Michael Shermer and Alister McGrath: Is God a Figment of Our Imagination?

welcome welcome to those of you are here in convocation hall at the university of toronto and welcome to all of you who are joining us from around the world for the live stream of this event is god a figment of our imagination my name is karen stiller and i will be your host for what we anticipate will be a fascinating and challenging evening we're going to make history tonight by finally solving this god thing no just kidding we won't solve it but we are going to explore the question with two of the most accomplished intellectuals of our time dr michael shermer and dr aleister mcgrath sponsored by wycliffe college the canadian scientific and christian affiliation faith today magazine the center for inquiry canada ravi zacharias international ministries power to change and the u of t secular alliance the religion and society series generates critical conversations on matters of faith society and public interest the series encourages discourse around topics that deeply matter like this one so friends you are welcome before i introduce our speakers here is a rundown of how the evening will proceed dr schermer and dr mcgrath will each speak for 20 minutes each of them setting the scene for the dialogue which will follow so instead of a formal rebuttal time we will then engage in conversation here on the stage and then take some of your questions please ask questions via twitter hashtag religion and society by texting and here's the number but you'll see it on the screen as well 416-886-3443 or through the youtube live stream chat option you will see on your screen if you're joining us from afar our team up front will then share questions with me via text which is why you will see me checking my phone it's not that i'm on facebook or anything so what makes tonight especially intriguing is not only the profound professional accomplishments of our speakers and i encourage you to read their full bios in the program you were given but also their personal histories the atheist who became a theist dr aleister mcgrath and the theist who became an atheist dr michael shermer are in conversation here this evening we welcome both of you and we thank you for being here [Applause] dr schermer is the publisher of skeptic magazine a monthly columnist for scientific american and presidential fellow at chapman university dr aleister mcgrath is professor of science and religion at the university of oxford he is the founding president of the oxford center for christian apologetics and so let's dig into this question is god a figment of our imagination dr mcgrath [Applause] so is god a figment of our imagination well it's a great question um and in fact it's a question that opens up lots of other questions do we simply make up all our beliefs creating a world that fits in with our preconceived ideas or our deepest longings and i'm one of many who i think is concerned that we're moving into what we might call a post-truth world whose unacknowledged patron saint is the german philosopher ludwig voybach we believe what we want to believe and we take offense when our imagined certainties are challenged and i think t.s eliot was right when he wrote these words which i think opened up a very deep question humankind cannot bear very much reality we don't like the way things are we invent a new way of seeing things and roger penrose in fact in a recent brilliant critique i think of some alarming trends in modern physics it points out that even the scientific quest to understand our universe often seems to end up being enmeshed with fashionable ideas blind faith and pure fantasy and the point i'm making is that human beings are very good at inventing worlds they would like to be real and figuring out intellectual justifications for those views afterwards in other words the desire comes first and the justification comes later so let me give you some words from the philosopher thomas nagel reflecting on his own atheism this from his book the last word listen to this it isn't just that i don't believe in god and naturally hope that i'm right in my belief it's i hope there is no god i don't want there to be a god i don't want the universe to be like that and having laid down advance how he wanted the universe to be nagel provides a post-hoc rational justification of his views now this intellectual strategy will come as no surprise to those of you who studied the psychology of belief formation you might think for example of the writings of jonathan height but many cultural historians would argue that the rise of atheism in western europe in the late 18th century reflected the desire on the part of many human beings to be free of external limits or divine interference and so my question tonight really is are we willing to confront this awkward truth about fashionable or desirable beliefs which applies i think as much to atheism as it is to christianity now going back to our question i have no doubt that some people do invent the idea of god to console themselves but i want to suggest it's more complicated than this there's a much deeper point here as the rise of a post-truth world makes clear we all run the risk of believing what we'd like to be true and when i was an atheist myself i took the view that i was from marx that the idea of god was the imaginary result of socio-economic conditions the opium the people which dulled their senses to the bleakness of life and inhibited them from taking revolutionary action to transform their world at that stage i was studying natural sciences at high school and just took the view that it was obvious that science gobbled up the conceptual space once occupied by god there was this necessary permanent contradiction between science and religion and for me at that time religion was just a pointless relic of a credulous past whereas science at least as i then saw it offered a complete totalized explanation of the world ruthlessly exposing exposing its rivals as lies and delusions and sure i know it was simple but that was the way i then saw things and certainly when i read richard dawkins book the god delusion some years later i got all nostalgic because kind of that was the way i used to be when i was much younger so the point i'm making is that um i began to study science doctor university really with the view that atheism was the best answer and i gradually moved away from that to the view that christianity gave a better way of looking at things i want to talk a little bit about that but i want to emphasize i am not criticizing atheists i'm saying in this talk that it's very difficult to make decisions about these big questions and inevitably we all end up as a matter of faith saying i think this is right rather than this and that really is the framework within which my conversations are taking place i discovered christianity at oxford and it seemed to me as if some kind of intellectual light had turned itself on and i was able to see things more clearly things came into sharp more sharp focus than was otherwise the case and i went on to do research in molecular biophysics and although i loved science to bits it was as if something else had appeared which in effect displaced it in the way in which i fought and lived if i could draw an analogy from the gospels it was like the pearl of great price which is so beautiful and precious it overshadows everything and i found this gave me a new way of looking at things but i must emphasize this is not about religion versus science this is about my realization as i saw it that in effect this way of seeing things gave a new significance to my science that in effect it enriched my vision of what science was and what it was all about and as i saw it science and faith came together not to compete but rather to enrich it's as if there is a big picture of reality and maybe science fills in part of that picture and religion another but nonetheless it's this extended amplified enriched vision of the way things are and like c.s lewis before me i came to the view that christianity was a way of looking at things that offered me the best way of seeing things and you may know lewis's very famous one-liner which i find very helpful i believe in christianity as i believe that the sun has risen not only because i see it but because by it i see everything else and although i have been drawn to atheism i think for several reasons one of them being the minimalization of its intellectual demands i now find myself discovering the richness of the intellectual outcomes of christianity and again i must emphasize it's not science versus faith it's a way of looking at the world which is a matter of faith that enables you to appreciate the successes of science and also i think to appreciate what its limits might be there was this explanatory capaciousness to faith which i find resilient and exciting we need both science and faith to engage and make sense of this world of ours and albert einstein made a similar point in a landmark lecture at princeton back in 1939 and many of you will know this lecture in which he argues that the natural sciences are outstanding in their sphere of competence and of course he's right but nevertheless there are limits to what it can say einstein's quote the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to and conditioned by each other and that's great but we need more than that if we're going to lead meaningful lives and einstein makes this point he says we need more than a purely rational conception of our existence if we are going to live out meaningful lives so that seems to me to be a very important point to begin to make in effect it's not simply cognitive understanding it's about existential traction on our lives we're looking not simply at how the universe works which is science's domain and it does that very well but deeper questions of what the world means what we mean how we generate values and how we understand questions like purpose and all of those impact on us here tonight now sure i'm going to agree entirely that religion can go wrong i think my point would be it's not that religion is wrong it can go wrong as so many things can for example some would argue that religion incites violence and i'm sure it does at times and i'm sure it can do but it's only part of a more complex position it's a bit like saying that music necessarily stirs up violent passions which may be the case but that was plato's argument as you will know but music can also stimulate reflection bring inner peace i don't think any would argue that the abuse of music means that we give up on it or ban it and the key point here is to recognize that good things go wrong and we need to challenge it when it does go wrong and for me that's a very important point like science religion can be abused science creates drugs to prolong life but it also creates weapons of mass destruction religion can create conflict sure but it also motivates people to work with the poor in the slums of calcutta and again my point is science and faith can both go wrong but that doesn't mean they are wrong now here's the point i want to focus on some demand that religious people should prove the existence of god that's an important point i want to focus on precisely because it is so important all of us whether we are religious secular whether we hold moral political or social beliefs have to come to terms with the epistemic tragedy of humanity namely that we can only prove shallow truths but that the greater beliefs that give meaning purpose and value to our lives in the end lie beyond proof and that means in effect that all of us live by faith at least to some extent even if for some reason you want to avoid that word faith because you feel it's just a word peculiar to religion it's not it's simply the way things are the big things that really matter lie beyond proof we try to justify them to show there are good reasons for them but in the end knowing we are not going to be able to demonstrate them to be right now sure some of the new atheists will argue that rational criteria can be used to judge religious commitments and i'm very sympathetic to that i just ask that those same criteria be used to adjudicate their beliefs as well that's being fair i think those who us who believe in god are told that we're required to prove this belief well i accept that challenge to the extent that i can but i also reflected back and say you too please prove your beliefs and if it turns out neither of us can do this then a more meaningful and realistic conversation begins which is how we live in a world in which we simply cannot prove the things that really matter to us so let us agree logical and mathematical truths can be proved but for the philosopher bertrand russell for my of great admiration the natural human craving for certainty just can't be reconciled with the limited capacities of human reason on the one hand and the complexity of the world on the other and russell wrote these words which i find to be wise and important he says to teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it again to teach us how to live without certainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation in other words knowing we can't prove but nevertheless wanting to live on the basis of meaningful beliefs and i think russell has got that right so was wrestle an atheist well there