All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:43
Arguing Atheism | Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm enormously pleased to have Peter Boghossian on the line.
Peter is a professor of philosophy in Portland and has some fantastic and powerful things to say about faith and religion and reason and evidence and all this kinds of good stuff.
So thank you so much Peter for taking the time today.
I thought it would be very helpful, instructive and, dare I say, illuminating for us to talk about some of the general ideas behind religion versus atheism, science versus faith, and so on.
This is something that is a very tricky topic, particularly in North America, not so much in Europe, but particularly in North America.
It's a very tricky topic.
People are quite tense about these issues.
These are issues that really, really do need to be dealt with.
They need to be discussed openly.
We need to get these on the table.
People of faith are making inroads into the political process.
People who are atheists have also made significant inroads into the political process, and this is going to create a clash.
We need to get these values, I would argue, very much out there on the table and have a frank and open discussion.
about the role of reason and evidence and faith and religiosity in our combined social discourse.
So thank you so much for taking the time.
Atheists, particularly in North America, not so much in Europe, but in North America, have a reputation somewhere between Rasputin, Jack the Ripper, and probably Satan's armpit himself.
And I just thought it would be interesting to talk about, and probably worthwhile talking about, Why atheism?
Why skepticism?
Why scientism or rationalism, whatever you want to call it?
And why continue, in a sense, to proselytize these particular beliefs?
So what is the driving or motivating factor behind you talking about these topics?
That's a very pertinent question, given that I spend so much of my life energy and my professional energy devoted to helping people have more reliable processes of reasoning.
This is a species-threatening event.
The problem is that, and I was just reading something about this today, it was a New York Times piece, The Stone, about religion.
It mentions something that I thought was interesting but that really needs to come forward and needs to be discussed more.
The difference between New Atheism and Old Atheism.
One of the components, one of the reasons for New Atheism is that There was an unspoken deal between Christians and atheists.
If Christians kept their beliefs to themselves or didn't affect the public policy arena, specifically abortion, issues regarding evolution, homosexuality, gay marriage, then atheists would not call them out on their delusions.
The problem is that Christians then violated that contract, or Christians violated that.
The part of the problem is that religion is now, faith-based processes are now infecting the public square.
That's dangerous for everyone because they're not subject to the same scrutiny as other beliefs.
Right, right.
And I think the way that I've approached it, I think is complimentary, is, you know, before I got involved in a discipline called philosophy, the first question to ask is, why do we need it?
Why can't we just go with religion or whatever impulse is stirring our mind at the moment?
And for me it was very much the idea that we are subject to error.
We make mistakes continually.
I mean I find myself tripping over my mental shoelaces at least 20 or 30 times a day if it's a very good and clear day in the world of reason.
So because I know that I'm subject to error, I need a methodology that is different from what is inside my brain to figure out whether I'm right or I'm wrong.
And so for me, just going with your emotions about what is right or wrong, going with culture or history or whatever religion you were inculcated with, or even nationalism, going with your emotions to try and determine truth versus falsehood is kind of like going with your tongue to decide what's good to eat.
Well, your tongue is going to veer you quite a long way down the chocolate cake road and not so much down the broccoli and carrots road.
And so we need nutrition as an external discipline because our desires lead us astray and we need to have, you know, nobody wants to sit on a bike machine and sweat their guts out.
We want to, you know, lie on the couch of watching a 60 inch plasma and munching chips.
And so we need these external disciplines like personal training, like nutrition and so on because our desires will often lead us astray.
And for me philosophy was akin to nutrition or other forms of sort of physical discipline, sports training and so on which push you to do things which are not particularly comfortable because you actually want to establish whether you're right or wrong.
You need something outside of your mind Like the scientific method versus, you know, reading chicken entrails or tea leaves.
So that, because we're subject to error and we need an external methodology, and I never found in my experience that I was raised a Christian, that religion could provide that external methodology.
It tries to provide the Bible, but that's just, I mean, that only kind of works if you cherry-pick and believe that it's the Word of God.
It's sort of a tautology or circular reasoning.
And for me, philosophy, reason and evidence gave that, and when you get to that place, it's really hard to look back with a great deal of respect at the sort of religiosity, at least that I came from.
So, to me, philosophy is about developing processes of reasoning.
What processes of reasoning can one hone, can one develop, can one use that will increase the likelihood that the conclusions one comes to will be true?
This is an essential question.
And I think so often when I read the literature of apologists, they all make the same mistake.
I said to my friend, wow, this is really a sophisticated form of confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is when you start with your conclusion and you work backwards.
He said, you're giving it way too much credit.
It's not sophisticated at all.
And I really thought about that, and I think that's one thing that philosophy will is capable of teaching people is how to identify mistakes in reasoning, errors, processes that people have.
Confirmation bias is big.
I teach that in my critical thinking class.
It's basically when you start with your belief first and then work backwards.
So if a piece of evidence comes in and you're thinking about whatever the issue may be, it doesn't even have to be in a religious or faith-based context, you say, well, I don't like that.
I'm offended by that.
This doesn't comport with the other beliefs that I have, so I'm going to throw it out.
But really what we ought to do, and I still find myself constantly making these mistakes, constantly, and that again is the corrective mechanism that reason affords us the opportunity to correct our cognitions.
In the Gorgias, Socrates says that he thinks it's better to be refuted than it is to refute, and I think that's absolutely correct.
Yeah, certainly better for your health if somebody takes the chocolate chip cookie out of your hand than if you take the chocolate chip cookie out of somebody else's hand.
I don't want to sound like I'm down on sugar, but these are metaphors.
I'm kind of hungry, so these are the metaphors that are popping into my brain at the moment.
Well, I have no – people say, well, what's your axe to grind?
I have no axe to grind.
I mean, I don't start with my belief first.
I remain open to the evidence based upon what people – you know, what the claim is.
Well, people say that there's this perception that atheism is, and of course it's buried in the word, against theism, against God, there's this hate on for the old man with the white beard sitting on the clouds.
But I go with Socrates, that the basic, and I hate to reduce philosophy to this, but sort of the way that I work, this is my holy trinity.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
This is the dominoes that go down in the philosophical life.
