Debate: Is religion good for humanity? Dennett & Shermer vs D'Souza & Esposito - CDI 2008

[Music] [Applause] [Music] yep amigos a la batalla de las áreas de Malaga quiero pasando siento veinticuatro tone LRA's del libro cuatro centas millones de neige Rona's question on dose el porque de la vida y preguntamos cenote crias todo lo que piensa que lindo libro sobre la mente daniel dennett sobre la conciencia michael shermer porque gente que cosa succede Ranas como la superstition la por que la gente Niguel ro costo gente que seja question ah dosa realmente la religion yo sobre todo después de anza de septiembre lech o más Daniel la humanidad que bien de Malabo derecho dos grandes tio Lobos dos Grande's tambien Oh lavoris pasando tone alavés de pez de Paz inesita cell Astoria una persona que defend ido debe voz otra vez de él los mejores estudios SI los negocios que yo ya conocido sobre el Islam is mo los mejores libros de los mejores estudios del Christian is mo Dos Passos completos demi lovato Patricia recommend lightly lady aqui SK lost volume Victor ambos I will invite both of you these all sound you ready you all ready come here come here please I will explain to the rules of the game whoever it's in Hagen is a salsa verde Cho whoever wins decides if they want if you want to start of the you want to begin whoever wins decides you will have each of you ten minutes colonists Alessandra Diez minutos to explain and to make your point para ser su Punto after that you will have ten minutes ten minutes ten minutes then it will come again to you for example and you will have a question for one of them or for both and then you will have five minutes to mate again another point then you have the time to make a question and five minutes to make a point and the same with you at the end you have two minutes this is a tricky one two minutes just to say in which way do you think that the other person in a way is right because don't believe everything you think the point is to understand the other perspective in a way everybody has something and probably a reason to think the way they think did you like the rules okay please por favor no vulpes backhoes anythin no partidos politico's please good luck tienes cocky like a gloss ollie tell sir Wow it's una Aguilar you ladies it's ten pesos okay so the winner is you have to say a la Sol please don't confuse me okay Aguila or Sun Sun Sun the new Aguilar they want would you like to begin tell okay to begin please go to science produced eres la pregunta es the question is is religion good for Humanity señora señora sustained Osuna preguntas in transcendence sia este Zelda vertical save even el mundo en la sport arroz de l'atlantique model review en los libros de richard on Quinta Daniel Dennett de michael shermer de dosed Esposito de de sousa es el debate a disposal anshel septiembre arena 0s ted avati en las olas ideas estamos en el tiempo de la vanguardia Delta Miguel devata welcome all right here we go so the question is is religion good for humanity and I want to amend the question immediately is religion good for humanity today let's not worry about the past I have a farm in Maine and some years ago I was planning to replant my hay field and a neighbor of a old farmer said Dan you want to plant oats as a nurse crop a nurse crop when you plant your timothy hay and I said what's a nurse crop and he said well the oats as a nurse crop they will come up faster they are more Hardy they will grow faster and they will protect the hay the young tender Timothy until it's ready the nurse crops you just plant once and it's it's a ladder you climb and then you harvest the nurse crop and then you have your hay and I thought well that's a very good idea that's what I did what I want to suggest to you is that religion has been a nurse crop for science that religion may indeed have prepared the way and been in essential preparation for the world of science we have now but it's time to harvest that nurse crop and move on well which religions are we talking about here there are many different religions religions come in so many different varieties that it's foolish to make generalizations about them all we have benign versions and we have toxic variants and just to remind you I'm going to give you I'm going to concentrate on three recent toxic variants Jonestown everybody knows about everybody remembers that and everybody deplores Jonestown here is a much more recent one Siyad Pervez comeback was sentenced to death in Afghanistan a few months ago for blasphemy as Steve Pinker said earlier that used to be a capital crime and in some places it still is now just a few days ago his execution was commuted now only only 20 years in prison I think that is toxic and I think it is important for all of us to say so it is not tolerance for religious difference that buttons one's lip and says this is not toxic this is evil this is toxic and I have one more even closer in time and that is this one yes you may chuckle it's hilarious it is preposterous it is also extremely dangerous it is obscenely stupid and dangerous and I think we it is our duty to discredit this stupid dangerous notion and it is all over the web there are probably hundreds of thousands maybe millions of my countrymen who actually say they believe this and that is a foolish and toxic at aspect of of religion now aside from those very dramatic cases of toxicity I think the prevailing problem with religion is that it's a sort of unscientific oh I debated Lord Winston in London and the question was is religion the greatest threat to rational scientific worldview and I said well if it isn't what is what is the greatest threat to a rational scientific world you and I came up with a number of candidates it might be alcohol it might be drugs it might be violent video games I suppose it might be advertising well all of these in their different ways can disable you but religion doesn't just disable it honors the disability it obliges you to wallow in irrationality at some point and it honors this and I think this is the single most difficult feature of religions to tolerate and to accept because it really is a danger to the world but I also am prepared to grant it doesn't equally affect everybody some people are more disabled than others by this idea that their religion obliges them to be irrational at times well back to the question is religion good for humanity today certainly most people think it is most people are quite sure that religion is a good thing and this in itself causes a serious problem the problem it creates is that there is simply no good reason at all to believe in Zeus I think you will agree or Poseidon or Zoroaster or Jehovah or Allah the traditional gods there are simply no good reason to believe in them at all we have very good explanations of why it is that people came to believe in these gods but no good reason to think that they're right and I think that people realize that so there's no good reason to believe in gods but there are good reasons to say that you do and this is the main thing I want to talk about in a few minutes that I have the good reasons by the way are I think the probably the press most pressing one is fear a lot of people are afraid Steve Pinker was talking earlier about failed States I think a lot of people are afraid that if we don't hold up our own here with religion that if the world goes into an a religious state the whole world will become a sort of failed state and that would be a very dire prospect indeed I think that they're wrong but I appreciate that if that's what you think then you must indeed believe that there is a very good reason to presume serve the myth of religion and this leads to what I call belief in belief now many people believe in God all around the world as many people believe in God in one way or another many more people believe in belief in God that is to say they think belief in God is a really good thing an important thing they're prepared to work hard to achieve greater compliance with the policy of believing in God how do I know that many more people believe in belief in God because all the people who believe in belief in God but have lost their faith fall into this category and I don't think there's anybody in the category of believing God but not thinking it's a particularly good belief to have you may know one or two who regret their belief in God but they're quite rare now this has been appreciated by religions for a long time and Cardinal Ratzinger as he then was he's now Pope Benedict in a declaration just a few years ago has a wonderful phrase which he actually emphasizes he talks about what Catholics are required to profess that is you can require somebody to profess something even if they don't believe it now why would anybody do that by the way returning to the theme of this you'd simply can't believe everything you think you can't believe everything you say but you can be obliged by your religious leaders to say things that you can't believe and in fact that's one of the things that many religious leaders themselves treat as a virtue it is a virtue to profess things that you by your own lights do not understand and cannot understand and I view that as itself a very dangerous thing what this creates is nothing short of systemic hypocrisy all over the world all over the world people say well at least we're not a theists when what they believe in is so different from one person to another that it's a joke I talked with a very eminent Episcopal priest in the United States a few years ago who told me about some of his in-laws some of his relatives who were Mormons and he spent a holiday with them and he came back from that and this is what he said when I found out what my Mormon relatives meant by God I rather wish they didn't believe in God he and his Mormon relatives do not really share a belief in fact the only thing that unites their belief is the use of the term a journalist who studied religions a lot said the other day at a meeting I was out in Chicago he said people say there's no polytheism in America oh no there's hundreds and hundreds of different religions in America it's just that their gods are all called Jesus I think there's an element of truth in that it's but it's a it's a it's a silly here's Lucy Lucy believes that rock is to die for desi thinks that rock is to die for Lucy is thinking of Rock Hudson desi is thinking of rock music they don't really agree at all about anything it's too late for religion the human race has grown up you need to foster the evolution of benign forms of religion carefully thank you very much - neva joke a few more seconds like Daniel Dennett heart is also thank you thank you very much can everyone hear me I am listening very carefully to Daniel Dennett and I feel a little bit like the mosquito in the the nudist colony I'm really not sure where to begin but I want to begin by saying that I believe in God and why in part because it gives us an explanation for some of the deepest questions that science has not even seriously begun to