James Damore joins us on The Ben Shapiro Show to talk about the Google Memo and why he thinks women are "biologically unfit" for the tech industry. He also explains why he doesn't think there are any biological differences between men and women, and why that may be why there are so few women in tech leadership. Also, the media is deliberately scaring people about North Korea, are the Republicans really willing to cancel the 2020 election, and we're about to have on the famous, infamous, most important guy in America today, James Damore. In just a second, in a second. We're all waiting with bated breath to talk to the man who wrote the infamous "Google Memo." He's sitting right here on the Skype, so we're going to be talking to him momentarily. We just want to jump right into it because I know that our audience has been waiting with baited breath ever since I announced this morning on Twitter that we would be having on the author of the Google memo, the infamous, The infamous Google memo. The most important document since The Magna Carta. James Damore is joining us right now. He was a senior engineer at Google until he made the mistake of penning an eminently correct scientific treatise on the differences between women and men in tech and why they may be "unqualified for the job in tech. And he's here to explain why this is a bad idea. and why we should all the more than a million people should be interested in working in tech, not less so they can be " biologically unfit for the industry. It's a good thing. If you don't like it, then you're not listening to this one, you'll have to listen to this episode. - Ben Shapiro - Subscribe to our new show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, to get notified when we deconstruct the latest news and let us know what you think of the latest episode of the show! Subscribe, rate, review and subscribe to our newest episode of if you like what you're listening to the show. Subscribe and review the show? and tell a friend about what you've been listening to it on your favorite podcast and what's going on in your favorite streaming platform! You can also become a supporter of our new podcast, subscribe on iTunes, comment down below!
00:00:21.000Okay, we're all waiting with bated breath to talk to James Damore.
00:00:24.000He's sitting right here on the Skype, so we're going to be talking to him momentarily.
00:00:27.000We just want to jump right into it because I know that our audience has been waiting with bated breath ever since I announced this morning on Twitter that we would be having on the author of the Google Memo, the infamous Google Memo, the most important document since the Magna Carta, James Damore, is joining us right now.
00:00:41.000He, of course, was a senior engineer at Google until he made the mistake of penning an eminently correct scientific treatise on the differences between men and women and why that may contribute in part
00:01:03.000Okay, so let me just jump right in here, and I want to ask you, to start, you've alleged that there's actually some illegal activity going on at Google, because that's why presumably they should be in trouble for firing you, because it's an at-will state, California's an at-will state, anybody can be fired for any reason, but according to the National Labor Relations Board, you cannot be fired if you're whistleblowing.
00:01:24.000So what is the purported illegal activity that's going on at Google that you are attempting to expose?
00:01:53.000What does that look like from the inside?
00:01:55.000It's just a group of all these people talking about the benefits of diversity and how much they love diversity and all the sexism and racism that happens and how we have to try to fix that.
00:02:11.000Okay, we know that Google has spent some 265 million dollars apparently trying to increase their diversity ratios, and this of course has been a wild fail.
00:02:18.000Well, I've read your memo at least three times now because I just want to make sure I'm not crazy.
00:02:23.000Because if you watch the media coverage of your memo, it is not in any way related to the actual content of the memo.
00:02:28.000The media has made a bunch of different claims about the memo.
00:02:30.000They've said that you were saying in the memo that women are biologically unfit for tech.
00:02:55.000I mean, I'm quoting your memo back to you here, but it says, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways so that these differences are just.
00:03:01.000I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women, women differ in part due to biological causes.
00:03:08.000This has been translated by the left into you are saying that women ought not work in tech or they're unqualified for tech.
00:03:14.000You weren't even saying when you have an entire section of your memo
00:03:17.000Promoting the idea that there should be more women in tech, and you offered a bunch of ways that you think that the tech community could be made more welcoming to women.
00:03:23.000So are you in favor of more women in tech?
00:03:31.000And if we're in general just trying to get more people interested in tech, then that would be one way to do it.
00:03:36.000So I want to talk to you a little bit about something that the YouTube CEO, a woman named Susan Wojcicki, that she wrote this morning over at Forbes.
00:03:45.000She wrote a piece at Forbes about the horrors of your memo, and how they'd obviously emotionally crippled her young daughter, who apparently came up to her and said, Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?
