The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig

good evening and welcome to the god debate my name is Malcolm Phelan and together with Joseph Stanfield our not my cry and the deans fellows we've organized the debate that you are about to see now whether you are here tonight to hear an exchange of views an enlightening discussion or just a good show I know you're not here to hear a long speech for an undergraduates I will keep this short first allow me to recognize those in the Notre Dame community who made this debate possible the god debate too was sponsored by the Institute for scholarship in the liberal arts and the henckles lecture series with additional generous support by the College of Arts and Letters the College of Science and the College of Business campus ministry the classics Department the history department the program of Liberal Studies and chemistry the Centre for civil and human rights ILS and the Department of German and Russian the Centre for philosophy of religion the Centre for undergraduates scholarly engagement the Rooney Center for American democracy the Glenn family Honors Program and learning beyond the classroom finally I would just like to read a quick passage that beautifully sums up the reason why we are here tonight Kenneth Burke writes this in the philosophy of literary form imagine that you enter a parlor you come late when you arrive others have long preceded you and they are engaged in a heated discussion a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about in fact the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before you listen for a while until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument and then you put in your or someone answers you answer him another comes to your defense another aligns himself against you to you the embarrassment or God vacation of your opponent depending on the quality of your allies assistance however the discussion is interminable the hour grows late and you must depart and you do depart with discussion still vigorously in progress so now please join me in welcoming two more to our discussion sam Harris and William Lane Craig and please welcome my moderator professor Mike ray from the Center for philosophy of religion thanks Malcolm welcome to the second installment of the god debate my name is Michael ray I'm a professor of philosophy here at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Center for philosophy of religion one of the sponsors of tonight's event the Center for philosophy of religion was founded in the late 1970s with the aim of promoting cutting-edge research on topics in the philosophy of religion and in distinctively Christian philosophy one of our goals and sponsoring the god debate series is to try to bring some of the very issues discussed among our research fellows to a wider non-academic audience and in a format that will hopefully be fun and engaging our show tonight as you already know is a debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris coming together for the very first time to discuss the question are the foundations of moral values natural or supernatural William Lane Craig is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada California he is best known among philosophers for his extensive and influential work in the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion he is known to the wider public as someone who is able to articulate and defend the doctrines of the Christian faith in a way that is highly accessible but also philosophically and theologically rigorous he became a Christian at the age of 16 pursued undergraduate studies at Wheaton College and holds two earned doctorates one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham and one in theology from the University of Munich he has authored or edited over 30 books as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology known as one of the Four Horsemen of the new atheist movement Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers the moral landscape the end of faith and letter to a Christian nation the end of faith won the 2005 pen Award for nonfiction mr. Harris's writing has been published in over 15 languages he and his work have been discussed in Newsweek time the New York Times Scientific American nature Rolling Stone and the other journals his writing has appeared in Newsweek the New York Times the Los Angeles Times The Economist The Times London The Boston Globe the Atlantic the annals of Neurology and elsewhere mr. Harris is a co-founder and CEO of project Reason a non-profit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society he received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA the structure of tonight's debate will be as follows each debater will take 20 minutes for his opening speech followed by rebuttals of 12 minutes and eight minutes respectively and then closing speeches of five minutes each at the conclusion of the debate we will have about 30 minutes for questions from the audience if you would like to ask a question line up behind one of the two microphones in front or in the balcony we're letting Notre Dame's students ask the first four questions tonight so if you are not a Notre Dame student and somehow find yourself at the front of the queue a line please allow a student to go ahead of you time will be kept strictly there is a timekeeper in the front who can be seen by both speakers and once each speakers time has elapsed he will be given at most 15 seconds to finish his final sentence before being rudely interrupted by me the time enforcer because we are keeping the time strict we ask you to hold all applause and other indications of agreement or disagreement cheering crowd surfing and the like until the very end of the debate please remember that flash photography videotaping and active cell phones are all prohibited finally remember that Notre Dame is the world's number one institution in the philosophy of religion and also has one of the world's best theology departments any questions you don't get to ask during the 25 or 30 minute Q&A you can ask if your local faculty in the days and weeks to come and now on with the show well good evening it's wonderful to be here at the University of Notre Dame and I want to begin by think sorry sorry I need to we're going to begin each speech with me checking with the timekeeper to make sure that he's ready and then the timekeeper is going to hit go and then you get to go all right so you've got open I say begin sorry for jumping the gun professor Craig gets gets the first word in the debate dr. Harris gets the last word timekeeper are you ready this is 20 minutes begin I want to begin by thanking the Center for philosophy of religion for the invitation to participate in tonight's debate the question of the correct foundation of morality is one that is not only of tremendous academic interest but also one that has enormous practical application for our lives now to begin with an important point of agreement dr. Harris and I agree that there are objective moral values and duties to say that moral values and duties our objective is to say that they are valid and binding independent of human opinion for example to say that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won world war two and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good one of the great merits of dr. Harris's recent book the moral landscape is his bold affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties he invades against what he calls the overeducated atheistic moral me list sand relativists who refuse to condemn as objectively wrong terrible atrocities like the genital mutilation of little girls he rightly declares if only one person in the world held down a terrified struggling screaming little girl cut off her genitals with a septic blade and sodor back up the only question would be how severely that person should be punished what is not in question is that such a person has done something horribly objectively wrong the question before us this evening then is what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties what grounds them what makes certain actions objectively good or evil right or wrong in tonight's debate I'm going to defend two basic contentions first if God exists then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties and second if God does not exist then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties now notice that these are conditional claims I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists maybe dr. Harris is right that atheism is true that wouldn't affect the truth of my two contentions all that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would then contrary to dr. Harris not exist so let's look at that first contention together if God exists then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties here I want to examine two sub points with you first theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral values moral values have to do with what is good or evil on the theistic view objective moral values are grounded in God as st. Anselm saw God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and therefore the highest good indeed he is not merely perfectly good he is the locust paradigm of moral value God's own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured he is by nature loving generous faithful kind and so forth thus if God exists objective moral values exist wholly independent of human beings second theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral duties on a theistic view objective moral duties are constituted by God's commands God's moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine Commandments which constitute our moral duties or obligations far from being arbitrary God's commandments must be consistent with his holy and loving nature our duties then are constituted by God's commandments and these in turn reflect his essential character in the judeo-christian tradition the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great Commandments first you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your heart and with all your mind and second you shall love your neighbor as yourself on this foundation we can affirm the objective rightness of love generosity self-sacrifice and equality and condemn as objectively wrong selfishness hatred abuse discrimination and oppression in summary then theism has the resources for a sound foundation for morality it grounds both objective moral values and objective moral duties and hence I think it's evident that if God exists we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties let's turn then to my second contention that if God does not exist then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties consider first the question of objective moral values if God does not exist then what basis remains for the existence of objective moral values in particular why think that human beings would have objective moral worth on the atheistic view human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time on atheism it's hard to see any reason to think that human wellbeing is objectively good any more than insect well-being or rat well-being or hyena well-being this is what dr. Harris calls the value problem the purpose of dr. Harris's book the moral landscape is to explain the basis on atheism of the existence of objective moral values he explicitly rejects the view that moral values are platonic objects existing independent of the world so his only recourse is to try to ground moral values in the natural world but how can you do that since nature in and of itself is just morally neutral on a naturalistic view moral values are just the behavioral byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival so their primate cousins Homo sapiens have evolved a sort of herd morality for precisely the same reasons as a result of sociobiological pressures they has evolved among Homo sapiens a sort of herd morality which functions well in the perpetuation of our species but on the atheistic view there doesn't seem to be anything that makes this morality objectively binding and true the philosopher of science Michael ruse reports the position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness is of biological worth morality is a biological adaptation no less than our hands and feet and teeth considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something ethics is illusory I appreciate that when somebody says love thy neighbor as thyself they think they are referring above and beyond themselves nevertheless such reference is truly without foundation morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory if we were to rewind the film of human evolution and start a new people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved as Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man if men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive bees that can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would like the worker bees think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters and no one would think of interfering for us to think that human beings are special and our morality is objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to speciesism that is to say an unjustified bias in favor of one's own species if there is no God than any reason for regarding the herd morality evolved by Homo sapiens on this planet as objectively true seems to have been moved take God out of the picture and all you seem to be left with is an ape-like creature on a speck of dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur Richard Dawkins assessment of human worth may be depressing but why on atheism is he mistaken when he says there is a bottom no purpose no evil no good nothing but pointless indifference we are machines for propagating DNA it is every living object sole reason for being so how does Sam Harris propose to solve the value problem the trick he proposes is simply to redefine what he means by good and evil in non moral terms he says we should define good as that which supports the well-being of conscious creatures so he says questions about values are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures and therefore he concludes it makes no sense to ask whether maximizing well-being is good