Richard Dawkins & Michael Shermer in Berlin, 11.11.2018

[Music] atius turn signals Indaba sunland guns normally mentioned survival booze Farah Lara ordered a Kellner in restaurant D my stones in saga noises netter mention threatens EDA here for close near uber vinden Sierra show for Dame on the can turn on big lightens image of the riser very common on board [Applause] - ah mo chairman Lee before nativist at Orleans foundation my name is yogge ever from the Richard Dawkins foundation in dodge tons before I make Jesse and didn't want us would survive scene V in you wanna go phenom go into the Biden gets Lisa the arm to insist not sayin SEC dish picture it in oil in her teens to tardy for stand Savoy if fish anger surveyor of tri-quarter anecdote unless he can is for tax Machir to Michael Shermer with an adventure una Buena vacation Oviedo confirm it with out sloop Jesus pet seasons instrument what in it was our shoe light on for nine hundred dollars to price and a Borden um damnit my wanna initially say - student of sushi on the entire 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rights in this D Foundation Madonna dodge parking website of a trading we would the activity in the adorns foundation met in yharnam afield fatigue of warden is the key understandings states like Ibrahim ever state in the further maneuvers and shaft we shall build on Kurdish and things on this of advisable student sustained a tradition varied between seal really used and fundamentalists most our gluten intolerance on mentally his light survived in wounds were hiding guests of attendees are ending the kind of sweeten SS media and Abbas under the foil on air is the hoity here because on second ladies and gentlemen please give a warm welcome to Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins [Applause] [Music] Wow thank you for that warm reception especially mostly for Richard I suspect they guys but I'm glad to be here too so I thought Richard we might cover the span of religion and science and then morality and science and then maybe say get a little bit into politics and it related to both terrorism what's the real cause of it religion politics both or whatever and then maybe wrap up with some of the recent campus craziness about post-modernism and and what's truth and and that sort of thing so starting on a positive note as as you know there's been a huge growth of the nuns the so-called people that tick the box for no religious affiliation you guys don't have this problem in Germany but you went through this already long ago but in America it's now about 25% of all Americans have no religion about 33% of Millennials those born after 1981 and it could be close to 50% of I Jenner's that is kids born after 1995 so now you're probably familiar with Stein's law that trends that can't go on forever won't but on the other end at least in large part to your work and that of the atheist movement can you foresee a day when say in England and in the United States when we could get to 80% 90% nuns and also we should stage that when they tick the box for no religious affiliation that doesn't necessarily mean they're atheist that's true they may be followers of Deepak Chopra or you know they they think there's a force in the universe of the secret and they just have to ask you go do something out there something yeah yes I think in German you probably don't have the same problem that we have with nun being confused with numb I I have a friend who who was in hospital and she was in bed and a nurse was taking down her particulars and you have to write down everything then that's it religion so she said none and then later when she was in bed she overheard two of the nurses gossiping about her and one of them said she doesn't look like a nun yeah I think we're on the right track obviously even in in America in Britain we're going getting there I think Scandinavia getting there in Germany I think pretty good there's still a nominal loyalty in Germany I think to either Catholic or Lutheran Church so much so that they actually pay taxes it's not just in general but you pay a tax to stop me if I got this wrong it seems hard to believe well what's you're baptized as say either Catholic or Lutheran then you have to pay tax to that Church unless you actually go and pay money in order to disassociate yourself from that church yeah it's a that's got to be something wrong there [Music] [Applause] it's actually withheld from your paycheck just like in America Social Security and in your health care and whatever is is taken out of your paycheck you never even see the money which by the way was why Scientology tried to get in Germany in the 90s as a major religion so they could get in on that withholding thing and that's why the Germans who had some experience with fringe cults in the past said no no Scientology is not a major religion but by the way the humanists if I recall that German humanists they they get some state support as a sort of quasi religion now Wow to know how you would define what's a true religion I mean right and I imagine that was the point about the Flying Spaghetti Monster was to it was to raise awareness of the of the absurdity of having a legal definition of what is a proper religion well as particularly Scientology is an interesting test case because in the 90s when the internet started to take off ex members were posting their secret documents online which was a new thing and you know this was like oh my god I can read about Xenu the galactic warrior you know and and all that crazy stuff the church actually got judges to give search warrants to go in and take people's computers their hard drives their floppy disks but they had at the time and confiscate them because it was proprietary copyrighted material almost like you stole the script for harry potter before it was broadcast or something like that which would imply that they made it up right it's a it's because if you copyright it then you just made it up there was a there was a another story there was a you probably know this woman JZ Knight who channels Ramtha the thirty-five thousand year old warrior like this oh yes so JZ Knight she's from Seattle Washington and she was an actress there's a little background for you so she all of a sudden she started getting these visions from Ramtha who was this thirty five thousand year old warrior who spoke English with an Indian accent yes where that was 35,000 years ago it's not clear but then a German woman started channeling ramza and JZ Knight said oh no no no no no I own Ramtha it's like right yeah copy right yeah which you know if she won that kid I forget how it turned out now I think she lost the case but if she won the case it would imply well you just made it up then yeah well I've always wondered about the Book of Mormon being written in the 19th century but written in the style of 15th century English what's that about it you just thought that would have given the game away right away that he's a charlatan you know is it's the fact that he wasn't that he was convicted of fraud earlier in his life wasn't enough if you've never read Jon Krakauer's book under the banner of heaven he's personal he's a great writer he's the guy that wrote into the wild and into thin air about client he's a climber then he got into the he wrote a piece for I think Vanity Fair Atlantic on this multiple shooting of a polygamist family there was a murder there and then that led him into the whole polygamy world which is illegal since 1980 96 but they do it anyway in these border states between Colorado and Arizona and Utah they're in these little towns where they marry one woman and then the others are sister wives and so he delved into that into the history of when Joseph Smith got the revelation from God he already was having an affair with this woman down the street so he comes home to his wife I forget what her name is now but see honey I've been talking to God and you're not gonna believe what he said you know our friend a mystery well I have to marry her to of course she was you know as you would expect livid about this well then I'm gonna take multiple husbands you know you know God was really clear about this it's a guy thing and and all my friends were there they heard it too they couldn't believe it either and it stuck until Utah wanted to become a state in 1896 apart the United States and the government said you can't have this polygamy thing and they got a new revelation from God he said I've changed my mind about it's back to monogamy and then the same thing they got a revelation in the 1970s about in America yeah yeah yeah I mean it really shows the you know the cultural bound is one one funny little personal story my wife is from Cologne Germany well Cologne I don't have this in America you have to say that anyway so when she met she was pretty much an atheist by then that was five years ago and she then decided to opt out of the withholding thing and she had to go down to the courthouse fill out the paperwork file a little fee to pay for that and she wore her she wore a black t-shirt that said Dawkins Dennett Harrison Hitchens of course they didn't get it but I thought it was pretty delightful but then they told her okay now just to make sure this clear you can't like get married in the Catholic Church the moment you sign this yep that's fine and you can't do this and then that's fine but it takes us a while to process the paperwork so we're gonna withhold three more months out of your paycheck and she's like wait a minute in a business contract when it ceases it ceases for both parties well not this one well let's have a big movement yet everybody goes to that church you know tomorrow and guess it is it so it's a it's a government thing yes you have to get excommunicated in the case of Catholics I think I know I've signed a number of excommunication certificates people that come to me and [Laughter] if anybody wants me to sign their excommunication certificate after this meeting I would be only too delighted to do so [Laughter] [Music] I'm curious how you answer the question that I always get what would it take to her for you to believe in God I mean I was once a believer then I became an atheist I didn't believe for really good reasons then but now you know being a science guy what's the evidence that would present to you that you would go you know what I was I was wrong I think there is a God and so when you go through the things like well a miracle happens here on stage the woman's cut in half or whatever we've all seen Penn & Teller do this kind of kind of thing so I can't imagine anything that would happen that I could not imagine also was a trick or an illusion or I miss perceived or something like that I think that really really good conjuring tricks are actually quite philosophically worrying from this point of view because it is I used to think well God would only have to appear you know it was a great deep pull ropes and type voice and see I exist and maybe trailing clouds of glory and but I mean you have you ever seen a really good conjuror in trick it's it's very easy to be fooled or a hallucination it is hard Carl Sagan had an interesting notion in his science fiction book contact where at the end the heroine le calculated the constant PI out to the umpteenth decimal place and she expressed it in binary and at some point way way way out in the in in the trillion quadrillion simal place or other binary place of the constant pi the the digits fell into a square matrix with nothing but zeros except there was a circle of one's bisected by a diameter of ones and this was God's signature woven into the very fabric of mathematics well that would be good of course it wouldn't happen actually maybe it would happen if I mean if PI goes on indefinitely maybe there would have to be somewhere where yeah