00:03:56.000Now, it seems to me that that was not exactly the claim you were making.
00:04:00.000Is it true there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?
00:04:03.000What's your response to the YouTube CEO?
00:04:06.000Well, I mean, to me, at least, it felt a lot like what Piers Morgan was trying to do to you on his show by taking a little kid out and saying, oh, aren't you sorry for him?
00:04:18.000I mean, they're just trying to guilt me.
00:04:21.000So I do want to ask you about what the political representation is like inside Google, because there was a poll, sort of an informal poll, that came out this morning.
00:04:30.000Uh, that said that 56% of people who were responding to this online poll who are working at Google said that they were against your firing.
00:04:38.000Um, number one, you know, are there a lot of people inside Google who have been expressing support for you?
00:04:52.000Do you think that Google is biasing their search results in the way they do business toward the left?
00:04:56.000Do you think that how they're treating you is reflective of how they do business as a company?
00:05:00.000I don't know about biasing search results, but they may definitely be biasing who they do business with.
00:05:08.000Okay, so, and inside the company itself, do you think that there is an obvious political preference for, you know, folks on the left?
00:05:16.000You know, if you had written a memo about how Black Lives Matter was the cause of the day, and that really mattered more than anything else.
00:05:22.000I mean, there are all these sort of internal Google chats, apparently, that you're a part of, these Google message boards.
00:06:11.000And out of 300 votes, 50 of them were downvoted.
00:06:17.000And she was complaining about how she didn't feel included at Google because she got one-sixth of them downvotes.
00:06:25.000And there were many other just random examples.
00:06:31.000Okay, so, with all of this said, number one, I think you have a lot of broad public support, obviously, but what do you think this says about the left's views of science?
00:06:39.000Because there's an article in Slate, for example, today saying science is bad now.
00:06:45.000Susan, watch Kiki as I say, she said at the very end of her screed, she said that these are questions that shouldn't even be asked.
00:06:53.000This is a direct quote from her piece at Forbes today.
00:06:55.000For example, for instance, what if we replace the word women in the memo with another group?
00:06:59.000What if the memo said that biological differences amongst black, hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explain their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles?
00:07:07.000Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo's arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author?
00:07:13.000What do you make of the left essentially saying that questions can never be asked about topics where the answer may not favor what the left wishes it to say?
00:07:24.000They're at least just putting their ideology before truth in these cases.
00:07:29.000And she's just trying to guilt me by association with Nazis or something.
00:07:36.000And when one group is just trying to guilt you and call you names, and the other is actually using evidence and science, you really know which side is actually seeking truth.
00:07:48.000And this, I think, is one of the points that is why this story has captured the imagination is because the memo itself is really moderate in tone and tenor.
00:07:55.000Even people like Kirsten Powers, who are on the left, have said they really don't see what the big problem here is or why people are going nuts over it.
00:08:02.000And yet you step out of line at a company like Google.
00:08:04.000And the reason people are freaked out about this is obviously Google is a super powerful company, but this happens inside Hollywood all the time.
00:08:09.000This happens inside journalistic institutions all the time, obviously.
00:08:12.000So, James Damore, Google Memo guy, what comes next for you?
00:08:15.000I've offered you off the air, I offered you a columnist gig to write about STEM issues, particularly with regard to differences between men and women and social science data and all of this, but I assume that you have job offers that are coming in from a wide variety of sources.
00:08:30.000What comes next for you now that Google is no longer in your future?
00:08:35.000Yeah, I'm still evaluating all my options.
00:08:37.000It's been a really busy past few days.
00:08:41.000And I've heard also that you were offered a position by WikiLeaks.
00:09:11.000Okay, so keep us updated on that, and obviously we are rooting for you as far as the whistleblowing aspect of this, and please keep writing true things even though there's pretty tremendous blowback.
00:09:22.000Thanks so much for joining the show, I really appreciate it.
00:09:26.000He's the senior engineer at Google who penned that diversity memo regarding why Google should change its practices if it wants to attract more women, actually.
00:09:34.000And he got shellacked for it by the left and fired from Google for that.
00:09:39.000James Damore, senior engineer at Google.
