A good-humored conversation between Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins

[Music] if you're watching this on YouTube you might have noticed that this episode is a week delayed but if you want to get early access to our episodes consider becoming a paying member if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share it with with your friends thank you for all your support the Richard Dawkins Foundation although mainly active in America also has a flourishing branch in Germany they develop resources to help children with scientific and critical thinking they frequently publish German translations of scientific and skeptical articles and they put on events in various German cities one of these events was a conversation between Michael Shermer and me in Berlin in 2018 shared by Jurg Elber Michael Shermer is the publisher and editor of skeptic a fine magazine of scientific rationality he's an excellent and prolific writer author of many popular books including why people believe weird things the moral Arc and a biography of Alfred Wallace called In Darwin's Shadow he was a columnist on Scientific American when that Magazine still had a high reputation among scientists I regard him as a good friend I hope you enjoy this good humored conversation between Michael and me as much as I did at the time it was a wide ranging discussion followed by questions from the audience ladies and Gentlemen please give a warm welcome to Michael shmer and Richard Dawkins [Applause] thank you much thank [Applause] [Applause] you wow thank you for that warm reception especially mostly for Richard I suspect hang on but I'm glad to be here too uh so I thought Richard we might um cover the span of uh religion and Science and then uh morality and Science and then maybe seg it a little bit into politics and related to both terrorism what's the real cause of it religion politics both or whatever and then maybe wrap up with some of the recent campus craziness about postmodernism and and what's truth and and that sort of thing so uh starting on a a positive note um as as you know there's been a huge growth of the nuns the so-called uh people that tick the box for no religious affiliation uh you guys don't have this problem in Germany but you went through this already long ago uh but in America it's now about 25% of all Americans have no religion uh about 33% of Millennials those born after 1981 and it it could be close to 50% of iers that is kids born after 1995 so now you're probably familiar with Stein's law that trends that can't go on forever won't uh but on the other hand uh at least in large part to your work and that of the atheist movement can you foresee a day when say in England and in the United States when we could get to 80% 90% nuns and also we should distinguish that that when they tick the box for no religious affiliation that doesn't necessarily mean they're atheists that's true they may be followers of deepo troa or uh you know they they think there's a force in the universe or the secret and they just have to ask there got be something out there something yeah yes um I think in German you probably don't have the same problem that we have with none being confused with none uh I have a friend who who was in hospital and uh she was in bed and a nurse was taking down her particulars and you have to write down everything then the nurse said religion so she said none and um then later when she was in bed she overheard two of the nurses gossiping about her and one of them said she doesn't look like a nun yeah I think um we're on the right track obviously even in in America um in Britain we're going getting there I think Scandinavia getting there um in Germany I think pretty good um there there's still uh a nominal loyalty in Germany I think to either Catholic or Lutheran Church so much so that they actually pay taxes um not just in general but you pay a tax to I stop me if I got this wrong it seems hard to believe once once you're baptized as say either Catholic or Lutheran then you have to pay tax to that church unless you actually go and pay money in order to disassociate yourself from that church yeah yeah it's a that's got to be something wrong [Music] there it's actually uh withheld from your paycheck just like in America's Social Security and and your health care and whatever is is taken out of your paycheck you never even see the money which by the way was why Scientology tried to get in Germany in the 90s as a major religion so they could get in on that withholding thing uh and that's why the Germans who had some experience with fringe Cults in the past said no no Scientology is not a major religion but by the way the humanist if I recall the German humanists they get some State support as a sort of Quasi religion it's hard to know how you would Define what's a True Religion right and I imagine that was the point about the Flying Spaghetti Monster was to was to raise awareness of the of the absurdity of having a a legal definition of what is a proper religion well particularly Scientology is an interesting test case because in the 90s when the internet started to take off uh x members were posting their secret documents online which was a new thing and you know this was like oh my God I can read about zenu the galactic Warrior uh you know and and all that crazy stuff the church actually got judges to give uh search warrants to go in and take people's computers their hard drives their floppy discs what they had at the time uh and confiscate them because it was proprietary copywrited material almost like you stole the script for Harry Potter before it was broadcast or something like that which would imply that they made it up right it's it's because if you copyright it then you just made it up there was a there was a another story uh there was a you probably know this woman Jay-Z Knight who channels ramtha the 35,000 year old Warrior no I don't oh yes so Jay-Z Knight she's from Seattle Washington and she was an actress there's a little background for you so uh all all of a sudden she started getting these Visions from rampa who was this 35,000 year old Warrior uh who spoke English with an Indian accent yes yes where that was 35,000 years ago it's not clear but then a German woman started channeling rampa and Jay-Z Knight said oh no no no no no I own rampa it's like copyright yeah copyright which you know if if she won that I forget how it turned out now I think she lost the case but if she won the case it would imply well you just made it up then yeah well I've always wondered about the Book of Mormon being written in the 19th century but written in the style of 15th century English what's that about you you just thought that would have given the game away right away that he's a charlatan yeah as if the fact that he wasn't that he was convicted of fraud earlier in his life wasn't enough if you if you've never read John cau's book under the banner of Heaven he's first of all he's a a great writer he's the guy that wrote Into the Wild and in thin air about climb he's a climber uh then he got into the he wrote a piece for I think Vanity Fair Atlantic on uh this multiple shooting of a of a polygamist family there was a murder there and then that led him into the whole polygamy World which is illegal since 19 1896 but they do it anyway in these uh border states between Colorado and Arizona and Utah there and these little towns where they marry one woman and then the others are Sister Wives um and so he delved into that into the history of when Joseph Smith got the Revelation from God he already was having an affair with this woman down the street so he comes home to his wife I forget what her name is now but honey I've been talking to God and you're not going to believe what he said you know you know our friend down the street well I have to marry her too and of course she was you know as you would expect live it about this well then I'm GNA take multiple husbands no you know God was really clear about this it's a guy thing and and and all my friends were there they heard it too they couldn't believe it either and and it stuck until uh Utah wanted to become a state in in 1896 a part of the United States and the government said you can't have this polygamy thing and they got a new revelation from God who said I've changed my mind about it's back to monogamy and then the same thing they got a revelation in the 1970s about African Americans yeah yeah I mean it really shows the you know the cultural boundness one one one one funny little personal story my wife is from Cologne Germany well cologne I don't have to in America you have to say that anyway uh so when she met she was pretty much an atheist by then that was 5 years ago and she uh then decided to opt out of the withholding thing and she had to go down to the courthouse fill out the paperwork file a little fee to pay for that and and she wore her she wore a black T-shirt that said Dawkins dennet Harrison Hitchens of course they didn't get it but but I thought it was pretty delightful but then they told her okay now uh just to make sure this clear you can't like get married in the Catholic Church the moment you sign this yep that's fine and you can't do this and that that's fine but it takes us a to process the paperwork so we're going to withhold three more months out of your paycheck and she's like wait a minute in a business contract when it ceases it ceases for both parties well not this one well let's have a big movement here everybody go to their Church yeah tomorrow and get a is it the courthouse it's a it's a it's a government thing yes you have to get excommunicated in the case of Catholics I think I know I've signed a number of excommunication certificates people have come to me and and [Music] [Laughter] said so if anybody wants me to sign their excommunication certificate after this meeting I would be only too delighted to do [Applause] so I'm curious how you answer the question that I always get what would it take shmer for you to believe in God I mean I was once a Believer then I became an atheist uh I didn't believe for really good reasons then but now you know being a Science Guy what's the evidence that would present to you that you would go you know what I was I was wrong I I I think there is a God and so when you go through the things like well a miracle happens here on stage the woman's cut in half or whatever we've all seen pen and Teller do this kind of kind of thing so I can't imagine anything that would happen that I could not imagine also was a trick or an illusion or I I misperceived or something like that I think that really really good Conjuring tricks are actually quite philosophically worrying from this point of view because it is I used to think well God would only have to appear you know with a great deep Paul Robeson type voice and say I exist and um maybe trailing Clouds Of Glory and but I mean have you ever seen a really good Conjuring trick it's it's very easy to be fooled or a hallucination um it is hard Carl Sean had an interesting notion um in His science fiction book contact where at the end the heroin Ellie calculated the constant Pi out to the tinth decimal place and she expressed it in binary and at some point way way way out in the in in the trillion quadrillionth decimal place or rather binary place of the constant Pi the the digits fell into a a square Matrix with nothing but zeros except there was a circle of ones bisected by a diameter of ones and this was God's signature woven into the very fabric of mathematics well that would be good um of course it wouldn't happen um actually maybe it would happen if I mean if p goes on indefinitely maybe there would have to be somewhere where um yeah and I think that was Carl's way of of like with the seti program what would constitute a pulsar is not going to give prime numbers for example no although yes the a Pulsa wouldn't you know the story of um periodical cardas do it giving prime numbers oh yeah you that's