So the first thing you have to be is rational.
If you're rational, then you can be virtuous because virtue is a consistency of moral action and you can't have consistent action if you don't have consistent thinking and consistent thinking requires virtue, requires reason.
So reason equals virtue equals happiness.
I believe that Philosophy, atheism, free thinking, secularism has a gift to give people, which is a connection in the real world, which is consistent beliefs, which is beliefs that are consistent with reality and internally with their own premises and arguments and syllogisms, a unity of perspective, a sort of shining structure of the soul that is not about to fall over based upon the newest winds of empirical data.
And I think that there's a great deal of happiness and joy that is possible when you align your mind with reality, and so it's not so much like I've got a hate-on for it.
I just feel like I've got this great jetpack that I want to share with people, and that, I think, is certainly what drives me.
I'm sure that has something to do with your passions as a teacher as well.
Philosophy offers people the opportunity to live a life free of delusion.
I genuinely believe that and I've seen that over and over again, not just my anecdotal experience, but I've seen that in the literature as well.
Philosophy is an opportunity for people to take certain tools, certain ways to think about the world that will help them to align their beliefs with reality.
We all have this will to truth.
We all want to know what's true, but because of the faith virus and other problems, problems with culture, etc., and problems with our brain's architecture and evolutionary holdovers, vestiges, it just makes it more difficult.
And again, that's more reason, not less reason, that we need to develop these tools.
The problem is, and this is Sam Harris's question, and among others, what evidence can I give you if you don't already believe in evidence?
Right.
So, this has started the trinity and the dominoes with reason and evidence, and you and I are on the same page.
But what if someone starts with the Koran?
Yeah, you see, but this is the great challenge of religion.
This is the sort of two-faced, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but this duality of religious thinking, which it has two simultaneous claims which need to be separated, I think, for any rational analysis.
So the first is that people, what do they say?
They say, I believe in God, and that's not what I say.
I don't say I believe in the moon.
I believe in the stars.
I believe that, you know, the heliocentric model of the solar system is the correct one.
I don't believe that.
That's what it is.
That is.
And what happens, though, is when people are talking about religion, they're describing an internal emotional experience, which they usually will call faith or belief or something like that.
But that is predicated, that is founded on the existence, objective existence of something outside of their mind.
And this is the great problem.
The moment you try to align your mind, which you should, I think, which all children, infants, and this is really the development of consciousness, is aligning your mind with reality so that you don't attempt to walk on water and swim in the dirt. - Okay.
But when people say, I believe in God, they're really saying two things.
They're saying, I have a subjective experience of a connection with a higher being, and that is a subjective experience which has no truth value.
You know, I could have a dream last night about being cradled in the arms of Jesus, and that would be a dream that I had.
I would not be claiming a truth statement about what actually happened last night in my bed.
So it's this internal experience that describes an external reality.
Now, the internal experience Philosophy, I don't think, has a huge amount to say with other than to say it's an internal experience.
If I dream about a flying elephant and don't claim that it's a truth of biology, then philosophy says, well, I'm glad you had a nice dream.
That's not really a philosophical issue.
But the moment I say, and it was real, and it's real, and it's out there, then I am in the realm of philosophy.
And I'm no longer in the realm of theology because I'm claiming that there's something out there that is drawing my belief out.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it makes perfect sense and I want to run with what you said a little bit and I want to talk about some of the mechanisms that allow those beliefs to flourish.
Epistemic systems are not like pizza toppings.
They're not matters of preference.
If you like triple pepperoni – I'm sorry, you're hungry.
You just made me think of it.
I'm kind of hungry too.
If you like triple pepperoni in your pizza and I like Canadian bacon on my pizza – well, actually, those are too similar.
I like green beans on my pizza or something.
Those are matters of taste.
One of the problems that I see over and over again is that people do make They confuse exactly what you just spoke of.
They confuse the subjective with the objective.
They think that their states, the way they feel about something, accurately maps on to the terrain of objective reality.
That is, the things that are outside them.
That's an illegitimate move, and that's something that philosophy can help people to understand.
Is that your feeling of something doesn't make it true.
I mean, your feeling of something does make it true in terms of matters of taste.
The type of music you like, the type, you're infallible in terms of your own taste.
If you tell me, Pete, I absolutely, you know, Canadian bacon, it's just like heaven to me.
It's the most wonderful thing I have ever imagined.
Okay, but if you start telling me, and again this is one of the problems with faith-based systems, that you love Canadian bacon, and therefore everybody else ought to eat Canadian bacon, and therefore there's a truth, there's something intrinsic to the idea of eating Canadian bacon that's not just good for you.
But that we need to legislate this, that's when we get problems.
And so that gets back to your earlier question of, you know, why am I doing this?
Why is this so important?
Well, this is important because it matters.
One of the things that matters, we can correct people's cognitions.
I mean, I know we can.
It's in the literature.
With some very simple tools, we can correct their cognitions.
We can get them to see the difference between objective and subjective.
And things that are subjective don't accurately map on to what's objective.
Philosophy is great for those introductory, preliminary ways to help people think through issues.
Right.
I mean, so it's the difference between saying, I like frogs and I like believing that frogs are mammals.
Right?
So the one thing is, I like frogs.
Great.
That's not a philosophical issue.
I think that's great.
Here's a nice little frog model or whatever.
Go build it.
But the moment you start saying, I like believing that frogs are mammals, then you have leapt out of your own skull into the world and you're making truth claims that are universal.
And that's when, you know, the great snapping jaws of philosophy are going to close on your brain and chew it up, hopefully, and give you... I'm not sure where that metaphor goes.
Somewhere unpleasant with gas and farting, but... No, that's right.
I think that's the important issue.
And part of the... One of the things that I try to do is to help people understand the difference between... And I know you think about this.
I think about this all the time.
It's almost like, why is he talking about this?
Is he the master of the obvious?
But no, I mean, these are really important issues that come up over and over again.
These are perennial problems that people encounter.
It's a confusion of the subjective to the objective.
I don't know if you saw the end of the May 6 talk, but I had a guy who was quilting there, and I tried to use Quilting as a metaphor or to try to help people explain the difference between the subjective and objective and it's remarkable what a comment.
