Jim Al-Khalili: The Clash of the Titans
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Believing The Unbelievable
The Clash Between Faith and Reason
2007 ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL - WEDNESDAY, JULY 4, 2007
MR. GERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Elliot Gerson, and I'm absolutely delighted on behalf of our sponsor for this track Allstate to introduce our next speaker. Sam Harris is the author of two best-selling books, The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation. He has appeared on countless television shows, he has written in many publications and indeed one could almost say that he was the first to launch a recent and very substantial intellectual and literary trend in the United States, carrying over into Europe, where people speak, very seriously, about faith and the lack of faith.
He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, he studied religion, extensively, over many, many years. He is also one of -- probably because of the best-selling status of his books and the demand for him as a speaker, he's very slow in getting his doctorate in neuroscience, but he assures me he will still do that some day. One thing though, I think that can safely be said about Sam in terms of his intellectual impact and his contribution to the free exchange of ideas. While I think it's probably still safe to say that it will be a very, very long time before a self-proclaimed atheist could be elected to public office in this country, unlike most countries in Western Europe, I think since Sam's pioneering book, and I think this is something that has to be applauded by everyone who believes in free speech and tolerance that people who are not of faith at least have the comfort in social settings to acknowledge their lack of faith in a way that really has not been the case in much of American cultural and social tradition. Sam indicates that he himself didn't use the word atheist of his own opinions until after his book. But he again has generated, I think, enormous interest, controversy and debate. And I think that is healthy for people of faith as well as people without faith. I'm very pleased to introduce Sam Harris.
MR. HARRIS: How come you’re all not at Walter Isaacson's talk on Einstein, even I want to be at Walter's talk on Einstein. Well, you have all made a terrible mistake. While I often -- can you all hear me okay -- I often begin any talk on this subject with an apology. Because I think I am destined to say some very derogatory things about religion.
And given that we live in a country where 90 percent of people believe in a biblical God, I think, I am destined to offend some of you here. I want to assure you that is not the point. It is not the point of my being here. It is not the point of my writing my books, I'm not being deliberately provocative. I'm simply extremely worried about the role that religion is playing in our world.
I think religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology that we have ever produced. And what is more it is the only ideology that has systematically protected from criticism both from within and without. It remains taboo, you can criticize someone's beliefs really on any subject but it remains taboo to criticize their beliefs about God. And I think we are paying an extraordinary price for maintaining this taboo. So I'm going to break this taboo rather enthusiastically over the next hour. I will leave some time for questions and I'm happy to take your criticism.
I also want to point out upfront there is nothing that I'm about to say that should be construed as a denial of the possibilities of spiritual experience and indeed of the importance of spiritual experience. And that is a subject I will come back to at the end. Here is my basic concern. Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st-century efficiency, and yet we are still, to a remarkable degree, drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature. This marriage of modern technology, destructive technology and iron age philosophy is a bad one for reasons that I think nobody should have to specify much less argue for, and yet arguing for them has taken up most of my time since September 11, 2001. That day that 19 pious men showed our pious nation just how socially beneficial religious certainty can be. You know, as someone who has spent a few years publicly criticizing religion, I have become quite familiar with how people rise to the defense of God.
As it turns out there are not a hundred ways of doing this -- there appear to be just three. Either a person argues that a specific religion is true or he argues that religion is useful and indeed so useful that it might be necessary, or he argues that atheism is essentially another religion, dogmatic, intolerant or otherwise worthy of contempt. And I want to differentiate these three strands of argument because they regularly run together and any conversation between a believer and a nonbeliever is liable to fall into one of these ruts.
Let us begin with the specific claim that a given religion is true. There are two problems with arguing this. The first is that as Bertrand Russell pointed out, over a century ago, they can't all be true. I mean given the sheer diversity of religions on offer. Even if we knew that one of them was absolutely true. I mean even if we knew that this was God's multiple choice exam here; is it a, Judaism; b, Christianity; c, Islam. Even if we knew we were in this situation, every believer should expect to wind up in hell purely as a matter of probability. It seems to me this should give religious people pause before they espouse their religious certainties. It never does but it should.
The second problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. And this subsumes all claims about the existence of the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of a certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, all of it.
Consider Christianity, the entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was a son of God, divine etc. This textual claim -this textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the Gospels follow Jesus' ministry by decades and there is no extra biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is quite a bit worse than that. The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred. Why not? Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.
I have met literally hundreds at this point of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus. I, actually, remain open to evidence of such powers. The fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All to my knowledge lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature's laws have been abrogated in this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.
But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology; materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. Right now, in fact all of these powers have been ascribed to Satya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan, supposedly, was born of a virgin, as was Alexander. Apparently parthenogenesis doesn't guarantee that you're going to turn the other cheek.
But Satya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure. He is not the David Koresh of Hinduism. His followers threw a birthday party for him recently and a million people showed up. So there are vast numbers of people who believe he is a living god. You can even watch his miracles on YouTube; prepare to be under-whelmed. Maybe it's true that he has an Afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings. But I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship him; in any case. So, consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this that miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Satya Sai Baba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence. We have Satya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. And they don't even a merit an hour on the Discovery Channel. But you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them. Does anyone else see a problem with that?
Speaking more generally, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are founded on the claim that the Bible and the Koran were dictated by the Creator of the Universe. There is a Creator, there is a Personal God and he occasionally writes books. He doesn't code software, he doesn't produce films, Mel Gibson's claim to have been toiling all the while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, I think, is probably an exception here. But in any case God is principally an author of books.
And this idea has achieved credibility because the contents of these books are deemed to be so profound that they could not possibly have been produced by the human mind. Please consider how implausible this is. Consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries. In the year 1665, beginning in the summer of 1665, Isaac Newton went into isolation to dodge the outbreak of plague that was incidentally laying waste to the pious men and women of England. And when he had emerged from his solitude he had invented the integral differential calculus, he had discovered the laws of universal gravitation in motion, he had set the field of optics on its foundation. Many scientists think this is the most awe inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. And yet no one is tempted to ascribe this to divine agency. We know that these accomplishments were affected by a mortal and a very unpleasant mortal at that.
And yet literally billions of us deem the contents of the Bible and the Koran so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. Now, given the depth and breadth of human achievement I think this is almost a miracle in its own right. It seems to me a miraculous misappropriation of awe. I mean it took two centuries of continuous human ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who have ever lived to significantly improve upon Newton's achievement. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible, I mean, anyone in this tent could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually in a matter of moments. Consider the possibility of improving the 10 Commandments. This might seem to be setting the bar kind of high because this is the only part of the Bible, the only text that God felt the need to physically write himself and in stone. Consider the second commandment; thou shalt not erect any graven images. Is this really the second most important thing, upon which to admonish all future generations of human beings? I mean, is this as good as it gets ethically and spiritually.
You remember the Muslims who rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons. What got them so riled up? Well, this is it, the second commandment. Now, was all that pious mayhem, the burning of embassies, the killing of nuns, was all of that some kind of great flowering of spiritual and ethical intelligence, or was it egregious medieval stupidity? Well, come to think of it, it was egregious medieval stupidity. The truth is that almost any precept we would put in place of the second commandment would improve the wisdom of The Bible. How about don’t mistreat children, how about don’t pretend to know things you do not know.
Or what about just try not to deep fry all of your food? Could we live with the resulting proliferation of graven images, I think we would manage somehow. So I submit to you that there is not a person on this earth who has good reason to believe that The Bible and The Koran are the product of omniscient intelligence. And yet billions of people claim to know that they are the Word of God.
In fact, 78 percent of the American population claims to know that The Bible is the Word of God. Seventy percent of college graduates believe that The Bible is the Word of God. So just leave aside questions of religion's truth for a moment. The second way of arguing in defense of God is to argue that religion is useful, and so useful that it may in fact be necessary. Now, this line of argument is also problematic for a few reasons. The first to say, it really is a total non sequitur. This is not -- even if religious belief was exquisitely useful, I don’t doubt there are circumstances in which it is in fact useful, but even if it were useful across the board this would not give us reason to believe that a personal God exists, or that anyone of our books are his word.
The fact that certain ideas are useful or motivating or give people meaning in their lives or the fact that the idea that God has a plan for me or everything happens for a reason, the fact that such ideas are consoling, does not offer the slightest reason to believe that they’re true. And in fact, ironically they -- even if we had good scientific reasons to believe that these ideas were true, their power to console us wouldn’t even offer an additional reason to believe that they’re true.
I mean even if the cosmologists and the physicists came forward suddenly and said, you know, sorry for the misunderstanding guys, but it seems there is a God and he has a plan for you. The fact that so many of us would find this consoling would give us further reason to be skeptical in scientific terms, this is why we have phrases like wishful-thinking, and self-delusion and selfdeception. This is why scientists do double-blind control studies wherever possible, this is why they submit their data for peer review. If we have conquered any ground in our career of rationality it is on this point, there is a profound difference between having -- between having good reasons for believing something and simply wanting to believe it.
Now, of course, there are other reasons to doubt the usefulness of religion, and many of these are enunciated on a daily basis by bomb blasts. I mean, how useful is it that millions of Muslims believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? How useful is it that the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq have such heartfelt religious differences? How useful is it that so many Jewish settlers think that the creator of the universe promised them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean?
How useful has Christianity’s anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations? Now, those who conflate usefulness and truth in defense of religion generally argue that religion provides the most reliable foundation for morality. Now, again before we even -- we’re even tempted to evaluate this claim, please notice that it is a non sequitur, it’s not -- even if religion made people moral, this would not provide evidence for the existence of God or that Jesus is his son, or any specific doctrinal proposition to which people are attached. Every religion could function like a placebo, they could be extremely useful and entirely barren of content. But let’s talk for a moment about the supposed link between morality and religion.
It seems to me that religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available. I mean ask yourself, which is more moral? Helping the poor, feeding the hungry, defending the weak, out of a mere concern for their wellbeing, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it.
The truth is people do not need to be threatened with damnation to love their children, to love their friends, to want to collaborate with strangers, or indeed to recognize that helping strangers can be one of their greatest sources of happiness. And what kind of morality is it that is entirely predicated on a self-interested desire to escape damnation? This seems to bypass the very core of what we mean by morality, which is an actual concern for the welfare of other human beings. Clearly it is possible to teach our children to form such a concern and to grow in empathy and compassion without lying to ourselves or to them about the nature of the universe, without pretending to know things we do not know. You can teach your children the golden rule as an utterly wise ethical precept without pretending to know that Jesus was born of a virgin.
And it's also worth observing that the most atheistic societies on the planet like Sweden and Denmark and the Netherlands are in many respects the most moral, they have rates of violent crime that are far lower than our own in the U.S. And they are more generous both within their own population and in the developing world on a per capita basis. Sweden, which opposed the war in Iraq, has nevertheless admitted more Iraqi refugees into its borders than any country and many more than the U.S. has.
So if you're looking for a state model of Christian charity, the most atheistic societies at this moment fit it better than the most Christian societies do. What about this notion that we get our morality out of scripture? Well, clearly we don’t get our most basic moral impulses out of scripture, because these can be seen emerging very early. I mean toddlers, 18-months old will spontaneously try to comfort somebody who looks upset. And a person clearly doesn’t learn that cruelty is wrong by reading the Bible, the Koran, because if you don’t already know that going in, you’re just going to be confronted with, with endless celebrations of cruelty in these texts.
And these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. The God of the Bible hates sodomy and will kill you for it, but he rather enjoys the occasional human sacrifice. But I think the very least we can say he doesn’t quite have his priorities straight. In the Old Testament we witnessed the most immoral behavior imaginable. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, the murder of children, kidnapping.
All of it not only permitted by God, but mandated by God. And if you doubt this take another look at books like Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and 2nd Samuel and Numbers, and 1st and 2nd Kings, and Zechariah. I mean these books -- in these books, the most unethical behavior is celebrated. If these events occurred in our own time, half the prophets and kings of Israel would be shackled and brought to The Hague for crimes against humanity, including Moses for slaughtering the Medinites, including Joshua for slaughtering the Malachites, including Elijah for slaughtering the prophets of Baal. These men by our standards today they were utter psychopaths, as was Abraham for -- as Christopher Hitchens recently put it, “For taking such a long and gloomy walk with his son Isaac.”
And you might wonder well, what about the 10 Commandments? What about “Thou shall not murder.” Well, the problem is the Ten Commandments simply give us more bad reasons to kill people. I mean what are you supposed to do when your best friend breaks the Sabbath or erects a graven image, or takes the lord’s name in vain? You’re supposed to kill him. And if you’re unwilling to kill him, your neighbors are supposed to kill you.
Is this really the best book we have on morality? Is it even a good book? Now, happily most Christians and Jews now disregard the morality on offer in the Old Testament. And they rationalize the barbarity we find there by saying, oh, this was appropriate to the time, it was appropriate to the ancient world. The idea being that the Canaanites were so ill-behaved, that just getting together a short list of reasons to kill your neighbor and sticking to it was a great improvement over the general barbarity of the time. No, it wasn’t. It was within the moral compass of human beings then to recognize that killing somebody for adultery was evil. The Buddha managed it, Mahavira, the Jain patriarch managed it, numerous Greek philosophers managed it.
