Atheism, Science & Reason | Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins & Matt Dillahunty - London UK

that's a chance to get a signing or saying but but because so people can interact so there's questions that people can ask questions and the response in it and and become part of the events and I think I think for for most people who come to these things the lecturer or of the events is great but the ability to be able to interact I think is really important they're cool oh you Matt and I also think it adds an aspect of community which one of my primary purposes as you know is I want to build communities I don't I want to go around you know if it somebody suddenly wants me to talk I want to find a way to make that work and what I hear like I was out front while people were waiting in line to come in and you know some of them wanted to see a magic trick somebody wanted me to sign something but the one thing that they really wanted to do was just connect and the the opportunity here for events like this is not necessarily for them to connect with us but for us to write a venue where they can connect with each other you asked that question over there and I thought that was so good yeah I think it's really important for this for this confer for this kind of community for people to feel a sense of community the public events that some of the other things we've done the films people really it's exceptionally important for people to feel they're not alone because there's so much social pressure on people to feel like they're bad people or whatever if they question are out of the norm and just end to be is be with a lot of people who are thinking like them is a is a is a reassuring thing for a lot of people and I think that that's exactly right that community and that sense of fun I think is great I think probably the biggest reason I do it is for the community but the second biggest reason is I actually enjoy it I do a call-in show so I get to talk to people who want to call in but I don't always get to talk to the people who are going to come to these events yeah and getting a chance even for you know a brief interaction even a correction somebody be hey you said something on the show and I think it would have been better this way I love those kinds of conversations and want to encourage more probably one of the biggest most important things apart from building the community is encouraging people because it's one thing to change minds but I want to encourage people to act we need to increase science literacy we need to increase the understanding we need to tear down the walls that people put up portraying secular people as if they're immoral and if these people feel like they're alone that they're the only godless person in their community they're not likely to act but events like this let them know they're not alone and that they can run for office and they should get involved in lobbying and in politics and that it's okay for them to come out and talk about this because they're not alone and you don't know that as much just from watching videos online you need this sort of interpersonal Max and of course I agree with that completely but and the last thing I think is it and it's nice for me but it's people get are really excited to just meet knit and I think I think that's a I mean ah it's ego gratification we like me or Matt Matt or whatever but it's more than that the fact to be able to actually connect to people and talk to them it's just a wonderful thing and it brings it brings things home and makes people realize that that that people are accessible so same reason you know you want to go to a theater too you want to be in the same room with people but more important I think is the fact that that it allows these people to also allows people to celebrate have a real celebration of an event that isn't a sports event or a church of hint and it's it images to actually have a real sense of celebration and excitement about people whoever those people are is I think wonderful and you know I obviously it's nice to to be the brunt of that but but whoever it is I think it's a really nice chance for people to be able to celebrate and say look we're we're lined up at a Music Hall but it's not for it's not for a televangelist [Music] [Music] [Music] there is a type of crazy mushroom there me the years of my connected by spiderweb of endless root systems it's one of the largest living organisms in order [Music] it may hold the answer to our century snow dependent on oil but we can son answer energy sign my energy the time is now like it always has you get your face [Music] keep my feet my life is it's wonder Dorsey's and I'm wondering just what [Music] there's too many gadgets not enough food bro [Music] I wanna love you from the bottom of my have a so long ago I started all the time is now like don't you get your feet stuck in the mighty gotta keep movin [Music] if you have a question look to nature she's got to answer if you have a question look to nature she's got your answer [Music] ah [Music] the time is like you always have [Music] don't you get your feets like in the mind you gotta be fun [Music] [Applause] the universe is a mystery and the very fact that it exists and that we exist as part of it is the only miracle worthy of the name no myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of this circumstance no personal God need be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation no ancient fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize that we do in fact love our neighbors and that we can only solve our global problems together the days of our tribalism are clearly number [Music] whether the days of civilization itself or number depends on how soon you realize [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage Matt Dillahunty thank you [Applause] thank you oh my goodness I let's have another round of applause for Tom Anderson from small-town artillery that he's gonna be selling a CD out there and the lobby later on thank you guys very much for that warm welcome I am thrilled to be here in London and holy crap this place is huge and it's full and I love all of you is my first trip to London and so whoo I I have spoken in the UK before I was at QED in Manchester and most of you probably realized this but if you're from here and you have that wonderful accent when you go over to my country I'm sorry you're gonna be revered and respected you're probably gonna get laid I came over to Manchester hoping that that worked in Reverse not that not that much and then when brexit happened I was sure that I was going to come over here and be revered as the sensible accent and then we elected Trump so screw it I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what's going to go on tonight I'm here with two other amazing wonderful people who you already know we're here because that's the reason most of you are here we're gonna have a conversation I'm gonna steer it a little bit but we're also gonna be taking questions from the audience a little later I'll signal you and there's microphones at the side just sit tight for now but will come up and ask questions and then afterwards of a book signing for the premium ticket folks because we can't accommodate everybody because oh my gosh I just don't take it can I take a selfie is this eye I know this is like a douche move but I'm hoping well let me I don't want to fall off stage does that be a great way to start there we go wave Hey all right now my wife's happy because she didn't get to come on this trip this isn't about me and to be honest I'm not sure it's about any individual the celebration is science and reason it's a big deal and we'll probably talk about a lot of subjects on behalf of penguin philosophy thank you guys so much for coming out and rather than taking up any more of your time please welcome to the stage Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins [Applause] thank you [Applause] maybe we should stop I don't know if it's gonna get much better than that you can only grade knock me over first how are both of you I mean this is the first event that Sam and I have done together and Richard I have done things that pass are you well are you excited I am impressively free of jet lag for a trip like this so I'm very happy to be here happy to be in London well I've only just come from Jersey you're not much jet-lagged from there so before we started we were sitting down in one of the dressing rooms and we were having a conversation about you know the communicating science the reason the fixing issues and one of the things that that popped up that I thought we might start with the Internet seems to have given power to people which is a good thing I would say and power to ideas and the opportunity to share ideas none of us can become an expert in everything you just don't have the time of the bandwidth so how do we deal with the issue of trying to figure out which experts people what criteria some people use to figure out which experts are worth listening to in an age where everyone has been empowered to become their own expert and just become science deniers or or fact deniers alternative fact deniers Richard you've been at this longer I'll let you start this it's a really difficult problem in science we have peer review that kind of thing we have methods in place for not respecting Authority necessarily but we know that an article is written in a reputable scientific journal has been peer reviewed we know that the findings will be if they're important if they're controversial they will be replicated and if they're not repeated it'll be matter for suspicion no scientist has the knowledge to understand all other science when reading even a journal like nature or science I can read the biological paper some of them I can't read the physics papers so you have to rely on authority to some and it's a very difficult problem because we we pay lip service to the idea that we don't actually respect Authority just because it is Authority just was its professor so so professor says somebody's something that FRS and so on so we it is a difficult problem and when I try to understand physics I have to some extent obviously rely on Authority as you say map the internet raises problems that everybody has a voice and fortunately not everybody has quite the same reaches everybody else but nevertheless it is a problem and we get politicians telling us things like you are the experts now well I'm not an expert on most things and Nora you and Nora you nobody is an expert on everything and so it is a difficult stage where in where people are being treated as though all opinions are equally valid yeah it actually strikes me as a fairly subtle and difficult to communicate point that in science and in intellectual life generally we don't rely on Authority except we do up until the moment we repudiate Authority you you have to be competent to the conversation in order to completely subvert the the status quo and so you know it's clear it's all it's true that science advances by discovering that the authorities were wrong at least on you know important marginal points and sometimes just wrong wholesale but it's just as Richard says I mean it's impossible to have the totality of human knowledge self-authenticating