 Any objections to getting started? Okay, great. Okay. All right Well, thank you all for coming today This will be a little bit of an atypical presentation for me in that it's not going to be a lot of Heavy science. It's more a discussion what will hopefully be discussion at the end about kind of a philosophy of science and This is something that is You know from really the time of Darwin into modern day is still this you know cultural debate about You know how we how we explain how we got here and so to that end I also want to say that again there are some very heavy views and beliefs on In this issue and that the one thing I do want to kind of particularly say is that if you're someone who has a very strong belief system in Creationism or intelligent design. I'm not here to in an overarching sense try and tell you You're wrong. I shouldn't believe that But one thing is that within these these range of arguments you can make for why you think that Your belief system describes of the real world. These are actually not good arguments. These are not many arguments on the side Um Okay, so again, it's a two-part talk. I'm gonna talk about this I'm gonna make some criticism of the idea of Irreducible complexity, which is one of these arguments from the design Institute that wants to argue a well. Let's just call it creationism light and then a biological basis for morality, which is a I think you know one other Point of view that the religious side tends to make is that we have to have religion And we have to have that in order to like have society and have morality And I want to make the argument again. There are many arguments one can make that that is not a Valuable point of a A rhetorically strong Argument, but I want to actually provide an alternative way. I think I said attacking that idea I want to make sure that we think about and provide a platform For describing what could be a basis for morality? all right, I Used to teach college biology and I did actually teach and honors Philosophy history of biological sciences class at Ball State University and Again in second life I tend to Come here for this all right Let me start with an analogy from a couple centuries ago now from William Paley and His argument this is something you might have heard here and there is that if you're walking You know if a person were to be walking along a beach and then they were looked down and see a clock Or a pocket watch that they would have really no alternative to say That because of the complexity of it that must have been designed that somehow a particular Intelligence a particular engineer made that and The analogy then that they have for this particular or what they're trying to analogize is the idea that biological complexity the the interactions and the complicated complexity of DNA RNA proteins enzymes that interact and are very Machine-like in certain ways must have been Designed that's an argument for a creator who helped put it together another line of argumentation and this is again this more but Particular narrow view of irreducible complexity is that not only do you have this complexity? But if you were to take any part out of it, then it just wouldn't work And so that means it must have been put together whole cloth that is it derived from something But it had to be there and the example that I like and people like to use our mousetraps and so I'm showing the mousetrap game from from Hasbro And if you've ever played this You know, there's just this complicated step of Processes to get the ball to knock down the mousetrap which which is fun And this is again the kind of generalized term for this This is like a Rube Goldberg machine that he was a I believe a cartoonist back in early 1900s Who made these very complicated devices or these chains of events and you also might have seen this in a Tom and Jerry cartoon Or even a Wiley Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner where there's a this complicated combination of things And if any part of that's missing then that particular machine won't work. And so again a very nice analogy To try and convince people that this is relevant to biological systems All right, and then in particular I don't know how many show me in local chat if If you're someone who has read this Michael B. Who is a biochemist? And he's at Lehigh University. He wrote a book called Darwin's black box And the idea here is that he took very specific examples of complicated protein quote-unquote machinery or Pathways in which You know every intermediate step is important for the final process And he argued that Evolution cannot account for these Or you know the current evolutionary theory can't account for this And so let me just give the two particular examples that on the left hand side is the flagellum and I wish I had a working flagellum. I think there are some in Second Life where This is actually a motor that's controlled and then this Is an it's an anchor for you know this little whip-like appendage that they can actually move Again the outer coat of the outer Florence alright the outer flow If something is is attached to a substrate or you can take or we can think of it as You know for bacteria that actually uses they use that to move around they have it actually have this mobility And so it's again it looks a lot like a machine And then the other example he gave is you know the blood coagulation pathway where there are several factors Going from I think all the way from one to ten or twelve where these are again are just particular enzyme steps that help put together a final Coagulation product including platelets and other things called fibrinogen that you know create clots and So his argument is that again if you take any one of these out Then the system doesn't work. And so there's also a disease in which there are a couple forms of these that are missing Hemophilia and so again hemophiliacs are not able to clot their blood they Again in a pre-medical intervention that stage they would basically just bleed out as young people any time they had any sort of Impact or movements even at their joints they would get bruises and it was quite quite painful and fatal All right, so I think that's a basic description of the arguments that you know because there are these things that exist in biological organisms And they're so complex if you take any part away. They don't work in the organism Could die or not be not have this fitness then Biology is explained by a design Okay, anybody have any quick questions on that I can entertain any Questions Again, there are lots of examples of this that one could use I will say one thing I actually have read Michael Bay he's Darwin's black box book I think I'm probably one of the few practicing Biologists who's done so And actually the thing was is given I think it was written in the 1970s It actually was this interesting intellectual shows the first nine eight or nine chapters were these like posing? I think a biologically important relevant question is how does evolution or how do we explain this? How do we explain these and of course this very last chapter was that the answer was oh We don't have a great explanation for right now So it must be God and I I just want to point out that This is a line of thinking that Their creationists and the intelligent design proponents tend to do and what they will frequently do is actually purposefully ignore Any sort of scientific evidence any sort of evolution evidence that over time does account for these things and The other thing they also will do is they'll create a goal post of saying oh We expect us and then you actually provide some component of the explanation because again science is iterative Sciences that necessarily always provide a final answer something but provides what is a currently best known explanation The expectation will have a more refined view later They just tend to ignore that and so yeah, so so This is a gene Discorrect us. We're gonna deconstruct those arguments now Again, I know William Paley is not here to defend his argument line of argumentation But this idea that if you see something that is complex and that it must have been engineered It poses. I think a very important question where is the watch porn and The reason I bring this up is that the analogy of a clock or again Any sort of complicated mechanical device is a completely flawed analogy to biological systems if a person Or let's just say an alien were to come along and be walking on the beach and were to be noticing people or Sharks or jellyfish. They might look at that and say well As I study this there is a clear Explanation for how these things can evolve and that is reproduction The ability to have simple chemical reactions that code information that then is mutable And that again over a period of time Can lead to more complex systems because there is an advantage to them and so I think that um Again one one key thing is that it's a completely flawed analogy of mechanical devices to biological systems And that's an important thing to keep in mind now In terms of Michael Bee he's irreducible complexity arguments again when you think about something like the flagellum then You know in the biological system There's some things you can do one you can actually analyze and understand what the genes are and see how the genes relate to other genes and biological systems But then even from it just a structural point of view is that the very The idea of irreducible complexity would mean that there's aren't similar things Existing in systems that were building component parts for that. And so here's a nice example Is that the ATP synthase machinery and one thing that's not again depicted here? I would invite you to look at some of the more exciting Videos of this the ATP synthase is also a crank and this is something that as as you actually power the crank with protons and Basically protons and electrons you actually turn the surrounding away that promotes the chemical reaction of putting of taking ADP and Turning that adding a third phosphate the p stands for phosphate and putting that last third phosphate on and then This is really important that the vast majority of biochemical reactions are powered by Leaving that third phosphate off of the adenosine dye phosphate and that's how a lot of biological reactions are powered It's a storage batteries chemical reaction for the cell So this more, you know in a sense reduced simplified system when you actually look at the genes for it these are actually Related genes and that this crank that's used for making ATP you can imagine with some modification and Again some evolution that you put a flagellum on it and boom you have actually a motor And then even going beyond that You know you might say well well okay fine those are similar, but they're actually an intermediate between the two and in fact there is that this Mechanical device that again bacteria have is called an injectosome right and this is something where when it comes time to delivering a toxin to Some other organism either protecting itself or it's a pathogen that this