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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:38
The Ethics of Atheism | Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux
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Hello, everybody. It's Sven Wallen from Pre-Domain Radio.
I am trippingly, fairly delighted to have Peter Goshen on the show.
Peter, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your final web statistics so that if anybody is completely outraged, they know where to find you?
Sorry, not here. When will I completely outraged?
My name is Peter Boghossian.
I teach philosophy in the Portland State University philosophy department.
I'm on Twitter at Peter Boghossian.
My email is pgb at pdx.edu.
A lot of my content is found on philosophynews.com and my videos and my podcasts are all over the place.
Richard Dawkins has been very kind to promote my stuff all over the place, YouTube, etc.
Right. A quick Google search would reveal it.
All right. I will put links where I can on the bottom of the video and on the podcast notes.
So we are going to talk atheism.
And just to start with, and I want to give you a chance to level your 22 on the word faith, feel as if there's hope.
It's a wonderful acronym. But I actually have a problem with the term atheism as a whole because...
I'm not against leprechauns.
I'm not against dragons.
I don't have a huge hate on for poltergeists.
I just accept that they don't exist.
So even the word atheist is, you know, against theism or...
I actually don't feel a lot of hostility towards things that don't exist.
And so it really is a tough...
I think this is where you get, you know, embittered atheists, atheism is a religion and blah, blah, blah, because it is really defined in opposition to something.
And I think that the true philosophical approach is to accept that square circles, consciousness without matter, just like gravity without mass, these things simply don't exist.
And we need to, you know, keep talking about the wise and the wherefores and come up with reasonable alternatives to the religious basis for ethics.
But I really don't like the term atheist any more than I like any other labels that are thrown because these are all conclusions.
I think that the title philosopher for anyone who's pursuing Socratic reasoning is now, atheism may be one of the, you know, I think if you're rigorous enough, that's one of the things that comes out of it.
But I just prefer to be thought of or just to speak out as a philosopher because that is a methodology, not a conclusion.
I wonder what your thoughts are on the word, the A word.
The A word. I think what you said is absolutely correct.
I don't ever promote atheism.
I think we should be promoting critical thinking and reasoning and rationality.
And there are certain conclusions, certain consequences of that, certain things that will fall from that.
Atheism is just not a part of my identity.
My identity is not in opposition to something else.
And I think clarifying these terms is key.
And the other reason I don't use the term atheist is because somehow it's taken to mean that Your belief is in parallel to a theist.
So, for example, you have just as much faith.
You need a lot of faith to be an atheist.
It's not a term for me.
Richard Carrier has a great piece about why he thinks he should reclaim the title atheist.
It's talked about a lot.
If somebody wants to call themselves an atheist, I have absolutely no problem with it.
I personally don't use the term atheist.
Yeah, I mean, even the word itself is dominated by the word theist, which is kind of annoying because, you know, that's not really a big part of where I come from.
Yeah, and it doesn't align with my overall goal.
Okay, so let's talk about the goal that you have and your purpose, your life mission.
I watched one of your really great lectures on faith.
Oh, thanks. And you talked about thinking obsessively, which I think is...
Thinking obsessively is the only way to think because it takes a lot to overcome the baggage of culture and history.
But you talked about thinking about this stuff for 22, 23 years straight.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the Socratic gadfly got into your head and why it's so energetic in there.
Well, I think Socrates, Plato is one of my favorite philosophers, and I love what we can do with the Socratic method.
My goal is to help people align their beliefs with reality, to embrace reason, to change the way people view faith, to change the way people view rationality.
And in order for me to achieve that goal, there are many ways to achieve that goal.
What I do is I like to use the Socratic method as a tool to help rid people of the faith virus.
But not just to rid them of the faith virus, and my book Against Faith is about this.
Not just to take something away, but to use it as a tool to instill reason and rationality.
To almost look at those conversations as a pedagogical intervention.
And it's successful.
It's not that difficult to do.
Can you give me an example?
Sure. The first thing is it's hard in the abstract because you need to know the context.
Is it a classroom context?
Are you talking with your friends?
But once you know that context, there are certain times that it's more or less inappropriate to do that in a classroom environment specifically.
But I do this virtually every single interaction that I have.
The first thing you want to do is you want to find out why someone believes what they believe.
And also, if you're genuinely open, it could be entirely possible that someone knows something you don't know.
And I've watched your videos, and you talked about the importance of evidence.
And even if something is fantastic, and I'll speak for you for a moment, if someone can show us extraordinary evidence for that, to our satisfaction, we can ask the experts.
We would say, yep.
So I think that attitudinal disposition is key to start the conversation.
Being open to listen to the evidence and really try to understand what someone has to say.
And once you understand Then you can target specific places where you can use what Socrates, what's subsequently been called the Blinkus.
It's that middle point in the Socratic method.
So it begins in wonder, someone has a hypothesis, and then there are Blinkus counter examples that are thrown out.
And that's when a genuine discussion can evolve.
That's also the opportunity to help someone in those moments.
Right, okay. Now, one of the biggest influences, at least on the genesis of my thinking, was the Voltaire perspective.
You know, there was this big literary tradition in the 18th century, which was, imagine you were an alien, or I guess for them it was the people coming from the New World, the noble savage or whatever, that they were coming to the French court, and what would they perceive of the system that was in place?
And I always find that to be a very, very useful thing.
What if I knew nothing about the society that I was living in?
And was having it explained to me as if I were three years old.
And, you know, as my daughter is, in fact, three years old, and I'm trying to explain things in the world to her.
It's a really, really great exercise.
And I think that innocence, that blank slate curiosity is quite essential because we get so many values, really, for want of a better word.
They're sort of handed down to us sometimes in a fist, sometimes in a male glove, and sometimes in a caress.
Which are just not true.
But there's a lot of emotional investment in them.
When you approach the world, and I think this is the Socratic method, you know, explain it to me like I'm three years old, pretend I know nothing.
And this approach I have found to be very useful, but it is quite upsetting to other people.
You know, there's that scene in The Matrix where Lawrence Fishburne offers Keanu Reeves the pill.
And we'd like to think that we're offering it orally, though some people feel that it's going in perhaps another orifice.
What responses do you get when you bring this blank slate, childlike curiosity to the examination of culture and society?
I want to go back to what you said before about it being disconcerting or discomforting.
I think any time somebody steps back and genuinely questions a thing that they believe, that can be disconcerting.
The Socratic method is a very useful and potent tool to help people to do that.
The reaction that you get is all over the place.
There's no one reaction.
It depends on the people. Sometimes it's true.
Sometimes people become upset.
Sometimes people become hurt, even.
Sometimes people need to...
I mean, I've had virtually every conceivable interaction.
What's really interesting is what happens months or years later.
Rarely will somebody come to a revelation and then change their beliefs according to the result of the Socratic conversation.
It will happen a month later, a day later, a week later.
Who knows? Years later.
I went to someone the other day and they had just spoken to me about it.
There is no one reaction that you get, and I published a paper about perplexity, and I think this idea that the purpose of the Socratic method isn't to perplex, but we become perplexed when we encounter All right.
Now, just before we go into the faith virus and why we think we both use that term, let's just have a quick flyby of the Socratic method, because it may mean different things to different people.
So the way that you approach it would be as follows.
Well, I'll give you the Socratic method as it's traditionally in practice, and then I'll throw it out how I use it on a daily basis to help people lose their faith.
So the Mino has a great example.
It's a Socrates Didn't write anything.
Plato was the author and he wrote about the character.
I don't know if there was an historical Socrates.
Christopher Hitchens tends to say no, I don't know the answer to that question.
And so there are stages of the method.
For example, it starts in a wonder.
Someone wonders something.
What is justice? Well, and then someone will offer a response to that.
Justice is paying your debt.
Or justice is harming somebody, harming a bad man.
And Socrates will come back and he'll give a counterexample, an instance of a thing that will make that sentence false.
So Socrates would say something like, well, What if you borrow a butcher knife from someone who later becomes insane?
Or in a contemporary context, a gun.
Should you give him the gun back? Sorry, you said borrow.