and I think there was Karl's way of like with the SETI program what would constitute a signal of intelligent design a pulsar is not going to give prime numbers for example no although yes the house I wouldn't you know the story of periodical cicadas do at giving prime numbers oh yeah you don't you wrote about that yeah not that it's intelligent life but it at least it's it's not it I mean it's it's it's a way in which prime numbers could be generated periodical cicadas are insects which for have plagued ears they they breed every either I think it's ever T or 17 years different races of them breed either 13 or 17 years and these are prime numbers and is rather odd that they should come out every 13 years or every 17 years they'll they lurk underground for 13 years and then suddenly they all come out together in it all in one burst and then 13 years later they all come out at the same time except the other species come out every 17 years and the theory is that they're running an evolutionary arms race with their predators and the Predators could be naturally selected to synchronize their breeding cycles with the prey breeding cycles so if you choose a time a time cycle anything other than a prime number it's possible for natural selection to favor the Predators that synchronize with it and so the idea is that in the arms race they gradually got lengthen their stride until they hit a prime number that that that predators couldn't match well that is at least a one way in which you can get prime numbers out of pure nature without a mathematician having to write them down and the the point about it as Michael was saying prime numbers might be what would be a very good way for an extraterrestrial intelligence to broadcast to the universe its existence because the theory goes you that there's there's only one way for prime numbers to be generated and that's through intelligence and the point about the cicadas is only that there is another way in which in which it could happen from the bottom up yes yeah yeah yeah on the same category of of thinking about this in terms of the far future of humanity or if we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences the point that SETI people make is they're not going to be first of all they're not gonna be bipedal primates with gnarly stuff on their forehead speaking English like in Star Trek and they're not going to be just five years ahead of us technologically like at Roswell where they you know with back-engineered silicon chips or something like this is the best aliens could do that you know they'd be millions of years ahead of us so if you if you just take you know Moore's law for anything and extrapolate it out and look how far we've come in just a half century or a century or so of technology they'd be like a million years ahead of us pretty much they could do anything we would call done they would have to beat the cook in order to get here because right so difficult to get here when I was about six I'm a science fiction story called Bobo goes to the moon about a dog that went to the moon and I had enough sense to realize that the people on the moon wouldn't speak English so I made them speak French instead [Laughter] but you know there's a there's a geologist quite a well-known geologist called Simon Conway Morris who does believe that we could expect them to be humanoid he's very impressed by the power of convergent evolution and there are numerous examples around the animal kingdom of animals that come from different starting points in evolution and converge on the same end point because it's a very good way to be for a certain way of life and he's in sufficiently impressed by that to think that we should not be over surprised if the unimaginative science fiction plot came true and they really were humanoid not speaking English or French but at least bipedal with perhaps eyes pointing forward big brain I'm a bit skeptical of that although he did he mean I'm second only to Simon Conway Morris in my admiration for convergent evolution he rather spoils it by dragging God in I think he's got a bit of a agenda there he he he he wants there to be alien life that is this is humanoid for some kind of theological reason I suspect I think so I think he also argued that there is probably not extraterrestrial intelligence of our capability oh yes I think that's right but yeah because if if that were true then of the you know billions of species that have evolved on earth how come only one lineage ended up as bipedal primates and we're the last ones standing and we shouldn't have it happen one has to be first I suppose to be first yeah okay right yeah and then once one has is first it might stop all the others also it's not obvious that it's an ideal way of life there are plenty of other very good ways of life other than being intelligent we know that well in America I for bought a remark on that he who will not be mentioned tonight yeah but but but the point is that how would you know it was God if you encountered somebody who is capable of genetically engineering cells or that engineering planets planetary systems or something like this these are just advanced problems to be solved yes technology and any sufficiently advanced technology he started to come round to that view I think it would be an easiest an easy point to demonstrate for God to devastate his existence but miracles are not that impressive when you compare them with even earthly contouring tricks let alone the tricks that highly advanced civilizations of the kind that are capable that that if we were ever visited as you said they would have to be so hugely more advanced than asked that they would appear to be godlike some people try to say from that well that means you sort of do believe in God because you do believe that there are extra but there's a huge difference between a highly advanced creative intelligence which has evolved by gradual slow steps which is what will be the case for an extraterrestrial intelligence and one that was there from the origin of the universe and created the universe is every difference in the world between between those two some people can't see that that distinction it's a hugely important distinction by the way parenthetically do you have an opinion on the Fermi paradox where is everybody a flight well where is everybody um I'm not at all surprised we've never been visited because actually visiting bodily is such a I mean why would they bother to come here but why haven't we picked up radio transmission that is more of a more of a puzzle the statistical calculation that leads one to suspect there is extraterrestrial life is based upon the huge number of stars and therefore planets we now know that all stole 30 all stars have planets so that's a strong statistical argument on the other hand it is conceivable that the origin of life on a planet is such a stupendously improbable event that it has only happened once and if that were the case then it would have to be here because here we are so there's that's not I mean it's it's not demonstrate all that that we are accompanied by other life-forms then again you could say well it could be a very improbable but not cut early improbable event so there may be only a matter of a few billion life-forms in the in the universe well there few billion is very few it's a very small number compared to the 10 to the 22 possible places so that the life-forms that have evolved out there could be so spaced out that they never encounter one another even by radio I think it would be enormous ly exciting if settied were to pick up intelligent signals of course the evolution of intelligent life is another step beyond the evolution of life at all it could be that life has evolved has originated bacterial life something like bacterial life has originated many times but only very on very few occasions has it broken through to perhaps multicellular life or perhaps intelligent life capable of broadcasting signals such as we might uniquely get all the way to Neanderthals and have us go extinct and they survive yes and we there's there's no indication of this proceeding along toward and then we've only been capable of it for a century or so right and so our signals are expanding in a in a bubble which is not yet has that doesn't yet have a very large radius it's been suggested that once a civilization reaches a sufficient technical level to produce high energy radio then they also capable of destroying themselves and so it might be that we have that they're all over the universe there are little little sparks of intelligent life coming into existence and then so nothing themselves out almost immediately which is why we have to colonize Mars just in case I'm not going but it's a one-way trip to stop yeah that's right yeah yeah now back to the we're talking here about generic gods back to the Christian God or the monotheism God our late friend Vic Stanger made the point that we don't even have to make this argument if that God exists the universe should show certain features and it doesn't and therefore we can kind of disprove the hypothesis the hypothesis has not been proved because here are the characteristics it would have to meet and it doesn't meet those you mean the universe would be more friendly more friendly the problem of evil is the biggest one yes gods all powerful and all that well yeah but there's no reason why shouldn't be an evil God I mean is it you you no reason to assume that God has to be good well yes but the Christian God oh yeah that way yeah so good that he had to have his son crucified in order to to forgive the rest of us because he loved us yes I've been trying to add a new argument with Christians who absolutely must believe in the resurrection or else why would you be a Christian so it had to happen why do you think it happened they give the arguments and then I say okay why don't the Jews accept those arguments now you can't say cuz they they believe they're wrong God they believe the same God as you they even believe the same book at least the old part of it and even Jews even believed there will be a messiah he just hasn't come yet so they're that far with you they know the arguments you can't say they don't understand the arguments these are learning rabbis have been studying this for 2,000 years why don't they accept it and I'd never get a good answer other than I'm praying for them or something like that but by way background to seg into a related question about truth last year I did a podcast with Joe Rogan on the ostensibly about ancient archaeology who built the pyramids that sort of thing with a fellow named Graham Hancock now he doesn't believe ancient aliens came here and built the pyramids but he thinks there was a civilization that lived 20,000 to 30,000 years ago that built them and they're much older than archaeologists think so this is sort of alternative archaeology category of which there are many but he's that particular one anyway so he's kind of an interesting character and he's really into altered states of consciousness particularly the ones you do artificially so oh I've got him yet he people keep trying to get me to take drugs with him that's it so last I don't know about six months ago he wrote to Richard and I and invited us to go to Costa Rica where there is this resort it's a nice place I mean first-class tickets you know stay at the resort for free free food yoga you know it's great massages everything you want but you got to do ayahuasca every day for five days now I didn't know much about ayahuasca so I read up on it and I stopped at the you vomit for four hours every day because it purges the negative energy and the bad things that happen and you're like whatever club of oh okay so but the reason he wants us to do this is because most people that take ayahuasca come back