is also something where you have this crank That's at the base the green and then this actually rotates in a way to shoot a You know basically the equivalent of a lance and deliver the payload across you know across a membrane And so this is again when you think about these as oh really complicated complex the reducible machinery then in fact they're not you actually can reduce them down and then we can see in the bottom the biological systems you can actually see these reduced forms of the of The device and again this is how evolution will work evolution is something where you can actually It's all repurposing right it's like almost all adapting repurposing stuff that you already have To do this and let me this is a more subtle point is that a lot of times you'll hear design institute people say oh well point mutations don't account for this type of building of complexity and That is actually a very logical and rational sound arguments But point mutations are not the only type of genetic change. That's possible There's things like gene duplication There's also recombination. There's also Lateral transfer genes from one organism to so you know they will try and say stuff That's very truthful And I think one thing I want to say about that is when you hear them make certain arguments unless you're actually very familiar with the technicalities of the field They are technically correct, but they're absolutely misleading and I do want to say that I think when you really Grow down that their purposalness at being sly that way I think betrays the fact that they are being All right, and then one last argument and again, this is one that has been made by smarter Scientists and I am who've engaged in these debates This is something that Kenneth Miller talked about as a witness in the Dover trial And so this was an example in Pennsylvania where some townspeople wanted intelligent design Biology textbooks to be used in the public school system and they sued and Again, the defendants in courts eventually, you know, they prevailed in court, but there is a Really good documentary by Nova that I really recommend and that's in the notes, but I also show the And again, this is idea this coming back to the idea that any single part missing and it won't work And they were talking about again the mousetrap that a lot of people are familiar with not the Hasbro version and what Ken Miller said and showed in court and has in the video is that yeah There are five parts of this mousetrap and yeah, you take any part of it away and it doesn't work as a mousetrap But if you think of just the base and the spring, well, that actually can work as a tie clip And this is a really good simplified analogy for describing how biological systems work that yeah Maybe at one point you have something that's making you ATP And that's a simplified version of it But then you find through some, you know, random genetic change and find a use for it in a different mode Then you have that in fact what I'm going to keep in mind too is that you can have both at the same time, right? You don't give up the ATP synthase who then make the flagellum You actually have both existing the cells the same And this is and that's also a line of argumentation that you hear sometimes where the design people will say oh Well, if we evolve from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? That's like, well, no, that's actually That's not how biology works. There's something in mind that we both had a common ancestor and that's you know humans first of all, it's just false to say that we evolved from monkeys Because we both evolved from the common ancestor and you can have Multiple organisms living and existing at the same time All right any questions on this kind of reducing Irreducible complexity elements some other people's lines of argument, but I I want to go into a different line of thought which is you know You can make these criticisms And I think the argument analogies and they're they're relatively easy to understand But it really sounds like you're not trying to talk to your audience And providing kind of a nice analogy that they can they can sympathize with right you can turn about say Oh, this is this is some doesn't work, but Because the next segment I want to talk about The evolution of the handgun Right and this is kind of the same level of argument that if you look at this right you look at the same This is this bread of 92 and other modern-day weaponry these are super engineer fine refined examples of Irreducible complexity you take out the trigger this thing doesn't work you take out the The barrel it doesn't work and that is true and I just want to provide kind of a again a little bit of an analogy Of how these types of things progress and this is you know analogizes to some of the parts Also, there's not a porn industry for guns because they don't have sex, but as an analogy I think it's kind of good one All right, um I do also want to point out. I am in no way a gun expert. I have And an invitation if anybody's coming through Des Moines, I will that you're a gun fanatic happy to go pay for the rounds and the Iron range fees and we can go shoot and talk evolution Okay, so So this information is derived from a largely pbs website called history detectives And they do this nice little evolution of the gun where I'm actually just largely directly quoting and taking the key parts Um, although I will also say that the Wikipedia page on handguns Um, it must have gotten reorganized in the past year or two because it definitely provides a nice more historical example All right, so I'm getting a message that my voice is sounding odd from time to time I'm just going to turn off my voice and click it back on But that could also just be um I do weird inflection sometimes Okay Yeah, I mean Hope I meant to record this too on my on a local device. Oh um Yeah, if there are network problems and there's not much I can do about it. Unfortunately All right, um Okay, so the handgun let's go back to uh, you know, uh 700 years ago that um This picture this is a gun a gun was just a barrel And what you would do is you would stuff a a wad of gunpowder At the bottom and then you would put a round lead Ball and then stuff that down with a with a stick and then Basically, you would use one hand as well as a prop A way of holding it up and you would just take basically take a match Well, not a match, but you know like a lighted piece of cloth and just Touch it to the gunpowder and it would shoot right so a very simplified way of a Of firing a high-velocity projectile And this you know a certain way this absolutely zero resembles the bread of 92 But on the hand you can see a platform a basis for which to build upon and ultimately modify that All right Moving forward the matchlock appears and the idea here is that you have this kind of essentially a A curved piece of metal that works through the um through the Uh Through the gun and it basically you have a wick you have a light a wick on the end of it And you just touch it down to that rag that has the gunpowder and boom So again, not much more complicated But again a nice little small thing where the main advantage is that You can now just hold and brace the gun in two hands And then just do one fine movement to ignite the the boom So that you can hold two hands and aim better you don't need a prop anymore and then this concept Where you basically can have a wheel lock to generate a spark So now you're no longer need to actually have like open flame which again Not a lot hard to do a firefight in a rainstorm in that particular case And can basically mechanically start that fire and ignite the gunpowder And so again, you'll notice that what you have here is a selective pressure Which is a need to be able to fire guns when it's wet And then something that also just works more efficiently But of course one thing it require would be the idea of using Say flint You know combination of flint and steel to be able to create that initial spark all right The next one is the yeah the flint lock where again you have this Basically the trigger Where again the combination of these things allow you to hold the the barrel of the gun Very simply and then just a very small amount of motion required to actually just ignite Ignite the gunpowder So again something that is a nice little small evolution now one thing you'll notice here is that this is something that's occurred over a period of time where There's been a lot of fine-tuning of one component of the system Right, there's not a lot that's different between that you still load a Something from the muzzle But you have this nice refinements and so there's not a lot of difference But there's enough to make it much more efficient and useful in the system All right, and again you'll see about 300 years have passed In terms of the timing all right, so as the This is like the big I think the next big advance And that is the idea that the idea of a percussion cap And again, this was based on the discovery of very specific chemistry That the ability of the of something to create a boom a something that can create a compressive power was based on Some discovering chemistry All right, and so this is a combination of mercury nitric acid and alcohol and your curex They were called your curex fulmarate And so now you have this other mechanism of delivering these things So again, this is bringing that ideas from chemistry and then apply it to this mechanical problem of being able to shoot Bullets I know again these percussion cap guns. This would be something that would occur say one at a time But it would allow you to basically develop a bullet so that You have basically the pre the preform bullet that can then be exploded And that also means that you're kind of redesigning the idea of what what a bullet actually is And then of course, so now one thing you actually have Sorry, let me go back that the percussion caps become in general use about 1825 And actually doesn't take very long To evolve a repeat repeater system. So again the cult revolver The idea here is that now you can basically have a You have The the gun mechanism where you can basically preload several bullets in a rotating wheel and have the Have the um The trick not not to trigger the uh, oh dang it uh The part of the gun that hits the percussion cap basically just repeat this and so now you've the hammer. Thank you gosh I'm blanking that um That you can actually have You've taken a major step forward in the and the ability to change how the thing works from a kind of mechanical point of view And then you can very rapidly evolve other ways of making that even more efficient And so I think this is kind of a nice example of when we think about how evolution works is that a lot of times Things don't work in a very gradual slow sense. What they will do is boom boom boom Something you'll have lots of very rapid evolution very shortly after you make a major change of discovery in the platform All right And then the ability to use pinfire cartridges and That again slight modifications to the chemistry