Valuetainment - Did God Create Man or Did Man Create God？

00:00:00.000 My guest today is Michael Shermer. He's an American science writer, historian of science, founder of the Skeptic Society, which they have 55,000 subscribers. He is a skeptic. And he wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things. He's got tens of millions of views on YouTube. And he's famous for saying, at least for me, I've watched him quite a lot. He says, humans created God, not the other way around.

00:00:24.640 We're going to find out what he really thinks about God at this phase of his life. Having said that, Michael, thank you for being a guest on Valuetainment.

00:00:31.760 Oh, nice to see you. And thanks for having me. I'm greatly honored.

00:00:35.880 Yes, I'm looking, I'm really looking forward to this conversation, especially on how you went from being a believer to being where you are today with the positions you have, your talk you gave on, whether it's TED Talks, your debates with, not necessarily debate you have with Dennis Prager was more of a discussion, but you've had many different debates.

00:00:55.040 The speech you gave at Oxford was one that really stuck with me. So I'm really looking forward to getting into it.

00:00:59.740 So, Michael, if you don't mind, let's take a step back and walk us through how you got to the point you are today and the way you believe, how you went from believing in God and all of a sudden you don't believe in God anymore.

00:01:10.800 Well, I wasn't raised religious. My parents were non-religious, I guess you'd say secular, but they weren't anti-religious.

00:01:17.040 They weren't atheists. They weren't anything. But I got into the born-again evangelical Christian movement in high school.

00:01:25.020 So this was early 70s at Crescent Valley High near your arch rival.

00:01:29.940 That's right.

00:01:30.320 You went to high school. And a couple of my friends are really into this, the whole Christian movement.

00:01:35.320 And so I just kind of followed them as you do, you know, peer group influence and all that.

00:01:40.800 But I took it pretty seriously. I went to the Glendale Adventist and became born again.

00:01:45.120 I went right up to the table where, you know, the pastor called us all up and I'm like, OK, I'll give this a shot.

00:01:51.080 So I did it. And then I went to Pepperdine, which is a Church of Christ school.

00:01:54.640 And it was pretty conservative politically and religiously.

00:01:57.960 No dancing on campus. Can't go in the girls dorms and vice versa.

00:02:02.480 And, you know, so that was my, shall we say, indoctrination or experience and inculcation into the Christian religion.

00:02:11.840 And I was pretty serious about it. I took courses in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the life of Jesus, the writings of C.S. Lewis and so on.

00:02:17.940 So I know the subject pretty well. And I believed it. I went door to door and to witness to people.

00:02:22.920 And that's what you do as an evangelical. So then I went to graduate school and slowly lost my religion, mainly because several factors.

00:02:31.920 One was being ensconced in science and in the empirical rational method of determining what's justified, true, justified, true, reliable knowledge.

00:02:44.340 And and also this began the study of kind of comparative world religions.

00:02:50.480 And I went through my Joseph Campbell stage of mythology and all that stuff.

00:02:54.700 And and it was clear that to me at the time that all religions claim to have a solid purchase on the truth, but they often contradict each other.

00:03:05.280 So how do you know which is the right one? And the answer is, you know, you're an anthropologist from Mars studying the world's religions, earthly religions.

00:03:14.060 You wouldn't be able to know which is the correct one. And and unfortunately, you know, the creator of the universe wrote more than one holy book and they don't always agree with each other.

00:03:22.880 So which is the right holy book? And anyway, that and then the problem of evil, I felt was never properly answered by religious people.

00:03:30.580 That is why bad things happen to good people, you know, why things happen at all.

00:03:34.780 And we put a moral valence on it, good or evil. Why is that? How does that happen?

00:03:39.360 And and I never felt that the theist arguments made much sense to me.

00:03:44.560 So I just quietly gave it up. I didn't announce anything.

00:03:47.260 I just just quit talking about it. And I think much to the relief of my family, because I was constantly witnessing you're going to you can imagine that the obnoxious kid at the at the family dinner table, you know, constantly talking about Jesus.

00:04:02.180 Yeah, they were and they weren't religious. Again, they weren't anti religious.

00:04:05.080 But, you know, I know they got sick of that. So there was probably some relief on their part there.

00:04:09.840 Got it. Can I ask you a question? This is just I'm asked a non secular.

00:04:14.480 They're not atheists, but they're not Christians. They don't believe in a God. They're more agnostic.

00:04:18.780 Would you say your parents were agnostics themselves?

00:04:21.100 Yeah, agnostic in the sense that not that they were searching and decided it was unknowable.

00:04:25.980 Just I think they didn't give it much thought. My parents weren't educated.

00:04:29.980 They never went to college and they were children of the Depression and and World War Two.

00:04:34.300 So they just it just never came up. I remember I remember they did drop me off at the Presbyterian Church.

00:04:39.840 In La Cañada, more of an obligation, I think. Like, I think we're supposed to do this for our kids.

00:04:46.820 I still I still have my Bible from that Presbyterian Church.

00:04:51.180 Anyway, but but it was it was not a big deal in our household.

00:04:55.060 You're a statistician yourself, right? You said when you were studying sciences, you you you like statistics.

00:05:01.180 So when you look at why people convert or why people eventually turn against God, right, that, you know,

00:05:08.360 not necessarily turn against, I become become an agnostic.

00:05:11.720 Do you notice a trend of those in your situation?

00:05:15.180 Not like you explained, you said, look, in the world, according to Oxford, you know,

00:05:19.660 84 percent of the world believes in some sort of a God.

00:05:22.300 They're part of some sort of a religion. And you said two billion is Christians.

00:05:24.920 I think you said one billion to two billion is Catholics. Then you have one point one billion, give or take, are Muslims.

00:05:31.140 Eight fifty. I think you said Hindu, four hundred million plus is Buddhism.

00:05:34.840 Then you got a few hundred million million that are in their own religions.

00:05:37.780 And then you got about 10,000 different religions.

00:05:39.820 Even Christianity, I think you said, has thirty four thousand denominations, if I recall some of those statistics that you said.

00:05:46.600 But walk me through, you know, if a person grows up in a Christian family, there's a high likelihood they're going to be a Christian.

00:05:52.720 If a person grows in a LDS, they're going to be an LDS.

00:05:55.180 So your parents were agnostic. You became agnostic eventually.

00:05:58.820 You're like you're following the lineage, like if there's some lineage there.

00:06:01.400 But what do you say to people who go from non-believers to believers?

00:06:06.220 What was the cause of that? And people who went from believers to non-believers, what's the cause of that?

00:06:12.340 Is there a trend for both?

00:06:14.480 Yeah, this is a big issue in the psychology of religious studies.

00:06:20.340 You know, there are journals and scholars that study this.

00:06:22.660 And the basic take is that the number one predictor of anybody's religiosity is that of their parents.

00:06:27.440 Of course, like in any social science issue, there's no one predictor that covers 100 percent.

00:06:33.120 Lots of different factors. The second factor is peer group influence.

00:06:36.560 Or if you have high conflict with your parents, that is, you don't get along with your parents, you don't like your parents.

00:06:42.380 Then you're less likely to be influenced by them. You might go the opposite direction.

00:06:46.220 So highly religious parents in conflict with their children, their children grow up to be less religious and vice versa.

00:06:53.140 So and then there's the influence as you get older, you know, parental influence starts to wane in your early teens.

00:07:00.400 And and then peer groups take over and then late teens, early 20s, mentors, teachers, mentors, books that you read, you know, pop culture also becomes an influence.

00:07:10.820 So after parental or family upbringing, then then, you know, peer group.

00:07:16.680 That's what happened to me becoming religious and then becoming non-religious.

00:07:21.060 Well, I went to a secular graduate university at Cal State Fullerton for a master's degree in experimental psych.

00:07:27.720 And again, this was the 70s. There was no atheist movement and no one talked about, you know, science and religion and atheism like it was a big thing.

00:07:35.480 It just never came up. And so for me, I realized another factor of losing my religion was you don't have to be religious.

00:07:42.440 These are good people, thoughtful people, moral people, and they're just not religious or maybe they are.

00:07:47.520 Who knows? I mean, it just never came up. It was not important.

00:07:50.840 And so that made it kind of what's called social proof.

00:07:53.980 You know, it's OK to not believe because other people don't believe and their lives are fine.

00:08:00.180 So, you know, that. So, of course, individually, you know, lots of people, you know, start off as atheists.

00:08:06.500 Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health and the head of the Human Genome Project before that.

00:08:11.900 Super smart guy. He was an atheist and became an evangelical and wrote a book about it.

00:08:15.500 The Language of God. You know, so, of course, there's individual cases where there's none of the influences I'm talking about.

00:08:20.940 The his case, he had just a personal experience, a revelatory experience.

00:08:24.520 You know, I was out on a hike on a cold day and I saw this frozen waterfall and I fell to my knees and, you know, I felt the presence of Jesus.

00:08:31.660 He writes about this in this book. OK, so there's lots of those kind of one off events that people have.

00:08:37.760 And then, of course, there's the always popular, you know, down on your luck.

00:08:41.800 You know, life is hard and bad things, bad things happen.

00:08:44.900 I remember I met Isaac Hayes, the singer once. He's a Scientologist.

00:08:48.380 And I knew he was a Scientologist. And and I've been pretty critical of Scientology.

00:08:52.520 But, you know, he's a was a super nice guy's Thanksgiving dinner at a mutual friend of ours.

00:08:56.780 So I just asked him, Isaac, what you know, what what does Scientology do for you?

00:09:00.480 And he said, well, Michael, let me tell you, I, you know, I had made it to the top.

00:09:05.000 You know, I was rich. I was a famous musician.

00:09:08.340 And so on, you know, he won a award for his theme from Shaft, theme music from that film.

00:09:16.380 And Big Star lost it all. You know, the typical story of, you know, drugs and and all the trappings that go with being a big star.

00:09:24.780 And he lost it all. And Scientology helped him get his life back together.