So Jews and Christians are simply lying to themselves when they talk about the impediments to morality that prevailed in the 5th century BC. And the other thing to notice is that rationalizing the barbarism we find in the Old Testament merely renders it irrelevant, it doesn’t render these books morally wise. I mean it is faint praise indeed, if the best that can be said of much of scripture is it can now be safely ignored.
Now, and despite what Christians say on the subject, the New Testament isn’t so good as to make The Bible a reliable basis of morality. In fact, much of the book is an embarrassment to anyone who would say it’s a moral book, much or less a perfectly moral book. And nowhere is this clearer than on the question on slavery. And the truth is The Bible in its totality, Old Testament, New Testament, support slavery. If we recognize anything, if we converge on any point in ethical terms now it is that slavery is evil. Nowhere in the Bible is this evil recognized much less repudiated. The slave holders of the south were on the winning side of the theological argument, they knew it, they never stopped talking about it. The best God does in the Old Testament is to admonish us not to beat our slaves so badly that we would injure their eyes or their teeth, or not to beat them so badly with a rod that they die on the spot, if they die after a day or two, no problem.
I think it should go without saying that this is not the kind of moral insight that got rid of slavery in the United States. Well, consider the treatment of women. And from millennia the great theologians and prophets of religions have set to work on the riddle of womanhood and the results in various times and places has been widow burning and honor killing, and genital mutilation, a cultic obsession with virginity, just other forms of physical and physiological abuses, so kaleidoscopic in variety as to scarcely admit of being summarized. Now, I have no doubt that much of this sexist evil predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there’s no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape. Now, while man was made in the image of God, women was made in the image of man according to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Humanity therefore is derivative, it’s ersatz.
The Old Testament values the life of women at one half to two thirds that of a man, the Koran says that the testimony of two women is required to offset the testimony of one man, and every women is deserving of one half her brother’s share of inheritance. But the Biblical God has made it perfectly clear that women are expected to live in absolute subjugation to their fathers, until the moment they’re pressed into connubial service to their husbands.
And the New Testament offers no relief, and Saint Paul put it in his letter to the Ephesians, “Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject to their husbands in all things.” The Koran delivers the same message. And on most translations says that disobedient wives should be whipped or scourged or beaten.
The eleventh-century sage Al-Ghazali, perhaps the most influential Muslim since Mohammed, described a women’s duties this way, “She should stay at home and get on with her spinning. She should not go out often. She must not be well informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbors, and only visit them when absolutely necessary. She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and in his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything. She must not leave the house without his permission, and if given his permission, she must leave surreptitiously. She should put on old clothes and take the deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice or recognize her.
She must not speak to a friend of her husband's even in need. Her sole worry should be her virtue, her home as well as her prayers and her fast. If a friend of her husband calls when the latter is absent, she must not open the door nor reply to him, in order to safeguard her and her husband's honor. She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment; she should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband's sexual needs at any moment.
Now, recall the blissful lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban or think about the millions of women who even now are forced to wear the veil under Islam or who are forced into these forced marriages with men they have never met. And you will realize that these kinds of religious opinions have consequences. The net effect of religion, especially in the Abrahamic tradition, has been to demonize female sexuality, and portray women as morally and intellectually inferior to men. Every woman, it is imagined, holds the honor of the men in her lives for ransom, and is liable to tarnish it with a glance or destroy it outright through sexual indiscretion.
In this context, rape is actually a crime that one man commits against another man, it's -- the woman is only shame's vehicle, and often culpably acquiescent being all blandishments and guile and winking treachery. In The Old Testament in Deuteronomy 22, God says that, "If a woman doesn’t scream loudly enough, while being raped, she should be stoned to death as an accessory to her own defilement." There is no escaping the view in the Bible and the Koran, that women have been put on earth to serve men, to keep their homes in order, and to be incubators of sons.
So I think this is a fact that really cannot be disputed, if we ever achieve a global civilization that truly values and honors the rights and capabilities of women it will not be because we paid more attention to our holy books.
So to summarize, the basic claim that we get our morality from religion is clearly false. The claim that we are the only species that has moral impulses is also false. Clearly, our ability to co-operate with one another can be explained in evolutionary terms. We've -- chimpanzees with whom we share 99 percent of our DNA, find one another's emotional lives contagious, just as we do. They are motivated to reconcile after disputes, to comfort one another. Chimpanzees have even died trying to save other chimpanzees from drowning; they react negatively to situations that they perceive as unfair like the unequal distribution of food. Given how gregarious all primates are, it is not a surprise that evolution would have selected for a variety of ethical concerns and social instincts.
Now religious people, I think, are right to believe that our morality isn’t merely a product of culture, it is deeply hardwired in us. And it clearly is massively empowered by our ability to speak and to write, I mean, language gives us the capacity to extend our moral horizons beyond our mere family and kin, and even beyond our species, but is also, it should be pointed out, that language also empowers our hatred and stupidity to a remarkable degree and we are the only species to my knowledge that can forsake life saving medical research, demonize homosexuals or fly planes into buildings because of what we tell one another about God.
The fact is, the basic fact is on this point of morality is that we decide what is good in our good books. I mean, we come to the Bible and we see that it says in Leviticus, "If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, you are supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep." We choose to reject this pearl of ancient wisdom, and then we choose to emphasize something like the golden rule, so that the guarantor of our morality is in our brains, not in our books.
So I've spoken about the problems in arguing that religion is true and arguing that religion is useful. The last way of defending God is to argue that atheism is dogmatic intolerance or otherwise of worthy of reproach. Now, as I pointed out in my second book Letter to a Christian Nation, atheism is really a term we do not need. We -- in the same way that we don’t have a word for someone who's not an astrologer, you know (Laughter) --
MR. HARRIS: You know, we don’t have websites for non-astrologers, there are no groups for nonastrologers. Nobody wakes up in the morning feeling the need to remind himself that he is not an astrologer. The irony is that atheism is completely without content, it is not a philosophical position, and all religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. I mean, we're all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods who lie in that mass grave we call mythology, think of Thor and Isis and Zeus. You know, these were once gods in good standing among our ancestors. Everyone now rejects them, well actually not everyone, I occasionally get hate mail from people who do believe in Zeus, but that’s another story.
But the -- more importantly, every Christian rejects the claims of Islam, just as I do. You know Muslims claim they have the perfect word of the creator of the universe. Why do they believe this -- because it says so in the book; sorry, not good enough. So this term "atheism" really is misleading, we're talking about specific truth claims and their evidence or lack thereof. Now, what about the charge that atheism is dogmatic?
Let’s get this straight. Jews, Christians, and Muslims claim that their holy books are so profound, so prescient of humanity's needs that they could have only been written by an omniscient being. An atheist is simply a person who has entertained this claim, read the books, and found the claim to be ridiculous. This is not dogmatism. There is nothing that an atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical God.
What dogma have we all embraced to not take Apollo and Zeus into account as we go about our day? What -- would it be dogmatic to doubt that the Iliad or the Odyssey was dictated by the creator of the universe? The atheists are simply saying, as Carl Sagan did, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, this is it. There is a related claim that atheists and scientists generally are arrogant, now this is rather ironic.
The truth is, is that, when scientists don’t know something like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed on earth they tend to admit it. Pretending to know things you do not know is a profound liability inside us. You get punished for this rather quickly, but pretending to know things you do not know is the life blood of faith based religion.
Any -- this is really one of the profound ironies of religious discourse. In the -- the frequency with which you can hear religious people praise themselves for their humility -
(Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: While tacitly claiming to know things about cosmology and physics and chemistry and paleontology that no scientist knows. Any person who dignifies Genesis as an account of creation or as even as informative is essentially saying to someone like Stephen Hawking, "Stephen, you are a smart guy and you know, I see a lot of equations over there, but you don’t enough about cosmology." You know, it says here that God did this in six days and then rested on the seventh; and I don’t see how you've really grappled with the nuances of the biblical account. Then this would be amusing if we're not having such disastrous effect upon our public policy. It is impeding medical research and the teaching of science in this country. 30 percent of biologists -- biology teachers in the United States at the high school level don’t even mention evolution, because of the hassle occasioned by -- just the religious hysteria that it provokes in their students and their students' parents.
We all remember the recent presidential debate where three republican candidates for the presidency solemnly raised their hands to testify that they don’t believe in evolution, and there was no -- there was no follow-up question. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I mean, this is embarrassing and it seems like every few months, the opinion page of the New York Times publishes another defense of this kind of ignorance. There is no question that this is eroding our stature in the eyes of the rest of the developed world. It is not arrogant or dogmatic to point this out, it seems to me that our intellectual honesty lives or dies in this trench.
Now it is also commonly imagined that atheists think there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding. The truth is that atheists are free to admit that there is much about the universe we don’t understand, I mean, it is obvious we don’t understand the universe. But it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding.
There could be life on other planets, complex life, technical -- technically accomplished civilizations. I mean, just imagine a civilization a million years old as opposed to a few thousand. Atheists are free to imagine this possibility; they are also free to admit that if such brilliant extra terrestrials exist the Bible and the Koran are going to be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: It is often imagined that atheists are in principle closed to spiritual experience. But the truth is that atheists – there’s nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self-transcending love or ecstasy or rapture or awe. In fact, there is nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year or a decade and practicing meditation like a proper mystic. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the cosmos on the basis of those experiences.
But there is no question that disciplines like meditation and prayer can have a profound effect upon the human mind. But do the positive experiences of say Christian mystics over the ages suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely because Christians would be having these experiences, but so have Buddhists and Muslims and even atheists. So there is a deeper reality here and it makes a mockery of religious denominations.
The fact is that whenever human beings make an honest effort to get at the truth, they reliably transcend the accidents of their birth and upbringing. We -- just as -- it would be absurd to speak about Christian physics, though the Christians invented physics, and it would be absurd to speak about Muslim algebra, though the Muslims invented algebra. It will one day be absurd to speak about Christian or Muslim ethics or spirituality.
And whatever is true about our circumstance, in ethical and spiritual terms, is discoverable now and can be articulated without offending all that we've come to understand about the nature of the universe, and certainly without making divisive claims about the unique sanctity of any book or pegging these most beautiful features of our lives to rumors of ancient miracles.
Finally, there's this notion that atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in the 20th century. Now this is actually, it is quite amazing to me, this is the most frequent objection I come across, so I think I should deal with it briefly. It is amazing how many people think that the crimes of Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao were the result of atheism. The truth is that this is a total misconstrual of what went on in those societies, and of the psychological and social forces that allow people to follow their dear leader over the brink.
The problem with Fascism and communism was not that they were too critical of religion. The problem is they're too much like religions; these are utterly dogmatic systems of thought. I recently had a debate with Rick Warren in the pages of Newsweek, and he suggested that North Korea was a model atheist society and that any atheist with the courage of his convictions should want to move there.
The truth is North Korea is organized exactly like a faith based cult, centered on the worship of Kim Jong-il. The North Koreans apparently believe that the shipments of food aid that they receive from us, to keep them from starving to death, are actually devotional offerings to Kim Jong-il. Is too little faith really the problem with North Korea? Is too much skeptical inquiry, what is wrong here? Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not the product of atheism; they are the product of other dogmas run amok; nationalism, political dogma.
Hitler did not engineer a genocide in Europe because of atheism; in fact Hitler doesn’t even appear to have been an atheist, he regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches. But that’s beside the point, he did it on the basis of other beliefs, dogmas about Jews and the purity of German blood. The history of Muslim jihad however does have something to do with Islam. The atrocities of September 11th did have something to do with what 19 men believed about martyrdom and paradise.
The fact that we’re not funding stem cell research at the federal level does have something to do with what Christians believe about conception and the human soul. It is important to focus on the specific consequences of specific ideas. So I want to make it very clear that I am not holding religion responsible for every bad thing that a religious person has done in human history. To be balanced against all the bad things that atheists have done, I am only holding religion responsible for what people do, and will continue to do, explicitly for religious reasons. So I submit to you there really is no society in human history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable.
Too reluctant to embrace dogma or too demanding of evidence. So in conclusion let me say that I think civilization in the 21st century is passing through a bottleneck of sorts, formed on the one side by 21st century destructive technology and on the other by Iron Age superstition, and we will either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact, more or less painfully, or we’ll destroy ourselves. Now perhaps this fear sounds grandiose to some of you, but the truth is that civilizations can end. In fact every civilization in human history virtually has ended. Over and over again in history some unlucky generation has had to witness the ruination of everything they and their ancestors who had worked hard to build. We are part of history. There is no guarantee that things can’t go spectacularly wrong for us.
In fact, it is an article of faith in many religious communities that things will go spectacularly wrong, and that this is a good thing. Seventy nine percent of Americans think that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and rectify all of our problems with his magic powers at some point in history. Twenty percent of Americans claim to be certain that it will happen in their lifetime. This is precisely the sort of thinking we do not need, and I think it should be rather obvious that prophecies about the end of the world, could well be self-fulfilling.
