Can we be good without God? I want to just jump right in because I think people often sort of nibble on the periphery of this debate without ever getting to the heart of it. You make a case, you say that even if God does exist or did exist, morality should still be grounded in secular arguments and evidence, not in God.
SPEAKER_01I apply that universal realism to moral realism. I think there are absolute rights and wrongs. Not in every sphere of human action, but many of them.
SPEAKER_02As soon as you've said that in addition to matter in motion, you've also got things like minds, you've also got things like maths, you've also got things like um music and beauty and all those sorts of things, and you've got these things called moral truths. Said that we're living in a very theological sounding universe. And I don't think it's coincidental that it's people who believe in a theological universe who also bring that morality to bear on nature.
SPEAKER_01Historically, most of the opponents of abolitionism were Christians. And they made sound, if in their minds anyway, sound arguments for why slavery is a good thing. A little late to the game, and to their credit, once the moral arc starts bending, religions do get on board.
SPEAKER_02From a purely biological point of view, from a purely rational point of view, why should we count every single member of the human population the same? What is it within your system that says no, everybody in the human family counts? I've been on the Unbelievable channel with Matt Delhunty and with Bart Ehrman, but I think this was my favorite ever debate. This was with Michael Schirmer, and they've been kind enough to let us put it on here on the Speak Life channel. Are you subscribed to Premier Unbelievable? Make sure you subscribe to them and make sure you subscribe to us as well, because we'd love to see you on further videos where we unpack God, morality, Jesus, everything. This was an epic conversation hosted by Vince Vitali. Check it out.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to Premier Unbelievable, where we tackle Light's biggest questions from all perspectives. I'm Vince Vitali, and today's debate is on a classic yet perennially relevant topic: Can we be good without God? We'll be diving into the heart of moral philosophy. What makes something good or bad? Is there an objective, universal truth behind our sense of morality? Or is it fully the product of culture, society, and evolution? Can morality stand on the foundations of science and reason alone? Or does it need something beyond us, maybe even something divine? Joining me to explore these questions are two accomplished thinkers, Dr. Michael Shermer, a skeptic and historian of science, whose book The Moral Arc argues that reason and science have driven moral progress. And we have with us Reverend Glenn Scrivener, an Anglican minister and the author of The Air We Breathe, where he argues that Christianity forms the bedrock of the moral values we cherish today. Together we'll explore where our moral values come from, whether morality requires something beyond ourselves, and if so, what that something might be. It's so good to have you both with us. I want to just jump right in, dive right in, because I think people often sort of nibble on the periphery of this debate without ever getting to the heart of it. So I wanted to throw it to you first, Michael. You know, you make a case for objective universal moral values without God. But what I find particularly interesting about your approach is that you say that even if God does exist or did exist, morality should still be grounded in secular arguments and evidence, not in God. Am I understanding you correctly on that point? And can you explain how you come to that conclusion?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. Um I I am committed to uh the principle of universal realism. There is a reality out there, and we can know something about it, although I also uh accept fallibilism. That is to say, none of us are omniscient or omnipotent. I'm not God, and neither are you. So we're all flawed, and so we could be wrong. So I can't say that we can know the truth about reality with, you know, a capital T and a capital R. Uh but we can approach it, you know, in an asymptotic curve and a Bayesian kind of probabilities. This is likely to be true or likely to be false, or we're not certain in some probabilities. And then I apply that uh universal realism to moral realism. I think there are absolute rights and wrongs, uh, you know, not in every sphere of human action, but many of them. And so I'm not a cultural relativist, I'm not a moral relativist. A lot of my secular and atheist friends are. Um so I'm kind of pushing back against that notion um that there are no moral truths or objective moral realities. I think there are. And I make that defense there. So that's that's my position.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's really helpful. You know, and you know, if God did exist, say a bit more about why that wouldn't change your approach. Because a lot of people might think, well, okay, you think God doesn't exist, so you find a way to understand morality, which is apart from God. But if God existed, then surely he would be the ground of morality. But you sort of push push against that. Explain that for us.
SPEAKER_01Well, I just don't see what it adds to the equation. If something is uh wrong, it's morally wrong, say slavery or child molestation or whatever, um, it's it's really wrong, whether there's a God or not. And and if there's a God that says, you know, that's okay to do it, it's still wrong. Uh and so one of the reasons is you know what what what what I want to know is why why should we uh endorse this or condemn that? Um and so you know, if God is um instructing us on what's right and wrong um based on these reasons, why not just give us the reasons? You know, we're rational creatures. Um and in any case, you know, that's kind of the philosophical argument. The historical argument is, you know, religion has been, you know, not particularly moral throughout most of history. Um, you know, there was no condemnation of slavery in the Bible, for example. It's not really until the 19th century that it uh that civilizations catch on that this you know thousands of years old practice is really actually immoral. It's wrong. And let's make it illegal and let's ban it everywhere and let's get it to the point where it's not even thought about anymore. Everybody knows it's wrong. You know, so how did that happen? It didn't happen through religion. Religion's helped push it along, but it happened because people started reasoning their way toward determining what's right and wrong.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so that's really helpful. And if I'm understanding correctly, you know, God might uh say, don't murder. And, you know, if he if he says that just willy-nilly arbitrarily, uh then it seems like there's no basis for it. He could have just said something else, but that doesn't seem right because we feel like murder would be wrong no matter what God said. But then if he says it because he has reasons for it, then you know, are you saying, okay, well, then he has reasons which are outside of himself, so just give us give us the reasons.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, give us the reasons, skip the middleman. I should point out just parenthetically that murder by definition is wrong. It's the wrongful taking of a life illegally. Well, we're talking about killing. And of course, not uh, you know, even Christians and conservatives agree that sometimes killing is good and necessary. Capital punishment, for example, is endorsed by a lot of conservative Christians. Uh a just war, self-defense, uh, and so on. So, you know, it's it it it is already context dependent and reason dependent. What are your reasons for why you killed this person? Uh uh, you know, oh well, he murdered my spouse. Okay, so it was self-defense. He's trying to kill me, it's self-defense. Oh, okay. That's different than premeditated murder. So I mean the legal system's already adjusted for these contexts. Great.
SPEAKER_03Well, Glenn, so good to have you with us as well. Want to let you jump in here too. Uh maybe you could respond on that point first. You know, what does God add to our understanding of of morality? You know, there's this dilemma here where it seems like either he commands things uh arbitrarily or he's relying on some sort of reason outside of himself, or at least that's what Michael's kind of saying. So God is sort of superfluous, you know, either way. How would you approach the same question?
SPEAKER_02Well, I guess you've got to ask what kind of reality we're actually living in. And if it's a reality that includes, as Dr. Shermer and myself both believe, it it includes things like matter, it uh it includes matter in motion, it includes, you know, particles and forces and that sort of thing. We both agree to that. We also both agree that reality includes things like minds, uh, which is a pretty extraordinary thing for reality to include, minds that can reflect on the fact on the fact that there are molecules in motion. Um so that that's a kind of an extraordinary thing to sort of take its place in the metaphysical furniture of this universe. You know, uh if you had the contents of the metaphysical furniture of the universe, tick. Uh we believe in matter, we believe in motion, we believe in minds. We also believe in maths. Um we we believe that there are sort of real abstract objects out there that are that are not material and yet have a real kind of um reality to them. But we also seem to believe, and I and I really rejoice that Dr. Sherman and myself have such agreement that there are also such things as morals in this universe. Um but as soon as you've said that in addition to matter in motion, you've also got things like minds, you've also got things like maths, you've also got things like um music and beauty and all those sorts of things, and you've got these things called moral truths that are real, that are objective, that stand above us, that obligate us towards certain uh actions. Um as soon as you've said that, you you've said that we're living in a very theological sounding universe. We're not living in a barren universe of mere physical forces. We're living in a universe of right and wrong. And if there are things that are wrong, um, such as certain kinds of war, if there are things that are wrong, such as child sexual abuse, if there's certain things that are wrong, such as slavery, then I guess there's something that is right and right with a capital R. And I guess I would just say that it is um it is not accidental that it was that it is Christianity that has given us um our modern building blocks for understanding what just war is. That's a thoroughly Christian idea. Augustine tracing things back to Romans 13 and elsewhere in the scriptures. Just war is a thoroughly Christian idea. The ending of child sexual exploitation, in other words, pederasty in the ancient world was a a Christian contribution to the world, and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was another Christian contribution to the world. And I don't think it's coincidental that it's people who believe in a theological universe who also bring that morality to bear on nature and start to come up with things like rights and humanism and abolitionism and um the dignity of the individual, equality, all these sorts of things are foundationally theological moral presuppositions. And whether or not you have a God from Mount Sinai decreeing X, Y, or Z, um to grant that there are such things as human rights, let's say, is to grant that we are already in a thoroughly theological universe, and that is not what you would expect on naturalism, on the philosophy that all there is is matter in motion.
