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June 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:52
Michael Shermer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 6
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It shouldn't matter what religion you are.
Whatever works.
If it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.
So joining us on today's show is Michael Shermer, Michael is the founder of Skeptic Magazine.
He's also the author of a couple of books, which I'll introduce in just a second.
I'm really excited to talk to him.
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OK.
Well, Michael Sherman, thanks so much for coming on the show.
First, I want to pump your books a little bit, because they are both fantastic.
These are the two most recent.
You've written more than this, but these are the two most recent.
The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice and Freedom.
And this one, which just came out and was favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia.
And I've really been looking forward to this conversation, Michael, because I know there's a lot that we disagree on.
I think people are going to be shocked to find there's a lot that we actually agree on as well.
Michael is a Probably one of the foremost atheists in America, if not the world.
And obviously, I wear the funny Jew hat.
So, we have a lot to get to.
So, thanks for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, I don't like to define myself by being an atheist, because that isn't anything.
Being an atheist, there's no set of doctrines that this is what we believe in.
We simply just don't believe in God, full stop.
Really, I'm a humanist, or enlightenment humanist, or secular humanist, or something like that, or I'm a classical liberal.
So here are the things I do believe.
Defining yourself by what you don't believe, I think it was Hayek who said, you know, just defining yourself as an anti-communist is not enough.
Yep.
What are we for, right?
So I think points of agreement might be something like we're in favor of reason, and logic, and empiricism, and things like that.
Then we can find some common ground.
Perfect.
So let's start with that.
So you call yourself now a classical liberal.
Can you give me sort of the story of your political development?
I mean, were you always in line with classical liberalism?
Well, I went to Pepperdine University for undergraduate.
I was a member of the first graduating class of the Malibu campus, and it was a great, great experience.
1970s, everybody's reading Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged on campus.
I mean, really, everyone's walking around with this doorstop of a book, and it's like, oh, I just can't get through the first hundred pages.
If you get through the first hundred pages, you're in.
You know, of course I did.
I think the way it works, though, is if the philosophy gels with your temperament, your personality, then you're more likely to adopt it.
So in my case, just the way I was raised and by genetics or whatever, I like being an individual.
I like autonomy.
I like taking personal responsibility for your actions.
To me, it's uplifting.
You mean I can actually do something about my situation?
Yeah, you can.
Okay, I'm going to go do that.
Uh, and so I think it gelled with me in that.
And so, okay, what is that?
Well, libertarian, you know, in the seventies, that was sort of Murray Rothbard and Reason Magazine was just getting going.
It's like, all right.
But as I got older and, and the libertarian party or party and small L libertarian started to adopt more of the fringe elements of society.
It's like, I'm not sure I want to be associated with this guy or that movement or the people in Idaho.
People dancing naked with the iron crosses on their bellies.
Yeah, you get the pornography, pot-smoking libertarians who just want to move to Idaho and be by myself.
Then you get the constitutional libertarians.
All right, so I recently decided, I think I'll try a different label.
I'd rather not use any labels, you know, but it's a shortcut for thinking that we all use.
So okay, classical liberalism, you know, focus on the individual as the primary moral agent.
That should be our concern.
You know, the human flourishing is our Our moral concern, but flourishing of what?
Not groups, not tribes, not races.
Races don't vote, genders don't vote, and religions don't vote or protect.
It's individual.
So I start there.
Even though there's something like an illusion of this self, I think there is a self inside my skin, inside my skull, that we can call an individual unit that can suffer.
Not just think, or like Bentham said, not just think and talk, but are you able to suffer?
And if you can, that should at least be our starting point.
What can we do to reduce suffering of the individual?
So there's a ton of us of this to unpack because there's a lot in that basic thesis, that philosophical thesis.
But before we get to the actual unpacking of your philosophy, I want to discuss for a second the fact that we find ourselves in the same room.
Because one of the things that's been very weird, obviously, is that we've now both been labeled members of the intellectual dark web by Eric Weinstein and Barry Weiss in the New York Times.
And how did we find ourselves on the same side of the aisle?
I mean, we obviously agree about a lot of the principles that you're speaking about, but it seems to me that there's an entire movement that's happening out there of thinkers from a variety of different backgrounds who suddenly have found themselves in common cause just because the left has become so focused on identity politics and unreason.
Yeah, well, it's, you know, this is a driving force, you know, it's just gone too far.
And we know from polling data that the center is getting smaller in the left and right.
Two humps are getting larger and larger.
It's a bimodal curve there.
And in the 70s and so on, the centrist was pretty large.
And now it's getting smaller.
So I think the further that each side goes, the more of us who are sort of on these two sides want to join together.
And I think that's what something like this intellectual dark By the way, I thought that watch should be like the official watch of the intellectual dark web.
They should try that.
We can get y'all some money.
We'll talk with our sponsors.
I mean, I'm not even sure what it is other than those of us who think we should be able to talk about anything without hysteria, without the tears, without safe spaces, microaggressions, all that stuff, because it's the only way we can find out what the truth is if we've gone off the rails.
You know, every one of us is subject to all those cognitive biases we're familiar with.
The only way to know is for us to talk.
So I push a thesis or an idea and you go, hang on Sherman, that's not quite right.
And then I can adjust and come back in a little bit.
If you don't talk to anybody outside of your tribe, then you can go down the rails to craziness.
And that's just not good.
So I think that's what unites us.
And obviously what you've spent an awful lot of time in your life doing is talking about reason and science.
I mean, you're a monthly columnist for Scientific American.
You're approaching the world record for monthly columns in one of these major scientific publications.
So let's go back to the philosophy now.
So you're talking about human individualism and human individual thriving.
Where do you get the basis for this as the basis of human society, the human individual?
Because that's obviously a rather newfangled concept in Western thought as far as the Enlightenment.
So where is it that Yeah, I've always believed that human meaning has to come in the interaction between individual value and also communal purpose.
That if you feel like you're by yourself all the time, you feel isolated, people need other people and people want to feel like they're part of something broader.
Right.
And that sometimes manifests in really ugly ways.
How do we get to the point where the individual is the key component of morality?
So for me, I just go back to Genesis and then I say individuals made in the image of God.
But for you, because you're not a Bible believer, where does that come from?
To me, it really begins, for the modern world, in the rights revolutions of the 18th century.
Just the idea that there are individuals who can have rights.
Now, the idea that these are inalienable rights, they're self-evident, well, that's not terribly satisfying now, because self-evident for you may not be self-evident for me, so we have to have some kind of argument.
I began with evolution.
That is, we are of evolved organisms who, as individuals, desire to gather as many resources as we can.
So I start with Dawkins' selfish gene.
Now, don't read this by the title.