right you wrote about that yeah yeah um not that it's intelligent life but at least it's it's not I mean it's it's it's a way in which prime numbers could be generated periodical cardas are insects which for have plague years they they breed every either I think it's either 13 or 17 years different races of them breed either 13 or 17 years and these are prime numbers and it's rather odd that they should come out every 13 years or every 17 years they they lurk underground for 13 years and then suddenly they all come out together in in all in one burst and then 13 years later they all come out at the same time except the other species come out every 17 years and the theory is that they're running an evolutionary arms race with their predators and the Predators could be naturally selected to synchronize their breeding Cycles with the prey breeding Cycles so if you choose a time a Time cycle anything other than a prime number it's possible for natural selection to favor the Predators that synchronize with it and so the idea is that in the arms raise they gradually got lengthen their stride until they hit a prime number that um that the Predators couldn't match well that is at least a one way in which you can get prime numbers out of pure nature without a mathematician having to write them down and the the point about it as as Michael was saying prime numbers might be would would be a very good way for an extraterrestrial intelligence to broadcast to the universe its existence because the theory goes you that there there's only one way for prime numbers to be generated and that's through intelligence and the point about the cardas is is only that there is another way in which it in which it could happen from the bottom up yes yeah yeah um yeah on the same sort of category of of thinking about this in terms of the far future of humanity or if if we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences the point that seti people make is they're not going to be first of all they're not going to be bipedal primates with gnarly stuff on their forehead speaking English like in Star Trek uh and they're not going to be just five years ahead of us technologically like at Roswell where they you know back engineered uh silicon chips or something like this was the best aliens could do um they you know they'd be millions of years ahead of us so if you if you just take you know Mo's law for anything and extrapolate it out and look how far we've come in just a half century or a century or so of Technology they'd be like a million years ahead of us pretty much they could do anything we would call God they would have to be in order to get here because it be so difficult to get here when when I was about six I I wrote a science fiction story called Bobo goes to the moon there about a dog that went to the moon and I had enough sense to realized that the the people on the moon wouldn't speak English so I made them speak French instead [Laughter] that's great um but you know there's a there's a geologist quite a well-known geologist called Simon Conway Morris who does believe that we could expect them to be humanoid um he's very impressed by the power of convergent evolution and there are numerous examples around the animal kingdom of animals that come from different starting points in evolution and Converge on the same end point because it's a very good way to be for a certain way of life and he's sufficiently impressed by that to think that we should not be overs surprised if the unimaginative science fiction plot came true and they really were humanoid not speaking English or French but at least bipedal uh with perhaps eyes pointing forward big brain um I'm a bit skeptical of that although he he I mean I'm second only to Simon conr morrris in my admiration for convergent evolution he rather spoils it by dragging God in I think he's got a bit of a agenda there he he he he wants there to be alien life that is that is humanoid for some kind of theological reason I suspect I think so I think he also argued that there's probably not extraterrestrial intelligence uh of our capability oh yes I didn't know I I think that's right but yeah because if if that were true then of the you know billions of species that have evolved on Earth how come only one lineage ended up as bipedal primates and we're the last one standing I mean shouldn't have it happened doz of one has to be first I suppose so has to be first yeah okay right yeah and then once one has is first it might stop all the others um also it's not obvious that it's an ideal way of life there are plenty of other very good ways of life uh other than being intelligent we know that well in America I for B A remark on that he who will not be mentioned tonight yeah uh but but the but the point is that how would you know it was God if you encountered somebody who was capable of genetically engineering cells or engineering planets planetary systems or something like this these are just Advanced uh problems to be solved with technology and any sufficiently advanced technology I started to come round to that view I I used to think would be an easy an easy point to to to demonstrate for God to demonstrate his existence but Miracles are not that impressive when you compare them with even Earthly countering tricks let alone the tricks that highly Advanced civilizations of the kind that are cap that that if we were ever visited as you said they would have to be so hugely more advanced than us that they would appear to be Godlike um some people try to say from that well that means you sort of do believe in God because you do believe that there are extra but there's a huge difference between a highly Advanced creative intelligence which is evolved by gradual slow steps which is what would be the case for an extraterrestrial intelligence and one that was there from the origin of the universe and created the universe there every difference in the world between between those two some people can't see that that distinction it's a hugely important distinction by the way parenthetically do you have an opinion on the fery Paradox uh where is everybody if life is it well where is everybody um I'm not at all surprised we've never been visited because actually visiting bodily is such a I mean why would they bother to come here for one thing um but why haven't we picked up radio transmission that is more of a more of a puzzle um the statistical calculation that leads one to suspect there is extraterrestrial life um is based upon the huge number of stars and therefore planets as we now know that all virtually all stars have planets um so that's a strong statistical argument on the other hand it is conceivable that the origin of life on a planet is such a stupendously improbable event that it has only happened once and if that were the case then it would have to be here because here we are um so there there's that's not I mean it's it's not demonstrable that that we are accompanied by other life forms um then again you could say well it could be a very improbable but not utterly improbable event so there may be only a matter of a few billion life forms in the in the universe well there few billion is very few it's a very small number compared to the 10 to the 22 possib possible places so that the life forms that have evolved out there could be so spaced out right that they never encounter one another even by radio um I think it would be enormously exciting if seti were to pick up intelligent signals of course the evolution of intelligent life is another Step Beyond the evolution of life at all it could that life has evolved has originated bacterial life something like bacterial life has originated many times but only very on very few occasions has it broken through to perhaps multicellular life or perhaps um intelligent life capable of of broadcasting signals such as we might you could get all the way to neandertals and have us go extinct and they survive yes and we there's there's no indication that they were proceeding along toward and then we've only been capable of it for a century or so right and so um our our signals are expanding in a in a bubble which is not yet has that doesn't yet have a very large radius um it's been suggested that once a civilization reaches a sufficient technical level to produce um high energy radio then they also are capable of destroying themselves right and so it might be that um we have uh that there all over the universe there are little little Sparks of intelligent life coming into existence and then snuffing themselves out almost immediately which is why we have to colonize Mars just in case yes yeah I'm not going well it's a one-way trip for start isn't it that's right yeah yeah now back to to to the we're talking here about generic Gods uh back to the Christian God or the monotheism God our late friend Vic Stanger made the point that um we don't even have to make this argument if that God exists the universe should show certain features and it doesn't and therefore we can kind of disprove the hypoth you know disprove a hypothesis the hypothesis has not been proved because here are the characteristics it would have to meet and it doesn't meet those you mean that the Universe should be more friendly more friendly uh the problem of evil is biggest one God's all powerful and all KN well yeah but there's no reason why it shouldn't be evil God I mean you you no reason to assume that God has to be good well yes but the Christian God oh yeah the Chris God that one yeah so good that he had to have his son crucified in order to to forgive the rest of us because he loved us yes I've been trying out a new argument with Christians uh who absolutely must believe in the resurrection or else why would you be a Christian so it had to happen why do you think it happened they give the arguments and and then I say okay why don't the Jews accept those arguments now you can't say because they they believe their wrong God they believe the same God as you they even believe the same book at least the old part of it and they even Jews even believe there will be a messiah he just hasn't come yet so they're that far with you they know the arguments you can't say they don't understand the arguments these are learned rabbis have been studying this for 2,000 years why don't they accept and I never get a good answer other than well I'm praying for them or something like that yeah um but by way of background to to seg into a related question about truth um last year I did a podcast with Joe Rogan on ostensibly about ancient archaeology who built the pyramids that sort of thing with a fellow named Graham Hancock uh now he doesn't believe Ancient Aliens came here and built the pyramids but he thinks there was a civilization that lived 20,000 to 30 ,000 years ago that built them and they're much older than archaeologists think so this is sort of alternative archaeology category of which there are many but he's that particular one anyway so he's kind of an interesting character and he's really into Altered States Of Consciousness particularly the ones you do artificially so oh I've got him yet he people keep trying to get me to take drugs with him is that's it so last I don't know about six months ago he wrote to Richard and I and and invited us to go to Costa Rica where there is this uh Resort it's a nice place I mean first class tickets you know stay at the resort for free free food yoga you know it's great massages everything you want but you got to do iasa every day for five days now I didn't know much about iasa so I read up on it and and I stopped at the you vomit for four hours every day uh because it purges the negative energy and the bad things that happen in your life whatever blah blah blah okay okay so but the reason he he wants us to do this is because most people that take iasa come back convinced that there is this other world this spirit world this other dimension this the doors of perception are opened through the iasa it's a it's a way