoretical commitment. I think it is a great Christian commitment. We shouldn't have these weapons. Humans are fundamentally not trustworthy with them. I think it's the fundamental question. We can't deal with having this level of power. However, there's no clear way to move from theory to practice on this problem.”

What can Christians do now?

[00:45:24] “And so when it kind of comes down to it, what can Christians do now, though? I think we have to recognize that, yes, the world is very complicated. There's both the mitigation of risk, in other words, the reduction of risk, and there's also the adaptation to risk. As we talked about these things before. What are some ways that we can adapt and make our world a safer place given the risk that we cannot remove from it? And both these strategies need to be taken.”

We need to use technology to make good easier and make evil harder?

[00:49:36] “We need to use technology to make good easier and make evil harder.We need to make doing bad things more difficult and we can use technology to do that…But what we should instead be doing is using technology to make the nuclear weapon smaller and slower…Just because if something slower, you have more time to make a decision. And if it's smaller, then you're more likely to decrease the total level of harm that comes if a mistake is made.”

God has entrusted us with freedom and God has entrusted us with trying to make the world better

[01:03:26] “I don't want to rely on divine intervention to protect us from something that we could fundamentally do ourselves. And I don't think that shows lack of faith in God. I think what it shows is that God has a lot of faith in us. God has entrusted us with freedom and God has entrusted us with trying to make the world better, trying to help us love our neighbors and glorify God and protect creation and all of those good things. And fundamentally, that is a trust that God has given to us, saying, I have faith in you, that you human beings are going to be able to handle this…we should try to live up to the trust that God has given us.”

Every technology is only good insofar as it actually helps people

[01:26:06] “Clearly seeing that technology is judged by ethics is not that every technology is good. Every technology is only good insofar as it actually helps people.”

[00:00:02.970] - JD
I'm JD, and this is the Christians for Impact podcast. We talk to Christians about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to impact them during and after university. Today, I speak with Brian Green on nuclear conflict and Christian careers promoting nonproliferation. Brian is the director of technology Ethics at the Marco Le Center for Applied Ethics in California. His work is focused on the ethics of technology. He has a doctor's degree in ethics, and he knows a lot about reducing nuclear risk, not just what that would mean ethically, but also practically we talk about the relationship between Christianity and technology and existential risks. We also talk about what it might look like if there was some kind of nuclear catastrophe or exchange, and also what you and I need to do and what careers people need to fill in order to prevent this from ever happening. It was a really interesting conversation. I learned a lot about it and just was encouraged that there are a lot of different paths people can take to address this quite specific problem. So I hope you enjoy the podcast. Brian, so good having you on.

[00:01:21.340] - Brian
Thank you. I'm happy to be here and glad that I can be a part of it.

[00:01:25.690] - JD
Could you please take a moment to share a bit about your background, what you studied and what it is you're doing now to impact the world?

[00:01:32.830] - Brian
Sure. So currently my job is I'm the Director of Technology Ethics at the Marcos Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. I work on ethics of emerging technologies, kind of fundamentally in a big picture sense, but especially the practical side of things. In other words, how do you actually solve these sorts of big technological ethical problems? Because it's one thing just to say, hey, we should be careful with technology. And it's a completely different thing to actually make that happen in a corporation where they are developing technology or in other sorts of locations or particular places where technology is being applied to. Whether it is space ethics or it is biotechnology or nuclear technology or AI or nanotechnology. All those things need to have very careful kind of thinking done around how to actually apply them and make them to actually do something good. It's not just a matter of wanting things. All the good intentions in the world are not going to get you to actually have a positive impact. You have to actually be really careful about how you put things together and implement them. And so just to kind of continue on with your question, how did I get here?

[00:02:49.930] - Brian
Because it is a kind of unusual place to be in. So I'll just give some of my faith story along with this also, which is that I was raised basically not believing in Christianity. I came from an atheist background. My father was atheist. My mother was a non practicing Catholic in school. I was not interested in religion, but I went to a Jesuit school in San Francisco. When I was at that Jesuit school, they put in enough ideas in my head that I saw that, okay, maybe Christianity is not completely irrational, which would be the way that everyone in secular society kind of talks about it, especially in California, where I'm from. Then when I went to college, I went to the University of California, Davis. I have a degree in genetics. From there, I started having a lot of questions, kind of big picture questions, and I also was hanging out with a lot of evangelical Christians. And it became apparent to me that I thought that the kind of secular worldview that I was coming from was actually not EAS reasonable as the Christian worldview. So at some point in college, I said, okay, I think I'm going to be a Christian now because it's a more sensible position to come from.

[00:04:05.790] - Brian
And then based on that, I continued with my studies of science, but I discovered that I actually didn't like laboratory work. I was doing genetic anthropology and plant biotechnology and those sorts of things. And the realization that I didn't like laboratory work was kind of devastating, because that's the way molecular biology works. You do stuff in laboratories, and if you don't, then you don't have a job.

[00:04:31.430] - JD
So you changed fields.

[00:04:33.990] - Brian
I did. I changed fields. I said, this is not going to work. Right after college, my wife and I got married. We joined an organization called the Jesuit Volunteers International, and we went to the Marshall Islands out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands are a group of basically coral atolls. If you know anything about coral atolls, they're just a ring, a reef, where an island used to be. And only the reef is left now because the rest of the island has eroded and subsided into the ocean. And so they're very small islands. They tend to be some of the bigger islands might be a mile long and 100 yards wide, so they're not very big.

[00:05:11.680] - JD
Aren't these one of the four island collections that are expected to go underwater in the next few years?

[00:05:17.750] - Brian
That's exactly right. There's the Marshall Islands. There's Tuvalu, there's the Maldives and then part of Kiribat. The Gilbert Islands. So they're all low lying coral apps, holes. And when sea level starts going up, they are nations that could be completely erased. But you're getting ahead of my story. So while I was out there, of course, this became apparent to me, which is that, wow, climate change and sea level rise is actually going to be doing something that humans have never been able to do before erase entire islands from the face of the earth. And it's not just that forward perspective that had an ethical valence to it. It was also looking to the past. The Marshall Islands were used by the United States for nuclear weapons testing. After World War II and we exploded, the biggest hydrogen bombs that the United States ever tested were tested in the Marshall Islands, weapons that are 1000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. And this, of course, negatively affected the islands. 10% of them are still not places that you can live because you can't eat the food there, you can go there, you can travel there, but you can't stay there for longer than a certain period of time and you especially can't eat the food there.

[00:06:29.770] - Brian
So this got me very interested in the ethical side of technology and oh, I should say the Marshall Islands are still used. There's a US military base out there and we still test ballistic missiles out there. So whenever anybody's talking about ballistic missiles and interceptors and trying to intercept ballistic missiles, that's involving Guadalin Atoll, which is where I was. I wasn't staying at the military base, I was on the island, which was next door to the military base, which is where the native marshalese workers live.

[00:06:58.310] - JD
So with your cup of coffee just flaw off the table and you'd say up, there was a nuclear bomb test today. How did that affect your day to day?

[00:07:07.190] - Brian
Nuclear testing stopped, thankfully, back in 1958. So that nuclear testing happened between 1946 and 1958. So long before I was there, I was there in 2001 to 2003. But there are certain fallout products that come from nuclear weapons which are long lasting and yet dangerous enough so they continue to basically act as poisons in the environment. It's caesium 137 and strontium 90. Strontium 90 acts like calcium. It goes into your body and it sits in your bones, or it sits in your muscles because they also use calcium. And then caesium 137 acts like potassium. So if you eat it, it goes into your body and it will act like potassium in your system. It tends to go through after a while. But strontium 90 is particularly bad, and both of them are quite bad because their half lives are about 30 years. So let's see if the testing ended in 58. We've been through what, like two half lives by now. It doesn't leave the environment very fast and these things are going to be around for a long time, continuing to make those places dangerous to human habitation. But kind of the rounding it all up is actually back up one step before I round it up, which is that I did see nuclear ballistic missiles enter the atmosphere.

[00:08:27.660] - Brian
I saw a Minute Man three reentry and it's like seeing three meteors followed by a little meteor behind it that's slower and burns up. That's the vehicle that holds the three warheads together. And when I saw this happen, it was a nighttime reentry. And I thought to myself, wow, if those are real, I'd be dead. And later on I told this to a person who EAS, a nuclear weapons designer, and I said, I was out in the Marshall Islands, I saw a minute man three re enter the atmosphere. And she said, oh, wow, that must have been really cool. And I said, yeah, I saw it. And I thought to myself, if those are real, I'd be dead. And she looked at me and she said, that's right. And I thought, wow. This confidence in your engineering skill to know that you're going to have a weapon of mass destruction that functions that way anyway. So to start wrapping this up, like I said, all of this got me very interested in the social impact of technology, because these islands were used for nuclear weapons testing, they're now used for ballistic missile and ballistic missile interceptor testing, and they're going underwater from climate change.

[00:09:30.440] - Brian
So if you want to look at all the nations on the Earth, the Marshall Islands are kind of the canary in the coal mine when it comes to technology ethics. They are a country that has been highly exposed to the negative impacts of technology, and ultimately, they're going to be one of the first nations that's wiped off the face of the planet. The sea level has already gone up about a little less than a foot, and if it goes up a little bit more, the islands are not going to be habitable anymore. They're only an average of 6ft out of the water at high tide. They're only maybe one or 2ft out of the water. So add some waves on top of that and your island isn't there anymore. So this got me, like I said, very interested in the ethics of technology. I went to graduate school at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I got my master's degree, which was on the master's degree was kind of a bridge between studying genetics and studying ethics. So it was on the Catholic Church's perspective on genetic therapy and enhancement when it comes to human beings.

[00:10:27.410] - JD
So this is like CRISPR technology.

[00:10:29.850] - Brian
So it would be any sort of technology that's directed towards changing human genetics, so it could be CRISPR? Yes, absolutely. But this is something where, once again, it kind of goes through summers and winters like AI does. This kind of idea of human genetic manipulation goes through summers and winters. So there was a period in the 1980s, for example, where everybody was talking about gene splicing, and it was very high on people's attention. Then it kind of went down for a while, and then it's come, of course, with CRISPR, it's come way back up again. So the Catholic Church has thoughts on this. Actually, they go all the way back to 1930s when the eugenics movement was happening. And so I studied those documents all the way up to the most recent ones that I could include in my dissertation. My dissertation was ten years ago, so it's a little out of date now. But then the general idea that came from that was that the Catholic Church is all right with anything that has a medical application to it. The Catholic Church, of course, runs a huge amount of health care, hospitals and clinics and things like that.