So the uniqueness of our circumstance, with respect to the growth of technology, I think, also shouldn’t be ignored. We've -- not only is technology growing but the rate at which technology is growing is also growing. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil have said that the rate is doubling every 10 years, so that if you look at the rate at which technology was growing in the year 2000 as your metric, the 20th century represents something like 20 years of change. Now we are in the process of making another 20 years of change in about 14 years and then 7 and then 3-and-a-half, if this trend continues, the 21st century won’t represent 100 years of technological change, but 20,000 years. 20,000 years ago human beings exactly like ourselves with the same sized brains, the same biological capacity for creative thought, had been languishing for at least 100,000 years and had produced nothing more complicated than a bow and arrow. We went from a bow and arrow to the internet in 20,000 years.
Imagine seeing this much change in a single century and let's be utterly conservative, let's just say we are going to have as much change in this century as we did last century. Even this is sobering when you recognize who is going to have access to this kind of technology. Let me -- just look at how the internet has facilitated the global jihadist movement among Muslims. Look how difficult it is proving to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So I think if we accept that the -- I think quite reasonable premise that it's going to remain easier to break things than to fix them or defend them.
The growth of technology is quite sobering in the way that it is interacting with religion, especially in a world that has been shattered into competing religious and moral communities, and especially among communities who think death is an illusion; that this world is fit only to be consumed by God's fury. And that the destruction of every tangible good will itself be the highest good, because it will be a gateway to eternity. These are explicitly religious ideas, they have no basis in fact, and yet they are amazingly well subscribed. It seems to me that it is everyone's responsibility to help break this spell. Thank you very much. (Applause)
SPEAKER: Hello, in your arguments you use mostly reason and the brain to argue against religion and the Bible. The ancient philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees, "The heart has reason in which reason does not know. We know this in countless ways." What would you say to people who try to lead a good and just life by -- through their religion, and by following what is in their hearts, rather than following the literal sayings of the Bible and following the reasoning?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, well I certainly don’t mean to diminish experience that has nothing to do with coming to a rational understanding of the way the world works. We have -- much of our experience is not a matter of reason, it's not a matter of belief even and some of the most important aspects of our experience aren’t. So experiencing love and devotion and awe these are features of our subjectivity that I think are extraordinarily valuable.
The important thing to recognize is that if you think the only real container, the only viable container for those experiences is your denominational Church, it’s the language of your ancestors. You know, if you are still committed to being a Christian, or a Muslim or a Jew, I think you are tacitly supporting the religious divisions in our world. I mean, you are giving cover, I think quite explicitly, to all of the people who take their holy books far more seriously.
But I can’t tell you how much time I and other people have spent having to fight the battle against the liberals and moderate Christians and Jews and Muslims, who will insist upon the viability of these denominations and of raising their children to be -- to think that they are Christians and Muslims and Jews, and will -- who will never admit that any of the extremist behavior going on in the name of their faith has anything to do with religion.
And so it -- there is no question in my mind that it provides a kind of friction in our discourse where we really can’t call a spade a spade, and say okay this is -- much of the Bible and Koran is just life destroying gibberish, and we just have to acknowledge this and cease to take these books seriously.
SPEAKER: All right, thank you.
MR. HARRIS: Okay.
SPEAKER: Hi.
MR. HARRIS: Hi.
SPEAKER: First of all, I loved your first book; I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
MR. HARRIS: Oh, thank you.
SPEAKER: And I'm stunned at how young you are. (Laughter)
SPEAKER: Because -
MR. HARRIS: Don’t be stunned, I'm not that young. (Laughter)
SPEAKER: Yeah, well in learning -- I mean, I thank you so much for taking the time to study western and eastern religions for decades, that’s why I thought you were older.
MR. HARRIS: Uh-huh.
SPEAKER: And I haven’t read the second book yet, I apologize. But my question has to do more with where our beliefs come from. We know there is a lot of peer pressure in our culture to be religious, to have a belief in god and to be a part of some organized religion. And I have tried my whole life to be a part of that in terms of -- I have tried three different religions, I have converted twice, and that thing doesn’t work for me. The God thing does not work for me and I have always felt very unhappy about it, that it was a lack somehow in my character, but then I've read recently that there is a study that has been done and I am wondering if may be this is why you are studying neuroscience, there is a study that has been done that posits there maybe a belief gene, there may be a gene in people that makes them believers and those of us who don’t have it, we don’t have it.
MR. HARRIS: Right, right. Well, I think you might be referring to Dean Hamer's much publicized notion of a God gene, which --
SPEAKER: Yes.
MR. HARRIS: -- if I am not mistaken related to a serotonin receptor or transporter that people have in abundance if they have the -- tend to have these transcending experience. So it didn’t deal with belief per se. I think the issue of belief is that, I don’t see religious belief as distinct from any other kinds of beliefs and we represent the world in our thoughts, and all of us are in the business of hoping that our representations are accurate or at least accurate enough, so that we can successfully negotiate our lives happily.
I mean, nobody wants to be mistaken, profoundly mistaken about their place in the world or about what you know, what happens after death, or where their loved ones go. We're not in the business of deceiving ourselves, just willfully.
And so religious beliefs are on all fours with all of our other beliefs, we're describing the world, we're trading in these descriptions through language. Someone says to you, whether you realize that Jesus is your personal savior and you know, nobody, you know, he is the way and the truth and the life and nobody gets to heaven but through him, that is a description of the way this universe is organized in moral terms and in spiritual terms, and it's either right or wrong, and it purports to be right.
And it offers -- it promises terrible consequences to those who don’t accept it. This is a very strange scheme, I think, to believe in -- I'm not the first person to point out that it is a very strange sort of loving God who would have salvation depend on a person's ability to believe in him for bad reasons. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a weird scenario, but it is a scenario that is -- many people find emotionally consoling. And there is another aspect here is that reason and belief are not easily separated from emotion. I mean, we, our emotion -- our rationale lives are deeply entangled with our emotional lives and we feel emotional responses to things we find to be unreasonable. I mean, I happen think that doubt is on the continuum with disgust and other psychological rejection states and so when we doubt a proposition, we are having an emotional response to it, and so I think we -- we just have to be -- I think there is an all purpose corrective here which is just intellectual honesty and if you cease to pretend to be certain about things you are not certain about, see where that gets you. See where that gets you in conversation with other human beings. I think it will get you a profoundly ethical life. It will certainly get you a profoundly non deceptive life.
SPEAKER: Which leads to me one other quick follow-up question?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah.
SPEAKER: When you say being intellectually honest, in the meaning you don’t know these things. You said there were three ways to look at religion; one that it's true; second, that it's useful, and third that you’re an atheist and that is a religion, but there is a fourth thing and that could be that you’re an agnostic. You don’t know whether it is true or not?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, but I don’t need too many agnostics about Zeus. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: You know, all these agnostics about the God of Abraham should also be agnostic about Zeus, that’s the same scenario, thank you.
MS. COLWELL: Hi, Angela Colwell. The Physics professor Mr. Haus (phonetic) just spoke to the Bezos scholars. One of the things he said, well actually before I say that, I would like to say about your comment on the biblical creation of women. It is only because creators have to make a rough draft before they get it right. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I stand corrected.
MS. COLWELL: But Mr. Haus was saying, in discussion of Galileo's theory of relativity and Einstein's discovery of the electromagnetism, such and such. Was that -- they're both right, but they're not necessarily consistent.
MR. HARRIS: Right.
MS. COLWELL: And I was wondering what your opinion on that sort of view is for evolution versus creationism?
MR. HARRIS: Well, this is -- this gets us, I think somewhat too far afield into questions of epistemology and the philosophy of science. There are real problems in trying to make the claim that our beliefs about the world represent reality as it is. You know, that our beliefs can ever be perfectly true, and there is much evidence in science that we get these approximations which are incredibly useful as guides to reality.
And then they become overturned by other approximations that actually don’t look much like the approximations they're overturning. So in relativity, Einsteinian relativity did not look much like Newton’s physics. And yet they both work, within certain limits.
So the question is, what is the relationship between reality and our thoughts? All of this is -- gets very interesting and nuanced and is perfectly legitimate to debate at the fringe of science and theoretical physics, certainly. But it doesn’t -- it really doesn’t apply to our commonsensical human experience in the same way.
I mean, we can -- it’s clear you can be right or wrong about a variety of propositions by which you would want to live your life, and you can believe things for good or bad reasons. For you can have justified or unjustified beliefs. And we all recognize a degree of intellectual honesty and rigor here.
I mean if somebody tells you that your boyfriend is cheating on you, you’re going to want evidence. And you’re going to be convinced to the degree that they provide evidence. Now if they provide, you know, if they dump out all the pictures on the tabletop and say here he is, caught in the act, then you will -- that’s one experience. If they just say, well, I saw it in a dream, - (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: -- you’re not going to be so interested. And there’s a continuum there, and there are these probabilistic ascriptions of certainty. We’re very rarely, totally certain about anything, and yet we have degrees of confidence that we can all talk intelligently about. And anyone who is certain that the Bible is dictated by the creator of the universe, or the -- it’s certain that Jesus was born of a virgin or certain that you get 72 virgins in paradise if you die in defense of Islam. These are virtually baseless certainties. And we can know that if we just speak honestly about these ideas.
SPEAKER: Hi, Mr. Harris.
MR. HARRIS: And I -- again I don’t know -- I’m not keeping time very well here. So someone's going to get a hook -- okay, you’re -
MR. ALTERMAN: I’m Ben Alterman, a Bezos scholar. You said that in religion woman was created for man, especially in the Old Testament?
MR. HARRIS: Uh-huh.
MR. ALTERMAN: In Genesis, there are two stories of creation.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah.
MR. ALTERMAN: There is also a story that goes, God created man, male and female, he created them.
MR. HARRIS: That’s true.
MR. ALTERMAN: In Judaism, the interpretation is such that man and woman, the conventional one is such that, man and woman were created back to back as one single unit, and then God cleaved them in half. And from that interpretation, there comes a lot of discussion about how man and woman interplay off of each other and grow together.
MR. HARRIS: Right.
MR. ALTERMAN: And that they take different areas because of the type of person the man and woman is. What is your response to the evolution of religions such that -- just the way science has evolved over time and that it starts to include more as it learns more, and understands more about people.
MR. HARRIS: Right, right.
MR. ALTERMAN: And, well, the text is just a basis for something that’s evolved over time.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, we should be -- first thing I would say is that by my lights, they are not, and cannot, and will not evolve quickly enough. I mean this is the -- we just don’t have that much time to wait around for people to dicker with their religious certainties, at least that’s my view.
But the other thing is that we have to be honest about why they are evolving. The door leading out of religious literalism doesn’t open from the inside. I mean these religions have been moderated because of the pressure of modernity. I mean, secular politics and a conception of human rights and our growing scientific understanding of the universe has applied pressure, much more so in the case of Judaism and Christianity than it has in Islam, because Islam has been isolated from the enlightenment and you know even the renaissance in some significant sense. And so this comes from outside, so this is not to be credited to faith. This is the legacy of faith continually losing the argument to science and secular politics and commonsense. This is why we’re not stoning people to death for adultery in Aspen. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: It’s a good thing we are not. Yeah, yeah, just wait, it’s possible. But -- so -- are you going to credit the Catholic Church that did not absolve Galileo of heresy until 1992? I mean it’s -- this is a -- this organization is very slow to move. And I think at some point, we take something like their prescription against contraception use.
I mean this is flagrantly immoral, getting people killed throughout the developing world. I mean this is -- ministers go into villages riddled with AIDS and preach the sinfulness of condom use. Okay. Shockingly immoral behavior mandated by their religious faith.
I certainly hope to live to see the day where the Vatican recants this dogma. And they say, well, this was a mistake. Condoms are blameless. That will be a good thing. Who is going to get the credit? The Vatican, when that happens?
This is a dinosaur of an organization that has really been slow to make the simplest accommodations to basic human sanity. So that’s the other point I would make, is that we have to be honest about where the change is coming from.
And the other -- now that I’m on the subject, the other point I would make is that, our attachment to these traditions essentially sends the message that it’s impossible to speak about spirituality and ethics in a truly new fresh, modern, rational, non-dogmatic, nondivisive way; that we have to stay linked to these traditions. I don’t see any evidence for that and we don’t play by those rules in any other domain, certainly not in science.
MR. ALTERMAN: But then how would you respond to the Sakyong and Rabbi Kula sitting down last night at an evening exchange and talking openly about religions and comparing the ways they both work.
MR. HARRIS: Well, that is the discourse of religious moderation. It’s true that you can put moderate Christians, and moderate Muslims, and moderate Jews on the same dais, and they may -- you know they may -- I think we should look closely at who is calling themselves a moderate and what they really believe.
I think there are many people who pretend to more moderation than they do in fact embody. I think there are people who are sitting on the same dais in a very friendly way, in a collegial way talking about the common project of religious diversity, all the while thinking that their colleagues are going to go to hell for eternity. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I think people are finding themselves in that situation a lot and not admitting it, but as I -- you know I sat down with Rick Warren who is criticized from the religious right. At least I wouldn’t call him a moderate, he is still a fundamentalist of sorts, but there are people much more fundamental than he who criticize him for not being biblical enough. You know in -- Jon Meacham asked him in the interview, “Do you think Sam is going to go to hell?” “Well, yeah, probably.” (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: So it’s -- and yet we had a perfectly congenial conversation, and we could collaborate on a common project to help people. There is no barrier to that. But this is to be ascribed to basic human decency. And a larger purview of ethics and intuitions about how we want to collaborate with one another.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah. One more question.