answer why do we have something which is to say a universe instead of nothing why do we have life instead of non-life why should we be good how can we teach morality to our children what is the purpose of life if it has any purpose at all science has made you might say some attempt but in fairness no real hasn't made any real progress in addressing these questions people believe in God not because they are bad scientists but because they are more curious and they recognize that life is more mysterious and offers up questions that science does not even purport or pretend the answer I want to suggest if I may that many of the values that even Daniel Dennett and Michael Shermer believe in and have defended throughout their life you might say secular values or atheist values are themselves dependent on a religious worldview for example the idea of the individual the idea of dissent the idea of science as an independent or autonomous enterprise in fact I pointed out point out to you that it's no accident that science developed within the orbit of Western civilization it developed within the bowels of Christendom many of the greatest scientists of all time from Copernicus to Galileo to Kepler to Boyle to Newton were not only deeply religious but they saw their scientific work as revealing the handiwork of God in the universe so they saw no incompatibility between science and God at all now even more than that I want to argue that science even today is based on suppositions that derive from a religious worldview let's take for example the idea that we live in a rational universe or we live in a lawful universe the universe whose objects can be described in the strange language of mathematics and orderly universe moreover not only do we believe in a rational universe but we believe that the rationality of our minds is capable of comprehending the rationality of the universe out there now why should this be so if we are merely evolved primates we would develop the techniques of survival but we wouldn't necessarily figure out how to determine the rotation of the planets or e equals MC square or Newton's inverse square law why do we believe that our beliefs are not merely useful but also true I've said a little bit of a word about science I also want to talk about how God or the belief in God and in this case Christianity has been responsible for much of the great moral advances of mankind earlier Steven Pinker mentioned the universality of slavery we've had slavery in every known civilization only in one culture which is Western civilization that slavery become controversial you had an anti-slavery movement only in the West by the way in every society there's one group of people that doesn't want to be slaves and that is of course the slaves themselves but but only in Western culture have you had movements to abolish slavery for everybody Abraham Lincoln said I would be a slave so I would not be a master he doesn't want to be a slave he doesn't want to be a master either so where did these anti-slavery movements come from well in the West they came out of the Christian idea that we are all created equal in the eyes of God and because we are all created equal in the eyes of God groups of Christians who had previously put up with slavery began to say wait a minute no man has the right to rule another man without his consent and this idea became not only the basis for abolishing slavery but it also became the basis of modern democracy because even today democracy is based on the idea that no man has the right to rule another without consent when Thomas Jefferson a man of the Enlightenment a very dubious or unorthodox Christian sat down to write down what is the source of human dignity what is the source of our inalienable rights he could only think of one and that is they come from our Creator if they don't come from their jefferson couldn't say where else they come from now we were debating here the benefits of religion the bet the blessings of of belief in God you always have to ask compared to what and some people say well let's say compared to Europe Europe is a relatively secular culture but they don't go around killing each other in Europe but that's because Europe is a culture that is still embedded in Christian assumptions and Christian values and even people who have ceased to believe in God still believe in those values if you really want to look at a truly atheist society you have got to look at some of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century I'm thinking not only of Mao in China and thinking not only of Stalin in Russia not only of the Nazi regime in Germany but many others Ceausescu Kim Jong Il Fidel Castro Pol Pot consider a regime like Pol Pot's in in Indo Indochina after the Vietnam War in a very short space of about three years this atheist regime managed to wipe out about two million people two million people even bin Laden in his wildest dreams does not even come close and if you look at the big a theist regimes of Stalin and Mao and Hitler those regimes in about five decades have managed to kill upwards of a hundred million people now atheism has produced an ocean of blood and a mountain of bodies even the Inquisition which is the great horror and embarrassment of Christianity if you read the scholarship on the Inquisition over a period of 350 years the Inquisition killed about 2,000 people 2,000 people over 350 years it's about five guys a year there is absolutely no comparison between the crimes of religion and the crimes of atheism now Richard Dawkins are leading atheists the order of author of the book The God Delusion says you have to wait a minute here because the Christians killed in the name of Christianity the radical Muslims kill in the name of religion you might have had tyrants who happen to be atheist but they didn't kill in the name of atheism now Dawkins is a pretty well known biologist as many of you know but sometimes I think it's better to keep the biologist inside the laboratory and the reason is that here is a guy who evidently doesn't know much history all you have to do is look at the works of Marx and you see that religion is not incidental it's actually central to the Marxist scheme the whole idea of Marx is that religion is a drug with an opium of the masses and the basic idea here is that we are trying to create a new man and a new utopia liberated from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality and so my conclusion is that it is atheism and not religion that is responsible for the mass murders of history and I want to make a final point about the about the benefits or the blessings of religion and that is ultimately religion causes us to believe in cosmic justice in the war here's what I mean by this life is very unfair we all believe in justice we say what goes around comes around but it's not true many times the bad guy ends up on top many times the good guy comes to grief now all the great religions of the world for what all their disagreements are based on the assumption that there is ultimate moral accountability in Hinduism you are a lousy guy in your last life well we'll be seeing you as a cockroach in your next life cosmic justice so the idea here is that if you were to remove God from the world the writer Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov if God is not everything is permitted and what he means is that if you remove God from the world then there is no Ten Commandments no basis of morality we are in a sense nothing more than evolved primates if you look at the nature Channel and you watch the baboon kingdom one baboon goes into the lair of another bludgeons the baboon to death grabs his wife drags our and rapes her and we all watch in fascination this is the way nature is this is the way things are the point is religion gives us ultimately a reason to be good a reason to transmit that goodness to our children and ultimately hope for a better and more just future thank you how many people here believe in God okay look the time is slipping away here you didn't tell me was going to be this lopsided but we're not talking about is there a god or not we're talking about here is religion metaphors for good or evil in the world and to that extent I would answer the question briefly that is religion is good when it does good evil when it does evil and so what we end up with is tallying the sheet up good on one side evil on the other side and I think this does not bode well for religion on the one hand yes of course you can find some good that religions do but it reminds me of Winston Churchill's comment in his observations of Americans when he said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else I suppose that's especially relevant in the last eight years but anyway hopefully that'll change and that does remind me actually I would modify the quote to say rule it we can always count on religion to do the right thing after it's tried everything else and by that I mean I think what actually happens is religions follow they do not lead they follow cultural social political and economic trends that have already begun for other reasons and then they fall into place justify their actions with scriptures from holy books to say look we always believe this here's the passage to support it and then take credit for the change that actually came about for other reasons let's take slavery as an example upon domitius own recommendation to me last year when we debated was to watch a film called Amazing Grace about the story of Wilberforce the slavery abolitionist in England as an example he said of a Christian doing something in the name of God to write social injustice so I did the remarkable thing about the Wilberforce story is that he was going up against all of his other Christian abolition or non abolitionist pro-slavery holders people that held slaves people that justified slavery in the name of Christianity people that cited the Bible to justify Christianity these were the enemies against which Wilberforce was trying to convince the abolitionist movement to take off and it didn't happen very rapidly it took decades to convince all those Christians that what they were doing was actually immoral and in fact Wilberforce was just on the heels of a growing enlightenment enlightenment movement that valued human life in and of itself without whether whether there's a God or not human life has value so slavery is an old example a more recent example I would say since I'm from the great state of California where we just had on the on our election on Tuesday gay marriage bill which did not pass but mark my words here's what's going to happen at the moment almost all Christians think homosexuality is an abomination it's a sin they should not get married they should not have the same rights as other people within a decade maybe two and most here's what will happen all that'll change it'll change because the people who are being subjected as Denisha said the people that don't like slavery or slaves the people that don't think there should be bigotry