There are only like four or five mistakes that people make consistently in their thinking and that's one of them.
Well, and I think that's a worthwhile thing to discuss and let's start with that.
So, I'll just love one and I'm sure it's one of the six.
So, when people ask the question, does God exist?
They think that the most important word in that is God, because it's the most dramatic one and it's the one that's most emotionally latent.
But to me, Peter, the most important word in the question, does God exist, is exist.
In other words, if we have a standard of existence, Then God should be subject to it.
We can't invent a different standard of existence for God, otherwise there's no point using the same word if it means something different in another context.
So, for me, the word existence, this is fundamental metaphysics or epistemology, what exists and what doesn't exist.
Now, we know what exists and what doesn't exist because when we see a wall with a doorway and someone says walk through it, we don't walk into the wall, we walk through the doorway.
We know that it's not there and the wall is there on either side.
And so, for me, is there matter, energy, or the effects thereof?
That's what existence is.
You've got to be able to measure it.
It's got to at least not be self-contradictory, and you've got to be able to measure it in some way, whether it's a potential existence.
But if we have a standard of existence versus non-existence, it is actually very easy to answer the question of whether God exists.
It's only if you focus on the word God that it gets confusing.
All right.
So, I'm going to pause you, and I'm going to say something that you might not like very much, but I'm going to say it because I think it's important.
What you just articulated would probably be accessible to 5% of the population.
Sometimes I do interviews and people will say to me, Hey, Dr. Boghossian, I read, you know, Dawkins book, whoever's book, but it was just way over my head.
I didn't understand it.
I think there's a mistake in these conversations if your objective is what my objective is, and that's to help people align their beliefs with reality.
And to do that, the biggest culprit, the biggest problem, we have to take care of the faith virus.
I think it's a mistake to discuss metaphysics.
Just as I think it's a mistake to discuss religion, I think we should discuss faith.
I think it's a mistake to talk about whether or not God objectively exists.
People get too bogged down in it.
It's too complicated.
It's just inaccessible to people.
I think you get far more mileage by talking about epistemology.
Far more mileage, again, if your goal is to help people and not people who think about this stuff constantly.
And then I have a different set of propositions for your strategies to help rid the faith virus for those people.
If your goal is to help people to align their beliefs with reality, I would suggest the tactic that I use, never talk about metaphysics, only talk about epistemology specifically, don't talk about conclusions, talk about processes of reasoning.
Talk about how one would know, what would constitute sufficient evidence, rather than talking about the actual existence of the entity and then working backwards.
Okay, so let's take a stroll through the questioning of the faith paradigm.
Okay.
Alright, so someone makes a claim and they'll say, I think God exists or, you know, Jonah lived in the belly of a whale.
The first thing you need to do is you say, well, how do you know that?
Why do you believe that?
I'll play the theist.
It's not hard for me.
I went to Sunday school.
So I will say, Jesus came down to save us, or something like that.
We'll go with that.
And you will say to me, how do I know that?
Well, I say, well, the Bible tells me so.
When I pray, God tells me so.
My parents have told me so.
My priests have told me so.
I've been to the Holy Land.
I've seen the relics.
I've seen bits of the cross.
I mean, that's as much evidence as there is for a quasar, and it's good for me.
That's great.
That's great.
So right there, the first thing you do is you put a supportive statement after that.
That's great.
That is a way of modeling the behavior that you want to see.
So I know that that sounds simple and you're asking, why is he spending so much time in this?
But that one little thing that's great will help the conversation to not become adversarial.
Someone's been to the Holy Land?
Fantastic.
All right.
So now we'll do it.
Well, actually, as if I'm using the Socratic method on you.
So I just want to clarify this myself because I'm trying to understand this.
So you believe that Someone lived in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights because it's in the Bible.
Is that right?
Well, I mean, it's more than just it's written down.
I mean, I'm aware that there's like interpretations and so on, but I do accept, belief is, you know, downgrading, but I do accept that God has divinely written or inspired people to write the truth, and back then it was the Age of Miracles.
I understand it's not quite so much the Age of Miracles now, but back then I believe that I sort of believe it on two levels.
I believe that it did happen physically, but I also believe that it is an essential story about faith and adherence to the glowing Word of God.
And so, you know, I can sort of take either path.
If it turns out to be true, fantastic.
If it turns out that this was not true, then it's an allegory or a metaphor that still helps bring me closer to God.
All right, great.
So let's take a look at the first one.
So, if it turns out to be true, so you're saying it's possible that it's not true.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't, I don't think we'll ever know for sure.
I mean, there's no time machine that would go back and see if that guy was drifting away.
That's true.
So I don't think we'll ever know for sure, but I certainly would not say, let's say that, that, um, uh, you know, Jesus himself came down tomorrow and said, Hey man, that was just like a metaphor.
Uh, I wouldn't be like, Oh my God, the guy didn't live in the belly of a whale and therefore there's no such thing as God.
Uh, so I believe it did happen, but if it turns out that it didn't, if some magical way to find out, It would still be not a crisis of faith for me.
Okay, so you don't really have faith, then, that Jonas lived... let's use Jesus walking on water, it's just much simpler.
You don't really have faith that Jesus walked on water, but you do have faith that there was a historical person named Jesus and he lived?
Yes, he was the Son of God who came down to redeem humanity from the original sin of Adam and Eve.
Great, fantastic.
Okay, so do you Are you certain that he walked on water?
I'm certain that he provided enough evidence of his divinity that people were willing to follow him under the very gates of death and be torn apart by lions and you know whether it was exactly walking on water or whether he carried flame in his hands or whether he raised people from the dead.
He provided, you know, because there's lots of crazy people on street corners who say that they're the second coming.
But he provided enough evidence for people.
The Romans took him seriously.
The apostles took him seriously.
He created a whole 22,000 plus year religion that's still one of the greatest cultural forces the world has ever known.
So something happened that was powerful enough that the people at the time genuinely believed it, and they wrote down their experiences.
Are they correct down to the last T?
I don't know.
There's no way to ever know for sure, but I am incredibly certain that something extraordinary happened in the ancient world.
