Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 4

this is this is what's anti-scientific when your certainty when your convictions don't scale with your evidence I mean I'm actually open-minded on the survival of death I I don't say about reincarnation that there could even be evidence for it in your body I mean I can easily tell you what would constitute evidence I'm not saying this evidence exists but I can tell you what would constitute evidence for the truth of Mormonism it's just not forthcoming this is we're not gonna get political on this I mean they say there are all kinds of scientific things you can say about religion which religious people tend not to want to hear you can say for instance that Mormonism is objectively less likely to be true than Christianity why can you say this because Mormonism is just Christianity plus some rather stupid ideas I think it's a it's a false fear the idea that we wouldn't find any reason to build beautiful architecture or paint nice paintings but for indulging certain religious superstitions it's just not it's it's I think of Fineman once wrote that it was a poor poet who must fall silent when he finds out that the Sun is actually a massive sphere of hydrogen fusing into helium I mean it's it's not the claim is that you have to take something on faith to be creative and it's it's I think it's a product of a an argument that you use briefly early on which is a fallacious one this idea that that the percentages of people who do these great I think you used in the in the connection to moodiness not in terms of in terms of goodness most P was it not fallacious in goodness I know it's most people are doing this good work are doing it for religious reasons well most people most of the time have been religious throughout human history there has been no one else to do the job this is true yeah I mean most people who have plucked chickens have plucked them while believing in God that does not mean you need to believe in God to pluck a chatty spur and there's no corner of the universe that announces certain events as good or bad or right or wrong we make those judgments but in doing that we seem to be broadcasting our preferences onto a reality that is intrinsically value free and where do our preferences come from where do our notions of right and wrong and good and evil come from well they clearly are the product of a fish impulses and social emotions that have been drummed into us by evolution and then they get modulated by culture so you take something like sexual jealousy for instance we come from a long line of primate ancestors that were probably quite covetous of one another despite the fact that everyone was covered with hair and this gets is this possessiveness gets modulated by culture and so we have something like the institution of marriage say and therefore from the point of view of science when you look at a statement like it's wrong to cheat on your spouse it seems like that statement doesn't really track reality in any deep sense there's a sense that this is just how apes like us learn to to worry when we when we acquire language it's just conventionally wrong can't be really wrong from the point of view of science this is just an improvisation we're doing on the back of biology now this is where religious people begin to get a little queasy and I think they should but they see no alternative by and large but to insert the God of Abraham into the clockwork as an invisible arbiter of moral truth so it so it's wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh deems that it is so which is rather odd because in other moods Yahweh is fond of genocide and slavery and human sacrifice the question is do you ever have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to explore this terrain to become truly what is sufficient evidence well it's the kind of evidence everyone in this room demands on any subject other than religion I mean there there are nuances here we can we it it takes a lot of work to to rise to the standard of scientific evidence but science is the one language game we are playing where we get really straight and rigorous about what constitutes evidence where there's a process of peer review where you have a lot of smart people trying to prove you wrong and where you actually win points by proving yourself wrong this is not what religions are up to religions are not falsifiable in this way they used a phrase that I thought was very useful to frame this you talked about what used to be and what must be I think was your phrase and I think we should reflect on what used to be because our religions come to us out of a tradition in many cases of human sacrifice because a human sacrifice was virtually a cultural universal this is where we come from these are the roots of religion this is it has been not it's been but by no means rare for a child to be born into this world only to find that he's being raised by religious maniacs who think that the best way to keep the Sun on its course were to cure the Kings venereal disease is to bury or butcher or burn him alive as an offering to an imaginary God this is this hat it's not just the Aztecs this is the ancient Hebrews human sacrifice is in the the Hebrew Bible at times condemned at times tacitly supported at times demanded and then as you know in the story of Abraham the demand is recanted this is we come from tradition for generations of people who did who did not know a damn thing about the causes of events in the world that really concerned them the spread of disease the the failure of crops the weather and so religious discourse has