By selfish, he just means the genes are just perpetrating themselves.
Now, it could be that the most selfish thing I could do is hoard all the resources and kill you if you try to compete with me.
But we're a social species, so living in a group, I can't be that way.
Oftentimes, the most selfish thing I can do is to be nice with you, or form a coalition with you, or you and I practice reciprocal altruism.
I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back.
And so in this case, I think we evolved a moral sense of caring about other people.
Now, it's not enough for me to fake being a good person.
Like, I really care about you, Ben.
You and I are good friends.
But the moment we walk out, I tell my buddy, yeah, that bastard, he's no good.
You're going to know at some point, because we're fine-tuned to our reputations, what other people think about us.
There's always going to be maybe 10% freeloaders, bullies, freeriders, people that are just going to use the system.
These are the psychopaths, sociopaths, and so on.
Or is he just saying that and he's using me?
And we're pretty good at discerning that.
Not perfect.
So there's always going to be maybe 10% freeloaders, bullies, free riders, people that are just going to use the system.
These are the psychopaths, sociopaths, and so on, the bullies of a society.
And we know from research, like Christopher Bohm's research of hunter-gatherer groups today, it's like that.
It's like maybe five to ten percent are people that don't play nice by the rules.
And all these hunter-gatherer groups have a whole series of sanctions against the individuals who are not cooperating.
Anything from, we gossip about you, we sit you down and have a little talk with you, we slap you around a little bit, or they actually practice capital punishment.
They go out on a hunt on the weekend with, you know, Og, and they come back without Og.
Right, and this is true for children, too.
If you look at the experiments, I mean, you know this stuff better than I do, but if you look at the experiments with children, and even adults, they will seek to punish each other and forego pleasure in order to punish each other if they feel like people are violating the reciprocal rules.
That's right.
In these common goods games where we all put some money in the pot, with transparency, we know who put what in.
Those who are cheating the system are holding a little bit back.
I will sacrifice some of my profit just to punish you.
So we do have an evolved sense of right and wrong.
I think we're born with it.
You know, Paul Bloom's research with the little puppets in his developmental psych lab.
And, you know, there's the good puppet that helps the other puppet get the ball up and the nasty puppet that pushes the ball back down.
And these little kids, you know, they don't even have language yet.
You know, they'll go out and slap the bad puppet or not choose the bad puppet, reinforce the good puppet.
So I think we're born with this and we have to have it because a social group cannot survive if everybody's too selfish.
So we have to evolve a sense of right and wrong and truly caring, whatever you want to call it, altruism or Sympathy, empathy, something.
I actually do care about other people.
How does that evolve beyond the tribe?
Because this is one of the great puzzles of human history is, number one, why this perspective on the human individual only arose in the 17th century?
If this is ingrained in human beings that the individual is of value and that we have to work with one another, then why only in a certain place in a certain time did it arise?
Was it a spontaneous combustion of human thought in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Or was this something that has deeper roots?
I obviously would argue this has deeper roots going all the way back to Sinai and Athens.
But how would you argue on that?
Yeah, so I think there's a tension there always between the individual and the group.
And then how do we get beyond the small tribes, tribal size of about 150 plus or minus, a few dozen, where everybody knows each other or related to each other.
So evolutionary psych can get us all the way out to that.
Now, beyond that, we need politics, economics, culture, history, and so on.
And so the one model I use is, I call this the Ndugu effect.
So in Jack Nicholson's movie about Schmidt, you know, he's a retired insurance guy and he's late night watching and there's one of these infomercials about adopting a little kid, Ndugu in this case, and he gives money to little Ndugu and the whole narrative plot is around that.
He doesn't know Ndugu from anybody, but they show him the picture of little Ndugu and here he is with his soccer ball and his brother and sister and here's their little hut they live in and five dollars a day will give them so on.
And now if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, I'm not giving any money or I'll give a dollar whatever you show me little Ndugu.
So really it's kind of tricking our brain into making little Ndugu an honorary member of our tribe, my family, my friend.
I care about it because And that's our evolved brain.
We care about people we know or can identify with.
So to get beyond that, first of all, you have to get people to care about other people by identifying them as individuals that are like me.
So that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives, that could be me there but for the grace of, in your case, God.
That could be me!
So how do we do that?
Well, beyond getting people to truly care, just having a large society with the rule of laws and democracy where we at least feel like we have some say.
But more importantly, I think free trade is one of these things where as long as you and I are both profiting from some kind of exchange we have, I have no desire to kill you and maybe I'll even start to like you a little bit because you're doing something for me.
So we know Government, you know, sort of liberal democracies and free trade are these things that provide trust in a society among strangers such that I can go to the Starbucks, somebody waiting for me to wait on me.
I don't know them.
They take my money.
They trust me.
I trust them.
I don't feel like I'm going to get bonked on the head or hopefully not arrested for not paying and buying a Starbucks.
You know, modern society is based on this idea of trust among strangers, and that requires all these extra add-ons.
So here I think of economics and politics as tools, social technologies.
So my question still remains.
Okay, I agree with a lot of your analysis.
Why the economics and politics of a particular time in a particular place?
Is it accidental?
Is it that we're just looking at a single sample size?
And why is it that only in Western Europe at a particular time, at a particular place in history, do we get this vision of individual rights that flowers out and then starts encompassing broader and broader groups of people?
Again, if this was embedded in human capacity from the very beginning, then why does it only happen as the outgrowth of one particular culture?
So you see where I'm going with this, right?
Yep.
So, well, I think Pinker tries to answer that, and the good social scientist that he is.
You know, this is a tangled web of correlations and inter-causal variables that are going up and down, and it's really hard to answer.
I mean, you get a number of things going on.
You know, the Industrial Revolution, free trade is coming, you know, double entry, bookkeeping, and all these things that kind of drive prosperity to go up, which enhances a bunch of other things.
So we can afford better governance and so on.
Then we have better educational systems.
Also, literacy rates start to go up around the same time.
Do you think any of this has to do with the Judeo-Christian system that is undergirding all of this?
Yes, that's part of it, of course.
Just the Western idea that the Judeo-Christian is sort of founding helps push it along.
Yes, I know we can go back to maybe the 13th century or 14th century and the first humanists in the 15th century, long before the Enlightenment.
Yes, okay, so there's Right, Grotius is talking about human rights back in the 1530s, 1540s.
Right, yes, yes, right.
So I think there's multiple strands.
When you write a book, you've got to start the clock somewhere.
So I didn't go all the way back to Athens and Jerusalem, you know, like some people do.
Okay, so there's some threads there.
But the idea that the individual is what counts and we're going to protect the individual's rights You know, like the Bill of Rights, for example, is a perfect example.
It's not the group, it's the individual.