why not because he's redefined the word good to mean the well-being of conscious creatures so to ask why is maximizing creatures well-being good is on his definition the same as asking why does maximizing creatures well-being maximize creatures well-being it's just a tautology it's just talking in circles so dr. Harris has quote-unquote solved the value problem just by redefining his terms it's nothing but wordplay at the end of the day dr. Harris isn't really talking about moral values at all he's just talking about what's conducive to the flourishing of sentient life on this planet seen in this light his claim that science can tell us a great deal about what contributes to human flourishing is hardly controversial II a controversial of course it can just as it can tell us what is conducive to the flourishing of corn or mosquitoes or bacteria his so-called moral landscape which features the highs and lows of human flourishing isn't really a moral landscape at all thus dr. Harris's failed to solve the value problem he hasn't provided any justification or explanation for why on atheism moral values would objectively exist at all his so-called solution is just a semantical trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic redefinition of the terms good and evil in non moral vocabulary second question does atheism provide a sound foundation for objective moral duties duty has to do with moral obligation or prohibition what I ought or ought not to do here the reviewers of the moral landscape have been merciless in pounding dr. Harris's attempt to provide a naturalistic account of moral obligation two problems stand out first natural science tells us only what is not what ought to be the case as philosopher Jerry Fodor is written science is about facts not norms it might tell us how we are but it wouldn't tell us what is wrong with how we are in particular it cannot tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions which are conducive to human flourishing so if there is no God what foundation remains for objective moral duties on the naturalistic view human beings are just Anam and animals have no moral obligations to one another when a lion kills a zebra it kills the zebra but it doesn't murder the zebra when a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female it forcibly copulates with her but it doesn't rape her for none of these actions is forbidden or obligatory there is no moral dimension to these actions so if God does not exist well I think we have any moral obligations to do anything who or what imposes these obligations upon us where did they come from it's very hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning on the atheistic view certain actions such as rape and incest may not be biologically and socially advantageous and so in the course of human development have become taboo that is socially unacceptable behavior but that does absolutely nothing to prove that such acts are really wrong such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom on the atheistic view the rapist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably the moral equivalent if you will of lady gaga if there is no moral lawgiver then there is no objective moral law and if there is no objective moral law then we have no objective moral duties thus dr. Harris's view lacks any source for objective moral duty second problem ought implies can a person is not morally responsible for an action which is unable to avoid for example if somebody shoves you into another person you're not responsible for bumping into him you had no choice but Sam Harris believes that all of our actions are causally determined that there is no free will dr. Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts of free will but also compatible istic accounts of freedom but if there is no free will then no one is morally responsible for anything in the end dr. Harris admits this though it's tucked away in the end notes of his vol moral responsibility he says and I quote is a social construct not an objective reality I quote in neuro-scientific terms no person is more or less responsible than any other for the actions they perform his thoroughgoing determinism spells the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties because on his worldview we have no control over what we do thus on dr. Harris's view there is no source of objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver and no possibility of objective moral duty because there is no free will therefore honest view despite his protestations to the contrary right and wrong do not really exist thus dr. Harris's naturalistic view fails to provide a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties hence if God does not exist we do not have a sound foundation for morality which is my second contention in conclusion then we've seen that if God exists we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and objective moral duties but that if God does not exist then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties dr. Harris's atheism thus sits very ill with his ethical theory what I'm offering dr. Harris tonight is not a new set of moral values I think by and large we share the same applied ethics rather what I'm offering is a sound foundation for the objective moral values and duties that we both hold dear thank you very much dr. Harris now has 20 minutes timekeeper are you ready begin well first let me say it's an honor to be here at Notre Dame and I'm very happy to be debating dr. Craig the one Christian apologist who seems to put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheist I've actually gotten more than a few emails this week that more or less read brother please don't blow this so you will be the judge now as many of you know I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing religion and one of the perks of this job is that you immediately hear from all the people who think that criticizing religion is a terrible thing to do and strangely the reason people rise to the defense of God is not that there's so much evidence that God exists but that they believe that belief in God is the only intellectual framework for an objective morality and clearly dr. Craig is among their number now the sense is that without the conviction that moral truths exist that that words like right and wrong and good and evil actually mean something humanity will just lose its way that's the fear and I actually share that fear I've come to believe that this this concern that many religious people have of the erosion of secular morality is not an entirely empty one now I once spoke at a meeting on these themes and I and I said as I will say tonight that once we understand morality in terms of human well-being we'll be able to make strong claims about which behaviors and ways of life are good for us in which aren't and I cited as an example the sadism and misogyny of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that was less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing and it turns out that to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy and after my remarks I fell into debate with another invited speaker and this is more or less exactly how our conversation went she said how could you ever say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science I said well because I think it's pretty clear that right and wrong relate to human well-being and it's just as clear that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not a way of maximizing human wellbeing and she said well that's just your opinion and I said okay well let's make it even easier let's say we found a culture that was literally removing the eyeballs of every third child okay at Birth would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human wellbeing and she said it would depend on why they were doing it so after my eyebrows returned from the back of my head I said okay let's say they're doing it for religious reasons let's say they have a scripture which says every third should walk in darkness or some such nonsense and then she said well then you could never say that they were wrong okay and so I you should know I was talking to someone who has a deep background in science and philosophy she's actually since been appointed to the President's Council Council on bioethics she's one of 13 people advising President Obama on all of the ethical implications of advances in medicine and and related science and technology and she had just delivered a perfectly lucid lecture on the moral implications of neuroscience for the courts and she was especially concerned that we could be subjecting captured terrorists to lie detection neuroimaging technology and she viewed this as really an unconscionable violation of cognitive Liberty so on the one hand her moral scruples were very finely calibrated to recoil from the slightest perceived misstep in ethical terms in our war on terror and yet she was quite willing to forgive some primitive culture it's fondness for removing the eyeballs of children in its religious rituals and she seemed to me quite terrifyingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan at this moment so I see this double standard as a problem and strangely this is precisely the erosion of basic common sense that many religious people are worried about I hope it will be clear to you at the end of this hour that religion is not an answer to this problem okay belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality it's it's it's it is itself a source of moral blindness now it's widely believed that there are two quantities in this universe there are facts on the one hand and of course science can give us our most rigorous discussion of these but then there are values which many people like dr. Craig thinks science can't touch take questions of meaning and morality and what life is good for now of course everyone thinks that science can help us get what we value okay but it can never tell us what we ought to value and therefore it cannot in principle be applied to the most important questions in human life questions like how we should raise our children or what constitutes a good life now it's thought from the point of view of science and dr. Craig just gave voice to this opinion that when we look at the universe all we see are patterns of events just one thing follows another okay and and there's no corner of the universe that just that declares certain of its events to be good or evil or right or wrong apart from us so may our minds we declare certain events to be better than others but in doing that it seems that we're merely projecting our own preferences and desires onto a reality that is intrinsically value free and where do our notions of right and wrong come from well clearly they've been drummed into us by evolution but the product of these a fish urges and and social emotions and then they get modulated by culture we take sexual jealousy for instance and this is an attitude that has been bred into us over millions of years okay our ancestors were highly covetous of one another despite the fact that everyone was covered with hair and had terrible teeth and this possessiveness now gets enshrined in various cultural institutions like the institution of marriage okay so therefore a statement like it's wrong to cheat on one spouse okay seems a mere summation of these contingencies it seems like it it it's an improvisation on the back of biology it seems that the from the point of view of science it can't really be wrong to cheat on your spouse okay this is just just how apes like ourselves worry when we learn to worry with words okay now here is where religious people like dr. Craig begin to get a little queasy as I think they should and many see no alternative but to insert the God of Abraham an Iron Age god of war into the clockwork as an invisible arbiter of moral truth okay it is wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh deems that it is so which is curious because in other moods Yahweh is perfectly fond of genocide and slavery and human sacrifice yeah I must say it's pretty amusing to hear to Craig and his opening remarks say that I'm merely focused on the flourishing of sentient creatures on this planet if that's a sin I'll take it okay one wonder is what dr. Craig is focused on now incidentally you should not trust dr. Craig's reading of me half the quotes he provided from me as though I wrote them were quotes from from people I was quoting in my book and often to different effects so you'll have to read the book now in in claiming that values reduce to the well-being of conscious creatures as I will I'm introducing two concepts consciousness and well-being now let's start with consciousness this is not an arbitrary starting point imagine a universe devoid of the possibility of consciousness imagine the universe entirely constituted of rocks it is clearly no happiness or suffering in this universe there's no good or evil value judgments don't apply for changes in the universe to matter they have to matter it'll at least potentially to some conscious system what about well-being well it is the well-being of conscious creatures and the link between that and morality may seem open to doubt but it shouldn't here's the only assumption you have to make imagine the universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it possibly could possibly can for as long as it can I call this the worst possible misery for everyone the worst possible misery for everyone is bad okay if the word bad applies anywhere it applies here now if you think the worst possible misery for everyone isn't bad or maybe it has a silver lining or maybe there's something worse I don't know what you're talking about and what's more I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about either the what I'm saying is the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone if we should do anything in this universe if we ought to do anything if we have a moral duty to do anything it's to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone and the moment you admit this you admit that all other states of the universe are better than the worst possible misery for everyone you have the worst possible misery for everyone over here and all these other constellation of experiences arrayed out here and because