In this episode, we talk with Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of The Moral Arc and Heavens on Earth, about what it means to be a skeptic, and why it's important to be an atheist. We also talk about how to define yourself as an atheist, and how we can find common ground in the face of so much disagreement. Thanks to our sponsor, Stamps, for sponsoring this special offer! Use promo code BENGUEST for up to 55 bucks of free postage, a digital scale, and a 4-week trial of Stamps! Don t wait, go to Stamps.com before you do anything else, and enter that promo code BenGuest for that special deal! You get that special offer at $55 of FREE postage, and all the services of the post office right from your desk, 24/7 when it's convenient for you! It's just awesome! And all of the services that Stamps is offering are fantastic, and you still need stamps? That's a special deal, too! Use Promo Code BenGuest to get 55% off your first pack of stamps, and get a 4 week free trial! If you don't want to go to the Post Office, use promo code BUY-UP at checkout, you still get 5% off of your first box of stamps! That's $55 plus free shipping when you sign up for the postage, plus an additional $5 when you run your first month, you get 5 weeks of free shipping! you get a 5-and-a-postage discount when you use the offer starts at $99.00! Ben and Ben are giving you an extra $5, plus a maximum of $25, and they get an additional 4 weeks of postage! Plus, you'll get 5 years of postage and a freebie when you spend $35.00, plus you get an ad-free version of the Daily Wire. You'll get $25.00. of the show and a FREEbie! Subscribe to the show! and get 5 months of the entire show. The Daily Wire is giving you get 20% off the show, plus they'll get a complimentary copy of the podcast, plus I'll be getting an ad discount when they run it in the ad-only ad-posting service, and I'll get 7 days of the whole show starts in two weeks.
00:01:34.000You've written more than this, but these are the two most recent.
00:01:37.000The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice and Freedom.
00:01:41.000And this one, which just came out and was favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia.
00:01:49.000And I've really been looking forward to this conversation, Michael, because I know there's a lot that we disagree on.
00:01:53.000I think people are going to be shocked to find there's a lot that we actually agree on as well.
00:02:25.000Defining yourself by what you don't believe, I think it was Hayek who said, you know, just defining yourself as an anti-communist is not enough.
00:02:42.000So you call yourself now a classical liberal.
00:02:45.000Can you give me sort of the story of your political development?
00:02:47.000I mean, were you always in line with classical liberalism?
00:02:51.000Well, I went to Pepperdine University for undergraduate.
00:02:54.000I was a member of the first graduating class of the Malibu campus, and it was a great, great experience.
00:02:59.0001970s, everybody's reading Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged on campus.
00:03:02.000I mean, really, everyone's walking around with this doorstop of a book, and it's like, oh, I just can't get through the first hundred pages.
00:03:08.000If you get through the first hundred pages, you're in.
00:03:46.000But as I got older and, and the libertarian party or party and small L libertarian started to adopt more of the fringe elements of society.
00:04:45.000Even though there's something like an illusion of this self, I think there is a self inside my skin, inside my skull, that we can call an individual unit that can suffer.
00:04:54.000Not just think, or like Bentham said, not just think and talk, but are you able to suffer?
00:04:59.000And if you can, that should at least be our starting point.
00:05:02.000What can we do to reduce suffering of the individual?
00:05:04.000So there's a ton of us of this to unpack because there's a lot in that basic thesis, that philosophical thesis.
00:05:10.000But before we get to the actual unpacking of your philosophy, I want to discuss for a second the fact that we find ourselves in the same room.
00:05:16.000Because one of the things that's been very weird, obviously, is that we've now both been labeled members of the intellectual dark web by Eric Weinstein and Barry Weiss in the New York Times.
00:05:24.000And how did we find ourselves on the same side of the aisle?
00:05:28.000I mean, we obviously agree about a lot of the principles that you're speaking about, but it seems to me that there's an entire movement that's happening out there of thinkers from a variety of different backgrounds who suddenly have found themselves in common cause just because the left has become so focused on identity politics and unreason.
00:05:42.000Yeah, well, it's, you know, this is a driving force, you know, it's just gone too far.
00:05:46.000And we know from polling data that the center is getting smaller in the left and right.
00:05:52.000Two humps are getting larger and larger.
00:06:20.000I mean, I'm not even sure what it is other than those of us who think we should be able to talk about anything without hysteria, without the tears, without safe spaces, microaggressions, all that stuff, because it's the only way we can find out what the truth is if we've gone off the rails.
00:06:34.000You know, every one of us is subject to all those cognitive biases we're familiar with.
00:06:38.000The only way to know is for us to talk.
00:06:40.000So I push a thesis or an idea and you go, hang on Sherman, that's not quite right.
00:06:44.000And then I can adjust and come back in a little bit.
00:06:47.000If you don't talk to anybody outside of your tribe, then you can go down the rails to craziness.
00:07:23.000Yeah, I've always believed that human meaning has to come in the interaction between individual value and also communal purpose.
00:07:30.000That if you feel like you're by yourself all the time, you feel isolated, people need other people and people want to feel like they're part of something broader.
00:07:35.000And that sometimes manifests in really ugly ways.
00:07:38.000How do we get to the point where the individual is the key component of morality?