00:09:50.000So Brian Williams, who should not be a member of the media after repeatedly lying about his own past over and over and over.
00:09:56.000Brian Williams was on MSNBC last night where he is still respected because it's MSNBC.
00:10:01.000And Brian Williams said that the reason that the media are covering North Korea in such insane terms
00:10:07.000is because it is their job to scare people.
00:10:09.000Now, before we get to Brian Williams on this, I do want to say that I think that a lot of this is overblown.
00:10:14.000North Korea has been pursuing nuclear weapons for a long time.
00:10:16.000They've had nuclear weapons for a long time.
00:10:18.000Obviously, it's not good if an ICBM is capable of reaching the United States, but mutually assured destruction is still a thing, and Kim Jong-un or his successors
00:10:28.000They would be fools, absolute fools, if they were to try and attack the United States.
00:10:32.000We would wipe them off the face of the earth in no time flat.
00:11:18.000Mutually Assured Destruction actually doesn't do the trick for you, because you always have to fear that there's going to be a conventional war under the umbrella of the Mutually Assured Destruction with the North Koreans.
00:11:25.000But, for the United States, are we deeply worried that they're going to destroy us?
00:11:29.000No, we're not deeply worried they're going to destroy us.
00:11:31.000I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the possibility that LA is going to be destroyed, even though we are under the umbrella of the North Korean nuclear missile.
00:11:38.000I'm really, like, really, I think that a lot of this is hyped to the extreme.
00:11:42.000But Brian Williams says that the media have a duty to hype this to the extreme.
00:11:47.000Our job tonight actually is to scare people to death on this subject so the talk isn't as free as it is about a preemptive or surgical military strike.
00:11:57.000Okay, why is it their job to scare people to death?
00:11:59.000And this is the problem with the media.
00:12:00.000The media sees it as their job to push you into a certain position.
00:12:04.000They see it as their job to evoke a certain emotional response in you.
00:12:07.000And it's something that we ought to keep in mind when we look at media coverage of world events.
00:12:11.000For many members of the media, it is not just about covering the events that are important to you.
00:12:15.000It is about trying to cover the events so as to evoke an emotional response in a particular way.
00:12:20.000Another example of this today on an unrelated topic.
00:12:22.000So there's a poll that lefties are passing around from the Washington Post that says 52%
00:13:00.000If they thought that it occurred, and if Trump won the popular vote, and then finally it asked them, if Trump said that it occurred, would they be in favor of postponing the election?
00:13:15.000Also important to recognize that these sort of push polls exist from both sides.
00:13:19.000You know, in 2016, there was a poll from WPA Research that found that two-thirds of Democrats would take an unconstitutional third Obama term
00:13:28.000A poll on November 14 from The Economist found that 39% of Democrats wish the Constitution would be changed to that purpose.
00:13:35.000So, a couple of lessons from these things.
00:13:37.000First lesson is, most people only like the rules if they benefit them.
00:13:41.000They only like the elections every four years if their guy's not in power.
00:13:44.000But, the more important thing is that the media attempt to gain a particular headline and very often
00:13:48.000They are attempting to get to that headline via the questions they ask.
00:13:53.000And you can see it even, look, in the interviews that I do, obviously when I ask a question, I'm expecting a particular response from people.
00:13:58.000When I talk to James Damore, I'm questioning him in a way that I think is important, but obviously the responses that he gives are ones that I'm looking for, right?
00:14:06.000I mean, I'm not questioning him as a feminist would, who's looking for a different response from James Damore.
00:14:11.000You know, that's the way the media works, and so you should always take that into account
00:14:14.000When you look at the coverage of North Korea.
00:14:16.000So the media yesterday was going nuts over Trump's apparently provocative threats.
00:14:21.000Fire and the fury, the fury and the fire, the power, the glory, the fury, fire, power, glory, huge emissaries, bands of evil, right?
00:14:28.000They were going nuts over Trump's over to the top language.
00:14:31.000But the reality is, does any of that make a huge difference in all of this?
00:14:35.000Okay, General James Mattis came out, Mad Dog Mattis came out yesterday, and what he said was, quote, The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack.