00:09:28.180 So there's a lot of those kind of stories, a level of loyalty to the religion that kind of got you when you were at the lowest level.

00:09:35.180 Yes. And, you know, to that, I say, well, good, you know, whatever it takes to get through life.

00:09:39.180 I understand. I'm not a militant atheist where I think, you know, everybody always must give up their religion.

00:09:45.140 Some people just find it comforting and they're not making any empirical claims that this is true in any ontological sense.

00:09:51.720 It's like this is the true nature of the universe. It includes this particular God.

00:09:55.700 No, they're just saying, look, it just works for me. OK, it helped me.

00:09:59.700 And I like these people. End of story. A little bit like maybe if you're a Democrat or Republican, you know, it's that that's not always a matter of who has the best arguments.

00:10:10.000 In fact, research on political science and preferences of what people choose, it often turns around what kind of people you like to be around, what are their values and which party kind of best represents those kind of people and those kind of values.

00:10:24.300 Not the particular planks in the platform of that particular election for that party.

00:10:30.520 And it's a little bit like that. And we do know from behavior genetic studies on twins separated from birth and to what extent these kinds of things are heritable temperament personality that, you know, people migrate toward political parties and religions that make them feel good.

00:10:46.140 That jives with their temperament, with their openness to experience, their conscientiousness, their, you know, introversion, extroversion, their, you know, their sense of right and wrong and, you know, and just the kind of people that they like to be around.

00:10:59.260 You know, it's it's fun to debate people that you disagree with, but it's not fun to hang around them all the time.

00:11:04.280 You know, I wouldn't want to be married to somebody who, you know, is the complete opposite of me politically, religiously and so on.

00:11:10.200 It would just get tiring. Right. So just kind of extrapolate that out.

00:11:14.000 You know, who do you like to just hang around with? And that is also an influence.

00:11:18.940 How about flip it? Flip it. So that's how people give their lives.

00:11:21.740 How they have a spiritual moment with a God, right, with their own God, whoever that may be.

00:11:26.360 Flip it to stories of people who were believers that became non-believers.

00:11:31.060 What caused that event?

00:11:34.360 Well, so there's not as much research on deconversion.

00:11:37.680 There's quite a bit of research on conversion.

00:11:39.220 And I've summarized some of that deconversion.

00:11:41.640 There's not much there's some research going on now on the nuns, the so-called people that have no religious affiliation.

00:11:48.200 They tick the box for none under religious surveys and polls.

00:11:52.620 And and, you know, there's some influence of education, for example, more educated people are slightly less religious, but not in a huge way.

00:12:01.700 Like, you know, if you have a graduate degree, you're highly likely to be an atheist.

00:12:05.020 No, not not like that at all. And interestingly, the in just the last decade, the percentage of nuns is more than doubled.

00:12:12.120 It's about about a quarter of all Americans and about a third of millennials.

00:12:15.840 That is, people born after 1981 have no religious affiliation.

00:12:20.340 They're the fastest growing religious cohort in the country.

00:12:23.500 No religious affiliation.

00:12:25.460 Now, my atheist friends go, aha, you know, they're going to be atheists.

00:12:28.780 Well, no, not necessarily. It's looking more and more like they're turning to more, shall we say, secular religions?

00:12:34.240 You know, Buddhism, Western Buddhism, meditation, you know, the kind of people that go to Deepak Chopra Center in Carlsbad or they go to Esalon Institute where they find a lot of New Age spiritual beliefs that are not religiously related.

00:12:49.060 And they don't believe in a personal God necessarily, but some kind of higher force or some kind of entity or something that exists beyond us.

00:12:57.720 But it usually remains poorly defined or not defined at all.

00:13:01.560 I mean, there's got to be a trend, though, because for me, I think about I was born in Iran.

00:13:05.840 So war happens. I see a bunch of people die.

00:13:09.420 I'm seeing stuff that I don't want to really see.

00:13:12.980 I go to church every time my mom and dad take me to church.

00:13:16.000 I get kicked out of Sunday school.

00:13:17.620 I keep asking one question for my Sunday school teacher that she can't answer.

00:13:21.320 It's a basic question.

00:13:22.480 If God so loved the world, why is why are we having so many people die because of war?

00:13:27.020 Why did we get bombed 165 times the other day if he loves us so much?

00:13:31.560 Why did this happen?

00:13:32.280 Well, you know, finally, she calls my mom and dad and saying, your son can no longer be in Bible study because for four straight weeks, she couldn't answer one basic question.

00:13:40.200 Right. So I go to Germany.

00:13:41.900 I see some behavior by a Armenian pastor that completely turned me off from a certain way he was behaving around my family.

00:13:50.660 Didn't like that. And I called him out on it.

00:13:52.780 And I was a 10, 11 year old kid.

00:13:54.760 He didn't like that too much.

00:13:55.680 But, you know, it's my father's son and I'm a protector.

00:13:58.840 And then we come to the States, go to the army.

00:14:01.080 I'm still an atheist.

00:14:01.900 25 years of my life, I'm an atheist.

00:14:04.540 Right.

00:14:05.160 So then eventually I study everything.

00:14:07.340 Scientology, whatever I can get my hands on because I'm curious.

00:14:09.940 It's LDS, Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Jehovah.

00:14:12.860 You read the books, Case for Christ, Case for Church, all these things.

00:14:16.240 But I also saw a trend why believers became nonbelievers.

00:14:20.640 Typically, there was a letdown by either a religious leader who set the example and he did something, you know, whether it's a behavior.

00:14:34.460 Normally, it's a it's a what do you call it?

00:14:37.020 A girl, a woman, you know, kid, drugs.

00:14:39.780 He wants to leave the life.

00:14:40.960 So you're disappointed.

00:14:41.800 Oh, my God, I cannot believe this pastor did this.

00:14:43.740 There's no way in the world I'm going to be a Catholic Christian.

00:14:45.640 So you'll leave the life.

00:14:46.540 Right.

00:14:46.840 Typically, it's a disappointment by a father figure, somebody in the family.

00:14:51.020 But there's also a heartbreak when they pray because they lose a loved one.

00:14:55.540 And that absolutely crushes them.

00:14:57.600 Right.

00:14:57.980 Where they sit there and say, look, I pray for this.

00:15:00.840 You didn't answer my question.

00:15:01.960 Why am I going to believe in God?

00:15:03.340 Would you mind sharing the story of Maureen with the audience for them to kind of and tell me if that had any effects for you?

00:15:10.060 Because I can tell you, for me, that was my biggest disappointment because I lost a loved one.

00:15:14.980 What kind of an effect did I have on your faith?

00:15:17.420 Yeah.

00:15:18.040 Yeah, sure.

00:15:18.600 I'll share that story momentarily.

00:15:20.400 I think you've tapped into, though, a huge issue.

00:15:22.580 That is what's called theodicy or the problem of evil.

00:15:25.400 Why bad things happen to good people.

00:15:27.180 Now, theists will argue, well, the examples you just gave of war.

00:15:32.260 That's human cause that we attribute to agency, free will.

00:15:36.320 Humans have free will.

00:15:37.360 God gave us free will.

00:15:38.380 And we made bad choices.

00:15:39.800 So too bad.

00:15:40.780 And that goes back to the fall in the garden when, you know, Adam and Eve and the whole story that we are by nature sinful.

00:15:48.640 And that's part of the sinful nature that theists are willing to agree we have.

00:15:54.660 And so things like war, homicide, genocide, rape, torture, so on, you know, those are human caused.

00:16:01.520 OK, so that's one thing.

00:16:03.620 But and that I agree with you, that is problematic from a theistic point of view.

00:16:08.700 But they do have a response to that, but they don't have a good response to, in my opinion, is natural evil.

00:16:13.740 That is tsunamis, earthquakes, childhood leukemia.

00:16:17.660 I mean, just take that one or just just take the thousands of children that die every year from starvation.

00:16:23.240 I mean, we know what they need.

00:16:25.120 And, you know, the Bill Gates of the world can only do so much.

00:16:27.820 Why can't God do what Bill Gates does?

00:16:29.540 I mean, why why can't he help?

00:16:31.380 You know, this is these are like a one year old.

00:16:33.440 What kind of volition and agency does a one year old have who gets, you know, leukemia and dies a horrible, miserable life suffering and the parents suffer for the rest of their lives, losing their children.

00:16:43.860 And at least, in my opinion, do not have a good answer to that.

00:16:47.660 So I think you've made a correct deduction there.

00:16:51.280 And in the case you asked about Maureen was my girlfriend in Pepperdine and for several years after in graduate school and so on.

00:16:58.700 And she got in a bad car accident and broke her back.

00:17:01.640 And this was the sweetest, wonderful, smartest, nicest woman I knew.

00:17:05.780 And I just could not believe that this happened.

00:17:08.240 And I was kind of in the transition from leaving to leaving my religion and becoming a nonbeliever.

00:17:14.000 But for a moment, I thought, you know what, I'm just going to pray for her because, you know, maybe there is a God.

00:17:18.540 What do I know?

00:17:19.580 And, you know, if anybody deserves to be healed, it's her.

00:17:22.860 And, you know, you talk to a million Christians and you'll get a million stories of, you know, people that are miraculously healed.

00:17:29.080 So, you know, they prayed to God and God, you know, reached into the world and performed a miracle.

00:17:34.520 Why not?

00:17:35.320 Why not her?

00:17:36.260 Well, of course, nothing happened.

00:17:37.440 And she's still paralyzed to this day.

00:17:40.060 And so it's like, why that?

00:17:41.680 Now, I wasn't putting God to some, you know, test.

00:17:44.640 It wasn't a public thing.

00:17:45.860 I didn't write about it for decades afterwards.

00:17:47.700 And but I just thought, you know what, that's a good one last nail in the coffin, so to speak, of the death of God for me was, you know, I think it's more likely that just bad things happen that they do.

00:18:00.480 Just, you know, bumper sticker says shit happens.

