 And now to introduce Michael Shermer. I am pleased to introduce him to you today. Dr. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. He's the director of the Skeptic Society and is a monthly columnist for Scientific American. But I'm told that Europeans are allowed to read it. Hey, they can't all be good. Think of the volume required. He lectures frequently at Caltech and hosts a TV series. He's also nice, friendly, good-looking, approachable. And it's guys like Shermer that make it tough for the rest of us. I mean, gee, Shermer, lower the bar a little. He has a new book out, another book, The Science of Good and Evil. And he will be doing a book signing at the break. Now, you have to buy a book to get it signed, but it's a heck of a book, and I urge you to do so. He is a remarkable fellow, while his PhD is not from the University of Michigan, like most high-quality scholars. He has overcome this educational handicap with a variety of publications, presentations, pronouncements, pontifications, other P words, which caused me last year to call him what I believe him to be, the intellectual successor to Carl Sagan. Dr. Shermer battles against ignorance by planting seeds of knowledge, seeds of reason, seeds of science. And I think of Dr. Shermer, and I'm reminded of the words of the poet William Ellingham. See how a seed which winter flung down through the winter neglected lay uncoils two little green leaves and two brown, with tiny root taking hold of clay, as lifting, strengthening day by day, it pushes red, branchless sprouts new leaves and sell after sell the power in it weaves out of the storehouse of soil and climb to fashion a tree in due course of time. Tree with rough bark and bows expanse, where a crow may one day build a mansion or a man in some new may lie under the whispering leaves and say, are the ills of one's life so very bad when a green tree makes me so deliciously glad as I do now? But where shall I be when this little seed is a tall green tree? Ladies and gentlemen, to plant a few seeds, Dr. Michael Shermer. How we doing? Can you see in the back? Can you hear in the back? I sat back there last night. It was tough. OK, good. Before I get started, I want to invite you all to come back to the booth later at some point in the weekend and meet our staff. The Skeptic Society staff is here. I have a new associate director who's taking over a lot of the duties I've been doing. Matt Cooper is back there. Matt's been doing a great job. He set up this beautiful booth, and he's been doing a lot of super stuff for the office. Also Tanya Sturman, who runs our office back there. And Diane is helping Pat, and especially Pat Lindsay, who is up here last night, who drew the picture of the horse. She actually does almost all the illustrations for Skeptic Magazine. She does those covers. And finally, Daniel Lockston, who has been doing our Junior Skeptic Magazine. If you're a reader of Junior Skeptic Magazine, and I understand there's a lot of non-Juniors who are big Junior Skeptic fans, Daniel's here from Canada. He came down. So we have the whole staff here. Do take a moment to go back there. And in fact, let me just take a moment to thank them all. Why don't we do that for Skeptic? Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Matt. Daniel, Tanya. Thank you for them. And finally, I want to thank Randy for doing this, so I don't have to. We put on seven of these conferences. And some of you are asking, when are you going to do another conference? And it's really tiring and exhausting, and it's a huge thing to put these things on. And so I'm really glad, Randy, that you guys are doing this. It's terrific. I can just come and have fun. It's great. At the first amazing meeting, I gave a preliminary lecture on this topic when I was still finalizing the book. So I could get feedback. And a lot of you gave me really good feedback. So this is the result of that. In fact, the book just came out Wednesday. I just got my first copies on Wednesday. And so this is basically my first attempt, because I'm going to take this on the road here for the next year, to see how this goes. So we'll see how it goes. Essentially, the book is a sequel. It's a trilogy, as it were, to the first two books. It wasn't planned that way at all. Why People Believe Weird Things was about pseudoscience and things like ghosts and haunted houses and spirits and life after death and near-death experiences and reincarnation, all of which I was skeptical about. So people said, well, if you're skeptical about those things, what about God? As well, I'm skeptical of that. So that led to the second book, How We Believe, which was originally supposed to be titled Why People Believe in God. Then the publisher got really nervous. But if you wrote a book about why people believe weird things, and then God, it sounds like it's a sequel. I said, well, it is. Well, we can't do that. Anyway, it's more than just about that. It's about mythology and storytelling and so on. But the natural response to that was, well, if there's no afterlife and there's no God, what about morality? And that really is what bothers particularly fundamentalists more than