In fact, these rights are there to protect you from being considered a member of a group that we feel we can discriminate against.
No, you can't do that.
And those have been expanding.
That moral sphere has been expanding more and more.
Yeah, no question.
And I think that this is where we all end up in the same place.
It's really quite fascinating.
Again, I've had conversations with, you know, you and Sam Harris, and we're coming at it from a completely different angle as far as the impact of God in all of this.
Jonah Goldberg suggests that this is the miracle.
And one of my great objections to Jonah Goldberg's terminology in that is that I'm not sure that the miracle happened in 1650.
I think the miracle happened a lot earlier and that that was the enzyme, the catalyst that led to this great outpouring of human freedom.
But we end up in the same place.
So the question becomes, how do we argue for that?
Because we actually do agree on a lot of these same values, even if we think the source of those values is different, right?
I think the source of those values begins much earlier.
I think that it is embedded in certain biblical principles that are evaluated and reasoned through over time.
But how do we espouse those?
So for me, I can espouse those values in a particular way, starting from the premise that there's a certain absolute morality that was established by God.
This is where the God question comes in.
And so I'm wondering, without that absolute morality, Where, how do we get to that point where we can convince people?
And I'll let you answer the question.
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Okay, so back to that really big question that I just posed to you.
Wait, you said something about, I'm gonna die?
What?
See, I don't have to fear a question as much.
We'll talk about that too.
We'll talk about big issues like life and death in just a second because this entire book on what heaven constitutes is really fascinating.
I just started reading Jonah's new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a weird title because it's much more of an uplift.
At least the first half is very uplifting.
Well, you didn't get to the downside yet.
Oh, okay.
I haven't gotten there yet.
There's no God in this book.
And I'm only going to use reason to argue for these principles.
Perfect.
And the reason that, to me, is good, not just because I'm an atheist, but that it shouldn't matter what religion you are or, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what the roots are, although it's intellectually interesting.
Whatever works, if it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.
And we should champion those.
And make reasonable arguments for why they're working.
And full stop.
That's all we need to do.
So where do you and I get our morals from?
How do you know what's right or wrong?
I tend to think we probably both get it from the same place.
That is, the still small voice within, and then our culture, our parents, our traditions, and so on.
But where did those come from?
And at some point, if you go back far enough, you're going to, I think, argue there's a supernatural intervention into the system that says, this is what's right or wrong.
But my question would be, how do you know?
Because we know from biblical scholars that the Bible is something of a wiki.
It's an edited volume.
We know people wrote it down.
And you say, well, maybe God inspired their writings or words or something.
But if we just take something like, is killing wrong?
We wouldn't ask, is murder wrong?
Right.
Because murder, by definition, is wrong.
But killing is wrong.
Well, it depends.
And so how do you know?
And so this is, as you know, Euthyphro's dilemma that if these moral principles are out there in some kind of You know, platonic space floating around up there.
Are they right or wrong because God said so?
Or are there reasons?
And if we have reasons for why it's right or wrong... Then what do you need God for?
Right.
You just skip the middleman and just go straight for the reasons.
So I actually disagree with... I know I watched your debate with... interview slash debate with Dennis Prager on Dave Rubin's show specifically about this.
I'm not somebody who disagrees that you can into it that murder is wrong just without the presence of God.
In fact, Judaism basically says that.
Judaism essentially says that there are certain principles where if you were born in a wilderness, you would still be held accountable for failing to abide by those principles, and those do include murder, right?
So murder is wrong whether you believe in God, whether you were born in a barn, it doesn't matter, right?
There are certain things you can intuit.
But some of the higher order morality that we're talking about, the value of individuals, or how far you extend the tribe, I'm not sure that that stuff can be done simply through pure reason.
I'm skeptical of that specifically because I think that what we tend to do in the West is we tend to say everything that was good was Enlightenment thinking and everything that was bad was counter-Enlightenment thinking.
So this is my criticism of Steven Pinker's new book on the Enlightenment is that what Steven does is he writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution.
He writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and he never recognizes that Rousseau was a member of the Enlightenment caste.
He didn't call himself counter-Enlightenment.
That the French Revolution was happening at the same time as the American Revolution, essentially, in the broad scheme of things, that there's a whole line of thought, including communism and Nazism, that considered itself uber-rational.
If you actually look back to the foundations of Marx, Marx is talking about imposing the reason of humanity on the economic system as a whole.
So pure reason, I'm not sure can get you there, is the argument that I'm making.
Well, first of the French Revolution, in The Better Angels, Steve talks about Burke and Burkean conservatism.
And Burke was in favor of the American Revolution against the French Revolution.
Why?
Because in the American Revolution, you had a balance between, we want to overthrow the systems that are not working, but retain the ones that are still good.
Because those are long, hard-fought traditions that work pretty well.
Now, unfortunately, slavery got thrown in there, but we eventually got rid of that.
The French Revolution was like, let's just blow the whole thing up and start over, including a new calendar.
But they did actually have a cult of reason, right?
I mean, they actually took the Notre Dame Cathedral and they actually put an idol to reason in the Notre Dame Cathedral and they had a cult of it.
So I guess my contention is that If you're going to make the argument that it's self-evident, these principles eventually are self-evident, I don't think in the absence of... The Burkean argument is, in essence, a religious argument.
There is a bunch of stuff that was passed down to us by our forebears, and we have the capacity through reason to evaluate whether we still think that the evidence is on the side of particular rules, or whether these rules have been misapplied.
Right.
But you have to acknowledge the value of what has been handed down, as opposed to the tabula rasa reason, which might be mandated by the social science Approach that is now being taken up by a lot of folks, people with whom I have great discussions.
But whenever I read Sam Harris's books and he says that, you know, throw religion out the window and we can come up with better than that.
As I said to him when I was talking to him, well, you grew up five miles from me and we share a lot of the same principles.
So I'm happy to have that discussion with you.
But if you'd grown up in a society that had a different tradition, I have a feeling you'd be arguing something very different and so would I.
Right.
OK, so two things.
One, I think Pinker makes the point that most of these are counter-Enlightenment Romanticist traditions.
The blood and soil of the Nazis, for example, that it's the race that counts and so on.
Now, you may make rational arguments about that and say, I'm using reason, but your reasoning is wrong.
And so we can say we're both using reason and these arguments are better than those arguments.
So I think those are the two points about that.
Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but I think that the question there about the misuse of reason would be this.
Is that your pattern of reasoning is wrong or that your premises are wrong?
If your pattern of reasoning is wrong, then we can all spot the flaw in the reasoning and say, OK, here's where you went wrong.
But if the premises were wrong, then we're back into my argument, which is that the culture you inherit is a deeply impactful thing on whether you believe in individual rights in the first place.