[00:11:38.130] - Brian
Any sort of technology that benefits healthcare is great, but if it comes to kind of more frivolous or however you want to describe these other sorts of genetic manipulations that are not towards a clear health goal, then they're not something that the church is going to necessarily get on board with very fast. And what it came down to is this actually facilitating the natural development of a human person towards what we are supposed to be as human creatures who are created by God. Anyway, so I thought my dissertation was great and that I was going to get hired by a theology department or a philosophy department somewhere in the country. And I applied for 50 jobs, and there weren't not any philosophy or theology departments who were interested in what I was doing. They were looking for people who were traditional doing traditional, quote unquote things having to do with theology.

[00:12:31.650] - JD
I imagine they're looking for aquinas scholars or those deep in antiquity on the.

[00:12:37.350] - Brian
Classical tradition, sort of, but not quite. The academia goes through fads, I would say. And so right now, Tomism and Aristotelianism and things like that are not in fashion. So the fact that I looked at technology kind of from that perspective made me not particularly fashionable either. However, I found them to be very useful lenses for looking at this kind of stuff. So they were looking for someone who was doing fashionable stuff for academic, religious studies and theology departments, and that didn't include technology, which surprised me. However, what I did is I got an adjuncting position at Santa Clara University School of Engineering teaching engineering Ethics. And I think this is a this is a credit to the engineers. The engineers saw this a big problem. We have so much technology right now, which is giving us huge amounts of power. It's giving us all these new ethical decisions. We don't know how to deal with them. What are we going to do? We need to hire somebody to teach our students how to think about ethical problems that come along with technology. So it was the engineering school that saw use for what I had studied, not a religious study department and not a philosophy department.

[00:13:47.040] - Brian
And religious studies and philosophy departments are starting to come around a little bit, but not that much yet. I think there have been a couple of schools that have become a little bit more amenable to thinking about technology in religious studies or theology or philosophy. But still, it's really engineering schools, a lot of them, that are being forced to lead the way because they literally need someone to work on these sorts of issues because they're an engineer and they look at it and say, I don't know what to do. And so they ask, hey, can you help me think about this? And so that's what I started doing. That's what I still do now. And that kind of brings me to the position that I am in working with corporations and students and various organizations around the world, like the Catholic Church, just trying to figure out what to do with technology and how to make sure that technology is being put towards its best uses and not towards its worst uses.

[00:14:44.570] - JD
It's a very unique story. Thank you for sharing. I expect you didn't plan to go this path when you were studying genetics, but in some sense, even though you're out of the lab, you're much more into science in general. And you're able to affect quite a lot in this abstract and indirect way that you're discussing these themes and discussing many different fields of research all at once and the issues that you're talking about. I'm not used to hearing a lot of these things from a theologian in churches. Growing up, the theologians I had contact with talked a lot about the theological issues, classical theology, and if technology came up, then we would talk about social media or video games. I didn't hear much about issues like nuclear proliferation or biosecurity or AI, but you seem to think that theology should should be more engaged with these issues. You wrote once that Christian theology has been, quote, remarkably uninterested in the subject of tech. This lack of interest is no longer tenable. Scholars of religion and theologians should seriously engage with technology because it is empowering humanity in ways that were previously reserved only for gods.

[00:15:54.370] - JD
When I think about the Marshall Islands, it's also an incredible story. I'm sure it was a surreal experience, this island that is constantly in existential threat. In some ways, what I hear you're saying is that that's the situation all of humanity is in. We all have these rising tides, and the waves may be, for some of us, waves caused by climate change, but they could also be waves of nuclear war. Thinking of all of these risks, what are the technologies that you're most concerned about?

[00:16:26.490] - Brian
Yeah, so those are great questions. I think you just raised several of them right there. Probably the most pressing threat right now is nuclear. Nuclear has always been the biggest problem. Ever since nuclear weapons were developed, and especially during the Cold War, things were completely out of control. There were a lot of near misses. There were lots of bad things that happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. There were multiple points in the Cuban Missile Crisis where nuclear war almost started, and it was just one person who said, no, I'm not going to do it. I believe President Kennedy afterwards, he said he thought the risk of global thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was something between a quarter and a third. That's bad. That's a bad situation to be in that means something screwed up seriously in order to have that happen. And after that, things have kind of receded a bit. But with the war in Ukraine, the one thing that Vladimir Putin likes to keep talking about over and over again is just reminding everyone we have nuclear weapons. That's his kind of get out of jail free card, which is that nobody can really engage them too closely because nobody wants to have this sort of horrible thing happen.

[00:17:45.190] - Brian
So nuclear is definitely number one. There's a professor at Stanford named Martin Hellman who he won the Turing Prize because he invented public key encryption back in the 1970s. But he's been very interested in he basically dedicated his life to nuclear arms reductions ever since then. And he says that he expects the rate of nuclear war per year as being something like 1%. But as soon as the war in Ukraine started, he said that he thought the rate had gone from about 1% per year to something more like 1% per month. Which is pretty terrifying when you think about it, because not a whole lot of months go by before you're in a situation where you pass kind of the 50 50 threshold and you have to do the probabilities in whatever way you do them. But a few years go by and you've really been in a high risk situation for a long time.

[00:18:40.870] - JD
He's probably also looking at stats for individual nuclear strikes with smaller devices too, right? Like so called tactical nukes.

[00:18:48.990] - Brian
Yeah, I mean, these are really terrible things. Now, one of the distinctions to make would be a distinction between global catastrophic risk and an existential risk. And most people, and I agree with them, say that the risk from thermonuclear war a large scale thermonuclear war is a global catastrophic risk. It's not necessarily an extinction risk because there are actually a lot of people on the planet were spread out all over the place. But the Northern hemisphere, of course, would be particularly hard hit, and the Southern hemisphere would not be as badly hit, most likely. So people would most likely survive. But still, you're talking about double digit percentages of the human population being killed by this. And it's not just the immediate blast. It's the fallout where you can't eat anything because there's no food, that you can't grow food anymore because all the plants become contaminated with things like season 137, like I was just saying. So those those are definite dangers that we are living with right now, I think. At the same time, there are a lot of not to get people super alarmed about this, but there are a lot of people working against this also.

[00:20:01.790] - Brian
Nobody wants this to happen, but the current way that the world system is set up is not as stable as it should be. And so the question is, are there ways that we can make this a more stable system? Are there ways that we can increase not only mitigate the risk in other words, reduce the risk overall, but also adapt to it. There's a certain amount of risk that can't be removed. Are there ways that we can adapt to it in terms of having places that are safer on the world? Are there refuges that you can set up, for example, like islands?

[00:20:35.190] - JD
You've written that islands might be a place to take refuge in a nuclear disaster. Could you give us a 32nd pitch on that?

[00:20:42.850] - Brian
Turns out that islands are great places generally to take refuge from disasters because they're surrounded by water. Water has a more consistent temperature. So if something like a nuclear winter scenario happens then they're likely to stay a little bit warmer. Especially if you're in somewhere that's a warm island, then you're more likely to if you're closer to the equator, you'll get more sunlight so you'll be less likely to starve. And then the Southern hemisphere has a lot of islands in it too. So they're good as refuges not only from something like a nuclear scenario but also from something like an asteroid striking the earth or a pandemic. If you look at the nations that did the best in response to COVID-19, there are very often island countries. New Zealand, for example, would be the prime example of this. They did a really good job. And actually, one thing that kind of makes me happy sometimes is that there are some particular researchers in New Zealand who have talked about New Zealand being a great place to basically harbor human civilization if a disaster happens. And they sometimes cite that paper. So that makes me happy.

[00:21:54.690] - Brian
And yeah, just in general, islands are resilient in a lot of ways. They also have a lot of weaknesses to them and that they are small. It's very hard. If you were going to try to run an entire industrial civilization just in New Zealand, it would be very difficult. You could do it with Australia, but New Zealand is too small and the smaller the island gets, the more difficult it is to run a certain level of society. So if you get down to the very smallest you're going to be ending up returning to the Stone Age and then you might just be trapped on that island forever.

[00:22:26.910] - JD
Being trapped in New Zealand in the Stone Age sounds to me a lot like Lord of the Rings but without the magic. So, yeah, I'll pass on that. I have a question for you about how risks from nuclear weapons and nuclear extinction change. EA EA EA for Christians should view these risks higher than secular estimates. A survey of academics at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference by the University of Oxford estimated about a 1% chance of human extinction from nuclear wars over the 21st century. And there is a range of estimates here. But given that, it seems like a lot of this hangs on not just a national actor making a mistake, but also an intentional individual or group keen on destroying humanity. It seems like that's something Christianity has views on. Christian anthropology says at least most interpretations are that humans are very deeply sinful, that there is original sin. We can debate about what that means, but we all seem to have this sense of human fallenness and that it's possible for someone to want to destroy humanity.

[00:23:39.910] - Brian
Yeah, I think as Christians who have a sense of sin and human shortcomings and limitations, I think that we should be particularly concerned about these issues because if we have the capacity, it's only a matter of making that capacity either engage intentionally or unintentionally. There's always the intentional let's blow up the world. Anybody who has the capacity to do that could try to make that happen. But there's also the accidental side of things because humans are also fundamentally make mistakes. A lot of the time we get bad information or we just do something accidentally, which was a bad choice. So one thing I would say about this is that one of the things that people talk about in safety engineering is how do you make a reliable system out of unreliable parts because any particular single part is going to be unreliable. Is there a way you can set up a system so that the overall system is much more reliable than individual parts? And the answer is yes, there is a way to set up systems like that, but you can never get to perfection because fundamentally, there's no way that you can take into account everything that could go wrong.

[00:24:53.620] - Brian
If you're engineering against asteroid strikes, then you can't build anything. We'd have to put our entire civilization underground. And even then we'd be dealing with different sorts of problems of being underground. So to a certain extent, every system is going to be able to fail at some point. And we shouldn't purely think about this in a mechanical way because you can think of it as the same with humans and social institutions. How do you make a sinless institution out of sinful human beings? If you want to look at it from a more human perspective or theological perspective, and the answer is you can't. We can always do better and worse. So that's really one of the things that I try to emphasize in my work, which is that perfection is not possible. We are human beings, and there's always going to be imperfection in whatever we do, but better and worse. Ara very real. We can do better and we can do worse. And so we always need to be trying our best to do the best job that we can. And also we can set up systems that kind of mitigate the dangers of sin.

[00:25:57.110] - Brian
A lot of times, if you set up to make sure that there's a check on somebody. So, for example, if you have engineers designing something, you have somebody on their team which says, hey, can we do better on this part? Or if you have a company that's being run by a person who's making bad ethical choices, is there a way that the government can regulate them just because FTX is in the news recently with crypto. There's been a big disaster there, and it's obviously very relevant to the EA community right now. There's an example of where people could have stepped in earlier in order to prevent this disaster from happening. And so once again fallible human beings. If you want to call it sin, if you want to call it just plain ignorance or limitations, whatever you want to call it, we're going to make mistakes. We can set up systems that are better and worse, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement, I guess would be the way I would describe it right now.