00:07:42.000So for me, I just go back to Genesis and then I say individuals made in the image of God.
00:07:46.000But for you, because you're not a Bible believer, where does that come from?
00:07:50.000To me, it really begins, for the modern world, in the rights revolutions of the 18th century.
00:07:55.000Just the idea that there are individuals who can have rights.
00:07:58.000Now, the idea that these are inalienable rights, they're self-evident, well, that's not terribly satisfying now, because self-evident for you may not be self-evident for me, so we have to have some kind of argument.
00:08:29.000Now, it could be that the most selfish thing I could do is hoard all the resources and kill you if you try to compete with me.
00:08:36.000But we're a social species, so living in a group, I can't be that way.
00:08:41.000Oftentimes, the most selfish thing I can do is to be nice with you, or form a coalition with you, or you and I practice reciprocal altruism.
00:08:49.000I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back.
00:09:35.000And we know from research, like Christopher Bohm's research of hunter-gatherer groups today, it's like that.
00:09:40.000It's like maybe five to ten percent are people that don't play nice by the rules.
00:09:45.000And all these hunter-gatherer groups have a whole series of sanctions against the individuals who are not cooperating.
00:09:52.000Anything from, we gossip about you, we sit you down and have a little talk with you, we slap you around a little bit, or they actually practice capital punishment.
00:10:00.000They go out on a hunt on the weekend with, you know, Og, and they come back without Og.
00:10:04.000Right, and this is true for children, too.
00:10:05.000If you look at the experiments, I mean, you know this stuff better than I do, but if you look at the experiments with children, and even adults, they will seek to punish each other and forego pleasure in order to punish each other if they feel like people are violating the reciprocal rules.
00:11:04.000I actually do care about other people.
00:11:05.000How does that evolve beyond the tribe?
00:11:06.000Because this is one of the great puzzles of human history is, number one, why this perspective on the human individual only arose in the 17th century?
00:11:14.000If this is ingrained in human beings that the individual is of value and that we have to work with one another, then why only in a certain place in a certain time did it arise?
00:11:22.000Was it a spontaneous combustion of human thought in the 17th and 18th centuries?
00:11:26.000Or was this something that has deeper roots?
00:11:27.000I obviously would argue this has deeper roots going all the way back to Sinai and Athens.
00:11:51.000Politics, economics, culture, history, and so on.
00:11:55.000And so the one model I use is, I call this the Ndugu effect.
00:11:59.000So in Jack Nicholson's movie about Schmidt, you know, he's a retired insurance guy and he's late night watching and there's one of these infomercials about adopting a little kid, Ndugu in this case, and he gives money to little Ndugu and the whole narrative plot is around that.
00:12:14.000He doesn't know Ndugu from anybody, but they show him the picture of little Ndugu and here he is with his soccer ball and his brother and sister and here's their little hut they live in and five dollars a day will give them so on.
00:12:26.000And now if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, I'm not giving any money or I'll give a dollar whatever you show me little Ndugu.
00:12:33.000So really it's kind of tricking our brain into making little Ndugu an honorary member of our tribe, my family, my friend.
00:12:41.000We care about people we know or can identify with.
00:12:44.000So to get beyond that, first of all, you have to get people to care about other people by identifying them as individuals that are like me.
00:12:51.000So that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives, that could be me there but for the grace of, in your case, God.
00:13:02.000Well, beyond getting people to truly care, just having a large society with the rule of laws and democracy where we at least feel like we have some say.
00:13:12.000But more importantly, I think free trade is one of these things where as long as you and I are both profiting from some kind of exchange we have, I have no desire to kill you and maybe I'll even start to like you a little bit because you're doing something for me.
00:13:24.000Government, you know, sort of liberal democracies and free trade are these things that provide trust in a society among strangers such that I can go to the Starbucks, somebody waiting for me to wait on me.
00:14:09.000Is it that we're just looking at a single sample size?
00:14:12.000And why is it that only in Western Europe at a particular time, at a particular place in history, do we get this vision of individual rights that flowers out and then starts encompassing broader and broader groups of people?
00:14:25.000Again, if this was embedded in human capacity from the very beginning, then why does it only happen as the outgrowth of one particular culture?
00:14:33.000So you see where I'm going with this, right?
00:14:35.000So, well, I think Pinker tries to answer that, and the good social scientist that he is.
00:14:40.000You know, this is a tangled web of correlations and inter-causal variables that are going up and down, and it's really hard to answer.
00:14:48.000I mean, you get a number of things going on.
00:14:50.000You know, the Industrial Revolution, free trade is coming, you know, double entry, bookkeeping, and all these things that kind of drive prosperity to go up, which enhances a bunch of other things.
00:15:00.000So we can afford better governance and so on.
00:15:02.000Then we have better educational systems.
00:15:04.000Also, literacy rates start to go up around the same time.
00:15:06.000Do you think any of this has to do with the Judeo-Christian system that is undergirding all of this?
00:15:14.000Just the Western idea that the Judeo-Christian is sort of founding helps push it along.
00:15:21.000Yes, I know we can go back to maybe the 13th century or 14th century and the first humanists in the 15th century, long before the Enlightenment.
00:16:11.000Again, I've had conversations with, you know, you and Sam Harris, and we're coming at it from a completely different angle as far as the impact of God in all of this.