anything else about evolution and science is that if you remove these supernatural explanations and foundations for our lives, what about morality? So that led to this book. That's the sort of the genesis, if you will, of this. I'm going to kind of give this is the most boring slide of the day. And if you can't read in the back, it's OK. I'll read it out loud. And boy, it sure looks small when you're way back there. Essentially in seven points in this less than one hour lecture, I'm taking a moral naturalism approach. That is, it's a scientific approach to morality, in which I argue that there's an evolved moral sense. That is, the moral sentiments evolved through natural selection, operating on individuals and through group selection operating on populations. The purpose of this moral sense that we evolved is to solve complex social problems because we are a complex social primate species, which I should note parenthetically that that's why we're here. We are a social primate species, and we like to hang around with other primates that think like us. That's what we're doing here. I hate to reduce a fun meeting to that, but that's what it is. And our nature is both moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and non-virtuous. By recognizing we have both of these, all of these, in ourselves, then it solves a lot of moral conundrums, why people do certain things. And then I argued for a form of provisional morality. That is, somewhere between absolute morality and relative morality, what I call provisional morality. That is, moral principles are provisionally true. They apply to most people in most cultures, in most circumstances, most of the time. I also have a chapter on free will and determinism and moral culpability, in which I argue that humans make free moral choices, even though we live in a determined universe, and what would be called a compatibilist, I guess. I still think we have free will. And thus, there is moral culpability. You have to be held accountable for your choices and actions, and in fact, human communities are structured to do just that, to make sure that you are taking responsibility. And finally, the ultimate and final challenge to a non-theistic or a scientific worldview on morality by those who hold a different worldview is that, what's the outside source? Where's the objectification of moral principles? Doesn't anything go if there is no God? So I argue that moral principles, in fact, belong to the species. They are outside of ourselves individually. Okay, so let's get started, number one. So my approach is a scientific approach, a naturalistic approach. You really shouldn't even need to defend this, but the fact is, morality has almost never been studied scientifically. It's been largely the province of theologians and philosophers and hardly any scientists have paid much attention to it at all. So it's a scientific approach. Whether there's a God or not is completely irrelevant, as it is with any scientific theory. It doesn't make any difference at all whether there's a God or not. The science stands or falls on its own. However, I do have to say, if somebody is a theist and a believer and they wish to believe that the laws of nature and evolution and all the stuff that created the moral sentiments was the way God did it, that's okay with me. I don't really care. I don't have a big dog in that fight. I think to set it up such that you have to reject a theistic position if you're gonna take a scientific position is not only untenable, it's a bad idea. It's a bad approach to getting people to think scientifically. In any case, I've long since given up trying to convert or I should say, deconvert religious people. As some of you know, I used to be a born again Christian. When I went to Pepperdine University, I was witnessing to people. This is what we call witnessing. It's sort of like Amway with Bibles. And you go around knocking on people's door and you tell them this is evangelizing. You're supposed to do this. If you're really a serious evangelical Christian, you're supposed to do that, so I did. Then I became kind of a born and atheist and I went around those same doors and knocked. I was wrong, I take this back. Turns out it largely doesn't matter what you do on the evangelistic front. It's hard to convert people one way or the other. The Mormons are not very successful at it. They do it from within through breeding. They do. There are statistics on this. Those young Mormon boys on their bicycles, which I applaud because I'm a cyclist, but they're lucky if they convert one or two a year. That is the average. It's hard to get people to change their mind on their religious beliefs for a whole variety of reasons I wrote in How We Believed. So really, if you just teach people to think scientifically, then let them come to their own conclusion and often they do. So anyway, I argue in fact that there is no such thing as a supernatural. There's only the natural. There is no paranormal. There's only the normal and all the stuff we can't explain yet. Morality has always been in that kind of mysterious realm in which I said, well, we should just take it out of that mysterious