I think you mean lend. What if you borrow a knife from someone and then he wants the knife back?
Oh yeah, and he says, because I want to go kill my wife or something.
That's right, that's right. Or what if, how do you know that your friends are really bad men and that you haven't been deceived?
And so that forces someone to, that calls into question the initial Proposition that one offered, the initial answer that started in wonder.
And then that goes back and forth like that until there's some kind of resolution.
You can either accept the hypothesis or reject it.
So what is justice?
Well, justice is fairness.
Justice is paying your debts.
And if you can't come to a counterexample in those contexts, then the definition provisionally holds.
That is an unbelievable tool, and it's incredibly useful with prison inmates.
In my dissertation and subsequent publications, I've spelled out in detail how to do this with prison inmates.
I wanted, if I may take a little liberty with your question, I'm doing a study now At OHSU, Oregon Health Science University, in which my hypothesis is that the Socratic method can be used as a pedagogical intervention, as a teaching intervention, to help diabetics in the diabetes clinic increase their treatment compliance.
So really quick, I'll give you a quick example of that.
Somebody says, for example, someone says, They write down their goals, and we look at their goals.
Well, what are your goals? Well, my goal, this is an actual conversation, my goal is to exercise for, is to walk for five minutes a day, and he made a joke, he said, unless it's raining.
The traditional treatments, we live in Portland, Oregon, it rains 300 days a year.
The traditional treatment is very saccharine.
The nurse will say, oh, it's great, write it down, okay, okay.
That's when you're asking people if they agree with themselves.
Well, what do you do if it rains?
Well, then I don't exercise.
Well, do you just not exercise at all or do you walk?
So you're always trying to throw a counterexample or an instance of something to make someone call their belief into question.
And my belief is, I really do believe that reason and rationality are types of hope.
My belief is that When someone gains even a very modest proficiency at the Socratic method, they can then impose that upon themselves, and they can learn to make better decisions, and that's the prison inmates.
But my thought is, well, if it works with prison inmates, and it works with helping people lose their faith and to reason about a whole range of things to not feel trapped when they don't have options, well, why not try it in a medical context?
Why not see if it can work with diabetics?
And the great thing is it's a mixed-method study, so there's some quantitative data that we're going to use, the blood measurements, etc.
Right, so you can see the physiological effects of rational thought.
I mean, that's really kind of a holy grail, is to have the double-blind test.
Yeah, and I'm glad you recognized how ambitious that is.
And that was, you know, Krauss' criticism and so many criticisms.
And I believe that to an extent that philosophy, in a sense, has lost its way.
I think it should be used to help people live a better life and to help people form communities.
And I call it street epistemology.
Which is, as Socrates did, go down to the marketplace and talk to people rather than fire off the academic cannons between various disparate white ivory towers and not actually help people.
I have a lot of criticisms towards contemporary philosophy.
I think that it's made shockingly bad progress in 2500 years, especially if you compare it to say the last 200 years of physics and engineering and medicine.
The fact is that philosophers are not regularly asked on television or into the media to provide solutions to what are fundamentally, I think, a massive array of moral problems in the world.
And I think that, yeah, I think there was some progress in the Enlightenment and so on, but the shattering of Nietzschean nihilism and then the postmodern stuff that occurred out of France in the post-war period.
Oh, just a complete monstrosity.
Philosophy is such a frustrating discipline because it seems to make progress and then there's this massive counterweight that smashes whatever edifices are being built and then just takes it off in the other direction.
To me, at least, if you look at the fundamental catastrophes of the 20th century, the wars, the genocides and so on, they fundamentally came out of a lack of shared ethics, a lack of moral understanding, the great promise of the Enlightenment that we could build bridges of ethics that crossed and overrode cultures.
That crossed and overrode language, that crossed and overrode history, was being built, and then we just kind of lost control of it and went off a hugely serious cliff for many generations.
I think that there's a struggle and a movement now to get things back on track.
I'm sorry to give – I don't mean to lecture a professor of philosophy about the history of philosophy, but – It is a very frustrating discipline compared to how other things have gone in the last...
I mean, look at the practical science and technology, the marketplace, even economics has incredible strides forward in the past couple of hundred years.
But philosophy is still considered to be a very abstract, very, you know, language-based and not something where the rubber really hits the road.
And I think that's tragic.
I don't think we're going to find our way to a peaceful and reasonable future unless philosophers throw, you know, all of our intellectual weight into the great questions of the day and argue ferociously and persuasively and relentlessly for the value of reason and evidence.
We should be the gatekeeper.
Keepers of reason, and I do think we've lost our way.
And speaking of which, we communicated in an email very briefly about the role of the college professor and correcting students' reasoning processes, and even something that shouldn't even be remotely controversial, such as that, has caused a hell storm.
So I think that...
It could also be a function of university architecture, although less so, but we're both on the same page.
I hadn't been able to get a chance to finish your book on God, but I read most of it.
We got a new dog, and I've been going to dog training school and spending time with my children.
But I think when you look at your book, you make some arguments in there to that effect.
One thing that we have in common is that we want to use philosophy as a tool to enable people to live a better life.
I don't want to write something that 300 people read.
You don't either. I mean, look at you.
Everything you're doing is not for a small number of people or super esoteric that philosophers sit.
No, that's not going to – the faith virus is a species-threatening event.
Okay, so let's jump into this particular controversy.
And to me, again, it's pretty shocking that it's still a controversy after a couple of thousand years of philosophy.
And of course, the description of religion among the ancients I thought was quite accurate.
I actually think that Socrates was more of an atheist than Plato claimed that he was in the Apology.
But, you know, that it is – the wise consider it false, the unwise consider it true, and the rulers consider it useful.
I think that's the greatest summation.
And the argument, of course, that was made about evil, right?
Can prevent evil but doesn't, then he's not all-powerful.
If he's all-powerful but doesn't, then he's evil.
And so all of these arguments were very encapsulated and very focused, you know, 2,000, 2,500 years ago.
But still, and this is much more particularly in England to some degree, in Canada to some degree as well, in the U.S. in particular, not so much in Northeastern Europe where 70 to 80 percent of people are atheists or agnostics.
But there is still such a controversy after so many years of this conflict between philosophy and religion.
And, you know, I heed, I think, as you do, Richard Dawkins' call to arms about being aggressive without necessarily being assertive without being offensive.
Blunt. Yeah, blunt.
What is the great challenge and what do you think is the great resistance and why is this still a battle?
I don't know the answer to that question.
I really don't know. Entrenched cultural forces.
See, the faith virus is very potent.
It has built-in defense mechanisms to prevent any form of belief revision.
So, to answer your question...
Well, it's had a long time to adapt, right?
Like all of this, it's had a lot of ability to fight back any kind of attack.
Yeah, and Dawkins talks about, we think about evolution in the domain of biology, but it's also in the realm of concepts and ideas.
So I'd have to answer your question directly and break it down.
It's different in different contexts.
In an academic context, I think that liberals and conservatives disagree on the reasons.
It's looked at as a type of hegemony on the part of liberals, a type of pushing your beliefs off on others.
And that's why I think that we need to conceptualize, even the term the faith virus is something I've started using now.
And we can talk about that if you'd like, Laurent.
But the first thing we need to do is define – look at faith as an epistemology, a way to reason.
We know it's a failed epistemology.
It just doesn't work. However, if somebody thinks that their faith is legit, then by all means, we can test it out.
As you said in your video and I say in all my classes, you can take the James Randi million-dollar test.
You can pray to the moon god and you can see if whatever it is that you claim to know.
And if there's sufficient evidence, you know, if you start praying and people grow back limbs and things like that, then that warrants, that's not conclusive, but it is a type of evidence that's suggestive in the right direction.
Or you, as Krauss says, if you walk outside and the stars are arranged to believe in me, I am god.
Okay, that's pretty remarkable.
And I think we'd have some pretty upset space aliens at that point who had their entire planetary systems moved around.
Well, yeah, you'd have to rule out other alternatives.
You know, you'd have to know that it wasn't a bunch of aliens from a trickster culture.