convinced that there is this other world the spirit world this other dimension this the doors of perception are opened through the ayahuasca it's a it's a way of engaging your brain with this other world and then we would come back and go we were wrong not that we're Christians but that we now know there's this other win the Templeton Prize and we could win the devil didn't prize so let's say we did that and unlikely but let's say it happened and we were convinced and I write one of my scientific American columns I was wrong there's this and you write in one of your books I discovered the spirit world why should our readers or any scientists or anybody with a burrow I think that there's a good argument there well because we're hallucinating we're we're I mean a subjective argument like that is no kind of argument you ought to have an objective argument it sounds a bit similar to Michael Persinger helmet which I think you've tried as well well yes this is a Canadian neurologist who has a rather interesting piece of research that he does he puts a a modified motorcycle helmet on your head and you sit in total darkness and he passed his magnetic field through your brain and with about 80% of people they have a religious experience of some sort they if they're Catholic they tend to see Virgin Mary's if they're it depends what their religion is they they if they're people like us they tend to feel at one with the universe and things like that and I was rather looking forward to it to that I was rather hoping to feel a sense of great spiritual oneness with the distant universe and with everything nothing happened with me at all unfortunately they had this was all done for a BBC television documentary and the BBC made a kind of gesture towards science by having a control which was one thicker who also underwent the same experience and he also reported the nose kind of spiritual experience however dr. Persinger believes he was lying because Persinger also monitored the electroencephalogram the EEG waves of the brain at the same time and the EEG waves of one of the 80% susceptible people looked different from the EEG waves of one of the 20% non susceptible and I showed the standard EEG waves of the 20% non susceptible The Vicar was right up at the extreme susceptible end but yet he was denying that he got anything instead he filled his brain with something it might have been reciting the multiplication table or something desperately trying to shut out the spiritual awareness which person as magnetic helmet was inducing not quite sure why they would want to do that actually maybe something about not wanting to admit that his spirituality was influenced by brain states do you think that's plausible I don't know yeah Persinger he kind of plays fast and loose with the interpretations of these experiences he is I had I had some experiences in there I felt like I kind of left my body a little bit there's a video on on YouTube you can we just sure martoma out-of-body experiences and I felt like a few things happened but on the other hand I've also done sensory deprivation tanks you know that it's a big thing in California you lay in these warm salt water and so you're just floating there and they close the lid so it's dark and it's quiet and so you basically getting no sensory stimulation and then your brain after about an hour it starts producing stuff and you know light hallucinations just kind of fun stuff drug free and legal and I couldn't tell the difference between what Persinger was doing and just doing that so if you are in total darkness yeah so yeah that's right so I think he needs better controls for that but I do like what he's doing in the sense he's looking for some natural explanation for an apparently paranormal phenomenon so to that extent I use that as an example as well that there's no such thing as the supernatural their paranormal there's just the natural the normal and stuff we haven't explained yet with natural means so for example if deep bucks favorite theory about consciousness quantum consciousness you probably know Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose theory about the quantum states inside the microtubules and neurons and these quantum states when neuron when you have a thought the neurons fire in a particular sequence and this causes the quantum state to go across the the distance whatever it is like the spooky action at a distance with quantum experiments and it affects the quantum states in your brain it causes your neurons to fire in the same pattern as mine and we can read each other's minds okay this is all but let's say it turned out to be true that would no longer be ESP that would just be the third neuroscience or whatever yes yeah just better better science or did four different different science right yeah can I ask you something yeah I'm about the moral arc which is just preach it in German is that is that that right is just being yep you perceive a an increase in moral sense as history goes by we're getting better we've abolish slavery we have better asked you towards towards kindness and towards women and everything and I have called this I think it's the same as what I call the shifting moral zeitgeist in both cases we noticed that as the centuries go by things that in past centuries were regarded as intolerably reactionary and I mean fuelled if you look back I'm fond of looking back just to the 19th century where Darwin and Huxley and Abraham Lincoln were right in the forefront of advanced liberal moral right on values yet they were by today's standards incorrigibly racist I mean even a link Lincoln freed the slaves but nevertheless he he made speeches in which he said of course in no nobody but an idiot would think that black people are the equal of white people and they should have to be given the vote and all that kind of thing and Huxley said similar things although he was right in the vanguard of advanced thought you can pretty much label any writer by simply looking at his moral values and saying right he must have lived in the 1920s the 1940s or whatever we change it and astonishingly rapid rate and you've I think compared it to the Flynn effect which is rather different but the Flynn effect is the increase in measured IQ during the 20th century decade by decade there's a really substantial increase in IQ it has to be standardized I said that the mean is 100 it's a hundred but you you couldn't do do that and and it looks as though IQ really does in measured IQ really does increase in the same kind of way of the shifting moral zeitgeist and I think it's empirically obviously true it happens what I'm less clear about is actually as with the Flynn effect as we leave still in IQ effect the moral Flynn effect the the shifting moral was like guy store the moral log in both cases it's mysterious what's causing it yeah yeah so picker first floated that idea in better angels of our nature because in the Flynn effect the it's not just that the overall IQ score is going up it's in particular in the abstract reasoning portions of the test so things like arithmetic vocabulary they haven't gone up much it's the you know you take a three-dimensional figure and you rotate it in space three times and then you pick it you have to pick the one down here that would match what it would look like those are the ones I can't do sorry you kids stay in school because we're gonna need you getting smarter three points every every decade so and so then the jump that is arguable I suppose a debatable is to reason morally it requires that kind of abstract rotation I have to put myself in your head to imagine how you would see the world and to then employ something like the the Golden Rule how would Richard feel if I did this yeah how would I feel if he did this to me well okay that requires this constant shifting back and forth so there's some evidence when I wrote this in 2015 that these studies hadn't been replicated a couple of them have now where people who read literature novels good novels not not People magazine type you know trash novels but good novels you know Jane Austen kind of stuff they score higher on these mind-reading tasks so you show people pictures of people's faces and say what what is this person feeling and people have empathy test empathy test yeah so people that read a lot score higher on those so the interpretation is is that reading novels helps train the brain for you to see what the world looks like through another character's eye and that's what did him immoral yeah that that's the idea we have it on the authority of Donald Trump's ghostwriter that he's never read a book in his adult life that explains a lot his book yes he didn't even write it live in reading we weren't gonna mention it but on the table okay it's alright it's okay we deal with this every hour now in America at first it was like once a month something crazy what happened then was once a week then was once a day now it's pretty much every hour yeah I think so yeah so I again like with I agree with Pinker there's nothing inevitable about it the whole thing could be reversed not likely on the big things it's not like slavery is gonna come back legally there is slave trade you know slave labor and and the sex trafficking and that sort of thing which is a kind of slavery but it's not legal and it happens in countries with crappy governments that can't enforce the laws against slavery and you know it's not like women are gonna lose the vote now that they have in every country including Saudi Arabia so I think those big ones will continue I think the little setbacks are like you know populism white nationalism authoritarianism some of those we have to think of as three steps forward to sentry blips yes I think I hope but looking at the big picture and the and the the shifting moral zeitgeist as it goes on from century to century or decade to decade actually I'm not clear what it's about I think it's a kind of complicated mixture a bit more like Moore's law which seems to be empirically this is to be empirically the case that computer power as measured by various measures increases at a fairly fixed or at a very fixed rate actually exponentially doubles a doubling time of about 18 months I think but it's not it doesn't have one cause it seems to be a complicated feeding area of lots of different causes and I suspect that's the case with the shifting moral zeitgeist as well that it's a sort of general something in the air - not some mystical but dinner-party conversations conversations in pubs legal decisions parliamentary decisions television journalism books all these things in a rather heterogeneous way combined to cause a continuous with occasional blips shift in the in the same direction we're getting better yeah you had some examples I think was in The God Delusion you talked about that right length the language shift yes so we can kind of see how that happens right now because we're going through this with this whole gender pronoun business where if I say I want to be called a Z or as or or whatever and I'm asking you to do that and then maybe the next time you write a book you'll you'll say you know Shurmur he Z yes you know so now there's a difference between you and me just having a conversation about it but then it you see how it spreads all of a sudden it's it across college campuses in part the Jordan Peterson phenomenon is driven by the fact that he stood up and said no I'm not going to do that and that was pretty controversial because before that this is just kind of what we do you know when people say I don't want to be called that anymore like yes I think he said that as a matter of courtesy he would have no objections right compelled to do it right it's right which so do i I miss scent yeah because the like like when we were first younger when we were young you