Moderator: Welcome to the second installment
of “The God Debate”.
My name is Michael Rea.
I’m a professor of philosophy here at the
University of Notre Dame,
and the director of the Center for Philosophy
of Religion,
one of the sponsors of tonight’s event.
The Center for Philosophy of Religion was
founded in the late 1970s with the aim of
promoting cutting-edge research on topics
in the philosophy of religion,
and in distinctively Christian philosophy.
One of our goals in sponsoring the “God
Debate” series is to try to bring some of
the very issues discussed among our research
fellows to a wider, non-academic audience,
and in a format that will hopefully be fun
and engaging.
Our show tonight, as you already know, is
a debate between William Lane Craig and
Sam Harris, coming together for the very first
time to discuss the question,
“Are the foundations of moral values natural
or supernatural?”
William Lane Craig is Research Professor of
Philosophy at
Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California.
He is best-known among philosophers for his
extensive and
influential work in the philosophy of time
and the philosophy of religion.
He is known to the wider public as someone
who is able to articulate and
defend the doctrines of the Christian faith
in a way that is highly accessible
but also philosophically and theologically
rigorous.
He became a Christian at the age of 16,
pursued undergraduate studies at Wheaton College,
and holds two earned doctorates:
one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham,
and one in theology from the University of
Munich.
He has authored or edited over 30 books, as
well as over a
hundred articles in professional journals
of philosophy and theology.
Known as one of the “Four Horsemen” of
the New Atheist movement,
Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times
best sellers:
The Moral Landscape,The End of Faith, and
Letter to a Christian Nation.
The End of Faith won the 2005 Pen Award for
non-fiction.
Mr. Harris’s writing has been published
in over 15 languages.
He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek,
Time, The New York Times,
Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone,
and many other journals.
His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The
New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The
Times London,
The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, the Annals
of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Mr. Harris is a co-founder and CEO of Project
Reason, a non-profit foundation devoted
to spreading scientific knowledge and secular
values in society.
He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford
University,
and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.
The structure of tonight’s debate will be
as follows: Each debater will take 20 minutes
for his opening speech, followed by rebuttals
of 12 minutes and
8 minutes respectively, and then closing speeches
of 5 minutes each.
At the conclusion of the debate,
we will have about 30 minutes for questions
from the audience.
If you would like to ask a question, line
up behind one of the two microphones in front,
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Time will be kept strictly.
There is a timekeeper in the front who can
be seen by both speakers,
and once each speaker’s time has elapsed,
he will be given at most 15 seconds to finish
his final sentence
before being rudely interrupted by me, the
time enforcer.
Because we are keeping the time strict, we
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Any questions you don’t get to ask during
the 25 or 30 minute Q&A,
you can ask of your local faculty in the days
and weeks to come.
And now, on with the show.
CRAIG: Well, good evening.
It’s wonderful to be here at the University
of Notre Dame, and I want to begin by
MODERATOR: Bill, Sorry.
CRAIG: Sorry.
MODERATOR: I need to—We’re gonna begin
each speech with me checking with the
timekeeper to make sure that he’s ready,
and then the timekeeper is gonna hit “Go”,
and then you get to go—
CRAIG: Alright.
MODERATOR: So, so you go—
CRAIG: Sorry—
MODERATOR: —when I say “Begin”.
CRAIG: Sorry for jumping the gun.
MODERATOR: Professor Craig gets, uh, gets
the first word in the debate,
uh, Dr. Harris gets the last word.
Timekeeper, are you ready? This is 20 minutes. Begin.
CRAIG: I want to begin by thanking the Center
for Philosophy of Religion for the
invitation to participate in tonight’s debate.
The question of the correct foundation of
morality is one that is not only of tremendous
academic interest, but also one that has enormous
practical application for our lives.
Now to begin with an important point of agreement:
Dr. Harris and
I agree that there are objective moral values
and duties.
To say that moral values and duties are objective
is to say that they are valid and
binding independent of human opinion.
For example, to say that the Holocaust was
objectively evil is to say that it was evil,
even though the Nazis who carried it out thought
that it was good,
and it would still have been evil even if
the Nazis had won World War II and
succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating
everyone who disagreed with them,
so that everybody thought the Holocaust was
good.
One of the great merits of Dr. Harris’ recent
book The Moral Landscape is
his bold affirmation of the objectivity of
moral values and duties.
He inveighs against what he calls “the over-educated
atheistic moral nihilist[s]”
and relativists who refuse to condemn as objectively
wrong terrible atrocities like
the genital mutilation of little girls.1
He rightly declares, “If only one person
in the world held down a terrified,
struggling, screaming little girl, cut off
her genitals with a septic blade,
and sewed her back up, … the only question
would be how severely
that person should be punished. ..”2
What is not in question is that such a person
has done something horribly,
objectively, wrong.
The question before us this evening, then,
is,
“what is the best foundation for the existence
of objective moral values and duties?
What grounds them?
What makes certain actions objectively good
or evil, right or wrong?”
In tonight’s debate I’m going to defend
two basic contentions:
1. If God exists, then we have a sound foundation
for objective moral values and duties.
2. If God does not exist, then we do not have
a sound foundation
for objective moral values and duties.
Now notice that these are conditional claims.
I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists.
Maybe Dr. Harris is right that atheism is
true.
That wouldn’t affect the truth of my two
contentions.
All that would follow is that objective moral
values and duties would,
then, contrary to Dr. Harris, not exist.
So, let’s look at that first contention
together:
If God exists, then we have a sound foundation
for objective moral values and duties.
Here, I want to examine two subpoints with
you.
First, theism provides a sound foundation
for objective moral values.
Moral values have to do with what is good
or evil.
On the theistic view objective moral values
are grounded in God.
As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the
greatest conceivable being and
therefore the highest Good.
Indeed, He is not merely perfectly good, He
is the locus and paradigm of moral value.
God’s own holy and loving nature provides
the
absolute standard against which all actions
are measured.
He is by nature loving, generous, faithful,
kind, and so forth.
Thus if God exists, objective moral values
exist, wholly independent of human beings.
Second, theism provides a sound foundation
for objective moral duties.
On a theistic view objective moral duties
are constituted by God’s commands.
God’s moral nature is expressed in relation
to us in the form of
divine commandments which constitute our moral
duties or obligations.
Far from being arbitrary, God’s commandments
must be consistent with
His holy and loving nature.
Our duties, then, are constituted by God’s
commandments and
these in turn reflect his essential character.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole
moral duty of
man can be summed up in the two great commandments:
First,
you shall love the Lord your God with all
your strength and with all your soul and with
all
your heart and with all your mind, and, second,
you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On this foundation we can affirm the objective
rightness of love, generosity,
self-sacrifice, and equality, and condemn
as objectively wrong selfishness,
hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression.
In summary, then, theism has the resources
for a sound foundation for morality:
it grounds both objective moral values and
objective moral duties; and hence,
I think it’s evident that if God exists,
we have a sound foundation for objective moral
values and duties.
Let’s turn, then, to my second contention,
that if God does not exist,
then we do not have a sound foundation for
objective moral values and duties.
Consider first the question of objective moral
values.
If God does not exist, then what basis remains
for the existence of objective moral values?
In particular, why think that human beings
would have objective moral worth?
On the atheistic view human beings are just
accidental byproducts of nature
which have evolved relatively recently on
an infinitesimal speck of dust called the
planet Earth, and which are doomed to perish
individually and
collectively in a relatively short time.
On atheism it’s hard to see any reason to
think that human well-being is objectively
good,
anymore than insect well-being or rat well-being
or hyena well-being.
This is what Dr. Harris calls “The Value
Problem”.3
The purpose of Dr. Harris’ book The Moral
Landscape is to explain the basis,
on atheism, of the existence of objective
moral values. 4
He explicitly rejects the view that moral
values are Platonic objects
existing independent of the world. 5
So his only recourse is to try to ground moral
values in the natural world.
But how can you do that, since nature in and
of itself is just morally neutral?