of engaging your brain with this other world and then we would come back and go we were wrong not that we're Christians but that we now know there's this other world and we'd win the Templeton prize that's right we'd win the Templeton prize so let's say we did that and unlikely but let's say it happened and we were convinced and I write one of my Scientific American columns I was wrong there's this and you write in one of your books I discovered the spirit world why should our readers or any scientists or anybody with a brain uh think that there's a good argument there well because we're hallucinating we're we're I mean a subjective argument like that is no kind of argument you got to have an objective argument it sounds a bit similar to Michael ping as um helmet which I think you've tried as well well yes this is a a Canadian neurologist who has a rather interesting um piece of uh research that he does he puts a a modified motorcycle helmet on your head and you sit in total darkness and he passes magnetic field through your brain and um with about 80% of people they have a religious experience of some sort they um if they're Catholic they tend to see virgin Marys if they're um it depends what their religion is they they if they're People Like Us they tend to feel at one with the universe and things like that and I was rather looking forward to to to that I was rather hoping to feel this sense of great spiritual Oneness with the distant um universe and with everything uh nothing happened with me at all unfortunately um they had this was all done for a BBC television documentary and the BBC made a kind of gesture towards science by having a control which was one vicker uh who um also underwent the same experience and he also reported that no kind of spiritual experience however Dr Persinger believes he was lying because peringer also monitored the electroen the EEG waves of the brain at the same time and the EG waves of one of the 80% susceptible people look different from the EEG waves of one of the 20% non-susceptible and I showed the standard EEG waves of the 20% nonsusceptible the Vicor was right up at the extreme susceptible end but yet he was denying that he he got anything instead he filled his bra with something it might have been reciting the multiplication table or something desperately trying to shut out the spiritual awareness which persinger's magnetic helmet was inducing not quite sure why VI would want to do that actually maybe something about not wanting to admit that his spirituality was influenced by brain states do you think that's plausible I don't know uh yeah personer he kind of plays fast and loose with the interpretations of these experiences he is I had I had some experiences in there I felt like I kind of left my body a little bit uh there's a video on on YouTube you can just type shurmer comma out of body experiences and I felt like a few things happen but on the other hand I've also done sensory deprivation tanks you know that it's a big thing in California uh you lay in these uh warm salt water and so so you're just floating there and they close the lid so it's dark and it's quiet and so B basically getting no sensory stimulation and then your brain after about an hour starts producing stuff and you know light hallucinations just kind of fun stuff drug-free and legal and uh uh I couldn't tell the difference between what perser was doing and and and just doing that you are in total darkness yeah so it yeah that's right so um I think he needs better controls for that but I do like what he's doing in the sense he's looking for some natural explanation for an apparently paranormal phenomenon So to that extent I use that as an example as well that there's no such thing as the supernatural the Paranormal there's just the natural the normal and stuff we haven't explained yet with natural means so for example if Deep's favorite theory about Consciousness Quantum Consciousness you probably know steuart Hammer off and Roger Pen's theory about the quantum States inside the microtubules and neurons and these Quantum States when neuron when you have a thought the neurons fire in a particular sequence and this CA causes the quantum state to to to go across the the distance whatever it is like the spooky action at a distance with Quantum experiments and it affects the quantum States in your brain it causes your neurons to fire in the same pattern as mine and we can read each other's minds okay this is all but it let's say it turned out to be true that would no longer be ESP that would just be physics or Neuroscience or whatever yes yeah just best best of or or different SS right yeah can I ask you something Michael um I'm about the moral Arc which is just printed in German is that is that that right just being y just you perceive a um an increase in moral sense as history goes by we're getting better we we've abolished slavery we we we have better attitude towards towards um kindness and towards women and everything um and I have called this I think it's the same as what I call the shifting moral Zeitgeist in both cases we notice that as the centuries go by um things that in past centuries were regarded as intolerably um reactionary and I mean if you if you look back I'm I'm fond of looking back just to the 19th century where um Darwin and Huxley and Abraham Lincoln were right in the Forefront of advanced liberal moral righton values yet they were by today's standards encoura racist um I mean you know L Lincoln freed the slaves but nevertheless he he made speeches in which he said of obviously no nobody but an idiot would think that black people are the equal of white people and they should ever be given the vote and all that kind of thing and Ley said similar things although he was right in the Vanguard of advanced thought you can pretty much label any writer by simply looking at his moral Valu and saying right he must have lived in the 1920s or the 1940s or whatever we change at an astonishingly rapid rate um and you've I think compared it to the Flyn effect which is rather different but the Flyn effect is um the increase in measured IQ during the 20th century decade by decade there's a really substantial increase in IQ it has to be standardized so the mean is 100 is 100 but you you can do do that and and it looks as though IQ really does in measured IQ really does increase in the same kind of way as the shifting moral sist and and I think it's empirically obviously true it happens what I'm less clear about is actually as with the Flyn effect as with the Flynn IQ effect the moral Flyn effect the the shifting moral zist or the moral Arc um in both cases it's mysterious what's causing it yeah yeah so picker first floated that idea in better angels of our nature because in the Flint effect the it's not just that the overall IQ scores going up it's in particular in the abstract reasoning portions of the test so things like arithmetic vocabulary they haven't got up much it's the you know you take a three-dimensional figure and you rotate it in space three times and then you pick it you have to pick the one down here that would match what it would look like those are the ones I can't do by the way sorry you kids stay in school because we're going to need you getting smarter three points every every decade so and so then the jump that is arguable I suppose debatable is to reason morally it requires that kind of abstract rotation I have to put myself in your head to imagine how you would see the world uh and to then employ something like the the the Golden Rule how would Richard feel if I did this to him how would I feel if he did this to me well okay that requires this constant shifting back and forth so there's some evidence when I wrote this in 2015 these studies hadn't been replicated a couple of them have now where people who read uh literature uh novels good novels not not not People magazine type you know trash novels but good novels you know Jane Austin kind of stuff um they score higher on uh these T mind reading tasks so you show people pictures of people's faces and say what what is this person feeling and people that empathy test empathy test yeah so people that read a lot score higher on those so the the interpretation is is that reading novels helps train the brain for you to see what the world looks like through another character's eyes and therefore to be more moral yeah that that's the idea uh we have it on the authority of Donald Trump's Ghost Writer that he's never read a book in his adult life that explains a lot his book yes he didn't even write it don't read it yeah we weren't going to mention it but it's on the table okay it's all right it's okay we deal with this every hour now in America at first it was like once a month something crazy would happen then it was once a week then it was once a day now it's pretty much every hour yeah so um yeah so I uh again like with I agree with Pinker there's nothing inevitable about it the whole thing could be reversed uh not likely on the big things it's not like slavery is going to come back legally uh there is slave trade you know slave labor and and and the sex trafficking and that sort of thing which is a kind of slavery but it's not legal and it happens in countries with crappy governments that can't enforce the laws against slavery um and you know it's not like women are going to lose the vote now that they have it in every country including Saudi Arabia uh so I think those big ones will continue I think the little setbacks are like you know populism white nationalism authoritarianism some of those we have to think of as three steps forward two back temp blips yes I think I hope um but looking at the big picture and the and the the shifting morals I guys as as it goes on from Century to Century um or decade to decade actually um I'm not clear what it's about I think it's a kind of complicated mixture a bit more like Mo's law which seems to be empirically seems to be empirically the case that computer power as measured by various measures increases at a fairly fixed at a very fix rate actually exponentially D the doubling time of about 18 months I think um but it's not it doesn't have one cause it seems to be a complicated feeding in of lots of different causes and I suspect that's the case with the shifting moral Zeitgeist as well that um uh it's a sort of General something in the air to not sound mystical but uh dinner party conversations conversations in power um uh legal decisions parliamentary decisions um television journalism books all these things in a rather heterogeneous way combine to cause a continuous with occasional blips shift in the in the same direction we're getting better yeah you had some examples I think it was in The God Delusion you talked about that right the the language shift yes so we we can kind of see how that happens right now because we're going through this with this whole gender pronoun business uh where if I say I want to be called a z or Aur or whatever um and I'm asking you to do that and then maybe the next time you write a book you'll you'll say you know shmer he Z yes you know so now there's a difference between like you and me just having a conversation about it but then you see how it spreads all of a sudden it's across college campuses in part the Jordan Peterson phenomena is driven by the fact that he stood up and said no I'm not going to do that and that was pretty controversial because before that this is just kind of what we do you know when people say I don't want to be called that anymore like I yes I think he said uh that as a matter of courtesy he would have no objection to doing to being compelled to do it which right which so do I I mean yeah because the like like when we were first younger uh when we were young uh you know when the the the his or her thing you know and you kind of clumsily go through and I guess now it's acceptable to say they when you're referring to the singular maybe I'm still uncomfortable doing that but