00:14:46.000Kim Jong-un should take heed of the UN Security Council's unified voice and statements from governments the world over who agree the DPRK, that's Democratic People's Republic of Korea, poses a threat to global security and stability.
00:14:57.000The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
00:15:02.000The DPRK should cease any considerations of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.
00:15:08.000That's pretty harsh language from Mattis, but I don't see the media losing their minds over that.
00:15:12.000Back, I think it was last year or a couple of years ago, Barack Obama threatened to destroy North Korea.
00:15:16.000So the media obviously are attempting to evoke fear in Americans.
00:15:20.000That Trump's precipitous nature will lead to a nuclear exchange.
00:15:23.000That's not what's going to happen here.
00:15:53.000The fact is that people who are living really under the threat of North Korea are happy that the United States is taking a pretty militant position on all of this.
00:15:59.000Guam, which was a nation that was threatened by North Korea in response to Trump's threat, the governor of Guam, he likes Trump.
00:16:10.000So do you think that the president's remarks are getting to the heart of the problem, no longer strategic patience, and does that play to solving this problem in the big picture?
00:16:23.000As far as I'm concerned, as an American citizen, I want a president that says that if any nation such as North Korea attacks Guam, attacks Honolulu, attacks the West Coast, that they will be met with hell and fury.
00:16:38.000What I'm concerned about is if a US senator says initiate an attack and causing a war and remembering that there are there in the Mariana Islands, this is American sovereign style.
00:16:49.000This is 600 mile archipelago of islands similar to Hawaii, where there are over 200,000 American citizens.
00:16:56.000So it's important that as we make decisions, that those folks that are in a position of leadership, that they understand to that war is the last
00:17:30.000And I think everybody is on board with this.
00:17:32.000I don't think Trump is precipitously into launching nuclear war, but a lot of this is the Democrats playing politics with all of this.
00:17:38.000A lot of this is the Democrats attempting to play politics with national security and basically suggest that Trump is a madman who is going to get us into a nuclear war.
00:17:49.000An MSCBC military analyst essentially said this.
00:17:51.000He said if Trump ordered a nuclear launch, Mattis would defy it because obviously Trump is crazy.
00:18:19.000Okay, so this is the narrative the media is creating, is that Trump is a nutcase and he's going to order a nuclear launch for no apparent reason.
00:18:25.000Again, I've seen no evidence of this on the international scale from President Trump, this sort of precipitous action.
00:18:30.000Even on domestic policy, Trump will fire off a tweet, but the actions that he's taking are really not particularly precipitous.
00:18:36.000The only precipitous action that you can say that Trump has really taken was his transgender ban in the military tweets, and even those are not being implemented by the Pentagon because there was no follow-up.
00:18:45.000So, you know, the business of American government does not work quite as smoothly as people think.
00:18:52.000Old Cold War mentality that we're five seconds away from launching nuclear war I don't think that's right And I do think that the media are attempting to twist you into knots make you feel really uncomfortable make you feel like we're a second away from being obliterated You know we also don't know what nuclear we all we also know military options are on the table
00:19:35.000You know, worry in the sense that we should come up with a solution to North Korea, but don't worry that we're five seconds away from a nuclear exchange.
00:19:42.000Okay, so, before I go any further, I want to talk about Trump's conflict with Mitch McConnell.
00:19:46.000I also really want to get to some things I like, things I hate, and the big idea.
00:19:49.000Today, I really want to get to the big idea because I think there's some important stuff here.
00:19:52.000There is a bit of a conflict breaking out now between President Trump and Mitch McConnell, and that's not because Trump and McConnell disagree on policy as much as it is because Trump doesn't like when people insult him.
00:20:02.000And this is my biggest problem with Trump attacking McConnell.
00:20:06.000If you want to attack McConnell on policy, I'm totally fine with that.
00:20:08.000McConnell has not been an effective Senate Majority Leader thus far, clearly.
00:20:12.000If you're just attacking McConnell because you're mad at him, then that's a whole different story.
00:20:17.000You know, it seems that he's attacking McConnell because he's mad at him, not on policy.
00:20:20.000If you're really mad at McConnell on policy, he wouldn't be backing Luther Strange in Alabama, who's sort of a moderate Republican who backs McConnell's play, over a couple of other candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:20:30.000So, what this really says to me is that Trump is still being driven by personal animus for particular political figures, not being driven by policy considerations, which is a problem, right?