and the only reason why we're confident that anything is the way it is is because we are content to rely on authorities most of the time and and and and the reason why that that faith to use a loaded word is valid is because these authorities are functioning in a culture that is in in the best case and science really is the best case here continually purifying itself of error and it's it's it's not being driven by ideology and it's not being channeled by accidents of birth you don't have a Japanese science and an American science and with nationalism getting in the way and then so so there's there's there's a process that that we rely on and and both things are true we rely on Authority and we don't so I I'm fond of pointing out that you know I don't have faith I don't I won't use the word to describe this because I think what I have is a confidence level of trust that is to borrow from him and proportional to the evidence that supports it and there are people who would just say well you're just you're not only picking and choosing your experts but you might be picking and choosing the evidence you want is it the case that as science is the single most consistently reliable tool that we have for discovering things about reality but we've taught people about the scientific method which is an inaccurate way of looking at it because there are multiple methods and we realize that the way we get to new information is by challenging and overthrowing the existing information and so you get the people who are like oh you laugh at me now but they laughed at Newton or they laugh data have we have we constructed a system inadvertently where we're going to be constantly fighting this battle and it's just amplified by our current access to massive amounts of opinions and information well it's amplified and also that the capacity to detect error is also amplified yeah this is just that the dual effect of the internet which either half of which is perverse that is if you want to remain a slave to confirmation bias you can forever apparently on the internet but if you if you actually want to discover if you're mistaken you can also do that pretty quickly so there's also we see in social media which all of us make use of it that the algorithms you see on Facebook and stuff basically feed you more of what you've already liked and so we're creating bubbles and there's mountains of concern in this room and everywhere else about the sorts of bubbles that we're creating and how do we start I mean obviously we're not gonna go maybe we can go to Mark Zuckerberg could you maybe Richard could go to Mark and say hey let's change these algorithms I think this is an interesting point because in our wild ancestry in our primitive state we live in a village 150 or so people and we met the people we knew and opinion was just shared within this group of 150 people and now that's broadened out to the whole world except that in a way it isn't because as you say we live in bubbles and so we each live in our village but our village is now distributed spatially geographically and it's no longer enclosed within within the village walls it's but it's um it's got a is a kind of virtual village which is which is interesting and it's a real discipline we have to retract right shake off the bubble mentality the village mentality and reach out to two other circles that we wouldn't normally encounter yeah and the degree to which we're in bubbles yeah I've never appreciated as much as since the 2016 election this is a point I've made on my podcast a few times but it just it I find it continually astounding so I'll make it again I realized I had heard that smoking cigarettes in the States at least it might still be might be true in the UK as well but smoking cigarettes in the States correlates with many different variables and also the communities of people who smoke and don't smoke tend to be quite separable and I realized that with a shock that hitch was the last person I knew on earth who smoked which I mean which is a measure of just incredible isolation socially and it's done I've done very little to remedy it I must say but it's you know who knows what else of in fact we know a little bit about what else segregates with that isolation and my complete bewilderment that we have president Trump is a symptom of that isolation I think I amuse dismay because as a former smoker I know that you're constantly being shoved outside so you end up outside with a group of other people who are already pissed off that they're having to go outside to smoke so now they're in this angry headspace and then they begin to share and connect so maybe smoking doesn't just kill but smoking creates insular communities that are sharing their anger and vitriol outside the door yeah they're all weighing along the along the platform along the pavement outside all the shops and all the places all these those are a long ribbon of smoking community this haze of blue smoke and just to be clear we're not blaming all the world's problems on smokers or Trump on smokers but that this issue that we're kind of dancing around with we've kind of moved on to something that I know that each of us repeatedly deals with concepts around free speech and who is who should be allowed to talk not just who should we listen to as an expert but what kind of things should go on at our universities had clearly the free speech laws that I'm used to in the United States are different than than they are here to some extent I and I and I don't know because I'm not an expert but there are places that are outlawing offense the causing of offense as if not just in the sense of blasphemy but you know the serious offense that bothers me almost as much if not more than what we're seeing happening in our halls of higher learning where do you think we are how did we get here and what needs to be done to fix it you're welcome for the fix the entire problem at once question well I'm a little uncomfortable talking about this in the UK where you don't have a bill of rights so we're actually we're in very different situations or importantly different situations in the US and the UK and you're libel laws are the inverse of ours I feel like the in the u.s. we have a slightly better balance as frustrating as it is to contemplate suing people for slander and then realizing there's actually no way to do that whereas here you can you can sue and yes III find for me the issue is not so much about free speech as freedom to listen and when people are denied access to when when that deep platform does I am bein have you been deep platform no strangers and this is you'd think we would have similar experiences here I've actually never had a heckler I've only had one with it so don't don't don't be the first that doesn't count yes I I've only had one that was in Oklahoma somebody who said you up you've insulted my savior and sure you had I was quite keen to engage with him actually but unfortunately that security people dragged him out yeah I was i I was D platformed in Berkeley California and this hurt me because this these were as I thought my own people this was KPFA which is a ultra liberal radio station in Berkeley California where I lived I lived there for two years and I loved kpf there used to be a subscriber their subscriber only and I subscribed to them and so I felt hurt by that I didn't think it was a free speech issue actually I mean that they're entitled to it's a radio station they don't have to have got me on but I did feel it was a freedom to listen and people had paid to come to an event which I was built to speak out and I thought this comes up again and again in universities and I do feel that unit Berkeley of all places where the Free Speech Movement started universities of all places are places where students ought to be exposed to opinions that they disagree with in is that they find distasteful or hurtful and I think it's a betrayal of everything that a university stands for that people are being deep LAT formed by students and prevented from and other students are prevented from hearing what they want and I'm actually very glad that you made that point so one of the things that happens is we announce an event like this in somebody's like oh there's massive disagreements between these how that they get on the same stage and blah blah there were people who would would have been convinced that you and I had a difference of opinion on this D platforming thing and in reality I think we're almost side-by-side because my view is a university gets to invite whatever speaker they want they can disinvite whatever speaker they want people can go or not go they can protest or not protest as long as they're doing it peacefully it's when they dishonestly go about trying to platform something so it's the method that they're using to shut someone down is what I object to more than people exercising their right to listen or attend an event and in many cases we've seen the people who run the venue have no idea about the nuances and whatever bickering has been going on in the community around this and they'll get a message from somebody had happened at an event I was at yesterday oh you're putting this group women in danger by having this speaker here and as the owners of a venue who have to listen and have to have insurance this is a tactic that works to get speakers removed when it actually has nothing to do with the content of what they're saying or a fair representation of the conversation that might have been yes I mean that is exactly what happened in the in the Berkley case that they they were thrown up by the one individual and and they and they just acted on that they you as you say they feel they have to act well the problem is it does work and especially when there are security concerns involved there you don't have them in touch with this group the X Muslims of North America which has been you know for reasons easy to parse from the title have security concerns and when they try to book an event at a university they're now finding their events cancelled the moment people figure out you know who they are and and but it is the it you know that they have a legal right to free speech there's no you know there's no law against criticizing Islam people have just discovered that it's so inconvenient to incur these security concerns that it you have a de facto loss of that freedom and it makes me wonder about this actually came up in a couple of business I had Muhammad Syed on on the show recently and yesterday I moderated a debate between Faisal and hazard Imani we there's a lot of different perceptions about what Islam is and what Islam isn't if I just said that faster had been a good tongue twister you you would think that if we exercised our moral outrage against problems fairly that it would not be the X Muslims the ones who are trying to point out the problems who end up D platformed that there would be enough high realism being a little idealistic and wide-eyed that there would be enough genuine concern about humanity that we could have conversations on important topics and not be cycling the people who are actively trying to work to fix the issue because not every X Muslim is is you know reactionary some of them are reformers are attempting to well of course there was a terrible