and and persecution against them are the gays in this case this will come about by them standing up and saying that's enough we're not going to put up with this anymore and we're gonna change the law and that will change and then what will happen is you'll find in the historical record a few Christian Pro gay marriage bloggers and writers and so on and then the religious people will go back and pick them out and say look we took credit for this all alone but note right now and remember this that's who's against that equal treatment under the law is Christians now Dinesh made a comment about science coming out of religion not quite that's not quite right Christianity through scholasticism gave us a tradition of linking Aristotle to Aquinas to reason and rationality what makes science different is not that it's reason that it uses reason and logic it's that it's empirical that it doesn't matter what the authority says based on reason and logic it matters what's actually out there in the world and when you go check it that's the only thing that matters so at the time the Denisha was talking about science growing out of Christianity in fact what it was was it's called the Battle of the books the book of nature versus the book of authority at the time dominated by the Christian Church Authority was the final arbiter science had to battle against that as when Galileo said yeah but if you actually look through the tube to his fellow Vatican astronomers you'll see that there's moons around Jupiter in spots on the Sun and all those things that the Catholic Church authorities said can't be there because the authority of startling reason and logic said they can't be there this is Aristotelian cosmology all orbits have to be circular all objects in space must be perfectly round and perfectly smooth and so forth all that was wrong and it's only because Galileo made the Vatican astronomers actually look through his telescope and they could finally see that the church authorities were wrong that's the only way it comes about is actually looking through the tube and it's science that does that not religion in my last five minutes I want to make a few comments about the actual nature of the question doesn't does religion make you more moral well we can address this on several different levels one if you go to google and you google George Barna George Barna is an evangelical Christian who has an institute in Santa Barbara that collects data on moral behavior his conclusion is that believers are no more moral than non-believers believers get divorced just as much as non-believers they have adulterous affairs just as much as non-believers they cheat on their taxes just as much as non-believers there's no single measure ever recorded and I'm not giving you the Atheist webpage I'm giving you the evangelical Christian webpage George Barna there's no single empirical measure that says religion makes people more moral on an individual level on a national level there was a study published two years ago in the journal of religion and society correlating the 19 Western democracies with their levels of religiosity and various measures of moral behavior the inverse correlation was that the more moral the nation the more religious the nation was based on self professed belief in God how often people go to church in that country and so forth and their levels of crime STD rates abortion rates teen pregnancy rates suicide rates all went up got it as religion goes up in a nation crime rate goes up STD rate goes up abortion rates goes up teen teen pregnancy rates go up any measure that we would by Christian measures say those are moral measures the religion does not make those nations more moral and makes them less moral as for the wars this is complete nonsense Dinesh the Hundred Years War the 30 Years War the Inquisition the witch hunts the American Civil War 600,000 dead northern Christians killing southern Christians fighting over slavery they're all Christians World War 1 German Christians killing French Christians and British Christians killing German Christians they're all Christians even in World War two the Japanese Emperor is a god figure Mussolini was a good Catholic Hitler well maybe not such a good Catholic but a Catholic nonetheless Roosevelt the Christian Churchill a Christian this was not an atheistic war because nobody kills in the name of no God what would you be killing in the name of there is no belief system of atheism where we're gonna fight for atheism by killing you know people kill in the name of God they do not kill in the name of no God now none of this would matter if we all follow the principle of Liberty that is I should have the freedom to think believe and act in any way I want as long as it doesn't infringe on your freedom to think act and believe anything you want that would be fine if everybody believed that who doesn't believe that the theocracies of the world don't believe that and that's the problem the fundamentalist religion is of the world do not feel the world will be right until every knee is bowed and every mind is chained that's the problem the solution is the spread of liberal democracy and free trade so that people can treat each other individually as just human beings with values in and of themselves whether those are God or not not the spread of more religion the spread of our religion encourages the fought and fosters the tribalism that is our natural state democracy and free trade breaks down those natural tribal barriers and allows people to treat them as individuals so in the end it comes down to what Rabbi Hillel said and when he repeated the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you that's the only law that matters all the rest is commentary thank you Wow attention John Esposito otro peso completo me Menino welcome let me begin by saying that as Brzezinski noted the 20th century was the bloodiest century in history but as he also know that they were not wars fought in the name of religion they were fought in the name of another ideology nationalism and if we look at the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan while you may see religion is fighting with in most of the bloodshed that occurs and occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought in the name of liberal democracy putting aside whether in our George Bush's is Christian and what his motivations may have been I should also begin by saying that my comments are that I'm going to make now are irrespective of my own religious belief but I should tell you at the beginning I am a Roman Catholic was in a monastery for 10 years had have degrees in Catholic theology and taught that for years have my doctorate in Islam and in Hinduism and Buddhism and so my comments come from that I have been a believer for many years and I have been an atheist for many years but whether or not I talk about religion and belief in God and see it as constructive as well as destructive really has to do with my observations of how I have seen religion and the fact that being a pluralist I believe that that people should be able to be religious as irreligious and think that both atheists and religious folk can both be good and can be dangerous and as far as I'm concerned I think history demonstrates that so let me get into a couple of introductory comments first of all I was I've learned a lot here and I want to thank you for that and my wife was supposed to come but I'm delighted she didn't at the last minute because the idea that I had to sit here with a woman I'd been married for 43 years who's going to hear that my brain was marinated in my testosterone and just create tremendous problems when we have our discussions we've never argued of course in 43 years but the second thing which I found great offence with and I have a real problem with in terms of the organizers is you can attack my faith you can attack my family but you don't attack my blackberry nor my attachment to my blackberry and if gene had been here today I would have never heard the end of it okay let's talk about religion we hear today about how science has succeeded religion well you know one of the words that I use a lot when I talk and my wife always says you shouldn't use it because it doesn't convey meaning it's stupid and I always say it makes me feel good she says it doesn't communicate anything Dennis you stupid a lot and I think the position that somehow science has now replaced religion is stupid the fact is we've had explanations from magic to witchcraft to religion in science and today the answers that people look for depending on the people come both from religion and science some people choose one of the others or the other but many people feel they they both work well together part of the problem we have even in this debate is that in the 20th century there was a notion that to be modern men to become westernized and secular PI's and the presumption was that as people became better educated and more secular they would become more less religious not just that religion would be restricted to private life but they become less religious Anthony Wallace a well-known anthropologist and through Paula gist of religion in the beginning of his book basically said I was raised the believer you know but then I kind of grew up and realized that empiricism simply replaced you know a human centered world with his empirical knowledge simply replace a divine Sennett world the problem is it's not an either/or certainly not for religionists some religionists go into an either-or world of selecting one of the other many do not that's why we have many very well-educated people many many people who have a profile just as their atheist friends but who also were believers in the 20th century we not only presume the pattern of the growing secularization of society but as a result we had the death of God theology now on the one hand many people thought that simple men that God was dead that was true but for others it meant God as we talked about him in traditional paradigms or models is dead and unless one gets new paradigms we're going to have a problem but very quickly that notion of the secularization of society which Harvey Cox celebrated and later backed away from and the the notion of the death of God was overtaken by the global resurgence of religion and so suddenly people had to deal with a phenomenon of well wait a minute there's now as Peter burger said who initially talked about secularization as inevitable there's Adi secularization of society now if you believe in the former the tendency is to then think that the latter is really a problem just as some religious folk when they hear people scientists who cut and who are atheist think oh my god you know then if my kid really studies science really closely he's going to be an atheist they create this either-or world I don't think that that ultimately is the case I think what we do have to recognize though as that really all religions have had their transcendent side and their dark side they believe in a transcendent