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Feb. 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:18:24

3587 Why Skepticism Is Important | Michael Shermer and Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	We are here with the eminent Dr.
	Michael Shermer.
	He's the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, or at least so I've been told.
	I've not verified it for myself.
	He is a monthly columnist for Scientific American and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.
	He's the author of many popular books, including his most recent, Skeptic Colon, Viewing the World with a Rational Eye, and it's Michael Shermer, S-H-E-R-M-E-R, Dr.
	Shermer, how are you doing today?
	I'm fine, thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for having me on.
	Your journey.
	Oh, boy.
	I mean, people think you've bicycled a lot.
	I mean, the metaphysical and epistemological journey that you've taken from your youth has been extraordinary.
	And I was raised as a Christian myself and became, I guess, an agnostic, then an atheist and so on.
	So I have some of the journey, but not, I think, quite as wide a spread.
	I wonder if you could help people understand who don't know your life history, where you came from, And to some degree, you know, the old question, who are you?
	Who are you, and how did you get here?
	Yeah, sure.
	Well, so I was raised in a non-religious home, which is unusual, just in Southern California.
	My parents weren't anti-religious.
	They just weren't religious, you know, post-World War II, Depression-era babies, you know, that grew up and no religion.
	And so I became a born-again Christian in high school because of Peer pressure, peer influence, that is, in 1971, 1972, which was about when the whole evangelical movement really took off in America.
	This was before the moral majority of the 80s.
	This was like the initial push to move away from traditional religion toward just kind of a non-denominational Christianity.
	That is, all you've got to do is just have your Bible and meet with fellow Christians and talk about Jesus and all that.
	I like that because I wasn't that interested in religion per se.
	I was more interested in the theology and what the book said and how to live your life and the philosophy of morality and all that.
	But I took it fairly seriously.
	I went to Pepperdine University, which is a Church of Christ school, which is pretty conservative.
	Gerald Ford came and spoke when he was president.
	We had a talk by the Hungarian physicist, the inventor of the H-bomb, Edward Teller.
	He came and gave his Mutual Assured Destruction speech.
	It was fairly conservative, but also a little bit libertarian.
	This is when Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged became all the rage to read in college.
	It really took off in the early 70s.
	Everybody on campus read this book.
	Some of my earliest influences were At that time, but then I went to graduate school at a secular institute, Cal State Fullerton, just a state university, and once again, no religion.
	It wasn't that people were atheist or agnostic or whatever.
	I mean, it just wasn't a thing.
	No one really cared.
	I was in an experimental psych graduate program, and all we were doing was research, and so no one really seemed to care about Christianity, and by then, I pretty much lost my faith.
	I'd taken courses in Comparative world religions and anthropology and studied mythology and all this.
	It seemed pretty obvious that I was in a little bubble at Pepperdine and Americans that are in Christianity are in a bubble.
	When you take a more cosmic perspective like Carl Sagan or Joseph Campbell and you see that every one of these belief systems, the people in it, think they're the one true religion.
	So I got to thinking, what are the chances that I'm right And I chose the right one, and all these other people that believe just as strongly as me are all wrong.
	And of course, the one that you chose that was right just happened to be the one that was in the culture around you, coincidentally.
	There's a certain amount of odds that stack up against those kinds of probabilities.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Anyway, I've written about this in detail in a couple of my books, but briefly speaking, when you're not in the bubble, And no one really cares.
	It's easier to be self-critical and read critical literature, those counterarguments and so on, without any pushback.
	Because, again, no one really cared what this was all about.
	This whole thing, you know, like we're in the whole science and religion, the war over evolution and creationism and atheism and militant atheism and the new atheists and all that, that's all new.
	You know, back then, no one really cared.
	It wasn't a thing to talk about religion and God.
	And so when I gave it up, there were no consequences for me.
	And I'm in my early 20s and not married and no kids and no one I knew was religious.
	And my family, I think, was kind of relieved that I wasn't witnessing to them anymore, telling them about Jesus every time we got together.
	I think they were sort of happy that I gave it up.
	But there was no pushback.
	Who I feel sorry for is people that write me now from the Midwest or whatever.
	Everyone they know is Christian.
	The only question is, which Christian denomination church do you go to?
	Well, I think also the great divide of, have you instructed your children in a particular belief system?
	If you then later abandon it, that is, I think, particularly painful looking back at what you might have taught your children that you no longer believe, because that would have formative influences on how they grow up and think.
	That's right.
	Yep, absolutely.
	And so then, you know...
	The bike racing thing.
	I was a bike racer for about a decade between graduate school stints and teaching college.
	When we started Skeptic in the early 90s, that's kind of when things really started getting heated up with politics and religion, science and religion.
	The moral majority was still highly influential after Reagan.
	We spent a lot of time in the magazine dealing with those issues.
	And then after 9-11, and then the new atheist movement and all that, you know, we've always tried to kind of walk a fine line there at Skeptic.
	We're a science magazine, so we don't want to define ourselves as atheists, you know, because you can't really define yourself by what you don't believe.
	Yes, I'm an atheist, but what else?
	You know, what do you believe?
	I believe in civil rights and civil liberties and democracy or free markets, whatever.
	These are positive things to define yourself as instead of just we're atheists and that's what we do.
	We just do atheism, whatever that would even mean.
	Well, we would like to think that the same – The same methodology that would lead someone to atheism would lead someone to other kinds of beliefs.
	Not that atheism triggers those things, but all roads lead to reason and evidence, hopefully, and from there, your beliefs should be universal, they should be reproducible, they should be rational, they should be empirically verifiable.
	Atheism is just one of the dominoes, or religion, I suppose, is one of the dominoes that goes down when you begin to apply the Socratic method and the scientific method and general epistemological rigor.
	And so, saying that atheism is not associated with other beliefs would make it kind of an isolated bubble and turn it into just another prejudice.
	But we hope it's a consistency of thinking that leads to many outcomes that are consistent.
	Yeah, that's the perfect way to put it.
	Dominoes, they just fall one after another.
	And I think that is the case.
	Philosophy my philosophy has just been to promote science and reason and critical thinking and Just let the chips fall where they may on all beliefs not just you know religious but anytime and And I think that is the best way to do it for various reasons strategically I think if you attack people head-on full frontal combat over their most cherished beliefs They're less likely to listen to what you have to say much less change their mind if you just promote science in a positive way and I
	believe in truth.
	You believe in truth, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, what's the best way to find the truth?
	And then the wall doesn't go up, and they actually listen to what you have to say.
	And I think that's true for politics, too.
	If you just tell people that disagree with you on some political issue or economic ideology or whatever, you just tell them that their most cherished beliefs are bullshit and they're wrong, that's the end of the conversation.
	They're not even listening to what you have to say anymore.
	Cognitive dissonance kicks in and they double down on their beliefs.
	So you really got to go around those kinds of foundational beliefs and come at it a different way.
	It's not the only way to do it.
	Militant atheism works for some people.
	Dawkins has tons of letters of people that read his book and changed their mind.
	So I think there's many approaches, but that's ours.
	Yes, one of the things that can be a surprise for people who haven't spent a lot of time in debates, particularly in public debates, is how much people's defenses go up when they're presented with counter-information.
	And as you pointed out, there are tons of studies on this that people's beliefs, they're sort of like Obi-Wan Kenobi at the end of the very first Star Wars.
	You know, if you strike me down, I shall return stronger than you can possibly imagine as a CGI ghost who can't stand George Lucas' dialogue.
	But that's a story for another time.
	So they do tend to double down.
	And people who receive information counter to their particular preferences or, dare we say, prejudices, it actually strengthens their belief systems.
	And that, of course, is one of the great challenges of changing people's minds, that assertively presented facts and evidence often serve to reinforce the very errors that you're trying to deal with.
	Yeah, that's, again, perfectly put.
	This is now called the backfire effect.
	It's really just cognitive dissonance, but a more recent term is the backfire effect.
	I just wrote about it last month in Scientific American.
	In the context of, say, you're talking to somebody about global climate change, and you present facts, and not only do the facts not change their mind, they double down, and they're even more likely to deny global warming, say, or something, or creationism.
	You present them with fossils and DNA and whatnot, and they just double down.
	And the discovery of this really was Leon Fessinger in 1954.
