Glen Scrivener & Matt Dillahunty • Morality: Can atheism deliver a better world?

this is the big conversation from unbelievable with me Justin Briley the big conversation is a series of shows exploring faith science philosophy and what it means to be human in association with the Templeton religion trust welcome long to the show today we're debating morality can atheism deliver a better world and the big conversation partners I'm sitting down with are Matt Dillahunty and Glen Scrivener Matt Dillahunty is a well-known voice in the world of atheist activism he hosts the Atheist Experience call-in show and leads the atheist community of Austin Glen Scrivener is my other guest he's the director of speak life an organization using modern media to bring the Christian message to a secular world Glenn's videos have reached millions of people and often defended the Christian worldview against the Atheist worldview so today we'll be looking at the modern atheist movement can secular morality provide a better foundation for society than Christianity and as people search for meaning in an increasingly post Christian West can atheism deliver the grounding needed for living a moral life Glenn and Matt welcome along to the show readiness a great to have you both with me really looking forward to this one today I've even donned my glasses which you rarely see me in on this program but I lost a contact lens the other day so these are my back up you look very studious thank you I hoped it will bring some gravitas it's a real delight actually to have you here in the UK with us Matt you don't get over here very often but I've seen you many a time through your YouTube videos and your speaking and lecturing and so on tell us a little bit about yourself you began an atheist community out in Texas why did you do that what was the reason behind it why did you start a call-in show about atheism I didn't actually start this show although that's a common misconception I was I grew up Southern Baptist I my parents thought God one may be a preacher so did the people in my church which was a an interesting story when I did a debate against Michael okona they some of them showed up from I'm the old 30 years ago I thought you were going to be serving the Lord what happened okay but I found my way out of religion while trying to to be a better Christian essentially I thought that God was punishing me and took away my my tech job because I hadn't become a preacher like he wanted and so I said okay if that's what you want me to do I'll do it that kind of lengthy story led to me eventually realizing I wasn't a Christian or couldn't be a Christian and kind of a search for what else might I be or wouldn't even call myself the atheist community vast n' has been around for twenty three twenty four years and they started the Atheist Experience TV show and it wasn't live initially it was kind of recorded conversations eventually it became a live call-in show and I joined in 2005 which coincides with YouTube and everything else and so that's when the show blew up and became something more than just here's a public-access TV you know and the Waynes world type of thing and it became a little a little bit more so is it's it's fortunate that I joined what I did although you know maybe I had a little something to do with the popular TV show and I think your face through it has become very well known if you like as a well-known face in the Atheist movement now I don't know if you think of atheism as a movement per se or whether you've kind of become a leader in a movement what's your thoughts on how atheism tends to portray itself to the public yeah I tend to draw a distinction mean atheism from a purely like philosophical position it's just I'm not convinced there's a God but there are movements that are tied to atheism there's a lot of kind of discussion and debates about what is the Atheist movement and what announces it and of course like any other movement there's n fighting and there's division but I always viewed that as a positive thing because when your group is big enough for you to split in two over a disagreement then you're probably doing something right I guess until then it was just a handful people sitting around patting themselves on the back for not believing God and complaining about religion and government and things like that and we've we've moved on but beyond that even if you just look at the atheist community of Austin and the programs that we're producing now for years it was the atheist experience was the premier call-in show it still is and then we had nonprofits which was a pre-recorded kind of political discussion about separation of religion government and godless [ __ ] for a while which is going to be making a comeback but talking about women's issues and things like that from a secular perspective because a lot of that gets lost we've now we work with foundation beyond belief which is a secular charitable organization and recovering from religion which was founded by my friend Del Rey and we often direct people to those resources because when people are finding their way out of religious belief that's not trivial and it's not easy and there are people who describe it as like everybody in my family may have may well have just died because now they're no longer there and I'm grieving this there's a lot of issues surrounding that and so we're producing more and more programs to kind of address the whole person so that it's not just let me call in and argue with you about sure I mean what you're describing sounds almost like an atheist media production company of producing different types of media as you would find a Christian media production company like ours producing different programs and so on are you the equivalent of the atheist TV evangelist or is that no quite fair god I hope not yeah I think considerably differently because it's not so much that I'm if you watch the televangelists what I see is there's communication coming from them ours instead is caller driven okay somebody calls then and tells me what they want we have a discussion sometimes it gets heated sometimes it sometimes I can be awful like I can be arrogant condescending on occasion sometimes I hang up too quickly but a lot of it is I mean it's all genuinely an attempt to alright let's figure out where our disagreements are it's just that with people with with our Carlin show I'm not dealing with somebody who spent their life studying and somebody who has some expertise in this it's just the average believer most of the time and because of that they can't often distinguish between attacking a belief and attacking the person who holds the and so even when you're not attempting to make anything personal it might still be taken personally it's a fine line to walk and nobody's gonna get it right all the time but I think it's it's been incredibly valuable not just in the fact that you know we have thousands of people who would say hey I'm an atheist now armas skeptic now because of what you've done on the show but also because there are plenty of Christian apologists and and preachers that I've made friends with over the years who still value that kind of conversation yeah yeah well we're all about having the conversation here as well so it's great to have you on the show today Glen great to have you as well thank you tell us a little bit of your background you kind of grew up in a Christian setting was that always the case yeah grew up in a church going home and I think during my teenage years though I went to youth group and was the kid with the hand in the air getting the answers right if you stick with Jesus you're kind of on to a winner internally I kind of had this idea that God was a large being far away watching and waiting to spot my mistake and found myself less and less compelled by that vision and I think by the time I went away to university I was pretty much done with Christianity and didn't didn't want to really have anything to do with church or that sort of thing but I think towards the end of my university career studying philosophy and studying philosophy religion and ethics and meta ethics and these sorts of things and studies I think through why the intuitions of my heart that were that love is the greatest thing and that a life of love is the greatest value and a friend who was challenging me to read through the Gospels and get back to the heart and soul of Christianity Jesus Christ and remember reading through Matthew Mark Luke and John and just thinking halfway through Luke's Gospel ah if God's like Jesus I'm in hmm and so that was a real turning point for me aged about 21 and I kind of jumped in with both feet at that stage and really yeah started loving church having hated it before and started loving getting to conversations the way that Matt loves getting into conversations with people but yeah I then found a graduate job afterwards that I was not very suited for not very suited for off work and then discover that you could do this thing for a living and started working for churches since the year 2000 and I've been shooting my mouth off about Jesus ever since then yeah and that's kind of what you're here to do in it as much as you're you're here to engage with Matt on the issue of atheism can it deliver a better world we're going to look at the issue of morality unpack all the issues there as well what about the atheist movement as a whole though I want to maybe tease that out a bit as we start today's show what how have you seen it develop in the the years that you've been obviously as a Christian engaging with the secular world and seeing I guess different forms of atsm emerging in that time well I guess there's not just one atheist movement just as there's not one atheism I think you know John Grey's latest book the seven types of atheism sort of yeah put Spader the lie that there's only one way of being an atheist or or one kind of metaphysical outlook that that you could describe as atheism but I guess what I've been very used to in the last 20 or so years maybe maybe a bit less than that is is the sort of the what's being described as the New Atheism I remember debating Andrew cops and the chief executive of the British Humanist Association who has been on this show a number of times I believe and you know I was debating him in in Oxford I guess this must have been about eight years ago and and the crowd was vibrant and it was pulsating and it felt like you know lions thrown to the Lions it felt very much like I was in a minority of one you know against the whole room that was very much of a dork and style of 8th you felt that was the overwhelming kind of feeling in the room was when they were backing that kind of atheist in that moment but it would be a better thing if relate if religion ceased to exist and then what was interesting is Facebook reminded me you know the time hop thing reminds you that you know eight years ago you were in Oxford and and I happen to be in Oxford last year to see a Jordan Peterson talk and I happen to see a number of people some prominent atheists from the Atheist community like cosmic skeptic was there and a number of people who were at the debates that I was at eight years ago and suddenly they were listening to Jordan Peterson it was a very different voice yeah a secular voice still although he has a much you know grander vision for the place of religion in society