[00:26:53.750] - JD
Let's talk about that room for improvement in the nuclear space before moving on to some more theological and philosophical considerations about existential risks. More broadly, it sounds like putting checks on power. In the case of nuclear, it sounds like that involves having anti insanity checks, having checks and balances for the president's power, or for other rulers power who could make a reckless decision, get access to the launch codes, and act on some kind of nihilistic tendency. What are the steps that we need to do to stop that kind of thing from happening? I imagine in the US that would involve a lot of policy change to implement the right structures. We probably are close to it now, but there's probably some work we can still do. Sounds much less tractable or solvable in other countries. We can't just change how the Soviet Union sets up its launch permission systems. Do you think that's a particularly important control question, or are there other issues that are even more important for controlling nuclear use?

[00:28:01.840] - Brian
Yeah, so that's a huge question right there. In the United States, I think in the US. I think we generally have pretty good control of our nuclear weapons. We have checks and balances. We have rules where you have to have two people involved in any one of these kind of decisions. They have to have permissive action links. In other words, you can't do it unless you have certain types of information exchanged. But if you talk about other countries like Russia or North Korea, there's no such luck, right? These autocratic countries are not going to be in firm control of their nuclear weapons in the same way that the United States or another Western country is, or even China. I mean, it's very likely. Every country is very secretive about their nuclear information and systems, overall governance systems. But China is always a country that's very top down centralized control. So it's very likely that that would be something that's under firm control there. Whereas something in Russia, we've seen Russia's military just. Plan falling apart in Ukraine. Very poor coordination, very poor ability to execute orders, very poor ability to follow orders. And so all these sorts of things would likely compound into making them not as capable of controlling their nuclear armaments as other people.

[00:29:32.230] - Brian
So then what measures could be taken? This comes down to a real difficult problem, right? Because we're in basically something like a prisoner's dilemma, where everyone is trying to figure out whether they need to kill each other. I guess it's not exactly a prisoner's dilemma. It's a variation on that problem, though.

[00:29:50.170] - JD
Well, this gets us into Game theory and into mutually assured destruction, right? So the thinking is, well, it's going to be the case that if we wage some kind of large scale nuclear war against other countries, that they're going to wage it back and destruction, whether from direct explosions or the fallout from them, it's mutually assured, so no one's going to do it. I think that's enough to deter others from acting. It's been a while since I took Game theory, but is that how it works? If you have some kind of Prisoner's dilemma game where both actors have infinite negative utility, if they don't cooperate, then they will cooperate. Help me out here. Is that enough to get us through this crisis?

[00:30:33.870] - Brian
So there are always limitations to game theory, is one thing I would say, which is that in the game you need to be able to attribute who's doing things. If you don't have attribution, then it doesn't work. And so it's one thing during the Cold War, when there are only basically two sides who had nuclear ballistic missile submarines. There EAS the Warsaw Pact in NATO, and of course China was there too. But you knew if there was a submarine launched missile and it hit a certain side, then it was obviously the other side that did it. Nowadays, if you have a country like North Korea and they make a ballistic missile submarine, they're claiming to be able to do these things, or they're trying to. They're working on it, although they've been faking a lot of it too. But if they did something like that, we wouldn't know whether it was North Korea or China or Russia or you multiply the number of actors and all of a sudden attribution becomes impossible and deterrence fails. And there ara other situations too, right? There's accidents, there's crazy people. If a crazy person involved, they are not deterred because maybe they think something good will happen if they die in some sort of suicidal attack.

[00:31:43.030] - Brian
So there are all these sorts of other ways that deterrence fails. And they're very well studied. In my space ethics book, I talk about war in space, and in that chapter on war in space, I talk about deterrence theory. And I come up with ten ways that deterrence fails. Some of them are the ones that I just described, but it turns out that deterrence because it's fundamentally psychological, only works when you're dealing with people with a certain type of psychology. And IFP you're dealing with someone who doesn't have that type of psychology or that sort of cultural perspective, shared reality with the other players in the game, then deterrence doesn't work anymore, and you have to figure out are there better ways to stop this from happening? Maybe we need an international treaty. So the United Nations, for example, has had a treaty floating around for a while, which would be a ban on nuclear weapons. The United Nations already has a ban on biological weapons and a ban on chemical weapons. That doesn't mean that biological weapons don't exist. They absolutely do exist, and they can be made by the countries that don't have them.

[00:32:50.390] - Brian
But it's very likely Russia has a fairly extensive stockpile of biological weapons, for example, just because it seems like their government actually doesn't control their military when it comes to that question. And so there are these various different ways we can pass treaties, and then there's a matter of treaty enforcement. And basically, fundamentally, the nuclear nations don't want to participate in this treaty, is the other thing. They see that as long as they have the nuclear weapons, it doesn't really matter what other people say. So I'm not sure whether we're going to come to a point in the future where this is something that can be restricted. I think we can certainly reduce nuclear weapons, but the question of whether they can never be completely eliminated, I think is a huge question. But just the reduction itself would be a huge step forward.

[00:33:42.250] - JD
One story worth mentioning now seems to be the story of falling stockpiles. Over the last 60 years or so, we used to have as many as 60 70,000 nuclear weapons around the world, and now we're down to about 10,000. So you could say there's a six or seven folder reduction in nuclear weapons right there.

[00:34:01.940] - Brian
Right?

[00:34:02.320] - JD
But 10,000 bombs still sounds like a lot to me. And I know most of these are in the hands of U. S. And Russia, but there are many other states who have weapons. I think we started out with five who were allowed, and then a few others took it upon themselves to obtain these weapons illegally. I think that's Israel, Pakistan, India, north Korea. And I'm curious if you think that we are currently at the status quo if we shouldn't expect any more countries to develop nuclear weapons, where do we see things going from here?

[00:34:37.470] - Brian
I think there is, unfortunately, strong incentive towards nations to keep or develop nuclear weapons. So, for example, Ukraine used to have nuclear weapons and they gave them up in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, among others. And if Ukraine had nuclear weapons, there's no doubt that Russia would not have invaded them. I think that sets a really strong negative example towards anyone giving up their nuclear weapons. And the fact that North Korea can basically do whatever they want to with impunity now is a strong argument in favor of having them. So, for example, the United States would invade Iraq. But the United States is not going to invade North Korea. So unfortunately there's a strong incentive towards bad behavior in this field and the only way to overcome that is to basically make them obsolete. And the way to make nuclear weapons obsolete is to have everybody not be in opposition to each other anymore. So for example, nobody worries about a nuclear war between the United States and Britain because the United Kingdom and the United States are friends. And the same thing with France. Nobody in the United States worries about nuclear war with France.

[00:35:50.590] - Brian
We only worry about nuclear wars with people who are opposed to us in some kind of fundamentally competitive or ideological sense. And therefore that has to be the solution to the problem. It has to be fundamentally one which facilitates global cooperation and integration to make war fundamentally unthinkable.

[00:36:15.190] - JD
Do you have any intuitions about what might work best in the long term? You mentioned the US and France and how it would be unthinkable if they were to engage in nuclear war. How do we make it so that it's unthinkable that the US and Russia would engage in nuclear war? It doesn't sound like that's going to happen anytime soon. It doesn't sound like there are any quick or easy solutions for this.

[00:36:38.590] - Brian
There are no quick solutions. However, what there are is the exercise of reality over time I might be able to describe it, which is that if you're a country where people are making better choices, then overall your country should do better over time. If you're in a country where people are making worse choices, then overall your country is going to end up worse over time. Ethics is a fundamental part of that because ethics should be able to tell you which of the two paths you are on or could move towards or away from. And fundamentally, culture is what you have to talk about there. The reason that nobody in the United States wants to go to war with France or Britain is because we're fundamentally friends with them. These are countries back up 400 years and everyone was in bloody hated conflict with each other. And even Germany and France just in World War II were basically killing each other. That was what World War II was. That's no unthinkable. Germany and France are not going to go to war with each other. That's not thinkable anymore. That's because the culture of Germany fundamentally changed in a lot of ways.

[00:37:51.940] - Brian
They moved away from militarism and they moved towards a more economic perspective on reality. But not just that. Also they had a turn away from autocracy and towards democracy. And I think that on the kind of political or cultural level, there's very important changes to be made there, which is that democracies don't wage war on each other. Democracies do get into wars with autocracies, and autocracies also fight each other. But for some reason, when countries become democracies, they lose interest in fighting other democracies. And this is a studied phenomenon in kind of war theory of war. So the more democracies we can have in the world and the stronger we can make the democracies that we already have, then the safer the world is likely to be.

[00:38:40.790] - JD
This sounds like an area where the Church can speak truth into. Right. The Catholic Church famously criticized the first use of the nuclear bomb, I think, the day after the first bomb was dropped. And it reminds me and others of Leonardo DA Vinci, who, among other designs, he had a design of a particularly heinous weapon that he, for reasons of his faith, decided not to develop. We didn't, unfortunately, get to that point when it came to nuclear bombs. The Catholic Church EAS maintained this stance and Pope Francis reaffirmed this stance in 2015 that the use of nuclear weapons is strictly immoral and it's an abomination. What do you think the Catholic Church should be doing now and the Church at large should be doing now to lead to de escalation? And how can a Church play a part in the long term culture change that makes war unthinkable?

[00:39:34.310] - Brian
Yeah, this is a super interesting question because if you back up into the Cold War, it was always understood that communism hates religion, it hates Christianity, it hates the Catholic Church, it doesn't get along with religion at all. And we can see countries that are still communist, are still highly anti Christian and anti religion. And so during the Cold War, there was kind of this deal that was struck between, I would say, Christians, including the Catholic Church, and the Western world, which is that we know that you're protecting us and therefore nuclear weapons are fundamentally kind of protecting us in that way. And you're protecting us against an organization which is atheist and fundamentally wants to take over the world and destroy all religion. That's no longer the case. In fact, Russia has become nominally quite Eastern Orthodox or Russian Orthodox now, although the Russian Orthodox Church, I would say, has an awful lot of problems in terms of being allied to the Russian state. And so the papacy of Pope Francis has moved towards not just condemning the use of nuclear weapons, but away from condemning even the possession of them, which is kind of a fundamental shift, saying that fundamentally these things should be abolished.

[00:40:52.860] - Brian
So I think the Catholic Church's position now can be described as advocating abolition of nuclear weapons, which I think is a great theoretical commitment. I think it is a great Christian commitment. We shouldn't have these weapons. Humans are fundamentally not trustworthy with them. I think it's the fundamental question. We can't deal with having this level of power. However, there's not a clear way to move from theory to practice on this problem. Like we've just been saying up until now, it's not like unilateral nuclear disarmament is going to make the world safer. In fact, it makes things a lot worse. And the disarmament problem is always it's the question of people have described it as you have a group of people with several guns all pointed at each other and who's going to put the gun down first. And the question is, it's not quite that easy. Right. But maybe you can reduce the size of the gun.

