Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Vancouver - 1 (CC: Arabic & Spanish)

[Music] please put your hands together for Brett Weinstein Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris [Applause] you [Applause] I guess we're in Vancouver Wow all right that is daunting so I hope you'll indulge me here for a second Jordan and Sam have given me the honor of moderating this debate or discussion depending on how you view it and I think that actually creates a certain kind of responsibility and I want to talk to you about my responsibilities and how I see it and Maira sense of how you all have responsibilities in this as well I suspect that what's gonna happen tonight is actually historical which doesn't necessarily make it good there's lots of bad history it could be good though and that's what I'm hoping will happen so the reason I say I think it's historical is that we are existing in a moment where all of the systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down the university systems are breaking down journalism is breaking down and at that same moment we have a network of people who are trying to make sense in an alternative way and I have to say I think beating the odds for the moment so here's the problem that network is not entirely in agreement with itself about some significant issues in Sam and Jordan have some differences that have proved very difficult so what could happen tonight is we could have some sort of a failure where things get even more muddled we could tread water where nothing gets clearer maybe it would be entertaining maybe it wouldn't but best-case scenario is that we figure out how to make sense of things that have gotten in our way before and if that happens then you all will leave here and as you talk in your various networks you will have something to say about in what way we upgraded our software so that we could talk more deeply about difficult issues so in to that end we would ask that you not film tonight's discussion and broadcast it online it's not that we want to hide this in fact we encourage you to discuss it but we would like to have all of us feel max we free to speak here to try out positions that we haven't tried out before in the hopes that we can get somewhere new all right so I think with that we will just put Sam and Jordan to it and see if we can head towards some of the discussions that have proved difficult in the past Sam Jordan I think I'll just start by saying that when we first had the idea to do this now some months ago I'm getting a little reverb here so if you can dial down that there's little feedback why wouldn't Norden I first decided to do an event together it was after we did those somewhat ill-fated podcasts and I joked that we would probably need a safe word for this event so that safe word as will come as no surprise is lobster [Music] so you'll know things are dire when one of us says says that but I you know I just want to express my motive for for helping to stage these events and day because I you know I I reached out to Jordan and it really was born of seeing him in conversation with people other than myself I saw him to a podcast with Joe Rogan I saw him speak to Dave Rubin I saw him speak with Brett on on Rogen's podcast and I had so much admiration for him in those conversations it's 90% of what he said in those conversations struck me as really wise and useful and well-intentioned and 10% didn't and I noticed that it was clear to me that that you've seen these successful conversations with other people who I respect I began to wonder that you know I might be the problem and I think I I think I am the problem I think well before you applaud maybe I didn't mean that quite the way you took it I think it's I think it's a good sort of problem for a Jordan to have because it's what happens on those 10% moments and and what doesn't happen that I think made our conversation so hard and and I think we there is stuff to clarify between us so I look forward to doing that and thank you Jordan for agreeing to do this it's an honor to share the stage with you and needless to say having Brett as a moderator is a almost obscene underestimation of the role he should be playing on any stage because he as you know he's been on my podcast and that was one of the best conversations I've ever had so thank you for doing this bro [Music] all right so I'm gonna jump right into it I think here so look this is I put up a poll a couple of days ago to find out what people broadly speaking might want us to discuss and I've been taking a look at that and I took a lot of notes which is why I have my computer here by the way on my phone it's not to check my email well the debates going on the discussion I thought what I might do is just lay out some places that I think Sam and I agree and because there's lots of places we agree and so and then I want to figure out where we disagree which I've been trying to sort out and then I want to see if we can hash it out a little bit and and move forward on that a bit so I'm gonna lay out see one of the things that Carl Rogers said this psychologist was that one good way to have a discussion with someone is to tell them what you think they think until they think that what you said reflects what they said but look this is a really useful thing to know if you're ever having a discussion with an intimate partner for example is that you have to put their argument back to them in terms they agree with it's very difficult so I'm going to try to do that and so so the first thing is I think I think that partly what's driving you if this is accurate is that you want to ground a structure of ethics in something solid and and and there's two there's two things you want to avoid two catastrophes let's say one is the catastrophe that you identified with religious fundamentalism and the other is the catastrophe that's associated with moral relativism that is that reasonable yeah that's good okay good good okay well okay so it's crucially it's crucially important that we get this right now so be and that's something that I think we really agree on because I've conceptualized that slightly different than you and that might be relevant but I think of that as a pathology of order and a pathology of chaos so the terminology is slightly different but I think we're working on the same axis so so so that's the first thing and then in order to do that it seems to me that's your first priority and then maybe your second priority is something like you know you see undo suffering in the world plenty of it and you would think that things would be better if that wasn't the case and that this morality whatever it's going to be is at least going to part ground itself in part on the presupposition that the less undo suffering in the world the better is that also reasonable yeah I would just add to that the the positive side of the continuum as well so you know the phrase I use though the word I use for this is well-being yeah and I know from having I don't think we spoke about this on my podcast but from haven't seen you in other interviews I I think you think that phrase doesn't capture everything one could reasonably want but I think it doesn't matter just I've you know it's an elastic suitcase term for a reason and it's it's actually in reading your book I realize there's a point of contact here because you use the word being capital B being with as though it were imbued with significant gravitas and and so for me well and I agree with you that's an appropriate use of being and for me well-being is simply just the positive side of being you know there's the negative side the suffering we want to mitigate but I think I think however good consciousness can be in this universe that the well-being for me subsumes all of those possibilities okay well so I so I focused on the suffering element I think as I've done in my own work because I actually think it's easier to zero in on in some sense like I think it's easier for people and I think you lay out the argument in the moral landscape kind of like this I think it's easier perhaps gain initial agreement between people on what might constitute a generalized ethic to concentrate on what we don't want yeah I'm not saying that what we do want is unimportant but it seems to me to be harder to get a grip on we don't want our swift's we don't want to do like archipelago so and and there are those and I would add to just closing the door to moral relativism here those who do want outwits are wrong to want auschwitz obviously it's only happened because some people did want pouch what's not the victim side but the perpetrator side and so crucially for me is the claim that I'm a realist I'm a moral realist and what realism means is that it's there that there are right and wrong answers to questions of this kind and and and you can not know what you're missing in fact we almost certainly don't know what we're missing on questions of human value and then and our job is to discover just how good life can be and just what variables are making it needlessly horrible and to to mitigate all of that and live in a in a better and better world okay okay okay so that's a that's a that's a lot of points of agreement so I also believe that there is a catastrophe of of arbitrary moral injunction and that there's a catastrophe of moral relativism and that that that has to be dealt with and that there are genuine differences between the proper way of behaving more lien and the improper way of behaving morally and I think that they are grounded in human universals even those are there's a wide amount of variation so that that's a lot of points of agreement right so we know that there's two things we want to avoid we conceptually speaking which is the moral relativism and this kind of moral absolutism that's grounded in an arbitrary statement of facts that you identify with religious fundamentalism I would identify that with fundly fundamentalism more generally not not with religious fundamentalism per se because I see it also having happening in secular states let's say like not too many or so it doesn't seem to be religious fundamentalism per se that's crucial to your argument no it's not ever say so they're just too close the loop on that the only reason why I would focus on religion in particular there is that religion is the only language game where in fundamentalism and of dogmatism dogmatism is not a pejorative concept the dogma is a good word in specifically within Catholicism and the notion that you must believe things on faith that is in the absence of compelling evidence that would otherwise cause a rational person to believe it that you know religious context is considered a feature not a bug elsewhere we recognize it to be a bug and that's that's why so it all right so is it reasonable to assume that the associate we've already established at least in principle that there's an association between the totalitarian regimes let's say and it's on dogmatism yeah and the dogmatism that characterizes religious belief what do you think although at least in principle the the secularists totalitarian states and the religious fundamentalist totalitarian states do differ in one important regard which is that the religious types ground their axioms in God and the secular totalitarian types don't and so there's got to be something about totalitarianism per se that's independent of that's associated with religious belief in the matter that you just described but that's not particularly associated with the belief in God there's something that makes them that's a commonality between them and so do you have any sense of what that might be well I would I think one has to acknowledge that there's something uniquely pernicious at least potentially about religious beliefs because they they have the the otherworldly variable the supernatural variable the you're going to get everything you want after you die so this life doesn't matter issue that right that allows for a kind of misbehavior that is especially okay so so it seems to that so that the claim would be that if you if you put forward axiomatically your claim that God exists then you can use that claim to justify whatever arbitrary atrocities your system might yeah I guess but the only point I was making there is that not all dogmas are created equal but some dogmas are on their face more dangerous and more devices right but but what I'm curious about specifically is because it seems to me that the dogmas of the USSR and the dogmas of Nazi Germany were as pernicious as any religious dogmas and and they may also share important features with your Nicias religious lives but it isn't clear to me from your perspective what those commonalities would be well so I mean in some ways your recapitulated in an argument I've made and this is an argument that I would make against you were you to claim as you've had you have elsewhere that that atheism is responsible for the greatest atrocities of the 20th century the idea that Stalinism and Nazism and fascism were expressions of atheism simply doesn't make any sense maybe in the case of fascism and Nazism it doesn't make any sense because the fascists and the Nazis by and large were not even atheists I mean Hitler wasn't a de theist and he was talking about executing a divine plan and he got lots of support from the churches and the Vatican did nothing to stop them and fascism as you know coexisted quite happily with Catholicism in Croatia and Portugal and Spain and Italy so but even in the case of Stalin what was so wrong with that situation was where all the ways in which it's so resembled a religion you had a personality cult you had dogmatism that held sway to a point where apostasy and blasphemy were killing offenses you know the people who didn't toe the line were eradicated and yeah you know so and nor so to take a more modern example North Korea is a religious cult it just doesn't happen to be a one that is focused on the next life or you know supernatural claims so what we magic okay so what would be the defining characteristics of a religious totalitarian movement that would make it different from a non-religious totalitarian movement well sure because there's a specular yeah they're very similar but the problem is dogmatism the overarching problem is believing things strongly on evidence and B and the reason why dogmatism is so dangerous is that it is it doesn't allow us to revise our bad ideas in real time through conversation it is it that dogmas have to be enforced by force or the threat of force because the moment someone has a better idea you have to shut it down in order to preserve your dog okay okay so so the commonality seems to be something like claims of absolute truth at some level that can't be that you're no longer allowed to discuss yeah okay and so okay so that's another point of agreement then I would say because part of the reason that I've been let's say a free speech advocate although I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it is because I think of free discourse like the discourse that we're engaged in as the mechanism that corrects totalitarian excess or dogmatic excess and so I also think that systems of governance that are laying themselves out properly have to eval have to elevate the process by which dogmatic errors are corrected over the dogmas themselves which is why I think the Americans are right say with regard to their first amendment is the process of free speech is the process by which dogmatic errors are rectified and so it has to be put at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values yeah yeah no I think you and I totally agree about the primacy of free speech okay okay good okay so that's another fine [Applause] okay so then we could think there's one point that we should just unlock in our games here it sounds like what you're saying is that the reason to fear religious dogma is really on the dogma side and not the religion side which at least leaves open the possibility that something could exist over on the religion side that doesn't have that characteristic right that often they travel in tandem but the thing to fear is not the religious belief it is the dogmatic nature of the way it is close yeah other way to say that is the only thing that's wrong with the religion is the dogmatism if you get rid of the door I've got no problem with the buildings and the music and the and the paintings and wait wait