00:16:17.000Jonah Goldberg suggests that this is the miracle.
00:16:20.000And one of my great objections to Jonah Goldberg's terminology in that is that I'm not sure that the miracle happened in 1650.
00:16:25.000I think the miracle happened a lot earlier and that that was the enzyme, the catalyst that led to this great outpouring of human freedom.
00:16:49.000So for me, I can espouse those values in a particular way, starting from the premise that there's a certain absolute morality that was established by God.
00:16:58.000This is where the God question comes in.
00:17:00.000And so I'm wondering, without that absolute morality,
00:17:03.000Where, how do we get to that point where we can convince people?
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00:18:12.000We'll talk about big issues like life and death in just a second because this entire book on what heaven constitutes is really fascinating.
00:18:19.000I just started reading Jonah's new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a weird title because it's much more of an uplift.
00:18:24.000At least the first half is very uplifting.
00:18:26.000Well, you didn't get to the downside yet.
00:18:37.000And the reason that, to me, is good, not just because I'm an atheist, but that it shouldn't matter what religion you are or, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what the roots are, although it's intellectually interesting.
00:18:48.000Whatever works, if it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.
00:19:16.000And at some point, if you go back far enough, you're going to, I think, argue there's a supernatural intervention into the system that says, this is what's right or wrong.
00:19:25.000But my question would be, how do you know?
00:19:27.000Because we know from biblical scholars that the Bible is something of a wiki.
00:20:04.000You just skip the middleman and just go straight for the reasons.
00:20:06.000So I actually disagree with... I know I watched your debate with... interview slash debate with Dennis Prager on Dave Rubin's show specifically about this.
00:20:14.000I'm not somebody who disagrees that you can
00:20:17.000into it that murder is wrong just without the presence of God.
00:20:21.000Judaism essentially says that there are certain principles where if you were born in a wilderness, you would still be held accountable for failing to abide by those principles, and those do include murder, right?
00:20:29.000So murder is wrong whether you believe in God, whether you were born in a barn, it doesn't matter, right?
00:20:33.000There are certain things you can intuit.
00:20:35.000But some of the higher order morality that we're talking about, the value of individuals, or how far you extend the tribe,
00:20:40.000I'm not sure that that stuff can be done simply through pure reason.
00:20:44.000I'm skeptical of that specifically because I think that what we tend to do in the West is we tend to say everything that was good was Enlightenment thinking and everything that was bad was counter-Enlightenment thinking.
00:20:52.000So this is my criticism of Steven Pinker's new book on the Enlightenment is that what Steven does is he writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution.
00:21:01.000He writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and he never recognizes that Rousseau was a member of the Enlightenment caste.
00:21:08.000He didn't call himself counter-Enlightenment.
00:21:10.000That the French Revolution was happening at the same time as the American Revolution, essentially, in the broad scheme of things, that there's a whole line of thought, including communism and Nazism, that considered itself uber-rational.
00:21:22.000If you actually look back to the foundations of Marx, Marx is talking about imposing the reason of humanity on the economic system as a whole.
00:21:29.000So pure reason, I'm not sure can get you there, is the argument that I'm making.
00:21:33.000Well, first of the French Revolution, in The Better Angels, Steve talks about Burke and Burkean conservatism.
00:21:41.000And Burke was in favor of the American Revolution against the French Revolution.
00:21:46.000Because in the American Revolution, you had a balance between, we want to overthrow the systems that are not working, but retain the ones that are still good.
00:21:54.000Because those are long, hard-fought traditions that work pretty well.
00:21:58.000Now, unfortunately, slavery got thrown in there, but we eventually got rid of that.
00:22:02.000The French Revolution was like, let's just blow the whole thing up and start over, including a new calendar.
00:22:09.000But they did actually have a cult of reason, right?
00:22:11.000I mean, they actually took the Notre Dame Cathedral and they actually put an idol to reason in the Notre Dame Cathedral and they had a cult of it.
00:22:20.000If you're going to make the argument that it's self-evident, these principles eventually are self-evident, I don't think in the absence of... The Burkean argument is, in essence, a religious argument.
00:22:28.000There is a bunch of stuff that was passed down to us by our forebears, and we have the capacity through reason to evaluate whether we still think that the evidence is on the side of particular rules, or whether these rules have been misapplied.
00:22:39.000But you have to acknowledge the value of what has been handed down, as opposed to the tabula rasa reason, which might be mandated by the social science
00:22:48.000Approach that is now being taken up by a lot of folks, people with whom I have great discussions.
00:22:53.000But whenever I read Sam Harris's books and he says that, you know, throw religion out the window and we can come up with better than that.
00:22:59.000As I said to him when I was talking to him, well, you grew up five miles from me and we share a lot of the same principles.
00:23:03.000So I'm happy to have that discussion with you.
00:23:05.000But if you'd grown up in a society that had a different tradition, I have a feeling you'd be arguing something very different and so would I.
00:23:12.000One, I think Pinker makes the point that most of these are counter-Enlightenment Romanticist traditions.
00:23:20.000The blood and soil of the Nazis, for example, that it's the race that counts and so on.