the experience of conscious creatures is dependent in some way on the laws of nature there will be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum it will be possible to think you're avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone and to fail you can be wrong in your beliefs about how to navigate this space so here's my argument for moral truth in the context of science questions of right and wrong and good and evil depend upon minds if they depend upon the possibility of experience minds are natural phenomenon they depend upon the laws of nature in some way ok morality and human values therefore can be understood through science because in talking about these things we are talking about all of the facts that influence the well-being of conscious creatures in our case we're talking about genetics and neurobiology and psychology and sociology and economics now I view this space of all possible experience as a kind of moral landscape with Peaks that correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys that correspond to the lowest suffering and the first thing to realize is that there may be many equivalent peaks in this space there may be many different but morally equivalent ways for human beings to thrive but there will be many more ways not to thrive there'll be many more ways to fail to be on a peak there are clearly more ways to suffer unnecessarily in this world than to be sublimely happy now the Taliban are still my favourite example of a culture that is struggling mightily to build the society that's clear less good than many other societies on offer the average lifespan from women in Afghanistan is 44 years okay they have a 12% literacy rate they have the highest almost the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality in the world and almost the highest fertility so this is one of the best places on earth to watch women and infants die it seems to me perfectly obvious that the the best response to this dire situation which is to say the most moral response is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read now of course this is common sense to us unless you happen to be a bioethicists on the President's Commission at this moment but I'm saying at bottom it is also these are also truths about biology and neurology and psychology and sociology and economics it is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality that the moment we notice that we know anything at all about human wellbeing we have to say this now some people with a little philosophical training may be tempted to say but what if a father wants to burn off his daughters face with battery acid you know who are you to say that he's not as moral as we are what if he has an alternate conception of well-being that's just as legitimate or who's to say that we should care about the well-being of little girls this is the kind of email I get it's a net line now moral skeptics of this kind and and dr. Craig has it essentially endorsed this position in a way without God think that the only way to judge one person's values to be wrong are with respect to another person's values and all such judgments have to be on a par okay this is not true that there are many ways from my values to be objectively wrong they can be they can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I hold they can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I would hold if I were only a deeper person it's clearly possible to value things that reliably make you miserable in this life it's clearly possible to be cognitively and emotionally closed to experiences that you would want if you were only intelligent and knowledgeable enough to want them it is possible not to know what one is missing in life so things can be right or wrong or good or evil quite independent of a person's opinions now some of you might worry that I haven't defined well-being enough how can how can something this loose as a concept be the the benchmark of objective values well consider by analogy the concept of physical health physical health is very difficult to define you know it used to be that if you were healthy could expect to live to the ripe old age of 40 you know now our lifespan our life expectancy has doubled in the last 150 years what what does health mean okay well it has something to do with not always vomiting not being in excruciating pain not running a fever okay but how how fast should a healthy person be able to run that question might not have an answer okay but this does not make the question of health vacuous it doesn't make it merely a matter of opinion or of cultural construction you have the distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear inconsequential as any we ever make in science and notice that no one is ever tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like who are you to say that not always vomiting is healthy what if you meet someone who wants to vomit and he wants to vomit until he dies okay how could you argue that he is not as healthy as your in talking about morality and human values I think we really are talking about mental health and the health of societies the truth is science has always been in the values business we simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values we consider the simplest statement of scientific fact water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen this seems as value-free and utterance as human beings ever make but what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition okay all we can do is appeal to scientific values the value of understanding the world the value of evidence the value of logical consistency what if someone says whoa that's not how I choose to think about water okay I'm a biblical chemist and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light so I take that to mean that there were no stars so there were no stars to fuse helium and hydrogen into heavier elements like oxygen therefore there was no oxygen to put in the water so either God created either water has no oxygen or God created special oxygen to put in the water but I don't think he would do that because that would be biblically inelegant okay what can we say to such a person all we can do is appeal to scientific values and if he doesn't share those values the conversation is over if someone doesn't value evidence what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it if someone doesn't value logic what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic okay so this I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face and what are we really saying when we say that science can't be applied to the most important questions in human life okay we're saying that when we get our biases out of the way when we when we most fully rely on clear reasoning and honest observation when intellectual honesty is at its zenith well then the those efforts have no application whatsoever the most important questions in human life but that is precisely the mood you cannot be in to answer the most important questions in human life it would be very strange if that were so professor Craig now has 12 minutes for a rebuttal timekeeper are you ready begin you'll recall in my first speech that I said I was going to defend two basic contentions tonight first that if God exists then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties first I explained that if God exists then objective moral values are grounded in the character of God himself who is essentially compassionate fair kind generous and so forth here dr. Harris didn't have anything by way of disagreement to say but I do want to clear up a possible confusion he represented this by saying that if religion were not true than words like good and evil right and wrong would have no meaning I'm not maintaining that that is to confuse moral ontology with moral semantics moral ontology asks what is the foundation of objective moral values and duties moral semantics asks what is the meaning of moral terms and I am not making any kind of semantical claim tonight the good means something like commanded by God rather my concern is moral ontology what is the ground or the foundation of moral values and duties to give an illustration think of light light is a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum but obviously that isn't the meaning of the word light people knew how to use the word light long before they discovered its physical nature and I might also add they certainly knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light now in exactly the same way we can know the meaning of moral terms like good and evil right and wrong and know the difference between good and evil without being aware that the good is grounded in God ontologically so that is the position on defending tonight is that moral values are grounded on illogically in god second our moral duties are grounded by god's commandments which are necessary reflections of his nature here the only response i detected from dr. harris was to refer to the atrocities in the hebrew bible but i think this is quite irrelevant tonight's discussion there are plenty of divine command theorists who are not jews or christians and place no stock whatsoever in the bible so this isn't an objection to divine command theory that i'm defending tonight now if you are interested in biblical ethics i want to highly recommend paul Coppens new book is god a moral monster which examines those passages in the hebrew bible in light of the ancient Near East and I can guarantee you will be a very enlightening and interesting read but this issue is strictly irrelevant in tonight's debate so we've not heard any objection to a theistic grounding for ethics if God does exist it's clear I think obvious even that we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties now what if God does not exist is there a sound foundation first of all for objective moral values now here dr. Harris said you don't need religion in order to have universal morality again that's a confusion of course you don't remember the Nazis for example could have won World War two and established a universal morality the issue isn't universality the issue is objectivity and I'm maintaining that in the absence of God there isn't any reason any explanation for the existence of objective moral values now dr. Harris says but we can imagine creatures being in the worst possible misery and it's obviously better for creatures to be flourishing the well-being of conscious creatures is good well of course it is that's not the question we agree that all things being equal flourishing of conscious creatures is good the question is rather if atheism were true what would make the flourishing of conscious creatures objectively good conscious creatures might like to flourish but there's no reason on atheism to think that it would really be objectively good now here dr. Harris I think is guilty of misusing uh terms like good and and bad right and wrong in equivocal ways he will often use them in non moral senses for example he'll say there are objectively good and bad moves in chess now that's clearly not a moral use of the terms good and bad you just mean they're not apt to win or produce a winning strategy it's not evil what you've done and similarly in ordinary English we use the words good in man bad in a number of non moral ways for example we say Notre Dame as a good team now we can hope it's an ethical team but that's not what's indicated by the win-loss record that that is a different meaning of good or we say that's a good way to get yourself killed or that's a good game plan or the sunshine felt good or that's a good route to East Lansing or there's no good reason to do that or she's in good health all of these are non moral uses of the word good and dr. Harris's contrast of the good life and the bad life is not an ethical contrast between a morally good life and an evil life it's a contrast between a pleasurable life and a miserable life and there's no reason to identify pleasure misery with good and evil especially on atheism so there's just no reason that's been given on atheism for thinking the flourishing of conscious creatures is objectively good but dr. Harris has to defend an even more radical claim than that he claims that the property of being good is identical with the property of creaturely flourishing and he's not offered any defense of this radical identity claim in fact I think we have a knockdown argument against it now bear with me here this is a little technical on the next to last page of his book dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists liars and thieves could be just as happy as good people then his moral landscape would no longer be a moral landscape rather it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people or evil people alike now what's interesting about this is it earlier in the book dr. Harris explained that about 3 million Americans are psychopathic that is to say they don't care about the mental states of others they enjoy inflicting pain on other people but that implies that there's a possible world which we can conceive in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape the peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people but that entails that in the actual world the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either for identity is a necessary relation there is no possible world in which some entity a is not identical to a so if there's any possible world in which a is not identical to B then it follows that a is not in fact identical to B now since it's possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical it follows necessarily that human well-being and goodness are not the same as dr. Harris has asserted in his book now it's not often in philosophy that you get a knockdown argument against a position but I think we've got one here by granting that it's possible that the continuum of well-being is not identical to the moral landscape dr. Harris's view becomes logically incoherent and all of this goes to underline my fundamental point that on atheism there's just no reason to identify the well-being of conscious creatures with moral goodness 8 ISM cannot explain the reality the objective reality of moral values what about objective moral duties I first argued from the is auto station