know when the the his or her thing you know and you kind of clumsily go through and I guess now it's acceptable to say they when you're referring to the singular maybe I'm still uncomfortable doing that but apparently that's grammatically acceptable now that all happened without any government top-down regulation people just that's what I mean by something in the end yeah does happen you see it through like comedians they'll use black comedians will use the n-word I never would yes and I think most white comedians don't now yes and and we've seen how that kind of just evolved just people just a thousand ten thousand conversations a day in which that comes up and you say I'm not gonna use that word and that's how it happens yes I I don't like the the his or her him or hit I prefer to use she because I'm male I think there's something rather gracious about using the opposite sex to your to your own but probably that preys on somebody's Collins I do yeah so I guess there's always this tension between do we drive it from the bottom up like how do we spread atheism well we just have a 10,000 conversations versus you know we got to pass laws well we need laws about discrimination probably yes but not like what you call people no now you can't legislate about about how you use languages remember the brights yes the this was an attempt to change the word from atheism to bright I don't know if any of you remember this but it didn't go anywhere because it was pretty clear to most people that if if the opposite of the bright are the dims and those are the people that believe in God which we thought was funny because well Dan Dennett suggested that the opposite of of a since the definition of a bright was somebody who did not believe in the supernatural that the flattering way to describe those who do was call them supers they behold a supa but I guess the problem is is you can't just by Fiat say this is the word we're gonna use it just happens like how did 9/11 start getting used I have no I don't think anybody knows it just started getting used that's right and it's used all over the world even it's only in America that the month goes before the day right said eleven nine that's right that's right most of the world but we've all adopted 9/11 yeah that's right another example of the bottom-up change yeah so I think we're getting there it's fun to speculate in the long-term future I just wrote an article on colonizing Mars what kind of government you know Elon says we're going to Mars okay we're going to Mars what kind of government you're going to set up there so I tweeted at them just for fun and amazingly tweeted back saying oh we don't have to worry about governments just just just straight democracy and just everybody votes and then it's going to be fine it's like no we already went through all this centuries ago you know just you know what uh you know one to one democracy like that just doesn't you know mob rule and so on anyway but it's fine to speculate about at the end of the moral arc I speculate about the de menthe eventual demise are following a way of the nation-state as a concept it will get back to city-states and and just as that book hit the press then Trump and authoritarianism and nationalism and you know the nation now is back as is a big thing which can be discouraging you're kind of a globalist right and what's our a globalist well I hate the idea of nation states I mean I I hate it make America great again we want to make the world great again we want we want to make make the whole of humanity great rather than then be loyal to what on earth is so good about a nation I mean we've been through that as you say and look where that got us right but it [Music] but they're counter to let's say steel man the other side argument that maybe we'll find some sympathy with if we just open the borders and let everybody in and then the terrorists come in we don't live in a global world where you know that that everyone can just get along there are still bad evil people that we have to have walls against yeah that is a warning I mean I mean Angela Merkel does a moral thing by opening the borders to people that are oppressed from an authoritarian regime and then she gets hammered for this I was talking to a young woman yesterday who is an ex-muslim apostate now living in Germany and she gets persecuted and threatened by fellow refugees from Islamic countries who have come into Germany and want to live in Germany want to presumably ought to be accepting a German way of life and yet they're persecuting a fellow refugee from an Islamic country because he doesn't follow their stinking religion do you sometimes feel like our tribalism is so deep in our DNA both literally and metaphorically that it's going to be almost impossible to break out of that either politically or religiously there's always going to be these kind of tribal conflicts I was having a meeting with Steven Pinker just yesterday and he reminded me of a something which I find totally hard to believe which is that people's attitudes to controversies which ought to be purely scientific like for example climate change are governed by the tribe they belong to the political tribes they belong to rather than by the evidence and so their absolute evolution or abortion or something like that is is a tribal thing what I should have said evolution because that that's a purely sexual matter that you're at your attitude to something purely factual like evolution should be governed by the political tribe to which you belong is a terrible indictment of humanity really yes and it continues yeah I find it hard to believe well it so it's a way of signaling you mean you don't have to know anything about climate change it's just a way of signaling to your tribe yeah I'm and Steve makes the point of you know Al Gore's film in Inconvenient Truth was actually a bad thing for client too productive but yeah because Al Gore is a liberal and we know the Liberals are bad yeah yeah and so then it got affiliated with the political movement rather than just a scientific issue I want to talk about just for a moment back to the atheism thing because I also get this a lot what do you say to somebody who's dying or a friend that's lost somebody or you know it's somebody that's going through an existential crisis you know I have no meaning in my life yeah there's this moment in Ricky Gervais is wonderful movie the invention of line if you have you seen this no I don't it's a great fit he's really funny but it's it's a very deep and thoughtful film so he lives on this it's it's a fictional world where everybody always tells the truth and so he discovers one day quite by accident when he goes to the bank and that the bank teller will just give you however much money you tell them that you have in your account and he mistakenly gives too high an amount and he and he assures her that she has that so she gives him the money and he then he checks his account and realizes oh I can just say whatever I want so of course you know the the humor follows quickly from there he's walking down the street he sees this beautiful woman he says we have to have sex right now or the world's gonna end and she says do we have time for a hotel room or do we have to do it right here and then there's a bunch of stuff with his buddies and so on but then it kind of turns a little darker where his mother's in the hospital and she's dying and and she asks him what's gonna happen to me now and so he has that moment like at the bank he's like what do I say then he makes up this story well in heaven you're going to heaven everybody gets a mansion a big beautiful mansion and you know people are there waiting on you and all the food you I and she's got this glowing smile on her face and then somebody overhears this in the other room and the word quickly spreads did you hear we all get a mansion yeah and so pretty soon now there's a throng outside of the outside of his house if I haven't seen it it's wrong outside of his house you know tell us about the mansion and what happens he's now like Moses so and then in a funny moment he he had ordered pizza he's got two big pizza boxes so he opens the pizza boxes pizzas gone and he he writes ten commands like these are the things that we should do and he comes out there with the two pizzas it's really funny what's the tale the invention of wine the invention of wine sounds wonderful but it is that question what do you say to somebody at that moment it is yeah it is it's a question of whether you betray truth in the interests of comfort and in my attitude is I write my books and you can read them if you want but I don't thrust them down your throat and so I'm not going to go into hospital and visit dying patients and say when you die that's it [Laughter] so IIIi don't have a very good answer to it there are various new form isms around like you become one with the Stars and you go back to back to the universe way or where your material came from I mean I think I mean one have to do that I sort of have myself is that there actually is something rather frightening about eternity I mean simply the forever being dead forever but also being alive forever as terrifying as well so what's terrifying is eternity it's and it's not being dead forever as being I mean is actually much worse to be alive forever because you would actually experience the Eternity every wasn't terrifying idea what you need it for something like that is is a general anesthetic yes which is what we're gonna have right so um I suppose you know one can use these posit Mark Twain said I was dead for billions of years before I was alive and never suffered the smallest inconvenience all right well hitch made this point about the Christian heaven be like celestial North Korea oh yeah you know you have this dictator that knows all your thoughts I don't want somebody who by thoughts and the potty you come leave you can't that's right you hurt the party and you can never leave right yeah Julia Sweeney may in a wonderful monologue letting go of God the that when the Mormon boys come to her door in Hollywood and they're they're given the the pitch about why they she should join the Mormon religion and they get it they give her the whole thing about you know the blind will see again and the Deaf will hear again and the handicapped will be made whole again and she said well I had uterine cancer do I get my uterus back though yes because I don't want it back I said what if you had a nose job and you liked it you have to have my own nose back and then and then they give her a thing and and you get to spend eternity with your family and she might uh I mean the moment you start thinking about yeah what is up there in heaven this is the topic of my latest book that heavens on earth it's just the problem of identity and and and turns out Christian religions have debated this like are you physically resurrected up there this is like the Star Trek transporter problem what's up there because if it's physically you how old are you and so they have somebody figured out the answer it's 30 you're 30 because that's the age Jesus was and it's a good year when you're strong and your memories are still well I'm 64 so what happened to the 34 years in my of my body that's not up there okay no it's just your soul but but what's that it's just a pattern of information that represents my memories but all my memories some of the memories because the memories are not fixed in there they're always changing anyway it's it's I think it's a it doesn't stand up to serious ratiocination does it no no it doesn't so well yeah I mean we don't have to say anything on the other hand we could still be intellectually honest perhaps and say I don't know what happens because we don't know what happens after this is strictly true but yeah I suppose it