are points at which he says i'm an atheist in the popular sense of the word yet russell insisted that philosophically he was an agnostic in that he regarded the question of god to lie beyond proof or disproof and it lay therefore beyond rational or empirical demonstration it is right to say that russell chose to live as an atheist behaviorally he was an atheist but epistemically he was an agnostic and i think is an important point to make in real life we very often end up basing our lives on things we cannot prove to be true but nevertheless believe we can trust that's just the way things are i wish you were otherwise i wish there was some way of proving the god question because then we could all go home whether we are right or wrong but the fact that we are still discussing this just brings home how irresolvable this question is but how meaningful it is also and therefore challenges us to think about how we might justify whatever our position is and i thus find myself reassured by a recent debate at oxford university between richard dawkins and rowan williams in february twenty twelve you can see this on youtube it's a fascinating discussion dawkins acknowledged that he was not completely certain that there was no god and the man sharing the discussion of philosophers anthony kenny expressed surprise saying look um are you not really saying you're an agnostic and dawkins agreed that he was indeed prepared to use that word to describe himself which prompted kenny to challenge why dawkins was then described as the world's most famous atheist but i think dawkins is right i think he's simply facing up to the real issue which is that whether christian or atheist you believe something that you think is meaningful which cannot actually be proved i'll come back to that point because i think it really is important in effect it's about being realistic about human nature if you read alexander pope's wonderful essay on man he describes human beings as being born but to die and reasoning back to air precisely because we have limited capacities we live in a complex world and so much lies beyond the scope of rational demonstration so does this mean that since nothing that really matters can be proved we simply believe whatever we like as if we are condemned to a relativism in which we pick and mix according to taste no i'm making no such suggestion and again just to avoid any misunderstanding i am not saying anything goes recognition of the limits on our epistemic capacities does not entail random or arbitrary belief generation we all need to justify our beliefs to show there are good reasons for holding on what we believe to be trustworthy and reliable whether we believe in god or the goodness of human nature or in the rationality of atheism we all need to be able to show that there are reasons for thinking this and the point i'm making is that we're like scientists who are confronted with a complex set of observations which are open to multiple interpretations and in the end we have to make a judgment as to which is the most reliable which is the most trustworthy when the evidence very often is not sufficient to force us to a conclusion those judgments may be contestable but nevertheless we make them all the time now social psychologists argue that human beings are meaning seeking animals to lead meaningful and fulfilled lives we need defensible notions of our personal identities our source of value purpose and our own self-worth who are we do we really matter what are we meant to be doing what's the good life and how do we lead it and i say to all of you here tonight whether you are religious or not unless you've somehow disengaged from reflective existence every one of you will have views on those matters and rightly so they matter to you but here's the point you can't prove that they are right that doesn't mean that you give up it means you say to the best of my ability here are my reasons for thinking that this is right we can't prove those deeper truths that give meaning and direction to our lives now the greater oxford philosophers are as i berlin made this point years ago and his conclusion was this as most of us seem to end up believing things that are quite distinct for good reasons we can at least be civil to each other and have the kind of conversation that i'm sure we'll be having tonight civility really matters and that's why i'm so glad this conversation is taking place in canada where we you have this uh wonderful aspiration to civility and toleration so yes i like canadians [Music] so we've moved away i think from the gross simplifications of the bygone age of reason that was all very well in the 18th century but that was then we're in a different place now and we understand how difficult it can be to come to firm conclusions on these things the contrast is not between an irrational faith and rational facts it's about making judgments about the best way of making sense of our world and our lives and that means all of us take positions of faith whether we are explicit about this or not so my own position which i put before you to as something i believe i believe i have reasons for doing so but i concede honestly and responsibly i cannot prove is this that belief in god is both cognitively and existentially satisfying in other words it seems to make sense of our world but above all give meaning to our lives and that seems to me to be very important i make no apology for declaring that i now find christianity to offer a deeply satisfying explanation of our world while at the same time engaging and satisfying that deeper human longing for meaning we all need a way of seeing ourselves and our world which we find to be deeply satisfying rationally morally and aesthetically now i once thought i'd find this an atheism now i believe i found this in christianity i make the point i bear no grudge against atheism i do not dismiss atheists as fools i simply say i think i found something better but it's open to debate that's the key point faith is not about running away from reality it's about recognizing the realistic limits placed upon us which means we have to make those judgments which we call faith simply because these are such big questions that whatever position we take lies beyond totally demonstrative proof so my own view which i offer tonight simply is this for me i found christianity to bring a new depth to my life and a new quality to my engagement with the natural sciences in short i believe christianity to be trustworthy but i think i know it satisfies the deepest longings of my heart and my mind thank you so much for listening [Music] thank you dr mcgrath we now invite dr schermer [Music] thank you so much can i have the house lights for just a moment i want to ask the audience a question and see uh what kind of answer i get uh so what i want to know i'm just curious uh how many of you believe in god oh oh boy well uh look at the time i've got uh 19 minutes and okay so yeah by the way uh while i've got you here with uh uh in a in a crowded theater i'm a big free speech fundamentalist so let me just try this out fire see it's all right no need to panic speech is not violence okay that's another subject all right a couple of quick red herrings atheism is not a thing it's not a world view it's not a position it's not a set of dogmas or beliefs is nothing it's just a word that describes what we don't believe which is god we don't believe in god full stop that's it so we're not contrasting christianity with atheism he said well what do you believe shermer as an atheist well i believe in civil rights and civil liberties and equal treatment under the law and women's rights and and so on and so forth democracy and and and so on that's atheism no that's not atheism that's other things atheism is just i don't believe in god full stop now uh dr mcgrath mentioned these terms agnostic okay atheism what do we mean by these things theist believes in god atheists just doesn't believe in god now there's two slight versions of this strong atheist believe there is no god which is technically a non-tenable position which is why richard uh scaled talk and scaled his beliefs on a one-to-seven scale so it's a six because to say it's a seven i know for sure there's no god it's not technically a tenable position although i think you can make an argument which i will tonight that um that that there's more evidence to show that we constructed the idea of god then vice versa by the way the question on the table tonight has got a figment of our imagination yes okay so that's the short answer uh uh huxley coined the term agnostic he he simply met it's not knowable uh not not that you're waiting for one more piece of evidence one more experiment one more a research project and there the evidence has come you know climate change is it is it real or not is it human caused or not you know just one more set of ice core data and i'll make up my mind then no it's not like that in that sense huxley meant science isn't going to get at that and so i've often called myself an agnostic in in terms you know epistemologically speaking yes we can't get out i'm not so sure that's the case i think vic stenger makes the point the physicist victor physicist victor stanger makes the point that if there is a god the world should be a certain way and it's not that would be evidence of absence i'll come back to that idea in just a moment um so that kind of just navigates some of those terms behaviorally i'm an atheist i act like there's no guy assume there's no god we all have to act in the world so fine and in any case when i was on the colbert reports uh when colbert stephen asked me what i believe said agnostic he's that's just an atheist without balls and it's like all right all right all right fine i'm an atheist okay fine non-theist i'm a skeptic i have a magazine called skeptic okay i'm a skeptic whatever okay first of all we're gonna talk about is god a figment of our imagination which god back of the envelope calculation in the uh ten thousand years of human history there's been roughly ten thousand different religions and a thousand different gods so what is the probability that yahweh is the one true god in aman aphrodite apollo bal brahma ganesha isis mithras osiris shiva thor vishnu woton zeus and the other 986 gods are all false gods as skeptics like to say we just go one god further you're all atheists of those gods so we're only talking about this one and even if theists could prove or somehow give enough evidence to slide you over to the theist position that doesn't mean it's christianity it doesn't mean it's yahweh that doesn't give you jesus or saviors or immortality or heaven or any of that all it does is just in some sense say well there must be something else out there okay maybe but let's wait and see what the evidence is for that um and it could be in that sense an extraterrestrial intelligence of of great power i mean if you think about it for a second i i know we're not talking about ball and zeus and all that stuff we're i know who we're talking about the all-powerful all-knowing all-good deity who created out of nothing the universe and everything in it who is uncreated and eternal a non-corporeal spirit who created us loves us and grants us eternal life to humans now that uh i claim is not really what we're talking about we're really just talking about where the universe come from where you know what what is it we're talking about when we're talking about god the problem with that particular definition omniscience omnipotent omnibenevolence how would you know you know to a neanderthal this is omnipotence and omniscience uh you know you know it's just relative uh to what we know so a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence or sufficiently advanced human or ai if the singularity happens like kurzweil thinks the 2040 boom it's going to be unrecognizable they'll be so far advanced than us that it'll seem ai will seem omniscient and hopefully not omnipotent if you drive a tesla that could be scary take you over the sidewalks and okay um so that's the problem with that how do you know what omniscience is we're we're finite beings we're mortal beings we are severely limited in our knowledge beings and and the more we learn about the brain the the more limited it seems we are in in what we're able to know so how would you even know if you encountered a god that it was god and not just e.t something like that it's not a trivial point uh because if we ever did make contact with an extraterrestrial they're not going to be well first of all they're not going to be behind us because we just achieved this technology to make contact with aliens so they're going to be a ahead of us and they're not going to be like just five years ahead of us like the people think that the aliens landed at roswell and they gave us transistors like ooh that's the big thing that aliens invented with transistors just slightly better than vacuum tubes okay no no they're gonna be like millions of years ahead of us by the way they're not gonna be bipedal primates that speak english with an indian accent with gnarly stuff on their foreheads they're not going to be anything like us and that would be what god would god would be even more like that just just inconceivable now an important point of logic um on the burden of proof is on the believer to prove god's existence or convince