Sam Harris: Best Arguments against Religion #1

[Music] [Applause] well it's a great honor to be here it seems to have fallen to me and my colleagues Christopher and Dan to argue against God in what I am now told is the most religious state in your nation I'm encouraged by the show of hands here I just want to assure those of you who are religious here that our purpose is not to offend you this morning but I will nevertheless repay your your hospitality by telling you exactly what I think about religion there was someone who spent the last two years criticizing religious faith I've become quite familiar with how people if they rise to the defense of God as it turns out there are not a hundred ways of doing this there appear to be just three either you argue that a specific religion is true or you argue that religion is useful or you attack atheism as intolerant elitist or otherwise corrosive of basic human values and the the only line of argument that is relevant to this debate or indeed any debate about the validity of religion is an argument that religion is true or rather that one religion is true because they of course they can't all be true in fact our opponents here stand for two distinct and mutually incompatible faiths was Jesus Christ the Messiah the rabbi and dinesh are not likely to agree on that point as Bertrand Russell pointed out over a hundred years ago even if we knew one of the Earth's religions was true perfectly true given the multiplicity of faith given their mutual incompatibility all all believers should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability now happily there's absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists and I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework this theistic framework in this world and what these moral underpinnings actually would be all right 9 million children die every year before they reach the age of 5 a picture picture a Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people one of those every 10 days killing children only under 5 okay it's 20 to 24 thousand children a day a thousand an hour 17 or so a minute that means before I can get to the end of this sentence some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony think I think of the parents of these children think of the fact that that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared and their prayers will not be answered okay but according to dr. Craig this is all part of God's plan any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way and their parents to grieve in this way either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to he is therefore either impotent or evil and worse than that on dr. Craig's view most of these people many of these people certainly will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God just think about that okay through no fault of their own they were born into the wrong culture where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation okay they're 1.2 billion people in India at this moment most of them are Hindus most of them therefore polytheists okay in dr. Craig's universe no matter how good these people are they are doomed if you were if you were praying to the monkey god Hanuman you are doomed okay you will be tortured in hell for eternity now is there the slightest evidence for this no it just says so in mark 9 and Matthew 13 and revelation 14:00 okay perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings it says when the elves die they go to Valley North but they can be reborn in middle-earth I say that just as a point of comparison so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus okay he engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of Revelation and then he created the penalty for this ignorance which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire beliefs are not like clothing they comfort and utility and attractiveness cannot be our conscious criteria for adopting them to believe a proposition you have to believe that you have good reasons for believing it and and the effect that this belief will have on your life can not be among those reasons and this is what it is to be clouded by bias this is why we have phrases like wishful thinking and self-deception to really believe that there is a God is also to believe that you stand in some relation to his existence such that if he didn't exist you wouldn't believe in him how does the supposed usefulness of religion fit into this scheme it doesn't so let's return to this question of truth it's very common for people to say there's no conflict between religion and science because they they relate to different subject matters yeah this is a lie religion is science both make claims about the way the world is they make incompatible claims about the same reality and they make these claims based on very different standards of evidence and modes of argument it should be quite clear that there is a conflict a perfect conflict between demanding good evidence for what you believe and being satisfied with bad evidence or no evidence so religion and science are in conflict because there's no way to disentangle religious and scientific truth claims that the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin say it's a central claim to Christianity it is also a claim about biology the claim that he rose from the dead and will return to earth is a claim about history it's a claim about the human survival of death it's a claim apparently about the human flight without the aid of Technology Jews Christians and Muslims while they while they disagree on many things all agree that on the day of judgement every person who has ever lived will be physically resurrected just which scientific laws does violate one stood to say all of them hey if the basic claims of religion are true science is so blind to this underlying reality and the laws of nature are so susceptible the spirit to supernatural modification as to render the whole enterprise of science ridiculous if on the other hand the basic claims of religion are false most of the people on this planet are profoundly confused about the nature of reality and beset by quite irrational hopes and fears and and many people are simply wasting their lives and spreading delusion often with tragic results it seems to me no thinking person can be indifferent between this the two sides of this dichotomy now it's often imagined that non-believers like myself must be in principle close to spiritual life this is not true hey there's no way that you can have a deep spiritual and ethical life without lying to yourself or to your children about the nature of reality without pretending to know things you do not know that there's nothing that prevents a non-believer from experiencing ecstasy and self transcendence love and rapture and on in fact there's nothing that believes it doesn't prevent a non-believer from going into a cave and practicing meditation for a year like a proper mystic what what non-believers don't tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the nature of the cosmos and about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences that is a difference where noticing but I want to suggest to you that whatever is true about our circumstance ethically and spiritually can be discovered now and can and can be talked about in language compatible with our growing scientific understanding of the world and of the human mind whatever discoveries are there to be made about how to maximize human wellbeing and be talked about in language that that is not an outright affront to all that we've come to know in the last two thousand years and to subscribe to one of the the Iron Age religions by christianity judaism in islam is to is to make the tacit claim that that is impossible but there is in fact no way to understand our circumstance using the tools of our modern understanding of the world that some measure of superstition is necessary some measure of mythology that we have to lie just this much the point is we can place our confidence only in human conversation and the question is do you want to place it in a 21st century conversation where we have all of the world's literature and learning available to us or do you want to place it in a in a first century conversation or a seventh century conversation as preserved in one of our holy books can please notice the double standard that people like dr. craig used to to exonerate god from all this evil okay we're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good but when someone like myself points out the OP whether obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath okay we're told that God is mysterious who can understand God's will okay and yet this is precisely the this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish His goodness in the first place you're something good happens to a Christian some he feels some bliss while praying say where he sees some positive change in his life and we're told that God is good okay but when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents arms and drowned we're told that God is mysterious this is how you play tennis without the net okay and I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way it is morally reprehensible [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Wonderful Truth

Views: 488,928

Rating: 4.8245749 out of 5

Keywords: Charles Tart, Richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, sam harris, ricky gervais, atheism, religion, god, god delusion, debate, non believer, Richard Dawkins, Science, Knowledge, Debate, Religion vs. Science, Atheist, Atheism, Theist, Evolution, Bible, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Islam, Buddhism, Neil deGrasse Tyson, The God Delusion, Darwin, Ricky Gerwais, facts, fact, Lawrence Krauss, Daniel dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, afterlife, life after death

Id: KRm3rSvh7R4

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020