On a naturalistic view moral values are just
the behavioral byproducts of
biological evolution and social conditioning.
Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative
and even self-sacrificial behavior
because natural selection has determined it
to be advantageous in the struggle for survival,
so their primate cousins homo sapiens have
evolved a sort of
herd morality for precisely the same reasons.
As a result of socio-biological pressures
there has evolved among homo sapiens a sort
of
herd morality which functions well in the
perpetuation of our species.
But on the atheistic view there doesn’t
seem to be anything that makes
this morality objectively binding and true.
The philosopher of science Michael Ruse reports,
The position of the modern evolutionist … is
that humans have an awareness of
morality … because such an awareness is
of biological worth.
Morality is a biological adaptation no less
than are hands and feet and teeth.
…Considered as a rationally justifiable
set of claims about an objective something,
ethics is illusory.
I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love
thy neighbor as thyself,’
they think they are referring above and beyond
themselves.
… Nevertheless, … such reference is truly
without foundation.
Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction,
…
and any deeper meaning is illusory …6
If we were to rewind the film of human evolution
and start anew,
people with a very different set of moral
values might well have evolved.
As Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of
Man, If … men were reared under precisely
the same conditions as hive-bees,
there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried
females would, like the worker-bees,
think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers,
and mothers would strive to kill their fertile
daughters,
and no one would think of interfering.7
For us to think that human beings are special
and our morality is objectively true is
to succumb to the temptation to species-ism,
that is to say an
unjustified bias in favor of one’s own species.
If there is no God, then any reason for regarding
the herd morality evolved by
homo sapiens on this planet as objectively
true seems to have been removed.
Take God out of the picture, and all you seem
to be left with is an ape-like creature on
a speck of dust beset with delusions of moral
grandeur.
Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth
may be depressing, but why,
on atheism, is he mistaken, when he says,
“there is at bottom no design, no purpose,
no evil,
no good, nothing but pointless indifference.
...
We are machines for propagating DNA. ...
It is every living object’s sole reason
for being”?8
So how does Sam Harris propose to solve the
Value Problem?
The trick he proposes is simply to re-define
what he means by “good” and
“evil”, in non-moral terms.
He says, “We should “define ‘good’
as that which supports [the] well-being”
of conscious creatures. 9
So, he says, “questions about values ...
are really questions about the well-being
of conscious creatures.”10
And therefore, he concludes, “it makes no
sense ...
to ask whether maximizing well-being is ‘good’.”11
Why not? Because he’s redefined the word
“good”
to mean the well-being of conscious creatures.
So to ask, “Why is maximizing creatures’
well-being good?”
is on his definition the same as asking,
“Why does maximizing creatures’ well-being
maximize creatures’ well-being?”
It’s just a tautology.
It’s just talking in circles! So Dr. Harris
has “solved” the
Value Problem just by re-defining his terms.
It’s nothing but wordplay.
At the end of the day Dr. Harris isn’t really
talking about moral values at all.
He’s just talking about what’s conducive
to the flourishing of sentient life on this
planet.
Seen in this light, his claim that science
can tell us a great deal about what contributes
to human flourishing is hardly controversial.
Of course, it can--just as it can tell us
what is conducive to the
flourishing of corn or mosquitoes or bacteria.
His so-called “moral landscape”,
which features the highs and lows of human
flourishing isn’t really a moral landscape
at all.
Thus Dr. Harris has failed to solve the Value
Problem.
He hasn’t provided any justification or
explanation for why,
on atheism, moral values would objectively
exist at all.
His so-called “solution” is just a semantical
trick of an arbitrary and
idiosyncratic re-definition of the terms “good”
and “evil” in non-moral vocabulary.
Second question: does atheism provide a sound
foundation for objective moral duties?
Duty has to do with moral obligation or prohibition,
what I ought or ought not to do.
Here, the reviewers of The Moral Landscape
have been merciless in
pounding Dr. Harris’s attempt to provide
a naturalistic account of moral obligation.
Two problems stand out.
First, natural science tells us only what
is, not what ought to be, the case.
As the philosopher Jerry Fodor has written,
“Science is about facts, not norms;
it might tell us how we are, but it wouldn’t
tell us what is wrong with how we are. ”12
In particular it cannot tell us that we have
a moral obligation
to take actions which are conducive to human
flourishing.
So, if there is no God, what foundation remains
for objective moral duties?
On the naturalistic view, human beings are
just animals,
and animals have no moral obligation to one
another.
When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra,
but it doesn’t murder the zebra.
When a great white shark forcibly copulates
with a female, it forcibly copulates
with her but it doesn’t rapeher--for none
of these actions is forbidden or obligatory.
There is no moral dimension to these actions.
So if God does not exist, why think that we
have any moral obligations to do anything?
Who or what imposes these obligations upon
us?
Where do they come from?
It’s very hard to see why they would be
anything more than a
subjective impression ingrained into us by
societal and parental conditioning.
On the atheistic view, certain actions such
as rape and incest may not be biologically
and
socially advantageous, and so in the course
of human development have become taboo,
that is, socially unacceptable behavior.
But, that does absolutely nothing to prove
that such acts are really wrong.
Such behavior goes on all the time in the
animal kingdom.
On the atheistic view the rapist who chooses
to flout the “herd morality” is doing
nothing
more serious than acting unfashionably, the
moral equivalent, if you will, of Lady Gaga.
If there is no moral lawgiver, then there
is no objective moral law,
and if there is no objective moral law, then
we have no objective moral duties.
Thus, Dr. Harris’s view lacks any source
for objective moral duty.
Second problem: “ought” implies “can.”
A person is not morally responsible for an
action which he is unable to avoid.
For example, if somebody shoves you into another
person,
you’re not responsible for bumping into
him.
You had no choice.
But Sam Harris believes that all of our actions
are causally determined and
that there is no free will. 13
Dr. Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts
of
free will but also compatibilistic accounts
of freedom.
But, if there is no free will, then no one
is morally responsible for anything! In the
end,
Dr. Harris admits this, though it’s tucked
away in the endnotes of his volume.
Moral responsibility, he says, and I quote,
“is a social construct,” not an objective
reality:
I quote: “in neuroscientific terms no person
is more or less responsible than any other”
for the actions they perform.14
His thoroughgoing determinism spells the end
of any hope or possibility of
objective moral duties because on his worldview
we have no control over what we do.
Thus, on Dr. Harris’ view there is no source
of objective moral duties because there is
no
moral law-giver, and no possibility of objective
moral duty, because there is no free will.
Therefore, on his view, despite his protestations
to the contrary,
right and wrong do not really exist.
Thus, Dr. Harris’s naturalistic view fails
to provide a sound foundation for
objective moral values and duties.
Hence, if God does not exist, we do not have
a sound foundation for objective morality,
which is my second contention.
In conclusion then, we’ve seen that if God
exists, we have a sound foundation for
objective moral values and objective moral
duties, but that if God does not exist,
then we do not have a sound foundation for
objective moral values and duties.
Dr. Harris’ atheism thus sits very ill with
his ethical theory.
What I’m offering Dr. Harris tonight is
not a new set of moral values--I think by and
large we share the same applied ethics--rather
what I’m offering is a sound foundation
for the objective moral values and duties
that we both hold dear.
Thank you very much.
Moderator: Dr. Harris now has 20 minutes.
Timekeeper, are you ready?
Begin.
Harris: I just want to say, it’s an honor
to be here at Notre Dame,
and I’m very happy to be debating Dr. Craig,
the one Christian apologist who seems to have
put the fear
of God into many of my fellow atheists.
I’ve actually gotten more than a few emails
this week, that more or less read,
“Brother, please, don’t blow this.”
So, you will be the judge.
Now, as many of you know, I’ve spent a fair
amount of time criticizing religion.
And one of the perks of this job is that you
immediately hear from all the
people who think that criticizing religion
is a terrible thing to do.