apparently that's grammatically acceptable now that all happen without any government top- down regulation people just that's what I mean by something in the air that does happen you see it through like comedians they'll use black comedians will use the nword I never would and I think most white comedians don't now yes and and we've seen how that kind of just evolved just people just a thousand 10,000 conversations a day in which that comes up and you say I'm not going to use that word and that's how it happens yes I I don't like the the his or her him or his I I prefer to use she because I'm male I think there's something rather gracious about using the opposite sex to your to your own but probably that treads on somebody's corns I don't yeah so I guess there's always this tension between uh do we drive it from the bottom up like how do we spread atheism um well we just have 10,000 conversations uh versus you know we're going to pass laws well we need laws about discrimination probably yes uh but not like what you call people no no you can't legislate about about how you use language remember the brights yes the this was was an attempt to change the word from atheism to Bright I don't know if any of you remember this but uh it didn't go anywhere because it was pretty clear to most people that if if if the opposite of the bright are the dims and those are the people that believe in God which we thought was funny because well Dan Dennis suggested that the opposite of of a since the definition of a bright was somebody who did not believe in the Supernatural that the flattering way to describe those who do was call them supers and they no might be called a super right but I guess the problem is is you can't just by Fiat say this is the word we're going to use it just happens like how did 911 start getting used I have no I don't think anybody knows it just started getting used that's right and it's used all over the world even it's only in in America that the month goes before the day right so it should be 119 that's right that's right in the rest of the world but we've all adopted 11 yeah that's right another example of a bottomup change yeah so I I think we're getting there it's fun to speculate in the longterm future I just wrote an article on colonizing Mars what kind of government you know Elon says we're going to Mars okay we're going to Mars what kind of government you're going to set up there so I tweeted at him just for fun and amazingly tweeted back saying oh we don't have to worry about government just just just straight uh uh democracy and just everybody votes and then it's going to be fine it's like no we already went through all this centuries ago and you know just uh you know a you know one toone democracy like that just doesn't you know mob Rule and so on anyway uh but it's fun to speculate about at the end of the moral Arc I speculate about the Demi eventual demise or falling away of the nation state as a concept and we'll get back to city states and and just as that book hit the Press then Trump and authoritarianism and nationalism and you know the nation now is back as a is a big thing which can be discouraged you're kind of a globalist right a what sorry a globalist well I hate the idea of nation states I mean I I I hate make America great again um we want to make the world great again we want we want to make um make the whole Humanity great rather than than be loyal to what on Earth is so good about a nation I mean we've been through that as you say and look where that got us right but the absolutely [Applause] but their counter to let's say Steel Man the other side argument uh that maybe we'll find some sympathy with if we just open the borders and let everybody in and then the terrorists come in uh we don't live in a global world where you know that that everyone can just get along there are still bad evil people that we have to have walls against yeah uh that is worry I mean I mean Angela Merkel does a moral thing by opening the borders to people that are oppressed from an authoritarian regime and then she gets hammered for this I was talking to a young woman yesterday who is an ex-muslim apostate now living in Germany and she gets persecuted and threatened by fellow refugees from Islamic countries who have come into Germany and want to live in Germany want to presumably ought to be accepting a German way of life and yet they're persecuting a fellow Refugee from an Islamic country because she doesn't follow their stinking religion do you sometimes feel like our tribalism is so deep in our DNA both literally and metaphorically that it's going to be almost impossible to break out of that either politically or religiously there's always going to be these kind of tribal conflicts I was having a meeting with Steven Pinker just yesterday and he REM remed me of something which I find totally hard to believe which is that people's attitudes to controversies which ought to be purely scientific like for example climate change are governed by the tribe they belong to the political tribe they belong to rather than by the evidence and so their attitude to Evolution or abortion or something like that is right is is is a tribal thing uh well I should have said Evolution because that that's a purely factual matter um that your your attitude to something purely factual like Evolution should be governed by the political tribe to which you belong is a terrible indictment of humanity really yes and it continues yeah um I find it hard to believe well it's it's a way of signaling you mean you don't have to know anything about climate change it's just a way of signaling to your tribe I'm Steve makes the point of you know Al Gore's film in Inconvenient Truth was actually a bad thing for cl ctive yeah because oh Al Gore is a liberal and we know the Liberals are bad yeah and so it then got affiliated with the political movement rather than just a scientific issue I want to talk about just for a moment uh back to the atheism thing because I also get this a lot what do you say to somebody who's dying or a friend that's lost somebody or you know somebody that's going through an existential crisis you know I have no meaning in my life there's this moment in Ricky D's wonderful movie The Invention of Lying have you have you seen this no fil it's a great he's really funny but it's a it's a very deep and thoughtful film so he lives on this it's it's a fictional world where everybody always tells the truth and so he discovers one day quite by accident when he goes to the bank uh the bank teller will just give you however much money you tell them that you have in your account and he mistakenly gives a too high an amount and he and he assures her that she has that so she gives him the money and he then he checks his account and realizes oh I can just say whatever I want so of course you know the the humor follows quickly from there he's walking down the street and he sees this beautiful woman he says we have to have sex right now or the world's going to end and she says do we have time for a hotel room or do we have to do it right here and then there's a bunch of stuff with his buddies and and so on but then it kind of turns uh a little darker where his mother's in in the hospital and she's dying and and she asks him what's going to happen to me now and so he has that moment like at the bank and he's like what do I say then he makes up this story well in heaven you're going to heaven everybody gets a mansion a big beautiful mansion and you know people are there waiting on you and all the food you want and she's got this glowing smile on her face and then somebody overhears this in the other room and the word quickly spreads did you hear we all get a mansion and and so pretty soon now there there's a throng outside of the outside of his house I see that I haven't seen it there's a throng outside of his house uh you know tell us about the mansion and what happens he's now like Moses so and then in a funny moment he he had ordered pizza he's got two big pizza boxes so he opens the pizza boxes pizza's got and he he he writes 10 commands like these are the things that we should do and he comes out there with the two pizza box it's really what's it what's the to called The Invention of line the invention of ly how have I missed that it sounds wonderful um but it is that question what do you say to somebody at that moment it is yeah it is um it's a question of whether you um betray truth in the interest of comfort and um mean my attitude is I write my books and you can read them if you want but I don't thrust them down your throat and so I'm not going to go into hospital and visit dying patients and say um when you die that's [Laughter] it um um uh so um I I I I don't have a very good answer to to it um there are various euphemisms going around like you become one with the Stars and you go back to back to the universe where your where your material came from um I mean I think I mean one attitude that I sort of have myself is that there actually is something rather frightening about eternity um I mean go simply the forever being dead forever but also being alive forever is terrifying as well so what's terrifying is eternity it's it's not being Dead Forever it's being I mean it's actually much worse to be alive forever because you would actually experience The Eternity I me what a terrifying idea um yeah um what do you need for something like that is is a general anesthetic yes which is what we're going to have right um so um I suppose you know one can use these was it Mark Twain said I was dead for billions of years before I was alive and never suffered the smallest inconvenience all right um well hitch made this point about the Christian Heaven being like Celestial North Korea oh yeah you know you have this dictator that knows all your thoughts I don't want somebody to know my thoughts and the party you can't leave and you can't that's right you're at the party and you can never leave right yeah and Julia Sweeney m in her wonderful monologue letting go of God uh the that when the Mormon boys come to her door in Hollywood and they're they're giving the the pitch about why they she should join the Mormon religion and they get they give her the whole thing about uh you know the blind will see again and the will here again and the handicap will be made whole again and she said well um I had uterine cancer do I get my uterus back and she they go yeah she goes I don't want it back she say what if you had a nose job and you liked it do I have to have my own nose back and then and then they give her a thing and and you get to spend eternity with your family and she went [Music] oh I mean the moment you start thinking about yeah what is up there in heaven this is the topic of my latest book that Heavens on Earth if just the problem of identity uh and and and turns out Christian religions have debated this like are you physically resurrected up there this is like the Star Trek transporter problem what's up there uh because if it's physically you how old are you uh and so they have somebody figured out the answer it's 30 you're 30 because that's the age Jesus was and it's a good year when you're strong and your memories are still well I'm 64 so what happened to the 3 four years in my of my body that's not up there okay no it's just your soul but but what's that it's just a pattern of information that represents my memories but all my memories some of the memories because the memories are not fixed in there they're always changing anyway it's it's I think it's a yeah it doesn't stand up to Serious ratiocination does it no no it doesn't uh so well yeah I mean we don't have to say anything on the other hand we could still be intellectually honest perhaps and say I don't know what happens because we don't know what happens after death that is strictly true but yeah I think I suppose it depends on who's asking uh but but on a related topic you must get this as well what's the point of going on if