MS. BASS: I’m Rebecca Bass, and I’m also a Bezos scholar.And I’m not a religious person and I don’t know what I believe yet. But I was wondering if you had ever struggled with finding a balance between the logic intellectualism, and what I think is kind of an innate human need for something more, something less rational.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah. I think, I don’t think I am a particularly good advertisement for achieving that balance, but -- (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: -- within the privacy of my own mind, I do, you know, work to find that balance. And I -- and you know, so I’ve spent months on meditation retreats. You know just doing nothing but practice meditation in silence and is -- this is not a matter of thinking or you inadvertently think, but the goal of meditation is not to think about anything rationally or figure anything out.
It is simply to pay more and more attention to the flow of your experience and see what it’s like to be just aware of sights, and sounds, and sensations. This is a highly non-rational pursuit. It’s not an irrational pursuit. I mean it only becomes irrational if you begin making claims about the universe that are not rationally justifiable, but it is, you know, it’s an occasion in which, you know, you experience bliss and a variety of things that spiritual people desperately want to experience. You don’t have to pretend to know anything, you don’t know in order to do that and that’s really my basic point. Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Applause)
MR. GERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Elliot Gerson, and I'm absolutely delighted on behalf of our sponsor for this track Allstate to introduce our next speaker. Sam Harris is the author of two best-selling books, The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation. He has appeared on countless television shows, he has written in many publications and indeed one could almost say that he was the first to launch a recent and very substantial intellectual and literary trend in the United States, carrying over into Europe, where people speak, very seriously, about faith and the lack of faith.
He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, he studied religion, extensively, over many, many years. He is also one of -- probably because of the best-selling status of his books and the demand for him as a speaker, he's very slow in getting his doctorate in neuroscience, but he assures me he will still do that some day. One thing though, I think that can safely be said about Sam in terms of his intellectual impact and his contribution to the free exchange of ideas. While I think it's probably still safe to say that it will be a very, very long time before a self-proclaimed atheist could be elected to public office in this country, unlike most countries in Western Europe, I think since Sam's pioneering book, and I think this is something that has to be applauded by everyone who believes in free speech and tolerance that people who are not of faith at least have the comfort in social settings to acknowledge their lack of faith in a way that really has not been the case in much of American cultural and social tradition. Sam indicates that he himself didn't use the word atheist of his own opinions until after his book. But he again has generated, I think, enormous interest, controversy and debate. And I think that is healthy for people of faith as well as people without faith. I'm very pleased to introduce Sam Harris.
MR. HARRIS: How come you’re all not at Walter Isaacson's talk on Einstein, even I want to be at Walter's talk on Einstein. Well, you have all made a terrible mistake. While I often -- can you all hear me okay -- I often begin any talk on this subject with an apology. Because I think I am destined to say some very derogatory things about religion.
And given that we live in a country where 90 percent of people believe in a biblical God, I think, I am destined to offend some of you here. I want to assure you that is not the point. It is not the point of my being here. It is not the point of my writing my books, I'm not being deliberately provocative. I'm simply extremely worried about the role that religion is playing in our world.
I think religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology that we have ever produced. And what is more it is the only ideology that has systematically protected from criticism both from within and without. It remains taboo, you can criticize someone's beliefs really on any subject but it remains taboo to criticize their beliefs about God. And I think we are paying an extraordinary price for maintaining this taboo. So I'm going to break this taboo rather enthusiastically over the next hour. I will leave some time for questions and I'm happy to take your criticism.
I also want to point out upfront there is nothing that I'm about to say that should be construed as a denial of the possibilities of spiritual experience and indeed of the importance of spiritual experience. And that is a subject I will come back to at the end. Here is my basic concern. Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st-century efficiency, and yet we are still, to a remarkable degree, drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature. This marriage of modern technology, destructive technology and iron age philosophy is a bad one for reasons that I think nobody should have to specify much less argue for, and yet arguing for them has taken up most of my time since September 11, 2001. That day that 19 pious men showed our pious nation just how socially beneficial religious certainty can be. You know, as someone who has spent a few years publicly criticizing religion, I have become quite familiar with how people rise to the defense of God.
As it turns out there are not a hundred ways of doing this -- there appear to be just three. Either a person argues that a specific religion is true or he argues that religion is useful and indeed so useful that it might be necessary, or he argues that atheism is essentially another religion, dogmatic, intolerant or otherwise worthy of contempt. And I want to differentiate these three strands of argument because they regularly run together and any conversation between a believer and a nonbeliever is liable to fall into one of these ruts.
Let us begin with the specific claim that a given religion is true. There are two problems with arguing this. The first is that as Bertrand Russell pointed out, over a century ago, they can't all be true. I mean given the sheer diversity of religions on offer. Even if we knew that one of them was absolutely true. I mean even if we knew that this was God's multiple choice exam here; is it a, Judaism; b, Christianity; c, Islam. Even if we knew we were in this situation, every believer should expect to wind up in hell purely as a matter of probability. It seems to me this should give religious people pause before they espouse their religious certainties. It never does but it should.
The second problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. And this subsumes all claims about the existence of the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of a certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, all of it.
Consider Christianity, the entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was a son of God, divine etc. This textual claim -this textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the Gospels follow Jesus' ministry by decades and there is no extra biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is quite a bit worse than that. The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred. Why not? Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.
I have met literally hundreds at this point of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus. I, actually, remain open to evidence of such powers. The fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All to my knowledge lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature's laws have been abrogated in this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.
But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology; materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. Right now, in fact all of these powers have been ascribed to Satya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan, supposedly, was born of a virgin, as was Alexander. Apparently parthenogenesis doesn't guarantee that you're going to turn the other cheek.
But Satya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure. He is not the David Koresh of Hinduism. His followers threw a birthday party for him recently and a million people showed up. So there are vast numbers of people who believe he is a living god. You can even watch his miracles on YouTube; prepare to be under-whelmed. Maybe it's true that he has an Afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings. But I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship him; in any case. So, consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this that miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Satya Sai Baba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence. We have Satya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. And they don't even a merit an hour on the Discovery Channel. But you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them. Does anyone else see a problem with that?
Speaking more generally, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are founded on the claim that the Bible and the Koran were dictated by the Creator of the Universe. There is a Creator, there is a Personal God and he occasionally writes books. He doesn't code software, he doesn't produce films, Mel Gibson's claim to have been toiling all the while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, I think, is probably an exception here. But in any case God is principally an author of books.
And this idea has achieved credibility because the contents of these books are deemed to be so profound that they could not possibly have been produced by the human mind. Please consider how implausible this is. Consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries. In the year 1665, beginning in the summer of 1665, Isaac Newton went into isolation to dodge the outbreak of plague that was incidentally laying waste to the pious men and women of England. And when he had emerged from his solitude he had invented the integral differential calculus, he had discovered the laws of universal gravitation in motion, he had set the field of optics on its foundation. Many scientists think this is the most awe inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. And yet no one is tempted to ascribe this to divine agency. We know that these accomplishments were affected by a mortal and a very unpleasant mortal at that.
And yet literally billions of us deem the contents of the Bible and the Koran so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. Now, given the depth and breadth of human achievement I think this is almost a miracle in its own right. It seems to me a miraculous misappropriation of awe. I mean it took two centuries of continuous human ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who have ever lived to significantly improve upon Newton's achievement. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible, I mean, anyone in this tent could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually in a matter of moments. Consider the possibility of improving the 10 Commandments. This might seem to be setting the bar kind of high because this is the only part of the Bible, the only text that God felt the need to physically write himself and in stone. Consider the second commandment; thou shalt not erect any graven images. Is this really the second most important thing, upon which to admonish all future generations of human beings? I mean, is this as good as it gets ethically and spiritually.
You remember the Muslims who rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons. What got them so riled up? Well, this is it, the second commandment. Now, was all that pious mayhem, the burning of embassies, the killing of nuns, was all of that some kind of great flowering of spiritual and ethical intelligence, or was it egregious medieval stupidity? Well, come to think of it, it was egregious medieval stupidity. The truth is that almost any precept we would put in place of the second commandment would improve the wisdom of The Bible. How about don’t mistreat children, how about don’t pretend to know things you do not know.
Or what about just try not to deep fry all of your food? Could we live with the resulting proliferation of graven images, I think we would manage somehow. So I submit to you that there is not a person on this earth who has good reason to believe that The Bible and The Koran are the product of omniscient intelligence. And yet billions of people claim to know that they are the Word of God.
In fact, 78 percent of the American population claims to know that The Bible is the Word of God. Seventy percent of college graduates believe that The Bible is the Word of God. So just leave aside questions of religion's truth for a moment. The second way of arguing in defense of God is to argue that religion is useful, and so useful that it may in fact be necessary. Now, this line of argument is also problematic for a few reasons. The first to say, it really is a total non sequitur. This is not -- even if religious belief was exquisitely useful, I don’t doubt there are circumstances in which it is in fact useful, but even if it were useful across the board this would not give us reason to believe that a personal God exists, or that anyone of our books are his word.
The fact that certain ideas are useful or motivating or give people meaning in their lives or the fact that the idea that God has a plan for me or everything happens for a reason, the fact that such ideas are consoling, does not offer the slightest reason to believe that they’re true. And in fact, ironically they -- even if we had good scientific reasons to believe that these ideas were true, their power to console us wouldn’t even offer an additional reason to believe that they’re true.
I mean even if the cosmologists and the physicists came forward suddenly and said, you know, sorry for the misunderstanding guys, but it seems there is a God and he has a plan for you. The fact that so many of us would find this consoling would give us further reason to be skeptical in scientific terms, this is why we have phrases like wishful-thinking, and self-delusion and selfdeception. This is why scientists do double-blind control studies wherever possible, this is why they submit their data for peer review. If we have conquered any ground in our career of rationality it is on this point, there is a profound difference between having -- between having good reasons for believing something and simply wanting to believe it.
Now, of course, there are other reasons to doubt the usefulness of religion, and many of these are enunciated on a daily basis by bomb blasts. I mean, how useful is it that millions of Muslims believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? How useful is it that the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq have such heartfelt religious differences? How useful is it that so many Jewish settlers think that the creator of the universe promised them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean?
How useful has Christianity’s anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations? Now, those who conflate usefulness and truth in defense of religion generally argue that religion provides the most reliable foundation for morality. Now, again before we even -- we’re even tempted to evaluate this claim, please notice that it is a non sequitur, it’s not -- even if religion made people moral, this would not provide evidence for the existence of God or that Jesus is his son, or any specific doctrinal proposition to which people are attached. Every religion could function like a placebo, they could be extremely useful and entirely barren of content. But let’s talk for a moment about the supposed link between morality and religion.
It seems to me that religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available. I mean ask yourself, which is more moral? Helping the poor, feeding the hungry, defending the weak, out of a mere concern for their wellbeing, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it.
The truth is people do not need to be threatened with damnation to love their children, to love their friends, to want to collaborate with strangers, or indeed to recognize that helping strangers can be one of their greatest sources of happiness. And what kind of morality is it that is entirely predicated on a self-interested desire to escape damnation? This seems to bypass the very core of what we mean by morality, which is an actual concern for the welfare of other human beings. Clearly it is possible to teach our children to form such a concern and to grow in empathy and compassion without lying to ourselves or to them about the nature of the universe, without pretending to know things we do not know. You can teach your children the golden rule as an utterly wise ethical precept without pretending to know that Jesus was born of a virgin.
And it's also worth observing that the most atheistic societies on the planet like Sweden and Denmark and the Netherlands are in many respects the most moral, they have rates of violent crime that are far lower than our own in the U.S. And they are more generous both within their own population and in the developing world on a per capita basis. Sweden, which opposed the war in Iraq, has nevertheless admitted more Iraqi refugees into its borders than any country and many more than the U.S. has.
So if you're looking for a state model of Christian charity, the most atheistic societies at this moment fit it better than the most Christian societies do. What about this notion that we get our morality out of scripture? Well, clearly we don’t get our most basic moral impulses out of scripture, because these can be seen emerging very early. I mean toddlers, 18-months old will spontaneously try to comfort somebody who looks upset. And a person clearly doesn’t learn that cruelty is wrong by reading the Bible, the Koran, because if you don’t already know that going in, you’re just going to be confronted with, with endless celebrations of cruelty in these texts.
And these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. The God of the Bible hates sodomy and will kill you for it, but he rather enjoys the occasional human sacrifice. But I think the very least we can say he doesn’t quite have his priorities straight. In the Old Testament we witnessed the most immoral behavior imaginable. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, the murder of children, kidnapping.
All of it not only permitted by God, but mandated by God. And if you doubt this take another look at books like Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and 2nd Samuel and Numbers, and 1st and 2nd Kings, and Zechariah. I mean these books -- in these books, the most unethical behavior is celebrated. If these events occurred in our own time, half the prophets and kings of Israel would be shackled and brought to The Hague for crimes against humanity, including Moses for slaughtering the Medinites, including Joshua for slaughtering the Malachites, including Elijah for slaughtering the prophets of Baal. These men by our standards today they were utter psychopaths, as was Abraham for -- as Christopher Hitchens recently put it, “For taking such a long and gloomy walk with his son Isaac.”