	On December 21st, 1954, he was a young psychologist Who went up to the top of a hill with the local group, UFO cult, that believed that the mothership was going to come pick them up at midnight on December 21st, 1954, just before the big flood comes and wipes out the Midwest and kills everyone on Earth.
	Anyway, so he thought, well, this would be a good experiment to see, presumably the Earth doesn't come to an end, what happens when it doesn't?
	You know, what happens at 12.01 a.m.
	and at 1 o'clock in the next morning?
	Did they go home and go, well, that was a dumb idea?
	Can I have my stuff back?
	Literally, a lot of people gave their belongings away.
	In fact, no.
	Of course, 1201, 1205, people were looking at their watch.
	Maybe it was Pacific Standard Time instead of Central Time.
	Maybe it was tomorrow night.
	Maybe we got it miscalculated slightly.
	Maybe it's next year.
	When they finally decided it was next year, they went down and went back home and just doubled down on their beliefs.
	And so he called this cognitive dissonance, and that's where that comes from.
	That if the beliefs that you hold centrally define you, this is who I am, and you confront facts counter to those beliefs, something's got to go.
	And it's almost always the facts that go.
	You know, the rise of alternative facts is the popular term this month.
	But it's the same idea, that we're just going to rewrite the facts to fit what we want to be true.
	Well, and I think that's a very important consideration.
	And I think particularly when people have moral values entrenched into their worldviews, then it becomes a sin.
	And I don't just mean that in the theological context, but it becomes an immorality to discuss particular things or to change your mind.
	Because we really, to me, a lot of our human beliefs are in this inverted pyramid where the point is, To have moral clarity and be able to make decisions that we can live with that are good decisions.
	So a lot of the people who are skeptical of, you know, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, that can only be solved by massive giant government intrusions into the economy and people's personal liberties.
	They don't like the last part in particular, the massive giant government intrusions into personal liberties and choices.
	I put myself, of course, squarely in that camp.
	And so they feel that the only way to push back against these massive giant government blah blah blah...
	Is to say, well, you know, it's all nonsense or, you know, There's no warming whatsoever or, you know, the CO2 has nothing to do.
	And, of course, there's warming and, of course, CO2 has something to do with it.
	And, of course, people are responsible for the production of CO2. However, of course, you can accept all of these things.
	You can even accept that it's going to be a disaster.
	And you could say, well, what we need to do then is shrink government and eliminate government debts and deficits because that stimulates the consumption of resources in the here and now.
	But if people don't have that distinction, then they're basically fighting against government encroachment by attacking particular scientific theories, which is a sort of square peg in a round hole kind of situation.
	Yeah, well put.
	Again, I have to agree with most of what you just said.
	I think it's good to break that particular question down into five parts.
	You know, is the Earth getting warmer?
	Do we have something to do with it?
	How much warmer is it going to get?
	What are the consequences of that warming?
	And five, what are we going to do about it?
	So what people worry about is number five.
	What are we going to do about it?
	Okay, so if you're conservative and you're worried about big government encroachment on business and the economy, then you're going to go all the way back to step one and say, as you just said, well, it can't be true because I don't want number five to be true.
	Right.
	That first domino.
	After that, it's all just physics and dominoes rather than choices and values.
	So when I talk to conservatives, I usually say, well, look, I agree with you.
	I think the solution is technological, scientific, Elon Musk, let's make huge battery factories and let's get off fossil fuels because it's a cool thing to do anyway.
	And by the way, you can make a lot of money in green technology and our profits can go up and we can have startup companies and IDOs and this is going to be the newest thing.
	Tesla's changed the world.
	Even if he goes out of business, Elon Musk still changed the world because everybody else now is getting on board with making cool, fast, electric cars that go you know hundreds of miles and That is a good thing to do, regardless of step one.
	I try to get them off, let's not worry about the government stuff and the economy.
	Let's just talk about what we know to be true, regardless of your political beliefs.
	The free market will try to make the most efficient possible use of existing resources.
	That will be some sort of transition if there are strong arguments to be made.
	Those arguments won't be made, I think, in the end to fairly ill-informed electorate who have very strong opinions about this topic.
	The argument eventually will be made, as I have made it as an entrepreneur, to highly skeptical investors.
	And that's, I think, where we want these.
	I want people to have their own skin in the game when it comes to solving these problems rather than, well, if politicians scare the hell out of the population, they're very good at, you know, clawing more power from the population.
	And I think people have a good reason to be skeptical of that approach.
	But, yeah, the idea that we could do things cheaper and more efficiently and better...
	Usually that has a lot to do with getting government out of the marketplace rather than having it control massive more sections of the marketplace.
	So yeah, you can accept it all and still end up with a smaller government.
	That usually takes the intensity out and allows people to approach the data a little bit more open-mindedly.
	I think one of the things I tweeted yesterday was that we cannot run out of oil.
	We will never run out of oil or fossil fuels because if there's a market for it, As the supplies diminish, the prices will go up and it'll just not be worth it anyone's while to drill anymore and people will find alternative sources of energy already happening.
	The day I tweeted this, like an hour later, the story came out about...
	Elon Musk's battery factory is going to open yesterday and they're going to do all these great things.
	Already in one week, like 15% of California's energy is going to come from these batteries and alternative energy.
	Wow!
	Okay!
	And that's what will happen.
	We won't run out of oil.
	It'll just become so expensive, no one will bother with it.
	It's an old econ argument that says if you're sitting in a room and you have like 8 billion peanuts, yeah, the first couple of peanuts are pretty easy to find.
	After a couple of years, you're really digging down and rooting, and at some point, there's still peanuts down there in the mountain of shells, but it's not even worth going to try and get them.
	I think most people don't get that, though.
	I think if I was education czar of the world, I would require Economics 101.
	Along with, you know, physics, psychology, 101, chemistry, whatever, you know, I think it should be right there because it's really what runs the world.
	And most people don't understand even the most basics of it.
	And there's so many resources.
	I mean, some of the most valuable courses I've ever had are from the teaching company, and they have these economics courses.
	I mean, they're super basic, 30-minute lectures, one at a time, boom, boom, boom.
	Here's how to think like an economist.
	Here's how the economy works.
	It's so basic that when you say stuff like, we'll never run out of oil, most people go, what?
	Are you kidding me?
	It's a finite resource.
	The earth is, you know, it's a globe and it's contained.
	We're going to run out.
	No, no, no, it won't happen because of economics, not biology or geology.
	And so I think we need more economic education.
	Yeah, we have fewer horses now, I assume, at least per capita than before the car because people used to have to use horses regularly.
	I think we're good to go.
	And we'll die.
	We were created by our parents.
	Therefore, the universe and the people in it must have been created by someone.
	Because the universe, in its conception, only exists in the couple of pounds of wetware we have between our ears.
	And so it's very easy, since the universe is encapsulated within our own mind, to think that there's a mind that's somehow out there in some other dimension encapsulates the universe.
	And this distinction between being alive and staring at dead, inert matter, I think, is one of the great challenges of almost deimagining the universe to look at it in its sort of bald...
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Before I address that, though, let me come back.
	One more point on that previously.
	In 1900 to 1920, there were more electric.
	Well, it was about one third, one third, one third electric taxis, gas taxis and steam taxis in New York City.
	And there were charging stations every 10 blocks in New York City.
	Imagine where we'd be if we had a century's worth of battery technology research or, you know, from all the major The only reason the electric car didn't win out was really because Henry Ford perfected the assembly line process, brought the price of the Model T down, which is allegedly why Elon Musk calls his Model S, because it comes before the T. But that's just market forces.
	We're going to get there now.
	But your other point is a super good one.
	Our brains are really wired to find...
	Not just patterns, but agency and intention design in the universe, because it is designed in a way.
	And, you know, if you think about, you know, eyes are designed to see, wings are designed to fly.
	You know, these are, it's called functional adaptations in evolutionary theory.
	And what Darwin did was to show that the design is there indeed, but who or what is the designer?
	And it's not a top-down concept.
	Intelligent designer.
	It's a bottom-up, unintelligent designer called natural selection.
	And natural selection would just operate to leave behind the offspring with these adaptations that are best for that particular environment.
	And that's what looks like design.
	It's just functional adaptations, just what works in that particular environment.
	And so, frankly, yes, the intelligent design creationists, I have to hand them to them.
	That was a clever marketing ploy to go from Scientific creationism to intelligent design because our intuitions get that.
	Yes, the eye is an incredibly well-designed structure for seeing things, and wings are amazingly well-designed to fly and so forth.
