Bret Weinstein: God is a 'hack' to make us behave

for more debates updates and bonus content sign up at the big conversation dot show how important do you think that specifically belief in God or God's deity is to the usefulness of religion so apart from say if you took God out the picture the belief in the deity if it was just the principles morals and values that have been passed down would we we have benefited just as much so so what part does that the deity part yes it's a belief in God play as opposed to just the right moral framework and yeah have we benefited in spite of the belief in God you know so going forward can we come up with a framework that doesn't involve a deity of some kind will that be just as effective a very insightful question so the problem is that the deity I mean you're gonna have to accept my terminology here which is going to be sacrilegious and I apologize for that but the deity is a hack right it hacks a structure in a way that functions so if one let's just take a trivial example or a semi trivial example do you take the money out of the cash register if you're pretty sure nobody's gonna see you do it but you're not entitled to it right one could say well if there's a one in a hundred chance of my getting caught and the amount of money is sufficient in the cash register to change my state in the world for the next week maybe it's worth it right well if you make that decision each and every time the equivalent of a cash register is left open to you then you will eventually run afoul of the odds somebody will catch you and you will experience a spectacular catastrophe for your reputation which will cost you way more than you ever got out of any open cash registers so that's a bit of Statistics that you need to understand and you need to understand what economists would call expected return so the expected return is very low on the cash register because of the spectacular cost the one time you get caught in however many instances so how do you can they that efficiently so that people get the statistical lesson without having to take the statistics class well you say you can't get away with taking it out of the cash register because there's somebody who cares and he's watching you and as you take it he sees it and boy is that gonna come back to haunt you so that metaphor correctly hacks your model for whether this is a good idea in a way that is actually in your interests now can you if you are aware and again this is my viewpoint if you are aware that there's nobody up there actually watching write a code that is equally effective at getting people not to behave in this way that's gonna be tough on the other hand I'm not sure we have a choice I think we have to figure out how to pass on this kind of insight in a way that does not depend on unfalsifiable belief structures I'm gonna toss it to Alistair as well in a minute but the question that occurred to me on hearing that which is a fascinating way of putting it Brett is but is what you'll then say is that the reason we develop the belief that it's wrong to take money from someone else in that way is because it's ultimately not in our best interests in terms of our evolutionary future rather than it's it's actually wrong to do that stuff all right so those two things converge okay right so there is a absolute wrong about it and what one wants is for us to take on the responsibility for not doing it because it is wrong but how does it become wrong how do we learn that it is wrong these things are induced in us through a mechanism you know in Catholicism the fact that you do wrong and that wrong counts against you in a way that you can relieve yourself of the debt but you have to confess it to somebody who's then in a position to give guidance to you and others that that you know again it's a hack it correctly teaches you that this is wrong through some mechanism that has to be instantiated in the real world and it can be done through metaphor it must be done now through insight and enlightenment and that's not going to be easy what's your take on this this idea that God is a sort of that a hack to get us to the right sort of answer but one that's you know a useful fiction in that sense I think I would say God is creator and that kind of way moves us in a very different direction I think there are two things I want to say what one is that I think that one of the one of the significant things about believing in a righteous God is this deep sense that when society goes very very badly wrong there is something against which we are being judged and if you look at for example I'm Germany during the late 1930s you see a resurgence of the kind of approach you now probably call natural law in other words look this we are the law is being rigged to in effect do all these things there has to be somebody above this who's able to say this is not right and so there's a very deep I think sense of that we need something which is able to say to us yes we created these laws but actually they are flawed but I think the the positive point I want to make is this I think that there's a lot of reason to think that we as human beings are trying to see how we fit into a bigger picture you might think of crystal Park and others in Chicago doing work on this but what is interesting is this if you articulate that in terms of God then in effect you are fitting into a bigger picture which actually gives you a sense of who you are what the whole point of things is and actually if you've read Salman Rushdie's and grant a lecture at Cambridge called is nothing sacred it's very short now if you read that he's he's not expressing total commitment to belief in God but he he figures out that there's something it's saying two things number one that God is the repository for a sense of amazement and wonder which makes us realize that there's something bigger and we are part of it and then secondly and really importantly says that there's something about human nature which means that a purely use the word secular passing but he was getting at a purely secular worldview actually is not going to satisfy because there's something about us that is looking for something deeper so I think that that's how I'd want to begin to answer the question but as you'll see there's a lot more needs to be said [Music]

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 15,011

Keywords: unbelievable justin brierley premier christian radio christianity atheism philosophy faith theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, bret weinstein, alister mcgrath, religion, evolution

Id: 3-umIZzwjNQ

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019