Neil deGrasse Tyson: StarTalk Live at Kings Theatre – Science and Morality

[Music] brooklyn in the house yes whoa tonight's subject is on the topic of morality and all the ways that science might or might not inform our future judgments regarding it and we have a panel specifically tuned for that purpose people of high and low moral stature just [Laughter] let me first introduce a comedian michael ian black michael come on out not only a comedian an actor a director we've been seeing the jim gaffigan show comedy central's another period and netflix we had a wet summer white hot american summer wet hot american summer close enough i'd also like to introduce the founding editor and publisher of skeptics magazine michael shermer michael schumer come on out michael hey then excellent all right thank you michael shermer is author of the moral arc how science and reason lead humanity towards truth justice and freedom audacious of you to do such a thing who else do we have here because not all morality perhaps comes from rational thought perhaps it comes from religious thought and we'll bring out father james martin a jesuit priest father martin come on out hello he's actually the best-selling author of a jesus pilgrimage is that did i get that name right the name of that is that right uh jesus a pilgrimage this is a pilgrimage and most recently building a bridge and this is subtitled how the catholic church and the lgbt community can enter into a relationship of reflection compassion and sensitivity whoa where'd this come from will you be excommunicated tomorrow for having done this uh depends what i say tonight okay excellent how many seats we have left one seat left join me in giving a warm a warm brooklyn welcome to whoopi goldberg whoopee where is she hey all right let's do this star talk live kings theater brooklyn in the house so uh michael you've you're this is not your first rodeo with books my third round third rodeo third rodeo uh what is your sense of uh the origins of what is right and wrong do you have some thoughts about that i do um i think since you're a physicist and you have the best selling physics book of all time i'd start with physics for the moment i'm going to start with physics the second law of thermodynamics entropy the universe is running down everything dissolves hot things get cold uh organisms wear out and so forth so the first second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life which is to push back against entropy that is to go up the energy gradient by doing things with your cells by replicating by flourishing by consuming energy and so forth okay so the most selfish thing you could do would be to hoard all the resources you can be selfish this selfish gene kind of thinking but the problem with that is that if you live in a social community everybody else who acts like that it's not going to work it's going to fall apart if you're super selfish and i'm super selfish and if we're just hoarding resources from each other this is going to dissolve so the most selfish thing i can do at times that could dissolve into war and death and bloodshed it's happened simply into ein rand novels yes that's a dystopian atlas right it's a it's true well it's sort of a hobbes you know nasty brutish and short so part of life is like that but sometimes the most selfish thing you can do is to be cooperative altruistic helpful nice be a good friend be a reliable respectful person with a good reputation because that way when you help somebody when they're in need when your time comes when you need help then they're more likely to help you now it's not a it's not a cold calculation like i'm going to trick you into into thinking i'm nice and then i'm going to stab you in the back once i get your resources no because you'll know that i'm faking because we're our brains are fine-tuned to notice when people are lying or people are dissembling or where they're narcissistic in a in a inauthentic way and so it's not enough to say i'm not talking about any no no one here no no one here the brains aren't fine too enough to tell when someone's narcissistic it's those people in california no no that's where i'm from no um no it's not enough to fake being a nice person you actually have to be a nice person and not in my experience okay there's our one yeah okay we have picked out the psychopath on the panel we found him it's because it's about one out of uh three out of a hundred or so anyway uh so my argument about a hundred i know three out of 100 people are psychopaths yeah about three out of a hundred well men three out of three out of 100 men sure and then i could have told you that all right oh it's true i'm sorry to say uh okay so you're describing something that is evolutionarily pre-selected for our own survival that's right so it's not enough to fake being a good person you actually have to feel it you have to have the genuine moral emotions of of wanting to help and feeling good about that now it's not to say that human nature is we're all good because we have a dark side we have our inner demons and our better angels in competition so the whole point of structuring a civil society in a way is to nudge the incentives to get people to be nicer and knock back those super selfish tendencies and it's a constant tug and pull of what we should do in this particular community or society or whatever to get people to be nicer so you're saying to be moral is uh for our own collective survival and that is sort of self-selecting and your survival i mean it's better for you okay you may okay you maybe could can benefit by by by being super selfish and and and betraying your friends and so on yes those people can get away with it but if too many of us act like that the whole system falls apart so we've evolved the propensity where most people most of the time are nice wait so uh what number like in a culture like in a society what's the number of like [ __ ] that can handle this that's right the threshold yeah what's the [ __ ] threshold it's about really there's studies on this it's about it's about twenty percent about twenty one percent well if you go out from you know the backstabbing psychopaths out to just the night not necessarily someone who'll eat your donut when you turn around yeah that that's about like one out of five but those people most of those 20 are are reformable you can in other words if you catch if you put a mirror in front of the donut uh stand there at the company and there's two donuts okay so father father uh jesuit father um another big laugh line first uh this is not your first time on star talk i am very happy to be back you you you you came back i thank you for coming back thank you for inviting me okay yes and uh earlier we wanted to get cozy with you uh call you jesuit james that kind of sound like jesse james jesuit james whatever you want it's your show so uh does uh if you can first speak more broadly about religion certainly as manifested in a modern american society and then perhaps more specifically from the view of catholicism does does what um michael said is that embraced as something that god knows about and put in place or or do you require some other deeper infusion of understanding immorality in religious thought that's a great way of asking the question um a lot of what michael says makes sense to me and is accepted and certainly signs and faith there's no uh um sort of conflict i think at least as a for a catholic um you know for example the idea that we would have certain emotions that would lead us to do good things i would definitely agree with that and that those emotions will ultimately lead to the common good we would say in the catholic church i think the added uh gloss i would put on that uh is that um for us for a religious person those no those notions and those emotions come from god and so i also agree that there are these different forces pulling us apart and pulling in different ways and we all know that we have sort of a selfish and selfless desires and we can feel that tug of war uh and what i would say is that the desire to do good is really uh god's voice within you right i mean you don't hear voices but you feel this desire to to do something good and and that's one way that you have of helping other people and in a sense carrying out god's will so that's and what is that called that's called your conscience basically and so that's how i see it uh that god that the moral law is spoken to us uh through our conscience and then you know through reflection uh throughout thousands of years of history we have given voice to that um you know in terms of laws and the bible and things like that you know the ten commandments are kind of an expression of that for that culture back then so yeah so i mean i would agree with a lot of that okay okay but the the so what i'm curious about here is the um there are many people who are not moral so would you say that all the people who are not moral and all that which would include everyone who is justifiably in prison they as a community are without god that's what you would i'd be forced to conclude that based on your statement so that you cannot say this moral imperative is put into everyone by god it is put into some people and not others by god well i would say that actually god is with everyone right but clearly not those in prison who committed multiple murders well there may be another bad guy inside just one over their god conscience just throwing out ideas no i mean yeah i'll leave it up to jesus uh we also have um we also have free choice god gives us free will and so those people in jail who i still think god is with and you know have have consciences and souls and god loves them um you don't think some of them god just likes you know what actually i think god likes the more oh i do well no because that's true if you think about i'm for the christian who does jesus go to jesus goes to the people who are seen as in the society sinful or on the outs and who is more on the outs than an inmate on death row right who is more forgotten and so i would say that this is the person who god kind of goes out to first and i believe scott also loves the nazis there aren't they're people like both sides people hate them they are they are to quote to quote james on the outs yeah they're on the outs it's almost 2020 and everyone is looking at everything on their cell phones you need your website to be perfect on any mobile device and wix automatically formats everything from mobile even