March 15, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:48
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| Alright, just a little addendum-a-rama for the Sunday show that we just had, March 142010, where I had the fine young gentleman who was relaying the arguments of his grandfather about religion. | |
| And a thought struck me today. | |
| I just wanted to sort of get it out, put it on the tail end of this Sunday show. | |
| So... Let's be generous. | |
| Let's say that in the future we find something which could be described as a deity. | |
| So we find some hyper-evolved intelligence out there in the universe that we can't easily detect or can only be detected in some methods and not others. | |
| And we converse with this evolved and abstract intelligence, and we can't quite understand its method of living in propulsion and purpose, but we get some amazing, seemingly omniscient insights from this being and so on. | |
| Let's say all of that happens in 5,000 years when we're out there exploring the galaxy, which we'll get to do once we get rid of the state. | |
| Oh, the IRS doth bar us from the stars, I tell you, my friends. | |
| And let's say this all happens. | |
| Well, what's going to happen is that I guess the last religious person 5,000 years from now is going to say, Aha! | |
| We knew it! | |
| And they will say that clearly this entity must have visited Earth in the far distant past and blah blah blah blah blah. | |
| And then we can see. | |
| So, you know, all those atheists were wrong because this intelligence is out there, this, that, and the other, right? | |
| Well... No. | |
| Not even close. Accidental prediction is not prophecy, right? | |
| Accidental, coincidental prediction is not prophecy. | |
| This is just the laws of statistics, right? | |
| It's the same issue, ah, I had a dream last year that did come true, right? | |
| I dreamt about a black cat crossing my path, and lo and behold, the black cat did cross my path the next morning, and therefore dreams are prescient and so on. | |
| That's just a self-selecting bias, right? | |
| There are tons and tons of dreams that are not prescient, and of course we're going to remember the ones that are, and we're going to forget the ones that aren't. | |
| And in the same way, we find the Earth a pretty comfortable place to live, and so we'll think maybe it was designed for us, but we forget about the vast reaches of interplanetary, let alone interstellar space, that are completely uninhabitable, let alone the other planets, or the surface of the Sun, or the asteroid belt, or the comets, or the... | |
| The white dwarfs, black holes, nebulae, interstellar dust and so on, which can't support life. | |
| This is just a self-selecting bias. | |
| So, even if we do run across something which could even remotely be described as a deity in the future, it gives no credence to religion at the moment as it stands. | |
| And I'll give you an example, right? | |
| So, let's say... | |
| That I record a bunch of random gibberish into a microphone. | |
| Well, let's say even more random gibberish than I currently do. | |
| I record all this random gibberish into a microphone. | |
| Bing, bing, bing, ole, fatang, fatang, biscuit barrel, and so on. | |
| And let's say a thousand years from now, as they're still rapidly listening to our conversations, which I think they will be... | |
| But a thousand years from now, they find out that that means, hello, my Volvo is an interstellar space jet in an alien space language. | |
| Well, won't they say, like, I record thousands of hours of gibberish. | |
| And then they play this back to an alien race, for reasons that I could not possibly fathom. | |
| They play this back to an alien race. | |
| And the alien race says, yeah, you know, I can get a few words and scraps of sentences every hour or two. | |
| Would they then say, oh my god, oh my god, space aliens doth visit the big chatty forehead low in those dark and dismal days of the early 21st century? | |
| No, of course they wouldn't. They'd say, well, you know, speaking of random gibberish, sooner or later it's going to sound like language to someone. | |
| I can go in and make embarrassingly possibly racist Chinese sounds, and if I keep making them for long enough, sooner or later I'm going to form a word or possibly even a sentence in Chinese. | |
| That don't mean I can speak Mandarin, right? | |
| It doesn't mean that I can speak Mandarin. | |
| It just means that if you make enough random guesses, then you will, you know, even random static looks like a picture of something once in a while. | |