and it made me see that you know things of things have moved on right you know in eight years and there are other strands to this and you start reading people like Jonathan Heights and start reading with people like David Sloan Wilson and and they again have a place for religion even though they themselves might be atheists and so I think it's a mistake and sometimes Christians make the mistake of thinking that every atheist is Richard Dawkins and yet he is one brand of one kind of atheism and really you need to have a better conversation with people you need to figure out what they actually believe you know I could I could assume all sorts of things about about Matt's metaphysical beliefs without ever having absolutely interrogated them and I think that's what's really great about having a conversation and saying oh but what do you actually believe about morality and metaphysics morals yeah it's interesting you talk about the essentially I would I would think he would be describing the tone of things eight years ago versus this and while I don't look at it is if there are different types of atheism oh I'd look at it as you know what atheism is a thing but there are different atheist and they're gonna have different ways of doing things but also just the general tone of things is going to change in the United States around the time that Sam wrote and of faith and there was you know the initial rise of what was called new atheism which annoys a lot of us because it's not new it's I guess a new activism on behind yeah I think that's what was new about it was that maybe the tone and the way it was being put across and the fact that the internet was now fueling it well we were also at that time Bush was president there were concerns about evangelicals encroaching on government and then you you know there was that ramp up and then Obama becomes president and you know we legalize same-sex marriage we do a bunch of stuff that and and not that all atheists are remotely liberal progressives but there's a good chunk of them that are in that category and so we were having conferences all the time there's a car I think I did 12 13 14 conferences in one year that sort of died down and work there was concern that people Oh atheism has had its heyday and now they're done and I think really what happened is that the the environment we were living in changed and now there were other things to worry about you didn't feel like there was this encroachment of religion in your life as much and that has shifted of course since Trump's been elected by but the tone and how people are doing things changes and you know I can look back on the early days doing the show and and I was rah rah rah rah and now there's a lot less of them you're a bit more filled out now but yeah there's tons of I think we need a number of different approaches because first of all not everybody believes for the same reason they're not going to give it up for the same reason and if I'm gonna be trying to educate myself on which believers are going to give the most compelling mm you know justifications for their belief or the best descriptions of the worldview they want to have then I have to go into without doing the I'm right you're wrong not nearly so much is I'm just not convinced can you convince me and we end up having much more conversations or much more stringent conversations about epistemology and you know what is what is in fact justified even if even if we turns out we agreed on the actual political positions and things like that yeah I mean it's sticking with the Atheist movement per se I think there are those who want a theism just to be that negative concept of simply not having belief in God and others who do see it as allied to a whole set of you know propositions about the way we should treat each other LGBT issues and so on and what's your view where do you feel like you know if I say I'm an atheist does it entail anything along those lines I don't think so once your identifies an atheist I just stick with that label that you're not convinced there's a God doesn't tell me anything else about you but it's undeniable that like for example the atheist community and has a list of position statements I know because I wrote them and it took quite a while to get the board of directors on board with us having these position statements I wasn't redefining atheism I was defining what the atheist community of Austin is goes down what are when I was gonna be doing and this is why the simple answer your question which I you know can a theism lead us to a better world no I can't if you're looking at atheism is just that yeah if you ask you know can secular humanism can these kind of values that were packaging together that people care about that happen to be held by some atheists they're not an exclusive to atheism at all I don't require that everybody I spend time with agree with me on everything and I don't assume that just because somebody shared a stage or something with them I mean because I you know I shared the stage with Dawkins there's plenty of people who have problems with him I showed your stage with Harris I share stage with Jordan Peterson those were different though if salmon Sam Harris and I are sitting down together the presumption is oh these two are in alignment and agreement which is true most of the time there are things that Sam and I disagree about the when I sit down with Jordan Peterson the assumptions oh this is the head head cops right and the interesting thing is that I don't know Glenn at all and there are people who are gonna assume oh this is the big battle but I don't look at debates or these kind of discussions is if they're WWE events this is a genuine conversation I find myself with far I find myself challenging people in the Atheist community far more often that I'm you know having conflicts with people who are religious of any type which is a great attitude to have but I think these days what we tend to see is canceled culture what we tend to see is if you've got the wrong views about things a prescribed set of views that have only really you know arisen in the last five minutes if you don't you know if you don't tow the line on a number of different orthodoxies and I use that word advisedly orthodoxies then you are kind of put outside the camp and again I use that word you know advisedly it's very religious language isn't it it's it's yes which I think where the interest is coming for folks like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray and Brett Weinstein others they so-called intellectual darkweb who are perhaps pushing against what some people see is this sort of politically correct from a secular point of view and and I find that there's some interesting bedfellows then between Christians who find themselves on the same kind of side as those guys and and they maybe set against other secular people who are far more progressive in their views and they kind of thing I mean it's it is an interesting sort of time at which there's a whole new set of questions that have been put on the table yeah and I think it speaks to the inner addict ability of a religious spirit to humanity okay and I do think that one of the things that I think has sort of marked out the New Atheism if we want to give any labels to anywhere would be the belief that it would be a better thing for society if far fewer people were religious and I think I think that that certainly captured the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the Atheist apocalypse you know Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett and Anne Harris they certainly wanted to see people D converted from Christianity in order to see a more flourishing and better world but I I kind of think duska Dostoyevsky was wrong when he when he said you know when when there is no God everything is permitted I think what we're saying is when there is no guards everything is very puritanical and every everything becomes actually even more heightened in its moralism and I think what we've what we've found is getting rid of God at that level of public discourse has actually led to people pronouncing anathemas on people and burning them at the stake and going on witch hunts see and I don't think this is actually is so much tied to atheism so what I've seen a lot of is people are talking past each other and people on both sides of an issue are engaged in hyperbole and perhaps not the most honest assessment of what they view as the opposition but the sort of thing that that Glenn is talking about it's not as if atheism is the foundation behind castle culture or what everyone say it is political ideologies and people who have its you know I will brook no disagreement and I am NOT interested in any conversation if you've said this you you are done and if you if you're willing to associate with somebody who said this or whatever then you are also done does that something not even an atheist thing yeah no that's exactly it's it's human nature I think someone like Jonathan hight would say in the righteous mind that we all orbit around these little totem poles of highest value you know and those totem poles bind and blind they bind together communities but they blind us against what the other commuter is a saying and therefore an atheist community can be just as religious in that sense as a Christian community Muslim community Buddhist community because we all we all have these highest ideals we're all involved in motivated reasoning we all have our in-group will have our out-group and we can all engage in behavior that is more or less tolerance of one another and then then the question becomes well how do we relate towards one another and the one thing that then rules out is we can't then have an irreligious solution to the problem of these different communities yeah is that a fair comment though that atheism in that sense is quite religious when it gets his expression in these ways man so I'm always gonna push back on this a thing just as far as the label but yes speaking kind of colloquially of course it can be like that because they're humans involved and this is what humans do my only concern with religions at all is is there any good reason to believe they're true I would not you know people say all religions never done anything good well that's crap religions have done lots of good things are actually more accurately people who are religious have done good things and they've given us universities hospitals that that would be true probably as much for secular people as well if it weren't for a disparity in the sort of privileged position that religions has had and benefitted from for all these years secular organizations had to do a lot more fighting and in a lot more recent time just to get a similar status for example we tax exempt status the United States it's just if you're a religion as long as you're one of the recognized religions you just granted it give acto we're a Baptist Church we're a Catholic Church we're a Unitarian Universalists even the Buddhists had to fight for property tax exemption in Austin because it wasn't on the list of like approve religions the Satanic temple just recently got approved by the I think pretty sure is the IRS as a religious organization so they can have a tax-exempt status and that always seems strange to me I realize I'm in the UK talking about American politics but I've always had a problem with