episode in London School of Economics when Miriam namazi who's as far as the leading X Muslim exponent in this country was make the happy get it giving a speech and she was Barrett and heckled and more or less the thing was closed down by a group of Muslims who came and I think tore out her microphone tore out her powerpoints that she couldn't speak and she courageously soldered on but what was truly distressing about that was that the feminist Society of LSE came out in favor of these Muslims feminism all people who should who you would think would be disgusted by the sorts of wait it women are treated by Islamists that I think was what was truly awful about that at LSE yeah it says it's a point that people don't tend to notice but the the X Muslims are actually the most vulnerable and beleaguered community because apostasy is I'm sure everyone here knows is thought to be punishable by death under Islam certainly most interpretations of it and so here you have a community that is threatened by their religious community they've attempted to leave and many of these people are in the closet they can't use their real names and yet this is precisely the community that is attacked as Uncle Tom's or racists or you know Colonia steals by so-called liberal non-muslims so they get it from both sides and they have they have virtually no sanctuary but the secular community this came up yesterday night and because I mentioned reformers I thought they would toss it out there you may or may not have a strong view on this is their value in encouraging reform of Islam and particularly extremist varieties of Islam or is that like trying to reform young earth creationists so that we end up with old earth creationist or day aged creationist is it is it a better tactic to just continue to demand evidence for bad ideas and expose them or are we willing to accept a softer gentler version of Islam well I think you I think we can move on both tracks at once may yeah so my friend and collaborator Mudgett Nawaz is very much on the reform side and his answer to this is if you think reform is hard just imagine trying to get 1.6 billion Muslims to apostatize which is really the alternative but obviously some people will apostatize when they're convinced that there is no God or no book could have been revealed by him so I think you I think you can make the argument both ways and simultaneously yes I mean the same argument comes up in the creationism debate should we should we allow ourselves with relatively sensible Christians who actually accept evolution or or shall be said should we say the whole of religion is bunk and I mean I I have collaborated with bishops in opposing and opposing creationism but on the other hand I can get what mater saying if you if you encourage the sort of soft wishy-washy Christian who actually accepts evolution but thinks somehow God has something to do with it somewhere along the line maybe that's more damaging and it's better to come out with all guns blazing against religion altogether I've done it both ways and I can't decide which is the best the the Reverend Barry Lynn is the current or former president of Americans United for church-state separation and we shared a state at a stage at a secular Student Alliance event and I I liked him and we get along and he's working on behalf of church day separation so it's great that we disagree vehemently on whether or not there's a God and so I told him that I have a goal of changing the entire world I'd like to get rid of bad ideas including religious ideas wherever I find but I told him that his soul was safe from me because I want him as the theist supporting church-state separation that I can point to so this would be the last soul that I tried to debunk so that we can continue to work together towards a good goal so if it's the case that we can work down multiple tracks one of the the things that came up is do you write about intractable Minds the ones that may not change the thing is I can't tell the difference if there's two people standing in front of me and one of them truly has a mind that will not be moved and the other one could be changed I can't tell which one switch and I'm not necessarily sure that that's true that neither of them can change their mind so I go with this assumption that their mind can be changed even if it's not by me or not right now and if there's somebody who I can't affect my goal becomes to try to change the world around them by dealing with the minds that can be changed in from for both of you when you you've both had conversations with people who could best be described as brick walls that that you might as well have had the conversation on your own rather than to engage with it what do you take away from that how do you is it does it get discouraging how do you battle the frustration of the perceived futility in the moment against the clear advances that we might be making unfortunately Dan Dennett is one of my brick walls on the topic of free will and I'm his well I think the one thing to notice is that as you say it's not always about changes in one's mind in the moment and the people tend to like to change their minds in private and that's I mean there's a kind of faith saving aspect to this and there's just you know kind of the water on the rock process where you might not be the the the final moment that changes their mind but you're part of a process so you I'm always impressed I think we've talked about this as well how few experience I experiences I have where it's clear that someone came into a conversation with a very strongly held opinion and by some process of reasoning they at the end of the conversation totally disavow it I mean this is I can I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen that happen yeah but you and I are just inundated with the testimony of people who have changed their minds on these core issues through some process and then the process all often entails reading books or hearing debates or maybe so it's not it's it's like watching it you've seen a supernova go off or something I mean they're going off all the time but we're not we're not seeing them a few years ago there was a talk about the atheist conferences by a man whose talk was called don't be a dick and he he he produced what he thought was an absolute slam-dunk argument he said how many of you in the audience if somebody called you an idiot would change your mind and of course nobody would but I I felt that was a very unfair tactic because if I if I tell somebody he's a he's an idiot or I don't do quite those words but if but if I if it the effect of what I'm saying is that he is an idiot I admit I'm not going to change his mind but if there are a lot of other people listening in say it's a radio audience I mean I've you've probably done I know you've done things where you're talking to one one person who probably is an idiot and yet you know that there are but there are hundreds thousands of people in the radio audience lists listening in yeah you haven't changed the mind of the idiot but you've probably changed the minds of all the other people who are listening at the same time and so this [Applause] it's first it's precisely the situation that that I deal with both on the Atheist experience it off I'm not necessarily trying to change the caller's mind although I'm happy for that to happen I'm having the conversation for all the people out there to agree who would have used those same arguments because we know that on some occasions if you can be shown to be wrong people sometimes double down especially if they've made a public profession on behalf of something this just becomes flat denial but we also know that through I don't want to go down the mirror-neuron route because you'll probably correct me but at least with respect to empathy if you see someone presenting your arguments and they are humiliating themselves not just you know I'm not necessarily emailing their mo name themselves this affects that individual who's watching in a way almost as if it had happened to them and that they yet they have the safety of not having been in public you know humiliated yeah yeah it might be wired differently here but I have a different reaction to being called an idiot if there's an ethical two medians no no no I mean well virtually so you know I'm well if the / if I guess the source is relevant but if the source is someone who you find credible on other topics and that source tells you you're wrong on topic X that becomes very interesting to me you know if Steve Pinker calls me an idiot I'm very interested and so and and and the offense really has nothing to do with it at that point so it is I it's more of a sourcing issue because you know the people who tend to call you an idiot or you usually disconfirm they're there when I was an undergraduate I I was I read the phenomenon of man my Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and I was completely taken in by it I thought it was wonderful and then I read Peter Medawar review yeah his book recommend it's the finest negative book review ever written read it and I finished this review and I said I'm an idiot I I was completely fooled by it by that moment of awakening I thought before it's not so much being wrong that affects people because you think you're right so it's you know it's not like anything to feel that you're wrong it's the discovery that you're wrong that is sort of the testament of your character because for me finding out that I was wrong is is joyous not that I was wrong but that I don't have to continue being wrong that I've made this actual discovery and there are you know people who were right in will say Oh Matt's wonderful on religion but terrible on topic X and without too much exaggeration I could probably pull up 100 emails and all of them disagree on what X is Matt's right about everything except X I want to get all of them together in a room so they can argue with each other because every one of those X's is covered by somebody else you might be wrong about everything Heike I am just compatible with the data at least I can't show that I'm not all right well it's interesting psychologically that we all have this experience of being proven wrong and that's interesting but I'm more interested in what we do with this sneaking feeling that we might be wrong but that's psychologically and culturally that's that is a far more well subscribed State of Mind and it's I think very consequential because well obviously when you're unequivocally wrong well then some people manage to ignore this but it's that's there's not a lot to well think I just lost there but most of us most of the time live with opinions that are not so well vetted you know and and it's I think it's good to be skeptical of thoughts that come out of your mouth or hit the page or you find yourself affirming which which you know if suddenly a very smart expert in the relevant area before you and said well have you really thought that through you know if you'd break out into a cold sweat at that point it's worth sort of calibrating your your conviction on those points I think I I think there's a phrase that I've heard over and over that feeds right into that exact moment because feeis arguments are at least the ones that I deal with on the show