There seems to me to be a difference between what you said about, you're not positive that Jesus walked on water, but you are positive that there was an historical Jesus.
Yes.
Huh, that's interesting to me.
Okay.
Well, no, but one would be more likely.
It would be more likely that there was a guy who, at least people believe, did miracles than, you know, some guy walked on water.
I mean, I guess that's a distinction without a difference.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I'm just curious.
So, what other stories in the Bible do you think may not be true?
Do you think the whole thing may not be true?
I guess I'm just trying to differentiate because you're a hundred percent sure when it comes to the existence of Jesus.
Are you a hundred percent sure that the existence of Jesus was a divine figure?
I am 100% sure that Jesus was a divine figure.
Yes, I am.
Okay.
But you're not 100% sure about other stories in the Bible, like Jesus walking on water.
I'm just curious, just for myself, to help me understand.
Could you assign that a percentage value, like that Jesus walked on water?
Yeah, I mean... 80?
70?
Yeah, 80%.
I mean, was it that he actually walked on water, or was it that someone was so blown away by something that he did, and then the story changed a little bit over time?
I don't know.
But I'm convinced that enough miracles happened at the time that Jesus could be verified by the people who were there as some extraordinary figure with supernatural powers or greater than human powers.
That's really interesting.
Now, I'm curious... I mean, let me put it this way.
If you wanted to 100%, I'm 100% that he came back from the dead.
Right, because he'd have to have come back from the dead.
If he didn't come back from the dead, then it's a little hard to go with the eternal life thing.
Okay, so you assign, again I don't mean to nitpick, but I'm trying to help myself understand this, so you assign the value of a hundred percent to the fact that he rose from the dead?
Yes.
So, if someone were to show you the bones of Jesus, for example, that would be sufficient evidence for you to say that he was not the Son of God?
If somebody showed me the bones of Jesus?
Yes.
Well, no, because let's say, I mean, let's say that they say that he ascended to heaven, but maybe that was his soul ascending to heaven in his human form and his human form collapsed and maybe noticed.
I mean, that to me would not change the equation.
That's a good point.
Yeah, that's a good point.
All right, so let's go back to this.
So, I just, this is me to you right now.
So, you can see this takes a lot of time, right?
Oh, and I'm being particularly slimy.
No, that's fine.
Not slimy, but I mean I'm being particularly difficult because I'm giving you two sort of parallel tracks of reality.
That's fine.
These things, and I'm happy to do this, my first thing that I'm doing now is I'm trying to really understand why you believe what you believe.
I'm trying to develop a rapport with you so that you don't think that this is an adversary relationship.
And then once I do that, I'm going to try to expose contradictions, but I can't expose any contradictions until I figure out exactly what the method of reasoning that you're using to arrive at these conclusions is.
So I brought in metaphysics there about the bones.
As a general rule, I don't do that, but I just wanted to see your reaction.
Okay, so let's go back to this, because I find this to be an interesting conversation.
Good, good.
Okay, so I'm curious, what would it take for you to disbelieve that Christ was the Son of God.
Like, what would that take?
Well, it couldn't take anything, Peter, that I could imagine.
I mean, because, I mean, we can't go back and verify the biblical accounts.
You're correct, you're correct.
We cannot.
Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't.
I mean, and so there's nothing that could happen in the past that would occur.
Okay, I can think of something.
Let's say that Zeus came back with Jesus, and Jesus said, I'm the son of Zeus, and the story really got a little confused over time.
So, I just need to clarify for myself, thanks for your patience.
So, you don't have faith, you believe in the basis of the evidence.
So, you think that the stories in the Bible are not claims, but they're sufficient to warrant belief because they constitute sufficient evidence.
So you don't have faith.
You believe in the basis of the evidence.
So you think that the stories in the Bible are not claims but they're sufficient to warrant belief because they constitute sufficient evidence.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean it's a two-part thing really.
So, I believe that something extraordinary happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and so on.
And so, because of that, I have surrendered to Jesus and love Jesus and pray to Jesus and accept Him as my Lord and Savior.
And as a result of that, I feel happy, I feel free, I have a great community, I feel calmer.
There's lots of empirical internal evidence of the power and happy and beauty of God's grace and faith and so on.
So, there is this sort of historical thing which I accept, but then, you know, I put it sort of into practice and found that my life was much happier and better and all of these wonderful things.
So, I'm just trying to narrow it down for myself.
So, you believe in the basis of evidence.
Now, I'm not talking about subjective things, about how you feel.
Once you've accepted Christ, you believe that there's objective evidence that any person can see, not only reading the Bible, but reading collaborating documents.
Yeah, and I also believe, based upon when I'm in an extremity of difficulty and I pray, I get wisdom that I didn't know that I had, which would indicate some consciousness outside of myself.
Hold on, let's not go there yet, because I'm just trying to figure this out for myself.
Why is it that you think that really smart people People who look at the same evidence don't come to that conclusion.
Well, because I would argue that, you know, without wanting to speak negatively of these other people, but the first thing that I would say is, and it's a bit of a cliché, but it's a very good and true cliché, have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior?
So if you just look at the cold hard evidence and say, well, okay, guys can't walk on water, therefore the whole thing is false.
Without looking at it as an allegory from an ancient time, a storytelling that was really attempting you to participate in the divine, then I would say they haven't got the second round of empirical evidence, which is the internal experience.
Hold on there, son.
Let's not get carried away.
So you, and again I'm trying to clarify this for myself, so in order for someone to look at this evidence and come to realize that from this evidence one can That has warrant.
It can convey warrant.
One can justify one's belief that Jesus is the Son of God.
That you already have to start with the belief that Jesus is the Son of God?
Well, I wouldn't say that.
I mean, my faith has grown over the years, so I would say that you can at least say, well, something extraordinary happened.
Let's stick to the original question I asked you, though.
We have a bunch of smart people who look at the same evidence as you.
Why don't they come to the same conclusion?
Because they haven't opened themselves up to the possibility that it represents something divine.
They've looked at it purely secular, scientifically, and they haven't opened up their hearts.
I hate to put it this way, but it's true.