the notion that in in the American Constitution the United States Constitution where we get to this notion that you are tax exempt because you're a religious organization is incredibly convoluted and it puts the government in a strange position of saying hey you're a church you're not a church how do you allow that decision to be made to the government level and not come to the conclusion that there's a necessary problem there with entanglement between religion and government because if the religion can decide which or the government can decide which religions are good enough for a tax-exempt yeah and that was a big issue with Scientology wasn't there a few few years ago they battle to be recognized as a religion and I mean obviously sometimes that there are differences between one side of the pond and the other Glenn with these issues but but it's interesting that Matt is willing to say yeah it can't all intensive purposes look rather religious in in some ways well I mean to the point of why should search is have tax-exempt status I mean that there's a big debate going on in Australia where I'm from right now about that very question I mean one of the issues to throw into the mix is that there is a tremendous amount of public benefit for religions to flourish in societies so when you look at the studies you see that those who have an intrinsic religiosity that is those who identify as religions the most important thing to me it helps me to frame the rest of my life if you ask those people on any kinds of measures of reproduction how many babies do you have longer life are you happier will you have more of a resistance to depression to recovery from illness recovery from surgery do you have a resistance to divorce to suicide there are any number of factors where an intrinsic religiosity that is a body of people who are saying that their religion means the world to them those people thrive in a world where if the government was able to put that into the water if they were able to put them a magic elixir into the water that could deliver those benefits life for goodness sakes happier healthier those that they give more money to charity they give more money to secular charities than the secular people do they give more time to secular charities and secular people do they give more blood than the secular people give all these things have been demonstrated in thousands of studies so I you know throw that into the mix as our government is looking at what will lead to the flourishing of society what what could make society better actually intrinsic religiosity is something that could definitely do that so here's where here's where we get to disagreement but it's gonna be difficult okay because I don't have access to go look at studies everything else but if you do a Google search for religiosity versus societal health there's a study that was done years ago there was in the Journal of religious education I'm gonna use Gregory s Paul yeah which shows something different but yeah a paleontologist who was actually hacked off with creationists he you know you go to Wikipedia and you find Gregory s Paul but that's all about Gregory's Paul I'm talking about his native think waiting for 15 years though I know but I'm quoting his data not him yeah but he's one study against thousands of others any any any swims against a tide of literally eighty nine percent of the studies show that everything goes in the other direction he did the univariate analysis about secularity and how it relates to public benefit sure and I'm not saying that Harry picked these results all right we'll see now we're in a different thing because if we're gonna start making accusations that his studies not wrong it's not good because he cherry picked it I'm not aware of the studies could you just explain what's in the study just so that I well that's the thing with it without saying this is this is a what I came to I don't want to get to stay wrong the point I make 50 years I've been getting a lot wrong for 15 years what his study says his study yeah his study is a univariate analysis of how secularity within European countries is indexed to a whole different number of things like murder rates right I think he didn't he didn't look at other things like crime rates and that sort of thing because it didn't help you as an al sure you are Europe two problems that you have with his methodology but that's not me getting wrong what his report says why are you camping out on his study when literally there are thousands of studies that show the benefits of religion well I was getting to that a minute ago okay because a number of the things that in the studies that you would cite I would also have a problem with their methodology because when you talk about first of all you've got the issue of self reporting how happy are you and we know for example from especially from ex-mormons that organ it in groups like Mormon culture encourage people to because they are representatives of the church to present themselves as happier when less problematic now who knows what the actual truth is there and I'm not saying what the truth is what I'm saying is there's an issue with self reporting there's also an issue with what is the real foundation here is it that they are religious which by the way is independent from the truth of the religious proposition that's why the challenge that I had for years was show me a real true benefit of religion that is necessarily only produced by the truth of that religion because you can you can produce the same things with compelling lie and if you've got five religion and only five religions and only one of them is true but all five of those people you know religious individuals or people who are adherence to those are reporting that they're better and happier and these other things then has nothing to do with that the truth of the religion it has to do with who we are and it may be the case that what people need is the community which religions have done a really good job of building those communities and it's one of the things that secular organizations are working towards doing now building stronger communities but we had to fight for just the right to exist and be open and talk about this before we could get to a point of building those sorts of communities I mean it's interesting we've gone to this area of what is the value of religion Christianity specifically I suppose in your case Glenn I mean is are you saying that the science seems to suggest that actually there's something about doing the things of religion whether it be the community aspect but in but also I suppose the ritual the belief the prayer that is in some way we're kind of made for in some way psychologically that is our natural state whereas you don't think that's the case with someone who adopts an atheist perspective on the world I think you can go there and you can make the argument that's this seems to fit the human person better therefore it might be more likely to be true you could go there but before you even go there I think it's important that this difference between intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic brilliant religiosity is just explain what those two terms are so intrinsic religiosity is you don't treat religion like a means to an end you know so you know your wife goes to church and so you go to church - just to keep her happy you know that would be extrinsic religiosity or you like the community or the past is not such a bad guy and you guys go bowling on a Friday and that's fine that would be extrinsic religiosity but but the the the key question that would identify you as intrinsically really religious would be this is the most important thing to my life or this is what helps me frame the rest of my decisions or that kind of thing and it's that that seems to make the difference so not not just that you have community yeah that you seem to be oriented towards something that is higher that it's something that is transcendent that seems to give that added effect and I wouldn't even dispute that I mean that it we do some funny things with language when people are like oh you don't believe in anything higher than yourself and I'm like well what do you mean by higher it do you mean that I not that I'm just basically selfish you know Matt is the superior are there's nothing higher than Matt no because there are things that I value there are things that I would sacrifice my time and energy for as well there are folks who come for example the Atheist community of Austin where this community has saved their lives people who were suicidal who were ostracized by family who felt alone and everything else and it has become essentially the most important thing to them I think one of the one of the differences is that I try to make sure that we're we're discouraging any sort of like huh yeah but I wouldn't deny or even object to the notion that the sorts of things that you're describing as religiosity are important to humans and may in fact be beneficial my my objection is to whether or not there's actually a truth behind that well God thing if it turns out it's I used to I used to irritate some atheists because I would say I can prove to you the prayer works and I can demonstrate it right now because if you're in a cave-in and you pray you are more likely to be rescued not because there's some God listening to answer that but because prayer has a calming effect on you which extends the amount of time that you can be trapped which extends the likely that you can be rescued the question then becomes if you know that it's the calming that extends the amount of time could you do the same thing with meditation or does the awareness that it's the calming somehow eliminate the benefit of it and that's the thing that I think we don't know I mean are you interested in a sense though like the new atheist project to some extent Indy converting people getting them out of those beliefs and if you do isn't they run the danger of actually creating a worse kind of life for them because actually they they may not make that transition into a secular version of the well-being that religion may have given them up to that point I mean it can be quite a really harsh process you know you're converting it can be terrible and and one of the things that we see undeniably within some people who leave religion who identify as atheist is they often fall into nihilistic kind of I won't say Wednesday often occasionally for some of us don't have any issue with that at all and so that it's it's not a I'd never pretend that there's no problems or anything else the first of all I don't go door to door hey have you stopped believing in Jesus yet we take incoming calls so we're having conversations with people that want to yeah and I think that if all we're doing is actually questioning the reasoning behind a belief in the same way that truth is always at of you know defense to slander that's what we're engaged in how much responsibly you know if somebody gives up their religion because of what I said and they have negative consequences because of that how much I mean am I responsible for this is something that I've considered quite a bit what I find is that the people who end up suffering the negative consequences the core problem there is still goes back to religion it's like if somebody told you when you're 30 you're gonna inherit a billion dollars