July 7, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, we're doing something a little different on the Rubin Report today. | ||
| For the past two years we've sat down one on one to interview interesting, relevant people, finding out what they think and why they think it. | ||
| Every week I also try to share with you what's on my mind, with an explanation as to why discussing the ideas of the week is so important. | ||
| One of the things we promised you when we launched on Patreon last year was that when we hit the $30k a month mark, we'd start expanding the show in new ways, such as hosting debates and doing more livestreams. | ||
| Just last week we did three livestreams with Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, Tim Pool and Majid Nawaz. | ||
| This week we're going to host our first debate. | ||
| We aren't quite at that 30k mark yet, but we wanted to offer this up as a tease of what's to come and show you that our commitment to bringing you new, engaging content is as strong as ever. | ||
| So, joining me today are two former guests of the Rubin Report, and more importantly, two people I'm proud to call my friends. | ||
| Dennis Prager is a conservative radio host and author of several best selling books. | ||
| Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and also the author of several best selling books. | ||
| I find both of them to be engaging, interesting, and unafraid to share their personal and political views. | ||
| About three months ago, Dennis did a video for his YouTube channel PragerU in which he made the case that without God, there is no objective truth to tell us murder isn't wrong. | ||
| A few days later, Michael made a follow up video on why he believes that you can indeed have morality without God. | ||
| Michael's response to Dennis was respectful and thoughtful, and I thought that it opened a door for us to have a conversation about one of the most fundamental issues about what it means to be human and to live a good life. | ||
| So, without further ado, I present you our first Rubin Report conversation, not debate, | ||
| but conversation, with two guests who hold deeply held opposing beliefs, but who I know | ||
| will be honest, decent and respectful at the same time. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Alright guys, I'm thrilled to be doing this today because I'm sitting here between two | ||
| men that I totally respect, but more importantly I consider friends, that I have broken bread | ||
| that I have just spent time in the green room chatting with. | ||
| So first, let's do some intros. | ||
| Here is Dennis Prager to my right. | ||
| Michael Shermer to my left, and we're gonna do something a little different today, a little different than I normally do. | ||
| I've had both of you on the show before. | ||
| We've talked about your ideas and let you say what you think about things, and today we're gonna have a discussion on something that you guys feel very differently about, but I think can do it in a respectful, honest, and decent way. | ||
| We're gonna be talking about morality and God, something that both of you have written a lot about. | ||
| You did a PragerU video about three months ago, and that's what sort of kicked off the idea for this conversation. | ||
| And before we do anything, even about the video, and even putting morality and God aside for a second, I thought we should start first by just three people sitting in a room that are okay disagreeing on some stuff. | ||
| Has become incredibly rare. | ||
| The idea that you guys have a totally different view on something that's really one of the most existential questions that there is. | ||
| But we were all just hanging out out there and your wife's here and my parents are out there and we were all everyone was chatting and laughing and have a good time. | ||
| And this has become almost an endangered species of an idea. | ||
| So let's let's just start there. | ||
| Why do you think this has happened? | ||
| I know the reason, but I'm afraid to say it because it will sound like I'm just a political advocate. | ||
| But I have no choice. | ||
| I believe that it is virtually entirely a product of the left. | ||
| And I could prove it. | ||
| I truly believe it's provable. | ||
| I have an acronym, SixHerb. | ||
| Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. | ||
| If you differ with anyone, from the New York Times, I'm not talking about crackpot left, normal left. | ||
| If you differ with them, you are bad. | ||
| You're not wrong. | ||
| You are bad. | ||
| And that's the origin. | ||
| We don't have that. | ||
| We do not have a six herb. | ||
| Conservatives don't have a list of adjectives that are comparable. | ||
| And that's why I attribute it to the left. | ||
| See how he buttered me up to start by going right to my wheelhouse. | ||
| Now, Dennis considers himself a conservative. | ||
| You're sort of a libertarian if we had to give you a label. | ||
| The labels are always problematic because people have in their mind what they think that is. | ||
| Like, oh, Ron Paul. | ||
| No, wait a minute. | ||
| I don't agree with everything. | ||
| Classical liberal, I like. | ||
| And I was glad to see you kind of throw that back into the ring. | ||
| That's a label that we should all be using. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Yeah, but what do you think has happened to conversation? | ||
| I know both of you guys, by the way, you do actually do this. | ||
| You debate people in a respectful way. | ||
| I'm considering this more of a conversation than a debate. | ||
| I'm not scoring this thing at the end. | ||
| I'm not announcing a winner. | ||
| But what do you think has happened to that? | ||
| Because even debates these days with people that are pretty well known and, you know, big authors and things, have sort of devolved into, I think, what Dennis is talking about, where it's more personal. | ||
| What do you think happened? | ||
| Well, I think Dennis is largely correct. | ||
| It's more from the left than the right, certainly. | ||
| In the Academy, I think it evolved from the 60s emphasis on the use of language and how certain words are toxic and cause people to think differently. | ||
| And so you start for something like the N word. | ||
| Let's stop using that. | ||
| OK. | ||
| And things like use his and her rather than always his. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, these are small things, but maybe that, you know, OK. | ||
| So they kind of get you to kind of kind of go along with some of that, you know, like. | ||
| I wrote about Sambos, Little Black Sambos, and the images of the little black kid, and it's like, okay, that's no longer cool. | ||
| And we've all kind of made that transition. | ||
| And most of it's reasonable. | ||
| But then you start cascading along the spectrum to every word you say, every phrase, the way you turn it, microaggressions. | ||
| There's no evidence at all that microaggressions cause harm. | ||
| There's not been a single study by a psychological scientist. | ||
| I think there have been studies saying that it doesn't, actually. | ||
| I think one even came out this week. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| So it just kind of caught on as an idea that's kind of a political movement idea that then got absorbed by the left. | ||
| So the left's argument is that, okay, so if words matter, words can hurt, then all of a sudden words are violence and therefore it's okay to commit violence against somebody who uses words. | ||
| Wait a minute, when did that happen? | ||
| Right, and this is this concept of punching Nazis, which I've been saying you cannot punch someone over an idea. | ||
| Okay, so one other thing before we get into the meat of this. | ||
| The crux of this is basically that you are a believer and that you are not a believer. | ||
| Well, that's not the crux, forgive me. | ||
| Well, take it away! | ||
| No, no, I don't think it is, because I have debated atheists, like at Oxford, many years ago, and it's in print and it's on the internet, so one could see it. | ||
| The professor, Jonathan Glover, who's an atheist, and a professor of moral, I think, moral philosophy, then at Oxford, now at another British university, the first thing he said when we debated was, I agree with Mr. Prager, if there is no God, ethics are subjective. | ||
| So, and there are people who believe in God who agree with Michael that it's whether or not there's a God is important, obviously, but still ethics are subjective no matter what. | ||
| Or you can't have objective ethics without God. | ||
| So the fact that he's not a believer and I am a believer is not fully dispositive here. | ||
| Okay, that's a fair critique, and you actually mention that in your video that you put up on PragerU. | ||
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unidentified
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That's right. | |
| You say that exact thing. | ||
| So, okay, I'll rephrase it a little bit and just say, you are a believer, and you are not a believer. | ||
| Fair? | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're fair? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Okay, so then I just wanna ask one other thing, and then we're gonna jump in. | ||
| Were you always a believer, and where does that come from within you? | ||
| Well, I was raised in a religious Jewish home, an Orthodox Jewish home. | ||
| I didn't stay Orthodox, but I stayed religious. | ||
| But, ironically, and I do write about this elsewhere, again on the internet, How I Found God at Columbia, the truth is, this will sound odd, but the biggest single factor in moving me to believe in God has been the secular foolishness that has permeated our society. | ||