there's no God or there's no after life why do you get out of bed in the morning that oh that's an easy one I mean you know how dare you say that you know what what you live in this wonderful world how dare you be how much more do you want than than than than to say to say because there is no God therefore life is is is not not worth living okay just die and Make Way for somebody else who can appreciate it problem right [Music] right and then where do atheists get their morals another one of [Laughter] those well that really gets back to the shifting morals I guys wherever we get them from it's the same as where everybody else gets them from because we are 21st century people whether we are religious or not and on the scale of the shifting morals zist we have the same morals as other 21st century people and different morals from 19th century people 16th century people um so we get them from whatever is in the air in our Century in our in our decade uh religious people may think they get their morals from The Ten Commandments or from the Bible but they don't they've never read The Ten Commandments or if they have they only remember one of them which is Thou shalt not kill um they don't remember that the the first commandment is Thou shalt have no other gods but me the second commandment is Thou shalt make no great graveen image um I mean they they don't know what they're talking about they think they get their morals from the Bible um and um nor should they well if you actually read the Bible yes be an appalling world we live in if we got our morals from from the Bible um so atheists get their morals from the same place as decent people get their morals whether they are religious or not now you make this point I think it's in The God Delusion about you're troubled by it when when scientists say when they bump up against one of these questions well here we have to hand it off to the Theologian oh God and you make a joke like why not hand it to the plumber exactly right exactly right yes I got that from the professor of astronomy at Oxford and I think actually it wasn't about morals it was about the origin of I don't know the fundamental laws of the nature or something like that he said ah well here we have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain to which I say why the chaplain not the gardener or the chef as you say the plumber yes but on the other hand when we talk about not where do we get our morals from but but but to what extent can we determine right or wrong or human values using science and reason most philosophers and scientists will say well at this point we hand it off to the whoever the utilitarian philosopher philosopher The Virtue philosopher you the Rian philosopher or whatever uh and as you know Sam Harris myself a little bit Pinker you know are kind of pushing for this well no wait a minute scientists can have something to say about this how far do you go on this yes you've got to have probably some I mean with in in Sam's case and I think yours um you have a kind of axom that suffering is bad yeah and um it's hard to dispute that but nevertheless it is something you have to well fundamentally the Bedrock of my moral faith is that suffering is bad and we should do all we can to avoid suffering among sentient beings and that can be get a bit controversial too um but once you've done that then everything else really follows from from by scientific reasoning but in which I would include moral philosophic reasoning which is based on scientific principles logical principles anyway so what once you accept a fundamental axiim like suffering is bad then you can pretty much do it all by scientific reasoning I think so although the critics would counter and say well let's move away from the left wall of Simplicity to more complicated issues like uh should women be wear a burka or not or female genital mutilation is is is a an even worse case uh what if the culture there says this is our culture and it's none of your business what we do you westerners uh you call it suffering we don't we call it culture or the richness of our religion or whatever and even some of the women will say yes this is what we'd like to do H how you know I wonder whether any woman has ever really said I want to be genitally mutilated probably not yeah they might be so brainwashed as to as to think this is what I worry so yeah there's maybe a couple of criteria uh you know the the moral the the issue that's that's being discussed in that culture is it totally prevalent or are there people that don't want to do it uh and if they say they want to are they really autonomous volitional beings it's like it's like the polygamy question shouldn't consenting adults do whatever they want or the prostitution question shouldn't women be able to do whatever they want yeah but when the girls are at s years old married off they're not autonomous that's right agents uh or drug addicted or whatever um and so there there's some criteria we could use well there's no doubt that that that when one says that that once you've got the Axiom then everything else follows by logical reasoning but moral Phil philosophy is notoriously a pitfall for difficult questions like this the B question is one um another one is these standard moral philosophic dilemmas like miners trapped underground um it would cost uh s so many dollars to rescue them that money could be spent on feeding starving people in TR problems yeah yeah um and the trolley problems um the these are well recognized problems they're very difficult problems and they arise whether you're religious or not um but that's not an argument against using scientific principles these are further difficulties which we have to face any anyway when doing moral philosophy I don't know where you stand we've never discussed abortion I presume you're pro-choice yes as as am I but I I have to say to Pro lifers who say you're killing a fetus you're killing a potential human life that's right it's also right that you're by refraining from having sexual intercourse you're depriving a human life that's true so therefore get out there that's right um I mean that there's a they they might counter that by saying ah yes but before before you have sex there is no particular human life that's in existence so you're not you're not actually depriving any the moment of conception is where they then then you confront them with identical twins and you say okay which of these two twins got the soul right and I've never met a Catholic capable of answering that question split Souls yes well so I mean there's no good place to draw the line a counterargument is just is personhood you're not a legal person uh therefore protected by laws and so on until U until well now the in the United States it's the second trimester after that you're the start of the third trimester unless the mother's life is in danger you are a person a legal person so so somebody recently killed a woman who was pregnant in her third trimester so it's a double homicide for example yeah um I I'm not impressed by the need to define something so rigid as personhood I know lawyers have to do that law lawyers insist on drawing lines like that it seems to me that uh personhood is something that develops gradually and a single cell zygote is a tiny step of the way towards personhood and and as you go further you further more and more but but coming back to suffering what's absolutely clear is that um to the extent that a fetus can suffer um an adult cow or Pig can suffer a hell of a lot more and so you're being totally hypocritical if you if you if you're passionate against abortion but but yet kill um or torture I mean in slaughter houses and things there is a a movement within the animal rights movement uh to make this personhood argument say for chimpanzees and gorillas just just as a legal strategy yes uh but of course Peter Singer is the Pioneer here uh on on this expanding Circle idea to include other species um and I have to say all the arguments for why we should not eat animals that can suffer I can't counter them and yet I had a steak the other night and and I know you You' struggled with this and other people that recognize this do as well it's hard to get completely on board with that yes um but but I think in the case of of of of abortion it clearly is a a a nonsense to say because this eight cell embryo is human it's therefore special I mean there's there's there's absolutely no evolutionary justification for that right um so uh you you should you should not use the argument that there's something special about human it when it's a fetus because it's because it's human right and and The evolutionary um counter to that is I think totally watertight at what at what point in in the evolution of humanity would you would you draw a line don't draw lines they don't exist right one of my favorite quotes from you is that uh I think it was no homo erectus mother ever gave birth to a homo sapien child yes that's right I mean when you tell people that they're like well what then how did it ever come about yes I met a lawyer once who said um isn't this a watertite argument against Evolution um every uh every child born let me think how did it go um uh yes if you go back in in in evolution there has to be a point where um our our ancestors were of of of a different species and yet we're told that species can't reproduce with um other other species isn't that a water tight argument against Evolution doesn't that prove that Evolution never happened to which the answer is you reach voting age you you you can vote at the age of 18 um doesn't that prove that development never never happens because right that's a good argument well Richard we've been going a little over an hour and uh we are instructed to leave uh time for some Q&A so uh I I don't know if we have a microphone or how you want to do it he says thank [Music] [Applause] you could we have the lights up in the house so we can see okay so first thank you very much uh dear Michael and Dear Richard for this interesting and entertaining talk so we have now the opportunity for the audience to ask some questions so we have a microphone from my point of view on the right side and on the left side so you can line up we can't see a thing can is it possible to have the lights up to have the house there's a mic over there and a mic over there I think they wants un and I have to apologize if we cannot we cannot have all question answered I think I think they maybe because we have only a limited time I would say 30 minutes for for Q&A uh okay well while they're working on the house the lighting the audience yes so it looks good so we so one on the right on the right side so we will start here on the right side then the next on the left side so I so please and only questions no statements so and um um then you you can address uh Michael sha and or Richard Hawkins for the question so please start here on the right side and go on can you hear me all right okay and please uh if possible uh an English language um on the question of convergent uh Evolution uh you said that it's possible that any uh species intelligent enough to produce radio waves strong enough to be heard from outside um would soon be able to destroy themselves somehow um could one of those possibilities also be AI um because neuron networks uh work very similarly than or similar to Evolution but are much faster and much more efficient and even now we already have ai that is smarter and better at doing stuff than we are um could we expect in a 100 years or so to be so obsolete in our Uh current system that we might as well just say okay AI you take over we don't we are necessary anymore there's a very interesting book by uh am is my mic still long y you're right um uh Matt tegmark I think it is um suggesting that uh AI um could um take take off to such a rapid extent that um as you suggest we could indeed be completely left behind and um uh however that that would not be a destruction in the same