You'd have to know, and then, you know, I've been thinking about that, this idea of a testament of the Holy Spirit, how people know that that's actually a Holy Spirit that's causing this, a Christian thing and not something else.
That was parenthetical.
Alright, so back to the idea of what the problem is.
I think that the right and the left Both have conceptualized this problem differently.
I will tell you that most of the grief that people have been causing me a tremendous amount of grief about trying to help people, trying to disabuse people of reasoning processes that are not reliable and adopt reliable reasoning processes.
Part of the problem, very rarely, in fact, I will even go beyond that, never.
Never has somebody said to me, your argument is wrong and here's why.
Not even one time. Here's what they say.
You shouldn't be saying that.
This is offensive to me.
You're hurting other people's feelings.
What you're doing is going to damage people.
You're going to take away their sense of hope.
All of these things that are not pertinent to the argument and that This is how it's incredibly helpful to view faith as an epistemology.
Faith is a process to know the world.
I don't buy any of those arguments.
Well, and I think what people need to know why you're using the phrase or the word epistemological is because faith is a knowledge claim.
Epistemology is a study, of course, of how we get knowledge.
Faith is a knowledge claim.
The word gets diluted and spun around like a rabbit in a dryer of a cruel kid or something, right?
The reality is that faith is a knowledge claim.
It is not hope.
It is not a belief in something better.
It is not the wish to meet someone in an afterlife.
It is a specific universal knowledge claim about a fact exterior to consciousness.
It is exactly the same as saying there is a bush over there.
It is a knowledge claim about something.
It is objective. It is not a description of an internal state.
It is not a description of a book I've read.
It is not a description of a dream I had.
It is a specific certain absolute universal knowledge claim that passes no...
The only reason I was smiling through that whole thing is I thought I was listening to myself.
You've either been really listening to my lectures and reading stuff, and I think my guess is that from what I've read and from what I've seen, you've come to these conclusions before.
But once you conceptualize faith as a knowledge claim, everything changes.
Once one really understands what that is and understands that it's an epistemology, that it makes claims about the world, and we're disambiguated, it's not hope, it's not confidence, it's not a promise.
Once one understands that, I think we don't have to worry about religion.
Religion will fall. That word, understanding the word is key, and disambiguating it and looking at it for what it is, which is a knowledge claim.
Right. And the interesting thing is when you delve into the world of theology, one of the things that's very frustrating, I'm sure you've experienced this too, is all of the social standards that we have for all other false knowledge claims completely go by the wayside.
So if I say something not true, like, I don't know, all blacks are dumb, and then people say, well, what's your evidence for that?
I say, well, I don't have any evidence for it, but I hold it as a matter of faith.
You say, actually, that's not faith.
That's called prejudice.
That's called racism. So knowledge claims which are false...
Excellent. Excellent. But they've created this special area where up is down and black is white and zebras can mate with frogs and produce hippogriffs.
It's a completely upside down and backwards world.
And if you take one step out of that world and into other false knowledge claims, the moral nature of what you're doing becomes clear.
Right. A solution to that is to not give those claims countenance.
So, for example, and I just submitted a paper about this, if a student is in class and the professor says, hey, look, this is the current theory of how influenza or how something affects a cell, and someone says, excuse me, doctor, that's not my theory.
Well, what's your theory?
My theory is theory Y. Well, why do you believe theory Y? Well, it's my faith.
That is given no count in the hard sciences.
So why is it that in the soft sciences that we throw up the white flag of surrender?
And one solution is, out of an academic context, we may want to think about treating faith-based claims like we treat racist claims.
Well, in fact, though, of course, faith-based claims are far more dangerous to people than racist claims.
You know, one of the things that is truly shocking, I mean, that there's no faster way to become an atheist than to read the entire Judeo-Christian Bible.
I actually, I worked as a gold panner after high school, saving up money for college, and I took a copy of the Bible because I'd always wanted to, read it cover to cover, and I'm like, ah, you know, what was left of my hair just jumped off my head and marched off into the woods in horror.
Because, I mean, the Bible is very clear about, you know, put atheists to death, put unbelievers, put witches, put homosexuals, and kill them all.
I mean, if hate literature – I don't agree with prosecution for hate crimes in literature, but if we applied these laws consistently, there would be no Gideon Bibles in any hotel room.
So this would be pure hate literature that would not be allowed under any current law.
But again, you get this massive exception because there's a large constituent of entitled people who want to hang on to these beliefs.
It's really eerie how I feel I'm really speaking to my doppelganger.
Yeah, that's actually right.
We're on the same page.
So if I may suggest an avenue where we can move this is what do we do about this?
How do we fight the faith virus?
I mean, I have my own thoughts about this.
What do you think? Well, I mentioned this in an email.
I've really delved into a lot of the psychology and the science behind how people make decisions.
And the science seems to be pretty clear that without, you know, Socrates' first commandment, before know the world is know thyself.
In other words, know the barriers you have towards knowing the world.
Because if you try and overleap your own prejudices and study the world without knowing yourself, I'm paraphrasing.
Socrates probably said it much more clearly than that.
But the science seems quite clear that I view the infliction of faith as traumatic.
I'm fascinated. You have kids too.
I'm a stay-at-home dad with my daughter.
I'm absolutely fascinated to see her thinking processes.
I've had Alison Gopnik and other psychologists on this show where they talk about the incredible cognitive abilities where children can start to do statistical reasoning before they're a year old and they start to gain empathy and a sense of ethics between 14 and 16 months of age.
The cognitive capacities of infants is the great unexplored resource of the universe.
They want to go and mine asteroids.
It's like, let's just go talk to babies.
My daughter had exquisitely developed moral reasoning at around the age of two, two and a quarter, because I don't lie to her, of course.
Then she started to experiment with lying.
I think that's a fine thing to experiment with.
It's a good skill to have under your belt if you're in an extremity.
But I did say to her, listen, Isabella, I don't want you to lie.
She's like, well, why not? I said, well, do I ever lie to you?
And there was this long pause and she said, okay, Daddy, you can lie to me.
Because she wanted to retain the ability to lie herself, but she understood that it was a universal principle.
And so I think that children are incredibly empirical, incredibly scientific.
I mean, there's a massive amount of information gathering that happens as children.
And I find them naturally empathetic.
I work in a daycare when I was a teenager for many years and I find them naturally curious and empathetic and very scientific and very rational.
And so the irrationality of the world, the subjectivity of the world, the moral chaos of the world, the evil, the violence, the initiation of force that the world is, has to be because something intervenes between the natural, healthy curiosity and rationality of the child and adulthood.
The faith virus. The faith virus, and good for you.
It sounds like you're using some Socratic tools there right from the get-go.
And so how even more tragic is that, that this is inflicted upon young minds everywhere?
And not only is it inflicted, the people who inflict it think that they're doing the right thing.
They think that they're promoting a value that they should be promoting.
And that's the other thing that I talked about in my talk and my writing center around, is trying to divorce faith from its moral underpinning.
And I think that that is a step in the right direction towards inoculating people and helping them rid themselves of the faith of the virus.
We must extirpate completely this idea that faith is anything other than a failed epistemology.
Having faith does not make you a good person.
Having faith does not make you a virtuous person.
And inflicting faith on others, inflicting a faulty reasoning process on others, that is actually a moral problem.
Well, it is a moral problem, and certainly when I was raised in England as a Christian, there were two moral commandments that to me were particularly horrifying.
I bounced out of religion very early on in life because I simply could not square the circle of a moral god who disobeyed his own commandments.
I mean, that's such an obvious one.
I just had a debate. Yeah, I mean, thou shalt not kill, but I'm going to wipe out the entire world except for Noah and Azu, including fetuses in the womb, including children who are innocent.
I'm going to kill them all, but thou shalt not kill.
By his own definitions, I mean, the Judeo-Christian deity is stone evil.
I mean, it's genocidal and murderous.
If he was a fictional character, he'd be stroking his mustache with a Hamburglar eye patch and so on.
You simply can't square these circles.