And, strangely, the reason people rise to
the defense of God is not that there’s so
much
evidence that God exists, but that they believe
that belief in God is the
only intellectual framework for an objective
morality.
And, clearly, Dr. Craig is among their number.
Now, the sense is, that without the conviction
that moral truths exist,
that words like “right” and “wrong”,
“good” and “evil”, actually mean something,
humanity will just lose its way.
That’s the fear.
And I actually share that fear.
I’ve come to believe that this, this concern
that many religious people have,
of the erosion of secular morality, is not
an entirely empty one.
Now I once spoke at an academic meeting on
these themes,
and I, and I said, as I will say tonight,
that once we understand morality in terms
of
human well-being, we’ll be able to make
strong claims about which behaviors and
ways of life are good for us and which aren’t.
And I cited, as an example, the sadism and
misogyny of the Taliban as an example of
a worldview that was less than perfectly conducive
to human flourishing.
And it turns out, that to denigrate the Taliban
at a scientific meeting is
to court controversy, and after my remarks
I, I fell into debate with another uh,
invited speaker, and this is more or less
exactly how our conversation went.
She said, “How could you ever say that forcing
women to wear burqas is wrong from the
point of view of science?”
I said, “Well, because I think it’s pretty
clear that right and wrong relate
to human well-being, and it’s just as clear
that forcing half the population to live in
cloth bags and beating them, or killing them
when they try to get out, is not a way of
maximizing human well-being.”
And she said, “Well, that’s just your
opinion.” And I said,
“Well, okay, let’s make it even easier.
Let’s say we found a culture that was literally
removing the eyeballs of every third child,
ok, at birth.
Would you then agree that we have found a
culture that is not perfectly maximizing well-being?”
And she said, “It would depend on why they
were doing it.”
So after my eyebrows returned from the back
of my head, I said,
“Okay, well say they were doing it for religious
reasons.
Let’s say they have a scripture which says,
‘Every third should walk in darkness.’
or some such nonsense.”
And then she said, “Well, then you could
never say that they were wrong.”
Okay, and so I, I—you should know,
I was talking to someone who has a deep background
in science and philosophy.
She’s actually since been appointed to the
President’s Council on Bioethics.
She’s one of thirteen people advising the
President on the ethical implications of
advances in medicine and, and uh, related
sciences and technology,
and she had just delivered a perfectly lucid
lecture on the moral implications of
neuroscience for the courts.
And she was especially concerned that we could
be subjecting captured terrorists
to lie-detection neuro-imaging technology–—and
she viewed this as, as really an
unconscionable violation of cognitive liberty.
So on the one hand, her moral scruples were
very finely calibrated to recoil from the
slightest perceived misstep in ethical terms
in our War on Terror;
and yet she was quite willing to forgive some
primitive culture its fondness for
removing the eyeballs of children in its religious
rituals.
And she seemed to me quite terrifyingly detached
from the real suffering of millions
of women in Afghanistan at this moment.
So, I see this double standard as a problem.
And strangely, this is precisely the erosion
of basic common sense that
many religious people are worried about.
I hope it’ll be clear to you, at the end
of this hour,
that religion is not an answer to this problem,
ok.
Belief in God is not only unnecessary for
a universal morality, it’s, it’s, it’s,
it is itself
a source of moral blindness.
Now, it’s widely believed that there are
two quantities in this universe—there are
facts,
on the one hand, and of course science can
give us our most rigorous discussion of these;
but then there are values, which many people,
like Dr. Craig, think science can’t touch;
questions of meaning, and morality, and what
life is good for.
Now of course, everyone thinks that science
can help us get what we value, ok, but it
can
be applied to the most important questions
in human life–—questions like
how we should raise our children, or what
constitutes a good life.
Now, it’s thought, from the point of view
of science,
and Dr. Craig just gave voice to this opinion,
that when we look at the universe,
all we see are patterns of events–—just
one thing follows another–—and there’s
no corner
of the universe that declares certain of its
events to be good or evil,
or right or wrong apart from us.
I mean, our minds—–we declare certain
events to be better than others.
But in doing that, it seems that we’re merely
projecting our own values and
desires onto a reality that is intrinsically
value-free.
And where do our notions of right and wrong
come from?
Well clearly they’ve been drummed into us
by evolution.
They’re the product of these apish urges
and social emotions;
and then they get modulated by culture.
If you take sexual jealousy, for instance.
This is an attitude that has been bred into
us, over millions of years, ok.
Our ancestors were highly covetous of one
another,
despite the fact that everyone was covered
with hair,
and had terrible teeth; and this,
this possessiveness now gets enshrined in
various cultural institutions like the
institution of marriage, ok.
So therefore, a statement like, “It’s
wrong to cheat on one’s spouse”,
ok, seems a mere summation of these contingencies.
It seems like it, it, it’s an improvisation
on the back of biology, ok.
It seems that, that, that from the point of
view of science,
it can’t really be wrong to cheat on your
spouse, ok.
This is just, just how apes like ourselves
worry, when we learn to worry with words,
ok.
Now here is where religious people, like Dr.
Craig,
begin to get a little queasy, as I think they
should.
And many see no alternative but to insert
the God of Abraham—–an Iron Age god of
war–—into the clockwork, as an invisible
arbiter of moral truth.
It is wrong to cheat on your spouse because
Yahweh deems that it is so.
Which is curious, because in other moods,
Yahweh is perfectly fond of genocide, and
slavery, and human sacrifice.
I must say, it’s pretty amusing to hear
Dr. Craig in his opening remarks say that
I’m merely focused on the flourishing of
sentient creatures on this planet.
If that’s a sin, I’ll take it.
One wonders what Dr. Craig is focused on.
Now, incidentally, you should not trust Dr.
Craig’s reading of me.
Half the quotes he provided “from me”
as though I wrote them were quotes from people
I was quoting in my book and often to different
effect.
So you’ll have to read the book.
Now, in claiming that values reduce to the
well-being of conscious creatures—–as
I
will–—uh, I’m introducing two concepts:
Consciousness and well-being.
Now, let’s start with consciousness—–this
is not an arbitrary starting point.
Imagine a universe devoid of the possibility
of consciousness–—imagine a
universe entirely constituted of rocks.
Ok, there’s clearly no happiness or suffering
in this universe;
there’s no good or evil; value judgments
don’t apply.
For, for changes in the universe to matter,
they have to matter,
at least potentially, to some conscious system.
Ok, what about well-being? Well, the well-being
of conscious creatures,
and the, and the link between that and morality,
may seem open to doubt,
but it shouldn’t.
Ok, here’s the only assumption you have
to make.
Imagine a universe in which every conscious
creatures suffers as much as it possibly can,
for as long as it can.
Ok, I call this “the worst possible misery
for everyone”.
Ok, the worst possible misery for everyone
is bad.
Ok, if, if, if the word “bad” applies
anywhere, it applies here.
Now, if you think the worst possible misery
for everyone isn’t bad,
or maybe it has a silver lining, or maybe
there’s something worse,
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
And what’s more, I’m pretty sure you don’t
know what you’re talking about either.
The—what I’m saying is, the minimum standard
of
moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible
misery for everyone.
If we should do anything in this universe,
if we ought to do anything,
if we have a moral duty to do anything,
it’s to avoid the worst possible misery
for everyone.
And the moment you admit this, you admit that,
that, that all other possible states
of the universe are better than the worst
possible misery for everyone.
You have the worst possible misery for everyone
over here,
and all these other constellation of experiences
arrayed out here,
and because the experience of conscious creatures
is dependent in some way on the laws
of nature, there will be right and wrong ways
to move along this continuum.
It will be possible to think that you’re
avoiding the
worst possible misery for everyone—–and
to fail.
You can be wrong in your beliefs about how
to navigate this space.
So here’s my argument, for moral truth in
the context of science.
Questions of right and wrong, and good and
evil, depend upon minds.
They depend upon the possibility of experience.
Minds are natural phenomena.
They depend upon the laws of nature in some
way.