| Now, they're also, given the laws of probability, in some, you know, some religions may have more in common with this deity than others, and everybody who's an adherent to that religion will seize this as the possibility that, or as the prophecy that, and you see the same thing with Nostradamus, right? Random statements, oh, you see, so much he predicted that came true, and so on. | |
| And they'll say, well, this deity must have visited in the past, oh, God, and so on. | |
| And this, of course, will be nonsense, because, you know, what I need as proof of a deity... | |
| Well, I mean, first of all, this is what people don't get. | |
| Like, if there's proof, it's not a deity. | |
| If there's proof, it's not a deity. | |
| It's not a god if there's proof, right? | |
| If there's evidence, if it's physical... | |
| If it's, you know, within the laws of reality, then it's not a god. | |
| It's just a dude, you know? | |
| It may be a very abstract dude, and it may be a dude wearing a very conceptual 10-gallon hat, but it's still just a dude, right? | |
| Like a brain in a tank being fed by saline solution and, I don't know, kept alive by... | |
| Some sort of excremental worms. | |
| Well, that's just a dude in a tank, right? | |
| It's still a dude. It's just a dude with a plexiglass exterior. | |
| You know, much like modern Hollywood actresses. | |
| And it's not a god thing, right? | |
| And, of course, what will happen if this were to happen in the future is that people will say, aha, there's these three characteristics which were perfectly predicted by my religion. | |
| And, of course, they will be A, imperfectly predicted, and B, not at all compared to the other nine million characteristics that don't match at all. | |
| You know, we're not going to meet a dude who remembers going to Earth, who can provide proof, who gave the Ten Commandments, because, you know, anybody who's got any brains at all would never provide the Ten Commandments as a set of moral rules, would never actually provide commandments of any kind as moral rules, but would rather provide a UPB-style methodology to evaluating moral propositions. | |
| And such a being would be, you know, rational and scientific and empirical and would be part of a free market because otherwise it never would have developed the technology to transcend mere physical matter and so on, right? | |
| I mean, this stuff wouldn't come from a government edict and so on. | |
| So there'd have to be a bunch of free-trading, semi-abstract, interstellar, polydimensional, super-intelligent gas bags floating around that would... | |
| Probably try and sell us an infinite iPod. | |
| First thing that they did was try and trade with us because they'd be free market dudes, right? | |
| Otherwise they wouldn't be advanced at all. | |
| They'd still be cavemen, right? | |
| And so we might want to You know, get on I-Bay, Interstellar Bay, right? | |
| And trade with these dudes for interstellar pretzels and nuggets of trans-dimensional wisdom or whatever. | |
| But it wouldn't have anything to do with deities. | |
| And this is the important thing that people need to understand. | |
| The prediction that something in the future may be discovered that resembles a deity gives no credence whatsoever to any kind of religion that exists in the present, because that religion is not derived from said deity. | |
| Because said deity will only be proven to exist according to reason and evidence, and nothing that has come into existence from religion has any reason and evidence behind it. | |
| We've got a bunch of sunbaked hearsay with extreme political and religious and financial motives, which is all completely discountable. | |
| If you come up with a bunch of nonsense around religion, which is the opposite of reason and evidence, it is completely the opposite of anything which is detected in the future according to reason and evidence. | |
| So there'll be absolutely nothing in common with anything that is discovered in the future. | |
| There's nothing that can be proven through science that will have anything to do with the religious manias of 5,000 years ago. | |
| Reason and evidence is the opposite of rank superstitious exploitation and lies and fantasy and the abuse of children through supernatural threats. | |
| So... I just sort of wanted to point that out, that there's nothing that's going to happen in the future that's ever going to validate the religiosity of the past, no matter how close it comes to any kind of deity that might be considered an echo of that which occurred to the ancient Jews or Hindus or Muslims or whatever. | |
| So I just wanted to point that out, that there's no path that leads to the validation of religion in the future, and I think it's really important that people remember that when having these kinds of discussions and debates. |
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