	Not perfect.
	Sorry to interrupt, but even the words design and adaptation imply mechanical intent of some kind.
	Absolutely, and that's what our brains are wired up to see.
	Of course, our intuitions go to that, and that's why oftentimes science is counterintuitive.
	It takes an extra step to say, okay, I get that.
	Now I have to doubt the top-down part, the intelligent part of the design, and think about how this could have come about from the bottom up, which is a little bit more of a cognitive load.
	Think about how that could have happened.
	And even people that are atheists or whatever, they still tell these so-called just-to stories about Darwin and And what would have been adaptive a million years ago or whatever.
	And we're just making stories up about what might have happened in the past.
	We don't know.
	You have to test these hypotheses.
	Some of them are true.
	Some of them are not.
	So we have to be careful about that.
	Because again, we're looking for design and looking for a purpose.
	And as Steve Gould always wants to Pound into our brains.
	Not everything was well adapted.
	Not everything has an adaptive purpose.
	Some of it is just accidental.
	They call these spandrels, like in a cathedral where you have the two archways that come together.
	There's a little space there created just by two arches coming together.
	And so in these medieval cathedrals, they put all these elaborate and ornate designs and structures and paintings and whatnot in those spandrels.
	But if you ask, you know, what's the purpose of the spandrel?
	There's no purpose.
	It's just an accidental byproduct.
	The arches are the design part.
	The spandrel, the space between them, it's sort of co-opted by these artists to use that space.
	Anyway, his point was that things like the panda's thumb, now the panda has a, you know, all mammals have these tetrapod forelimbs, you know, just one big bone here, then the humerus, the ulnar and radius, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges.
	And we all have them.
	And so, but if you look at the panda, the panda paw, it's sort of like this, and it has this little thumb that comes out, sort of like, looks like, sort of like that.
	And it looks like it's a functionally adapted thumb, but it's not a thumb.
	It's just the wrist bone that's been adapted.
	And so, because nature can only work on what is already available.
	And the five digits of the panda paw are all anatomically connected to each other with tendons and ligaments and muscles.
	So it can't Just do that.
	It was just easier for nature to work on the wrist bone.
	So that's an example of not an adaptation like we think of, like the eye.
	This is a sort of coaptation or a spandrel, an accidental evolutionary byproduct.
	And one of the great debates today now is religion, an accidental byproduct of something else, or was it Was it adaptive for its own reasons?
	And we don't have an answer to that.
	I mean, there's good arguments on both sides.
	Yeah, I mean, I just think of the number of people with knee and back problems because, you know, it's kind of tough going from quadruped to biped, you know.
	Sure, it's great, you know, because you have less of your skin exposed to the sun, so you can use more of your water to grow this giant brain.
	But nonetheless, it's kind of a crab.
	It sort of reminds me of, what do they call it, the Schirmer neck?
	You know, if you're a long-distance bicyclist, then everyone who's ridden bikes for a long time gets this kind of...
	On your neck, right?
	It's like, well, it's great fun, but it's not exactly...
	It is Sherman Neck, right?
	Did I get that right?
	Sherman Neck, that's right, yes.
	I'm telling you, a century from now, it's the only thing I'll be remembered for.
	It's wonderful to be known...
	The biggest thing you're known for is being a pain in the neck.
	That's a beautiful thing.
	That's going to be on the tombstone.
	This is a pain in the neck.
	It's a medical term.
	I do think, and this question has...
	I've been talking about this in my show for quite a while, that atheists have, of course, opposed religiosity, religious thinking, and there's science and there's lots of good rational arguments against it.
	But, you know, the purpose of religion remains the question.
	And if atheists have sort of disemboweled religion at the epistemological level or the metaphysical level too, but if it really served its purpose in the realm of ethics, then it is kind of incumbent, I think, upon atheists to work to create a moral structure to replace that which has fallen with religiosity.
	And to me, if atheists have evicted people from a church during a storm, well, they kind of need to give them some new housing to get them out of the storm.
	And that's been my biggest criticism of modern atheism is not working hard enough to create a moral framework because to my mind, the human mind is sort of it's like the one foot on the pier, the one foot on the boat situation.
	We are designed to process empirical reality because that's where the food is and that's where the shelter is.
	And if you get that wrong, as you point out, you make a category one error, well, you're lunch, right?
	And so we are designed to process empirical reality, but at the same time, we need social cohesion, which has a lot to do with somewhat irrational beliefs that are handed down by the tribe.
	We're a social animal.
	We need the cooperation of the tribe for our offspring to survive because of this ridiculous foreclosure.
	Fourth trimester, it takes so long for us to become functional as animals.
	It takes less like a year to do what a monkey can do in the first couple of hours.
	And so we need social support, which means we have to conform to the tribe.
	But at the same time, we also need to deal with empirical reality.
	And the values of the tribe and the empiricism of reality are often at odds.
	And the question is, why?
	And that to me, you know, this idea that there's an external agent watching you, making you be good, making you conform, making you support the tribe...
	Well, I could see that having significant adaptive advances and taking that away, I think, has proven quite challenging for the West.
	Sorry, that was a big, giant mess of stuff.
	I hope that you can extract something useful out of it.
	You're very articulate.
	You say things exactly right.
	We call that the shadow of enforcement.
	The idea, if you're going to have a self-governing people where you have smaller government and everybody just sort of takes care of their own, well, they need to have an internal governor.
	When the Founding Fathers of America talked about this, the internal governor was religion.
	It was like, yeah, religion's a good thing because, you know, they need it.
	And the argument was a little bit patronizing to citizens.
	Like, they need it, we don't, because most of the Founding Fathers were deists.
	They didn't believe in a personal God actively involved in the world.
	But, you know, but the masses need it.
	And that has been true to say over the millennium, that religion evolved along with government.
	About the same time, about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.
	And maybe even earlier, these finds at Gobekli Tepe, where they have these apparently religious-looking icons.
	Anyway, but it's old.
	And this goes back to Seneca.
	Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
	Exactly, exactly right.
	But what the Founding Fathers also did was to embody a set of Moral principles, call them rights and other things, that stand on their own.
	This is the enlightenment experiment, that these rights, they don't come on high.
	They're natural rights.
	It's natural law theory.
	You get it by dint of being born a human, and that's it.
	We have these rights by just being alive.
	Yes, of course, we need to protect them.
	That's why you need a military and a police and a constitution, rule of law, justice system, and so forth.
	But those don't define the rights.
	The rights are there in and of themselves.
	That's natural law theory.
	And so I think we, secularists, humanists, whatever, need to push that more as a positive agenda.
	We're not atheists.
	We are humanists.
	It's a more positive...
	Yes, we're atheists.
	But in atheism, there's no set of rights...
	Or principles of morals that anyone's laid out.
	But humanism has done that.
	And my concern about secular humanism is that it's become too political, left-leaning political.
	And if you don't go along with, there's a dozen or so central tenets that this is what we humanists believe.
	And maybe I'm on board with eight of the 12s.
	So when am I? And, you know, well, you're not really a humanist.
	Well, yeah, I am.
	Enlightenment humanism is a term that Steve Pinker talks about in The Better Angels of Our Nature.
	I like that.
	Classical liberalism, I think, is the more popular term that economists use or political theorists.
	Not modern progressive liberalism, but classical liberalism, which is more along the lines of modern libertarianism.
	Whatever it is that we end up talking about, whatever words we use, I agree with you that we need to do more of that and keep pushing that as society becomes more secular, which it is.
	You know, the rise of the nuns.
	I'm sure you're familiar with the numbers.
	The fastest growing group in America and all Western countries, in fact, are the people that tick the box for no religious preference, no religious affiliation.
	Now, these aren't necessarily atheist agnostics.
	You know, a lot of them are into Deepak Chopra, you know, the force be with you, and, you know, all this kind of new age stuff, but at least they reject traditional religion, which is a good thing.
	And so what are they replacing it with?
	Well, they have their own personal spirituality, but, you know.
	That's a kind of me-ism, you know, vague karma and deepities and stuff that they get from their massage therapist.
	Anyway, that's perhaps a topic for another time.
	But is it?
	See, this is the question, is it?
	And this is an argument from consequences, so I understand it is not an argument from principles, but consequences are important too.
	And I've noticed, and I've talked about this, the growing addiction, I would almost say, of people who are atheists or secular.