[00:41:46.190] - JD
So when you say disarmament makes things worse, you mean in the short term, there's some kind of heightened disequilibrium?

[00:41:53.350] - Brian
Exactly. Disarmament is an unstable situation, and so you have to figure out how you actually do that disarmament process. And right now, the world is going basically going the wrong direction. China is building more nuclear missile silos. We don't know whether those silos are going to have real missiles in them or fake missiles, because maybe they're just there to absorb, they're there to act as targets. Basically, they put them out in the middle of the desert. That way if anyone attacks them, they'll attack those silos. Because that's one of the first things you do in a nuclear attack, is destroy the other side's nuclear weapons. So those could just be dummies that act as a way to distract any enemy who's attacking them. But they could be real. And obviously, relationship between the west and Russia right now is also really bad. I think there are opportunities to move forward, but it has to be done very carefully. One other thing I want to say on the point of view, talking about the numbers of nuclear weapons going down over time from the Cold War until now, it's not just numbers, it's also the size of the weapons.

[00:42:58.020] - Brian
So during the Cold War, nuclear weapons were really big. They were megaton scale weapons. A lot of the time talking about things that are nine megatons or ten megatons or 20 what would be ten.

[00:43:10.650] - JD
Megatons relative to the Hiroshima bomb.

[00:43:13.010] - Brian
So it would be anything that's in the megaton range is about 1000 times bigger than the Hiroshima weapon. So we're talking things that don't just destroy the inner part of a city, they destroy the entire city and everything around it. But most nuclear weapons now have reduced down from being 1000 times the size of the Hiroshima weapon to being something more like ten times or ten times is still huge, but they're about ten times that size or maybe 50 times that size. So the size of the weapons has decreased significantly. And that's also really important when it comes to global effects of these weapons in terms of fallout and in terms of their likelihood of creating a nuclear winter.

[00:43:53.290] - JD
So it sounds like the Catholic Church has taken as extreme a stance as it can. It doesn't have an enforcement mechanism like it did many hundreds of years ago. Do you have any other ideas of other ways that the Catholic Church or the global non Catholic Church can influence this issue?

[00:44:11.360] - Brian
Yeah, I think fundamentally Christianity, we should have a sense of human sin and we should also have a sense of the fact that very bad things can happen. All you have to do is read the Bible and see that there are all these examples of terrible things happening. All you have to do is look at human history and see examples of really terrible things happening. We should have this perspective of deep time because the Church has been around 2000 years. I'm not just talking about the Catholic Church, I'm talking about Christianity overall. And in that time the Roman civilization collapsed at one point and empires rise and fall and we've seen these things happen. And so we should be aware that any stable situation that we get into with nuclear weapons is likely to become an unstable situation at some point in the future because things change over time and once again we're fundamentally human beings with limitations and inabilities to do things correctly and fundamentally also sin. So backing up once again to the Cold War. So I know a couple of people who were nuclear weapons designers and the Bay Area, the reason they live in the Bay Area is because we designed them at a laboratory in the Bay Area and they're very devoted Christians.

[00:45:24.540] - Brian
They became nuclear weapons designers because nuclear weapons were going to protect us from the evil communists. And some of them, I don't think they actually regret what they did. I think they recognized that at the time it certainly seemed like the right thing to do. And even now maybe it still seems like the right thing to do. And there are certainly arguments to be made that if you're fundamentally in a competition between good and evil, then the good side needs to be at least as powerful as the evil side. However, the evil side is always going to think that they're good too. So you have this kind of conflicting perspectives problem. And so when it kind of comes down to it, what can Christians do now, though? I think we have to recognize that, yes, the world is very complicated. There's both the mitigation of risk, in other words, the reduction of risk, and there's also the adaptation to risk. Like we talked about these things before. What are some ways that we can adapt and make our world a safer place given the risk that we cannot remove from it? And both these strategies need to be taken.

[00:46:36.430] - Brian
And I think there's a lot more that can be done on the risk mitigation side of things. But it's a difficult thing to try to get people to cooperate with each other unless they recognize that they're fundamentally not enemies. We need to use Christian terminology. We need to love our enemies. How do you love your enemies? You make them not your enemy anymore. I'm not sure if this is a real quote from Abraham Lincoln or not, but supposedly he said, do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend? And that mentality, it's a fundamentally Christian mentality. How do you destroy your enemies? You make them your friends. And if we can do that, then that would be great. However, not everybody wants to be your friend. We've seen this with recent times, have made this very clear. Not everybody wants to be your friend. No matter what you do, you can be as friendly as you want to be. And if they still want to exploit you and do bad things to you, they're going to do that because human sin is inevitable. And so this is kind of, once again, the fundamental problem.

[00:47:41.010] - Brian
I think there's a lot of room for improvement. Like I said, there's perfections, impossible. Better and worse are very real. And the question is how do we aim towards the better? And I think there are lots of opportunities to do that. But it's going to be a long term process and so we have to do the best we can given that this is a long term project.

[00:48:01.450] - JD
So I want to spend some time now talking about potential policy solutions and I want to get your opinion on each of these. We talked a bit about insanity checks a bit earlier. How important do you think it is to invest in early warning systems or other detection methods in the event of some kind of nuclear build up in some other country?

[00:48:22.770] - Brian
So I'll just go with the question of early warning systems. Every country needs to trust their own early warning system. So as long as they trust their early warning system, they're fine. But if they feel like their early warning system is inaccurate, or if they trust it in such a way that they shouldn't be. So for example, it's a faulty system that keeps giving false positives or other sorts of bad data, then you need to fix it so that you can actually trust it. Because if you're getting bad data from your early warning system, that just sets you up for making a bad choice because you have bad information to act on. So there's that kind of fundamental thing. It would actually be good to get more, I would say more certainty about this and also slow down the speed of warfare in a lot of ways. There's always this incentive to accelerate the speed of warfare, but when it comes to something like efficiency of killing people, you want to slow it down. So one of the things I say kind of as a motto, which is that we need to use technology to make good easier and make evil harder.

[00:49:36.430] - Brian
We need to make doing bad things more difficult and we can use technology to do that unfortunately there's kind of this tendency or this logic built into technology, which is that more efficiency is better. So if your nuclear weapon kills more people faster, then that's a better nuclear weapon. But what we should instead be doing is using technology to make the nuclear weapon smaller and slower and especially and of course, we don't want to have an imbalance between the sides because like I said, that's destabilizing. But if both sides can agree that they're not going to have nuclear weapons that are very large in other words, very large yield megaton scale weapons and if they agree that they're going to get rid of ballistic missiles for example. Or if they can trust that they can work with slower weapons of some sort, that's really the better way to do it. Just because if something slower, you have more time to make a decision. And if it's smaller, then you're more likely to decrease the total level of harm that comes if a mistake is made. We just had some sort of accident just happened on the border between Poland and Ukraine and there's controversy.

[00:50:50.340] - Brian
Was it a Russian missile that went astray? Is it a Ukrainian weapon that went astray? What exactly happened there? We're lucky that it was small and that it was something that we can talk about and try to figure out what happened there and that we don't have to rush to a conclusion within five minutes. Because IFP you are put in that conclusion of there's a massive attack coming and I have five minutes to decide, that's a bad situation to have to make any sort of decision in.

[00:51:18.990] - JD
You've done work in space ethics. How do spacebased systems play a role here in nuclear threat reduction, especially space based defense systems? Is this something we should be hesitant to adopt? Or is this something we really need to defend ourselves against bad actors?

[00:51:38.830] - Brian
So that's an interesting question. There was an anti Ballistic Missile Treaty that was in effect for a long time. The United States pulled out of it under the second Bush administration because we wanted to start making ballistic missile interceptors once again. Technology all explored in the Marshall Islands wanted to make those real. We wanted to put them into action. And so we withdrew from that treaty. Theoretically, that means we can do all sorts of space based stuff too, if we want to. Although the Outer Space Treaty limits the idea of having weapons platforms or weapons of mass destruction in space. So the Outer Space Treaty theoretically bans those in the United States would have to withdraw from that treaty also. But in some ways the whole reason that that ban existed was because they were seen as destabilizing, which is that if you have two people with swords ready to hit each other and then one person swings, the other person swings, and the fights over, they're both dead. On the other hand, if one of them picks up a shield, all of a sudden the situation EAS, become unstable. And so that's what the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty was about.

[00:52:45.740] - Brian
It was about preventing people from picking up shields. It's the same reason that the United States actually didn't want to have massive civil defense infrastructure during the Cold War. In other words, we could have passed a law that says every building is supposed to have a nuclear fallout shelter. And if we had done that, we would have been better able to withstand a nuclear attack if we were hit. But because of that logic of mutually assured destruction, we kind of made, I think it was just a tacit agreement, not an explicit agreement with Russia, which is that neither side was going to do that. That way, mutually assured destruction would not be destabilized.

[00:53:21.410] - JD
It's very unintuitive logic. I would imagine someone, a policymaker trying to convince a state, say California, to adopt bomb shelters throughout the state. You can imagine the fear that was calculating present at that time in the then somebody saying, no, well, we want it to be a quick finish if it happens, we don't want to create more defenses and make it more likely by means of creating this kind of sword and shield scenario like you described. It just sounds so difficult a pill to swallow. I'm surprised we ever refrained from that. But you're saying that it's a similar situation in the space race that if we develop more defense systems, that actually makes offense perhaps more likely.

[00:54:12.450] - Brian
Yeah, that was one of the problems that people had. Ronald Reagan, when he was president, had his idea of a Star Wars defense system, which would be a bunch of satellites in space, and whenever the Russians shot missiles at them, then we just shoot their missiles down. Turns out it's super difficult. It's not an easy thing at all to do. It's taken until now, the last decade perhaps, before interceptors are actually fairly reliable.

[00:54:39.690] - JD
Makes for great movies. You see it all the time in Sci-Fi movies nowadays.

[00:54:44.480] - Brian
That's right. There are solutions to these problems too, right. If you put up a shield, then somebody says, oh, well, we'll just figure out a way around your shield. So the Russians have been coming up with very, very long range cruise missiles. They've been coming up with giant nuclear torpedoes that are autonomous and go underwater and wouldn't be vulnerable to antiblistic missile defenses. There's always a way to escalate the problem to a worse level, and fundamentally you have to make it so the two sides don't want to fight with each other. There's a great line from Pope John the 23rd. He wrote an encyclopedo called Patcham and Terrace, which means peace on Earth. And he said, we have to have a disarmament that goes right into human, into our very souls. There's no way to fundamentally stop this arms race from happening unless we actually don't want to have an arms race. It has to be something that goes penetrates all the way to our very heart, to our very soul. We have to not want these weapons anymore. And the only way to do that is to once again, to not have enemies. And I think the logic of Christianity there is very clear, which is that we have to love our enemies and we have to figure out a way so that our enemies also can figure out how to love us.

