Sam Harris’s Best Argument of all time, Part One

I'm not a fan of the term atheism I mean atheism is a term totally without content it's like being an honest Rolla jure we don't have a word for someone who's not an astrologer wait and we don't end up astrologers suddenly became ascendant in our society we wouldn't need to invent non astrology as a discipline we could talk about reason and science and evidence and common sense and and put astrologers in their place and I so it could be with religion this is this is what's anti-scientific when your certainty when your convictions don't scale with your evidence I mean I'm actually open-minded on the survival of death I I don't say about reincarnation that there could even be evidence for it in your book I mean I can easily tell you what would constitute evidence I'm not saying this evidence exists but I can tell you what would constitute evidence for the truth of Mormonism it's just not forthcoming this is we're not gonna get political on this I mean they say there are all kinds of scientific things you can say about religion which religious people tend not to want to hear you can say for instance that Mormonism is objectively less likely to be true than Christianity why can you say this because Mormonism is just Christianity plus some rather stupid ideas I think it's a it's a false fear the idea that we wouldn't find any reason to build beautiful architecture or paint nice paintings but for indulging certain religious superstitions it's just not it's it's I think fine then once wrote that it was a poor poet who must fall silent when he finds out that the Sun is actually a massive sphere of hydrogen fusing into helium I mean it's it's it's not the claim is that you have to take something on faith to be creative and it's it's I think it's a product of a an argument that you use briefly early on which is a fallacious one this idea that that the percentages of people who do these great I think he used in the in the turn to - not in terms of most P was it not fallacious and Guinness most people are doing this good work are doing it for religious reasons well most people most of the time have been religious throughout human history there has been no one else to do the job this is true yeah I mean most people who have plucked chickens have plucked them while believing in God that does not mean you need to believe in God to pluck a chatot science is not in principle committed to the idea that there's no afterlife or that the the mind is identical to the brain right or that materialism is true science is completely open to whatever in fact is true and if it's true that the consciousness is being run like software on the brain and chemistry by virtue of ectoplasm or something else we don't understand can be dissociated from the brain of death that would be part of our growing scientific understanding of the world if we could discover it now and there's there a way as we could in fact discover that if it were true the problem is there are very good reasons to think it's not true and we know this from now 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain and faculties are lost and they're clearly lists not that everyone with brain damage is perf has their soul perfectly intact they just can't get the words out this is that you everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain you can cease to recognize faces you can cease to know the names of animals but you still know the names of tools I mean the fragmentation in in the way in which our our mind is parse elated at the level of the brain is not at all intuitive and hit and there's a lot known about it and what we're being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain and the mind something about the mind and subjectivity is lost you damaged another and and yet is lost and yet if you damage the whole thing at death we can rise off the brain with all our faculties intact recognizing grandma and speaking English the question is do you ever have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to explore this terrain to become truly what is sufficient evidence well it's the kind of evidence everyone in this room demands on any subject other than religion I mean there there are nuances here we can we it it takes a lot of work to to rise to the standard of scientific evidence but science is the one language game we are playing where we get really straight and rigorous about what constitutes evidence where there's a process of peer review where you have a lot of smart people trying to prove you wrong and where you actually win points by proving yourself wrong this is not what religions are up to religions are not falsifiable in this way and if they used a phrase that I thought was very useful to frame this you talked about what used to be and what must be I think was your phrase and I think we should reflect on what used to be because our religions come to us out of a tradition in many cases of human sacrifice I mean as a human sacrifice was virtually a cultural Universal this is where we come from these are the roots of religion this is it has been not it's been but by no means rare for a child to be born into this world only to find that he's being raised by religious maniacs who think that the best way to keep the Sun on its course were to cure the Kings venereal disease is to bury or butcher or burn him alive as an offering to an imaginary God this has this hat it's not just the Aztecs this is the ancient Hebrews human sacrifice is in the the Hebrew Bible at times condemned at times tacitly supported at times demanded and then as you know in the story of Abraham the demand is Rick this is we come from tradition for