So I guess what I'm trying to get you to, and maybe I'm trying to argue you into it, is acknowledging that Judeo-Christian values are at the very least utilitarian.
Even if you don't agree with the source of them, you agree that the legacy that begins with Judaism and through Christianity in the Christian world, that is a necessary, not a contingent part of history.
Maybe.
But how do you deal with then all the bad side of the Christian tradition before the Enlightenment?
Right.
You know, the Inquisition, the witch hunts.
So the way that I deal with that is what I say is that the Bible was given to a specific group of people.
If I were to give you a written document right now, I'd have to speak the language that you and I were speaking.
I couldn't use terminology that you didn't know.
I couldn't give you rules that were so Deeply radical that they would run counter to anything that you could possibly believe.
So, for example, when Maimonides talks about sacrifices, you know, these animal sacrifices that seem really barbaric to us now, what Maimonides is arguing in the 12th century is CE, right, about a document written presumably by Jewish tradition 2,000 years earlier.
He's arguing that if you're going to try and convince people away from sacrifice, you have to first change the nature of the sacrifice.
You can't just abolish something that people think is completely dependent and necessary.
And then over the course of time, there are certain parts of the Bible that speak to eternal human nature, right?
So, for example, this is what Judaism and Christianity would say is true about sexual matters, is that human beings are the same regardless of where they are.
They always have the same sexual nature.
That is non-changing.
But what is changing is the necessity to slaughter animals, for example.
Or what is changing is the evidence basis for witness testimony.
Yeah.
Do you mean like when Jefferson said, all men are created equal, but he has slaves?
By today's standards, nobody's a racist.
But really, he's just trying to get something done, and you can't have everything.
So he's saying, look, we have to use what we have now, and we could try to change it later.
Essentially, yes.
So to me, it feels like modern thinkers looking back at ancient texts saying, well, when Jesus said this in Mark 3, 27, he really meant women should have the vote.
Wow!
I mean, you're getting this out of that passage.
I think we're reading back into it, a lot of it.
I think that you can find traditions.
To me, this principle of interchangeable perspectives, that is, if we're going to set up a society, I can't know which group I'm going to be in, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
And I, as an individual, can't convince you to treat me nice just because I'm me and you're not me.
And I have a privileged position just because I'm me.
So the golden rule is really that.
And it's metallic derivatives, as Pinker calls them.
And I like that idea because I think the basis of that is in this kind of evolutionary model of Myself, as genes, drive me to just want to hoard all the resources, but you're making the same calculation, so we have to come to some agreement.
One way to do that is for me to put myself in your position.
How would I feel if I were Ben and I was doing this to him?
Well, okay, I would feel bad.
So I think religions discovered certain eternal truths about human nature long before there was the Enlightenment or modern Western culture at all.
I don't know, maybe by accident or just trial and error, at some point you're going to figure out.
Or maybe.
Well, but by observation.
It's like the point Jordan Peterson makes about novelists having deep insights into I think that's right, and there's a whole branch of evolutionary psych that does evolutionary literature.
Like when Shakespeare and Jane Austen write about their characters, they're really getting it right about how people behave, their sexual nature, power structures, hierarchy, the kinds of things that drive conflict in human relationships.
They figured it out long before there was anything even called psychology.
How did they do that?
By observing, by paying attention.
So I do think religions get it right a lot of the time just because they're 2,000 years, 4,000 years of observations that get written down.
And then what we do is go back and pick and choose the ones that seem right.
And the other ones, like capital punishment for X, Y, and Z, we don't practice that anymore.
We've rejected those.
We accept these.
Based on what?
Based on modern Standards like these are good arguments.
So we'll use those and emphasize those to the flock.
Okay, good.
That's fine.
Okay, so so I want to talk a little bit now about the the Arguments that you make with regard to free will because you're you're libertarian politically or at least classical liberal politically You don't want the government in anybody's business and that presupposes a certain level of responsibility among individual actors because obviously you do something and now you're responsible for the thing that you did and You have the choice to make, but you have a kind of interesting view of free will.
So I am a free will, as a religious person, I'm a free will absolutist in the sense that I believe that I don't know how it happens, but I don't think that if you had a giant God machine, right, and the giant God machine had all the information of the universe programmed into it, that you could predict how I'm going to, the next sentence I'm going to say to you.
Right.
That I think that I have the capacity as an individual actor to, there's something outside the system, in other words, that allows me to make, to subsume my biology and say something different and think something different.
I'm an individual.
So you, in your scientific view, there are a couple things that you do that seem to cut against libertarianism.
And I just want to know how you, how you rectify the breach.
So one is that you, you've suggested before that there is such a thing as a self, but there really kind of is not such a thing as the self.
That basically are a bunch of firing synapses that identifies as the self.
So, without a self and without the capacity to make a free decision, every decision you make is determined, predetermined, how do you get to a libertarian political position?
Or even just a libertarian free will position.
The modified version of that is called compatibilism.
In a survey I like to cite from 2009 of 3,500 professional philosophers and graduate students and so on, 59% were called themselves compatibilists.
Very few are in the sort of pure free will, like there's a little homunculus in there pulling the levers, and the rest are determinists, say, along the lines of the arguments that Sam Harris makes.
So Dan Dennett, I think, makes the best arguments for these, which is that, first, we are I mean, we live in a determined universe.
There's cause and effect.
This is what scientists do when they study things, except for quantum physics, which wouldn't give you...
Quantum uncertainty doesn't give you free will.
It's just...
Uncertainty, right?
It's chaos.
Uncertainty, yeah.
But in other words, that position is if there were a full God machine, you would be able to tell me the next sentence I'm going to say.
Yeah, that's right.
But first, we're not God machines.
We can never know that.
Second, we are active agents within the causal net.
So you have this causal net, the universe, all these things operating.
But we can actually change the variables as we go.
As the pathway unfolds, we can push back, we can stop smoking, we can go on a diet.
So I want to ask you for clarification on that.
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I interrupt you right in the middle of the stream of thought, which is the worst thing to do.
But where you were, where you left off, was you were talking about we have the capacity to kind of, we still have the capacity to change things.
We can still go on a diet.
We can still, so how, that's a lot of active verbs.
I said it's a lot of active verbs for what is a passive phenomenon.
The concept is that Dan Dennett uses the degrees of freedom.
That is, within a mechanical system, you have degrees of freedom of how much it can move around.
In organisms, say, cockroaches have fewer degrees of freedom than the dog.
The dog has fewer degrees of freedom than the chimp, and the chimp far fewer than humans.
And even within human groups, the law already takes into account the fact that, say, murder in an act of rage, or you were drugged up, or somebody held a gun to your head, or something like that.