Morality and human values, therefore, can
be understood through science,
because in talking about these things,
we are talking about all of the facts that
influence the well-being of conscious creatures.
In our case, we’re talking about genetics,
and neurobiology,
and psychology, and sociology, and economics.
Now, I view this space of all possible experience
as a kind of moral landscape,
with peaks that correspond to the heights
of well-being,
and valleys that correspond to the lowest
suffering.
And the first thing to realize,
is that there may be many equivalent peaks
on this landscape.
There may be many different, but morally-equivalent
ways for human beings to thrive.
But there will be many more ways not to thrive.
There will be many more ways to fail to be
on a peak.
There are clearly many more ways to suffer
unnecessarily in
this world than to be sublimely happy.
Now, the Taliban are still my favorite example,
of a culture that is struggling mightily to
build a society that’s clearly less good
than many other societies on offer.
Ok, the average lifespan for women in Afghanistan
is 44 years.
Ok, they have a 12% literacy rate.
They have the highest, almost the highest
infant mortality and maternal mortality in
the
world—–and also almost the highest fertility—–so
this is one of the best places on
Earth to watch women and infants die.
Ok, it seems to me perfectly obvious that
the,
the best response to this dire situation—–which
is to say the most moral response—–is
not
to throw battery acid in the faces of little
girls for the crime of learning to read.
Now of course, this is common sense to us,
unless you happen to be a bioethicist on the
President’s commission at this moment.
But I’m saying, at bottom, it is also, these
are also truths about biology, and neurology,
and psychology, and sociology, and economics.
It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban
are wrong about morality,
that the moment we notice that we know anything
at all about human well-being,
we have to say this.
Ok, now some people with a little philosophical
training may be tempted to say,
“What if a father wants to burn off his
daughter’s face with battery acid?
Who are you to say that he’s not as moral
as we are?
What if he has an alternate conception of
well-being that’s just as legitimate?”
or,
“Who’s to say that we should care about
the well-being of little girls?”
This is the kind of email I get, incidentally.
Now, moral skeptics of this kind, and
Dr. Craig has essentially endorsed this position,
in a way,
without God, think that the only way to judge
one person’s values to be wrong
are with respect to another person’s values,
and all such judgments have to be on a par.
Ok, this is not true.
There, there are many ways for my values to
be objectively wrong.
They can be, they can be wrong with respect
to deeper values that I hold.
They can be wrong with respect to deeper values
that
I would hold if I were only a deeper person.
It’s clearly possible to value things that
reliably make you miserable in this life.
Ok, it’s clearly possible to be cognitively
and emotionally closed to experiences that
you
would want if you were only intelligent and
knowledgeable enough to want them.
It is possible not to know what one is missing
in life.
So things can be right or wrong, or good and
evil,
quite independent of a person’s opinions.
Now, some of you might worry that I haven’t
defined “well-being” enough.
How can something this loose as a concept
be the, the,
the benchmark of, of, uh, objective values?
Well, consider by analogy the concept of physical
health.
Physical health is very difficult to define,
you know.
It used to be that if you were “healthy”
you could expect to live to the ripe old age
of forty.
Even now, our lifespan, our life expectancy
has doubled in the last 150 years.
What, what does “health” mean?
Well, it has something to do with not always
vomiting, ok,
not being in excruciating pain, not running
a fever.
Ok but how fast should a “healthy” person
be able to run?
That question might not have an answer,
but this does not make the question of health
vacuous.
Ok, it doesn’t make it merely a matter of
opinion, or of cultural construction.
The distinction between a healthy person and
a dead one is about as clear and consequential
as any we ever make in science.
Ok, and notice that no one is ever tempted
to attack the
philosophical underpinnings of medicine with
questions like,
“Well, who are you to say that not always
vomiting is healthy?
What if you meet someone who wants to vomit,
and he wants to vomit until he dies, ok?
How could you argue that he is not as healthy
as you are?”
In talking about morality and human values,
I think we really are talking about mental
health and the health of societies.
And the truth is, science has always been
in the values business.
We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting
to values.
Consider the simplest statement of scientific
fact:
Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
This seems as value-free an utterance as human
beings ever make.
But what do we do when someone doubts the
truth of this proposition?
Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific
values.
The value of understanding the world.
The value of evidence.
The value of logical consistency.
What if someone says, “Well, that’s not
how I choose to think about water.
Ok, I’m Biblical chemist, and I read in
Genesis 1 that God created water before he
created light.
So I take that to mean that there were no
stars.
So there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and
helium into heavier elements like oxygen;
therefore there was no oxygen to put in the
water,
so either God created, either water has no
oxygen,
or God created special oxygen to put in the
water—but I don’t think he would do that,
because that would be Biblically inelegant.”
Ok, what can we say to such a person? Ok,
all we can do is appeal to scientific values.
And if he doesn’t share those values, the
conversation is over.
Ok, if someone doesn’t value evidence, what
evidence are you going to
provide to prove that they should value it?
If someone doesn’t value logic,
what logical argument could you provide to
show the importance of logic?
Ok, so this, this,
I think this split between facts and values
should look really strange to you on its face.
I mean, what are we really saying when we
say that science can’t be applied
to the most important questions in human life? Ok,
we’re saying that when we get our biases
out of the way,
when we, when we most fully rely on clear
reasoning and honest observation, when,
when intellectual honesty is at its zenith,
well, then those efforts have no
application whatsoever to the most important
questions of human life.
That is precisely the mood you cannot be in
to answer the
most important questions in human life.
It would be very strange if that were so.
MODERATOR: Professor Craig now has 12 minutes
for rebuttal.
Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.
CRAIG: You’ll recall in my first speech
that I said
I was going to defend two basic contentions
tonight.
First, that if God exists, then we have a
sound foundation for objective moral values
and duties.
First, I explained that if God exists, then
objective moral values are grounded in the
character of God himself, who is essentially
compassionate, fair,
kind, generous, and so forth.
Here Dr. Harris didn’t have anything by
way of disagreement to say,
but I do want to clear up a possible confusion.
He represented this by saying that if religion
were not true,
then words like “right” and “wrong”
and “good” and “evil” would have no
meaning.
I’m not maintaining that.
That is to confuse moral ontology with moral
semantics.
Moral ontology asks, “What is the foundation
of objective moral values and duties?”
Moral semantics asks, “What is the meaning
of moral terms?” And I am not making any
kind of semantical claim tonight that “good”
means something like “commanded by God”.
Rather, my concern is moral ontology:
What is the ground, or foundation, of moral
values and duties?
To give an illustration, think of light.
Light is a certain visible range of the electromagnetic
spectrum.
But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of
the word “light”.
People knew how to use the word “light”
long before they discovered its physical nature.
And, I might also add, they certainly knew
the difference between light and
darkness long before they understood the physics
of light.
Now, in exactly the same way, we can know
the meaning of moral terms like “good”
and
“evil”, “right” and “wrong”, and
know the difference between good and evil,
without being aware that the good is grounded
in God ontologically.
So, that is the position I am defending tonight,
that moral values are
grounded ontologically in God.
Second, that our moral duties are grounded
by God’s commandments,
which are a necessary reflection of his nature.
Here the only response that I detected from
Dr. Harris was to refer to the atrocities
in
the Hebrew Bible.
But I think this is quite irrelevant to tonight’s
discussion; there are plenty of Divine
Command theorists who are not Jews or Christians
and place no stock whatsoever in the Bible.
So this isn’t an objection to Divine Command
theory that I’m defending tonight.
Now, if you are interested in biblical ethics,
I want to highly recommend Paul Copan’s
new book Is God a Moral Monster?,
which examines those passages in the Hebrew
Bible in light of the Ancient Near East.15
And I can guarantee you, it will be a very
enlightening and interesting read.
But this issue is strictly irrelevant in tonight’s
debate.
So we’ve not heard any objection to a theistic
grounding for ethics.
If God does exist, it’s clear, I think—obvious
even—that we have a
sound foundation for objective moral values
and duties.
