Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 5

yeah I think the evolution point is also don't do that again blessed year there was someone who spent the last two years criticizing religious faith I've become quite familiar with how people if they rise to the defense of God as it turns out there are not a hundred ways of doing this there appear to be just three if either you argue that a specific religion is true or you argue that religion is useful or you attack atheism as intolerant elitist or otherwise corrosive of basic human values and the only line of argument that is relevant to this debate or indeed any debate about the validity of religion is an argument that religion is true or rather that one religion is true because they of course they can't all be true in fact our opponents here stand for two distinct and mutually incompatible faiths was Jesus Christ the Messiah the rabbi and dinesh are not likely to agree on that point as Bertrand Russell pointed out over a hundred years ago even if we knew one of the Earth's religions was true perfectly true given the multiplicity of faith given their mutual incompatibility all all believers should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability but before I go deeper into this issue of religious truth I just want to illustrate how confused a person must be to argue that it is reasonable to believe in God because religion is useful because it gives life meaning because it makes people more moral than the otherwise would be as the rabbi suggested because it makes people happy any of the benefits you could imagine of religion hey imagine you're walking down the street and you run into an old friend and he looks radiantly happy you asked him what was going on in his life and he tells you that everything changed for him the day he realized that he was destined to marry Angelina Jolie it might occur do you ask what why does he believe this Oh Angelina Jolie is after all one of the most beautiful and famous people on the planet she's not instantly married to Brad Pitt hey something like 27 children at this point okay what if you're a friend sensing your skepticism said clearly don't understand this belief gives my life meaning yeah I now know my purpose in life is to be Angelina's husband what if your friend said that this belief has made me a better person I'm now being incredibly kind to children anticipating having to raise Angelina's once Brad leaves or what if your friend said to you you can believe whatever you want but I wouldn't want to live in a universe where I don't marry Angelina Jolie look at it it's to be quite clear at this point that your friend has lost his mind okay it's probably a dangerous person and yet this is precisely the kind of talk that so often passes for wisdom in religious circles and may attempt to pass for wisdom here certainly the morale the morality argument is of that sort beliefs are not like clothing a comfort and utility and attractiveness cannot be our conscious criteria for adopting them to believe a proposition you have to believe that you have good reasons for believing it and and the effect that this belief will have on your life cannot be among those reasons and this is what it is to be clouded by bias this is why we have phrases like wishful thinking and self-deception to really believe that there is a God is also to believe that you stand in some relation to his existence such that if he didn't exist you wouldn't believe in him how does the supposed usefulness of religion fit into this scheme it doesn't but I think there's a we we the Atheist community is somewhat culpable for this week because because we're criticizing faith and irrational belief in God's what I've run into in talking about Islam specifically among Athey is a sense that we have to be we hit was somehow logically committed to being equally opposed to all religions irrespective of their effects so there's a sort of single out Islam from the point of view of atheism is somehow to be co-opted by these these by bigotry by and a lot and Alliance with with Christians but I mean they said there's nothing that there's nothing that demands that we not notice the different consequences between different faiths any anyone who is just as worried about the Amish or about Anglicans as they are but Islam is just reading the wrong section of the newspaper but whenever you Bob mentioned the mosque controversy what was so startling about this event clearly the mosque is legal to build it should be legal to build wherever you build it you can build a church you should be able to build a mosque that's not the issue the issue is that everyone who defended who rose to the defense of this mosque did so by denying what is patently obvious so you have you have Mayor Bloomberg standing up saying Islam had nothing to do with 9/11 as long as a religion of peace it 9/11 was as much a product of the actual tenets of Islam as the homophobia of the Christian Right is a product of a vast discussion about the abomination of homosexuality that has been going on in Christianity for centuries and it's directly attributable to the writings of Paul me I specific ideas have consequences any any of you who have read Lawrence Wright's book the looming tower he talks about the people who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets to fight jihad and they used to when one of their comrades would die in battle first of all they would they would put their encampments in completely exposed places so they could be bombed by helicopters and thereby martyred and when one of their comrades would die in battle they would weep with envy they would congratulate him and weep with envy that they weren't martyred it seems to me that that secular people and religious moderates are uniquely ill placed to appreciate what that state of mind is like and yet people are testing to this if you if we will only listen people are attesting to this the strength of this belief system ad nauseam and the other variables that Bob wants to invoked here and again specifically on Islam economics and political oppression don't account for this behavior the nineteen hijackers were living in Germany they all were college educated most of them had PhD use these are engineers and architects these people that the Germans were monitoring their their conversations their apartment was bugged four months before 9/11 all these guys talked about was paradise and the Quran and the evils of infidel culture read the book perfect soldiers so what we have with the problem we have is that we desperately want to believe that everyone used the world the same way and if we could just moderate our Behavior all of our enemies would disappear it'd be so much easier to imagine that we made our enemies there's there's no evidence for that no credible evidence for that and so whenever I hear someone on the left and again I'm on the I am on the left on every relevant issue I think homosexuals should be free to marry I think taxes should go up on the wealthy I think the war on drugs should be declared over I am just as I am left but when I hear people on the Left talk about Osama bin Laden as though he were the Reverend Jim Jones of the Muslim world and that that is a phantasmagorical degree of denial of the obvious Osama bin Laden could be