us why you believe instead of not believing not on the skeptics to disprove god although technically i can't prove a negative i can easily argue that i can't prove there's no isis or zeus or so on but i don't have to i just say the way any scientist would i doubt your hypothesis until you run the experiment and and reject the null hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance and then we'll will consider your your hypo something like that the the position of the skeptic and the scientists is just we're withholding judgment on belief until we see the evidence and at that point it's always okay to just say i don't know and leave it at that you don't have to construct an entire world view based on gaps or uncertainties one of my favorite stories is my microphone working here yes okay good so one of my favorite stories is from the great carl sagan in his book demon haunted world he's a chapter in demon hunter world called there's a dragon in my garage and he says so the story opens like this like i've got this dragon in my garage you want to see it it's super cool like look come here let's see you open the garage door and you look in there and it's like i don't see anything there's a couple paint cans a bicycle and it's just empty well see this is an invisible dragon oh an invisible dragon yeah yeah yeah it's invisibly super cool well i've got some flowers so let's spread flower on the floor and we'll catch the invisible dragon's footprints now we see this is a very special dragon it hovers above the floor about a foot uh okay well i have some infrared heat detecting uh equipment for my camera so we'll measure this dragon now see this is a cold-blooded dragon it doesn't give off any heat what about the dragon fire we can surely measure the fire not as coal fire coal fire so at some point the question is what's the difference between an invisible hovering cold heatless incorporeal dragon and no dragon at all if you can't falsify it in some way disprove it test it get at it through some kind of test then what are we talking about nothing it's just sort of the end of the conversation it's just well this is my opinion and that's your opinion and in a way this is like playing baseball without the bases or the ball this is well what are we doing here just looking at each other so it's just an assertion i just assert there's a god because it makes me feel good okay fine listening to bach makes me feel good so what have we proven nothing it's just what makes us feel good it's an assertion and as christopher hitchens said in in his max quote that i elevated to a maxim in my scientific american call that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence if someone just makes an assertion you don't have to respond well you say what's your evidence if they don't have any it's like okay next so the question is what are the chances that dr mcgrath a christian happens to have chosen the the right god in religion and all the billions of other believers in the world who believe in different gods and religions are wrong or what's more likely that that he's right and everyone else is wrong or that there's just no particular gods now i mentioned i'm a skeptic the oxford english dictionary just defines a skeptic as one who holds that there is no adequate grounds for certainty as to the truth of any proposition whatsoever okay this is too nihilistic i don't accept this it's not what a skeptic is skeptic is just a scientist asking for evidence quality of evidence convergence of evidence there's lots of things we can know there's i'm told something like a thousand people in the room tonight we can find out if that's true we can determine absolute truth tonight about the number of people in the audience by just counting dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago we can verify that by replicating multiple radiometric dating techniques of the rocks belief beneath the fossils in the rocks above the fossils and there's no more dinosaur fossils above the iridium layer there at the at the k t boundary and so forth we can accept that as true the universe began with a big bang that's true by a convergence of evidence from a wide range of phenomenon such as the cosmic microwave background radiation the abundance of light elements like helium and hydrogen the distribution of galaxies the large scale structure of the cosmos the galaxies are all expanding away from us redshifted expansion of space itself it looks like an explosion so these propositions are true in the in the sense that the evidence is so substantial that it would be unreasonable to withhold your provisional ascent it's possible dinosaurs went extinct less than 10 000 years ago right after the babylonians invented wine like young earth creationists think but it's so ridiculous that you don't have to waste any time even talking about it then there are negative truths such as the null hypothesis in science and no hypothesis science nothing fancy it's just we don't believe it until you you prove otherwise just like the just like the food and drug administration doesn't grant you a patent on your your aids drug or whatever until you run the clinical trials and you show us the evidence you can't just post testimonials on your web page and go there's my evidence sorry in science we have a little more rigorous demands for quality of evidence like that so negative truths are there it's it's there's an absence of evidence and that's the truth which is why it's worrisome that major scientific journals don't publish uh negative findings you know we couldn't replicate the famous study oh we're not interested then no no the not replication is super important okay and by the way for my other rest of my day job i find i found it very interesting that in all the wikileaks the tens of thousands of documents of the us government there's not one about ufo cover-ups at roswell 911 was an inside job by the bush administration you know elvis is still alive you know nothing no fake moon landing documents nothing okay that absence of evidence tells us something so that that has value then there's propositions that are true by internal validation only dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate now i'm pretty confident that that's an objective absolute truth but but i know people who disagree with that stairway to heaven is the greatest rock song ever period now i know people that say no no free bird okay free bird i love free bird stairway's better okay but the meaning of life is 42 okay so these are trues by internal validation they're true for me fine okay that's fine you know you like choc dark chocolate i like milk whatever that's fine but there's nowhere else to go from there i believe that most religious claims are more in that category along the lines of what dr mcgrath was talking about tonight it gives me existential meaning and purpose i feel better it kind of brings all of the complexities of life together in some coherent picture okay okay fine but that's not what we're talking about when we're talking in science about proof or evidence or something we can we we can uh you know sort of sink our teeth into um in that sense faith is not a reliable epistemology it doesn't get us anywhere faith is just like the personal validation it's like in my constant debates with deepak chopra you know about meditation and and sort of introspection that buddhists use now there's evidence coming out that it's actually externally validated it it has all sorts of physical health benefits and mental health benefits and they're measurable and so on okay so now i'm much more open to shifting toward the sort of eastern wisdom traditions of buddhism like okay there might be something to this because it's not just deepak saying i like it and i'm going i don't like meditating i sit there and i just talk to myself with my eyes closed you know it's that's not medita i know so but anyways you get the point we gotta shift somehow from it's inside my head it's true for me uh versus something else it's a little bit like the we talked about the post-truth world well you know this all began with the post-modernist movement in the 70s and 80s with the kind of deconstructing literary texts they don't have any real meaning okay i could kind of see the argument you know you re you read jane austen i read jane austen you get something different out of it then i get out of it so there's not a truth truth in there you know we find our own truths okay fine um but but then they kind of started to spill over into history you know well there's no true history there's just different people's versions of history you know like the holocaust didn't happen wait wait what uh okay this is going too far right so at some point you go from that internal to external uh and we would like to have external validation where we can so the problem with things like did jesus exist yeah probably you know joshua was a fairly common name even atheist uh scholars like my friend bart ehrman say yeah i think jesus probably existed and was he crucified probably the romans crucified everybody i mean you know it was a violent world okay he died for my sins different category of truth that's entirely internal how would you ever prove that what does that even mean okay the resurrection okay this is a hundred billion to one odds of this happening you know how i calculated this because before us about a hundred billion people have ever lived and not one of them have ever come back to life so what are the odds that this is the particular one that really happened and not just a story and uh and so we have the principle proportionality you should proportion the confidence of your beliefs in the amount of evidence for it or as skeptics like to say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence the resurrection of a single person out of the 100 billion would be truly extraordinary the evidence for it not extraordinary way worse than even evidence that pompeii existed or caesar existed or whatever okay we're not debating that tonight but you see where i'm going with this there's these different kind of claims which claim are we talking about science and religion are not in conflict if you think the earth is is 4.6 billion years old and the creationists think the earth is 10 000 years old the truth is not halfway in between you don't add them up divide by two no no there's a conflict one of them is just wrong okay so it depends on the particular claim that's being made there so i think we can build a case as i do in into my books that that that god was made by humans that is if you look at the anthropology sociology of religion and you look at all the different beliefs that people hold all the flood myths that commonly pop up the creation myths the virgin birth myths uh here are just a few that of gods that came from uh the the birth of with without the help of of us guys dionysus perseus buddha atis krishna horus mercury romulus and of course jesus just consider the parallels between dionysus the greek god of wine and jesus of nazareth both were said to have been born from a virgin mother who was a mortal woman but were fathered by the king of heaven both alleged to have returned from the dead transformed water into wine introduced the idea of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the creator and to have been a liberator of mankind resurrection myth so cyrus was the first deity that was resurrected in egypt 2400 years before jesus these are common myths that come up over and over just think of sort of a joseph campbell deconstruction of myths around the world and how common these themes come up either by diffusion or more likely through simultaneous creation because there's only so many stories in hollywood for example and in in mythic stories like this so i think it's far more likely that instead of but our resurrection story is the one true resurrection story and all the other ones are made up literature well first of all you don't have any more evidence for those than the other people have for their stories and even in the i know so most of us are monotheists okay so but the christians believe the bible is the inherent uh gospel handed down from god muslims believe that the quran is the perfect word of god christians believe that christ was the latest prophet muslims believe that muhammad was the latest prophet mormons believe that joseph smith was the latest prophet and slightly tongue-in-cheek scientologists believe that l ron hubbard was the latest prophet i'm telling you i visit scientology offices in various cities around the world whenever i get a chance and they all have his a desk and a writing pad with a pin ready for him to come back and write the next novel they think he's coming back okay so the parallels are there and i think it's far more likely that those parallels are indicative of our capacity as a storytelling species to create certain mythic themes that come up over and over for psychological social cultural reasons political reasons whatever not that we're reflecting a true reality of the external world and if that was the case then some of those claims are extraordinary and we need extraordinary evidence in support of them it isn't there therefore i beseech you to withhold judgment on the god question and be a skeptic thank you [Applause] [Applause] thank you both my phone has been lighting up so i think there's