frequently there's almost a script and my job or my goal most of the time is get them off the script because I care more about getting them to think about it rather than parroting what they heard from some apologists and when you start getting them off the script seems to me the most common reaction to that which may be them mulling over the possibility that they could be wrong is to just say oh that was a trick question there's there's a defense mechanism there as if there's I don't know you sure what a trick question is I asked you okay please explain what you believe in why what was tricky about that and yet this seems to be perhaps a defense mechanism that creeps in at those times if we I don't know how many others how many more defense mechanisms mechanisms like that we might find but I'm constantly looking for ways to combat them constant looking for ways to have a better discussion doesn't mean I'm gonna have a good discussion with every single person but if we see these same trends over and over how do we maybe there's no answer but shouldn't we try to identify those trends in the actual thought processes and attack those perhaps more than the facts surrounding the the underlying belief yeah it's more about process than about facts because of the facts change and you're I mean that there's always new ones coming in and so he says it's the process by which you are vetting your opinions that I think is is crucial and I think it's it's useful I ask yourself and he's gonna ask someone you're arguing with what would have to be true of the world for you to admit that you're wrong like what would how in what sense is your view on this topic falsifiable and often there's no answer that you know often that there's often there was an especially in the case of religion you'll get people will actually sign on this dotted line they'll say you know there's absolutely nothing in the world of my experience that could change that would falsify my belief in jesus say and if that's true well then that's proof positive that is actually not based on any engagement with with the world of your experience hello what I'll hear sometimes the people who will do that have true an unfalsifiable position but they'll go then to personal experience for example Ray Comfort will tell you there's no way you could prove to him that Jesus doesn't exist because he's as real to Ray as his wife and even when I tried to point out you can introduce me to your wife and I can you know meet her and talk to her right you can't do that was it doesn't phase and when I not to continually use my mother as an example sorry mom not that she'll ever freaking see this but she will say she doesn't care about the Bible she doesn't or what she I mean she does but she doesn't care if you can point out problems with it doesn't care about philosophical arguments doesn't care about the logical arguments she sees Jesus working in her life everyday and even if I were try to go down the route of I'm willing to accept that you have experiences that you are claiming and attributing to Jesus I just wonder what the justification is for that that has no impact on her maybe me that I should never have these conversations with my mom but that's the path that it often goes down when when they start seeing this this doubt mechanism coming in of oh no no couldn't be true because of this of this experience that I have as skeptics as critical thinkers I when I don't know in much the same way that I talked about perhaps not addressing the facts as much as the mechanisms I think there's a value for a campaign to teach people to stop being so confident about their interpretation of their personal experiences because all of us seemed to be an argument from ignorance I experienced this I have no explanation for it therefore it must be God or therefore it's a ghost or therefore this pill worked or this whatever worked and III think I had to confess that if I'm asked what it would take to falsify my non belief in God or what it would take to convince me of anything supernatural I find it very hard I used to think it'd be easy you just you just see no God would appear in clouds and chariots of fire and things well that's a start isn't it I used I used to think that but I I mean I've seen so many good conjuring tricks and were you absolutely swear blind it's supernatural hmm and yet we know it's a trick I suppose if Jesus came down and a chariot from a cloud that would do it for me but I want that piece of video excerpt bit and put on YouTube I I still think actually a more plausible explanation than anything supernatural is natural we don't yet understand and so a trick wrought by an alien civilization that we don't know about yet or something is actually as implausible as it is it is more plausible than the laws of physics have been violated which is what we're kind of talking about when we talk about this issues you and I discussed this a bit over in Lawrence Krauss and I did as well because quite often people will say ah well what would it take to change your mind about whether or not there's a guy and I I used to give fairly glib answers of Jesus coming down from the clouds whatever and I realized that what you were just talking about so my answer changed I have no idea what would convince me that a God exists but if there's a God he should absolutely know what should convince me and he hasn't done that which means he either doesn't exist or doesn't want me to know he exists either way it's not my problem I want to keep talking I want to give people the opportunity to start don't make a mad rush but you could start lining up for questions at us but I had some for Richard that we both kind of talked about earlier because it came in salmon tweeted out hey what what do you wanted to talk about and one that came in which I have absolutely virtually no input or thoughts on is the future of human evolution what we might see in the future both from I guarantee that will come up from the audience while is done I'm proud I'm pre-empting it so that those people don't have to walk up to the microphone and we can talk about that in the interim okay well if you're talking about a real major evolutionary change comparable to say the increase in size of the human brain that's happened over the last three million years if you look three million years into the into the future would you expect the brain to sort of balloon out like the Mekong and the answer is yes only if the selection pressure in favor of braininess is maintained there must have been during the past three million years is Australopithecus there must have been a selection pressure such that the brainiest individuals survived better and had the most children is it the case in our world today that the brainiest individuals enoughenough I suppose you could you could imagine that if we colonize distant planets maybe even Mars such that there's very little gene flow between the home planet and the colony living in greenhouses on Mars that you might expect to get some interesting evolutionary change due to the reduced gravitational field more spindly legs a mortal spider like form of a human body rather than the rhinoceros light form that you would get if you were colonizing a planet with a very much stronger gravitational field but the trouble is really that in our world today reproductive success is so what's survival indeed is so much cushioned by the civilized conditions under which we live that it's almost impossible to say that there will be a consistent selection pressure in any particular direction I've sometimes jokingly on the many many occasions that I've been asked this question I've sometimes jokingly suggested that a large number of people are probably born because their parents were incompetent at the use of contraceptives it's the wrong selection pressure and therefore it is therefore if this in incompetence of we've fumbling you might expect future generations to be more and more incompetent in this what will forget how to make latex entirely but I mean but that's really an absurd example to illustrate the point that since we live in conditions when well in particular case what it takes to be incompetent is going to change by the by the decade let alone buy them by the millennium let alone by the million new years so in a million years time conditions will be so different because of civilization condition will be so different if we still around at all which is a moot point that that it's unlikely that any selection pressure that's going on now will still be recognizable then and so and so I would not even begin to make a forecast as to what's gonna happen so let me throw on my quasi creationist beanie and instead of speculating about perhaps features or what might happen because they try to make a distinction between species and kind whatever what time frame let's say we colonize Mars and now there's no more interbreeding what time timescale are we looking at so where we might be seen as completely different species independent that means the timescale until the point where we can no longer interbreed yes well it could be as as quick as ten thousand years I suppose what's the time scale for no longer wanting to interbreed surely that's measured it here yes actually know that we did weed isn't it it's the opposite lesson based on what that we we apparently did with the Neanderthals or they did with us yes well we now know that we did it debrief with them yes well Richard just to follow on that what are your thoughts about the artificial evolution of engineering our genomes to be guaranteed to come might as well do it here yeah I I don't have any great I mean it's it's it's I think it's both an exciting and and they frightening possibility if you had to guess that that the time course of this well what when do you think it will attend early one morning I mean we've been manipulating evolution in agricultural animals and plants for thousands of years and we produced dramatic changes in cabbages in dogs in cows and pigs and when you think that a Pekinese is a wolf and and we've been doing that by by the selection part of the Darwinian equation when are talking about the mutation part of the Darwinian equation about actually manipulative genes we have during all those thousands of years we have never changed humans in the way that we've changed dogs and cabbages and horses so in a way you might say well since we haven't done it by the easy way which is selection why would we suddenly imagine them you might start doing it by the hard way which is genetic manipulation maybe we will you don't think the hard way is gonna become the easy way fairly quickly could be yeah is there an implication there that there are certain genetic pathways that are more amenable to change that maybe how rigid of a path have humans become what what are we just assuming that we can manipulate things and implement changes maybe we're in a rigid structure where we can't couldn't possibly do the same thing that we do with Daleks no I mean I think I think it sam says I think it will become easier and then then society's gonna have to decide what what to do about that so on that note I'm gonna have them bring the house lights up so that we can see the people are waiting for questions and just for clarity I'm the by that I