and you get to be 30 and you find out you're wrong now your life may be crop from that point on because you may have lived as if you were going to inherit a billion dollars and you didn't you may have built up expectations and and changed your fundamental perspective on the world so that once it's not true you're not miserable maybe you're bankrupt and everything else but it's not learning that you did not inherit a billion dollars that was the problem it was the false promise of a billion dollars at the beginning that was the problem yeah I mean I guess from your perspective as well as a Christian Glenn you're you don't want people to be Christians just because of the benefits it brings in terms of you know the community in the lifestyle and the psychological well-being so you're interested in truth as well just absolutely yeah what if we found out the happiest way to be was just to be high on heroin all the time we do negative consequences that long-term I don't think that's likely possibility yeah absolutely I think it needs to be existentially grounded I think it needs to be true in order to live out that life because I mean life is a wager I am constantly you know I don't mean this in the religious sense at all like life your life is an act of faith you know I step out into the world not knowing what's going to hit me am I gonna open myself out to the world in a certain way that will make me vulnerable that will make me weak that could get me attacked but in another sense it could help people all of life is a venture of faith and if it's not true then I'm a fool you know and and I think you know Christianity is a venture to be in Jesus and with Jesus extending my arms out to the world the same way that he was in sacrificial love if God is not on the other side of that raising me up again which is the Easter story cross and resurrection then I am to be pitied more than all men which is what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 so I absolutely believe that you know we have we have common cause on this one it must be true but if it is true I think that is what explains its workability right you know there are some people have done debates online with people who are very much atheists in the mold of Jonathan hight and David Sloan Wilson and who see the usefulness of religion Ryan's own right it's metaphorically true which is true enough and really the the debates we seem to have had they seem to have been saying well to live this way ie in this moral way works therefore it's true and I kept on saying well no I think it's true and therefore it works and I think that's that's where I come to with that brand of atheist I do think you need to ground it in what is actually true about the world but I think an inference to the best explanation for why it is that religion actually does work in the world is that it is true I mean Matt says that you need to give secular humanism a chance it hasn't had a long time to actually get going and create community and and potentially you will see all the same benefits accrue to someone who simply says well that's my my way of finding meaning in the world I don't have to have it no offense it oh maybe you wouldn't well well I come pretty close okay okay one of things is when when Jordan Peterson I sat down I pointed out that there's never been a secular humanist government and he tried to say that the Soviet Union was and he just doesn't understand what secular humanism that wasn't secular humanism that was by state enforced to atheism okay and was very much an T religion and so if we're gonna use the language we we can certainly separate the the types of things that we would put in a bucket is religiosity maybe it's a sense of awe atheist can have a sense of awe maybe it's the notion that there's something that may be greater than the self that you might want to consider yourself with I I think so I think there are concepts truth and freedom I think that you know the society that I benefit that I'm also a part of it needs to be considered you can't be myopic when you're looking at something like well-being and to say well this benefits me and you know who cares what it does to anybody else because we're intertwined but there were a couple to kind of go back to something that Glenn mentioned I would agree that if they're worried a god will stick with a Christian God so they won't have to drag everybody else into it today but if if there were a god that would be a sufficient explanation for why some of these devout religious tendencies seem to be beneficial to the practitioner in the same way that if were a god that would explain some of the things that creationists point to with regard to design my concerns on these are separate yes of course that would be sufficient but is it actually true because we've done this over and over again where we make an inference to an explanation based on whatever limited knowledge and information we have right now and then we find out later we got it wrong and every time we found out later that we got it wrong it was scientific exploration and discovery that found out it was wrong and at no point have we ever found out we were wrong about a god what do you make of that well I you know is is secular humanism new in one sense yes Quentin you in another sense it's I think it's a repackaging of Christianity light I do think I do think Nietzsche's critique holds that's secular humanism tends to be Christianity where God is swapped out for the good but to the extent that's true couldn't we just say that Christianity is the Hammurabi code swapped out or upgraded or changed or that all of this is derivative at some point we're talking about human beings and how they choose to try to answer the questions and live lives cooperatively whether you're going back to animism and some tribals struggle then this becomes a more codified sort of language and when people aren't paying attention to it and the the village elder is no longer sufficient Authority we appeal to one outside of there I mean this would also be a sufficient explanation for the history of religion so to say that secular humanism is a new newly packaged light modified version of Christianity it really isn't relevant if Christianity is a modified version of other things that all tie back to the human being which is a big if and I don't think it is at all I think what what you gets when you look at human civilizations what you get when you look at the Hammurabi code when you look at the enumeration when you look at any number of the ancient near-eastern texts when you look at any number of greco-roman understanding of the world or Persian understanding of the world or Muslim understanding of the world it is basically that in the realm of the flesh in the realm of biological reality it is survival of the fittest you know and and therefore sacrifice of the weakest and I think what you get absolutely uniquely in Christianity is the reverse of that you you have in Christ the the fittest who is sacrificed for the survival of the weakest and what you get burst out of the Christian movement is a unique preference for the poor the marginalized the weak the outsider to draw them in such that obviously in every society there's tit for tat and there's let's go operate and let's do all that kind of stuff but who is we in that sentence let let us cooperate well who's the us you know it could be just you and me and not Justin what could be just me and Justin and not you right who are the people on planet earth who are actually saying it's actually all of us even our enemies are those who we include in the circle of humanity and who we grant equal human dignity to and who we say they must never be marginalized no matter how weak they are in a manner ineffectual they are no matter how maladaptive to survival they are they are ours and we will you know we will grant them a universal human dignity that's a thoroughly Christian idea and I and it's it's not you know it's obviously this found on the first page of the Bible so it sits there in Judaism but it's it is a uniquely Christian idea that I think secular humanism has taken on but I don't think you derive that secular humanism anywhere else but in Christianity and Judaism mm-hmm let's call it the judeo-christian worldview sure let's credit the Abrahamic God with everything and when I look at it my issue is if there if there is an Abrahamic God okay that's an important question which I guess we're going to somewhat sideline because at the end of the day this notion that human beings who care about human beings are not going to come up with multiple different ways of structuring a society and that some of those which may be consistent with your view and understanding of Christian which I would argue is perhaps different than some other people's view understand Christianity I don't think that's particularly contentious at this point doesn't mean that this is Christianity light and modified and updated or that it's all derived from Christianity as the original source because that presumes that there's something other than human beings that are the original source for those ideas the fact that they became popular within Christianity you know that you have somebody talking about blessed are the meek did that ultimately lead some people to the United Nations Universal code of human ethics type stuff and secular humanism sure because we're all together on a planet and these ideas get passed around and my my take on it has always been take the best ideas wherever you find them and get rid of the rest and so from you know the Bible I can pull out some really good ideas and I can get rid of its support for slavery or genocide or misogyny or any of those things I don't have to hang on to the baggage or claim that I'm doing it because in a sense you're getting rid of everything including God obviously in the process of doing that and it is your argument Glenn that there's a danger in doing that you can't simply have the ethics without some of the supporting foundations for you earlier than you think which is Nietzsche's critique as well yeah absolutely that you you get rid of the god of Christianity and you must get rid of the ethics of Christianity as well because it is founded on the God who took flesh who became the weak one in order to rise up again and and and bring us weak ones into his family and and he uniquely gives to the entire human race the dignity which you can kind of secularize that term and call it Universal Declaration of Human Rights but that's basically the imago Dei that's basically the image of God from Genesis chapter 1 no so when on one hand you seem to be saying you can't remove God and still maintain these things and yet your your keys claiming that secular humanism isn't done exactly that secularism has done exactly no hasn't done it has done exactly that that when I when I advocate for secular humanist principles when I when I that that I'm basically taking the principles that you see in Christianity and just removing God from it mm-hmm so clearly you can do that you can do that but on what grounds now is every human being in the image of God or now in this new updated term is every human being now included in the universal declaration of you yeah this is this is the the thing that I keep running up against is I have yet to find anybody presenting an objection to secular morality that is in any way solved