And you might wonder well, what about the 10 Commandments? What about “Thou shall not murder.” Well, the problem is the Ten Commandments simply give us more bad reasons to kill people. I mean what are you supposed to do when your best friend breaks the Sabbath or erects a graven image, or takes the lord’s name in vain? You’re supposed to kill him. And if you’re unwilling to kill him, your neighbors are supposed to kill you.
Is this really the best book we have on morality? Is it even a good book? Now, happily most Christians and Jews now disregard the morality on offer in the Old Testament. And they rationalize the barbarity we find there by saying, oh, this was appropriate to the time, it was appropriate to the ancient world. The idea being that the Canaanites were so ill-behaved, that just getting together a short list of reasons to kill your neighbor and sticking to it was a great improvement over the general barbarity of the time. No, it wasn’t. It was within the moral compass of human beings then to recognize that killing somebody for adultery was evil. The Buddha managed it, Mahavira, the Jain patriarch managed it, numerous Greek philosophers managed it.
So Jews and Christians are simply lying to themselves when they talk about the impediments to morality that prevailed in the 5th century BC. And the other thing to notice is that rationalizing the barbarism we find in the Old Testament merely renders it irrelevant, it doesn’t render these books morally wise. I mean it is faint praise indeed, if the best that can be said of much of scripture is it can now be safely ignored.
Now, and despite what Christians say on the subject, the New Testament isn’t so good as to make The Bible a reliable basis of morality. In fact, much of the book is an embarrassment to anyone who would say it’s a moral book, much or less a perfectly moral book. And nowhere is this clearer than on the question on slavery. And the truth is The Bible in its totality, Old Testament, New Testament, support slavery. If we recognize anything, if we converge on any point in ethical terms now it is that slavery is evil. Nowhere in the Bible is this evil recognized much less repudiated. The slave holders of the south were on the winning side of the theological argument, they knew it, they never stopped talking about it. The best God does in the Old Testament is to admonish us not to beat our slaves so badly that we would injure their eyes or their teeth, or not to beat them so badly with a rod that they die on the spot, if they die after a day or two, no problem.
I think it should go without saying that this is not the kind of moral insight that got rid of slavery in the United States. Well, consider the treatment of women. And from millennia the great theologians and prophets of religions have set to work on the riddle of womanhood and the results in various times and places has been widow burning and honor killing, and genital mutilation, a cultic obsession with virginity, just other forms of physical and physiological abuses, so kaleidoscopic in variety as to scarcely admit of being summarized. Now, I have no doubt that much of this sexist evil predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there’s no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape. Now, while man was made in the image of God, women was made in the image of man according to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Humanity therefore is derivative, it’s ersatz.
The Old Testament values the life of women at one half to two thirds that of a man, the Koran says that the testimony of two women is required to offset the testimony of one man, and every women is deserving of one half her brother’s share of inheritance. But the Biblical God has made it perfectly clear that women are expected to live in absolute subjugation to their fathers, until the moment they’re pressed into connubial service to their husbands.
And the New Testament offers no relief, and Saint Paul put it in his letter to the Ephesians, “Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject to their husbands in all things.” The Koran delivers the same message. And on most translations says that disobedient wives should be whipped or scourged or beaten.
The eleventh-century sage Al-Ghazali, perhaps the most influential Muslim since Mohammed, described a women’s duties this way, “She should stay at home and get on with her spinning. She should not go out often. She must not be well informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbors, and only visit them when absolutely necessary. She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and in his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything. She must not leave the house without his permission, and if given his permission, she must leave surreptitiously. She should put on old clothes and take the deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice or recognize her.
She must not speak to a friend of her husband's even in need. Her sole worry should be her virtue, her home as well as her prayers and her fast. If a friend of her husband calls when the latter is absent, she must not open the door nor reply to him, in order to safeguard her and her husband's honor. She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment; she should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband's sexual needs at any moment.
Now, recall the blissful lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban or think about the millions of women who even now are forced to wear the veil under Islam or who are forced into these forced marriages with men they have never met. And you will realize that these kinds of religious opinions have consequences. The net effect of religion, especially in the Abrahamic tradition, has been to demonize female sexuality, and portray women as morally and intellectually inferior to men. Every woman, it is imagined, holds the honor of the men in her lives for ransom, and is liable to tarnish it with a glance or destroy it outright through sexual indiscretion.
In this context, rape is actually a crime that one man commits against another man, it's -- the woman is only shame's vehicle, and often culpably acquiescent being all blandishments and guile and winking treachery. In The Old Testament in Deuteronomy 22, God says that, "If a woman doesn’t scream loudly enough, while being raped, she should be stoned to death as an accessory to her own defilement." There is no escaping the view in the Bible and the Koran, that women have been put on earth to serve men, to keep their homes in order, and to be incubators of sons.
So I think this is a fact that really cannot be disputed, if we ever achieve a global civilization that truly values and honors the rights and capabilities of women it will not be because we paid more attention to our holy books.
So to summarize, the basic claim that we get our morality from religion is clearly false. The claim that we are the only species that has moral impulses is also false. Clearly, our ability to co-operate with one another can be explained in evolutionary terms. We've -- chimpanzees with whom we share 99 percent of our DNA, find one another's emotional lives contagious, just as we do. They are motivated to reconcile after disputes, to comfort one another. Chimpanzees have even died trying to save other chimpanzees from drowning; they react negatively to situations that they perceive as unfair like the unequal distribution of food. Given how gregarious all primates are, it is not a surprise that evolution would have selected for a variety of ethical concerns and social instincts.
Now religious people, I think, are right to believe that our morality isn’t merely a product of culture, it is deeply hardwired in us. And it clearly is massively empowered by our ability to speak and to write, I mean, language gives us the capacity to extend our moral horizons beyond our mere family and kin, and even beyond our species, but is also, it should be pointed out, that language also empowers our hatred and stupidity to a remarkable degree and we are the only species to my knowledge that can forsake life saving medical research, demonize homosexuals or fly planes into buildings because of what we tell one another about God.
The fact is, the basic fact is on this point of morality is that we decide what is good in our good books. I mean, we come to the Bible and we see that it says in Leviticus, "If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, you are supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep." We choose to reject this pearl of ancient wisdom, and then we choose to emphasize something like the golden rule, so that the guarantor of our morality is in our brains, not in our books.
So I've spoken about the problems in arguing that religion is true and arguing that religion is useful. The last way of defending God is to argue that atheism is dogmatic intolerance or otherwise of worthy of reproach. Now, as I pointed out in my second book Letter to a Christian Nation, atheism is really a term we do not need. We -- in the same way that we don’t have a word for someone who's not an astrologer, you know (Laughter) --
MR. HARRIS: You know, we don’t have websites for non-astrologers, there are no groups for nonastrologers. Nobody wakes up in the morning feeling the need to remind himself that he is not an astrologer. The irony is that atheism is completely without content, it is not a philosophical position, and all religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. I mean, we're all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods who lie in that mass grave we call mythology, think of Thor and Isis and Zeus. You know, these were once gods in good standing among our ancestors. Everyone now rejects them, well actually not everyone, I occasionally get hate mail from people who do believe in Zeus, but that’s another story.
But the -- more importantly, every Christian rejects the claims of Islam, just as I do. You know Muslims claim they have the perfect word of the creator of the universe. Why do they believe this -- because it says so in the book; sorry, not good enough. So this term "atheism" really is misleading, we're talking about specific truth claims and their evidence or lack thereof. Now, what about the charge that atheism is dogmatic?
Let’s get this straight. Jews, Christians, and Muslims claim that their holy books are so profound, so prescient of humanity's needs that they could have only been written by an omniscient being. An atheist is simply a person who has entertained this claim, read the books, and found the claim to be ridiculous. This is not dogmatism. There is nothing that an atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical God.
What dogma have we all embraced to not take Apollo and Zeus into account as we go about our day? What -- would it be dogmatic to doubt that the Iliad or the Odyssey was dictated by the creator of the universe? The atheists are simply saying, as Carl Sagan did, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, this is it. There is a related claim that atheists and scientists generally are arrogant, now this is rather ironic.
The truth is, is that, when scientists don’t know something like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed on earth they tend to admit it. Pretending to know things you do not know is a profound liability inside us. You get punished for this rather quickly, but pretending to know things you do not know is the life blood of faith based religion.
Any -- this is really one of the profound ironies of religious discourse. In the -- the frequency with which you can hear religious people praise themselves for their humility -
(Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: While tacitly claiming to know things about cosmology and physics and chemistry and paleontology that no scientist knows. Any person who dignifies Genesis as an account of creation or as even as informative is essentially saying to someone like Stephen Hawking, "Stephen, you are a smart guy and you know, I see a lot of equations over there, but you don’t enough about cosmology." You know, it says here that God did this in six days and then rested on the seventh; and I don’t see how you've really grappled with the nuances of the biblical account. Then this would be amusing if we're not having such disastrous effect upon our public policy. It is impeding medical research and the teaching of science in this country. 30 percent of biologists -- biology teachers in the United States at the high school level don’t even mention evolution, because of the hassle occasioned by -- just the religious hysteria that it provokes in their students and their students' parents.
We all remember the recent presidential debate where three republican candidates for the presidency solemnly raised their hands to testify that they don’t believe in evolution, and there was no -- there was no follow-up question. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I mean, this is embarrassing and it seems like every few months, the opinion page of the New York Times publishes another defense of this kind of ignorance. There is no question that this is eroding our stature in the eyes of the rest of the developed world. It is not arrogant or dogmatic to point this out, it seems to me that our intellectual honesty lives or dies in this trench.
Now it is also commonly imagined that atheists think there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding. The truth is that atheists are free to admit that there is much about the universe we don’t understand, I mean, it is obvious we don’t understand the universe. But it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding.
There could be life on other planets, complex life, technical -- technically accomplished civilizations. I mean, just imagine a civilization a million years old as opposed to a few thousand. Atheists are free to imagine this possibility; they are also free to admit that if such brilliant extra terrestrials exist the Bible and the Koran are going to be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: It is often imagined that atheists are in principle closed to spiritual experience. But the truth is that atheists – there’s nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self-transcending love or ecstasy or rapture or awe. In fact, there is nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year or a decade and practicing meditation like a proper mystic. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the cosmos on the basis of those experiences.
But there is no question that disciplines like meditation and prayer can have a profound effect upon the human mind. But do the positive experiences of say Christian mystics over the ages suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely because Christians would be having these experiences, but so have Buddhists and Muslims and even atheists. So there is a deeper reality here and it makes a mockery of religious denominations.
The fact is that whenever human beings make an honest effort to get at the truth, they reliably transcend the accidents of their birth and upbringing. We -- just as -- it would be absurd to speak about Christian physics, though the Christians invented physics, and it would be absurd to speak about Muslim algebra, though the Muslims invented algebra. It will one day be absurd to speak about Christian or Muslim ethics or spirituality.
And whatever is true about our circumstance, in ethical and spiritual terms, is discoverable now and can be articulated without offending all that we've come to understand about the nature of the universe, and certainly without making divisive claims about the unique sanctity of any book or pegging these most beautiful features of our lives to rumors of ancient miracles.
Finally, there's this notion that atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in the 20th century. Now this is actually, it is quite amazing to me, this is the most frequent objection I come across, so I think I should deal with it briefly. It is amazing how many people think that the crimes of Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao were the result of atheism. The truth is that this is a total misconstrual of what went on in those societies, and of the psychological and social forces that allow people to follow their dear leader over the brink.
The problem with Fascism and communism was not that they were too critical of religion. The problem is they're too much like religions; these are utterly dogmatic systems of thought. I recently had a debate with Rick Warren in the pages of Newsweek, and he suggested that North Korea was a model atheist society and that any atheist with the courage of his convictions should want to move there.
The truth is North Korea is organized exactly like a faith based cult, centered on the worship of Kim Jong-il. The North Koreans apparently believe that the shipments of food aid that they receive from us, to keep them from starving to death, are actually devotional offerings to Kim Jong-il. Is too little faith really the problem with North Korea? Is too much skeptical inquiry, what is wrong here? Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not the product of atheism; they are the product of other dogmas run amok; nationalism, political dogma.
Hitler did not engineer a genocide in Europe because of atheism; in fact Hitler doesn’t even appear to have been an atheist, he regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches. But that’s beside the point, he did it on the basis of other beliefs, dogmas about Jews and the purity of German blood. The history of Muslim jihad however does have something to do with Islam. The atrocities of September 11th did have something to do with what 19 men believed about martyrdom and paradise.
The fact that we’re not funding stem cell research at the federal level does have something to do with what Christians believe about conception and the human soul. It is important to focus on the specific consequences of specific ideas. So I want to make it very clear that I am not holding religion responsible for every bad thing that a religious person has done in human history. To be balanced against all the bad things that atheists have done, I am only holding religion responsible for what people do, and will continue to do, explicitly for religious reasons. So I submit to you there really is no society in human history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable.