[00:56:04.530] - Brian
We have to figure out how to be lovable in that way. How we do that is really difficult because once again, sin makes it very difficult. It's not like you can just go up to Vladimir Putin and give him a big hug and say, we're friends now. Not going to work that way. But there are other solutions to make this problem better. I think fundamentally the world is on that path, but once again, it's going to take a long time and it's going to take a lot of improving human institutions, institutions that are devoted towards peace.

[00:56:38.110] - JD
Is it true that during the 60s, when tensions about the Cold War and a nuclear change between the US. And Russia were at its highest, that this issue was at its most popular among the population in general, but specifically among Christians? Nowadays it seems like there's not only less general concern, but also less specific Christian concern. I've never heard a sermon in a Protestant church about nuclear war. At least if I did, I don't remember. It's probably my fault there if I did. But it seems like a profoundly Christian message that we should protect the destruction not only of human life, which is holy in many ways, but also of the life of this world and the created order which God calls us to steward. Is it in fact true that back in the 60s this was a more not just popular issue, but distinctively Christian issue? And are there movements alive today within Christian communities or churches that are focusing on this?

[00:57:47.190] - Brian
So this is a great question. The first thing I would say is that I think the signal to noise ratio between the 1960s and now is very different. I think churches actually got people's attention back in the 1960s, whereas nowadays Christianity is significantly weakened in the entire Western world. And also it's a difference between theory and practice. So in theory, the the Catholic Church has very explicitly stated that it is anti even possession of nuclear weapons. At this point. However, in practice, what does that turn into? Do you hear about that in church? Do you hear about there are organizations, there are Christian peace organizations for sure. But how much effect do they have? Do they actually have bishops supporting them? Is this just something that Pope Francis is saying and nobody else in the church is hearing about? So once again, the signal to noise ratio is important and also. The theory versus practice distinction, I think, is really important because there are, of course, also lots of other Christians who are in government who think that we ought to have probably even more nuclear weapons. And they have a logic to what they're saying right.

[00:59:02.110] - Brian
Which is that these weapons fundamentally act as deterrence. It's a terrible, terrible thing you're threatening to do. The gravest crimes in the history of humanity, the greatest sins that any human can do short of deocide, which of course humans did when we killed Jesus. And so it's not a situation that's easily gotten out of. It's going to take a long time of people trying to become better and trying to make the world a better place. But a lot of the things about the culture has actually become a lot more difficult since the 1960s, I would say.

[00:59:42.010] - JD
I want to move on to talk about some criticisms of some EAS we've been discussing. So one is that it's perhaps not the calling of Christians to be concerned about catastrophic or existential risks, and existential risks in particular. There is one view that God will defend the Earth from all future catastrophes. We read in the story of Noah that God sent this rainbow as a blessing and also as a promise that something involving a flood would never occur again. We read in the Gospels Jesus's texts about not being concerned about tomorrow, not being anxious for each day will take care of its own troubles. Some might argue that concern for the end of the world is quite sci GFI and that concerns here are driven by some kind of underlying anxiety. Do you think there's a compelling Christian case to focus just on near term issues and let God focus on long term issues? It doesn't also seem like this is something that many of us have in our hands to control. Right. What do you make of this, but especially this idea that it's God's role to take care of existential concerns and it's our role to take care of everyday concerns?

[01:00:59.330] - Brian
Yeah. Every time I hear that, I think to myself that there are a lot of people who have died in genocides around the Earth who really would have wished that God had stepped in. Right. We live in a universe where God has given us freedom, and the fact that we have freedom means that we can do very bad things with that freedom if we want to. And so I do not think we should assume that God is going to step in and save us from everything. And also that's not the way that fundamentally a good parent would necessarily do things. I mean, obviously when you're talking about mass murder and things like that, you'd really maybe like God to interfere. But God's logic doesn't operate on the same level that ours does, because God is thinking more about the ultimate end of human souls in heaven with Him, rather than necessarily things that are happening here. And that's a scary thing to think about. It's terrifying in a lot of ways. It's terrifying that God's given us that much freedom is basically what I would say. So what I would say in addition to that, is that God has also said that we're supposed to love our neighbor.

[01:02:06.530] - Brian
And if we're supposed to love one neighbor and two neighbors and three, then we should certainly love one or two or 3 million or one or two or 3 billion. It's just a matter of scaling at that point. And so if you're talking about whether we should care about these very large scale issues, the answer is absolutely yes. We've been given a mission to try to make the world a better place. We ara to love God and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and to even love our enemies, which is very extreme. And so given that situation and given that logic, we have to make sure that we are doing the best that we can. Now, given that we don't know the things that God has saved us from, it's quite possible that God has already interfered in order to prevent nuclear catastrophe from happening. There's no way to say that because it didn't happen. And the causal chain is obscure to us. We can't say that vessel Archipov, for example, when he was in that submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis down near Cuba where he was about to fire, the other people on the submarine wanted to fire a nuclear torpedo at the US fleet.

[01:03:16.770] - Brian
And Archipov said, no, we're not going to do that. We don't know that that wasn't somehow set up by divine intervention. There's no way to look at that. Another thing to think about is that JFK multiple times agreed with the generals, okay, we're going to start the nuclear war now or we are going to start the nuclear war if this scenario happens, and then that scenario would happen. And he would say, no, we're not going to. So there are ways that we can see that perhaps God has intervened in order to protect us in the past. I don't want to rely on divine intervention to protect us from something that we could fundamentally do ourselves. And I don't think that shows lack of faith in God. I think what it shows is that God has a lot of faith in us. God has entrusted us with freedom and God has entrusted us with trying to make the world better, trying to help us love our neighbors and glorify God and protect creation and all of those good things. And fundamentally, that is a trust that God has given to us, saying, I have faith in you, that you human beings are going to be able to handle this.

[01:04:25.350] - Brian
Now, humans haven't necessarily done a great job with that so far, but I think we should try. I think that's the fundamental thing right we should try to live up to the trust that God has given us. Because fundamentally, what is our job here on Earth? Our job here on Earth is to do to love God and neighbor and to try to be stewards of creation and all of those good things. And we've been given this trust and we need to live up to it. We need to show that we're the people who can handle this situation that's been presented to us.

[01:05:03.170] - JD
How much credence do you put in the more fatalist apocalyptic view that no matter what we do, god has providentially ordained the end times and that the end is near? After all, Jesus said that frequently in his ministry. He did also say that nobody knows the hour at which the thief will come. But he did often say that the end is near, and many other New Testament writers wrote just as much. Why doesn't that apply now? Should we make assumptions that we really do have more than a few generations left to live? After all, a lot of Christians today do think that the end might happen in just a few decades. A 2010 research poll from Pew found that about 40% of Americans believe that Jesus will return by the year 2050. That's a pretty high number. I wouldn't have guessed it's so high. But if we believe that might be true, then maybe it doesn't make as much sense to work on long termist risks like nuclear war. What do you say to that kind of argument?

[01:06:06.540] - Brian
Yeah, I think you're right to talk about no one knows the day or the hour. And also, just fundamentally speaking, right? If God wants it to be a nuclear war, there's going to be a nuclear war. There's nothing that humans could do to stop that if God wills that to happen. However, I think that's bad theology. I think that's a bad way of thinking about divine action, because once again, God has given creation, not just humans, but creation freedom to kind of develop in the ways that it does. And that's, once again, a lot of trust that's been given to us. You mentioned justice. There could be a horrible sort of justice in that. And that's one of those things that I actually think about, which is that it used to be when I was younger, I would pray for justice, but now I pray for mercy because I think that when it comes to justice, we're all going to not do very well. When that's applied to humanity, it's not like anybody gets away from that because we're all sinners. It affects all of us. So I think that mercy is something that I definitely pray for now, and at the same time, there's no reason to.

[01:07:22.010] - Brian
I guess I want to back up to kind of the premise of the question, right, which is that nuclear war would somehow be God's Judgment Day and Jesus would return because of that. There's no reason that those two events should correlate with each other. Fundamentally, if you want to talk about the second coming of Jesus, nobody knows the day or the hour. It's already been 2000 years. There's no reason to think it's going to happen in the next two years or the next 20 or 200 or 2000. Right. It could be anywhere in there. And it's fundamentally not our concern, I think is what Jesus is saying when he talks about it in those passages, like don't worry about it, just be prepared for the fact that you are going to die at some point and you're going to be judged. So work a little harder on that and also help your neighbor because you love them. And so that's going to be a fundamentally different sort of reality than any sort of existential catastrophe or global catastrophic or global catastrophe that happens because of technology. Could they be correlated? Yes, but they might not be correlated.

[01:08:23.160] - Brian
And so when we are thinking about technology, which is fundamentally something that humans do, we should be thinking about fundamentally it being also something that humans control and that humans need to take responsibility for, because we are creating it, we're generating the problem, we also need to generate the solution. At the same time, there are lots.

[01:08:42.970] - JD
Of discussions and population ethics about what the future looks like in terms of the number of people who will come into existence, right. Even if we don't grow in the future, even if population rates level out, or if we just maintain our current population, or just maintain the current projected peak, which is something like 10 billion people, I think then in just a matter of decades or a couple of centuries, we will surpass the number of all the people who have lived on Earth up to now. And if we live for many thousands of years after that, well, most the vast majority of people who will ever live on Earth will be living in the future. Do you think that's something Christians should consider? You mentioned this passage don't worry about the hour, and you take this to mean don't worry. Right. But does that mean we shouldn't think about it either? An existential catastrophe might be very important even if we only live another century, but if we could potentially live for many thousands of years more, or even possibly even millions of years more, then it would be even more important. Right? What do you think of arguments that emphasize this long term aspect and say therefore, even the smallest chance of an existential crisis from nuclear use or anything else should be weighed morally, extremely heavily?

[01:10:09.890] - Brian
So I generally agree with that perspective, which is that we do need to consider neighbors, not only spatially, but temporarily, if you want to think about it that way. We have neighbors in the future, we have neighbors in the past. What do we do to respect our neighbors in the past. We fundamentally respect them. We tell the truth about history, we learn from them, we appreciate the things that they've passed on to us. What do we do for our neighbors in the future? We give them a world. Hopefully that's the best world that we can hand over to them. That includes culture and ethics and all the knowledge and truth not only of science and technology, but also of religion and philosophy and culture. Everything good that we can pass on to them. So I think that everything is ethically charged not only in terms of what we are doing right now spatially, in terms of neighbors, but also temporarily. And yes, there are potentially a lot of future neighbors, but fundamentally also, it's a mystery. So I wouldn't evaluate this from a utilitarian perspective because I think people start talking about discount rates and should we have zero discount rate or 1% discount rate or somewhere in between?