no that wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute that's not a trivial that's not a trivial point and it's not just a joke because the buildings and the music are very important parts of the religious process and so I know I know there's a humorous element to that but it's not like Sam is throwing out the baby with the bathwater there is and to go further than that I've got no problem in fact I'm deeply interested in the phenomenology of spiritual experience so so whatever experience someone like Jesus had whoever he was historically or any of the other Maitri arts and patriarchs of the world's religions though that that that phenomenology is is subjectively real I mean that it's diverse I'm not saying everyone's had the same experience but there are changes in consciousness that explain both how religions have gotten founded by their their founders and the experiences people have had in the presence of those people or by following their methodologies that seem to be confirming of the dogmas that got that grew up around those traditions and my issue is that whatever is true about us spiritually whatever opportunity being born to this universe actually presents as a matter of consciousness spiritually that truth has to be deeper than accidents of culture and just mere historical contingencies the fact that somebody was born and in Mesopotamia and not in China and got a different language game and so whatever is true there has to be understood in universal terms about the nature human psychology and and the human mind okay so so another thing that that I wanted to just point out obliquely and then I want to return to outlining maybe where we agree is that one of the things that was really shocking to me I would say was the the my reading of what was originally Jane Goodall's discovery about chimp behavior you know because there was this idea that was really rooted in Rousseau Ian's thinking that the reason that people committed atrocities in the service of their group identity let's say they're tribal identity was because culture had corrupted us so it was this uniquely human thing but then of course Goodall showed in the 1970s that the chimps at Gombe I think that's been pronouncing that correctly would go on raiding parties right and so there'd be like four or five adolescent chimps usually male sometimes with a female in there they would patrol the borders of their territory if they found an interloper on the border near the border from another troop even if it was a member of their troop that had emigrated so to speak and that they that they had had some history with they would tear them to pieces and of course that was shocking to Goodall but and and my understanding is she had some trepidation about publishing it although she did but then that's been noted repeatedly in other forms of chimp behaviors so see I've been really interested in the Commission of atrocity in the service of belief and it's tempting to pin that say on on Dogma and then to associate that with religious dogma I think that's all tempting but the fact that chimps do it shows that it can't be a consequence of something like religious belief unless you're willing to say that the reason that chimps commit atrocity in the service of their troop and their territory is because chimps are religious and so they're not religious and they don't really hold a secular totalitarian viewpoint but they act out they still act out the atrocity element that's characteristic of human behavior and so to me that makes the problem deeper than one of mirror let's say surface statements surface statements yeah yeah the obviously the problem of primate aggression which we've inherited along with the shims is deeper or at least different than the problem of religious violence or totalitarian political structure is that okay get the worst out of people so but we have we have these primate capacities that we have to correct for and we're busily trying to correct for almost everything that we've been evolved to do and we're not you know we don't like the state of nature for good reason and virtually everything that's good about human life is born of our I would argue culture based and and you know highly intelligent and necessary effort to to mitigate what is in fact natural for us and that and we try there's nothing more natural than tribal violence would you love this or that you're describing in Jim's okay so so then that it also seems like we agree that the the core element of tribal alliance which would have its roots say in in the chimpanzee proclivity to or its analog in the chimpanzee proclivity to identify with the dominance hierarchy of the troop is something that's a source of the proclivity for human social aggression that's independent of it's at least independent of any obvious religious substrate so there are other reasons for group belief and the Commission of atrocity that can't be directly attributed to to religious dogma yeah I mean as and what most worries me about religion I would say obviously religion can channel these primate urges in unhappy ways so you can get tribal violence that gets amplified by religious dogmatism and that should trouble everyone but it's not unique to religion it's also nationalism and it's racism and it's all other kinds of dogmatism but what most worries me are those cases where clearly good people who are not necessarily captured by tribalism per se are doing the unthinkable based surely on religious doctrines that they believe wholeheartedly with with good evidence so you have the person who joins Isis who wasn't even Muslim before they converted you know 16 months ago and they go all the way down the rabbit hole to the the most doctrinaire most committed most uncompromising view of just how you have to live in this world if you're going to be Muslim and they join Isis based on the idea that salvation only goes one way and the dying and defense that the one true faith is the best thing that can happen to you there's no question that they're individuals who have made that journey in fact there are individuals by the thousands who have made that journey and there are far more benign versions of that they're people who just waste their lives I would argue converting to whatever the belief system is and just wasting a lot of time worrying about hell or worrying about the fact that their child is gay and the you know the creator of the universe doesn't approve of that and so there all kinds of suffering that strike me as truly unnecessary born not of again ape-like urges but ideas that any rational person would if believed what would follow to that that same terminus I mean if the thing is if you buy if you buy the fact again to take Islam as as a current example if you buy the claim that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe and never to be superseded by anything humanity does now or a thousand years from now that commits a rational per that then then the exercise of human reason is bounded by this I would argue pathological frame which leads to certain outcomes that should really worry us so so let's take that claim apart for a minute because that's not your claim specifically that the claim that you were describing see because that's that's really not the claim that religious fundamentalists make the claim they make is worse than that because they claim that the Quran say or the Bible for that matter is the literal word of God but more than that they claim that their understanding of that word is correct which means they conflate two things like because you could imagine a situation where you had a book and I'm not saying this is the case it's an imaginative exercise where you had a book that had all the answers that was extraordinarily complicated and so that when you read it it wouldn't be obvious that you understood it perhaps it wouldn't be obvious that you didn't understand it either but you're not going to be able to you can't get an uninterruptible and so the fundamentalist claim is far worse it's that not only is there an absolute reality truth embedded in the book but that their particular take on that absolute reality is the absolute take on that book yeah so they conflate their own they make an assumption of their own omniscience and then pass that off on to God yes except in their defense and I don't often rise to the defense of fundamentalist it's it's very easy to get there because some of the claims in the book are not at all hard to parse in fact so many of them can only be honestly interpreted one way so to take again an example that will be not inflammatory to you but makes the point it just says that the remedy for theft in the Quran is to cut the hands off a thief auuu that is the unambiguous injunction it's not an allegory it's not it's so so the you have to be you have to indulge some kind of tortured [Music] interpretive scheme to avoid the the shocking fact that the creator of the universe thinks you should live this way for all time and people like Isis I mean this is my claim it's just that this is most of what is in these books and this is what worries me about those books because they can't be edited most of what's in the books is clearly not the best that humanity is capable of in the ethical domain or in this so and and so and so clearly and that this is true for morality you know most pressingly but it's true for science is true for economics is true for anything else that we are wise to pay attention to so slavery is condoned in the Bible in both Testaments and in the Quran there's no getting away from that now you can say well it's not the central thrust of any of these books but if you if you go to the books and try to figure out what the creator of the universe wants with respect to the owning and needless immiseration of other people right he expects you to keep slaves and he's told you how to do it you know don't knock out their eyes and their teeth don't take if you're a Muslim don't take other Muslims as slaves but it's not an accident that the people who joined Isis thought that it was absolutely kosher to take slaves to take sex slaves and I mean they were even there their use of their sex slaves was conducted as a sacrament and that's not an accident may they work a crane over there that they use 80 girls before they rape them so this is this is not unlike what many people expect it's not that this doctrine is being used as a pretext for people who would otherwise do terrible things like take sex slaves and rape them and so there's no net damage being done here by this belief system no these are I would argue in many cases psychologically normal people who are simply convinced of the absolute veracity of these ideas and and in the in this case that the perfect example of Muhammad as the the most self actualized human who's ever existed and you know what did Muhammad do Muhammad took sex slaves so you know he and he said and then then once you once you grant that and this is Emma this is where you there's a tension between you know how we pursue the same goals like you know as we've just established we have many of the same goals but insofar as you make religion look palatable insofar as you suggest to your audience that they can they can have their religious cake and eat it - they can they can have their reason they can have their respect for science they can have a 21st century worldview but they can also hold on to everything they love than Christianity or fear to lose it is undoubtedly mostly Christianity but but whatever any religion my concern is that it keeps us shackled to these Iron Age philosophies and these Iron Age conversations where we should be having a 21st century conversation about everything ethics included okay okay so [Applause] okay so but I want to ask you a little bit about your feeling wait wait before it before you move on I want to get each of you to clarify something so that we know where we are so Sam you said the problem here is that the dogma can't be updated right that slavery is with us permanently because it's written into the dogma but clearly most of the traditions in which it's written into the holy book don't practice slavery and the people who who adhere to these belief systems wouldn't defend slavery so clearly there is the capacity for an update mechanically I mean they've been forced it had beaten out of them right I mean that we fought a civil war in the u.s. to get rid of slavery but what Christians who have lost slavery in England though what was that it was Christians who were at the forefront of the movement to abolish it there are Christians on either side of everything there's no one else to do a job but that's the update but there's but it was specifically Christians who were using their Christian belief as a justification yes eradicated sliver the problem was they were actually on the losing side of a theological argument and and it would be much better I think you would agree if one of the Ten Commandments had been don't keep slaves but there's certainly one we could swap out for that one and and so that way it would've been much easier for Christians to have fought against slavery and it's it's much harder for Muslims frankly to fight against it now the problem is that there's a point I made I think in my first book is that the the door is leading out of this kind of fundamentalism don't open from the inside they get bashed open from the outside and it's it's it's humanism and it's secularism and it's scientific rationality that has exerted such pressure such winnowing pressure on Christianity you know now for multiple centuries that that's why we're not encountering the Christians of the 14th century on a daily basis but we and we are essentially encountering Muslims of the 14th century not only in the Middle East but in our own societies in in terms of their intuitions about how we should all live right I mean the fact that zero percent of UK Muslims think homosexuality is acceptable right zero percent me you there's almost no question you can come up with where we could pull this this this society and say you know I mean do you think that that the Lizard King is living in the Oval Office you know that you do never get a zero percent response to any poll question right but if you ask Muslims on the streets of London is homosexuality morally acceptable apparently you can find no one who says it is that's shocking and it's not an accident right and it would be much easier if the book actually said actually you can love anyone you want and you know it's it's not a problem it is it is shocking but I think you know there's a reason that you keep finding yourself that at Islam which may be the slowest to update for reasons that may be ancient but that's that's a you that is useful well I can do it for Christianity I just I want to make the I want to make the point as cleanly and as undistracted Lee as possible but yeah it's admit it's true I have the same kinds of concerns about Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology or anything else and they're all at the point is they're all different and there's no reason to be because you know Islam to take the case where it's fine Islam doesn't represent any impediment to stem-cell research right because they just don't think that that the the design of fertilized ovum is immediately in sold they wait it waits 40 days or 80 days or 120 days depending on what hadith you believe so it's just that never came up when we were all complaining about how religion in this case Orthodox Judaism and Christianity and in the States was posing an impediment to embryonic stem cell research okay okay so I wanted to ask you a clarifying question - yeah sure in Pope's same level would you agree that there are things written into these religious texts that are unambiguously unacceptable viewed through a modern lens and not because the texts are so complicated that we have misunderstood something but there are things that are just written in there that we now understand to be wrong okay so so the first thing the first thing I would say is that we have to be very careful about equating all the religious texts and I do actually think that who are careful about that but that's something we can have a discussion about so so because you know for a lot of my life I was I would say more interested in the universal truths expressed in religious belief across different cultures but I've become more and more aware of