SPEAKER_03So Glenn thinks you sound, Michael, like uh you're living in a theological universe. I I suspect you don't uh agree with that, so give us a response.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I guess it depends what that means, theological universe. Um yeah, so uh just a couple of things. Um historically, yes, it's true some Christians got on board with abolition, for example, Wilberforce and the Quakers and so forth, but not many. And most of the opponents of abolitionism, that is, pro-slavery proponents, were Christians. And they made sound, it in their minds anyway, sound arguments for why slavery is a good thing. Uh, you know, these were subhuman populations, they, you know, we could save their soul, we give them a better life. Yeah, you can read the sermons in the uh early uh to mid-19th century, for example, which I did in the moral arc, I kind of went through some of these uh before the American Civil War, where they were totally justified, you know, that this is the way God wants things. Uh so a little late to the game, and so to their credit, once the moral arc starts bending, religions do get on board.
SPEAKER_02The Enlightenment was even later later, though. If we if we waited for Enlightenment humanists to end the slave trade, I think we'd still be waiting.
SPEAKER_01Uh um, no, I don't think so. I mean, Lincoln's arguments against slavery, for example, were purely rational. As I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave owner. Uh, you know, the first principle of a moral principle is its interchangeability, it's it's generalizability. Does it apply to you and not just me? And uh, you know, you can take some credit for that with the golden rule. It's true. It's it's it's a it's a basic sound principle of game theory. Um, you know, I don't want you to do to me what I would do to you, and so on, the golden rule and the platinum, the silver rule and the platinum rule, and so on, the variations on that. But you know, like same-sex marriage, for example, um, you know, religious people were the primary opponents of that until there was a shift, and all of a sudden everybody got on board. Um, and it happened fairly quickly, and now it's you know kind of a non-uh subject, even amongst Christians, except for a few extreme Christian nationalists in America, but for the most part everybody accepts it now. How did that happen? You know, if same-sex marriage and you know, gay rights and so on was opposed by religion, which it was for centuries, millennia, then what happened? And it's not like there's a new revelation from God or some new interpretation of scripture, like, oh, this is what it means in Galatians, it means we should treat gay people the same as straight people. No, nothing like that happened. It happened through the agitation by gay people that they want the same rights as everybody else. That's a principle of interchangeable perspectives or the generalizability of a moral principle.
SPEAKER_02So the interchangeability of moral perspectives um is absolutely something that is shared among many different religions in the world. I think where it gets interesting is when you start to question whose perspectives count, and do some perspectives count more than other perspectives count? And while many people speak the language of uh that kind of reciprocal altruism, in practice, I think a lot of worldviews around the world and down through history um have counted some people's uh uh some some people's utility, some p some people's uh happiness uh as far more significant than other people's happiness. Um I guess I'd I'd want to know from Dr. Shermer why we can believe that every single human, without exception, is considered worthy of counting. He he does a great job of saying the individual is at the heart of our moral concern and our political concern and all that kind of stuff. And that I I I take it he believes that every human being counts equally. But from a from a purely um biological point of view, from a purely rational point of view, why should we count every single member of the human population the same, especially when you realize that there are lots of people who are are not um perhaps economically fruitful in society? There are some people who are rich, some people who are poor, some people are strong, some people who are weak. Um perhaps the society might flourish if we got rid of the weakest 10% and uh the rest of the 90% can kind of can flourish even further. What is it within your system that says, no, everybody in the human family counts, no matter who they are, no matter how rich or poor, um, that that their that their utility counts the same as everybody else's?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, nice. Yeah, well put. Um so there Glenn is articulating the kind of difference between utilitarianism or consequentialist uh moral philosophy versus deontological Kant's idea of a kind of universal uh universality to morals. And that that's been the tension. Though those two systems are largely at play for the last couple centuries in philosophical circles, and then you can throw in Aristotle's virtue ethics if you like. Uh, but but just take those two. This is the the Glenn has identified the deep flaw in utilitarianism, um, you know, that uh it's not okay to kill the one to save the five. This is the famous trolley problem. You know, there's a trolley hurling down the tracks about to kill the five workers, and you're at the switch. Um, and if you divert the trolley down the other side track that kills one worker, would you throw the switch? Almost everybody says, well, yeah, it's a simple calculation. Kill the one to save the five. Um, but of course, if you generalize that to let's say you're a physician in a hospital and you have five dying patients, uh each of which has a different um disorder, and you have one healthy um uh bystander in the in the waiting room, should you sacrifice that guy and take his five organs and save the five patients? No, you should not do that. Why? Because we don't want to live in a world in which people can be sacrificed at any moment at the whim of the majority. So the the first time this was articulated was the first round of rights revolutions in the uh late 18th century, primarily by the founding fathers of the United States, but also some of the European uh philosophers. That is to say, we universal rights uh have have the concept of universal rights that apply to everybody no matter what. And this was a revolutionary idea because before that, everybody thought it was perfectly okay to favor our group over some other group. Uh there was not nothing particularly um horrific about genocide in history, as long as it didn't happen to your group, right? And so this was revolutionary, uh, and no one had ever come up with anything quite like this. And this and they did that purely through secular reasoning. Uh, that is to say, our government was set up as secular, not not religious. You could be religious or not, it doesn't matter. These are the principles we're going by. So then the second rights revolutions in the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, you know, just took that and applied it to everybody. So what I track in the moral arc is that there's been a literally a moral arc. The arc of the universe is bending toward uh including more and more people as honorary members of our in group because of our tribalism. It's perfectly natural to want to favor your group over some other group. Everybody has done that through history. What it's what's new is that okay, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to give everybody the same rights. And uh and that that was revolutionary. The the argument for why, the philosophical argument is that you are born with the rights to have uh you know autonomy and control over your body. Uh that was revolutionary, and it it's a it's a philosophical argument. Um, I think you have to start the kind of moral causal chain somewhere, and that's where I began it. That's where the founding fathers began it. Individual autonomy and control over your body. So therefore, slavery is wrong and genocide and so on.
SPEAKER_03And Michael, would you say that some of that those things were true even before that revolution, even before we had reason to some of those conclusions were people wrong sort of back in the day? They were misaligned with an objective truth, or did the truth change over time?