[01:11:21.920] - Brian
Does it go up over time? Does it go down over time? I don't think that's the right way to look at the problem. I think utilitarianism fails under those circumstances. What I think actually does work is more of a virtue ethics perspective. And the virtue ethics perspective says guess what? You're supposed to be a good person. Does a good person ruin the world for the next generation? The answer is no. A good person does not do that. And so it's very clear when you look at it from other sorts of perspectives. You don't need to get into discount rate. All you need to do is say would a good person do this or not? And if a good person would not do that, if that's the action of a bad person, then don't do it.

[01:11:59.990] - JD
What does it even look like to be a neighbor to somebody who lives 1000 years from now? It sounds like a very Sci-Fi question, but also like a very important and relevant question based off the interpretation that you have about what Jesus is telling us.

[01:12:14.640] - Brian
So it's a wonderful question, is what I would say. The reason it's wonderful is because we have the same question thinking spatially here on Earth, right? How am I supposed to relate to people who are on a different continent? Or even IFP maybe they're only 100 miles away, but I don't even know they exist? And the answer is that if we have any way to affect them, we should try to affect them in a good way and not a bad way. We should have their best interests in mind. We should be trying to help them become the good person that they should be. All of us are finite. We have limitations on our ability to act. And that's actually a form of divine providence. Because if we were responsible for everything, then the world gets much more difficult. But collectively speaking, we do have a lot of power. For example, United states as an entity has a huge amount of influence over the way the world operates. So when you're dealing with things like that, it's one thing for me to think about my neighbor 100 miles away or 100 years in the future. It's a different thing for the United States to think about the neighbor 100 miles away or 100 years in the future.

[01:13:15.200] - Brian
First of all, because 100 miles away from me is still within the United States, so it's within the the requirements of the US. Government to actually care for its own people. And second of all, because hopefully, temporarily speaking, 100 years from now, some of those people are still alive. Ara probably already alive in the form of children, right? There are babies alive today who are going to live 100 years, and we should be thinking about them in terms of they're actually not that far off. And we want to make sure that we're handing over a world to them that is the best world that we can give right now. The trend lines are bad in terms of going into the future, but technology is growing very rapidly. And I think there also ara many, many reasons for hope. And those reasons of hope, reasons for hope are things that can help us hopefully turn those trend lines towards the positive and ultimately give those future humans a better world.

[01:14:11.790] - JD
When you say trend lines are bad, are there specific trends you're referring to? What do you mean by that?

[01:14:16.870] - Brian
Yeah, so I think there are several bad trends that I don't like. There's climate change, of course. There's also environmental toxicity. There's resource over exploitation. Technology can deal a lot with resource exploitation because every time a price on something gets too high, somebody figures out a way to either make it cheaper or use something else to replace it. So science and technology ara great solutions to any sorts of resource restriction, but also there's a lot of I mean, there are fundamentally big cultural problems that are happening right now. Those big cultural problems include people being more interested in video games than in solving world problems, for example. And you see this a lot in junior high and high school and college age and other folks who are dealing with this, which is that, oh, I'll just play this video game for a while, it's not so harmful. And then a whole day goes by and instead of doing something productive, like learning how to sort of doing your homework or doing something productive for society or becoming a better person in whatever way that might have happened that day, you've instead wasted a lot of time.

[01:15:27.160] - Brian
And I think we should really think about these things as being vampires that are sucking our life out of us, fundamentally. And technology has been really, really weaponized in order to do this with companies, corporations coming up with things that are going to suck our life out of us by taking our time. I'm not saying all social media is bad or all video games are bad. I think there are ways that they can be good forms of art and good forms of teaching. But we really need to be careful about that because there are ways that we're not even thinking about how we are setting our culture on a trajectory which is not a good one. We're becoming more lonely. People are feeling less meaning in their lives. People are feeling less goal oriented. People are feeling less loved by their family members. They have fewer friends than they used to have. All of these are kind of negative trend lines which are, once again, if you're busy playing a video game, it's short term hides you from the problem, but long term it makes the problem worse. And so we need to figure out how to balance these against each other and ultimately turn things around so that once again, the signal to noise ratio is corrected.

[01:16:38.680] - Brian
We need to have a strong signal from Christian churches and other Christian organizations or not even necessarily Christian anybody. I think the effective altruism movement has been an amazing example of a signal that has appeared in the middle of the noise trying to make the world a better place. And I think it's actually a wonderful thing for Christians to see non Christians doing that because it's a critique of us and our failure to have done better in this respect. This is fundamentally our job. And somehow or another God said, you know what, I can raise up Christians out of these rocks, right? And maybe they're not theoretical Christians, but maybe they're better practical Christians than we are. And so this is something that we need to be aware of and also take that critique to heart, not as a oh, we're so terrible, but rather as I can do better. This is an opportunity for me to become the better person that I am supposed to be and make the positive impact on the world that God really wants us to make.

[01:17:37.330] - JD
Effective altruism being this idea of using reason and evidence to do good better, but also being the social movement that's applied that to charity and also to careers. What are some things that you think the church can learn from the effective altruism movement?

[01:17:52.890] - Brian
So this is a great one, and this is interesting because I've been thinking recently about why there's a group called Effective Altruism for Christians. Why is it not Christians for effective altruism? Why is the order of the name in the way it is? Because it seems like it reverses the order of the evangelism, right? If it's effective altruism for Christians, then the then the message is going from effective altruism to Christianity, which I think is correct based on that critique that I just said. But also I think Christianity for effective altruism that is thinking about, you know, fundamentally the message has arrived, and now we need to turn it back. We need to make it our own and be more effective when it comes to kind of making an impact, a positive impact on the world. One of the things that I've argued in various papers that I've published over time is that science and technology are fundamentally created by Christianity. This is something that happened because in medieval times, people who are in Western Europe were interested in technology. There Ara monks and monasteries who were saying, you know what? We don't have kids to do the work here because we don't have kids, or a bunch of monks.

[01:19:13.950] - Brian
And so they figure out how to make a tidal powered water wheel, for example, or they figure out a new way to drill a well on their property, or they figure out a better way to ferment alcohol. Which is why, if you go to monasteries in Europe, there are all these different types of monastic beers. I was just in Belgium, and Belgium is known for their Trappist beers. And that should be looked at as a form of biochemistry, fundamentally food science, biochemistry, and overall, just kind of chemical engineering. Figuring out how these things work.

[01:19:46.090] - JD
You found a way to wrap your interest in Belgian beer with your work.

[01:19:50.330] - Brian
Yes, it's something we should appreciate also from our ancestors. Right. So, like I was saying, we need to be thinking about our neighbors temporarily, both in the past and in the future. We should be appreciative of the gifts that have been given to us.

[01:20:07.200] - JD
We've received all support your ancient local brewery.

[01:20:10.840] - Brian
Yes, that's right. We should recognize that there's a very strong connection between Christianity and science and technology, and we need to continue that into the future. There you know, it was about only about 200 years ago that that this kind of big lie happened, that that science and religion are opposed to each other. It's really a big lie, and we should not think of it as being an acceptable thing for people to talk about anymore. Science and religion are not opposed to each other. Science is direct. Science comes directly from philosophy. It's natural philosophy. And philosophy was part of the curriculum in every religious school throughout medieval times, all the way up until, you know, even today. Now philosophy has become secularized. Over time, science has become secularized. But fundamentally, their success is something that we need to remember, because it's something that Christian theology permitted. It didn't just permit it. It promoted it. It made it happen. Because this is something that Christians both practically and theoretically wanted to have happen. This is an exploration of God's creation in the form of science, and also an exploration of the providence that God hid in creation.

[01:21:28.350] - Brian
In the development of technology.

[01:21:31.630] - JD
The Church is often perceived as an institution that is reactionary against new forms of technology, whether that's gene editing or contraception. The Church seems to be oftentimes against something rather than for something, rather than for scientific or technological progress that promotes human flourishing. Is this your sense? And why is it a common belief among people my age that the Church is against technology?

[01:21:58.230] - Brian
Yeah, I think it's fundamentally forgetting your own story, right? Which is that if you think about Christianity being a story where Jesus is the word of God, what is the word of God? The word of God isn't just one word, it's a story. It's the story of Jesus's life. It's the story of God's relationship with creation. It's the story of everything that has come since then in the form of everything that Christians have done. Now, it turns out, of course, that no human mind is big enough to deal with these sorts of thoughts. But what we have to do is we have to distill these stories down into a narrative that we can understand. And the way that we do that is by remembering things and telling the story over and over again. The story of science and technology got forgotten at some point and other people picked it up and said, see, the Christians don't care about this at all. But all you have to do is look at Wikipedia. Wikipedia has this long list of entries of Catholic scientists, not just Catholic scientists, but also Catholic religious, in other words, people who are priests or brothers or sisters or nuns who also did science.

[01:23:04.320] - Brian
It's a list of at least 200 people last time I checked. And there's also the list of people who were Catholic and also were scientists. Like Louis Pasteur is a prime example. Jordan Atre, who came up with the Big Bang theory, gregor Mendel, who was, of course, an abbot of a monastery when he was doing his genetic experiments. There are all sorts of examples through history. There's lots and lots of them, but for some reason that story fell out of telling. And there are lots and lots of Christians who do science and technology today, and we're still not telling their stories. So the question is, why is the story not being told? And I think we need to do some soul searching to recognize that this is fundamentally, I think it's a case of bad theology. We've decided that science and technology are not as important as they actually are. Lots of people have discovered that they're very important. I think this is very clear in any sort of Silicon Valley entrepreneur is always thinking about what's the next thing coming from, what's technology giving us, what's science giving us, what can we do to exploit that and then fundamentally, sometimes create an exploitative relationship with consumers or whoever you're trying to get things from or sell to.

[01:24:19.110] - Brian
It doesn't have to be an exploitative relationship, by the way. It can be directed towards good, but you have to have the ethics in there in the first place. And I think if more Christians were thinking about that, we could hopefully make some better decisions. And I know there are examples of this. Silicon Valley is full of Christians who are thinking about these issues, and they're entrepreneurs and they're worried about the ethical impacts of what they're doing. And they're specifically working on particular ethical problems with technology because they are Christians and they want to solve those problems, those social problems, with something. And they see that technology gives us the possibility of doing that. But I think, once again, if we could actually turn that into a stronger signal in the middle of all the noise, this would do a lot towards resolving this kind of adversarial misunderstanding that exists between science and religion because it's fundamentally wrong. It's really, really not true.

[01:25:15.170] - JD
So there are a lot of people nowadays who say that science and religion are or are not contradictory. But what it seems like, and what I'm hearing from you, is that we also need to show that this isn't the case. We need to demonstrate through our lives, through our work and our vocation, that we can use technology to promote human flourishing and promote life.