changed we're not sacrificing people happily now but it has changed by virtue of progress from the outside its urges certain modes of operation are no longer tenable when you can get a weather report on the evening news you no longer have to sacrifice a child in a vain attempt to control the weather I mean you have something like the host desecration yeah I don't know if you know about this phenomenon that I came across while researching my first book the communion host is thought to be once blessed to start to actually physically be the body of Jesus and therefore if it's mistreated this is you know you can literally in torturing a cracker you are torturing the body of Jesus there are accounts of whole villages purged of Jews who were accused of having mistreated crackers you know it so the question is does the belief in the transubstantiation which is a belief that I would have thought could be rather harmless have anything to do with the idea that someone can mistreat a cracker and that you should kill him for it yes it does have something to do it's impossible to believe in the torture of crackers unless you think Bible initiation but it's not the truth of this this fact value issue actually reaches deeper than that because science has always been in the values business we simply cannot speak about facts without embracing certain values it's not it's not that you can't get a naught from it is you can't get an is without embracing certain odds you can consider the simplest statement of scientific fact water is two parts hydrogen in one part oxygen okay this this seems to be as value-free and utterance as human beings ever make but what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition what if what if someone comes forward and says well I'm sorry but that's not how I choose to think about water what if someone says I'm a biblical chemist and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light which in fact it says in Genesis 1 so therefore there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like oxygen so there would have been no oxygen to put in the water so God either made either there's no oxygen in water God made special oxygen and I don't believe you do that because I would be biblically inelegant what what could we possibly do with such a person okay all we can do is appeal to scientific values and if a person doesn't share those values the conversation is over okay we we must appeal to the value of understanding the world the value of evidence in this case some hundreds of years of evidence in chemistry the value of logical consistency much of what we believe about the world is predicated on the validity of our beliefs about the structure of water if someone doesn't value evidence what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value it if someone doesn't value logic what logical argument could you invoke to prove that they should value logic a few things to say here it's easy to exaggerate the problem and it's easy to to overlook very important differences among religions I mean one problem one problem with a discussion like this is we have a word religion right that is a suitcase term your religion is a is a word like sport you know you have it you have a sport like you know Thai boxing where people get killed and hit in the head with elbows and knees and then you have a sport like lawn bowling you know edit what is in common between these sports apart from breathing not much and so any of their both sports and religion is like that you have a religion like Jainism which I occasionally reference because it is the one truly nonviolent religion and the core dogma of Jainism is nonviolent so so that no matter how fanatical you get as a Jain you are never going to be a Jain suicide bomber community you simply cannot make sense of it by the lights of Jainism now by no stretch of the imagination is Islam a religion of non-violence Islam is a religion of violence in certain circumstances and it is a great danger to us all that these circumstances can be construed with enough agility as to apply almost anywhere anytime to anyone who wants to die for the faith now I'm not saying all Muslims view their religion this way but there are there very few tools within Islam by which to say Osama bin Laden has completely misconstrued the faith he has not completely misconstrued the faith so but so between Islam and Jainism you know we have a range of convictions and behavior is borne of them and the kind of the style of discourse that you're using to talk about again what religion should be not what it is I would argue just just obfuscates this terrain we have people really killing and dying based on propositions that they are granting credence to and the end and these beliefs are thriving in a context in which they are immune to criticism and we and we are collaborating in that process by not criticizing them publicly incessantly relentlessly until we break this spell and then now this is this is often claimed the idea that the Bible is just the best that was possible for that community in that period in history the 5th century BC was an age of such barbarism that Leviticus is really kind of a bridge like the you know the US Constitution a brilliant document it is not a brilliant document it is it is an appalling guide to morality and and just think of how good a book just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by the creator of the universe there's not a single sentence in any book of the Bible that could not have been written by somebody living in the Iron Age this is a problem for claiming that this is the best book