People say, ah, well, you see, but he killed the children because he knew they were going to grow up to be evil.
It's like, well, if he knows they're going to grow up to be evil, how can he send them to hell?
Because that's like getting angry at a rock for bouncing down a cliff.
So two things there.
They're trying to use reason to justify something that's inherently irrational or unreasonable.
And immoral. It short-circuits your moral reasoning, which is very clear.
My daughter is two years old. When she was two years old, she was doing very, very clear moral.
It short-circuits that to create a being of ultimate virtue who disobeys his own commandments.
And then you can't ever – it's blasphemy to call that hypocrisy.
It's like saying to a kid, up is down, black is white, gravity goes up, and two and two make a blue pony.
I mean, it short-circuits the brain.
It gives you an area of fear and trauma that you can't go back to.
At least not easily. So here's one of the things that's interesting.
So when you talk about it as being blasphemy, I've never understood when people say that I'm blasphemous, it's only blasphemy if you buy into the system.
If you don't buy into the system, it's not blasphemous.
If I say something against Apollo to a Christian or to a Muslim who has just accused me of blasphemy and I ask them if it's blasphemy, they say, well, of course it's not blasphemy.
So why should I buy into...
I don't buy into the idea that it's blasphemy because I don't buy into the system.
Right. But what I'm sort of arguing in a very tragically roundabout way is that when you begin to bring reason to the Socratic method and rationality and evidence to this, I genuinely believe that it reawakens this trauma of being told...
I think the two central terrible things which we mentioned before the show started.
The first, of course, is...
That if you disobey or even question or even think about or even doubt these irrational and contradictory commandments, you're going to hell, right?
So I mean, I just came back from Sao Paulo, where I did a presentation which touched on some of these subjects.
And of course, it's a very Catholic country.
And so I was given, well, but...
But religion is voluntary.
And I said, but it's not voluntary.
Because if I threaten you with murder, that is a crime.
That is a very bad thing to do.
I don't actually have to follow through on it.
I just have to threaten you. It's not voluntary for children.
Yeah, and if you threaten a child with eternal torment and separation from everyone that they've ever loved and devils poking out their eyeballs in squishy Shakespearean scenes till the end of time, that is psychotic.
That is unbelievably destructive and terrifying.
It overwhelms a child's developing brain and short-circuits so much of their reasoning.
The second, of course, which is terrible, is to topple the corpse into the crib and say that Jesus died for your sins, that the best and most noble being who ever existed died because you were bad.
I mean, if any human parent were to do this, were to take a child's beloved pet and strangle it and then say, well, I had to do that because you didn't obey me, That would be unbelievable child abuse.
The authorities would jump in to rescue that child.
But again, you move this over to the realm of religion and suddenly it becomes a story of hope and people have the temerity to call this good news.
And so when you begin to push reason into this area, I think you are awakening some very early traumas for people and that's why I think you get these very stonewalling emotional defenses.
It's kind of agonizing to think that your parents You may have a more benevolent view of their self-interest or their motives than I do, but to think that your parents inflicted this on you as if it was just absolutely true without any question and then told you not to lie and told you to live with integrity and all the things that they didn't do, I think that's very, very painful for people.
I think that's why we all get such a pushback in this area.
I think that's changing, and I'm incredibly hopeful.
That's an empirical statement that I stand behind.
I think that people are coming, so the internet also forces people to go even more deeply and entrench in their beliefs, which is problematic.
But I think that I do think it's changing.
I do think that there's a whole – CFI, for example, has put on talks and speeches, and there are grassroots organizations that never existed 20 or 25 years ago.
In fact, at Portland State University, the kids put out a table that says, ask an atheist anything.
And I think that's fantastic.
I think that 20 years ago in this country, I don't think you would have seen that.
But I think that the tide is turning, and I do think that people are coming to value reason and rationality, although you don't see that manifest in a political domain so much because the discourse is so bipolar.
But I do think I do think things are changing.
I'm incredibly hopeful.
I mean, the four horsemen ushered in or started, particularly the end of faith, started, it gave people an awareness of this that then allowed me and others to go and try to do our contribution to help rid the world of the faith virus.
Yes, but of course, as I'm sure you're aware, the fall of faith is a very, very dangerous time for humanity because the irrationality, the core irrationality still is there, right?
If people lose faith, there's kind of like a vacuum, I think, and who tends to rush into that vacuum are sophists, right?
So when you had the fall of religiosity in the 19th century, you got the cancer of communism, which, you know, killed, what, 120 million people or so in the 20th century.
When you have a reduction in religious faith, you often end up with, you know, more on the left wing where they have more faith in the power of government.
So I think, you know, for once in history, can philosophers not suit up, helmet up, joust up, and ride into the void and say, no, no, no, no, we don't want the pendulum to swing to some other irrational ideology, to some other anti-human ideology, but let's try and get it to rest in the middle where reason and evidence is going to be our guide.
We're just swinging from one extremity to the other.
I think that's I agree with you.
It's very, very positive. I think atheism and agnosticism have doubled in the last 10 to 15 years in the U.S. There are two churches a day closing in the Netherlands.
They had, I think, 30 priests die last year in Ireland.
That sounds like that's something I want.
But they only had, I think, one new priest.
There are no new nuns.
The Gutenberg press of the Internet is doing, in a sense, to the unity of religious belief as...
Luther's theses and publications did for the unity of Christendom in the 15th century, 16th century.
But, you know, this fissure that opens up underneath people, they rush to nihilism, right?
So the fall of religion sort of created a void which totalitarianism, fascism, Nazism, communism rushed into in the 20th century, a very, very ridiculously broad statement.
But I think there is a great danger when faith falls because then people who have rested their ethical center on faith say now all is permitted.
And we can live for pleasure.
We can live for power. We can live for control.
We can live for consumption. And we can live for dominance.
And so we're either going to be angel or beast according to this phenomenon rather than reasonable human beings.
And I think that is a great challenge that we need to take up as best as we can.
Two comments on that.
The first comment is… That argument itself divorces the idea that what I focus on is faith a reliable process to get you to the truth.
Now you've talked about, which is great, I can engage that conversation with you because we're now on the same page.
Usually what I do is before I engage that, I make somebody go into a conversation or have a conversation which is okay, faith is not a reliable process, it will not lead you to the truth, fantastic, you and I are on the same page, now we can talk about the benefits of faith.
I'm not so sure that's true.
I mean, we've seen that in Scandinavia, and the guy from Pitzer, what's it, Mark Zuckerberg, secular studies guy, he's written some fantastic books.
I just was reading one the other day about secular societies and secular faiths.
I'm not sure I buy that empirical claim, that if somehow people lose their faith, they're going to go on homicidal rampages.
Well, no, sorry. That was an extreme way of putting it in the 20th century.
I think you could make a case that the fall of faith did raise some pretty toxic ideology, some of which were worse than the religions that they replaced.
I mean, if you look at communism, we're certainly arguably worse than sort of late czarists where they freed the serfs and you had moderates coming up.
But my concern is that it doesn't necessarily mean that we enter into some post-acocalyptic Mel Gibson flaming-haired bicycle, like motorcycles and machetes world.
But it does mean I think I'm sort of concerned that then people go more towards the state as the solution to problems.
These have been the two things, right, that solve humanity.
I think they've done a terrible job overall.
But we say, okay, so we have religion solves the problem of ethics at a personal level, and the state solves the problem of ethics at a social level, and both of them just rely on aggression and punishment.
So my concern is that it doesn't mean that there's still a mad chaos or anything like that, but my concern is that where you do see increasing secularism, you do see an increasing faith in the powers of the state to solve problems, and I don't really think I think that the case could be made.
Obviously, if we became philosophical, we neither need gods nor governments, and I think that's something where we need to really, really focus.
As somebody who likes Plato, you may not be in agreement with me about the small estate positive thing, but I do think that… I do have a concern about the fall of faith, and I think it is happening, but I think that we need to make a very compelling case.
There's lots of people doing this much better than I am, but I think that we really need to make a compelling case so that when we say to someone, you need to give up your faith because it's not true and it's destructive and it's dangerous.