the important distinctions between the religious cultures maybe in the last 10 years so it isn't clear to me that you can just throw all religious dictum dicta in the same bucket and there maybe there's complex reasons for that so you know and one question which you kind of sent it Sam already is do you see a hierarchy of unacceptability between different religious doctrines I mean and I would say act it okay fine fine fine so okay now but here here's an interesting issue and and I think we're starting to zero in on we've we've covered what we agree on a lot of it but there's no answer bread's question because I think I'm sorry sorry I answered the first half of it but the second part is I think that this is where I'm going to sound like a postmodernist which I really hate I would say sentence by sentence yes you're correct paragraph by paragraph perhaps but here's here's the problem with complicated texts especially ones that actually constitute narratives so in imagine imagine this so imagine you're at a movie and it's a movie with a twist at the end and so the entire movie is set up to make you think one particular way and to have one set of experiences but when you put the twist in at the end it changes the entire structure and so this is the one of the complex problems that actually led to the rise of postmodern interpretations of literature which is that if you take a complex narrative there's a very large number of ways of interpreting it and it isn't self-evident which of those are canonically correct and we can deal with that horrible issue later but but it's a good objection and it's true and what it does is it makes these sorts of things quite complicated because in the the Bible is a series of books and they had influence on one another and they were sequenced with a very complex editorial process and there's actually a developmental narrative that links all the chapters together and what that means this is at least I'm going to speak from from the perspective or in terms of analysis of the Christian Bible what it means is that you have to read the beginning as if it's also influenced by the end which is what by the way and in case you think that I'm weaseling around here and I'm not is that that's exactly what you do every time you read any story any work of fiction you say well you're not claiming that the Bible is a work of fiction it's like don't don't that's it that's just a cheap objection that's not my point my point is that it's a narrative and everything in a narrative is conditioned by all the rest of the things in the narrative and it is well known like if you're a screenwriter for example there's an old dictum remember who generated was one of the great Russians that if there's a rifle lying on a table in the first scene that it better be used by the end of the second scene or it shouldn't have been there at all so there's this coherence I'm looking for the rifle in your answer to this question yeah I want to be used my point is is that it isn't reasonable to take a single sentence out of a coherent narrative and say that stands on its own or it's rarely reasonable because you have to interpret the word in the sentence and the sentence in the paragraph and the paragraph in the chapter and the chapter in the context of the entire book you have to do that now you could object and reasonably so that there are some sentences that are so blatant that you can't use context to to what paraphrase them let's say but I think you also have to give the devil let's do that the Christian Bible is a developmental narrative and the beginning has to be read in light of the end and that's that's a that's is it a fact so what does that do to Moses's laws of war though this is not a narrative this is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land if you intend to take over that land you kill every break right there are other rules in there about killing husbands and taking the wives custom it's a brutal document absolutely brutal and so my point would be I don't know that reading that portion in light of the end even if you call the end of the New Testament I don't know that it changes Moses's laws of war and their acceptability well hypothetically if you take the New Testament seriously it does because it's a suit it's a document that supersedes it and I think there's actually technical reasons doesn't supersede it on every point I mean this is a problem slavery is a very straightforward case because clearly the the the bible thumpers of the south who were defending slavery with reference to the text felt they were on firm ground and I would just I would invite anyone to read what the the New Testament and the Old Testament say about slavery to see that they were on fairly firm ground that the the balance of the of the honest reading was on the side of clearly we can we can keep slaves right Jesus Jean Jesus never envisioned a world without slavery and he had mom slaves to serve their masters well and to serve their Christian masters especially well the English Protestants wouldn't have agreed with that because like I said they were at the forefront of the fight against sleep okay so but I think there is a clue in spite something outside the text and this is begin is you're making this harder than it is and my concern is why well I don't think I am because I think that the fundamental message in the New Testament for example is that so that usually all that if we so-so Jews are in possession of a book that has some diabolical passages that would be better left out you're not going to offend it's not like it's in the Old Testament itself in the Jewish Bible there's there's also the seeds of the same tension so for example there's a tension and this would be a tension that's of interest to you because you you've stated quite clearly in your book in in the moral landscape that you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater with regards at least a religious phenomenology you said that for example I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual runes maintained at enormous economic and social cost but now I understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble well I'm trying to find the important psychological truths in the rubble and so and so I but we have to decide also if we agree about that like are there important psychological truths to be found in the rubble oh absolutely okay so but the problem with revelation this notion of revelation this notion that some books weren't written by smart people they were written by God allows you confines you to take in the whole text even though this text was cobbled together over centuries and some four whole centuries some books were in the New Testament and then they got thrown out the centuries later and some books weren't in and then got put in so it's a it's an all too human process that got us these books in the first place but once they were set the believers imagine that you're stuck with every passage and there are passages in the Old Testament that tell you to stone a girl a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death right and where you probably agree that those are wrong so yeah there's another point for greed only you don't have to read the book to the end to know that it's wrong you can get you can get that from the paragraph yeah but that is what I said I didn't say you had to read the end to the end of the book to those related to end you needed to read to the end of the book to contextualize those statements within the whole I didn't there's no it's called Puteri there's no X company contacts to those kinds of statements and that's there is in the Old Testament there's a real there's a real tension and this is I think the tension that would be of interest to you is there's a tension between the dogmatic and the prophetic traditions and I think to the degree that you're interested in religious phenomenology you find yourself on the side of the prophetic tradition and the prophetic tradition has implicitly in it what would you call an an implicit damnation of those dogmatic crew those cruelly dogmatic rules you see that emerge all the time and only only well arguably in Christianity and I think the only Judean see clearly there in the Old Testament once again to Islam but but every prophetic the notion of prophecy is dangerous and worth worrying about I mean the idea that any ancient book contains in it a perfect description of rightly interpreted however difficult to interpret it if you're only smart enough you could extract from this text a perfect window on to the future right and that that whole generations of people have lived by the lights of this cockamamie idea right that the world is going to end and it's ending is going to be glorious right this is this is V at the center of most in most eschatology it's just that the when the wheels come off totally right that's in some levels the best thing that's ever gonna happen because it's showing you that that in this case Jesus is going to come back and throw the sinners into a lake of fire and at the sea I read I've read to the end of the book it's pretty scary at the end as well and in Revelation is yeah yeah no kidding well let that's that's a really good objection but you know like when I did my lectures on the Bible last year I said they provided a psychological take on the biblical lectures and that's what I'm going to attempt to maintain here because I don't believe that I'm qualified to make fundamental metaphysical statements but but you know that that that that the scene that's that's delimited out at the end of Revelation so that's a very interesting book read psychologically because what it anything and this is we should talk about well let me let me just let me just address it all I only take a minute to do it and I'll try to be succinct so there's an idea that's expressed in that book is that it's something like things are always falling apart in a fundamental manner it's part it's built into the strut there's an apocalyptic element to human life we fail in small ways and we fail in catastrophic ways and everything that we have we lose and we die so there's and and societies come to an end there's an apocalyptic element built into the structure of human reality and part of part of what's revealed in that strange book at the end which is like a hallucinogenic nightmare in some sense is that the hero is born at the darkest point in the image in the journey and it's a psychological truth and it's very very apt because at the darkest point this is also why christ is born near near the darkest time of the year from from a from a metaphysical perspective there's an idea there that when things fall apart that's the time for the birth of the hero and the hero in Revelation is also the place where free where we're truthful speech most clearly manifests itself because in the Christian tradition Christ is identified with truthful speech and so the notion there is that redemption under apocalyptic conditions is to be found in the revelation of truthful speech which is something that you actually believe well I believe in truthful speech but I also believe that you can play this kind of interpretive game with almost any text this is this way of but then you can do it with the world salmon that wreaks havoc with your value from facts argument no actually I didn't hear what you just said what was that well I said you can you can you could make exactly the same objection with the world of facts is there's an infinite number of facts and there's an infinite number of potential interpretations and so Pat tracking the pathway from the fact to a value is actually impossible it's the same argument with regards to know what you're talking we should talk about that but that I I don't think that's a good analogy i they're more and less plausible interpretations of any situation any data and any text arguably but the problem is that you can you can read into any story some apparently meaningful set of psychological insights which write you can do that with any set of facts - well no I mean there's certain things you can't you can't over interpret to your heart's content and come out anyway you choose my point is that the first of all there are there this is why fundamentalism always has an edge over more quote more sophisticated theology because the the sophisticated theology is in in most cases inspired by a more and more modern recognition that well we can't read it literally because it either makes no sense or it makes barbaric sense right so we have to get away from the literal and the more you get away from the literal the more you are unconstrained by the text and you can just broadcast on it anything you want to put there and so you know the the literal X there's no question that most generations of Christians who read revelation expected the world to end in some literal sense of this kind of phantasmagoria I mean there was there was gonna be a beast and it was I mean this you know undoubtedly they thought this is going to happen in their own time you know under Rome but this is a you know if you're going to go purely literary on any of these texts you are on some level you're playing tennis without the net you're just you're unconstrained by the text and you can do with it more or less anything you want I mean isn't that isn't that argument working at cross-purposes with your other argument well no because it's always tempting first of all there are lines that do not announce there that they're susceptible to that interpretation I mean yes you can you can say listen Allah does not want us to cut the hands off of Thieves he just you know here he he meant to cut the you know the the hand of their volition rather than their actual hands right so you're constraining them rather than kind of now sure undoubtedly there was some some Muslim somewhere who wants to interpret it that way but it gets harder and harder the clearer that the line is and the problem with all of these texts is that there are so many principles again I mean since it read revelation any way you want it is still a problem that it it is perfectly rational on the basis of reading that text to expect the world to end and for Jesus Jesus to be the only savior of it therefore if you know if you happen to be born a Hindu or born Muslim or born a Jew who doesn't recognize Jesus to be the Messiah and you are screwed well no eternity it's a funny thing though I mean it's a strange thing let's say that one of the things we already agreed on as far as I can tell is that the antidote to pathological dogmatism is is free truthful expression something like that is that yeah okay yeah well but one of the things I would say that's absolutely crucial to Christianity in particular is the notion that the thing that's redeeming is exactly that and it doesn't matter so it's a universal truth now if we both agree on that the idea that the free expression of truthful speech is the antidote let's say both denialism and to totalitarianism then the notion that that might be embodied in something like the word which is truly I think the deepest of Christian ideas is that why is how is that not the same claim now let me elaborated more a little bit more or completely so here here's the strange thing first of all I agree with you by the way about the danger of flying off the text right about as you move away from the text your interpretation gets less and less constrained and I think it's also the same danger as move of moving away from the facts which is I think why you want to ground values and facts so I get that argument I think it's accurate but here but here's here's something strange is that this notion that redemptive that redemption is to be found in truthful speech is actually embodied in Christian mythology let's say as a personality and not as an idea it's actually something that you embody and act out it's not just an idea and that's why there's an emphasis on the idea of the embodiment of the word in flesh it's a very sophisticated idea I mean it's it's an insanely sophisticated idea so anyway well and there's one more thing and then okay so look you you you've made the case and I hope we can really get to this because this is the really tough part of our discussion I think is that you want to ground the world of values in something that's true we could say objectively true but let's just say true for a minute and I share that desire but but