by appealing to a religious one the big thing that you get to is well what's the the foundational source and why should I care about it this is where when Sam writes moral landscape and people are like well you haven't fully explained well-being of course we can't we have it I mean this is a process where we we're continuing to discover things well why should anybody care about well-being is is the big question that Sam always gets asked and the in the this question also applies to why should anybody care about what a God says and this is one of the things where whether or not there's a God I don't necessarily see any evidence when I look at Christianity in particular at least the way I understood it when I was a Christian that there's a God who has human interests at heart it's humans who have human interests at heart so not only would secular humanism stand with regard to Occam's razor but the thing that we're appealing to is the very thing that we're seeking to do which is we care about us why do we care about us we care about us because we're us now when you have when you add in the god of Christianity you get the notion that no God's got a plan you are a part of that plan and okay he loves you and he's making a place to either torture you or rescue you to and he can serve as a foundation that we can point to so that we don't have to point to ourselves but nowhere in there is it is there any sort of guarantee that that there either is a god or B that that God has the actual best interest of humans at heart it's just an appeal that God understands these things better than we do and so when it seems like God doesn't have the best interests of humans at heart that's just our failure to understand it which is really fallacious reasoning except that Christianity is about God the human I mean foundationally Christianity is Christ it's it's foundationally God the son has become God our brother we've just celebrated Christmas it's it's the the time at which the word became flesh which is just a stunning a stunning religious idea that has found nowhere else disgusting to my Muslim friends you know it's disgusting to the greco-roman minds and yet the Christian claim uniquely is that God took flesh and even became a single cell in Mary's womb became the weak and despised thing for the sake of all weak and despised things and I think from there you get the principle that Humanity in and of itself has a dignity because God has so dignified it otherwise it's us elevating humanity to a certain you know position why should we elevate humanity to a certain position Why should there be such a thing as human exceptionalism why shouldn't there be is that just a power play right I mean I don't I'm not just asking that and to like yep you know you have no what do you think I don't I don't really see any reason why it shouldn't be well of course we're gonna be concerned about our own well-being I mean you talk about yeah there's a sore elbow or is that just a pal so this this is the thing when we talk about what is moral so that quite often they'll say well well the thing you're describing that's all well and good but it's not morality fine then I don't care about morality you need to tell me what what you're going because there's the only thing you're gonna count is morality is some sort of you know divine command or a supernatural being that serves as a grounding for whatever you want to do that's not what I think anybody's ever really cared about for morality when we're talk about morals we talk about this we're evaluating the consequences of our actions with respect to some goal and does it ultimately increase decrease or have no effect on our well-being which is why I think Sam what with well-being I didn't used to use that I used a different language when I did my you fundamentally agree with sam Harris that that's something we can objectively measure through say scientific means as long as we know what benefits what generally humans want in their lives I think you can do as active assessments eject objective evaluation that's with respect to a standard you don't have an objective reason why you care about that standard just like you don't have an objective reason why you care about a God if there was he should come along and kind of clarify all this I would think that would be a duty but the the the beautiful story you're talking about where you know the most powerful being comes down and becomes a cell becomes one of them you know one of the week one of the fall and in order to save them that's an incredibly nice way to package it but that's I have I guess a completely different take on it because the story is a little different the story starts in Genesis where God creates everybody and then it all screws up and then he tries to fix it and it screws up and he tries to fix it in it screws up its this parade is this comedy of errors and then you get to a spot where God who's been demanding that we slaughter animals and burn them because he likes barbecue is now decided that he's going to come down and take human form and sacrifice himself to himself for a weekend to fix everything for everybody that's not that's blood magic that is sacrificial game blood magic thinking and nothing to do about human value who actually believes that what you what we just describes as a summary of Christianity I mean who actually believed could you not did God come down and become human God the Son became good at brother he's still God God the Son okay God that brother but sent the son are you an Ontario sorry that's precisely because I'm Trinitarian God the Son right became God our brother full of the Holy Spirit okay in order to unite us as family back to the same source back to the Father okay this is basic Trinitarian God not sacrifice himself the father sent the son but they're the same they're not the same they're they're part of the Trinity they are one right now definitely part of the one though that I United absolutely the father sons United I mean we're United at a table but we're not one the father is in the son some is in the father so that they are united on a level of is far superior to ours but then why does it need to be a blood sacrifice well because to to walk away from God to be disconnected from life means death right and in the Bible the life is in the blood well who made that rule it's it's the nature the case don't you think if God is life God has a lot of done it differently well if God is the source of life and we reject life what does that leave us with death if God wants to unite with us in our death what will he have to take on our death so you're talking first of all you're speaking kind of metaphorically here because I'm not rejecting life I'm rejecting a proposition that there's some eternal life because I don't see sufficient evidence for it if there is cool but God this notion why does it need to be a blood sacrifice at all at some point we were running around killing animals and doing it because God loved the smell of burning flesh literally it says that mm-hmm now while it's I know I know what I think I know what part of the objection is it's like the Easter story when they when when atheists will say and then the zombies rose up and marched on Jerusalem and people be like there's nothing in the Bible about zombies but it does talk about the dead getting up out of the graves and going in there and so it's a colloquialism to refer to it as zombies I don't think even the Atheist by and large are thinking that we're talking walking and dead here but it's a shorthand to show that there's something that's potentially absurd here an extraordinary claim that doesn't have evidence for it this isn't even that this isn't even an extraordinary claim does have evidence for it this is to me bizarre what is it about killing something that God needs you to do in order for God to forgive you because if God is the creator of everything including the rules of how all this works couldn't he have come up with rules that don't involve killing things well I mean first of all the priest was many other things but he was also your butcher right you you would eat the lamb after you sacrificed it you would eat the the bull you know we we still go to the butcher we still sacrifice our animals and in that sacrifice even today in a very secular sense the death of that animal means our life in in that in that very literal sense okay that animal dies so that we might live and it's just in the Old Testament it was also teaching a spiritual dimension on top of the barbecues that we all love you're from Texas I'm from Australia we love barbecues okay the vegans are gonna hate us it was a great conversation with cosmic spectacle on top of that butchering there was also spiritual lesson being taught and that and the spiritual lesson being taught was not that the blood of this ball is paying for your sin but but that there is a messiah who is coming who will pay for your sins because no the blood of goats and bulls cannot pay for sin but God can take responsibility for his handiwork and God did take responsibility for his handiwork and and it was his death that actually paid for sin that's that that's the story I mean I what I wanted to move us on from what is a very interesting theological debate at this point may move us back a bit to to the central thesis of the journal thing I mean we've been asking can atheism deliver a bit better world talking about this in the context of morality Matt first of all from the outset what do you say just to that question we haven't even asked that yet can atheism deliver a better world what's your sort of I have no idea I've never suggested that atheism or even secular humanism guarantees a better world first of all we're always dealing with human beings and so you can come up with ever whatever rule system you want and it's like I got it I got a thing wrong on the show the other day somebody was talking about natural family planning and I confused it with the rhythm method and I kind of mocked it isn't that nothing wrong with natural family planning other than you have to actually follow it diligently and it will result in you having sex less often and then in within the Roman Catholic Church they are required to just abstain rather than using alternate things and during fertility there's nothing I'm not saying that secular humanism it guarantees a better world but even if we take what Glenn's saying even if you were to look at this as Christianity light without the God thing I would already view that as better because a we guarantee that we have humans best interests at heart that's humanism it's the it's the foundation of it you can you can say and you would be correct that it's just a bold bald assertion that we should care about humans okay I have no response to that I don't even know why anybody would want to come up with a response there's nothing that says the world will be better this way except for this I did a debate in a Church of Christ where I told them I could write a better book than the Bible and I could prove it to him because I could rewrite it word for word reverse its position on slavery and it would be a better book because for the people who are looking at this not so much as metaphorical lessons or like that if they're looking at this as an instruction book for life that book advocates slavery that it's not even a question if you were to say thou shalt