It's bad for your brain. You don't have the right to inflict it on your children even if you choose to believe it as adults.
I think what happens is they do a social calculation.
I think these things occur very rapidly.
The social calculation is, okay, so I give up on faith.
Okay, so now I have to talk to my parents, and now I have to talk to my uncle, and now I have to talk to my brother, and now I have to talk to my community, and now, you know, it's like I'm suddenly the new gay guy in a very sort of fundamentalist town.
And I think when they do that social calculation, they say, well, there's a whole lot of downsides to rejecting faith.
Just that, you know, social punitive ostracism, aggression, or just really difficult conversation standpoint.
My mother's in tears, and my dad tells me I'm going to hell, or whatever.
So there's a lot of downsides to that.
I don't know that we've necessarily given them enough of an upside for them to want to jump that thorny bush, so to speak.
If you frame it like that, get rid of your faith, well, there are many different points you made.
Of course, there are communities that get together.
There are people who Who go to religious institutions and attend religious institutions.
And my students have come and they've told me afterwards, oh, you know, I've started thinking about things, I'm questioning, and now my uncle's mad at me.
I have a line in my talk that I'm going to give a Saturday night that faith is like, I don't say faith because I didn't want to kind of shove it in anybody's face, but it's like the horse in Alice in Wonderland that rides off furiously in all directions.
And it really is. There's no convergence like in science.
There's no – it's just – it's really arbitrary.
Faith is arbitrary. I don't buy any of this.
I just don't buy this idea that somehow people are worse off if they give up bad ways of reasoning.
I just – I can't possibly – I'm not saying that if I have a bad way of reasoning and my friend Joe has a bad way of reasoning and I give up my bad way of reasoning, Joe won't say, oh, Pete, you gave up your bad way – Look at it like this, too. Pretending to know things you don't know.
If I stop pretending to know things that I don't know, and I hang out with a bunch of other people who pretend to know things they don't know, of course they're not going to like that I'm not pretending to know things that I don't know anymore.
But that doesn't mean that I should not stop pretending to know things that I don't know.
Now, because you've made this point in a number of your lectures that your definition of faith is Pretending to know things that you don't know.
And if you substitute that, so people say, well, life has no meaning without faith.
And you say, so what you're saying is life has no meaning if you stop pretending to know things that you don't know.
But I would maybe throw a little argument in there to say that it's worse than pretending to know things that you don't know.
Because if I, you know, sometimes trying to impress a woman with my knowledge of geography, I come up with some ridiculous, I say, the capital of The Netherlands is Tanzania or something, right?
I'm pretending to know something that I don't know, but that's not faith.
I think faith for me is pretending to know things that it is completely impossible to know or that you know are false.
Because if you look at the history of religion, it's like a horse galloping over the horizon all the time.
Because as science expands, religion stays one step ahead, right?
So when we didn't know where lightning and thunder came from, they were the weapons of Zeus.
And then when we figured that out, then we didn't know where the tide's from.
Well, they were, I don't know, Neptune shrugging his shoulders.
And then when we figured the tides out, right?
It's the god of the gaps.
It's always right over the horizon, and now God is hiding right before the Big Bang and right deep down in the subatomic structures of quantum physics, neither of which he is to be found in, but it's always just that little bit further.
As knowledge expands, God retreats but remains eerily absolute despite the fact that he's giving up territory faster than Napoleon at the end of the Russian invasion.
And so this is something that – it's more than pretending to know things that you don't know.
It's pretending to have knowledge of that which is completely impossible to know.
It's pretending that such a thing as a square circle can exist, that you can have consciousness without matter, that you can have an omnipotent and an omniscient God at the same time because if God is omnipotent, then he can change the future.
If he can change the future, he can't know what's going to happen.
All of these square circles and contradictions, it's more than a claim of – Pretending you know something that you don't know.
To me, it's pretending to know something you can't conceivably know or accept if you state it openly to yourself.
Yeah, you don't have to just look at this in a theological or religious context.
You can pretend to know things you don't know, like the other example of the Netherlands and Tanzania.
That was choice. You can pretend to know things that you don't know about anything you want, but it doesn't mean that you can't know those things.
It just means that you're pretending.
Now, I will say...
Yeah, you can go look up the capital of Netherlands and find out that it's Yosemite.
Sorry, go on. Yeah, I will say that there are some people who do not pretend to know things that you don't know.
I think you're one of the people who does not pretend to know things that you don't know.
I aspire to be.
I don't think I pretend to know things that I don't know.
But then there are some people who are delusional and they believe, for example, in talking snakes or that people lived in the belly of a whale or that people walked on water or that other people flew to heaven on a winged horse.
They believe this stuff. I think, again, this might be where we need a little linguistic clarification.
These people aren't pretending.
They're full-blown delusional.
And I'll tell you what I mean by that.
I don't think that they can...
I think belief revision for them is much more difficult.
Oh, so you think that they would actually pass a lie detector test?
Some of them. The guy who just died from handling the snake would be one, yeah.
Yeah. Okay, because that's important, right?
Because, I mean, there are ways to reproduce religious visions in people by applying electricity to certain parts of the brain.
I mean, it does seem to be a brain disorder.
Of course, epilepsy and religious visions have gone hand in hand quite a bit throughout history.
But there are people, I'm sure, yeah, they genuinely believe it and they would pass a lie detector test in the same way that some schizophrenic genuinely believes that voices are telling him to do good or bad things.
They pass that lie detector test.
I mean, I personally think that's quite a small minority.
I've only talked to a few of those, thank the Lord, in my life, but they even get very aggressive when questioned.
Aggression to me is always the mark of uncertainty.
You should be open to be questioned about everything and anything under the sun, always open to revising your arguments and accepting better data.
I mean, of course, that's just That's the basic of being not even a philosopher, just a basically civilized human being.
But I think to me, aggression and what people call blasphemy or the sacred or the higher, to me, it's just a mask for aggression.
Whenever anyone says that something is sacred, it just means that I'm going to get really angry if you question this.
That's all it means to me.
Sacred is just a cover for, you know, the fist coming into the face if you raise the wrong question.
If one had evidence, they wouldn't need to get upset.
They'd just present the evidence. Yeah, I don't say two and two is four is a sacred belief of mine because it's true.
I don't need a sacredness if it's true.
I need to surround it in this penumbra to make people's eyes water so they can't see the nonsense at the center.
But I think it's a very small minority of people who actually would pass the lie detector.
I want to pause you there. So I think there's a tiny bit of lag or what have you.
So I want to pause you because I think that the way that you framed that was really good.
So that is when you use a Socratic intervention.
In that moment where you can help people to see either that the beliefs that they have is a contradiction or the belief that they have is just so nonsensical, John Loftus has this thing called the outsider test of faith.
So many people have developed these really interesting tools.
I think that the Socratic method is a way to target that, and I don't remember the exact words, but it was right before you used the word penumbra, which is a cool word, but there are ways to target this Through a conversational intervention.
Throughout this discourse, this dialogue, we've been talking about atheism.
We're on the same page. Now the thing for me is to talk about how to help people.
I know you want the same thing. We both want to live in rational societies, rational communities.
You're outspoken and bold.
I am outspoken and bold.
Correct me if I'm wrong, do people think you're a jerk?
Oh, I've been called publicly in the media, I mean, every bad name that you could conceive of and, you know, praised as well.
But to me, if you are not annoying, nasty people, you're just not doing your job as a philosopher.
I mean, that's natural.
I mean, you're not doing your job as a cop if the criminals don't dislike you.
And so that to me is, you know.
I think people, one of the reasons people fear, and I'll speak for philosophers in general, is they don't want to be perceived as a jerk.
I hope people don't perceive me as a jerk.
I don't think so. I think people perceive me as someone who's blunt.
I think my guess would be, because this is how I perceive you, you're someone who's blunt.
And I think that that is a strategy to help people.
Now we just need to, we, not you and I, but we need to empower people to give them conversational tools to embolden them to help people to use those conversations, little things, someone at the bank, someone who, the woman who does my shades, whatever.