00:18:03.000 It's the second law of thermodynamics.

00:18:04.820 It's entropy.

00:18:06.020 You know, there's just more ways for things to go wrong than things to go right.

00:18:09.460 Just think of a sandcastle at the beach.

00:18:11.520 You know, how many how many ways are there to push grains of sand together into something that looks like a castle?

00:18:15.960 Well, not many compared to the near infinite ways the grains could be molded into just featureless lumps.

00:18:22.180 And that's a metaphor for the human body.

00:18:24.800 Just way more things to go wrong than right.

00:18:27.700 And and so people get cancer just randomly.

00:18:30.320 It's just there's no meaning behind it at all.

00:18:33.780 And and if there is a God and he's all good and all powerful, then it's an indictment that he's not all good if he doesn't do anything about it.

00:18:42.220 So that's my take on it.

00:18:43.760 You know, it's like anything you debate.

00:18:44.940 So I'm sitting there debating somebody on the topic of guns and there's no way I can win this debate.

00:18:50.540 I'm like, why is this person debating it with me in such a strong way?

00:18:54.240 There's no matter what I say, this this woman is not going to and eventually realize, you know, her kid, her husband, they believe in guns.

00:19:01.780 They let the gun out.

00:19:03.340 The kid grabs it and shoots herself.

00:19:05.020 And I mean, no matter how the more you debate this person on the freedoms of gun and Second Amendment, the more she's hating you, the more she's like, the more so there's no winning that debate.

00:19:17.480 Right.

00:19:17.600 So for me, there's not a black and white in this when it comes down to talking, because everyone's got a little bit of a different story.

00:19:23.640 And that's personal.

00:19:24.520 The only thing you know is your life.

00:19:25.920 The only thing I know is my life.

00:19:27.080 The only thing we know is to get our and then whatever books we get our hands on.

00:19:30.540 It's kind of tough to get to the truth on the other way around.

00:19:33.560 But if you don't mind taking the argument that you made, I thought it was so profound, I wouldn't mind you unpacking that a little bit more, where you said, if there's all these arguments, if there's all these 2 billion Christians, you got 1.1 Muslims, why is it that those 1.1 Muslims believe everybody else who doesn't believe in their God is an atheist?

00:19:53.580 Or, you know, the argument you were making, would you mind going through that argument on why you think people, man created God, rather than God created man?

00:20:05.200 Yeah, sure.

00:20:06.060 I'll do that in a moment.

00:20:07.120 But you brought up a good example of guns.

00:20:09.120 Guns are another religious-like value that people hold.

00:20:14.620 It's, in my opinion, because I've done a number of gun debates, I think we do need some gun control, even though I used to be against gun control as a former libertarian, now classical liberal.

00:20:24.060 I discovered that belief in guns is a proxy for something else, for freedom, for liberty, for the American way, for some deeper value.

00:20:35.920 So in that extent, it doesn't matter how many people are shot every year and homicides, accidental childhood, you know, guns going off and things like that.

00:20:45.960 It's irrelevant.

00:20:47.340 There's no amount of people that could die that's going to change the way they feel about guns, because it's not about the guns.

00:20:52.540 It's about the Second Amendment.

00:20:54.200 It's about the Constitution, freedom, liberty, autonomy, self-defense, and, you know, these kind of deeper features.

00:21:00.860 And so a lot of religious truths work that way.

00:21:04.440 And so it's whenever you're talking to somebody about politics or religion, it's always good to figure out what's the deeper moral value behind the specific thing they're talking about, immigration or abortion or whatever.

00:21:17.180 Because if they're pretty stubborn and stuck on the belief that, and they're not going to change because it represents something deeper, then it's really a waste of time to go through, like, this data and statistics on gun violence or abortion rates or immigration rates or whatever.

00:21:34.620 It doesn't matter.

00:21:35.300 And I think religions operate that way, you know, that this is my religion, this is what I believe, that's it, we'll stop, I'm not interested in debating it.

00:21:44.660 And you could go through, like atheists do, they go through all the different arguments for God and why they don't hold water, and therefore it's more likely there's not a God than there is a God, and so on.

00:21:54.660 But that's irrelevant to somebody that believes for some other reason, you know, this gives my meaning, my life meaning or purpose, it's what my family is all about, it's all my friends and my social network are all of this religion, I see everybody every week, and we all go through the rituals together, and it gives my life meaning, good music and social camaraderie.

00:22:14.880 So the arguments that you might make, like I will in just a moment, are really irrelevant to the believer.

00:22:22.320 So, now, on that subject of man creating God, so here I take the approach of an anthropologist or a social psychologist of religion, of which there are many who study this, that, again, going through where we started with, you know, the predictors of people's religiosity.

00:22:38.740 But it also depends, if you take it up one more scale, where you happen to have been born in the world, and what century you were born in, or what millennium.

00:22:47.480 You know, if we were born, you and I, or anybody in the world, anybody born more than, say, 2,500 years ago, time of the ancient Greeks, there were no Christians, you wouldn't be a Christian, because Christ wasn't born yet, Jesus wasn't born yet.

00:23:01.220 There were no Christians, or Mormons, or Scientologists, or anything else.

00:23:06.540 So, very much, you know, religion, very much, the God you happen to believe in, is very much determined by where on earth you happen to have been born, by chance, and what century or millennium you happen to be born.

00:23:19.480 To me, that, in conjunction with the fact that no religion has any particular purchase on truth, that is, reliable knowledge, that I have arrived at through empiricism and reason.

00:23:36.200 And these are the six reasons I believe X, whatever it is, and there's some way to test it.

00:23:43.260 Religion doesn't have anything like that.

00:23:44.880 I mean, religious believers give their arguments, this is why I believe, but it isn't really why they believe.

00:23:49.480 They believe for these other emotional, psychological reasons, and, and again, in some cases, that's okay, like politically, you know, there's, there's no one right truth there.

00:23:58.600 But, but the problem arises when religions claim that they have absolute truth.

00:24:05.780 So, in your case, you know, in Iran, you know, so you have, you have religious conflicts there with no way to resolve the problem, or if you want to just turn to the Israeli or Arab-Israeli problem.

00:24:16.120 So, you know, basically, you got two, two guys with, they both have a deed to the same piece of land, and there's no escrow company to go to, to resolve who actually owns it, right?

00:24:26.240 Because the escrow company is God.

00:24:27.780 And each of them says, I have a direct line to God, he told me, this is mine.

00:24:31.820 And each of them says that, and the anthropologist from Mars goes, well, which one of you is right?

00:24:36.460 And they each go, well, I'm right.

00:24:38.040 And the other guy goes, I'm right.

00:24:39.660 And there's no way to resolve it.

00:24:40.800 There's no experiment we're going to run to go, oh, you're the right one, the other one's the wrong one, so you get the land.

00:24:45.900 Historically, these things are always settled, you know, violently through, through war, conflict.

00:24:49.880 And, but we can't do that anymore because of nuclear weapons.

00:24:53.340 So, so we're probably going to be stuck with this Israeli-era problem, short of a two-state solution, which is the only way I can see could ever be resolved.

00:25:03.120 So, you know, asking somebody, you know, could we pay you for this particular piece of land?

00:25:08.940 You know, it's almost like asking somebody how much they would charge for sex or for dinner.

00:25:15.520 You know, if you have friends to have you over for dinner, what can I pay you?

00:25:18.860 You know, it's just, that's a sacred value.

00:25:20.420 You don't put money on it.

00:25:22.040 And, you know, there's a whole suite of, of beliefs like this, like organ donations.

00:25:27.740 You know, why not sell your organs?

00:25:29.320 Well, people are very uncomfortable with this idea.

00:25:31.780 And same thing with prostitution.

00:25:33.620 Most people are not comfortable, you know, and, and, you know, sex workers that charge for their services, you know, that used to be called prostitution, which has a negative valence to it.

00:25:43.880 Because, again, people have certain sacred value values that they'll never give up, that you can't put a price on.

00:25:50.840 And, and there we, that, you know, that explains much of the world's conflict, I think.

00:25:55.260 So, man created God, not the other way around.

00:26:01.600 God created God.

00:26:02.000 That's what, that's what it looks like to me.

00:26:03.740 I mean, you know, if you kind of lay it out, the different claims made by the different religions that are in conflict with one another.

00:26:09.780 And, and the, and the fact that, you know, flood myths are common amongst religions that, you know, were born and raised, that is the religion, on a body of water that floods, right?

00:26:21.280 Or resurrection myths, you know, Christians claim ours is unique, you know, because we have the resurrection.

00:26:25.780 No, that's not true.

00:26:26.820 There's lots of religions with resurrected gods.

00:26:29.100 And the theme of resurrection comes up a lot, either literally or metaphorically.

00:26:34.680 And, you know, almost all born of a virgin, you know, that this is also not unique to Christianity.

00:26:39.420 There's lots and lots of examples of, of deities that are born of virgins.

00:26:44.100 And, you know, God's having sex with humans in the, in the ancient Greek and Roman world around the time Christianity came, came online.

00:26:53.000 That was very common.

00:26:54.280 God's, God's routinely came down from the heavens, had sex with mostly women.

00:26:59.100 And, you know, then the result with the virgin births, right?

00:27:02.500 You know, this was not unusual at the time.

00:27:05.180 And men could become gods or partial gods and gods could become humans or partial humans.

00:27:10.940 You know, so this whole business that, that critics of Christianity have about how can you believe that Jesus was, was, was both God and the son of God?

00:27:20.060 How can that be?

00:27:21.160 You know, there's a problem of identity.

00:27:22.600 You can't be both at the same time.

00:27:24.420 Well, in the Roman times when Christianity was born, that was quite common.

00:27:28.200 Gods could routinely have sex and, and become human for a while and then return to becoming just gods and, and go back to being human or partial human.

00:27:37.000 And that, that was actually a common belief.

00:27:39.100 So to me, all elements of all the religions are obviously socially constructed.