not own a human being as property that would be better than saying you can and that you can pass them on and so this was the example I used for the people who are kind of like Bible worshippers not the people who go in looking for hey there's an interesting message here they're gonna tell me something on my life but no no no this is literally word-for-word Bob you know that that type of mindset is probably more responsible for the harm and damage that a lot of us would lay at the foot of Christianity then cleanse version for sure I mean I I don't I don't think Glenn's at pro-slavery at all and when you start looking at things that that where you are finding a way to take a message that could easily be viewed as this is a blood magic sacrifice and say well life has to consume life to exist and you want to kind of maybe blow off why God would have made it that way or why it had to be made that way which is a weird and interesting theological discussion getting rid of those things and keeping the good parts is all I've advocated for ever and secular humanism to me is taking good parts whether they're found in Christianity Judaism Scientology and he's deciding on the more in a sense and the good is simply defined by what you regard as the measure of human well-being the only thing that basically points us in that direction yeah and it's not as the model and it's not fully defined or anything else but to pretend that we don't have some beginning understanding of it I think it's a bit ridiculous so was I mean so I think very briefly in a sense there Matt is sketching out this this idea that there is a secular morality well there's an example that came along with this that Glenn produced when he was listening office idle health versus religiosity and teeing me up for the Gregory s Paul thing he mentioned divorce rates but that comes with the presumption that divorce is a bad thing and I don't believe that I I'm recently divorced me and my ex-wife are as good friends now as we ever were and better and we're both in agreement that was absolutely the right thing for us to do and so what's happened here is from my perspective and obviously people can disagree religious thinking religious teaching religious dogma has done a number of great to services to human beings by setting up a notion of a soulmate by setting up the notion that marriage needs to be one way one man one woman forever that's caused countless problems by setting up a view of death that does not allow people to deal with that if we if we started with the notion that death is the eventual consequence of life it would fundamentally change and then that was the end as far as we knew and anything else would be a bonus would fundamentally change I think how we treated people while they were still alive and so there's a number of problems here that are rooted in the theology and rooted in the notion that there's a God which I think if you get set those aside and just focus on the things that actually directly try to benefit human beings it has to be okay on earth so it's it's all the benefits of Christianity plus a few more because you haven't got some of the baggage essentially well you know I mean matt said that's he could write a Bible that's superior to the Bible by reversing his position on slavery I think if you started from scratch without the Bible though I don't think you and I don't think anyone has written a book or a series of books or a collection of books a library of books that has done what the Bible has done for slavery in the world because slavery is a human Universal and it has not been overturned by anyone other than those who took the Bible seriously back in the nineteenth century there were evangelical Christians there were Quakers there were people who took the Bible seriously so parts of it seriously well what yeah well you it's a longer discussion about how you take the Old Testament but that that's got to be interesting at least because I mean we can't do a compare and contrast there's no a be testing about this okay there's only thing kinda undermines what you're just saying yeah I'm sorry I mean in a right but I'm gonna greement with you you're viewing it as nobody else has done this and you don't think anybody else could and my thing is we have no way to find that out because we live in a world where this is the way things happened and so to argue that you couldn't actually write a list of moral precepts from scratch that are superior to Christianity but then but then aren't you saying okay at least with the Christian side we've gotten that there is one group of people that has guaranteed universal equality for all human beings and has ended the slave trade okay it might have taken far longer than you would have wanted it to have taken but there is one group of people who have done that we don't know if anyone has or could do that let's give it a go anyway let's let's walk away from this thing that has given us all these benefits of the universities and the hospitals and the schools and the scientific method and emancipation of the slaves and all this sort of stuff let's listen walk away from that that that's quite a leap of faith do you think and am I also getting the sense Glenn that I mean I want to come back to this this human at the center of this and the fact that Matt says hey humans are humans and yet since then it's natural that we're going to prefer ourselves and that's where the morality comes from our own best interests and you're saying no somehow Christianity has actually grounded an intrinsic dignity to the human that Matt's godless ethics isn't necessarily going to support it might go in that direction for them for a moment but there's no ultimate foundation to it is that why yeah absolutely I mean we are always going to look after ourselves but who is we and who are ourselves in their conversation and we are always wanting to narrow the circle around us and our mates and exclude the other tribe and exclude the other kinds of people so you know in the news here in the UK just recently they brought in a non-invasive prenatal test for Down syndrome and it had the reliable effect that everybody knew it was going to have as people knew that they were going to have children with Down syndrome they aborted them at ever-higher rates and yet the that the headlines said children with Down syndrome down 30% and it sounded like people had like how to cure Down syndrome or something like that they hadn't found a cure for Down syndrome they just drawn the circle around humanity and kept those with that condition on the outside and wanted to eliminate them and that to me is a very chilling way of proceeding with a kind of a humanism because that's that's always the danger like who is us who are those who we are going to grant with the right to life and who are those who we are going to say they do not qualify and it's always tempting for the for the humans to say ok it's the strong who will make the decision and it's the weak who must take the hindmost what is it you know what is it that's going to stand up for all humans regardless of capacity regardless of attributes regardless of achievements who is it who's gonna stand up for all humans and actually be true humanists and grant them human rights too this is this is the problem is so first of all whether or not that abortion scenario that you're talking about is humanism or not is subject for a whole nother debate but you're you say well nobody could do this and then when we talk about here's a list of presets where we don't include a God in it then your answer is now you're just borrowing from Christianity it's Christianity lighting you've just remove the God and then the the other objection that you're gonna launch the second morality is what's going to be the foundation beyond this we at least we have a foundation it's God well what if people don't accept your foundation that is exactly the same objection that you are leveraging you're launching it secular humanism the whatever problems secular humanism may have with regard to foundations of ethics no religious foundation has any way of solving that because ultimately if and until some God comes in and says I am in fact the god of the universe and I am the moral authority and people are forced to recognize that this is the case then the only thing that's happening is Glenn saying God is the foundation of morality and I'm saying humans are and nobody is going to be none either of those systems is going to work for people who don't accept that that's a foundation do people have to all recognize his foundation in order for it to be the foundation no people don't need to recognize that two plus two equals four for it to be the case that two plus two equals four and for you to go to your grave proclaiming that two plus two equals four even if the whole world said it was otherwise then two plus two would still equal four people don't need to recognize a moral truth to be a moral truth for it to be moral they do if they're gonna if you're talking about a moral system if you want to if you want to create you know computer code and get people to start programming in it you've got to be able to convince them about ones and zeros so two plus two plus two equals four isn't even in the same ballpark of there is a God it's either true or it's not but it's not a foundation for something if you're talking about a moral system the only the true foundation is agreement on what the foundation is that the three of us care about human beings and then we can start arguing about how much we care and where there's gonna be conflicts and everything else but as long we can't do any of that until we agree on that foundation and if Glenn's foundation is there's a god at the bottom of this and he can't demonstrate that then we're not even gonna get started on solve that's that's not what su plus two equals four is the analog of in this conversation two plus two equals four is the analog of all human beings are worthy of provision and protection all of them right do it would you agree with that all humans all members of the human family no matter what their achievements no matter what their attributes all members of the human family are worthy of all provision and protection I have no idea mm-hmm that's a problem it's definitely a problem especially when you've got people who are discovering disabled children in the womb and when I when I say I have no idea it's about that simplification my instinct is of course to say yes mmm it's a very Christian instinct thank you that's a very 80s response the incident of course say yes the problem is that when we start talking about the specific language there are going to be rights conflicts that we have to address sure but all other things being equal as a general principle would you say that what Glenn is laid down there is is one that you can agree to the importance of treaty sure in general color corset yeah yeah and what's your point England that this two plus two equals four as it were this agreed agreement the daddy that doesn't exist just on the basis of mass preferences it's like it's a fact in the way two plus two equals four as a fact as far as you're concerned yes ii and i don't i don't agree with it is it is certainly there there are things that we're going to agree on that i don't know how you could ever demonstrate that this is in fact like true like some intrinsic truth