lets you refine it for a perfect experience how cool is that head to the link in the description and start your site today that's wix.com go slash star talk la la la okay forget it so whoopee yes you've you've been i'm on the outs with everybody all the time first let me let me be a fan boy here for a minute you're one of a dozen living humans who have won the grammy the emmy the oscar and the tony award and still i work every day still you work still i work every day it's a wonderful thing but you know you still got it you still gotta get up and go to work and dance for your food so i'm just fanboring a little bit there so you've you've led what i have judged to be a very real even raw uh life absorbing reality and manifesting that in the decisions you make for a greater good where do you where does your morality come from how do you decide what's right or wrong well i i judge it by my mother okay because my mom pretty much said look you can go over there and rip those people off but you can't be surprised when they beat you to death with a baseball bat now you can go and do it you can still do it but you have to take responsibility for your choice which is what you're talking about you know if you if you subscribe to the religious some religious thought you know the ideas that god is basically saying listen i'm not going to do for you i'll be here if you need me but i'm not going to do for you now not everybody wants to hear that because you you know you hear first the story god got pissed at gomorrah look what happened right old testament there's a lot of well there's a lot of smite and [ __ ] you know it's just yeah sorry father he's here to forgive us all at the end yes it depends on on which book you're you know there's so many religions and so many ideas so you have to at some point make a decision what's going to work for you you know now sometimes people end up killing people they don't mean to but they did does that make him a godless person i don't know we'll have to ask dick cheney [Laughter] so michael yeah i didn't do it back in 04 you wrote a book uh called the science of good and evil yeah why people cheat gossip uh care share and follow the golden rule yeah so clicks right it's for clicks yeah yeah that works but let me i'm just trying to get to the bottom of this yeah you spent the opening remarks saying that there's a force in our culture that leads people to be honest and moral well in our nature in our nature so whether that was sort of genetically inbred evolutionarily or imparted by god the point is it is clear that not everybody behaves this way so let me hear a little bit more about that 20 percent that can percolate up because in every office environment we know people who lie steal cheat yes and they take the paper clips they don't pay for the donut but but the point of the mirror was if you put a mirror in front of them they're more likely to pay for the donut they see themselves and that reflects literally their conscience so what what you're doing with the mirrors is is reminding them like whoopi's mother don't forget to be a good girl okay and so think of the moral sense like a language we all evolve the capacity to learn a language everybody which language you learn depends on which culture you grow up in so think of like a moral sense moral emotions are like a language we all get it just by dent of being human which thing like the the capacity to feel guilt everybody can feel guilt not having except the three percent except for the three percent yeah they're they're guiltless but but but but most of us uh now what you feel guilty about specifically depends on your culture now catholics feel guilty about certain things that protestants don't feel guilty about or both feel guilty about everything am i approximately correct not this [Laughter] catholic okay do you feel guilty about your predecessors prosecuting galileo yes i do okay just have to get that off yeah well you took it all the way back i took it all the way back in the day galileo galileo jesuit priest there you go but it wasn't until 1992 that the pope forgave galileo back in 16 early 1600s changed i'm still not over it [Laughter] so michael so what of the people who are not just simply passively or opportunistically cheaters the people who are presumably not only in the three percent who are actively aggressive yes huge armies yes to lay waste yeah are declared enemies yeah so the myth is that how do you the myth is that they're not moral in fact they're overly moral they're uber moral they the most homicides the majority of homicides are moralistic in nature they're not instrumental well i killed him to take his rolex or his car no it's the bastard scratched my car he insulted me in front of my girlfriend he cheated at cards that's why mostly men cheated at cards oh this used to be a thing in the you know right in the wild west yeah smith and wesson beats four aces so i mean there there are studies of of all these guys on death row like in the in i've studied the database in the state of uh texas they've executed five hundred and forty-five people since and only two were guilty was it i said and only two were guilty yeah well well a lot of them are yeah so probably a good 10 to 15 percent didn't do it but a lot of them did do it and when you ask them why'd you do it they don't say because i'm a bastard or an [ __ ] that you know it's like well the guy cheated he she cheated on me or he he stole my cup he insulted me in front of my girlfriend this kind of thing in other words the the the murderer is acts as in in a form of self-help justice as judge jury and executioner in one shot can i ask a question it seems like what you're saying is morality is a narrative we tell ourselves to justify our actions so to flip that around you would then say that texas the state is acting morally by killing these people and therefore if you extrapolate further any state or nation which is basically what you said uh tells themselves the narrative of they are acting morally to commit genocide that's right so it's but as a stepping back from that we go well that's not moral behavior so how do you so then it seems like morality can be anything you say it is as long as you tell yourself you're doing the right thing yeah yeah so great joke michael he's hilarious you psychopaths they have their moments you know okay so here's what happens with this here's the problem um because there are bullies the problem is people are killing each other that's the problem yes yes yes okay so yeah because of this 20 or so of free riders bullies [ __ ] you have to stand up and fight back you got to just you know just slap this guy back you have to develop a reputation you know you don't spit into the wind you don't you know take you know and so forth you gotta you gotta fight back and that's the one way like your mom said if you go steal that they're going to punch you okay kill her with a bat and i believe she was talking about robbing a baseball team i grew up in new york individuals all the way up to groups to states to nations develop this belief that comes from nature like you got to fight back you got to stand up to bullies and free riders and people that steal your stuff you got to stop them all right so then this ends up getting into this sort of just war theory when is it okay to go to war and the problem is is exactly what you said um there's a new database i've just been reading about in this book called the internationalist 500 war um statements by nations this is why we're going to war it's 500 different versions of why we should kill these people and take their stuff and it's all rationalization so everybody that commits a crime or an immoral act or whatever they don't think they're doing that they think they're doing good but what's happened over the centuries is that we've been adjusting that rationalization to be less and less hopefully violent aggressive justified violence and more and more toward international courts the u.n the hague all these kinds of international laws that said and this really is just the last 50 years you can't do that anymore war is illegal and so to get around it because you've noticed people have gotten around that over the last 50 years but but the idea is first you outlaw it like slavery you outlaw it now it still goes on but then you enforce the law and eventually it's it stops and then we stop thinking about it as an option except that you know that sounds really great but people get really pissed off when they lose a war they just they can't let it go well if you think about germany and japan i'm thinking about the us oh you're talking about us civil war and people can't let it go you know you you're dealing with it we're dealing with statues that were put up in the 50s yes well here's a yeah this is a perfect example okay the adjustment of our sensibilities these used to be heroes these martial statues honoring military men that's just not cool anymore and that's no no the the statues that have gone up were of the guys who actually broke the law they were the you know a lot of the a lot of those statues that went up were what happened he said traitors you okay all right they were trading we'll take care of it thank you sir you know we uh well let me ask let me ask our is there any sense that other animals have any sense of morality oh they did a purely human thing no no no no no other than penguins that's right the most moral animal in the world that's what we need another penguin movie yeah we didn't have enough yeah uh we know that uh chimps and bonobos uh fight a lot and then they have makeup sex afterwards so it's it's usually the females that break up the fights and you know and smooth things over they have they have all kinds of behavioral ways of calming things down after uh hostile interactions uh we know that we've seen dolphins and whales like push their wounded uh brothers and sisters up to get air um we know that elephants grieve you can see dogs that feel guilt grieve griez breathe what kind of dogs that feel guilt like if they eat too many snacks or they like yeah they steal your stuff and they you know you come in and go hey and they go you know the tail goes down but is that guilt or is that a fear of punishment or is that is or are those too distinguishable i i was visiting some folks house and we left some cheese on the table and went out for an hour it came back and the cheese was gone it was a big slab of cheese and we said where where'd the cheese go no one