Now, what if God does not exist?
Is there a sound foundation, first of all,
for objective moral values?
Now here, Dr. Harris said, “You don’t
need religion in order to have universal morality.”
Again, that’s a confusion.
Of course, you don’t! Remember, the Nazis,
for example,
could have won World War II and established
a universal morality.
The issue isn’t universality, the issue
is objectivity.
And I’m maintaining that in the absence
of God, there isn’t any reason, any explanation,
for the existence of objective moral values.
Now Dr. Harris says, “But we can imagine
creatures being in the worst possible misery,
and it’s obviously better for creatures
to be flourishing—the well-being of conscious
creatures is good.”
Well, of course, it is.
That’s not the question.
We agree that, all things being equal, flourishing
of conscious creatures is good.
The question is rather, if atheism were true,
what would make the flourishing of
conscious creatures objectively good?
Conscious creatures might like to flourish,
but there’s no reason on atheism
to think that it would really be objectively
good.
Now here Dr. Harris, I think, is guilty of
misusing, uh, terms like “good” and “bad”,
“right” and “wrong”, in equivocal
ways.
He will often use them in non-moral senses.
For example, he’ll say there are objectively
good and bad moves in chess.16
Now that’s clearly not a moral use of the
terms “good” and “bad”.
You just mean they’re not apt to win or
produce a winning strategy.
It’s not evil, what you’ve done.
And similarly, in ordinary English, we use
the words “good” and
“bad” in a number of non-moral ways.
For example, we say Notre Dame has a “good”
team.
Now we can hope it’s an ethical team, but
that’s not what’s indicated by the
win-loss record! That—that is a different
meaning of “good”.
Or we say, “That’s a good way to get yourself
killed!” or “That’s a good game plan”
or
“The sunshine felt good” or “That’s
a good route to East Lansing” or
“There’s no good reason to do that”
or “She’s in good health”.
All of these are non-moral uses of the word
“good”.
And Dr. Harris’s contrast of the good life
and the bad life is not an
ethical contrast between a morally good life
and an evil life.
It’s a contrast between a pleasurable life
and a miserable life.
And there’s no reason to equate “pleasure/misery”
with “good” and “evil”--especially
on
atheism! So there’s just no reason that’s
been given,
on atheism, for thinking the flourishing of
conscious creatures is objectively good.
But Dr. Harris has to defend an even more
radical claim than that:
Uh, he claims that the property of being good
is identical with the
property of creaturely flourishing.
And he’s not offered any defense of this
radical identity claim.
In fact, I think we have a knock-down argument
against it.
Now bear with me here; this is a little technical.
On the next-to-last page of his book, Dr.
Harris makes the telling admission that if
people like rapists, liars, and thieves could
be just as happy as good people,
then his “moral landscape” would no longer
be a moral landscape.17
Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being
whose peaks are occupied by good and
bad people, or evil people, alike.
Now what’s interesting about this is that
earlier in the book,
Dr. Harris explained that about three million
Americans are psychopathic.18
That is to say, they don’t care about the
mental states of others.
They enjoy inflicting pain on other people.
But that implies that there’s a possible
world, which we can conceive,
in which the continuum of human well-being
is not a moral landscape.
The peaks of well-being could be occupied
by evil people.
But that entails that in the actual world,
the continuum of well-being and
the moral landscape are not identical either.
For identity is a necessary relation.
There is no possible world in which some entity
A is not identical to A.
So if there’s any possible world in which
A is not identical to B,
then it follows that A is not in fact identical
to B.
Now since it’s possible that human well-being
and moral goodness are not identical,
it follows necessarily that human well-being
and goodness are not the same,
as Dr. Harris has asserted in his book.
Now it’s not often in philosophy that you
get a knock-down argument against a position.
But I think we’ve got one here.
Uh, by granting that it’s possible that
the continuum of well-being is not identical
to the
moral landscape, Dr. Harris’s view becomes
logically incoherent.
And all of this goes to underline my fundamental
point that on atheism,
there’s just no reason to identify the well-being
of conscious creatures with moral goodness.
Atheism cannot explain the reality—the objective
reality—of moral values.
What about objective moral duties?
I first argued from the is/ought distinction
that there is no basis on, uh, atheism,
for thinking that we have any moral val—uh,
duties.
And here Dr. Harris says, “If we have a
moral duty to do anything, we have a duty,
uh, to avoid the worst possible misery”.
But the question is the antecedent of that
conditional:
“If we have a moral duty to do anything.”
What I’m arguing is that on atheism,
I don’t see any reason to think we have
any moral duties to do anything.
Moral obligations or prohibitions arise in
response
to imperatives from a competent authority.
For example, if a policeman tells you to pull
over,
then because of his authority, who he is,
you are legally obligated to pull over.
But if some random stranger tells you to pull
over, you’re not legally obligated to do
so.
Now, in the absence of God, what authority
is there to issue moral commands or prohibitions?
There is none on atheism, and therefore there
are no moral imperatives for us to obey.
In the absence of God there just isn’t any
sort of moral obligation or
prohibition that characterizes our lives.
In particular, we’re not morally obligated
to promote the flourishing of conscious creatures.
So this is/ought distinction seems to me to
be one that’s fatal to Dr. Harris’s position
and
has been widely recognized as such by reviewers
of The Moral Landscape.
But secondly, the problem that’s even worse
is the “ought implies can” problem.
In the absence of the ability to do otherwise,
there is no moral responsibility.
In the absence of freedom of the will, we
are just puppets or electro-chemical machines.
And puppets do not have moral responsibilities.
Machines are not moral agents.
But on Dr. Harris’s view, there is no freedom
of the will, either in a libertarian or a
compatibilistic sense, and therefore, there
is no moral responsibility.
So there isn’t even the possibility of moral
duty on his view.
So while I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris’s
affirmation of the objectivity of
moral values and moral duties, at the end
of the day his philosophical
worldview just doesn’t ground these entities
that we both want to affirm.
If God exists, then we clearly have a sound
foundation for objective moral values and
moral duties.
But if God does not exist, that is, if atheism
is true,
then there is no basis for the affirmation
of objective moral values;
and there is no ground for objective moral
duties because there is no moral lawgiver
and
there is no freedom of the will.
And therefore it seems to me that atheism
is simply bereft of the
adequate ontological foundations to establish
the moral life.
MODERATOR: Dr. Harris now has 12 minutes.
Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.
Harris: Well, that was all very interesting.
Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending
eternity in Hell?
Well, I, I’m told it’s rather hot there,
for one.
Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view
of morality.
Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so
it is imagined,
is to safeguard the eternal well-being of
human souls.
Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence
that the Christian Hell exists.
I think we should look at the consequences
of believing in this framework,
this theistic framework, in this world, and
what these moral underpinnings actually would
be.
Alright, nine million children die every year
before they reach the age of five.
ok, picture, picture a, a a Asian tsunami
of the sort we saw in 2004,
that killed a quarter of a million people.
One of those, every ten days, killing children
only under five.
Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a
thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute.
That means before I can get to the end of
this sentence, some few children,
very likely, will have died in terror and
agony.
Ok,, think of, think of the parents of these
children.
Think of the fact that most of these men and
women believe in God,
and are praying at this moment for their children
to be spared.
And their prayers will not be answered.
Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all
part of God’s plan.
Any God who would allow children by the millions
to suffer and die in this way,
and their parents to grieve in this way, either
can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t
care to.
He is therefore either impotent or evil.
And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view,
most of these people—–many of these people,
certainly—–will be going to Hell because
they’re praying to the wrong God.
Just think about that.
Ok, through no fault of their own, they were
born into the wrong culture,
where they got the wrong theology, and they
missed the revelation.
Ok, there are 1.2 billion people in India
at this moment.
Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore
are polytheists.
Ok, in Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how
good these people are, they are doomed.
If you are, if you are praying to the Monkey
God Hanuman, you are doomed, ok.
You’ll be tortured in Hell for eternity.
Now, is there the slightest evidence for this?