about a million questions waiting for you but i'm assuming that you have a question or two for each other so i'd like to invite you to dialogue for a few moments and whoever would like to begin well let me let me get the conversation going i mean you're using the word skeptic to in effect designate science i mean don't think you will use the word skeptic to be critical of everything including your own yeah absolutely sure political religious claims anything anytime i mean let's let's give an example um you rightly talk about um contemporary theories of cosmology supposing you and i have been here a hundred years ago and the scientific method was still being used the consensus was the universe had always been here there's been a radical change what was thought then to be true is now known not to be true and if we try and extend ourselves into the future and ask what will people think 100 years from now we just don't know the answer and i think i think what you're doing is you're giving us a very simplistic take on science which is inattentive to radical theory change in science which is ongoing i was wondering how that fits into your way of thinking right uh well thanks for calling me a simpleton uh no no no no galileo did it to the pope right simplicity that's not history it's okay i got an ego i can take it uh okay so first of all what do you think you know a fair amount about cosmology what do you think the chances are that the big bang probably isn't true the universe is not 13.8 billion it's 1 billion or 100 billion or or that the steady state theory is going to turn out to be true and the big bang theory is going to i mean we make progress there's cumulative evidence for multiple lines of of inquiry that point to this conclusion it could be wrong but the chances of that at this point i'd say are pretty slim we have some cosmologists in the audience they can chime in what i'll say is that on the basis of current evidence then i have no difficult the present way of thinking the difficulty is we don't know what theoretical advances lie ahead in the future and we don't know what evidence is waiting to be discovered and therefore i think we have to say is at the moment this is the best way of explaining it providing we don't say and this is right because in the past they've said this is right yes and they've been shown to be wrong and as someone who studies history history is littered with scientists who say this is the way it is and then there's radical theory change so what i'm saying is it's absolutely right for us to say that science gives us the best way of seeing things that we possibly could have at the moment for example i mean richard talking tonight disagree on many things but he's absolutely right when he says that in 100 years time we may have to abandon darwinism or in effect take on something radically different because of accumulation of evidence so what i'm saying is we need epistemic modesty recognizing that things may change in the future and we can't freeze things and say the way we now see things is the way things actually are we can say the way we now see things is what we believe to be right but nevertheless we cannot judge what the future is going to say because they may have access to more evidence than we do at the present i would be quite surprised if richard actually said that or if that's what he meant because i mean the basics of evolutionary theory uh we now have over a century of cumulative evidence the chances of that being wrong in the in the in the hole are pretty slim now what what might happen is you know perhaps this group selection thing will take off and it'll be multi-selection theory i doubt it but it could happen and natural so natural selection with the tar the individual is the target of selection maybe that will be slightly less important than say dawkins makes it out in the selfish gene that yeah but that's just kind of fine fine-tuning if you'll pardon the theist argument fine fine-tuning the theory and it's not like like newton was wrong because of einstein's discoveries you know einstein is adding on to what's already there so so that the this cuny and idea of paradigm shifts make it seem like you know science is sort of willy-nilly bouncing around from one paradigm to another and who knows what people are going to believe in a century we we have a pretty good idea you know i mean my particle physicist friends tell me you know the zoo of particle this is really pretty much it we're going to fine-tune a little bit here a little bit here but the main stuff is not going to change i call it roger penrose at the beginning and he's very critical of string theory yeah i mean would you would you share those criticisms yeah see okay so there's different kinds of theories i mentioned that you know big bang evolution those are the ones were spot on super so theories of consciousness you know there's there's a dozen who knows which ones that that's going to turn out to be i don't know no one does same thing string theory who knows uh so you know there's grades of confidence so i i use i like that the definition of fact and science something uh supported at such a degree it would be perverse to withhold our provisional ascent that's stephen j gould's definition but there's lots that that we're not even remotely close to that you know you know again what's consciousness all the you know free will and determine there's a bunch of these big questions that sort of spill over into philosophy and metaphysics that that we're not confident in and that could be completely different in a century from now which would be a good argument for cryonics to come back just to see what happened uh if you don't mind being defrosted like strawberries anyway that's a different yeah so um but i'm curious i mean i took careful notes um and okay so i completely respect the idea that look i can't prove uh some of these assertions and i believe them in a way because they they're existentially meaningful deep important yes so i for example on a different question like on free will and determinism i'm a compatibilist and others are determinists i don't think it'll ever be resolved so it's kind of a useful fiction for me to pretend i'm free and you're determined and you pretend you're free and i'm determined and we all just sort of go about our day okay there's that category would you put god in that category like we're not you know it's just you believe one thing i believe another thing and and you know we the world's a big enough place for all of us the way i'd see it is that if there is a god then that gives you a big picture of reality which actually allows you to generate value and meaning and so on and i think one of the things we really interesting to discuss is i mean i know from what you just said and i agree with you on many of these points that you have certain values and so on so the issue would be i think how we generate these without some bigger picture of reality and that's why for example i'm interested in philosophy like iris murdoch who was not a theist at all was an atheist but nevertheless unless you've got some transcendental grounding for things like meaning or value then in effect it's simply the hypothesization of the the in effect the prejudices of a society so i'm really trying to get at this question of what we actually able to base things on and i fully take the point you made you know you're the infected atheism that doesn't really impact on things like civil liberties and so on but where do those values come from what sort of big picture do you have yeah that allows you to generate them that seems a very interesting question i think it's a huge question you know i've written quite a bit about this i've still not worked it all out um i think in in part a lot of our values come from an evolutionary basis of the fact that we're a social primate species and we have to get along with each other so we're not just selfish we're also selfless we're altruistic we're reciprocally altruistic and so on all that and from there you start to layer on higher levels of sort of abstract values that you can derive from the more base values and as you know as you well know um you know there's plenty of secular philosophers who derive values utilitarianism or kant's categorical imperative in aristotle's you don't need god for any of that and you can construct a world view that that is at least coherent and even though there's criticisms of those philosophies you can get that without a god at all there's nothing sure you can generate those values i i fully take that and say that this is the way i see it but the question of how you stabilize what you say this seems to be not simply me projecting my desires because the point i was trying to make is we very often simply take what we want to be true and create that in terms of values that you then define to be self-evidently true and what what objective basis do we have for actually doing that that's not simply a rarification of our innate desires yes yes yeah yes it's absolutely true i wrote a whole book about this the believing brain we start off with the belief and then we seek evidence to support it motivated reasoning confirmation bias hindsight bias and all that and smart people believe we're things because they're really good at that uh so the question but the question is is are all beliefs that are generated that way are they is there a way to work around those cognitive biases and the answer is yes it's science the the scientific method developed over centuries for this very reason starting with francis bacon saying look we have all these um these problems cognitive issues that cause us to distort the way we see starting with the ore in the water that's bent and you know it's not bad but it sure looks bent can't trust my vision all the time and so on and now we know from cognitive psychologists that you know there's much we can't trust that's why you have to have collaborators in your research you got to have peer review you got to have replication of studies you got to have you know multiple lines of evidence coming at it just to get our confident up confidence up that it's not just me in my head deluding myself and i've gone down some side track and i'm you know off the rails crazy uh but i'm a lot this is why you know people write me with these theories of physics uh you know you know newton was wrong and einstein was wrong and i worked it all out in my garage this weekend and i'll share the nobel prize with you if you help me with the math you're talking to the wrong guy i don't do the math uh you know you got you go to the local high school physics teacher and talk to him i mean you gotta get out there and see what other so it's a social community so that's it science is very social and that's what helps us get out of that problem of just generating beliefs willy-nilly and then finding evidence to support them i wondered in both of your literature you talk about the soul and i think you both uh reject the dualism that religion sometimes brings to that question could you discuss briefly together your respective ideas of the soul the soul well i go first i mean i mean i do not see the soul of some sort of um magical intrusion into human nature but well i do see it as designating something as absolutely distinct about who we are what really matters something that in effect is is really essential to our identity and what i would want to say is that it is extremely important that that is safeguarded and that in effect we we recognize the importance of individual human beings we don't dehumanize we don't collectivize in effect we value individual human beings and that means trying to find some way of giving us a handful to in effect say this individual human being is really important and from a christian perspective you are going to want to say in some way a potential relationship to god is really important in generating that and sustaining that so i i personally wouldn't really use the word soul i have misgivings about the way it's translated from the original hebrew and greek we're very often it simply means life i want to say that the vocabulary isn't very helpful but nevertheless there has to be something about us that is distinctive on basis of which we talk about human rights and that seems to me to be something that really we have to safeguard in a very significant way yeah well so this is kind of the subject of my next book heavens on earth about the search for immortality in the afterlife and and you know so the common idea is that there's a there's some sort of pattern of you that survives the death of your physical body okay so what would that be you know from a scientist perspective the soul is just your pattern of information it's all your dna all your memories your synaptic connections your connectome your genome and and a lot more than that and and the problem is is how do you restore how do you put that into a platform that lasts beyond your body because well believe it or not they're scientists working on this is sort of the core of my book is you know the you know google and some of these high-tech companies are not only working on radical life extension as woody allen says i don't want to live on through my workout i want to live on in my apartment you know just keep going for as long as you can but obviously you know we're electric beat that's not