00:27:45.440 You know, people made them, made up these stories.

00:27:47.520 So, so two follow-up questions for, for that.

00:27:51.280 So in, in, in the story of Virgin Mary, right?

00:27:54.600 When Jesus was born and we read the Bible in your mind, based on the Bible that you read and you studied, did she say, I was not with anybody?

00:28:02.900 I'm a virgin.

00:28:03.420 I've never been with a man.

00:28:04.340 And then the story came about, meaning what is the sequencing in your ideas?

00:28:09.640 Because yes, a lot of people at that time can claim and say, look, I didn't get pregnant.

00:28:13.060 I'm telling you, I didn't do it.

00:28:13.900 I don't have sex with anybody.

00:28:14.820 It was a guy that came and I'm pregnant.

00:28:16.900 The question would be, what are the chances of her saying that and her son being Jesus Christ?

00:28:24.200 That's a mathematical question.

00:28:25.520 That's more statistically, you know, the chances of her saying, yeah, I'm telling you, I wasn't with anybody.

00:28:30.240 This is God's work.

00:28:31.420 Like, okay, Mary, you know, you, you're full of it.

00:28:33.120 You have no idea what you're talking about.

00:28:34.280 I'm telling you, this is not me.

00:28:35.940 And then boom, one point, one out of 113 billion people being born, her kid becomes Jesus.

00:28:42.960 What's it?

00:28:44.060 I see these are, in my mind, two independent events.

00:28:48.300 They're, they're not necessarily tied together.

00:28:50.140 We don't know.

00:28:51.280 We don't, we, you know, people that study ancient Roman gods, you know, can list off some of these names that are not at the top of my head.

00:28:57.720 But, but there was another one of, let's see, of Tyana, I forget his name.

00:29:06.060 2,500 years before it happened to Jesus.

00:29:09.000 There's another story like that.

00:29:10.400 No, no, no.

00:29:10.860 Around the same time, actually, the same century.

00:29:15.080 And anyway, his name is escaping me now.

00:29:17.700 But, but, but, but there were lots of individuals like this who claimed that they were born of a virgin, were persecuted by authorities, were put to death, were raised, you know, from the dead and went to heaven and so on.

00:29:30.120 The Jesus story is not the only one.

00:29:31.820 So you can't put a calculation on it.

00:29:34.160 And then, and then combine these two independent events, the virgin birth and the particular Jesus story.

00:29:39.460 But the difference is, you know, you know one of them and you can't think of the other person's name.

00:29:42.600 But no, there's, there's lots of them.

00:29:44.000 There's lots of them.

00:29:44.640 What I'm saying to you is, no, no, what I'm saying to you, I know you say there's a lots of, my skeptic side, I'm more skeptic than I'm a believer.

00:29:51.060 I'm more on the skeptical side, on the believer side.

00:29:53.200 But I'm also a math guy.

00:29:55.520 What is the likelihood of a person saying that and the son ends up becoming who he is and has 2 billion people following this guy?

00:30:06.280 Well, again, these are independent events.

00:30:08.940 Jesus didn't become Jesus because of the virgin birth or anything like that.

00:30:13.620 It's because of Paul.

00:30:14.220 And even there, you have to really trace for about two centuries how Christianity became the state religion under Constantine in the fourth century.

00:30:26.440 No, late fourth century.

00:30:28.540 And, and, and, and, and you only need like a one and a half, 2% conversion rate or birth rate within a religion for it to grow from, you know, a few tens of people to a few tens of millions of people to a few hundred million people by the fifth century, all the way up till today to 2 billion people.

00:30:48.740 That's like compound interest.

00:30:50.000 So it doesn't take a miracle to explain the growth of religion.

00:30:52.880 Same thing.

00:30:53.780 You can't say that.

00:30:54.920 Same thing.

00:30:55.480 But the argument you're making could be made for Islam.

00:30:57.680 One of the chances that Muhammad in the seventh century and his particular unique story would end up, you know, in the 21st century with a billion and a half followers.

00:31:08.180 No, no, but that's not what I'm saying.

00:31:09.360 No, no, that's not what I'm saying.

00:31:10.100 No, no.

00:31:10.440 There's two.

00:31:11.180 By the way, if you want to do that math, then we have to go back to Hindu, which I think is 2300 BC.

00:31:16.160 And then Buddhism, that's 2500 BC.

00:31:19.420 How come they're both smaller than Muslim and Christianity?

00:31:21.760 Then the debate becomes, well, then if that's the case, Muslim is creating more momentum than any other religion in the world.

00:31:26.740 So we can have that discussion.

00:31:27.860 I've done that as well because that's completely separate.

00:31:30.220 Where I'm going with you is the following.

00:31:32.200 I'm going to, a guy gets up and he says, here's who I am.

00:31:37.520 This is what's going to happen.

00:31:38.440 A woman is pregnant.

00:31:41.120 She says, I'm telling you, I didn't hook up with anybody.

00:31:43.760 I'm like, what are you talking about?

00:31:45.460 Of course you're going to claim something like that.

00:31:47.140 You're out of your mind.

00:31:47.840 I'm telling you.

00:31:48.760 This is not, I didn't do anything.

00:31:51.180 I'm a virgin, whatever.

00:31:52.980 I don't know what's going on.

00:31:53.980 This could be something special here.

00:31:56.300 Years later, we find that it's Jesus.

00:31:57.940 And the chances of that to be 2 billion people, you can't say, well, it's that easy.

00:32:03.040 Any religion could do it as long as they grow 1.5%.

00:32:05.200 Well, but that's the hindsight bias.

00:32:07.140 You're taking the one that won out and ignoring all the other ones that didn't become major.

00:32:12.800 All I'm saying is, it's the chances of a virgin mother, and she makes the claim, then the son becomes who she said he was going to become.

00:32:21.420 That's a very, it's a little bit spooky, if I can use the word, because even as a skeptic myself, you sit there and say, what are the chances of that?

00:32:30.340 So I'm not going to what Prophet Muhammad said.

00:32:32.560 I'm not going to what anybody else, and I'm specifically using that situation.

00:32:36.320 We don't have any other story like that that got as big as this one did.

00:32:38.960 Well, but again, you're picking out the hindsight bias.

00:32:43.300 You're picking out the one that happened to be successful.

00:32:46.800 You have to look at all the ones that have the same story that didn't become successful.

00:32:50.760 Why didn't they?

00:32:53.400 So that's a question for you, though, not for me.

00:32:56.860 Here it is.

00:32:57.600 I found it.

00:32:58.600 I was looking at my slides here.

00:33:00.200 Apollonius of Tyana.

00:33:01.800 He's a first century AD living in Asia Minor.

00:33:04.240 His followers claimed he was the son of God, that he was able to walk through closed doors, heal the sick, cast out demons, and raised a dead girl back to life.

00:33:12.180 He was accused of witchcraft, sent to Rome before the court, was jailed, but escaped.

00:33:16.520 After he died, his followers claimed he appeared to them and then ascended to heaven.

00:33:21.220 So now this is around the same time as Jesus, and Jesus didn't become a big thing until, again, centuries later.

00:33:28.580 You know, the Gospels themselves were not even written, or the earliest one, Mark, was 40 years after Jesus' death.

00:33:35.260 The others, 50, 60, 70, 90 years.

00:33:38.240 And I'll just give you some other examples here.

00:33:41.500 Virgin birth myths.

00:33:43.600 These are deities who were born of a virgin.

00:33:46.560 Dionysus, Perseus, Buddha, Atas, Krishna, Horus, Mercury, Romulus, and Jesus.

00:33:52.860 Dionysus is the ancient Greek god said had been born from a virgin woman, fathered by the king of heaven, to have transformed water into wine, introduced the idea of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of God, was the liberator of his people, and to have returned from the dead.

00:34:09.540 Resurrection myths.

00:34:10.680 The Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility was Osiris.

00:34:14.080 So this is 2400 BCE that appears in the first pyramid text.

00:34:18.440 He was considered to be the giver of life in this world, the redeemer and merciful judge of the dead in the next world.

00:34:25.600 Egyptian kings believed that as Osiris rose from the dead, so would they, in union with him, inheriting eternal life.

00:34:31.860 And by the new kingdom, everyone believed that if they accepted Osiris as their god, they too would be resurrected.

00:34:37.000 Which one of them has 2 billion people?

00:34:39.740 Well, so there you're making an argument for, you know, populist argument that, you know, whoever has the most inheritance is more likely to be right.

00:34:47.020 So Christianity is about one and a half times more likely than Islam.

00:34:49.940 No, no, I simply give it a point.

00:34:51.800 No, no, I simply get, are you a sports guy or no?

00:34:54.280 Are you a person?

00:34:55.000 Oh, I'm a big sports guy.

00:34:56.440 Okay, which one?

00:34:57.180 Tell me which sport.

00:34:58.540 Oh, I follow the, you know, NFL and NBA.

00:35:01.760 All this sport.

00:35:02.380 So let's do NBA.

00:35:03.960 Okay, let's do NBA.

00:35:04.660 Who's the greatest basketball player of all time?

00:35:07.120 Well, it's got to be Kareem.

00:35:09.020 So you say Kareem.

00:35:10.260 Okay, good.

00:35:10.760 But I'll go with Michael Jordan too.

00:35:12.520 Okay, but I think you make it interesting if you keep it Kareem, right?

00:35:15.360 Okay, Kareem.

00:35:16.040 Give me your top five.

00:35:17.220 So let's just say Kareem and Michael are top two.

00:35:20.080 Who's the other three?

00:35:21.200 Well, if we're going with pre-current players, because LeBron obviously has to be on the list.

00:35:27.340 Okay, let's put LeBron there as well.

00:35:28.680 So you got two more.

00:35:29.200 Okay, LeBron.

00:35:29.820 Yeah, okay.

00:35:30.540 So I guess I would put Magic Johnson.

00:35:33.220 Okay.