Too reluctant to embrace dogma or too demanding of evidence. So in conclusion let me say that I think civilization in the 21st century is passing through a bottleneck of sorts, formed on the one side by 21st century destructive technology and on the other by Iron Age superstition, and we will either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact, more or less painfully, or we’ll destroy ourselves. Now perhaps this fear sounds grandiose to some of you, but the truth is that civilizations can end. In fact every civilization in human history virtually has ended. Over and over again in history some unlucky generation has had to witness the ruination of everything they and their ancestors who had worked hard to build. We are part of history. There is no guarantee that things can’t go spectacularly wrong for us.
In fact, it is an article of faith in many religious communities that things will go spectacularly wrong, and that this is a good thing. Seventy nine percent of Americans think that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and rectify all of our problems with his magic powers at some point in history. Twenty percent of Americans claim to be certain that it will happen in their lifetime. This is precisely the sort of thinking we do not need, and I think it should be rather obvious that prophecies about the end of the world, could well be self-fulfilling.
So the uniqueness of our circumstance, with respect to the growth of technology, I think, also shouldn’t be ignored. We've -- not only is technology growing but the rate at which technology is growing is also growing. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil have said that the rate is doubling every 10 years, so that if you look at the rate at which technology was growing in the year 2000 as your metric, the 20th century represents something like 20 years of change. Now we are in the process of making another 20 years of change in about 14 years and then 7 and then 3-and-a-half, if this trend continues, the 21st century won’t represent 100 years of technological change, but 20,000 years. 20,000 years ago human beings exactly like ourselves with the same sized brains, the same biological capacity for creative thought, had been languishing for at least 100,000 years and had produced nothing more complicated than a bow and arrow. We went from a bow and arrow to the internet in 20,000 years.
Imagine seeing this much change in a single century and let's be utterly conservative, let's just say we are going to have as much change in this century as we did last century. Even this is sobering when you recognize who is going to have access to this kind of technology. Let me -- just look at how the internet has facilitated the global jihadist movement among Muslims. Look how difficult it is proving to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So I think if we accept that the -- I think quite reasonable premise that it's going to remain easier to break things than to fix them or defend them.
The growth of technology is quite sobering in the way that it is interacting with religion, especially in a world that has been shattered into competing religious and moral communities, and especially among communities who think death is an illusion; that this world is fit only to be consumed by God's fury. And that the destruction of every tangible good will itself be the highest good, because it will be a gateway to eternity. These are explicitly religious ideas, they have no basis in fact, and yet they are amazingly well subscribed. It seems to me that it is everyone's responsibility to help break this spell. Thank you very much. (Applause)
SPEAKER: Hello, in your arguments you use mostly reason and the brain to argue against religion and the Bible. The ancient philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees, "The heart has reason in which reason does not know. We know this in countless ways." What would you say to people who try to lead a good and just life by -- through their religion, and by following what is in their hearts, rather than following the literal sayings of the Bible and following the reasoning?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, well I certainly don’t mean to diminish experience that has nothing to do with coming to a rational understanding of the way the world works. We have -- much of our experience is not a matter of reason, it's not a matter of belief even and some of the most important aspects of our experience aren’t. So experiencing love and devotion and awe these are features of our subjectivity that I think are extraordinarily valuable.
The important thing to recognize is that if you think the only real container, the only viable container for those experiences is your denominational Church, it’s the language of your ancestors. You know, if you are still committed to being a Christian, or a Muslim or a Jew, I think you are tacitly supporting the religious divisions in our world. I mean, you are giving cover, I think quite explicitly, to all of the people who take their holy books far more seriously.
But I can’t tell you how much time I and other people have spent having to fight the battle against the liberals and moderate Christians and Jews and Muslims, who will insist upon the viability of these denominations and of raising their children to be -- to think that they are Christians and Muslims and Jews, and will -- who will never admit that any of the extremist behavior going on in the name of their faith has anything to do with religion.
And so it -- there is no question in my mind that it provides a kind of friction in our discourse where we really can’t call a spade a spade, and say okay this is -- much of the Bible and Koran is just life destroying gibberish, and we just have to acknowledge this and cease to take these books seriously.
SPEAKER: All right, thank you.
MR. HARRIS: Okay.
SPEAKER: Hi.
MR. HARRIS: Hi.
SPEAKER: First of all, I loved your first book; I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
MR. HARRIS: Oh, thank you.
SPEAKER: And I'm stunned at how young you are. (Laughter)
SPEAKER: Because -
MR. HARRIS: Don’t be stunned, I'm not that young. (Laughter)
SPEAKER: Yeah, well in learning -- I mean, I thank you so much for taking the time to study western and eastern religions for decades, that’s why I thought you were older.
MR. HARRIS: Uh-huh.
SPEAKER: And I haven’t read the second book yet, I apologize. But my question has to do more with where our beliefs come from. We know there is a lot of peer pressure in our culture to be religious, to have a belief in god and to be a part of some organized religion. And I have tried my whole life to be a part of that in terms of -- I have tried three different religions, I have converted twice, and that thing doesn’t work for me. The God thing does not work for me and I have always felt very unhappy about it, that it was a lack somehow in my character, but then I've read recently that there is a study that has been done and I am wondering if may be this is why you are studying neuroscience, there is a study that has been done that posits there maybe a belief gene, there may be a gene in people that makes them believers and those of us who don’t have it, we don’t have it.
MR. HARRIS: Right, right. Well, I think you might be referring to Dean Hamer's much publicized notion of a God gene, which --
SPEAKER: Yes.
MR. HARRIS: -- if I am not mistaken related to a serotonin receptor or transporter that people have in abundance if they have the -- tend to have these transcending experience. So it didn’t deal with belief per se. I think the issue of belief is that, I don’t see religious belief as distinct from any other kinds of beliefs and we represent the world in our thoughts, and all of us are in the business of hoping that our representations are accurate or at least accurate enough, so that we can successfully negotiate our lives happily.
I mean, nobody wants to be mistaken, profoundly mistaken about their place in the world or about what you know, what happens after death, or where their loved ones go. We're not in the business of deceiving ourselves, just willfully.
And so religious beliefs are on all fours with all of our other beliefs, we're describing the world, we're trading in these descriptions through language. Someone says to you, whether you realize that Jesus is your personal savior and you know, nobody, you know, he is the way and the truth and the life and nobody gets to heaven but through him, that is a description of the way this universe is organized in moral terms and in spiritual terms, and it's either right or wrong, and it purports to be right.
And it offers -- it promises terrible consequences to those who don’t accept it. This is a very strange scheme, I think, to believe in -- I'm not the first person to point out that it is a very strange sort of loving God who would have salvation depend on a person's ability to believe in him for bad reasons. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a weird scenario, but it is a scenario that is -- many people find emotionally consoling. And there is another aspect here is that reason and belief are not easily separated from emotion. I mean, we, our emotion -- our rationale lives are deeply entangled with our emotional lives and we feel emotional responses to things we find to be unreasonable. I mean, I happen think that doubt is on the continuum with disgust and other psychological rejection states and so when we doubt a proposition, we are having an emotional response to it, and so I think we -- we just have to be -- I think there is an all purpose corrective here which is just intellectual honesty and if you cease to pretend to be certain about things you are not certain about, see where that gets you. See where that gets you in conversation with other human beings. I think it will get you a profoundly ethical life. It will certainly get you a profoundly non deceptive life.
SPEAKER: Which leads to me one other quick follow-up question?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah.
SPEAKER: When you say being intellectually honest, in the meaning you don’t know these things. You said there were three ways to look at religion; one that it's true; second, that it's useful, and third that you’re an atheist and that is a religion, but there is a fourth thing and that could be that you’re an agnostic. You don’t know whether it is true or not?
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, but I don’t need too many agnostics about Zeus. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: You know, all these agnostics about the God of Abraham should also be agnostic about Zeus, that’s the same scenario, thank you.
MS. COLWELL: Hi, Angela Colwell. The Physics professor Mr. Haus (phonetic) just spoke to the Bezos scholars. One of the things he said, well actually before I say that, I would like to say about your comment on the biblical creation of women. It is only because creators have to make a rough draft before they get it right. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I stand corrected.
MS. COLWELL: But Mr. Haus was saying, in discussion of Galileo's theory of relativity and Einstein's discovery of the electromagnetism, such and such. Was that -- they're both right, but they're not necessarily consistent.
MR. HARRIS: Right.
MS. COLWELL: And I was wondering what your opinion on that sort of view is for evolution versus creationism?
MR. HARRIS: Well, this is -- this gets us, I think somewhat too far afield into questions of epistemology and the philosophy of science. There are real problems in trying to make the claim that our beliefs about the world represent reality as it is. You know, that our beliefs can ever be perfectly true, and there is much evidence in science that we get these approximations which are incredibly useful as guides to reality.
And then they become overturned by other approximations that actually don’t look much like the approximations they're overturning. So in relativity, Einsteinian relativity did not look much like Newton’s physics. And yet they both work, within certain limits.
So the question is, what is the relationship between reality and our thoughts? All of this is -- gets very interesting and nuanced and is perfectly legitimate to debate at the fringe of science and theoretical physics, certainly. But it doesn’t -- it really doesn’t apply to our commonsensical human experience in the same way.
I mean, we can -- it’s clear you can be right or wrong about a variety of propositions by which you would want to live your life, and you can believe things for good or bad reasons. For you can have justified or unjustified beliefs. And we all recognize a degree of intellectual honesty and rigor here.
I mean if somebody tells you that your boyfriend is cheating on you, you’re going to want evidence. And you’re going to be convinced to the degree that they provide evidence. Now if they provide, you know, if they dump out all the pictures on the tabletop and say here he is, caught in the act, then you will -- that’s one experience. If they just say, well, I saw it in a dream, - (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: -- you’re not going to be so interested. And there’s a continuum there, and there are these probabilistic ascriptions of certainty. We’re very rarely, totally certain about anything, and yet we have degrees of confidence that we can all talk intelligently about. And anyone who is certain that the Bible is dictated by the creator of the universe, or the -- it’s certain that Jesus was born of a virgin or certain that you get 72 virgins in paradise if you die in defense of Islam. These are virtually baseless certainties. And we can know that if we just speak honestly about these ideas.
SPEAKER: Hi, Mr. Harris.
MR. HARRIS: And I -- again I don’t know -- I’m not keeping time very well here. So someone's going to get a hook -- okay, you’re -
MR. ALTERMAN: I’m Ben Alterman, a Bezos scholar. You said that in religion woman was created for man, especially in the Old Testament?
MR. HARRIS: Uh-huh.
MR. ALTERMAN: In Genesis, there are two stories of creation.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah.
MR. ALTERMAN: There is also a story that goes, God created man, male and female, he created them.
MR. HARRIS: That’s true.
MR. ALTERMAN: In Judaism, the interpretation is such that man and woman, the conventional one is such that, man and woman were created back to back as one single unit, and then God cleaved them in half. And from that interpretation, there comes a lot of discussion about how man and woman interplay off of each other and grow together.
MR. HARRIS: Right.
MR. ALTERMAN: And that they take different areas because of the type of person the man and woman is. What is your response to the evolution of religions such that -- just the way science has evolved over time and that it starts to include more as it learns more, and understands more about people.
MR. HARRIS: Right, right.
MR. ALTERMAN: And, well, the text is just a basis for something that’s evolved over time.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, we should be -- first thing I would say is that by my lights, they are not, and cannot, and will not evolve quickly enough. I mean this is the -- we just don’t have that much time to wait around for people to dicker with their religious certainties, at least that’s my view.
But the other thing is that we have to be honest about why they are evolving. The door leading out of religious literalism doesn’t open from the inside. I mean these religions have been moderated because of the pressure of modernity. I mean, secular politics and a conception of human rights and our growing scientific understanding of the universe has applied pressure, much more so in the case of Judaism and Christianity than it has in Islam, because Islam has been isolated from the enlightenment and you know even the renaissance in some significant sense. And so this comes from outside, so this is not to be credited to faith. This is the legacy of faith continually losing the argument to science and secular politics and commonsense. This is why we’re not stoning people to death for adultery in Aspen. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: It’s a good thing we are not. Yeah, yeah, just wait, it’s possible. But -- so -- are you going to credit the Catholic Church that did not absolve Galileo of heresy until 1992? I mean it’s -- this is a -- this organization is very slow to move. And I think at some point, we take something like their prescription against contraception use.
I mean this is flagrantly immoral, getting people killed throughout the developing world. I mean this is -- ministers go into villages riddled with AIDS and preach the sinfulness of condom use. Okay. Shockingly immoral behavior mandated by their religious faith.
I certainly hope to live to see the day where the Vatican recants this dogma. And they say, well, this was a mistake. Condoms are blameless. That will be a good thing. Who is going to get the credit? The Vatican, when that happens?
This is a dinosaur of an organization that has really been slow to make the simplest accommodations to basic human sanity. So that’s the other point I would make, is that we have to be honest about where the change is coming from.
And the other -- now that I’m on the subject, the other point I would make is that, our attachment to these traditions essentially sends the message that it’s impossible to speak about spirituality and ethics in a truly new fresh, modern, rational, non-dogmatic, nondivisive way; that we have to stay linked to these traditions. I don’t see any evidence for that and we don’t play by those rules in any other domain, certainly not in science.