doing anything else he wants with his life and he and the problem we face visa vie Islam is that hid the version of Islam that he is teaching is is really faithful to the Quran and the hadith I mean you have to split hairs to see what he is distorting if anything now if he were Amish or a Jain or even a Buddhist it would be absolutely obvious what he's distorting I mean you just couldn't make sense of his behavior in terms of his fame I'll tell you a little story I was at a conference a few years ago talking about the link between morality and human well-being as I'm going to tonight and I said something that I thought would be quite uncontroversial in this context I said listen we know that morality relates to human well-being we know that human well-being relates to the mother the the the facts that allow mind to emerge in the brain and and so it's constrained by by truth claims in some sense and therefore we know that cultures are wrong about how to maximize human wellbeing and therefore there are they're wrong in terms of what they value and I cite it as an example life under the life for women especially under the Taliban it seemed to me they're violent misogyny and religious lunacy was was a pretty obvious context in which people especially women were not thriving now it turns out to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific conference is to court controversy and so after I spoke a a another speaker came up to me and said well how could you ever say that the compulsory veiling of women is wrong from the point of view of science and I said well okay the moment you link questions of right and wrong to questions of human well-being then it seems pretty clear 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 way of maximizing well-being and therefore not a good practice and she said well that's just your opinion I said okay well let's just make it easier let's imagine we found a culture that was removing the eyeballs of every third child okay would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human wellbeing and she said it would depend on why they were doing it ah so that after I picked my jaw back up off the floor 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 you'll be pleased or horrified to know that she just bit the bullet here and said then you could never say that they were wrong okay now this is this was a woman who's has a background in science and philosophy she's now on the President's Council for bioethics she's one of 13 people advising our President on all of the issues related to progress in medicine and life science generally she had just delivered a totally lucid lecture on the moral implications as she saw them for for the use of neuroscience in our courts she was she was very worried that we have been developing lie detection technology and that we are using this on captured terrorists and she viewed this as an invasion of cognitive liberty okay so on the one hand her her her moral scruples were really finely calibrated to our own possible missteps in this case in our war on terror but she was rather sanguine about the the ritual and nucleation of children and it seemed to me terrifyingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan at this moment so this kind of impossible juxtaposition of views it's something I'm encountering a lot now among disproportionately well-educated and liberal people so it's it's it's something we have to grapple with now the issue for most people is that it has been said over and over again that there's a distinction between facts and values and that science and rationality generally can only really make truth claims about the former so science obviously can deal with facts we have a universe of facts that we can understand to a greater or lesser degree facts transcend culture in some basic sense but it's not that values are another thing entirely values are the domain of questions of right and wrong and good and evil and inconveniently for us this is the area where the most important questions in human life arrives these are questions like how how should you raise your children what goals should you strive for in life what what constitutes a good life and it's thought that science will never be able to tell us the right answers to these questions is that justice science is never going to tell you whether you should like chocolate over vanilla it's not going to tell you how you should raise your children or treat your neighbor now I think this is an illusion I think this is quite confused and it's a dangerous illusion for as I said it erodes the conviction of very smart people in the face of really barbaric practices which occasion needless human misery we define physics as you know loosely speaking our best effort to understand the behavior of matter and energy in the universe so it's defined with respect to the goal of understanding how matter is going to behave now anyone else is free to define physics in some other way and the you know a creationist physicist could come into the room and say well you know that's not my definition of physics I want my physics I want I want to simply match the book of Genesis and we are free to exclude that person say well you really don't belong at this conference that's not physics as we are interested in it you're using the word differently you're not playing our language game that that gesture of exclusion in no sense the fact that the discourse of physics is not sufficient to silence that guy that that person can't be brought into the conversation doesn't nullify physics as a domain of right and wrong answers and yet on the subject of morality we seem to think that the possibility of differing opinions the fact the fact is someone can come forward and say well no my morality has nothing to do with human flourishing it has to do with following you know Sharia law the fact that that position can be articulated I hear people like Jonathan and certainly many philosophers say well that proves in some sense that there's no there there this is all made up this is not that we can't the fact that you can articulate a different position is a is a problem for the whole field and I think it's not so I think I think we have obviously we have an intuitive physics and much of our intuitive physics is wrong with respect to bathe to the goal of understanding how matter and energy are going to behave in the universe I'm what I'm want to say is that most people most of us most cultures have an intuitive morality and much of our intuitive morality may be wrong with respect to the goal of maximizing human flourishing you

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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 (Literary Genre), Philosophy, argument, funny, Science, great, nice, cool, Good, Fun, debate, comeback, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, death, afterlife, religion, reason, logic, science, Christopher Hitchens (Author), Richard Dawkins, Atheism, Anti theist, anti theism, agatan, foundation, fnd, agnostic, agnosticism, five

Id: ziT2yH1nqhI

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/atwoslottoaster]

I love that "bless you" line, never heard that one before.

[u/beverlyfreaks]

What is that second clip from? Why is his podium surrounded by a tiny boxing ring?