	To, you know, fairly lefty big government programs.
	I mean, the number of atheists who vote Democrat is vastly, vastly many, many times more than the people who vote to the right or who vote conservative.
	So the question then becomes, and this is where I do understand where the Christians are coming from.
	I think the Christian argument goes something like this, Mike.
	It says, okay, you can get rid of God if you want, and then you get rid of the watcher, right?
	As you've pointed out, they've done studies with kids where they say, you know, don't take a cookie and the kids will go and take a cookie.
	But if they say there's an invisible princess named Anne who will watch you if you take the cookie and you'll get in trouble, then they don't take the cookie.
	I mean you've created this injectable conscience through concepts, which is really quite a fascinating thing and reduces the social cost of enforcement enormously.
	You know, if you don't have to chase people around with police to get them to do right or chase them around with regulators to get them to do right or chase them down with the tax collectors to get them to give to the poor or something.
	well, it's much more efficient.
	So Christianity, by creating this injectable conformity conscience, has inoculized society to a large degree against the large state.
	Now, by getting rid of that and without providing an alternative, I think that as religion and conformity to those norms, you know, some of which I think, you know, don't steal.
	I mean, we're all going to be fine with those.
	Then the power of the state is the great seduction for those who have lost the power of the conscience through religion.
	And I think by removing the power or reducing the power of the conscience, it has driven people into the arms of state enforcement.
	And state enforcement in the West is not optional.
	Unlike, you know, religion is optional.
	If you live in a Christian society, you can be an atheist.
	You may suffer some negative social consequences, but you ain't going to jail.
	Whereas as bigger and bigger government programs come along, if you disagree with them, you know, you break the law, you don't pay your taxes or whatever, you're off to jail.
	So I think this is the concern to say, well, you can have all of the skepticism you want about religion, but if you carve out the conscience, you end up with the enforcement arm of the state, which is far less free than living in a religious society, at least a Christian society.
	And this is what's happened in Northern European countries where their rates of religiosity have plummeted in the last few decades down to single digits in some countries.
	And even those that have two-digit figures, maybe 20, 30, 40 percent believe in God.
	They're not actively involved.
	Churches are pretty much dormant.
	But one of the reasons for that, I think, different theories about this, is that The state has taken over much of the work that religion did.
	So taking care of the poor, manning the soup kitchens, and so on.
	If the state says, look, we're going to create a safety net where everyone's taken care of, and there are no poor, you know, there are no soup kitchens because there are no people on the street because we've taken care of them, well, then that takes one more thing away from religion for it to do.
	Now, most people on the left would say, hallelujah, you know, political left.
	I mean, they say, you know, that's a good thing.
	Okay.
	Yeah, maybe.
	Yes.
	All right.
	But, you know, is there another solution to that?
	Do you have to...
	Is it just between big government and big religion?
	And can we have some other solutions to these social problems?
	And I think we can.
	I think there's different experiments.
	Well, there used to be.
	I mean, there used to be.
	And we can look at Japan as well as far as increasingly secular and increasingly statist.
	I call them statheists.
	Just a statist atheist in my shorthand.
	a statist atheist in my shorthand.
	But that, of course, is the big challenge.
	But that, of course, is the big challenge.
	And there's a number of arguments for the religious approach to these things, which is that for you to solve social problems in a religious community, you get involved.
	And there's a number of arguments for the religious approach to these things, which is that for you to solve social problems in a religious community, you get involved.
	You go visit the poor rather than just vote for some politician to print money to send them and devalue everyone's savings.
	You have to get involved.
	You have to try and get people out of poverty rather than just send them checks, which usually creates a permanent dependent underclass that's going to vote for a bigger and bigger government.
	And last but not least, of course, the church cannot spiral the unborn into bottomless debt in order to feed the moral and charitable vanity of existing voters.
	They have to actually use their own money to go and help the poor, where politicians, of course, borrow and print and sell bonds and create a whole bunch of funny money in order to assuage the moral conscience of their voters.
	And so, inarguably, given that it's voluntary, participative, have the goal of solving the problem of poverty and can't enslave the next generation into debt, you could say that the religious solution to social problems has a lot going for it relative to not the atheist solution, but the leftist solutions.
	Yes.
	Yes, well, you know, Clinton tried to, Bill that is, tried to, you know, modify the welfare system in the 90s, you know, with some success, some not so successful examples of that.
	I think the long-term solution is to eliminate poverty through science and technology, you know, through what's called post-scarcity economics, Star Trek economics.
	That is, everyone has a replicator in their house and everyone has plenty to eat.
	Now, this sounds like complete science fiction.
	But in fact, the UN and the Gates Foundation both are projecting the end of poverty by 2030.
	That is in 14, 13 years.
	But of course, that's not what you and I are talking about.
	When they're talking about poverty, that's $2.50 a day, mostly in Africa.
	Extreme poverty, $1.25 a day in 2016 dollars.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to remind people who maybe get depressed about world events, look at the reduction of poverty over the last quarter century in the world.
	It is by far the most staggering advancement Even Jesus said, you know, the poor will always have with you, and the only thing religion could offer from him to Mother Teresa was comfort in the next life.
	You know, that's not what people need.
	They don't need comfort in the next life.
	They need water.
	They need food.
	They need shelter.
	They need vitamins.
	Well, they did provide charity, but they didn't provide the kind of free market opportunities that lifted all the boats.
	That's right, yeah.
	And that's where we're heading.
	It's happening.
	It's exciting.
	I agree.
	It'll be the most moral thing that's ever happened, you know, ending poverty.
	I mean, I wrote a book about this, The Moral Arc, you know.
	Civil rights, civil liberties, all these things are great, but the basic needs of life, who cares about civil rights if you don't have anything to eat tonight?
	They're all tied up, but that's why I admire the Gates Foundation.
	You know, they're really focused on solving some of the most basic problems there are.
	And then we can deal with the other higher order issues, you know, once we get people out of poverty.
	But, yeah, it's coming to an end.
	That's the long-term solution, I think, to get rid of both big government and big religion is get people out of poverty.
	Well, again, this comes back to what I hope is a sort of stereoclarion call to secularists, to atheists, to humanists, which is the question of meaning, the question of conscience, the question of virtue that, you know, the old Socratic argument that reason equals virtue equals happiness is something the old Socratic argument that reason equals virtue equals happiness is something that we really need to work Tearing down religion has...
	It's created some opportunities and has certainly ameliorated some of the frantic paranoia that occurs from people raised to believe that a satanic force is always watching them and they're, you know, one footfall on a slippery slope away from falling into hell itself.
	And I, you know, have often said that this is a horrifying way, in particular, to raise children, to put them in this George Orwell, you know, bearded father is always watching and about to whip you with his lash of many flames.
	But at the same time, it has challenged people in terms of, woohoo, we're free of rules, we're free of consequences, and there has, I think, been a bit of a Nietzschean will-to-power struggle that has occurred that has, I think, taken down some of the higher angels of our nature.
	And it is, I think, incumbent upon those who set fire to the church, as I mentioned, to provide some alternate accommodations and to give people a sense of virtue, a sense of morality, a sense of community.
	And I know that you've been working on this, which is why I was excited to chat today.
	I know Sam Harris has been working on this.
	I've certainly been working on this for many years.
	And that, I think, is more important now than taking down another argument for God, is to give people a place to live where they have meaning and have a sense of virtue and have a sense of a commitment to something larger than themselves.
	Because I think a bit of materialistic selfishness can come out of a stripping of the divine.
	Absolutely.
	And, you know, religion has been at this for millennia, so they have it down.
	You know, we've got the churches and the socials and the music and the free parking.
	You know, we need to take note of that.
	And there's a lot of secular and humanist organizations that have these, you know, gatherings on Sundays.
	Much like the Unitarian Universalists do.
	They sing tunes and hymns to Newton and Darwin and whatnot.
	Light candles and phrase Einstein.
	All that's great.
	It's not my thing.
	I'd rather just go for a bike ride on Sunday mornings.
	But a lot of people, they like that.
	A lot of my friends that are atheists, they like that.
	They like going to those things.
	Okay, great.
	So let's just have a marketplace of all kinds of different solutions.
	But the underlying current I think that you're after here is It's inculcating into our thinking and make it part of our nature, almost like second nature, these moral values.
	And that's one of the things that Pinker and I and Sam and others have been working on is that just sort of studying how that's happened over the centuries.