reality and they enable people to transcend themselves to be better than they might normally have been whether it's their moral life their spiritual life etc but religion has its dark side like any ideology I want to emphasize that wars have been fought in the name of democracy if President Bush had had his way we would have redrawn the map of the Middle East in the name of the promotion of democracy so let's not be foolish about this what religion has had its dark side and still does I deal with a religious tradition that is particularly come in for a grand slam and that is Islam but the fact is part of the problem we have and this ties in with some of our earliest speakers is that often people go with their intuitions or what they hear everybody else say and regrettably when you get into an area like dealing with Islam in the Muslim world and whether 9/11 signaled a religion that is evil or it signaled some religious believers who were evil is out there but most people don't have the data to respond to it we have experts who take diametrically opposed positions how can that be experts with wonderful training and reputations Bernhard Lewis Martin Kramer the darth vader's as i like to call them of my profession on the other hand we have a whole group of folks myself and others who are I believe the forces of light others see us as the forces of darkness we have the same training the same experience but part of the problem is we are content to listen to Talking Heads on Sunday we are content to listen to militant Muslim religious leaders and Christian religious leaders we are content to listen to a battle of experts all of who tell you what the vast majority of Muslims alike but do not do not have the data for what the vast majority of Muslims believe and in fact today we do the Gallup Organization is done a poll which represents 90% of the world's Muslims 1 billion Muslims and what we discover when we look there is that yes a minority of Muslims are extremists we know that as a fact and yes a minority of Muslims are also politically radicalized that is they're not engaging in violence now but given their position unless that position is turned or many of them a turn they could be recruited however what our data shows is 90 to 93 percent of the Muslims in the world in fact at poor the attacks on 9/11 even if many of them don't like American foreign policy that in fact both political radicals and mainstream are not thinking when they have resentment towards the West or even anti Americanism they're not thinking about a clash of religion or culture they thinking about a clash of interest in foreign policy that's a fact some say is Islam incompatible with democratization is it incompatible with women rights we find in our data and hate to plug the book who speaks for Aslam what a billion Muslims really think we find that majorities of Muslims want democratization but they also want their religious values that majorities of men and women across the Muslim world including in Saudi Arabia in the sixty percentile believe that women should have legal rights citizenship education holding positions and if you like the question driving cars 61% of Saudi women believe they should be able to drive a car as well as have top positions and they don't want they don't see it as necessary to have that in a secular framework they believe that it's compatible with their interpretation of religion because as we know from experience religion like any ideology is capable of multiple interpretations and is capable of change over periods of time we all think and grow both in our secular values and the way we view the world and in our religious values classic example is myself I'm a lifelong Democrat I pick Nixon over Kennedy even worse my wife reminded me at a party that I voted for Barry Goldwater to which I blocked that out completely I mean the reality of it as we grow and change and my position today would be much different and the same thing happens with many of us in our moral positions and our religious positions and in our political positions as I love to say to Muslims you'll become like ethnic Italians you know when you make it you move from being a Democrat to a Republican I mean the reality of it is we have a lot of reasons for why we change our positions so I look forward to the rest of the debate even though I know that the forces of light will prevail Daniel Dennett Denise Oh Michael Shermer una pregunta but I just one question to them and five minutes whatever you want no no I have to ask a question you have to ask a question and then you have 5 min soldiers to elaborate and whatever you wish okay but first I asked the question and then he answers and no no just ask the question elaborate five minutes all right so my question is for Dinesh and then I guess he can answer it later so my question is this Dinesh where do you get your morals from presumably you're a Christian you're a Catholic I presume you get these from God or from the Bible but if you get them from God how do you get them though do you ask him and he tells you do you pray about it do you meditate about it if you get them from the Bible which passages do you pick and choose from you obviously I presume would ignore the passage is about enslaving your neighbor and your daughter and that sort of thing and stoning to death you're disobedient child or the adulterous woman down the street and I'll review it you would probably ignore or discount those moral homilies in the in the Bible and yet pick a few others that you like so which ones what's your criteria for deciding I want this one instead of that one and if it's from the and again if it's from God himself are you hearing voices or what okay so in my final four minutes I want to make a few comments about this business of democracies versus theocracies and dictatorships and so on we have a fair amount of data on this now that it's very rare for democracies to fight other democracies it's true it has happened occasionally but it almost never happens compared to other forms of governments one of the key aspects of liberal democracies is that they separate religion from the state they're a secular state in the sense that it doesn't matter which religion you adhere to or which God you happen to believe in these are the set of values and rules that we abide by in this particular country and that's a superior position that leads to by superior I mean it leads to less tribalism less violence greater levels of prosperity and liberty and freedom for more people in more places so I mentioned democracy and then again free trade I call this basquiat sprin suppose Frederic Bastiat was a 19th century French economist who said we're goods cross sorry we're goods do not cross frontiers armies will so the corollary would be where Goods do cross frontiers armies will done it's not a perfect law of nature however wherever two countries are free to trade with one another they're far less likely to fight with one another those two values liberal democracy and free trade are product not of religion even if religion had some input in a in it it's a product of the modern enlightenment values of once again treating other people as valuable in and of themselves and just applying the golden rule now I ended my 10-minute talk quoting from the scripture well what I want to find finally say is that back to where I started that the moral zeitgeist changes in culture first and then religion follows the reason that happened is because we evolved over millions of years as a social primate species certain values of how we have to treat one another because we have to somehow get along with our fellow group members so we have these amazing capacity for sympathy and empathy altruism reciprocal altruism pro-social behavior cooperativeness within our group within our tribes we have that capacity that was there long before religions came upon the scene what happened is is that works really well for small groups around about 5,000 years ago these small bands and tribes began to coalesce into larger chiefdoms and States and eventually into empires of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands and millions of people in which case it's too easy to get away with cheating and so you needed some form of codifying the rules of how we're going to get along as members of a social group the two institutions that came along the scene were government and religion government said these are the rules you obey Him or else justice will prevail now religion said yeah and if you still think you're going to get away with it mr. big will get you later now that may be true for them back then I think we can do better wouldn't it be better for justice to be served now to the extent that we can rather than hoping that the deity takes care of Hitler in the next life wouldn't it be better if we treat one another with respect now in this world and not use this work there's some stage for some future date that may open up there in some afterlife where maybe justice will be served of course we all believe that that's why we have justice systems now thank you he missed you so shy a question on five minutes I want to end by answering Michael schirmer's question because in the process of answering it I will state my own question when I think about where I get my moral beliefs in fact who not on from the Bible they do not come from voices that I hear in the dark they come from actually a most unexpected place and I would assume that for Michael Shermer the answer is exactly the same we actually come from within me it is sort of you might say the still small voice of conscience this I want to argue has no adequate Darwinian explanation and is in fact much better understood as the voice of God within us I'll give an example to illustrate what I mean because it then leads to my question let's assume I'm walking on the riverbank and I hear somebody shout help help help I'm drowning I'm not a very good swimmer I turn I see this person is if my brother is that my cousin is that my neighbor no it's a complete stranger I've never met this person in my life I have no genetic kinship with this person at all the question becomes now should I help this person and an instinct in me let's call it the Darwinist instinct says don't help this person preserve your genes keep walking but the moment I start doing that a little lamp goes on my head that says don't do that you should try to help and then the other part of me says but I'm not a very good swimmer well then this other part of me says that's okay at least put out a stick and maybe you can pull the person to safety and then the first voice says yeah but look how big that guy is who's drowning if you put give him the stick he'll pull you in the point I'm trying to make here is this there is within the human psyche a kind of a war between the instinct for survival on the one hand and the perpetuation of our genes that has a full and adequate Darwinian explanation and a rival instinct that we asks us ultimately to take sacrifices that imperil