They haven't opened their hearts up to the possibility of the divine, and therefore it can't flood in and confirm what the evidence may point to.
Fantastic.
That's a great answer.
Thanks.
So I'm curious, have you opened up your heart to Islam?
I have not opened up my heart to Islam.
Well, that seems to be problematic.
I mean, how do you know that Muhammad didn't ride to heaven on a winged horse?
We have the unequivocal testimony of literally a billion people who would believe otherwise.
I think that you might benefit from using the same standards that you apply to opening your heart when looking at the evidence to opening your heart and reading the Quran.
I don't understand.
I don't understand.
Can you explain to me why you're not a Muslim?
I think I can explain to you why I'm not a Muslim.
Although I can't claim any definitive answers.
These are just my own thoughts on the matter.
Okay, sure.
So, the The idea of the divine and how it communicates to people is obviously different in different areas.
I do believe that there are true and there are false religions.
And I do sometimes wonder if, of course, if I'd grown up in an Islamic country and been exposed to those teachings, would I have the same experience?
My relationship with Jesus is, you know, personal and wonderful and great and moving and special and all kinds of good things.
kinds of good things.
But obviously their relationship with Muhammad is equally powerful for them.
So I don't have an answer as to, you know, I mean, the Bible may say, well, they haven't accepted Jesus, therefore they're going to hell They may say well you haven't accepted Muhammad and therefore bad things are going to happen to you.
I like everything that helps people participate in the divine.
I mean obviously it's the same Old Testament God for the Jews and the Muslims and the Christians.
Is it only through Jesus?
I believe so.
I don't know the divine plan.
Maybe Muhammad is the root for them, maybe Jesus is the root for me and the people that I grew up with.
I don't know the divine plan, and I certainly would hesitate to.
So, and I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth, but you think it's possible that Jesus Christ could both be the Son of God and not the Son of God?
I believe that it's possible that different cultural traditions require different avenues to the divine, and therefore different prophets may have been given to different religions and different cultures and different times.
I think that's possible, and again, I don't claim any particular answers.
For me, Jesus is the root to the divine, but I, you know, and I know that, you know, strict teaching is to say only and so on, and maybe that's true, but that's beyond what I can answer as a mere mortal.
Right.
So, as a result of this conversation, do you think you'll take the same openness that you'd had and apply it to others?
Because, for example, if you lived in Saudi Arabia with Wahhabism or Do you think you'll apply that standard to other religions?
What about Mormonism?
Have you tried that?
Have you checked that out yet?
I haven't, in the same way that when you've had a great meal, you don't start looking for a restaurant right away.
I have a great meal with my religious experience, and so I don't feel the need to go and explore other religious experiences.
A great meal!
We're going to add a nice dessert to that!
Okay, so I think that conversation, and we can continue it, but I want to talk about The point in that, I think that there was one point in there when I asked why you're not a Muslim by the same standard.
I think that that was the point, that was the kind of moment of doxastic openness or belief openness.
And there are these little nodes in the conversation, there are these little points in the conversation.
You did say something that the overwhelming majority of people would not have said, and that is, this could be one path after you just specifically talked about Jesus.
The other thing that you did was interesting is, you didn't claim to know these things with certainty.
It's much more difficult For some, it also makes the conversation quite interesting as well.
If one doesn't claim to hold things with certainty, if one says there's a possibility that those are wrong.
As a general rule, I always yield people when they tell me how it's benefited them or what their feeling states are.
Because again, we spoke about this before, you're infallible in terms of your own feelings.
I stick to the idea of objective claims and using those standards of measurements for objective claims.
You were a slippery... I'm so sorry.
I feel like I was... I didn't cross over to the dark side or something, but I was definitely a greased eel in oil.
No, no, those are great.
Those are fantastic responses.
My only issue I have is I don't think someone would have said at that juncture, I don't think that they would have said, well, there are many paths, after they specifically talked about Jesus and the resurrection and the bones, etc.
Well, I would argue, though, it would depend, necessarily.
There are a lot of people who are very well educated.
I mean, usually religion does provide two faces, right?
One for the less educated and less sophisticated, and one for the more educated and more sophisticated.
And so a lot of Catholics are against evolution, even though the Pope is fine with it.
I mean, so I think there is that sort of Janus side of religiosity.
I don't think that you can have many productive conversations with a relatively uneducated fundamentalist because I think you're just going to hit too many brick walls of defensiveness.
But somebody who's a little bit more sophisticated can – who does that little bit of a dance and is not willing to bring down the hammer of complete bigoted intolerance of other religions is where you may have a little more traction.
So two things.
I think that those conversations with fundamentalists are really important to have because you don't know the effect that that's going to have on someone the next day or year.
You might plant a seed of doubt and then that might be sown, come to its fruition.
I mean, it could be broken down into several sections.
If that conversation were to continue, and I'm happy to continue if you want, but if that conversation would continue, I now think I have a better idea for what you believe.
I would consider what you just articulated a sophisticated form of belief, but yet I think that that has endemic vulnerabilities that you yourself must see when you do mental gymnastics to try to make these pieces fit together.
And I think that focusing on this idea of a process, even though I did bring some metaphysics into it, focusing on this idea of a process will gain you the most traction.
Right, okay, okay.
Yeah, I mean, I would take probably quite a complementary approach.
You know, for me, the argument that something extraordinary happened in the ancient world and therefore we can be relatively certain of Jesus's divinity is not a very good argument, as you pointed out.
I mean, there's lots of other religions who believe exactly the same thing, and why is one truth claimed better than another?
And even more recently, to use a crass but true historical example, there were the people who thought, I think, the Halley-Bopp comet was a divinity.
They cut off their genitals to go and meet it.
I mean, obviously, they thought something special was going on, and so the idea that Other people's beliefs confirm divinity is simply not true.
Okay, but here's the thing, and I'm certainly not a psychologist, I'm not going to pretend to know things I don't know about psychology.
Here's the problem.
The problem, I think, is when you start questioning the fact that these events occurred a long time ago, I don't think that's going to help you achieve your goal.
I think that people are just going to shut off intellectually.
I think anytime you bring metaphysics into this, not anytime, but often when you bring metaphysics or talk about facts as opposed to talk about processes, I think you lose people.