[01:25:34.330] - Brian
Yeah, there's always showing and telling. People say a great story shows you, it doesn't tell you. And that's certainly the case. It's a great story. But also we're living in a world of sound bites now, right. It's very difficult to figure out how to show something. Maybe in a tweet. It's possible, but you have to be good at it. It's a skill. And in the absence of sufficient people with that skill, perhaps we need to resort towards telling. Right. Which is just say it over and over again. Christianity and science are not opposed to each other. Christianity and technology are not opposed to each other. And so you brought up the example of contraception and the fact that the Catholic Church is opposed to abortion. It's opposed to any sort of technology that is fundamentally anti life, I think would be the way to phrase it. Anything that reduces it either kills people or prevents life from coming into existence. And the reason for that is because fundamentally, technology is supposed to serve life. There's a reason nuclear weapons are looked at as something that's fundamentally very, very evil. It's because they kill lots of people very fast and in horrible ways.

[01:26:43.350] - Brian
And that is something that's anti life. And IFP human life is of value because God fundamentally says that it is, then it's something we need to take seriously. And so we need to be thinking to ourselves once again, how can we use technology to make doing good easier, and how can we use technology to make doing evil more difficult? And that kind of balance between the two. Clearly seeing that technology is judged by ethics is not that every technology is good. Every technology is only good insofar as it actually helps people. If we can make those kind of those fundamental. Perceptions and develop that awareness within ourselves and then actually implement them. And that includes telling stories of good technology and stories of bad technology, then I think that's going to put us on a better road. Like you were saying with your church. Your church was maybe saying, cell phones are bad, social media is bad. We also need to have the good of it. Too right? We need to recognize that there is a good that we are aiming for. Technology is very beneficial and we need to remember that beneficial side of things absolutely.

[01:27:51.640] - Brian
Too and work on it and develop it. Medical technology being a prime example, it's hard to dispute any sort of technology that saves people's lives.

[01:28:00.410] - JD
I'd like to pivot to talk now about the technologies and also the careers supporting these technologies. Do you think would be especially valuable, whether that's for the nuclear space or whether that's for promoting human flourishing more generally, starting with the nuclear space, are there any particular paths that you think would be most influential that could be in the policy route or in the cultural route? What would make you excited if you heard someone woke up one day and said, I'm going to work on nuclear nonproliferation project X? What is that?

[01:28:35.830] - Brian
X gosh. This is a difficult question, but I think that one of the things that people have noticed over time is that artwork is actually a great way to promote certain types of cultural perspectives. So there hasn't been a big anti nuclear movie in a long time. There probably should be a big anti nuclear movie, and there should probably be one of those coming out all the time because it's not like the problem is solved. After the Cold War happened, everyone was like, yay, the Cold War is over. Everything's fine now. That's not true. Obviously, we're back into this unstable situation yet again. So we were in a stable situation for maybe 25 years, and now we've gone into this unstable situation again. And so we really need to think to ourselves, artwork is a great way to convey a message in a way that isn't necessarily confrontational. It's also kind of super rational, if you want to think about it that way. If you have an argument with someone about nuclear weapons, you're invariably going to run into all of these practical impediments to making that happen. On the other hand, if you have something that's an ara form, maybe a story of caring or compassion or love in this kind of situation where nuclear weapons are the thing that are threatening it, that strikes people in their souls, right?

[01:29:59.090] - Brian
They're not going to want it as much anymore. They're not going to want to live in a world where these terrible things are possible, and they're going to want to figure out how to stop them from being that way. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities for art whether it might be video games also, right? I mean, there's actually some video games about nuclear war, like Fallout for example, and other games. There are these examples and I think we need to start recognizing that we need to not be filling our culture with noise, we need to be filling it with signal. And I think that it's possible to get that signal back, but we have to actually the only way you get a signal is by taking a bunch of taking a certain piece of the spectrum and making it coherent and turning it into something that is actually doing something positive. And I think that's actually what we're hoping to do with this. What you're hoping to do with this podcast, what anybody who's trying to start a social movement is doing. Take a bunch of people who might have formerly been just noise doing our own thing.

[01:31:00.130] - Brian
They might have well been good things on their own, but squeezing them together into a signal which has actually been much more powerful than anybody could have been individually.

[01:31:09.270] - JD
I love the art example in the video game example as well. Just a data point on this. A family member of Mine is a trader and he actually first traded on a video game that we played together and that's where he first heard about trading was on this video game and now he earns to give. And yeah, so many people, they start out being fascinated by the characters they see in video games or films and it seems like we need to get the most important problems somehow communicated through these video games as well. I was also thinking of the Jesus Film Project and how getting people to see this film in every language that shows the story of the gospel, how this communicates extremely important message to people in so many different contexts. I don't know what a Jesus film would look like in other contexts. Like a Jesus film version for existential risks maybe, or maybe not a good idea, but all for using culture and tech to get more people interested in the most pressing problems. What are some other recommended paths or just general career advice that you would give for undergraduates who are interested in the nuclear space and especially for the nuclear space?

[01:32:26.260] - JD
What do you think are good majors? They would get somebody relevant expertise, a sense of what the career field feels like.

[01:32:32.960] - Brian
So yeah, this is a great question. This actually gets into the kind of career advice question, which is that I firmly believe people have a vocation, right? There's something that we can do for the world that's particular to us. And so this idea of vocation is at the intersection of your talents, what you're interested in and what the world needs. And of course the world needs people thinking about this nuclear issue. It needs the world thinking about all these sorts of kind of existential risk. But nuclear is particularly acute right now and also bio risk. We were going to talk about birth and we haven't even had a chance to get into that. Maybe on a future episode. But this idea is that all these big problems can be attacked from so many different directions. It's one thing you can try to shift the culture, you can try to make better technology. If you go into business, you can help with business decisions in any sort of situation where you might have one of these relevant problems appear. And you really need to have something that is your combination of your talent, what you're really good at, what is your skill and your interest because you want to love your job, you want to be passionate about what you're doing and then what the world needs.

[01:33:48.010] - Brian
And the world certainly needs a lot of people working on this right now. There are a lot of opportunities. There's not just one problem to work on, there are lots of problems to work on. So what I would say is really find where your skills and your passion intersect and then hopefully you'll be able to find a problem that you can address with that. If you're interested in political activism, you can go into political activism. If you're interested in technology, you can go into technology. If you're interested in business, you can go into business. All of those opportunities are laid out before us. If you're interested in religion, you can go into theology or you can go into philosophy. Because fundamentally if somebody sees that you are skilled and somebody sees that you are interested and passionate about something, they're going to see that and they're going to say, this is a person who is a good person to work with. We want them working with our organization. We want them working with us. We want them to join us in whatever type of work that we're doing. So it might be difficult finding that right job.

[01:34:49.820] - Brian
But this is another piece of career advice I give to people. Try lots of things. You'll learn a lot about yourself by trying lots of things and you'll also hopefully eventually find that right place for you.

[01:35:04.050] - JD
For someone who's interested in the nuclear weapons or bioweapons space, how do they get their toes wet? Are there any conferences or internships or learning experiences to give them a sense of what the community feels like?

[01:35:18.310] - Brian
Yeah, I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. It's one of those things where we have to search around on the Internet would be one way to do it. We all spend a lot of time on the internet but also start getting into those networks. Start finding the right people. If you don't find the right person, immediately ask them for recommendations of people to talk to because there's that six degrees of separation thing. If you study social networks you discover that you're actually connected to people pretty quickly. I just discovered yesterday on Facebook that one of my friends knows somebody else who's been in the news recently. And I'm like, oh, that's surprising. I had no idea that connection was there. And it's only two people away from me. And so I think we should recognize that we know more people than we think we do, but also we can do a lot towards developing our own social networks. And that's something that I learned after graduate school, which is that I didn't get a job. Fundamentally, I didn't get a job because of what I knew. People didn't like my they didn't like what I did.

[01:36:18.360] - Brian
They said, technology, ethics, and theology or philosophy, who cares? That's not something we're hiring for. We don't know what to do with you. And so I had to fundamentally meet people outside of my discipline who were in the engineering school at Santa Clara University. And they said, oh, well, we have a job for you. Come work here. So you need to meet a lot of people if you're looking for a job also. So that's I guess one more thing I would say is talk to lots of people. Just keep expanding your network outwards, and it's not going to hurt you. It's going to help you eventually because you might feel like socialization is socializing. Meeting people might seem like a waste of time to you. That's kind of the perspective I came at it from. But really it's very important for how humans operate. Guess what? We're social creatures. You can't get away from that. Nobody's going to hire you if they don't know who you are. Nobody's going to just drop the perfect job into your lap. You have to go out and find it. And one of the ways you find it is by talking to people.

[01:37:19.770] - JD
You earned a graduate degree in theology. Do you think that this was, in retrospect, something that was good for your career? It was definitely a part of your formation experience, part of your vocational journey. I think many would discourage a theology degree for those who are trying to build up their resume for a corporate career or just some other career that would be quote unquote, high powered or very selective. What advice would you have for someone who's considering further theological study or seminary as a way to have an impact?

[01:37:51.120] - Brian
So I'm a big advocate of studying theology and religion and philosophy, so I highly recommend it. But there's a caveat here, which is that you might not get a job in where you expect it to be. So I thought I was going to be some sort of academic who EAS teaching in the theology department, not what I'm doing. I am an academic, which is actually I look back on it and it's kind of surprising. Now, it's extremely improbable that I would have ended up where I am, in a job, in a very happy and I like to think that either God was helping or it was divine providence or something like that helped to make it happen. So I absolutely advocate prayer. I advocate anything that we can do in terms of strengthening our own relationship with God to drive these sorts of things forward. But at the same time, what's the saying? Pray like it's all up to God and work like it's all up to you. So definitely do the work and it's not necessarily going to turn out how you expect. So you might go to theology school and after a year say, this is not for me.

[01:38:59.470] - Brian
And unfortunately there are a lot of theology schools like that. For example, people might end up going to say, I'm going to study academic theology and discover, actually, I don't like this, I don't think this is much fun, I'm going to switch gears or I'm going to do something else, or I'm going to just study it on my own while I do something else. There is always the opportunity to choose a new path, and I think that you just have to try everything. Like I was saying, every time an opportunity comes up, think to yourself, is this worth my time? And if it is close enough to being within that circle of things that are worth your time, you should do it. And also, if you feel very compelled towards doing something, if you're feeling the calling towards ministry or something like that, you got to do it. You got to follow it.

[01:39:41.850] - JD
You wrote me earlier about ambition and that ambition could be good and holy, but don't fool yourself. What did you mean by that?

[01:39:48.160] - Brian
I think that sin and hubris always sneak in there, right? You think you're being the best business person ever and you're raising lots of money, and all the while you are actually doing something which is harming the world or harming your customers or there are just lots of examples of where people ara meeting one objective, which is that, hey, I'm going to make a fantastic video game that everybody wants to play. And then later on people are like, yeah, you probably could have spent your time better than doing that. That video game is not actually that great. It might have gotten lots of eyeballs on it, it might have been very monetarily successful, but what did it actually positively do for people in their lives? So, yeah, don't fool yourself, and the easiest person to fool is you. I can't remember there's some person who said that, but it's very important to come at it as objectively as possible and also check with other people.