our genes and imperil our sociality in for people that cannot in any way benefit us now you might get some big and tall stories about how that has a Darwinian explanation man evolved to be social if you listen to Steven Pinker earlier man was not all that social for tens of thousands of years the sociality if you will ultimately is developed you might say in the rather late history of our species now what about slavery earlier we heard of slavery and how ultimately the Christians later figured out to be against slavery because William Wilberforce had to fight against all these slave owners well we kind of know why the slave owners are for slavery they stand to benefit from it the philosopher Immanuel Kant said a long time ago out of the Crooked Timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made I don't think we have to explain for what I human beings want to employ other human beings for free that does not require explanation what does require explanation is why there are movements against that now interestingly slavery was abolished in Europe for the most part between the fourth century and the 10th century it was replaced largely by serfdom so the anti-slavery movement did not begin in the modern era with the Enlightenment it actually began in the medieval era in the so-called Dark Ages and I want to say if I may a word about Galileo because the truth of it is Galileo has been made into a sort of secular saint a kind of apostle of science against religion Galileo was in fact a devout Catholic and the truth of it is in Galileo's time the argument for heliocentrism or the argument for the idea it's the earth that goes around the Sun that argument had not been an conclusively as stablished the evidence for that only came fifty years later if you go and read Galileo's book he makes all kinds of erroneous and bad arguments for why the earth goes around the Sun he says for example that one proof that the earth goes around the Sun is that we have the tides he says obviously the earth is moving very fast because that's what makes the water slosh back and forth in the motions that we call the tides well today we know this argument is absurd the tides have a lot more to do with the gravitational effect of the Sun and the moon acting upon the earth so the point I'm trying to make is what we are getting here is not science but a kind of bogus interpretation of science that is being used as a battering ram against religion I think ultimately will it the effect that religion does in the world could be explained very well by an incident involving mother Teresa she was found by a bunch of Indian guys who are walking on the streets of Calcutta and she was ministering to and hugging a leper and the Indian guy said to mother Teresa I wouldn't do that we wouldn't do that for all the money in the world and she replied I wouldn't either I am doing it for the love of Christ that is what religion makes people do in the world thank you Dinesh the salsa mr. de Sousa what's your question for him my question is this we want to teach morality in the absence of religion if you were to teach your own sons or daughters what more what would be the source of the morality you taught them and on what basis would you teach it there have been many philosophical systems Hegel can't Nietzsche I don't know a single person I've ever met who got their morality from Hegel or Kant or Nietzsche religion today is probably the main if not the only mechanism for transmitting moral values to the young if religion won't do it what will okay okay Daniel in it so let me begin with my question and I will address it to I fully appreciate that there are a majority of Muslims who are themselves deeply offended and in fact deeply frightened of their Islamist Islam assist the fanatics and I have been trying to figure out for some time how I can help them bring order into their house and what my liberal Islamic friends tell me is stay away don't try to help us any help you offer us will be treated by the Islamists by the fanatics as a sign that we are the tools of the West this leaves me baffled and an unempowered I don't know what to do I wonder what can we do to help the moderate Muslims in this world gain control over their religion and I'll make it particularly pointed my understanding is that when the Danish cartoon issue erupted moderate Muslims around the world we're praying for us in the West to say don't be childish don't be stupid this this these displays that you're these riots shame on you for those riots of course we're going to have freedom of expression of course we're going to allow this and that our failure to do this pull the political rug out from under a moderate Muslim feet if you disagree with that I'd really like to know why but now let me respond to a few other points that have been raised Dinesh has a caricature of evolutionary theory he thinks that the only thing that evolution can explain is basic maybe tit for tat reciprocity reciprocal altruism a kin selection and what he doesn't realize is that in the last 20 or 30 years there has been a veritable explosion of really interesting work on the cultural evolution the cultural evolution of moral norms in the work of many theorists both scientists and philosophers he wants to know where I would get to give the religion where that where the religion would come to where I would get the the principles to educate my children or my grandchildren and the answer is very simple I would get it from secular philosophy from ethics the 20th century saw a flourishing of brilliant work by people like John Rawls and amar chess and and and and to name somebody perhaps a little closer to your persuasion Robert Nozick a more a more sort of right-wing theorist and many others and they're all really building on human in one way or another I would say not Nietzsche particularly not Kant and what they're actually doing and what philosophers have been doing for 2,000 years and more is using their reason the reason that evolved first called first genetically and then culturally to reevaluate the values they found if you like in their genes what Hume said was that we had these natural virtues and then we as human beings as cultivated people developed what he called artificial virtues and that the way these developed is not by reading holy books although holy books may have a lot of valuable lore in them too as grist for the mill but by a careful communal rational discussion of what do we want to do what do we think the right things to do are if you look at the history of morality over the last two thousand years you find that it has evolved tremendously nobody nobody in this room would live by Old Testament morality nobody would live by by New Testament morality unvarnished the varnish has come from this rational exploration and it has been secular all the way through is there a growing religious revival I don't think the statistics bear that out the fast according to the Christian Encyclopedia the fastest growing category in the world is secular is no religion at all and what I think we've seen these days is a growing anxiety of growing even desperation on the part of religious groups to shore up their ranks and where they're making more noise than ever they are working harder than ever and because they have to the Baptist's themselves recently passed a resolution deploring what they took but their own statistics suggested which was that only 4% of their youngsters were going to be what they called Bible believing adults the world for better or for worse is undergoing a wave of secularization Western values are sweeping the planet not always with pretty results I think it's behooves us to look very closely at the effects we're creating with this wave of secularization but the one thing that we shouldn't do is to suppose that there isn't within that wave the wherewithal the content the principles of ethics that we can help to spread to other people and we can spread it to them in a purely rational way we can say come sit down with us you tell us your religious beliefs you tell us your moral prohibitions and don't tell us that this is what you do because it's in your holy book that may be true but that doesn't settle anything if you believe that your religion has the right moral precepts defend them in secular terms why is this the right thing to do there is plenty of scope within a perfectly secular worldview to articulate and defend morality we really we may have needed religion in the past to do this for us but we don't need it too now in fact it's getting in the way don't John Esposito please well first of all with regard to I mean I'm not sure about the statistic about the growth of secularism but certainly most demographic studies I've seen talk about the growth of that the fastest growing religions in the world today are Islam and Christianity particular evangelical Christianity and the spread of its missionaries etc but I don't have the stats so I'm not you know I'm not going to go there on that one how can we help Muslims very clear majorities of Muslims again in the Gallup World poll make make it very clear what majorities of Muslims basically say is in open-ended questions this is 35 countries 50,000 interviews again the largest most comprehensive study of the Muslim world ever done and what they first thing they say and it goes right to the heart of the Danish cartoons in terms of framing the reaction respect Islam and don't view Muslims as less than non-muslims in terms of the worth of their lives etc and we see that in fact the reaction to the Danish cartoons on the part of mainstream Muslims I'm not talking about the extremists who engaged in violence was absolute abhorrence because feeling as if they were looked down upon and their religion was looked down upon living in a Europe in which often they don't really have equal citizenship to then have yourself held up your religion to ridicule and have your prophet portrayed as a terrorist was was considered utterly offensive and and so that's one of the things that's brought out but it's not just that when you actually ask you also get a response to talk more specifically what many Muslims say is look help us get exactly what we admire about what you have we admire self-determination we admire the rule of law but what do you do what your policies you continue to support authoritarian regimes they're not about promoting democratization they're not about an open press they're not about an open educational system they're not about developing civil societies and indeed many of your closest allies whom you continue to support are the very offenders that's whether they're democratic administrations or republican and indeed in your now global war against terrorism and the notion that part of what you're doing is not just fighting terrorism it's the spread liberal democracy at the end of the day have you really pushed for liberal democracy in Egypt have you pushed for liberal democracy in his vaca staff and in many of the countries in the Muslim world those are