that there is no basis on atheism for thinking that we have any moral Vout duties and here dr. hare says if we have a moral duty to do anything we have a duty to avoid the worst possible misery but the question is the antecedent of that conditional if we have a moral duty to do anything what I'm arguing is that on atheism I don't see any reason to think we have any moral duties to do anything moral obligations or prohibitions arise in response to imperatives from a competent authority for example if a policeman tells you to pull over then because of his authority who he is you are legally obligated to pull over but if some random stranger tells you to pull over you're not legally obligated to do so now in the absence of God what authority is there to issue moral commands or prohibitions there is none on atheism and therefore there are no moral imperatives for us to obey in the absence of God there just isn't any sort of moral obligation or prohibition that characterizes our lives in particular were not morally obligated to promote the flourishing of conscious creatures so this is off distinction seems to me to be one that's fatal to dr. Harris's position and has been widely recognized as such by reviewers of the moral landscape but secondly the problem that's even worse is the ought implies kin problem in the absence of the ability to do otherwise there is no moral responsibility in the absence of freedom of the will we are just puppets or electrochemical machines and puppets do not have moral responsibilities machines are not moral obligations but on dr. Harris's view there is no freedom of the will either in a libertarian or had a ballistic sense and therefore there is no moral responsibility so there isn't even the possibility of moral duty on his view so while I can affirm and applaud dr. Harris's affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and moral duties at the end of the day his philosophical worldview just doesn't ground these entities that we both want to affirm if God exists then we clearly have a sound foundation for objective moral values and moral duties but if God does not exist that is if atheism is true then there is no basis for the affirmation of objective moral values and there is no ground for objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver and there is no freedom of the will and therefore it seems to me that atheism is simply bereft of the adequate ontological foundations to establish the moral life dr. Harris now has 12 minutes timekeeper are you ready begin well that was all very interesting ask yourselves what is wrong with spending eternity in hell well I'm told it's rather hot there for one dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality okay the whole point of Christianity or so it is imagined is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls now happily there's absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists and I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework this theistic framework in this world and what these moral underpinnings actually would be all right 9 million children die every year before they reach the age of 5 a picture picture a Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people one of those every 10 days killing children only under 5 okay it's 20 24,000 children a day a thousand an hour 17 or so a minute that means before I can get to the end of this sentence some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony think think of the parents of these children think of the fact that that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared and their prayers will not be answered okay but according to dr. Craig this is all part of God's plan any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way and their parents to grieve in this way either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to he is therefore either impotent or evil and worse than that on dr. Craig's view most of these people many of these people certainly will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God think about that okay through no fault of their own they were born into the wrong culture where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation okay they're 1.2 billion people in India at this moment most of them are Hindus most of them therefore polytheists okay in dr. Craig's universe no matter how good these people are they are doomed if you were if you are praying to the monkey god Hanuman you are doomed okay you will be tortured in hell for eternity now is there the slightest evidence for this no it just says so in mark 9 and Matthew 13 and revelation 14 perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings it says when the Elves die they go to Valinor but they can be reborn in middle-earth I say that just as a point of comparison okay so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus okay he engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of Revelation and then he created the penalty for this ignorance which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire okay on the other hand on dr. Craig's account your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America okay who spent his life raping and torturing children need only come to God come to Jesus on death row and after a final meal of fried chicken he's going to spend an eternity in heaven after death okay one thing should be crystal clear to you this vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability can please notice the double standard that people like dr. Craig used to to exonerate God from all this evil okay we're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good but when someone like myself points out the art whether obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath okay we're told that God is mysterious okay who can understand God's will okay and yet this is precisely that this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish His goodness in the first place if something good happens to a Christian some he feels some bliss while praying say or he sees some positive change in his life and we're told that God is good okay but when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents arms and drowned we're told that God is mysterious okay this is how you play tennis without the net okay and I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way it is morally reprehensible okay this kind of faith is really is the perfection of narcissism God loves me don't you know he cured me of my eczema he makes me feel so good while singing in church and just when we had given up hope he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage okay given all the all that this god of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others given given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant this kind of faith is obscene okay this to think in this way is to fail to reason honestly or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings and if God is good and loving and just and kind and he wanted to guide us morally with a book why give us a book that supports slavery why give us a book that it monitors us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft now of course there's a way of not taking these questions to heart according to dr. Craig's divine command theory God is not bound by moral duties God doesn't have to be good whatever he commands is good so when he commands that the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it okay well here we're being offered I'm glad he raised the issue of psychopathy we're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude it's psychotic because this is completely delusional there's no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh but it is it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from from the well-being of human beings in this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children okay just that just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God's will there is absolutely nothing that dr. Craig can say against their behavior in moral terms apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God if they had the right God what they were doing would be good on divine command theory now I'm obviously not saying that all the dr. Craig or all religious people are psychopaths and psychotics but this to me is the true horror of religion it allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own okay if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that's saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley okay you have lost your mind okay but if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus you're just a Catholic and I'm not the first person to notice that it's a it's a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence okay it's it's I mean if you live 2,000 years ago there was evidence galore and he was just performing miracles but apparently he got tired of being so helpful okay and so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrines implausibility and and and and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and we and what we know about the all-too-human origins of scripture becomes more and more difficult and it's not just the generic God that dr. Craig is recommending it is God the Father and Jesus the son okay Christianity on dr. Craig's account is the true moral wealth of the world what I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice Christianity is not a religion that sell that repute er repudiates human sacrifice it is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective God so loved the world that He gave His only Son John 3:16 the idea is that that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none needs suffer hell except those those billions in India and billions like them throughout history okay this is this is this is astride this doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism we come from people who used to bury children in under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods if we just think about that they're in vast numbers of societies people would bury children in postholes people like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings these are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible if there is a a less moral moral framework than the one dr. Craig is proposing I haven't heard of it professor Craig now has eight minutes for a rebuttal timekeeper are you ready begin the less moral framework is atheism atheism has no grounds for objective moral values or duties and it's interesting that in that last speech I was disappointed to hear no defense given of that crucial second contention that I offered against dr. Harris's view remember we talked about the value problem I gave what I consider a knockdown argument to show that the moral landscape is not identical to the continuum of human flourishing we talked about objective moral duties these verses ought distinction the autumn flies can problem none of these have been responded to so if you want a really desperate moral system try atheism there's no foundation for objective moral values and duties there now what about theism does it do any better well in the last speech we heard some attacks on my first contention that God provides a sound foundation for morality unfortunately it seems to be that most of these were red herrings a red herring is a smiley old fish that's dragged across the path of the bloodhounds to distract them from their true query so they get distracted and go off following that the dead fish and I'm not going to be distracted by the red herrings that were offered in that last speech for example in response to my claim that if God exists then objective moral values exist we heard that I haven't truly offered an alternative to his view because the goal on theism is to avoid hell honestly that it simply shows how poorly sam harris understands christianity you don't believe in god to avoid going to hell belief in god isn't some kind of fire insurance you believe in God because God as the supreme good is the appropriate object of adoration and love he is goodness itself to be desired for its own sake and so the fulfillment of human existence is to be found in relation to God it is because of who God is and his moral worth that he is worthy of worship it has nothing to do with avoiding hell hell or promoting your own well-being he then responds but there's no good reason to believe that such a being exists look at the problem of evil and the problem of the unev angel' eyes both of these as I explained in my opening speech are irrelevant in tonight's debate because I'm not arguing that God exists maybe he's right maybe these are insuperable objections to Christianity or to theism it wouldn't affect either of my contentions that if God exists then we have a sound foundation for moral values and duties if God does not exist then we have no foundation for objective moral values and duties so these are red herrings now I have written on each of these problems the problem of evil and the problem of the unev Angeles and you can find much of what I've said at our website reasonable faith org if you're interested go ahead and look at that or as Michael Rea suggested talk to one of your philosophy professors Michael has written extensively on the problem of evil and I'm sure he'd love to have a conversation with you about those things notice is secondly I would want to say evil actually proves that God exists because if God does not exist objective moral values and duties do not exist if evil exists then it follows that objective values and duties do exist namely some things are evil so evil actually proves the existence of God since in the absence of God good and evil as such would not exist so you cannot press both the problem of evil and degree with my contention that if God does not exist objective moral values and duties do not exist because evil actually will be an argument for the existence of God notice that dr. Harris has no more foundation for saying that Christian beliefs are morally exokernel because he has no foundation for making such a judgment if atheism is true what objective foundation is there for affirming that one view is exha : another is not there's simply no basis for such judgments so if he wants to have a debate on theism I