think we're all aware that questions in in a question mark and don't begin with your life story or your dissertation or anything like that and to spare either of them any public embarrassment if you've gone on too long I can go back to Austin and London can hate me if I cut somebody off a little too quickly but if we wanted to take questions and just remember there's a lot of people lined up I think what if we get the house lights up we'll start over here off to my right and and by the way sorry I'm good at interrupting I do it on this show all the time you could say your name if you want to but if you have a question specifically for one of us please say so because we're gonna avoid all three of us answering everything so that we'd go on all night and could please have the house lights out yeah I just want to say it I'm really thankful that you had already addressed the question of what would change your mind because I had a dilemma which question to ask coming in I consider myself agnostic and my question is regarding the future of agnosticism and atheism and this whole difference I myself however have never read the Bible nor the Koran or any other religious text that says claims a lot of times very scientific unscientific claims in it but I also know a lot of religious people who believe all these crazy claims who have never read the texts so my question is does one really need to have read those texts in one or the other category and what do you think will happen in the future when we have virtual reality and crazy entertainment which would make people less likely to read the books there sounds like what was a hundred or thousand years ago okay right that's two questions that may not necessarily be in the same who wants this well you need to read the holy yes no I mean clearly people are getting their religious worldview from more than just the books and there are as you say there are people who might even be fundamentalist in their religion who are pretty unschooled and what it's actually in the text because they're getting it in church or synagogue or mosque I think it's in the u.s. you might know this better than I do but it's something like 50% of the population can't say who delivered the Sermon on the Mount that's impressive in a country where 83% are sure that Jesus rose from the dead and will be coming back to earth so there's a there's a mismatch there but I think it's it it's useful to read the books because it's not so much what it's not something so much all the bad things that are in the books from my point of view it's all the good things that aren't in the books that an omniscient being definitely would have put in there but that's that's the deal-breaker as far as the the credence given to the claims of Revelation it would be so easy to write a better book than any of these books especially if you were omniscient and there's just there's nothing in there that demands an omniscient God as author yes I was going to say the the the the the best cure for religion would be to read their holy books but the same kind of preempted that turn and to unto an injustice to cap the the the story about the sermon on them on the Mount my British foundation British the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and science did a survey of in 2011 in the day after the census the week after the census we took just the people who ticked the Christian box in the what is your religion so these people who self identify as Christian and among the read gave a an opinion thought for these people and among the questions was can you name the first book of the New Testament and we only gave a choice of four matthew acts genesis and psalms i think only somewhere in around 30 percent I was 39 percent of the people who take the Christian box were able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament so they don't read the Bible and I think it actually would be rather a good idea if they did [Applause] hey so first of all thank you and my questions for Sam I voted leave in the brexit referendum giving thank you very much they're given your friendship with both Richard and and Douglas Murray if you'd had the vote which way would you vote I guess I could walk does that my brain has two segments into there I really have to plead ignorance here I have a exactly if you had can I ask the question or do you have a degree in economics no I don't but I thought I'd roast people like those Mary who I think is a genius so well I I am an immense fan of Douglass's and and he may even be here tonight i I I have to plead ignorance on this point I really don't I don't consider myself informed enough to know what the likely consequences were at the time of the vote and what what a truly intelligent person and well-informed person would have thought at the time of the vote but nor do I know where it's all going but I have a bias which is that an integration of our world is it generally speaking a good thing and a hey populist backlash against integration is a sign of good things not happening and the end so when you think about the the solutions the likely solutions to problems that exist at a global scale I think those are almost certainly this is almost a tautology those are almost like a guaranteed to be global solutions and if we can't if we can't integrate enough to actually execute on global solutions in a in a timely way that that's going to be a disaster for us so I think my bias is definitely toward toward integration and so I again I don't I can't say that I know brexit is that the death knell of civilization but you know just if I had to toss a coin I would it would probably come up on the side of being being worried by that trend so thank you very much [Applause] hello my name's Andre thank you very much for being here Sam I'm a big fan question for you for song for Sam we are nine months in from tram presidency don't you miss the days when the biggest issue was creationism not so much tribalism social justice and so on and what should it be if the next presidency would be Hillary Clinton to do in order to change the voters that those words should not both with Trump again what should that president do for those voters dude did you just suggest that the next president might be Hillary Clinton like like the Democratic Party I mean Oh what is it what are the Democrats need to do to avoid there there are a few things more impossible than the Hillary Clinton might be president I'm not sure I understand the question enough to satisfy you I think we need to clearly we have a problem on the Left I mean there's a kind of there's there's a tendency for it toward a a swing into what's now being described as a kind of authoritarian left in liberal circles and an intolerance of free speech it's the most salient symptom there on college campuses and that definitely worries me because it's that's precisely what is not going to give us an answer to to populism and authority ISM with aura terian ISM on the right it's not you know Trump Trump wins it has every advantage in his response to that kind of irrationality on the left so if you want to to amplify Trump's power and you want to to give further voice to the most odious people who celebrate his power what you should do on the left is become absolutely focused on identity politics and this species of leftist unreasoned we're seeing so I think we need something that at one point I call the new center this this phrase has has exactly no traction but it's not an accident that the right answer to many questions and the right the right answer to just how you have a rational political process of compromise is rarely at the extremes politically and so I think we have to find something that is animating about about not being an ideologue on the left of the right I mean did you just a second question for each other well well we should probably go on and if I'm to be fair and and actually it is spin off as something Sam said and I don't know that this is a significant point of disagreement I'm definitely on the left I don't think that'll surprise anybody however I'm also been in attacked by people on the left and among some of my friends who raised legitimate criticisms about the manner in which some people on the Left are engaging or encouraging disengagement they moved to a new center or let's define this I don't do that I stay on the left I'm clearly on the left and then I point out all the crap that's wrong on the left I spend as much time probably addressing irrationality and a dishonest argument from the left as I ever would on the right and the same thing applies with regard to religion dealing with theistic arguments after thirteen and a half years of doing the show it's trivial it's almost boring if I didn't make a game out of it which we can talk about another time but I find myself engaging with other atheists other skeptics other seculars because I hate bad arguments but I hate them most when they're coming from the people who are ostensibly part of my group or agree with me on the issue I don't want lack of belief in God to be so poorly argued for that we're providing ammunition to the opposition and I can be opposed to fascists and opposed to an tyfa and not think the exact same thing or I'm just like I can be opposed to cancer in athletes and not but but the thing is if if the people with the truly bad ideas that are terrible for the world objectively terrible for the world are working within the bounds of the law and are less likely to cross boundaries of reason than those in opposition are who are engaged in hyperbole and zero nuance and if you are not absolutely in agreement with me you are the end of the world I've been called a Nazi sympathizer just for suggesting that maybe I shouldn't run around uh punching people that I disagree with that was enough so but I'd rather stay on the left and point out the problems on the left rather than trying to create a new center which I would still think would be defined as like old left that new center is old left yes i-it's write an essay on something which society considers taboo or disgusting anything I wanted to kind of write about and I had to try and justify it and what I was kind of came up with is the topic of incest as far as he thinks it's disgusting it's weird it's odd so this is my question ready and I thought about him I say two sisters this is another subject if there's a penthouse letter got our attention it's an odd subject people almost matically think it's disgusting the two sisters they love you're off to a good start yeah I'm hoping you'll talk about this and that also say it's disgusting but two sisters they can't produce children which are disabled they're in love and they're not harming anyone so my question is apart from saying is disgusting weird and therefore wrong can you give one good reason as to why two people are in love and not harming people shouldn't be together just one good reason that's not it's disgusting just like people said against homosexuals okay yeah it's it's a it's a very clever device to to make it to sisters I think that's brilliant and I think that this this beautifully points up the difference between absolutist morality where you just say it's disgusting the yuck factor and utilitarian or consequentialist morality I think you're absolutely