depends on who's asking yeah but but on a related topic you must get this as well what's the point of going on if there's no God or there's no afterlife why do you get out of bed in the morning though that's an easy one yeah you know how dare you say that you know but what oh you live in this wonderful world how dare you be how much more do you want then don't I said just to say because there is no God therefore life is not not worth living okay just die and make way for somebody else you can appreciate [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] and then where do a theists get their morals another one of those [Laughter] well that really gets back to the shifting moral zeitgeist wherever we get them from it's the same as what everybody else gets them from because we are 21st century people whether we are religious or not and in on the scale of the shifting moral zeitgeist we have the same morals as other 21st century people and different morals from 19th century people 16th century people so we get them from whatever is in the air in our century in our in our decade religious people may think they get their morals from the 10 commandments or from the Bible but they don't they've never read the Ten Commandments or if they have they only remember one of them which is that shalt not kill they don't remember that the first Commander's thou shalt have no other gods but me the second commandment is thou shalt make no graven image I mean they don't know what they're talking about they think they get their morals from the Bible and nor should they wait if you actually read the Bible it's been appalling world we live in if we got our morals from from the Bible so atheists get their morals from the same place as decent people get their morals whether they're religious or not now you make this point I think it's in The God Delusion about you you're troubled by it when scientists say when they bump up against one of these questions well here we have to hand it off to the theologian old Gandhian you make a joke like why not hand it to the plumber I got that from the professor of astronomy at Oxford and I think it wasn't about morals it was about the origin of I don't know the fundamental laws of nature or something but he said ah well here we have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain to which I say why the chaplain not the gardener or the chef as you say the plumber but in the end when we talk about not where did we get our morals from but but but to what extent can we determine right or wrong or human values using science and reason most philosophers and scientists will say well at this point we hand it off to the whoever the utilitarian philosophers the virtue philosopher you know the rauzein philosopher or whatever yeah and as you know sam harris myself a little bit Pinker you know are kind of pushing for this well no wait a minute scientists can have something to say about this how far do you go on this you yes you've got to have probably some I mean within in Sam's case and I think yours you have a kind of axiom that suffering is bad yeah and it's hard to dispute that but nevertheless it is something you have to say well fundamentally the bedrock of my moral faith is the suffering is bad and we should do all we can to avoid suffering among sentient beings and that can be get a bit controversial too but once you've done that then everything else really follows from from by scientific reasoning but in which I would include moral philosophic reasoning which is based on scientific principles logical principles in any way so once you accept a fundamental axiom like suffering is bad then you can pretty much do it all by scientific reasoning I think so although the critics would counter and say well let's move away from the left wolf simplicity to more complicated issues like should women be wear a burka or not or female genital mutilation is a an even worse case what if the culture there says this is our culture and it's none of your business what we do you Westerners you call it suffering we don't we call it culture or the richness of our religion or whatever and even some of the women will say yes this is what we'd like to do how do you know I wonder whether anyone ever really said I want to be genitally mutilated probably not yeah they might be so brainwashed as to as to think this is what I worry so yeah there's maybe a couple of criteria you know the the moral the issue that's that's being discussed in that culture is it totally prevalent or are there people that don't want to do it and if they say they want to are they really autonomous volitional beans it's like it's like the polygamy question shouldn't consenting adults do whatever they want or the prostitution question shouldn't women be able to do whatever they want yeah but with when the girls are seven years old married off they're not autonomous agents or drug-addicted or whatever and so there's some criteria we could use well there's no doubt that that that when one says that that once you've got the axiom then everything else follows biological reasoning but moral philosophy la Sofia is notoriously a pitfall for difficult questions like this the burning question is one another one is these standard moral philosophic dilemmas like - trapped underground it would cost so many dollars to rescue them that money could be spent on feeding starving people in in trolley problems here yeah the trolley problems these are well-recognized problems they're very difficult problems and they arise whether you're religious or not but that's not an argument against using scientific principles these are further difficulties which we have to face in anyway when doing moral philosophy I don't know where you stand we've never discussed abortion I presume you're pro-choice yes as a SMI but I have to say to pro lifers who say you're killing a fetus you're killing a potential human life that's right it's also write the deal by refraining from having sexual intercourse you're depriving a human life [Music] [Laughter] so therefore get out there I mean that there's a they might counter that by saying ah yes but before before you have sex there is no particular human life that's in existence so you're not you're not actually depriving in the moment of conception is were they then then you confront them with identical twins and you say okay which of these two twins got the sole right and I've never met a Catholic tape of answering that question [Laughter] split souls yes well so I mean there's no good place to draw the line at our argument is just personhood you're not a legal person therefore protected by laws and so on until until well now the in the United States it's the second trimester after that Europe just started a third trimester unless the mother's life is in danger you are a person a legal person so so somebody recently killed a woman who was pregnant in her third trimester so it's a double homicide for example yeah I I'm not impressed by the need to define something so rigid his personhood I know lawyers have to do that law lawyers insist on drawing lines like that it seems to me that personhood is something that develops gradually and a single-cell zygote is a tiny step of the way towards personhood and and as you go further you're further more and more but but coming back to suffering what's absolutely clear is that to the extent that a fetus can suffer and as our cow or pig can suffer a hell of a lot more and so you're being totally hypocritical if you if you if you're passionate against abortion but yet kill them or torture me in slaughterhouses and things there is a movement within the animal rights movement to make this personhood argument say for chimpanzees and gorillas just just as a legal strategy yes but of course Peter Singer is the pioneer here on this expanding circle idea to include other species and I have to say all the arguments for why we should not eat animals that can suffer I can't counter them and yet I had a steak the other night and I know you've struggled with this and other people that recognize this do as well it's hard to get completely on board with that yes but I think in the case of abortion it clearly is a nonsense to say because this eight-cell embryo is human it's therefore special I mean there's there's that's absolutely no evolutionary justification for that and right so you should you should not use the argument that there's something special about humanity when it's a fetus because it's big because it's human right and and the evolutionary counter to that is I think totally watertight of what at what point in E in the evolution of humanity would you would you draw a line don't draw lines they didn't resist right one of my favorite quotes from you is that I think it was no homo erectus mother ever gave birth to a homo sapien child yes that's right I mean when you tell people that they're like well what then how did it ever come about yes I met a lawyer once who said isn't this a watertight argument against evolution every every child born anything hard to go yes if you go back in in evolution there has to be a point where our ancestors were of a different species and yet we're told that species can't reproduce with other other species isn't that a watertight argument against evolution doesn't that prove that evolution never happened to which the answer is you reach voting age you can vote at the age of 18 doesn't that prove that development never never happens right that's a good argument well Richard we've been going a little over an hour and we are instructed to leave a time for some Q&A so I don't know if we have a microphone or how you want to do it he says thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] could we have the lights up in the house that we can see okay so say first thank you very much the Mike Conley research for this interesting and entertaining talk so we have know the opportunity for the audience to ask some questions so we have a microphone from my point of view on the right side and on the left side so you can line up we can't see a thing okay is it possible to have the lights out you have to have it okay Candace listen listen Mia you only see me about your son there's a mic over there and a mic over there oh they want my train at all that I only hear your lights and links understand and I have to apologize if we cannot we cannot have all question answered I think that they worry because we are only a limited time I would say 30 minutes for Q&A okay well we're working the lighting and the audience yes good so yeah somebody hung anima objections or one on the right one on the website so we will start here on the right side then the next on the left - I so pleased and only questions no statements so when you you can address Michael Shermer and war which the talking's for the Christian so please start here on the right side I go on can you hear me alright okay and please if possible in English language on the question of convergent evolution you said that it's possible that any species intelligent enough to produce radio waves strong enough to be heard from outside would soon be able to destroy themselves somehow could one of those possibilities also be AI because neural networks work very similarly then or similar to evolution but a much faster and much more efficient and even now we already have AI that is smarter and better at doing stuff than we are could we expect in a hundred years or so to be so obsolete in our current system that we might as well just say okay AI you take over we don't are necessary anymore and there's a very interesting book by is by much too long yeah you're at um max tegmark I think it is suggesting that a I could take off such a rapid extent that as you suggest you we could indeed be completely left behind and however that that would