We say, well, that's different than me freely choosing.
Well, what's the difference?
Say the OxyContin addict and me, I'm not an addict, or my father was an alcoholic, for example.
He just could not stop drinking, and I'm not.
I just didn't get the genes.
So I have more degrees of freedom than he had, and I'm willing to cut, say, the alcoholic or the drug addict some slack that he's not choosing like I could choose.
So if I actually get drunk and kill somebody, I should be held more accountable than, say, the alcoholic who just can't control himself, although there should be always punishment there.
But anyway, that's the idea, that the more degrees of freedom you have, the fact that you can never know all the causal variables anyway, we feel like we are free in the same way we feel we are a self.
And if you want to call it, you know, Sam calls that an illusion.
Okay, it's a great illusion.
It's one of my favorite illusions.
It's the one that makes life fun and interesting.
But yeah, I think that the reason that, so essentially you're redefining free will to mean free of outside or interior compulsion.
Meaning that it's not that you are free to make any decision that you want to, it's that you are free of somebody putting a gun to your head, or you are free of a genetic factor that forces you to do X. I'm not free to be an NBA player, okay?
Right.
You're constrained.
Yeah, we're all constrained.
But within the channels that we're going down through life, they're wider than I think most of us intuitively think, and that you can actually tweak the variables.
So the compatibilism that you're talking about sounds a lot like, you agree with Sam on principle, but you agree with me in action.
That's right.
That's right.
And this is what's kind of fascinating is that, you know, for people who are arguing the strong non-compatibilist position, right?
For people who are arguing the strong determinist position, you end up in this weird place where you wonder why you're doing what you're doing all the time.
But people, they don't.
Sam doesn't walk around going, well, I wonder where he's going.
This is what I asked Sam and he didn't really...
I'll ask him again when he comes on.
To me all determinists are pragmatic compatibilists.
No one walks around going, well I wonder where he's going next.
And I think all compatibilists are disguised absolutists because in the end there's what they believe is true and then they're acting completely opposite of that because if you believed everything was determined then you'd sit around navel gazing all day presumably.
By the way, the social science tends to demonstrate this, that when you tell kids that they have so many constraints on them that they can't get anything done.
This is why victim ideology is really a problem.
Victimhood mentality.
You tell a bunch of kids society is constraining you, there's vague racism out there, there's vague institutions that are trying to It kills them, right?
It destroys them as human beings.
It's a learned helplessness.
They go, well, what's the point of trying?
Right, exactly.
Which is why I think the determinist position is not good to practice or preach, because no one actually lives their life that way.
I'm not sure you can teach a child this.
It was really interesting.
This is the determinist position.
When I was talking to Sam on his podcast, we did a thing in San Francisco, and the best part of the evening was a woman got up and she said, I totally agree with you, Sam, about determinism, but I have a seven-year-old kid.
What do I teach my seven-year-old kid?
I heard that.
It was pretty amusing.
It was pretty interesting because this is one of the big questions, is what do you teach your kids if you feel that the science is not in confluence with how they should actually Act or move.
And the same thing holds true for the self.
So I want to get your view of the self and then we can move further in this direction.
Just one more point.
Social psychologists and clinical psychologists talk about learning self-control, willpower.
And we know now there's a lot of research on, you know, the marshmallow experiment.
Right.
I've tried it on my daughter.
I'm that kind of person.
You can train yourself.
I mean just knowing, okay, I know if I can resist For 15 more minutes than I'm going to be a better person.
I'm going to do it and you can do that.
You can just buy it.
So that's an example of you actively throwing yourself into the causal net saying I am going to tweak the variables.
And you know I'm going to I'm going to set my alarm for 6 and I'm going to have my running clothes already out because I know if I don't.
Call it what you want.
To me, that's a kind of free will or willpower.
Use the active verbs.
just knowing that.
So we're different than all the other animals, I think, in the sense we're self-aware of the causal vectors influencing us, and then we can change them.
Call it what you want.
To me, that's a kind of free will or willpower.
Use the active verbs.
I'm good with active verbs because that is what we do.
But it's essentially a faith-based argument.
You have faith in yourself that you're capable of acting, even though in reality you may be just a bunch of neurons firing based on stuff that happened several trillion years ago.
Probably wouldn't use the word faith, but we bump up against these...
Language walls.
I mean, this is part of the problem with talking about God, free will, and consciousness.
We use these words, and it's really hard to define them carefully enough to get an answer.
So like the consciousness one, for example, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, where what is it like to be you, Ben?
Is your red the same as my red?
Oh, we've got to work on this problem.
This is an insoluble problem, because I can never be in your head.
I can't know what it's like to be a bat, Thomas Nagel's famous thought experiment.
Because to do that, I'd have to bolt on some wings and the muscles and the neurons.
According to modern scientists, you can't know what it's like to be a woman.
You can claim you are one, but... Okay, maybe if you do the surgery and the hormones, but even that's just sort of bumping you closer and closer to that.
But if we really did it, all the way, you would just no longer be a man or a human wondering what it's like to be a bat.
You'd just be a bat going, well, I'm a bat.
I mean, you wouldn't be thinking...
So like in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, where the salesman wakes up and he's like, whatever he is, a cockroach or something.
That can't happen.
You would just be the cockroach.
You wouldn't be walking around going, oh, this is what it looks like to be a cockroach.
So that to me is one of the, these are called mysterian mysteries.
They can never be solved.
So that free will, we use these words, determining the free will, they're by definition in conflict.
How can you resolve them?
We just tried.
It's not perfect.
And God, the last one, I think, If you mean by God a supernatural agent outside of space and time, well then by definition we can never know that because we're in space and time.
It's not falsifiable.
No, not falsifiable.
So if you mean like a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that we can meet one day and go, oh, so you have the power to actually do, even like telekinesis or something, you know, this could be done with computer chips in the brain.
It's already done and so on.
But that's a natural agent.
And I think by God, we've never talked about this, but you probably mean a super outside of space.
Yeah, the classical definition.
Correct.
So how would you know?
And the answer is you don't, which is why you're a believer, not a knower, typically.
What I've said before is I know in God, meaning that there are certain premises that I use for my politics and my values in my daily life.
That I believe spring from the principle that there is an intelligent being that exists outside space and time and that has created a system that is knowable by us, an objective truth that is discoverable by us, and a universe that is understandable to a large degree by us.
And that's not falsifiable, but it's no less falsifiable, no less unfalsifiable than the theory of multiple universes because we can never get outside our universe.
So there's no way for us to know whether we're a bubble on top of a bubble or whether we are specifically Designed as a as a unique place for life, right?