| I was taught at Columbia, it's a prestigious place, by very bright, secular, often non-believers, and I was taught mostly nonsense. | ||
| And I remember I went crazy thinking, why is there so much nonsense being taught at an Ivy League University by bright people? | ||
| Then, a phrase from the Bible came into my brain in Hebrew, and it's very well known to people who've studied the Bible, you will know the phrase certainly, and that is, wisdom begins with fear of God. | ||
| And then I realized, wow, no God, no wisdom. | ||
| And that has permeated my life. | ||
| In other words, it is the anti-God crowd that has made me realize how important God is. | ||
| God didn't appear to me. | ||
| The religious have not convinced me. | ||
| The irreligious have convinced me of the centrality of God to the world. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| You didn't have the burning bush moment. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I had the opposite. | ||
| I had a frozen bush. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I actually mentioned a few weeks ago on the show, I did hike Mount Sinai myself, and I was ready. | ||
| I mean, I was about 21, and I was ready to see a burning bush, and I hiked at the wrong time of day, so I was, you know, dripping with sweat, and I had eaten some bad pigeon in Egypt, so I was having some stomach problems on the holiest mountain on Earth. | ||
| That might be. | ||
| And nothing happened when I got up there, and I really was ready. | ||
| So, for you, I mean, I know this, so I'm leading a little bit, but were you always a non-believer? | ||
| Where did this come from? | ||
| Yeah, so I was raised in a largely secular home. | ||
| My parents were not religious. | ||
| Neither were they anti-religious or atheists. | ||
| It just never came up. | ||
| And, you know, when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, that wasn't a thing. | ||
| Like, you know, what's your religious position? | ||
| Are you an atheist? | ||
| You know, atheism wasn't even a thing. | ||
| Really to be so but when I went to high school and then in college You know the born-again movement was kind of taking off so I became a born-again and in high school in 1971 I went to Pepperdine University which a Church of Christ school a very conservative at the time and And I was pretty serious about it I mean I took all the Bible classes the Old Testament the New Testament the life of Christ the writings of CS Lewis I've read everything he's written and so forth and And I even went door-to-door, because if you're an evangelical, by definition, you're supposed to evangelize. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| So, you know, Amway with Bibles. | ||
| I did it, and I liked doing it. | ||
| And then when I became, when I kind of gave that up, I wasn't really a militant atheist, because again, that wasn't really a thing in the late 70s and early 80s, when I sort of dropped my religious beliefs. | ||
| That brings us to this point that atheism isn't really a thing to be. | ||
| It's just a lack of belief, full stop. | ||
| So what do you believe? | ||
| Science and reason and civil liberties and civil rights and equal treatment under the law, all these kind of enlightenment values that we might call enlightenment humanism or whatever, classical liberalism. | ||
| Those are the things I believe in. | ||
| I don't believe in atheism because it isn't a worldview. | ||
| I don't believe in God, full stop. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| So then it becomes, okay, so are those values that you believe in, equal treatment under the law, women's rights, gay rights, civil liberties, right and wrong, is killing, is murder wrong? | ||
| Yes, I believe they're real, and you believe they're real. | ||
| So the question then is, well, what's the source? | ||
| Right, and that basically brings us to you doing this video. | ||
| Yes, I have a question for you. | ||
| It's not a trick question, nothing. | ||
| I'm very curious. | ||
| I think you've heard my show on a few occasions. | ||
| I think he's been a guest on your show. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| I listen to your show. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why not listen to me and why not have you on my show? | ||
| So I say, I now say, and I've written on this, the question I most want an answer to, most curious to get an answer to from an atheist, do you hope you're right or do you hope you're wrong? | ||
| I don't really hope. | ||
| I just sort of go along and just try to lead a good life. | ||
| And I'm not hoping for anything, really. | ||
| I mean, if it turned out there's a God... Yes. | ||
| Would you be happy? | ||
| I mean, look, there are undoubtedly people you love in your life. | ||
| So if there is a God, and the traditional belief there's an afterlife, you would reconnect Sure, I would be glad about that, of course. | ||
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Okay, let me tell you why I ask. | |
| If that was the version that was real, you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, if God is good, there's an afterlife. | ||
| If God is an idiot, or God is cruel, or God doesn't give a damn about his creation, then there's no afterlife. | ||
| But I make only two leaps of faith. | ||
| It's all I make. | ||
| That God exists, that God is the Creator and God is good. | ||
| And if that's the case, then there's an afterlife, that's all. | ||
| You can't have a good God and this totally unjust world be the only existence. | ||
| That would be a cruel God. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| And the only reason, by the way, I ask it is because, and I'm happy you did that, because I respect you, as you know, and I'm always puzzled If an atheist doesn't answer, well, of course it would be nice, or of course I'd like it. | ||
| It doesn't undermine your position in the least. | ||
| I think it gives you credibility. | ||
| That, in other words, against your desire, nevertheless, your mind has reasoned out there is no God, which is fine. | ||
| Which makes that completely consistent, though, with the things you believe, because it's sort of that you have a curious mind, so if you found out at the end That it was a little different than perhaps you thought. | ||
| I would be curious to know, you know, how was it done? | ||
| And what is it that actually happens? | ||
| This is the subject of my next book, Heavens on Earth. | ||
| So I talk about the idea of uploading the mind into a computer, you know, copying all your memories and you get to live forever. | ||
| Or how is that different really from God pulling you up out of the grave? | ||
| What's he pulling up? | ||
| Because most religions believe, you know, the body stays in the grave and the soul or the copy of you goes to heaven. | ||
| Well, if it's a copy of me, then it's not really me. | ||
| What's actually going on there? | ||
| I'd be curious to know how that works, if that's the case. | ||
| Also, I do have some issues about heaven, though. | ||
| Is it boring? | ||
| Eternity is a long time, especially near the end, as somebody said. | ||
| As Hitch famously said, heaven would be like celestial North Korea. | ||
| I don't want a dictator that knows every one of my thoughts. | ||
| I'm thinking of it as a human. | ||
| That can't be what heaven would be like. | ||
| I don't actually even know, Dennis, Right. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| I only know that a good God figures out how to undo the terrible injustice of this life. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| I wasn't planning on even asking this, but would you both concede that the other one could be right? | ||
| Of course he could be right. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| I would only say, intellectually, this has obviously nothing to do with Michael who I have great respect for. | ||
| Intellectually, I respect agnosticism more than atheism. | ||
| The certitude that that implies, I don't intellectually quite understand. | ||
| It's like, I don't understand a believer who never has doubts. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| So I don't understand an atheist who never has doubts. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair critique? | ||
| Because we hear that a lot about atheists. | ||
| These days I think we hear it more than usual. | ||
| A clarification on the term. | ||
| Agnostic, technically, when Huxley coined the term, he meant unknowable. | ||
| Not like you're waiting there for one more experiment or one more piece of data and then I'll make up my mind. | ||
| He said it's just not knowable in any rational scientific sense. | ||
| Ontologically speaking, I'm an agnostic. | ||
| We can't know. | ||
| There's no experiment we're going to run. | ||
| And there it is, 0.05 level of significance, God exists. | ||
| There's strong and weak atheism. | ||
| Strong atheism, I know there's no God. | ||
| That, to me, is an indefensible position. | ||
| Weak atheism, I just don't believe in a God. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| That's the more defensible position. | ||
| That would be my position. | ||
| I think that's sort of consistent with what you're saying. | ||
| Well, more so, obviously. | ||
| I just, I mean, this is not obviously the subject, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| It's a great dialogue anyway. | ||
| I intellectually, not emotionally, not religiously, I don't get how someone can look at the universe and think It came about on its own. | ||
| I debated Lawrence Krauss on the show, who said, something from nothing. | ||