00:35:33.680 You know, a great player and also charismatic and, you know, change the game.

00:35:39.120 Yep.

00:35:40.040 And probably Larry Bird, just to throw in, you know, one white guy.

00:35:43.200 Well, it's good to know you don't discriminate.

00:35:46.860 I respect you.

00:35:48.100 So now let's go with that.

00:35:49.280 Now you said Kareem.

00:35:50.080 Tell me why Kareem.

00:35:51.020 Because I think Kareem is a very easy argument as the greatest of all time.

00:35:54.600 But what's your argument for Kareem being the greatest of all time?

00:35:56.600 Well, because the top scorer of all time and also a number of championships and, you know,

00:36:01.460 a true motivated leader of his teams.

00:36:05.700 And he dominated game, you know, college, NBA, you know, revolutionary type of a player.

00:36:11.100 He couldn't be stopped.

00:36:11.920 Consistent, yeah.

00:36:12.720 Number of MVPs, number of MVPs, things that he did.

00:36:15.760 So all I'm saying to you is I'm not saying that single event is the reason why Kareem

00:36:23.840 Abdul-Jabbar is a great, you know, how they say Michael Jordan is the greatest of all time

00:36:26.440 because he went to six championships and he never lost one.

00:36:29.080 I think that's one point.

00:36:30.280 But I don't think that alone is enough of a catalog to call him the greatest of all time,

00:36:34.120 right?

00:36:34.820 So LeBron's been to more championships and you have to go to Bill Russell.

00:36:38.160 But to say that your mother was a virgin and you were born and you got 2 billion followers,

00:36:44.520 I think that gets a point.

00:36:45.340 I don't know if that says you are the greatest of all time.

00:36:48.440 I see where you're going with this.

00:36:50.160 Yeah.

00:36:50.580 No, I'm afraid I can't agree with that because I just don't have to agree with that.

00:36:54.660 We just got to give a point there.

00:36:56.480 I think they're independent variables there.

00:36:58.660 Anyway, go ahead.

00:36:59.340 So now let me give you the point for the opposite side.

00:37:01.460 Here's a point for the opposite side.

00:37:06.360 And I'm going to give you a soft one here, you know, just see what you're going to say about this.

00:37:09.800 So, so many people that are educated, that have degrees, smart folks,

00:37:15.040 you mentioned Paul earlier, or Jesus became big because of apostle Paul.

00:37:18.460 He was a pretty big skeptic and he was Saul before he was Paul, right?

00:37:21.940 So he's a, he wasn't just a lightweight guy.

00:37:24.560 And he was a true believer later on without him, you know, him and Billy Graham probably

00:37:28.820 compete for who baptized the most people.

00:37:30.280 Some say Billy, some say him.

00:37:31.800 It is what it is.

00:37:33.080 What do you say to those who say, Michael, super educated people like C.S. Lewis, who

00:37:40.320 wrote mere Christianity, Oxford University professor, the guy didn't believe in anything.

00:37:45.760 He wrote the Chronicles of Narnia.

00:37:47.320 Then he flips and he becomes one of the biggest, you know, believers of the religion of Christianity

00:37:53.180 to the point where any church that baptizes and brings new members on the first book they

00:37:57.980 read of costs of discipleship.

00:37:59.340 The second book they read is mere Christianity.

00:38:01.600 Why is an educated man like, you know, C.S. Lewis later on in life that you're supposed

00:38:07.500 to get smarter, the smarter he got, the more he flipped.

00:38:11.220 Why?

00:38:11.800 And you studied C.S. Lewis.

00:38:13.360 Why?

00:38:13.600 Yes, yes, yes.

00:38:14.760 Well, again, these are in individual cases.

00:38:17.480 Everyone's different.

00:38:18.620 I mentioned earlier, the language of God, Francis Collins story.

00:38:23.760 And yeah, C.S. Lewis is similar.

00:38:26.500 In fact, Francis Collins cites C.S.

00:38:28.680 Lewis as an example, because he was obviously such a smart guy.

00:38:32.600 Frankly, amongst the theologians that is really serious, super professional theologians that,

00:38:38.000 you know, they don't think C.S.

00:38:39.080 Lewis is all that serious as a theologian, even though they share their beliefs.

00:38:42.600 Not that I'm able to make that assessment, but just for what that's worth.

00:38:48.120 Okay.

00:38:48.300 Why?

00:38:48.640 I don't know.

00:38:49.040 You know, he he wrote a beautiful book called The Grief Observed about his wife who died

00:38:54.400 of cancer.

00:38:55.000 Again, you know, he grapples with the problem of evil, the odyssey.

00:38:58.800 Did you ever see the movie?

00:38:59.780 Did you see?

00:39:00.320 Oh, yeah.

00:39:00.720 Oh, yeah.

00:39:00.980 Of course.

00:39:01.500 Yeah.

00:39:01.680 Yeah.

00:39:01.960 Yeah.

00:39:02.300 Joy was her name, right?

00:39:03.420 Joy something.

00:39:04.140 I think.

00:39:04.520 Yeah.

00:39:05.080 Joy died from cancer and it really questioned his faith.

00:39:09.120 Right.

00:39:09.660 Yes.

00:39:10.040 No, no.

00:39:10.480 It's an incredible.

00:39:11.160 So I think Anthony Hopkins plays C.S.

00:39:12.900 Lewis.

00:39:13.420 He crushed it.

00:39:14.520 Yeah.

00:39:14.660 I mean, yeah.

00:39:15.240 And Deborah Winger plays Joy.

00:39:17.120 It's a great film.

00:39:19.040 Yeah.

00:39:19.400 Yeah.

00:39:19.900 So there again, you know, I don't fault anybody for, you know, wanting or needing or

00:39:25.380 desiring religion or claiming it on some level.

00:39:29.020 For what it's worth, one of the leader top modern skeptics, Martin Gardner, he was one

00:39:34.220 of the founders of the modern skeptic movement, longtime monthly columnist before me at Scientific

00:39:38.620 American, wrote many books about arguments for and against God.

00:39:42.860 And he himself said, well, I think atheists have better arguments than the theists do for

00:39:46.820 God's existence.

00:39:47.600 But I believe in God.

00:39:49.620 And it was like, what?

00:39:51.300 And he called himself a phidist or a pragmatist.

00:39:55.120 Phidist is the correct term, but pragmatist.

00:39:57.700 That is, there are pragmatic reasons for believing in God that have to do with emotion, emotional

00:40:03.620 need and meaningfulness, purposefulness in life.

00:40:06.420 And since you can't prove there is no God.

00:40:09.060 And it's one of a handful of mysterian mysteries, as they're called, like free will and determinism.

00:40:14.660 You know, scientists tell us that the universe is determined from whence comes volition or

00:40:19.700 free will.

00:40:20.140 Well, I feel free.

00:40:22.760 So I think of it as a useful fiction.

00:40:25.640 You know, and maybe God is like that for some people.

00:40:28.760 And I, and I think some, I think it's something like that for C.S. Lewis, although I don't

00:40:32.600 recall exactly, it's been so long since I studied him, that that what his reasoning was

00:40:38.080 personally, everyone has a personal story.

00:40:40.800 And so I think probably it was something along those lines.

00:40:44.700 Got it.

00:40:45.640 You know, in, in regards to, in regards to religion, like, you know, years ago for me,

00:40:53.680 I was sitting there debating with somebody at Rafi's place and this lady and her husband

00:40:57.240 were telling me, you know, this is the word of God.

00:41:01.180 This is the truth.

00:41:02.460 You know, this is, you know, a hundred percent the truth.

00:41:06.140 I sat there and I said, so let me, let me get this straight.

00:41:07.980 So you got the Bible from day one till today.

00:41:10.640 How many times has it been, you know, how many different versions that we had, how many

00:41:13.420 different translations that we have, how many different times has it been said, you

00:41:17.180 know, rewritten different languages.

00:41:18.880 Do you not lose some meaning to it until it becomes English, right?

00:41:24.820 And that's the skeptics point of view.

00:41:27.280 You expect to believe this, right?

00:41:28.760 How is this even possible for this to stay exactly what was said at that time?

00:41:32.420 Well, you know, this is the word of God, but the part I would go with you is a little

00:41:35.540 bit different than that one.

00:41:36.500 Do you think religion was in a way used at that time to try to control, uh, the naive

00:41:44.600 populace where it was easier to do then than it is today?

00:41:49.400 Well, um, okay.

00:41:50.880 There's, there's many different theories to explain, um, you know, the origins of religion.

00:41:57.380 This is one of them, you know, the kind of control, uh, uh, population control of people

00:42:02.580 sort of enforce or reinforce, um, uh, moral values and, and, uh, norms of the society.

00:42:10.720 It's a way of saying, look, even if, you know, you think you got away with it, uh, from our,

00:42:15.960 our police force or whatever, you know, there's an eye in the sky that sees everything.

00:42:19.860 Um, so that's one element of religion.

00:42:21.960 Uh, the other is more social capital.

00:42:24.580 That is to say, it's a way, you know, if you particularly like, just think of the founding

00:42:29.100 fathers of the United States.

00:42:30.500 And they argued that, uh, for a, a, a self-governing people, a self-governing society to operate,

00:42:37.580 people need an internal governor.

00:42:39.500 Uh, and they need some kind of, uh, value, moral value system.

00:42:44.180 And religion is one of those.

00:42:45.680 Now the founding fathers were mostly deists.

00:42:47.680 So they made an argument from Aristotle's virtue ethics.

00:42:50.640 That is, there's value in, in developing virtuous characteristics in your children and

00:42:57.060 in yourself, and then we'll have a society of virtuous people.

00:43:00.580 And therefore you don't need so much government or religion.

00:43:03.880 Uh, but, but of course that's pretty late in the game.

00:43:06.440 Uh, both religion and governments came about around the same time on the axial age, maybe

00:43:12.760 five, 6,000 years ago when these, you know, kind of chiefdoms, bands, tribes, and chiefdoms

00:43:19.420 began to coalesce into larger States and empires.