MR. ALTERMAN: But then how would you respond to the Sakyong and Rabbi Kula sitting down last night at an evening exchange and talking openly about religions and comparing the ways they both work.
MR. HARRIS: Well, that is the discourse of religious moderation. It’s true that you can put moderate Christians, and moderate Muslims, and moderate Jews on the same dais, and they may -- you know they may -- I think we should look closely at who is calling themselves a moderate and what they really believe.
I think there are many people who pretend to more moderation than they do in fact embody. I think there are people who are sitting on the same dais in a very friendly way, in a collegial way talking about the common project of religious diversity, all the while thinking that their colleagues are going to go to hell for eternity. (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: I think people are finding themselves in that situation a lot and not admitting it, but as I -- you know I sat down with Rick Warren who is criticized from the religious right. At least I wouldn’t call him a moderate, he is still a fundamentalist of sorts, but there are people much more fundamental than he who criticize him for not being biblical enough. You know in -- Jon Meacham asked him in the interview, “Do you think Sam is going to go to hell?” “Well, yeah, probably.” (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: So it’s -- and yet we had a perfectly congenial conversation, and we could collaborate on a common project to help people. There is no barrier to that. But this is to be ascribed to basic human decency. And a larger purview of ethics and intuitions about how we want to collaborate with one another.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah. One more question.
MS. BASS: I’m Rebecca Bass, and I’m also a Bezos scholar.And I’m not a religious person and I don’t know what I believe yet. But I was wondering if you had ever struggled with finding a balance between the logic intellectualism, and what I think is kind of an innate human need for something more, something less rational.
MR. HARRIS: Yeah. I think, I don’t think I am a particularly good advertisement for achieving that balance, but -- (Laughter)
MR. HARRIS: -- within the privacy of my own mind, I do, you know, work to find that balance. And I -- and you know, so I’ve spent months on meditation retreats. You know just doing nothing but practice meditation in silence and is -- this is not a matter of thinking or you inadvertently think, but the goal of meditation is not to think about anything rationally or figure anything out.
It is simply to pay more and more attention to the flow of your experience and see what it’s like to be just aware of sights, and sounds, and sensations. This is a highly non-rational pursuit. It’s not an irrational pursuit. I mean it only becomes irrational if you begin making claims about the universe that are not rationally justifiable, but it is, you know, it’s an occasion in which, you know, you experience bliss and a variety of things that spiritual people desperately want to experience. You don’t have to pretend to know anything, you don’t know in order to do that and that’s really my basic point. Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Applause)
TED - Sir Ken Robinson
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
TED - Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.
The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.
And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.
That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-yearolds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21 now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?"
She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.
The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.
And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.
That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-yearolds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21 now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?"
She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.
Idea City 05 - Sam Harris
Idea City 05: Sam Harris
Introduction by Moses Znaimer(?):
In a progressively more secularised world it sometimes seems that the only religious people out there are fanatics, and frankly I’m fed up with them. You look into any over-the-top, cruel and wanton atrocity in the world today, and chances are you’ll find some scripture-spouting nut bar; judging and condemning, and punishing and happily killing the innocent while cloaked in the garb of faith. They preach love but they practise exclusion, and they display a toxic intolerance to different views. I don’t know about you, but for me, the very definition of arrogance is someone who presumes to know God’s will and to speak in her name. So, our next speaker, Sam Harris, thinks it is time to address the role that religion plays in perpetuating human conflict. Sam?
Sam Harris:
Thank you. So am I on, you can hear me?
I’m going to talk about belief, specifically the problem of religious belief, because I happen to think that how we deal with belief, how we criticise, or fail to criticise the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has more to do with the maintenance of civilisation than anything else that is in our power to influence. Our world has been balkanised, as Moses just said, by incompatible religious dogmas; we have Christians against Muslims against Jews. The books themselves make incompatible claims. We have this founding notion that God wrote one of our texts; unfortunately we have many such books on hand.
Now, before I launch into my heresy, I want to say upfront that I am going to offend a few people in this room. I know you are very likely a secular bunch; I come from a country to your south that is fast growing as blinkered by religious lunacy as the wilds of Afghanistan, but still I think some people in this room will be offended by what I say. I want to say upfront that my intention really is not to offend anyone, I’m not being deliberately provocative, I am simply worried. I am going to worry out loud for the next 20 minutes, because I see no reason for us to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely.
It seems to me transparently obvious that the marriage of 21st century technology, forget about nuclear weapons and biological weapons; even the computational technology we heard about this morning, the fact that a few short years from now, you’ll be able to sit in a cave in Afghanistan, and with your $1000 laptop you’ll essentially have a supercomputer that can kick off its genetic algorithms, its malicious code, to the rest of society. This alone makes this balkanisation of our world, the separate moral identities, the fact that we are not identified just merely as being human beings, but we are Muslims and Jews – it makes it untenable.
So, briefly, what is a belief? What does it mean to believe something to be true? Well, clearly, beliefs are representations of the world, but they are more than that. The difference between a belief and a hope, say... I can hope that I have won the lottery, that is a representation of the world, it is a representation of a possible state of the world, but believing I have won the lottery is the only thing that actually opens the floodgates of emotion and behaviour, to... to behaviour and emotion that is appropriate to actually having won the lottery, then you go an that lunatic shopping-spree and offend all of your friends. What makes the difference is believing that your thought, certain propositions held in your mind actually map on to reality. Now, if you think this is an abstraction, just imagine the transformation on your physiology at this moment, in your neurology and in your psychology, if you came to believe that your child had been taken hostage. First you have to have a child, that child has to be in some appropriately war-torn place, but given the requisite conditions, you get a phone call, mere language, a mere sentence spoken into your ear; should you grant it credence, would completely transform your life, all the panic that would precipitate out of that experience, would be born of believing a certain representation of the world. So, this is why beliefs really are machinery for guiding our behaviour and emotion through time.
We don’t yet understand this at the level of the brain, I’m trying to understand this through functio-neural imaging, but at the level of our conversation with ourselves, at the level of thought, it is pretty clear we are talking about linguistic representations of the world.
So what do people believe? Well, where I come from, the US, 22% of the population claims to be certain, literally certain, that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and save the day sometime in the next 50 years. Certain. Another 22% think he probably will come back in the next 50 years. This is 44% of the electorate. These people not only elect our congressmen and presidents, they get elected as congressmen and presidents.
This should be terrifying to all of us. This belief obviously does not exist in isolation; it is not an accident that 44% of Americans also want Creationism taught in the schools, and evolution no longer taught. Actually 62% of Americans want Creationism taught in the schools, but 44% want it taught exclusively. We are building a civilisation of ignorance. 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, in his role as an omniscient real-estate broker.
It is clear that this belief has geo-political consequences, this is not... these beliefs don’t exist merely on Sundays, when we get together to talk about God and the Bible. Take another belief that seemingly would have very minor consequences. Consider the Catholic belief that condom use is sinful. Ok, now this is obviously, from my point of view, obviously, a total falsification of morality, I mean one thing that religious dogma does is it separates questions of morality from questions of real suffering: human suffering, animal suffering. Here we have no discernable suffering at all, and yet we are told it's a moral proposition that condom use is ethically problematic. What are the possible consequences here? Well, we have millions of people, every year, dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and you have quite literally Catholic ministers preaching the sinfulness of condom use, in villages where the only information about condom use is the representation of the ministry.
It seems to me that the time for respecting religious beliefs of this sort is long past. You take another effect of religious dogmatism in my own country: we have college-educated politicians resisting stem-cell research, certainly impeding its progress, not funding it, putting up one road-block after another, probably one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies, is being impeded by this mediaeval notion that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and therefore blastocysts in a petri dish - literally undifferentiated clumps of cells - have to be given the same kind of moral concern, have the same interests, have the same – no-one even talks about suffering, but presumably we are worried about their experience at some level – and that the interests of these cells trump the interests of eight-year-old girls with diabetes or 40-year-old men with parkinson's. Ok, the conversation never gets had, the moral arguments never even have to be made at a political level, because it is fundamentally taboo to criticise someone’s religious beliefs. Faith is really a conversation-stopper.
Now, in response to these sorts of problems, many of us, many well-intentioned people, have come to think that the appropriate accommodation with modernity is to develop what’s called “religious moderation”, generally. You can have your God, you can talk about him in some - or her – in some unspecified way, it’s considered unseemly to be too sure about what happens after death and about the moral structure to this universe, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, religious moderation is the way to go, and really the soul of religious moderation is this political correctness where everyone should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, there is just no harm, no foul, beliefs are private.
Let me tell you, for a moment, why I think this is a dead end. First of all, religious moderation gives cover to religious fundamentalism, because we cannot criticise religious extremism, religious literalism, because it is politically taboo, it’s considered uncivil, and this is really enforced by religious moderates. Religious fundamentalists, they’ll criticise every faith but their own; you know, the religious fundamentalism in my country will say Islam is an evil religion. Religious moderates balk at that. And so now we can’t ... George Bush can call a press conference and announce to the world that he is going to appoint common-sense judges – this is a quote: “I’m going to appoint common-sense judges who realise that our rights are derived from God.” Now, just imagine... it seems to me the next sensible question by any journalist in the room would be “Mr. President, how is that any different from appointing common-sense judges that realise that our rights are derived from Poseidon?” It’s not like someone in the third century actually figured out that the biblical God exists, but Poseidon doesn’t. You know, this is not data that we have. Ok, this obviously would be the last question that journalist would ever ask! Ok, we can’t call a spade a spade, because it is ...because of this taboo around criticising religion, and I would argue that religious moderates are really the greatest offenders here, the greatest force propping up this taboo.
Another problem with religious moderation is it’s actually intellectually bankrupt. When you... just consider for a moment this notion that you should respect other people’s beliefs. Where else in our discourse do we encounter this? I mean, when was the last time anyone in this room was admonished to respect another person’s beliefs about history, or biology, or physics? We do not respect people’s beliefs; we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Respecting another person’s beliefs never enters into it, and ... just appreciate for a moment how easy this is to see when we change the subject from “God” to some mundane, grandiose claim... this is actually an example from my book; if I told you that I believe there was a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator, it might occur to you to ask me why. If, in response, I gave the kind of answers you hear from religious moderates, answers that describe the good effects of this ...of believing as I do, so I say things like “Well, this belief actually gives my life a lot of meaning”, or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator!” It’s pretty clear that responses of this sort are deeply inadequate. They are worse than that; they are the responses of a lunatic or an idiot. By responding in that way, I would have disqualified myself for any position of responsibility in a first-world society. Except you change the subject to religion, to the moral demands of an invisible superintelligence, to what happens after death, and all bets are off, then you can say anything you want!
Another problem with the religious moderation is that it’s not only intellectually bankrupt; it is theologically bankrupt, because the fundamentalists have actually read the books, and they are right about them. These books are every bit as intolerant, every bit as divisive as the Osama bin Ladens of the world, or the Jerry Fallwells of the world suggest, and I am not necessarily equating the two of them in moral terms, but there is ...once we dignify the claim that the Bible or the Koran, conspicuously, is a book... is a communication that is fundamentally different from any other book, be it the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad, [that] these books are not literature, [that] they are the best books we have in moral terms, once we dignify those claims we are really hostage to their contents. I mean... the creator of the universe *does* hate homosexuals; if you read the Bible, at the very least homosexual men, gay sex, is an abomination, it is spelled out in Leviticus, it is ... this edict is ramified in Romans, it’s not ... many Christians imagine that the New Testament fundamentally repudiates all the barbarism that’s found in the Old Testament, in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and second Samuel and Exodus; that’s not true. You can take Jesus in half his moods and get some really beautiful, ethical precepts like the golden rule, but Jesus also said things like, in Luke 19, ‘anyone who doesn’t want me to reign over him: bring him before me and slay him before me!’ OK, I guarantee you that the inquisitors of the middle ages who were burning heretics alive for five solid centuries, they had read the whole New Testament, they had read the sermon on the mount, they found some way to square their behaviour with the ministry of Jesus.
It’s not an accident that the great lights of the church, people like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, people who are still taught to every freshman in every Great Book seminar in, certainly in my country; in Aquinas’ case, he thought heretics should be killed outright; in Augustine’s case, he thought they should be tortured. Augustine’s argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the inquisition.
Ok, we look back on these events and we think - oh, people being burnt alive, scholars being tortured to the point of madness for speculating about the nature of the stars – we look back from our perch in the 21st century and we think, ok these societies were just unhinged, I mean, these were lunatics! It’s not true, this was totally reasonable behaviour, given what was believed. Heresy ... just think about it, if there is something you neighbour can say to your child that is so spiritually wayward that it could put your child’s future in jeopardy for eternity, ok, that is much worse than the child molester living next door, we’re talking about an eternity of suffering because your child has learned to call God by the right name, or think there is no God. The stakes really are enormously high.