00:23:26.000Now, you may make rational arguments about that and say, I'm using reason, but your reasoning is wrong.
00:23:32.000And so we can say we're both using reason and these arguments are better than those arguments.
00:23:38.000So I think those are the two points about that.
00:23:41.000Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but I think that the question there about the misuse of reason would be this.
00:23:46.000Is that your pattern of reasoning is wrong or that your premises are wrong?
00:23:51.000If your pattern of reasoning is wrong, then we can all spot the flaw in the reasoning and say, OK, here's where you went wrong.
00:23:56.000But if the premises were wrong, then we're back into my argument, which is that the culture you inherit is a deeply impactful thing on whether you believe in individual rights in the first place.
00:24:05.000So I guess what I'm trying to get you to, and maybe I'm trying to argue you into it, is acknowledging that Judeo-Christian values are at the very least utilitarian.
00:24:13.000Even if you don't agree with the source of them, you agree that the legacy that begins with Judaism and through Christianity in the Christian world, that is a necessary, not a contingent part of history.
00:24:32.000You know, the Inquisition, the witch hunts.
00:24:34.000So the way that I deal with that is what I say is that the Bible was given to a specific group of people.
00:24:39.000If I were to give you a written document right now, I'd have to speak the language that you and I were speaking.
00:24:42.000I couldn't use terminology that you didn't know.
00:24:44.000I couldn't give you rules that were so
00:24:47.000Deeply radical that they would run counter to anything that you could possibly believe.
00:24:50.000So, for example, when Maimonides talks about sacrifices, you know, these animal sacrifices that seem really barbaric to us now, what Maimonides is arguing in the 12th century is CE, right, about a document written presumably by Jewish tradition 2,000 years earlier.
00:25:04.000He's arguing that if you're going to try and convince people away from sacrifice, you have to first change the nature of the sacrifice.
00:25:10.000You can't just abolish something that people think is completely
00:25:15.000And then over the course of time, there are certain parts of the Bible that speak to eternal human nature, right?
00:25:21.000So, for example, this is what Judaism and Christianity would say is true about sexual matters, is that human beings are the same regardless of where they are.
00:25:29.000They always have the same sexual nature.
00:25:57.000So to me, it feels like modern thinkers looking back at ancient texts saying, well, when Jesus said this in Mark 3, 27, he really meant women should have the vote.
00:26:18.000To me, this principle of interchangeable perspectives, that is, if we're going to set up a society, I can't know which group I'm going to be in, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
00:26:28.000And I, as an individual, can't convince you to treat me nice just because I'm me and you're not me.
00:26:35.000And I have a privileged position just because I'm me.
00:26:41.000And it's metallic derivatives, as Pinker calls them.
00:26:43.000And I like that idea because I think the basis of that is in this kind of evolutionary model of
00:26:53.000Myself, as genes, drive me to just want to hoard all the resources, but you're making the same calculation, so we have to come to some agreement.
00:27:00.000One way to do that is for me to put myself in your position.
00:27:02.000How would I feel if I were Ben and I was doing this to him?
00:27:07.000So I think religions discovered certain eternal truths about human nature long before there was the Enlightenment or modern Western culture at all.
00:27:19.000I don't know, maybe by accident or just trial and error, at some point you're going to figure out.
00:27:30.000It's like the point Jordan Peterson makes about novelists having deep insights into
00:27:36.000I think that's right, and there's a whole branch of evolutionary psych that does evolutionary literature.
00:27:41.000Like when Shakespeare and Jane Austen write about their characters, they're really getting it right about how people behave, their sexual nature, power structures, hierarchy, the kinds of things that drive conflict in human relationships.
00:27:54.000They figured it out long before there was anything even called psychology.
00:28:00.000So I do think religions get it right a lot of the time just because they're 2,000 years, 4,000 years of observations that get written down.
00:28:12.000And then what we do is go back and pick and choose the ones that seem right.
00:28:15.000And the other ones, like capital punishment for X, Y, and Z, we don't practice that anymore.
00:28:31.000Okay, so so I want to talk a little bit now about the the Arguments that you make with regard to free will because you're you're libertarian politically or at least classical liberal politically You don't want the government in anybody's business and that presupposes a certain level of responsibility among individual actors because obviously you do something and now you're responsible for the thing that you did and
00:28:48.000You have the choice to make, but you have a kind of interesting view of free will.
00:28:52.000So I am a free will, as a religious person, I'm a free will absolutist in the sense that I believe that I don't know how it happens, but I don't think that if you had a giant God machine, right, and the giant God machine had all the information of the universe programmed into it, that you could predict how I'm going to, the next sentence I'm going to say to you.
00:29:09.000That I think that I have the capacity as an individual actor to, there's something outside the system, in other words, that allows me to make, to subsume my biology and say something different and think something different.
00:29:20.000So you, in your scientific view, there are a couple things that you do that seem to cut against libertarianism.
00:29:25.000And I just want to know how you, how you rectify the breach.
00:29:29.000So one is that you, you've suggested before that there is such a thing as a self, but there really kind of is not such a thing as the self.
00:29:34.000That basically are a bunch of firing synapses that identifies as the self.
00:29:38.000So, without a self and without the capacity to make a free decision, every decision you make is determined, predetermined, how do you get to a libertarian political position?