[01:40:46.220] - JD
Yeah, how do you do that? How do you get objective feedback on your trajectory? It's also a very vulnerable thing to do, right? To ask someone who knows you well to tell you you're wrong.

[01:40:54.720] - Brian
Yeah, you have to have people you trust. And I think this is actually something that Christianity does pretty well. Christianity because we're supposed to be humble. We're supposed to be looking to God for guidance. We're supposed to be in communities where we talk to each other, communities of disciples, where we're all actually considering these things very seriously. This should hopefully give us friendships and relationships where we can trust people and say, do you think it's good that I'm creating this thing? And if the person says, oh yeah, that's good, well that's nice. That's one person's opinion. Maybe ask another person and really listen to your conscience inside of you and pray about it. And if you feel like you're being torn up about something, then there's something there to investigate further. Keep investigating it. On the other hand, even if you're doing something good, there might be something better that you're doing. It might not be a choice between good and bad. Also this is something that I often talk about in my classroom, which is that the choice between good and bad is generally an easy one. You don't do the bad thing and you do the good thing.

[01:42:01.210] - Brian
It's when you're choosing between two good things or two bad things that it becomes much more difficult. Hopefully you can avoid those lose lose situations where you only have bad choices and of course you want to choose the less worst option. But when you're choosing between good choices, that can be a very difficult choice because very often it's not something that happens very frequently. The prime example I use is if you're choosing what university or what graduate school to go to, you're choosing between good options. The question is which is the better option for you and your objectives and what positive thing you can do for the world.

[01:42:33.460] - JD
You said earlier that you're not a utilitarian, that you're a virtue ethicist. How do you think that as a virtue ethicist? You go about those tricky scenarios, those trade offs between a good and a better choice. How do you resolve that trade off? How do you consult to a decision criteria? You want to be prudent, you want to weigh the outcomes. It's maybe tempting to want to quantify everything into some kind of simple metric. What do you lean on besides prayer and some other advice from somebody you trust?

[01:43:02.750] - Brian
So this is a great question. Very often virtue ethics talks about moral exemplars. Who is a person that you look up to as being a moral exemplar? Of course every Christian is going to say Jesus Christ is the person that we look up to as our primary moral exemplar. This is an example of a human who lived the best possible life. Jesus was a carpenter. However, he did not, which means he's a technologist basically, right? He used the technology of his day to do things, but he did not save the world through technology. That's a very interesting thing. In fact, it was a piece of carpentry that he was killed on. He was killed on a wooden cross. And this is a very interesting kind of interplay there between the idea technology is bad. This is the thing, right, is that he blesses technology. IFP Jesus had not been a carpenter, maybe we could have looked at the cross and said, technology is bad. But the fact that he is a technologist at the same time and then killed on a piece of carpentry, I think is an interesting interplay because it shows that technology is dual use.

[01:44:00.140] - Brian
So there ara other examples of moral exemplars, too. There's catholicism, of course, holds up saints as being these, like, paragons of virtue that you can imitate. And there are, for example, there are saints who are engineers. There are patron saints of engineers. There are lots of examples of people who were in the Catholic Church who did various sorts of engineering things, like I was saying earlier, or they're into science and technology. And of course, that's the case for all of Christianity. The guy who invented the laser, Charles Towns, he was a very devout Christian, and he won the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser, basically. And he was a professor at UC Berkeley for a long time, and he was also associated with the Graduate Theological Union right across the street from Berkeley because he saw this interplay between science and religion as being one of the most important things that humans can engage with. And so as a Christian, he he found it to be important to personally support that. So Charles Towns EAS a great advocate of those sorts of things, and he was not a Catholic. He was, you know, came from a different religious background.

[01:45:06.870] - Brian
Norman Borlaug, who created the Green revolution. Norman Borlaug is, I think, a great paragon of what a Christian can do when they go into technologies. So Norman Borlaug, he basically figured out a way to create crops with much higher yields than crops had before, and he increased crop yields so much that he basically averted famine. He saved billions of lives not just billions of lives once, but on a continuing basis, right? Contemporary civilization could not exist without the crops that he worked on. And he won the Nobel Prize for this. And in his Nobel Prize speech, he cited the Bible five times, and biblical themes ran throughout the entire speech. And you can think about this as there's a verse in the Bible where Jesus says, I'll do great things, and you'll do even greater things than these. I just screwed up the verse, but it's something to the effect of, I'm going to do great things, and you're going to do even greater things than these. And it's kind of a fundamental thing, right, where you think about Jesus multiplied. He fed thousands with loaves and fishes, and this is something that Norman Borlaug did with technology.

[01:46:21.290] - Brian
He's created a miracle that we are all still benefiting from because he multiplied the amount of grain that you could grow on a piece of land. And it's just something that we once again should all be appreciative of, what we should be thankful for, those who came before us, and we can also learn from them as models, right? What is it that I can do? What does the world need right now that I can do something about? And hopefully as Christians, we have that motivation that can drive us forward.

[01:46:47.570] - JD
I'm glad someone on our podcast mentioned Norman. We actually have him on the COVID He's the one, I think, at the top with the grain of wheat coming out. You said that ambition could be broad and impactful, but also narrow and deep. What do you mean by that?

[01:47:01.910] - Brian
So this is another thing, right, is that not everybody in the world gets to be Norman Borlaug? Not everybody gets to be Charles Towns. We all have families, we all have parents. They may not be alive, we may not know them very well, we may not hang out with them very often. But if we can have a positive relationship with those who are close to us, then we are, I'd say, duty bound. If you're in a legal relationship with someone to do the best you can. And of course, I'm not going to say that you have to work with people who are abusive or other things like that, but it can be much smaller than that and ultimately making a positive impact on the world. We really have to think about ourselves and how we can make ourselves better people. And if we become a better person, then we should have better relationships with those around us. And fundamentally it's kind of this opportunity to lift kind of the tide of society where we're the leaven in the bread. It would be another way to think about it. This is what we are called to do as Christians, is to make the world a better place by ourselves becoming the better people that we can be.

[01:48:10.170] - JD
So in closing, I want to ask you a question about how to become a better person. Specifically, many I've talked to have said that becoming a parent has helped them to become a better person. So one way to think about this is I guess you could do good through your children, right? You could leave a legacy by raising children who have a heart for God and a heart for the world and are committed to improving it. But it can also change the parent. Right. It's a wonderful experience to just grow in patience and in kindness through that parenting experience. Do you think more do gooders should aim to have children? And do you think that's helped you to do more good in the world?

[01:48:50.780] - Brian
Yeah, I think that children are way more important than we give them credit for. They've been taken for granted for all of history.

[01:48:58.080] - JD
Right.

[01:48:58.270] - Brian
They said children disappear and then the next generation happens but IFP you have control over the number of children you have and things like that, all of a sudden it becomes a question of why should children exist in the first place? And the answer is that they're the future. They're the hope. Without them, we don't have temporal neighbors in the future. We just have a past. This is really important, and we need to do the best we can to not only give them the world that they deserve as human beings, but also to help them become the best people that they have, so that when the world is given to them, they actually take care of it properly. So we need to raise them up to be the best people that they can be, because fundamentally, we're handing the world over to them. We're going to die at some point, and we're giving them this gift that God gave to us. So we need to pass it along to people who are prepared to accept that. And that means that we have a lot of work to do to help educate them, to help them become the most moral people that they can be.

[01:49:56.350] - Brian
And this is a big task. It's not a little thing. Every generation has to learn ethics over again because every generation grows and lives and then dies. And so every generation has to learn this over again. We can set up good institutions, but even those institutions need to have people who are running them. And also, I don't want to necessarily say that they have to be biological, right? I think biological children are fantastic. Go for it if you think that's a great path forward for you. But at the same time, be an educator, be a teacher, be someone who cares for your niece or nephew or things like that, there's a lot of opportunities to help the next generation become the best people they can be besides just the biological component to it.

[01:50:42.990] - JD
That's so helpful. Thank you for sharing that. Any final comments? And also, if somebody wants to follow your work or get in touch with you, how can they do that?

[01:50:51.790] - Brian
So you can Google my name, Brian Green and ethics. That's probably the easiest way to find my work. If you go into Google Scholar, it's a great place to find it. You can find my website on the Markalist Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. I have a web page there also. Yeah, I just want to share two more pieces of advice that I got when I was trying to pick out my career, which I thought was good advice. Bill Hurlbutt, who EAS on my he's a professor at Stanford, he was on my doctoral committee. He said, Always go for the deeper problem. And I found that to be just really good advice. You might think you're dealing with a problem that's an important problem. But if you scratch the surface, you'll discover, of course, there's something below it and something below it. There's always a deeper problem. And if you're really going to solve things at a kind of a large scale, you need to go for the deeper problem. And that's why, fundamentally, culture and international relations and international culture of human beings, and it has to be something that humans can actually do.

[01:51:56.300] - Brian
These sorts of ethical questions at the grandest scale become really important. That's just one thing. The other one came from a theologian named Stanley Howard Wasps, who was a professor at Duke, and he was at a meeting with young moral theologians, people who are Christian ethicists, basically. And he said, look, don't undermine the preconditions for your own existence. What does that mean? He was saying, there are lots of people who are criticizing Christianity right now. If you want to have a job at a Christian university, don't expect that you can just criticize Christianity and have Christian universities exist anymore. You're going to destroy the preconditions for your own existence. And this is another thing with evangelism, right? Evangelism is actually really important because if Christianity goes extinct, guess what? There's not going to be anybody carrying this kind of Christian message into the future. And maybe extinct is too great a term, right? But if Christianity keeps weakening, then our ability to try to make the world a better place, we cans along with it. So don't undermine the preconditions for your own existence or if you want to frame it positively, strengthen those sorts of things that make your life and success possible.

[01:53:08.970] - Brian
And of course, that means that we need to have a next generation. That means that we need to have strong institutions. That means that we need to have a positive culture that is aiming towards creating the kind of world that we want to live in. Fundamentally, that's our task, right? We want to create the world that we want to live in, and we do not want to create the kind of world that is an evil world full of horrible things that's creating hell on Earth. We can through our own choices, we have a lot of power to influence whether we get the first or the second.

[01:53:39.510] - JD
Brian, thank you so much for coming on.

[01:53:41.480] - Brian
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

[01:53:43.670] - JD
Hi, listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, wow, nuclear war, huge issue. How do I start? How do I plan a career in this space? You're not alone. It is a challenging area to plan a career in. But we have done research on next steps that you can take. We would love to provide that. You can find that@christiansforimpact.org under our problem profiles. We can also provide free mentorship to help you explore options and plan your next steps with a Christian advisor. So you can find that at our website, christiansforimpact.org.

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JD Bauman