will happily engage in one with him but that's not the debate for tonight he also says there's it's psychopathic to believe these things now that remark is just as stupid as it is insulting it is absurd to think that people like Professor peter van inwagen here at the University of Notre Dame is psychopathic or that a guy like dr. Tom Flint who is as gracious a Christian gentleman as I could have ever met is psychopathic this is simply below the belt so it seems to me that we've not been given any refutation of the view that if God does exist then his essence his character is determinative for the existence of objective moral values what about objective moral duties here I explained that God's commands must be consistent with his nature and dr. Harris continues to press the point oh but the Bible supports slavery again I'll refer you to Professor cope Anne's book which shows that that is a gross misrepresentation of ancient Israel which did not in fact promote slavery as we understand it in light of the experience in the American South but again that's simply not irrelevant because I'm not that isn't relevant because I'm not defending the Bible tonight I'm saying that for a theist whether Jew Christian deist Hindu moral duties will be grounded in the divine commands which are based in his nature he says but then what about people like the Taliban who say that God has commanded them to do certain atrocities I would say the very same thing to the Taliban that dr. Harris says namely God did not command you to do those things that's exactly what dr. Harris would say the reason he thinks that is because he doesn't believe that God exists but I would say that because I think that the Talley it's got the wrong God that in fact God hasn't commanded them to commit these atrocities and indeed God will only issue such commands are as are consistent with his moral nature and for which he has morally sufficient reasons so I don't think this first contention is really in much dispute tonight I think it's obvious that if God exists then obviously objective moral values exist independently of human opinion they're grounded in the character of God and there would be objective moral duties if God exists because our duties arise in response to the moral imperatives that God issues to us so the real debate is on that second contention can atheism provide a good foundation for objective moral values and duties and I think we've seen powerful reasons to think that it cannot dr. Harris now has 8 minutes timekeeper are you ready begin well perhaps you've noticed dr. Craig has a charming habit of summarizing his opponent's points in a way in which they were not actually given so I will leave it to you to sort it out on YouTube needless to say I didn't call those esteemed colleagues of his Psychopaths as I made clear in any case dr. clay Craig has merely defined God as being intrinsically good that's if you want to charge someone with merely semantics games the shoes on on the other foot as well there is there is no reason that I can see why there couldn't be an evil God or several okay he but his God is intrinsically good goodness is grounded in his very nature that is a definitional definitional move that he has made now I have presented a positive case for grounding an objective morality in the context of science and thinking about moral truth in the context of science should only pose a problem for you if you imagine that a science of morality has to be absolutely self-justifying in a way that no science ever could be okay every branch of science must rely on certain axiomatic assumptions get certain core values and a science of morality would be on the same footing as a science of Medicine or physics or chemistry you need only assume that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and indeed the worst case scenario for conscious life and if science is unscientific of this if having a value assumption at the core render science unscientific what is scientific now dr. Craig is confused about what it means to speak with scientific objectivity about the human condition he says things like from the point of view of science we're just constellations of atoms and we're no more valuable than rats or insects okay as though the only scientifically objective thing that could be said about us is that we're constellations of atoms okay there are two very different senses in which we use these terms subjective and objective okay there's the the first is epistemological it relates to how we know and when we say we're reasoning or thinking objectively in this sense we're talking about about the style in which we're thinking we're talking about the fact that we're seeing through our biases we avoid work which is to say trying to jettison bias we are reasoning in in a way that's available to the data our minds are open to counter arguments now this is the this is the absolute foundation of science and this is what that this is what opens such an invidious gulf between science and religion the difference here in this approach to objectivity but science does not require that we ignore the fact that certain facts are subjective ontologically subjective there are facts about the human condition that science can understand and study that are first-person facts facts about what it's like to be you and and we can study these facts and our study of them reveals how much deeper and richer and more meaningful our lives are than the lives of cockroaches so this this is a false reductionism that he's pervane here now so there are subjective facts if you happen to have an intact nervous system being burned alive will be excruciatingly ly painful the painfulness of pain is a subjective fact about you okay I'm what my argument entails is that there there are we can speak objectively about a certain class of subjective facts that go by the name of morality that relate to questions of good and evil and these depend upon on the well-being of just creatures especially our own and by this light we can see that it's possible to value the wrong things if you think you prefer to be neurotic and in pain and incapable of creative work and completely disconnected from other people there's something wrong with you okay objectively wrong with you yes okay in that York you are closed to higher states of consciousness higher with respect to what higher as in further from the lowest possible state of consciousness the worst possible misery for everyone okay is the worst possible misery for everyone really bad once again we have hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question now I want to take a brief moment to speak about these higher possibilities because it's often thought that non-believers like myself are closed to some remarkable experiences that religious people have that's not true that's not true there's nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self transcending love and ecstasy and rapture and awe there's nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year like a proper mystic and and and doing nothing but meditate on compassion say what atheists don't tend to do is make unjustifiable and unjustified claims about the nature of the cosmos or about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences now that the prospect of somebody becoming a true saint in life and and inspiring people long after their deaths is something that I take very seriously I've spent a lot of time studying meditation with some very great wise old Yogi's and and Tibetan Lamas who've spent decades on retreat it really remarkable people okay people who I actually consider to be spiritual geniuses of a certain sort and so I can well imagine if Jesus was a spiritual genius you know a palpably non neurotic and charismatic and wise person I can well imagine the experience of his disciples I can well imagine the kind of influence he could have on their lives okay no we do not have to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence in order to explore this higher terrain of human well-being we don't have to take anything on faith we don't have to lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality if we want to understand our situation in the world along with these deeper possibilities we have to do it in the spirit of science okay given given that people have had these remarkable experiences in every context while worshiping one God while worshiping hundreds while worshiping none that proves that a deeper principle was at work at the sectarian claims of our various religions can't possibly be true in that context and all we have is human conversation to capture these possibilities we can either have a first-century conversation as dictated by the New Testament or a seventh-century conversation as dictated by the Quran or a 21st century conversation that leaves us open to the full wealth of human learning please think about these things we're now moving to five minute closing speeches timekeeper are you ready okay begin in my closing statement I'd like to try to draw together some of the threads of the debate and see if we can come to some conclusions first I argued that God if he exists provides the sound foundation for objective moral values and duties by the time of his last rebuttal the only argument that I heard dr. Harris offering against this position is to say that you're merely defining God is good which is the same fallacy I accused him of committing I don't think this is the case at all God is a being worthy of worship any being that is not worthy of worship is not God and therefore God must be perfectly good and essentially good more than that is an some saw God is the greatest conceivable being and therefore he is the very paradigm of goodness itself he is the greatest good so once you understand the concept of God you can see that asking well why is God good is sort of like asking why are all bachelors unmarried it's the very concept of the greatest conceivable being of being worthy of worship that entails the essential goodness of God and I think it's evident that if God exists then we do have objective moral values and duties secondly I argued if God does not exist we have no foundation for objective moral values or objective moral duties I showed that on his view there is it is logically impossible to say that the moral landscape is identical to the landscape of the flourishing of conscious beings and that therefore his view is incoherent we also looked at the is aught distinction and the autumn flies can to which dr. Harris has never replied in the course of this evenings debate in his last speech he said but we simply must rely upon certain axioms well that's the same as saying you've got to take it by faith and if these axioms are moral axioms then I think he's admitting my point that on atheism there simply is no ground for believing the objectivity of moral values and duties he just takes them by a leap of faith he says well there are different senses of the word objective yes of course and in my opening speech I made clear the sense in which I was defining the term I mean valid and binding independent of human opinion and moral values are not objectively binding and valid in that way on atheism he says science can study subjective facts for example pain is a subjective fact granted that's certainly true so my question is is the wrongness of an action a subjective fact on a theism it's hard to see how it couldn't be any more anything more than a subjective fact in which case you cannot say as dr. Harris wants to say and I agree with him that the genital mutilation of little girls is objectively wrong not just a subjective opinion he says well but if your psychopathic a neurotic there's something wrong with you granted I agree with that there is something wrong with you but the question is on a theism if atheism were true would there be anything objectively morally wrong with doing what the psychopath does he hasn't been able to show that indeed there are no moral duties on his view and remember he himself admitted that Psychopaths could occupy the peaks of well-being on his so-called moral landscape and that therefore it is not a moral landscape at all to conclude I want to quote from a remarkable article that appeared in the Duke Law Journal by Arthur Allen left called unspeakable ethics a natural law doctor less difficulty is the same as dr. Harris's he wants to find a foundation for moral values and duties in this case for the law that would be independent of human opinion would be objective and would be in the world and he can't find one he says any attempt to ground values in the world is open to the playground bullies retort who says and this is how his article concludes all I can say is this it looks as if we are all we have only if ethics were something unspeakable by us that is something transcendent could law be unnatural and therefore unchallengeable as things now stand everything is up for grabs nevertheless napalm in babies is bad starving the poor is wicked buying and selling each other is depraved there is in the world such a thing as evil altogether now says who god help us and now dr. Harris has five minutes timekeeper are you ready begin I'm curious how many of you consider yourselves to be devout Muslims see a show of hands don't mean to single anyone out but not many now you're all aware of course that the Quran exists and claims to be the perfect word of the creator the universe you're aware that once having heard this possibility and rejecting it you're all going to hell for eternity I mean needless to say dr. Craig and I are both going to hell if this vision of life is true the problem is that everything dr. Craig has said tonight with a few modifications could be said in defense of Islam in fact has been said in defense of Islam if the logic is exactly the same we have a book that claims to be the Word of the creator of the universe it tells us about the nature of moral reality and how to live within it well what if what if Muslims are right what if Islam is true okay how should we view God in moral terms how would we view God in world terms or I should say Allah okay we have been born in the wrong place to the wrong parents given the wrong culture given the wrong theology okay to needles to say dr. Craig is doomed he's been thoroughly confused by Christianity I mean just