right I can see no reason at all why why that these two sisters shouldn't shouldn't marry what they want to know is very separate I suppose if no I think I think that that stands yeah that's gonna be great on YouTube Richard I can make it better by just agreeing with him well I one thing I I would add here is that disgust as a moral emotion is is obviously this is part of our evolutionary inheritance but it is a very bad machine for producing moral wisdom and and and what is disgusting in one context or one key you know with cultural context is often not in another and you know I'm not I I think there is a a truly universal way of solving the question of how to maximize human well-being as it's not it's not even to say that there there's only one right answer that but there's certainly wrong answers there can be many right answers and there's certainly many wrong answers and they're wrong not just for you and me and everyone in this room they're wrong for everybody you know cutting the head off your child is a bad way to raise that child to be a functional adult and so that's one wrong answer number one but this issue of incest and in this case me this is a thought experiment that that psychologist Jonathan height has has used a great effect to produce a phenomenon that he calls moral dumbfounding where he'll ask he'll he'll produce an example like that and he'll ask people whether it's right or wrong and they'll have a very strong discussed based sense that it's wrong but then when told to give a rationale for why it's wrong they they basically come up with it this is very lawyerly opinion that that is just okay kind of confabulation you know it doesn't really it doesn't really intersect with any kind of moral philosophy I think the one of the one of the consequentialist point I would make is that in the local case it might well be not wrong for two people who can't have kids and can't suffer in anyway it to be you know prosecuting their their tableau love for one another but there's I think part of the consequences are the just what happens to society what happens to other relationships what happens I mean there's a you're in dialog you're not an amoral solitude usually with your behavior and so I'm another example is we know why when someone dies why don't we just chuck their body in the garbage right it's all the same to them there's no you know there's no one to suffer that desecration but that the point of treating a dead body well is because of all the good it does for the living right it the way it honors our relationship with the people we still love and and have spent our lives connected to so it's not just the people in their life but that individual as well there's this questions come up to me Sam and I advocate for very almost identical versions of consequentialism if you live in a society where you know that there's a likelihood that your body's just going to be thrown in the trash or that your organs are gonna be farmed out and this isn't what you want you have particularly this diminishes the quality of your life while you're living if you live in a society where you understand that we're going to respect the wishes of people after they're dead this increases the the well-being of your life while you're living that is not inconsequential that's something that you have to consider it's not just about the other people in their life it's about the quality of your life leading up to their death if you were living in Logan's Run and you knew the secret oh sorry spoiler that they're going to be you know it would change how you live to those years prior to that and that's we tend a consequentialist coming to fire by people who's from my point of view seem to only be able to look at things myopically as oh this is how it affects me right now and and like in your example I don't have any objection to your example but I'm an agreement with Sam that there may be extenuating circumstances in the complexities of a society that might make it not a good idea and slippery slope arguments that can be perfect perfectly good as well and the argument against eating human roadkill's would be where there's nobody to mourn them there's probably an argument about against using the phrase even if I mean slip slippery slope we have a very good taboo against against cat against capitalism in the case of the taboo against incest I was about to say I remember I stopped myself maybe there's a slippery slope but I can't actually think of it in that case I can't think of this case of two sisters marrying what the slippery slope would look like I think Matt just gave it if it's behind every closed door there might be two sisters having sex that would diminish our quality of life while alive I'm not quite sure that's what I said but I'll go with it I mean if you're allowing two sisters we kind of talk then you get mother and son arguing for and of course that's not right sure but we're not gonna spend the rest tonight going down that slippery slope I thank you for your question thank you and I want to move over to the side thanks for waiting what we talked about all kinds of stuff good but I think her phrasing good lawrence krauss signs is changing the playing field in a way which makes people uncomfortable and you gentlemen I three prime examples of this ever accelerating trend so Richard Dawkins says we are survival machines meant to propagate genes in the gene pool Sam Harris says there's the self as evolution and there might not be free will and Matt Dillahunty says there's no God the universe doesn't have to have a purpose and doesn't owe you anything how do we address this discomfort and nihilistic views that some people might have fun transitioning out of religions or dogma and maybe you have sometimes this this thoughts and how do you fend them off thank you I'm glad your app says yeah I don't know how well you paraphrase any of the three of us because we're all gonna nitpick this but this this issue of meaning was something that we talked about that we wanted to address night issues about death and and nihilism and the fears of oh my gosh you you are insignificant to the universe how can we better deal with those well we might have slightly different answers to this but I think it's worth acknowledging that that it really is a problem I mean the way the way I view secularism secularism and even atheism specifically these are not answers to the problem of living a good life and that and that is a problem every one of us wake up in the morning trying to solve you you have to you have to find some game to play in this life that is satisfying and it's a genuine question you know ahead to how to get what you want out of life and there's a deeper question about whether or not you want the right things right is there a deeper game to be playing that you're not aware of or you haven't learned how to play and I think there I think there are right answers to those questions there that it's possible to not know what you're missing it's possible that you are in a circumstance where your life could be much better than it is but it's not going to be that way because you're attending to live as you did yesterday and the problem with secularism and atheism and even humanism is that these really aren't answers to that question these are just ways of clearing away the bad answers offered by religion and that the religious answers are bad for many reasons but they're but they're bad because in in their substance of particulars that they're almost certainly untrue but they're also there's a there's a diversity of religious which are are in zero-sum contests with all others and therefore they're divisive and therefore they you know amplify the tribalism we see in the world so this problem of how to live a good life is a real one and into that space cleared by secularism and atheism and and the criticism of ancient bad ideas has to come something and for some people it's science for some people it's art for some people it's it's some secular version of what I've in terror and shame and in scare quotes called spirituality but you need something and most people on earth are living as though there's there's either there's no basis to find something apart from religion or having lost religion they're living as though the answer is just to be eating a little less sugar than the average person your age and watching a little less pornography than the average person your age and trying to be responsible and well-educated and there's there is nothing sacred or profound left and I think that's that is a real deficit of the secular conversation and I think we need we need a a secular version of profundity that again this is a place where we may may differ I don't think science and art and fun fully capture what we want in life that there's something else [Applause] the particular but particularly for the questioner through me was my view that we are survival machines for our dream for our genes which many people think is bleak and Sam's view that we have no free will is big I think there's a nobility in that bleakness I I'm inclined to say if somebody says to me oh well somebody did say to me actually after The Selfish Gene was published that he couldn't sleep for three nights after after he read it and another man told me that a Canadian professor said that a young woman student of his came in to him in tears having read The Selfish Gene because it made her feel that her life was was meaningless I mean my inclination there to say well tough maybe your life maybe your life is meaningless but you need to change the way you look at your life because because what's true can't be changed and reminded of the 18th century which I forget who it was a lady said I accept the universe and he said by GAD she'd better that was one of my sort of first first reaction but actually accepting the universe accepting the truth of the universe accepting the truth about life bleak as it may be there is a nobility you you stand up and face into the keen wind of the truth and I think that is a noble and they an actually aesthetically pleasing thing to do anyway so I don't want to hide from the truth I think that the truth can be hard but there is nobility in accepting it and I think Darwin it's I mean that's somewhat the meaning of Darwin's famous closing words of the Origin of Species there is a grandeur in this view of life so I think that maybe I differ slightly from the salmon but I would we just add that there's nothing unscientific in what I would propose we need to honor the funda T of our circumstance it's not that you have to believe anything on insufficient evidence I just feel like there's more to a rich human experience than merely not being wrong of course or not or or having correct you know propositional knowledge of the world and I know obviously you share that view and it may not be one answer for everybody I tend to look at it by the way as religions I think by and large have come from flawed thinking trying to answer the questions about reality including about our fears and death and life and what's what's the meaning and purpose and because of this and because they become so pervasive they have absolutely infused every conversation even if you're not a religious individual you're surrounded by people and and they've