generations of people who did who did not know a damn thing about the causes of events in the world that really concerned them the spread of disease the the failure of crops the weather and so religious discourse has changed we're not sacrificing people happily now but it has changed by virtue of progress from the outside its urges certain modes of operation are no longer tenable when you can get a weather report on the evening news you no longer have to sacrifice a child in a vain attempt to control the weather I mean you have something like the host desecration yeah I don't know if you know about this phenomenon that I came across while researching my first book the the communion host is thought to be once blessed is thought to actually physically be the body of Jesus and therefore if it's mistreated this is you know you can literally in torturing a cracker you are torturing the body of Jesus there are accounts of whole villages purged of Jews who were accused of having mistreated crackers you know it's so so the question is does the belief in the transubstantiation of which is a belief that I would have thought could be rather harmless have anything to do with the idea that someone can mistreat a cracker and that you should kill him for it yes it does have something to do it's impossible to believe in the torture of crackers unless you think people begin to worry well what about all the good moods I mean can you still love people while viewing them as part of this vast fabric of of causality and I find that that there is no sacrifice to the good stuff I mean it's not if it first of all things have to be a sort of situationally appropriate I'm not constantly looking at my daughter thinking about she's just a part of the physical universe and Wow you know neurotransmitters giving rise to all this cuteness I mean that's that's not the mode I'm in but even even to think in those terms it doesn't cancel the desire for her happiness it doesn't can't I mean the love survives the truth it doesn't love the love is not vulnerable to knowing how things are arising and knowing how things are arising sudden doesn't nullify all the distinctions about about the differences in the possible differences in human experience that we care about it we still care about living good happy easy positive lives and it's what else could we care about question is do you ever have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to explore this terrain to become truly what is sufficient evidence well it's the kind of evidence everyone in this room demands on any subject other than religion I mean there there are nuances here we can we it takes a lot of work to to rise to the standard of scientific evidence but science is the one language game we are playing where we get really straight and rigorous about what constitutes evidence where there's a process of peer review where you have a lot of smart people trying to prove you wrong and where you actually win points by proving yourself wrong this is not what religions are up to religions are not falsifiable in this way the divine origin of certain books figures rather centrally to Christianity Judaism in his longest this can tale entails a variety of claims which are on their face at odds with science the belief that that Jesus was born of a virgin may be a cherished claim for most Christians it is also a claim about biology this is why you can't keep religion and science apart they're they they they they're truth claims cannot be disentangled which is what you I don't wanna I don't want to spend my night defend the virgin birth they think that their body doesn't disintegrate they assume that it does disintegrate what they assume is that there is something inside of you that is eternal which I assume as well it doesn't seem to me resurrection doesn't seem to me anti-scientific well it's anti-scientific if you believe that you have good evidence for that I mean this this is this is what's anti-scientific when you're a certainty when your convictions don't scale with your evidence I mean I'm actually open-minded on the survival of death I I don't say about reincarnation that there could even be evidence for it in your bones I mean I can easily tell you what would constitute evidence I'm not saying this evidence exists but I can tell you what would constitute evidence for the truth of Mormonism it's just not forthcoming there are all kinds of scientific things you can say about religion which religious people tend not to want to hear you can say for instance that Mormonism is objectively less likely to be true than Christianity why can you say this because Mormonism is just Christianity plus some rather stupid ideas I think the best way to address the the compatibility of science and religion is in the person of Francis Collins I don't know if you know him he ran the human genome project for the u.s. he's a medical geneticist obviously a scientist with a great career in science and he's also an evangelical Christian and he's written a book entitled the language of God where he claims to square his evangelical Christianity with the last 50 years of molecular biology and argue successfully that that God exists we know this based on scientific principles and Jesus is his son now I can't say that he's not a scientist but what I can say is that the place in his book where he tells you when his doubts were truly removed his conversion experience is testifies to the to the way the human mind can be partitioned where where a scientist can can can lapse in the most egregious way in in terms of his scientific standards and because the passage goes like this I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains and came