way as say a um nuclear warw because the the AI that would be our Legacy would be our successors would be presumably as capable or or even more capable of Broadcasting um signals that seti could pick up so that would not be an example of the short livess of a of of a civilization that that would have to come from something more destructive admittedly the AI might destroy us which might be a good thing uh but um it but it would not destroy the capacity to communicate with the rest of the universe yeah yeah t Mark's book is Life 2.0 it's a good read I an AI Optimist I I I'm not worried about it I don't think the disaster is coming in a way picker makes this uh Point actually it's sort of self-refuting that when you press for examples like well we'll instruct this AI machine to make paper clips and it's going to turn after it uses up all the material it has it's going to consume the chair and me and you and all humans the room the rest of the whole planet will be paper clips so this machine is is so smart it can it can do this but so dumb it has no idea what we mean by paper clips and where to stop uh and and you can apply that to pretty much any example like I program my car to take me to LAX like I did the other day and and and to get me there in the shortest route possible it goes up on sidewalks and plows through pedestrians like like Elon is going to actually not figure out with his Engineers that you're not supposed to do that or the you know government Regulators are not going to prevent that from happening before it gets to the point where AI can cause our own Extinction so I I I don't think it's going to happen so on the left side from my point of view yeah as a person comes from the Middle East out of a war um I have a question of the future of Science in um weapon uh development and inventions and the moral side of life saving suffer suffer reduction and um and another part the the the the end of PTI so um how can science help that in and the future of humanity so what was the question I didn't so um the what and and the moral why in the moral side of science how would it help with the uh weapon Productions weapon a weapons production science right yeah I think this is the a question about how Science and Technology like the AI question can can can can be used for immoral means is that what you mean yeah like the bomb yeah okay yeah well but of course the Technologies are used by governments or people uh not not not themselves they don't do this by themselves uh so I it's not the kind of thing I think scientists have to worry about by themselves but the ethical aspects of the use of science which is why Oppenheimer and the rest uh you know had second thoughts after Hiroshima like maybe we shouldn't have done this I I I think the way I put it is that if you want to do good things then science is the way to do it if you want to do bad things science is the way to do it as well so science provides the tools it's the best possible tools to do whatever governments whatever politicians whatever Society wants to do and so if you want to do bad things then then you use scientific means to to to do it um whether scientists have an additional responsibility to refuse uh is another matter and is is certainly arguable and um it might even have happened I I think I mean I I dare say there are scientists who refuse to work on on Weapons Systems um I think it's been suggested that uh in the in the second world war um the reason why Germany did not develop an atomic bomb was that Heisenberg I mean the the official reason is that Heisenberg miscalculated but interesting question is whether he deliberately Mis miscalculated as a as a as a moral act and I'm not sure that's ever been settled maybe it has yeah the problem like back to the a AI question the use of artificial intelligence the internet Whatever by Rogue States and terrorists and so on that's the problem it's not the technology it's the people uh and so to get to nuclear zero is going to be very difficult because of the other guy problem I'll give up my nukes if you do but he says well I'm not going to until you do and you end up in this so now we have nine nuclear States so the the money spent that we spend on building these weapons should be spent on Game Theory analysis or diplomacy or social science or you know how to get people that are in Conflict to to talk to each other so that they don't want to do that anyway that's but that's a harder problem okay next question on the right side I'll just take the microphone I guess uh good evening first off I wanted to thank you a lot for this opportunity to speak to you tonight um you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier and he's been gaining a lot of popularity um he talks a lot about values like intrinsic archetypical values and they conveniently happen to be Christian values so my question would be if atheism or secular societ IES have failed to deliver a compelling narrative for people that they can like grasp on thank you yes okay so um yeah I know Jordan um and I think what the appeal is you can go on skeptic.com and read my explanation for the phenomenon I I I think the appeal is more of self-help uh you know people feel like not that they don't have the right Christian values they go to him for the same reason they go to say Tony Robbins who's a a huge literally huge he's like 6'4 but he's very popular and you know there's a Netflix film called I'm not your Guru in which it shows Tony Robbins is very much everybody he's Guru and and and it it has nothing to do with Christian values he's just talking about like Jordan stand up straight make your room you know work out every day eat white and because the world is a dangerous harsh place and people aren't nice and so you got to be strong something like that I think that's the appeal where in my opinion in that of others that have studied him uh he gets a little murky on the you know did the resurrection happen well what do you mean by the resurrection uh do you mean suffering for your sins or or like you ask him do you believe if you ask me do you believe in God the answer is no he asked Jordan Jordan do you believe in God it would take me 40 hours to answer that question all right if it takes you 40 hours to answer then you know you're talking about something completely different and there he gets into Jung and Freud and nii and doovi and all that stuff and again that's it's okay to say novelists have tapped into deep truths about human nature that's true I mean the reason Shakespeare and Jane Austin and so on are popular novelists is because they're saying something deep that we all kind of get like that that's true these power struggles and uh and sexual infidelities and all this stuff yeah they've tapped into that before psych cognitive scientists started studying it but but but to then and here's where he gets fuzzy then he makes transition from that to like a scientific proof it's like no no wait it's okay to say it's a metaphorically it's metaphorically true or the novelist making up the story or tapping into something that's true but but but the story is not true and and there he gets a little murky that makes people nervous like me okay next question from the left side uh Professor doen you said um living forever is rather frightening I wonder and this question is for both would you consider or encourage the use of Life Extension Technologies to prolong your life through science well I I might go for 200 years that about my limit yeah my answer is you know cuz I again I just wrote that book Heavens on Earth so I interviewed all these people talk to these people shmer don't you want to live to be 500 or a thousand years I go look just get me to 80 without prostate cancer get me to 90 without Alzheimer's get me to 100 where I'm not in a bed plugged in just incremental so we call this protopia not Utopia protopia just little bit better every day and don't worry about the you know the takeoff Point 500 years from now we get to live forever something like that um and if along the way these longev there's a lot of money startup money in this in Silicon Valley for these longevity life extension Technologies to which I say great because along the way they're going to have to solve cancer problems the Alzheimer's cility dementia problems uh and that would be good and again don't worry about the far just tomorrow [Applause] okay next question from the right side uh so we heard Michael talk about Jordan Peterson I wanted to ask Richard if you have an opinion an opinion on him as well and if you plan on debate debating him in the future I I'm sorry I didn't get that at all Jordan Peterson is that what you said yes exactly I wanted he want to know your opinion and if you plan on debating or not God I'm just aware that every time I look at the internet Jordan Peterson Jordan Peterson Jordan Peterson um no I don't have an opinion um no why should I have an [Music] [Applause] opinion okay I gather I I I I gather he objects to being forced by the Canadian by Canadian law to use pronouns that people want him to use and on that I'm thoroughly in his fa faor good for him uh yeah my question was to Peterson related so I guess I I just I just find it weird that you don't have an opinion on him because your teachings or what you usually say is would be contrary I never offer an opinion on something of which I'm ignorant yes here he is [Music] so uh so I am a big uh I'm very big on moving towards progressively moving towards a global culture uh and I often do these thought experiments how we can very constructively move towards a more Global culture where we are interacting more uh with each other and uh often the problem that comes to my head is like the tribal Instinct in my head uh feels a bit um uh cringes a bit when it thinks about uh okay so we are going to lose out on certain languages we are going to dilute a lot of cultural things some of them of course are bad they will be veed out but a lot of good stuff will also get weeded out and and somehow I feel that this tribal instinct is getting tapped in a very negative way and a lot of the problems around in the world is due to this tribal instant so how do you see uh conceivable constructive way towards future where we still go towards a the global Direction but still plate the tribal Instinct that we have within us so the problem is the reconciling of tribalism with globalism yes right well well part of it is first you break down economic barriers so you allow free trade and people exchange and they realize you're not a bad person or whatever getting political borders to be more porous I think is going to be more is going to be harder because of you know language and other tribal defining characteristics something like that yeah I do think tribalism is one of the great evils actually one of the things we really need to to work on to to try to and I think we all suffer from it to some extent and need to purge ourselves of it yes there's a great um documentary film a PBS film on Jane Elliot the third grade teacher in I think 1968 uh came into her class one day so these are third graders uh and she says well you know we're going to divide the room today and to the blue-eyed people and the brown-eyed people and now we've all you're you're probably all familiar with the study but you have to watch the film of how effective she is at making the the prejudices happen within minutes of how quickly you know because then then one of the brown-eyed students says something and she says you see blue-eyed kids that's just the kind of thing a brown-eyed person would say isn't it and they're like yes it is yeah and then they do a followup which I was not aware of that she did I don't know maybe a decade later uh with a a group of prison staffers so guards and administrators or whatever and she did the same kind of thing same thing with them Brown the brown-eyed people and the blue-eyed people and she started dividing them up and they fell right into it like