not be a destruction in the same way as say a nuclear war would because the the AI that would be our legacy would be our successors would be presumably as capable or or even more capable of broadcasting signals that SETI could pick up so that would not be an example of short-lived nosov a of a civilization that would have to come from something more destructive admittedly the AI might destroy us which might be a good thing but it but it would not destroy the capacity to communicate with the rest of the universe yeah Tech Marx book is life 2.0 it's a good read I'm an optimist I I'm not worried about it I don't think the disaster is coming that in a way picker makes this point actually it's sort of self refuting that when you press for examples like well we'll instruct this AI machine to make paper clips and it's gonna turn after it uses up all the material it has it's going to consume the chair and me and you and all humans the room the rest of the whole planet will be paper clips so this machine is so smart it can it can do this but so dumb it has no idea what we mean by paper clips and where to stop and and you can apply that to pretty much any example like I programmed my car to take me to LAX like I did the other day it had and to get me there and the shortest route possible it goes up on sidewalks and plows through pedestrians like like Elon is gonna actually not figure out with his engineers that you're not supposed to do that or the you know government regulators are not going to prevent that from happening before it gets to the point where AI can cause our own extinction so III don't think it's gonna happen from the left side from my point of view yeah as a person comes from the Middle East out of a war and I have a question of the future of science in weapon development and inventions and the moral side of life saving suffer suffer ingestion and an another part then the the the end of Pavarti so how can science help that if you in the future of humanity what was the question I didn't so the and immoral why in the world side of science how would it help with the weapon productions what a weapons production science right hmm yeah I think this is the question about how science and technology like the a question can can leak and can be used for immoral means is that what you mean like the bottom okay yeah well but of course the technologies are used by governments or people not not not themselves they don't do this by themselves so I it's not the kind of thing I think scientists have to worry about by themselves but the ethical aspects of the use of science which is why often himer and the rest you know you've had second thoughts after Hiroshima yeah maybe we shouldn't have done this I I think the way I put it is that if you want to do good things then science is the way to do it if you want to do bad things science of the way to do it as well says science provides the tools it's the best possible tools to do whatever governments whatever politicians whatever as society wants to do and so if you want to do bad things then then you use scientific means to do it where the scientists have an additional responsibility to refuse is another matter and this is certainly arguable and it might even have happened I think I mean I decid there there are scientists who refuse to work on on weapons systems I think it's been suggested that in the in the Second World War the reason why Germany did not develop an atomic bomb was that Heisenberg I mean the official reason is that Heisenberg miscalculated but interesting question is whether he deliberately missed miscalculated as a moral act and I'm not sure that's ever been settled maybe it has yeah the problem like back to the AAI question the use of artificial intelligence the internet whatever by rogue states and terrorists and so on that's the problem it's not the technology it's the people and so to get to nuclear zero is going to be very difficult because of the other guy problem I'll give up my nukes if you do but he says well I'm not going to until you do and you end up in this so now we have nine nuclear States so the the money spent that we spend on building these weapons should be spent on game theory analysis or diplomacy or social science or you know how to get people that are in conflict to talk to each other so that they don't want to do that anyway that's but that's a harder problem okay next question hold the right side take the microphone I guess good evening first off I wanted to thank you a lot for this opportunity to speak to you tonight you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier and he's been gaining a lot of popularity he talks a lot about values like intrinsic archetypical values and they conveniently happen to be Christian values so my question would be if atheism or secular societies have failed to deliver a compelling narrative for people that they can like grasp on thank you yes okay so yeah I know Jordan and I think what the appeal is you can go on skeptic comm and read my explanation for the phenomenon I think the appeal is more of self-help you know people feel like not that they don't have the right Christian values they go to him for the same reason they go to say Tony Robbins who's a huge literally huge he's like 64 but he's very popular and you know there's a Netflix film called I'm not your guru in which it shows Tony Robbins is very much everybody's guru and and it has nothing to do with Christian values he's just talking about like Jordan stand up straight make your room you know work out everyday eat white and because the world is a dangerous harsh place and people aren't nice and so you got to be strong something like that I think that's the appeal where in my opinion in that of others that have studied him he gets a little murky on the you know did the resurrection happen well what do you mean by the resurrection and II mean suffering for your sins or or like you asked him do you believe you if you ask me do you believe in God the answer is no if you ask Jordan Jordan do you believe in God it would take me 40 hours to answer that question alright if it takes you 40 hours to answer then you know you're talking about something completely different and there he gets into Jung and Freud and Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and all that stuff and again that's it's okay to say novelists have tapped into deep truths about human nature that's true I mean the reason Shakespeare and Jane Austen and so on are popular novelist is because they're saying something deep that we all kind of get like that that's true these power struggles and and sexual infidelities and all this stuff yeah they've tapped into that before psychology of scientists started studying it but but but to then and here's where he gets fuzzy then he makes the transition from that to like a scientific truth it's like no no wait it's okay to say it's a metaphorically its metaphorically true or the novelists making up this story or tapping into something that's true but but but the story is not true and there he gets a little murky that makes people nervous like me okay left side professor dokkan you said living forever is rather frightening I wonder and this question is for both would you consider or encourage the use of life extension technologies to prolong your life through science well I might go for 200 years but that bout my limit yeah my answer is you know because I again I just wrote that book heavens on her so I interviewed all these people talked to these people Shermer don't you want to live to be 500 or a thousand years I go look just get me to 80 without prostate cancer give me to 90 without Alzheimers get me to 100 where I'm not in a bed plugged in just incremental so we call this proto Pia not utopia proto pissed a little bit better every day and don't worry about the you know the take-off point 500 years from now we get to live forever or something like that and if along the way the salon GEB there's a lot of money startup money in this in Silicon Valley for these longevity life extension technologies to which I say great because along the way they're gonna have to solve cancer problems the Alzheimer senility dementia problems and that would be good and again don't worry about the fart just tomorrow [Applause] okay mixed veggies from the right site so we heard Michael talk about John Peterson I want to ask Richard if you have an opinion opinion on him as well and if you plan on debate debating him in the future so I didn't get that at all Jordan Peter said is that he said yes exactly I wanted to know your opinion or not god I'm just aware that every time I look at the internet Jordan Peterson Jordan beets and Jordan even know I don't have an opinion why should I have an opinion [Applause] okay I gather iiii gather he objects to being forced by the Canadian by Canadian law to use pronouns that people want him to use and on that I'm thoroughly in his favor good for him and I yeah my question was - he doesn't related so I guess I I just I just find it weird that you don't have an opinion on him because your teachings are what you usually say would be contrary I never often an opinion on something of which I'm ignorant yes here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so so I am a big I'm very big on moving towards progressively moving towards a global culture and I often do these thought experiments how we can very constructively move towards a more global culture where we are interacting more with each other and often the problem that comes to my head is like the tribal instinct in my head feels a bit cringes a bit when it thinks about okay so we are going to lose out on certain languages we are going to dilute a lot of cultural things some of them of course are bad they will be weeded out but a lot of good stuff will also get weeded out and and somehow I feel that this tribal instinct is getting tapped in a very negative way and a lot of the problems around in the world is due to this tribal incident so how do you see conceivable constructive way diverse future where we still go towards a global direction but still placate the tribal instinct that we have within us so the problem is the reconciling of tribalism with globalism yes right well part of it is first you break down economic barriers so you allow free trade then people exchange and they realize you're not a bad person or whatever getting political borders to be more porous I think is gonna be book is gonna be harder because of you know language and other tribal defining characteristics something like that yeah I do think tribalism is one of the great evils actually one of the things we really need to to work on to try to and I think we all suffer from it to some extent and need to purge ourselves albeit yes there's a great documentary film at PBS film on Jane Elliot the third grade teacher in 1968 came into her class one day so these are third graders and she says well you know we're gonna divide the room today into the blue eyed people and the brown-eyed people and now we've all you're out your problem all familiar with the study but you have to watch the film of how effective she is at making the the prejudices happen within minutes of how quickly you know because then one of the brown-eyed students says something and she says you see blue-eyed kids that's just the kind of thing a brown-eyed person would say isn't it and they're like yes it is and then they do a follow-up which I was not aware of that she did or maybe a decade later with a group of prison staffers so guards and administrators or whatever and she did the same kind of thing same thing with them Brown the brown-eyed people and the blue-eyed people and she started dividing them up and they fell right into it like the third graders like within minutes you know one of them