00:43:21.980 You needed a way of resolving social conflict.

00:43:25.100 So you have set of rules and laws.

00:43:26.880 You got to have a police force in a court system, some kind of judicial system.

00:43:30.720 The state has to be able to impose punishments or else what's the point of having rules because

00:43:34.580 people will violate them.

00:43:35.600 And, and, and religion at the same time, you know, if you have just 10 people or 50 people

00:43:40.900 living in a small community, you can all just meet, you know, every Friday in the commons

00:43:45.820 and, and talk about your problems.

00:43:47.360 But if you have millions of people, you can't do that.

00:43:49.440 You need some kind of social institutions to do that.

00:43:52.340 So religion is one of those.

00:43:53.980 So that's the kind of general explanation that historians and sociologists of religion

00:43:58.600 offer.

00:43:59.280 This is a vital role of religion, uh, is to kind of hold people together.

00:44:03.600 Now in the modern world, let's say in post-World War II Europe, where you've seen this massive

00:44:09.480 decline of religiosity, uh, almost flipped in the, in a matter of decades, uh, from almost

00:44:15.080 everybody believing to, you know, only a small percentage of true believers and churches

00:44:19.900 falling into, into disuse.

00:44:21.940 A lot of them are empty.

00:44:23.260 These major cathedrals are more like art, art museums now.

00:44:27.640 And, uh, you know, and, and, and, and like, even in Germany, where my wife's from, you know,

00:44:31.800 the Catholic church is just bleeding members, particularly after the whole pedophile thing,

00:44:35.620 you know, people are just, just had enough.

00:44:38.020 And, uh, but see European societies are different.

00:44:41.640 They have, uh, than America, they have much tighter social safety net because one of the

00:44:45.480 rule roles of religion over the centuries has been to take care of the poor, which before

00:44:49.840 the, before capitalism and the industrial revolution, almost everybody was poor, you know, 90% of

00:44:55.400 the world was poor, right?

00:44:56.400 So this is one of the major roles of religion, but in the 20th century, um, most governments

00:45:02.480 today, including the United States, uh, have a, about, uh, about a quarter, about 20% of

00:45:08.480 their GDP is allocated toward, uh, social services, you know, welfare, social security, you know,

00:45:15.100 food stamps, aid for poor families and so forth.

00:45:18.280 Uh, that's actually pretty common, even though you'll hear conservatives complain bitterly

00:45:22.280 about the numbers too high or liberals complaining that the number is too low.

00:45:26.540 It's about the same as most European countries.

00:45:28.720 So, uh, uh, the social safety net is kind of taken over the role of religion, which leaves

00:45:34.000 America as something of an outlier.

00:45:35.740 How come religion hasn't declined as much or as rapidly in America as in European countries?

00:45:40.880 And, and one answer is because we have the first amendment that forbids the religion,

00:45:45.480 the government, the state from getting involved in religion.

00:45:48.260 So religions have undertaken to become pretty expert at marketing their products and services.

00:45:53.100 They're really good at, if you've ever been to a mega church, uh, uh, which I have several

00:45:58.100 times, it's quite the show.

00:45:59.420 It's, I mean, they're offering a lot to their people.

00:46:02.640 I mean, it is really fun to go to it's music and free parking and lots of community and,

00:46:08.880 and, uh, you know, and people like that.

00:46:11.840 And so it's not just, I need somebody to tell me what's right or wrong or the meaning of life

00:46:16.460 or whatever.

00:46:16.820 There's a lot more to it than that socially.

00:46:18.920 I mean, let me, uh, uh, ask this other question for you to, uh, see, you think that a country

00:46:24.340 based on a Christian religion or, uh, a peaceful religion does better than a country that doesn't

00:46:30.520 have a religion?

00:46:31.480 Uh, well, this, you know, there's, there are studies on this that, uh, the more, uh, religious

00:46:36.780 a nation or society, um, the less healthy the society is now how is health measured quantitatively?

00:46:46.100 What we're talking about here are things like, um, abortion rates, teen pregnancy rates, STD

00:46:52.320 rates, homicide rates, suicide rates, um, you know, uh, like infant mortality.

00:46:58.340 There's about 15 of these different characteristics and a social scientist named Gregory Paul did

00:47:04.000 this massive correlational study of like the top 20, uh, industrial democracies in the world

00:47:09.480 as measured and then measured by their, uh, religiosity as measured by, you know, what percentage

00:47:14.900 of the population says they believe in God, they attend, uh, church services, you know,

00:47:20.000 every week they read the Bible every day and so forth.

00:47:22.440 And, you know, basically it's an inverse correlation, the higher, the religiosity, the lower the rates

00:47:28.320 of these, um, uh, social health measures.

00:47:31.580 That is to say, like in America is the standout, you know, we have the world's highest among these

00:47:37.020 20, uh, democracies, you know, we're the most religious, but we have the highest rates of

00:47:41.460 homicides, highest rates of suicides, highest rates of STDs, uh, pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies,

00:47:47.840 uh, abortions, you know, uh, teen, uh, problems, uh, infant mortality and so on.

00:47:53.480 Now, each of these, I have to say parenthetically, each of these has an independent series of causes

00:47:59.840 that have nothing to do with religion.

00:48:02.000 But my point is that if religion is such a great prophylactic against social ills, that if,

00:48:07.480 if a society needs it to be a healthy, happy society, how come it's the opposite in America?

00:48:12.320 We're the most religious and we have the most social problems of any of these countries on

00:48:17.240 those measures.

00:48:18.140 And so to me, it's like, it's whatever religion is doing, it's not doing that.

00:48:22.640 It's not helping.

00:48:23.660 So you think a country is better off without, without a religion?

00:48:26.680 Absolutely.

00:48:27.460 Yes.

00:48:27.800 Really?

00:48:28.460 So yeah, as long, yeah, as long as they have, of course, you got to have some kind of social

00:48:31.760 safety net.

00:48:32.320 You got to have a set of standards and values that people go on.

00:48:36.200 And so my Christian friends say, yeah, even if every, no one believed in God in America,

00:48:39.960 we're still a Judeo-Christian society from historically.

00:48:44.120 Okay.

00:48:44.460 That's true.

00:48:45.180 So, so then you would much rather trust in a man's values and principles that dictate

00:48:50.000 the country than a set of principles based on a book or a Bible.

00:48:54.820 You'd much rather have a man lead your country.

00:48:57.220 Really?

00:48:58.120 Oh yeah.

00:48:59.100 Because let's think about the constitution.

00:49:01.700 Yeah.

00:49:01.960 And the enlightenment values, this, this whole centuries long experiment has been one

00:49:06.400 of, of saying, regardless of whatever your religion is, these are the values we hold

00:49:11.220 that we, that people are born equal, that is of equal value and should be treated equally

00:49:16.620 under the law.

00:49:17.700 And we're going to abolish slavery and torture and civil rights and women's rights and gay

00:49:21.980 rights and all the things, you know, we've kind of experienced in our own lifetime.

00:49:24.800 And these came about because of this central principle of interchangeable perspectives.

00:49:30.740 There's nothing special about me or my religion or my race that, that makes me better than

00:49:36.400 you and your religion and your race are equal is in terms of value.

00:49:43.080 So that is an enlightenment principle.

00:49:45.380 No religion came up with that.

00:49:47.320 And in fact, religion has come up with quite the opposite, you know, that our religion is

00:49:50.880 the one true religion.

00:49:51.720 And back to where you were talking about earlier in the conversation, you know, all these wars,

00:49:55.680 the ones you personally experienced growing up, that's because of religions conflict with

00:50:00.760 each other and no means to result.

00:50:02.320 I think it's the complete opposite, though.

00:50:03.680 I think it's the complete opposite.

00:50:05.000 I think what you're saying is, you know, what America was founded on the constitution,

00:50:09.220 you know where they got it from.

00:50:11.180 You know where they got it from.

00:50:12.440 Well, okay.

00:50:13.460 You're going to say they got it from the Bible, but no, actually, the founding fathers were

00:50:16.820 mostly deists.

00:50:19.020 Jefferson, Hamilton.

00:50:19.920 No, no, I'm not going to say the Bible, but do you know where they got it from?

00:50:23.360 Okay, go ahead.

00:50:24.340 I'm curious.

00:50:24.780 I'm asking you, what do you think they got it from?

00:50:26.720 What's the history?

00:50:28.140 So the constitution, did they come up with these ideas?

00:50:30.880 Did they get it from?

00:50:31.660 Well, we know where they got it.

00:50:33.300 They told us.

00:50:35.400 All of them were classically trained.

00:50:37.380 So they knew history.

00:50:38.620 They knew Greek and they knew the history of Greece and particularly Rome.

00:50:42.300 So if you read the Federalist Papers, for example, there is just example after example

00:50:46.700 between Hamilton and Madison of examples from ancient Greece and Rome.

00:50:51.900 And they knew these histories.

00:50:53.580 And then, of course, they're the products of the Enlightenment.

00:50:55.880 They were in the Enlightenment.

00:50:57.400 You know, so, you know, John Locke and John Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes and all the

00:51:03.920 thinkers that kind of particularly Locke that led to this division of separation of powers.

00:51:10.500 Because if you read the Federalist Papers, they're very much steeped in human nature.

00:51:14.700 They start off going, look, what are people like?

00:51:16.820 People are selfish.

00:51:18.320 They are power hungry.

00:51:19.880 If you let them, they will take more than they need.

00:51:22.740 Do you believe that?

00:51:23.820 Oh, yeah, totally.

00:51:25.460 Absolutely.

00:51:25.900 So if you believe that, if you believe that, how would you trust more of a man coming up

00:51:31.920 his values and principles to run your country than a higher power that you can't change it

00:51:37.420 because the higher, and I'm purely talking to you from a logical standpoint.

00:51:41.180 Yeah.