No.
It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13,
and Revelation 14.
Ok, perhaps you’ll remember from The Lord
of the Rings,
it says when the elves die, they go to Valanor,
but they can be reborn in Middle Earth.
I say that just as a point of comparison.
Ok, so God created the cultural isolation
of the Hindus, ok.
He engineered the circumstance of their deaths
in ignorance of revelation,
and then he created the penalty for this ignorance,
which is an eternity of conscious torment
in fire.
Ok, on the other hand, on Dr. Craig’s account,
your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America,
ok,
who spent his life raping and torturing children,
need only come to God,
come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final
meal of fried chicken,
he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven
after death, ok.
One thing should be crystal clear to you:
This vision of life has absolutely nothing
to do with moral accountability.
Ok, and please notice the double standard
that people like Dr. Craig use
to exonerate God from all this evil, ok.
We’re told that God is loving, and kind,
and just, and
intrinsically good; but when someone like
myself points out the rather obvious and
compelling evidence that God is cruel and
unjust,
because he visits suffering on innocent people,
of a scope and scale that
would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath,
we’re told that God is mysterious, ok.
“Who can understand God’s will?”
Ok and yet, this is precisely—this, this,
this “merely human” understanding of God’s
will,
is precisely what believers use to establish
his goodness in the first place.
You know, something good happens to a Christian,
he feels some bliss while praying, say,
or he sees some positive change in his life,
and we’re told that God is good.
But when children by the tens of thousands
are torn from their parents’ arms and
drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious,
ok.
This is how you play tennis without the net.
And I want to suggest to you, that it is not
only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people
speak this way, it is morally reprehensible.
Ok, this kind of faith, is, is really the
perfection of narcissism.
“God loves me, dontcha know.
He, he cured me of my eczema.
He makes me feel so good while singing in
church, and,
and just when we had given up hope,
we found a banker who was willing to reduce
my mother’s mortgage.”
Ok given all the good—all that this God
of yours does not accomplish in
the lives of others, given, given the, the
misery that’s being imposed on
some helpless child at this instant, this
kind of faith is obscene.
Ok, to think in this way is to fail to reason
honestly,
or to care sufficiently about the suffering
of other human beings.
And if God is good and loving and just and
kind,
and he wanted to guide us morally with a book,
why give us a book that supports slavery?
Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill
people for imaginary crimes,
like witchcraft.
Now, of course, there is a way of not taking
these questions to heart, ok.
According to Dr. Craig’s Divine Command
theory,
God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t
have to be good.
Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands
that the Israelites to slaughter the
Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically
good because he commanded it.
Ok, well here we’re being offered—I’m
glad he raised the issue of psychopathy—we
are
being offered a psychopathic and psychotic
moral attitude.
It’s psychotic because this is completely
delusional.
There’s no reason to believe that we live
in a universe ruled by an
invisible monster Yahweh.
But it is, it is psychopathic because this
is a total detachment from the,
from the well-being of human beings.
It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter
of children.
Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment
who are blowing themselves up,
convinced that they are agents of God’s
will.
There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig
can s—can say against their behavior,
in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based
claim that they’re praying to the wrong
God.
If they had the right God, what they were
doing would be good,
on Divine Command theory.
Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that
Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are
psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me
is the true horror of religion.
It allows perfectly decent and sane people
to believe by the billions,
what only lunatics could believe on their
own.
If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that
saying a few Latin words over your
pancakes is gonna turn them into the body
of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind.
But if you think more or less the same thing
about a cracker and the body of Jesus,
you’re just a Catholic.
And, and I’m not the first person to notice
that it’s a,
it’s a very strange sort of loving God who
would make salvation depend on
believing in him on bad evidence.
Ok, it’s, it’s, I mean, if you lived 2,000
years ago,
there was evidence galore, I mean, he was
just performing miracles.
But apparently, he got tired of being so helpful.
And so now, we all inherit this very heavy
burden of the doctrine’s implausibility.
And, and, and, and the effort to square it
with what we now know about the cosmos and
what we know about the all-too-human origins
of Scripture becomes more and
more difficult.
Ok, and, and, and it’s not just the generic
God that Dr. Craig is recommending;
it is God the Father and Jesus the Son.
Christianity, on Dr. Craig’s account, is
the true moral wealth of the world.
Well, I hate to break it to you, here at Notre
Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human
sacrifice.
Christianity is not a religion that cel—that
repudiates human sacrifice.
It is a religion that celebrates a single
human sacrifice as though it were effective.
“God so loved the world that he gave his
only son.” John 3:16.
Okay, the idea is that Jesus suffered the
crucifixion so that none need
suffer Hell—except those billions in India,
and billions like them throughout history.
Ok, this is, this is, this is astride, this
doctrine is astride a contemptible history
of
scientific ignorance and religious barbarism.
We come from people who used to bury children
under the foundations of
new buildings as offerings to their imaginary
gods.
Ok, just think about that.
There, in vast numbers of societies, people
would bury children in
postholes–—people like ourselves—–thinking
that this would prevent an
invisible being from knocking down their buildings.
These are the sorts of people who wrote the
Bible.
Ok, if there is a less moral, moral framework
than the one Dr. Craig is proposing,
I haven’t heard of it.
MODERATOR: Professor Craig now has 8 minutes
for a rebuttal.
Timekeeper, are you ready?
Begin.
CRAIG: The less moral framework is atheism!
Atheism has no grounds for objective moral
values or duties.
And it’s interesting that in that last speech,
I was disappointed to hear no defense given
of that crucial, uh,
second contention that I offered against Dr.
Harris’s view.
Remember, we talked about the Value Problem.
I gave what I consider a knock-down argument
to show that the
moral landscape is not identical to the continuum
of human flourishing.
We talked about objective moral duties, the
“is vs. ought” distinction,
the “ought implies can” problem.
None of these have been responded to.
So if you want a really desperate moral system,
try atheism!
There’s no foundation for objective moral
values and duties there.
Now, what about theism?
Does it do any better?
Well, in the last speech, we heard some attacks
on my first contention,
that God provides a sound foundation for morality.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of
these were red herrings.
A red herring is a smelly old fish that’s
dragged across the path of the
bloodhounds to distract them from their true
quarry,
so they get distracted and go off following
the dead fish.
And I’m not going to be distracted by the
red herrings that were offered in that speech!
For example, in response to my claim that
if God exists,
then objective moral values exist, we heard
that I haven’t truly offered an
alternative to his view because the goal on
theism is to avoid Hell.
Honestly, that just simply shows how poorly
Sam Harris understands Christianity.
You don’t believe in God to avoid going
to Hell.
Belief in God isn’t some kind of fire insurance.
You believe in God because God, as the supreme
Good,
is the appropriate object of adoration and
love.
He is Goodness itself, to be desired for its
own sake.
And so the fulfillment of human existence
is to be found in relation to God.
It’s because of who God is and his moral
worth that he is worthy of worship.
It has nothing to do with avoiding Hell, or
promoting your own well-being.
He then responds, “But there’s no good
reason to believe that such a being exists.
Look at the problem of evil and the problem
of the unevangelized.”
Both of these, as I explained in my opening,
are irrelevant in tonight’s debate
because I’m not arguing that God exists.
Maybe he’s right; maybe these are insuperable
objections to Christianity or to theism.
It wouldn’t affect either of my contentions:
that if God exists,
then we have a sound foundation for moral
values and duties;
if God does not exist, then we have no foundation
for objective moral values and duties.
So these are red herrings.
Now I have written on each of these problems,
the problem of evil and
the problem of the unevangelized,
and you can find much of what I’ve said
at our website www.reasonablefaith.org.
If you’re interested, go ahead and look
at that.
Or, as Michael Rea suggested, talk to one
of your philosophy professors.
Michael has written extensively on the problem
of evil,
and I’m sure he’d love to have a conversation
with you about, uh, those things.
Notice, uh, secondly, I would want to say,
evil actually proves that God exists because
if God does not exist,
objective moral values and duties do not exist!