of the bullets so that you basically have these very fine-tuned ways of of um of um Igniting the reaction that leads to the compression or the decompression So um Again, and there's one point on here I do want to make a point about which is that if you look on the left hand side here in 1854 through 56, you know muzzle loaded guns Are still being used in major conflicts. Okay, and that's the idea here is that um This is like what I was saying earlier It's just because you've evolved something one way and you have something that's a more optimal way of dealing with You know some sorts of pressure then you don't you haven't gotten rid of all the air stuff The air stuff doesn't appear it's still here. All right um, so Winchester guns again the idea of being able to Uh load multiple bullets at a time and then also introduce cartridges So that you can have uh again not just the wheel like the handgun But actually larger volumes of bullets feed into the system so that you can actually fire multiple bullets at a time um And again the winchester I think again something classically known about from the western united states But this idea of being able to start repeating to basically have a higher rate of fire And you know being able to carry more ammunition around within a system before reloading is again this other evolution that now that you've developed Efficient bullets and decompression technology that again that becomes very useful and again It's meeting the need of being able to again You know fire and hit more targets And of course that leads to the example of again in modern day times And this is where we're going to kind of end the analogy is that uh automatic handguns where again you have these um pistols that have these reloadable cartridges a trigger Bullets that are rapidly loading And again very high of rapid rate of fire and again you've you're also reducing the technology down in size In that you're making then you're taking a technology like you have with the rifle And you're basically being able to optimize it for smaller and smaller um Yeah, so urie is pointing that he's saying that cartridges rapidly are shotgun type weapons Which are a different function and goal than a rifle or a handgun uh, yeah mechanically Distinct I just wanted to make you know the the point of the value of it to the system And in terms of thinking about it and making that next step in the evolution of the handgun Although again, I just I can't say that I can picture and mentally understand All of the mechanics of the two systems So again in terms of trying to Uh Point out that you know you can take a snapshot of time and say this is something irreducibly complex And you can take something like the gun which I've used here But you can also think about things like cars planes Uh phones these are all things that from a you know, they definitely are designed They hit a certain purpose, but you can't take any game snapshot and say oh, this just kind of came out of whole cloth This is just you know, obviously it's had to have been designed this particular way that even in the development of technology We look at you know platforms that have You know iterative steps that make it to its refined step All right, so Any questions about that analogy? Again, I think you know the point is that you know if you're having a conversation with someone who kind of wants to um Make that argument that That just point out that well there were previous versions of handguns and that's been they actually do evolve over time And there's there reasons why this works Okay, so the last point I want to talk. Okay. Thank you, Yuri Um Yuri says that my general. I think my my idea is correct and that's We'll leave it at that. I wish I were a gun expert. It's actually really cool. Um Got pretty fascinating reading by a lot of it Okay, so, um I'm gonna Start here talking about the last segment a biological basis for morality And again, I just took definitions from Mirren Webster to say concerning what is right or wrong Uh ideas of what are good standards of behavior how people should treat each other um That This is a line of argument that if you don't have religion if you don't have a creator Then how can you have any basis from her? And I just want to kind of say that Uh, there are multiple ways to argue that that is not correct And I invite you and I'll throw this into local chat here The youtube video That if you just watch the first two minutes, you can see some lines of arguments of again religion creationism proponents Who are doing it? What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a cue from cue who's recording this and I'm gonna go ahead Be quiet and let him cue that up. I invite everyone here to watch it um And then when he's cued me when cue has cued me that he is done with the video recording then I'll get started again If god does not exist, why do all people have a fixed moral obligation to love and not murder? How do molecules in motion have any authority to tell you how to behave? When you do something wrong, whose standard are you breaking? Who are you displeasing? If life isn't sacred, then why is murder bad? Nobody likes the idea of an absolute all-powerful Unchanging authority thus sayeth the lord people just don't like that and the bible says in second peter chapter three And the last day scoffers would come who would be ignorant and I think that's what we have is people who simply they don't want god Telling them what to do because the bible chaps their hide Well, I recommend you get some vaseline because you're going to be judged by that book. Okay Has to do with the ontological category known as morality Where does morality come from does it come from the benzene molecule the carbon molecule the oxygen molecule? In your worldview, where does it come from? My question is for professor Dawkins Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of absolute morality Would it not then be an irrational leap of faith which atheists themselves so harshly condemn for an atheist to decide between right and wrong? Absolute morality The the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what stoning people for adultery death for apostasy Punishment for breaking the Sabbath These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities I don't think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out reasoned argued discussed and Based upon I could almost say intelligent design Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality the sort of society that we want to live in if you actually look at the The moralities that are accepted among modern people among 21st century people We don't believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women We believe in in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent They have very little basis in biblical or Quranic scripture They are there are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning Sober discussion argument legal theory political and moral philosophy These do not come from religion to the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures You have to cherry pig You you search your way through the bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse That is an acceptable profession of morality and you say look at that that's religion And you leave out all the horrible bits And you say oh, we don't believe that anymore. We've grown out of that. Well, of course we've grown out of it We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy And rational discussion if god is dead isn't everything permitted isn't everything permissible Where would our ethics be if there was no super intending deity? This again seems to me a very profound insult to us in our very deepest Nature and character it is not the case. I submit to you That we do not set about butchering And raping and thieving from each other right now Only because we're afraid of a divine punishment or because we're looking for a divine reward. It's an extraordinarily base and insulting thing to say to people On my mother's side some of my ancestry is jewish I don't happen to believe the story of moses in egypt or the exile Or the wandering in the Sinai and in fact now even israeli archaeology has shown that there isn't a word of truth to that story Or really any of the others but take it to be true Am I expected to believe that my mother's ancestors got all the way to mount Sinai quite a trek Under the impression until they got there that rape murder perjury and theft were okay Only to be told when they got to the foot of mount Sinai bad news. No of these things is kosher after all They're all forbidden. No, I don't think so. I think I think we can we can actually have a better explanation in every sense Superior as well as better That no one would have been able to get as far as mount Sinai or in any other mountain in any other direction Unless they had known that human solidarity demands that we Look upon each other as brothers and sisters and that we forbid activities such as murder a rape perjury And theft that this is innate in us of those to whom it is not innate The sociopaths who don't understand the needs of anyone but themselves and the psychopaths who positively Take pleasure in breaking these rules. Well, all we can say is They according to one theory. They're also made in the image of god Which makes the image of god question rather problematic Does it not or that they can be explained by further and better Research and have to be restrained and disciplined meanwhile But in no sense here is original help where it claims to help most which is to our morality Do you think there's a practical reason for having um a religious belief for for many people? Well, there can't be a practical reason for believing what isn't true That's quite at least I rule it out as impossible Either the thing is true or it isn't if it is true. You should believe it and if it isn't you shouldn't and If you can't find out whether it's true or whether it isn't you should suspend judgment But you can't it seems to me a fundamental Dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity To hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true Well, I was thinking of those people who find that um Some kind of religious code helps them to live their lives. It gives them a very strict set of rules The rights and the wrongs Yes, but you know those rules are generally quite mistaken Greek many of them do more harm than good and It would they would probably be able to find a rational morality that they could live by If they drop this irrational traditional taboo morality that comes down from savage ages But are we uh, perhaps the ordinary person perhaps isn't strong enough to find this own Ethic they have to have something imposed upon them from outside Oh, I don't think that's true. And what is imposed on you from outside is of no value. Whatever doesn't count My view is that morality our human morality is older than religion So instead of saying morality comes from god or religion gave us morality For me, that's a big no-no. Our current religions are