00:51:41.860 Because you just kind of power, you know what happens.

00:51:43.800 But the problem is, how do you know what the higher power thinks?

00:51:47.380 Here's a part of me.

00:51:48.620 There's a part of me that actually doesn't care.

00:51:51.160 There's a part of me that cares.

00:51:52.220 Well, but you have to care because I'm going to ask you, well, where'd you get that

00:51:55.220 particular idea?

00:51:56.100 You got to say world comes from the Bible.

00:51:57.760 Well, here's why.

00:51:58.500 Let me explain to you why.

00:51:59.480 Let me explain to you.

00:52:00.180 So how sure are you about your beliefs?

00:52:03.200 About what?

00:52:04.280 About the fact that you think a man created God, not the other way around.

00:52:08.340 I'm reasonably confident.

00:52:09.460 And it's sort of a Bayesian, say, I'd say 80 to 90%.

00:52:12.080 Okay, great.

00:52:12.760 You think there's people on the opposite side that are also at 80 or 90%?

00:52:16.280 I'd say there's religious people that are 100%.

00:52:18.640 Yeah, I would say atheists that think they're 100%, which to me, the atheist argument is the

00:52:22.980 most.

00:52:23.260 Well, no, no, no.

00:52:23.760 Atheist is just a lack of belief in God.

00:52:27.620 It doesn't mean the strong atheist that says, I know there is no God is not a tenable position.

00:52:31.760 You don't know there is no God.

00:52:33.400 All you can do is put a probable.

00:52:34.700 That's right.

00:52:35.260 We're on the same page there.

00:52:36.240 Yeah.

00:52:37.780 Agnostic to me is the one that says, you know, they don't know, right?

00:52:42.280 But the atheist says, I know there is no God.

00:52:45.000 Well, the weak.

00:52:45.680 Okay.

00:52:45.920 There's the strong atheist that says, I know there is no God.

00:52:48.300 That's not a tenable position.

00:52:49.400 In my opinion, the weak atheist says, I just don't believe in God.

00:52:52.420 Now, there might be.

00:52:54.020 And if I could change my mind or, you know, I may find out later.

00:52:56.980 But okay.

00:52:57.480 For now, I just assume there isn't unless proven otherwise.

00:53:02.060 Okay.

00:53:02.300 But that doesn't tell you anything about what somebody believes.

00:53:05.180 You know, and say, well, what do you believe in?

00:53:07.440 Well, I believe in civil rights and civil liberties and I believe in love and whatever.

00:53:11.420 That has nothing to do with atheism.

00:53:12.980 But there's one thing, a religion, that's 100% proven.

00:53:17.720 That's proven it's 100% right.

00:53:20.280 You know what religion that is?

00:53:22.700 The religion of I don't know.

00:53:24.740 The religion of, okay, all right.

00:53:26.340 Yes or no.

00:53:26.900 I mean, that's 100% proven.

00:53:28.440 So meaning you can say you believe in Jesus.

00:53:32.620 He can say he believes in Prophet Muhammad.

00:53:35.180 She can say she believes in whoever.

00:53:36.800 I can say, guys, listen, we can sit here and fight all we want and put the events together

00:53:41.060 in halls and gather a thousand people and sell $100 tickets.

00:53:43.960 And you and I can debate all day long.

00:53:45.660 And the answer at the end of the day is what?

00:53:47.380 Neither one of us know, right?

00:53:48.900 Okay.

00:53:49.520 So if we know, we know that's the only 100% is that we don't know.

00:53:54.660 Let's set that aside.

00:53:55.880 If we know we're going off of, you're never going to be 100% right.

00:53:59.720 I'm never going to be 100% right till we die.

00:54:01.560 We're not going to know, right?

00:54:02.680 So as long as we're living and we have the religion of I don't know.

00:54:06.860 What do we want to base the country off of?

00:54:09.100 Let's pick a manual.

00:54:10.600 This manual called Bible Works.

00:54:12.520 We have the Bible.

00:54:13.620 What's the book that L. Ron Hubbard wrote?

00:54:15.480 Dianetics.

00:54:16.200 We have the Koran.

00:54:18.080 We have the Book of Moroni, whichever book you want to pick.

00:54:20.880 We have, pick any of the books.

00:54:22.460 We have Buddhism, you know, great book.

00:54:24.060 I've read it.

00:54:24.520 It's very, to me, it's, it's, it's, if I wasn't a Christian, I'd probably be a Buddhist.

00:54:29.380 You know, let's take all these books.

00:54:30.740 Let's take Meditations by, what do you call it?

00:54:33.800 It's by our friend, the Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, right?

00:54:37.280 Marcus Aurelius.

00:54:39.060 Let's pick one of these books, Michael, and let's build the foundation of the country of

00:54:43.960 this one person.

00:54:44.800 And let's not even look at it as a God.

00:54:46.700 Let's look at it as a philosopher and a way of living.

00:54:49.340 Don't you think it's better to pick a book of a person that's not alive to go live life

00:54:54.420 off of that than a person that's alive that can all of a sudden have a meltdown and change

00:54:57.880 and become a dictator?

00:54:59.340 No, the, the, the, the, the, the, the correct, the correct answer is you don't base a, you

00:55:04.760 don't base a constitution on any book, no book, no book.

00:55:08.160 The whole point of the U S constitution, what makes it unique amongst all political systems

00:55:13.100 ever invented is that it's not based on any book.

00:55:16.560 It's based on a set of principles derived through reason and then open to change.

00:55:21.080 You know, as, as Madison said, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

00:55:26.180 People have their preferences, the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, they each want as much

00:55:30.800 power as they can get.

00:55:32.020 So we have to have a rule in there that says nobody gets to have any state sanctioned religion.

00:55:36.840 There are no religion state sanctioned by the state full stop.

00:55:40.020 You can believe whatever you want, but it can't influence our political system done.

00:55:44.700 Okay.

00:55:45.020 Next, you know, well, I, you know, that, that my race should be the superior race.

00:55:48.940 Okay. Well, we kind of messed that up in the, with the slavery thing, but, but, you

00:55:52.720 know, we got that eventually solved through a civil war and so on.

00:55:55.380 So, but, but, so the whole principle is based on ideas, not people's books, not

00:56:01.800 holy books, not revelation.

00:56:04.260 You know, you can't, if you were to write a new constitution today, you wouldn't start

00:56:08.420 off saying, well, we began with that.

00:56:10.860 Jesus is our savior and died for our sins because Jews and Muslims would go, Hey, Hey,

00:56:15.680 Hey, we live here too.

00:56:17.060 But America was founded based on Judeo Christian values and principles, you know,

00:56:20.680 roughly speaking minus minus Thomas Jefferson being a side, you know, but again, read Hamilton

00:56:28.780 and Madison, read the Federalist Papers.

00:56:30.500 There's no God in there.

00:56:31.300 There's no Bible.

00:56:32.220 There's no religion.

00:56:32.900 These are all just ideas.

00:56:34.800 So, so was there, was there God for George Washington?

00:56:37.160 Was there God for, uh, was there, Washington was a, he was a deist, but more of a believer

00:56:41.780 than Jefferson.

00:56:42.400 Jefferson was definitely not, but, but, but, but it doesn't matter what the founders

00:56:47.420 believed.

00:56:48.080 It doesn't matter.

00:56:48.740 It's the ideas that they came up with.

00:56:51.040 I totally agree.

00:56:52.020 Oh, I totally agree.

00:56:52.920 But like, you know, uh, kids going to school, would I want the kids go to a school that are

00:56:58.480 based on a certain values and principle?

00:57:00.940 That's a higher power than a man.

00:57:02.600 I don't know if I'm from my record, anybody you've given too much power to, you've heard

00:57:07.100 the quote before power, you know, corrupts people and absolute power to repeat that.

00:57:11.840 You've heard that a million times.

00:57:13.160 I'm just a bit too concerned about giving men a little bit too much power.

00:57:16.160 Absolutely.

00:57:17.120 Again, ambition must be made.

00:57:19.060 Maybe you like that.

00:57:20.520 Maybe you like that.

00:57:21.340 Maybe you married a German and she rubbed off on you.

00:57:23.420 I don't know.

00:57:23.960 You kind of like a man having too much.

00:57:27.060 Okay.

00:57:27.580 Right.

00:57:28.140 My inner Nietzsche.

00:57:29.780 Your inner Nietzsche.

00:57:30.960 Yes.

00:57:31.380 Let's talk about some other topics.

00:57:32.860 We can get off of religion here.

00:57:33.860 By the way, what's more important, a better debate or better debate?

00:57:37.780 Well, the better debate is the key.

00:57:41.600 It's ideas.

00:57:42.580 Ideas.

00:57:43.140 I'm interested in ideas.

00:57:44.280 I don't care whether I win a debate or not.

00:57:45.760 It's irrelevant.

00:57:47.380 But you know how sometimes you got a better debater with bad ideas ends up crushing somebody

00:57:51.200 with a better debate.

00:57:52.180 Well, see, that's the problem.

00:57:53.580 For example, Christopher Hitchens and I were pretty simpatico on most things, but I wouldn't

00:57:58.600 want to debate him on even something I knew way more than him about.

00:58:02.580 If he just took the other side, I know I'd lose.

00:58:05.720 By the way, one of my favorite guys to watch when there's a debate, it's him.

00:58:10.860 Have you seen him and his brother?

00:58:12.080 Oh, I've watched all his videos.

00:58:14.100 It's ridiculous.

00:58:14.940 I knew Hitch.

00:58:15.580 He was a friend of mine.

00:58:16.560 Yeah.

00:58:16.780 I knew him.

00:58:17.820 And my dog's name is Hitch.

00:58:19.480 You know, there's something about him that feels very likable and warm.

00:58:23.740 I don't know.

00:58:24.100 He is a likable guy.

00:58:24.980 He is a likable guy.

00:58:25.840 I don't have to agree with the guy, but I like them.

00:58:29.620 So is Dawkins.