SPEAKER_01A really good question. Uh, I tend to not want to judge people in the past by modern standards, because I can't say for sure if I was a Roman, if I lived in the Middle Ages during the witch trials or something, I wouldn't have just gone right along with what everybody else was doing. Um, because we're all creatures of our uh our our cultures. Uh the way I say it is that we now know they were wrong to do that based on modern understanding of moral principles. That's so we now know they were wrong then. But I I I'm not gonna you know pass judge, you know, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Yeah, I know. Not good, but you know, that's uh you know, there was nobody thought anything particularly unusual of thinking that blacks were um less intelligent and let's say less human in the 18th century. Almost everybody believed that. You know, so I can't I can't fault Jefferson for you know some of his famous quotes uh along those lines. What's your perspective on that, Glenn?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think some of the utilitarians uh very famously um rejected out of hand natural law. Jeremy Bentham said natural law is nonsense and and natural rights are nonsense on stilts. He had absolutely no time for the Declaration of Independence and uh for some of the utilitarian reasons that Dr. Shermer um enumerates there. But um I'm I'm just unsure of why we shouldn't go with utilitarianism as opposed to uh a doctrine of human rights. I'm very glad that Dr. Shermer does go with a doctrine of human rights. Um I think he gets the history of them wrong. I think I think he that his history is out by at least six centuries. I think the Gregorian reforms of the of the 11th century um were where that first articulation of um human rights really come from, and and absolutely it was a reflection upon the image of God um on page one of the Bible. There have always been theological underpinnings to what human rights have been. Um so in the 11th century, that was the first real articulation of that particular language. I think they've always existed in the same way that gravity existed before Isaac Newton um wrote The Principia Mathematica. He discovered something that was already there. I think the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century were um articulating something that was already there. I think in the 18th century, what you have is Thomas Jefferson saying, We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. That all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, as Dr. Schermer is aware, and he writes about it very compellingly in his book, The Moral Arc, it was Thomas Jefferson who said that we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men have been created by their endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. And it was Benjamin Franklin that put his quill through that and said, no, not sacred and undeniable, self-evident. And what Franklin is trying to do is found the Republic on self-evident reason rather than on revelation, rather than on the sacred truth that humans are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights. Now, that still works only within a theological universe. Because let's think about what human rights are. Human rights are these non-arbitrary things. We've been endowed these rights by our Creator, according to the Declaration of Independence. It's not just that human beings have asserted that we are valuable because that's just a power play. We're in this cozy little club and we've decided that we've got human rights. Well, who's we and why should what we say have any uh moral valency to it? Um and so the Declaration of Independence is absolutely saying it, no, it's non-arbitrary. Someone from outside the system, a moral legislator who has the authority to say that humans have value, has said so. And it is uh an unconditional human right that we have, no matter how rich or poor we are, slave or free, black or white, no matter your identity, no matter your strengths, no matter your resources, like everybody uh possesses this human right. It's universal, it goes to the very fringes of the human family, and it's equal. No one within this human family uh has any more of a right than anybody else. Now, again, this is a thoroughly theological anthropology. It's a thoroughly theological view of what the human person actually is. And when you're born into the world, it is not obvious. It is not self-evident that all people are possessors of this metaphysical kind of pixie dust called human rights. It is not self-evident. The only thing self-evident about human rights is that they're not self-evident, which is why they have not been the product of other civilizations around the world down through history. They have come to us through a particularly Christian history because they are a particularly Christian kind of metaphysic. Michael, I see you pulling a book off the off the shelf there, so I know you have a response.
SPEAKER_00It's my own book.
SPEAKER_01Uh Glenn is the Glenn, you are the first person I've encountered that knows of that story about um Ben Franklin scratching out the uh sacred and undeniable. Yeah, I mean, I'm a very very very good. Here's what I wrote about. This is I'm quoting here um Walter Isaacson's uh biography of of Benjamin Franklin. The idea of self-evident truth was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson's favorite philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin's close friend David Hume. And what became known as Hume's Fork, the greatest the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, such as London is bigger than Philadelphia, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. The angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees, all bachelors are unmarried. By using the word sacred, Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question, the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable inalienable rights, was an assertion of religion. Franklin's edit instead turned it into an assertion of rationality. So yeah, I think that's uh I think that says a lot about how that idea came about. Now, when you say um that it dates back centuries before that, um can you give us a source of like, I mean, was this revelation? Was it reinterpreting sacred scripture? Was it what was it?
SPEAKER_02So the canon lawyers uh under Pope Gregory um were basically collating all sorts of ecclesiastical court decisions uh in which you know you you had to think about legal cases from first principles, and obviously the first principles that in these ecclesiastical courts they were using uh were scriptural, and absolutely it was reflections on scripture and reflections on the kind of theological anthropology that is found within the Bible. And what they began to articulate and as they collated together these these case laws is principles. And you'll you'll notice that as they are collating together principles from the book of Scripture, um, you'll start to recognize how similar that is to the scientific method that that sort of emerged again from Christian sources as people looked at the book of nature and tried to collate together um the empirical data of what's out there in the world and to try and come up with principles. And one of the principles they came up with was that human beings do not merely have obligations. I have an obligation to the poor person in order to give to the poor person. Um, but there is the flip side of that. And this is this is the articulation that they started to make under Pope Gregory that not only do I have an obligation to give to the poor, but the poor person has a right. A right to protection and provision. And and that starts to be a right that um the underprivileged can claim against the privileged. And you can see how um that that is right at the heart of what a kind of a theory of rights is all about. The theory of rights is all about protecting the little guy from big, bad old structures that are outside of them and saying that this this this little guy or this little girl has um inviolable rights, unalienable rights. Um but that but that language, um Larry Sidentop writes about this in Inventing the Individual, or Tom Holland writes about this in Dominion. Uh this is this is right at the heart of, I think, a rights-based moral order.
SPEAKER_01See, to my ears, that sounds like they're reasoning their way to these conclusions. Are there biblical passages you can cite that you know you could say, well, there it is, right there in this chapter and verse where it says all people should be treated equally or everybody's born with universal rights, or whatever the equivalent of uh of biblical language would be of that.
SPEAKER_03Glenn, just a very quick response on that, and then we'll have to go to a break.
SPEAKER_02Sure. I I think page one of the Bible um gives you a theological anthropology. What are human beings like? And we are not just survival machines, we are not just here to replicate our DNA. Um, we are those who are king and queen of all creation, male and female, made in God's image with dominion over the world and tasked with that job of bringing dominion over the world. And so the divine right of kings, as it were, um, was first really applied to humanity in general in Genesis chapter one, and certainly uh there is a fall from that kind of situation, and we've got the Old Testament as this non-ideal provisional kind of uh ethical system, but Christ comes as the image of God to raise us up into a community in which there is no Lord except Him. We're all brothers and sisters in the same family, and there is no male nor female nor uh slave or free, Jew or Gentile, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. I think that's as quick as I can do in terms of a biblical theology of that trajectory that gives you the language of rights.
SPEAKER_03Great. Well, th thank you both for jumping right into this conversation. We need to take a quick break on Viz Vitali, and you're listening to Unbelievable, the show that welcomes the questions that matter. Hit the subscribe button if you're on YouTube. Take a moment to follow the podcast. As always, we love hearing from you, and you can email us at unbelievable atpremiere.org.uk. We will be back in just a moment. Well, welcome back. We've already got a great debate going here. We've uh pulled out our philosophical shovels and we're digging into meta ethics, the deeper questions behind what we mean when we talk about good and bad, right and wrong. You know, even if we agree about specific moral rules, such as not stealing or not lying, there are underlying questions about where those rules come from and whether we really have any obligation to follow them. There's a an oft-quoted line from the brothers Karamazov if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Uh, the idea being that without the objective overarching standard of God, all we are left with is our subjective preferences, which can vary person to person, culture to culture, and potentially with no way to arbitrate uh between them. It's an oft-quoted phrase. I suspect that our two guests today disagree about that. Uh, but Glenn, I'll I'll put it to you first and then I'll ask Michael as well. Is that a statement, that statement penned by Dostoevsky that you would agree with or that you would challenge?
