Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 3

that we need we need to cease to a reward people for pretending to know things they do not know and the only area of discourse where we do this is it is on the subject of God and I risk let me ask you there are a few claims there that we have to shelve what one is this idea that we get you just claim that I've got my morality from a religious tradition mmm ask yourself when you pick up the Bible or the Hebrew Bible or any holy book and find ethical wisdom in there well what does that process like I mean you pick up Leviticus or Deuteronomy and you find that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you're supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep okay presumably you choose to reject that pearl of ancient wisdom and then you find another line that you know I think this is also in Leviticus love your neighbor as yourself or the golden rule has preached in the New Testament and this resonates with you as a as a good operating premise to generate further moral intuitions if nothing else is a good idea to live toward now that process you at the Grand Tour of your morality in that case is not the book it's in your brain and that this kind of truth testing is something that we bring to religion now religion does a lot of work on people and you can get good people to believe some very terrible things in the name of God and this is what worries me about religion and I think we should we waste time talking about Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot frankly because these were these were political religions these were dogmatism through and through and when anyone started to make too much sense in opposition to these dogmatism were carted off and killed these were not this were not context in which rational discourse prevailed and the best idea won so to call them science is just to misuse the term and end its I mean in the case of Hitler it's just a total non sequitur because Hitler never really repudiated Jesus and he used Jesus in his speech and he's you know he was facilitated by a thousand years of religious fulminating against the Jews in the name of Christianity I mean this is religion is implicated certainly in the Holocaust so it's it's it's not I think a conversation worth having and the reasons are not so numerous that it turns out there's not a hundred ways or reasons to rise to the defense of God there really are only three either you argue that a specific religion is true or you argue religion is useful in general or you argue that atheism is intolerant or in bad taste or corrosive of something that's important in human life and it's interesting that people rarely argue for the truth of religion even fundamentalist I find fun demenna lists almost never come forward with evidence for miracles or the confirmation of Biblical prophecy some do but for the most part that's not even their primary concern rather it's the usefulness of religion especially as a a framework in which to think about morality that people are willing to advocate for and the commensurate danger of atheism that atheism is somehow corrosive of morality now the first thing to notice is that as an argument for belief in God that is not only a bad argument that's actually a non sequitur I mean religion could be useful but completely empty of content it could function like a placebo and beliefs really you can't you can't believe something or shouldn't be able to believe something merely based on its utility beliefs are not like clothing you can't adopt them on the basis of comfort or utility but people of faith really to a man are worried that unless we have a universal moral framework unless we have a sense that words like good and evil and right and wrong actually mean something then humanity will lose its way and I and I actually share that fear and I should point out that not all atheists do but I I do and Iife I want to tell you when this this concern was first seared onto my brain I was at a meeting at the Salk Institute I believe it might've been one that Richard was at as well and I gave a talk about morality and I and I argued as I will here tonight that morality must relate at some level to questions of human and animal well-being and the moment we admit this we can see that certain moral codes are in fact worse than others and I cited as an example the misogyny and sadism of the Taliban as an example of an orientation that was obviously less good than others and at the end another invited speaker approached me and said how could you ever say from the point of view of science that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong I said well because the moment you admit right and wrong has something to do with with human well-being then it's obvious that that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not a good way of maximizing it and she said well that's just your opinion and I said okay well let's make it easier let's say we found a culture that was removing the eyeballs of children every third child say what would you that would you then agree that we'd found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human wellbeing and she said what would depend on why they were doing it and so after my eyebrows returned from the back of my head I said okay let's say they're doing it for religious reasons let's say they have a scripture which says every third should walk in darkness or some such nonsense and she said well then you could never say that they were wrong now you should know that I was speaking to a woman who was quite a sophisticated student of philosophy in science in fact she she has since been appointed to the President's Council on bioethics in the United States she's one of 13 people advising President Obama on all of the ethical implications of medicine and progress in related science and technology and she had just delivered a perfectly