00:20:38.000I want to see the policy, I don't care about the personal animus.
00:20:41.000I don't care about Trump's personal issues.
00:20:42.000I don't care that Trump likes McConnell.
00:22:24.000Trump should ask himself that because he wasn't particularly active, as we pointed out at the time, in pushing this thing beyond the last couple of weeks and didn't understand the policy.
00:22:31.000But, you know, that's not a wrong demand.
00:22:33.000I would hope that Trump's personal animus for Mitch McConnell turns into him actually demanding policies that I like from Mitch McConnell and McConnell caving.
00:22:41.000But as even Laura Ingraham is noting, you know, it's hard for Trump to be ripping McConnell at the same time he's providing McConnell with more senators who agree with McConnell.
00:22:49.000President Trump came out and endorsed Luther Strange in that Alabama special election for Jeff Sessions' seat.
00:22:59.000Now, Luther Strange was appointed, so he's the incumbent for the time being.
00:23:03.000But there's all these other people running, including Mo Brooks and Judge Roy Moore is running.
00:23:10.000And so they're probably going to have to have a runoff because no one will get a majority.
00:23:14.000But Donald Trump came out and endorsed the incumbent, more of an establishment,
00:23:18.000Uh, guy, Luther Strange, and that is very interesting because that's Mitch McConnell's favorite pick.
00:23:22.000Right, and if Lord Enron is acknowledging this, this is obviously true.
00:23:25.000So, if Trump is going to go after members of the Republican Party, let's do it on the basis of policy.
00:23:30.000What I don't want, and what I sort of see happening, which is not particularly encouraging to me, is that President Trump is mad at leaders of the Republican Party, and you could easily see Chuck Schumer making an overture to him after the 2018 election, and Trump swiveling left in order to work with people who are praising him more fulsomely.
00:23:45.000And gaining praise from the New York Times in the process.
00:23:47.000That's the scary part of all of this in terms of policy.
00:23:50.000Okay, I want to get to things I like and things I hate in The Big Idea, but before we do all that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:23:57.000Okay, $9.99 a month means that not only do you get to see this most watched and this most listened to news and politics podcast in the country according to iTunes, we're still number two to Oprah, people.
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00:24:50.000We are the top news and politics podcast in America.
00:25:02.000Okay, so let's do some things I like and some things I hate in The Big Idea.
00:25:05.000So Thursdays are our Big Idea Day here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:25:10.000So let's first start with things I like.
00:25:12.000So, you know, we're talking about communism and I thought that it would be worthwhile to recommend a book about North Korea in case you are interested in what North Korea is actually like today.
00:25:21.000The book is by Andrei Lankov and it's called The Real North Korea Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.
00:25:27.000And it's a fascinating book because it doesn't try to paint
00:25:30.000An excessively dark picture of North Korea while not ignoring the problems in North Korea.
00:25:35.000Basically it says that it is a stunted rump state that is run in the most horrific dictatorial way and that manifests more in the everyday lives of North Koreans than it even does in sort of our horror imaginations of gulags and people being shot en masse.
00:25:49.000That's less what's happening than just the gradual degradation
00:25:54.000And the real North Korea, Andrei Lankov, fully worth reading.
00:25:58.000I think a fair and honest, relatively objective look at what North Korea is like today.
00:26:03.000It is a stain on the global, on the so-called global community that doesn't really exist.
00:26:08.000It's a stain on the UN, certainly, that North Korea has continued to terrorize its people for more than half a century at this point, just as it's a stain on the international community that Cuba continues to be a dictatorial backwater.
00:27:05.000In some of my work, I defend a liberal position about early abortion.
00:27:10.000So I defend the view that there's nothing morally bad about early abortion.
00:27:15.000So a lot of people think, well, it's permissible to have an abortion, but something bad happens when the fetus dies.
00:27:21.000And I think if a fetus hasn't ever been conscious, it hasn't ever had any experiences, and we abort it at that stage, that actually nothing morally bad happens.
00:27:31.000And this view might seem unattractive, because it might seem that it dictates a cold attitude towards all early fetuses.
