Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 2

that point of not knowing what happens after death is what worries me about this conversation I was I've been very worried about this that all of you have given up a perfectly serviceable Tuesday evening only to hear the four of us tell you every which way that we have no idea what happens after that and I expressed my the spirit of my wife and she was actually able to put me these I'm worried obviously about boring all of you and she said nothing Hitchens does is ever boring so I have that going for me right I think we should think about this this what this concept of the afterlife does we will talk about the plausible versions of it how implausible some of the traditional ones are but I think well just to give some context we who are living in a world in which nine million children every year die before they reach the age of five year after year after year and that is that is a an asian-style tsunami of the sort you remember from 2004 every 10 days killing only children before the age of five think about these children think about their parents know that virtually all of these parents are people who believed in God and were praying all the while that their children would be saved and their prayers were not answered now the afterlife is comes into the midst of this reality and as a promise that all of this is going to make sense in the end that somehow at the end of existence we are going to be all let in on the the punchline and have a mighty laugh with Almighty God for eternity now there's no evidence of that and I think therefore this concept of the afterlife really functions as a as a substitute for wisdom it functions as a substitute for for really absorbing our predicament which is that everyone is going to die there are circumstances that are just catastrophic ly unfair evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins and the only justice we're going to find in the world is the justice we make and I think we have an ethical responsibility to to absorb this really down to the soles of our feet and and this notion of an afterlife that the happy talk about how it's all going to work out and it's all part of God's plan is it's a way of shirking that responsibility but the problem is that without God and without a promise of an eternal existence after death life appears to be an emergency it's it's a long emergency for many of us but it is an emergency it you can't help but notice that things are going very wrong in this place I mean no matter how much fun you are having a glance at a newspaper will show you that it's possible to have no fun at all and everyone seems to have a run of bad luck in the end now it's hard not to see the absurdity of the situation you you unwrap your shiny new iPad upon which you hope to squander an unconscionable amount of time and attention only to discover that perhaps on the iPad itself that the people who built this gorgeous device live lives of such unendurable drudgery that they regularly hurl themselves off the rooftop at the factory where they work Nets have been installed to catch their falling bodies is is there any sense to be made of disparities in luck of this kind okay religion make sense of it you know it's my Karma it's it's God's will that I'm so lucky if God had wanted me to do dangerous and deadly boring work for a few dollars a day that's what I would be doing but as it happens he wants me to have a new iPad hallelujah you can make a philosophically respectable respectable argument that consciousness could survive the death of the brain it's by no means that the majority opinion in neuroscience or philosophy that it would for instance there's a philosopher Oxford Nick Bostrom this is one of one of the weirder arguments but still more plausible than the arguments you get from religion Nick there's actually very little you have to assume to make this seem somewhat robust the argument is called the simulation argument and he argues that we are all very likely not not living in a real universe but living in a simulated universe and we are being simulated on the hard drives of computers of the future and now he gets there with a few simple steps you you simply have to acknowledge that consciousness is at bottom the result of information process at the level of the brain and there's nothing magical that brains it could be information processing in a computer of the future most scientists think that think that's true they don't think there's anything magical about the wet stuff in our heads and the consciousness is at some point going to be instantiated in computers then you simply have to grant that humans of the future will run simulations of the past in the way that we run simulations Sims games and and then there's just one short move that that simulated universes by almost by definition will outnumber real universes and therefore we are a lot more likely to be among the simulated ancestors than the real ancestors now again this is this everyone acknowledges it seems a little crazy but there's but the assumptions that you have to but you take take onboard or not not so weak and I would add to this the somewhat disconcerting idea that if in fact we are running as a simulation on a computer of the future this computer could have been built by Mormons or Scientologists who would want to simulate the truth of their religion and therefore all religions could be true in this simulated universe and we could expect to see Jesus coming back and clouds of glory and moving to Missouri as that as the form is expected so now all that sounds completely crazy but it is not as crazy as the version of the afterlife that is really on offer traditionally which has been actually neatly sidestepped here because it entails the resurrection of the dead most people think that that the afterlife religion is offering Christianity Judaism and Islam has something to do with the soul floating off the brain into a ton of light and into paradise but that's actually not the canonical afterlife the canonical afterlife view God has to do the the humble work of reassembling us and I don't want to take more than my lot of time here but I think we should talk about just how impossible that vision is because that actually is the vision of the ISM and Christianity in Islam in the United States we still have to argue about contraception about whether women should have access to birth control for forget about abortion contraception is still something we're fighting for okay it's the Catholic Church one of the richest institutions on earth will oppose contraception with its last breath and in so doing it imagines it's exercising the most finely calibrated morality the earth has ever seen all the while nurturing an army of child rapists and and protecting them from from secular justice and shuttling them from parish to parish so they can find fresh victims and threatening these victims with endless litigation in this life and and Hellfire in the next the misuse of human energy that the needless manufacturing of unhappiness just boggles the mind so moral and political progress is difficult even in rich nations where there should be nothing but progress so I just want to show you all how the sausage of faith gets made or at least at least argued for - I see two problems with what you just did okay perhaps you're aware of them one is that Maimonides actually said that this could not be understood allegorically or in any other way but literally he came back 25 years later after he had been misunderstood in the guide to the perplexed and wrote and I think in this commentary to the Mishnah that this that the resurrection is a literal truth has to be believed in there may be some some caveats there in his genealogy but he was talking about bodies being reanimated the other issue is you made this sort of artful move to the free will loophole you said people have