lucid lecture on the moral implications of advances in neuroscience and she was especially concerned that we might be subjecting captured terrorists to fMRI based lie detection technology and she thought she thought this would be a a truly unconscionable violation of their their cognitive liberty so on the one hand her her moral scruples were really finely calibrated to to recoil from the slightest perceived misstep in our war on terror and yet she was totally detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan at this moment so I view this double standard as a problem and strangely this is the erosion of basic common sense and moral goodness that religious people tend to be worried about the dialogue between science and religion has gone this way it has been one of relentless and one-directional erosion of religious authority I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer however inadequate but for which now the best answer is a religious one now you can think of an uncountable number of questions that run the other way where where we once had a religious answer and now the authority of religion has been battered and nullified by science and by moral progress and secular progress generally and I think that's not an accident and the the one area where religion still seems to hold its ground is now under assault by science and it's it's very good that it is under assault by science and this is the whole issue of morality and human happiness and what constitutes the good life these are and let me just tell you why I think this is a scientific question even the place of science is ultimately a scientific question because surely there are objective facts to be learned about the basis of human happiness the moment you recognize that morality and spirituality and and and value is a matter of happiness and suffering and that we're moving and suffering in the direction of happiness then you realize that if they're objective facts to know about human happiness and surely there are facts about the way the genes and ideas and uses of attention and economic systems social structures all of these conspire to make us happy or miserable and again the it's true that that's scientific discourse is just in the beginning of addressing these issues but it's not too soon to say that love is better than hate in terms of ethics and we're we argue studying these things at the level of the brain eventually we will understand the brain basis of love and hate and the kinds of mechanisms both cultural and personal that ramify these states of mind and they will be right and wrong answers and we'll find for instance that honor killing is a bad strategy if you want to raise compassionate men we know that already but well at some point we will know this biochemically now the Taliban are still my favorite example of a group of people who are struggling mightily to build a society that is obviously less good than others on offer average lifespan for women in Afghanistan is 44 years okay they have a literacy rate of 12% they have almost the highest fertility rate in the world and almost the highest infant and maternal mortality in the world this is one of the best places on earth to watch women and infants die they also have a GDP that's lower than the world average in the year 1820 so it seems to me patently obvious that the optimal response to this situation which is to say the most moral response is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls with a crime of learning to read now I think this is common sense to everyone in this room and common sense it should be to everyone in the civilized world except you if you happen to be a bioethicists working on the President's Council at the moment but this is also of necessity a claim about biology and psychology and sociology and economics it is not unscientific to say but the Taliban are wrong about morality in fact we have to say this the moment we admit we know anything at all about human wellbeing well well the thing is this this is a a trick and this is one of the reasons why I'm it's not a trick I'm not a fan of the term atheism I mean a theism is a is a term totally without content it's like being an honest Rolla jur we don't have a word for someone who's not an astrologer we and we got astrologers suddenly became ascendant in our society we wouldn't need to invent non astrology as a discipline we could talk about reason and science and evidence and common sense and [ __ ] and put astrologers in their place and I so it could be with religion and so this this notion that Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot were doing what they did because of atheism because of non belief in God ask yourself is is too much skeptical inquiry really what's wrong with North Korea the North Koreans are a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons right now they think that the food aid that we give them is a is a devotional offering to the genius of their dear leader they are systematically impoverished both physically and in terms of information they're too much knowledge any knowledge is too much knowledge in North Korea this is not a a paradise of reasonableness now all I'm advocating is that we use the same standards of rationality that we use in every other area of our lives when people start making claims about the divine origin of certain books and the virgin birth of certain people and the glorious end to history where where the good people will be raptured into the sky these are the kinds of things that we should apply pressure to and it is taboo to apply pressure to these claims and religious moderation unfortunately ramifies that taboo one of the problems with consequentialism is that people don't think very imaginatively about what counts as a consequence so you have that the classic trolley problem that many of you probably heard of is this is ubiquitous now in in moral philosophy