upon a beautiful frozen waterfall and my doubts were removed and I fell to my knees in the dewy grass and surrendered myself to Christ it's virtually verbatim so now I would suggest to you that it should be obvious to all of you and it certainly should have been obvious to Francis Collins that if a frozen waterfall can testify to the divinity of Jesus anything can mean anything he said he actually elaborated on this point in an interview for Time magazine he said the waterfall was frozen in three streams and this put him in the mind of the Trinity okay this is this is psychotic thinking in any other context it's exactly what we do with Elvis I mean this or astrology or anything else that that gets laughed off the Dyess I mean just imagine if or with it's what we do with any other God but the God of Abraham imagine a political candidate who was who was forthcoming about his belief in Poseidon it would be a problem he could not possibly get elected it's not like someone has proved that Poseidon doesn't exist I mean that is Russell's teapot you cannot prove that Poseidon doesn't exist the question is is there any good reason to believe he exists the answer is no it's the same answer for the God of Abraham the place to put our faith is in human conversation this is all we have to work with and the choice is to have a truly modern 21st century conversation availing ourselves of all of the tools and all of the wealth of human effort that is our legacy or we can fixate our conversation in a prior century it can be the seventh century of your Muslim it can be the fifth century BC if you're a Jew and we can privilege a conversation that was had then among people who could barely see the wisdom of swapping out their child for a goat in a sacrifice and and dignify their claims to understand in reality with some kind of special oppressions and I think we should be very leery of doing that given what we see about us in the name of religion thank you what what what should we do how would either spawn in the aftermath of a faith-based write-protect and not a new killer 9/11 it seems to me that that that the that the faith part is is not particularly relevant once the bombs have actually fallen maybe getting out is just this that faith he introduces something obviously that I went into in some detail in my first book the end of faith but the problem with with other worldly faith the problem with the idea that you get everything that you could conceivably want after you die is that it takes dead the the entirely rational and important motivating component of death out of the equation so you hate you so you so then you then you can walk around the world meeting people who are in some basic sense eager to die and they're not bluffing there are many secular people and and religious liberals and religious moderates who think that everybody is bluffing and it doesn't matter how many people make a suicide video and then blow themselves up it's they still think that that in some sense you can't trust people's representation of their beliefs you can't take that at face value there's always some deeper thing they've been manipulated they've been brainwashed they've been it's politics is economics it's never the faith I think that faith the the certainty of paradise is intrinsically dangerous one because it's very likely false all right there's no good reason to believe it so if it's your you're actually failing to maximize the only circumstance of well-being that is you can be certain of but to it it allows people to do things that would be unthinkable otherwise and that's yeah so I do worry about I want to hold you to a a close scrutiny of this phrase which i think is a real shocker and-and-and you must have intended it to be a shocker most Muslims are utterly utterly deranged by their religious faith I've even heard you back off a little but now you went from most to some significant subset well let me let me just make clear I'm not backing off of that because utterly deranged by their I set the bar rather low for utter derangement I mean my by my lay my life's thinking that the Quran is the best book ever written on any subject really is getting you pretty close to derangement thinking that it is it that someone should be killed for criticizing it or that that that it's a real problem that cartoonists caricature the the Prophet Mohammed and they you know they should be kidnapped that that this is the kind of these the treading upon the sanctities of the religion is a is a real social problem that demands more energy in its criticism than suicide bombing that I think is a kind of arrangement that is immensely widespread and we shouldn't minimize it I think we have to admit to ourselves that we are confronting the behavior of a death cult among millions and millions of Muslims not 10,000 who went to training camps in Afghanistan where we are confronting an endorsement of this kind of behavior and a reflexive political solidarity or Muslim side with other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior simply because there are other Muslims we can't deny the problem while trying to encourage a more benign face of the religion when I do see the world this way it completely undercuts the basis for hatred there is just there is no rationale for hating a person a few things to say here it's easy to exaggerate the problem and it's easy to overlooked very important differences among religions I mean one problem one problem with a discussion like this is we have a word religion right that is a suitcase term your religion is a is a word like sport you know you have it you have a sport like you know Thai boxing where people get killed and hit in the head with