knew and then we all looked at the dog just just looked at the dog and the dog cowered and went behind we didn't even say anything but if you did that yeah that was that way you didn't even but but guilt guilt implies the ability to uh correct if you did that 100 times that dog would eat that [ __ ] cheese a hundred times until he tried to poop it's is is god in a thieving dog soul well there's a famous experiment by franz duvall at emory university with two capuchin monkeys in side by side capuchin monkeys these cute little they're like that yeah yeah they're like yeah yeah just anyway they're like i'm the only one who didn't know what a capuchin monkey was i didn't know but i felt like you had already got a tiny brain little monkey just tiny you know like 20 pounds okay anyway so there's two of them side by side in this cage translucent wall they can see each other and they've been trained to give a pebble to the uh experimenter who gives them a piece of food in exchange so they just learn to associate that so the pebbles are like money for exchange all right so uh in comes the experimenter you can watch this on youtube it's quite hilarious so she gives him a pebble and he gives it back to her and she gives him a cucumber slice and he's all excited oh boy he eats his cucumber slices they like cucumbers then the other one does the same thing and she gives him a grape now they like grapes even more because you know who doesn't and and so but but the first one now sees that this one got a grape and he's very excited like oh boy i'm gonna get a grape and he gets the pebble to her and she hands him a cucumber and he goes boom like this and then he's like pounding on the cage and rattling the cage while he is pissed he he can clearly see i did the same amount of work as that guy and he got paid twice as much as and that is not cool whoa no they don't have language they can't say you know i hereby protest and i'm going to union yeah but they got pooped right wait what kind of monkey is it again capuchin is there a capuchin bernie sanders that's right we're going to smooth out the income equally yeah so interesting so this is the frustration felt by not being compensated for the same work exactly right it's there and and we are evolutionarily separated from these capuchins by about 30 million years so this goes way back in mammals so it's a social social mammals that you have to have a sense of of right and wrong in order to get along with your other fellow group members so so father is the does the catholic church have some definition of or operational discussion a way to describe what is just as pure evil well i'm evil in general as was what distances you from god or an act that that that itself distances you from god and it's contrary to you know what we would say would be the moral law yeah but there's different kinds of evil too so all right so i'll grant that but historically what we may have judged to be evil has evolved right so there are people not blaming you for this but we can say without hesitation there are many people who justified slavery as the moral thing to do to help out the the african savages okay as a moral imperative and so and now that is not it's not viewed in that context so some something is evolving a sense of morality and judging what is evil and what it isn't what what is that wait wait wait what are you doing what's matt well i i never heard that explanation i always thought it was like look we can get them cheap and they went and grabbed people which makes it immoral are you a descendant of ham your skin is darkened and you are cursed and so this is in christianity but so when does the when does when does the moral compass stop because there's or is it always in flux well depends doesn't it that's what i'm asking well you would hope that it's always evolving that it's always improving that you know as as the community reflects on what is good and what is bad that we have a greater sense you know as one gets when one ages right or gets older and so we see that that's clearly immoral now and evil which you're right they didn't see that back in the day and also it was in the bible you had slaves in the bible you have slaves in the new testament and so they not only looked at it as uh you know kind of justifiable but something that's in scripture and so now with more not only that not from my read of scripture there is no indictment of the possession of slaves so well it's not even just a neutral thing there's not even any yeah i mean and negative statements right right and so the question is to your point michael about you know how do we discern and how do we develop i think as an individual uh can develop a sense of right and wrong and kind of deepen it right as you get more mature and understand more about the world i think a community can do that too right and so a community can look at a statue and say there's this person who now we no longer you know want to honor right because we are developing our sense of morality but if if if this is laid down by god shouldn't it be in eternal truth if you went to heaven and you had slaves and then you were like i was a great person i had these slaves and that was the moral thing to do and then a hundred years later people like you shouldn't have slaves does that person get kicked out of heaven that yeah yeah [Laughter] that's a good oh and that's that's a very important question i mean how much of and i don't have an easy answer that how much of morality is culturally conditioned and is also conditioned in the time that you live and i sometimes wonder what are the things that we are doing today that 100 or 500 years from now will be seen as you know unbelievably immoral well i i sometimes think that you know candy corn well i think we can all agree on that the cultural change though is not random it's not just cultures are just bouncing around believing different things it's moving in a certain direction the ark is bending towards justice thank you thank you neil available at fine book tours everywhere that that is to say the moral art moral sphere is expanding to include more people as equal under the law under rights under treatment dignity respect and so on such that um that more and more we are tending to think of people that are different from us whoever that is are equal to us uh and that's what's been changing it's taken centuries to do it but it's slowly gradually getting so civil rights women's rights gay rights and that sequence that was in that sequence that's right that's how that unfolds so the so father coming out in defending lgbtq rights is a big step because somebody on your team that comes out and says we are going to treat these people equally whatever your argument is if god created them all equally i don't care that's good that's part of the step to one more step and the moral arc the moral arc we're getting there this is star talk live from king's theater brooklyn new york we are talking about the science of morality so michael can can science inform or even determine human values if that's the case that's opposite or very different from what so many people have learned or been taught throughout their lives you attend some religious service and and your most people's understanding who are religious is that your morality comes from god and so and you're it seems like you're not even going there you've got other explanations for this so how how is it that facts that drive science can inform values which are the products of our feelings and of society that we create yeah so this is the hard problem um almost all scientists and philosophers say you can't and they always turn to the great philosopher david hume who said you can't derive an ought from an is this is the way nature is that doesn't mean it ought to be this way we can change it okay in other words scientists can describe nature would not offer not use science to inform how nature ought to be that's right okay so i would like to challenge that a little bit in this sense just think about say mathematics or or physics again we'll go back to that if you're doing your calculations correctly there are certain things you will find out that are more likely to be true than other things so say kepler discovering that planets travel in elliptical orbits rather than circles given that he was doing his calculations correctly and planets really do travel in ellipses he could hardly have discovered anything else okay so this is true in biology had darwin not discovered the theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution somebody else would in fact somebody else did alfred russell wallace and then so i i would say the same thing with with the moral sense what we've been doing for centuries is discovering that there's certain ways of structuring a society a community of people that live together in that that are more harmonious to our collective and individual uh well-being our our survival and flourishing as sentient beings you're saying we're discovering a pre-existing yes fact that are there in nature it's there in our nature we desire to be free to be autonomous to have to be treated equally that is for me to convince you to be nice to me i have to appeal to your sense that i will be nice to you back this is the golden rule it is this is the kind of thing that's really whoopee what i i think i don't understand what you're saying because that means she doesn't understand well yeah okay because if it is in fact morally in us because of science to do and make these decisions why is it that it isn't it hasn't morally been able we haven't morally been able to treat women equal to men we haven't been able to if it's if it's a science if it's in our if it's in there and it's in our dna why is this why is it so hard to do that that's what i'm asking okay good question yeah my answer is is that 2017 is the best year in the history of human civilization for women it's never been this good it's got a long ways to go you about to get i wouldn't say that i i might i might look that back a little bit i'll let me you wouldn't put it in 2015 or so i got this i got this if you were female or if you were black and you walked into a time machine is there any time in the past where you would say yeah things were better than than today but that but neil is that there is there give me a give me a year where that was the case i can't give you the year but i'll tell you egypt seemed a lot more interesting when cleopatra was running [ __ ] okay i'm just