Another problem with moderation, incidentally, is moderates, and certainly secularists, tend to be blinded by their own moderation, it’s very difficult for moderates to actually believe that people believe this stuff. It’s difficult for a moderate, when you see them on the news broadcasts, you see the jihadist, looking into the video camera, saying things like “We love death more than the infidel loves life”, and then he blows himself up; religious moderates, not fundamentalists, religious moderates tend to think “No, well, that really wasn’t why he blew himself up, it doesn’t have anything to do with religion, this is economics, it’s lack of educational opportunities.” I don’t know how many more engineers and architects have to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour for us to realise this is not simply a matter of education. The truth of our circumstance is quite a bit more sinister than that, it is actually possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb and still believe that you are going to get the 72 virgins. That’s how balkanised our discourse is, and that’s how easily partitioned the human mind is. I can tell you, there is no place in the curriculum of becoming a scientist where they tell you, you know, this is bullshit, do you stop believing it.
So to wrap up, I see my time has dwindled mercilessly, um, I just want to say that whatever is true, spiritually and ethically about our circumstances, there are... no doubt there are spiritual truths, there are spiritual experiences human beings can have, and there are ethical truths; whatever is true about that has to transcend culture, it has to transcend our cultural differences, there is a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics, because these truths actually... an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works both places if it is teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically, that is true spiritually, and the only thing that guarantees that our human conversation is open-ended is a willingness for us to have our beliefs about reality updated and revised by conversation. Because when the stakes are high we have the choice between conversation and violence, both at the level of individuals and at the level of societies, so my pitch to you is, really, that the end game for civilisation is not political correctness and tolerating all manner of absurdity, it is reason and reasonableness and an openness to evidence.
Thank you very much.
In a progressively more secularised world it sometimes seems that the only religious people out there are fanatics, and frankly I’m fed up with them. You look into any over-the-top, cruel and wanton atrocity in the world today, and chances are you’ll find some scripture-spouting nut bar; judging and condemning, and punishing and happily killing the innocent while cloaked in the garb of faith. They preach love but they practise exclusion, and they display a toxic intolerance to different views. I don’t know about you, but for me, the very definition of arrogance is someone who presumes to know God’s will and to speak in her name. So, our next speaker, Sam Harris, thinks it is time to address the role that religion plays in perpetuating human conflict. Sam?
Sam Harris:
Thank you. So am I on, you can hear me?
I’m going to talk about belief, specifically the problem of religious belief, because I happen to think that how we deal with belief, how we criticise, or fail to criticise the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has more to do with the maintenance of civilisation than anything else that is in our power to influence. Our world has been balkanised, as Moses just said, by incompatible religious dogmas; we have Christians against Muslims against Jews. The books themselves make incompatible claims. We have this founding notion that God wrote one of our texts; unfortunately we have many such books on hand.
Now, before I launch into my heresy, I want to say upfront that I am going to offend a few people in this room. I know you are very likely a secular bunch; I come from a country to your south that is fast growing as blinkered by religious lunacy as the wilds of Afghanistan, but still I think some people in this room will be offended by what I say. I want to say upfront that my intention really is not to offend anyone, I’m not being deliberately provocative, I am simply worried. I am going to worry out loud for the next 20 minutes, because I see no reason for us to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely.
It seems to me transparently obvious that the marriage of 21st century technology, forget about nuclear weapons and biological weapons; even the computational technology we heard about this morning, the fact that a few short years from now, you’ll be able to sit in a cave in Afghanistan, and with your $1000 laptop you’ll essentially have a supercomputer that can kick off its genetic algorithms, its malicious code, to the rest of society. This alone makes this balkanisation of our world, the separate moral identities, the fact that we are not identified just merely as being human beings, but we are Muslims and Jews – it makes it untenable.
So, briefly, what is a belief? What does it mean to believe something to be true? Well, clearly, beliefs are representations of the world, but they are more than that. The difference between a belief and a hope, say... I can hope that I have won the lottery, that is a representation of the world, it is a representation of a possible state of the world, but believing I have won the lottery is the only thing that actually opens the floodgates of emotion and behaviour, to... to behaviour and emotion that is appropriate to actually having won the lottery, then you go an that lunatic shopping-spree and offend all of your friends. What makes the difference is believing that your thought, certain propositions held in your mind actually map on to reality. Now, if you think this is an abstraction, just imagine the transformation on your physiology at this moment, in your neurology and in your psychology, if you came to believe that your child had been taken hostage. First you have to have a child, that child has to be in some appropriately war-torn place, but given the requisite conditions, you get a phone call, mere language, a mere sentence spoken into your ear; should you grant it credence, would completely transform your life, all the panic that would precipitate out of that experience, would be born of believing a certain representation of the world. So, this is why beliefs really are machinery for guiding our behaviour and emotion through time.
We don’t yet understand this at the level of the brain, I’m trying to understand this through functio-neural imaging, but at the level of our conversation with ourselves, at the level of thought, it is pretty clear we are talking about linguistic representations of the world.
So what do people believe? Well, where I come from, the US, 22% of the population claims to be certain, literally certain, that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and save the day sometime in the next 50 years. Certain. Another 22% think he probably will come back in the next 50 years. This is 44% of the electorate. These people not only elect our congressmen and presidents, they get elected as congressmen and presidents.
This should be terrifying to all of us. This belief obviously does not exist in isolation; it is not an accident that 44% of Americans also want Creationism taught in the schools, and evolution no longer taught. Actually 62% of Americans want Creationism taught in the schools, but 44% want it taught exclusively. We are building a civilisation of ignorance. 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, in his role as an omniscient real-estate broker.
It is clear that this belief has geo-political consequences, this is not... these beliefs don’t exist merely on Sundays, when we get together to talk about God and the Bible. Take another belief that seemingly would have very minor consequences. Consider the Catholic belief that condom use is sinful. Ok, now this is obviously, from my point of view, obviously, a total falsification of morality, I mean one thing that religious dogma does is it separates questions of morality from questions of real suffering: human suffering, animal suffering. Here we have no discernable suffering at all, and yet we are told it's a moral proposition that condom use is ethically problematic. What are the possible consequences here? Well, we have millions of people, every year, dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and you have quite literally Catholic ministers preaching the sinfulness of condom use, in villages where the only information about condom use is the representation of the ministry.
It seems to me that the time for respecting religious beliefs of this sort is long past. You take another effect of religious dogmatism in my own country: we have college-educated politicians resisting stem-cell research, certainly impeding its progress, not funding it, putting up one road-block after another, probably one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies, is being impeded by this mediaeval notion that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and therefore blastocysts in a petri dish - literally undifferentiated clumps of cells - have to be given the same kind of moral concern, have the same interests, have the same – no-one even talks about suffering, but presumably we are worried about their experience at some level – and that the interests of these cells trump the interests of eight-year-old girls with diabetes or 40-year-old men with parkinson's. Ok, the conversation never gets had, the moral arguments never even have to be made at a political level, because it is fundamentally taboo to criticise someone’s religious beliefs. Faith is really a conversation-stopper.
Now, in response to these sorts of problems, many of us, many well-intentioned people, have come to think that the appropriate accommodation with modernity is to develop what’s called “religious moderation”, generally. You can have your God, you can talk about him in some - or her – in some unspecified way, it’s considered unseemly to be too sure about what happens after death and about the moral structure to this universe, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, religious moderation is the way to go, and really the soul of religious moderation is this political correctness where everyone should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, there is just no harm, no foul, beliefs are private.
Let me tell you, for a moment, why I think this is a dead end. First of all, religious moderation gives cover to religious fundamentalism, because we cannot criticise religious extremism, religious literalism, because it is politically taboo, it’s considered uncivil, and this is really enforced by religious moderates. Religious fundamentalists, they’ll criticise every faith but their own; you know, the religious fundamentalism in my country will say Islam is an evil religion. Religious moderates balk at that. And so now we can’t ... George Bush can call a press conference and announce to the world that he is going to appoint common-sense judges – this is a quote: “I’m going to appoint common-sense judges who realise that our rights are derived from God.” Now, just imagine... it seems to me the next sensible question by any journalist in the room would be “Mr. President, how is that any different from appointing common-sense judges that realise that our rights are derived from Poseidon?” It’s not like someone in the third century actually figured out that the biblical God exists, but Poseidon doesn’t. You know, this is not data that we have. Ok, this obviously would be the last question that journalist would ever ask! Ok, we can’t call a spade a spade, because it is ...because of this taboo around criticising religion, and I would argue that religious moderates are really the greatest offenders here, the greatest force propping up this taboo.
Another problem with religious moderation is it’s actually intellectually bankrupt. When you... just consider for a moment this notion that you should respect other people’s beliefs. Where else in our discourse do we encounter this? I mean, when was the last time anyone in this room was admonished to respect another person’s beliefs about history, or biology, or physics? We do not respect people’s beliefs; we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Respecting another person’s beliefs never enters into it, and ... just appreciate for a moment how easy this is to see when we change the subject from “God” to some mundane, grandiose claim... this is actually an example from my book; if I told you that I believe there was a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator, it might occur to you to ask me why. If, in response, I gave the kind of answers you hear from religious moderates, answers that describe the good effects of this ...of believing as I do, so I say things like “Well, this belief actually gives my life a lot of meaning”, or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator!” It’s pretty clear that responses of this sort are deeply inadequate. They are worse than that; they are the responses of a lunatic or an idiot. By responding in that way, I would have disqualified myself for any position of responsibility in a first-world society. Except you change the subject to religion, to the moral demands of an invisible superintelligence, to what happens after death, and all bets are off, then you can say anything you want!
Another problem with the religious moderation is that it’s not only intellectually bankrupt; it is theologically bankrupt, because the fundamentalists have actually read the books, and they are right about them. These books are every bit as intolerant, every bit as divisive as the Osama bin Ladens of the world, or the Jerry Fallwells of the world suggest, and I am not necessarily equating the two of them in moral terms, but there is ...once we dignify the claim that the Bible or the Koran, conspicuously, is a book... is a communication that is fundamentally different from any other book, be it the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad, [that] these books are not literature, [that] they are the best books we have in moral terms, once we dignify those claims we are really hostage to their contents. I mean... the creator of the universe *does* hate homosexuals; if you read the Bible, at the very least homosexual men, gay sex, is an abomination, it is spelled out in Leviticus, it is ... this edict is ramified in Romans, it’s not ... many Christians imagine that the New Testament fundamentally repudiates all the barbarism that’s found in the Old Testament, in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and second Samuel and Exodus; that’s not true. You can take Jesus in half his moods and get some really beautiful, ethical precepts like the golden rule, but Jesus also said things like, in Luke 19, ‘anyone who doesn’t want me to reign over him: bring him before me and slay him before me!’ OK, I guarantee you that the inquisitors of the middle ages who were burning heretics alive for five solid centuries, they had read the whole New Testament, they had read the sermon on the mount, they found some way to square their behaviour with the ministry of Jesus.
It’s not an accident that the great lights of the church, people like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, people who are still taught to every freshman in every Great Book seminar in, certainly in my country; in Aquinas’ case, he thought heretics should be killed outright; in Augustine’s case, he thought they should be tortured. Augustine’s argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the inquisition.
Ok, we look back on these events and we think - oh, people being burnt alive, scholars being tortured to the point of madness for speculating about the nature of the stars – we look back from our perch in the 21st century and we think, ok these societies were just unhinged, I mean, these were lunatics! It’s not true, this was totally reasonable behaviour, given what was believed. Heresy ... just think about it, if there is something you neighbour can say to your child that is so spiritually wayward that it could put your child’s future in jeopardy for eternity, ok, that is much worse than the child molester living next door, we’re talking about an eternity of suffering because your child has learned to call God by the right name, or think there is no God. The stakes really are enormously high.
Another problem with moderation, incidentally, is moderates, and certainly secularists, tend to be blinded by their own moderation, it’s very difficult for moderates to actually believe that people believe this stuff. It’s difficult for a moderate, when you see them on the news broadcasts, you see the jihadist, looking into the video camera, saying things like “We love death more than the infidel loves life”, and then he blows himself up; religious moderates, not fundamentalists, religious moderates tend to think “No, well, that really wasn’t why he blew himself up, it doesn’t have anything to do with religion, this is economics, it’s lack of educational opportunities.” I don’t know how many more engineers and architects have to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour for us to realise this is not simply a matter of education. The truth of our circumstance is quite a bit more sinister than that, it is actually possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb and still believe that you are going to get the 72 virgins. That’s how balkanised our discourse is, and that’s how easily partitioned the human mind is. I can tell you, there is no place in the curriculum of becoming a scientist where they tell you, you know, this is bullshit, do you stop believing it.
So to wrap up, I see my time has dwindled mercilessly, um, I just want to say that whatever is true, spiritually and ethically about our circumstances, there are... no doubt there are spiritual truths, there are spiritual experiences human beings can have, and there are ethical truths; whatever is true about that has to transcend culture, it has to transcend our cultural differences, there is a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics, because these truths actually... an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works both places if it is teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically, that is true spiritually, and the only thing that guarantees that our human conversation is open-ended is a willingness for us to have our beliefs about reality updated and revised by conversation. Because when the stakes are high we have the choice between conversation and violence, both at the level of individuals and at the level of societies, so my pitch to you is, really, that the end game for civilisation is not political correctness and tolerating all manner of absurdity, it is reason and reasonableness and an openness to evidence.
Thank you very much.
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