the problem is is that I can't see and you actually state this in your book I can't see how you can interpret the world of facts without an a priori interpretive structure and and this is an old philosophical claim it's not unique to me it's it's the claim of conte for example that you can't get directly from the fact to the value because there's an interpretive framework that mediates between you and the facts and so first of all I'd like to know if you accept that proposition and then the second question would be if you do accept the proposition then what's your understanding of the nature of the interpretive framework because I think it's best understood at least in part as a personality or as a story for that matter so well I think our intuition of truth the the intuition that there's a difference between fact and fiction or fact and fantasy the intuition that we are in we live in relationship to a and reality about which our understanding can converge provided we're looking in the same direction with the same tools I think that is it's certainly deeper than religion it's not best captured by stories it's it even if it even if you could as a matter of historical fact point to its roots in story and myth and religion that's not an argument that it's now in the 21st century best captured by story and myth and religion I think it's it is a fundamental intuition to which our sanity both personally and inter subjectively is anchored I mean to lose a sense of objective reality is to lose the the platform on which you can communicate with anyone and or rationally expect anything to happen a moment from now so to think that your memory represents something about a prior state of the world and your beliefs represent something about a possible state in the future all of this is anchored to a sense that there's a difference between knowing something really and just imagining it right there's a difference between perception and hallucination all of these distinctions are born of this this intuition I think we do have clearly we have fundamental intuitions which are either impossible to analyze or can be analyzed with respect to only other intuitions which we did which we deem more rudimentary with upon which everything else we do as a matter of knowledge gathering and sense making is built so the intuition that two plus two makes for right you know you you at some point you've learned basic arithmetic and you learn what addition is and it's demonstrated to you with objects and you show it you're shown you take two apples and you take two more apples and then you have four apples look just count them the the intuition that that can be generalized to any four objects right that it's not just a fact about apples right this is something that we are clearly designed to have there are places where it might break down right they might break down and you know the quantum level it might break down and in areas where our intuitions fail we recognize those failures in science and mathematics by recourse to other intuitions which again are unanalyzed but so there is just this fact that we do pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and that's not embarrassing I mean so what's the difference between and I'm not trying to trap you here seriously not so so there might be mathematical intuitions a priori so let's say Kant identified time and space is a prior intuitions but I think there's a third category of a prior intuitions that are in fact stories or their personalities or stories so let me give you an example so I'm gonna do a quick rereading of the moral landscape so because see you talk about GE Moore's argument of infinite regress if you claim that something's good and you equate it with something you can also ask infinitely why the thing you're equating it with is good now it seems to me that the way that you step out of that argument correct me if I'm wrong here is you tell this you tell us you tell a story I'm not trying to be smart about that you tell two stories you tell a story about someone who has an absolutely terrible life there in a in a jungle where nature is trying to kill them all the time and well they're trying to be killed by nature while nature is trying to kill them all the time horrible barbaric thugs are making their life miserable in every possible way okay so that's one Paul let's say and then another pole you identify and these are hypotheticals so I guess they're fictions that's one way of thinking about it even though they're extracted from real situations they're there they're met have fictions they're meta truths that's another way of thinking about it you contrast a good life and you know that's a life where the person has enough to eat and enough shelter and you know they have the things that you would expect people to want you say this is a bad life and you say this is a good life and so and then you say that's and then you make a side move which I would say is that that's an objectively verifiable I would say I don't think it is an objectively verifiable fact I think it's a fundamental moral claim and I think that's where you put your stake in the ground and I would say when I read that I thought well if you take your jungle story which you've extracted from a bunch of Horrors and compiled and you take your positive story which you've extracted from a bunch of horrors or a bunch of quasi utopias let's say and compiled you're two-thirds of the way to a landscape of Hell in heaven right also then why not continue the abstraction and say look what we're really trying to avoid here is hell oh yeah we're really trying to move towards this heaven yeah but oh yeah but we'll know as soon as we do that you might name it just Lansky no but my name for hell is it's very interesting because like we're talking about this at dinner we're talking about this at dinner and how that would be the overlap or lack of overlap between our audiences and so like I just heard from your audience there and you might have heard from the odd convert but but what's amazing to me is so like I have to do some work to figure out what point they think you made a nice ed if you're gonna produce a fiction oh I don't go right to the end okay so did produce a fiction it's you you can tell stories by way of communicating certain ideas I mean that's obviously so I'm not saying stories aren't incredibly powerful and useful and inevitable right it's like we wait I think you are you know I'm not saying you might not be saying that they're that they're they're no they're not inevitable but you are debating their utility and power because you know you said that you don't need this story as an intermediate now we have a few doors open here which I think we should okay we should extract the most out of these areas that we've touched and not run onto something else oh okay III think there's to talk about the utility of story right which is obviously a fact about the world and about human psychology that you're reading a lot into and more into that I'm reading right and the people we just heard from love that you well maybe I'm reading more into it than you are but you talk a lot about the primacy of stories and you're trying to get me to admit that they are that I even I helplessly resort to storytelling to make my points right well you think I think this is a good place for us to and I don't want us to get bogged down but I think it's a good place for us to touch this topic of the distinction between literal and metaphorical truth what you I mean you might want to introduce it but I because that in my mind that covers this there's different emphasis on stories okay briefly but we are we are at we are at 60 minutes and we had a good to go an hour and 15 before we start QA so I agree that metaphorical truth is relevant here metaphorical truth is my argument that there are some things which are literally false but if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would if you behaved according to the fact that they are false and so that these things hover in a kind of intermediate space to call them false is is incorrect right and I hear Jordan wanting to call them true because they're so useful right so but you also call look this is what happens in the moral landscape I think tell me that tell me why I'm wrong because I'm really trying to understand it see I think you dealt with GE Moore's problem of infinite regress by by staking a moral proposition and your moral proposition was look here's a way things can be horrible and here's the way things can be good can we accept that this is horrible and this is good and that we should move towards good and if the answer is yes we can accept that then we can proceed and maybe we can even proceed with extracting values from facts but we have to accept that a priori presuppositions first and you insist that we have to accept it because it's objectively true and I don't think that's clearly so so let me just get the proposition clear so my argument is that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad that's hell okay that's so so hell is is the religious version of that but I'm just you can forget about religion or whether there's a God or anything else that we live in a universe that admits of the possibility of experience I'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious mind every mind that can have an experience is tuned to the worst possible experience for that mind for as long as possible so there's no silver lining there's no there no lessons learned everything that can suffer suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can now that includes human beings includes animals and includes the future AI that we might build that can suffer it includes beings that we will never know about right so my argument is that's bad if anything is bad that's bad okay we don't disagree that the hell is bad if the word bad is going to mean anything that's bad you can't say that's fine but it's not a factual claim no it is it's a factually it's a claim about so I would argue to you and again at this it's it's hard to impart this intuition if someone doesn't share it but if someone doesn't share this intuition I have no way of interpreting any other other word that comes out of their mouth after they admit they don't share this so episode just imagine someone saying and that doesn't make it a factual claim so again you guys are gonna get stuck here and I think I think you know give us give us one more minute okay one more one more minute because I don't think we'll get stuck here every claim every claim we make about anything at a certain point if you trace all the tools were using down to you know Turtles all the way down to something that we can't explain and justify right this is true of physics it's true of mathematics I just said it was true of arithmetic good ol proved it's true of arithmetic I mean there's that we have intuitions of truth that can't be cashed out by recourse to the system itself and it's true morally I would argue in this sense that yes the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and if you're gonna say well okay well who knows maybe it's good what I had what does that mean what a bad means bad again you guys are gonna get stuck let me it's ok what does bad I really I really think that we're gonna go down a rabbit hole here okay this is this is a crucial issue absolutely why you get stuck all right so we're putting our we have a mutiny here we're at war with our moderator yes give us two more minutes because okay also so so let me but let what I mean honestly by the way I have a prediction that in your two minutes we won't be any further okay let's bet I'll bet you a bet you a dollar you're literally playing devil's advocate here because you don't believe that it's that hell might be good no of course okay I didn't say that so you agree that it's bad this isn't I would argue that anything you would say if you're going to use the word bad and good yeah or better and worse or anything any make any value judgement about anything it will implicit in those judgments will be an acknowledgment whether you're going to acknowledge it or not when I put the question to you that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad you can't use the word bad unless you're disagreeing in the least about that okay so it's built into your good and bad in with respect to every other situation in life fine right you know if you if you're going home tomorrow and you're you know a bus drives by and cuts your hand off and you say well that was bad it only makes sense with reference to this underlying claim well it would be worse if the other hand got cut off too and everyone's hands got cut you're beating a dead horse here man I agree with you so I'm saying that everyone assumes this whether they whether they claim to or not okay okay and so and so to say and this is this is how I bring GE Moore's argument to end yeah he says his argument depends on it being intelligible at that point to say well is that really bad is it really bad okay well what would really bad be if if the worst possible misery for everyone didn't get you there right that there's no there's no other space to occupy I'm also not disputing the utility of your move to bring GE Moore's infinite regress to an end I'm disputing something very specific I'm disputing the issue that that's a factual claim that's all well it always bad we should avoid it it brings lures infinite regress to an end all of that I agree it's deeper than a factual claim it's just a claim about the it's a claim that is required to make any value judgment intelligible right any value judgment so it's like it's not an it's not an arithmetic all claim so an aeromedical claim about addition in this case is is now you could say you could say the same thing you could say when I say two plus two makes four you could say but is that a factual claim and there's some way of jiggering the way you talk about facts with respect to mathematics where I could say well it's not a factual claim but it's an arithmetic Elaine it's a mathematical claim well I'm also not trying to suppose don't COCs need to balkanize yep fine what I'm trying to do is to what I'm really trying to do we need see the the problem I have with your argument and this isn't I don't mean that you're wrong I see what you're doing and I see why you're doing it and as far as I can tell it's laudable but for the problem is is that as far as I can tell there's problems it doesn't solve and there's other problems that leaves on address that don't have to be unsolved or unaddressed and so and one of the problems is this problem of the intermediary interpretive structure and you you already said we need intuitions to guide our our interrelationship with facts because we've already agreed on that so the question is what are the nature of these intuitions and I'm saying some of those intuitions take the place of stories take the form of stories but even more than that so I'm gonna go after the hell thing again okay because you said well it's bad and you made sure that I also agree with that which I do I agree with that and then it's a point of profound agreement between you and I like I've spent my entire life trying to understand why people did the worst things they could possibly imagine in the service of their dogmatic beliefs and so I think that that's not good seriously and I'm no fan of moral relativism so we're on this we're in the same page there now but what I noticed it in when you wrote the moral landscape is you you tell it and I'm not trying to trap you you you tell a story about it looks to me like it's a story about heaven versus hell essentially let me use that language momentarily but it's also a story about good versus evil and this is why it's because the question is what's bad about Hell now you say the suffering it's like fair enough man true enough but not true but not true enough so in what is what's also bad about help in addition to the suffering the actions that put you there the malevolence that generates okay with that that's part of the suffering so I mean oh no it's not no it's not it's not the same as the suffering it's not it's not the having your hand cut off it's the pleasure that's derived by the person who cut it off that's more so but that's part of my picture well but wait it's an important to distinction the distinction is important so why am i depicted but Jordan my picture of the