going to last forever protein is going to break down so uh so we can how about we upload our our minds our brains into a computer so the idea would be your the connect dome every memory you have in there that's your soul and you plant it in some other medium that lasts longer you know a thousand years instead of 100 years or something like that okay the problem is is there is no fixed set of memories that's just you because that's constantly changing so like and i have the same problem with religious versions of the soul like when you die when you when you're resurrected in heaven with jesus how old are you well i i know some the answer is 30 because it's a great age uh well i guess it's because jesus died when he was 30 right something like that okay but but but but you get a lot of good memories after 30 i hope because i'm 63 now and and so at what point are you resurrected in any case if you managed to scan a connectome if somebody was living and put it in the computer and turn it on which people are working on this and you're still sitting here looking at the world through your eyes you wouldn't go you wouldn't suddenly wake up inside the computer your point of view wouldn't transfer to the computer so i don't see how this could work either from a scientific perspective or a religious perspective the soul it's just now here this is it through your eyes your memories and your point of view that are constantly in fluid change throughout a lifetime in your book the moral arc you talk about science and reason leading humanity to a better place and that if i understand correctly people and society are getting better and i wanted to invite you dr mcgrath to interact with that idea do does christianity argue that as well where are you on that well i i very much admire those who think that things are getting better and i hope i just hope you're right but i i quoted burton russell earlier and i just have to quote him again that you know his book unpopular essays written during the second world war looking at the collapse of civilization and saying i have long studied humanity looking for evidence of rationality i regret to say i've yet to find it and one of the points that russell is making is that we seem to be very good at destroying ourselves and i i don't if you've read the diary of anne frank um there's a wonderful entry for july 1944 in which he says i just cannot stop believing that human beings are fundamentally nice and decent and good because without that belief i just couldn't live and you know she died in belsen and i just wonder um you know what happened to her when as that viewers chip was challenged i think from what i want to say is that the the view that human nature is good is simply not empirical i think in fact if anything empirical evidence goes way against it i think what we need is something which goes beyond the very naive enlightenment view about human nature which recognizes that we are capable of doing some good things but we're all scared of doing some dreadful things and that is the kind of idea the christian idea of sin tries to articulate that actually we can go very badly wrong that any human undertaking actually unfortunately can go wrong and therefore we need to be alert to this challenge this and try and figure out where this takes us in other words avoiding this delusion that somehow we are perfect so i do hope we're moving towards a better place but as i have to say as i look at the world i think that the sort of optimism of the 1950s is really beginning to go because we're confronting what seems to be a very unsettling place and i do hope we're moving to a better place but yeah i'm not not persuaded i'm afraid i like to remind my conservative friends that the tax rate in the 50s was in the 90 oh well we don't want that part of the 50s and the television shows were dragged i mean terrible anyway i'm kind of surprised to hear you better direct correct i'm kind of surprised to hear you say that because you quoted me in your debate with hitch uh in which from my book how we believe that for every act of violence there's ten thousand acts of kindness that go unreported the media doesn't record people being nice it records people being nasty and you were quoting that i think in the context of you know religion encourages people to do good things and so on and so i think this is part of my point is that if you if you if you just look at the headlines it looks pretty bad uh and that things are bad getting worse but you look at the trend lines 2017 is the best year in the history of the world it is it's the best year ever and 2018 is going to be even better i mean if you just look you know the gates foundation just released a whole data dump of of their work on poverty poverty will be ended by 2030. gone first time in history even jesus gave up hope and said there's no hope for the poor you're always going to have them gates is doing something about it okay so that's encouraging and by any measures women have more power freedom prosperity than ever in history yes there's still problems yeah so you know it's three steps forward two steps back but if you go across the centuries definitely better than it's ever been so i'm encouraged uh by that and you know i don't discount i'm not like hitch where i say you know religion poisons everything just almost everything sorry uh you know but but but the point i want to make there is that we do have a good nature i agree with and frank on that it's not just a hope i i hope because even where is that positive hope coming from that's part of nature you know that we have a good side steve pinker's you know better angels inner demons they're always in conflict so here i think you guys got it right that is conservatives christians whatever have a view of human nature that's more realistic than the liberal perspective that people are just naturally good and they're corrupted by society police money greed whatever from from a bad society we can civil engineer society no we have a dark side for sure and the whole point of civil society is to tweak the variables the incentives to attenuate the dark side accentuate the good side and i think christianity got that right in terms of that you know original sin we don't call it that it's you know it's it's our inner demons but whatever that is whatever you call it it's there and we have to do something about it i'm wondering um schermer is there basically it used to be weird if you didn't go to church and now it's a little bit weird in north america at least if you do go to church do you think there will be a time where we don't have religion in terms of the evolution of humankind one can hope hope springs eternal but why would you say that given that you well the fastest growing religious cohort in uh in the united states is the nuns the you know the people that tick the box for no religious affiliation uh that's that's 25 of all americans 33 of millennials uh that's a third you know and and and and so it's sliding up the the demographic scale yeah it'll probably be 50 of millennials within a decade or two now these are these by the way these aren't necessarily atheist agnostic skeptics whatever these are just people that don't affiliate with religion they may believe in god of some kind who knows but but the point is in a way i don't really care what people believe as long as they don't you know corrupt politics fly planes into buildings you know just do bad things to people you know that's the first sort of first level of change so if we get there and yeah i'm sort of hopeful i i agree though that that we need something so this is a big debate amongst humanists and atheists do we need to replace religion with something well yes we need a world view that's fulfilling existentially meaningful purpose where do you get purpose if you don't have god right so a lot of us write about this you know there's you know carl sagan was one of those spiritual people i i've ever known and his writings are just so beautiful they bring you to tears you know that's as good as anything i've read in religious texts you can get that from a scientific maybe you can't prove that scientifically in experiment but the the elegant writing about what science has revealed to us is deeply existentially meaningful and so from that we can derive purpose all the things that that you're concerned we're all concerned about purpose meaning love these things we can we can get all that with without religion you can get it with religion without religion so it's not necessary to have that i think one of the things here is that um social views change over time unpredictably and certainly you can say that for example a view that was seen as eminently rational 500 years ago is no longer seen today the difficulty is trying to predict what the future is going to hold i think that's one of the reasons why i think you know looking at trends is actually quite dangerous because these are quite short-term trends i don't think we really have any indications to what the future is going to hold because people do shift things in quite radical ways so i'm very interested in what the future holds but i'm not quite sure um what you're saying i mean i agree carl sagan writes some wonderful works but don't you think in effect he's taking his authority as a scientist and then in sort of imposing that on a domain where in fact he's saying just trust me and in effect he's saying things which i'm sure mean a lot to him but they are simply his personal views and they don't really have any substantiation beyond that well just the the discovery that we're made of star stuff i mean that's just a phenomenal thing i mean that all the atoms that that are in us came from the interior of stars that's a phenomenal idea it's a true idea that science discovered and then you could like music and art you layer on that the narrative story the pale blue dot you know everyone you ever knew uh who lived out their lives on you know so forth carl's beautiful soliloquy on that um you know that that's where you get these sort of art and literature layered on to the scientific truths that we discover uh but but just one quick quick point i want to push back on do you really think it's possible any nation in the country in the world would ever bring back slavery as a legal institution i very much hope not but i'd want to say that that you seem to be implying that somehow that's a religious idea no no no no no not at all i'm just saying that there's certain kinds of progress we make that the reversal of them while not impossible is very unlikely to go back uh i mean like what are the chances like women can now vote in every country in the world including saudi arabia which finally came around in 2015. now it's true they have to be driven to the voting places by their husbands okay still need some progress there but what are the chances that any country would say you know what this was a bad idea we're taking the franchise away from women now my wife likes to say why don't you reverse it say how about we take it away from men what so those are the kinds of big changes that are not going to i doubt that they're going to be reversed they're not random we made them happen dr mcgrath um this week we had hurricane irma devastating parts of the world always when there are disasters and tragedies you see on the news someone saying oh god saved my child thank god meanwhile a whole bunch of other children died um how do we make sense of god in that light and being a force in the world for good or for bad help us understand that well i think in any world view that there's always going to be a point at which um there's a tension between the world view and what you see i would say for atheism might be why there's so many people who believe in god but certainly for christianity it's this whole idea of suffering and so i think it's a perfectly legitimate question i think there are a number of points that one could make i mean what one might wonder for example whether the recent intensification of hurricanes has anything to do with us you know in effect you know doing things with the atmosphere so i think that that needs to be brought into the picture but certainly for me the destructive capacities of natural forces is something that causes us to stress even though we probably know that actually this is just the way things are and we can't really anticipate that it could be otherwise i mean we might all i think feel that we could design the universe in a way that would work better but actually we haven't got another universe to compare it with so there is an issue there so i think for me the the main issue to talk about here really is um how on earth we um bring this idea of the suffering that arises through these natural disasters into sharp focus and above all i can do do two things one is to say what um what is the human response to these things because very often it is in the way which we respond as human beings to these things that actually shows us the kind of people we are and i suspect dr sherman would probably agree with that without the god element but nevertheless there is an issue here about sense of being empowered to want to do something about this but the second point i'd want to make is this and it's a more theological point and it's that in effect um whatever one thinks about the christian narrative the key theme is redemption