realm and study it like anything else. Like political scientists study the political process. Psychologists study psychological processes. I always like this cartoon, so I use it often. This is the Sydney Harris cartoon where the scientist is sitting here and he said that a miracle occurs at step two here. You need to be more explicit at step two than a miracle occurs. Sorry if you can't see that in the back. Essentially, morality has always been in this middle murky realm. Well, I don't know how it happened. I don't know where it came from. I guess God did it, or a miracle, some sort of supernatural being. That's not the case. And the problem with any case, dealing with things like morality from a supernatural perspective, here's the argument you often hear. Humans are moral beings, animals aren't. Where did we get this moral sense? Through the ultimate moral being, God. Without God, the highest of higher moral authorities, then there'd be no knowledge of good and evil and anything goes. One way around this, there's several ways, what I call the myth of pure evil and the myth of pure good. I have a little section on this in the book. I actually claim that good and evil don't exist. That is pure good and pure evil in a metaphorical sense. In the sense that there's like some evil homunculus in somebody's brain that makes them really bad. Or on the other side, that Mother Teresa has some really good angel homunculus in her brain or something like that. Good and evil are great words as adjectives. They describe behavior and thoughts, but mostly behavior we're concerned about. So if we look at something like this and you hear the rhetoric of our current administration that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and so on are evil. They're the embodiment of evil. Why, why did they do this? Because they hate us. Well, but why? Because they hate freedom and liberty and they hate life. Well, that's not true. That's not in any case, even if it, whether it's true or not, it doesn't get us any closer to a scientific understanding of the cause of these events. And so until we remove the supernatural element and just say, well, these are people that are motivated by different things. So let's see if we can understand the cause of those things. Same thing with the holocaust before 9-11, the embodiment of pure evil, Hitler and Himmler and the burning of bodies outside crema five there on the right at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thankfully, the holocaust literature and holocaust community that studies this is getting past this supernatural thing. For a long time, you'd read these books that Hitler is simply inexplicable. He, not only is he unexplainable, he is not to be explained, because pure evil cannot be explained. With that attitude, we'll never prevent these kinds of things from happening. So, anyway, that's my justification of a scientific perspective on this. So if it wasn't a supernatural explanation, then what's the natural explanation for morality? Where did it come from? So we start with the first evolutionary ethicist, Charles Darwin. I actually argue, using a Darwinian perspective, that the moral sense, and here I mean, when they used to use in the 18th century, the sentiments, the moral sentiments, the feelings, the emotions, the feeling of doing good in the form of positive emotions, such as righteousness and pride, evolved out of behaviors that were reinforced as being good, either for the individual or the group. In the immoral sense, the feelings of being bad, shame and guilt and embarrassment, these are emotions, they're feelings that evolved out of behaviors, reinforced as good, bad for the group or the individual. So this is important. Yes, it's true that morals vary across cultures, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm after a deeper level. The cultures may vary on which behaviors are defined as good or bad, but the feeling of doing good or bad, whatever the behavior is, that's what evolved at this deeper level. So we begin with the first of all moral principles, reciprocity, and I begin with a favorite episode of The Honeymooners. In this particular episode, the two couples have moved in together to share costs on rent, and so they're sitting down for their first dinner. And Ralph notices that when Trixie put two potatoes on the table, one big one and one small one, and he's talking to Norton, you immediately took the big one without asking what I wanted. So Norton says, well, what would you have done? Ralph says, well, I would have taken the small one, of course. Norton says, you would? And he says, yes, I would. So what are you complaining about? You got the small one. You can see the sense of justice and injustice, fairness and unfairness. In lots of primate species, in fact, they have a really good sense, as do children, of when they've been cut out, even as something as simple as food, which one got the bigger slice of the cake, so to speak. We were designed to do that. And in fact, it is really the basis of the golden rule. Reciprocity is the whole idea of doing it to others, as you would have them do done to you, or don't do unto others, as