elbows and knees and then you have a sport like lawn bowling you know it what is in common between these sports apart from breathing not much and so any of they're both sports and religion is like that you have a religion like Jainism which I occasionally reference because it is the one truly non violent religion I mean that this core dogma of Jainism is nonviolent so so that no matter how fanatical you get as a Jain you are never going to be AJ and suicide bomber community you simply cannot make sense of it by the lights of Jainism now by no stretch of the imagination is Islam a religion of non-violence Islam is a religion of violence in certain circumstances and it is a great danger to us all that these circumstances can be construed with enough agility as to apply almost anywhere anytime to anyone who wants to die for for the faith now I'm not saying all Muslims view their religion this way but there are there very few tools within Islam by which to say Oh Osama bin Laden has completely misconstrued the faith he has not completely misconstrued the faith so but so between Islam and Jainism you know we have a range of convictions and behavior is born of them and the kind of the style of discourse that you're using to talk about again what religion should be not what it is I would argue just just up these gates this terrain we have people really killing and dying based on propositions that they are granting credence to and the end and these beliefs are thrive in in in a in a context in which they are immune to criticism and we and we are collaborating in that process by not criticizing them publicly incessantly relentlessly until we break this spell this is this is often claimed the idea that the Bible is just the best that was possible for that community in that period in history you know the fifth century BC was an age of such barbarism that Leviticus is really kind of a Brits like the you know the US Constitution a brilliant document it is not a brilliant document it is it is an appalling guide to morality and and just think of how good a book just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by the creator of the universe and there's not a single sentence in any book of the Bible that could not have been written by somebody living in the Iron Age this is a problem for claiming that this is the best book we have and and so the the problem is if you're going to live if you're living by Leviticus and Deuteronomy you should be a good Jew for all time now why are you not a good Jew for stoning stoning your neighbor for working on the Sabbath today you are not because we have different standards of morality and and reasonableness and and we we happily we do and those came from outside of religion versus I think you at one point he said to me that you either expected or in fact we're receiving more criticism from talk with regard to talking to me then talking to Islamists or even I'm sorry yeah that's so he could go and talk to a failed suicide bomber right and everyone's happy and everyone's that's completely legitimate use of his time and of course we need to have conversations how else could we move forward but talking to famous atheists over here that is that's as controversial as it gets and there's that is of a piece with this liberal or pseudo liberal criticism that both of us are getting on this top where people can't seem to see that one that we're talking about ideas and their consequences and everything we say about Islam or Islamism or jihadism or it depending on what the focus is conservative Islam is applies to white converts to the faith and it applies to people in a hundred different countries who and of a wide variety of ethnicities if ever I say something disparaging about Islam compared to Hinduism or Buddhism well then that has nothing to do with racism or the colors of people's skin I mean listen so racism and bigotry against people based on ethnicity or the country they're buried it has nothing to do with any with this conversation at all and so this this meme of Islamophobia that has been thrown up to prevent conversations of this kind it's really quite destructive and it's something that I mean the hypocrisy here should be just shattering to liberals in particular because you have as much as just said we are abandoning the women and the freethinkers and the gays and the public intellectuals and the apostates in these are the most vulnerable people on earth in Muslim societies where you have you're a theist bloggers or even not even atheist bloggers it's just secular bloggers people that rape button we getting hacked to death you know and liberals are not only not giving them any tools by which to better their lives they are castigating the people who are trying to shine a light on this the disproportionate nature of the problem here and there's no corner of the universe that announces certain events as good or bad or right or wrong we make those judgments but in doing that we seem to be broadcasting our preferences onto a reality that is intrinsically value free and where do our preferences come from where do our notions of right and wrong and good and evil come from well they clearly are the product of a fish impulses and social emotions that have been drummed into us by a Ellucian and then they get modulated by culture so you take something like sexual jealousy for instance we come from a long line of primate ancestors that were probably quite covetous of one another despite the fact that everyone was covered with hair and this gets this this possessiveness gets modulated by culture and so we have something like the institution of marriage saying and therefore from the point of view of science when you