through suffering a god who chose to suffer in order to bring about the redemption of humanity and for me that theme of a god who suffers who knows what this is like actually does give us a way of looking at these natural disasters which helps us to see them in a new way but it doesn't alleviate the pain it causes it doesn't in effect excuse us from trying to do something to make this less likely to happen in the future and to try and do something to relieve the pain and suffering that people are going through at the moment dr sherman so i presume you believe that god reaches into the world from wherever outside the universe or or something to stir the particles in some way to like like jesus is resurrected that's a miracle or maybe some of the old testament miracles this is god reaching into our world to do something and interact with it and then maybe pulls back or whatever do you think god still does this interacts in the world in in any way i would say that god is in some sense present in this world and therefore shares in its suffering and its pain what does that mean he's present in the world what does that mean i mean that that god is in some way not simply transcendent from the world but actually is in here and that's a very characteristic christian way of thinking that god is not an utterly transcendent reality but something is actually present with us in the world at the moment so but what she's getting at the pro that the problem of the odyssey the problem of evil so why the one gets saved and the others ten thousand uh die god works in mysterious ways or we don't know why he does things or rabbi kushner's famous answer and why bad things happen to good people he just can't do it he's not really actually omnipotent or chooses not to be or whatever it seems to me you can't there's no way around this uh problem i've never seen a good answer to it i mean say things like he's present what does that mean he's present why isn't he present in the cockpit of the of the plane going into the world trade center building and turn the steering wheel why didn't he do that well human evil okay yeah but what about earthquakes what about childhood leukemia come on why that what's the moral lesson we're supposed to get out of that well i think you know there are no easy answers to these questions like that that's absolutely clear one of the points i'd want to make though is that the christian vision of reality is to say suffering is wrong and therefore the the sort of the feeling of so many christians they want to get involved in relief they want to get involved in the medical profession is in effect a desire to try and make this world a better place through their own limited capacity because this is what god would want them to do to suffer a little bit or what do you mean no you just said pain is wrong yes i did yeah okay so i mean if he's got why why this whole cosmic drama unfolding on earth when in in the you know sending the sun down that's actually him why not just create the heaven and just and skip the whole middle portion of the play and just go straight to the you know but you're assuming that there is another world against which we can compare ours and say that's the way it ought to be or that shows can be done in a different way we don't know the world can be different that's the challenge to us okay but so again back to dr sagan's dragon what's the difference between what looks like complete randomness you know it's just the second law of thermodynamics it's just entropy happening happens that's it uh and you know some people are spared some are not somebody went left down the stairwell and they got killed somebody went right down the stairwell and they survived that's just random there god's not present at all say well yes he was present you know so here's the problem with you know prayer and all this stuff you know when good things happen god gets the credit and when bad things happen who gets to blame not god so no matter what happens it fulfills the the belief system so how could we ever falsify it well i think we're going to have a longer conversation about this but for me one of the key themes is this you say happens i agree with you the issue is the issue is um how do we try and change things by trying to make this world a better place and for me the religion gives you this deep motivation to want to try and make this world a better place because you believe that that is what god wants you to do okay all right so if it's a motivating factor fine but there isn't really a god who wants us to do that what you're kind of say it's like dan dennett's idea of belief in belief i don't believe in god but i believe that it's good that people believe in god because it makes them behave better why don't we just teach them to behave better in just through internal motivation because just because it's good because we need some sort of belief system that goes beyond the empirical which is able to sustain that yes okay so i would offer you this here are some belief systems that you know that that are sort of like the god idea and i'll make an analogy money fiat money issued by the government is completely worthless it's just paper with ink on it right there's no gold behind it we don't have the gold standard anymore but we all just kind of pretend it's valuable that's our belief and democracy is kind of like that i mean where is it well it's what it's it's what we do you know and so that's a belief system but but it works you know we've kind of discovered through the centuries of experimenting with different political economic social cultural systems what works better works by what people want what individuals want for freedom and prosperity and health and so forth public health measures we invented that because we want to survive longer and we don't like people dying in math so those are all ideas that are kind of like the god idea it's not it's not it's not empirical but but but we act on it that seems to me not only good enough it's better than what religion offers because it's it's we created that and so therefore we can keep doing more of that and we get to have some responsibility for that i'd like to uh i rest my case let's um i'd like to shift and focus in on jesus for a few moments um you talked dr sherman that there is we can you can accept that he probably lived and was crucified uh christians believe there is proof or historic evidence of the resurrection i i think in the believing brain you touch on uh the idea of the apostles the christian argument that the apostles wouldn't have early disciples wouldn't have died you know for something that wasn't true i think you talk about that let's talk for a few minutes about proof about who jesus means to christians and how you both feel about that yeah do you want to do that okay well so yeah um again so if we're just talking about like it's a piece of literature with meaning you know shakespeare's story or whatever and and the myth is is that you know there's kind of a death and destruction and redemption or or sin and redemption you know okay that's fine i i get that i think that's an important concept uh for humans to have forgiveness uh and starting over and so on those are common themes but that's different than this person actually did that they actually came back to life first of all why is that even important i mean why can't god just forgive us why do we have to go through the whole thing where he incarnates himself partially i guess in the form of a human and then tortures himself i mean if you if you just say it i'll just say it i mean basically god sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself you know when you kind of lay it i i don't mean to be disrespectful but it's it sounds barking mad but but we're all used to that story you know when you hear the scientology stories like what uh or the mormon story you know the gold plates and the head the hat and what uh you know so fresh it's so new that you know we have a historical wreck you see how it came about like the cargo cults it's like okay this is this is not really true but i just kind of feel like the christian resurrection story is old enough you know kind of lost in the midst of time that you can kind of bury it behind theological arguments but at some point how do you know well i think the the thing i'm going to say is that for me um the story of jesus christ is something that i believe to be historically reliable well i know i can't prove that but there's something very significant about this that in effect is saying this is saying something very deep about what human nature is like but also what god is like and for me what is distinctive about the christian narrative is not simply that this is about someone who lived and suffered and died but also someone in whom not simply the will of god but also the face of god is known in other words gives us a handle on what god is like and for me it is a very powerful and moving story and it's very easy to to make fun of it i know and i i quite enjoyed your way of doing it but the point is there is something deep there that's saying in effect that this is really about the illumination of the human situation it's about a framework which allows us to find meaning it's about the inhabitation of suffering with meaning and dignity and it's about living with hope now i realize that these are all to do with non-empirical things like meaning and value and so on but again the point is we are human beings who need these things i'm not saying that the need generates the reality i'm saying that it does connect up with some very deep things about who we are and so for me the christian narrative is really about enabling us to journey through life with meaning and dignity and suffering and above all with hope for the future so that's the way i read it now of course one could argue that the logic does not seem to make sense because there are certain over-interpretations of this but for me there is something there that really is speaking very deeply into the human situation and saying this actually enables us to live a meaningful life even when going through times of suffering and despair yep okay fair enough fair enough i would point out uh that of course jews and and muslims who presumably believe in the same god but not accepting jesus as a savior or who was resurrected or any of that and it seems to me uh jews and muslims have the same equally deep thoughtful existentially purposeful worldview without the jesus story at all so clearly it's possible of course it is but i'm trying to say what is distinctive about christianity without making any imperialistic claims about it okay all right as a follow-up to that we're now sort of officially shifting into the questions that you send in so please do uh text them or use the youtube page to share your questions we'll try to get to as many as we can but this is a good follow-up to what we were just talking about dr mcgrath someone is asking uh when you came to discover christianity at oxford uh why is it christianity you believe in as opposed to islam or buddhism or any other religion for that matter i think the question line behind that is maybe you just reach for the nearest cultural variant in other words something that is there in culture and that i think is a very interesting point i mean it could be argued against atheism simply something that you reach for in western culture it's not an option elsewhere but for me here's what drew me to christianity rather than anything else i make the point i'm making no judgement about morality or anything i'm saying for me this is what did the trick here is what uh i often thought when i was an atheist if there is a god then god is up there in eternity i am down here in history and time and if there is a god and if god is up there in eternity that has no relevance to me whatsoever in space and time and that's why this christian idea of incarnation which is you know so important for christians is basically about a god entering into history and inhabiting it and that to me really change that if that idea is right and obviously you know we have to discuss that but if that idea is right it's a game changer because there's talking not of a distant disinterested god but of a god who inhabits history who is compassionate who knows what it's like to suffer who knows what it's like to go through everything that history throws about us so that for me was something that really stood out as distinctive and interesting and meaningful so one thing i want to talk about is just general idea of a big picture which gives us so much intellectual resilience but that idea of the incarnation is what made christianity stand out for me not simply the nearest cultural option but rather this seems to be something that really made sense to me would you like to interact with us well i mean i was once a believer so i kind of i understand yeah you know when when you're in that world view that bubble like i was at pepperdine university i went in my undergraduate years um and uh you know everybody there was a christian most of them evangelical and you know it sort of all made sense internally coherent logical and so on until you get out of the bubble and you sort of encounter other world views like well that makes sense of course it helps when you're in your 20s to be able to do this sort of bounce around trying different