just two or three thousand years old Which is very young and our species is much older and I cannot imagine that for example A hundred thousand years or 200 thousand years Our ancestors did not have some type of morality. Of course, they had rules about how you should behave What is fair? What is unfair? Caring for others all of these tendencies were in place already So they had a moral system And then at some point we developed these Present-day religions Which I think were sort of tacked on to the morality that we had and maybe they serve to codify codify them Or to enforce them or to steer morality in a particular direction that we prefer And so so religion comes in for me secondarily. I'm struggling with Whether we need religion so personally, I think we we can be moral bizarre religion because we probably had morality long Before the current religions came along So I think we can be moral without religion But in large-scale societies Where we we are not all keeping an eye on each other because we don't In societies with a thousand people or several thousand or millions of people We cannot all keep an eye on each other and that's maybe why we installed religions in these large-scale societies Where a god kept watch over everybody and then the question becomes is this really needed now in northern europe I'm from the netherlands. There is basically an experiment going on in northern europe The majority of people are not religious anymore when you when you ask them they say they're non believers And they still have a moral society as far as I can tell and so There is a sort of experiment going on there Can we set up a society where religion is not dominant at least it may be present But there's not dominant anymore that is still a moral society and until now I think that experiment is going pretty well. And so I'm optimistic that religion is not strictly needed But I begin by asking and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting Is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs To appeal to our fear and to our guilt. Is it good for the world to our terror? Our terror of death. Is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame About the sexual act and the sexual relationship is this good For the world and asking yourself the while are these really religious responsibilities as I maintain they are To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment not just of themselves but of their parents and those they love Perhaps worst of all to consider women and inferior creation is that Good for the world and can you name me a religion that has not Done that to insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence religion forces nice people to do unkind things And also makes intelligent people say Stupid things Handed a small baby for the first time. Is it your first reaction to think beautiful almost perfect Now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the lord No It is uh as the great as the great physicist steven weinberg has very aptly put it In the ordinary moral universe the good will do the best they can the worst will do the worst they can But if you want to make good people do wicked things you'll need religion Now Andrew here Hi, did you read matthew 5 27 and 28? Sure. I've read the whole bible several times Okay, do you know what it says there is that the passage about Adultery where it's not doesn't just have to be physical adultery if you look at another one another man's wife would lust You've committed adultery in your heart Exactly It says whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in its heart. Sure That's That's That how do you not think that that's a good thing for people to have limits You think that's you think that's a good. It's called it's called mind control You're trying to determine what I think and what I don't think That's one of the stupidest things I could imagine. How can you control or even pretend to control? What somebody thinks that is jesus what jesus said right there? Well first first of all we'll set aside how you think you know that this is what jesus said Second of side we'll set aside whether or not it matters whether jesus said it I don't care who said it if it's wrong. It's wrong And so if somebody says now I will say if a man looks on a woman lustfully He's committed adultery in his heart is absolutely wrong because first of all, he's not necessarily married and adultery is specifically A lustful or sexual action that extends beyond the bounds of marriage So as a single person looking on a woman lustfully isn't adultery And by the way, I put it to you that almost nobody on the planet outside of arranged marriages Would have ever gotten married or had sex if they hadn't looked at someone of the opposite sex lustfully and finally Why is it a man looking at a woman lustfully? Why isn't it a woman looking at a man lustfully or a man looking at a man or a woman looking at a woman? Don't you think it's important to have limits on your sexual sexual desires? Otherwise everyone would just be raping everyone really you think people would just run around raping people. How do you get from It's probably a good thing if people don't run around raping each other to therefore this statement about lustful thoughts is necessarily morally correct Please make the connection between those two. How do you get from we should have some limits to what we can do? To we need to we need to have thought crime legislation How do you how do you get there? What limits do atheists have? Well, what culture tell me one culture that doesn't have limits and it's I mean there's all every culture on the face of Earth has limits and it's they're not Christian cultures Chinese culture has got limits Japanese the most secular country in the world is Japan. They have the lowest rape rate Denmark Sweden they very unreligious places religion and they don't have any rape problem We have much more rape in the United States And by the way ever doing Denmark or Sweden religion doesn't seem to To be any kind of deterrent to rape are you implying that all rapists are non-christians or non-religious? What about the the priests who are raping little boys and little girls? I just got back from where do you get your limits from I get my limits from a rational consideration of the consequences of my actions That's how I determine what's moral. I get it from a foundation that says my Actions have an effect on those people around me and theirs have an effect on me And that if we're going to live cooperatively and share space We have to recognize that impact and my freedom to swing my arm ends at their nose And that I have no right to impose my will over somebody else's will in that in that type of scenario Well, if you just do all that let's just say you go out with a gun and you just rape a bunch of people Then you just shoot yourself. What's going to be the punishment for you if I go out and rape a bunch of people and shoot myself What's going to be the punishment for me? I'll be dead Hang on hurt the bullet's going to go through your head in about a second. There isn't going to be any pain That's correct. I'll be dead. Okay. So let's let's flip the script here. Let's say somebody goes around and rapes and murders somebody And then after they're done they get saved. What's the punishment for them? The punishment is hell. No, no, they got saved Are you saying that a rapist can't be saved? See, this is the problem. This is the problem with christian religion It establishes unrealistic and irrational and immoral criteria by which to live and then it creates a loop hole So that you don't ever have to be responsible for those actions No, Andrew, shut up. It's undone Christianity is not a moral system It is an immoral system because it specifically says that there aren't necessarily consequences that you're going to have to pay Because of a loop hole and what is the loop hole? It has nothing to do with how good you are or how morally you act or anything else It has to do with whether or not you're willing to be a sycophant to an idea And if you are then there is now an exception For which you no longer have to suffer a penalty for this So the idea that secular morality offers no guarantee that people will ever pay for their Crimes and their atrocities is not an argument against secular morality because that is a tenant of christianity It is the foundation your the idea that that the christian god is just Is directly contradicted by the idea that the christian god is merciful Perfect justice and perfect and any mercy Are in are necessarily directly in contradiction because mercy is a suspension of justice So do not pretend that your religion is moral and just and then try to attack my position Which is based on reality because somebody might rape people shoot themselves ahead and then not get punished That's asinine you keep going to this slippery slope thing of well if there is no, you know Den commandments or jesus or whatever then you've got no limits. You'll just run around raping and killing people Well, that's already demonstrably false and there have been multiple studies That that actually investigate the correlation between the religiosity of a society and its societal health And there is always a strong negative correlation the more atheistic The society the better they score on societal health factors from everything from teenage pregnancy rates to std's To happiness to wealth to to murder murder rape rape to Health care now go out and do some actual research that contradicts this And then you might have a case for your assertion that I think you'll live a better life if you're no you won't There's no there's no there's no evidence to demonstrate this Name an ethical statement made or action performed by a believer in the name of faith That couldn't have been By an infidel and name if you can this is easier a wicked action that could only be Mandated by faith and then you'll see how silly your question was wherever you were The only thing you need to be A moral realist without having to appeal to transcendental values and and other Apostles is to one believe that morality is about questions Of suffering and happiness and the difference there In conscious systems not just humans And two to believe that there are right and wrong answers To those questions. I mean is it is it Is everything up for grabs or they're better or worse strategies to produce human happiness And the moment you acknowledge better and worse there You can be a realist and you can and you can admit that these questions are open to the kind of refined empirical studies That we have yet to do frankly, but that there's no reason to imagine that there aren't facts to be found there Can it not be said do you not in fact hear it said repeatedly about religion and by the religious themselves that well It may not be really true. The stories may be fairy tales The history may be dubious, but it provides consolation Can anyone hear themselves say saying this or have it said of them without Some kind of embarrassment without the concession that thinking