moral landscape includes all of this it includes everything that and this is why I don't readily answer to the name of utilitarian or consequentialist because the way those those views tend to be taught they tend to take as in the in the tally of consequences you leave out the psychological implications of being the sort of person who would who would have sought those consequences or behaved that way right so I would grant you and this I'm explicit about this whenever I talk about this that part of the picture of any consequentialist discussion of well-being are is everything about the human mind and social relationships and societies born of all the individuals living together everything there that leads to different states of consciousness so it's like you having you having negative intentions towards other people that give you that that produced certain negative actions in the world they those intentions themselves are part of the consequential picture those intentions themselves lead that closed the door to certain kinds of positive mental states that you don't have let's say you let's say you don't have compassion because you wake up every morning just trying to figure out how to manipulate people well not not being able to feel compassion for other people is a bad thing for many reasons we could adduce and yet the usual consequentialist picture just looks at what's happening out in the world in terms of the body count and that's not you know that's i it's all part of this picture it's all we're all talking only thing that can possibly affect a conscious mind anywhere is part of the picture that i'm painting that i'm calling the moral landscape okay so you okay I want you I want you to let me step in I I think I can we need that we need to bring you guys get us somewhere alright I'm gonna start with you Sam let's swap out the idea of metaphorical truth for something a little harder headed heuristics right we have heuristics and we use them to perceive the world they're often highly reliable in fact almost everything that you believe that lets you operate has to be a heuristic of some kind I mean if you decided to learn to drive and you got into the car and they said okay well it's all quarks out there right you need to understand how quarks interact with each other not useful right not useful right what you need are some heuristics in which you can stipulate that there's something called a vehicle out there and you don't have to be overly precise about what it is and you learn to avoid it okay the heuristics vary a lot in quality some of them are really good the periodic tables are really good okay the idea of gravitational potential energy is kind of crappy right if I have a phone on a table here I can tell you how much potential energy it has by measuring its mass and its distance from the ground but if I've got a whole one depth on one side of the table and another depth on the other side of the table I can't calculate it because it's a crappy heuristic works well enough in regular stuff right now here's the question what if these religious texts are heuristics through which most people simplify calculations that they are in no position to do based on the limited amount that they are capable of perceiving the amount that they understand about the thing that are in play so they're deploying these heuristics maybe to reduce things that degrade well being if it were true that religious heuristics increased well-being by allowing people to actually on average operate in the world in a way that that increased well-being what would you say about them that well I would worry much less about them obviously and that's why I don't treat all religions equally and their religions I literally never think about because I'm not seeing the daily casualties of those belief systems so but you say that as people get away from fundamental versions of these things and I'm not advocating for fundamentalist in here but you say yourself as people get away from the fundamental versions of these things things tend to go haywire and so in its in essence what you're saying is well we tend to go haywire in what sense well I thought I was in term of multiplicity of interpretations right well yeah but so people are in that's the researchers better or heuristics I think the pressure is some of these heuristics are obviously so bad that there's there's civilizational pressure to find better interpretations and and but you said that the fundamentalists have an advantage yes what is that advantage because if you just go back to the text and say listen I just want to I want to understand what these words mean right you get at the first pass the literal interpretation right and you're not bringing the the any armamentarium you've brought your view you've got from the outside from other parts of culture to parse the text you're just trying to rip if it's in English and you speak English you're just trying to decode the words right right and when it says if you're if you're the girls not a virgin on her wedding night take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death that you know what stone means you know what girl means you know what father means and you're you're 90% there to an obvious atrocity i I get the horror of it and we'll get to that in a second yeah but but the basic point is to say that the fundamentalists have an advantage is to acknowledge something functional about those stories which I'm claiming are going to be some kind of evolutionary heuristic for living a life though them defensible they have you know they have an event an advantage that it's an advantage it's a mimetic advantage it's an advantage Isis has the advantage when when the people who share their interpretation of Islam they have you know it's like it's it's why someone like you know Anwar al-aulaqi could make youtube videos that so many people found compelling it's because it's it's totally straightforward it's like the advantages listen that a lot of people spend a lot of time lying to you about what these books mean and what the Prophet and how he lived right I you you you know in your heart that my interpretation of this is correct you just read the words right and there's a strength in that there's that there's an honesty in that there's a there's a it's just it's clear when it says sacrifice a goat goat means goat right like you don't have to do something else to make goat means having nothing to do with goat right and so that is it's an ace it's an asymmetric war of if you're gonna try to make your dogmas more and more palatable by importing stuff that clearly was never even in the worldview of anyone who birthed these religions you're playing you're not doing that because you want to live even more by God's Word no you found some of God's words unacceptable right and that's and every fundamentalist can sniff that out and they're right to sniff it out because in fact either it is in fact the motivation okay good so I think we have we've got a tenuous kind of agreement that there might be some kind of utility that that utility might be morally questionable sometimes but that there is some reason that people would resort to a fundamental simple interpretation because as they depart from that interpretation things get more difficult and it creates some kind of disadvantage well the part of the problem with that would be that as you move away from the text you you fractionate the moral belief system and you end up with a nihilistic situation so as you move away from dogmatism you move towards the parallel danger which is moral relativism and nihilism and so hopefully you can find some balance so let me ask you know I want to ask you a question oh yes okay and also what time do we actually stop this party is it 10:00 I just missed the time card but I think we have another couple of minutes okay okay so there's no expect of reality to time I think hahahaha actually it's a pretty good conversation we could have but so here's my question for you is if we agree that there is some way in which religious texts carry some kind of value because they allow people to figure out how to navigate their lives in ways that might reduce suffering reduce the complexity of the choices that they have to make presumably you will agree that that would be consistent with an evolutionary interpretation that the fact that the stories themselves are yes functional would provide an advantage to those who were deploying them yes so here's the problem isn't it then also true that those stories are responsive to past environments and so the claim that these things might be timeless would be suspect and yes that you would expect a spectrum of durability some stories would be right in a brief moment as okay oh that's true oh that's true so far so good well so far so good this is this is actually I think quite excellent then because what we have is a recognition that there is something to these belief systems that has to do with practical realities in the past and we also have an acknowledgment that we cannot trust in these things based on simple faith because even if they are can be certain to have worked at some point in the past we don't know what their relevance is to the present right okay fair enough like that's and I would say that's that's two things about that that's exactly why we're having this discussion and you see what happens in the most profound of such texts is the idea that the process by which your knowledge is updated has to occupy a position in the hierarchy of values that supersedes your reliance or Dogma is the fundamental claim that's why for example in Christianity the notion is is that the word is the highest of values and that's the embodied word and that's the thing that mediates between order and chaos and everything else has to be subject to that and I would say that's not a claim that's unique to Christianity so for example okay no I think I think because we're we're we're being told we're out of time here so I want to give Sam his reaction to that as well and then we'll move on to Q&A well I'm tempted to just ask Jordan a question here this it's hard to know what to save for tomorrow night but I feel like we've got 3,000 people sitting here who would really like an answer to this question you say you believe in God you have been know I say I act as if he exists you say what I say I act as if he exists so a much more precise claim okay so then what look but in this case what fits it so you act as though God exists and in addition I've heard you say that I act as though God exists that I can't realize so far it's a yes yes we'll see that the night is young [Applause] so in that sense I'm not really an atheist I've heard you say this so that some of you is well if I were really an atheist I would be far more poorly behaved than in fact I am right I would be like we're Skolnick off committing murders and and assuming there's nothing wrong with more it would be more likely yes yeah okay so so that's a big distinction no more likely what was that that's a big distinction that you would is very different than it would be more likely taking the safety off the gun it's not the same thing you're shooting it right yes the temptations laid open to Raskolnikov would be more at hand okay just as they were to him so what in that so you know in what sense do you mean well what is the God that you act as though he she it exists and what is that what what is the God shaped thing I must have in my life to prevent me from being a quote real atheist well okay first of all I have to point out that there's no possible way I can answer both those questions in two minutes well it's the same question I mean what is it like what what do you mean by done okay well I'm going to tell you some of the things that I mean by God we do have to get the questions we're gonna do this tomorrow maybe this is where we start well that was a pretty resentment now it seems like that constitutes an audience question wouldn't you say I tell you what I tell you what let's let's do this but let's be deliberate about time okay okay okay well I'm I'm going to read some things that I wrote because it's so complicated that I'm not sure that I can just spin it off the top of my head and so you'll have to excuse me so and what I'm going to do is sort of paint a picture by highlighting different things so now I already made one point here I made the point that part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is is expressed in truth the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies and that isn't all it does it also confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order that's a that's the metaphysical proposition and that that's best conceptualized as at least one element of God and so I would think about it as a transcendent reality that's only observable across the longest of timeframes the longest of iterated time frames to your point so so okay so here's here's some propositions and they're complicated and they need to be unpacked so I'm just gonna read them and you're that'll have to do for the time being so God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of timeframes but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now so what that means in some sense is that you have conceptions of reality built into your biological and metaphysical structure that a consequence of processes of evolution that that occurred over unbelievably vasts expanses of time and that structure your perception of reality in ways that it wouldn't be structured if you only lived for the amount of time that you're going to live and that's also part of the problem of deriving values from facts because you're evanescent and and you can't derive the right values from the facts that portray themselves to you in your lifespan which is why you have a biological structure that's like 3.5 billion years old so God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth that's a fundamental element of here mythology God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values that's another way of looking at it God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure God is the voice of conscience God is the source of judgment and mercy and guilt God is the future to which we make sacrifices and something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation here's a cool one if you're an evolutionary biologist God God God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men so you know men arrange themselves into hierarchies and then men rise in the hierarchy and there's principles that are important that determine the probability of their rise and those principles aren't tyrannical power there's something like the ability to articulate truth and the ability to be competent and the ability to make appropriate moral judgments and if you can do that in a given situation then all the other men will vote you up the hierarchy so to speak and that will radically increase your reproductive fitness and the operation of that process across long expanses of time looks to me like it's codified in something like the notion of God the Father it's also the same thing that makes women men attractive to women because men women peel off the top of the male hierarchy the question is what should be at the top of the hierarchy and the answer right now is tyranny as part of the patriarchy but the real answer is something more like the ability to use truthful speech in the service of let's say well-being and so that's that's something that operates across tremendous expanses of time and it plays a role in the selection for survival itself which makes it a fundamental reality Jordan if I just cut in here with one question stop with that for now what [Music] so I was not hearing in that list of attributes a God who could care if anyone masturbated I was not hearing a God who depends on what else is stopping you from doing Sam well I'm sorry that I miss that I said it depends on what else it's stopping you from doing well yeah okay so it's yes it's important to do something other than masturbate yes yes which is which which actually constitutes a problem which is harder than it sounds I'm not hearing a god a personal God who can possibly hear anyone's prayer is much less answer them right and I'm just I'm wondering what percentage of religious people who would say oh yeah I believe in God and it's the most important thing in my life what percentage of