ideas and uh but it seemed to me taking classes like in cultural anthropology and and and seeing what and watching all those joseph campbell videos and the books and all that stuff like well all these people are like me they they believe absolutely in this thing that i i never even heard of this before and they're completely committed to this world view that gives them purpose and meaning so mine can't be really right it's just something i happen to believe and none of them are really right in that that sense they're just right sort of for you personally okay fine uh but still i kind of sense that you you would like some element of truth to it it's really jesus really did incarnate god really incarnated in the world as jesus and he really was killed and he really was resurrected right so i mean the point you're making is very interesting because in effect are you saying that we all inhabit some bubble as a question of choice or all are all the bubbles we inhabit to a skeptic simply equally meaningless well i mean i'm just going back to mine on the basis of your assumptions you cannot inhabit any bubble yes well you can inhabit the the big bubble what's that the science science no no science you're just saying science is where it is now we've established i think that science could be in a very different place in the future in which case not bubble burst not not really nearly very different it depends on which area of science or but let me pull back really what we're talking about is what i call enlightenment humanism or secular humanism it's a world view that's you know that that's loaded with all kinds of beliefs that you and i mostly share you know democracy and equal rights and so forth um and and and that's that's good enough it's yes it's a kind of a bubble but it it measurably works better than other forms that have been tried in the past so i think there's progress both scientifically and culturally politically socially so i mean it it it is a bubble and you feel it's a meaningful bubble that we can inhabit and you're not bringing your skeptical razor against this and saying what is actually the evidence for thinking oh i do i do for example i used to be in favor of the death penalty now i'm against it i used to be against gun control now i'm in favor of some gun control uh and i've bounced around on the abortion issue you know now i'm pro-choice i'm probably still going to be pro-choice but i can see the pro-life argument so it depends you know new evidence comes in it's like okay that's a good argument yeah i'm going to change your mind about that so it depends so it's not a it's not a logic it's not a logic type compartment bubble um dr shurmur we talked earlier about religion um you know sort of subsiding in north america but in the global south i think the church is growing uh and quite rapidly generally this relates to a question someone has sent in uh you wish for a world without religion isn't that position a way to erase cultural identity whether it be muslim aboriginal black or asian identity and colonializing it under the hood of enlightenment western thought right yeah go [Applause] a couple of middle-aged white guys telling everybody what they should believe oh boy oh yeah okay well look you know i'm kind of libertarian on these things you know believe whatever you want i don't i don't want to take away anybody's identity i care about what's true right so if you're making a claim a truth claim then i want to know what's your evidence is it really true if you're saying well it's true for me okay fine but but what are the consequences of this this is why this is why i'm a supporter of ayan hersey alley this is not just interesting cultural differences between muslims in somalia and americans it it's it's not that you know they're generally mutilating girls they're marrying them off you know in these arrange america this is terrible this is not good for women and we have to be able to stand up and say that it's wrong it's it's not as good it's it's less it's less progressive in that sense so you know on one hand yes i respect other people's cultures but not if they're hurting people if they're killing people if you know these kinds of things are there that's a problem but isn't there an issue here i mean the questioner may overstate but isn't one of the main concerns that's brought against enlightenment these days that in effect it's about the ethnocentric imposition of western european values globally as if these are self-evidently correct and isn't there isn't there a real issue there but in effect privileging one culture over others well okay i mean there's a reason why democracy has spread up to we have 120 democracies now in the world there was zero in 1900 women couldn't vote anywhere except for pitcairn island where the bounty mutiners went that was it you know and women couldn't vote in america until 1920 you know so people want autonomy they want freedom they want to be able to participate in their own destiny they want control over their bodies this is why women have fought for reproductive rights for so long and it's been such a struggle and certain cultures don't want to let that happen and i i think i'm willing to say they're wrong you can call it european colonialism whatever i don't care ask the people there what would you prefer and and they will tell you i would prefer you know to not be sick and i prefer not to have cancer i would prefer to have my body intact i'd prefer to make my own choices rather than somebody else make my choices most people you know would say that well i i'd agree with them just worried about this the sense you know we've got right and you guys are wrong i think there's there's just this issue of um uh in effect you know cultural privilege and i'm just i'm just nervous about this i'm sure that yeah you know there are good things i'm just worried about this imposition of our values on somebody else even though i agree with what you're saying yeah yeah i mean it's sort of a classical liberal libertarian whatever i am i don't like the labels but uh i mean for the most part i'm a little concerned about so much intervention into other cultures but american foreign policy i'm talking about here you know just let people do whatever they want unless they're committing genocide then we have a moral obligation to go in and do something about it but i agree imposing our culture on other people if they seem like they're doing their own thing and you know they have their own autonomy fine but if they're violating civil rights this is why we impose economic sanctions on countries like north korea because everybody agrees that's a bad way to treat people everybody except them well them the one guy you know i mean if you ask the north koreans would you rather live in south korea or north korea look on the globe at night you can see the difference look at the heights north koreans are three four inches shorter than south koreans they have crappy diets they they're they're impoverished they don't want to live like that it's questionable about whether we should march our troops in there to stop them i agree that's a questionable thing to do but in the long run it would be better if they were democracies if it was a democracy again for you dr schermer but i know you both will interact with this does it bother you that you can answer how the world works with science but never why we're here well i don't think that's true i mean we have a pretty good idea of why we're here i mean kind of an understanding of evolutionary theory tells us you know we're here well this is the point of talking selfish gene you know i mean it's the body is the genes way of carrying on immortally in that sense or we can derive purpose in a in this sense that the laws of nature you know dictate certain systems operate a certain way what's the purpose of a star its purpose in life is to convert hydrogen into helium that's what it lives for and it does it really well under certain temperatures so that's about as simple as it gets and from there you kind of start to scale up to organisms and their purposes to survive and reproduce and flourish and so on and then we just happen to be lucky to have a big brain to add other layers like music and art and things like that and so from there you can just kind of build a purposeful worldview out of this kind of you know sort of the laws of nature it seems to me that's answering the why a why question i'm not sure what the question is that because in evolutionary theory they make a difference between proximate and ultimate answers you know the proximate answer for why something tastes sweet is because of the molecules on your tongue and so forth the the ultimate the why answer is because in an evolutionary environment where uh fruits are at once rare and nutritious it's better if they taste good because you want more of them you know that that so that's kind of a why i think we can do that for the all the way up but it's a hypothesized why because we don't observe that it's an interpretation of what we're actually seeing and i mean isn't aren't you just really redefining why in terms of an extension of how well i don't know i mean it's sort of a linguistic game i guess what do you mean by why i mean that's why we use the word the ultimate explanation versus proximate explanation these are just words what do you mean by what does somebody mean by why you know what but don't you think i mean for example let's take dawkins book selfish gene which i admire in many ways but i mean i i'm struck by the fact that the conclusion almost seems to contradict everything that's there before this idea that we are able to resist our our genetic heritage so to speak i mean the issue therefore is why would you want to do that what is distinct about us it's almost like there's this issue that somehow we want to be free and be able to do our own thing and never resist this yes and the language of um in effect the tyranny of replicators actually involves value judgments this is not simply what's happening it's bad we need to resist it so in fact it's imposing almost like a moral framework on what is meant to be yes and any moral process yeah i'm interested in just yeah i mean i i i very much enjoy interacting richard dawkins but i think there's a kind of imposition here of a moral framework which i don't see itself coming from a scientific presupposition yes i think it can be most scientists probably not agree with me on this the sort of the is odd question but but if you start with like robert trevor's um kin selection theory and reciprocal altruism parent offspring conflict all these models that were laid down in the 70s that dawkins kind of put together in the selfish gene uh from that you can show how my being nice to a fellow group member uh either someone i'm genetically related to or someone i know intimately and we're going to interact for our whole lives i i it's actually the self most selfish thing i can do is to be nice and to be helpful and to be a good team member a good cooperator a trustworthy person have a a reputation of being somebody you can count on because that's the best way for for me to have help when i need the help not in a cold calculated way because you know the psychopaths who do this in a calculated way but don't feel it you know they get found out you can kind of tell when somebody is a genuine friend or if they're just using you you can tell from all sorts of cues so my argument is that uh is that it wasn't enough to pretend to be a nice person you actually have to believe it yourself you got to feel good get a little hit of dopamine when you make that that donation to the charity like ooh i got a little heated dope uh and i'm i'm claiming that's a that's also an evolved characteristic because emotions drive behavior the emotions evolved to get us to do certain things like hunger gets us to go out and get food and you know lust gets us to go out and have sex and and you know and being nice gets us to go out and interact with other people in a way that gets them to interact positively with us reputation and so on i'll also scale up now it's harder when you don't know anybody and in a population of you know billions or you know millions in a nation i don't care about the people in somewhere you know so so you have to you have to tweak the social system to make you care this is why nonprofits always put one child one face one name you know if they show somebody a picture of ten thousand starving kids in the sedan or whatever they get this many donations if they put a picture of you know little endugu there and he plays soccer and he's starving and your dollar a month will oh the donations go way up that's a trick they're tricking the brain into making you think that person is an honorary friend or family member and then you want to be nice so again it's the inner demons the better angels they're they're there so go back to the question though i mean one of the things that really interests me is this i mean i would say science is very very good telling us how we came to be here but it doesn't answer the question why we're here now you might say in fact that that is a spurious question but again it's interesting and important for us so i mean surely we have to keep this this language of why open even though it might not be a scientific issue so i guess the question i'm really opening