here is directly Wishful that yes, it would be nice if you could throw your sins and your responsibilities on someone else And have them dissolve, but it's not true And it's not morally sound So few occasions to praise c.s. Lewis and to let alone to defend him against you That i'm going to insist on doing it properly. Here is what Lewis says he says If jesus claims to be able to take your sins on himself Remember what we're talking about here the to me revolting idea of human sacrifice of vicarious redemption Of scapegoating the idea that you can throw your sin on someone else and make him die and take your sin With him the repulsive immoral idea of vicarious redemption. I can pay your debt Brother sister, I can I will if I can I could serve your your sentence in prison If if I if I was brave enough Or if it was allowed to me maybe But I cannot take your responsibility from you Because it would be moral to do so you have no right to ask it of me. You can't shed that responsibility The whole basis of morality Requires that you face it and take it upon yourself Nonetheless christianity offers the repulsive idea of vicarious redemption and lewis faces it and this is what he says He says now unless the speaker offers that is god This is really so preposterous as to be comic We can all understand our man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes. I forgive you. You steal my money I forgive you, but what should we make of a man himself unrobbed? And untrodden upon who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes And stealing other men's money Asinine faturity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. This is lewis Yet, this is what jesus did He told people their sins were forgiven And never waited to consult the other people whom their sins had injured He unhesitatingly behaved as if he was the party chiefly concerned The person chiefly offended in all offenses This makes sense only if he really was the god whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin In the mouth of any speaker who is not god These words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit Unrivaled by any other character in history To people like thomas jefferson a hero of mine who said that jesus wasn't divine, but he was a great moral teacher Lewis quite properly spoke with scorn and said that's the one thing we must not say A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things jesus said would not be a great moral teacher He would either be a lunatic or else. He would be the devil of hell You must make your choice either this man was and is the son of god or else a madman and something worse And lewis who's argued so well up till then Can't complete a syllogism poor guy. He never quite could do that. He said since I don't think he was the devil of hell I have to conclude he was the son of god Well, you don't have to follow the poultry logic of that to see that at least lewis is not making it easy on himself Let's call it evil Where does evil come from religion? Nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five A picture picture an asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people One of those every 10 days killing children only under five Okay, it'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 Think think of the parents of these children Think of the fact that 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 Okay, 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 Okay, on the other hand on dr. Craig's account You're one of the mill serial killer in america Okay, who 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. Okay, one thing should be crystal clear to you This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do With moral accountability, you know something good happens to a christian some he feels some bliss while praying say Or he sees some positive change in his life and we're told that god is good Okay, but when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents arms and drowned We're told that god is mysterious This is how you play tennis without the net Okay, and i want to suggest to you That it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way. It is morally reprehensible This kind of faith is really is the perfection of narcissism. God loves me Don't you know 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 he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage Okay, given all the all the 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 Okay, this to think in this way is to fail to reason honestly Or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings Morality comes from the fact according to david and and many people that it was Advantages to us as a tribe and so we we formed rules which stopped us killing each other perfectly true That once you've got altruism and cooperation seeded into a community It confers a massive selective advantage The question which you need to address yourself to is how did natural selection Allow that seed to be planted in the first place that just like is very effective in getting around stamping on the seeds of altruism Before they jump up Reciprocal altruism for example the notion that I scratch my back because you'll scratch me back a tremendously Sophisticated calculation of benefit and death. Let me bring Diana in here because you're an evolutionary biologist And this is this is just your area This is my area So there is yeah, there's a great deal of evidence about kin selection about reciprocal altruism But we evolved in very small scale societies in which every every interaction was face to face And certainly if you look at biblical texts if you look at even other religions It's perfectly fine to kill out group members But it's not okay to kill in group members And if you look at how people act towards one another in one off interactions people aren't very nice There's a lot of Reinforcement in society and punishment for people who weren't nice to each other The society and the rules of society have been built around our evolved psychology Which enables altruism to be possible for instance in the military brothers in arms That is a way of leveraging kin selection to make people altruistic and the whole idea that you were saying before That biology the fact that we all have an origin story means that there must be something true about it Well, I think this chair is solid But now physics has shown that there's a tremendous amount of space between Between atoms the smartest species on this planet are all social group species And what happens is you have to get smart in order to be able to infer the mental states of other animals Now if you take that and try to explain the world that way You will think that there's a universal consciousness that governs the world So what we're doing is we're using our our mind which is like a hammer to see the world like a nail Our mind is good at inferring consciousness. Therefore, we're inferring consciousness in the world chimps can go to war with one another but within their own in group It's very rare that they kill each other. They kill monkeys. No, but they don't have our levels of consciousness Yeah, they don't have our level of consciousness But you could say why don't they all kill each other? They must have been endowed with god with an altruistic motivation ants will sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the colony They must have been endowed with god by god with an altruistic motivation People didn't understand how you social insects work until very recently and just because we don't understand how Altruism might have been seeded in our human species doesn't mean that it has been endowed by anyone else That is the but they don't talk about things is a great example of a god of the gaps argument They don't talk. Hello professor Dawkins. My name is Ingazi Arandu, and I am in London, England In your essay man versus god You ask what is so special about life and then you like in humanity to matter If life isn't sacred then why is murder bad? Why is child molestation theft lying? Why do we all Generally in most cultures consider them wrong. Where do we get the notion of morality? From physics or from god believe I cannot I cannot believe you're suggesting That if you didn't believe in god You would think it was okay to go out and murder people Do you seriously think that we need religion in order to agree that murder is a bad thing? Do you seriously think that before I don't know moses came down from the mountain with the 10 commandments? And and said thou shalt not kill the people said. Oh, right. Thou shalt not kill. Oh, how surprising We didn't know that before right in future. We won't kill. Of course. That's not how it happened We have perfectly good reasons for saying we don't like to live in the sort of society Where people kill each other at will and if they do it we lock them up and be thinking in any case that it's a bad thing There's absolutely no evidence that atheists are any less moral than religious people not physiologically perhaps But it's certainly true that it comes from the from the brain and it's very there are very good evolutionary reasons Why we should shrink from being cruel from being unkind one can make a very good case for that But I want to come back to the point. I cannot believe that any Person in good conscience would ever say the only reason that I that I'm good the only reason I'm a good person Is my religion if you believe that you're actually admitting that if you thought god wasn't wasn't watching you say You'd go out and kill somebody. I mean, I don't want to know that kind of person I want to know the kind of person who is good for the sake of being good Where does morality come from does it come from the benzene molecule the carbon molecule the oxygen molecule? In your worldview, where does it come from when when christians say, you know, god does stuff But he does it through us Well, that's the same as the story of the stone soup where the guy goes into the town He cons everybody into he cons everybody into Making this big pot of soup so that he can have something to eat by telling me as a magic rock He puts it in the bowl He tells them, you know, go boil up the rock and we'll get this great soup and then he starts saying You know, I had this once before and we added carrots. It was really good And by the time he's done they've added carrots and ham and broccoli It's like everything's in the soup and they make this giant pot of soup the whole town eats everybody's happy and wow His magic rock was great. That's an awesome magic rock It's like, you know, you don't need the rock if you're going to put everything in there and make your own soup Right, and that's the whole thing. It's like, you know, if god helps those who help themselves to me That's like the the most blatant statement of atheism you could make because you're saying I need to do it because god's not Going to do it. Yeah, right. So why bother with this god thing? Why not just go do it? Yeah, if you're doing it anyway It's the same thing we talk about the youth