	Stephen in The Better Angel of Our Nature has a whole chapter devoted to the civilizing process, which he got from A German sociologist named, oh gosh, his book was called The Civilizing Process.
	The name will come to me.
	We'll link to it below so people can check it out.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Anyway, but the argument was that starting in the late Middle Ages, people started mining their manners.
	There were these books of manners and courtesy and customs and, you know, like don't take a knife at the dinner table and stab people.
	Your piece of meat.
	Stick it in your mouth.
	No double dipping.
	No cursing.
	Don't urinate in the hallways.
	Hundreds of things that Make it look like our ancestors were just gross, disgusting people.
	I mean, they just did these, just disgusting, you know, and it's true.
	Well, they were.
	What's the old story of the French king?
	Opened his windows to enjoy the view of Paris and fainted from the stench of the sewage running in the gutters and, oh my, it's horrifying.
	And, you know, people, cars are polluting.
	Man, do you ever walk behind a horse?
	Anyway, go on.
	Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
	So the idea is that by learning to curb your inner impulses for little things, You also learn to curb your impulses for the bigger things like violence and aggression.
	So maybe I've learned to count to ten and sort of control my urges about eating and how I use utensils and blow my nose and just really basic stuff.
	But that also means if you and I get in a little tussle at a bar, I'm less likely to kill you over some meaninglessly, you scratched my car, you insulted my girlfriend, whatever.
	You know, these are typical things that guys fight about, particularly after they've had a few drinks, because the alcohol lowers your impulse control.
	So, but anyway, the idea is that over the centuries, we've become more civilized in the sense of impulse control, and we've learned to delay gratification.
	You know, the famous little marshmallow experiments with, you know, the kid has one marshmallow now, he can have two if he waits 15 minutes, and These videos are hilarious that these kids are just tormenting themselves, trying not to eat that marshmallow for 15 minutes so they can get a second one.
	Sorry, just for those who don't know, it's horrifyingly predictive.
	For those who don't like genes and IQ, genes and intelligence and so on, the kids who are able to defer gratification when they're I think it's about four that they have these experiments.
	The kids who are able to wait to get the two marshmallows in 15 minutes rather than one now, very significantly end up making more money, having more stable marriages, having better lives, better health, longevity.
	I mean, it is astounding what is predictive at four, and it's just worth for people to explore that more because it's very thought-provoking.
	Sorry, Mike, go ahead.
	Yeah, no, that's right.
	I just remembered the other guy's name, Norbert Elias, the civilizing process.
	And so his argument is that over the centuries, we've all gotten better at that.
	All the boats have, you know, the tide has risen.
	All of us are better at self-control.
	And the studies of violence and aggression and homicide, for example, show that about 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature.
	That is, the person I killed deserved to die.
	That bastard scratched my car.
	He insulted me.
	He, you know, he cheated at cards, whatever.
	And, uh, Only about 10% are instrumental.
	That is, I killed him because I wanted his Rolex or his car.
	Usually, when burglars burgle your house, they're hoping you're not home.
	They just want your stuff.
	They don't want to kill you.
	Often, these things happen by accident.
	A person comes home.
	Mostly, 90% of these homicides are moralistic in nature.
	The central core of reducing that is to get people to control themselves.
	Instead of killing this person you're angry with, Control your impulse.
	Count to ten.
	Leave the room.
	Stop talking to this person.
	Turn off Twitter and social media.
	Stay off of it for a day.
	In the long run, I think we just need to continue doing more of that, just teaching people to inculcate into their thinking all the rights revolutions that have happened over the centuries and all the things that we think of as Secular humanist values are values that everybody should embrace.
	They've become second nature and we don't even think about it anymore.
	Like the abolition of torture, how people used to treat other humans or animals.
	Cat baiting and bear baiting and all these things that people used to do to animals are pretty unthinkable now.
	Bullfighting is probably going to be gone.
	I don't think anyone will do bullfighting anymore within a few years.
	It's basically like having a court system as opposed to having a big vat of boiling water you had to reach in I mean, and all of these arise out of skepticism.
	And this is where I really want to bring the conversation to because skepticism has a kind of sour lemon taste in many people's mouth.
	Oh, he's a skeptic.
	He can't enjoy anything.
	He's sitting in a hammock, probably doesn't even really believe it's a hammock, whatever it is.
	But this kind of skepticism is literally the salvation of civilization.
	And to me, civilization and skepticism are hand in hand because skepticism means – it's having the fundamental Socratic humility to say, I don't know what I don't know.
	Is this person innocent or guilty?
	Let's have the evidence.
	Let's have the arguments.
	Let's cross successes.
	Let's allow the presumption of innocence and the right to confront his accuser and so on.
	And let's get to the bottom.
	Let's get to the truth.
	And to me, skepticism is one of the fundamental humilities.
	That allows us to have civilized discussions.
	Nothing is more anti-civilizational than an appallingly aggressive certainty in my particular viewpoint.
	Because if you are certain in the absence of knowledge, you can't be reasoned with.
	And in the absence of reason, if events escalate, violence is almost always the outcome.
	And so, given that, you know, Skeptic Magazine, you started in your garage many, many decades ago.
	Sorry, I shouldn't say that because you look so stunningly young.
	But this...
	Issue of skepticism.
	I wonder if you could talk about, you know, I know you're happily married, but I really feel that your mistress has been skepticism low these many years.
	Yes, well, I agree that it's where all knowledge begins with skepticism.
	And, you know, it really goes back to Descartes and the Enlightenment.
	And, you know, we can know nothing except we, well, but wait, we know that there's a doubter.
	We know that there's a skeptic who's doing skepticism.
	So from there, you build a worldview that Based on science and reason and logic and critical thinking.
	And there are things we can know, you know, but you have to, it has to be evidence-based.
	We have to ask, what do we really know?
	And all the checks and balances that do workarounds of our attempts to have and achieve certainty so I can impose my values on you.
	Wait, wait, maybe you're not right.
	Maybe you don't know.
	I just turned in my column yesterday, my monthly column of Scientific American for May on torture.
	So the title is On Witches and Terrorists.
	Because of the conversations about maybe torture works or whatever.
	It doesn't work.
	No, it really doesn't.
	And that's very well established.
	It works in a sense of purging people's emotions in the moment.
	But as far as practical outcomes, if we can strip the moral question, the practical outcomes are worse than useless because they have people chasing around made-up Kaiser Soze fantasies that people kick up simply because you're pulling their fingernails out and you don't actually get to the real answer.
	You know, if torture worked, why do we have a legal system?
	That's right.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So I opened this column with the story from the Duke of Brunswick at the height of the witch craze in Germany.
	And he called, he was concerned about the use of torture and essentially waterboarding and other, the rack and so on.
	So he called in these two Jesuit scholars to go investigate the Inquisition.
	You know, how are they doing?
	And they came back and said, oh, they're doing great.
	They're doing their duty.
	They haven't prosecuted a single innocent person.
	They're all guilty of it.
	So he said, well, all right, let's accompany me down to the dungeon.
	So they got a woman on the rack, and he says, now, woman, you are a confessed witch.
	I suspect these two men here with me are being warlocks.
	What say you?
	Executioner, another turn of the rack, please.
	And she's like, no, no, no.
	You're right.
	I've seen both of them on the Sabbath.
	They became warlocks, and they had sex with these women, and the children were frogs and snakes, and Spiders, and they could fly around in brooms.
	And, of course, the Jesuits are sitting there like, holy crap.
	If this wasn't a friend that set this up, we'd be screwed.
	And one of these is a guy named Frederick Spee who wrote a book called Cassio Criminalis, Latin.
	That is, we should be very careful about how we do this because clearly people give false confessions.
	Mind you, this guy still believed in witches.
	He says right at the beginning of his book, oh, I know witches are true.
	Absolutely.
	Of course, there are demons and witches.
	I'm not saying that.
	I'm just saying torture doesn't work.
	That was really the beginning of the abolition of torture.
	That's a good example of the problem of having certainty and that we should have doubts about everything.
	It's not that we don't believe in things.
	Skeptics believe all sorts of things.
	I believe the Big Bang Theory of the Creation of the universe.
	I believe in the theory of evolution.
	I believe in the germ theory of disease.
	Lots of things because there's evidence.
	And that's the bottom line.
	Right.