the third graders like within minutes you know one of them didn't have the clipboard right you know that's just the kind of thing a brown-eyed person would do with a clipboard see and and they were like yeah yeah it's like wow yeah typical Taurus or typical yes yes Libra Libra right I think another similar experiment was perhaps you know this better than me Michael um dividing children up giving them at random either green t-shirts or orange t-shirts it's the same kind of thing yeah same kind of thing and I I imagine extending that um experiment for a couple of hundred years when you have a rule that children with orange t-shirts have to grow up and marry other orange children and green children have to marry other green children and they and then they yes then they have children of their own who have to wear the same t-shirt and they go to either orange schools or green schools and that goes on for 200 300 years and what have you got Northern Ireland [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] thank you uh this is leading very well to to the question that I have you were mentioning the the nuns uh you are mentioning the tribalism the nationalism that is rising up again in our societies we can we can see a lot of Muslim people who somehow cling very much to their to their uh the belief of their for fathers let's say and uh I am uh thinking if all this is also very much a sign of a need for an identity in a world where we can really choose pretty much what we want to do and I'm thinking if uh the secularism is lacking somewhat this identity and does it make hard for people to uh yeah to commit themselves on secularism because they feel like it's some somehow it's nothing or something and uh you Mr Dawkins you have been inventing this a for atheist which is somehow I see it as an proposal somehow to to give an a little bit of an identity to this new atheism or something but so my question would be should we put more effort into uh I don't know or is it is it like trying to install a new tribe uh what about this uh secular identity I should like to think that we don't need to do that but unfortunately it it may be that we do and and I'm impressed as I think we said earlier by the the fact that people do show such astonishing knowy to their tribe even with respect to um scientific beliefs and so I would like not to need to do that I would like to say here is the evidence this is this is what what what the evidence shows show this this this is therefore you know take it or leave it but if if we really do have to wear a uniform if we really have to sort of wear a sort of funny hat to show where're atheist or something I I would not wish to be a part of that wait a a skeptic pin yeah I know I mean I you're you're you're right we had this red red a as a as a as a badge um and I I I quite like it when somebody comes into a book signing queue wearing a a t-shirt that I made up like religion together we can find the Cure um which which which I see occasionally um and and but but but I I I would like to think we can do that without we can do it with the evidence we can do it by reason without the need to wear a uniform without the need to go to church every Sunday and and band together as a as a group but maybe not an atheist identity maybe a humanist identity which is why yeah you know the late Paul CTS wanted to build a a humanist building in every city in the world yes a place to go where you can hang out with like-minded people that's for something we're for civil rights and civil liberties and free speech and not not just we're against this we're for these things over here and uh you know you've probably spoken at many of these Universalist Unitarian churches and the same kind of thing they don't really believe in God and they light candles and they sing hymns to Newton and they they have testimonials about how they lost their religion and I don't I don't really enjoy these because I don't feel a need to go to church I never lik that part of religion but obviously some people do yeah they like the Sunday service uh without the god well maybe we can have meetings like this Le right right okay next question so my question is about the discussion of moral OB objectivity so you mentioned earlier uh this uh sort of moral Maxim or moral Axiom that all you need to to start to Kickstart the discussion about the existence of objective moral values or how we ought to behave morally is to understand that suffering is wrong and satient creatures can suffer and therefore that's wrong so that does a lot of work for a person like me but I find myself often at an impass when I argue with people that have a different conception of objective morality because it seems that they for by that they understand that a situation in which we have a universe that is only made out of stars and rocky planets no sentient beings whatsoever still has some sort of moral code there embedded in it and they understand that as the only way in which you can understand moral objective values so I'm wondering how can I argue with such people to say that it's subjective enough to say that so suffering is wrong and if there are sentient creatures that's all you need to Kickstart and build an objective morality but they just don't take that as subjective enough yeah I think um I think what okay there's a couple of threads here so first of all if if you're Tom Hanks stranded on that island there's no moral issues it's just you're just by yourself there's no other sentient beings that can be affected by your action so morality is not even part of the equation I think uh as for it be being built in the universe not the universe but but in the sentient beings in the universe there's morality in the sense that if you just think about what's the purpose of a star the star's purpose is to convert hydrogen into helium that's what it does uh what's the purpose of mountains to grow and a road and so on there so there's purposes in nature what's the purpose of humans well read the selfish Gene you'll build from there but at some point we're intera acting with other social beings and how you interact with them then becomes moral or immoral and and that's when it begins the objectiv the hard part about the objectivity is how that word is used like we're going to stand outside of humans and find here is where we know abortion is wrong or or it's okay whatever the issue is you can't because it's it's a human thing so within human nature we have certain impulses that we can discover through science that tell us what humans need what do we want we don't want to suffer and then you start there now the critic would say that's not objective knowledge you're just asking people you know would you like to suffer no that's not objective knowledge I think it is but there go anyway so um first of all thank you both for for the great discussion tonight um looks like three people already asked my questions so I'm going to ask it from a different angle so Professor Dawkins you unforunately very sorry about that so you said you have no opinion about him it looks like looks like he does an opinion about you there is a video of him saying that he thinks atheist like lure Dawkins should be should be oppressed first Arters and number two um Michael I've read your article I've read Steven Banker's article on on skeptic magazine I've seen your I've listened to all the podcasts with Sam Harris Etc the trouble is that people like uh Peterson are filling up the void that was created with Millennials and gen z um by not believing in God and and he's he's he's big with Gen Z in his advocacy of the of the Christian God of the Bible his Twisted um relationship with uh with reality and truth and in your time Michael you have debunked people like Chopra and others but you didn't quite push back uh in your discussions with with Peterson my question is why well because again it it depends which claim is he making that I'm going to push back on there's parts of Deo that I don't push back on when he says you know meditation is good okay yeah it probably is not for me but other people okay fine but then when he gets into the quantum Consciousness woowoo then I push back so again I happy to push back I did in my article on Peterson about his theory of Truth the archetypal theory of Truth which is very close to Ronald Hoffman's uh interface theory of Truth Hoffman's he's a cognitive psychologist at UC Irvine who has this interface theory of truth that the brain is like um well sort of like a laptop screen and these icons are floating around on there they don't really exist in the brain they're just they're just our perceptual icons so all of the what we perceive in in nature isn't real they're just icons because our senses are just converting photons of light into neural impulses for example so then then you can go he doesn't quite go so far as say solipsism or something like that but but I push back on that and and and Jordan's theory of Truth is very similar to that which I think is incorrect and and I said so and and you know if if you've got four or five hours to drive listen to the Sam Harris podcast a matter and you know it's it's just uh painful to listen to it uh uh there was a Star Trek episode where Captain peard is captured and being tortured and the torture will stop if he'll say there are five Bright Lights here even though there's four and he keeps saying there's four and they crank up the pain and so finally he's rescued and back at the ship he tells ship's counselor Troy you know I came to believe there were five that was my truth and I almost said it but there were really just four he's just wrong all right so anyway that's my critique of that's straight from 1984 when when Winston right yeah yeah oh they stole that that's theyo it there's only seven plots in Hollywood they just recycle them all okay I to I think thank you um so on the subject of tribalism and uh uh the future of humankind um bearing a highly improbable Alien Invasion what do you think in your opinion will take for humans to um to kind of abolish this sense of tribalism and and kind of like extrapolate it to the whole planet to the whole human race so you're suggesting that if we invaded by aliens we would become one tribe yeah there are there are precedents for that yeah yeah well it's an area of cognitive science uh what's called debiasing or deprogramming people uh where like what's the best way to get a climate denier to accept the science okay it turns out it's not just throw the fact right there in front of them and then he'll go oh I see no you have to like in the previous example you have to say this is not a left-wing right-wing issue and you have to take the politics out of it you can keep your belief in free markets and unfettered capitalism you can have all that but here's this other issue here I just want to get you there or you can keep your Jesus but evolution happened anyway whatever if but if you if you give somebody a choice like a choice between Jesus and Arwin if they're Believers they're they're not going to accept Darwin right so so the the idea is to figure out what it is they're really signaling when they say I believe this and then and then and then go after that there's research on you know like teaching students like what's the best way to get them to you accept critical thinking principles or something like that and anyway you can Pinker has a nice chapter on this in I think it's in Enlightenment now summarizing the research on debiasing deprogramming first of all you can tell people about the confirmation bias the hindsight bias and so on unfortunately there's another bias the bias that I can now recognize the cognitive biases and everybody else fortunately I'm not subject to those self-serving bias okay is that um so uh I have two very brief questions the first is that in the United States an atheist cannot become president no matter what good of a politician they are do you think that that will perhaps ever change I think it already