We need to use, there should be no Replacement for Hitchin.
There's no other four horsemen.
There's a million horsemen.
There's each one of us, each voice.
There are people that we can empower, that we can give basic tools, that can use every opportunity as a chance to help someone lose their faith and not just lose their faith, to help them reason and understand what that means or embrace scientific processes or frame it like this.
To embrace certain processes that are more likely to help them get what they want, to more likely help them live a better life, a good life.
You know, what's a good life? It's back to the philosophy questions that we talked about when we were off the air.
But I think that those ways to frame the problem of everybody speaking bluntly but having some basic tools, and you've seen a lecture, there are only like 10 things somebody can say to you.
I mean, there are really only like 10...
One of the things that we talked about is, well, God's logic.
You don't know God's logic.
And that came with the problem of evil, of why does it go, well, it's in God's mind, how could you possibly know God's mind?
Okay, so you give people some tools, you say, look, here you go, there are about 10 or 12 things, hey, when is this podcast going to be released, by the way, this videocast?
I may work on it tonight or in the morning, but I try to get them out as quickly as possible.
Okay, because I'm going to do street dialogues with a buddy of mine, Matt Thornton.
We're going to go around. We have someone hold a camera, and I'm going to attempt right then and there to disabuse people of their faith.
So I'm going to find people.
So I want those techniques to be modeled.
I want people to use that as a type of street epistemology to go around and to try to help rid people of the faith virus.
But within that, I think it is...
I don't think there's any contradiction between being blunt and being incredibly compassionate.
Yes, and I very much agree with that.
I mean, there are ridiculous errors that are in the world today.
But, you know, like so people go off and fight in wars that are unjust and certainly non-defensive.
But I mean, I have a huge amount of compassion for people who've, you know, been steady dripped, a Chinese water torture of propaganda their whole lives, never been taught how to think.
To me, most people's brains look like those tortured Chinese women's feet from the early 19th century.
They've been twisted and mutilated and they've been bound and now they're hobbling around.
It's like, that's terrible.
Now, fortunately, the neuroplasticity of the brain can...
Sorry, go ahead. You don't hate these people.
I don't hate these people.
I'm not an angry atheist.
You're not an angry atheist.
So I think that those conceptions that people have, we need to tear those down.
Those just aren't true. I mean, I'm concerned.
Don't get me wrong. I'm deeply concerned, but I'm not mad at someone because they caught the faith virus.
I'm not mad at someone. No, no.
No, of course not. Now, but I do think that one of the reasons that people dislike philosophy is philosophy creates a choice where before there was only an absolute.
And so people then resist having that fork in the road, right?
So if you never meet somebody who questions your faith and you stay within a faith-based community or whatever, the odds of you having significant problems in that faith are very low.
If some annoying philosopher comes along, starts asking all these questions, now that which was formerly an absolute, like gravity, now becomes something that is a choice, something that is optional.
I think that the purpose of the Socratic reason, the purpose of reason and evidence, the purpose of philosophy is to create choice where before there was only an absolute.
Now, once people are given that choice, if they then continue down the path of believing things that are patently false, believing things that are against reason and evidence, and in particular, inflicting beliefs that they question now in their own minds on their children as if those beliefs are true, they've crossed over to another moral dimension. inflicting beliefs that they question now in their own minds
So, you know, I don't hate people for being propagandized, but once you give them the information, and, you know, that can take time, months, it can take a long time to help somebody turn that supertanker of faith around, but there is a choice that comes after that that I think people must be responsible for.
No, I agree, and we also need patience when we deal with these people.
Sometimes you can have a conversation, and I've mentioned this before, and a year later or what have you, someone will come around and say, hey, I hated you, I couldn't stand you, or something happened.
In aggregate, all these small things that we do make a contribution to help cure the world of the faith virus, but again, as you said, It's not just that we stop people or help them overcome bad ways of reasoning.
We have to teach them the value of critical rationality, the value of reasoning.
I think that these things are values.
When you talk about critical thinking, critical thinking is a skill set and it's an attitude.
The skill set is pretty easy to learn.
It's really easy to learn. Fallacies, inferences, etc.
It's the attitudinal dimension that's particularly difficult.
That means changing your beliefs on the basis of evidence or being trustful of reason or being willing to revise your beliefs.
I know very few people who actually teach the attitudinal component of critical thinking.
It's not enough that we just help people We also have to help them push them towards opportunities so they can see what it is that they're doing and how it can benefit them, kind of cognitive dispositions.
That's significantly more difficult to teach people how to do.
I think that the Socratic method is a good tool for that.
I've never seen it used like that.
I'm trying to do something like that with my book.
I've never seen it used like that, but I think it can be used very effectively to do that because It's not enough to disabuse people of failed epistemologies.
That's only half the battle.
It's a big half, don't get me wrong, but it's only half the battle.
Yeah, and you know, there's lots of different ways that you can make the case.
One of the things I think is, I always try to go back to the brain science, which is an incredible field of study right now, and There's some significant evidence that holding contradictory beliefs is very stressful and that stress leads to very negative health outcomes.
Everything from, you know, can raise the risk of cancer significantly, can raise the risk of Alzheimer's significantly because, you know, stress releases cortisol, cortisol goes into the brain and kills off brain cells.
There's no such thing as a perfectly religious person because perfectly religious people have to get out of bed and they have to tie their shoes and they have to drive to work or even if they live on a mountaintop, they have to go and drink the dew and hunt a rabbit or something.
And so we live in the real world.
We live in the empirical, rational, scientific world.
And so that we can't get rid of.
I mean, the moment you get rid of that, you've just jumped off a cliff and nobody has to worry about your arguments for more than a few seconds.
So we always are going to have to at least be partially immersed in the rational, empirical, scientific world.
Why not just go the whole hog?
And then you don't have the contradictions, you don't have the stress.
I mean, you're going to have some social stress, but that'll pass.
But then you can live without having to hide things from yourself.
You can live without having to have electric fences within your own mind that you can't go and can't touch and other people can't touch.
That's a really stressful way to live where you're afraid any time somebody's going to ask you a question that's uncomfortable or you're afraid any time that somebody's going to look up at you when you propose saying grace and saying, I don't know, grace, can we eat?
So it's a much less stressful existence to live in reality.
It doesn't take courage to do that.
It takes honesty. Nothing more is required.
Stop pretending to know things you don't know and just be incredibly honest.
And that's a move that I would like to see you and that I try to do.
When someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, just say, I don't know.
That's all you know. You mentioned brain science.
You didn't ask me a question about it, but I would tell you.
I don't know.
I'm not a specialist in brain science.
I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist.
The guy in my department is a computational neuroscientist.
I'm not that guy. So when someone asks you a question that you don't know, all you need to do is say, I don't know.
And the same thing is concerned with supernatural entities.
The same thing is concerned with gods or talking snakes.
Someone asks you a question, just be really honest with them.
And I think a lot of the times people give verbal behavior for something, but they don't believe it themselves.
They'll indicate it verbally.
Well, you know, I was thinking about people who will say things like, well, you know, I don't believe things.
I don't understand why you should believe things on the basis of evidence.
Well, maybe you haven't articulated that to yourself.
But you live as if that's the case, right?
You live as if cars actually, you'd get hurt if you got hit by them or if you wanted to make coffee in the morning that you'd grind the coffee bean and you'd stick the thing in the, you know, we have a little coffee, you'd stick the plug in the wall.
I mean, you don't live that way.
You live according to the dictates of evidence every day.
So it's unclear to me.
I think oftentimes people give verbal behavior and I'm not a psychologist.
I don't know the underlying, you know, What's up with the brain that yields these phenomena?
I don't know. My guess is that it would be incredibly complicated.
Covariant with culture and tradition and brain architecture and Shermer's written some fantastic stuff on that.
Others have written some great stuff on that.
But I think it gets back to what we talked about before.
There are practical ways to deal with this.
There are ways to help people overcome this and there are ways to help people understand the value of reason.
What I would like to see is I would like to see a lot of things, but one of the things that I'd like to see in terms of helping people rid the faith virus, I think a big part of it starts in academia.