This is this is one of the the arguments that's being made now and it's why Stephen Hawking was so attached to the idea of multiple universes because they're that that weird problem that we exist, which is a very statistically Non-probable event.
The way of getting around that is by saying, well, yeah, we're just that series of nines in pi, basically, that when you do 3.14, you go far out enough, you get 60 instances of nine in a row.
And so we say, well, right, because pi is sort of randomized beyond a certain point.
Well, but there's no way to know that because now you're positing a thing that we cannot falsify to debunk another thing we cannot falsify.
Right.
Yeah, where's the lever, the Archimedean lever, to stand outside?
We can't.
Okay, now my physicist friends tell me that the multiverse is a derivative of their models predicting that that would be the case.
Now, this is out of my... Right, and mine too.
So I'd have to bring in Brian Keating or something.
So the question is, when we bump up against these grand mysteries, what do you do with them?
To me, it's okay to just say, you know what?
I don't know.
Like with the heavens on earth, is there an afterlife?
I don't know.
You're an agnostic, not an atheist.
Well, in the sense that Huxley meant it when he coined that word in 1869, unknowable.
I think the God, free will, consciousness, as they're phrased, they're unknowable.
So they're outside of science.
Now we can talk about them and use reason or whatever, but I think we're going to bump up against a wall there.
So I was curious, by the way, that the ancient Jews, the Shoal, you don't go anywhere after your death, right?
Yeah, the idea of the afterlife is a pretty modern invention in Judaism.
It really only crops up, historically speaking, a little bit in the prophets, and it's usually the late prophets.
And it's really maybe as a response to early Christianity or Greek thought.
So yeah, in the Bible itself, there's no reference, in the Torah, there's no reference to the afterlife at all.
So what do you think happens after the death of your body?
I mean, I only have suspicion, because again, unverifiable.
My suspicion is that if there is a God, which I believe, who exists outside of time and space, and that what animates me is that I'm made in the image of God, and that what animates my capacity is that I'm made in the image of God, that I reunify with God.
Basically, the traditional Jewish take on this has been that there's a cleansing process.
Judaism doesn't believe in eternal hell.
So it's instead this idea that there's a cleansing process for for your soul, the part that you got from God, that spark of life that you got from God, you've schmutzed it up while you're alive, and now there's a cleansing process, and that's what hell is, sort of.
And then you are reunited with God, and you have greater understanding.
The idea of me being a distinct personage outside of my body, I think, is a difficult one.
That's my own personal belief.
So you don't think you're physically resurrected into heaven with God?
No.
Something like a soul, or energy, or consciousness, or something like that?
Yes, yes.
A form, like an Aquinas form, right?
But yes, I think that those are actually two different things in Judaism as well.
Like the idea of tichayat ha-metim, which is the idea of resurrection of the dead.
That's a different idea than what happens after you die, right?
Tichayat ha-metim is the idea that eventually the Messiah comes, that we'll all be resurrected back in our physical bodies at a certain point, which You know, honestly, given the nature of how science is moving and the possibilities of cloning, it's actually less crazy than it sounded probably a couple of thousand years ago.
Yeah.
I debunk most of the modern, you know, the singularities coming.
We're going to upload everybody into the cloud.
This is not going to happen.
No, definitely not.
I mean, that's good to know because I just feel like the computer would be really weird.
It's weird to live inside a computer.
Or that we're living in a computer now, but there's no buffering or, you know, little pixels that are going off.
Every so often when I'm just staring off into space, it's because the connection went down.
But while I got you here, I want to push you on something.
You know, my Christian friends and people that I debate, particularly on the resurrection, you know, they have a whole series of arguments, you know, if you just followed our reason, you would accept Jesus as your Savior.
And my answer to this is, The great Jewish rabbis who are smarter than you and I sitting here, they've gone through all these arguments.
Why don't they accept Jesus?
Why don't you accept Jesus as the Messiah?
Okay, so the reason that I don't accept Jesus as the Messiah is because I think that a lot of the arguments in... So, Jesus as the Messiah is a different figure than anything that exists inside Judaism.
So when people say that Judaism predicts the coming of Christ, the change in the nature of what Christ is, what a Messiah would be, is different from Judaism to Christianity.
So Judaism never posited that there would be God come to earth in physical form, and then you know acting out in the world in in that way judaism posits that god is beyond space and time occasionally he intervenes in history but he doesn't take physical form it's one of the key beliefs of judaism actually is an incorporeal god uh so that means that it's it's a the the idea is is actually foreign to judaism of of a merged god man uh who then is who is god in physical form but then dies and is resurrected and all this this is it's a
it's just a different idea than exists in judaism so you're not waiting for the messiah to come right he's not coming in the so I'm waiting for the Messiah to come in the form of a political figure, right?
So the Messiah in Judaism is a guy who's going to come back and is going to establish peace in Israel and is going to assure that there's sort of a happier world with a bunch of political aspects to it, as explained by Maimonides.
But he's going to die too, right?
He's not going to come back and everybody lives forever and any of that kind of stuff.
He's a corporeal agent.
He's just like us.
Right.
In the Jewish view, any person could be the Messiah.
Any Jew can be the Messiah in the Jewish view.
So I could be it.
Who knows?
I'm not.
Well, you're off to a good start.
But that's a different view than the Christian view.
So the argument typically made to Jews by Christians on this is that it's forecast by the Bible.
And for Jews, we have a whole different read when you read the Hebrew about why this may or may not be true.
But Christians claim the Old Testament predicts it's going to come.
So you disagree.
Well, I disagree because, I mean, I think a lot of the verses that are cited are actually misreads of the Hebrews.
I read Hebrews, so I think that... But, you know, again, that's not to disclaim, even in the Jewish view, the impact of Christianity on world history, right?
Yeah, that's a different question.
We're just talking about the ontological question.
Is there a God out there, and is there a Jesus, a Messiah, in physical form?
Right, so I have actual beliefs that run counter to the idea of God taking physical form as a human being, because I think that that leads to a lot of weird Yeah.
Side effects.
It sure does.
Yeah.
Like, to my Christian friends, you know, well, you're resurrected in heaven.
Well, how old am I?
I mean, physically resurrected.
30.
Some of them say you're 30, because that was a good... Jesus was 30, you know, and so... But, you know, but I'm 63 now, so what happens to all the memories I have of the last 33 years?
Do they go into the brain?
Yeah, no, these are definitely puzzling questions, which is why I don't believe in that version of heaven.
What's interesting, we can talk about this now, I mean, what's interesting is your version of a heaven, which I want to talk about in just a second.
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I'm trying to remember where we were.
Well, do you believe there's a soul or something like a soul, a pattern of information that represents who you are that floats off the body and goes, continues on?
So, I don't know.
I mean, honestly, I don't know.