saying she seemed that she seemed to have it together and you know yeah but then i guess but like jews wouldn't go back that's right yeah that's right very few jewish women would go back and change it around and make it work see if women ran things we would actually i i believe if women actually ran things we could help men adjust to a lot of things typical woman i know a typical woman would be much nicer about it but so let me get back to a time that we generally think of as the scientific revolution after the the the scientific method was advanced by galileo francis bacon and the enlightenment that generally we think of uh in europe where science flourished culture flourished art flourished there were wars and things in the rest of that but that's kind of has always been happening the rest of this was different and there was great cathedral building church building over that time would you say that over that time there was moral progress yes absolutely i mean just what about some examples okay abolition of slavery abolition of torture abolition of capital punishment except for the united states uh civil rights women's rights gay rights these things have all happened go back to well okay so it begins with the idea that the universe is discoverable and it's governed by natural principles and laws that we can understand that starts with the physical sciences into the biological sciences into the social sciences the idea that a society a political system is a system we can study and and look at it and go look these systems are better than these over here democracies are objectively better than dictatorships and theocracies by every measure and this is my point these are experiments just to be clear objectively better would mean it spreads happiness more well-being survival flourishing rights all that stuff okay our mutual friend the late great carl sagan has a great chapter in the demon hunter world on these kinds of experiments we have 50 different states with 50 different laws constitutions different gun control laws different alcohol laws and so on these are experiments that we can look and go social experiments social experiments so this is this is called the comparative method of natural experiments you can't control the variables in a lab but we can look at what happened so just go back to 1970s korea so north and south korea are divided in the early 70s they split economically and politically one went super dictatorship the other liberal democracy you can see the difference from space one is dark and impoverished the other one is light and enlightened the south koreans are five inches taller than north koreans okay so a liberal democracy is objectively better than a dictatorship that we can measure and say with confidence and not just democracies but all these other concepts of of like civil rights and civil liberties just ask the people that are affected would you rather live in which you are treated equally under the law or not of course people say yes i want to be treated equally okay when is that it's not perfect so if our metric is it has to be perfect we're not there and we're never going to be in utopia but it's better than it was last year better than it was 20 years ago better than a century ago and so on your time machine over on average on average so so father is there uh what do you see as the okay whoopi what i'm just going to say it again you know if you go back and trace when you're talking about science female scientists in galileo's time were not they were burned as heretics and women which is yeah see the h word is because i was talking to you but but i just i i just think to myself yeah lots of things have changed but some things have taken an inordinately long time in doing and education for people who are not wealthy women for women i mean science and and all of these things you all are talking about are things that kept women out i'm just wait wait so let me add something to what she said now yes i want to back up my woman here okay if what you guys are saying is true it shouldn't have required centuries of bloodshed to get to the bits of equality that we have today it should be it should have flowed naturally you martin luther king would not have would have had to march on washington you wouldn't have had to have all the women's demonstrations you wouldn't have had to have the gay rights movement because it would have just been natural for people to think of equality that way and the fact that it has been so delayed thousands of years of history argues against your thesis and father your thesis that this is somehow deeply within us and that it is an inevitable consequence okay no but i yeah can i respond okay am i did i get your back no i and i yes i think that's i mean i think that's i think that's a very important question but i also think that it is deeply within us but it is also deeply within us to choose the wrong thing i mean we're also we are i mean it's a word that's not popular but we are sinful people in many ways and we have uh you know subjugated people out of it is about power we have been selfish we have been selfish as community towards another community so yeah it's taken a ridiculously long time to get to the place of women's rights and and african-american rights and lgbt rights because you know we are you know as you were saying the beginning there are those conflicting forces that we see i would say on us on a small scale within us you know you you struggle with selfish and and selfless as the society does um i also think a lot of it has to do not only with power but we were talking about that statue of teddy roosevelt in front of the natural history museum who we see as other right who is the other right and as we understand more and more people as as as ourselves right there's there's no us and them there's just us then we can come to understand what their needs are and yeah it's terrible it's taken so long but i think that's a lot of that is human nature and our own you know terrible sinfulness but also morality is deep in there this book trying to put an olive branch out between the catholic church and lgbt community i would say most of the nation's resistance to the equality of that community if you part the curtains has religious foundation that is absolutely right okay so they are making a moral judgment yes they are private lives right and so one of the things is that what this is what put you on the on the [ __ ] list of the of the right wing conservative christian right right yeah but but in 20 years you wouldn't be on the [ __ ] list because no one's going to they'll all be gay [Laughter] an army of [ __ ] conservatives yeah and so that and so the challenge and so the challenge for people uh is to be able to see uh you know in my case in the catholic church lgbt people not as other anymore you know not as not as the them but as the us that's why you wrote this book yeah and you know i mean part of it is this is what this is what jesus does in the gospels jesus is always going out to people on the margins right the roman centurions margins of the day and the martial exactly right which were different than the margins of of our time and he's getting you know to use a theological term he gets [ __ ] for it too so and i think that but think about think about how fast this has happened for the gay community versus say women african-american slavery death penalty and so on which took centuries to change you know the the you know the the the the equal opport equal marriage you know laws and all that changed pretty quick once that started cascading in other words there's kind of an acceleration as one moral movement uses the techniques and methods and strategies of the previous moral revolution because they know they can see what works so like when when martin luther king jr did his uh you know marches and so on these were calculated to do certain things to change the laws and subsequent generations of moral crusaders can look and see what worked now let's try that it turns out violence doesn't work almost never works father you make an argument about a two-way bridge could you describe that from your book yeah so i say that the um there are two groups there's the institutional church which is the hierarchy and the bishops and anyone who works in any sort of official capacity in the church including lay people who would run schools women and men and there's the lgbt in this book it's very sort of specific the lgbt catholic community and the illness is on the institutional church to reach out to the lgbt community because it is the institutional church that is marginalized the lgbt catholic but it is a two-way bridge because the lgbt community you know has to kind of you know enter into a dialogue as well you know even though it's more difficult you know because they're the marginalized ones and so it's a it's an attempt to try to build a bridge between those two groups uh and it frankly just to start the the conversation and it's it's a difficult conversation as you know as since i'm on the [ __ ] list but the point is you know i think i would i would say this you know i would say this i think your point is a good michael that that it is up to see it is up to the the religious person to to stand for the other at least in the in the christian point of view it is up for the the jesus always takes the side you know desmond tutu said that the simplest way god sides with the outsiders period right and so it's actually up to religion which unfortunately has been used against the outsiders you know as an excuse right but the only time in history that's happened what's that sorry i said the only time in history that's happened well no but i mean you look at i mean for example like you look at the reverend dr martin luther king you know who comes out of this this christian tradition right and who uses his uh his christian background king's mentor his his sort of role models were gandhi and non-violent yeah social change because non-violence works faster and better than violence to bring about social change and that itself has progressed over the last half century so let me make one final statement that'll bring a heap of hate on me just because i i don't have enough tonight conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s yeah that's probably right yeah just think about how people talked about jews and blacks and women in the 1950s than now yeah so we've still we've all okay i know it's not we're not there yet but but but it's it's