appreciate what a bad position he's now in to appreciate the true Word of God I've been thoroughly misled by science it where is Allah is compassion okay and yet in a tree he's on it he's omnipotent he could change this in an instant he could give us a sign that would convince everyone in this room and yet he's not going to do it and he'll awaits and hell awaits our children because we can't help but mislead our children okay now just hold this vision in mind and first appreciate how little sleep you have law over this possibility okay just feel in yourself at this moment how carefree you are and will continue to be in the face of this possibility what are the chances that we're all going to go to hell for eternity because we haven't recognized the Quran to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe please know that this is exactly how Christianity appears to someone who's not been indoctrinated by it our scriptures were written by people who by by virtue of their placement in history had less access to scientific information and facts and basic common-sense than any person in this room okay in fact there's not a person in this room who's ever met a person whose worldview was as narrow as the worldview of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Mohammed and most of these people with a few exceptions had had a moral worldview that was more or less indistinguishable from that of an Afghan warlord today okay and yet dr. Craig insists that the authors of the Bible knew everything they had to know about the nature of the cosmos and about how to live within it to guide us at this moment okay I want to suggest to you that this vision of life can't possibly be true okay but just as there's no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra there can be no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality whatever is true about our circumstance in moral terms and in spiritual terms is discoverable now and can be talked about in in language that is not an outright affront to everything that we've learned in the last 2,000 years okay what remains for us to discover are the facts in every domain of knowledge that will allow the greatest number of us to live lives truly worth living in this how is it that we can build a global civilization a viable global civilization of now destined to be 9 billion people with a maximum number of people truly flourish that is the challenge we face sectarian moral denominations okay a world shattered balkanized by competing claims about an invisible God is not the way to do it apart from the fact that there's no evidence in the first place that should be compelling to us to adopt that view the only tool we need is honest inquiry and I would suggest to you that if faith is ever right about anything in this domain it's right by accident thank you very much it's been a pleasure to talk we started 15 minutes late and so I'm going to allow us to go until 9:15 that gives us 30 minutes for questions as I said at the beginning we're going to allow Notre Dame students to ask the first four questions after that the microphones are open to anyone we'd like to keep a brisk pace for the question so please limit your questions to about thirty seconds and I've been I've asked the debaters to limit their responses to about two minutes I'll take the liberty of urging people to get quickly to their point if these time limits are violated we have microphones here and here I think we have microphone oh good I can see the microphones on the balcony so I'll just go in a circuit thank you dr. Harris if dr. kraig could link out of your objections about the problem of evil and the problem of choosing the right religion so that those weren't really problems those weren't functioning that debate where does that put you dialectically well how do those function in the debate do you mean if I was given good reason to believe that Christianity is true or if I could show that choosing a particular religion wasn't necessary for the grounding of of morality just that some religion being true was sufficient for there being a grounding for morality and that the problem of evil was somehow answered well I would never be tempted to dispute that we could make up a religion that if true would be a grounding of morality maybe we could those are those imaginary schemes are there for the asking we could make them up we could in about five minutes we could make up a better religion than any that exists I mean you just you just take Christianity and cut out Leviticus and Deuteronomy and already you've done great work so and you know we could write we could rewrite the Ten Commandments in less than five minutes and improve upon it so you know beam kind to add beam kind to children and swap out the bit about the graven images and you've already made it a much wiser document now but that that's not the point I mean the point is that but one point I made which which he never really addressed is that the you're smuggling in a concern for well-being in any case you just have a different timeline if Christianity were true it would be part of my moral landscape I mean if someone like myself is going to suffer in hell for eternity based on what I'm currently thinking then I've clearly mmm doing the wrong thing I mean I would I would want I would want that information and I would think I mean that would be a revelation to me which I would take seriously and I would do everything I could to get into heaven I mean that would be heaven is that if eternity in heaven versus eternity in hell is really the landscape that we're living on well that's part of my moral landscape it just changes its its its temporal characteristics there's just no reason to think that that's the universe we're living in thank you up in to my left professor Craig you made an interesting analogy you said that long before we could explain scientifically where light came from we could distinguish between light and dark and that the same could be said for good and evil but to me that analogy seems dangerous because long before we could explain scientifically where light came from we said it came from God could the same be said for morality and then also how do you explain ships in moral consensus over time okay I'm not sure I understood all of the questions so I might need our moderator to help me here that the last part of the question was shifts in morality over time don't confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology moral ontology is the foundation in reality for objective moral values and duties moral epistemology is how we come to know the goods that there are and the duties that we have and clearly affirming that there are objective moral values and duties doesn't mean that we always know them infallibly clearly over time there's such a thing as moral growth and moral development when I look at my own life I I look back at my life as a young man and I can see certain attitudes and things that I had that I now would be ashamed of morally I think I've experienced moral growth so there's there's no reason to think that the objectivity of moral values and duties implies that there isn't such a thing as moral growth or a clear apprehension of the good or sadly in some cases a moral degeneration of a society and turning away from good so these are two different problems and my concern is moral ontology now I didn't catch the first part of the question Mike did you yeah tell me if I misrepresent you but I take it that she's asking you you say that we understood light and dark Oh before we understood the physics of light she says but we posited supernatural explanations for light also at that time why not think moralities in the same situation yeah again the I think you misunderstood the analogy there that I'm making what I'm saying there is distinguishing moral ontology for moral semantics and what I'm saying is I'm not offering a moral semantical theory about the meaning of the words good and evil right and wrong I'm talking about their foundation and reality and so the example of light was simply to give an example of where people understood the meaning of the English word light even if they didn't know its physical nature in terms of electromagnetic radiation sorry I get that you're arguing that there needs to be a source for good and evil that makes sense so why does that source have to be God could it not be that we just haven't discovered what the source is well that would be my second contention that in the absence of God I can't see any foundation that would be left for affirming the objectivity of moral values and particularly the value of human beings and conscious life on this planet and then that second problem about objective moral duties is especially serious the is ought distinction and then the ought implies kin problem no free will so that that would just be to reiterate the arguments have already given as to why I think in the absence of God there wouldn't be objective moral values of duties I allowed to follow up only because there is misunderstanding just so you know up and to my right yeah I've got a question for dr. Harris so a lot of the argument is I felt like it depended a lot on the definition of good good and bad right and wrong and I wanted to ask you if you thought it would it would be possible for there to be so I've got a two-part question for there'd be a hypothetical god that so to scratch everything you know about today ISM Christianity Hinduism create your own new God and if it would be hypothetical for this God to perfectly align with your definition of morals of moral theory so say that this guide says in commands that good and bad are dependent on the well-being of conscious animals and then simultaneously to that question whether you think a God of love does just that is it seems to me and in my experience and looking at history that there is no greater continuum across human history than the presence of love and the fact that we've had marriage whether homosexual heterosexual transgender from the moment we've been we've been living animals and so if that really is the root of our well-being then how does it how does a God of love not promote well-being so but in response yeah yeah well love clearly has a lot to do with with our well-being and if there were a God of love who was really acting like a God of love and was making I bet the problem is that the existence of God doesn't really add to the moral stature of love in that case because or the moral stature of a good I mean this is - goes to the Euthyphro dilemma that we haven't spoken about probably mercifully but I mean if it's either intrinsically good or it isn't and for God to say it's good doesn't make it more good and it's not it's not good by Fiat so he's either saying it's good because it is good in which case we can just deal with the fact that it is good or it's just good because he says it's good but then he can say any evil thing is good which dr. Craig's God does rather often apparently so but love is clearly something we desperately want in our lives and we're right to want it were deeply social creatures and the fear that is sort of circulating here that's that well-being somehow leave something out that's important I think and I argue at some length of my book is quite unfounded because whatever you bring to me which which is truly important you say okay you're talking about well-being but here I'm talking about self-transcending love this is really important well self-transcending love is a is a probably at the core of the deepest well-being that we can experience as human beings and but likewise if the Christian hell exists and awaits me well-being in the in the end is predicated on avoiding those flames and so that means all of it you're smuggling is smuggling in a concern about consciousness and its future changes whatever you bring in the moral domain and so I'm saying we we must be honest about that we ground this in consciousness and then we can talk about how how human beings like ourselves can can thrive and I would would grant you that love is is is probably on the top of the list down here to my right um mr. Harris um uh for my personal experience and from my faith I find that um Christ's first commandment was to love thy neighbor and you know thy God and I believe that if you are a Muslim then you follow through with that if you are devout Muslim and you care about the well-being of all mankind and um it's kind of in relation to my next question which is like how what a naturalist respond to amazing miracles by God which like say the miracle of the Sun which was witnessed by thirty thousand two hundred thousand people in Fatima Portugal in 1917 as well as miracles of the Eucharist in which the Eucharist actually starts to form veins and bleed and where this blood is actually tested and is found to be a B+ from the left ventricle of the heart and it's actually been research under leading pathologist in New Zealand to actually be throbbing and living as it was in its his laboratory for the thirty days okay well the problem with with miracle stories are that there they truly are a diamond does I mean the miracle stories that cash out Christianity are miracle stories set in the context of the pre scientific context of the first century roman empire attested to by copies of copies of copies of ancient greek manuscripts that have thousands of discrepancies now there are miracle stories that you can find in india today attested to by living eyewitnesses so you look at the people surrounding someone like Satya Sai Baba thousands of Western educated people go to India spend time with Satya Sai Baba and come away claiming that he's performed a variety of miracles in fact if you if you add up all those stories every miracle attributed to Jesus including including the resurrection of the Dead is attributed to Satya Sai Baba and he's and millions of people think he's a living God these stories from our point of view don't even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel okay and yet 2.3 billion people think that the miracles of Jesus are worth organizing your life around and that that I think is a an intellectually unsustainable disparity now I'm not I'm not closed to the evidence of miracles and it would be trivially easy for God to convince me of his existence or the powers of