And I don't think anybody has a great verifiable account of that.
I have suspicions, but again, they're suspicions less about knowledge.
What I do know, and the reason why I'm religious, is that a religious lifestyle that is based on certain fundamental premises, I think, makes life better for people.
I think that the rules that are set down, As currently understood, at least, are rules that are likely to lead you to leading a happier and better life than your pure reason alone.
Because pure reason alone, unleashed, without even those moorings in Judeo-Christianity, can lead to a lot of really terrible places.
But I want to ask you about your version of heaven, because we're talking about heaven.
So we can get back to that very controversial statement in just a second.
But your newest book is Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife Immortality and Utopia.
And you make a pretty compelling case that heaven on earth is basically, to a certain extent, you enjoying yourself transcendentally.
That basically, if you go out and look at a forest, that that may be heaven on earth or as close to it as you're going to get.
Well, not just that, though.
That really just living a full, meaningful life and being engaged with other people in your society, with your family and friends and so on, And we should be doing this anyway, whether there is an afterlife or not, because these are good things to do.
So in the last chapter, I deal with, well, if you're an atheist, if there's no afterlife, maybe there is, but whether there is or not, we don't live in the afterlife, we live in this life.
We're not living in the here and after.
We're living in the here and now, so make the most of it.
But not the most of it by just plugging in the morphine drip or sucking down whiskey all night or whatever your pleasures are.
It turns out that research shows that that doesn't do it for most people.
It's not enough.
I mean, there are some just pure hedonists who just get stoned all day or whatever, but most people find that unsatisfying.
And so, there's a distinction between happiness and meaningfulness.
So, leading a happy life, if this is your goal, the things you do are more short-term, immediate.
It's leading a pain-free life.
You know, pain-free or it's just fun, like going out for dinner and drinks with family and friends.
Okay, that's fun.
Three hours later, it's over.
It's like, okay, now what?
But doing something that's more long-term, either looking back to your past, what have I done with my life that's productive?
What am I going to do in the next 20, 30 years?
And then doing things that are not fun or pleasurable now, like the example I use in the book is caretaking.
I have four parents, step parents, and bio parents, and I was caretaker for two of them, and this wasn't fun at all.
It wasn't pleasurable driving my dad around all these hospitals, and then the nursing homes, and the pharmacies, and you know, I'd get home and I'm just exhausted.
But I feel better as a person having done that, because I kind of feel like, well, they did this for me when I was little, and I would want somebody to do that for me in the cycle of life and all that.
You know, and those kinds of things are something much simpler, like working out in the morning.
Like this morning I did a couple hour bike ride with the guys.
It's not fun when we're going really hard.
I mean, it's kind of painful actually.
But when I'm done, I'm like, I feel better about myself.
I did that, and then down the line, it's a good thing to do.
That's kind of it.
And this is the concept of flow also, that when you're ensconced in work, this is the happiest you are, like when you are at one with the work that you're doing.
And I totally agree with this, by the way.
I think that happiness in life is not utterly disconnected from action in life.
I think that the attempt to make a hard break between, okay, so you take a bunch of stuff that you hate during life and you're going to hate it your whole life and then you're going to die and everything's going to get fixed in heaven, I actually don't think that's a very good way to teach religion, number one.
Right, right.
That's right.
I don't think that's what religion is here to do.
I think that religion is here to better your life here on Earth.
And then if you believe in an afterlife, if you believe that there is a rectification of the wrongs that you experienced at the hands of others, you were a baby who was killed by the Nazis, and now there's an afterlife where you're going to live on, that's a different question slightly than what religion provides to most people.
And so when I talk about religion, this is why I found your book actually kind of interesting and inspiring, is that when I talk about religion, the stuff that I find the most interesting about religion is not the stuff that happens that's unverifiable after you're dead.
It's the stuff that you're doing while you're here.
And a lot of that is tied in for a lot of people with religion.
In fact, I think that the decline of religion in America has been heavily tied in, even from a secular point of view, with a decline in secular happiness for a couple of reasons.
One is obviously the lack of community, right?
As you fragment communally, there's been attempts to sort of graft on different forms of community in the absence of church, but those have largely failed.
And you're seeing people atomized in a new way because of social media.
That's a real problem, whereas you see higher levels of communal happiness when you feel like you're part of a group of people who actually have a common worship purpose.
Yeah, so I think that we don't have a human need for religion.
That's too big a word.
We have a need for community, society, for being part of a social group that's doing something that we feel is good and right and gives me deeper meaning.
Not just fun.
Fun, pleasure, doing something with friends is one thing, but being part of, say, a religious group, a bowling league or whatever in the famous example.
I'll challenge you on that a little bit.
In the sense that you say that being part of a community is the entirety of it.
I'm not sure that a bowling league is quite the same thing as a church.
Bowling league is probably not the right example.
But it is an interesting one because obviously Robert Putnam uses bowling alone as the evidence of lack of community in American life.
And I would say it's probably not going to church is the best example of lack of community because it's not just about being a member of a community.
It's about feeling like you're a member of a community with a common purpose that is in fact transcendental and that matters.
I think that when you talk about purpose and meaningfulness and living a meaningful life, I think there are people who are capable of generating, self-generating meaning and feeling good about what it is that they do.
But I think that human beings by and large, and this is my main case for religion actually, is I think that human beings by and large are really crappy at defining their own meaning.
I think when human beings are left to their own devices to generate their own meaning, I'm glad that you and I agree on politics, but people very often find meaning in controlling others.
They very often find meaning in making standards for others.
They very often find meaning in making a better world.
And by that, they mean silencing people they disagree with and shutting them up.
And human history is replete with this.
And it's replete with religious people who did the same thing.
So the idea of a transcendental purpose, I think there is a necessity for people.
People do seek the religious, which is why religion is common to literally every culture on planet Earth.
So by transcendent, if you mean beyond just ourselves, yes.
And beyond our lifetimes, too.
Or even, yeah, so like for me, going to Mount Wilson or other observatories where there's huge telescopes and the big dome is just as meaningful as when I go to the, my wife's from Cologne, Germany, so we go to the dome there.
It's this, you know, thousand-year-old magnificent, and I love going in there.
I feel like this is a transcendent experience in the same way as when I go to the astronomical domes.
I think it's the idea of getting us beyond ourselves in some bigger way.
Not just beyond our friends and family, but our whole lifespans and so on.
Now, the religions that do that, I'm on board with you.
Not all of them do that.
The prosperity gospel business, Joel Osteen, these people, Creflo Dollar, all the way back to Reverend Ike, you know, God wants me to be rich.
Yeah, I don't believe that.
But the ones that are going out to man the soup kitchens and so on and helping the poor, OK, that's good.