we've all shifted that the whole moral zeitgeist has shifted through a thousand different little uh avenues even yeah i mean today you can hook up in a car and nobody would care in the 50s you were judged that's right yes if it's a kia i'm still judging this is star talk live from king's theater brooklyn new york we are talking about the science of morality with best-selling author michael shermer lately author of the moral arc he's also publisher and and uh editor i guess editor-in-chief of skeptics magazine i doubt it [Laughter] oh man i've never heard that one [Laughter] still enjoyable though we're with father james martin he's a jesuit priest his second time on star talk we love him to death we have a special guest appearance at whoopi goldberg whoopi thanks for coming out for this wow yeah uh we got michael ian black michael thanks yep and also uh eugene merman eugene so eugene i have a one-line bio for you in my notes here it says um you're the voice of gene belcher in bob's burgers and i thought surely there's more on his resume than that but we'll accept the one-liner as a then i realized this is part of the eugene merman comedy festival so that's a whole thing with his name so eugene thanks for keeping comedy i don't know whether life would be bearable without the the the legions of comedians you bring to bear on all of society's challenges thank you thank you neil it's it's probably safe to say we're the real heroes [Laughter] [Applause] so in your book you you have a chapter on lgbt rights can you comment on uh if science has anything to say about that well okay so first at the very least if the science informs us that it's not a choice it's you're just born that way that tells us that condemning it as a wrong choice is itself wrong and so that at least gets us a step in the right direction if we know something about biology and embryology and hormones and so on and and you know so there's this great spectrum uh in in uh you know sexual choices and preferences and so not choices preferences that's why we use that word it's just how it is so or orientation uh then we can at least be more respectful so i mean so in the book i talk about the witch theory of causality if you believe that burning women at the stake for cavorting with demons in the middle of the night as an explanation for storms and diseases and plagues then you're either insane or you live 500 years ago now nobody burns women as witches in the west anyway it's very rare elsewhere and so we've been debunking essentially wrong ideas mainly science you know that that that blacks are inferior that women can't run companies and countries these are wrong ideas that jews poison the wells or cause the plague or the stab in the back in the first world war these are all wrong ideas and we debunk them to the point where no one even talks about it anymore you don't even think about it these are crazy ideas and so no i don't poison wells if that was the question so whoopi you you've had some lgbt activism in your day yes i have and and so so so here is someone who has been active and can comment on the success or failure rate of these efforts well what's interesting is that what you're saying about science and what science knows and has been hesitant to say definitively this is what is this is why you're wrong science hasn't come out and actively fought the prejudice people have and in part you're catching a lot of [ __ ] because when people think religion you know there are religious things you know people keep pointing to things in the bible saying well it says man shall not lie with men well i always tell people at my shows have you read isaiah have you read the rest of it because one of them is you know any man who has sex with an animal shall be put to death but so shall the animal my question what did the animal do you know what i mean anyone who curses their parents shall be put to death yeah half the room is gone it's so adultery too you have yes i mean you have you have this idea of what is moral and what is religiously moral and what is scientifically moral and trying to get the two to reconcile seems to be difficult because you just said as science knows you know it isn't a choice you are born this way i was talking and i explained i often get into trouble because i say well if you believe in the bible you believe in adam and eve you say well what happened god said hey adam what's up adam's saying i don't know i'm feeling some kind of way that was the black god yeah what'd it be like [Laughter] that's the tv black guy very good god says what i know what's wrong you need some company if you believe okay what is it adam says god says take a deep breath this is going to hurt goes in gets a rib pulls it out pulls it out of the man atom and structures a female which says to me that god if you believe in god and you believe in the bible gave us a sexual duality in us so if you believe in god this is god-given this is god-given so i say this in my shows and people freak out they don't they say that's not what god that's not god so i don't know how to get both hands to stand up for community that desperately needs both your health yeah very important point thank you just to sort of still hit that but move it a little further it's not only the lgbt community and you know the woman within the man the man within the woman there's also lots of dialogue about whether contraception is immoral especially from the catholic church and also abortion now here's what's interesting to me i have conversations with my wife about this often so you have um generally the people who are anti-abortion if you part the curtains there's a religious foundation for their argument but in principle you could make a a just a non-killing another human argument without reference to god because thou shalt not kill is the one of the ten commandments that's made it into secular law so the rest nobody really well stealing feelings yeah sure but graven images and stuff right yeah yeah that's that's it was very in its day yeah that was a thing but just to be clear i'm currently having sex with my neighbor's wife that's cool legally right [Applause] so so uh so what i what i want to understand here is there's a moral judgment placed coming from a religious community on abortion yet one can say you are killing a living human being whether or not it's yet sentient or or viable and you can say um that the woman's body is her own so all of these for her to choose so so all of these have arguments some of them more religiously conceived than others can you now project into the future where morality will land on that spectrum well we're about to go to the break and neil wants to resolve the abortion issue yes in 30 seconds or less are you can you invoke are you going to evoke science well you can invoke okay you can you can look at the trends which has been more and more toward the autonomy and liberty of individuals to make their own decisions so the abortion case is a special one in this case because you know the fetus is at least a potential human but a higher moral principle is that the women should be free to choose because of a whole host of historical reasons and that there's certain moral values that are higher than others but you're making a moral judgment by saying uh the the woman has the higher moral principle yeah well so what i'm invoking is is the historical tendency for uh liberal democracies to give more people more rights in more areas of life over time and so so again we're back to the ark the arc so women having reproductive control over their uh choices uh is a step in the right direction because for thousands of years men have lorded it over women to make that choice for them and that is a kind of slavery it's kind of controlling somebody else so moving away from that now you know admittedly the abortion issues complicate you know you can be against abortion and pro-choice you can say i'm not gonna do it but i recognize your uh free freedom to choose what you want to do well that's that's the that's the gay marriage issue so if you don't like gay marriage then just don't get gay marriage that's right it's not it's not a requirement kind of yeah not requiring it of you for this to be to be the case um did you just kill my joke [Laughter] if you don't believe in gay marriage don't marry a gay person that's the joke oh yeah that is how you should have phrased it neil [Laughter] um so so here's here's a point to that to those issues okay um religion is clearly bringing a pre-existing um foundation of moral judgment to these issues clearly okay recognizing father as you've said candidly that it can evolve as we go forward by discussion or analysis or whatever if science up till now you you've mentioned science only in the context of informing people about how they might make a decision but at no time are you saying that the science itself is saying what is moral well i am saying that actually i haven't quite gotten you haven't said it like explicitly so if i ask you if science has the power to shape morals should it well yes because wouldn't that then carry in just the way different religions carry in to this table when they carry in maybe the biases or preconceptions of the scientific community at that time go back when was the tuskegee experiment the 40s in the 1940s 30s medical doctors giving out not treating syphilis when they could have leading the men black men to believe that they were getting medication so that they can study the progress of the disease yet not telling them this is like a moral failure of the medical community who were conducting a scientific experiment but isn't that partially because the moral failure was not of the scientists but of the time because they these people these men were not seen as human beings and that's but if it's already in you why don't why why didn't it become a moral decision well because again we have our the the inner demons and the better angels or the sinful nature there's that other side where like as you put it we can get them cheap well there's plenty of people that are willing to to to go along with that and rationalize it with biblical arguments or we're saving their souls for christianity or whatever uh and but we don't think like that anymore because we've debunked this idea that they actually like being slaves no they don't you're wrong about that boom now sometimes you got to fight you don't get to pass the laws fight the wars whatever but once you get there what are the chances