issues that are out there what do they say specifically also that that they that they'd like to see they don't want to see a double standard when it comes to the promotion of democracy President Bush's senior State Department official ambassador Haas in the first term when we were ready to go into Iraq and said we don't we can't find weapons of mass destruction what he trotted out as our excuse and I think he was genuine when he said it is that every American American administration he acknowledged every American administration including the first term of Bush up until that point had had a double standard when it came to the promotion of democracy in the Muslim world promoted in other parts of the world and not there and so he said we're now going to listen to our other friends not just the regime's we're going to promote that democracy at the end of the day that simply hasn't happened and you could see it vividly when Karen use who met well promoting diplomacy public diplomacy went to the Middle East and immediately reached out to women's audiences in Turkey in Saudi Arabia and played the woman's card when in fact women turned around and said in effect hey the first thing in our society that we have a problem with is the slaughter of men women and children because of what your armies are doing in your invasion in Iraq and the war that you're conducting not that they're not concerned about women's issues I gave you the stats that show that they are so there's a lot that we can do concretely and this is a major issue now you have a sea shift now taking place people around the world are looking whether whether we voted for Obama or not they're looking for turn in American foreign policy they see Obama as an internationalist I received emails from people I didn't even know the night of the elections were announced the results and the next morning from all over the world saying congratulations as if somehow I have been elected would that I had that plane the rest of that they can keep but I still want the jet anyway the reality of it is that we are in a position to make a difference but it means that an American administration has to stop doing what not only in the Muslim world but outside the Muslim world has caused anti-americanism stop looking as if in the name of liberal democracy and American a Western secular democracy stop looking as if we're promoting a new world order which is a new form of neocolonialism the white man's burden the mission to civilize is now changed by our mission to spread democracy and whether or not we're willing to lead with diplomacy rather than the military to provide economic aid and educational aid massive aid in places like Iraq Afghanistan to rebuild the infrastructure rather than massive export of our weapons and our military into the region that's what it's about it seems to me if we think about the future thank Mucho most beautiful final points communitychannel points two minutes well again thanks for welcoming us to your country and I really appreciate that I since I'm a science guy I want to cite one more study published last year in the annals of family medicine a study on eighteen hundred and twenty medical doctors measured by their levels of religiosity or not and how many of them help poor that is they practice medicine without getting paid for it needy areas thirty one percent of Christians people who consider themselves deeply religious practice medicine in needy areas for no pay 35 percent of atheists doctors in this school worked for no money helping the poor and needy areas why would they do that if religion is such a great force for moral values what would these atheists do that and when asked they said because it felt like it was the right thing to do that's my commitment as a physician to do that that I think is that still small voice dinesh that you and I both get our morals from what I'm claiming is that that still small voice comes from our deep evolutionary past not in some Darwinian set like most people think of it as selfish cutthroat competitive not that kind of Darwinism the social Darwinism the kind of Darwinism in which you become more successful by being cooperative pro-social and altruistic in my argument here I want to claim that it's not enough to fake being a moral person in some Darwinian calculation therefore you're more likely to pass on your genes for faking moral values because in small groups where everybody knows one another you can tell if somebody's faking or not you actually have to be moral live it believe it and actually be moral and that's the source of that still small voice thank you so much for having me [Applause] it's interesting that when you have a disaster in the world let's say a huge famine tomorrow in Rwanda there would be a big explosion of concern and compassion and you would find that in the Western countries there would be a great agitation to collect donations and food send Doctors Without Borders and so on however in Indian culture India you would get very little of this reaction at all in China you would also get very little of this reaction and why is that if the Darwinian imperative was equally planted in everybody all cultures should respond equally to this great human tragedy but no the Christian cultures would respond immediately because of a tradition of compassion developed within the Christian West an idea of the dignity of human life which is not common to all cultures is not a Darwinian phenomenon go to ancient Greece and Rome the Spartans would take the sick child and leave it on the hillside and were happy to find it dead in the morning Steven Pinker has shown that infanticide is common in many cultures so the respect for childhood for innocence for human life these are not Darwinian ideas and Darwin never thought they were there is now an effort to rescue morality by taking Darwinian morality which is essentially biological and superimposing on it something that is not Darwinian at all which is cultural evolution cultural evolution is everything that human beings have done since the Babylonians and that is now in a sense grafted onto Darwinism as though it simply came out of our human nature evolved from the Apes one other thing I want to notice is that science and this debate is always judged by the best and newest things that has done and religion by the oldest and worse things that has done when people talk about science they don't say there was this idiot named Paley's who lived in ancient Greece who thought everything was made of water no we judge science by Einstein in the 1950s but when we judge religion we let's go back to the Old Testament and find in a way the book at the verse in the Book of Numbers you notice nobody condemned Christ or the New Testament so if we're going to allow scientific progress let's consider the possibility of religious progress as well thank you Daniel Dennett your last point thank you very much delighted to be here speaking with you all and I want to thank our opponents for their lively interventions I think that Dinesh has still got a lamentably over simple view of the Darwinian possibilities for explaining morality and it's interesting that he should think that the the best of morality in recent times is to be attributed to Christianity this morning we heard Lawrence Krauss give a brilliant tour de force brief account of what we know about the billions of galaxies each with their billions of stars and the idea that the Christian God chose this one tiny planet on this one in one minuscule galaxy and several thousand years ago decided to make this in effect the center of the moral universe the just the arrogance of that idea the the the infantile quality of this self-absorption with with our own beginnings strikes me as just breathtaking and even if morality has developed in Christian nations in the West got to some of the expanding circle points that Steve Pinker talked about this morning sooner than other or this afternoon sooner than some other cultures have it's not due to the fact that it was Christian it's due to the fact that those Christian cultures in those Western cultures there was a tradition of rational criticism and debate and freedom of debate these were not theocratic regimes these were Enlightenment democracies thank you very much but our Thomas a Kempis Thomas a Kempis a major theologian and something of a hermit who lived many years ago had a saying every time I go out among men I come back less a man I often say to many of my Christian and Muslim friends because I deal with those two audiences every time I go out among believers I come back less a believer but that's my way of saying to them your kind of believer is one kind of a believer Christian and Muslim and you ought to think about the fact that your vision is problematic just as I will say to them when they are extremely exclusivist in their theologies tying in to the worldview you were talking about your God is too small and the fact is that just as science has grown from pre-modern to modern so theology grows now regrettably some of our theologians in some of our church leaders some close to a church that I'm very well associated with having groaned as fast as they should but there are modern Christian and Muslim theologians who in fact no longer hold the kind of worldview that you have and say that basically that worldview comes from another time it's a paradigm that you know that grew out of a whole set of circumstances and they have moved beyond it and that's one one of the things to think about when we are when we're dealing it seems to me I absolutely agree with what you said about social values I mean to me it's ridiculous to think that someone cannot have social values and have a strong morality whether they were believer or not but the point is it can be both and neither are exclusive and indeed that's why many people who are modern educated today choose not to be atheist others do but feel a need and a want to be both modern educated scientifically oriented but be believers because religion still answers for them some deeper dimensions of many of the critical questions of human existence Who am I why am I here what should I be doing and why does it matter thank you hacer cosas mentos un estecado intellectual Mexicano que NOS hicieron una pregunta le pasa ramos el el microphone Oh por favor Sergio una Prados oppa los que lo Kosan but I came belief in a pedestal a low-priced okay but thank you gracias the question is if when we talk about God there are so many versions of God if we if we talk about the Muslim God who talked about our life we talk about the God of the Jews if we talk about the Christian God we are talking about totally different entities if we talk about the morality that mr. D'Souza talked about we're also talking about different moralities does it is it really relevant anymore to talk about to argue about either the existence of God or the place of religion in society at a time when when in fact world we're talking about totally different things and and we're not really arguing