you don't want them not to do unto the triple negatives. Here's just a few, you can't read these, it doesn't matter. These are just a few of the versions of the golden rule that I dug out historically to show that it's really quite a universal concept. It is really the first thing anybody ever wrote down as a first principle of morals, of how you should treat other people. That led me to looking at human universals in general. So I have a whole appendix in the book and the discussion and narrative. Portion from Don E. Browns, Don Browns, book, Human Universals. This is a terrific book. It's a list of 373 behavioral characteristics common to all people everywhere on the planet. Usually when you take anthropology, you usually hear about one or two. There's actually lots of them. So I went through his list and I culled out the ones I thought were kind of related to the golden rule, cooperation, cooperative labor, gestures and signs of recognition, acknowledgement of gifts, things like that. Then I went through and looked at the ones related to morality in general, such as attachment and crime and empathy, incest between mother and son as unthinkable or taboo, the one we always learn about. These are, again, these deeper emotions related to what we would call the moral sentiments. And here's a bunch of others just related to controlling behavior, bad behavior, good behavior, reinforcing and so on. Don't worry about reading the list or anything. The point is that there's a lot of these that are common to everybody which I need to establish to show that it's a universal thing, that these are an evolved trait, not just a purely cultural learned thing. But why? Why would emotions evolve like this? So let's take something less complex and less controversial than morality and the moral feelings. Let's talk about something simple, like the feeling of being hungry. When you are depleted of energy, you don't compute caloric input output ratios, although I guess Weight Watchers would have you do that, which is probably a good idea, but that's not the normal thing. You just feel hungry. That feeling is an evolved biological hunger sentiment that triggers eating behavior. Similarly, when you need to procreate or pass on our genes into the next generation, we don't calculate the genetic potential of our sexual partner. We don't actually compute that waist to hip ratio that evolutionary psychologists like this study. You just feel horny and you seek out a partner, you find attractive. This sexual urge, the undeniably powerful feeling of wanting to have sex, is an evolved sexual sentiment that triggers sexual behavior. So when Theus asked me, well, if there's no God, why should you be moral? To me, this is asking like, why should you be hungry? Why should you be horny? I don't know, I just am. I just woke up this morning and I was hungry, or whatever. So for that matter, why should you ask again on the deeper level, why should you be jealous? Why follow love? Why did you follow love? I don't know, it just happened. Why are you jealous? Well, because it's just this deep feeling I have. Same thing, with the moral sense. And as long as we're approaching morality unscientifically or without evolutionary theory, we'll never get deeper than the how, it's called the proximate level of analysis, just a sort of shallow immediate causal level, because of the way you ate yesterday or whatever, but why, why? With evolutionary theory, we can go deeper, we can go to the why. So let's do that. Let's look at, for example, here we are traveling in a town, most of us don't live in, and maybe you'll go to a restaurant. Well, you'll never see the server again. Why tip that person? This is actually a little thought experiment that evolutionary psychologists play with. Well, maybe you're with somebody and you want to impress them, you know, oh, look, I'm a big tipper, okay? Because this raises you in status, something like that. But what if you're alone? Well, evolutionary, or I should say, ethical egoism, the theory of ethical egoism, states that, like, Einran's objectiveism. They would say that I leave a tip because it makes me feel good. That is, it's not an altruistic thing. I'm not doing it for this other person. I'm not doing it to impress anybody. I'm not doing it for this other person. I'm doing it for me, because I'm selfish, because it makes me feel good. Whether that's right or not, what I want to know is, why does it make you feel good? That's what I'm after with an evolutionary analysis. What does it mean to feel good about an act? Why would those neurons in your brain fire that send that signal to that part of the hypothalamus that feels good? Why is that? That's an evolved moral sense, and here's why. Humans practice both deception and self-deception. Research shows that we're better at deception than we are at deception detection. That is, we can lie slightly better than we can detect other people lying to us. However, we're decent at lie detectors. Deceivers that continue to deceive consistently with the same people get caught. That's what happens. They do, they get caught, eventually. Research also shows that the normal cues we