Ben Shapiro Challenges Atheist's Ethical Worldview

I guess I I ascribe to emotivism more than anything which has sort of gone out of fashion in the past decade but I think still has some some some truth to it in in a sense it's um more of a philosophy of language than it is a philosophy of of what good and bad actually is what I do know however is that there are problems I think with trying to ground Morality In the existence of a God especially if it's done so on the grounds that it essentially can't be done anywhere else I mean as far as I'm concerned the religions of the world are false I I think that they are incorrect that is I don't think there really is a supernatural Authority and what that means is that the inventions of religious morality are just those inventions and inventions of a human mind now if you have a human morality that recognizes that it is essentially a series of compromises between the history of mankind trying to get along with each other on a planet then what happens is sometimes these ideas and these philosophies rub up against the real world and we can we can adapt them as necessary now there is a there is a deep problem with this and that is if I meet a man who wants to kill me or a friend and he says that he doesn't believe in God there's very little I can do to talk him out of that except I can threaten him with legal sanction I can threaten him with moral reproach exclusion from the moral Community but there's not much more I can do however if a person says that he wants to kill me and he believes that he wants to kill me because God has told him to do so then I don't even have that minimal approach reproach available to me because there is no law written by Any Man of any time that could ever count one iota against the dictates of the creator of the universe therefore if that God in fact does not exist and if these moralities are in fact human inventions then what you have in the grounding of an ethical system in the dictates allegedly of the creator of the universe it's all of the arbitrariness and subjectivity and and failure and faults of nihilism and human invented morality with all of the certainty and all of the faith and all of the unanswer ability of the creator of the universe that to me seems a dangerous cocktail that we drink at our Peril so so many things there and and so much that you're saying is is quite brilliant I actually thought you were going in a different direction with that last example which I'll explain in a second so yeah to to start with the the very beginning obviously the the idea of right and wrong so there are many problems with the motivis alist McIntyre does a good job sort of breaking down the problems of the tivism um but the the sort of idea that there has to be C there have to be certain moral absolutes that are Beyond contention and those moral absolutes have to be universally accepted you can ground that I suppose in a sort of descriptive Universe the problem is that to go back to your example which again I think is a really interesting one if a man comes to kill me I think the the the real question of religion versus non-religion in the utility sphere here is is it more likely that a man is going to come to kill you being a a devote of a religion that says that he must kill you or is it more likely that a man is going to kill you out of self-interest because he is not a devote of a of a God who says that killing is wrong so if you are faced with these two alternatives to kind of remove your example One Step the question is why the man has come to kill you I mean that's that's the your premise is the man has come to to kill you because God told him to and so he can't be dissuaded by force agreed we see that full scale in the real world on a fairly regular basis it is also true that over the course of human history men have come to kill one another on the basis of self-interest in extraordinary amounts of the time tribal self-interest particularly having no particular relationship with God just the idea that I want to kill you over territory I want to kill you over resources I want to kill you because you're not a member of my immediate kin family or because you killed a member of my kin family and so in Revenge I need to kill a member of your kin family the entire to to borrow from your language the entire sort of evolution of religion on a utility basis would have been to create moral absolutes that are applicable more broadly to then than to you and your friends any morality that can be created on an individual level is inherently dangerous because you can immediately graph that morality onto your personal self-interest the entire purpose of religion whether you want to ground that in evolutionary brain functionings or whether you want to ground that in Revelation the entire purpose of religion on a utility level is to remove morality from the purview of my special interest and to say here are things that I cannot do even if they are in my interest because there is a higher power that says I cannot do these things I think that a society that does not have these moral absolutes is in deep trouble a society that that refuses to say that there are certain absolutes that cannot be crossed under any circumstances that are universally applicable it reduces things that we all take for granted like Equal justice before the law like the idea that the law is supposed to equally apply to everybody whether they're a member of your family or whether they're not and there are broad cultural differences in these questions mean to pretend that all human societies have equality under laws obviously not true it's not remotely true actually uh there's a a very good book called the weirdest people in the world all about the idea that we in the west have this sort of ethnocentric view of ourselves where we think everybody thinks like people in the west but the truth is that because we are Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic we have particular views of the world those views are drawn from a particularistic tradition that particularistic tradition is biblical in nature I mean it is judeo-christian in nature even if you're just describing European Society or American Society historically speaking so the the kind of removal of God from the equation your suggestion is that God makes a person impervious to counterveiling responses and my answer is yes God does make a person impervious to counterveiling responses including the evils of One's Own Heart if you truly believe that God is standing above you telling you not not to do that thing and again social science tends to bear this out people who believe that that God is is above them tend to give more charity for example people who tend to live inside religious communities in religious within the religious community and I again I'm not going to pretend that I think all religions are equivalent in their in their truth propositions because I don't I mean I if I did I wouldn't be wearing a yamaka right so that's just what it is inside religious communities a lot of social bonds and a lot of social Frameworks are built on the basis of this shared belief system in other words diversity itself self-interest cannot always check self-interest and it tends to tear apart societies and communities unless is an orienting goal that orienting goal traditionally has been performed by church it's been traditionally performed by the idea that you are serving God together and because of that people build these these social bonds including the institutions of police for