of pro dilemma when we're talking about morality is Is something moral because god says so or does god say so because it's moral, right? If it's the latter, what do we need god for? We don't need an intermediary to tell us what's right and wrong But actually, I mean the I think the main argument is that god actually does just make the morality Yes, because whatever god says to do the christian will say that is right That's the direct response that I got from a number of christians recently is that the the the solution to the youth of Pro Dilemma is that yes, whatever god says is true and if god says tomorrow that killing that murder is Is morally correct and that would be so and we just wouldn't even think about it or question it because God would change our fundamental way of Viewing things so that we would understand that murder was right and and this as soon as they said it I was like well there goes free will Once you assume a creation and a plan it makes us objects In a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick And commanded to be well, I'll repeat that created sick And then ordered to be well And over us to supervise this Is installed a celestial dictatorship A kind of divine north korea greedy Exigent exigent, I would say more than exigent greedy for Uncritical praise from dawn till dusk And swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place However, let no one say there's no cure salvation is offered Redemption indeed is promised at the low price of the surrender Of your critical faculties So maybe I should just trust myself not even listen to the bible amen. There you go Everybody here is clapping for you mark everybody Now here's the thing Don't just listen to yourself Because you can be wrong. I can be wrong. Jen can be wrong. We've all been wrong before You have to actually make a concerted effort and look at what's going on around you and have conversations with other people Because how do we decide whether or not we consider something to be moral or immoral? It has nothing to do with what some old book said or somebody else's opinion It has to do with the consequences of that action and realizing that your actions have impact on other people and their actions have an impact on you And when those when those these are those things come in conflict. That's where we make Assessments with respect to our values. Yeah, because when gay people have sex, it doesn't hurt anyone else. Yes Unless like they hurt each other. Well, you know, we'll assume it's consensual I know plenty of people who hurt each other in sex and are really happy about it Uh, but we'll say that for another time. I gotta go mark. Thanks for the call Come to my church sometime. I may 15th. I'll be there. We really like you may 15th. Bye. Bye All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get started to the uh, line of argument I have here Um, so again, when you watch that video, you'll notice that a lot of times people are are kind of just making a Very blank basic statement that you have to have god or you have to have religion in order to have your uh, morality. I think That is appealing in certain ways and I think there is a lot of uh, solace that one can find in thinking that one uh, has to appeal to a higher authority to have a type of um Guidance to what you're supposed to do Uh, but I think that again we And it is a fair criticism because I think a lot of times from a science point of view That scientists will typically argue well, science is just science just facts And I think that and the argument I kind I kind of want to try and make here is to move a little bit away from uh That stance because it just takes you out of some argument that people Find appealing for saying give me guidance for what I should do and I like this idea of a creator A deity of power to do this and so um I think this is a somewhat unique line of argument that I haven't seen much out there in the uh, the world of this of the philosophy of this So uh, follow along with me and again the main idea here is that what I want to do is Use some principles of biology To say well, how should we treat each other as people? All right, um There's one kind of thing that needs to be granted I think in the argument if you're willing to go along with it Is that the survival of the human race? Is just the most important thing Right, and I'm going to say well We can't even have this conversation if the human race doesn't exist the idea of morality Is kind of irrelevant to us if we are not here to have the conversation or to have moral based decision making Uh so um, and I want to talk about some concepts from darwini evolution and it's again, it's a very modern synthesis Of of some some basically sets of principles for human human interaction based on again maintaining the survival of the human race and so just a reminder and I've talked about this point almost in all of the talks that you're doing for science circles So you can go back and look at some of those Darwinian evolution is a combination of two forces and that is you have this inherited template of a species this dna these genes Then you inherently have to have some diversity for systems to evolve and then as that Diversity is there these selective pressures that are exerted in terms of survival or mating pressures That you end up selecting for the most fit individual and that um This is how evolution works. This is important for the survival I would say Of a species and its descendants because again one thing you can let me just point out that We've talked about the homo sapiens human species What we may have what we could have two or three million years from now Would not be homo sapiens, but would still be our descendants. So again, that that survival is Thousands millions tens of millions Now how does this diversity help the species survive and I want to just give a few key examples that we know from genetics That are um, I think some of you are are familiar with and ones. I've actually talked about before So bubonic plague and hiv have very specific infection routes into the body And there are mutations in gene cxr4 and ccr5 That eliminate the ability of these to be pathogenic within individual And again, there's an old show called secrets of the dead If you ever get a chance to see the one on this it is just a great episode that explains this type of biology Uh, so again in terms of you know, if hiv or bubonic plague were to become so much more widespread In terms of potentially affecting the killing the entire human race This is an example where A small number of individuals with these mutations allow for the race to survive And this is what actually has been seen and that's what You know multiple scientists have looked at this But that the bubonic plague killed two-thirds of the european population the first time it it Spread and then one-third of the population And then slowly fewer and fewer and so you know the ability of a of a plague to decimate our species Can be limited by this diversity Uh cholera is another example. It's cholera something that was uh, you know pandemic and killed millions of peoples over Hundreds of years or thousands of years and we actually have a mutation cystic fibrosis is something I don't know. I put the wrong thing here. Um Yeah, no, that's right cystic fibrosis is something where It basically affects the ability of chloride channels to work And so that's very bad for your lungs and ability to breathe and you will die without medical intervention at a relatively early age On the other hand it protects you from the dehydration that cholera can can have Another example is malaria where mutations in hemoglobin leads to sickle cell anemia But you actually get protection from malaria and the high prevalence of the sickle cell traits in african nations Burmilaria is endemic is an example of again small numbers of genetically diverse people allowing people to survive A high high intensity uv light is something that induces cancer In the skin and so the response to that is so again, there's actually this is a multi copy gene It's not one gene But basically you have more copies of melatonin working and you produce more of it and that helps protect you from uv On the flip side if you go to a low intensity uv region Then Um You actually can get rickets if you have really dark skin in a low uv intensity area You can have rickets, which is a pretty bad bone malformation And so again the response there is to have light skin Another nice interesting example is adult lactose utilization is basically keeping on the expression Of the newborn genes, which is like the base design rate is that we actually have the ability to digest lactose as infants But then we lose it and there have been mutations that allow adults to do that And again that means that as agriculture rose The prominence and we use dairy food dairy as a resource people had a survival advantage because they could get more energy metabolism from that resource Okay, so How does this um So sorry one more example I talked about this in my last talk about Darwinian evolution That the more diverse the set of genes in a z major histoid compatibility complexes Then the more robust your immune system is And in fact there's very good scientific evidence that we can sense more diverse mhc class molecules and a potential mate Through pheromones signaling and smelling And so again, this is basically showing that you can spread out farther Your um your genetics that if you can detect people that are more diverse genetically then you can actually Uh have more healthy offspring. Okay, so when we think about these things of having diverse genetics and survival the human race That it's in a sense a moral imperative as well as a practical imperative to say we should help the most people survive and To uh have The best opportunity to reach adulthood the best opportunity to choose their mates and have the rights to do those types of things And so in terms of what we would think of as moral behavior, what's what's actually valuable there is, you know, helping poor communities because those are Pools of genetics that we would not want to miss out on Again promoting dignity human rights promoting peace elimination of conflicts And again very importantly the right to choose one's mates and the ability to you know Basically in some senses control your ability to devote time and energy to however many offspring you wish to have Now I think there could be some over interpretations of this Where again, you could say well if this is going to be our basis for morality then people who aren't helping reproduce To be excluded from a sort of morality Or we should engineer out good or bad genes either through breeding or even maybe some sort of technology And those and maybe another argument would be that if you have really high reproductive potential very unique diverse genetics That you should be protected slash in place So anybody who's watched the handmaid's tale, which I've not watched but I know the the basic idea behind it Is that that's kind of what they're doing Um, and there