those religious people do you think have in mind a God of the sort you just described I don't know Sam it's a good question because when I go talk to people when I when I talk to people online and use exactly this terminology millions of people listen so it's not so obvious which what percentage of the people see it this way it's maybe that they have the intuitions but they haven't been articulated well I mean this is this is the problem this is what worries me about this so I mean you you could do the same thing with the idea of ghosts right so people traditionally have believed in ghosts it's a it's an archetype you might say the ghost survival of death is certainly in archetypes and we know what most people most of the time mean when they say they believe in ghosts and I say I don't believe in ghosts and you say no no you you do believe in ghosts ghosts are your relationship to the unseen that's a ghost so you having a new definition of ghost that you're putting in the place provided which I have to say well of course I have a relationship to the unseen so yeah I guess I do believe in ghosts you know win that argument but that simply isn't what most people mean by a ghost motion you mean use that simplified argument about might conception but ghost as an analogy for the proposition that I just put forces what I see you do I mean maybe you have more to say on the topic of God but this is what I hear you doing with God you have defined the God that most people believe in and we know this is the God that most people I was asked what God I believed in yes no I'm asking you what percentage yes but you you by shifting the the definition you have robbed the the noun the traditional noun of its traditional meaning and you're giving you're imparting to people yes wait a second wait a second I'm not so she mean by traditional meaning look it's one of the one of the elemental claims in the Old Testament is that you're not even supposed to utter the name of God because by defining it too tightly you lose its essence and so let's not be talking about what the classical definition of God is here okay it's a historical non-starter okay there's plenty old engines can I can I check in with the audience is the audience all right with us continuing down this road so can I can I jump in your sacrifice your Q&A so yeah that that it isn't the expense of Q&A that's that's what you're giving up but I think it's probably worth it so let me say Sam I do not believe in a supernatural God but the God that I've heard Jordan just described I do not have any difficulty understanding why he might care if you masturbate and I also don't have any trouble figuring out how he might answer prayers well well tell me more then well I I can tell you I can tell you I can tell you how a prayer might be answered these are no specifics so so it'll be interesting so I'm not Jordan we've not talked about this if I heard an answer from him that actually would satisfy me as to what the mechanism of action might be that that'd be pretty interesting and if he can tell me what I heard I think it would it would suggest that that we're not just making up stories here so you might like this you may be doing but well it's possible okay so imagine that okay so let's imagine that hellish situation that you laid out okay but but let's let's put the extra twist in it because one of the things that we both decided I think was that you also have to build in the intent into that so let's say the hell that we're talking about isn't the victim of the terrible massacres that you you laid out in the jungle story but a perpetrator okay so someone who's actually acted in a malevolent manner truly malevolent manner okay or maybe perhaps who wouldn't have to take that extreme case we could say well perhaps you've decided that any of you you've decided that you've seriously done something wrong okay and that you you want to get away from hell you want to make things better okay so here's here's an exercise you can try so here what you do is is as you sit on the edge of your bed and you say okay what I did was wrong and you have to really believe this right so you've thought about it's killing you it's killing you so now you're penitent and you're confessing let's say and you're confessing to yourself as much as to anyone and you say I really want to know what I did wrong and I really want to know what I could do to put it right and I'm willing to accept any answer that will manifest itself to me you try that see what happens well that's a prayer that will be answered and it won't be answered in the way that you want it to be answered I can bloody well tell you that okay but but that what are you communicating with are you communicating with will you know that that is something that that is a process that I'm familiar with it doesn't require any supernatural explanation and it certainly it certainly doesn't require that many imagine that any of our books were dictated by the creator of the universe I didn't say that there's no acquired any secret okay nobody should nor that it requires my concern I was asked to provide an instance of prayer that worked and that's what I did I didn't either than that that's that's fully understandable in terms of human psychology and it's not understandable because we don't know where the answer comes from well we don't know where anything comes for that's true yeah okay so yeah but that doesn't that doesn't open the door when one thing we can know with absolute certainty said that whoever wrote the Bible didn't know either and there's many other things he or she didn't know like everything else we know scientifically right it's not it's not so obvious whether people know when they don't no one even knew the brain was involved in any of this right so yeah but about as much as we do about how the brain was involved in it but we've already we've already established in some tenuous way that things that nobody understands could have evolved into these stories in some way that would be useful but nobody knew what they were writing when they wrote it right that the problem is that you can so again with this has been focused through the lens of your attachment to Christianity largely but the Hindu is a Hinduism is a completely different set of stories right now and many of them the logic the emotional logic the psychological import many of them have the opposite valence from any Christian story you would tell the like for instance the whole notion of good and evil yeah right which has such primacy I mean you talk about religion being deeper than ethics because ethics just deals with right and wrong and religion deals with good and evil right at bedrock okay good and evil do not have the same meaning in the East Buddhism and Hinduism do something very different with living I'm willing to accept your definitions of good and evil for truth is just not even evil is just ignorance on some level it's just evil is just you haven't met any real evil people if you believe that well okay so then all the Hindus and Buddhists are wrong about this that's that's a that's a possible claim I'm just saying that there there's over a billion people who have a religious system of stories from which they derive all kinds of meaning yep to which they're mightily attached to where we could play the same game of archetypal interpretation and valuing and yet you that the the cash value with respect to good and evil is is irreconcilable with what you get christiana look but it doesn't it doesn't have to be interoperable right well but but in a reality presumably Hinduism is also useful as a set of heuristic as to be for Hindus and if Hinduism as a matter of doctrine and as a matter of the interpretations of the heuristics by the devout in both systems if Hinduism and Christianity are irreconcilable right then there must be a deeper level of reality that explains why they both work that can't be reducible to Christianity being true or Hinduism being true yeah that's a look Sam that's a there's there's absolutely nothing wrong with that objection like so this is one of the immense problems obviously that that actually leads down the road to the kind of nihilism that you were objecting to in in in the moral landscape it's like one of the things that Nietzsche said was it was it's very much apropos to this is that you know it's one thing to have your your belief system shattered by the observation that there are other belief systems that are in commensurate that seem to have equal utility so that that's but it's even worse is that once you make the observation that there are other belief systems that that have equal utility then it can shatter your belief in belief systems themselves and then you're in the postmodern nihilist landscape and that's a big problem or you could just be in a more fundamental landscape that subsumes both of those losses that's fine let's hope that that can happen but that I would say that's the landscape that I'm trying to pursue now you said that this is that I've been approaching this safe from from a Christian perspective in this dialogue and to some degree that's true but there are reasons for that but I would also say I'm also doing what you recommend doing because in maps of meaning for example because you said well what about this problem of multiple interpretations of you can road maps of meaning what's that you wrote maps of meaning I wrote them all and sorry I must have missed sorry I must have to get tired but what I tried to do well I tried to address that problem seriously like it's a really big problem there it's the problem of multiple interpretations it's the postmodern problem is that there's an infinite number of potential interpretations okay so also what do we do about that and the answer is it's something you allude to I'm sorry in in the moral landscape and it's part of the basis of your argument why these things need to be grounded in facts so because that is part of the the answer to the problem of an infinite number of interpretations in maps of meaning I tried to do what L Wilson recommended but this was before he wrote his book I tried to use a conciliatory assistance I looked at Christianity I looked at Neri biology I looked at philosophy I looked at neuroscience and I looked at the literature on emotion and motivation and and in the literature on play that was very nicely delineated by Piaget and I tried to see where there was a pattern that repeated across all dimensions of evaluation which is exactly what you do for example when you use your five senses to detect something real in the world and that's what Wilson recommended was a Concilium I proposition was if it manifests itself here and here and here and here and here six places and it's always the same pattern then the probability that that pattern exists independent of my delusional interpretation is radically decreased yeah my claim however is that many of these things don't repeat in fact they're they're flipped around completely based on different religious assumptions and different cultures and again I mean yeah I would just argue this is trying to dispense with those but I'm just saying something as fundamental as evil doesn't run through all these cultures and all these religious traditions then how can you make the claim that everyone would agree with your description of what constitutes bad beginning in the landscape it would be it's just it's just not it's not evil in the sense that that it's there's better and worse there's better can we do we have there's either universal moral intuitions or they're honest notes is it yes no they are some moral intuitions universal yes no I would think that listen we are just human beings right we're human beings first before we're Hindu or Buddhist or Christian we can all get indoctrinated into the religion of our parents this is a an artifice that's laid on top of something far deeper that should be obvious so right so so we're trying to get down to what's deeper okay so there may be there may be some moral universals sure I think okay Jordan no but possible that there are some moral intuitions that are highly specific to particular traditions and wouldn't translate over to others yeah oh it's a highly probable because there would be environment specific adaptations like the environment specific tool use of chimpanzees right or maybe it's not even the environment maybe it's the self-consistency of the belief pattern in question so I'm sure I would put that in the broader environment it might be a consequence of the particular ease of that culture there would be things that look think about it like languages like many and then this is kind of an answer to the problem that you you laid out which is a real problem I'm not trying to deny the problem if you look at there's a lot of languages lots of languages look at how different they are it's like yeah have some levels of analysis they're fundamentally different and at other levels of analysis they're fundamentally the same which is how we know that their languages and you could say well there's a very large number of stories it's like yes there are but the fact that there's enough commonality across the class of stories the set of all possible stories so that we can identify what constitutes a story and I would say that there's enough commonality across the set of all possible good stories that we can say well here's a canonical good story which is by the way what you do at the beginning of the moral landscape because you say this is horrible this is good we should move from what's horrible to what's good say yes you're you've you've taken a fragment of the universal story and you've made it the axiom of your moral system which is what you should do it's a but but the claim that that I think is not helpful even though I understand it is that that's purely a claim of like of unmediated fact it's like no there is no one people without there is yes even facts aren't unmediated facts I mean you can't right hand you can't judge something to be factual without presupposing the validity of certain intuitions like right that that causes precede events you know so or causes precede their effects and those intuitions could be wrong I mean we could live in a teleological universe where everything is getting pulled into the future by some kind of a tractor right and our notion of causation is totally backwards that remains to be discovered and we have we would use other intuitions to make that discovery so is it but again you do pull yourself up by your bootstraps and that there's there's no branch of science or mathematics or anything fundamental logic that can get away from that right right well that's another place but given that picture that doesn't render all intuitions equally respectable absolutely someone says well I happen to have an intuition that the Joseph Smith saw those golden tablets and they were you know and what Mormonism is true that's not the sort of intuition we're talking about here your intuition doesn't look good insight into history could say a Brits point is that like moral intuitions of the sort that you're describing have different zones of relevance so there's some things that would only work as an intuition in very delimited areas of time and space let's say there's a hierarchy of moral intuitions and the more profound the intuition the more it works as a universal truth across contexts just like in a scientific truth so scientific truth is more profound this is why the postmodernist readings of Thomas Kuhn are wrong is that the idea that protons are real is really fundamental because no matter what span of time and space that you pick you're going to encounter protons it works everywhere and then with moral intuitions let's say our moral a priorities you have the same issue as some of them are so delimited that they only work here and now and those are sort of impulsive low-level intuitions of whim even but some of them are really really deep the ones for example the one that Orient's you to make the claim that you made in the moral landscape that the hellish story is bad and the heavenly story is good right I would say that's one of the deepest most context independent moral intuitions which which is kind of the claim you make except you claim it again back to my fundamental concern here and in the difference with respect to the difference in with how we talk about these things to call that thing God is fine