SPEAKER_02It doesn't seem to have worked out the way that Dostoevsky thought it would. Um because um I I I quoted in um uh in in my book, uh The Air We Breathe, which is in in in many ways, it it gives the opposite view to Dr. Sherman's view in the moral arc. You know, I I say that we are far more Christian uh than we ever imagine, that the the Christian presuppositions that we tend to have, even in these moral conversations, are um profoundly Christian-ish presuppositions that we have. Um and I go through seven values uh in the book that I that I think have a very Christian history to them equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress. Um one of the reasons that you can see that uh we have imbibed these values is that the worst thing in the world is if someone something is unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive. That's the worst thing in the world. Why is that the worst thing in the world? Because we we already know what the best thing is. And isn't it interesting that we often find the church, and even I find the church at times, to be unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive. Um that only just proves that I that I think those values have become these moral intuitions that we all now share. It's the air we breathe. Um and what's happened in a post-Christian society is I think we've detached those values from the Christian story in which they they first found significance. And we've detached them from the story and we've detached them from each other, and now we have what GK Chesterton said: uh the virtues are running amok, right? And so j just the virtue of compassion, let's say, just runs amok all by itself, untethered to any greater moral philosophy, untethered to any other value. And now we've got, you know, the the be kind hashtag um hides some of the cruelest behavior you'll ever witness online. And what have we gotten to? We've gotten to the position where actually, you know, without God, it's not that everything is permitted. Without God, everything is preachy. Really, really, really preachy. And and actually some of the fruits of the Christian revolution have been detached from their source, detached from one another, and now instead of being the morals to a story, they are kind of cudgels, they're kind of baseball bats that we use to beat one another one another over the head with. And and so online discussions just you know routinely um call people bigots and phobes and all the rest of it because people are violating compassion and equality and all these sorts of things. So I I don't think it's the case that um with institutional Christianity in the rearview mirror in the West, I don't think it's the case that we've become lesse fair about morals and ethics. We haven't become amoral at all. Uh, I think we've we're we're incredibly moralizing creatures, and uh we've just used a a post-Christian version of those virtues uh in in order to slander one another with that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's helpful. And and Michael, I'd love for us to kind of back up a bit now. We've you know we've dove into some of the tension points, but you know, you come to the conclusion that we don't need those Christian roots, we can have an objective, universal morality detached from the supernatural. Uh maybe here if we can just hear you flesh out a bit more that theory.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, so first just responding to what Glenn said. Uh, I I think he and I are in agreement on this that um that the vast majority of violence and uh you know just cruelty in the world has not been a lack of morals, it's it's too much morals. Everybody's moralizing. I mean, we know the famous statistic in in criminology 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature, not instrumental. I killed him because I wanted his Rolex or whatever. It's you know, I killed him because he cheated, he he he slept with my girlfriend, or he took my parking spot, or he cheated at pool. You know, that that that that that's why people moralize and they feel that the person they killed deserved to die, right? That's the problem. So and and of course, the there there's lots of sources of motivation for that uh religion being just one of them, and that that there's others. If you're talking about the the crazy woke progressive left glen that uh moralizes online about everything and cancels people right and left, yeah, I think it's I'm in total agreement with you on that. That's a big problem. Um, you know, and so uh but but back to the you know, does anything go? No, of course not. I mean, if if there's no God, don't I still have moral obligations uh uh to keep my promises to my wife, to my business partner, you know, and and so on, that I shouldn't cheat on my wife, I shouldn't embezzle for my business partner because I said I wouldn't. Isn't that should be good enough? Whether there's a God or not, uh those are still good moral values that we should Why? Because it hurts somebody else, and I wouldn't want them doing that to me, and so on. Anyway, um I asked the question about the uh other biblical passages about these universal rights. I asked that because uh I did a debate with Denisha Souza on this who claimed that Galatians 328 is the passage where Apostle Paul says there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor m female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. D'Souza imagines that this Bible verse is the foundation of the famous line in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. And then I say, I'm afraid not. D'Souza's yanked the passage out of context, and the surrounding verses demonstrate clearly what Paul is up to. Here's Galatians 3, 1. O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you that ye should not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you. And what is this truth according to Paul? The truth is that, quote, the Jew in becoming a Christian need not become a Greek, nor the Greek a Jew. The slave might continue to serve as master, and male and female retained each its function in the ongoing stream of life. Close quote from Paul. In other words, Paul is saying that you can carry on as you are. If you're Greek, there's no need to become a Jew. A significant dispensation given that a man converting to Judaism often had to submit to adult circumcision, and this is just the kind of thing that puts a guy off the whole idea. Anyway, I was having a little fun there. Uh but that's it. I mean, I d you know, if if universal human rights is so important, you you would have think the creator of the universe, when he's writing his, or at least inspiring his holy book, would have said something about that a little more forcefully.
SPEAKER_02Gosh, but Jefferson thought absolutely it it was a sacred truth that had come to him and that we have been endowed by our creator with these things. Um so is is Jefferson wrong about that? Well, as you know, Jefferson was not a Christian per se.
SPEAKER_01He's more of a deist at most. Yeah. So uh again, what what is our source? All right, I mean, is it Revelation? Is it interpretation of scripture? Is it the still small voice within? I claim it's the latter, the still small voice within that we all have. You have, I have, you and I are getting our sources of of right and wrong and morality from the same same same sources. Um, and you're you're saying I'm getting it from the Bible or I'm getting it from Christianity. I don't know. I I'm so what is your source?
SPEAKER_02What is your source, Dr. Shermer? Because um you you you talk about the the individual is this sort of indivisible atom, you know, just as the atom is the indivisible unit of physics, so the individual is the indivisible kind of unit of a kind of social order and moral order. Um I don't get that even from science, and and I certainly don't get the the idea from somebody's DNA that anything morally follows from the fact that somebody possesses human DNA. So where where do you get this inviolable human worth and dignity?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so that's a fair question. I I think I get it from the same place everybody else does today. We're all thoroughly modern uh Enlightenment, children of the enlightenment. That is to say, we've inculcated these values from many sources, from culture, from novels, from you know, ideas from our parents and our peer groups. And it's just in well, okay, it's in the air. How's that? But not the religious era, it's really in the cultural air. And this is why I try to document the moral arc is that something happened over the last several centuries. It happens slow enough, you don't quite see it. It's sort of on the decadal level instead of monthly or yearly where the changes happen. Um, and so it's hard to discern. You have to kind of look at the bigger picture. You can you can study like the shift in language in novels over the past two centuries. Just look at the way novelists in the early 20th century talked about blacks and Jews and women that we would today find abhorrent, embarrassing. We would just, you know, never want to use that kind of language. And that just happened over the decades where you know everybody just kind of stopped using certain words or they started using new words. And and a lot of that's just kind of cultural, and it comes from I think mostly the bottom up. I mean, you can pass laws that say you shouldn't do this or that, but mostly we all have our consciousness raised by just thinking about and talking to other people and getting these ideas from our culture. So that that's kind of my source. By the way, I emphasize the individual for two reasons. One, in evolutionary theory, I I don't endorse group selection. I think it's individual is the target of selection. And two, politically, I think it's a mistake. This is mostly a problem in liberals, who uh are, at least in recent decades, placing more emphasis on group identity rather than individuals. And that's why I emphasize the individual. I think it's a it's a big mistake, and it's going against what Dr. King taught us, you know, to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That is to say, your group identity defines you. No, it doesn't. You define yourself, you're an individual.