00:27:39.000But what I think is that actually, among early fetuses,
00:27:43.000There are two very different kinds of beings.
00:27:46.000So, James, when you were an early fetus, and Elliot, when you were an early fetus, all of us, I think that we already did have moral status then.
00:27:55.000But we had moral status in virtue of our futures, in virtue of the fact that we were the beginning stages of persons.
00:28:41.000It's not an argument I agree with, because potential life is still potential life.
00:28:44.000And the question as to what level of potential life is necessary in order for you not to be able to kill it, that's a pretty dicey question morally.
00:28:52.000Because they're children who are born with disabilities.
00:28:54.000You get to kill them because they don't have a lot of potential to grow into full human beings, or fully functional human beings.
00:29:01.000This is why the abortion argument doesn't work.
00:29:02.000But the argument she's making is so nonsensical that James Frankel absolutely wrecks her unconsciously.
00:29:07.000Without even thinking about it, he says, if a woman decides to have an abortion with an early fetus, just that act or that intention negates the moral status of that early fetus, just because if she goes out and has an abortion, it's pretty certain it's not going to become a person.
00:29:18.000And this professor just struggles and struggles and struggles and struggles as well as she should.
00:29:23.000Again, this lady, this lady, was a, she's a member of the, of the, she has a philosophy, a PhD in philosophy from MIT, a bachelor's from Harvard.
00:29:33.000Her father was a member of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.
00:29:36.000She's part of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.
00:29:40.000And she teaches courses called Designing Life, The Ethics of Creation and Its Control, and Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance.
00:29:46.000Okay, this lady should not be able to teach a course called Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance when James Franco, again, James Franco, a guy who looks like he maybe has seven brain cells that he can rub together, is wrecking her unconsciously on abortion.
00:29:58.000Like when even James Franco's going, uh, this doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it makes no sense.
00:31:26.000The fact is all that will happen is that people will stop actually going to games because people will assume that we are now going to use the NFL as a cram down for leftist politics.
00:31:35.000Viewership dropped relatively dramatically last year.
00:31:39.000Thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick and other players protesting the national anthem.
00:31:44.000You do this for Colin Kaepernick and you reinvigorate this particular debate.
00:31:47.000I promise you the NFL is going to lose ratings as well it should because when I watch sports I don't want to hear about how America is racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic.
00:31:55.000I just want to watch sports, particularly when a lot of the best players in the sport are black.
00:32:08.000So Bernie Sanders cut a commercial, and this just demonstrates how far left the left wing has moved.
00:32:13.000Bernie Sanders cut a commercial about Medicare for All.
00:32:16.000Look who he is using as a sort of moral guidepost in discussing Medicare for All.
00:32:28.000I would make sure that employers are not responsible for the healthcare.
00:32:38.000What that would do is free people up to have more mobility in terms of changing jobs, in terms of not worrying about illness, putting them into bankruptcy, and all those types of situations that we're in now.
00:32:54.000And the only way to do that is through a single-payer system.
00:33:52.000To a tremendous extent, doctors are overburdened, they're not taking a lot of Medicare patients, they won't take new Medicare patients.
00:33:58.000Even the idea that you're going to purchase supplementary insurance, that's only going to last if there are doctors who take the supplementary insurance plus the Medicare, and a lot of doctors are saying, I'm not even going to work in the Medicare system because the reimbursement rates are too low.
00:34:09.000So, no, none of this makes any sense, but it just demonstrates the coalition of the far left is growing, but it's still reliant on these tentpoles of insanity, people like Bernie Sanders.
00:34:19.000So now I want to talk about the big idea.
00:34:20.000I want to talk about this last week a little bit, and we ran out of time on it, but there's this idea that you see sometimes discussed in philosophical circles, Athens versus Jerusalem.
00:34:32.000The idea that Western civilization is built on these twin poles, Athens and Jerusalem.
00:34:36.000Athens being the idea of Greek reason, people like Plato and Aristotle and Socrates.
00:34:59.000Okay, if reason falls, then religion can't last on its own, and if religion falls, then reason can't last on its own.
00:35:05.000We now live in a secular society where Jerusalem has largely fallen, where people have decided that faith in a creator who cares about you, cares what you do morally, and has created a rational system capable of our interpretation because we're human beings made in his image.