that's a god I have no problem with right but that's not how most people most of the time are using the word and there's something misleading about that and that worries me yeah well if if the claim if if the claim that you're making is that we're all deeply confused about the nature of divinity and ultimate reality it's like yeah yes another thing we agree on I also don't disagree what I don't disagree look I've never said I've never made the claim that what I'm talking about is like what other people are talking about I mean it is in some ways but I've not made that claim so I don't see why that's a justifiable criticism it's like well no it's a it's a criticism in the with respect to the very likely effects of communicating in that way because I see the results of that communication it's a little bit I mean this is gonna sound more invidious than it is but they have the kind of thing that I get into a Deepak Chopra yeah Deepak and I agree about Allah I think it's more invidious than it sounds actually yeah well you're not wearing rhinestone book glasses if you graduate to that we'll have more of a problem but it's Deepak clearly wants to let his audience believe that everything they're into is on some level justifiable by his reading of quantum spookiness right so it's all so you know if you want to go out and just buy a lot of crystals and think they're gonna heal you it has something to do with tomato really nothing like you know know what I'm saying but I think Deepak could say if I if I got his back to the wall Deepak could say honestly say listen I've never said anything about crystals right I'm not selling crystals I've never said they work but it's it's the way in which he's failing to make the clear differentiation defendant that the fact that it takes you 20 minutes to admit that there's that a lot of the Bible is filled with barbaric nonsense catalytic it took me 20 minutes to admit well we'll go to the tape on this these things matter these things matter and I'm just saying it's like you say if you're in a parish of one or in a parish of one thousand or a parish of a hundred thousand but not in the parish that has anything in common with the with the bible thumpers in my country who think that Jesus is very likely coming back in their lifetime because he never died and he's gonna judge the living and the dead and there will be a resurrection and Hellfire and all the rest if that's not the game you're playing at all on it why why are you why are you why are you all applauding about that it's like what what do you mean known it it's like I already made my claim it's like I'm not playing a religious fundamentalist game so what's all the applause about so I don't understand that and own it it's like I was just listen I was as clear as I possibly could be when I delineate it my answer to the question people say well what do you mean by God asked you if Jesus was one second answer but no well forget it man Jordan Jordan and the organ women women well I think we can actually this is one second I don't want to end on it I don't want to end on a note of acrimony but what someone once asked you whether you thought Jesus was literally resurrected and you said it would take me 40 hours to answer that question okay that's best if that's the kind of thing I'm responding to here you don't need to do that if you have a clear-cut answer to that question and don't have a clear answer to a few bones and if you don't that that connects with many other things that we still have to talk about yes definitely because because that it isn't obvious in the biblical account that Christ was literally resurrected so it's not simple this does no no no no you don't but if the question is do you think he well let's put it probabilistically I mean anything's possible I'll tell you that it's possible that he was physically resurrected I mean it's it's not it's even possibly in a second ID with the second one McKenna's the point is you said it would take me 40 hours to answer the question I didn't say that he was okay how's this for an answer almost certainly not what's what's what's wrong with that answer you want I think I think I know what's wrong with that answer it's it's a it's a fine answer and people have been giving that answer for a very long period of time but the idea doesn't seem to go away okay so that when there's any evidence of what exactly I don't know I can tell you one thing it's an evidence of all right a deep idea let this be the doorway to our next three-hour conversation sure the clear sure so we have we have 10 minutes left oh well then let's answer that question in 10 minutes so wait I want you to trust me here you for whatever reason decided I should moderate so I want you to trust me one thing you film ins worth I really would like to answer that question like but I'm trying to figure out people seem to think that I'm trying to evade the question it's like not evading the question I'm trying to figure it out it's a really people have been arguing about this for 2,000 years it's like it's not simple that's a simp thats a symptom of the effect of religious dogma tiesm for 2,000 years no it's not okay it's hardly a symptom of that it's also partly a symptom of the idea the resurrection of Jesus is clearly an important question but you've raised a much bigger and more pressing question for the audience which is whether or not God cares whether they masturbate so I actually think if we pursue that answer that we will actually wrap this up in a way that you want to end this on masturbation I think we owe it to them or - okay so look hey give me a little leisure that the floor is yours great how did I end up here all right so here's here's the question let's just figure out if we can determine why God might care if you masturbate right so let's suppose that we have a story a heuristic of some kind that stands in for something and the story is God is watching he sees you always he doesn't want you masturbating so don't you dare what happens what happens yeah well it's it's rather ineffectual news idea yeah well I mean I think that story private I think some people from well no but I think the reality was was that you had people masturbating and feeling terrible about it and you had a whole layer of sexual neurosis that we got grafted on to human psychology unnecessarily okay so she Anna T has a certain technology of sexual hang-up array which which you know that on tricks don't have so if I understand you correctly you are agreeing that a certain amount a certain number of people with a master base some of some of them join the priesthood and raped little boys I mean that song is there yes the topic so certain number of people will have masturbated they will have thought honestly is the same topic I mean that though that the the taboos around masturbation the taboos around sexuality prior to marriage the taboo around divorce all of the taboo around out of wedlock birth the the ideal of celibacy in the priesthood all of that is a is just a diabolical machine of needless sexual conflict and misery hold on hold on but yes okay you have to take how's the whole flood of pornography thing working out okay great I will I will grant you that there is some interpretation that takes supernatural principles and magic and other worldliness out of the equation here that gets you some wisdom in the heuristic yes if you're masturbating all the time you're not satisfying you are you're monogamous relationship with your wife or husband we don't need to go there let's just you're not procreating and we must agree that a certain amount of masturbation was presented was prevented by that story which made people fear the consequence of them engaging it which would result in I'm pretty sure less yes masturbation which means that in seeking a release which we are physiologically programmed to seek one might end up looking in a more urgent fashion for a mate right so so it's are we going to enforce monogamy as a No so look I'm trying to take you somewhere I think I think there is a way that we can rescue some important part of what both of you are saying that can now be reconciled and then there's a bitter pill for each of you I mean that's just the way this looks to me so if we can agree that this makes sense actually is a Fitness enhancing adaptation that this story would result in people behaving in a way that might result in the marrying early might result in them reproducing earlier than they would otherwise right then we can understand it as mechanistic and we can understand what you said that you know maybe God would care about whether or not people masturbate because God is a metaphor for some set of stories that gets you to behave in an adaptive fashion but the point for you then would be that Sam is arguing with reason we can decide whether or not to employ this story at this moment whether it's a good idea for us to urgently reproduce as quickly as possible which for example increases the size of the population of the planet whereas delaying reproduction keeps the rate of population growth down and might be a better choice for a moment in history we have seven and a half billion people on the planet so in some sense what I think I see is the religious story itself make some kind of sense if you adhere to it in a manner that you are obligated and I have no tools with which to question it then you will miss the fact that at this moment you might want to throw that story before the problem is it doesn't makes and this is this is a problem with these heuristics in general it doesn't make sense for the right reason and that's why it's not a reliable guide given other changes in the world but with everything changing you want to be making sense for the right reason you don't want it like it's a useful fictions have to be retired at a certain point useful truths stay true I mean if you because they're based on your engagement with reality and so to take your point about pornography which i think is totally valid you could have a completely rational conversation in terms of human psychology and sociology and what you want society to look like about the corrosive nature of pornography right that's not you don't have to be a Victorian prude to worry that there might be something wrong with the infinite availability of pornography to thirteen-year-olds and above right I mean this that's I don't know what what's generation of human beings were raising in the current environment it's it's you know it's quite worrisome actually but again you don't have to invoke mythology to do that and I would say the temptation to invoke mythology say well you actually you know how do you do it Poseidon really gets pissed off when you master how do you how do you do it how do you do it we don't have any effects you have no mechanism for control about the effects on human relationships and your own mind and your own intention and the way you view other pieces have now barely works for sex ed it barely works for condom education well what was already works like those sorts of educational interventions to stop that kind of fundamental behavior have very little effect well people aren't nearly as amenable to behavioral changes as a consequence of rational educational interventions as you might hope I mean in that that's that's part and parcel of but that broad clinical literature there they're not Azamat they're not as amenable to dogmatic intrusions either I mean that they are well that might be a problem and there are problems well no because because there again this is just that the problem is that this even if you could make the case that a dogmatic attachment to one or another religion was better all things considered than being secular it's truly secular and truly rational right it's vulnerable it's vulnerable to every next thing we find out I mean that's why it's like you could have said to go back you know 200 years before the germ theory of disease you could have said well all of these dietary taboos and and taboos around you know hand-washing and foot washing it's actually very wise the wisdom of the germ theory of disease was sort of built into our Scripture and people were surviving there was a kind of differential level of survival based on those who really adhere to these these practices and those who didn't okay but it one it's blind to the actual variables like as there's nothing special about shellfish necessarily or there's nothing special about pork necessarily or whatever the example is and once you get the actual variables in hand then the whole edifice comes crashing down and then you really just want to understand the variables that work look I don't know if I don't know if the whole edifice comes crashing down it and it isn't clear to me that you want to claim that because one of the things you did say in the moral landscape and I think this is associated with your interest in spirituality is that there is some baby mixed in with the bathwater and the question is how do we how do we how do we distill that out yeah and the objections that you're raising are the objections that are look how difficult it is to do the distillation it's like yeah absolutely man and it's not like I'm a foal of the Enlightenment I think you enlightenment types and I put Pinker in the same cabin radically overestimate the degree to that was that was a cause of sui it's like everyone was barbaric and superstitious until 1750 and some miracle occurred and now we're all in what we all became enlightened like there was a lengthy develop clearly all haven't I mean with this hence hens - are complaining about the problem and most of the world most of the world hasn't had the enlightenment through on some look I know fold the Enlightenment but I think that it had a lengthy developmental history that is radically under played by the people who who grounded purely in rationality it's clearly still developing my point is we we should be able to agree that having a worldview guided by a continuous honest engagement with reality and so far as we can apprehend it is better than having a worldview solidified or anchored to unchanging ideas that were born of people who had none of our present tools none of our present insights into anything Paul it depends on it depends on the principles it depends on the principles like I would say there there are situations where that clearly applies but I think there are broad principles and again we should probably stop with this I think yep I'm out there because I'm I'm starting to get tired I'm sure everyone else in here is starting to get tired well I'm starting to get tired anyways and I mean the the there are there are principles there are higher-order principles of the sort that I described that you also appear to rely on in the moral landscape the idea of these profound moral intuitions yeah and so that's what I'm after is what are these profound moral intuitions and what is their source and like I'm also perfectly willing to make the claim and have in fact in in detail that these moral intuitions see that this is a place where we differ a little bit it's like and maybe we can go here tomorrow night see it seems to me that that you for you for you in your argument is the facts are laying out there and you can extract out value from them and and we already described why you want to do that because you want to at least not move into the nihilistic direction and you want to ground them in some sort of reality it's like fair enough but the thing is is that the facts as they are have been around for a very very very very long time right let's say three and a half billion years the entire expanse of life and it's the operation of those facts on life that has produced the a priori implicit interpretive structures that guide our interaction with the facts and those a priori implicit structures that have emerged out of this evolutionary course have a structure that mediates between us and the facts that cannot be derived from the facts at hand and so so then the question is what is that structure and and it's in both of our interests to get that right yeah because you use that as the source of moral intuition it's like right aggrieved that's the source of moral intuition so and and Clint clearly what we need to table this for tomorrow night but that's a good guys I'm just going to interrupt you guys let's give Jordan Peterson Sam Harrison Pat Whiteside a huge hand let's go thank you