| So at a given point in the debate, I said, so what is nothing? | ||
| And he said, well, nothing is something. | ||
| And you know how respectfully I treat people I differ with, because you've been on the show a number of times. | ||
| And I was respectful, but I did say something to the effect I'm now entering a sort of voodoo land. | ||
| If nothing is something, then nothing isn't nothing. | ||
| You can't have it both ways. | ||
| Couldn't you have pulled some sort of rabbinical something out there? | ||
| I probably could have. | ||
| Much of it turns on what we mean by these words. | ||
| So when a physicist like Lawrence Krauss talks about nothing, he doesn't mean it in the same way, say, a theologian might say nothing. | ||
| Because there is no nothing in physics. | ||
| There's always some energy field, a quantum foam field, something like this, that things pop out of. | ||
| Like photons of light don't exist, and they pop out of nothing in atoms. | ||
| This is Lawrence's argument. | ||
| So when he says nothing, he means something different. | ||
| that all physicists agree that's how light is formed. | ||
| Okay, so why can't a universe, this is Lawrence's argument. | ||
| So when he says nothing, he means something different. | ||
| And I think at some point, we kind of hit an epistemological wall | ||
| when we talk about things like nothing, eternity, As finite beings that are in a three-dimensional world, or four-dimensional world, we can't really know what those words mean on some, say, cosmic sense. | ||
| Something outside of us. | ||
| Do you think that could be just the great existential question of being a human, that we simply, you know, we're gonna do, we'll do this, we can go for hours if you want, we can have you guys clear out your evenings and do dinner here too, but we're, you know what I mean, like a certain amount, there's a certain amount of people in between, right, that may go, you know, Prager's making a little sense and it'll move me that way, or Shermer's making a little sense and it'll move me that way, but that most people, at a certain point in life, you can't get them to move too far. | ||
| Right, that's why I just, I fully admit I don't quite understand seeing the universe and concluding that on rational grounds, just rational, logical grounds, this all came from nothing and that all the design I see implies no designer. | ||
| I debated the head of American Atheists. | ||
| They were a wonderful group, by the way. | ||
| And I always say they gave me the check that day, which a lot of religious groups do not do. | ||
| So I just want to be clear. | ||
| Who is this? | ||
| David Silberman? | ||
| I don't recall the name. | ||
| I feel bad. | ||
| But they had their annual convention in Minneapolis and I debated their head. | ||
| And I looked at the audience at one point, and it just struck me to ask them. | ||
| It was very spontaneous. | ||
| I said, how many of you, please raise your hand, if you have ever doubted your atheism? | ||
| And now one hand went up. | ||
| Although they maybe were afraid to raise their hand in that community. | ||
| Well, all right, that's possible. | ||
| Which is an interesting point, actually. | ||
| But I made the point, though, I said, look, when a child is born with terrible deformity, every believer I know goes, where's God? | ||
| So when a child is born perfectly formed, why doesn't the atheist go, wow, It doesn't seem that it's completely random. | ||
| Well, not random. | ||
| It's still a wow moment for all of us. | ||
| Well, no, wow, but it's a random wow. | ||
| Not random. | ||
| Well, it's either design or random. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So the forces of nature are not random. | ||
| The emergent property of complexity comes from simplicity by the laws of nature themselves. | ||
| It's built into the system. | ||
| Now, you can ask, well, where do the laws of nature come from? | ||
| Yes, well, I would ask. | ||
| But you still have the same problem with the infinite regress argument. | ||
| So if you say, well, God did it, well, Where did God come from? | ||
| Well, God is that which does not need to be created. | ||
| Well, why can't the universe be that which does not need to be created? | ||
| Because the universe is physical and God is metaphysical. | ||
| Well, but there could be a pre-existing state. | ||
| You know, again, we can only push back so far. | ||
| We can only push back so far within the physical universe. | ||
| But the idea that something outside of the physical realm made the physical realm is more coherent to me than the physical realm made itself. | ||
| Well, but there could be multiple universes. | ||
| Okay, that's the latest. | ||
| That's where you lose me. | ||
| Where the Dave Rubin Show is happening just like this because there's an infinite number of universes. | ||
| Well, not that kind of multiple universes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not a better show than this. | |
| That's a toughie, that's a toughie. | ||
| So that argument to you, that's the same thing as the Krauss argument, right? | ||
| You mean the multiple universe? | ||
| The multiple universe is a cop-out. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He knows better than I, because he knows more science than I. You cannot possibly, ever, it's not possible for us to have contact or prove another universe. | ||
| So, it's a statement made that has less argument for it than the belief in God. | ||
| Well, I don't think you said it was provable. | ||
| No, he didn't say it, but even offering it as an argument. | ||
| If that's your argument, then I have a good sound argument. | ||
| Okay, so that's not quite the argument. | ||
| So first of all, dispense with the multiple universes where we're sitting here in another studio somewhere. | ||
| I don't go for that. | ||
| But the idea that there could be an eternal sequence or cycles of universes, kind of a Buddhist sort of thing or Hindu sort of thing. | ||
| Or all the way up to what, you know, there's a half a dozen of these physical theories that are put forth by physicists. | ||
| They're not meant, they're not like, oh, I'm an atheist, I gotta come up with something. | ||
| That's not what they're doing. | ||
| They're making predictions based on the mathematical principles of the universe and how these laws of nature could come about and so on. | ||
| They may all be wrong, they may never even be tested. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| And that's perfectly okay in science to throw those kinds of things out there and see what happens. | ||
| Maybe the gravitational wave research now, that's all the thing. | ||
| That may be able to detect colliding universes that cause these gravity waves to trigger. | ||
| Something like that is possible, not now. | ||
| But that could make it testable. | ||
| At the moment, it's not testable. | ||
| Both of us end up at an epistemological wall where we can't go any further, and then now we're just using words. | ||
| Well, God is that which does not need to be created and is outside of space and time. | ||
| Okay, these are just words we're using. | ||
| You don't know that. | ||
| No, I don't know that, but it makes more sense than the physical world and everything in it. | ||
| You and I both love music, you know, so there is no point... Bach, who I'm sure you adore, Bach, essentially the father of Western classical music. | ||
| This may be the best argument for God's existence, by the way, is Bach. | ||
| Yes, that's why I'm using him. | ||
| And a self-immuter playing the violin. | ||
| Right, and he wrote on every one of his manuscripts for the greater glory of God. | ||
| So, you hear this stuff, and so we've gone from photons to Bach, and that's designed, but there's no designer. | ||
| Why that strikes you as more logical is my puzzle. | ||
| Well, okay, so the derivative of complex ideas from simpler ideas and from big brains, from smaller brains, we can see the gradation in evolution. | ||
| So the chimp can't do Bach. | ||
| The dog can't do Bach. | ||
| Or morality, for that matter. | ||
| So the reason we're different than, say, lions killing something, and why we would call it murder and the lion wouldn't, is because we have brains big enough capable of conceiving of morality, music, mathematics, logic, So, we've done about 20 minutes and we haven't really mentioned morality or what the purpose of your original video was and your category. | ||
| Now, I watched them both again this morning because I really wanted to have them fresh In my mind. | ||
| And I kind of struggled with how exactly I was going to frame this because I thought well maybe if I just go off your video that would be the right way because you did the counter video. | ||
| Then I thought maybe I need to bounce back and forth between a few things. | ||
| So I'm going to bounce around. | ||
| I have a feeling that I've got... | ||
| Two people of intellect that can follow me here. | ||
| So one of the things that you talked about, so let's shift this into morality, God, and murder. | ||
| So you talk about scientific facts versus moral facts. | ||
| And I think people can probably figure out what that means, but can you just explain that concept again? | ||
| Well, I think everyone can understand. | ||
| I'm not saying this in a condescending way that if you don't agree with me, you're not on my level of understanding, but I think it's axiomatic that you can't learn morality from nature. | ||
| Nature, especially if you believe in the survival of the fittest, if that's your guideline, and that was a guideline for people like Hitler, he actually did say that, but even dropping any reference to a given mass murderer, science doesn't tell me to be honorable, science doesn't tell me to Do anything against my self-interest. | ||