psychic powers of saints or whatever it is it may be if you can tell I've got a 20 digit number written on a piece of paper in my wallet sir I'm sorry okay but if you if you tell me what that number is then we have a very interesting miracle on our hands and I still can't let the follow-ups continue sorry we have a whole bunch of people lined up yes over here dr. Craig I know you wanted to kind of stay away from the epistemological questions but I I I need some advice because um accepting in objective good I guess where do we go from that practically because something happened to me last where I'm I mean I've been I've been a Christian but um last night God appeared to me and he told me that that that homosexual lovemaking was it was every bit as beautiful and and loving and good as as heterosexual procreative sex in in the in the system of marriage and he he said come and let everyone know that I said no God they won't believe me they won't they won't they will not believe me how do i what where do we where do we go from here practically with divine revelation it do what do I leave my peers like your feigned sincerity about this you know listen fooling anybody it's not the topic of tonight's debate I'm not even going to address idly question like this I didn't mean to offend you I'm sorry we we aren't doing follow-ups with the quite allowed the one up there because there was a misunderstanding but the question has come out it's received an answer so this question is for dr. dr. Harris unfortunately mine won't be is funny okay so it seems to me that there's there's a distinction and in your argument that I'd like you to discuss which is the conceptual possibility of the most miserable world and its material possibility so basically what I'm asking is whether you can cite any evidence to believe that this is not the world that is most miserable or otherwise so if you can't let's assume this is the world with materially the material conditions for the most misery to exist then wouldn't it be moral to destroy it all destroy all consciousness so I'm just wondering how would you distinguish that this is not the worst possible world well it may be the only world with conscious life we I think I doubt that given the trillion fold universe we're living in but we don't have any evidence of life elsewhere much less conscious life but so this this your question cuts to the issue of you know what if it's all about well-being well why don't we just you know kill all the unhappy people in their sleep tonight okay why wouldn't that raise sort of the aggregate level of well-being on on earth and their infinite number of thought experiments like that you can come up with it seem to push on this concern well it's just about suffering well you can just eradicate it painlessly for people and you have have increased the net well-being but all of those thought experiments neglect all of the cascading effects of living in a world in which we do that sort of thing where the consequences of doing that so why don't we why don't we in the classic experiment that everyone trots out is what if you're a doctor and you realize that you have somebody who could benefit from the organs of you know you have five people who could benefit in the organs of one person who's sitting in your waiting room so you go into your waiting room you you knock him out and you euthanize them you vivisect them and you give away as organ okay that seems like it's it's a net benefit to five people but if we were all living in a world where at any moment your doctor could vivisect you and steal your organs that would have rather obvious ghastly consequences that none of us would want to submit to and there's a our intuitions about the sanctity of human life caring for for people treating people as ends in themselves rather than means to some other end all of that conserves intuitions we have about trust and its importance in life and all of these ways in which we are knit together as a community and and and ways in which only we only rise or fall together I mean so it's in a very important sense our happiness is is dependent upon the happiness of others and we are not atomized selves that that are radically separate so this idea that that killing everyone we first of all killing everyone would just would eradicate all the suffering yes but it would also foreclose all the happiness they would it would it would nullify every possibility of experience so if you think that a universe where the lights are on is better than a universe where the lights are off then turning the lights off is worse but I could imagine a universe which it would be worth turning the lights off in I mean the Christian hell is one of them you know you'd be doing people a lot of goods whether you know I'm sorry no follow-ups I'm going to be really strict about this it is the question well to answer your question if this is the only world well then it is by definition both the most miserable and the happiest and everything in between and now I just have no idea whether what else is out there up on my right dr. Craig when discussing Islam and more specifically the Taliban you said that they have the wrong God sighting I assume their their violent attacks based on jihad and because of that how do you know that you have the right God and if you do have the right God what explanation can you offer for him authorizing the Crusades again this isn't the topic of the debate tonight but let me just say that one of the side areas that I specialized in in my theological studies in Germany is Islam and I'm persuaded that there are better reasons for believing that God has revealed himself decisively in Jesus of Nazareth by raising him from the dead after his crucifixion whereas Islam is committed not only to the fact that Jesus wasn't raised from the dead but that he was not even crucified which is the one historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth that is universally acknowledged by New Testament critics across the spectrum and so with all the best will in the world I could not be a Muslim I see a lot of points of commonality I applaud the monotheism of Islam but in the end I think that the Muslim faith gets it wrong about Jesus so dr. Harris I think that you've post some interesting challenges to Christianity and to theism general but I want to return to the issue of debate which is the more the objectivity of morality and so you say that the your basis you can base objective morality on the assumption that that this worst possible world is bad so I think that we can all agree that on that statement that it is bad but what's to say that that's not simply just a subjective assertion that it's just something based on human human opinion it I don't see any reason to think that that's an objective well I tried to to show you in my in my opening remarks why that particular concern is not interesting or necessary you can play that same game with everything that we think is objective so why does 2+2 make for that seems to make for to us but how do we know that's not just a human intuition I mean how what is wrong with a logical argument that contradicts itself why is why is is self-contradiction not a a good way to argue it well it just doesn't seem to fly now you could always try to get behind that as an epistemological skeptic or a logical skeptic and say well this is just how you monkeys are wired to think and and there are interesting ways in which science at its forefront does does create some of that tension there ways in which which are our logical expectations begin to break down in physics but we use other scientific intuitions and in this case mathematical intuitions to try to to get behind them you have to pick yourself up by your bootstraps somewhere okay it's better than pulling yourself down by them and so you have you have to every every objective paradigm has to make a first move it has to step into the light based on some axiomatic judgment that is not self justifying a girdle proved this in logic and and this is if this is true for arithmetic it's true for things far more complicated and arithmetic I'm saying that that a recognition that this universe offers a spectrum of experience on the one hand truly intolerable and on the other sublimely wonderful and that we all know that movement across the spectrum toward the sublime is better than movement toward the unendurable and pointless suffering now that's again you might ask well what about suffering that actually turns out to be good in the end what about the suffering of you know the stress of learning to play a musical instrument or whatever again that's not a counter I mean they're they're tight there are ways to climb we might have to go down a little bit to go up to a higher place on this landscape and that we can make sense of of that kind of struggle and so I'm not equate in the good with mere pleasure in a way that dr. Craig suggested it thank you fun here yes dr. Craig in your refutation of mr. Harris you rely very heavily on the distinction between is statements and all statements where you could take the entire election of known is statements and never be able to logically derive an ought statement so I have one question for you is the statement God exists an is statement or an ought statement that's an is statement so you can't derive any moral objective duties from it not from that alone then you have unstated premise 'yes in your arguments well not stated them clearly i said that they're based in god's commandments and that moral obligations and duties arise in response to imperatives issued by a competent authority and so i would see that our moral duties are grounded in the imperatives issued by the good itself okay okay actually just add one piece there because i want to bring back this notion of psychopathy because it now strikes me as even more relevant than i thought so this is this this idea that morality comes merely from the mere issuance of a competent authority what one of the features of psychopathy is an inability to distinguish true moral precepts that relate to the well-being of people and things that merely issue from a competent authorities if you yes children sitting in a classroom is it okay to drink a soda in class if the teacher gives you permission most of them will say yes if you if you ask them is it okay to punch your neighbor in the face if the teacher gives you permission so that they immediately recognize the distinction between moral infraction and and a mere conventional rule and this and this is very young children but children at risk for psychopathy don't children risk for zakappa they think that rules are just given by an authorities or the teacher tells you can punch a child in the face you can punch a child in the face this is again I'm not accusing religious people in general being Psychopaths but there is there is a psychopathic core to this moral worldview this divine command theory that dr. Craig is advocating suggests that if God only tells you accra Phi's your firstborn son it is good to do it that's where goodness comes from and so you've got people waking up in trailer parks all over America suffering some form of mental illness that's that's destabilized them and made them vulnerable to this way of thinking and there are people who kill their children thinking they're Abraham who just didn't get interrupted by an angel and this is this is the kind of morality that you get out of a divine command theory that again offers no retort to to the jihadist other than sorry but Buster you happen to have the wrong God but that's exactly your retort Sam the 30 seconds that God has not issued such a command and therefore you're not morally obligated to do it I've God did he would be evil I mean I can get behind that God if God is issuing that command well he's a process that you see on atheism you don't have any basis for making that kind of moral judgment I've tried to give you a basis sorry we have time for one more question up there this is for dr. Craig I wanted to ask you about consensus above what consensus consensus yeah so if if we're all looking for the same answer to a question I think we would value a consensus and the idea of a consensus is something that's very much valued within scientific thought so if God is the basis for morality it seems like it would be easy to come up with a consensus and yet within Christianity among Christians who are reading the same Bible and worshiping the same God you find an absence of consensus where questions like is evolution true or is homosexuality wrong there's a vast variety of debate within Christianity almost as much as there is with Christianity and secularism and yet in the secular world those questions we have found consensus and they've generally been put to rest so do you value consensus and how do you account for the lack of that well consensus on doctrinal issues is not relevant here you would have to be talking about a lack of consensus on moral issues and I think there there would largely be a consensus on moral issues as I said in my first speech I'm not offering dr. Harris a new set of applied ethical values I think we largely agree on the issues of applied ethics what I'm offering to him is a sound foundation for the moral values and duties that we both hold dear and recognize so any disagreement about the perception of moral values is an epistemological question not an ontological question my my argument is that on atheism human beings are just animals their electrochemical machines they don't even have free will and therefore there is no objective moral duty there is no objective moral value to them and if we're to have a basis for the common moral truths that we I think all recognize we need to have it in a transcendence that is beyond nature beyond the shifting sense of culture and opinion and is rooted in a being who is goodness himself and whose commands then reflect that goodness to us we've reached the end of our time dr. Craig and dr. Harris both will be available afterwards out in the lobby to sign books I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge Arnoff Dutt who spent a good portion of the debate operating the PowerPoint which I believe on faith was me and Aaron Rey who is our timekeeper was there a PowerPoint all right good Oh so let's now thank our speakers thank you you