	And when you pursue knowledge based on skepticism, it is the surrender of the willed ego or the preference for outcome and this subjugation to reason in theory or in hypothesis and evidence in practice.
	And that definition of truth, first of all, It is conditional, because certainly with science, there are not quite as many revisions and adjustments as people tend to claim, but there certainly are improved measurements, new information that comes along and tweaks to existing theories, which means you kind of have to view truth not as a destination, But as a surf, you know, like you're surfing, you're kind of balancing on reason and evidence and you may end up in a different place.
	That can be challenging for people who want to just sink their stakes deep into conclusions and not move from there.
	And, you know, keep moving, people!
	Keep moving!
	Keep moving!
	I mean, that's the important thing and that can be a challenge for some people.
	And it does do the wonderful thing, though, of pushing back against dogma.
	You know, we're either progressing or regressing generally as a society.
	and when dogma has been invested with absolute moral value.
	And you can look at this, of course, on religious sites.
	You can also look at this on the left in sort of the hysterical political correctness.
	You know, everyone's a racist.
	Everyone's a fascist.
	Everyone's a sexist.
	Punch all the Nazis you can find.
	And if you can't find them, just call someone a Nazi and, you know, continue your exercise as before.
	And this is the real challenge that the subtlety and curiosity and humility of skepticism and the scientific method, you don't know what you know.
	And this to me is the beautiful story of Socrates, you know, who was told by a friend, the oracle, the Delphi said he was the wisest man alive.
	And he said, well, that's crazy.
	I really don't know anything and goes through questions all the sophists.
	And then he's like, oh, I get it.
	I don't know stuff.
	But at least I know that, and that makes me wise.
	And that humility is a real challenge, and it seems to me that a lot of people have kind of wandered into public discourse.
	I mean, it's great the Internet allows us to have these conversations, I hope, and I believe it does a lot of people good.
	You know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are going to listen to this over time.
	But it's also given a giant megaphone to people who aren't contributing much about the dogma and retrogressive perspectives to the social discourse.
	And as the volume of dogmatic people rises, I think that some of our staunchness and ferocity must rise as well.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, really, skepticism is the basis of science.
	Scientists are skeptics.
	We start with the null hypothesis.
	We start with the assumption that your claim is not true until proven otherwise.
	And when it is, then we'll accept it.
	And that's a good place to start.
	To me, it's what makes science so exciting because, you know, you don't know what we're going to find out the next day.
	We don't have the answers.
	Every scientific theory could go the way of phlogiston and other wrong ideas.
	You just don't know.
	Now, I would be surprised if, say, theory of evolution turned out not to be true.
	It'll be modified little bits here and there, but, you know, But there's a lot of others that are right on the...
	You know, we just don't know about string theory.
	We don't have a good theory of consciousness at the moment.
	There's a bunch of these, you know, dozens that we just don't know.
	And a lot of people think, well, that means science isn't working.
	No, that means it is working.
	You know, that's what graduate students are for.
	They've got to have something to do.
	You know, you have to push out into what we don't know yet and find more answers.
	And so it's the search.
	You're right.
	It's the journey.
	It's the process.
	It's not an end goal that we achieve.
	It's like we're just never...
	Never there, we're always working on it.
	It's not a portrait, it's a window you go through.
	Now, let's talk about two things, if that's alright with you.
	Number one is the evolution of science, because in the modern age, at least for those who are pro-science, if that means anything...
	It's kind of taken for granted.
	You know, of course, you know, the sun is the center of the solar system and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	But the evolution of science has been a really exciting and challenging phenomenon.
	I mean, the scientific method in many ways was known to ancient Aristotle, but it was not particularly, you know, formulated by Francis Bacon, and then it moved forward slowly and painfully against sometimes, and sometimes with the support of religion.
	You know, there's this general cliche based on Galileo that the church was always against science, but...
	It really was not the case.
	The Church did fund a lot of science and was pro-science in many ways.
	But you, of course, have studied this quite extensively.
	Could you give people – I know it's a lot to ask – if you could give people a fairly brief synopsis of how the hell we got here into this wild, wild world where we turn to reason and evidence, at least for the solution of material matters.
	Yeah, well, so it really begins with the scientific revolution and the idea that the universe is governed by laws and principles that we can know and understand.
	And that really begins with Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton.
	And from there, it went from the physical sciences to the biological sciences and medicine to the social sciences and psychology and human behavior in the Enlightenment.
	And so really, for centuries, we've been just applying this central core idea that there are Principles we can go out into the world and discover, figure out how they work, and then apply them to the world to change it, to make the world a better place for us to live in.
	And that's what we've been doing, and it works pretty damn well.
	And this is one of the arguments I make in The Moral Arc, is that the idea that there's a moral science, that we can figure out what's right and wrong based on how we live and the quality of life and the well-being and...
	Conscious creatures, I think is the way Sam puts it, or the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, as I put it.
	There's lots of different ways to kind of say it.
	Kind of a utilitarian argument, but basically that we can actually know and figure out what's the best way to live.
	And there are certain, say, government programs and experiments that work better than others.
	There are certain economic experiments that work better than others, and we can measure it.
	My low-hanging fruit there is North Korea versus South Korea.
	It can't get much more stark of a difference than that.
	It's the same people.
	Fifty years ago, they were the same country.
	What happened?
	Just two different political economic systems.
	These are natural experiments that you can't run like a physicist would run an experiment at the CERN, but they're already experiments that are happening naturally, so let's go collect the data.
	And that's another thing that we've been doing.
	That's part of science.
	And people don't think of that as science.
	They think, well, the physics is the hard sciences.
	Well, the math is hard.
	It's true.
	But the social sciences, psychologists, you know, we have the hard, the really hard problem.
	Figure out how an economy works.
	Well, that is really hard because there's so many variables.
	Anyway, in short, looking forward, you know, the way you put it was, you know, we don't even know what we don't know.
	Right.
	I have no idea.
	This is one of the best arguments for being chronically frozen and being brought back 500 years from now.
	Just what in the world are they saying about the people in the 21st century?
	Look what those idiot people believed in 2010, 2015.
	Can you believe it?
	I mean, it was like we believe in witches or something to be the equivalent of that, and I have no idea what that is.
	No one knows.
	And the sort of the consequentialist arguments, I mean, I think are important.
	I've certainly argued for those in my book of ethics from a From a philosophical perspective, generally, if you're going to categorize human beings as having rights, but then you create a separate group of human beings with opposing rights, you've committed a classification error.
	You know, like, all mammals are warm-blooded, but I'm going to toss these blue lizards in and call them mammals anyway.
	It's like, nope, nope, nope, nope, you've got it.
	So if all human beings have property rights, then creating a group of human beings with the capacity to violate property rights at will, such as the communist government and so on, Is a fundamental classification error, which is the most boring anti-communist statement.
	Classification error!
	You know, it's not very rousing and it won't fit on a sign very well, but philosophically speaking, you are not creating a consistent system.
	If you're saying, well, all human beings have these rights and properties, except for these guys, who can do whatever they want at will using force.
	The initiation of force is really, really bad, except for this group who can...
	It doesn't work logically in the outcome of it.
	As these rights widen between rulers and rules, the outcomes get worse.
	Just as if biology managed to screw up all of its classifications, the science would rapidly become incomprehensible and possibly even destructive to human understanding.
	Now, let us turn...
	To my most precious question.
	Ah, my precious.
	So, there is something that I guard against materialists.
	I'm not putting you in that category, right?
	I'm just in general.
	And that I have most in common with Christians in particular, but others.
	And I fiercely guard this like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with its most beloved eggs, and that is the question.
	of free will.
	And that is something that I think there are some tensions in the atheist community, not just because of the materialism and the idea that, you know, all matter follows particular mechanical rules.
	Matter and energy follow the rules of physics.
	You can't just create an exception for the couple of pounds of wetware between the ears and so on.
	That, of course, is one challenge.
	And also, of course, people on the left tend to look at economic determinism.
	You Well, there's crime because there's poverty.
	It's just dominoes that fall.
	There's no particular free will, as opposed to you could, I think, even more strongly create the case that there's poverty because there's crime.
	But anyway, this question on the left of economic determinism, or you're defined in your essence by your relations to the means of production or whatever, and among other Scientific folk and secular folk, the idea that there's no ghost in the machine, right?
	That there is not any animating principle that defies physics, that inhabits the human mind, that gives us choice.
	It's important to talk about your biases, and this is a giant bias of mine.