| A selfish gene written by an atheist. | ||
| We are composed of selfish genes. | ||
| You need... | ||
| You need a mind, and you need, I believe, an outside source to say, this is what is right, this is what is wrong, because science doesn't tell you that. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| It's not a... I don't even think that's debatable. | ||
| How do I know not to steal because of atoms or biology? | ||
| I don't think you do. | ||
| Well, your moral conscience tells you that. | ||
| And where did that come from? | ||
| Okay, so let's pull back for a second. | ||
| So, your video opened up, is murder wrong? | ||
| Okay, what is murder? | ||
| Let's define some terms here to get us some clarification. | ||
| Murder is the wrongful killing of one human by another. | ||
| So, it's like asking, is wrong, wrong? | ||
| Yes, it's right there in the word. | ||
| So, maybe we mean, is killing wrong? | ||
| No, no, we meant his murder. | ||
| I meant his murder wrong. | ||
| Well, by definition it's wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, by definition. | ||
| But that's not the issue. | ||
| My video is not... is why is murder wrong, not whether it is wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is it wrong? | ||
| Yeah, why is it wrong? | ||
| Because we've defined it that way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, but that's my argument. | |
| My argument is that's the whole point. | ||
| If we've defined it that way, then we are God, and we could say, murder blacks, murder Jews, murder gays, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, because of, okay, so two things. | ||
| One, Well, first of all, if you say that, well, it's God that told us that it's wrong. | ||
| Alright, so first of all, did God have reasons for why murder is wrong, or is He just randomly declaring this and that wrong or right? | ||
| My guess is you'd say He had reasons. | ||
| And so, the question is, what are those reasons, and why not skip the divine middleman and just base our moral reasoning on those reasons that we too can come up with. | ||
| Moral reasoning, because I wish it worked. | ||
| Because my bottom line is I just want people to do good. | ||
| I'm much closer to a good atheist than a bad religious person. | ||
| So my bottom line is goodness. | ||
| But I realized at a very young age that reason doesn't take me to goodness. | ||
| Reason is a tool. | ||
| Reason is a hammer. | ||
| Hammers build hospitals and hammers build torture chambers. | ||
| So reason is great. | ||
| But it doesn't give you the goal. | ||
| Reason gives you the means. | ||
| But to pull back, how do you know that murder is wrong from the Divine Command Theory, your perspective? | ||
| I mean, you said you don't talk to God, you're not... Right, I believe in Revelation. | ||
| I do believe the Ten Commandments were revealed. | ||
| Okay, so, again, as you know, Plato refuted this argument 2,500 years ago. | ||
| If God is just declaring things randomly, then if He didn't say murder was wrong, would that make it okay? | ||
| Well, to be consistent, it would be. | ||
| But he didn't do that, so it's irrelevant. | ||
| It's like there's an old saying, you know, if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather. | ||
| Okay, so this is not an if that matters. | ||
| It turns out that moral reasoning and what God is dictating seem to coincide very often. | ||
| But that's not the issue. | ||
| Remember, my issue is beyond what we're speaking about. | ||
| There is no, forgetting murder for a moment, there is no good and evil if there is no God. | ||
| There are only opinions about good and evil, just like beauty. | ||
| Do you think there's an objective beauty? | ||
| I think there's a basis to it, yes. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| There's an evolved propensity to prefer some characteristics in people and landscapes. | ||
| Alright, but it doesn't make something beautiful, objectively speaking. | ||
| Okay, but what do you mean by objective? | ||
| Objective that it has just this objectively this cup, this glass exists. | ||
| So it's not just It's not my opinion. | ||
| I think moral values actually have a factual basis that are like the glass. | ||
| A little more complicated, but based on our human nature. | ||
| So you mentioned the selfish gene. | ||
| We do have our inner demons that cause us to want to be selfish and greedy and avarice and so forth. | ||
| But we also have our better angels. | ||
| That is, it pays to be cooperative, nice, altruistic, and caring and loving for other human beings, particularly those in your tribe. | ||
| And it benefits your selfish genes to be nice to other people. | ||
| Now, immediately in your immediate family, extended family, and your community, and studies show this does pay off. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, we're very tribal to other people. | ||
| Who may be threatening our empathetic notions about our fellow beings. | ||
| But that's an evolved characteristic. | ||
| We can see it in primates, in children, and so on. | ||
| There's a deep sense from the moment you're born of there's a right and a wrong. | ||
| And that comes from this evolved propensity to survive in a social community. | ||
| You can't survive by murdering, cheating, lying, and so forth. | ||
| And so that's where it comes from. | ||
| And I consider that to be transcendent of you and me. | ||
| It's not my opinion. | ||
| It's not your opinion. | ||
| It belongs to the species. | ||
| We're born that way. | ||
| Lions don't have that. | ||
| Chimps don't quite have that like we have it. | ||
| And so there's a scale of this. | ||
| So one of my favorite videos from Franz Duval is the two little capuchin monkeys that are each taught to swap a pebble for a grape or a cucumber slice. | ||
| So pebbles are like money. | ||
| So you see this video where the experimenter gives the one a pebble, he gives it back and he gets a cucumber slice, he eats it, he's happy. | ||
| Then the other one does the same thing and he gets a grape. | ||
| Now they like grapes better than cucumbers, because who doesn't? | ||
| And so the other one, the first one, sees that. | ||
| He goes, oh boy, I'm going to get a grape. | ||
| And he runs and gets his pebble, and he puts the pebble in the experimenter, gives him a cucumber slice. | ||
| And you see him, and he throws it at the experimenter. | ||
| He's pounding on the cage. | ||
| He's rattling the cage wall. | ||
| He is pissed, because that guy got something I didn't get. | ||
| That was not right. | ||
| I did the same amount of work that he did, and he got something. | ||
| So you can see that sense. | ||
| They don't have language. | ||
| They can't call it anything. | ||
| But they have a sense of wrong. | ||
| I was wrong. | ||
| That was not fair. | ||
| Okay, so let me respond. | ||
| That experiment does not show what you just said. | ||
| That experiment shows that he's pissed on his behalf. | ||
| You find me one monkey on the face of the earth that rattles the cage because the other guy was wronged, then I will take that argument seriously. | ||
| This is completely selfish based. | ||
| Number two, you mentioned children. | ||
| So you have raised... | ||
| Yes, it is selfish based, but it's about what's right and wrong. | ||
| For me. | ||
| For me. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| So it's not about right and wrong. | ||
| It's about me. | ||
| I feel gypped. | ||
| That doesn't count. | ||
| They don't rattle cages on behalf of other monkeys. | ||
| No, it's a sense of fairness. | ||
| Like, I want what's right for me. | ||
| Yes, for me. | ||
| But I don't want what's right for you, fair for you. | ||
| So what does it take for us to scale up to, for me to care about what's right for me, to care about what's right for you? | ||
| It takes transcendent morality. | ||
| It doesn't take selfish genes. | ||
| Take children. | ||
| You mentioned children. | ||
| The idea that we could learn that children are born with a strong moral sense, I mean, you've read Lord of the Flies. | ||
| I think that's far more accurate. | ||
| Let me just ask you a question. | ||
| You raised a child, right? | ||
| So I just want to ask you, how many times do you feel, roughly, you told her, say thank you? | ||
| 10,000? | ||
| No, not that many times. | ||
| I think you just have to nudge him a little bit. | ||
| Nudge him a little bit? | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| But the research on child development shows that... I told my sons, each of them, at least 10,000 times in their life, say thank you. | ||
| If they were inherently good, they would, first of all, never have to be told the first time. | ||
| And certainly not many other times. | ||
| Not black and white, they're all good or they're all evil. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, no, but don't say we can learn that we have this great built-in sense. | ||
| We do, we do. | ||
| Then why did the world stink? | ||
| Read Paul Bloom's book. | ||
| Why is slavery universal? | ||
| Rape universal? | ||
| Murder universal? | ||
| Goodness is rarer than all of these terrible things. | ||
| But it's been changing. | ||
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| And the reason is reason. | ||
| Ever since the Enlightenment, we've been changing the conditions of society, politics, economics, and social systems to emphasize the better angels and sort of attenuate the inner demons. | ||
| And we know how to do this. | ||
| It's sort of like a behavioral game matrix. | ||