passed on as memes to address oh well you can't have meaning unless it's this type of meaning that is encapsulated within religion when there may be other meanings that's valuable we buy by poisoning the well with religious ideas of the way things ought to be it it seems to increase this frustration when we find out things don't work the way religion thinks they ought to be and it's the example I've heard somebody say once that religion poisons you and then offers you the Cure and I change that to say that religion convinces you you're poison when you're not and then offers you the homeopathic remedy and instead of going down that route it's going to be difficult to take people who have had these ideas that everything where the entire conversation has been colored by religious claims about the way things ought to be it's going to take work and that's why I hear from people who've been atheist for 50 years and wake up with nightmares of Hell or frustrations about nihilism and I would say I'm sure we'll get into this at some point maybe not tonight but Dennett would point out that the conversations around freewill have been similarly poisoned by the things that we want about freewill that we want to have moral responsibility and I don't think that free will in any libertarian sense is required for that first place in order I think it exists so I'm kind of in the middle ground on that and I don't want to go down that path since we all answered this one but will yes sir I am this is a question for some you're all talking earlier about authority in science and social media who to trust I was wondering who you thought had more authority in general when it came to metaphysics an expert scientist or an expert philosopher well it's a bit depends what you mean by metaphysics people use this word in a wide variety of ways can you can you unpack that I guess the reflection on physics as a whole so was someone who had first-hand experience with experiments and stuff as a physicists have some sort of greater authority in that regard well it's not really a matter of granting authority to any one discipline over another any or one person over another in any kind of generic sense of a the person who has the most authority for me is the person who's making sense at that moment you know and the moment the evening the greatest authority stops making sense right he he or she's got about two sentences to solve that problem before my faith in their view of at least that topic begins to erode so every year as sort of as good as your last sentence in this game and that's and that's say that's what makes it thrilling to actually have public conversations with people who are smart and who have a lot of knowledge to bring to bear on the topic as far as the contributions of philosophy I'm not somebody I said something that was fairly that was read it's fairly denigrating in a philosophy in the moral landscape but actually it was misinterpreted and I'm a huge fan of philosophy I don't think philosophy is going away and insofar as we're making an effort to resolve conceptual confusion in our science you know that that that's always going to be the work of philosophy whether it's done by scientists or philosophers in each model at the moment and you know whoa metaphysics in the philosophical sense is is often working in the background of any kind of assertion about our beliefs being in in register with reality when we're doing science so I mean the work of a philosopher is is always there to be done but I lost my mic there I wanted to point out we've got about 15 minutes of questioning left and as a reminder they'll be book signing up there for those people who are part of that but so I will do my part to keep my answers maybe even non-existent but at least brief and and we'll try and do the same by keeping questions short so we get to as many people as possible yeah I'll give you an easy one I just wanted to bring up the animal issue I'm not like a militant vegan or anything but Richard and Sam you've both interviewed Peter Singer who's somebody who intuitively I sort of not sure about and then I find myself really unable to sort of disprove or things which he say seem quite logically sort of consistent and I just ones ring talking about brick walls earlier are we all brick walls on this topic why are we sort of wise Society so stuck and where do you see it sort of going forward from here on this issue specifically on the food issue or well this particular question comes from in arguments I had over foie gras which I guess it's all yeah where you are in case you are a hard case yeah it's a continuum I guess but yeah going whatever you want surprised me you you weren't you weren't eating that foie gras with Nazis were you well singer a singer is can make you very uncomfortable because his arguments take you to an extreme point of criticism with respect to your own daily ethics and yet it's hard to find fault with them I think his his shallow pond argument is among the best in in moral philosophy and I don't think there is an adequate response to it this doesn't relate to the the issue of food if it's just for those of you who don't know the shallow pond arguments worth a moment the singer asks us to contemplate what it would be like to let's say I told you now I came to this auditorium and on the way I passed a small child drowning in a shallow pond but I was late so I just left her there to drown and actually my most important concerns I didn't want to get my shoes wet they cost a couple of hundred dollars and you know I you know this seems a shame to waste a pair of good shoes now you would rightly view me as a moral monster for having that sort of inner life and yet if I told you I received an appeal from UNICEF or some valid charity which said if you know if only you gave us $200 you could save a human life just like this one and and they even provided a photo of a child and I told you that you know I get those appeals all the time and I you know I sometimes send money but sometimes I don't and I happen to throw this one away you will you that's that's sort of the common experience of humanity at this point we're all that moral monster we know there's something we could do to save a life that we didn't do today because the mechanism is there to do it and then singer asks us to square that that seeming paradox and it's it's only the paradox has only reduced infinitesimally when you when you add things like well this is this is a life that's near to you a vs1 that's far away I think the the future for truly truly immoral species is in getting taking more and more of singers arguments onboard institutionally where we are off we are allocating resources in a way that could withstand that kind of analysis and we're doing it and we're not requiring each of us to be a saint moment a moment but we're just requiring that that our systems function with with that degree of moral wisdom and I think we're over Oh far away from doing that but that that is the goal so I think he's he's ultimately right on on most of those points I think Peter Singer is a very good example of philosophy at its best and as Sam says it's extremely difficult to fault his arguments they're immensely persuasive not quite sure why you need to be a philosopher just need to be a clear thinker and you don't need to be donea to actually read a lot of the history of philosophy I think to be able to come up with arguments as he does questioner asked mostly about the animal issue and you know I'm struggling with trying to be more vegetarian than I was and I've been at home I'm pretty much entirely vegetarian now I tend not to be vegetarian in when I go out to dinner without the people so it's a sort of step in the right direction but it's not a big big enough step I think I'd like everybody to be vegetarian then then great chefs will start creating dishes that are less boring [Applause] but I do feel I do feel a moral guilt about humanity and by about myself and I feel it particularly when I see those lorries with going off to the slaughterhouse with eyes peering through those little flats is being crowded in there but there might be a technological fix for that too and there's this movement now called it was called cultured meat it's now called clean meat and there's some startups in the u.s. maybe there are in the UK that are trying to to grow actual animal protein you know that yes you know them by the way that's that could we could revert to an earlier discussion about the the up factor there's no reason at all of course why you shouldn't have teacher culture of human meat another point with it again that we will see on you to a set of human roadkill human lab kill that's just the kind of question that moral philosophers like to deal with them and write yourself about the distinction between a set of ideas and the people who subscribe to them because I know that when you are criticizing a set of ideas you can be called stuff like gross or racist but the standard response seems to be that oh I'm not criticizing people I'm criticizing the ideas but I think that while it's true to some extent it's also a bit of a cop-out because if a set of ideas is truly horrible than the person subscribing to those would by consequence be a horrible individual and well no no look think of what happens when someone actually changes their view I mean there are people who were it's not open to change but well I was just wanting to hear your thoughts about that distinction and the controversy surrounding it I tend to try not to assess people in that sense of you're a good person you're a bad person and instead it's you're advocating for good things or you're advocating for bad things rather than trying to sum up I don't even in the heated discussions or something you might say oh that you're an idiot err that's moronic or whatever else and and I've done it I've done it a surprise on the show but it it is still a give up move it's probably born more of frustration I've always advocated for addressing ideas instead of the people I tried to avoid summarizing that I'm going to fail but I as Sam was interjecting the fact that somebody is currently advocating for bad ideas that alone isn't enough for me to determine the content of their character I can only address the content of those ideas and say because if you change their mind and their mind has changed perhaps relatively quickly and some of us changed our minds that tells you far more about the actual content of their character the fact that we there are people with bad ideas is independent of of the you know an assessment of their whole character but listening to the question I think what lay behind the question of it was the very frequent occasions when criticizing Islam is taken as criticism of individual Muslims I think that's where it's totally different from what you've been talking about that because they're what I would say to that is that individual Muslims are usually the most severely maltreated victims of Islam and so we're not we're not talking about whether we we should respect people who have bad ideas but we're talking about people who have who are the victims of bad ideas and who are not necessarily mean they may propound them in an in a certain way but but I think that's what lay behind the