okay slavery is illegal in every country in the world all 192 countries what are the chances that any of those countries would bring it back as a legal institution no no they have you i'm i i don't even want to tell you this but you would be shocked to find out how many countries are engaged in slavery so the point here is there's whatever the country says and then there's yeah what's happening yes that's right you got people that eat bad people they just want to exploit people the point is having a law first and then enforce the law have a these are mostly in countries where the governments are weak or corrupt and they can't enforce their laws so anyway a lot of this is is there a place science should just stay out of in the moral fiber and i might even ask the same of religion if you have 10 different religions giving you 10 different moral interpretations of conduct maybe none of them should be listened to and we go to a secular analysis of it yeah i mean i think there's i think there are plenty of places i mean we have separation of church and state you know thank god in this country there are plenty of places i mean truly there are plenty of places where you know religion uh you know you can bring you are a moral person who who are who is uh sort of informed by your religion but there are plenty of times when religion does not need to be explicitly applied to a particular situation absolutely and we have also seen times when religion has been applied you know unjustly you know or immorally but i would say i mean i think the lgbt case is a good one in terms of how science informs us so this idea that which we now discard i think most you know reputable psychologists and psychiatrists uh that that it's a choice right so since people understand it as something that you're born you know as lady gaga says born that way right um yeah no it's true but she said born this way thank you well um not that way this way i'm 56 so yeah um that you know just for [Laughter] that you know we understand that it is not uh which we used to think many people used to think was a a choice and therefore a moral choice right and so therefore the person who chose that was immoral and bad and so needed to be condemned and so now i mean i think you're seeing this diminution of people you know who actually think that and the majority understand not only through through their own experience with their families and people coming out but thank god science which actually i think is going to eradicate a lot of that prejudice you know or at least at least most of it that says that this is some sort of choice and thank god so i mean in a sense that's where science can really inform i think that's a great case where science can really inform and we can see it in a lifetime a moral choice can i ask another very unfunny question that's sort of what i do both i i feel like what both of you are saying uh is that in terms of how morality developed it seems like it has to do with scarcity of resources that in order to propagate and make our species survive et cetera et cetera et cetera we need to vote co-op we need to uh cooperate um and what you're saying or what i understand morality to originate in the in in biblical writings is that it had to do with a similar thing keeping the keeping the tribe safe keeping people safe learning how to cooperate for propagation and uh and essentially harmony doesn't there come a point that's not what he said but keep going i'm not listening to what he said doesn't there come a point if everybody is harmonious and cooperating that doesn't then the uh doesn't resources become more scarce and doesn't that make us actually more likely to tip into uh entropy uh leading us back into the second law of thermodynamics back to the physicist yeah isn't it too soon to say that you know world war ii was 60 years ago that's that's less than an eye blink and it was that was the most devastating war in human history right so who are we to say that in 10 years you know it's not going to happen again i mean there's a lot of people think we're going to war with china they got a billion people there that's going to suck it's not first of all how are they going to get here who the chinese zeppelins billions just like people feared in 1910 i do want to make one one small point even if it turned out that being gay was a choice it's still not okay to oppress gay people because there's a higher moral principle that you have autonomy and freedom over your body to choose whatever you want if no one else is harmed okay so to that point i'm going to add punctuation i'm going to end this segment uh if you hadn't made that point i would have coming out of this segment because there's a point where and if you hadn't i would have i think this is the easiest case to say this about but there are probably other cases for which this applies there are times where i would declare that the science is irrelevant i was asked this from a magazine that served the gay community they said what's your stand on whether science shows that it is a choice or or or inbred and i said it doesn't matter what the science says we live in a free country at least we tell ourselves we live in a free country and for me what consenting adults do is an expression of what it means to live in a free country no matter whether science says that that's your choice or not so you should not be waiting around for that scientific result and then grabbing it and putting it forward if it says it's not a choice because if the science happened to say it is a choice then you're going to have to reject the science and say you need it on the principles of the founding fathers of this country so that would be a case where if it's about human freedom it's not about the science it's about what we choose as a secular society but do we only live in a secular society say what i said but that would be so if we only lived in a secular society you know that ends our second segment of star talk live welcome back star talk live king senator brooklyn we're going to try to see if we can expand the moral sphere of this and so let me ask you father would you say that religion on the whole has helped hindered or been neutral to this arc of moral progress that that michael talks about well i would say i'm this is going to sound very jesuitical um but that's a word that is a word is oh i like it i'm using it tomorrow [Laughter] you know but it depends do you mean the way that uh people have actually lived religion or do you mean actual religion i mean that's like that gandhi quote about right i i'd love to meet a christian one day um i think people who i think people who really live religious lives you know someone like francis of assisi or saying our day someone like pope francis you know does uh change the world for the good but there are other people who have used religion uh you know just as evilly uh in general i would say that uh religion has been a moderating influence on some of our our worst tendencies our selfish tendencies the golden rule for example but i would also say that you know religion has been used to subjugate people and religious wars in particular uh you know religion versus religion has actually led to you know great suffering i mean for example you know the the the foundations of a lot of anti-semitism in in europe you know which led to the holocaust were religiously based right and so it's a very complex question um and and once again it depends what you mean by religion and and who you're talking about and how they live out their religion so uh is there some sort of moral place you can see us heading towards again i'm on this arc concept here uh in 10 years something going on now that you say religion will be a good force in that and in 10 years that'll that'll be oh yeah i mean i i mean i know i'm you know a little biased but i think that to be very specific i think that pope francis's shift uh to a church that is more focused on mercy and compassion i mean that is his constant theme right and he's supposed to blame and just well yeah and he has said specifically uh i think that we have been talking too much about sexual morality right and i think in a sense you know everybody knows what you know that the church teaches and so i want to bring us back to the the basics which is more mercy compassion and desire for uh justice for the poor and i think uh you know that if people actually put that into action you know we'll be a lot better off and he's not afraid to to shake things up the question is again and to your point and i know it you know you've raised this a couple times the question is do we accept that or not i mean do do we as as individuals accept you know the migrants and refugees have as much place uh you know as anyone on the stage does right i mean they're individuals who are who are desirous of something good or do we individually and as a community and as a nation reject that right so i mean that that's that's the difficult thing because we are sinful and selfish and we have to work against those things do you agree with i mean i can't see how you do but father do you agree that the higher moral principle in the abortion debate is that women have autonomy versus uh an un i mean that is a very you know i thought we left abortion but but look it's gonna get this is gonna get cut out anyway but yeah you're both you're both moral authorities you're from a scientific point of view you from religious point of view i assume you both feel like you can claim the higher moral principle from your point of view so how does a layman like me go yeah he's right or he's right or in whoopi's case well but i think i think that's where your conscience comes in i mean it's not simply no no i know that old thing uh you know it's not it's not simply i mean in a sense you know it's not simply sort of an imposition of rules from the outside it's also your own conscience i mean you know one of the great things about the church that people i think forget about is is this this idea of the primacy of your conscience you know where as as one church document says you know god's voice resounds in you right and so so there's that too and it's i mean because we don't and this is one of the things that pope francis is trying to remind us of you know life is not about black and white laws right uh there are black and white laws in some cases yes or no laws but in most cases you know our lives are very gray and so it's it's a development of the conscience and the development