we have and and so the the problem is if you're going to live if you're living by Leviticus and Deuteronomy you should be a good Jew for all time now why are you not a good Jew for stoning stoning your neighbor for working on the Sabbath today you are not because we have different standards of morality and and reasonableness and and we happily we do and those came from outside of religion so in closing I just want to remind you of why religion can't be the answer to the question of moral truth well first there's just the simple fact that all of our scriptures were written by people who by virtue of their placement in history had less access to scientific knowledge and what is now basic common sense than any person in this room in fact there's not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview is as narrow as the worldview of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Mohammed this is the these people knew nothing next to nothing that is now of the facts that are now relevant to us in the 21st century they knew nothing about the the origins of life the relationship between mind and brain they didn't know that mental illness was even a category of human suffering they knew nothing about DNA or viruses or computation or electricity none of this is in Scripture they had no idea why people got sick and died unless unless you saw someone stabbed with a spear you had no idea why they died and in moral terms with it with a few notable exceptions most of these people were no wiser than than your average Afghan warlord today they had absolutely the most had absolutely no notion that slavery was problematic that it was there was something morally unsavory about owning people and treating them like farm equipment Jesus and His apostles couldn't see that slavery was worth condemning in closing I just want to suggest to you that just as we don't have Christian physics though the Christians invented physics and we don't have Muslim algebra though the Muslims invented algebra we at some point will not have Christian and Muslim morality okay the truth has to float free of these provincial ideas but what remains for us to discover are all the facts that relate to genuine questions of human well-being and and the goal clearly is to build a global civilization based on shared values now it seems to me the only tool we need to do that is honest and open inquiry and if faith is ever right about anything in this space it's just right by accident thank you very much I think the best way to address the compatibility of science and religion is in the person of Francis Collins I don't know if you know him he ran the human genome project for the u.s. he's a medical geneticist obviously a scientist with a great career in science and he's also an evangelical Christian and he's written a book entitled the language of God where he claims to square his evangelical Christianity with the last 50 years of molecular biology and argue successfully that that God exists we know this based on scientific principles and Jesus is his son now I can't say that he's not a scientist but what I can say is that the place in his book where he tells you when his doubts were truly removed the his conversion experience is testifies to the to the way the human mind can be partitioned where where a scientist can can can lapse in the most egregious way in terms of his scientific standards and because the passage goes like this I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains and came upon a beautiful frozen waterfall and my doubts were removed and I fell to my knees and the dewy grass and surrendered myself to Christ it's virtually verbatim so now I would suggest to you that it should be obvious to all of you and it certainly should have been obvious to Francis Collins that if a frozen waterfall can testify to the divinity of Jesus anything can mean anything he said he actually elaborated on this point in an interview for Time magazine he said the waterfall was frozen in three streams and this put him in the mind of the Trinity okay this is this is psychotic thinking in any other context it's exactly what we do with Elvis I mean this or astrology or anything else that that gets laughed off the Dyess I mean just imagine if or with is what we do with any other God but the God of Abraham imagine a political candidate who was who was forthcoming about his belief in Poseidon it would be a problem he could not possibly get elected it's not like someone has proved that Poseidon doesn't exist I mean that is Russell's teapot you cannot prove that Poseidon doesn't exist the question is is there any good reason to believe he exists the answer is no it's the same answer for the god God of Abraham the place to put our faith is in human conversation this is all we have to work with and the choice is to have a truly modern 21st century conversation availing ourselves of all of the tools and all of the wealth of human effort that is our legacy or we can fixate our conversation in a prior century it can be the seventh century of your Muslim it can be the fifth century BC if you're a Jew and we can privilege a conversation that was had then among people who could barely see the wisdom of swapping out their child for a goat in a sacrifice and and dignify their claims to understand in reality with some kind of special oppressions and I think we should be very leery of doing that given what we see about us in the name of religion thank you you

Channel: Agatan Foundation

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Id: nznnB9JAkVQ

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 26 2014