Channel: University of Notre Dame

Views: 2,872,560

Rating: 4.7384372 out of 5

Keywords: God, debate, atheist, christian, good, christianity, creationism, religion, spirituality

Id: yqaHXKLRKzg

Length: 126min 55sec (7615 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/EzzoMahfouz]

"Homo..homosexual love-making"

[u/i_never_post_ever]

If he had kept it short and sweet, and taken a more serious tone, he might have received an answer.

[u/wannabeDayvie]

The student talks like Morty

[u/wetsuitgang]

Time for mobile users?

[u/Murakami8000]

The unfortunate thing is the dude on stage saw through the guy's ruse, and knew he was bullshitting. The kid's acting was a bit cringey here.

[u/grandlotus2]

Cum, and let everyone know!!!!

[u/jdubbs311]

The next question was if you don't have evidence that this isn't the most miserable existence, then you assume it is the most miserable, and thus would be justified in.....destroying everything.

The guy actually gave a great, thought-out response though. I'm impressed with how well this panel deals with bullshit.

[u/future_potato]

Jesus H. Christ, I've never heard so much muttering, stumbling, and stammering through a question in my entire life. For fuck's sake man, formulate the question beforehand and succinctly present the god damned thing.

[u/Snizzlefry]

Love the thumbs up from Sam.