#19 — The Riddle Of The Gun (Revisited)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
160.14426
Summary
No rational atheist holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing religious people do, we blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its doctrines such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates. No rational atheist is dogmatically opposed to believing in god, it s just that the evidence for his existence is terrible. It s easy to write a book that posits that the Bible and the Qur and Ayn Rand's The Old Testament contained a single chapter that resolved the deepest questions of science rather than merely telling us how to sacrifice goats to goats and when to stone our daughters to death. That s the kind of thing a rational atheist would do, and yet many people push back against this. In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I discuss the pushback against that pushback, and offer a counter-explanation of why no rational atheist has anything to fear from the idea of a God who doesn t exist. And why a book about God could be written by an omniscient being, rather than by a man who doesn't believe in it. I also talk about the possibility that there could be no evidence for the existence of a god at all, and why there's no doubt that there is no evidence of human origin in the Bible or The Qur and The Qur, and a book on the Qur, which is a book written by a human being who does, in fact, believe in something other than the Old Testament, but not by a God of the dead god who didn't have a human origin, but rather by someone who does not believe in the Old God. that s not a God at all things that exist in the Qur or the Old Qur or a Qur and the Quran but by a being who s not human in the Torah and that s a God is not a god at all not a being a god who s . What's the point of my book about the Qur? what does it say about God s existence? What does it tell us about God? is that he s not ? does he really exist if he s how to be a god? or why he s ? is it , where does he when to be who s a god ? and can he really be a God ? what
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy
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what we're doing here please consider becoming one okay well a lot has been going on there's been a
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another mass shooting which is really the the proximate cause of this podcast but the reaction
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to it ties in with my release of my book with majid nawaz this week and some of the pushback against
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that for instance the the minor demagogue deem obidala who i collided with on cnn last week
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got onto twitter after this shooting which took place in a community college in oregon
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and because of a rumor that the shooter had asked people their religion before killing them
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he speculated that this was the result of new atheism and perhaps could be directly tied to me
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uh but he was he was um he made a great show of withholding judgment by way of uh casting aspersion
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so he got on twitter and he said uh hey friends i know that many of you don't like sam harris
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but seriously don't unfairly link new atheism to this shooting we don't know the facts yet
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that is just a masterpiece of demagoguery and i mean this is this is a point that i then felt i had
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to spell out on social media so i wrote a a short piece on on um facebook and also on twitter
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and i'll just i'll just read it to you i think it's important people are so confused or pretending
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to be confused about the nature of atheism that it's um the argument is always that it's just like
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religion so dawkins and i are often accused of being just as fundamentalist as our most fundamentalist
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adversaries on the religious side of the argument but this is just a totally fatuous thing to say
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there is there's no analogous doctrine on the side of atheism so in any case this is what i wrote
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no rational atheist or new atheist holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing
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religious people do we blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its
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doctrines such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates atheism has no doctrines it does not
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demand that a person do anything or refrain from doing anything on the basis of his unbelief
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consequently to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him apart from the fact
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that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion atheism is simply the condition of not
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believing in poseidon or thor or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in that graveyard we call mythology
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to that extent everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist the atheist has simply added the god of
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abraham to the list of the dead if a belief in astrology were causing people to go berserk to deny medical care to
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their children or to murder unbelievers many of us would speak and write about the dangerous stupidity of astrology
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this would not be bigotry or intolerance on our part it would be a plea for basic human sanity
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and that is all that an atheist criticism of religious tribalism and superstition ever is
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if you understand this you will recognize any attempt to blame atheism for specific crimes great or small
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for what it is a fresh act of religious demagoguery
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so many people got back to me in response to that saying no no no atheists believe all kinds of things
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atheism is full of doctrines you believe things about evolution you believe things about cosmology
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okay again this is confusion so my response was
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yes atheists harbor all sorts of beliefs ethical political scientific
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rather their atheism is itself the product of what they believe about science
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and about the merely human origin of all our books
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no rational atheist is dogmatically opposed to believing in god
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it's just that the evidence for his existence is terrible
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it would be trivially easy in fact for an omniscient being to write or inspire a book
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neither the bible nor the quran is that sort of book
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for instance if the old testament contained a single chapter
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that resolved the deepest questions of 21st century science
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rather than merely telling us how to sacrifice goats and when to stone our daughters to death
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they thought that there could be no book that could testify to its author's omniscience
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i think you're not thinking clearly enough about just how good a book could be
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written by an omniscient being and what sort of signs could be in there
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that would demonstrate that it could not possibly have been of human origin
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it's pedantic to fixate too much on the word omniscience
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i'm just saying that every rational atheist could be convinced
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about the reality of god or about the truth of christianity or any specific religion
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given sufficient evidence if jesus shows up on the white house lawn and starts wielding his magic powers
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and david copperfield and all the other magicians can't figure out how he's doing it
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and he's healing the sick and he's reading minds
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and he's flying without the aid of technology and he's just just doing the whole superhero dance for us
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every scientist would be convinced that something supernatural
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or at the very least totally unique in human history was going on
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and we would just wait to be told by this being what the hell that something is
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there's a sufficient demonstration that could make believers of all of us skeptics
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and so the reality is that atheism is simply a position of not being convinced
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by the unjustified and in certain cases unjustifiable claims of religious people
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and that is not a situation of intellectual parity
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extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
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the extraordinary claims are not on the side of atheism
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they're on the side of those who believe that their books
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they're on the side of people who believe that their favorite
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now it's true that certain atheists can express this failure
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and express their views about the stupidity of those who are convinced
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in particular Muslim apologists have been waiting for this
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with the Chapel Hill shootings earlier this year
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but this guy grew unhinged over a neighbor dispute
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there's no sign that that was the cause of his behavior
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and again this is a point that was in the piece I wrote