may be others that are here so Let me uh, just conclude the argument that the proposal that you should really be nice and respect everyone because his or her genes could be the salvation of the species And I think that's where I will end it and basically uh handed off to bariton to have a um panel discussion and again, I know a lot of people were commenting in local chats and I Wasn't trying to perfectly ignore that but I think we'll hold on to that and come back to that in the in the discussion We're you going to raise the table or chairs But thanks everyone. Thanks for listening. Uh, again, if you don't want to sit around for the panel discussion, um Feel free to head out, but thanks for coming. Thanks again for especially with the last minute notice of I said, hey, I'll I'll fill in For uh, to have at least some sort of event this week when there weren't any other Um people on the calendar Oh, okay. You know, I am seeing that bariton does not have a light dot For oh, there it is. Okay Oh testing testing Should I speak on voice To moderate the discussion? Yeah, I think I think so Oh a combination of local chat I think scissor g and tagline can Uh use text if that's more comfortable. Does that sound all right Testing one two All right, very good Well, um Perhaps I'll make a little bit of an opening statement. Um Uh And uh to get the conversation started um fumon asks What we think of thomas kuhn who, uh is a philosopher of science and uh was famous Back in the 90s for Uh the critique of paradigm shifts in scientific thinking um and I think a little bit detrimentally. I mean my perception of thomas kuhn is that his notion of paradigm shift was latched on to by Uh anti-progressives, um by reactionaries uh to sort of um Uh In a sense discredit science by saying that Um, well everything we think science believes is true Could be wrong Because another paradigm shift is just over the horizon that will change everything So I think in the long run Thomas kuhn's paradigm shifts Um Turned out to be kind of detrimental And I also wanted to make a comment on the video That we watched Because I noticed that many of the religious defenders Reduced morality to physics or chemistry Um sort of the inanimate Um elements of nature But one thing I noticed is that none of the religious defenders Um recognized that just mere human experience um can provide us with um You know the um The the reasons for developing a moral code Um, I was a little bit surprised. I mean it just seems so obvious that the reason we behave Well to each other is because our experience teaches us to That just seems like the most obvious reason So I mean I kind of think that morality is a little bit like game theory that you know You learn how to behave in society by sort of trying different behaviors and adopting the ones that work um so um Anyway, that's kind of my take on it I mean maybe I can latch on to something that Berrigan said The idea that we can have morality coming from inanimate matter Um, this is uh related to another comment that was given by I think it was maybe by Yuri talking about how complexity Can arrive from very simple rules like from oh, so I can't hear I see tag lines, uh Um Voice waves over his head, but I actually could not oh, I bet I need to turn up my volume What was tagline speaking? Okay. Oh, there you go. I had my volume down, but I hear you now tagline Okay, well, this is scissor g speaking. Oh, I'm sorry scissor g I I I have my camera too far back. I couldn't see the name Right, right, right Anyway, I was just saying that the complexity can arise from very simple rules and uh one example that was given in in the dialogue was the Was the chess the chess rules Chess is amazingly complex and based on very simple rules But I would also add that you can have very simple equations that lead to very complex behavior fractal behavior And I would say that our behavior can arise from the complexity of inanimate matter because uh The chemistry or biochemistry is amazingly complex Uh, well, yes, I'm going to endorse that idea. I'm a huge believer in um complex systems evolving out of the application of simple rules And also like the iteration of the application of simple rules, you know, like you mentioned with fractals it's just iterating sort of a A simple set of rules over and over and over and over again Um, which also by the way relates to game theory because a lot of game theory Experiments involve like the the uh the iteration of a game over and over and over again thousands of times In order to kind of really see how the rules play out This makes me think Can you hear me? Yes, who is speaking? This is All right, great Thank you. This makes me think of chaos theory and that really Is a great example of very simple things becoming extremely complex and Unpredictable in a mechanistic way by recursive formula recursive processes tend to create The most complexity and nature I think Or things that are described by recursive mathematics Can you still hear me? Oh mic drop Yes, we I hear that uh that was Brought out in this A video I watched yesterday about simon vile w e i l Who only lived to be 33 and she Is known for a lot of philosophical viewpoints and uh She was in a search for uh the divine as well She basically starved herself and died of tuberculosis, but uh They talked about um how such simple rules can Lead to exceedingly complex and increasingly complex phenomenon on and experiences And related that to an idea of a god Who would be infinite but could somehow love The finite And transient like humans I want to I want to latch on to something that was said, uh I've said in the dialogue about well morality from the bible talking about the Old testament or the new testament and the old testament there is morality is considered Is is rather brutal um For example, if you find that when you marry a woman and if you find that she's not a virgin You're supposed to stone her to death. Well, it shows a distinct lack of knowledge of human biology You can't tell whether a woman is a virgin or not. It's it's not that simple It's not it's not as simple as whether the hymen is intact or not for example and so this more so-called morality is is based on ignorance The addresses of human biology for example I would say ignorance and territoriality and possessiveness of women as chattel or property rather than It's it reflects primitive tribal societies Which were brutal in terms of uh, I saw a comment that even a god can't be infinite If a god existed and were infinite What cardinality of infant infinity would that god be as infinite as the natural numbers or the rational irrational numbers or Any set of all the subsets of any of these larger sets Yeah, I think those are called all of zero all of one I think there's an all of two as well different levels of infinity. I'm not sure how the math applies to god in this particular case He's generically infinite so Infinite has become more defined in a sense Maybe god is the she If god exists Maybe god is a non gender Or the third gender So many possibilities Yeah, I do want to make a point for Those who want to believe in god and believe in science at the same time Is that If you want to make that You want to you want to do that they can believe in a god that is infinite enough and that his expression to What you might argue is something that he created was that he did it through natural science and that there's not a You know a constant intervention of some sort of supernatural being but that in some sort of very like almost quantum status way that this universe is here through completely natural forces Through a power that is You know kind of like super infinite in that way But that's again, so you can reconcile these from I think a philosophical point of view sometimes that way Yes, I think that was Einstein's view of god He believed that the the laws of the universe were what constituted god And that kind of god isn't really a personal god. It's it's a Very impersonal god that rules the universe so to speak through his rules scientific rules That would approach pantheism I think Of the universe as god I would say in terms of logic if one were Trying to create a Uh rigorous theory To describe God or a deity that you would have to take god As a primitive notion and leave it undefined Or else you'll run into contradictions testing testing All right, I hear you All right, I'm back anyone who tries to define god's gonna have a lot of problems either way One point that struck me at Just a moment ago at steven hawking Stated that If god had much to do with the universe It was very limited and very early And that was it Because after that it just unfolded on its own um Yes, I think um One of the problems you get into as you confront the complexity and Enormous enormity of the universe Is sort of the diminishing god um, it becomes increasingly um hard to believe that and um That a conscious god Is able to kind of um intimately Manage and be aware of all of that And so your notion of god tends to retreat Into just kind of a motive an initial motive force Or some kind of initial um, maybe motive thought but um But not the but that sort of god is not really personally interested in you Or really doesn't really um You know it's not necessarily Aware of everything that's happening Well, one thing I'd like to touch on is complexity. How do we how do we uh How do we explain complexity in the universe now? As mentioned before in steven's talk, he's there's supposedly an intelligent designer and he used the watchmaker argument Which is easy to deconstruct just from phil philosophical point of view All you have to do is say that if the watch because of its complexity needs a watchmaker Then the watchmaker is even more complex and you need a watchmaker maker And then a watchmaker maker maker and so on And how do you explain the complexity of the universe if you say that there's a intelligent designer then you need A god then you need uh something that made god Or if you somehow fold all the may the makers of god into god himself Then you still have a huge complexity that you can't explain But there is a way to explain complexity and it's strangely enough It comes from the second law of thermodynamics. That's something that I've read in an article once where That's second law of thermodynamics actually requires complexity at some level because if you start um Entropy for example entropy of energy is basically heat Any system that has energy is going to dissipate some of that energy in the form of heat And when you have a system, uh, let's say Pond slime which has many molecules most of the molecules be very simple but Some of the molecules a tiny fraction of them will become complex Just by interactions between them and those complex molecules will dissipate dissipate heat better And so some tiny fraction of those will become even more complex and so on until you have something which you could call a living being And then when you get a living being some tiny fraction of those will slowly over time become even more complex And you end up with planet ups for example