about about the same kind of God I mean I I have a slightly different take on that I I don't think that on anything I think part of the problem we have is that we always see things in terms of either/or you know when we in our language the fact is just as some came to realize before world war two we always had a separate kind of Judaism Christianity but some came to realize that despite differences there were some common roots and so we talked about a judeo-christian you know faith and that means that Jews and Christians do share some commonality in terms of belief in the one true God in terms of a set of prophets a notion of Revelation that's not to say that they don't have differences they share some moral basis I would argue today that there is a judeo-christian Islamic tradition and there always has been Muslims except Abraham Moses Jesus and the revelations but there are differences but they see themselves as worshiping the one true God even though there are differences and I think the reason it's important if for no other reason is that this is not only a heritage this is where many people in the world are and with globalization not only in terms of international relations but in terms of Western society thirty years ago Muslims were invisible in the West today it's the second or third largest religion Hindus and Buddhists ahir that's important I do think arguments about the existence of God frankly are tedious irrelevant el doctor Eduardo in said que muchos Distasio no Cena Travis de los programme's a los que hemos Colorado con Kunta meant a in in canal siete y por supuesto Zubrin programa reddy's un grande vulgar scientific pregunta i still love the the Dell'Abate [Music] surveys Casey's tone experimental the metro don't rain can travel in estación por una obviamente en el otro extremo de la estación in la via a via think opera arias in la vía trabajando the man delicacy Nadia Thea nada el tren madaba syndrome II do I think opera arias you were on a persona in Lent Rada the love of the lassithi on kim poong oh oh sorry excuse me then I am cattle and so I speak them out all wrongly including Castilian so let me let me repeat them there is an experiment which very well-known of Railways in a railway station a train was getting into the tube from one side in one side and at the other end of the station there were five workmen working down in in in the railway so that if nobody did anything the train would kill the five people okay so there was one person at the other end of the tube station who just push in voluntarily or voluntarily we will never know push one person to to the railway he was killed but the train stopped so you had one death instead of five death the truth is that if you try this in practice in reality you will find some people who have the brain in organized in such a way that they will search for a solution which will be the most technical reliable solution that's to say to kill somebody innocent my question is the following is there innate morality which preceded by far and long the rise of religions an innate morality who was there before religion and the second question can I put a second question but shorter say the second question is that what would happen if we devoted some time some resources some energy to train children my granddaughter for instance in the management of social and emotional intelligence in other words if we devoted some money not only me but the UNESCO as you know is also asking for this what would happen if we devoted some money to train young people not in values which will always be suspect of right wing or left wing but on what receded values the only thing people come into this world with the basic universal emotions of happiness hate surprise rage what would happen because at this moment I mean are you are you to an exercise I would ask the audience to tell me how many you what does the Astellas creen que si puede ser feliz todo el rato Oh casi todos righto caleb anton el brazo por favor los que creen que se puede ser feliz casi todo el rato es mucha gente la que Crees o y como savez Como's avez des Gracia demente es fall so no average visto nunca and navi a con Carrasco todo el rato Uno's conquer Alaska just for a few seconds so we would gain a lot and what would happen to religion and to morality if this teaching was given to the young people thank you very much for your patience I think that I think that this question in a very strange way points not to the difficulties of a religious worldview but to aid the difficulties of a secular worldview of the kind that Professor Dennett and Michael Shermer have been arguing and here's why you look at the example of the of the Train you have a choice do you do a bad thing and kill one guy or do you do nothing and kill five guys and my question is what is the answer that reason gives you to this question and the short survey of philosophical history shows that the greatest philosophers in the world disagree completely about the answer to this question for example the utilitarian philosophy would say it's a matter of the greatest happiness of the greatest number it's okay to kill the one guy save the 5 guys maybe their happiness counts for five times the one guy on the other hand the philosopher Immanuel Kant said that we as human beings should never be used as objects we are subjects and it is wrong in itself regardless of the consequences even to save five hundred people to deliberately kill one guy so the point here is that when it comes to these moral dilemmas Daniel Dennett solution teach reason is completely useless in fact it is completely different than science in science if you bring the great physicist and into this room they will have agreed-upon answers about many of the conundrums facing the universe biologists will have generally agreed upon contours for the shape of evolution but on the other hand the greatest philosophers in the world from played out of of Aristotle on through Kant and Nietzsche not only disagree they give you exactly opposite remedies for what to do so what faith can we have that philosophy which is to say you might say the morality of reason is going to give us a work of human moral code if five philosophers in a room can't agree what possible uses that to the rest of us now recently the full of Hans Kuhn the theologian brought the leaders of all the great religions of the world together into what he called the Parliament of Religions to make a rather interesting discovery and that is that although all these religions disagreed about the early creation and they disagreed about how the fall occurred of how man became distant for God in other words religion is a human attempt to apprehend God it's not surprising that religion offers in some senses a human grasping at the infinite religious answers don't always correspond to each other but even though religions disagree about theology the finding of the Parliament of Religions was that there is enormous agreement on the issue of morality and so for example much of the differences between Christianity and Islam for example and not because we have radically different moralities but it's rather because our similar morality is being applied in a radically different situation in other words the principle is the same even if the application leads to a different rule in a different cultural context and so the point I want to make very simply is that there is no simple rule book to give us a complete answer I think the question really is do we have the naive faith that modern science which has done a lot of good in showing us how we are but has absolutely nothing to say on the subject of how we should be the great syllogistic error of the other side is to try to take how we are and make up some rules about how we should be and pretend like modern science is pointing us to those rules it is not for a moral code to live by were better off turning to some religious understanding of the world thank you thank you science doesn't answer the question of what you should do in the trolley problem with the five versus the one but it can study it and Mark Hauser and others have been doing a lot of research on this and one of the things they find is that it doesn't make any difference what religious upbringing you have how you answer that question it isn't as if good Christians answer it one way and people of other religions answer it another way and by the way I'm curious to know what does what does that what's the Christian answer to that question I don't think you I think you can find support for both answers in in the Bible and what what it shows is that it is possible to devise moral dilemmas for which as best we can tell there isn't any one clear obvious answer and science shows us that that's alright too there can be moral imponderables at the end of the day but science doesn't give you that answer reason does where we're reasoning about what we should do which is not a scientific question but ultimately a question of politics of morality I because there are a lot of questions to this like I would like to make you a very quickly question at the end you're a scientist you haven't asked yourself well why through the history of the time we always believe in something it doesn't matter if it is called sales if it is calls whatever we don't have a reptilian part it's not part of our evolution to believe and you believe in the people that believe so why actually bother answering this debate if you really know that in within us it's part of our nature to believe to survive whoever you want to answered this question is on the nature of belief and yes we have to believe something our brains evolved in a way that we are pattern-seeking storytelling primates we connect the dots we connect the a to B to C that's called learning and then we tell a narrative story about it to try to give it some meaning in the past we have told thousands of stories about thousands of patterns many gods one god ghosts aliens hidden conspiracies secret cabal's spirits psychics all kind hidden patterns out there in nature and people believe them or they don't the difference with science is that for the first time in history we had an actual method to tell whether the pattern was real or not you just run an experiment to find out if it's real or not and you rerun it and you retest it and somebody else tests it and you have peer review and collaboration and constant checks and balances that's the difference between science and all these other beliefs and that's what gives us it power okay I have a question for mr. de souza actually two questions but I want to preface it as I'm acting I've been heard a lot of book talk about science and religion and I'm actually a scientist so I thought I it might be nice to have a scientist come up and I the thing that upsets me most is people talking about science who haven't done their homework and I think Dandan has been very polite about your statements about Darwinian evolution being less than perhaps up to date but there's but there's a another question