questioner yeah and more generally I think there's this confusion between criticizing the ideas and hating groups of people for reasons of race or xenophobia or some other animus and I mean this is this so clearly doesn't map on to what real critics of Islam are doing my real critics of Islam are are are trying to help Muslim apostates right who share all of the racial and ethnic and national backgrounds of their former co-religionists so if you're if you're prejudiced against Arabs or Pakistanis well then you know it's kind of strange behavior to be the becoming best friends with with that Pakistani or Arab ex-muslims right and in terms of just how fully people can redeem themselves I think you it's just we shouldn't undersell this yeah yeah Maajid Nawaz was it was he was an Islamist right and he's one of the greatest people I know now and yet he was he came he can point to a moment on the calendar where his mind changed you know and and as an Islamist I couldn't really imagine collaborating with him nor nor him with me I'm sure but but he's an absolutely fantastic person and a friend and we sort of stumbled into a friendship a friendship by by virtue of first meeting under conditions that were seemed quite hostile to conversation so this really can maybe you can really fully converge with someone who at one point you would have totally disagreed with I'm endorse that imagine now as I think is a real hero [Music] and I want to say there's this there's at least a chance that your question is the last one not to put any pressure on you okay this is a question for anyone to jump in on and it's basically revolving around around comedy a lot of comedians say that like the reason that jokes are funny is because they have like at least an element of truth to them so I want to ask what you all think of the role of ridicule and satire in changing people's minds I think ridicule and satire is great and I think I think it's out it's our greatest weapon against against religion you and there's so much food for ridicule with so much opportunity it kind of touches on the last question about the difference between ridiculing individuals and ridiculing ideas actually I I'm a I'm a fan it and if an idea is ridiculous is deserving of ridicule by definition of the the absurdness of it but it values it attacks the issue in a way that may be safer than a straight forward oh this is wrong and here's why it may not only be more effective but it may be safer because we can laugh at stuff we can laugh at you know transubstantiation or you know when Elvis died for my sins he stayed dead type of things the the ideas are far I'm fine with ridiculing I love it I love satire and all that I don't know that it's the starting point but I also don't know that it's not the starting point we had in the secular atheist community for years and probably still disagreements over whether there should be fire brands or diplomats and then it was and he started labeling who's a firebrand and who's a diplomat well I'm both depending on the situation and who I'm talking to and I think that we need as many different honest avenues of attack as we can find because people believe for different and they're going to stop believing for different reasons there are people ha men I'm never gonna convinced there Richards going to convince there's people who neither one of us are gonna VIN convinced the Ricky Gervais is gonna convince with a joke why not what's the problem with having multiple paths of attack instead of saying well you firebrands you're the bad a theists or you diplomats you're the you know the conformist the there they're the the peacemakers you're letting them get away with the softer version of their religion I think that's a time or one mole I can't see that well we'll do one more on that side real quick or is it so first of all all the people behind me we're at a celebration of reason they believe in miracles Sam I'm a fan of yours I've a mother small percentage of people that pays to enjoy your podcasts and I even you know I even tweeted you to invite you out to dinner you spoke before about the two possible tracks in terms of influencing change of Islamic reform or just abandon it surely you might be missing a trick which is that these 1.6 billion people their religion is wrapped up in their culture in their identity and who they who they are their food their communities their values or they perceive perception of those things and surely I think in a place into the question that we thought we stood here before me when when we are engaging whether it's you know on YouTube or any conversation with with somebody who professes to belong to that community whatever their believes we need to be sensitive to the way they perceive themselves so for example that a Muslim person considers himself may assert himself to be a Muslim in this in and and if there's nothing they can do better they were born that way in the same way as I was born or Caucasian and and doesn't that come back into that question about people feeling for us it's personal against them when you attack their religion or their beliefs they're a lifestyle well it's understandable that people would feel that way I mean that's so that's the first concession yes attacking Islam in a very abbreviated form without a lot of context or without an ability to to explain the issue that can be expected to offend some number of Muslims no doubt but we're talking about a longer conversation that the culture has to have with itself and only in the best case the people in the culture can have that conversation I think only they can have it effectively ultimately for reasons that you allude to but there's nothing that the the the worst beliefs can be dissected out of any religion or they can be just ignored I mean they don't even have to be edited out of the books necessarily although that would that would be convenient and it is a problem that they're not edited it is a problem that there's a tradition that were that we can't edit these books because they're a matter of Revelation because then fundamentalism becomes kind of like a you know the reboot procedure on the on culture if you just put people on an island with a copy of the Quran but the Islam they will very likely create out of a situated be most apt to criticize so it's it's a problem that you can't battle their eyes Scripture but no when you look at the the life of an ex-muslim who still has a is very much in the community who has of relationships with current muslims and speaks the language and loves the food and loves the the architecture and then that's their world that's the / that's the front line of this conversation and that's and that clearly is that's a change that's happening and can happen and then there's again that the other track which is the the muslim reformer therefore the person who hasn't disavowed the faith necessarily for who it's a person for whom it's absolutely clear that we don't want to live in a world where you cut the hands off of thieves right or kill apostates or even even more edgier still you want to live in a world where women are the political equals of men though you can find precious little reason to do that on the basis of a study of the Quran and hadith and that you know even in Saudi Arabia some some people just woke up to a world where women can now drive you know as I'm into so the change is conceivable and once that change happens it's it's harder to roll it back I think and so I think I wouldn't underestimate how much progress people can make within the culture and you also shouldn't underestimate the effect of people like ourselves outside the culture making the the offensive noises we make because when I was with Margit in Australia at a book signing someone came up to me and said listen I just want you to know I'm I've come straight from Pakistan I was in a absolutely fundamentalist context to all my friends and family are Islamists it's not jihadists and yet your YouTube videos reach me I saw that I say that not to congratulate myself I'm just saying that but I was bowled over by that it never for a moment it seemed possible to me that that would would happen or have any positive effect really in that context and yet it does and if majek wants to attest to that somewhere he began [Applause] can I can I can I put any little bolsters as well there is there is no official Arabic translation of The God Delusion there is an illicit bootlegged PDF of The God Delusion in Arabic which has been downloaded ten million times and the third of a third of those in Saudi Arabia on on that note my apologies to the people standing in line I'm told there's a young man about five up that line that we're just going to move to the front and give to the final question two [Applause] hello hi there's one way to find out if I sound like a mouse on helium okay first I'd like to state that I am a member of the ACA so curtsy but my question for you is I've had Christian prayers come into my school I've had Christian priests and even a Christian pop group come into my school I'm wondering what you think if I were to say that maybe a Muslim pop group were to come in my school what do you think that teachers and everybody else in the school would be supportive of that or would they see it differently from anything else [Applause] Henderson so I I should I probably won at least qualified to answer this because in the UK they don't have the same type of church-state separation that we have in the US and it's been very effective because when the Christian groups come into schools to do things that they ought not be doing but nobody really cares about because we're just going to go along with it because our culture one of the most effective counters to that has been Satanists Satanists have been coming into the United States schools the United States saying hey if the Christian groups can do it we can do it too and they put out these awesome coloring books that have nice moral messages in them and as soon as they start handing out their stuff all of a sudden the Christian propaganda just vanishes there's a difference with the issue of potentially having a state religion as to whether or not that same sort of tactic could exist here but it might I don't know I can't tell you how the teachers have react but I'd encourage you to give it a go we're spreading Satanism to the youth now really considering the other things we spread tonight Satan is pretty up there first I don't me just expressed how amazed I am that that you are here and that you asked a question that well I gives me hope for the future and your parents could be great all right if there's nothing more at ease they very good did you guys have a closing statement for the crowd that you wanted to make nope being a great crowd thank you very much thank you all for coming thank you guys so much they'll be book signing up there Shanna's with the talking [Applause] you guys so much thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 315,312

Keywords: richard dawkins, sam harris, matt dillahunty, pangburn philosophy, travis pangburn, religion, science, atheism, god, pangburn, harris, dawkins, dillahunty, atheist, secular, humanism

Id: fzKMhLcnJrw

Length: 114min 47sec (6887 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 27 2018