We need to correct people's – we need to remove the taboo that prevents professors from – in the soft sciences in particular, when it comes to correcting a student's reasoning process that is out of alignment with reality or will take them further away from reality.
And that's not...
That's not intellectual abuse.
That's your job.
That's what you're supposed to do. Professors of philosophy are supposed to help people.
This is my conception.
My job is to help people to reason more clearly and to think through problems.
And that's applicable across multiple domains of thought.
We need to remove that taboo.
We also need to embolden and empower people so that when they do have a conversation with someone and someone says, I'm offended, they don't throw up the white flag of surrender.
We have to change the cultural values that we have To engage that.
There are a tremendous number of things that we can do.
We need to make the discussion more public.
I would urge my colleagues who are watching this, who are philosophy professors, to chill out, particularly if you have tenure, chill out on writing things that 500 or 300 or maybe 50 people are going to read.
Chill out on it. Start writing things that are accessible to people, that they can understand, that will teach them the value of critical rationality and reasoning.
There are so many contributions within the domain, within the field of philosophy that one can make.
Applied epistemology, Tim Van Gelder has some great stuff about argument mapping.
There's a whole host of things, but we need to take philosophy out of this abstract discipline, in my opinion, and we need to put it into the service of humanity.
By the way, Portland State is great about that.
One of the things that Portland State has a community service component.
The other thing that my colleagues can do if they're listening to this is they can try to get critical thinking programs into the high schools, and there's a lot of politics involved in that.
We can try to help people early on.
So there are many things and there are institutional mechanisms that help people with promotion and tenure and hiring that enable that.
But we really need to make this move in philosophy, in my opinion, to make the things that we write and do more accessible to people, to put it into the service of humanity, to teach people that they really do have options to the problems, that they can live better lives.
Reason is the tool to do that.
It's not goat sacrifice.
It's not faith. It's not flipping coins, it's just, it's not.
But again, I'm completely open to the idea, if somebody wants to tell me that they have faith, or that flipping coins, or worshipping the moon god, or looking at the stars, I'd like to look at that evidence, and then we can have a conversation.
Make empirical claims, and you can sit at the adult table.
Absent those empirical claims, you need to go back to the children's table.
I think that my colleagues can really make a tremendous contribution to put philosophy back to where it should be, into the service of people to help them live better lives.
We should be the gatekeepers of reason and rationality, and we should clearly articulate what the values of those things are.
They don't want to talk about faith because they're afraid of end-of-course surveys or administrative reprisals.
The secular outpost has a link that I sent you.
We could probably post it on this about this idea of what is the role of the professor in regard to disabusing students' beliefs.
Okay, great. Then you don't have to talk about faith.
I'll do the dirty work, like one of those fish in the tank that just sucks up all the bad stuff.
I'll do right about faith.
The benefits of reason and rationality, how you can institutionalize those.
You can talk about it across a spectrum of thoughts.
Take whatever you do. It's a call to Hume scholars as well.
There's an untapped wealth in Hume scholars.
And help people to live better lives.
Help people to understand how to evaluate consequences and actions and decisions.
Help people understand that there really are ways, there are epistemologies that will fail you.
Help people understand why they should value truth.
Help people understand that their feelings aren't a reliable guide to reality.
Help people understand that you can You can do things like the Socratic intervention at OHSU, the Oregon Health.
You can go into the prisons.
And the prisons, boy, the prisons are in their faith incubation chambers.
They are in desperate need of reason and rationality.
These people need reason and rationality.
Top in the list.
And one more thing now.
This is a call to administrators, if I may.
You can change some of the metrics for promotion and tenure and hiring to weight studies more than you do just peer-reviewed scholarship.
And you can weight community outreach more for people who are in philosophy departments trying to spread reason and rationality in the schools, in the prisons, in the hospitals.
And we can set this in our discipline as a value.
We can say, okay, look, enough is enough.
We've gone quite astray with postmodernism and all this...
What we can do is we can bring it back.
we can bring it back to using philosophy as a tool to help people to live better lives and have better communities.
It doesn't take – Well, be of service to humanity.
I mean I was very struck when I read as a teenager that Aristotle wrote of his criticism of the platonic forms.
You know, we love Plato but we must love the truth more than our friends.
And I think that's very true because any friend who demands that you live in unreality is not really a friend at all but rather a co-conspirator in delusion.
And the last thing I would – let me put a call out to your colleagues as well.
If this doesn't scare them, nothing will, which is that if you don't get into the public sphere, if you don't mix in the marketplace as everybody that you praise and everybody that you teach did, you know, at least take the examples of the – If you don't do that, then philosophy in the public sphere is going to be left to amateur internet idiots like me.
And if that doesn't terrify your colleagues, I can't imagine what will.
So come in.
Otherwise, people might mistake me for a real philosopher.
Whatever you do, try and block that.
Whatever you do, be the sunblock that gives this.
A real philosopher is – I don't even know if there's any such thing as a real philosopher.
As far as I'm concerned, a real philosopher is someone who doesn't pretend to know things that they don't know.
It's someone who tries to help people to live better lives through reason and rationality and science.
They model those virtues that they want to see others emulate so they're not angry.
They're not upset. You're not upset with people who use failed epistemology.
No one is mad at them. We want to help them.
Yeah, it's a call to my colleagues and maybe even it's a call to some of the people on YouTube or who watch this.
Use the tools that you have to help.
A lot of people, they feel trapped.
They feel that they have no place to turn to.
That's when they start getting into terrible problems and they turn to the synagogue or the mosque or the church, which will yield them ultimately arbitrary answers to the questions that they seek.
Well, and I think it's become incredibly important now.
I think the stakes are so enormously high because science and technology and the free market has produced such incredible power, both for good and for ill, right?
It's given us incredible technology, medicine, heat, and this amazing conversation.
But it has also given us the capacity and power to wreck humanity through environmental depredation and wars and tyranny and so on.
And the technology of surveillance and control is rising along with the technology of communication and liberation.
And so the science, the rationality in that particular sphere, both in terms of free market productivity and the wealth it creates, which is so often seized by governments as scientists are seized by governments to turn their capacities to control and destruction.
If we only let the technology of humanity be the sole center of the focus of rationality and evidence, then our capacity to do ill is far outstripping our capacity to live virtuously.
And so I think we really need to focus that laser on the question of ethics and how to have a secular ethics which does not require punishment, which is reasonable from first principles, which can't be argued against.
I've done my own little work on this with a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
I think it's held up fairly well, but if people think it's nonsense, I still think we've really got to answer that question of ethics because I don't think people are going to let go of that log that's the only thing they think is keeping them afloat unless there's something else to grab onto.
Absolutely. On why be good, what virtue is, why it's so important, how it can be proven without the punishment of jail or the threats of hell.
That, I think, is the most important thing that we can work on so we can give people that transition and we can finally have, God, wouldn't it be amazing as a species to finally have a moral technology that approximates our scientific and destructive technology because I think if we don't catch up, things are not going to go very well in the long run.
Yeah, we agree on the consequences of that, and one of the things, well, a multitude of things, one deliverable that's come out of this videocast, is that what you call it a videocast?
Yep. A vlog, baby.
A vlog. One deliverable that's come out of this is, I like your analogy of the log.
Don't let go of the log until you have another log right there.
We have to make sure that when we engage people in an academic context or not, or the woman at the bank or not, we're always ready to substitute the other log.
Where nobody's left alone in the cold or hanging.
And I think that's come up repeatedly in this podcast, this vlog, excuse me.
I think that's come up repeatedly and I think that that's essential because people are scared.
And I can totally understand.
I mean I've never, fortunately I've never had any faith myself, but people are scared to give that up.
And I can understand that they're scared, and I'm sure you can understand that they're scared, and that's why our additional job is to make sure – I just love that log thing – that there's another log.
They're not going to sink. There's something else that's going to be there for them.
Instead of a – you're not just replacing – It's an island.
It's a resort.
It's sandals. It's not just another log.
It's an island.