00:29:48.000Or even just a libertarian free will position.
00:29:51.000The modified version of that is called compatibilism.
00:29:54.000In a survey I like to cite from 2009 of 3,500 professional philosophers and graduate students and so on,
00:30:00.00059% were called themselves compatibilists.
00:30:03.000Very few are in the sort of pure free will, like there's a little homunculus in there pulling the levers, and the rest are determinists, say, along the lines of the arguments that Sam Harris makes.
00:30:12.000So Dan Dennett, I think, makes the best arguments for these, which is that, first, we are
00:31:46.000All loans made by WebBank member FDIC equal housing lenders.
00:31:50.000I interrupt you right in the middle of the stream of thought, which is the worst thing to do.
00:31:53.000But where you were, where you left off, was you were talking about we have the capacity to kind of, we still have the capacity to change things.
00:32:00.000We can still, so how, that's a lot of active verbs.
00:32:04.000I said it's a lot of active verbs for what is a passive phenomenon.
00:32:06.000The concept is that Dan Dennett uses the degrees of freedom.
00:32:10.000That is, within a mechanical system, you have degrees of freedom of how much it can move around.
00:32:13.000In organisms, say, cockroaches have fewer degrees of freedom than the dog.
00:32:18.000The dog has fewer degrees of freedom than the chimp, and the chimp far fewer than humans.
00:32:22.000And even within human groups, the law already takes into account the fact that, say, murder in an act of rage, or you were drugged up, or somebody held a gun to your head, or something like that.
00:32:35.000We say, well, that's different than me freely choosing.
00:32:57.000He's not choosing like I could choose.
00:32:59.000So if I actually get drunk and kill somebody, I should be held more accountable than, say, the alcoholic who just can't control himself, although there should be always punishment there.
00:33:09.000But anyway, that's the idea, that the more degrees of freedom you have, the fact that you can never know all the causal variables anyway, we feel like we are free in the same way we feel we are a self.
00:33:20.000And if you want to call it, you know, Sam calls that an illusion.
00:33:25.000It's the one that makes life fun and interesting.
00:33:28.000But yeah, I think that the reason that, so essentially you're redefining free will to mean free of outside or interior compulsion.
00:33:36.000Meaning that it's not that you are free to make any decision that you want to, it's that you are free of somebody putting a gun to your head, or you are free of a genetic factor that forces you to do X. I'm not free to be an NBA player, okay?
00:33:51.000But within the channels that we're going down through life, they're wider than I think most of us intuitively think, and that you can actually tweak the variables.
00:33:59.000So the compatibilism that you're talking about sounds a lot like, you agree with Sam on principle, but you agree with me in action.
00:34:09.000And this is what's kind of fascinating is that, you know, for people who are arguing the strong non-compatibilist position, right?
00:34:14.000For people who are arguing the strong determinist position, you end up in this weird place where you wonder why you're doing what you're doing all the time.
00:34:29.000To me all determinists are pragmatic compatibilists.
00:34:33.000No one walks around going, well I wonder where he's going next.
00:34:35.000And I think all compatibilists are disguised absolutists because in the end there's what they believe is true and then they're acting completely opposite of that because if you believed everything was determined then you'd sit around navel gazing all day presumably.
00:34:46.000By the way, the social science tends to demonstrate this, that when you tell kids that they have so many constraints on them that they can't get anything done.
00:34:53.000This is why victim ideology is really a problem.
00:35:24.000When I was talking to Sam on his podcast, we did a thing in San Francisco, and the best part of the evening was a woman got up and she said, I totally agree with you, Sam, about determinism, but I have a seven-year-old kid.
00:35:34.000What do I teach my seven-year-old kid?
00:35:38.000It was pretty interesting because this is one of the big questions, is what do you teach your kids if you feel that the science is not in confluence with how they should actually
00:36:29.000I'm good with active verbs because that is what we do.
00:36:48.000But it's essentially a faith-based argument.
00:36:49.000You have faith in yourself that you're capable of acting, even though in reality you may be just a bunch of neurons firing based on stuff that happened several trillion years ago.
00:36:58.000Probably wouldn't use the word faith, but we bump up against these...
00:37:24.000Oh, we've got to work on this problem.
00:37:25.000This is an insoluble problem, because I can never be in your head.
00:37:28.000I can't know what it's like to be a bat, Thomas Nagel's famous thought experiment.
00:37:32.000Because to do that, I'd have to bolt on some wings and the muscles and the neurons.
00:37:35.000According to modern scientists, you can't know what it's like to be a woman.
00:37:37.000You can claim you are one, but... Okay, maybe if you do the surgery and the hormones, but even that's just sort of bumping you closer and closer to that.
00:37:46.000But if we really did it, all the way, you would just no longer be a man or a human wondering what it's like to be a bat.
00:37:52.000You'd just be a bat going, well, I'm a bat.
00:38:25.000If you mean by God a supernatural agent outside of space and time, well then by definition we can never know that because we're in space and time.
00:38:35.000So if you mean like a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that we can meet one day and go, oh, so you have the power to actually do, even like telekinesis or something, you know, this could be done with computer chips in the brain.
00:38:59.000And the answer is you don't, which is why you're a believer, not a knower, typically.