look at a statement like it's wrong to cheat on your spouse it seems like that statement doesn't really track reality in any deep sense there's a sense that this is just how apes like us learn to worry when we when we acquire language it's just conventionally wrong can't be really wrong from the point of view of science this is just an improvisation we're doing on the back of biology now this is where religious people begin to get a little queasy and and I think they should but they see no alternative by and large but to insert the God of Abraham into the clockwork as an invisible arbiter of moral truth so it so it's wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh deems that it is so which is rather odd because in other moods Yahweh is fond of genocide and slavery and human sacrifice we we the Atheist community is somewhat culpable for this week because because we're criticizing faith and irrational belief in God's what I've run into in talking about Islam specifically among atheists is a sense that we have to be we had were somehow logically committed to being equally opposed to all religions irrespective of their effect so they're just sort of single out Islam from the point of view of atheism is somehow to be co-opted by these these by bigotry by and a law and alliance with with Christians but I mean they said there's nothing that there's nothing that demands that we not notice that different acquaintance between different faiths anyone who is just as worried about the Amish or about Anglicans as they are but Islam is just reading the wrong section of the newspaper so in closing I just want to remind you of why religion can't be the answer to the question of moral truth well first there's just the simple fact that all of our scriptures were written by people who by virtue of their placement in history had less access to scientific knowledge and what is now basic common sense than any person in this room in fact there's not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview is as narrow as the worldview of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Muhammad this is the these people knew nothing next to nothing that is now above the facts that are now relevant to us in the 21st century they knew nothing about the the origins of life the relationship between mind and brain they didn't know that mental illness was a even a category of human suffering they knew nothing about DNA or viruses or computation or electricity none of this is in Scripture they had no idea why people got sick and died unless unless you saw someone stabbed with a spear you had no idea why they died and in moral terms with it with a few notable exceptions most of these people were no wiser than than your average Afghan warlord today they had absolutely the most had absolutely no notion that slavery was problematic that it was there was something morally unsavory about owning people and treating them like farm equipment Jesus and His apostles couldn't see that slavery was worth condemning in closing I just want to suggest to you that just as we don't have Christian physics though the Christians invented physics and we don't have Muslim algebra though the Muslims invented algebra we at some point will not have Christian and Muslim morality okay that the truth has to float free of these provincial ideas but what remains for us to discover are all the facts that relate to genuine questions of human well-being and and the goal clearly is to build a global civilization based on shared values now it seems to me the only tool we need to do that is honest and open inquiry and if faith is ever right about anything in this space it's just right by accident thank you very much Michael or I say something derogatory about Islam or Christianity which seems possible the response from the other side shouldn't mention quantum mechanics and it shouldn't reference a notion of God that is so denuded of doctrine as to more or less be synonymous with pure mystery or pure information or pure energy or pure anything so I just wanna I wanted to plant a flag there there's something called the observer effect where intention orchestrates space-time events which we then measure as movement and motion and energy and matter and addressing Sam we can have a personal relationship with this intelligence because we have a consciousness that is part of the sea of consciousness Rumi the great Sufi poet said you're not just a drop in the ocean you're the mighty ocean in the drop and all you have to do is understand the principles of science and understand that you have within you the resources to intuitively grasp this mystery but one of the things we have to do today one of the things we have to do today my friends at Caltech you have given us this opportunity that you have to stop being the jihadists and the Vatican of conservative and Orthodox science which is not relevant anymore you asked there what I meant by will that is the very embodiment of whoo stringing together at a rapid patter of a bunch of scientific sounding words sprinkled in with some spiritual new-age words is doesn't mean anything and by the way scientists are not jihadis here this is Caltech we're not jihadist that was really very unspiritual of you very undie POC of you to say that well you bring out the list of me maybe you need to meditate a little bit there I mean just take this one example of this non-local quantum effects we're all connected no this is not true what quantum physicists talk about nonlocality in the interconnectedness of things they're talking about things at the quantum level hold on Deepak you spoke for quite some time the deeper point to make here and and what I want to invest I