SPEAKER_02That's why I emphasize I I was so fascinated to read um that that kind of history of you with Scientific American and um and your your columns there are just a model of communication, not just of science, but of but of anything. I I learned so much from reading many of your columns, um, Dr. Sherman. And and I think I'm on your side when you know you you wrote an article about the colorblind egalitarianism of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and they sort of pushed back on that, and there were the that was my demise. It was your demise, wasn't it? Because identity politics was kind of trumping um science in that sort of sense. And I think we can see with Scientific American they they they seem to you know call mathematics is Eurocentric, apparently, and um clownfish can teach you trans ideology, and apparently Scientific American can tell you who to vote for in November. And I think everybody can recognize that that is an illegitimate sort of politicization of science. But I guess my question to you, Dr. Shermer, is perhaps you're part of it. It's just you are on the classical liberal side of that political divide. You've looked into the mirror of science and you've discovered the individual. You've discovered human rights, uh, you've discovered that there's a moral arc that's bending towards justice, you've you've decided you've discovered a kind of a colorblind egalitarianism within science. Different people have looked into science and have discovered actually that what's staring back at them is pretty much their own political presuppositions. And so progressive liberationists might you know see themselves in science. Scientific racists can look into science and they can they can discover that racism is somehow, you know, um dictated to them, you know, b because of science. And I I wonder whether we're in this kind of problem of the politicization of science, because it's it's kind of the only place we've got now to tell us our morality. And so I think we're we're we might we might be going to science to tell us our morality when science wasn't really intended for that. And maybe we need to go back to Stephen Jay Gould, who I know is a great hero of yours, and the the non-overlapping magisteria of of science and religion, and and and let us have our values discussions and our political and moral discussions in one register, and let's just go into the lab and do good science over here. But I think imagining that we can go into science and derive from it some kind of libertarian settlement is is probably to play a political game that's it's that's gonna end up biting us on the backside.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, nicely put. Yeah, um, when I say talk about science, I don't mean, you know, go to the archaeologist or the paleontologist to get your morals. I mean kind of the fullness of human knowledge uh through philosophy and reason, rationality, logic, empiricism, science, the whole package. Um, and you know, like I mean the word science and scientists, these are fairly new terms. You know, Newton was not a scientist, he was a natural philosopher. That that word wasn't even used until the mid eighteen hundreds. So that's what I mean. Uh uh, you know, just can we reason our way? Through discovering certain principles. By discover, I mean kind of conclude that this must be true. I'll just here, let me just read this to you from Stephen Pinker, who puts it even better than I do. He thinks that there might be some of these Platonic truths that exist out there, back to your wonderful meta uh what'd you call it, the metaphysical furniture of the universe. I love that phrase. On this analogy, we're born with a rudimentary concept of number, so maths would be part of the furniture. But as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths, but not others. No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four, and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that two plus two equals four. Perhaps we're born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral real moral reality forces us to some conclusions, but not others. And then he gives an example. If I appeal to you to do something that affects me, to get off my foot or tell me the time or not run me over with your car, then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interest over yours. Say, retaining my right to run right to run you over with my car if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I'm galactic overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can't act as if my interests are special just because I'm me and you're not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I'm standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it. Now, you know, historically, that's how everybody thought. Yeah, my place in the universe is special because I'm standing on it and you're not. So too bad. So, you know, the the moral arc is that we've all moved away from that and tried to inculcate these more all-inclusive moral principles.
SPEAKER_03Michael, I had a question about that, that quote. Uh, you know, on that sort of approach, is truly selfless motivation or behavior possible? Because right, it sounds like I don't want to be run over, so you know, I better respect your right not to be run over, but primarily because I don't want to be run over, which sounds different from what I would think of as genuine morality. I don't want to run you over because I recognize the inherent value of you as a person.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. Uh, and of course, we don't know what's in somebody's heart, uh for sure, but um my argument is that um it's not enough to pretend well, let me let me back up for a second. Yes, it would behoove me to be selfish uh all of the time to you know uh allocate all the resources to me and my family and screw you. But the problem is you might be thinking the same thing, and so it's actually more selfish for me to be selfless or altruistic or cooperative or nice or friendly and helpful to you because when times are tough for me, uh you're more likely to help me if when times were tough for you, I was willing to help you. Now, there's one more move here that I make. It's not enough to pretend uh to be a friendly, a good friend. Um I actually have to feel it because you will know if I'm faking. That is to say, humans evolve. This is Robert Trevor's theory of deception and self-deception. That is to say, um, we've evolved a kind of a cheating detection module in our brain, so to speak. That is to say, I I can kind of sense if somebody's a genuine caring person or if they're not. I mean, there are psychopaths, maybe one to three percent, maybe one percent women, three percent men in our population. And and you kind of get you kind of figure out who those people are in your social group, you know. I don't trust that guy. I don't I get some bad vibes about that guy, but it this person over here, I I'd really trust them. So and so my move is to say that um it it's better if in terms of how I feel about you, if I actually really feel like I like you. Not pretend, I'm not just faking like a psychopath knows what facial expressions to give or whatever, but they don't actually feel it inside. Most of us do feel it. Like, and and so it's better if I feel it, and then I really genuinely do caring, loving things for my friends and family. And that's the to me, that's the ult, that's the as deep as I can go in terms of moral foundation. If you kind of drill down to the bedrock, that's my bedrock. Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_03And I can imagine some people coming with you in terms of the source of morality being evolutionary and cultural processes, but maybe getting off off the train when they find it difficult to understand how that makes morality objective and absolute. So I'm hoping you can say a bit more uh about that. Like just like we could have evolved, you know, six fingers rather than five on each hand. Could we have evolved biologically and culturally such that our moral rules looked very differently as well?
SPEAKER_01Well, if you're a social species uh and you have to get along with others in your group, then you have to have something like uh moral values, moral emotions. You know, all primates have them, for example. Ours are just more developed because we have a bigger brain and cognition and language and and so forth. But you know, if if if if it's a different, if it's like a social insect species or on some other planet, they had a different kind of DNA or whatever, yeah, they could they could have different morals. But so I'm so when I say universal, I mean amongst humans, say our species. Um, and that uh that and that's as deep as I could go because you know uh depends what you mean by objective and absolute or you know, I don't know, transcendent of me as an American living in California, whatever, born in 1954. I mean I inherited from uh my ancestors all the way back for our species. We get this package, this kind of suite of moral emotions, you know, guilt and shame when you violate a contract or you hurt somebody. Most of us feel guilt about that. Not everybody, but again, most people do. And and why is that? I mean, why should you feel guilty about anything? You know, what what's the purpose of the emotion of guilt or shame or jealousy? You know, jealousy, a lot of research on this, you know, it's it's it drives people to make art. You know, why should you make art? Why should you care if your spouse cheats on you or not? Well, there's good evolutionary reasons for this, right? So I'm saying we we are born with those suite of moral emotions. We all get them. So it's transcended of me.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_03And Glenn, do you do you think that's good enough? Or is there how would you talk about how you see God as giving us a deeper kind of underlying foundation for that sense of absolute and objectivity within morality?