It's something infinitely better than like a water-soaked log, something that was bringing them down when they thought they were floating and they're slowly drowning.
And now we're replacing it with something.
Not even to keep them afloat, but to allow them to run and to be and to live and to be free.
I mean, it sounds cheesy, but it really is.
No, it is. I mean, yeah, get out of the half-drowning and get into the sandals resort.
You need sandals, you know, like Socrates' ward.
See how these are all weaving together.
Okay, then the one last thing that I was sort of put out as a call is that the one thing I think that philosophers really need to provide, in particular to parents...
You want your children to be good.
You want your children to be nice.
And that doesn't mean compliant. But you want them to have empathy but also to have moral courage and to do the right thing.
And you don't want them to lie ferociously and steal and hit other kids for their lunch money and so on.
And I think that giving tools to parents on here's how you answer, Mommy, why shouldn't I lie?
Or why shouldn't I just go knock that kid over?
Why shouldn't I? Why should I share my toys?
Or should I share my toys? I think providing things for parents because parents want their children to be good for some shallow social reasons but also I think for genuinely good reasons.
If they don't have good answers, they're tempted, you know, like some crack addict who wants to get a backslide, you know, they're tempted to just say, because Jesus said so, you know, some, you know, I don't know how to answer them.
Yeah, so expecting them to invent philosophy when philosophers haven't done a great job, I think, of explaining secular ethics in 2,500 years.
We can't expect them to do that any more than we, you know, hand them a bucket of sand and say, go make a computer.
But I think if we can focus on making the answer simple and clear and, you know, educational philosophy for kids, for parents with their kids, As you know, earlier intervention is better.
There's that chilling statement of the Jesuits until they're seven, their mindful life.
I think if we can give parents more tools, animated tools, children's books and so on, I think that would be a fantastic service, obviously for the children but also for the parents who need these kinds of materials and they're not really that easy to find.
So why don't we put out yet another call to my colleagues?
That would be a fantastic collaborative effort.
It would be a wonderful thing that universities, not just philosophy for children, but tools that parents can use to help.
Dawkins has a wonderful book, The Magic of Reality.
I mean, we can augment and supplement that.
We could have lines of literature on that, but written in a way that parents can really understand and they can use some of these techniques and they can help their children to embrace reason and lead more rational lives.
Yeah, because, I mean, how do kids learn morality?
They have these terrible... So, Jimmy lied, and then he fell down a well.
You know, it's like, Jimmy lied, and nobody wanted to play with him.
I mean, these are not moral arguments.
These are just punitive arguments, and they're social metaphysics arguments.
And so, you know, but it's a real challenge.
How do I explain my daughter why lying shouldn't...
why she shouldn't lie? These are challenges.
I'm sort of working this stuff out, and I think other people, I'm sure philosophers like yourself, you've got your kids with their own moral questions...
So yeah, I think that's a huge service and that's not going to be particularly controversial because it's not like you're putting it in a high school curriculum where you're going to be stoned by a bunch of religious parents.
This is material for people who already want to provide this information to their kids but don't have a central place to go.
May I throw a total curveball at you?
Go. All right. So one of the things that I do with my kids, I teach them Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
I don't teach them. They learn.
They study Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I think, is a fascinating way to teach children to think critically because it's reality.
It's total reality-based.
Here's what it gives you.
You're smiling and that's great.
You're looking at me a little suspect, which is great.
I'm curious. Okay, so I think it's really important because it teaches kids not only what they can do, but what they can't do.
And faith has no corrective mechanism.
There's no corrective mechanism in faith.
There are certain activities in which you engage.
Living in general is an activity in which you engage, in which you get feedback.
You put your finger on a hot stove and it gets burned and empirically you learn that.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a wonderful way to give kids a sense of reality.
That doesn't mean that there aren't Brazilian Jiu Jitsu schools for Jesus and all that stuff.
It is. There are. But it really teaches children that...
What do I mean by a corrective mechanism?
A way to fix their mistakes.
A way to fix their mistakes physically.
And I think that the Socratic method is very similar.
I'm writing a paper about that now.
It's made me think of it. The Socratic method is very similar because it offers, initially on the part of the facilitator or the Socratic figure, it offers a possibility of giving a corrective mechanism.
So initially when I'm in the Prisons or what have you in my classes, I am the corrective mechanism.
Eventually, people will learn how to impose this on themselves.
They'll learn how to impose this elinkist, this structure of, huh, is that wrong?
Is that right? Why? Well, can I think of a counter example?
Well, what would that mean? Okay.
And they can run through these examples.
I think Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a great way to do that in a short period of time in the physical arena.
Yeah, certainly I think empiricism gets great value from people who have to think and live in the moment.
You know, we think of philosophy as a lot like chess or geometry or these very abstract disciplines, but...
To me, the great value of philosophy is self-knowledge, courage in the moment, and a quick response to the empiricism of now.
Because that's really, I think, how you can convince people is to really listen to them, to absorb their concerns, to think nimbly in the moment.
And yeah, I love sports, and I think anything which absorbs you in the moment really is only going to do your thinking good if you have a good foundation.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think, again, I'm just going off of your idea for parents, they need some kind of a corrective mechanism.
The ultimate in corrective mechanisms are when not just children, but everybody imposes these structures upon themselves.
This kind of, to put it in a scientific context, this kind of hypothesis testing with your own ideas.
One can look at the Socratic method like that.
The trick is not only how do we teach parents to do that, but how do we teach people how to teach that?
Like, how do we teach others how to teach that?
It's not just enough that I teach about 250, 260 students a term.
That's not enough. It's not enough that I do this.
We need to create a generation of people.
We need to create people I think by the end of this year, we should be at about 70 million downloads.
It's huge. It's huge.
And this is just because of the technology and, of course, the quality of the guests and the quality of the listenerships.
I'm just a little central hub, but it is an amazing, amazing medium.
Congratulations. Thank you.
It's hitherto impossible.
I mean, the odds of me – I come from a business background, an entrepreneurial background – the odds of me going around North and South America talking about philosophy all summer – I think philosophy has not had such a potent tool in the history of philosophy.
Socrates was limited to the power of his voice and then the written words of those who came after him who generally were persecuted in their works except for Aristotle's mostly Mostly buried, but we have this amazing capacity to reach people, to inspire people, to reason with people, to show how incredibly wonderful and exciting just being in the world is.
I mean, we get these great dreams every night that are just wonderful and magical, and that's all part of reality.
We don't need... To invent more wonderful things in the world that are delusional.
You don't need to pretend to know things you don't know to live a good life.
You don't need to believe in supernatural entities or think that there are supernatural entities.
You don't need any of these things to lead a good life.
If you want to lead a good life and you want to improve, you want to live a great life with your daughter, reason.
There's no other tool. There's no other way.
There's no other way. All right.
Well, listen, I think we should wrap this up before we bring down the entire internet when this is published.
But please just give your websites again for people who want to get more out of your work, which I highly recommend.
You give great speeches.
I really like the way that you interact with your audience.
Also wanted to compliment you on a very witty and elegant and accessible writing style.
I've debated some academics.
I just debated an academic in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
He was actually a very good sport during the debate, but his writing was fairly impenetrable.
So I really wanted to compliment you on sort of reaching out from the ivory tower like Goldilocks with the hair.
Really, that's what I'm saying. It is very accessible, very enjoyable, and people want to book you to come and speak.
I highly recommend it. It's very thought-provoking.
So just where people can get a hold of your information again.
Thanks. That's very kind of you.
I really appreciate those kind words.
Twitter is at Peter Boghossian, P-E-T-E-R-B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-A-N. My email is pgb at pdx.edu.
Philosophynews.com hosts some of my podcasts, and a few videocasts and podcasts are hosted by the Richard Dawkins Society and on YouTube.
Well, I really appreciate that.
For anyone who listens to this, my show is at freedomainradio.com.
It was a real pleasure. I hope we can do it again.
It was as much fun as I thought it was going to be, and I had high expectations, so I really do appreciate your time and energy.
Thanks. I really appreciate it.
It was a great chat. Thanks.
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