don't get anything that you might not have to because the deeper point here and this is where there the whole style and content of what you're saying is so deeply unscientific is that there's not there's not a physicist sitting on this stage right now okay I would never be tempted to lecture a room full of a thousand people at Caltech about physics I'm not a physicist you're not a physicist and and and basically every sentence demonstrates that that you speak on the subject I take resentment that you're questioning my scientific credentials in fact if anyone on this stage is more scientifically credentialed it's me I took physics chemistry biology I'm an MD I'm a neuro endocrinologist and I want to object hoarding does not obey non look this is a game and it's a game that is that is designed for export to people who don't know much science and don't know how science is done and there and if you missed the point I wasn't criticizing your scientific credentials you're an endocrinologist you're an MD you're not a theoretical physicist you you know you don't see arrogance I mean your bet is likely to see real arrogance as you're likely to see nudity at a scientific conference I mean it this is this is people are constantly offering caveats and hedges toward what they say they that every every statement is couched in I'm sure there's someone in the room who knows more about this than me but because everyone is desperate to avoid public embarrassment now there seems to be something you are not in the absence of a conscious entity the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum si de park that is that that you have to have a conscious being yeah listen to the sounds in the room not the truth of this this fact value issue actually reaches deeper than that because science has always been in the values business we simply cannot speak about facts without embracing certain values it's not it's not that you can't get a naught from it is you can't get an is without embracing certain odds you can consider the simplest statement of scientific fact water is two parts hydrogen in one part oxygen okay this is this seems to be as value-free an utterance as human beings ever make okay but what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition what if what if someone comes forward and says well I'm sorry but that's not how I choose to think about water what if someone says I'm a biblical chemist and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light which in fact it says in Genesis 1 so therefore there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like oxygen so there would have been no oxygen to put in the water so God either made either there's no oxygen in water or God made special oxygen and I don't believe you do that because that would be biblically an elegant what what could we possibly do with such a person okay all we can do is appeal to scientific values and if a person doesn't share those values the conversation is over okay we we must appeal to the value of understanding the world the value of evidence in this case some hundreds of years of evidence in chemistry the value of logical consistency much of what we believe about the world is predicated on the validity of our beliefs about the structure of water if someone doesn't value evidence what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value it if someone doesn't value logic what logical argument could you invoke to prove that they should value logic variables that Bob wants to invoke here and again specifically on Islam economics and political oppression don't account for this behavior the nineteen hijackers were living in Germany they all were college educated most of them had PhD use these are engineers and architects these people that the Germans were monitoring their their conversations their apartment was bugged for months before 9/11 all these guys talked about was paradise and the Quran and the evils of infidel culture read the book perfect soldiers well the problem we have is that we desperately want to believe that everyone used the world the same way and if we could just moderate our Behavior all of our enemies would disappear it would be so much easier to imagine that we made our enemies there's there's no evidence for that no credible evidence for that and so whenever I hear someone on the left again I'm on the I am on the left on every relevant issue I think homosexuals should be free to marry I think taxes should go up on the wealthy I think the war on drugs should be declared over I am just as I am left okay but when I hear people on the left talk about Osama bin Laden as though he were the Reverend Jim Jones of the Muslim world and that that is a phantasmagorical degree of denial of the obvious Osama bin Laden could be doing anything else he wants with his life and he had a problem we face visa fee Islam is that hit the version of Islam that he is teaching is is really faithful to the Quran and the hadith I mean you have to split hairs to see what he is distorting if anything now if he were Amish or a Jain or even a Buddhist it would be absolutely obvious what he's distorting I mean you just couldn't make sense of his behavior in terms of his faith

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Keywords: ScienceToday, Sam Harris, sam harris trump, sam harris hannibal, sam harris ai, sam harris milo, sam harris ted, sam harris podcast, Argument, sam harris, philosophy, document, science, technology, discover, document discover, Physicists, debate, religion, atheism, Philosophy Of Science (Idea), talks, talk show, Atheist, Interview

Id: UO700RmpzCI

Length: 39min 55sec (2395 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2017