| So if we had this debate 200 years ago, right before the Enlightenment, you would have agreed with me? | ||
| I probably would have been religious and we probably would have been on the same page on pro-slavery and so forth. | ||
| Well, I do think this is an interesting point because when I had you on just a couple months ago and you were arguing for morality through a Judeo-Christian value, a lot of people were saying to me he's actually just arguing for Enlightenment values, which I thought was... I think that's the case. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I think your beliefs have been influenced by the Enlightenment very much. | ||
| I can't answer you. | ||
| Having been raised in my specific case, which is truly irrelevant to the point, but in my specific case, I assure you, I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish milieu. | ||
| Half the day Hebrew studies in Hebrew of the Bible and the Talmud and so on, and half the day secular studies. | ||
| If I would have said to one of my rabbis from Eastern Europe, So, the French Enlightenment, he would have looked around and, you know, was that the name of a new, I don't know, not rock group, he didn't follow rock groups, but anyway, he would have thought maybe it was a food, French Enlightenment. | ||
| Right, but that might have showed the limitations of his thinking, though. | ||
| Yes, I agree with you, but that's not the point. | ||
| The point is what influenced me more? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I believe that God wanting to me good, God demands that I be good is the single most | ||
| animating thing in my life. | ||
| And I want it to be the most animating thing in everybody's life. | ||
| I don't trust people who listen to their inner voice. | ||
| A handful of occasions it will work for the vast majority of people. | ||
| The inner voice will be, if a young man can get away with grabbing a woman, the inner voice will be dwarfed by his testosterone. | ||
| All right, so it's a good segue to two things. | ||
| So first, I just want to jump back to the monkey example here for a second. | ||
| Because do you think it's possible that if they kept doing that experiment over time, the monkey, who was seeing his friend be wronged, would eventually start protesting on behalf of the monkey? | ||
| Because I think that would strengthen that argument. | ||
| I don't know that they... Okay, so Frans de Waal's research shows that you can nudge it in that direction. | ||
| Not very far. | ||
| He does research with elephants and other mammals, and you can see that they start to care for the other individual if they're being harmed, like they're getting electric shocks if they do something that sacrifices themselves to stop the electric shock. | ||
| Right, but you use the grape and the cucumber. | ||
| The day a monkey starts rattling the cage because his friend got a cucumber, not a grape, I will be impressed. | ||
| Then also read Paul Bloom's book, Just Babies. | ||
| They show that these little things with the infants, they can't speak yet, but they're doing these little puppet things. | ||
| They have a puppet show where the one puppet is trying to push this ball up a ramp and another puppet comes in and pushes him back down and he fails. | ||
| Or the other puppet comes up and helps him. | ||
| Then they show the babies to pick which puppet they liked the most. | ||
| They always liked the one that helped. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so Bloom's got these great videos where you can see a lot of times these little babies will reach out and slap the bad puppet. | ||
| You know, it's like that puppet was bad. | ||
| So this is at like six months, a year old, year and a half. | ||
| They already have a sense of that's right and that's wrong. | ||
| Helping is good. | ||
| Harming is not good. | ||
| OK. | ||
| We don't need to go from there to say, how do you explain evil? | ||
| It's in there. | ||
| We have inner demons. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| You might say, God put it in there, but to get back to my earlier point, how do you know? | ||
| You said revelation, but you mean the Bible, the Old Testament. | ||
| But other religious leaders, like the leader of ISIS, Baghdadi, he says, I get revelation from God, I know what's right and wrong. | ||
| Right, so I have an answer to that. | ||
| I have an answer, and I'm curious to hear your answer. | ||
| Because I've heard this a lot, and it's a plausible argument. | ||
| How do you know which God, for example? | ||
| Okay, if I came along and I developed a brown, bubbly drink, and said, this is Coca-Cola, And you would say, well, there really is a real Coca-Cola. | ||
| You are making up something new, well beyond, chronologically, the original Coca-Cola. | ||
| It's your recipe. | ||
| It doesn't taste like it. | ||
| It doesn't look like it. | ||
| And you don't have the same ingredients, but you're calling it Coca-Cola. | ||
| God was introduced to humanity by the Old Testament. | ||
| That everybody acknowledges. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| That's the God I'm talking about. | ||
| If there are variations on that theme, that's their business. | ||
| There is a Coca-Cola. | ||
| And I'm talking about Coca-Cola. | ||
| I'm talking about the God given to humanity through the Old Testament. | ||
| That God gave the Ten Commandments, in my view, and that made murder absolutely wrong, not dependent upon personal or societal opinion. | ||
| So what about right before that happened? | ||
| Right before that happened, there were people who thought... Two days before. | ||
| Two days before, there were a lot of people who thought murder was wrong. | ||
| Of course that's true. | ||
| But it wasn't objectively wrong, it was subjectively wrong, and there's a big difference. | ||
| I am now telling you, God says, that killing wrongly is absolutely wrong. | ||
| There is an objective morality here. | ||
| Which commandment are you talking about here? | ||
| The sixth. | ||
| So this is thou shalt not kill. | ||
| No, murder. | ||
| The Hebrew and the English are murder, not kill. | ||
| But again, back to my original point, by definition it's wrong. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| We're really talking about killing. | ||
| Wrongful killing. | ||
| Right, wrongful killing. | ||
| But some killing is okay. | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| Yes, of course that's true. | ||
| Some sex is okay, some sex is rape. | ||
| That's true about every action. | ||
| All right, so how much of this, then, to you is the micro versus the macro? | ||
| Because I sense you're actually conceding a little bit of ground in that you don't think that Michael is going to murder anyone, but that you think that for society as a whole, so that his atheism... That's right, because... His atheism is okay, but for society as a whole, there is... What is the legal statement? | ||
| Bad cases or exceptional cases make bad law, whatever it is. | ||
| I, of course there will be individuals, look, my favorite analogy, seatbelts save lives. | ||
| Is that a generalization? | ||
| It is true. | ||
| Is it true in every single case? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Sometimes you die because you wore a seatbelt, it choked you, you couldn't get out of a burning car or whatever. | ||
| So, if there are two people, one, they're both moral. | ||
| Michael Shermer's moral, this guy's moral. | ||
| The guy who thinks God will judge him for his behavior, I trust in the final analysis more than the person who only has to answer to his own conscience. | ||
| I am not a big believer in humanity. | ||
| Unless the guy says Allah Akbar just before he tells you. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That's not the God I'm talking about. | ||
| But if we had an imam here... Alright, so fine. | ||
| So Mao Tse Tung was an atheist. | ||
| I didn't saddle you with Mao. | ||
| Mao killed 80 million people. | ||
| But you addressed that in your video, don't you? | ||
| That what they had replaced with religion was a different ideology. | ||
|
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Yes, yes. | |
| It was an atheist religion. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But that's another issue. | ||
| Not an atheist religion. | ||
| Communism was an atheist religion. | ||
| Of course it was. | ||
| But that's not... People don't kill in the name of atheism. | ||
| They kill in the name of some economic ideology. | ||
| Or whatever, right? | ||
| Or racist, or... I understand that. | ||
| It doesn't matter, though. | ||
| You first have to get rid of God. | ||
| If you believed in God, Mao killed you. | ||
| No, I don't want to saddle you with the ISIS thing. | ||
| I'm just saying, if we had an imam here, and he said, well, we believe in revelation also, and ours came in the 7th century, and you know... Yeah, that's fine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, I'm telling you that the God that you and I are talking about was revealed in the Old Testament, that's the God we're talking about. | ||
| That another man makes another claim, May he live and be well. | ||
| It is irrelevant to my argument. | ||
| There are people who believe God has twelve heads and is a turtle. | ||
| I can't deal with that. | ||
| I'm dealing with the God who gave the Ten Commandments. | ||
| Okay, but so that though, how then do you square the people, I mean remove the three monotheistic religions, and I'm not talking about the guy that believes in a turtle with 12 heads, but just other religions, just other polytheistic religions that have existed for a long time that do have a basis in morality. | ||
| Or Buddhism, Judaism. | ||
| Yes, and I think it's terrific. | ||