00:39:04.000What I've said before is I know in God, meaning that there are certain premises that I use for my politics and my values in my daily life.
00:39:10.000That I believe spring from the principle that there is an intelligent being that exists outside space and time and that has created a system that is knowable by us, an objective truth that is discoverable by us, and a universe that is understandable to a large degree by us.
00:39:25.000And that's not falsifiable, but it's no less falsifiable, no less unfalsifiable than the theory of multiple universes because we can never get outside our universe.
00:39:33.000So there's no way for us to know whether we're a bubble on top of a bubble or whether we are specifically
00:39:38.000Designed as a as a unique place for life, right?
00:39:41.000This is this is one of the the arguments that's being made now and it's why Stephen Hawking was so attached to the idea of multiple universes because they're that that weird problem that we exist, which is a very statistically
00:39:55.000The way of getting around that is by saying, well, yeah, we're just that series of nines in pi, basically, that when you do 3.14, you go far out enough, you get 60 instances of nine in a row.
00:40:03.000And so we say, well, right, because pi is sort of randomized beyond a certain point.
00:40:07.000Well, but there's no way to know that because now you're positing a thing that we cannot falsify to debunk another thing we cannot falsify.
00:40:57.000Now we can talk about them and use reason or whatever, but I think we're going to bump up against a wall there.
00:41:02.000So I was curious, by the way, that the ancient Jews, the Shoal, you don't go anywhere after your death, right?
00:41:07.000Yeah, the idea of the afterlife is a pretty modern invention in Judaism.
00:41:11.000It really only crops up, historically speaking, a little bit in the prophets, and it's usually the late prophets.
00:41:16.000And it's really maybe as a response to early Christianity or Greek thought.
00:41:22.000So yeah, in the Bible itself, there's no reference, in the Torah, there's no reference to the afterlife at all.
00:41:27.000So what do you think happens after the death of your body?
00:41:30.000I mean, I only have suspicion, because again, unverifiable.
00:41:33.000My suspicion is that if there is a God, which I believe, who exists outside of time and space, and that what animates me is that I'm made in the image of God, and that what animates my capacity is that I'm made in the image of God, that I reunify with God.
00:41:47.000Basically, the traditional Jewish take on this has been that there's a cleansing process.
00:41:51.000Judaism doesn't believe in eternal hell.
00:41:53.000So it's instead this idea that there's a cleansing process for
00:41:56.000So you don't think you're physically resurrected into heaven with God?
00:42:21.000Something like a soul, or energy, or consciousness, or something like that.
00:42:27.000But yes, I think that those are actually two different things in Judaism as well.
00:42:30.000Like the idea of tichayat ha-metim, which is the idea of resurrection of the dead.
00:42:34.000That's a different idea than what happens after you die, right?
00:42:36.000Tichayat ha-metim is the idea that eventually the Messiah comes, that we'll all be resurrected back in our physical bodies at a certain point, which
00:42:42.000You know, honestly, given the nature of how science is moving and the possibilities of cloning, it's actually less crazy than it sounded probably a couple of thousand years ago.
00:43:03.000Or that we're living in a computer now, but there's no buffering or, you know, little pixels that are going off.
00:43:08.000Every so often when I'm just staring off into space, it's because the connection went down.
00:43:10.000But while I got you here, I want to push you on something.
00:43:12.000You know, my Christian friends and people that I debate, particularly on the resurrection, you know, they have a whole series of arguments, you know, if you just followed our reason, you would accept Jesus as your Savior.
00:43:31.000Why don't you accept Jesus as the Messiah?
00:43:33.000Okay, so the reason that I don't accept Jesus as the Messiah is because I think that a lot of the arguments in... So, Jesus as the Messiah is a different figure than anything that exists inside Judaism.
00:43:44.000So when people say that Judaism predicts the coming of Christ, the change in the nature of what Christ is, what a Messiah would be, is different from Judaism to Christianity.
00:43:54.000So Judaism never posited that there would be God come to earth in physical form, and then
00:44:00.000So you're not waiting for the Messiah to come?
00:44:30.000I'm waiting for the Messiah to come in the form of a political figure, right?
00:44:32.000So the Messiah in Judaism is a guy who's going to come back and is going to establish peace in Israel and is going to assure that there's sort of a happier world with a bunch of political aspects to it, as explained by Maimonides.
00:45:18.000Well, I disagree because, I mean, I think a lot of the verses that are cited are actually misreads of the Hebrews.
00:45:24.000I read Hebrews, so I think that... But, you know, again, that's not to disclaim, even in the Jewish view, the impact of Christianity on world history, right?
00:45:35.000We're just talking about the ontological question.
00:45:38.000Is there a God out there, and is there a Jesus, a Messiah, in physical form?
00:45:41.000Right, so I have actual beliefs that run counter to the idea of God taking physical form as a human being, because I think that that leads to a lot of weird
00:45:56.000Some of them say you're 30, because that was a good... Jesus was 30, you know, and so... But, you know, but I'm 63 now, so what happens to all the memories I have of the last 33 years?
00:46:08.000Yeah, no, these are definitely puzzling questions, which is why I don't believe in that version of heaven.