I think they become defensive.
I think that that creates an adversarial relationship.
So, I don't think a productive way, and I'm not saying this is for everybody, I'm saying this to myself, I don't think a productive way is to go full steam on and say, come on, what's your evidence?
Why do you think these things occurred?
And then attack the fact that these alleged phenomena occur.
I just don't think that's productive if your goal is to help people to align their beliefs with reality.
Right, right, okay.
Because, certainly, on the receiving end of the conversation, I didn't feel that there was any particular clincher.
I mean, there was stuff that gave me pause, but it may be more because I would not want to reveal my beliefs about intolerance towards other religions.
I may want to sort of speak a bit more socially and so on, but there wasn't much that brought me up to the point where I was like, bah!
Although, certainly, when you brought Islam in, it was definitely, you know, I think, like most people, it would be a bit of a challenge to stay relaxed at that point.
I think that.
So look, oftentimes when you have these conversations with people, pause is pretty good.
If something gives somebody pause, because look, people go through their whole lives and nobody gives them pause.
In fact, not only do they not get pause from anyone, but they're told that if they have a crisis of faith or they're given pause, that's a moral problem.
It's a bad thing.
And again, I cannot stress enough, just as a general strategy for these conversations, to not make them adversarial.
If your listeners get nothing out of this, just take that out of it.
Because that's when there's an openness.
My mentor told me a story about Korean defectors, U.S.
soldiers who defected to the Korean War.
My mentor is 95.
His name is Frank Wesley.
Emeritus PSU professor in psychology at Portland State University and he was telling me that the people in Korea who defected almost invariably were told that the Koreans were terrible people how awful they were etc etc and then the people who and then they went there and they were shown a little kindness or what-have-you and they defected.
The people who never defected Where the people who, once they were captured, they said, in their train, introduction, say, look, you know, they're just people like you and me, they're under the sway of a bad government, etc., etc.
If I can add one more, maybe weird little story, my mentor also told me this fascinating study about, there's something called a literal pecking order, and I'm going to relate this to the discussion of religion and helping people lose their faith in a minute.
If seven chickens are put in a small area, like a chicken coop, they'll form a natural hierarchy of one through seven.
Chicken one will pick on every chicken, and no one will peck every chicken, and no chicken will peck that chicken.
Chicken two, it goes all the way down.
Chicken two will peck on chicken three, four, five, six, seven, and will only be pecked on one, et cetera.
So chicken three picks on everybody down.
It's only picked on the top chickens.
So, what these researchers do is they put an electric collar around the necks of the chickens to try to see if they could reverse the pecking order.
In other words, they try to make chicken one, chicken seven, and chicken seven, chicken one.
Have I been articulate?
Am I clear?
Yeah, you're trying to make the waterfall of the pecking order run back uphill.
Yeah, I also want to pause myself and say, when you talk to someone of faith, did you see how I phrased that question to you?
I put it on myself and not on you.
I didn't say to you, do you get it?
Because that would make it as if there was a problem with your understanding.
Yeah, am I being clear?
So it puts it on me.
So whenever you talk to someone of faith, make sure you do that.
Okay, so they put these collars on chickens and they gave them jolts.
What do you think the result was?
I'm putting you on the spot.
They started pecking themselves?
They attacked the people giving them jolts?
I really couldn't guess.
Oh, that's what I'd do.
I'd attack the person who put the call on me.
But after one jolt, just one single jolt, chicken one became chicken seven.
There's no amount of jolting that chicken six and seven get because they were on the bottom of the pecking order.
So they constantly had that.
So that's a metaphor for, you know, why corporal punishment doesn't work in school, why harsh treatment for inmates won't work.
I mean, that story alone is a tremendous metaphor.
I mean, there's so much wisdom in that story about how we should structure our institutions and the role of punishment in our institutions.
But I'd like to apply that to faith.
So what you don't want to do is you don't want to create adversarial relationships.
You never know, like, Talking to you in that conversation, and I don't want to necessarily say you were like a certain chicken a certain pecking order But you need a different strategy like beating you down in the conversation by constantly giving you jolts Telling your interlocutor that she or he's stupid that that's ridiculous and again oftentimes that comes out in metaphysics and not in epistemology that's all that's often why as well, I think discussions about religion are a mistake and
And I know the Four Horsemen do it, but I do street epistemology and I try to help people lose their faith constantly every day.
I think it's a mistake.
You know, where you have your bar mitzvah, who your friends are, who you go bowling with, who you play bingo with.
Attacks on religion are deeply personal.
They're interwoven into the fabric of people's lives.
Don't attack religion.
If you attack faith, get rid of faith, the whole thing will fall.
There's no problem in my opinion with people getting together in church and singing songs or reading old books.
The problem is faith.
The faith virus is the toxin because then they start to objectify as true these things.
But the reason that I mentioned the chicken story in the beginning and the prisoners is you want to create relationships right away that are honest and there's an intellectual reciprocity and you show that you model those behaviors.
You're willing to reconsider.
You're open to ideas, et cetera, et cetera.
And those are the sorts of relationships that you want to have with the faithful right from the get-go.
You will be much more effective in helping to liberate them of the faith virus if you have that strategy.
And then once you do that, then you can try to create pause or you can find these moments when they're thinking about something once you understand the thought process that got them to the conclusion.
Interesting, interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't have any objection to building bridges and having, you know, faith is not a one-time exorcism, so to speak.
I mean, it does take a lot of Conversation back and forth.
I think that figuring out why people believe stuff is really, really important.
I mean, the reality of course is that most people believe stuff because they get lots of social reinforcement and it's what they were told when they were young.
It's not, you know, it's hard to reason people out of beliefs that they weren't reasoned into, but simply float down the cultural treacle of history.
And so I think... But never think, and I mean never ever think, that one of those conversations that you have won't make a difference.
You have no idea.
I mean there's a guy I do jujitsu with who wrote me the most lovely Facebook note just the other day about how he had never – he was raised in a religious family, etc., etc., and he saw these things.
Every time I would go, I would speak to him.
I would speak to him about faith.