| I don't think that the Buddha would have argued that morality is objectively real. | ||
| I've studied Buddhism. | ||
| I'm not a Buddhism scholar. | ||
| But anyway, he sought inner enlightenment. | ||
| The Buddhist project is not to make the world moral. | ||
| It is to have the individual transcend his ego. | ||
| And there's great value in that, but it's a different So what do you think about the micro versus macro thing? | ||
| Because I know you pretty well and I'm pretty sure this thing's not going to end with you murdering the two of us. | ||
| But I do think there's some legitimacy to the argument that on a societal whole, if everyone just starts listening to the thing in there, people are are kind of wacky and are gonna do crazy things. | ||
| And we have evidence because we've already just mentioned ISIS and all kinds of other things. | ||
| So what do you think about that? | ||
| It's the small, you know, the individual versus the collective. | ||
| No, it's a perfect point. | ||
| So you and I are both fans of the founding fathers and the constitution and so on. | ||
| And we were just talking about the Hamilton biography and what a genius this guy was, Jefferson, so on. | ||
| I don't think they were channeling Moses or Jesus They were channeling Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, all the great philosophers who came before that thought, what's the best way to structure a society that we attenuate the inner demons and accentuate the better angels? | ||
| All right, we need three structures, three judicial branches of government. | ||
| We don't really use them anymore. | ||
| We need a Supreme Court, we need a local court, we need a rule of law, we need a police, military. | ||
| Basically all that was sort of a science or technology of social structure. | ||
| How can we do this? | ||
| Because people will act on their own best self-interest. | ||
| That's why we need checks and balances and so on. | ||
| And that didn't happen in very many places in the world, and historically only a couple of times has that happened. | ||
| So it's a unique experiment, and in a way the social contract, let's call it that, is a transcendent, objective form of moral, legal, Social system by which we're going to live so that we all flourish and survive and flourish and have a more moral lives and And it works pretty well even though like in your seatbelt example doesn't always work But it works better than all the other systems and to me it to me it feels transcended in the sense It's not my opinion. | ||
| It's not your opinion You know, these guys set this up. | ||
| It's been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked. | ||
| It's like an experiment. | ||
| You know, that's why Jefferson called what we're doing an experiment. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| He said, we're running the experiment. | ||
| Tweak the variables, have another election. | ||
| Tweak the variables, the Supreme Court says, no, we're going to do this. | ||
| Let's change that. | ||
| That, to me, feels objective in the sense of it's outside of me and you. | ||
| It's not just opinion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know why it feels objective, because they were opinions. | ||
| They were great opinions. | ||
| We both adore these people, but they were opinions. | ||
| I just have to take issue, though, and this one is not, contrary to everything else we spoke about, this is not an opinion issue. | ||
| This is a factual question. | ||
| And I just factually disagree. | ||
| Every single one of the founders, except for Thomas Paine, Was a God-centered person who believed that without God the American experiment would not work | ||
| Washington said it in his famous inaugural address, or his farewell address, I should say, where, I'm paraphrasing, he is a fool who thinks that we can have a moral society without religion. | ||
| Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, we are endowed by our Creator. | ||
| Because if the Creator doesn't endow us with inalienable rights, there are inalienable rights. | ||
| Well, of course, as you know, Jefferson was a deist, not really a... No, but wait, deist in those days is not what deist... Deist today means you believed in a creator in that end of the issue. | ||
| They all believed in a providential God who interfered in human events. | ||
| Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote, I believe in a God who works in history and who judges all people. | ||
| And in the hereafter. | ||
| Franklin and I have the same exact theology. | ||
| He wasn't an Orthodox Christian. | ||
| Most of them were not. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But they were all God-centered, and the God was the God of the Bible. | ||
| So you can separate that sort of God-centered view that they had from the fact that they very clearly wanted a separation of church and state. | ||
| That's a separate issue. | ||
| And they feared the overreaching power, not only of government, but of religious theocracy. | ||
| But they had a bigger fear in a society that would abandon God as the root of rights and human worth. | ||
| That was as big a fear as any. | ||
| And by the way, separation of church and state, as we all know, but it's worth just noting, is in one letter that Jefferson wrote. | ||
| It's not in the Constitution or anything else. | ||
| Actually, one of my favorite moments in the Hamilton biography is where he's later asked, how come you didn't put God in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution? | ||
| And he said, I forgot. | ||
| And then it turned out, the biographer goes, this from a man who never forgot anything, he didn't forget it. | ||
| Because it's not an argument. | ||
| You can't make an argument to your fellow politicians or whatever you're trying to campaign. | ||
| It was the supposition of the founders that people would believe that rights came from religion and that the Bible would be the moral, educative tool of their children. | ||
| Lincoln rarely went to church, had a Bible on his nightstand, and everyone says he read it every day. | ||
| Well, why do you think they put in Endowed by Our Creator? | ||
| Do you think it was just sort of a linguistic trick in a way? | ||
| I think it's language they put in just to kind of reinforce the point, like putting in God we trust on the money, which was done in the 50s to counter the atheism of communism. | ||
| And I think also, to your point, I think there was a sense in the Founding Fathers that we can't police everybody. | ||
| It's a big, open country. | ||
| We can't have, you know, policemen on every corner and so on. | ||
| It would be good if everyone had an internal policeman. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| Well, I don't think we need that anymore in the sense that... Oh, okay. | ||
| Why, we're better? | ||
| People are kinder today? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| The American experiment is unraveling. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| You have more optimism about what's happening in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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I do. | |
| Well, you should be super optimistic. | ||
| The Republicans are running the show. | ||
| I think you have bigger fears related to the media. | ||
| Look, all I know is 50% of kids, according to Pew, do not believe in free speech for hate speech. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a problem. | ||
| We already agree on that. | ||
| I know we agree. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| I think that the American Revolution is being undone. | ||
| Equality is supplanting liberty. | ||
| The French Revolution is defeating the American Revolution. | ||
| All right, you know what, let's hold that to the end, because I think that's where we can all sort of come around and tie this nicely together. | ||
| But just circling back, because I'm glad you brought it to the political part of this, when I see all these people on the right that often talk about God publicly, you know, politicians, let's say Ted Cruz or something, He'll also say, you know, I'm a constitutional conservative and I'm an absolutist. | ||
| Now, I believe that the Constitution is probably the greatest political document ever made. | ||
| I wish we could be governed by those three branches of government that we're supposed to be. | ||
| I wish we were doing things the way that they are written. | ||
| Unfortunately, we're not for a series of reasons. | ||
| But do you think that, so you just don't think that that would be enough? | ||
| That the Constitution simply would not be enough. | ||
| And the Founders would have said it's not enough, too. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| It's my opinion, obviously, but I believe it was their opinion, too. | ||
| They understood that human nature is so anarchic that without believing that I am morally responsible to a moral God, the society will fall apart. | ||
| And I think they're right. | ||
| I would prefer to believe that people can internalize moral values such that intrinsically it's good not to do this just because. | ||
| Full stop, not because I'm being watched as an eye in the sky, not because I'll get rewarded later, but because it's just good to be good. | ||
| Would you prefer that people work hard without getting paid? | ||
| Well, it depends what they're doing. | ||
| And anything. | ||
| A waiter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| A factory worker. | ||
| You. | ||
| I believe people should be paid. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Why is that less... Because work is not moral. | ||