00:35:20.000As that pole has fallen in esteem in American circles, in secular circles, then science is the next thing to fall.
00:35:26.000Because without the idea of a rational universe, and a rational creator, and a rationally articulable system, and a people who are capable of grasping huge swaths of that system,
00:35:37.000You end up with people basically saying that science should no longer be a thing.
00:35:40.000So Slate has an article out today talking about how science is bad, right?
00:35:44.000Science is actively bad because it creates this idea that science is going to govern all of us and that there are objective standards of right and wrong, or more importantly, objective standards of true and false.
00:35:53.000Science can't tell you right and wrong, but science should be able to tell you true and false in scientific terms.
00:35:57.000The left is saying, science can't even do that anymore.
00:36:00.000Science can't even do that, because we live in a universe where cause and effect aren't really things, they're just things that we perceive to be.
00:36:06.000That science is all about the idea of hypotheses being verified, but those hypotheses depend on the ideas that come out of biased brains, and so there's no way to really get to a scientific truth.
00:36:17.000And so you're seeing the left do this because the left is looking at science and they're saying science is coming up with results that we don't like, so science itself should be undermined.
00:36:24.000Without the faith in a rational creator and a rational universe capable of our penetration, it's very difficult to make the case that science ought to be the gold standard in terms of how we live.
00:36:34.000Religion creates the notion of free will and personal responsibility.
00:36:37.000How do you build a society along those lines, on scientific lines, if you don't believe in any of those things?
00:36:43.000The tragedy of Western civilization is that if you look back at Aristotle, Aristotle and Plato were attempting to grasp at the infinite, right?
00:36:51.000When they talk about Plato's cave, this idea that
00:36:53.000That we are all sitting in a cave and we see shadows on the wall, but there's something out there that we can't fully grasp, but we can sort of grasp the shadows, but we're grasping in darkness.
00:37:00.000You know, that idea brought to fruition by Aristotle in the idea of the forms.
00:37:07.000There's a reason that religion, when Aristotle's work was rediscovered in the late first millennium, it was taken in by a lot of Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas and merged with religion.
00:37:19.000In Judaism, Maimonides tried to do the same thing, looked at Aristotle and saw a religious thinker, a secular but religious thinker, a rational thinker who's attempting to reach out to the idea of the infinite.
00:37:29.000What is it about the universe that allows us to grasp it in so much of its complexity but not grasp its purposes?
00:37:36.000This is the big question that animates all of human life and all of human reason and the striving.
00:37:40.000And the religious community takes that question and they say, okay, here's our answer to the why, but science is going to have to tell you the what.
00:37:46.000We're going to have to use reason to grasp God, but it's important to grasp God.
00:39:27.000Except that the next thing that happened is that science ate the idea that man is king.
00:39:30.000Because the more you move into the scientific world, the more you realize that human beings are just another animal with a bunch of brain functions.
00:39:59.000We're seeing the oboros, the snake that eats its own tail.
00:40:05.000That's what's happening with science right now, because once you disconnect science from faith in a rational universe with a rational creator who cares about us, then you lose, number one, the impetus to actually seek out the universe.
00:40:16.000You lose the faith that there is a rational universe to be comprehended.
00:40:19.000And number three, you lose the free will that would drive you to do all of these things.
00:40:23.000That's why you need both Athens and Jerusalem.
00:40:25.000And they seem mutually exclusive, and they do battle with each other for primacy and the upper hand.
00:40:29.000But if you lose either one of those, if you lose science, then religion just becomes, you know, grasping at shadows.
00:40:35.000Religion just becomes faith based in nothing.
00:40:38.000And if you lose religion, then science just becomes a group of animals seeking to build huts of sticks.
00:40:46.000With no meaning and no drive toward a better society.
00:40:50.000And you have to answer the question as to why a more moral society is necessary when morality has no meaning, better has no meaning, and society has no meaning outside of just a bunch of animals living in a similar space.
00:41:00.000So this is why you need both Athens and Jerusalem.
00:41:02.000This is why reason and faith must hold hands even though they disagree all the time and slap at each other with their free hands.
00:41:09.000Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.