	I will give up free will with my last dying breath, but at least I'll choose to give it up.
	So I know that you've talked about this stuff.
	What are your thoughts in this area?
	As near as I can tell, I'm in agreement with you on this.
	I'm a compatibilist, so-called compatibilist as it's called.
	Probably the most famous compatibilist today would be Dan Dennett.
	His book, Freedom Evolves, I think is highly influential in this area.
	I have an old chapter devoted to free will and the moral arc in which I make basically four arguments.
	Yes, the world is determined.
	The scientists didn't get it wrong.
	There is no ghost in the machine.
	And even if there was a ghost in the machine, that doesn't give you free will.
	It's just the ghost making, or the soul, or whatever, making the decisions for you and your brain.
	So that doesn't even work anyway.
	But there is no such thing.
	But, okay, so first of all, This idea that there's parts of your brain that make decisions before you even know.
	These famous Benjamin LeBay experiments and now they can scan your brain with EEGs and so on.
	We know which thing you're going to pick on the menu before you even know because we can see it in your brain scan.
	First of all, it's your brain.
	It's not like there's somebody else's brain for it.
	It's all your brain.
	It's all in your skull.
	You are an autonomous individual within your skin, within your skull.
	It's you making that decision.
	Also, it's not like the values you hold prior to that decision haven't influenced your automatic response.
	It is a cycle.
	You have particular perspectives and particular ideas.
	Of course, if you are A reasonable anti-racist, and this is what your views are, and you see a picture of a KKK march, why, yes, you're going to have a negative reaction, and probably the brain scan can pick that up.
	But if you're some horrible racist, then you may be in that march and thinking it's a wonderful thing.
	So the fact that you have these values which then influence your automatic responses, I think, is important.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	The last thing I'll mention is that that's the first commandment of Socrates, know thyself.
	If you know your impulses, as we talked about earlier...
	You can intercept in the quarter second you have from your amygdala firing off your fists to hit someone.
	You have the capacity to intercept yourself.
	If you know that you have, say, a bad temper and you work on it and you learn your cues and you learn your impulses, yeah, the impulse is to temper.
	It's not to hitting people.
	You have control over that if you're willing to examine your own motives sufficiently.
	Absolutely.
	It's back to that impulse control thing.
	So another example that everyone uses, including me, is this Mr.
	Oft.
	OFT, just a pseudonym of this character, this middle-aged guy that had a brain tumor.
	Well, anyway, back up.
	He became a pedophile.
	He started inappropriately touching his stepdaughter.
	His wife panics, turns him in, and he's in big trouble.
	He's about to ship off to rehab in jail when it's discovered that he has a brain tumor pressing up against his orbital frontal cortex.
	And so they remove the tumor.
	He no longer has these pedophilic feelings for his stepdaughter or anything else.
	And, you know, six months later, all of a sudden, his wife catches him watching kiddie porn.
	Okay, brain scan, tumor's back, take the tumor out.
	Okay, so this is often used as an example of, you know, he's not a pedophile.
	He's a victim of a medical condition.
	He has a tumor.
	What's the difference between having a tumor and having just an incredibly crappy background or you were dropped on your head or whatever happened in your background that made you a criminal, whatever it is.
	And so that's the argument.
	So Dennett's ideas of degrees of freedom that he introduces in his book, Freedom Evolves, is that they always use that example, the guy with the tumor.
	And you and I don't have a tumor.
	So the addict, the drug addict, the alcoholic...
	You know, these are extreme examples over here.
	You and I are here, and maybe the dog is here, and the cockroach is over here, and you know, the single-cell organism is to the far left.
	You know, there are degrees of freedom.
	That is, how many choices do you have at any particular juncture in your day, say?
	And we have many more degrees of freedom than my dog has, for example, and he has more degrees of freedom than maybe the cockroach.
	And so on.
	Again, it's not libertarian free will where you really are free.
	No, but there are degrees of freedom.
	You have more options.
	And it's still you making the choice.
	And your example is that I can become aware that if I go shopping on an empty stomach, I'm likely to buy stuff I probably shouldn't be eating.
	But I'm aware of that fact.
	So I'm going to eat something before I go shopping.
	I'm not going to have the ice cream available in the fridge.
	Knowing that I act this way.
	There's a good book on this by Roy Baumeister called Willpower.
	Willpower implies that you have a will.
	That's true.
	You do.
	You do.
	You do have a will.
	Knowing yourself means knowing what are the conditions in which I'm likely to do this or likely to do that.
	And so although a determinist would say, yeah, but we knew which way you were going to go from the beginning of the universe since the Big Bang.
	Well, you still can know these are the conditions that are more likely to push me this way, so I'm going to go that way.
	And so your choices may be, the universe is determined, but your choices within the causal net of the universe are still your choices, and so you are responsible for them.
	Yes, we make exceptions for the drug addict, you know, the schizophrenic, whatever.
	We make exceptions because of those degrees of freedom.
	But most of the time, most of us, in most circumstances, make choices and we are responsible for them.
	Well, very, very well put.
	I would add one or two more thoughts.
	And if you have your bike helmet handy, it might be a good time to put it on because my rant might blow back your hair.
	No, this drives me crazy because surely we should pursue more knowledge.
	More knowledge, right?
	So, I mean, one of the debates which you've talked about recently is the question of genetic components to homosexuality or heterosexuality.
	I've made the case for many years that my particular belief, which is conditional upon new evidence but seems to be supported by a lot of the existing stuff, is that it's genetic.
	It's genetic.
	It's not a choice.
	Now, there are people on the right and people who are Christians or other religious denominations who believe that it's a choice because it's described as a sin and you can't possibly make a genetic condition a sin.
	So there's a lot of complicated stuff around that.
	But if we find out that it's almost exclusively genetic, that's important.
	That has significant outcomes in terms of free will.
	I didn't choose to be heterosexual any more than a homosexual would choose to be homosexual.
	It's just the way the brain and the hormones and the system has worked itself out.
	But surely we want more knowledge.
	I mean, if I know that my family has a history of heart disease, then that gives me a choice.
	I can choose to then just say, well, I'm going to be dead by 40, so smoke and drink and, you know, stay up all night and gain weight because, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy.
	Or I can say, I think I'm going to go out with Dr.
	Mike on a bike ride because I've got to stay lean and mean and keep my ticker clean because I have this genetic susceptibility.
	So surely we want more and more choice.
	You know, it's like the old joke about, it's not really a joke, but a sort of free will mention of, You know, two twins, right?
	One's an alcoholic and the other one isn't.
	And they say to the one who's an alcoholic, why are you an alcoholic?
	And he's like, ah, my father was an alcoholic.
	It's genetic.
	You know, this is what I do.
	And you say to the other one, why aren't you an alcoholic?
	He's like, oh man, I saw what my dad did.
	That's the last kind of life I ever wanted.
	And so I never touch the stuff.
	And so surely you want more information.
	Science can give us that information.
	That's number one.
	Number two, it seems to me that everyone who's alive is enjoying the emergent property called life that exists nowhere in any of your individual atoms.
	None of your carbon atoms are alive.
	Yet magically, this pile of carbon atoms can have a conversation about carbon atoms with another pile of carbon atoms.
	Through the internet.
	So, the emergent property called life is why we're able to even have discussions about this stuff.
	The idea that there's not an emergent property called consciousness that is greater than the sum of its parts.
	Ah, you know, carbon atoms don't decide to go for lunch, but I can decide to go for lunch.
	So, you know, this to me is, you know, it's kind of simplistic to reduce us to our atoms and our mere physical properties because then you don't get life, let alone consciousness.
	And the last part is that for the hardcore determinists that I've had, Ooh, just a few of them on my show, Happy Debates.
	But for hardcore determinists, they say, your brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe.
	It's like the weather.
	Maybe we can't predict it all, but we don't think that it's alive.
	And it's like, well, do you ever have arguments with the weather?
	No, that would be crazy.
	Well, we're just like rocks bouncing down a hill.
	We don't know where the rock's going to land, but we don't assume it's choosing something.
	Do you ever have debates with rocks bouncing down the hill?
	No, that would be insane.
	So you're saying my brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, but to discuss free will with anything other than a human brain would be completely insane.
	So it's exactly the same as everything else, but you have to treat it singularly as completely opposite from everything else.
	It's just not a logically consistent position.