I would speak to him about process, and I didn't really think anything of it, quite frankly, until I got this.
You just don't know.
I mean, things to you might not seem very significant, but to some people, literally, remember, they go back into cultures, and their family, and their friends, and their wives pull them back in.
I mean, the faith virus is virulent.
It's a terrible, terrible disease.
Don't ever think that when you engage people, you get this feeling at the end, oh, I didn't do any good.
No, you have no idea.
You just don't know.
No, you don't.
And sometimes it does feel a little bit like we're scattering seeds from an airplane.
You never know where they're going to land, but some amazing things can grow just as a result of putting a few ideas out that are counter to people's habitual ways of experiencing the world.
It can create a cross current that can have enormous effects on people.
It really can be a little ripple that grows to a tidal wave.
And it takes two things.
It takes perseverance on your part.
So I always wait.
I know this is going to sound weird.
I have a few people at the bank I've identified as faithful.
And then I wait.
I try to get in their line every time and then bam, once I'm in there, develop that rapport, boom, and then I start in on them.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Yeah, and so it takes time, it takes patience, but the other thing is, if you do this enough, I mean if you really do this enough with an open heart, you get pretty proficient at it.
You really start to understand where these points in the conversation are that will give people pause.
Almost never do you have a conversation and someone, I mean, I shouldn't say, once every few years at the end of the conversation, And it just happened with a Mormon missionary just recently, where someone actually just almost on the spot changed their belief.
And I can actually tell you what I said to them, and it was amazing to me.
He was about to go on missions, and he said, well, you can't explain the universe.
It had to be God.
And I just, I don't know, I wasn't even thinking, I was tired.
I just said, well, I don't know, the universe could have always been here.
And he looked at me like that was some great revelation.
I mean, here's a guy about to go out and proselytize and he had never thought of the most basic objection.
But the point is, if you do this enough, and I would urge your listeners, just think about these people who try to convert people.
And it's interesting.
Someone accused me the other day of this being unethical.
We're going to get conversations.
I'm going to get these conversations on videotape.
I have to have people sign releases, and that's going to be a little bit problematic, but we're going to get these conversations on YouTube.
We're going to put them on YouTube, and my friend and I, Matt Thornton, are going to spend 20 minutes, and we're going to help them liberate themselves of the faith virus.
Impressive.
Well, I think it's important, but someone said that it's unethical, but nobody would say to the Mormon or to the Christian or to whoever else is going door-to-door with Jehovah's Witness that it's unethical.
So why is it that helping people to have more reliable methods of reasoning is unethical?
Right.
And, of course, one of the things that I really do admire about the religious, I mean, is the proselytizing.
I mean, they're more Socratic than most philosophers in terms of going out into the marketplace and talking to people about virtue and meaning and depth and all of these good things, which I really believe should be the preserve of philosophy.
But they go out and they do it.
They go door to door to door.
There's not a lot of people in the philosophy realm who'd be willing to do that.
And their commitment, I think, is something to be really learned from.
Yeah, I'm glad you phrased it like that.
Their commitment is something that we have to learn from.
I went to a church service, I think I might have said this to you off the air, I went to a church service a long time ago with my friend who was, I can't remember what strain of Christianity it was, but the pastor, the preacher, what have you said, it's essential, life and death, you've got to bring two people in here every week, we've got to grow this, we've got to, and I thought to myself, wow, this is great, I have to remember to do this.
We have to do the same thing.
So we have some organizations that are fantastic.
Dawkins organization, Skeptic Society, Shermers, Harris Project, we have these organizations, CFI, fantastic.
But it's not enough.
We also, individuals, have to take responsibility for this as well.
We cannot rely on these institutions to help rid people of the faith virus.
Especially since we have other institutions, particularly those institutions on the left, that are making accommodations for people of faith.
Yeah.
Yeah, and of course the stakes for religious people are very high, and the stakes for secular people in terms of eternal salvation or damnation aren't as high, but the stakes in terms of the quality of the future of the world for our children are exceedingly high.
Exactly.
In fact, they're really high in a way that fantasies of salvation and damnation are not.
Right.
And so we really do need to rouse ourselves out of the short-term lifespan, can't-be-bothered thing that is a little bit the hallmark of the secular world.
And rouse ourselves to remember that the world we're going to leave to those who come after us is the direct result of the level of commitment we have to truth.
Absolutely.
And if people are more committed to error than we are to truth, error will win.
It's, you know, there's no magic in these kinds of battles.
It's a question either way.
That's unquestionably true.
I'd like to throw in a couple more ideas if I may.
So one of the things that I'd like to share with your listeners is that remember Faith is currently, and I'm doing my best to change this, faith has a moral edifice.
We must divorce the fact that people think having faith makes them a good person.
We have to divorce faith from virtue.
There are many ways to do this.
I think a change in terminology, calling it the faith virus, is helpful because it makes it as if it's a virus that people caught.
And we're not mad at people for catching viruses like we're not mad at people for catching colds.
So that's one thing.
Remember when you speak to people of faith to talk to them about the process of faith and to always stress that using an unreliable process of reasoning does not make you a better person.
And people can develop their own strategies for how they want to effectively cure their friends and family of the faith virus.
But that idea that there's something about having faith – this is the protective sheath that faith is wrapped in – there's something about having faith that people associate that with virtue or morality, and that has to end.
Right, right.
Yeah, I mean, in my mind, or at least in my experience, faith, because it connects the subjective experience with a universal and divine truth, it tends to amplify the natural characteristics of the person.
So I do believe that faith can make some good people better, and faith can make some bad people worse.
It is the amplification beyond the natural limits of the human frame and mortality that I think is particularly dangerous.
And so I think that people can always point to examples and say, well, this person did wonderful works and they were faithful, and that's true.
And then this person did some really bad things.
I would argue that they did it in spite of faith and not because of it.
Go on.
Well, there are multiple ways you could look at it, depending on how you define faith.
If you define faith as pretending to know things you don't know, then it becomes clear that they did it in spite of faith.
If you define faith as belief in the basis of insufficient evidence, maybe you could say, look, this person was so petrified of going to hell that he would have ordinarily been a mass murderer, but since he found the Emperor of Japan or what have you, he has suddenly turned his life around and now he works for disabled orphans.