changed I think we have one well that's a good point and the second is that and more rather directed to Professor Dawkins you said earlier that uh modern morality is a product of change in society and I totally approve but isn't there another second huge aspect uh on the origin of morality which could be derived from perhaps altruistic genes or group solidarity Behavior which can be observed in a chimpanzee I think it's true that uh there are evolutionary roots to morality which you can trace in um both from ethological studies of chimpanzees and other mammals and and also from uh darwinian Theory uh but that um that's just the basis of it and then culture comes along and builds upon that and uh and it's that that's subject to the changing moral Zas but you're absolutely right that there is uh an evolutionary basis which which we we can call upon when trying to understand morality yes I agre thank you one of my favorite lines from the selfish Gene is uh that the difference between a rock and another and and an organism is the rock doesn't kick back if you kick it yeah that's right and that's that it begins right there yeah so I'm afraid if we take all these questions it would take another 30 minutes and it's uh a little bit too long so I would propose two question from this side and two question from that side and then we have a book signing so the next question here Mr Dawkins uh you alluded earlier to the very political nature of um the processes that govern um which domains uh of science or which exact scientific facts we rely upon when formulating arguments or building our world view worldview um surely the um raised differences in IQ um are known to you and aside from Sam Harris I'm not aware of anyone uh on the left side of the political Spectrum uh who really addresses this issue um and of course it is then um capitalized on by the right wing um you surely know that for example uh ashkanazi Jews or other European ethnic groups uh score about one standard deviation above the mean which is as you mentioned earlier um but unfortunately on the other end of the of the bell curve we have uh some African tribal groups who only uh score I think about 60 which is uh unfortunately reported by independent researchers since um pretty much the first IQ tests were um were well um taken there so what do you make of it that only the right um if any people at all addresses this question I am afraid I I was ignorant of the facts that you that you quote and probably um I I I I was aware that um an astonishingly High number of Nobel prizes in science have been won by people of uh Jewish cultural heritage um I it's very difficult to decide when you have figures like that to what extent these might be of genetic origin to what extent they might be of cultural origin there are such huge cultural differences between the groups that you that you mention um I so I mean certainly the case of the Flyn effect itself the increase in IQ over um the 20th century over decades um that happens too fast to be a genetic evolutionary effect even if that one could imagine a selective pressure in favor of it so that at least that shows that we can get dramatic differences in IQ which are of non- gentic origin um and um that would make me tend to be suspicious of the suggestion that um the differences that you describe are of genetic origin but I think scientists should always be open-minded to such possibility and we should not automatically reject a hypothesis simply because it's politically or so socially undesirable I should point out that [Applause] abely the comment that only right-wing people point out the racial differences in IQ and and and liberals don't all of this research is conducted by professional cognitive scientists and so and psychologists published in peerreview journals and so on there are hundreds and hundreds of them they're all academics they all teach at universities and we know from studies of uh the political persuasion of professors in the social sciences it's about 80% liberal so although I've never seen a study asking people who study IQ who they voted for or who they donated to or what their political self-identification is is it's very likely the vast majority of people that study IQ that record and Report those differences are liberals now maybe they don't want to go on a podcast and with Charles Murray and talk about it because Murray has kind of made it a right-wing thing to say but the vast majority I'm quite sure are not right-wing it's okay question from lesson please a brief question maybe if possible without a long introduction all right so uh on Jordan Peterson no oh no I'm joking I'm joking all right um he's joking he's joking yeah I'm joking so so earlier you talked about how humanity is getting better and the thing is around the Western Hemisphere we see that um encroachments on uh freedoms especially freedom of speech and introductions of blasphemy loss and all of that so my question to both of you would be how do you Factor this in with what you said about Humanity constantly getting better and the other thing is arguments Pro Freedom have already been made like by voler John Stewart Mill and all of that why is that forgotten and how can we reintroduce people to those ideas thank [Applause] you well I think the short answer is as I said three steps forward two steps back it's not a a perfect smooth linear your curve going upwards and by the way there's no there to get there's no there there to get to it's an astoic curve like this we're always going to have to work at it uh John Stewart Mill is still po popular in college courses his 1859 on Liberty uh has just been reprinted by the heterodox Academy um under just portions of the book um it's titled all minus one all minus one it's free you can download it at the heterodox Academy website um and it's beautifully Illustrated and it's the central points of you know why we should listen to what other people have to say uh based on Mills famous you know if if all minus one believed one thing we should still listen to that one person we might be wrong we might be partially wrong we might be completely wrong even if we're right we'll learn more about our arguments and make them better he who knows his own only his own side of the argument doesn't even know that you got to know what the other side's arguing and steal man or articulate their argument as as good as they would or even better to the point where they would say yes that is exactly what I believe and then you can demolish anyway that's so I think it's it's still out there we just have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing back against those forces they'll always be there yeah okay the last question from this side the last question okay um for a long time uh have tried to basically portray it as an allegory with the truths being more read between the lines and they don't and lately it's not even required that to actually believe in a god U the truths can be found by everyone and often times this has been criticized as laying giving false legitimacy to religion and thereby extremism can foster more easily but I've recently heard a point made that this act these attempts are actually quite good for uh the decline of religion because uh for example the Anglican Church has been have uh declining numbers all since the 1980s and it has been very quickly declining in in fact while other denominations have stayed pretty constant throughout the years so maybe this attempt to make origin more intellectually flattering uh makes it have no selling value anymore and for the public and and actually this is good for the decline of origion what are your thoughts on this second Point yeah if if not sure there was a question there but no whether or not uh this these attempts to make relig religions more intellectual have negative effects more negative effects like fostering extremism or uh they actually help the decline of religion as can so you mean that sophisticated theologians who sort of waffle yeah in in a semi incomprehensible way are killing their own church more effectively and we should be more welcoming of those kinds of people there's probably something in that I think um and it's it's a remarkable fact that some of the most doctrinaire religions seems to be the ones that command loyalty religions that spout palpable nonsense seem to be the one that that people remain loyal to um and or not only spout palpable nonsense but also demand extremely uncomfortable rituals and discipline and uh forcing people to undergo unpleasant sacrifices and things like that it's as though people almost like to be tortured in this kind of way um and I've it's always puzzled me but I think maybe you've got a point and um anything that leads to the decline of religion is okay by [Laughter] [Applause] me I rather like the idea of almost like idea of mandatory religious education of children all of the religions including Scientology Mormonism all the crazy stuff all for that yeah as Dan denn said the best way to get rid of religion is to make people read the Bible that's right okay see last question from this side last question at all uh no there should be another question from the other side it was it was four he but he asked his this the last question from this side and you had the last question Sor okay um well good evening um thank you for coming to Bin My question is kind of hard to phrase I hope I get it right there is a uh school of thought that is basically nihilism sitting on the top of um science as evolutionary biology and physics and that school of thought basically says that um the universe is deterministic so there is no uh Free Will is Just an Illusion um it says that Consciousness and feelings are nothing but an illusion either because they're nothing but um arbitrarily evolved uh neurochemical reactions uh I don't know if you both subscribe to that school of thought however I think it it must be understandable when people feel aggravated when they hear it um because it basically if you forgive the phrase it invalidates their existence and it says that the love that you have for your children and so forth is nothing but an illusion uh do you think that is a problem and what do you make of it I was always taught by an Oxford tutor effectively to reach for My Revolver when I hear the phrase nothing but um nothing but an illusion it may be an illusion but it's a wonderful illusion [Applause] [Music] and Consciousness may be an illusion Free Will may be an illusion but it's a very powerful illusion it's one that we all have and it's one of it's one of the things that makes life worth living [Music] [Applause] perod could I could I could I say something before we break for the uh book signing and I I haven't actually talked to Michael about this um I often when it's a large audience as this is and there's potentially therefore a rather large line cue for s in books um I feel it's unfair on people at the end of the line if we spend a lot of time dedicating books to particular individuals um at the beginning of the line and so I have always try to make it a rule not to dedicate books personally when it's in a long line I do it privately but but and ditto with with selfies I wish I'd remember to ask Michael how you feel about this I don't care we'll see how how goes well that that leades it open okay no selfies at all you thank you again uh I'll follow your lead on that Michael and Richards thank you and thank you thank you for the audience so much thank you so much thank you thank you thank you Richard that was great really good thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] if you enjoyed this episode you can show some support by subscribing to the podcast sharing it with your friends and leaving a [Music] review

Channel: The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

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Id: U32-vZFy7BQ

Length: 114min 35sec (6875 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023