about the like for example i think human lives have incredible value i don't think they have any intrinsic value i don't think the universe cares at all about human life they have value because they have value to us mm-hmm and whose us humans mm-hmm all humans well native able humans who are consider the proposition of whether or not they have value which is the strong and and and that's that's my problem is that it it becomes an ever-shrinking circle of humanity that we have and it's the strong rule over the weak well the characterization of evolution is being strong over the weak i I would argue as it necessarily accurate but it's also because there's no decision there it's whatever survives survives and what is strong in one sense a weakness may become a strength depending on the the situation that's what evolution does it's not like ooh me he-man you weak I'm gonna kill you type thing maybe you know for example sickle cell anemia provides protection against certain things and so while it may be under certain circumstances there's a reason why animals develop camouflage and other changes but slime of wine young female is it wrong for you know I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law even though we're near the end of the program why was it wrong for Hitler and the Nazis to you know euthanize disabled people and gay people and people that they felt were outside of their their circle of who they considered to be human what why what was the kind of I'm not convinced they considered him outside of the circle of what the considered a human they had a view that these were somehow inferior humans I think they would all acknowledge they were human just that they were somehow inferior or less or less diverging yeah race yeah things like that a stir race so it's one of those things where people say because a lot of people would say Hitler was wrong about a fact there whereas from what I'm I'm wondering like we're getting to the issue of is there this objective moral value to human to humanity yeah it reminds me of the people who argue that you know hey slavery is really good for the slave owners and so if you're a slave owner you can look at this and say hey slavery is a good thing because it benefits me the problem is is that when you look at the larger picture it's actually not necessarily good for the slave owners and get we're beginning to recognize that every member of society affects potentially every other member fundamentally changes and it shifts our in-group out-group dynamic so that when Hitler goes after the Jews for whatever religious reasons he had for whatever superior you know ooh ooh BRR guy yeah that's fundamentally different from whether or not killing them make society worse or better and it's it's kind of this thing of oh this is what I think makes us better which is independent from what actually makes us think better nobody not samurai nor anybody is suggesting that if we begin with an agreement on well-being as a foundation that there aren't going to be things that are that we think we have the right answer about and find out we were wrong at that stage then it would seem like instead of having World War two we would have a symposium in which the Nazis would present their papers and others have presented other papers and then we'd have a panel and we discuss them and we try and thrash it out at what stage do you say that their vision for updating for evolving for having a master race at what stage do you say that that is morally unjustified and therefore there is a just war that can be fought against them what I don't know that there's an answer for that apart from assessing the individual situations which is what we did mm-hmm but we didn't have to rely on a God for it well are you we relied on nineteen hundred and forty nineteen hundred and thirty nine years of Christian understanding of what is the good life and and the good life is the the the sacrifice of the strong for the protection of the weak and and Hitler was doing the exact opposite of that and so it was it was very obvious to people in that sense the evil of of the Nazis and they went and fought a just war against us sure so it was Christianity that was the credit for ending the Nazi regime and and and why would people not even Judaism no it was Christianity that had shaped the West and its moral sensibilities such that Nazism appeared to them as very obviously the very reverse of the way of the cross all right so this is something you just can't argue with because it's just an assertion from Glenn's perspective because if if we come up with something that is good we're borrowing from Christianity there's no way to not be accused of borrowing because Christianity was around before and if you find something that was before Christianity well that was foreshadowing Christianity that because the God the God that he believes in it's been there forever so anything true and good that was pre Christ was God foreshadowing it and anything is after it somebody borrowing from it there's no response to this and there's also no way for him to demonstrate that that's what's happening is that a fact I think we've said from Old Testament and New Testament we've said from Genesis one I totally believe in in the same God from the beginning but I think what is the unique thing about the Christian about the Christian story is you've got the sacrifice of the fittest for the survival of the weakest you've got this way of the cross you've got this way of Jesus which is unlike the greco-roman world that's unlike the Persian world unlike the Babylonians it's it's unlike the the Muslim world it is very like what secular humanists now say about inclusion and welcome and diversity and bringing people to the center and caring for the weekend if you're very selective about what you read you know it'd be really nice about Christianity if it were the nice unique feature of Christianity was but if it could be demonstrated to be true that would be a unique feature among religions which would be very nice we had the God who was the master came down became the slave he paid the slave price I know the story yeah you can't demonstrate it's true well well it we're living in the effects of it we're living in the ripples of the truth that's true either that's just how you're viewing it I don't think we're we're living in the in the rippled effects of people who believe that to be true which is independent from whether or not it is true yeah I mean obviously we've o call different standards of what would qualify as evidence which is why and this is the thing this is why I keep saying that I have yet to be presented with an objection from religious an objection to secular morals the religion solve and it's not God could fix this if there is a God God could fix this just like that just like he could have said thou shalt not own another human being his property instead he was more concerned about wearing mixed fabrics and whether or not you should eat shrimp evidently I mean it's conversation about the old covenant that we can have but the old covenant scold old for a very good reason what I've been saying again and again is there be multiple covenants why can't God just say here's the way things are that's just the law that's just the law but the law does say here's the way things are but as we've both admitted humans get things wrong look what what we need is great it's what we need is the God who is the lawgiver to actually come and save us to actually come and forgive us for all the different ways that we get things right I don't think I need a God to come and save me or forgive me I think any a new God to come down and demonstrate that he exists mm-hmm the God who comes down in the Christian sense is the God who becomes incarnate but but a number of times Matt you've used you know the Word of God being sort of a super being or I don't know that was the phrase you used anyway a superbeing which I imagined to be something kind of within the created order and who you know might appear you know in a cloud and that's two men today because only time I talked about superbeing was when we were referencing Nazis no no super anyway anyway forgive me but carry on God God is God is not one more item within the created order he is the source of being and and you know so for you to say why isn't God showing himself it's a bit like Juliet saying you know where is Shakespeare it's like in one sense where isn't Shakespeare okay it's kind of the opposite of that because in that category you have a fictional character asking where's the real one and this one you have the real character asking where's the fictional one but I you the fictional one I'm not I'm a real boy as far as I can tell yeah yeah and and yet you didn't give life to yourself isn't one of your isn't one of Glenn's contentions though in a sense that if you're looking for evidence for God we find it by looking at the fact that we have this intrinsic view that humans are equal and that isn't something we can just deduce from science science doesn't have anything particularly to say to moral values it's because it's not in it's not a true that's not intrinsically true it's not like two plus two equals four it's not a mathematical truth yeah I mean in terms of morality is rejected it is leave an objective moral values or like not the objective foundation but the objective assessment with regard to the foundation I think well-being is is the best that we've come on in that sense so science as far as it can give us a morality like sam harris says is once we've agreed what the the goal is and then great if you agree on what the goal is there's no ultimate sort of yeah there's there's no ultimate foundation right saying this is the way we should all this is the goal we should all ascribe aspire to but presumably Glenn you believe there is some kind of ultimate thing that we're made for something we're about a grand narrative we're living in right and that the fact that we is the fact we recognize that mmm somehow within ourselves evidence for God in your you can make a moral argument for God's existence yes I do believe God is love and the good life is to live in love and I believe that not just Christians can recognize this and not just Christians do recognize it well we can do the same thing so that this thing of the fact that we seem to have a desire for meaning purpose value all those things he'll use as evidence for the God because that serves as an explanation for it I can do that with that exact same example the fact the reason that Glenn sees God as the justification for that is because he's uncomfortable with the possibility that there isn't an explanation for it or that this isn't some sort of universal truth so a preference for I want there to be intrinsic human dignity gets you to hey if there was a God there would be human dignity because this God is guaranteeing it and so that same circular preferences there I'm just eliminating both of them saying I'm gonna go ahead because I care about human beings and and I value human beings because I am one and say whether there's a God or not this is what I'm going to go for and if there's a God that has a better way they can demonstrate it why isn't a Damascus Road experience good enough for everybody so the moral argument for God's existence is is not that we need some kind of arbitrary moral figure who has some whims and he will enforce