SPEAKER_02I think there's that's another sense in which Dostoevsky is wrong. You know, without God everything is permitted. I I think um Dr. Shermer has just told us that there are a whole bunch of uh behaviors that are prescribed, um, even if we're just using game theory, even if we we just want to be DNA replicators, there are all sorts of rules that we ought to follow in order to flourish as a species. You don't need Jesus Christ in order to uh no, don't cheat, um you know, and that there are various free rider problems and and to to play game theory games cleverly. Okay, you don't need Jesus for any of that. What I do think you need is um all that gets you to is pro social behavior. You know, I I pick knits off you, you pick nits off me, we're friendly to one another, so we can smash the other tribe. That is the differential that actually gets natural selection going. Okay, like so let's just let's just jump into a godless universe in in which evolution unfolds in a godless way. Um it's uh we must cooperate. Absolutely, we must cooperate with one another. We must cooperate in order to compete. And um, you know, and what's interesting is that a a naturalistic kind of um ethic does develop from that that sounds very much like um some classical ethics. So, you know, um a very common platitude in Rome was every day do something to help your friends and harm your enemies, right? And that's perfectly well adapted to just a purely Darwinian environment. Okay. Um absolutely I am to help my friends. And I'm to within my kin, oh, my kin shared genes with me. And so um, Dr. Shermer, even though he doesn't believe in in group selection, he does believe in kin selection. And um so I am to be very kind to my kin who share genes with me. And if we're going to replicate our genes, then we we'd really better be really nice to each other, right? Um we are really to love our neighbor. But then the real question comes in Luke chapter 10. The the the lawyer, it's always lawyers asking asking these tricky questions. They say, Well, who is my neighbor? And and in his mind, uh, which is a mind formed by scripture, you know, in Luke chapter 10, this lawyer is saying, you know, who is my I know I'm meant to love my neighbor, but who is my neighbor? He wants to circumscribe the the you know the circle of compassion quite tightly, and he does want to love all those within it, and and and and that is moral behavior, but also what is moral behavior to an ancient person is to love those who are in the in-group and to smash those who are in the out-group and to out-compete them in the struggle for survival. That is an ethic. That is undoubtedly an ethic, and you might even want to call that an iron law of morality. It's just got nothing to do with human rights. It's got nothing to do with what Christians have been talking about when they want to privilege the individual and say that the individual, even if they are on the outside of your little in-group, they they possess certain rights, by virtue of which you are not to take from them their their right to life just because they are your your enemy. And so I can go along with with Dr. Shermer wanting to say that there are such things as objective moral values even without Jesus Christ. But I do think the sorts of moral sensibilities that we have that make us very nervous about utilitarianism and make us very nervous about having a society in which we we do eliminate the weak and the low and the botched, as Nietzsche would have called them. We are very, very attuned to hating that idea. Our moral sensibilities have been formed. They haven't been formed by the Enlightenment. They've been formed by Christianity, which is what Nietzsche, Nietzsche's whole point was. It's God on the cross has taught us to value and to prize the weak and the low and the botched. It's the transvaluation of all ancient values. Nietzsche thought it was disgusting that Christians believed in pity and all these things. Um and he had he had a moral and a moral sense. Hisn't his will to power was his sort of highest ideal. Um, so it's not the case that we're we're arguing really about whether there can be objective moral values or not. I think we're arguing about what kind of morality follows from a naturalistic universe. And you could have objective values that end up sounding very unlike what either Dr. Shermer or myself would ever want.
SPEAKER_03Michael, I'll throw it to you at the beginning of the next uh segment, but we have to take a break. Uh, if you want early access to some of our shows, articles, and extra content, head on over to our website, premierunbelievable.com. And if you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am, hit the subscribe button. Take a moment to follow or rate the podcast. I'm Vince Vitali, and I'll be back in a moment with my excellent guests, Michael Shermer and Glenn Scrivner. Welcome back. You are listening to Unbelievable, the show that gets Christians, skeptics, and everyone in between thinking about the topics that matter to all of us. We're heading into the final part of our debate with my guests, Michael Shermer and Glenn Scriven. I want to ask you both to reflect on a line of reasoning. Glenn, you sort of glanced in this uh direction uh earlier, but I thought it was worth opening up a little more. This idea that all people are uh equally valuable seems to be one of our most fundamental, foundational moral truths. But you might think that for all people to be equally valuable, there has to be something that is equally true of every single person, in virtue of which they are all equally valuable. So I'm interested to know, sort of on each of your belief systems, how you think about that, what that truth maker might be, that thing which is equally true of every single person, in virtue of which every single person can be equally valuable, which seems to be at the foundation of our deepest instincts and intuitions about uh morality. Michael, I'll I'll throw it to you first. What would you say in response to that?
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, um, you know, we talked about, or um Glenn quoted um Bentham about rights being nonsense and natural rights being nonsense and stilts. Uh I disagree with that. I I don't like Bentham's comment. I disagree with his utilitarianism at that extreme level. I think we are born with rights. Okay, now if you how far down can you drill? Where where are these rights? Where are they? I'm looking around, I'll see them anywhere. You know, well, I have them in America. Well, that's that's because we have a constitution and we have an army and we have police and we have, you know, uh the rule of law and and so on, courts and and whatnot. So uh you could always say, well, it's possible that, you know, if uh if we lived in in North Korea, you wouldn't have any rights. Well, that's right. And that's why no one wants to live in North Korea. And so, you know, here I make the move of saying, you know, let's use history and psychology and political science and whatever to see what people actually want to do. You know, where would you rather live, North Korea or South Korea? Where would you rather live? You know, East Germany or West Germany before the unification? People vote with their feet uh and their dollars and so on, because why? Why is that? You know, is it possible that um, you know, my cultural relativist friends uh are are correct and that you know maybe there's some other society and centuries hence where slavery will be embraced by everybody, except the slaves, I guess, uh, or where you know female genital mutilation is perfectly natural and normal and everybody endorses it, and you know, Jews don't mind being exterminated in gas chambers and blacks don't mind being enslaved. No, I I you know is it possible? I suppose, but not likely, because in uh so uh our human nature leads us to want to be free, autonomous individuals with control over our bodies and choices. And you only have to look around the world to see what people actually want, uh and and so on. And so therefore, I you know I think we do have a moral obligation to help people in other countries that uh are being oppressed, you know, to the extent that we can. We can't do everything. But um, and I think that comes from discovering what these actual rights are. They really are there in the same way that maths are there, or platonic concepts of like logic or you know, beauty, truth, the circle, the triangle, whatever. I mean, these things are really there and rights are in that same uh bin.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay. And then in terms of who we include in that moral community, I was interested in how how you think about that. You know, I was thinking that you know, you can have human persons who maybe are cognitively more limited than certain other animals might be. I mean, in fact, that'd be true of all of us at some point early enough in our lives as infants, and yet we have this deep sense that if you're part of kind of the human uh race, there's a sort of value which is perhaps distinct from even other animals, even an animal that might be cognitively superior to a human who is cognitively limited. So that's just kind of a test case, but share with us how how you would think about how to frame that moral community.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, so um, and again, historically, most people didn't think along those lines. They they didn't think that there was anything particularly wrong with enslaving other people or genocide. It didn't happen to you and your group. So that uh, as Glenn articulated it so well, that kind of within group amity and between group enmity is the history of uh human humanity. And it's been our pushback against that. But but based on what? Well, based on this kind of acceptance of this idea that uh everybody wants autonomy and control over their own choices and bodies, and that's the kind of direction we've been moving, albeit slowly, you know, and so um you know, I've kind of outlined how that happened historically, but how would Glenn explain it religiously? Like just take Christianity. You know, the Old Testament is, you know, it's pretty harsh in a lot of areas, and the New Testament's better. I mean, Jesus was a you know, a better moral philosopher than say Moses. Um, you know, but even there, you know, there's a lot about what Jesus said to his followers and you know, give up your belongings and follow me. And you know, you never had a family unless you believe Dan Brown and stories about Mary Magdalene and all that. Uh, you know, you've I'll just read a quote, a couple of quotes from Jesus. You have heard, you've heard it was said by them of old time, thou shalt not commit adultery, but I say unto you that whoever whosoever looketh at a woman to lust after her hath already committed uh adultery in their heart. Uh and if the right eye offends you, is this wait a minute to get this through Matthew 9, 27. Yeah. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, for it's profitable for thee. Uh that one of the it's really hard reading uh the King James Version today. Uh, you know, in terms of his own moral values, you know, Jesus said, When woman, what I've what have I done to oh sorry. Um turned away his own mother. Right. He says to his mother on the wedding feast, what have I to do with you? Maybe I'm pulling these out of context. I'm sure I am. Send her away, you are my family now, he says to his followers, sends his mother away. I mean, there's a bunch of passages like that, better than the Old Testament, but come on, we can do better than that.