free will if a man wants to lock his daughter in a dungeon and have sex with her God has allowed that because he's given us this rather diabolical freedom that doesn't cover all of the other suffering for which only God can be responsible if he exists the nine million children I agree I just talked about dying every year yep through through cancers and violence and accidents and lack of access to clean water and this is this is God's fault if God exists me either he is either he can do nothing about this or he doesn't care too so either he's impotent or evil and this is the this is the problem that you can't eat that the free will that I get you out but the problem is that most people most of the time are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for for patently emotional reasons and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death and when we're arguing about teaching evolution in the schools I would argue that we are really arguing about death but it seems to me the only reason why any religious person cares about evolution is because if their holy books are wrong about our origins they are very likely wrong about our destiny after death so when you say to someone that you are a fool for not believing in evolution or a fool to think the universe of 6,000 years old I think that gets translated as you are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with God and that is a very different communication before I get to the end of this sentence something unforeseen and terrible will happen to somebody somewhere and we will read about it in the newspaper tomorrow but the question is how can people close to these tragedies make sense of them and religion provides an answer for that it's an unjustified answer it's a bad answer it's an answer that comes with a host of other liabilities because it did one being that it has birthed a a many competing and irreconcilable answer is and therefore religious conflict and political tribalism seem impossible to overcome but religion does provide an answer that most people think they need and the schism among secularists the fact that so many people this conference are regularly attacked for criticizing religion follows from this point if people are worried about the grief of other people the scientists and journalists who have made a career out of attacking and the so-called new atheists are worried about the grief of other people there's some confusion here I think there's a there's a really a symmetry between science and religion that shouldn't go unobserved and there's a there's an effort on the part of david and bradley to not own the very clear propositional claims that have been made by every religion from Eleni claims about the way the universe is structured claims a very explicit claims about what's going to happen in the future about what happened in the past about what happens after death and these claims are incompatible so for instance if buddhism is true buddhism purports to be true buddhism has a doctrine of karma and rebirth you can be reborn as an animal you can be reborn in various realms if buddhism is true Judaism Christianity and Islam are absolutely false in their core claims these are not pictures that that can be squared logically and every religion isn't in the in the business of making these claims about the afterlife and about all manner of other thing and the the crucial difference between religion and science is that every religion is beholden to its literature and doesn't think for the most part apart from the fringe of liberal intelligentsia for the most part people don't think it's man-made they don't think that these are just books if everyone read the Bible like Shakespeare we would be hich and I would be doing something entirely unrecognizable right now this is there would there would be no problem and and so the problem we're articulating is everyone has this idea that they have knowledge about the afterlife the end of days the virgin birth of certain people etc and these are these are claims to truth and they are they're profoundly anti-scientific because you can't edit the books you can't edit the Quran you can't edit the Bible you can't acknowledge freely within the context of the faith that there are just mountains of life destroying nonsense in these books and that's a problem don't you know that there's going to come a day when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die and you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll think what was I doing you know this and yet if you're like most people you will spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you'll live forever he is like watching a bad movie for the fourth time or bickering with your spouse this these things only make sense in light of eternity there better be a heaven if we're going to waste our time like that so so unlike religious people we atheists really have a good reason to make the most of life to make the most of the present moment because it cuz even if you live to be a hundred there's just not that many days in life there's a false assumption about science operating here science is not in principle committed to the idea that there's no afterlife or that the the mind is identical to the brain right or that materialism is true science is completely open to whatever in fact is true and if it's true that the consciousness is being run like software on the brain and chemistry by virtue of ectoplasm or something else we don't understand can be dissociated from the brain of death that would be part of our growing scientific understanding of the world if we could discover it now and there's there ways we could in fact discover that if it were true the problem is there are very good reasons to think it's not true and we know this from now 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain and faculties are lost and they're clearly lists not that everyone with brain damage is perfect as their soul perfectly intact they just can't get the words out this is that you everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain you can cease to recognize faces you can cease to know the names of animals but you still know the names of tools I mean the fragmentation in in the way in which our mind is parse elated at the level of the brain is not at all intuitive and hid and there's a lot known about it and what we're being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain and the mind something about the mind and subjectivity is lost you damaged another and yet more is lost and yet if you damaged the whole thing at death we can rise off the brain with all our faculties intact recognizing grandma and speaking English and I think much more important point is if everything you were saying about your religious orientation is true because you're basically confessing a kind of scientific attitude toward the mysteries of subjectivity and and what happens after death then the usefulness of holding to these traditions and these first century books is is I'm completely at a loss a method it seems like you're in the wrong line of work you can be psychology

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 732,197

Rating: 4.8923922 out of 5

Keywords: Sam Harris (Author), best, Two, amazing, arguments, clever, comebacks, part, of, Sam, Harris, And, Delivery, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Debate (Quotation Subject), Religion (Literary Genre), Philosophy (Professional Field), argument, funny, Science (Literary Genre), great, nice, cool, Good, Fun, debate, comeback, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, death, afterlife

Id: woS9XxjOEz4

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/lisaslover]

Every time I lisren to someone like Harris, I just come away thinking.... How hard to someone have to work to keep their mind so closed tight that what is being said can not make any sense to them what so ever?