| Work is not morality. | ||
| It's a different realm of behavior. | ||
| You know, I'll never forget, it made a big impact on me. | ||
| Before I got married at 32, so my whole twenties I was a bachelor, and I knew nothing about marriage, because nobody knows anything about marriage until you get married. | ||
| And so I talked to married men. | ||
| I had a friend who was a married guy. | ||
| So he's a good-looking guy, he was an ex-marine, he was an intelligent guy. | ||
| So I said to him one day, I said, Bob, I'm just curious, you were close enough, did you ever cheat on your wife? | ||
| And he said, you know what, then it's funny you should ask, because obviously I gotta know, you know, I'm tempted, I travel a lot, it's tempting. | ||
| And he said, you know, I'm not at all religious, you know, I never go to church or synagogue, but I gotta tell you... | ||
| I know this is going to sound funny, you're going to laugh at me, but I really do believe God is watching and He said do not commit adultery. | ||
| I think that between, forgive me for being as crass as it sounds, between the penis and the conscience, the penis will usually win. | ||
| And having God say control your organ is more powerful. | ||
| You know, I used to be in a band in Brooklyn called Between the Penis and the Conscience. | ||
| Were you? | ||
|
unidentified
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It was a hipster band in Eastville. | |
| I knew that, and I was making an allusion to that. | ||
| So jumping from that, so you basically, because you believe that eventually we'll self-regulate ourselves into some goodness sort of, you think we could have the laws of the land that we have right now, and we simply don't need the, even if the Founding Fathers had some God-centric viewpoint. | ||
| Yeah, regardless of what the Founding Fathers, I mean, we've already been doing this for centuries. | ||
| You know, the whole structure, the whole sort of moral progress of Western civilization that I have written about, Steve Pinker has written about, and so on, comes about from this idea that we can actually set up political and economic and social systems in a way that nudges people toward being better. | ||
| And they are! | ||
| Do you think Europe is committing suicide? | ||
| This has nothing to do with the God or anything. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| You mean because of the immigrant issue? | ||
| Yes, and because it no longer believes in itself. | ||
| Yes, because European countries are based on this enlightened humanism. | ||
| Yes, the godless universe ceases to believe in itself. | ||
| The Western world No, but the problem is these super-religious immigrants that are from Islam. | ||
| No, the problem is the secularism. | ||
| Of allowing them to come in, yes. | ||
| Not only allowing them to come in. | ||
| They don't believe in anything anymore. | ||
| They believe in vacation time, in maternity leave, higher wages. | ||
| That's what they believe. | ||
| It's all material. | ||
| Well I think you may also mean that they don't believe in the goodness of the society. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Which you would argue comes from God. | ||
| I argue that a will to live, even to make babies, the religious affluent have far more babies than the secular affluent. | ||
| There is a massive, this is why I said earlier, I came to God most particularly because I saw the alternative doesn't work. | ||
| The godless world being created in Western Europe is dissipating. | ||
| The countries are literally disappearing. | ||
| People don't even have the will to marry, or the will to have babies, or the will to preserve Britain, or Germany, or France. | ||
| That's a loss. | ||
| So that's why I think the micro-macro thing is the most interesting part of this conversation, because again, I don't think I think that is ultimately the reason. | ||
| in and of himself and with all your friends and family live a perfectly moral life. | ||
| But do you think there is something to that? | ||
| Because we are watching Europe slowly crumble and I don't think anyone knows exactly why. | ||
| I think that is ultimately the reason. | ||
| That's why I think the universities have crumbled. | ||
| Godless is wisdomless. | ||
| On an optimistic side. | ||
| I know a lot of Germans now because my wife's from Cologne. | ||
| They're not just sitting around going, how can we get more welfare and make more babies and get more food stamps. | ||
| That's not what they vote for. | ||
| They go to work. | ||
| Like the rest of us do. | ||
| But that is what they sit around thinking. | ||
| I just had a German medical student live with us for six months. | ||
| He described a Germany that I assumed, and it's not just Germany, it could be Belgium, it's irrelevant. | ||
| That's what the materialist, secular mind thinks about. | ||
| It's material. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| It is now in the European Constitution, I believe, how much vacation time... Oh, it is now a human right to travel. | ||
| But they didn't even mention in the European Constitution that Christianity had formed Europe. | ||
| I'm a Jew saying this. | ||
| But I care about truth. | ||
| Christianity made Europe. | ||
| Without Christianity, you lose Europe. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| Okay, so you're picking certain countries that maybe Christianity had positive development. | ||
| Most Christian nations. | ||
| Like all the Catholic nations in South America and so on. | ||
| They didn't develop all those civil rights and equal treatment for women and so on. | ||
| Right, I'm talking about Western Europe. | ||
| So it's not religion, it's something else that's going on there. | ||
| And my argument is that it's these Enlightenment... It's right religion. | ||
| It's good religion. | ||
| There's bad religion and there's good religion. | ||
| There's a little trapdoor you're giving there. | ||
| It's not a trapdoor. | ||
| Of course it's true. | ||
| How could I argue otherwise? | ||
| He would argue there's good atheism and bad atheism. | ||
| There's good secular and bad secular. | ||
| It's just, why can't we be allowed that truth? | ||
| There are people who get it wrong. | ||
| There are people who do not emphasize the Ten Commandments. | ||
| They emphasize 55 other things and they call themselves religious. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| I'm unhappy about that. | ||
| But how do you know which is the better religion or the less good religion? | ||
| What's the criteria? | ||
| The same criteria that you would offer. | ||
| I want to see your fruits. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That's the only thing that matters. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the fruits of secular Europe is no more Europe. | ||
| But see, I don't think it's the secular part. | ||
| I think there's other factors going on. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's a fair difference of opinion. | ||
| Since the Second World War, they've had a rather different history from before for obvious reasons. | ||
| They're killing each other less. | ||
| Yes, well they had to do something to stop it. | ||
| No, I agree with that. | ||
| So they gave up, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| They threw out nationalism and religion. | ||
| So, to sort of pull back a little bit, again, we're talking about what criteria are we using to judge right and wrong? | ||
| Okay, so when you say, well, it's religion, Christianity, and I point out, well, what about all those Catholic countries? | ||
| That's the wrong... No, no, first of all, I mean, when all is said and done, if I had to compare Catholic Uruguay to pre-Catholic Uruguay, I'll take Catholic Uruguay. | ||
| You have to believe there, or you know, take the Mayans. | ||
| I think you believe that in Mexico it was a step up for Mexicans to Catholicism from Mayanism. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe, alright. | ||
| Alright, so let's get out of sort of the real world politic of this and we'll go to a slightly higher dimension here if we can for a moment. | ||
| So if God handed us these Ten Commandments and made all these strong arguments, Wouldn't there just be less pain? | ||
| I mean, I know this is sort of an easy one, and you've written some books on this kind of thing, as have Michael, but wouldn't there just be less? | ||
| It seems like there's plenty of religious people that do all sorts of bad things in the name of religion. | ||
| It shows you the power. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| But I don't know anybody who's done bad things in the name of the Ten Commandments, which is where I really focus much of my religious belief on. | ||
| But yes, look, that is why I don't want to bore everybody. | ||
| That is why there is only one of the Ten Commandments that God says he will not forgive. | ||
| And that is doing evil in his name. | ||
| People call it taking God's name in vain, but that's what it really means. | ||
| The Hebrew is do not carry, not do not take. | ||
| Because of exactly your questions and your points. | ||
| Nothing ruins the possibility of God-based ethics as much as people who do unethical in the name of God. | ||
| Do you know that this is unreported much? | ||
| There are more atheist kids in Iran today than in the history of the Muslim world. | ||
| The Ayatollahs are creating more atheists than every atheist activist on steroids. | ||
| And it makes perfect sense. | ||
| And you would argue that's a beautiful thing. | ||
| Between a secular Iranian and an Ayatollah Iranian, I'll take the secular any day. | ||
| I told you the fruits are what matter to me. | ||