you said at the very beginning that I think is central to why you think science is less than adequate it doesn't answer fundamental questions that people ask about the universe and I talked a lot of people and they often say that but one of the things you said was that science doesn't answer the question of why there's something rather than nothing now in fact that's actually completely not true this morning I talked about why physicists believe that believed the universe was flat before we discovered it was there's a reason for that the total energy of a flat universe is precisely zero we live in a universe that's total energy is zero it's the only universe that could result from absolutely nothing moreover the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that if you have nothing something must result there will always be quantum fluctuations that will produce something so in fact quantum mechanics tells us there must be something so my question to you is I have two questions one will you stop saying this nonsense and two will the fact that what you said is wrong change anything about what you said please briefly yet let me suggest this that what we have in the Scot debate our scientists who are very capable of saying very smart things about science pretending that they also know something about philosophy and about theology the question I raised was not how did we get a universe from nothing actually professor Krauss the speech is very useful in tell in trying to answer that question science is very good in answering the question of how I said why is there something rather than nothing and to that question professor Krauss has given absolutely no answer while pretending and fooling himself into thinking he has and this ultimately I think is the deep arrogance of scientists who are given a lot of credibility in our culture because they do come up with things like iPhones that are the closest things to miracles in the modern era and so they feel that since they have good answers to the how question we should listen to them about every question let me let me illustrate kind of what I'm getting out here with an example imagine if I were to take some water and put it into a pot and put it on a stove and begin to heat it and then take out a tea bag and drop it into the pot and then I were to bring a scientist and say what's going on the scientist would give an elegant description about the boiling temperature of water and elegant a description about the dissolving power of tea in water and so you'd get essentially a molecular biological and physical account of what's going on but if I were to say why is this going on the answer has nothing to do with science it's because I want to have a cup of tea that is in fact the explanation without which all the other parts of it make absolutely no sense the pure scientific description of the action is incomprehensible without adding the answer to the question why and so the point I want to make here is that the reason debates like this are very is that they are a dialogue across the disciplines I think that we should be we should listen carefully to science to get questions to get answers to the questions of what science is in a position that tell us about but when scientists do what they often do and we've seen a lot of examples of this today a lot of talk about how Darwinism really has done a lot of work to explain morality but actually none of that work actually cited or no examples given not a single argument made just the kind of old appeal to Authority go read the right books and you'll come to agree with me I've actually read mark Hauser's book that's the reason I responded as I did to the example of the Train which is taken from mark Hauser's book on moral mountains so I think what we need here ultimately is to acknowledge the great power of science while not becoming if you will Craven devotees of science because if we do that we'll be replacing one set of priests in white robes with another thank you todos los que estamos aqui no vamos a preguntar los que está Ella tiene no esta tomando de meses pregunte Rizzoli appear case al muy muy brevis algunos van a ser comentarios Amira axial para que no lo conozco nación embark on un Cruzeiro hasta los deseos vivo ye e tiene los mejores libros de Mysterio in mathematica intrados Ahlul team oto remedy Fermat do you have a comment or question very very quick question I'm sorry very quick with this microphone my question is none of you mentioned a personal God you talked about God of Christianity or Islam Judaism whatever and science my hero is Einstein and I think Einstein had a very interesting personal God and said many things about God he said subtle is the Lord but malicious is not he was trying to find out what God was meaning when he created the universe what is this puzzle of the universe and that's where science and religion at least the person of God do meet in my mind of course he also said God that I shall never believe that God plays dice with dice with the universe and of course he was wrong the great Einstein was wrong because quantum mechanics is based on probability so this is my question to you about personal God in science and a very quick one - Larry Krauss quantum mechanics of course came as our effort to understand the universe but you're going back and saying quantum mechanics proves that there is a universe well I don't know if I should be allowed to answer but he asked me to snap an answer so I will and then I'll get off the stage well quantum mechanics describes how the universe works I actually agreed precisely with mr. de souza about that science doesn't answer questions of fundamentally questions of why and answer questions of how but the key point is that when we know how the universe works for many people ultimately that is a sufficient description of nature and it's a description of how that gives us guidance of how we should live we should live according to the rules of nature yeah Michael would you like to say something about Einstein got a chance religion very quickly yeah Einstein did not believe in a personal God in any way all he was willing to concede was there was great mystery and the universe science is the best way to find out what it is if you want to believe in some sort of theistic force of nature that you call God fine but it's just nature that's all okay I'm Dean Hamer and this was supposed to start out as a debate over whether what religion is good for people or bad for people and instead it involved into a debate up or whether there's a god or not because that's what everyone's interested in but I'm gonna ask a simple yes-or-no question that will give us an idea of whether the atheist or the Christians well how they view society and the question simply is do you believe an equal rights for all people including the right to marry and you believe that everybody should have that right white people met so Indian people Mexican people American people gay people lesbian people bisexual people should everybody have that right and how does your Christian answer or your atheist answer help people or help Society yes or no everybody but Mormons just how about you yes or no I think this is a this is a bit of an unfair question without giving one a chance to explain and the reason is well the reason is is yes or no well I qualify my yes but I think that I think that the key thing here is marriage is marriage is a privilege assigned by society to promote the family individuals can always make contracts with each other marriage has been an institution historically that served a very specific purpose so I think the question here is the question here is simply this should the privilege of marriage be extended by the way and it's not just a matter of gays that you forgot to mention should people be able to marry more than one person should people be able to marry their sister should people be able to marry their dog the point I'm trying to make here is marriages researchers had historically a very precise definition many cultures have permitted polygamy you had even incest permitted in many cultures there is no culture so far known to man that I that as that as a loud gay marriage so it's at the very least a radical experiment I think reasonable people can disagree with it Obama disagrees with it there are many people who don't agree with it and that doesn't make them bad people or less Christian or non-christian one can develop Christian or atheist arguments on both sides in my view Dean hammer para que no lo conozco loco no sir Anton uno de los mejores Diablo sasame de viento Cano Stroh's Hennis holiday la cocina de las sexually odd yo grandes estudios sobre la cuidad de janeiro y el matrimonio entry la libertad a kinky refer libre en cualquier CTO bob cooter su pregunta is director de la scala de leche economía de harvard es uno de los grandes pencil OS the campus rico my spot all the survey evidence shows that in the united states people participate in religious life much more than in Europe one of the explanations that's been given for this is that in the United States we've had competitive religion just like we've had competitive markets we've never had an established church we've never had a monopoly religious framework and so each religious group has had to compete with the others to convince people that they're right one of the things that concerns me about religion and about non religion are those people who want to extinguish my intellectual freedom my freedom to inquire and find for myself what I believe is true about religious matters and so I would like to know whether in fact religion or its absence is the better protection of my Liberty David Livingstone of thought of a liberal or gaming demos why we lie so we should believe what you will say well you got your choice I'm not gonna make any assertion and I'm going to ask a disguised question as I initially had a rather long question but Andres asked for a brief comment Dinesh you alluded to progress in religion now it seems to me then when we make statements of progress in order for them to be meaningful we have to measure something against the standard external to it so presumably when you talk about progress and religion you must have in mind that we can measure religion against a standard external to religion you may recognize this as a version of the old youth Euthyphro problem and in Plato I think you owe us an explanation of what that standard is and you also owe us an explanation of how if we can indeed measure religion against a standard which is non-religious what that says about the nature of religion [Music] [Applause]

Channel: LaCiudaddelasIdeas

Views: 3,010

Rating: 4.5897436 out of 5

Keywords: andres roemer, roemer, ciudad de las ideas, grupo salinas, poder cívico, congreso, mentes brillantes, ideas, pláticas, conferencia, ciencia, pensar, puebla, conocimiento, pensamiento, idea, cdi, cdipuebla, talks, speakers, ted

Id: 9JUhri-Icok

Length: 109min 45sec (6585 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017