of human beings where we're certainly dissipating a lot of heat here so Even from second even from the second law of thermodynamics the increasing entropy of the universe you end up developing complexity from simplicity You don't need a god to explain it or an intelligent designer Um, yeah, I love that um another, um, um view on uh entropy that I recently came across on youtube Um was this notion that uh Nature tends toward having more degrees of freedom So that um a complex system has fewer degrees of freedom Um entropy is simply the tendency of nature to try to have more degrees of freedom the you know, um the the simpler a system is the more freedom it has um and This uh this particular talk. I was listening to the lecture um uh Connected that with time that that's why time moves forward because um nature is Um moving toward more degrees of freedom. I didn't quite follow the full thread there, but I'll be fine to talk again um um I think also the notion of I think it's evident when you look at complex systems that they um have the legacy of previous experiments or previous um Attempts to make something work, you know, much of our molecular systems are that were developed Very primitive the first, you know life forms that developed in the sea a lot of those very primitive biological mechanisms are preserved pretty much intact all the way through the subsequent chain of life They're not improved. You know what I mean? They're not really designed. They're just sort of carried on with us lock stock and barrel Yeah, perhaps I didn't explain it very well, but I can give it an analogy Suppose you have a little box of toothpicks If the box the toothpicks are in the box, you can arrange them in a huge number of ways, but They can be arranged in an even huge number of ways if you dump them on the floor And when you dump them on the floor, is the pattern looks uh of toothpicks looks random But not completely random you'll notice that some fraction of the toothpicks will form little structures little coherent structures Only a tiny fraction of them and that's just from random chance and that's what happens in a pond of sludge You'll have most of the molecules will be very simple, but through just chance encounters some of them will become more complex Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm Yes, and that complexity is going to increase over time as more and more of those encounters happen Exactly, but only a tiny fraction a tinier fraction each time will become more complex Mm-hmm Um, some people in chat are commenting about Yuri's point about how religious morality tends to Result in horrible outcomes And I think some in the video we watched in steven's video one of the speakers makes that I think it might have been uh Um, oh, what's his name? Who's the famous scientist atheist? I'm blanking on his name now, but um the english guy Anyway, he yeah, um, he makes the point that you know Religious morality is so Um, great, you know, why are we you know stoning adulterers to death or you know Um coming up with all of these sort of draconian punishments for what seem to be minor infractions and so forth That seems to me it's an uncaring world that we find ourselves in and humans have coped with this since early on by tribal behavior Gathering together with social bonds and it's a survival coping mechanism, but uh the brutality and the uh Yeah, me first is still always there Yes, that that reminds me of something I came across Kind of studying the history of the ancient world and one of I think seems to me a plausible scenario is that um one of the purposes uh early tribes kind of um developed kings Um was this idea that uh kings Were could intervene with god to bring about a good harvest or have a successful hunt or good weather or you know uh fertility things like that and that um Kings that the um The authority of the king could be undermined over time If things went badly that if if he was not a good intervener with god But this uh, I guess the fundamental notion is that um You know primitive human societies We're trying to Come up with some way to Cope with the capriciousness of nature Um and uh So there was this thought that um, you know, some people have a more powerful connection with nature And those are the people who can kind of intervene with nature on our behalf Um, but of course it tends to fall apart over time because actually no one can really intervene with nature If it's good to be king Then it would have to be good to be lucky Well kings, I think eventually delegated that authority to priests, so they would have someone to blame Good point In a way, we are already intervening with nature. We are uh Heating up the entire planet. Um, of course, we're not really controlling our own nature or we would stop that kind of behavior Yeah, I'm gonna just if I can interject real quick to you that I think We've kind of focused a lot of the discussion of religion and morality on the bible And of course our other religious systems that find bases for for um for morality But you might say something specific about the bible how people look to that as a basis morality is that if you actually look at the history of the writing of it that It's really was written as a way of Uh centralizing power is written by the Nicene council as a way of Um, you know cementing power within uh, was it the emperor at the time constantly? Yeah. Yeah, that's true of the new testament. Absolutely. That's right Yeah, so we there there's they're drawing this from historical Accounts or historical records that ultimately the form of which we're looking at the bible right now is really it's a propaganda engine or authoritative power to rule over a common out the common people and so I think you know, um That not necessarily the specific strict interpretation of the bible is not how I think modern christianity necessarily works But that you know the origins of how you believe what you believe is um, and how that's Been communicated and it's origins. I think it's a really important part of this conversation When you think about religion as the basis for Yeah, that is interesting the the nicene creed Sort of came about as Was really prompted by wanting to suppress heresies Because in the in the early days of christianity, you know all sorts of different sex had all kinds of crazy ideas and um, the the nicene council was an attempt to formulate a a definitive authoritative theology Really for the main purpose of suppressing all of these crazy heresies, which only seem crazy Because they were rejected by this council um, and uh, that's something that churches, you know constantly struggle with is how to keep um heretics from From splitting off the flock One of the things required is to find a term To categorize the heretics like the term heresy itself That um becomes demonic Anyone who questions is demonized Yes, I I think like the split between roman catholicism and the um eastern orthodox religions Has something to do with the nature of communion sort of whether The host is Transformed in some spiritual sense into christ or whether in fact Like it just embodies christ's spirit In other words, whether there's some kind of a fizz anyway, so that's kind of those are the kind of little hair splitting angels dancing on the head of a pin Heresies that can you know that just broke the church into and similarly I think in in islam with you know She is and and with the sheites and uh, and the others, you know, they they break apart You know that all has to do with who was the true descendant of muhammad things like that Yes, but I think I think the split of the of the church was more political. Um, as as mentioned, uh The new testament came from from this this council trying to suppress heresies Which is a grab for political power, but the roman empire was had split into two parts the western part eastern part Which is Byzantium right and that's and that's what led to the breakup of the church or at least that was an important part of it Yeah, that's true And the politicization of religion is pervasive and ongoing Just recently the russian orthodox church has broken off from constant from the Well, the the main body of the uh Eastern orthodox religion in Istanbul. I started to say Constantinople Um, but Istanbul was Constantinople Right. There was a song about that. That's right. Nobody knows why it works. It's nobody's business, but the Turks Yes, but they broke off because um, I think the russian orthodox church is starting to serve the russian federation government under Putin's uh directions and right is uh Raising the issue of ukraine As a reason That's pure politics Uh, yes, and I have to say that's something I've noticed that it's always been a little bit shocking to me How pliant the russian orthodox church has been with authoritarianism in russia I don't know bothers me That may be uh historical. The russians were actually looking for a religion Many centuries ago So they they were flexible in what religion they would adopt they they would not adopt islam because you could not drink And if you wanted to survive the russian winter without drinking that they thought that was nuts So they but they found that eastern orthodoxy would would fit them very well. So I think they they tend to be very uh flexible There was um, uh, we could we could talk about this all day, but um, uh, it's getting on to about 20 after the hour um a little bit longer session than usual so Um, much as I hate to cut it off because it's really getting interesting. Um, why don't we go ahead and and wrap up for May I make one last comment? Yeah, sure uh in regard to the, uh Video I watched that I talked about it's it's I strongly represent uh recommended John berger berger reads chance by simone. Wow. I'll put the link on here Very good. Um, there was a point That they made that I thought was fascinating That It's Really an amazing thing that one can summarize experience in a more compact way than Actually experience experiencing it and uh, how does that happen that uh I tend to think of it as we have um pattern recognition and uh, we have language And so we can describe things in terms of patterns like the strange attractors Yeah but, um I think we have evolved So that we can see these patterns because It enhanced survival of individuals To be able to function in the universe this leads. This is my last point at this anthropic principle Philosophical consideration that observe observations of the universe must be compatible with conscious and sapient life That observes it Very good. Yeah, those are all great points Um, it's really painful to have to wrap this up because I we could talk about this all day I'd love to take you all out for a beer Um, but I guess we'll have to wrap it up. Um, uh before I uh log off sign off on voice I did want to make a plug for the naked scientists Uh, which starts in about 40 minutes. Um, we listen to the bbc Weekly radio science program and discuss the topics. So you're welcome to join us At nuba to do that And thank you for um your attention today and uh, we'll see you all next week Thanks