didn't have the clipboard right you know that's just the kind of thing a brown-eyed person would do with a clipboard see and they were like yeah yeah it's like wow yeah typical Taurus or typical yes yes yes I think another a similar experiment was perhaps Eunice is better than me Michael and dividing children up giving them at random either green t-shirts or orange t-shirts is the same kind of thing same kind of thing and I imagine extending that experiment for a couple of hundred years when you have a rule that children with orange t-shirts have to grow up and marry other orange children and green children have to marry other green children and they're and then they yes then they have children of their own who have to wear the same t-shirt and they go to either orange schools or Green Schools and that goes on for 200-300 years and what have you got Northern Ireland [Laughter] [Music] thank you this is leading very well to do the question that I have you were mentioning than the nuns you are mentioning the tribalism the nationalism that is rising up again in our societies we can we can see a lot of Muslim people who somehow cling very much to their to their believe of therefore for others let's say and I am thinking if all of this is also very much a sign of need for an identity in a world where we can really choose pretty much what we want to do and I'm thinking if the secularism is lacking somewhat this identity and it doesn't make hard for people to yeah to commit themselves on secularism because they feel like it's some somehow it's nothing or something and you mr. Dawkins you have been inventing this a for atheist which is somehow I've see it as a proposal somehow to to given a little bit of an identity to this new atheism or something but so my question would be should we put more effort into I don't know or is it is it like trying to install a new tribe what about this secular identity I should like to think that we don't need to do that but unfortunately it may be that we do and I'm impressed as I think we said earlier by the the fact that people do show such astonishing not to their tribe even with respect to scientific beliefs and so I would like not to need to do that I would like to say here is the evidence this is this is what what the evidence shows this this is therefore you know take it or leave it but if we really do have to wear a uniform if we really have to wear a sort of funny hat to show we're atheist or something I I would not wish to be a part of that so we're to skip the skeptic pin yeah I mean I you're right we have this red red a as a as a as a badge and I I quite like it when somebody comes into a book-signing queue wearing a t-shirt that I made up like religion together we can find the cure which I see occasionally and and but but but I I would like to think we can do that without we can do it with the evidence we can do it by reason without the need to wear a uniform without the need to go to church every Sunday and and the hand together as a as a group but maybe not an atheist identity maybe a humanist identity which is why yeah you know the late Paul Kurtz wanted to build a humanist building in every city in the world yes a place to go where you can hang out with like-minded people that's for something we're for civil rights and civil liberties and speech and not just we're against this we're for these things over here and you know you've probably spoken at many of these Universalist Unitarian churches and the same kind of thing they don't really believe in God and they like candles and they sing hymns to Newton and they they have testimonials about how they lost their religion and I don't and I don't really enjoy these because I don't feel a need to go to church I never liked that part of religion but obviously some people do yeah they like the Sunday service without the God well maybe we can have meetings like this lecture right right okay next question so my question is about the discussion of moral object objectivity so you mentioned earlier these sort of moral maxy more moral axiom that all you need to start to Kickstarter discussion about the existence of objective moral values or how we ought to behave morally is to understand that suffering is wrong and same thing creatures can suffer and therefore that's wrong so that does a lot of work for a person like me but I find myself often at an impasse when I argue with people that have a different conception of object morality because it seems that they for by that they understand that a situation in which we have a universe that is only made of stars and rocky planets no sentient beings whatsoever still has some sort of moral code they're embedded in it and they understand that as the only way in which you can understand moral objective values so I'm wondering how can I argue with such people to say that it's subjective enough to say that suffering is wrong and if there are sentient creatures that's all you need to kickstart and build an objective morality but they just don't take that as objective enough yeah I think I think we okay there's a couple of threads here so first of all if if you're Tom Hanks stranded on that island there's no moral issues it's just you're just by yourself there's no other sentient beings that could be affected by your action so morality is not even part of the equation I think as for it being built in the universe not the universe but but in the sentient beings in the universe there's morality in the sense that if you just think about what's the purpose of a star the star's purpose is to convert hydrogen into helium that's what it does what's the purpose of mountains there to grow and erode and so on there's so there's purpose is in nature so what's the purpose of humans well read The Selfish Gene and you'll build from there but at some point we're interacting with other social beings and how you interact with them then becomes moral or immoral and and that's when it begins the objectivity the hard part about the objectivity is how that word is used like we're gonna stand outside of humans and find here is where we know abortion is wrong or it's okay whatever the issue is you can't because it's it's a human thing so within human nature we have certain impulses that we can discover through science that tell us what humans need what do we want we don't want to suffer and you start there now the critic would say that's not objective knowledge you're just asking people you know would you like to suffer no that's not objective knowledge I think it is but anyway so um first of all thank you both for for the great discussion tonight looks like three people already asked my question some I'm going to ask it from a different angle so professor Dawkins so you said you have no opinion about him it looks like about you there is a video of him saying that he thinks atheists not Richard Dawkins should be should be oppressed first orders and number two Michael I've read your article I've read a Stephen Bankers article and on skeptic magazine I've seen your I've listened to all the podcast with Sam Harris etc the trouble is that people like Petersons are filling up the void that was created with Millennials and Gen Z by not believing in God's and and he is gray he's big with Gen Z in his advocacy of the of the Christian God of the Bible his twisted relationship with with reality and truth and in your time Michael you have debunked people like Chopra and others but you didn't quite push back in your discussions with with Peters and my question is why well because again it depends which claim is he making that I'm gonna push back on there's parts of deep ox that I don't push back on you know meditation is good okay yeah it probably is not for me but other people okay fine but then when he gets into the quantum consciousness woowoo then I push back so again I happy to push back I did in my article on Peterson about his theory of truth the archetypal theory of truth which is very close to Ronald Hoffman's interface theory of truth Hoffman's he's a cognitive psychologist at UC Irvine who has this interface theory of truth that the brain is like well sort of like a laptop screen and these icons are floating around on there they don't really exist in the brain they're just they're just our perceptual icons so all of the what we perceive in nature isn't real they're just icons because our senses are just converting photons of light into neural impulses for example so then you can go he doesn't quite go so far as say solecism or something like that but but I push back on that and and Jordan's theory of truth is very similar to that which I think is incorrect and and I said so and and you know if you've got four or five hours to drive listen to the Sam Harris podcast and you know it's it's just painful to listen to this [Music] there was a Star Trek episode where Captain Picard is captured and being tortured and the torture will stop if he'll say there are five bright lights here even though there's four and he keeps saying there's four and then they crank up the pain and so finally he's rescued and in fact at the ship he tells the ship's counselor Troi you know I came to believe there were five that was my truth and I almost said it but they were really just four he's just wrong all right so anyway that's my critique that's straight he's a 1984 when when Winston yes yeah right yeah yeah oh they stole that that's there's only seven plots in Hollywood just recycle them office okay Masons I do I think and thank you and so on a subject of tribalism and the future of humankind burying a highly improbable alien invasion what do you think in your opinion we'll take and for humans to to kind of abolish this sense of tribalism and and kind of like extrapolated to the whole planet to the whole human race so you're suggesting that if we are invaded by aliens we would become one tribe yeah there are there are precedents for that yeah yeah well it's an area of cognitive science it's called de biasing or deprogramming people we're like what's the best way to get a climate denier to accept the science okay it turns out it's not just throw the facts right there in front of them and then he'll go oh I see no you have to like in the previous example you have to say this is not a left-wing right-wing issue and you have to take the politics out of it you can keep your belief in free markets and unfettered capitalism you can have all that but here's this other issue here I just want to get you there or you can keep your Jesus but evolution happen anyway whatever if you but if you if you give somebody a choice like the choice between Jesus and Arwen if they're believers they're not gonna accept Arwen right so so the idea is to figure out what it is they're really signalling when they say I believe this and then and then and then go after that there's research on you know like teaching students like what's the best way to get them to accept critical thinking principles or something like that and anyway you can tinker has a nice chapter on this and I think it's in enlightenment now summarizing the research on deep biasing deprogramming yeah first of all you can tell people about the confirmation bias the hindsight bias and so on unfortunately there's another bias the bias that I can now recognize the cognitive biases and everybody else fortunately I'm not subject to those self-serving bias okay because I didn't so I have two very brief questions the first is that in the United States an atheist cannot become president no matter what good of a politician they are do you think that that will perhaps ever change I think it already changed I think we have one well that's a good point and the second is that mo rather directed to professor Dawkins you said earlier that modern morality is a product of change in a society and I a totally