Whatever it takes to move the needle a little bit to increase human flourishing, reduce human suffering.
Which brings us to the question of cosmic impact.
So the difference between going and looking at the cosmos and saying, wow, I am a tiny speck of humanity amidst this magnificent thing.
that whether it came about accidentally or was created, it's irrelevant to this particular moment when I'm looking at something and saying, wow, that's just incredible.
But does that imbue you with a sense of purpose?
Like, how do you get up every morning is what I'm asking you, right?
What motivates you to get up every morning that you're having an impact in the universe?
So a religious person would say, I'm having an impact because God wants me to do X, right?
God gave me a certain set of rules to live by and everything that I do matters, which is why Judaism is such a ritual-based religion and really takes ritual seriously.
Like every time I drink water, before I do that, I'm supposed to bless God and recognize that God is present in my life, which is an attempt, I think, to get to that feeling of Yes, but of course there are religions that do this in a bad way, like my purpose is to get up this morning and become a suicide bomber.
That's the wrong purpose.
How do we know?
Which is why I'm not.
Which is why I don't believe their set of beliefs, yeah.
And so we have to have some kind of standards.
What are our standards, and where do we get those?
Okay, I'm back to the Enlightenment, or wherever you want to start.
Using reason to get us there.
So religion can do it, but not all of them do.
I think it's reason and religion.
And I think that's why we can have a conversation, which is really so great, is that I'm not coming at it and just citing Bible verses at you.
I'm saying it's a merger of religious revelation and a reason that takes that and crafts it.
And that it's a mix.
Religion is an enzyme, it's a catalyst.
And that catalyst is what creates the cheese of civilization, right?
You put that enzyme in there, you create the cheese of civilization.
You don't have that enzyme in there, that Judeo-Christian enzyme in there, and it just remains a watery way.
Yeah, you have to pick and choose, though, from the Scriptures to get the ones that we are now using to, say, contribute to a better society and ignore the other ones.
Well, they were picked and chosen, right?
I mean, that's why we're here.
Yeah, I mean, the passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, a lot of them are pretty grim.
No question.
Yeah, so we do this anyway.
Why do I get up in the morning?
Well, I have a family that I want to take care of.
I like working.
I enjoy it.
I like being productive.
I want to move the needle a little bit, make society a little bit better through my writings or whatever.
And I just, you know, I think, I'm not sure I call it cosmically.
I'm not sure.
That'd be a little egoistic to think I can, you know, change the cosmos or whatever.
But you have to feel like that.
Everybody has to.
A little bit.
Yeah.
You know, just a little bit.
Yeah.
Okay.
Even when you say you have to move the needle to make things better.
I mean, we have to define better.
We have to define moving the needle.
And all of this has to exist in a context where you feel like you are making a difference.
But you don't do it because you're expecting to get rewarded in the afterlife.
No, I'm doing it out of duty.
And I think there's a difference between duty and reward.
You know, religion puts a heavy focus on the idea that it doesn't matter what you want to do.
Finding your bliss is a lot less important than you doing what you're supposed to do.
Well, here I think we can derive duty from Kant's deontology.
There are certain things which really are consequential arguments, ultimately.
These are good rules and duties and things we should do.
Why?
Because it makes society better.
And I don't think you have to step out of this world to justify it.
You can justify it through pure reason.
Now, people are critical of Kant to a certain extent on this, but we can at least get there if we bolt on some utilitarian arguments and maybe some Rawlsian I think it's possible to get there.
I don't think it's mandatory to get there.
And that's why I think that the argument from pure reason tends to fail, just because pure reason in the absence of culture ends up at the French Revolution.
So here we want to throw in empiricism.
Okay, what are the actual consequences and results?
What can we see?
So, for example, we have 50 different states with 50 different constitutions, 50 different sets of tax laws, 50 different sets of gun control laws, and so on.
We can look around and see the different experiments as they unfold and go, well, this one's working, this one's not working.
There was a news story last night about the rates of homicides in Chicago just went down like 50% because they implemented this police program that we're using here in LA where they put cops out on the corner because they have the data showing there's more homicides and gang drug things at that corner right there.
Go park a squad car there and get out of the car and stand there.
Okay, boom.
You know, these things.
So whatever works in that sense.
The only question becomes at that point, and then we get back into the big question.
So what does working constitute?
Because one of my favorite shows on TV is Man in the High Castle.
Have you seen it on Amazon?
I haven't seen it yet.
It's really fun, but it's fun in a not in the purest sense.
I mean, the story of the show is that there is the Nazis and the Japanese won the war and they divvied up the country.
And if you go into Nazi land, everything is beautiful.
The planes work beautifully.
It's like 1960 and they have these incredibly advanced technologies.
Everything is extraordinarily clean, of course.
Everything seems wonderful for the people who are alive.
For the people who are dead, not so much.
But this is one of the big problems, I think, in Kant's deontology, is that when Kant says, you know, treat everybody as you would have everybody else be treated, which is basically a rewrite of the golden rule, it's slightly different, right?
The original golden rule was actually the silver rule, which is don't treat anyone else as you would not want to be treated.
Once you get to treat everybody else as you'd want to be treated, well, if you feel you're a superior being, that means you get to treat inferior beings in an inferior way.
And so I think that we have to come up with some definitions that are reliant on certain premises.
And that's why I keep insisting on the premise.
If we can accept the same common premises, then I think that we end up at the same place.
And this is why I don't think atheists are, there are people who argue atheists can't be moral.
I think that's utter nonsense.
But I will argue that a system without Just saying, this is my moral starting point.
principles, whether they call them God-based or not, but you have to take certain principles on faith in order to end up at the right place.
They're not all self-provable.
You mean just saying, this is my moral starting point, period.
I can't prove it, but this is where I'm starting.
Yes, I think probably we do that.
Yes.
I mean, I'm trying to make the argument that the individual is the moral starting point, survival and flourishing of sentient beings, something like that.
But they're words.
I just string together some words and I try to base it.
So we're evolved organisms.
I don't think it's a proof.
I think it's just an argument.
But you're calling on, well, I'm going one step further outside of space and time.
But still, at some point, you have to tell us how you know what the deity wants.
Because again, you know, Muhammad Atta, when he's flying the plane into the building, he's just as sure as you are that, hey, the outside source told me this is the right thing to do.
Yeah, and the proof that he's wrong is that he's wrong.
It's wonderful to have you.
I really appreciate the discussion.
One of the most fun things that I get to do every week is talk with folks like Michael Shermer.
Folks, go out and get his books.
Heavens on Earth is his new one, and his slightly older one, but just as worthy of the read, is The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.
Michael, thanks so much for stopping by.
but I really appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special was produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
And title credits by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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