SPEAKER_02Huh. I think you're absolutely right to focus on Jesus, and I and I think uh humanity's intellectual firepower has been most concentrated on the question of humanity uh when it comes to the humanity of Christ. And I think the this centuries-long intellectual tradition of trying to figure out what is a person, it was theolog theologians who are constantly thinking about what is a person because they were hammering out the doctrine of the Trinity, and then they have to hammer out this doctrine of, well, this second person of the Trinity, God the Son, um, takes on a full humanity. And he takes on this humanity as man, and he's the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and yet he saves humanity by being man. So apparently, men and women like share a human nature, and for all the differences between male and female, those are both biological and scriptural, but for all the differences between male and female, apparently we share one nature because Christ, in assuming uh a male humanity, is a man for all men in that universal sense, and he's also Jew, uh a Jew, but apparently he is a Jew for all peoples and all nations. And so you see, even in his own person, that Galatians 3, verse 28 kind of verse is um is is actually um he is the one who ensures that male and female share a single nature, and that um and that Jew and Gentile, you know, so ethnicity and gender um uh are kind of uh are transcended by a single human nature, and what you have in God the Son is as he adopts humanity, he is the one who so bestows value on the human person. You couldn't be um uh a more serious humanist than a Christian because a Christian believes in God the human, right? We have we have the highest place for humanity. The highest place for humanity is seated at the right hand of God, um so that humanity has been exalted to the very highest place by someone who has the authority to do so. It's not just that Thomas Jefferson and his other land-owning European and American uh males have decided that we're going to confer rights on ourselves, and it's not governments that confer rights on ourselves. There is a legitimate moral authority that can say humanity has dignity and worth. And Christ has assumed that humanity and raised it to the highest height, so that you now you could not have a higher view of the dignity, dignity, and the worth of humanity. You also have a humanity in Christ that is above the selfishness of um us squabbling kind of um animals. T. S. Eliot said you if you take from the word humanity everything that the Bible has given to it, what you are left with is a very clever, adaptable, mischievous animal. Um and when we say, oh, that's inhumane, or um when we talk about being a humanist, we apparently don't mean um those terrible crimes that humans can often commit. We apparently mean that there is a virtuous human who somehow exists above all selfishness that is being called valuable by a moral authority that is able to call it um valuable, that this humanity transcends differences of race and ethnicity and and and gender. Um, and all these things are are kind of part and parcel of the Christian theology. I think you try and derive your humanism from somewhere else, and I think Yuval Noah Harari is absolutely right, you know, that if you take a human being, cut them open, you will not find human rights. You will find the heart and neurons of And kidneys, but you won't find any rights. The place you find rights, says Yovan Noah Harari, is in the stories that we've told about human beings that are found in the Bible. He's very clear that our concept of human rights, so you know, he it's it's not just Jurgen Habermas and John Gray and Larry Sidentop and Tom Holland and Nietzsche that are telling you that humanism comes from Christianity. Um you've got you've got modern skeptics like Yval Noah Harari saying that humanism has come from Christianity. And I think it's come from Christianity for those kinds of theological reasons.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, Michael, I'm interested to know in terms of your understanding of the development of morality and that history throughout our culture of that coming to be what we want, these rights from each other. But you also spoke about moral truths as something like mathematical truths, like they're real, they're sort of part of this moral reality that's out there. And so one of the questions that came to mind for me was how can we be assured that what we want and what's developing through our cultural and evolutionary processes is actually aligning with these actual objective moral truths that are out there in some kind of platonic sense? How do we know that what the conclusions we're coming to in any way reflect the actual moral reality?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, you don't know for sure. If we were chronically frozen and woken up 500 years from now, I'm sure there's values we embrace today. Maybe meat eating would be one, you know, how we treat factory animals in factory farms is pretty abhorrent. Um, you know, maybe that would be one of them. But if I if I knew what they were, I I wouldn't do it. If I knew the bad things that I shouldn't be doing now, I wouldn't do them. Uh, you know, so we're all all creatures of our you know uh culture in that sense. But I suspect that 500 years from now, you know, there'll still be no slavery, or or at least there won't be any states that you know, like there's not a single state today that uh legally endorses slavery. There's still sex trafficking and slave labor and so on. But that's just a matter of you know, crappy governments that don't enforce their laws. Uh and and I you know, so and I don't think in any time soon, you know, women are gonna want to give up the vote, say. Uh I you know, these things uh happen for a reason that are embedded in our natures. You know, women don't want to be treated differently than men when it comes to political choice, for example. And I don't think that's gonna change and go backwards. I mean, it's possible that some country will have a you know be taken over by some dictator and that says, we're gonna now ban women from voting and driving or whatever. That's possible, but not universally. Um, you know, so so so I think that again we're moving in that direction toward this kind of universality. We can debate about to what extent you know pre-Enlightenment, pre-scientific revolution threads from humanism uh that was also heavily influenced by um Christian authors and so on. Yes, of course, uh, you know, that's all part of the story. That's just kind of historically how did it unfold. And you know, Glenn uh articulated some of that well. And uh, you know, that's true. Uh, but but that's kind of a secondary issue of you know, what are those ideas and are they actually really true? You know, and I I think we're in agreement. Yeah, yeah, they are. Uh in in that kind of platonic truth sense that they are out there, out there in the sense that we have a human nature. You know, there's no more if there's no people anywhere, if you're on a desert island by yourself, there's no morality per se. Uh, you know, it involves other other people, other sentient beings.
SPEAKER_03Right. And then you know, you also spoke about this almost, uh, maybe I'm not putting it the right way, but almost a gray area where you know science might not be able to settle certain moral disputes. And you gave some interesting examples, uh, issues of abortion or immigration, foreign aid, foreign wars, tax brackets. Uh and uh I wanted to reflect on that um a little bit. You know, you said I'm not sure science can settle, for example, the dispute between pro-life and pro-choice advocates. In the end, we may be left with conflicting rights claims or conflicting moral systems that are ultimately unresolvable by science. Uh at the same time, I can understand someone coming back and saying, oh, but this seems like a really important moral issue where there must be a right and a wrong of the matter. And if it's not resolvable by science, then how can it be resolved? How do you think about that category of cases?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it gets it, it gets resolved politically. So you just change you change the laws. That's what uh Christian conservatives have been doing since 1973. They've played the long game of you know, we need to change the law. There were the abortion bomb uh clinic bombers and so on. That didn't work, that backfired on them. And there weren't many of those anyway. Uh, but it was changing the laws. How do you do that? Well, you get different judges in there, you know. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for that. Uh and if you're pro-life, then that's a good thing. Um, and um, you know, but again, I uh I'm pro-choice because in conflicting rights, I I'd rather give adult women the rights to choose rather than uh over the rights of the fetus to live. But but but along the way, acknowledging that, yeah, that's a human life. You know, and it so you know, uh legal, safe, and rare is the phrase that people like me use. Um it's it should not just be a willy-nilly form of birth control. And uh to me, the if you want to get off on this issue, I mean, the problem is not abortion, the problem is unwanted pregnancy. Why are women getting pregnant when they don't want to? Well, okay, now that now we have a social technology issue, you know, birth control, education, you know, what's going on here? You know, moral values and and whatnot, uh, you know, broken families, uh poverty, lack of education, whatever, you know, whatever. Then then we're off the uh on that topic. So yeah, while I embrace science and reason as helping us discover absolute moral truths, not everything is in that category, right? So what's the right level of uh tax um uh percentage of upper income tax bracket? I think it should be lower, of course. But you know, other people say, no, no, it should be higher. I I I can't I'm I'm not sure I could uh I I might make a utilitarian argument, you know, like a trickle-down economics kind of uh Arthur Laffer Laffer curve kind of argument. But there are counters to that, and I'm not sure science can resolve that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay, okay. So would you see these issues as in some way distinct from some others that for example, whether or not slavery is is right or wrong, there there's in a sense a moral truth about that that's in this platonic moral realm somehow. But when it comes to some of these other issues, there's not a kind of moral truth of the matter. We have to resolve that politically.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think a lot of these are difficult. Like uh, you know, should we support Ukraine? Should we support Israel? I I think we should, but why? You know, and then you have to kind of push up against uh conflicting values. You know, well, we can't America can't do everything, uh, but we can do something, and it's in our interest to help a lot of these countries. I mean, we are the world's policemen, and and without that, the world will probably be a worse place. Uh, you know, but but we can't go to every country in Africa and do everything, you know. So you just have to kind of pick and choose.