up in discussion with you i think this is really a question about science rather than religion is in effect whether science is because of the way in which it works is actually unable to engage these existential issues and therefore if we're able to answer those questions about value meaning and so on in effect we are going beyond science which would you say is therefore wrong in trying to deduce these or do you think science is able to kind of generate these questions of meaning and value which are psychologically so important to us as human beings i do yes i take a whack at this in the last chapter of my next book kevin's on earth uh out january 9th pre-orders available on amazon uh and there's actually a lot of research on uh there's a whole new industry called positive psychology and there's a whole slew of these books on happiness what makes people happy and so we now have some pretty good data uh you know meaningful work uh family a loving relationship um and some kind of spiritual or you know sort of transcendent kind of thing that you do whether it's meditation or long walks on the beach or prayer something like that um and uh let's see what was the uh there was a fourth one there uh it's a meaningful work family relationships and you know hobbies things like this things to do kind of elevates people but then there's also research that shows that there's a difference between being happy and being purposeful or meaningful because it turns out a lot of the things we do don't make us happy it's not fun to do a lot of things like i'm a cyclist right and most of the rides i do with these these guys that ride really hard they're not fun at all it's a suffer fest i'm miserable i can't wait to be done but when i'm done i'm really i feel really good you know and and you know you know have kids kids it's stressful you know marriage stressful and jobs you know these things aren't mostly fun but they they make you feel better in the long run like so on one of this research by roy baumeister that you know the people that that ca become caretakers for their elderly parents it is not fun i've done this for two of my four parents i have step parents and it is just hugely stressful but it made me feel like i'm a better person for it and so that's different happiness is different from meaningfulness so even there i think we can say well what is it that makes people feel like they have a purposeful meaningful life well here's some things you could do you know that was the other one like working for a charity a non-profit doing something you're not paid for so it's in a different category so i mean i just take him by meister seriously i mean now which i do i think he's very very important he's saying in effect that the issues of for example value generation this issue of who we are this issue of agency and so on this issue of our own sense of self-worth are our generations of these ideas which in effect go beyond the empirical are are you as a skeptic saying these are simply constructions which allow us to get through or do they actually have significance beyond ourselves beyond ourselves it depends what you mean by that uh because you know i for me this is all it is it's just us on this planet that's it not external okay i've expressed myself badly okay um i want to be happy so i decide if i do this this and this i'm going to be happy therefore that is what i do or i feel there is some something deeper out there which is the way things are and therefore i'm under some obligation to respond to that which might not make me all that happy or that might but it's this sense that actually there's something beyond me in that sense of not something i've constructed but something that is there and i'm under some sort of obligation to try and work within that system yeah i think that the sense of transcendence we could we could argue that it's in our human nature to want these things and that human nature comes with the species so it isn't just you know people born here they're just everybody of our species has these certain characteristics of human nature you know language development color color vision and so on but also a moral sense yeah and and all these other emotions we have there's a whole suite of characteristics of our human nature that you get by dent of just being born human so that's transcendent of me and you personally say transcendental culture it's there inside of us it's at least half of our nature i'm going to uh just we're running out of time to prove whether god exists or not i thought i already took care of that we only have a few minutes left so i'm going to ask uh one final question from my phone and then ask you both to give you know a three or four minute wrap-up statement if you will and then i'll close us off so here is the last light question how do you define good and evil why is your definition correct and not someone else's so if both of you could tackle that just in the way that you want to and then when you've both done that i'll ask you to give a wrap-up you go you go for it um the temptation is that i simply make good and evil my own personal construct so in effect i say that's what i think is good that's what i think is evil these are my ideas and they are ultimately generated by me in pursuit of my own self-interest or indeed of the social groups to which i belong in other words this is the ethics of an in-group of which i am a member and for me the big question is can i stand outside that and find a position which allows me to say this is what good is is what evil is and i'll tell you for me one of the concerns i have is that we are moving towards situation where we're unable to use that word evil in other words that we are we are in effect moving towards this idea that we say you know everybody's good in some different ways and one of the points that c.s lewis made during a book he wrote during the second world war was that he was deeply concerned that in effect the british educational system was creating this notion that all people were equally good and therefore the use of the word evil was unjustified as a result there was no way of turning to nazi germany and say that is evil and i think that's a very important point so for me i would want to say that we need a moral framework beyond us to be able to begin to answer that question and for me um you know from a christian perspective human human beings are enormously important that there are problems yes but they're never that's enormously important and therefore this whole question of evil is very much about dehumanization reducing us to commodities as hitler did during those extermination camps where in effect they were stripped of any human value and for me that would be a very good example of what is evil we need a moral framework which allows us to value individual people and say there is something wrong about violence being done against any of those so that's how i begin to answer that question but we'll take more than three or four minutes yeah i'm sure dr shermer good and evil in three minutes that's right well so in the moral arc i start with you know my moral starting point is the survival and flourishing of sentient beings so of individual sentient beings so and i use that instead of people because you know we now know that a lot of animals are sentient and feel and suffer and as jeremy bentham said it's not can they talk or reason but can they suffer so the suffering of sentient beings is is sort of the starting point so things that lower suffering are good things that increase it or evil i don't believe there's good and evil you know it sort of in a theological sense like out there somewhere you know floating around in the ether no it's it's we're talking about behavior actions that we do and uh and there's certain things i i am willing to say are are truly evil objectively absolutely evil like link lincoln famously said if slavery is not wrong nothing's wrong and i would say about the holocaust you know if the holocaust is not wrong nothing's wrong you know i was i visited your your royal ontario museum today they have a display called the evidence room this was put together by robert jan van pelt who is a architectural historian who pieced together auschwitz through architectural um plans and how they built it and so on it's just a really moving uh exhibition and it's just you know just thinking about this because you know the whole holocaust deniers and all this stuff and i mean that that is truly evil and and our focus on the holocaust so much and the nazis and hitler and all that is because that has come to embody absolute true evil that everybody recognizes it's why it's become like a meme you know that you just you know within seconds you know the the the the accusation that you're hitler or a nazi comes in it's the end of the conversation i forget that that has some death somebody called that something but reductio ad hitler you know the moment you go you know because we all recognize i think deep down all right that is truly wrong okay so if would anybody disagree with that okay from there you can just sort of scale back now i can't i can't claim i can judge every single behavior as good or evil i mean it's very complex and contextual but we can at least start there dr schermer will you leave us with a final thought and then dr mcgrath and then i'll close us out oh yeah okay so well i've always been fascinated by this question since college and because i think it's important i mean i think it we all deeply care about not so much does god exist or not i think that's a proxy for something deeper the stuff we've been talking about you know why are we here what's the purpose and meaning of life and those are the kinds of big questions that motivate people and so you know my concern is you know people act on their beliefs so what are the beliefs and it'd be better if they were truer beliefs than false or beliefs and so that's why i think science and reason is so important it's the only tools we have to make some progress in determining what's true and from there you can then build i think a better society which is what we all want and and offer as many people as possible all people you know this a purposeful meaningful life of autonomy and and prosperity and freedom and and so forth um and so whether you get to however you get there on one level i don't care you know whatever gets you through the night you know life is hard uh but in general i think the world view that offered by science and reason is just incredibly it's uplifting it's you know it's just grandeur it's you know it's transcendent to me i mean i love going to cathedrals i go to europe my wife's from from germany and we like to visit cathedrals you know not i'm not religious but but i get even more value in going into um observatories with big telescopes to me it's just you know it's like this is like a a cathedral it puts puts us in touch with the cosmos which is everything there is thank you dr mcgrath uh well for me um science is wonderful i want to make absolutely clear i don't think it answers fundamental questions about who we are why we're here i think it actually may inform things but it doesn't determine things and so for me the issue is that science really is is engaging at a level which is to be respected but we need more as human beings that's the issue and the issue then is whether we simply make this up or whether we believe there's something beyond us into which somehow we tap and which shapes our thinking and that that's why in many ways i'm a christian because i believe there is this ground beyond us which motivates us which excites us and which is a power for doing good and i'd like to share um you phrase you're a secular humanist i mean i'm a humanist in one sense too tuba of a christian humanist which is that for human nature to reach its fulfillment it in effect needs to relate to god and when that is done that animates you it motivates you it gives you a way of understanding things but above all a motivation for wanting to do good in the world and actually you and i agree on that the importance of doing good in the world the issue i think one of the big issues is simply what is that motivating factor and for me i find that in faith which actually generates this way of seeing the world and this desire to do something about it so for me that that is why i think god remains an important idea and a valid idea and maybe it's maybe it's time we'll come back again in the future thank you [Applause] [Music] all that and our guests are going to sign books at a reception uh that follows our time together so um you're all invited to a reception and book signing at wycliffe college here on campus please join us and let's continue to talk or just eat and drink and visit uh please join me in thanking again our speakers dr michael shermer and dr alistair mcgrath thank you thank you thank you all thank you all for joining us here and thank you to everyone who joined us uh over live stream all around the world uh please watch for upcoming religion and society events you can always check wycliffecollege.ca for updates thank you you

Channel: Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto

Views: 60,550

Keywords: Dr Alister McGrath, Dr Michael Shermer, Atheism, Theism, God, Debate

Id: eScykHWO4LY

Length: 116min 5sec (6965 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017