| You're fruit-oriented, I'm fruit-oriented. | ||
| What is the tree producing? | ||
| I'm saying a godless tree will ultimately not produce a good world. | ||
| But I'd rather have a good godless person than a bad god person. | ||
| Is that sort of the irony? | ||
| Is that in a weird way? | ||
| The secular person or the non-believer needs a little bit of sort of the crazy religious stuff, in this case the Ayatollah, to actually, that makes it easier to breed some of the things that you believe, rather than Michael Shermer showing up in Tehran and going, guys, you know, let's talk about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not going to Tehran to proselytize or atheism. | |
| But is that sort of ironic in a way? | ||
| That is why, by the way, parenthetically, I am very disappointed in the Western religious world. | ||
| There should have been a hundred thousand rabbis, priests, and ministers gathering in Washington, or London, or I don't care where, as a protest against all the evil done in God's name in the world today. | ||
| They have sat on the sidelines, intimidated by the New York Times, which would call them Islamophobic. | ||
| They have more fear of the New York Times than fear of God. | ||
| I would say that as a general assessment of most religious people, Jew and Christian, in the world today. | ||
| Maybe we should organize a joint atheism, secularism. | ||
| We should. | ||
| And protest. | ||
| That is exactly right. | ||
| And I don't care if somebody calls it. | ||
| We're not Islamophobes. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We're evil-phobes. | ||
| We're evil-phobes. | ||
| That's my man. | ||
| So I'm glad we got there because, look, we could do this for hours and hours. | ||
| We've done about an hour already. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So first off, before I kind of get us toward the final part, did we miss any? | ||
| I know we could dissect each video perfectly. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It was exactly what I imagined. | ||
| It was a wonderful discussion. | ||
| Is there anything you want to club him over the head with that I might have missed here? | ||
| These are the great issues of all time. | ||
| The fact that they're not ultimately resolvable, I think, hints at how difficult they are. | ||
| The big questions, is there a God? | ||
| Free will, determinism, moral right and wrong, good and evil. | ||
| So how do we put that into practice? | ||
| don't have universal agreement on it, like a law of physics that you can measure everywhere, | ||
| tells us these are hard problems. | ||
| Which is why the only way to figure out what to do is to talk to other people, | ||
| especially those who don't agree with you. | ||
| 'Cause if you're in the echo chamber, you're only gonna hear what you, | ||
| you're just wasting your time. | ||
| So how do we put that into practice? | ||
| Because I try to talk to people from all over the political map, | ||
| and here I have two people who view one of, perhaps the biggest issue of all time | ||
| in a very different way, and I have equal respect for both of you. | ||
| And what I-- | ||
| The question I get from people all the time is, well, what do we do now? | ||
| Because I do think people think, as you said, Western Europe is crumbling. | ||
| I think people think the underpinnings of America, for a zillion reasons. | ||
| For the people that fear Trump, the people that fear the media, whatever corner you're in. | ||
| But here we've had, You know, the fear of Trump is irrational, okay? | ||
| It's just irrational. | ||
| We're not here for politics, but you raised it. | ||
| I just want to say, you don't have to vote for him, you don't have to support him. | ||
| But this, there is a hysteria, like Russian collusion. | ||
| It was all hysteria. | ||
| Like he foments anti-Semitism. | ||
| It was all hysteria. | ||
| You know who called in 90% of the hundreds of threats to Jewish community centers? | ||
| An American Jewish kid living in Israel. | ||
| And the others that he didn't call in were called in by a black radical who wanted to | ||
| frame his ex-girlfriend. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| You're not, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's true. | ||
| Now it's all over. | ||
| Nobody talks now about all this anti-semitism in America because of Trump. | ||
| They do lie. | ||
| When that was happening I actually purposely didn't tweet about it because I saw everyone getting on board and saying it's all Trump, it's all Trump. | ||
| And I remember thinking this just seems too easy. | ||
| I want to wait a little bit and then of course you end up right. | ||
| How do we take this, how do we take the richness of this, and go, all right, we fundamentally believe something so different, but we actually still wanna live in the same society. | ||
| Because I don't think you guys are going, well, you know, even if you think that the ideas that Michael has pushed here aren't gonna be good in the long run for your society, or you think that Dennis- Yeah, but we're allies in the cause of liberty. | ||
| And that's where I wanted to go. | ||
| So liberty and freedom, freedom of speech and so on, is the fundamental. | ||
| Right that trumps all the other well trumps. | ||
| It's the basis. | ||
| It's beneath all the other stuff We're talking about and so isn't it interesting that you both can get there Yeah, absolutely and I'm encouraged by that and as well as I'm not sure what you call what you're doing alternative media to the mainstream media or I call it something different in every universe that I'm doing. | ||
| I don't know what the right word is, but I'm really encouraged with shows like yours, Joe Rogan's, Sam Harris. | ||
| These are great shows. | ||
| The most interesting conversations that I listen to are there, not on CNN or whatever. | ||
| No, this is where it's at. | ||
| This could be the future. | ||
| Where even academics, who are seemingly hopelessly lost here, will see like this Jordan Peterson guy. | ||
| He can make more money on Patreon than from the universe. | ||
| Maybe that's the future. | ||
| It's like just talking to people. | ||
| Well look, I know Prager University, we tell people get a free education. | ||
| We'll have 400 million views this year. | ||
| And the greatest single percentage is under 35 years of age. | ||
| All right, so then I have one final question for you both. | ||
| What would be your greatest sell, if someone that's listening to this, that is an atheist, they've just come to that conclusion, and if they didn't want to be not convinced, they don't want you to convince them to not believe, but they want to be convinced of wanting to live in the same society as you, what's the greatest sell? | ||
| Well, I gave the argument earlier. | ||
| The founders did understand that without God, a limited government won't work. | ||
| Just as you said, we seemed to, that was an area of agreement, it seemed to me, and I don't want to put any words in your mouth, God forbid, but they understood if people feel morally accountable to God, then we don't need a lot of police. | ||
| We don't need a big government. | ||
| Government rises in the West as God diminishes in the West. | ||
| And in the United States or in Europe. | ||
| Because somebody's got to police people. | ||
| Somebody's got to dictate what happens. | ||
| The government substitutes. | ||
| I don't want big government. | ||
| And the American dream was to have limited government so that we're free, but ultimately morally answerable to the God of the Ten Commandments. | ||
| That's clever because he's playing to the classical liberal small government people here. | ||
| What would be your sell job for the person that's a believer that's watching this, but you want to live in that same society? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think Dr. King had it right. | ||
| The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. | ||
| I think the origin of the bending force has been this inculcating in all of our thinking to make it our second nature. | ||
| To be good for goodness sake. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Now, we're a long ways from, you know, getting there, but we're better than we were half a century ago, better still than a century ago, and so on. | ||
| I do think there's, and I think that moral arc is built into the structure of society, the way we keep tweaking it. | ||
| It's like an experiment, and I think we need to keep running the experiment, and that open, free dialogue and speech is the only way to keep tweaking it in the right direction. | ||
| Well, this has been an absolute pleasure for me, so I hope you guys have enjoyed it. | ||
| You both agree it took us a while to get the schedules lined up because you guys are busy, but I'm glad we did this and I hope we can do something like this again. | ||
| We can figure out some other existential things. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| I just kind of turned this way a little bit. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I have no reason to patronize you, so I'm not. | ||
| But your questions evince sincere curiosity, and that's a big deal. | ||
| Strangely, I've been doing something that should be common these days. | ||
| It should be. | ||
| Well, thank you for that, and thank you for coming in, and thank you guys for watching. | ||
| And yes, we are gonna do more of these. | ||
| I've got a couple interesting ones lined up. | ||
| So it's, yeah, you know, it's youtube.com. | ||
| Remember, you're watching this right now, so I didn't even need to say that. |
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