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 2,131,503

Rating: 4.8152595 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, jordan peterson, travis pangburn, pangburn philosophy

Id: jey_CzIOfYE

Length: 126min 38sec (7598 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/themaratha]

JP: "It is Christians who were at the forefront to abolish slavery."

Sam Harris: "They were Christians on either side of everything. There was no one else to do the job"

[u/Amida0616]

Jordan Peterson's response to any tough question is to just provide an untenable amount of time to answer.

"Hey Jordan do think jesus had magical powers? "

"well that would take me 32 days to answer"

"um ok. Did you maybe want to think about this in the weeks leading up to a series of debates with a "famous atheist"?"

"well I could answer that but that would take me 42 days to answer"

"um ok we are almost out of time. Do you want fish or steak for dinner?"

"Well thats a bloody complex question. It depends on the biological faux imperatives of pre-humanoid primates in sub-Saharan Africa"

"ehh..."

[u/iwojima22]

I’ve never been so frustrated watching a video than when hearing Peterson’s appalling ambiguity and vagueness. He’s brilliant when it comes to identity politics or psychology...but this is hard to watch.

“Was jesus resurrected?” .......

[u/-Bob_Sacamano-]

Vocabulary lessons with Sam Harris.

Phantasmagoria (noun.) - a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream

[u/FanVaDrygt]

The fucking cheering is killing me.

[u/Avenger_]

Part 2?

[u/jordanpitt269]

Can someone save this so they can provide a mirror for me when the YouTube link goes down?

[u/MyNameIsGladiat0r]

JP is the ultimate religious apologist. It's that simple. Hes perfect at it. He gets to advocate it without admitting to actually believing it. It's scary to be honest.

[u/JohnM565]

Modern sex ed is also way better than abstinence-only education, etc.