example to to prevent people from from killing each other because we now all agree that killing is wrong so we ought to have a third party that we can actually give the power to to stop to stop that killing so again I think that the the question of utility here is one of whether you think that the chief danger is that people are going to believe in a God who tells them to to kill in in God's name or whether you think that the chief the the chief danger is in man's own heart and that man is going to be driven by his own self-interest to commit murder and then call it something else I think it's all very well and good when this religious tradition is protecting what you think is good but as we know it can do the exact opposite and it can do so with the same force and I suppose the question we have to ask is whether this is a worthwhile tradeoff that is to say you know there may be uh some social utility in in putting our fundamental ethical assumptions outside of the realm of debate but when those ethical statements begin to inspire what we would probably consider to be less than socially cohesive Behavior there is nothing you can do nothing to talk people out of them because precisely because that's where they've placed them and that seems dangerous to me and it seems it seems for example you know a lot of people talk about how religion can make people happier it can make people more socially cohesive it can it can promote people to to start families and have children this is true of most religions this is also true of Islam which I'm not sure you would want to I don't want to put words in your mouth but I'm not sure you'd want to say it's a Force for good in the world I don't think in other words that it's always a worthwhile trade-off now I agree just because you mentioned the how the sort of culture of Europe and its success in America is indebted to Christianity I mean this is of course true in a sense but there's been a a recent Revival it seems I don't really know quite how it's happened I think it's got a lot to do with Tom Holland maybe that's the historian not the super hero not Spiderman the this idea that that actually he's good too actually the great I wonder what he would have to say on all this the that the western civilization sort of depends and and should be in Gra itude to uh to a religious tradition because it provided this kind of ethical framework in which this could have Arisen we hear about the scientific Enlightenment we hear about you know the the the grounding of ethics and God the creation of of natural rights as if these things weren't established in resistance all the way along to the religious tradition a society that today I'll expand on this if you like the society a society today that decides that religion throughout its history has been wrong about the position of women in societ iy wrong about the Mortal fate of practicing homosexuals wrong about the position of the Earth in relation to the sun wrong about the age of both of those celestial bodies wrong about the common evolutionary ancestry of every animal including the human animal on planet Earth wrong about the ownership of other human beings as private property now now has to contend with a religious tradition that doesn't come to us with Contrition and apology and say well maybe we were wrong about these things but no these are all our things after all we're going to claim these things as you know I know that St Paul says I suffer not a woman to teach nor to Asser authority over a man rather she should remain silent for Adam was formed first then Eve and that man is the glory of God but woman is the glory of man but don't you know that the social justice movement is essentially judeo-christian in origin I know that the Old Testament not only explicitly condones the ownership of other human beings as private property but gives detailed instructions about exactly how to buy and indeed take them sometimes including his sexual property but don't you know that the Abolitionist Movement was essentially judeo-christian in origin yes I know that Galileo was shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition for having the temerity to suggest that the Earth might orbit the sun rather than the other way around but don't you know that the Scientific Revolution which he authored was essentially judeo-christian in origin I I I'd find it funny if it wasn't so offensive to the people who established these very developments against the very religious Traditions that now want to claim them as their own okay so I would buy that except for the fact that many of the people that you mention in these contexts explicitly counted themselves as religious believers and we speaking in the name of the religion while they're doing it so to take the Abolitionist Movement as as an example I mean William Wilber Forest obviously a tremendously religious person and a big believer in in the New Testament Isaac Newton obviously deeply ins sconed in in the New Testament right certainly important to the Scientific Revolution the the point about religion and this is why when I wrote my book I have to name the title now and plug myself because that's the the right history the reason that I talked about how reason and moral purpose made the West is because I think that one of the fundamental precepts of at least judeo-christian religion is that when God gives a text or a set of ideas to human beings he expects us to use our reason to apply to those texts and so the the sort of evolution of interpretation is part of the religious tradition I mean that's always been the case in in My Religion anyway so I can only I I I always hesitate to speak on behalf of other people's religions because I don't know them nearly as well as I know my own uh so when I when I talk about sort of the application of reason to tradition in the religious tradition obviously have books and books and books of texts discussing and debating these very ideas and the idea of religious debate has always been Central to the idea of judeo Christian religion and when it hasn't been it's been seen as repressive and as spawn than other Christian movements that then argue with the original movement and and end up generating in almost heelan fashion some new form of of interpretation the the point that I'm making is that outside that framework it doesn't exist meaning that that once you if if the argument is over interpretation a particular Biblical verses in a context in which there is a God who puts certain moral precepts Beyond human judgment those arguments you can have without threatening the entire social structure what is very difficult is to have a social structure at all in the absence of fundamental moral precepts that are presupposed by everyone and I think one of the reasons that you're seeing a a sort of Revival of this idea that religion is very important to the West is because one of the things that we have seen is that as religion has become less important to the West we've seen declining birth rates on mass we've seen rises in suicidal ideation we've seen especially over the last 10 years tremend tremendous individual atomization certainly an extraordinary amount of less social connection right all of these things are things that frankly used to be provided by church and these social institutions that again were oriented toward a single purpose

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 207,362

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: C6mkPTmym0o

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024