SPEAKER_03I'd like to ask each of you, um, if you were if you were wrong about your position regarding God's existence, uh what impact would that have on your view of morality? Like Glenn, if i if somehow you you received compelling evidence that God didn't exist, how would you rethink your approach?
SPEAKER_02Um I was asked a similar question by a a Muslim um who who said, you know, what what if it's Allah and it's not Jesus? And um and I and I said to I said to him, just give give me hell with Jesus, because uh hell with Jesus would be heaven for me. Um and and and maybe if it's a godless universe, um I I think I want to go down with Jesus, if you see what I mean. I think I I think I want to go down with the one who says, uh love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek. The one who says, put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword. I want to go with the one who spread his arms to the world and bled his own heart's blood even for his enemies, praying, Father, forgive. I think that's the most divine thing this world has ever seen. I think that vision of deity is what has birthed the greatest sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen, um, that has given us a rights revolution and has given us equality and compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress that has given us abolition of the slave trade and all these other things that we've we've kind of talked about. I think that vision is divine. Um and if you tell me there's no such thing as divinity, um, I will tell you, no, it's Jesus, it's Jesus or bust for me. So I'll I'll I'll go down with him, I say.
SPEAKER_03Okay. And and and how about you, Michael, if uh if you somehow were given irrefutable evidence that God does exist, you would that make you rethink in some way uh and think, ah, God must be the ground of morality in some way, even if I can't see exactly how it is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, like a large deposit in a Swiss bank account under my name of $10 million. Yeah, that would do it.
SPEAKER_00No. He's probably already done it, Dr. Sherman. Just over over 50 years, that's all. That's right. Yeah. It's all in the stock market. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Um, yeah, it's a really good question. I I I'm not sure things would change all that much for me anyway, because I I mean I try to lead a relatively moral life with values, and uh, you know, a lot of the values I embrace uh are endorsed by uh conservatives and Christians. I I do think a lot of those values are are you know are good for society, good for individuals, and so on, although I'm not a conservative, classical liberal, but um but along those lines, um, you know, the arguments I make for the things we should and shouldn't do morally, um, I don't think would change much. Um, you know, I I suppose it it might give me some more reflective um values about the long term, you know, the afterlife. And you know, maybe I'd uh I don't really worry about dying, but it it would be nice to know that you know, you know, there's some life that that comes after uh this life, but um, but I don't know that, and no one else does either for sure. Um but if there is, then okay, good. Um that's fine, uh hopefully. Uh and you know, so no, I don't think think things would change much, really.
SPEAKER_03We have time for maybe reflection on one more question. I wanted to ask for each of you, are you are you hopeful or pessimistic about the future of human morality? In reflection on your theory, your approach to morality, how does that affect your uh emotions as you think about the the future of human moral progress?
SPEAKER_02Sure, I think in the in the very long term, I'm incredibly optimistic. I I think this Jesus Revolution, it it began with a guy choking to death on a cross, and somehow he turned Godforsaken execution into world domination. I think it's the ultimate water into wine miracle. Uh Dr. Sherman might be skeptical about lots of different miracles. Here's a miracle that definitely has happened. Um, everything has come from nothing, and order has come from chaos, and and life has come from non-life, and minds have come from mindless matter. A moral universe has emerged out of merely matter. Um, but also I think the Jesus movement has emerged from a guy choking to death on a cross, and I think that's a that's an extraordinary kind of thing. And and and Jesus seemed to predict the triumph of his kingdom, and he thought it would work like yeast works through dough or like a mustard seed grows into the greatest of all plants, so large that even the birds of the air are enfolded within it and perch in its branches. And I think that's what we are kind of seeing. I think the Christian revolution is the most diverse, the most inclusive, the most um influential um revolution in human history, and the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church of Jesus Christ in the long term. Um in the meantime, um, I I think you know that there have been 65 million abortions uh in the US since Roe versus Wade, uh, which is five times more people than than died in the transatlantic slave trade, and only in about 50 years, as opposed to in in in 350 years, um, it is the greatest human rights scandal of our day. And I think in the meantime, I think the moral arc of the universe is going down in lots of different ways. And I think um it would be too convenient for us to think that we are living at the end of history, uh, we are the ones that we've been waiting for, yay, us. Um I think that actually um there are profound question marks over whether we are the humanists that we think that we are, especially when we kill a million babies a week around the world right now. Um I think we're deeply in trouble as a kind of a humanity, and we need Jesus and we need to cry out to Jesus for salvation, actually. In the end, though, in the end though, Jesus says that the gates of hell will not prevail against his kingdom. And so ultimately, I am I am that kind of optimist. I think both Dr. Shermer and I, we believe in the moral arc and that it bends towards justice. I think the the the arc though bends down and then up. It it is down through darkness and then up into the light. It's cross, then resurrection, it's suffering now, it's his glory later. Um, so in the end, I am absolutely an optimist, but in the middle of the struggle, I think we need to bring the light of Christ into some very dark places.
SPEAKER_01How about you, Michael? Well, well, that's a very theological answer. Obviously, mine's gonna be different. I think uh, you know, the arc of the moral universe has been bending. There's no time in history w when you'd rather live than now. You know, these are the good old days and they are getting better. Again, on a decadal level, it's slow enough, you hardly see it, but you know, the decline of poverty, you know, in 1800, like 85% of the world lived in a state of poverty. Today it's less than 10%. Supposed to, you know, the UN millennial goals are supposed to be gone by 2030 to 2040, there'll be no more poverty anywhere in the world. It's astonishing that this could happen. I mean, we're about to colonize Mars, for gosh sake. This is incredible. Uh, you know, and that more people have more rights in more places around the world than ever before. Admitting that there are setbacks here and there, it's you know, two steps forward, one step back. It's easy to find the dark um, you know, stories in the nightly news, the police beatings of blacks and you know, the mistreatment of women in Islam and so on. That yes, these things are all real. We just got to keep working at it. Uh, but you know, in terms of when I'd rather live, I'd I'd like to live now. If nothing else, the dentistry is much better now than it was 500 years ago. Uh and and in the future, I I think we will continue to expand the moral arc and we will become an interplanetary species, uh, you know, and there'll be no more poverty. And you know, the the idea of people uh ha having you know wants and needs not met, I think we're gonna conquer that problem. We already are. And uh yeah, so I'm I'm pretty optimistic. You know, the only thing I worry worry about really is nuclear weapons. That's the only existential threat. All the others I don't worry about, AI or you know, whatever. These are not true existential threats, only nuclear weapons. And even that's gotten much better since the height of the Cold War in the 1980s. Um, and so we're getting there. And yes, of course, you know, some nut can you know launch his nukes, and you know, that's possible, but you know, but it hasn't happened, and I'm encouraged by that fact as well. So I remain optimistic.
SPEAKER_03Well, guys, thank you. That has been such a compelling uh discussion and really a model of how to disagree well, and boy, do we need more of that uh in the world. So for now, we need to finish there. You've been listening to a debate between two excellent thinkers, Michael Shermer and Glenn Scrivener. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've benefited uh from it. I sure have. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. Send us your questions at unbelievable at premiere.org.uk or on social media unbelievable F E on X or at Premiere Unbelievable on Facebook and Instagram. Please rate and review so more people can learn about us and more importantly, learn about the deepest questions of life. For now, I'm Vince Vitali, and it's been a pleasure to be with you. I look forward to the next question, the next discussion as we pursue truth together. Until then, all the best from me and the team. Goodbye.