If evil exists,
it follows that moral values and duties do
exist, namely, some things are evil.
So evil actually proves the existence of God,
since in the absence of God,
good and evil as such would not exist.
So you cannot press both the problem of evil
and agree with my, uh,
contention that if God does not exist, then
objective moral values and
duties do not exist because evil will actually
be an argument for the existence of God.
Notice that Dr. Harris has no moral foundation
for saying that Christian beliefs are
morally execrable, because he has no foundation
for making such a judgment.
If atheism is true, what objective foundation
is there for affirming that
one view is execrable and another is not?
There’s simply no basis for such judgments.
So if he wants to have a debate on theism,
I will happily, uh,
engage in one with him; but that’s not the
debate for tonight.
He also says it’s “psychopathic” to
believe these things.
Now, that remark is just as stupid as it is
insulting.
It is absurd to think that Peter van Inwagen
here at the
University of Notre Dame is psychopathic,
or that a guy like Dr. Tom Flint,
who is as gracious a Christian gentlemen as
I could have ever met, is psychopathic.
Uh, this is simply, uh, below the belt.
So it seems to me that we’ve not been given
any refutation of the
view that if God does exist, then his essence,
his character,
is determinative for the existence of objective
moral values.
What about objective moral duties?
Here I explained that God’s commands must
be consistent with his nature.
And Dr. Harris continues to press the point,
“Oh, but the Bible supports slavery”.
Again I’ll refer you to Professor Copan’s
book,19
which shows that that is a gross misrepresentation
of ancient Israel,
which did not in fact promote slavery as we
understand it, uh,
in light of the experience in the American
South.
But, again, that’s simply not relevant,
’cause I’m not—uh, that isn’t relevant
because
I’m not defending, uh, the Bible tonight!
I’m saying that, uh, for a theist—whether
Jew,
Christian, deist, Hindu—uh, moral duties
will be grounded in the divine commands,
which are based in his nature.
He says, “But then what about people like
the Taliban,
who say that God has commanded them to do
certain atrocities?”
I would say the very same thing to the Taliban
that Dr. Harris says, namely,
“God did not command you to do those things.”
That’s exactly what Dr. Harris would say.
The reason he thinks that is that he doesn’t
believe that God exists,
but I would say that because I think that
the Taliban has got the wrong God,
that in fact God hasn’t commanded them to
commit these atrocities, and,
indeed, God will only issue such commands
are—as are consistent with his
moral nature and for which he has morally
sufficient reasons.
So I don’t think this first contention is
really in much dispute tonight.
I think it’s obvious that if God exists,
then obviously objective moral values exist,
independently of human opinion—they’re
grounded in the character of God—and
there would be objective moral duties, if
God exists,
because our duties arise in response to the
moral imperatives that God issues to us.
So the real debate is on that second contention:
can atheism provide a foundation for objective
moral values and duties?
And I think we’ve seen powerful reasons
to think that it cannot.
MODERATOR: Dr. Harris now has 8 minutes.
Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.
Harris: Well, you, uh, perhaps you’ve noticed
Dr. Craig has a charming habit of
summarizing his opponent’s points in a way
in which they were not actually given,
so I will leave it to you to sort it out on
Youtube.
Needless to say, I didn’t call those esteemed
colleagues of his psychopaths,
as I made clear.
Uh, in any case, Dr. Craig has merely defined
God as being intrinsically good.
It’s, if you want to charge someone with
merely semantic games,
it ap—the shoe’s on, on the other foot
as well.
There is, there is no reason that I can see
why there couldn’t be an evil God,
uh, or several.
Ok, he, but his God is intrinsically good,
goodness is grounded in his very nature.
That is a, a, a definitional move that he
has made.
Now, I have presented a positive case for
grounding an objective morality in the context
of science.
And thinking about moral truth in the context
of science should only pose a
problem for you, if you imagine that a science
of morality has
to be absolutely self-justifying in a way
that no science ever could be.
Ok, every branch of science must rely on certain
axiomatic assumptions, ok,
certain core values.
And a science of morality would be on the
same footing as a science of medicine,
or physics, or chemistry.
You need only assume that the worst possible
misery for everyone is bad and
worth avoiding, and indeed, the worst-case
scenario for conscious life.
And if science is unscientific, if this, if,
if, if, if having a value assumption at the
core renders science unscientific, what is
scientific?
Now, Dr. Craig is confused about what it means
to speak with scientific objectivity
about the human condition.
He says things like, “from the point of
view of science, we’re just constellations
of atoms,
and we’re no more valuable than rats or
insects”, ok, as though the
only scientifically objective thing that could
be said about us that we’re constellations
of atoms.
Ok there, there are two very different senses
in which we,
we use these terms, “subjective” and “objective”.
Ok there, there is, the first is epistemological.
It relates to how we know.
And when we say we’re reasoning or thinking
objectively in this sense,
we’re talking about, about the style in
which we’re thinking.
We’re talking about the fact that we’re,
we’re, we’re seeing through our biases,
which is to say, trying to jettison bias.
We are reasoning in a way that’s available
to the data.
Ok our minds are open to counter-arguments.
Uh, now this is the, this is the absolute
foundation of science,
and this is what, this is what opens such
an invidious gulf between science and religion,
the difference, here, in the approach to objectivity.
But science does not require that we ignore
the fact that certain facts are subjective,
ontologically subjective.
Ok there are facts about the human condition
that science can understand and study,
that are first-person facts, facts about what
it’s like to be you.
Ok and, and we can study these facts, and
our study of them reveals how much deeper
and
richer and more meaningful our lives are than
the lives of cockroaches.
Ok so this is a false reductionism that he’s
purveying here.
Now, so there are subjective facts.
If you happen to have an intact nervous system,
being burned alive will be excruciatingly
painful.
The painfulness of pain is a subjective fact
about you.
Ok I’m—but what my argument, uh, entails
is that there, there are,
we can speak objectively about a certain class
of subjective facts that go by the name of
morality, that relate to questions of “good”
and “evil”,
and that these depend upon the well-being
of conscious creatures, especially our own.
And by this light, we can see that it’s
possible to value the wrong things.
I mean, if you think you prefer to be neurotic
and in pain, and incapable of creative work,
and completely disconnected from other people,
there’s something wrong with you, ok.
Objectively wrong with you?
Yes! In that you are closed to higher states
of consciousness.
Higher with respect to what? Higher as in
further from the lowest possible state
of consciousness, the worst possible misery
for everyone.
Is the worst possible misery for everyone
really bad?
Once again, we have hit philosophical bedrock
with the shovel of a stupid question.
Now, I want to take a brief moment to speak
about these higher possibilities,
because it’s often thought that nonbelievers
like myself are closed
to some remarkable experiences that religious
people have.
That’s not true; that’s not true.
There’s nothing that prevents an atheist
from experiencing self-transcending love and
ecstasy, and rapture, and awe.
There’s nothing that prevents an atheist
from going into a cave for a year,
like a proper mystic, and doing nothing but
meditate on compassion.
What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustifiable
and unjustified claims about the
nature of the cosmos or about the divine origin
of certain books on the
basis of those experiences.
Now, the, the prospect of somebody becoming
a true saint in life and,
and inspiring people long after their deaths,
is something that I take very seriously.
I’ve, I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time
studying meditation with some very great wise
old yogis
and Tibetan lamas who’ve spent decades on
retreat, I mean really remarkable people,
ok.
People who I actually consider to be spiritual
geniuses, of a certain sort.
And so I can well imagine that if Jesus was
a spiritual genius, you know,
a palpably non-neurotic, and charismatic and
wise person,
I can well imagine the experience of his disciples.
I can well imagine the kind of influence he
could have on their lives, ok.
We do not have to presuppose anything on insufficient
evidence in
order to explore this higher terrain of human
well-being.
We don’t have to take anything on faith.
We don’t have to lie to ourselves, or to,
to our children, about the nature of reality.