for the christian i mean i'm sorry to focus on christianity so much on jesus and an encounter with jesus and seeing and noticing what he does and how he treats people and so one one one moves from that the degree to which you agree with pope francis may certainly be genuine but we should be reminded that he is your boss that's right clear about that um i have a few comments to make on religion um and i'm reminded of winston churchill's comment about americans you can always count on americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else and and religion do the right thing eventually eventually one of those yeah okay that was that was spike lee and you can't really do the right thing yeah oh yeah religions do come around slowly and so when the father talks about it we change our conscience it's religion is almost always lag behind by a decade or so or two from the culture that's already making the shift just think about interracial marriage remember when that was a thing yeah me neither in 1967 it was illegal in the united states it was illegal and now it's not no one even talks about it anymore and in in 1959 a poll showed that 96 percent of americans were against interracial marriage now they don't even ask the question anymore religions oppo oh they do okay well religions opposed interracial marriage now they don't what happened the culture shifted and and so the wave is like this and religion is kind of coming up behind the wave the surfer that catches it after it's already broke that's my metaphor he lives in a surfing community now yeah so is it is it are we actually talking about morality or are we actually talking about empathy because they're i think they're to go together no i'm not i don't know if they do that's why i'm asking because i think when you ask the question in 10 years i think depending on how you educate your children i grew up with trick-or-treat for unicef and because i grew up with trick-or-treat for unicef and the chocolate bars that we sold we were told this was helping children like us around the world you were selling chocolate bars to other children on halloween that's important no no no that's immoral but when i was a kid i went to catholic school and so we would have these drives to raise money for the school and also to raise money for other communities and you bring home these few pennies and that was your bit and you well you know if you did it for halloween you got a lot of money got those pennies but see people don't give pennies anymore but we felt we were we had some hand in making the world better and so i i don't know if we thought of it as being moral we just thought of it as doing the right thing to help the world so do we actually just sort of whittle this down to empathy that's a great question let me broaden it by asking do you teach this in schools can you teach morality in schools even if it's this little exercise of of a of a unicef collection i think it starts with parents siblings peers and so on it gets inculcated in culture most of the kinds of shifts we've been talking about have come from the more from the bottom up than the top down yes you do need the laws passed sometimes you need the military to go in but most of the time it's just our language changes if you look at literature from the 30s versus the 50s versus the 90s and so on comic books films novels all of it shifts the words you use the way you describe characters and all that uh just that moment when ellen says on that show you know into the microphone i'm gay or whatever where she said well that was a big step now you know 10 years later seinfeld makes a joke about you know not that there's anything wrong with it and now we laugh about it and now it's just kind of commonplace you know gay whatever dude who cares and that's how it kind of just slows it happens slow enough you don't really notice it and the other problem is the media only covers the bad stuff so for every act of violence school shootings you see on on tv there's 10 000 acts of kindness every day that go unreported so so going forward should the religious leaders the religious community work with scientists to shape to to shape this moral arc and it's one thing to say religion is lagged a decade behind or more but religion has huge influence in the western world especially in the united states so it's not something that should be discounted in its role in shaping society so are there is there your you or your counterparts reaching out i know carl sagan did carl sagan would have meetings with religious leaders just to talk about saving the world and how can that best be accomplished so uh i have to presume father that your your very presence on the stage is a step in that direction to reach for scientists to find out what we're thinking and how and why yeah that book was almost called who cares you're gay dude are you suggesting might there be a future of collaboration with what scientists think uh philosophers are thinking well yeah i would think i mean there already is i mean in most uh sort of forward-thinking churches and there is there's no fear and there should be no fear of science well i mean they're they're both geared towards the truth basically and sort of unearthing the truth and helping us understand things better and understand the world better so the latest encyclical uh the the holy father uh spoke at length about climate change no of course right and you know it's interesting of course did you say like that oh no i know why they're course for him but you know he's a religious leader he is awesome to talk about he is also a scientist he was a chemist uh you know as a jesuit he studied chemistry and taught chemistry yes herrera for chemists um and so you know and and i think i think this is i think this uh the encyclical laudato c which talks about climate change and the economy and the and the the connection between the effects of the disproportionate effects of climate change on the poor i mean he links those things he uses not only you know science science but economics right in terms of helping us understand the world so there i think that's a really great example of a way that uh the church or a church can use things like science uh climate change economics to help us understand what is i think at heart a moral document it was funny i was uh on this panel with uh uh cardinal turkson um who was a uh cardinal from ghana and he was the one in charge of the uh encyclical la dato c and he said you know what he said this is not a an encyclical about uh the climate it is this is a social encyclical it is about encyclical about society right and about our culture and so you're that's a great example of how those two things can be uh brought together and we have nothing to fear from that nor should we i mean there's some people who do but we shouldn't at least once a week i ask myself because as i see the the the landscape shifting under our feet particularly if you're old fogies you say those young whippersnappers they you know i don't want to be that guy so i'm trying to stay with it as things shift and my kids are keeping me in touch uh so i ask myself i i pose to my kids i say what do you think you're doing today where your kids will say mommy daddy you are so out of it and so i came up with one i think i came up with one i would say uh there's at least a dozen or more sports in the olympics that should not be segregated by gender like archery and shooting and badminton and uh so but they are still segregated i think there's a day when all these attentions we focus on competitive sports even even why women's tennis why why don't they play the same number of sets as men they're just as fit they can last just as long it's just so ridiculous right i've forgotten about that right they play a three sets instead of five right right right so there's things like that that no one is focusing on yet but it is a difference in that case between men and women built into baked into society on a level that we're not even recognizing because maybe the too many other more important things we've got that are distracting us but you know you can say i think that's a great example you can see the shift in how we look at football right now in terms of the brain injuries right and and what that does to to people who play and maybe in a couple years we'll say how could we have allowed people to play in that particular way football if it was hurting their brains it wasn't that a form of exploitation of those people particularly those young men right so i yeah i agree and i think we have to start thinking about those things now father if we uh create a sentient robot is it immoral to kill it oh my gosh okay that's the neck that's the next papal encyclical i guess right is that wow uh can we talk about the eclipse instead [Laughter] well yes yes yes data's a person personhood is what we're talking sentence leads to personhood which leads to rights it's murder so who will judge that it's sentient i'll do it okay if i pulled you from 50 years ago from 20 years ago and i just had you have a conversation with siri you would say that my device was sent in and if i took a sledgehammer to it you would then object yeah i don't know what today is thinking seriously that's right we have a little ways to go before this happens so now is the time to be thinking about how should the law deal with that same with animals you know higher primates and so on you know the and that's why are your value judging them well the criteria yes yes you value adjusted yes okay yes yes it's not higher or lower they're all around today evolve from the beginning of the family tree that's right okay yep yes but i eat plants and some meat yeah but not much just like what like uh just like dumb ducks [Laughter] so so uh a subset of the vegetarian community sees eating animals as immoral not just something for health or environment or or whatever do you see that as no yeah and i i've as you were talking i was thinking i can imagine i don't know but i can imagine in 50 years people looking back and saying i cannot believe people ate those animals i cannot believe they killed them and raised them you know if we yeah i mean i can see that um i i'm not a vegetarian but i can totally understand how someone could feel that and i could understand in 50 years how that becomes law let's not predict something so horrible why am i going to be dead you don't you don't know me i could live to be 120. yeah that's the plan there is that generation