00:58:30.500 And so is Sam Harris.

00:58:31.320 Everybody thinks these atheists are militant and so on.

00:58:35.860 No, they're not.

00:58:36.480 They're actually nice guys.

00:58:37.380 I actually think they're necessary because they can point out the weakness in the opposing

00:58:40.440 argument and sometimes strengthen it.

00:58:42.700 Well, that's the point of debate is that if you can't articulate the other side of your

00:58:48.280 positions, then you don't really know your own position.

00:58:50.020 No question about it.

00:58:50.880 No question about it.

00:58:52.060 Final thoughts on a conspiracy theory.

00:58:53.920 So which conspiracy theory gave you the most hard time debunking where you're kind of like,

00:59:04.360 oh my, I mean, I've heard your 9-11.

00:59:06.520 I've heard your John F. Kennedy.

00:59:08.260 I've heard a lot of your debates and you're just like, nope, this is what happened.

00:59:13.460 Nope, this is, nope, nope, nope.

00:59:15.820 But which one is it where you're like, I don't know.

00:59:17.960 There's something there.

00:59:19.240 Well, at the moment, the one we're going through right now is the lab leak hypothesis for COVID.

00:59:24.660 That door is not shut.

00:59:26.220 We don't know.

00:59:26.920 That could still be a kind of conspiracy, even if it's an accident.

00:59:31.040 Probably not intentional, probably not a bioweapon development, but a gain of function

00:59:34.540 for other reasons, maybe research that leaked.

00:59:36.780 But whatever it is, and then the Chinese are hiding it, that's a kind of conspiracy

00:59:41.480 of which there's a theory about it.

00:59:44.560 And I'm troubled that the fact that in early 2020, say March, April, that was a viable

00:59:51.360 conspiracy theory to discuss.

00:59:53.960 And then all of a sudden, it wasn't acceptable to even talk about it anymore.

00:59:57.440 It was considered fake news.

00:59:58.460 And now all of a sudden, it's okay again, because Jon Stewart went on a comedy show and

01:00:04.200 talked about, you know, it's like, how is it that a comedian can tell our society what's

01:00:08.780 acceptable for debate?

01:00:10.200 Come on.

01:00:11.260 All right.

01:00:11.720 So, well, then a few other, well, Chris, I was about the Jeffrey Epstein death at first.

01:00:18.100 I thought, nah, no conspiracy.

01:00:19.560 And then, you know, and then when the news came out about the second camera that broke down,

01:00:23.360 I thought, okay, come on, chances of that are fairly low.

01:00:26.060 So my priors were changed.

01:00:28.180 My Bayesian reasoning went up that, you know, changed my priors to the probabilities being

01:00:33.140 higher that it was murdered.

01:00:35.140 But then I got an email, and I posted this on Twitter, and then I got an email from somebody

01:00:39.140 saying, I worked at that prison.

01:00:40.580 Those cameras never worked.

01:00:42.000 It's a piece of shit.

01:00:43.380 Prison.

01:00:43.900 Nothing worked in there.

01:00:44.900 I'm like, oh, okay, never mind.

01:00:46.720 I think they just closed down the prison, though.

01:00:48.200 Did they not?

01:00:48.740 Like, they just either closed it down to something.

01:00:50.120 I think so.

01:00:50.840 Yeah.

01:00:50.960 I think they lost their funding.

01:00:52.440 I don't know what.

01:00:53.360 Anyway, but I just finished my next big book on conspiracy theory.

01:00:57.540 So I actually have several chapters on real ones.

01:01:00.540 You know, all the stuff that between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, you know, Edward Snowden

01:01:06.180 stuff about what our government was doing, you know, warrantless wiretaps and surveillance

01:01:13.400 programs, not just under Bush, but under Obama, you know, Mr. President Transparency.

01:01:18.980 You know, there was a lot of shenanigans going on there.

01:01:21.320 And then the stuff that came out about Abu Ghraib and, you know, torture.

01:01:26.400 And, you know, we still have captured 9-11 terrorists in Guantanamo Bay just sitting there

01:01:32.900 20 years later, and they still haven't had a trial.

01:01:36.540 That's totally against not only our own judicial system, but the Geneva Convention about war crimes and how war prisoners of war are to be treated.

01:01:46.660 I mean, it's just staggering, the stuff that's coming out.

01:01:49.740 And now there's new stuff about just coming out like this week, hopefully, about the role of the Saudi government and the Saudi royal family and so on, funding the 9-11 terrorists.

01:02:02.360 You know, that we then support their regime.

01:02:05.680 They're our allies.

01:02:07.100 Hang on for a second.

01:02:08.580 And this gets back to the, you know, Michael Moore's crazy.

01:02:11.120 No, not Michael Moore.

01:02:12.080 Sorry.

01:02:12.360 It was, I think it was.

01:02:13.560 No, that wasn't Michael Moore.

01:02:14.980 It was my Alex Jones conspiracy.

01:02:16.560 You know, about, you know, all the Saudis who left America on 9-12.

01:02:22.320 You know, the U.S. government said, OK, you can leave.

01:02:25.140 But all flights were shut down.

01:02:26.600 How did they leave?

01:02:27.300 OK, what is the story there?

01:02:29.800 Come on.

01:02:31.100 You know, so forget the 9-11 truthers and their inside job that Bush did it.

01:02:34.520 He couldn't he couldn't figure out how to do any of that.

01:02:38.140 You know, the real story is probably this other conspiracy.

01:02:42.660 Not to mention the two trillion dollars we spent just in Afghanistan.

01:02:46.980 Six trillion total on both wars and the whole homeland security and the surveillance state and all the loss of civil liberties because of that.

01:02:55.220 All these things, that's that's the true conspiracy.

01:02:58.880 Right.

01:02:59.240 So don't get sidetracked by these 9-11 truthers.

01:03:02.960 They're a distraction from the real stuff that's going on.

01:03:06.520 Even now, here we are in the second weekend in September of 2021.

01:03:11.520 There's still stuff that happened.

01:03:13.140 We don't know.

01:03:14.180 And I think that's there's something there.

01:03:17.020 9-11 truthers are the real conspiracy.

01:03:20.320 Yeah, they're the just another the distraction.

01:03:22.420 They're the ones that are the real conspiracy.

01:03:25.220 What concerns you more?

01:03:26.900 What concerns you more, Michael?

01:03:28.340 Biowarfare, cyber warfare, you know, or, you know, what you hear about, you know, we were talking to my Eric here, who, you know, some are talking about weather to be able to manipulate weather.

01:03:40.360 You know, that's been around for a while.

01:03:41.580 They've been talking about that.

01:03:42.600 I've talked to a inventor who said it's very easy to manipulate weather if you want to add larger scales, a different story.

01:03:48.840 What concerns you the most?

01:03:49.900 You look like somebody that would read these weird books and study.

01:03:53.040 I read all those weird books.

01:03:55.000 That's my job is studying weird things.

01:03:57.520 The only real existential threat that I see is nuclear weapons.

01:04:01.020 You know, there's still over 10,000, which is enough to eradicate the species.

01:04:05.960 There's nothing even remotely like that.

01:04:07.560 I don't think climate change is an existential threat.

01:04:09.800 I don't think terrorism is an existential threat.

01:04:12.020 But nuclear weapons are.

01:04:14.000 We'd have to get it down below 1,000 nuclear weapons to prevent, like, a nuclear winter or something like that, that could be catastrophic.

01:04:20.840 Even if it didn't kill every last human, it would, you know, cause such massive suffering.

01:04:25.720 That's a concern.

01:04:27.660 And I don't know a way around it because of what's called a security dilemma or the Habizian trap or the other guy problem.

01:04:34.600 You know, I want to get rid of my nukes, but the other guy's got them.

01:04:36.940 But, you know, so we can't, we can't, you know, like with North Korea, we can't, we can't let up.

01:04:42.000 And that's always going to be a problem.

01:04:45.520 Yeah, there's not a solution there.

01:04:47.480 And even if, let's just say, they say, oh, we got rid of everything.

01:04:50.800 Do you believe them?

01:04:51.820 No.

01:04:52.780 So, so how do you, how do you figure that part out?

01:04:55.380 Anyway, all right.

01:04:57.220 I've enjoyed having you on.

01:04:58.780 You know, we're going to put the link to your books below.

01:05:01.220 And thank you for taking the time.

01:05:03.400 You're welcome.

01:05:03.920 Thanks for having me.

01:05:04.380 This was quite the conversation.

01:05:05.520 I had no idea what we were going to talk about.

01:05:07.440 So this worked out great.

01:05:09.000 Thank you.

01:05:09.780 Anytime.

01:05:10.220 Take care.

01:05:10.620 Bye-bye.

01:05:10.980 Okay.

01:05:11.360 Bye-bye.

01:05:11.920 So I'm curious, did man create God or did God create man?

01:05:15.420 Comment below.

01:05:15.740 I'm curious from today's interview.

01:05:17.400 If you like this interview, I got two other interviews for you.

01:05:19.360 One of them is when I sat down with Deepak Chopra and Carlsbad.

01:05:22.440 We had a great conversation together.

01:05:23.980 And the other one is a sit down I had with Dennis Prager, one of my favorite people in the world

01:05:28.340 to listen to click over here.

01:05:29.680 Take care, everybody.

01:05:30.360 Bye-bye.

01:05:35.520 Bye-bye.

01:05:36.320 Bye-bye.

01:05:36.760 Bye-bye.

01:05:40.980 Bye-bye.

01:05:41.100 Bye-bye.

01:05:41.240 Bye-bye.

01:05:42.900 Bye-bye.

01:05:45.160 Bye-bye.

01:05:45.720 You say that's a long one.

01:05:46.440 Bye-bye.

01:05:46.860 Bye-bye.

01:05:47.460 Bye-bye.

01:05:48.020 You

Valuetainment - September 24, 2021

Did God Create Man or Did Man Create God？ - Michael Sherman

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