	So I just wanted to sort of get your thoughts on that because...
	And also the basic fact that people are coming to try and change your mind about whether you can change your mind just seems to me a bit of a self-detonating argument.
	You really need to change your mind about free will.
	I need to convince you that you can't change your mind.
	Do you know what you're doing here?
	Is there a mirror in the house that you can look at?
	So, where do you see things going at the moment?
	I mean, this is a very, very big picture question, but I know you can take it.
	And that is, one of the problems with atheist societies or secular societies, you don't really have so many of the kids.
	That seems to be a rather significant problem if you look at Japan, you know, with its 1.1 birth rate and so on.
	And as religion has fallen down in Western Europe and in Northern Europe, I mean, birth rates are way below replacement levels.
	Kind of ironically, as religion goes down, a lot of groups that could be considered somewhat more religious are entering into Europe, perhaps as a way of making up the shortfall when it comes to kids.
	That to me, you know, biologically speaking, I can sort of see how atheism didn't evolve because it seems to be not so positive on having kids.
	In other words, it selects itself out of the gene pool because of a preference for something other than children.
	So where do you see sort of Western rationalism versus other societies and other cultures going?
	Because it seems to be a little bit of a crossroads at the moment.
	Yeah, well, first of all, atheists like sex as much as anybody, so I don't think that's going to go down.
	What we do know is that when women are educated and given power, economic opportunity, and especially, of course, access to affordable birth control, then populations go down.
	So, unfortunately, at the moment, in Africa, in African countries, overpopulation is still a problem.
	In Muslim countries, in particular, women don't have as much economic power and therefore choice, and therefore they have more kids.
	I'm mildly concerned about, first of all, I don't think overpopulation is an existential threat to the species at all, like a lot of people still seem to harbor for all the reasons you just said.
	Yes, there are a few pockets where there's still overpopulation problems in Africa and some of these Muslim countries, but getting them democracy, trade, education, particularly the women, it'll solve itself.
	In the meantime, I think sort of combating the more extreme forms of religious violence is the best we can do.
	We have to do that.
	I don't think ISIS or any, you know, Islam is an existential threat to civilization, but it is a problem that we have to face, talk about it, speak honestly about it, as many of us are, and, you know, that's part of the problem.
	The regressive left doesn't want to do that, and the alt-right is going too far the other way, you know, so we have to, you know, sort of chart a course in between those two extremes, and I think we will do that.
	I think in centuries from now, the population problem will be solved just economically.
	We'll never run out of oil.
	We'll never have too many people.
	And I don't mean mass starvation and famine.
	No, I think people will just gain control over the size of the families they want.
	We'll end up with 2 or 3 billion probably.
	That'll probably be about a sustainable number by 2,200 maybe, something like that.
	So I'm not too worried about that.
	I'm not worried about AI as an existential threat either.
	This seems to be a favorite topic.
	What's the latest existential threat?
	The only thing really is nuclear weapons that could do it.
	And even that, we've gotten a pretty good handle on.
	We're down from about 84,000 nuclear weapons in the mid-80s down to about 10,000 now.
	It's still enough that could be fairly threatening.
	It's moving in the right direction.
	Maybe Trump and Putin could be jockeying a little bit in ways that we don't want, but maybe not.
	But a lot less than Hillary Clinton, who threatened to attack Russia if she thought they might be doing something untoward on the Internet.
	So I'll take my chances with Mr.
	Trump myself.
	Again, before we push the panic button, let's just wait and see here.
	And the long-term trends are almost all positives over the long term.
	Decades and centuries.
	Again, follow the trend lines, not the headlines.
	That's where the optimism is.
	So I'm an optimist.
	Excellent, excellent.
	And upcoming projects that you wanted to mention, speaking tours, gigs where you'll be playing live with YouTube, anything like that that people need to be aware of?
	Yes, I'm opening for YouTube.
	No, so, well, I just turned in my manuscript.
	My next big book is called Heavens on Earth.
	And that'll be out about a year from now.
	It's about the quest for immortality and perfectibility.
	So the immortality part, of course, all the religious attempts at achieving heaven and the afterlife.
	But the core of the book is what I call afterlife for atheists.
	These are all the attempts at radical life extension, cryonics, transhumanism, the extropians, they're against entropy, mind uploading, the singularity, All this stuff.
	It's all really super interesting.
	And most of the people that I've met are uber pro-science and technology.
	Most of them are atheists.
	They love science.
	They think science is going to save us and all that.
	But they just go too far.
	It's like Ray Kurzweil.
	I think he's great.
	You know, the singularity is coming in 2030, and it's going to happen in our lifetime, and we all get to live forever.
	You know, okay, you know what?
	People have been saying this for thousands of years.
	I'm still doing my sit-ups.
	Zero percent, you know, success rate.
	Okay, so what are the chances that you're the one that, okay.
	Just once, I'd like one of these guys to go, okay, the big thing is going to happen, and we're going to get to live forever, and it's going to happen in 2345.
	Well, that's not particularly interesting.
	It's too far away.
	They always put it right within, just within reach, long enough to sell books, but not so close that you can be proven wrong tomorrow.
	Yeah.
	Well, see, this is what people don't understand about my YouTube channel.
	It is my play for immortality because I'm hoping in the future they can simply reassemble me from my YouTube channel.
	So my afterlife will be being stuck in a white room having fascinating conversations while yelling at a camera.
	So I can live with that because, you know, it's a pretty great life.
	But that's, you know, just a note for people from the future.
	Assemble me from the digits.
	That's what Kurt Kurzweil literally wants to do.
	He wants to bring his father back.
	Yeah.
	His father died at age 51, and he has this huge basement.
	This is all in this film.
	No, it's Transcendent Man.
	It's a documentary about him.
	And his whole basement, his house, is all of his father's stuff, including recordings of him.
	And ultimately, make an AI that's his dad and bring him back.
	It's kind of a resurrection scenario.
	I just don't think this is realistic.
	Of course, I understand the sentiments behind it, but In any case, even if we copied you and brought you back 500 years from now, I don't think it's you.
	It's not like you go to sleep tonight and you wake up tomorrow.
	Through your own eyeballs looking at the world, it's still you.
	There's a continuity there.
	500 years from now when we're able to do this and have all the recordings of your YouTube videos and stuff.
	I mean, how much of me are the memories that I've never shared with anyone that would be inaccessible to any genetic manipulation?
	I mean, how much of me and my experiences which would not be susceptible to genetic manipulation?
	And I don't think it would even get as close as that abomination known as almond milk, but that just might be a personal taste.
	So I think we have to remember to try and have as much impact positively in the world I'm always a little bit concerned that the thirst for immortality can turn your day into a little bit more procrastination.
	Maybe I'm on a bit of a treadmill panic to have an impact before the great beyond swallows me, but I am always a little bit concerned that the quest for immortality I don't know, maybe it's an unprocessed grieving process for a much-loved father who died young, or maybe it's a feeling that you're not getting enough done with your life.
	But if you have an eternity, maybe you will, but I'm going to stay with the panic of mortality for my particular spur in the horse.
	Yeah, well, this is what I say to these immortalists.
	It's like, just, you know, go out and enjoy today.
	I mean, you know...
	Maybe you're right.
	Maybe this is all going to happen.
	But, you know, if you're on this uber low-calorie diet so you can live a little bit longer and you're in a state of starvation almost all day every day, you know, you call that living?
	That's not living.
	And I think that's been disproven to some degree.
	So the people who emaciated themselves for...
	You know, a couple of extra minutes of being hungry at the end of it all.
	They may not even have been correct in their analysis, but...
	Well, listen, I really want to take time to thank you so much, not just for this conversation, which was most enjoyable, but for the work that you do.
	You can dip into a Michael Schumer book and emerge a golden god of insight, and I would really recommend...
	It's great writing, too.
	You know, this is underappreciated, particularly for people who write non-fiction.
	It's a challenge, because you can't stuff your haikus in to make it spicy.
	So please, everyone, go to michelshermer.com and, of course, Skeptic Magazine.
	We'll put a link to that as well and check out his monthly column for Scientific American and most recent book, of course, Skeptic, Viewing the World with a Rational Eye.
	I hope that we can chat again before your next book comes out, but certainly when your next book is available so that we can get people towards your font as well.
	Thanks so much, Dr.
	Schirmer.
	It's a great pleasure.
	You're welcome.
	Thanks for having me.

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