00:46:13.000What's interesting, we can talk about this now, I mean, what's interesting is your version of a heaven, which I want to talk about in just a second.
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00:47:34.000Well, do you believe there's a soul or something like a soul, a pattern of information that represents who you are that floats off the body and goes, continues on?
00:47:44.000And I don't think anybody has a great verifiable account of that.
00:47:48.000I have suspicions, but again, they're suspicions less about knowledge.
00:47:51.000What I do know, and the reason why I'm religious, is that a religious lifestyle that is based on certain fundamental premises, I think, makes life better for people.
00:47:58.000I think that the rules that are set down,
00:48:01.000As currently understood, at least, are rules that are likely to lead you to leading a happier and better life than your pure reason alone.
00:48:09.000Because pure reason alone, unleashed, without even those moorings in Judeo-Christianity, can lead to a lot of really terrible places.
00:48:17.000But I want to ask you about your version of heaven, because we're talking about heaven.
00:48:19.000So we can get back to that very controversial statement in just a second.
00:48:38.000Not just that, though, that really just living a full, meaningful life and being engaged with other people in your society, with your family and friends and so on, that this is it.
00:48:49.000And we should be doing this anyway, whether there is an afterlife or not, because these are good things to do.
00:48:53.000So in the last chapter, I deal with, well, if you're an atheist, if there's no afterlife, maybe there is, but whether there is or not, we don't live in the afterlife, we live in this life.
00:49:04.000We're not living in the here and after.
00:49:06.000We're living in the here and now, so make the most of it.
00:49:08.000But not the most of it by just plugging in the morphine drip or sucking down whiskey all night or whatever your pleasures are.
00:49:17.000It turns out that research shows that that doesn't do it for most people.
00:49:47.000But doing something that's more long-term, either looking back to your past, what have I done with my life that's productive?
00:49:53.000What am I going to do in the next 20, 30 years?
00:49:56.000And then doing things that are not fun or pleasurable now, like the example I use in the book is caretaking.
00:50:01.000I have four parents, step parents, and bio parents, and I was caretaker for two of them, and this wasn't fun at all.
00:50:08.000It wasn't pleasurable driving my dad around all these hospitals, and then the nursing homes, and the pharmacies, and you know, I'd get home and I'm just exhausted.
00:50:18.000But I feel better as a person having done that, because I kind of feel like, well, they did this for me when I was little, and I would want somebody to do that for me in the cycle of life and all that.
00:50:27.000You know, and those kinds of things are something much simpler, like working out in the morning.
00:50:31.000Like this morning I did a couple hour bike ride with the guys.
00:50:34.000It's not fun when we're going really hard.
00:50:36.000I mean, it's kind of painful actually.
00:50:38.000But when I'm done, I'm like, I feel better about myself.
00:50:40.000I did that, and then down the line, it's a good thing to do.
00:50:44.000And this is the concept of flow also, that when you're ensconced in work, this is the happiest you are, like when you are at one with the work that you're doing.
00:50:50.000And I totally agree with this, by the way.
00:50:51.000I think that happiness in life is not utterly disconnected from action in life.
00:50:54.000I think that the attempt to make a hard break between, okay, so you take a bunch of stuff that you hate during life and you're going to hate it your whole life and then you're going to die and everything's going to get fixed in heaven, I actually don't think that's a very good way to teach religion, number one.
00:51:43.000Heavily tied in, even from a secular point of view, with a decline in secular happiness for a couple of reasons.
00:51:49.000One is obviously the lack of community, right?
00:51:51.000As you fragment communally, there's been attempts to sort of graft on different forms of community in the absence of church, but those have largely failed.
00:51:59.000And you're seeing people atomized in a new way because of social media.
00:52:02.000That's a real problem, whereas you see higher levels of communal happiness when you feel like you're part of a group of people who actually have a common worship purpose.
00:52:09.000Yeah, so I think that we don't have a human need for religion.
00:52:12.000We have a need for community, society, for being part of a social group that's doing something that we feel is good and right and gives me deeper meaning.
00:52:25.000Fun, pleasure, doing something with friends is one thing, but being part of, say, a religious group, a bowling league or whatever in the famous example.
00:52:32.000I'll challenge you on that a little bit.
00:52:34.000In the sense that you say that being part of a community is the entirety of it.
00:52:38.000I'm not sure that a bowling league is quite the same thing as a church.
00:52:40.000Bowling league is probably not the right example.
00:52:42.000But it is an interesting one because obviously Robert Putnam uses bowling alone as the evidence of lack of community in American life.
00:52:48.000And I would say it's probably not going to church is the best example of lack of community because it's not just about being a member of a community.
00:52:54.000It's about feeling like you're a member of a community with a common purpose that is in fact transcendental and that matters.
00:52:59.000I think that when you talk about purpose and meaningfulness and living a meaningful life,
00:53:04.000I think there are people who are capable of generating, self-generating meaning and feeling good about what it is that they do.
00:53:09.000But I think that human beings by and large, and this is my main case for religion actually, is I think that human beings by and large are really crappy at defining their own meaning.
00:53:17.000I think when human beings are left to their own devices to generate their own meaning,
00:53:21.000I'm glad that you and I agree on politics, but people very often find meaning in controlling others.
00:53:25.000They very often find meaning in making standards for others.