If we want to understand our situation in
the world,
along with these deeper possibilities, we
have to do it in the spirit of science.
Ok given, given that people have had these
experiences in every context,
while worshiping one God, while worshiping
hundreds, while worshiping none,
that proves, that a deeper principle is at
work.
That the sectarian claims of, of our various
religions can’t possibly be true in that
context.
And all we have is human conversation to capture
these possibilities.
We can either have a first-century conversation,
as dictated by the New Testament,
or a seventh century conversation as dictated
by the Qur’an—or a twenty-first
century conversation that leaves us open to
the full wealth of human learning.
Please think about these things.
MODERATOR: We’re now moving to 5 minute
closing speeches.
Timekeeper, are you ready? Okay, begin.
CRAIG: In my closing statement, I’d like
to draw together some of
the threads of the debate and see if we can
come to some conclusions.
First, I argued that God, if he exists, provides a
sound foundation for objective moral values
and duties.
By the time of last his rebuttal, the only
argument that I heard Dr. Harris offering
against
this position is to say that you’re merely
defining God as good,
which is the same fallacy I accused him of
committing.
I don’t think this is the case at all.
God is a being worthy of worship.
Any being that is not worthy of worship is
not God.
And therefore God must be perfectly good and
essentially good.
More than that, as Anselm saw, God is the
greatest conceivable being,
and therefore he is, uh, the very paradigm
of goodness itself.
He is the greatest good.
So once you understand the concept of God,
you can see that asking,
“Well, why is God good?” is sort of like
asking,
“Why are all bachelors unmarried?”
Uh, it’s the very concept of the greatest
conceivable being, of being worthy of worship,
that entails the essential goodness of God.
And I think it’s evident, that if God exists,
then,
we do have objective moral values and duties.
Secondly, I argued if God does not exist,
we have no foundation for objective moral
values or objective moral duties.
Um, I showed that on his view there is—it
is logically impossible to say that the
moral landscape is identical to the landscape
of the flourishing of conscious beings,
and that therefore his view is incoherent.
We also looked at the is/ought distinction,
and the “ought implies can”,
to which Dr. Harris has never replied in the
course of this evening’s debate.
In his last speech, he said, “But we simply
must rely upon certain axioms”.
Well, that’s the same as saying you’ve
got to take it by faith!
And if these axioms are moral axioms, then
I think he’s admitting my point,
that on atheism, there simply is no ground
for believing in objective moral values and
duties.
He just takes them by a leap of faith.
He says, “Well, there are different senses
of the word objective.”
Yes, of course; and in my opening speech I
made clear the sense in which
I was defining the term: I mean “valid and
binding independent of human opinion”.
And moral values are not objectively binding
and valid in that way on atheism.
He says, “Science can study subjective facts;
for example, pain is a subjective fact.”
Granted, that’s certainly true.
So my question is: Is the wrongness of an
action a subjective fact?
On atheism, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t
be any more—anything more than a
subjective fact, in which case you cannot
say, as Dr. Harris wants to say,
(and I agree with him) that the genital mutilation
of little girls is objectively wrong,
not just a subjective opinion.
He says, “Well, but, uh, if you’re psychopathic
or neurotic,
there’s something wrong with you!” Granted,
I agree with that;
there is something wrong with you! But the
question is,
on atheism—if atheism were true—, would
there be anything objectively morally
wrong with doing what the psychopath does?
He hasn’t been able to show that.
Indeed, there are no moral duties on his view,
and remember he himself admitted that psychopaths
could occupy the
peaks of well-being on his so-called “moral
landscape”,
and that therefore it is not a moral landscape
at all.
To conclude, I want to quote from a remarkable
article that appeared in the
Duke Law Journal, by, uh, Arthur Allen Leff,
called “Unspeakable Ethics,
Unnatural Law.” Dr. Leff’s difficulty
is the same as Dr. Harris’s.
He wants to find a foundation for moral values
and duties, in this case,
for the law, that would be, uh, independent
of human opinion—it would be objective and
it would be in the world.
And he can’t find one.
He says any attempt to ground values is open
to the playground bully’s retort,
“Who sez?” And this is how his article
concludes:
All I can say is this: It looks as if we are
all we have. . . .
Only if ethics is something unspeakable by
us [that is, something transcendent],
could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable.
As things now stand, everything is up for
grabs.
Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
buying and selling each other is depraved. ...
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
(All together now:) Sez who?
God help us.20
MODERATOR: And now Dr. Harris has 5 minutes.
Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin.
Harris: I’m curious: How many of you consider
yourselves to be devout Muslims?
Let’s see a show of hands.
Don’t mean to single anyone out, but not
many.
Now, you’re all aware, of course, that the
Qur’an exists, and claims to be the
perfect word of the creator of the universe?
You’re aware that once having heard this
possibility and rejecting it,
you’re all going to Hell, for eternity?
I mean, needless to say,
Dr. Craig and I are both going to Hell if
this vision of life is true.
The problem is that everything Dr. Craig has
said tonight,
with a few modifications, could be said in
defense of Islam,
in fact has been said in defense of Islam,
ok.
The logic is exactly the same:
We have a book that claims to be the word
of the creator of the universe.
It tells us about the nature of moral reality
and how to live within it.
But what if Muslims are right?
What if Islam is true?
How should we view God in moral terms?
How would we view God in moral terms, or I
should say, Allah?
Ok, we have been born in the wrong place,
to the wrong parents,
given the wrong culture, given the wrong theology.
Ok, needless to say, Dr. Craig is doomed.
He’s been thoroughly confused by Christianity.
I mean, just appreciate what a bad position
he’s now in to appreciate the true word of God.
I have been thoroughly misled by science.
Ok, where is Allah’s compassion? And yet,
an eter—He’s omni—He’s omnipotent;
he could change this in an instant.
He could give us a sign that would convince
everyone in this room.
And yet he’s not gonna do it.
And Hell awaits.
And Hell awaits our children, because we can’t
help but mislead our children.
Now, just hold this vision in mind,
and first appreciate how little sleep you
have lost over this possibility ok.
Just feel in this moment how carefree you
are, and will continue to be,
in the face of this possibility.
What are the chances that we’re all going
to go Hell, for, for eternity,
because we haven’t recognized the Qur’an
to be the perfect word of
the creator of the universe?
Please know that this is exactly how Christianity
appears
to someone who’s not been indoctrinated
by it.
Our scriptures were written by people, who
by, by, by, by virtue of
their placement in history, had less access
to scientific information and facts,
and basic common sense,
than any person in this room.
ok, in fact, there’s not a person in this
room who has ever met a person whose worldview
was as narrow as the worldview of Abraham,
or Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad.
And most of the people, with a few exceptions,
had, had a moral worldview that was more
or less indistinguishable from that of an
Afghan warlord today.
Ok and yet, Dr. Craig insists that the authors
of the Bible knew everything that they had
to know about the nature of the cosmos, and
about how to live within it,
to guide us at this moment.
Ok I want to suggest to you that this vision
of life can’t possibly be true.
Ok, it would, just as there is no such thing
as Christian physics or Muslim algebra,
there can be no such thing as Christian or
Muslim morality.
Whatever is true about our circumstance in
moral terms,
and in spiritual terms, is discoverable now,
and can be talked about in,
in language that is not an outright affront
to everything that we’ve learned in the
last 2000 years.
What remains for us to discover are the facts,
in every domain of knowledge,
that will allow the greatest number of us
to live lives truly worth living in this world.
I mean, how is it that we can build a global
civilization, a viable global civilization,
of now destined to be 9 billion people,
where the maximum number of people truly flourish.
That is the challenge we face.
Sectarian moral denominations, ok, a world
shattered,
Balkanized by competing claims about an invisible
God, is not the way to do it.
Apart from the fact that there’s no evidence
in the first place that should be compelling
to us to adopt that view.
The only tool we need is honest inquiry.
And I would suggest to you that, if faith
is ever right about anything in this domain,
it’s right by accident.
Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to talk to all of you.