All right.
Maybe there are some instances like that.
I would yield that.
But for the most part, I don't think that's the case at all.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there are there are people who do, you know, bring food to starving people in Africa as part of a religious mission.
And then the Pope helped spread the spread of AIDS by banning condoms for believers in Africa.
So maybe those people would bring food independent of me.
Maybe they bring food in spite of it.
Right, right.
And we don't know that for sure, but I'm not willing personally to strip all good deeds and say that they have nothing to do with faith.
I think that people's belief does help them do some good things.
But, you know, I think on the plus and minus side, the minus is far more dangerous than the plus in terms of the bad deeds that have been done in the name of irrationality and superstition and absolutism.
And so… But again, we cannot judge the value of a belief by its consequences.
A belief is true or false on its own merits, not as a result of its consequences.
And so even if people are doing good deeds as a result of faith, that doesn't make faith true, and it doesn't make the existence of God pop into any kind of reality.
So it still doesn't help.
In terms of that, they have to find another way to be good.
I think a more sustainable and better way to be good.
And at least we then won't have the excuse for bad things that is so often used by religious people that, you know, that the other religion is the enemy, that we are the good guys and, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I guess I'm caught up what you're saying.
I'm trying to think if there's a case when someone would benefit from having an unreliable process of reasoning.
I mean, I think it's certainly possible that if someone has an unreliable process of reasoning, But again, if someone has an unreliable process of reason, they could do anything.
It doesn't converge on doing something that has positive consequences.
I guess the only time that I would really like unreliability is if I'm, say, stuck on the side of Mount Everest running out of oxygen.
If I rationally sat down and calculated the odds, I might just stick my head in a snowbank and expire.
Like to have sort of hope, despite the odds, maybe a time when I'd want a little bit of unreason.
But that's such an extremity that, you know, the whole point is, why am I up there with no oxygen?
There must be some faulty heating that got me up there to begin with.
But even then, you wouldn't want to be delusional, because you wouldn't want to suffer.
You'd just stick your head in the ice or wherever it is, so that you'd Suffer for less so even then reason and reliable processes of reasoning would be useful even when you're dying Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah, I can certainly see that Yeah, and and again if it if it's the result of prior unreason then do you know it can't blame reason for that Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's just it's amazing to me that someone would actually say to me Don't do this don't And and I actually have a whole plan about how I want to get people on tape and try to try to help them lose their faith It's amazing to me that people would make that a moral issue on my part.
They would think that that's somehow problematic.
Well, if you're already in the faith paradigm and you believe that it is only through faith that people are virtuous, then what you're doing is not stripping people of their faith, but of their morality, of their virtue, and damning them to hell.
So obviously that would be considered a pretty bad thing, if you're in the paradigm already.
And what if you're in a secular paradigm?
Why would secular folks think that that's an uncool thing to do to somebody?
Well, because they're avoiding the responsibility of doing it for themselves.
And if you do it, suddenly it's a choice for them to do it, so they want you to stop doing it.
But they don't want to admit the truth, so they'll just make up some moral reason.
I think that it could be that... It's always amazed me that the secular community defers or bows to people of faith.
It always amazes me that... Oh, by the way, I have a total non-sequitur.
I'm still trying to figure out when someone says to me at the end of one of these conversations, I will pray for you.
I have not yet come up with a good response to that.
I've tried.
I'll reason for you.
I've tried.
If you have something or if any of your listeners have something, let me know because after all these years, I still do not have – and I'm not talking about a comeback.
I don't want a one-liner, but I want something that's sincere, that I can feel, that's a legitimate, genuine, honest response to when someone tells me after I've spent time with them trying to help to disabuse them of an unreliable process of reasoning, I'll pray for you.
I I can tell you what I said to somebody who said that to me once.
Yeah.
They said, Steph, I will pray for you, and I said, And you know what?
If that really works, I will pray back.
I will pray with you.
That's a good thing to say.
That's a good thing to say.
It shows openness.
It shows a willingness to invest.
Yeah, because, hey, empirically, if you pray that I can fly and I can fly, I'm in, man!
I mean, you've got the goods.
I'm going to explore your paradigm and, you know, throw mine aside for a while.
Yeah, but even if... So, if I pray that you could fly and you flew, that's...
That doesn't necessarily indicate that there's a God.
It might not… No, but it does indicate that prayer is doing something pretty cool.
I mean, it doesn't mean that there's a God.
It means that person probably is a God.
I mean, like, okay, I'll worship you or something.
Yeah, if you could… It means that something out of the ordinary has occurred.
Oh, absolutely out of the ordinary.
If you could repeat that and we could pray about a whole bunch of different stuff, Let's take it on the road, man.
Let's join a Russian circus.
Let's make a fortune.
How cool is that?
Yeah, a Russian circus.
We should be going in every single children's hospital with all these kids who have bone diseases or what have you, and we should be praying on them if it worked.
Absolutely, absolutely.
But yeah, I mean, because if somebody is saying, I will pray for you, clearly they're still in that paradigm.
And, you know, I was in a debate I had about agnosticism and people said, well, what if Jesus came down?
And it's like, well, then I'm reevaluating my position.
It's not going to happen, but if it did, that's reason and evidence.
Then he's out of the realm of superstition and into the realm of science.
Then he's just some super dude and I'd be curious to learn about him.
It's not that complicated.
Believe in the base of evidence and don't pretend to know things you don't know.
Thank you again so much.
If you want to hit my listeners with your web stats, where to find your work.
That'd be great.
I'm on Twitter at Peter Bogosian, P-E-T-E-R-B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-A-N.
You can Facebook friend me by all means.
You can find some of my podcasts and videos at philosophynews.com.
That's philosophynews.com.
Just started a YouTube channel that will post some videos and such to there.
Thanks again, Peter.
It's a real pleasure, as always.
And, hey, I look forward to when we're driving from Vegas to Vancouver.
We'll drop by and break bread.
It would be fantastic.
I would absolutely love that.
Fantastic.
All right.
Well, take care.
Have a great night.
All right.
Thanks.
Bye.
▲
Export Selection