00:53:28.000They very often find meaning in making a better world.
00:53:31.000And by that, they mean silencing people they disagree with and shutting them up.
00:53:33.000And human history is replete with this.
00:53:35.000And it's replete with religious people who did the same thing.
00:53:38.000So the idea of a transcendental purpose, I think there is a necessity for people.
00:53:43.000People do seek the religious, which is why religion is common to literally every culture on planet Earth.
00:53:47.000So by transcendent, if you mean beyond just ourselves, yes.
00:53:53.000Or even, yeah, so like for me, going to Mount Wilson or other observatories where there's huge telescopes and the big dome is just as meaningful as when I go to the, my wife's from Cologne, Germany, so we go to the dome there.
00:54:05.000It's this, you know, thousand-year-old magnificent, and I love going in there.
00:54:09.000I feel like this is a transcendent experience in the same way as when I go to the astronomical domes.
00:54:16.000I think it's the idea of getting us beyond ourselves in some bigger way.
00:54:20.000Not just beyond our friends and family, but our whole lifespans and so on.
00:54:24.000Now, the religions that do that, I'm on board with you.
00:54:28.000The prosperity gospel business, Joel Osteen, these people, Creflo Dollar, all the way back to Reverend Ike, you know, God wants me to be rich.
00:55:14.000So a religious person would say, I'm having an impact because God wants me to do X, right?
00:55:18.000God gave me a certain set of rules to live by and everything that I do matters, which is why Judaism is such a ritual-based religion and really takes ritual seriously.
00:55:26.000Like every time I drink water, before I do that, I'm supposed to bless God and recognize that God is present in my life, which is an attempt, I think, to get to that feeling of
00:55:35.000Yes, but of course there are religions that do this in a bad way, like my purpose is to get up this morning and become a suicide bomber.
00:55:59.000And I think that's why we can have a conversation, which is really so great, is that I'm not coming at it and just citing Bible verses at you.
00:56:04.000I'm saying it's a merger of religious revelation and a reason that takes that and crafts it.
00:56:12.000Religion is an enzyme, it's a catalyst.
00:56:14.000And that catalyst is what creates the cheese of civilization, right?
00:56:18.000You put that enzyme in there, you create the cheese of civilization.
00:56:20.000You don't have that enzyme in there, that Judeo-Christian enzyme in there, and it just remains a watery way.
00:56:26.000Yeah, you have to pick and choose, though, from the Scriptures to get the ones that we are now using to, say, contribute to a better society and ignore the other ones.
00:56:36.000Well, they were picked and chosen, right?
00:57:46.000And I don't think you have to step out of this world to justify it.
00:57:51.000You can justify it through pure reason.
00:57:53.000Now, people are critical of Kant to a certain extent on this, but we can at least get there if we bolt on some utilitarian arguments and maybe some Rawlsian
00:58:03.000I don't think it's mandatory to get there.
00:58:05.000And that's why I think that the argument from pure reason tends to fail, just because pure reason in the absence of culture ends up at the French Revolution.
00:58:13.000So here we want to throw in empiricism.
00:58:16.000Okay, what are the actual consequences and results?
00:58:19.000So, for example, we have 50 different states with 50 different constitutions, 50 different sets of tax laws, 50 different sets of gun control laws, and so on.
00:58:27.000We can look around and see the different experiments as they unfold and go, well, this one's working, this one's not working.
00:58:33.000There was a news story last night about the rates of homicides in Chicago just went down like 50% because they implemented this police program that we're using here in L.A.
00:59:21.000It's like 1960 and they have these incredibly advanced technologies.
00:59:26.000Everything is extraordinarily clean, of course.
00:59:28.000Everything seems wonderful for the people who are alive.
00:59:30.000For the people who are dead, not so much.
00:59:32.000But this is one of the big problems, I think, in Kant's deontology, is that when Kant says, you know, treat everybody as you would have everybody else be treated, which is basically a rewrite of the golden rule, it's slightly different, right?
00:59:43.000The original golden rule was actually the silver rule, which is don't treat anyone else as you would not want to be treated.
00:59:48.000Once you get to treat everybody else as you'd want to be treated, well, if you feel you're a superior being, that means you get to treat inferior beings in an inferior way.
00:59:55.000And so I think that we have to come up with some definitions that are reliant on certain premises.
01:00:01.000And that's why I keep insisting on the premise.
01:00:03.000If we can accept the same common premises, then I think that we end up at the same place.
01:00:06.000And this is why I don't think atheists are, there are people who argue atheists can't be moral.
01:00:32.000I mean, I'm trying to make the argument that the individual is the moral starting point, survival and flourishing of sentient beings, something like that.
01:00:49.000But you're calling on, well, I'm going one step further outside of space and time.
01:00:53.000But still, at some point, you have to tell us how you know what the deity wants.
01:00:57.000Because again, you know, Muhammad Atta, when he's flying the plane into the building, he's just as sure as you are that, hey, the outside source told me this is the right thing to do.
01:01:05.000Yeah, and the proof that he's wrong is that he's wrong.
01:01:18.000Heavens on Earth is his new one, and his slightly older one, but just as worthy of the read, is The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.
01:01:26.000Michael, thanks so much for stopping by.