who will be born where they will never die because they will always be available for the next thing that will prolong life yeah isn't that immoral to live forever if you're if you're living on a planet with limited resources no no you you explore outer space resources are unlimited let me ask each of you just for some parting thoughts we'll wrap this up before we go to q a um uh why don't we end on on on the father let's let's really you don't think that i mean he'll be something about like love it up lovers but then i'll be like in here as i've studied over the generations okay what do you have for us just give me some summative thoughts you can even um reflect on what might what would morality look like in a hundred years so is this jerry's final moment yeah yeah okay yes what will morality look like in a hundred years there will be i think unless we destroy ourselves uh optimistic say it again are you optimistic i am i think that it will be largely better i do think that overall uh things get better and better i i think that football will either be significantly more violent or gone [Laughter] that's basically it but i think overall yeah i think it'll it'll be better hopefully they'll people still eat fish jesus come on that's why i didn't meet anyway and he did michael well uh i've rarely been as frustrated in the conversation conversation as i have been in this one i think they're both full of [ __ ] i i think i think everything that you're saying is is great and and and scientifically based and i think everything you're saying is great uh and i think that one nuclear bomb uh or one crazy person obviates all of it and it doesn't matter uh what you're what you're saying that's the the power in the hands of those who are immoral yeah but i also think renders moot the statements of morality who are yeah nothing inevitable about this i didn't call on you yet okay all right so all right so so you you so you're not optimistic about it it's not that i'm not optimistic but i don't think i don't i don't feel like we've come any closer to solving the question of morality in this conversation but you know i was mostly thinking about jokes the whole time so agreed it's not michael it's it's not inevitable the whole thing could go south absolutely the south that's a value judgment all the more reason that to keep keep working you pass moral judgment on the south in that sentence sorry things that go north really fast we end up in canada because of global warming yeah yeah then they're going to build that wall and make us pay for it anyway so um the canadians building the wall making us faithful you know it's three steps forward two steps back you know we have to keep chipping away at it and and working at it um and so and in part science and technology is part of the solution synthetic meat we are getting there within a few decades you we won't need factory farms anymore you can just grow it and and and and make it a profitable thing for companies and we'll have burgers and steaks that are just as marbled and tasty and oh boy but isn't there also the argument that i know but the cows will go extinct if we do that the cows will go extinct if we do that or close um well unless you can make cows your pets that's that's the only place you'll find cows is in india yeah right so isn't that likely so the cow only exists for that purpose they still use them for milk i guess yeah yeah so one platter yeah and butter yeah milk butter cheese all milk products right yeah yeah so technology and then i agree uh neil i think in the last chapter the moral arc i speculated on us becoming a multi-planetary spacefaring civilization in which there's no more nation-states either nation-states is is a temporary stage in human history cities are the oldest structures we have the oldest collective system organizations we have there are cities that are thousands of years old there are no nations that are thousands of years old the borders change these will come and go once you just open the borders up and let people do whatever they want to do then there'll be more freedom and autonomy and this will reduce the chances of nuclear war and things like that so i'm optimistic optimistic okay uh and just one note uh in martin luther king's i have a dream speech there's a very significant moment where he speaks of the moral arc bending towards righteousness so justice yes justice bends towards justice uh whoops yeah what you got for us i know you got something don't i don't know what i got free you know i i i think that it's it is incumbent upon us all as individuals to decide who we are morally whether you're whether it's inbred and you or you know these are these are things that come to you because of your experiences what you learn what you know who's taught you what you believe what you've come to believe and i think that those are important things and you can put it in science and you can put it in god and whatever it is it's still your it's still you you have to decide morally what and who you're gonna be and you know you can blame it on god or blame it on science but when it comes down to it it's it's your choice i think but that's just me i smoke too much weed the jesuit james what do you have for us uh i smoke just as much brother that's why they put us together uh not recently though no i mean i would agree you know i would i would uh agree with that and say uh you know it's up to the individual i would also say it's up to us as a community and so in terms of where we're going i i'll try down on a positive note but i think that the last two years have made me not optimistic uh the last two years i think that at least in the united states that we've gotten angrier and more divided and more coarsened and i think you could make the argument worldwide too in general but i would say that i'm as a christian i'm hopeful uh but it really it it's it's up to us i mean it is it is a choice i mean and it is a moral choice uh whether or not we're going to um you know be generous or not so i'm i'm not not optimistic but i remain hopeful so let me i'd like to offer a system i i'm an astrophysicist so that's the lens through which i view the world for better or for worse uh a bit of this that we lost a little bit track of from the beginning was the sense of cooperation and how morality feeds into the survival of a community and not only the survival but whether or not it thrives and so when i think of the reasons people have fought wars uh many of them if not most have been access to limited resources many other wars fought on the premise of one religion versus another when you part the curtains again it's access to resources either natural resources or land itself so when i think of space space in fact has unlimited resources there are ingredients on earth called rare earth elements it's an entire row of the periodic table that are fundamental to modern electronics and most of those are in china and so that's kind of interesting so that's a limited resources by the way there are asteroids that are primarily made of metal that have an abundance of rare earth elements an abundance of iridium platinum gold silver copper so in the future let's go 100 years a thousand years into the future it's possible that we can remove war over limited resources we can remove that incentive entirely if we have access to the unlimited resources of space not only mineral resources but energy resources wars have been fought over energy and so when i see this i add to this fact that the hubble telescope the most productive scientific instrument there ever was responsible for 20 000 research papers with collaborators in every country in which you find an astrophysicist wait what word did i use collaborators do you know the international space station is the greatest collaboration of nations outside of the waging of war that there ever was the olympics and the world cup are a distant second and third to that the scientific community and especially astrophysicists because our targets of interest are up there and up there is not divided by national boundary or religion or by who's in charge up there is space and it's over everybody's head and so when we study the universe i'll pull out a telescope i look here somebody in another country also looks at that object and we compare notes we are scientific colleagues we publish papers together it may be that the future of morality is rolled up in what it takes to get along and what i know firsthand is that when you do science you get along you get along because the object of your affection sits outside of ourselves it's a higher purpose a higher goal to understand the nature of this universe in which we live so i foresee in the centuries to come if space becomes accessible to us i see a time where we will only know peace and look back at a time when people killed one another because of our differences and we said my gosh how could that have ever happened because today we celebrate one another because of our differences and that is a cosmic perspective coming to you from star talk join me in thanking father james martin whoopi goldberg shermer michael ian black eugene murman the eugene merman comedy festival this has been star talk we have been live at the kings theater in brooklyn and you've been an amazing audience thank you all and good night [Applause] [Music] before we go i just want to thank wix from simple landing pages to complex professional websites wix has you covered no need to hire a web developer if i was able to build this for star talk certainly you can build your site with wix the editor gives you full design freedom freedom it's like that that was my braveheart wix thing oh never mind they have apps that let you grow your business they have unlimited fonts everything 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Channel: StarTalk

Views: 439,568

Keywords: StarTalk, Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, Michael Ian Black, Rev. James Martin SJ, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Shermer, morality, science, Kings Theatre, Brooklyn, moral compass, human religion, Skeptic, modern society, moral, LGBTQ community, reproductive rights, Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, religion, StarTalk Radio, Science Podcast, StarTalk Live, father james martin, james martin sj, lgbt, space, astronomy, astrophysics, space podcast, astronomy podcast, comedy

Id: WP2cxR6Xnsw

Length: 97min 50sec (5870 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019