them at the point of hell and therefore it would be better if we want to live in a moral world to believe in such a God's the moral argument for God's existence is there is an objective realm of moral values and the explanation for that objective realm of moral values is not going to be a material cause because morals are not material things right moral values are not reducible to just biological reality and and thank God for that because biological reality is the survival of the fittest okay but moral values are something distinct from biological values natural values you cannot get from those natural values to the ethical values you can't get from an is to a naught and you sure can't get from preferences to an odds you can't get from a like to a naught of course you can is you can always get from preferences to a not no you can only get from preferences to another preference it's just it just becomes another preference just backed up with force the product is alright we're not going we're not going to necessarily so first of all I don't think we disagree on the is off the limit but it seems you get into preferences that's the objection the reason you can't get from it is odd is that you have to inject a preference it's it's injecting the preference that gets you to the odd I would like to live in a world where this happens therefore I ought to do that the the objection and the is a thing is this thing if I try if I start with the foundation of I would like to it's not a problem I should I live with the power I suppose is what I'm getting kind of saying if if the person in power I say the Hitler simply has a very different conception of what the best is for his life compared to your life then do you have any moral if you like force to say you're doing something wrong isn't he just going with his preferences as opposed to your preferences yes so what is it that's up here that says those preferences are better and those preference right it was this is what this this is the the objection that's often launched hmm so I could sit down with Hitler I wouldn't because he's dead but I guess and if we could find the thing that we agree about that we care about I can show we can then demonstrate which one of our preferences are in conflict with that if if he eat because what we what we do as human beings often delude ourselves and and we look at our preferences and assume they're right but they're gonna conflict with something foundational which is basically the beginning of that superiority secular morality talk I talked about how you could begin with let's say three foundational premises life is generally preferable from to death health is generally preferable to sickness and pleasure is generally preferable to plane none of them are universally true sometimes pain is preferable sometimes death may be preferable which is why I support death with dignity for people who no longer have any hope of a quality life and with their individual autonomy and control over their own life but you can begin with those and you can build something but you can start with anything you could start with death is better than life and what you get to his extinction and so if I find something I think Hitler probably I mean there's the old joke Hitler probably loved his mother to Hitler probably valued human life just had justifications for excluding certain others right and so you could reason hit light into I don't know that I necessarily could because they're easy to his way it might be I'm nice I'm not saying that that's not necessarily the case I'm saying if you can show that what your actions are and the things that you're justifying are in conflict with a a foundation that you agree with mm-hmm that's where the problem is right and what if the it's it's the establishment of the master race because if the fittest do survive then wouldn't it be nice if the fittest should survive like we take that hop skip and a jump and and sure and then you then you ask what what criteria are using to determine fittest we're having a symposium and we should be finding a wall and this is no no we should always be having a symposium so we don't have to fight wars why would anybody ever say we should be fighting a war you sound like Neville Chamberlain you know I've found peace in our time I'm gonna sit down with it I'm sorry that I'm sorry the waiting the reasoning rather than the blowing crap up is so an Optima I think we tried to reason with him I'm not saying you see this okay here's really confusing I'm not saying after the war started synmat it's very clever I we're using a precise example to talk about a more abstract one which is essentially let's say you and I disagree on you you want to take some action you want to exterminate some portion of the population the the process that I'm advocating for is for us to figure out what shared foundation we have if any which will find something shared and show which one of us is more in conflict with and which one of us is more in keeping with that foundation is it always gonna be the case no but you asked how you would actually solve that and I would and if it didn't work I'd kill him and if and if well being just very vaguely just defined if well being is as the metric that we're using yeah Hitler could say oh we are so much better off without disabled you have no idea you know where we're soaring our industry and numbers are through the roof our well being is is yeah is doing incredibly well once we eliminate the the sick the weak handicapped is he right at that point well that's when you go through and you talk about what data are you looking at to define well-being because what data yeah you're having that conversation about because he's because he's just told you I've eliminated like I'm no know happening right now okay that there is a Down syndrome population for instance that's being eliminated globally right now and we're having a conversation about it like I know and I think it's better to have a conversation than to blow people up and all that sort of stuff but it's it's a very live issue it's not it's not just the god ones I'm just going with the example that you say Hitler comes to me and says you wouldn't believe how much better our society is of now that we're eliminating these people then you have to go back and look at it and say okay what have you lost is your society better and are you just looking at the short-term did you in fact how do you know that you didn't lose a cure for disease how do you know that you're not worse off because it has fundamentally changed your psyche how do you know that you're not worse off because you've lost art because you've you've lost human connection it's not just you see that this is one of the problems that you could point out to people that are going down there well-being is not just worth something even if they didn't produce a cure for cancer or great works of art even if they just you know sat around and consumed all the resources that all that able-bodied people were doing if somebody sat around it nothing could consume I I don't know how you could consider that as adding value yeah you have to point to something where they're adding value to society that achieve they have to add value so that they don't have value yeah so this one I'm saying when I say that there's no intrinsic value to it but that I value that I value human life and that everybody almost see who's that you you might tell I'm speaking specifically for me but also it doesn't you try to reason them out of it but what yes what are you okay see you sit them mm-hmm okay let's try it I don't value human life change my mind mm-hmm look at the Nazis look at that vision of human I don't care I don't value human life change my mind mm-hmm you have yourself a humanity that has dignity you might not believe it right now I don't change my mind I'm trying to change your mind by saying without achievements without attributes without contributing a penny of money without expending a calorie of effort I worried by the way that this is gonna get cut as really understand whether this point is a point here that if you simply choose not to believe humans have value then nothing that nothing that he's gonna say is gonna change them all right telling me that there's a God or Jesus that's not going to change my more than my life you'll point then glad cuz cuz my part is the changing in the mind is not the most important factor that's going on here it's the immorality of eliminating a whole people group that's that's probably a little bit more important talking about a conversation we're talking about someone who doesn't value human life not what they've done but what they think yes yes yeah you have to figure out a way to change their mind and the best way we've discovered over two thousand years it's to tell a story about the God who becomes the weak and the spires and the marginalized and the single cell in Mary's womb and I think better than telling a story but you think about what evidence you have well give it a shot there's no reason to think it's not worth I accept all the scientific studies that said it brings us nicely to the end of the show and I'm just going to ask that question one last time can atheism deliver a better world in your view I have no idea and that's that's genuine I think that there are things that if you take the good wherever you find it religion non religious philosophical thing take those things keep them get rid of the baggage how could we not be better off and you'll final thoughts on that one too well I guess what follows from atheism mmm I mean atheism just a lack of belief in a God I don't think any kind of moral system necessarily falls out of that I'm a if we're biological survival machines clinging to an insignificant rock hurtling through a meaningless universe towards eternal extinction what follows you know what one thing that might follow is nothing another thing that might follow is anything and and therefore I think you know Matt's venture is very much a venture of faith you know we we want to we ought to create more atheists or or at least create more skeptics about the the idea of religion when everything we know about the the utility of religion is that it's a net gain a net win to society and when the the consequences of get getting rid of this story especially this story of the God who became weak is to have a certain callousness to the whole rest of society and I think that meta ethical issue will play out in negative ways about how we treats the least and the last and the lost and I agree with them that atheism doesn't necessarily lead to anything which is why I keep advocating for secular humanism when you say that everything we've learned religion has been a net gain I'm not convinced look I've really enjoyed the conversation so Matt and gladden thank you very much for being with me Thank You Justin thinking about such things I hope you enjoyed glen and matt debating atheism and morality there's also a bonus video of them discussing the trans controversy that divided the atheist experience get it now along with loads more exclusive content by subscribing to our newsletter at the big conversation dot show

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 753,075

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate

Id: B3-sjyDYO2I

Length: 89min 44sec (5384 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020