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July 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:51
The Most Honest Answer an Atheist Could Give...
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Now, one of the concerns I have with the atheist community, just to sort of give you a little bit of the meta background of what it is that I'm doing here, one of the concerns I have with the atheist community is it got lazy, got soft, because they are hitting the Christians or the religious people where there is the greatest vulnerability, which is in the metaphysics, really, the nature of the existence of God and so on.
So they're hitting where they have the strongest arguments and religious people have the weakest arguments.
Now, I understand that.
And what I've been trying to model to Christians and also to put out the challenge to atheists, because if all you do is play your strengths to other people's weaknesses, you get an inflated sense of your own ability, right?
So if I notice that someone's backhand is really bad and I just keep hammering it at their backhand and they have not figured out that my backhand is really bad, then I'll think I'm a better player than I am because the moment I come across somebody with a good backhand and they notice that my backhand is weak, I lose games like crazy, right?
So sorry for the slightly labored analogy, but does that sort of make sense so far?
No, in fact, that confirms kind of what my suspicion of what the impetus for the tweet really was, was kind of hitting atheists in their weaker area and trying to have a productive conversation about from the atheist worldview, what is really, you know, the view on lying as a general, as a universally bad thing.
Right.
I'm being a good coach.
So what I'm doing is I'm going to the atheists and I'm saying, I'm not going to serve to your strengths.
I'm going to serve to your weakness.
So you get better and you figure out some of the limitations of your own worldview and you stop dunking using, you know, Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and other people's arguments, you know, the Sky Daddy and unicorns and so on.
And in fact, I would say I was really quite disappointed in the atheists as a whole.
They seemed to be a little bit more intellectual when I was younger.
It could, of course, be a filtering mechanism on X, but it really was universal.
They just had terrible arguments, aggressive arguments, and so on.
And so allowing atheists for decades to hit the religious where the atheists are strongest and the religious are the weakest, you know, turned about is fair play.
And so to ask atheists for the reasons why they wouldn't lie is really interesting.
And again, I'm not dodging your question.
I know you're asking, am I an atheist and so on?
So we'll get to that.
I just want to sort of give you the backstory behind what it is that I was doing.
So what is the most, and this is a real question for you, right?
I don't want to just make this a pure monologue.
So what is the most honest answer that an atheist could give as to why he shouldn't lie?
Frankly, in my personal view, I don't think that there is a universal principle against lying.
I think there are situations, and at least in atheist worldview, I think there are situations where you can say lying is obviously the wrong choice here.
But I don't think like Christians, like Muslims, like Jews, that there is a metaphysical reason to just not lie.
Right.
So what is the most honest answer that an atheist could give to the question, why shouldn't you lie?
I would say the most honest answer is that there isn't.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And if you had honesty, this is back to Socrates.
Nobody, I mean, most atheists don't know about my secular proof of ethics, my rational proof of secular ethics, university preferable behavior, which we'll get to in terms of my answer.
But most atheists don't know that.
In fact, most atheists virulently hate UPB.
I've actually had much more hostility from atheists regarding UPB than I ever have from Christians.
Christians find it fascinating that there can be a rational proof of the basic edicts of God's commandments.
In the same way, in the sort of late medieval scholastic period, a lot of the people in the church were fascinated and in fact positive towards the argument that science could prove some of natural phenomenon in a way that they felt glorified God even more.
If there's a mathematical perfection and beauty and symmetry and synchronicity to the universe, that's more evidence of God's plan.
So they didn't hate physics or chemistry or biology or anything like that back in the day.
So they had obviously some tangles with Darwin.
But so I found that Christians did not view my rational proof of secular ethics, UPB, as anything negative.
In fact, they viewed it as very positive.
I had a lot of very interesting conversations and debates with Christians about UPB.
Atheists, on the other hand, hostile to it because it limits the power of the state, which is their cultish adherence, right?
But statistically, right?
So I know that there's an answer as to why you should or shouldn't lie.
Christians have an answer.
And I understand, of course, the atheists disagree with that answer, but they have an answer.
They have an answer.
And atheists don't.
They don't have an answer.
And the most honest thing an atheist could do would be to say, I don't have a good answer for that.
I mean, you'd have the self-reflection, hopefully, as an atheist.
I don't know if it's like this sort of lack of inner voice.
I posted earlier this morning about how atheists seem to be utterly lacking in the capacity for self-criticism.
And self-criticism is related to an internal dialogue to internal criticisms.
And of course, I posted shortly after I came back to X, which was the first sort of big banger multi-million view tweet, which was, you know, 30 to 50% of people have no inner dialogue.
They have no inner voices.
And perhaps part of the power of Christianity in particular is you pray, you receive answers.
Now, of course, if you're religious, you view those answers as coming from the universe, from God.
If you're not religious, at least you're having a debate with yourself.
What should I do?
What would Jesus do?
What's the right thing to do?
And you have this argument with yourself.
And that's a plus.
So if you were an honest atheist, you would say, I don't have a good answer.
Now, you'd have an impulse for an answer, right?
And you'd say, well, it's good for me to not lie because people trust me.
It's easy to do business.
People like me.
They believe me and so on.
So there's an advantage to that.
However, however, and I don't know if the atheist just grew up in like hyper-secure suburbs or something like that, but atheism doesn't have a very good mind map of human evil, right?
Because if you say, I tell the truth because it benefits me, then the question is, if telling the truth is universally beneficial to all people, then why is there lying at all?
Why is there a lying?
I mean, everybody knows.
I mean, if you've had kids, right?
And even if, you know, I've never punished my daughter and so on, but, you know, did you take this candy?
No.
Right.
Who knocked over the lamp?
He did.
She did.
Like they don't.
So lying is instinctive and innate, right?
We're sort of born liars and we have to sort of grow out of it.
Children generally lie and say they didn't do things or did do things, you know, but it's not, it's not true, right?
So if lying is just universally beneficial to everyone, like breathing, well, we've evolved to breathe.
So why did we evolve to lie if lying is not beneficial?
That's a basic Darwinian question, right?
Why would we evolve to lie?
Now, of course, it only takes a moment's thought and not even that really, just a life not spent staring at your own navel to look out into the world and say there are countless people who do very, very well in terms of money and power, prestige and so on by lying their asses off.
I mean, particularly under the COVID regime, right?
I mean, we saw all of this repeatedly.
I mean, pharmaceutical companies made tens of billions of dollars, probably even more in the long run, by making claims about the vaccine that weren't even tested for and weren't particularly true, right?
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