and in neuro scientific research on morality you have a train coming down the track and it's going to hit and kill five workmen who don't see it coming but you stand at a switch and you can throw throw the switch and the train will take another track and there it will only kill one workman and so people are asked you know should you flip that switch now when asked this 95 percent of people say absolutely you have to flip that switch you save a net for lives you'd be a moral monster not to to do that but you can pose the problem another way you now stand on a footbridge overlooking the the trolley track trolleys come down the track and there's a suitably large person at your side who you can push into the path of the oncoming trolley killing him obviously but saving a net for lives and now posed under this guise ninety-five percent of people say you would be a monster to push that fat man onto the track now I happen to think this is somewhat ill-posed because I think we all have an intuitive physics and we burn a fair amount of fuel wondering whether the fat man is really going to stop the trolley but even if you even if you finesse it and make it clear that that he will they seem different these situations now from the usual consequentialist point of view people say well it's the same you just have body count this is actually this is the same scenario but maybe it is in fact not the same if it is just fundamentally different to push a person up close and personal to his death than to flip a switch if that difference can never be reformed then they're not in fact the same if you're going to wake up with nightmares for the rest of your life because you push someone but feel like a hero because you flip the switch those are the consequences that have to be built into our analysis and and there there are many ways in which which traditional the traditional discussion of these issues breaks down so even if I conceded that religion is is profoundly useful so useful as to be indispensable you know people without religion will just rape and kill each other and we don't want that so by all means fill the churches and mosques and synagogues that would not for a moment grant credence to the idea that one of our books was dictated by an omniscient being or that such a being exists all religion could function like a placebo and way I mean we I could invent a religion for you right now that would be guaranteed to be useful in fact more useful than any religion in existence and you wouldn't know it would be untrue I could right this moment I could invent a religion which the precept is be kind to others don't lie cheat steal or kill and it is where it gets novel make sure your children make every effort to understand science and mathematics to the best of their abilities and if you don't by the way you could take that right out of my mana tea she said that ok but and if you don't do that you'll be tortured for eternity after death by a 17 headed demon named Dexter if we could spread this faith to billions right now we would live in a better world absolutely if we could replace Islam with this faith we would live in a better world for starters okay but that wouldn't lend the slightest credence to the idea that such a demon exists I actually think that the frontier between science and philosophy actually doesn't exist I think I think when we we don't have when it when a question is not eaten alive when we don't have an experiment we can perform when we don't know how to get data then we tend to be talking to talk a philosophy but the moment philosophy is kind of the womb of the sciences and in fact it was physics at one point was called natural philosophy the moment something becomes experimentally tractable then we these Sciences but off from from philosophy and I think every science has philosophy built into it so the board that there there is no partition in my mind but the relevance of neuroscience is born of the fact that everything we experience everything we care about every every instance of something mattering to us is at bottom a state of our brain for you about belief in in the divine origin of certain books figures rather centrally to Christianity Judaism in Islam yes this can tail into inhales a variety of claims which are on their face at odds with science the belief that that Jesus was born of a virgin may be a cherished claim for most Christians it is also a claim about biology and this is why you can't keep religion and science apart there they they their truth claims cannot be disentangled one of the embarrassing things about Christianity is it actually it stands astride to this truly contemptible history not as a any kind of departure from it Christianity is not a religion that rejects human sacrifice it's a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were fully effective and people tend to elide this this bizarre commitment when moderates want faith itself to be respected at all costs and they want the basic project of raising children to be Jews or Muslims or Christians to be respected and in that context it is often very difficult to honestly evaluate just how much needless human suffering is being produced on a daily basis by by religion and religious belief

Channel: Agatan Foundation

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Keywords: Sam Harris (Author), best, amazing, arguments, clever, comebacks, part, of, Sam, Harris, And, Delivery, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism, Debate, Religion, Philosophy, argument, funny, Science, great, debate, comeback, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, death, afterlife, three, religion, reason, logic, science, Christopher Hitchens (Author), Richard Dawkins (Author), Daniel Dennett (Author), Anti theist, anti theism, agatan, foundation, fnd, agnostic, agnosticism

Id: BW2y1z_ReVk

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 10 2014