proof but isn't there another second huge aspect on the origin of morality which could be derived from perhaps ultra-stick genes or group solidarity behavior which can be observed in a chimpanzee I think it's true that that there are evolutionary roots to morality which you can trace in both from ethological studies of chimpanzees and other mammals and and also from Darwinian theory but that that's just the basis of it and then culture comes along and builds upon that and it's that that's subject to the changing morals itthat's but you're absolutely right that there is an evolutionary basis which which we can call upon when trying to understand morality yes I agree thank you one of my favorite lines from The Selfish Gene is a that the difference between a rock and another and an organism is the rock doesn't kick back if you kick it yeah that's about it begins right there yeah so I'm afraid if you take all these questions it would take another 30 minutes and it's a little bit too long so I would propose to questions from this side and to question from that side and then we have a book signing so the next question here mr. Dawkins you alluded earlier to the very political nature of the processes that govern which domains of science or which exact scientific facts we rely upon when formulating arguments or building or world we worth you truly the raise differences in IQ known to you and aside from Sam Harris I'm not aware of anyone on the left side of the political spectrum who really addresses this is a few and of course it is then capitalized on by the right-wing usually know that for example Ashkenazi Druze or other European ethnic groups score about one standard deviation above the mean which is 100 as you mentioned earlier but unfortunately on the other end of the of the bell curve we have some African tribal groups who only score I think about 60 which is unfortunately reported by independent researchers since pretty much the first IQ tests were well taken there so what do you make of it that only the right if any people that all addresses this question I am afraid I was ignorant of the facts that you that you quote and probably I was aware that an astonishingly high number of Nobel prizes in science have been won by people of Jewish cultural heritage I it's very difficult to decide when you have figures like that to what extent these might be of genetic origin tourists and they might be of cultural origin there's that huge cultural differences between the groups that you that you mentioned I so I mean certainly the case of the Flynn effect itself the increase in IQ over the 20th century over decades that happens too fast to be a genetic evolutionary effect even if the one could imagine a Selective pressure in favor of it so that at least that shows that we can get dramatic differences in IQ which are of non genetic origin and that would make me tend to be suspicious of the suggestion that the difference is that you described our of genetic origin but I think scientists should always be open minded to such possibilities and we should not automatically reject a hypothesis simply because it's politically or socially undesirable I should point out that the comment that only right-wing people point out the racial differences in IQ and liberals don't all of this research is conducted by professional cognitive scientists and psychologists published in peer-reviewed journals and so on there are hundreds and hundreds of them they're all academics they all teach at universities and we know from studies of the political persuasion of professors in the social sciences it's about 80% liberal so although I've never seen a study asking people who study IQ who they voted for or who they donated to or what their political self-identification is it's very likely the vast majority of people that study IQ that record and report those differences are liberals now maybe they don't want to go on a podcast and with charles murray and talk about it because murray has kind of made it a right-wing thing to say but the vast majority I'm quite sure are not right-wing it's okay that somebody's a brief question maybe it's possible all day long introduction alright so on Jordan Peterson no no I'm joking all right he's joking he's joking I'm joking so so earlier you talked about how humanity is getting better and the thing is around to Western Hemisphere we see that encroachments on freedoms especially freedom of speech and introductions of blasphemy laws and all of that so my question to both of you would be how do you factor this in with what you said about humanity constantly getting better and the other thing is arguments pro-freedom have already been made like by Voltaire John Stuart Mill and all of that why is that forgotten and how can we reintroduce people to those ideas thank you well I think the short answer is as I said three steps forward two steps back it's not a perfect smooth linear curve going upwards and by the way there's no there to get there's no there there to get to it's an asymptotic curve like this we're always gonna have to work at it John Stuart Mill is still popular in college courses on his 1859 on Liberty has just been reprinted by the heterodox Academy under just portions of the book it's titled all - 1 all - when it's free you can download it at the heterodox Academy website and it's beautifully illustrated and it's the central points of you know why we should listen to what other people have to say based on Mills famous you know if if all - one believe one thing we should still listen to that one person we might be wrong we might be partially wrong we might be completely wrong even if we're right we'll learn more about our arguments and make him better he who knows his own only his own side of the argument doesn't even know that you got to know what the other side is arguing and steel man or articulate their argument as as good as they would or even better to the point where they would say yes that is exactly what I believe and then you can demolish anyway that's so I think it's it's still out there we just have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing back against those forces they'll always be there yeah okay last question from the side the last patient okay for a long time religions have tried to basically portray it as an allegory with the truth being more read between the lines and they don't and lately it's not even required that you actually believe in a God the truths can be found by everyone and oftentimes this has been criticized and as playing giving false legitimacy to region and thereby extremism can foster more easily but I have recently heard a point made that this action these attempts are actually quite good for the decline of religion because for example the Anglican Church has been have declining numbers or since the 1980s and it has been very quickly declared declining in fact while other denominations have stayed pretty constant throughout the years so maybe this attempt to make an original more intellectually flattering makes it have no selling value anymore and for the public and actually this is good for the decline of religion what I have thoughts on this second point yeah if if I'm sure there was a quite a bit now whether or not this these attempts to make religious religions more intellectual have negative effects more negative effects like fostering extremism or they actually help the decline of religion yeah so you mean that sophisticated theologians who sort of waffle yeah is in a semi incomprehensible way are killing their own church more effectively [Laughter] there's probably something in that I think and it's a remarkable fact that some of the most doctrinaire religions seems to be the ones that command loyalty religions that spout palpable nonsense seem to be the ones that that people remain loyal to and/or not only about palpable nonsense but also demand extremely uncomfortable rituals and discipline and forcing people to undergo unpleasant sacrifices and things like that it's as though people almost like to be tortured in this kind of way and I was always puzzled me but I think maybe you've got a point and in anything that leads to the kind of religion is okay by me [Laughter] I really like the idea of almost like the idea of mandatory religious education of children all of the religions including Scientology Mormonism all the crazy stuff for that yeah as Dan Dennett said the best way to get rid of religion is to make people read the Bible okay is the last question from this side last question at all no there should be another question from necessary it was for he but he asked his this last question from this side and you had the last whistle okay well good evening um thank you for coming to Berlin my question is kind of hard to phrase I hope I get it right there is a school of thought that is basically nihilism sitting on the top of science as evolutionary biology and physics and that school of thought basically says that the universe is deterministic so there is no free will is just an illusion it says that consciousness and feelings are nothing but an illusion either because they're nothing but arbitrarily evolved neural chemical reactions I don't know if you both subscribe to that school of thought however I think it it must be understandable when people feel aggravated when they hear it because it basically if you forgive the phrase it invalidates the existence and it says that the love that you have for your children and so forth is nothing but an illusion do you think that is a problem and what do you make of it I was always taught by an Oxford tutor effect effectively to reach of my revolver when I hear the phrase nothing but nothing but an illusion it may be an illusion but it's a wonderful illusion [Music] consciousness may be an illusion freewill may be an illusion but it's a very powerful illusion it's one number that we all have and it's one it's one of the things that makes life worth living here if I say something before we break for the book signing and I haven't actually talked to Michael about this I often when it's a large audience as this is and there's potentially therefore a rather large line queue for signing books I feel it's unfair on people at the end of the line if we spend a lot of time dedicating books to particular individuals at the beginning of the line and so I have always tried to make it a rule not to dedicate books personally when it's in a long line I'd do it privately but but and ditto with with selfies I wish I'd remember to ask Michael about how you feel about this I don't care we'll see how it goes well that leaves it open okay no selfies at all no thank you again I'll follow your lead on that Michael it shuts thank you and thank you thank you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Joerg Elbe

Views: 99,293

Rating: 4.7455325 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Wissenschaft, Vernunft, Moral, Richard Dawkins Foundation

Id: 2lT8aNj2mkk

Length: 119min 14sec (7154 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/nom420]

I'd really rather them rephrase and reword their language around these ideas because people far too often imagine a long life of age and suffering, not a lifespan extended by youth and great physical health like that of a 20 year old for an indefinite number of years. "Life extension technologies" should be referred to as "rejuvenation biotechnologies", reversing aging, slowing aging, extending youthspan, etc. It's frustrating because the lay public always, always, always 100% of the time jumps to the conclusion that we're wanting to extend the end part of life, not the youthful part. As if we're trying to invent machines that keep people suffering.

[u/MercuriusExMachina]

tl;dw?

[u/naderc]

Excel answer by Michael Shermer. Thanks for sharing!