give off when we are attempting to deceive each other, deceive others, are less likely to be expressed if you actually believe the lie yourself. See, what we're looking for are these little behavioral cues, and I did a show with an expert on this, so-called expert. Nobody's that good at it, but she was showing me what to look for. If somebody's lying, they break the gaze, they don't make as much eye contact with you, they take a deep breath. We were analyzing Clinton's famous, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. And you can see him, he's sort of fiddling with his glasses, and he takes a deep breath, and he looks off to it. Now, not everybody does that, it's hard to be consistent about detecting lies like that, but these things are true, and that's what we're looking for. But if you believe the lie, that is, you don't think you're lying, your body is not gonna give off those cues, okay? So in other words, it's not enough to fake doing the right thing in order to fool our fellow group members, because although we're fairly good deceivers, over time, you'll get caught. If you're living with a small community of people for a long time, they'll catch on to what you're up to. Therefore, we cannot fool all of the people all of the time, so we assess through observation, and especially gossip, who is trustworthy and who is not, so it is better to actually be a moral person, because that way you believe it yourself, and thus you're not actually lying. You're not faking being a moral person, you're actually being a moral person. That way, that is, the best way to convince others you're a moral person is to actually be it, not just fake it, because you'll be caught eventually. Don't just pretend to do the right thing, actually do the right thing. So it's my contention that in those long gone millennia, living 99% of our existence in these small communities of hunter-gatherer bands of a few tens of people, immediate family and extended family in a small community, we actually evolved this sense of wanting to do the right thing, not all the time, but enough of the time that we had these moral sentiments, and that those who were not very good at that eventually were excluded or excommunicated or oft, as they say. So I actually have a section on the book, it's amazing what sociologists study. There's actually a huge community of people, or huge body of literature on the study of gossip, and what gossip is about and who gossips and so on. The premise of this is that in these communities, these small communities, of about 150 people, and it looks like about kind of a magic number. It's roughly the number of living descendants a Paleolithic couple would produce in four generations. In other words, this is how many people they knew in their immediate and extended family and small community, 150. Archaeological evidence from the Near East shows that archaeological communities typically numbered about 150 people. Modern farming communities like the Hutterites average about 150 people. Studies on the military, British Army and US Army in World War II, determined that the ideal company size was 130 in the British Army, 223, within our order of magnitude. We're looking for those few tens to a few hundred people. The idea is that there's not so many people you feel anonymous, but enough people that you have some power. Same thing with the study of businesses, departments and large corporations, a church of England study. What's the ideal size for a congregation? You want enough people that fundraising goes well, we have some political clout in the community and so on, but not so many people that nobody knows each other and you feel anonymous. The reason for this probably, and by the way, that's the average number of people in your address book. So those who study this tell me. The reason for this is that our brains are only so big to keep track of that many relationships, roughly 150. Some people have really good social skills. Politicians are really good at remembering names. Most of us are not. If you can remember 150 people that you run into, that's, you're doing pretty good. What has gossip got to do with this? I like this little editorial cartoon from Bill Reckon and Don Wilder. All you've done today is gossip. Well you gossip too. I don't gossip. I transmit pertinent data via a verbal mode. And that's what gossip really is. Those who study gossip know that it's mostly about other people and who's sleeping with who and who has power and who doesn't and who has high status and who's doing who and what not and who's doing what. It's about relationships, human relationships. That's why you're not supposed to do it because we're supposed to talk about ideas as higher in the hierarchy of importance, but it's not really what people really want to talk about as other people. Why? Because that's how you find out who's a deceiver, who's a cooperator, who's a competitor, who's excessively greedy, who we can really count on. One of the things that religion does really well is it is by having all those rituals. If I see you in the pews on Sunday and you're wearing the cap and you're not eating meat or whatever the ritual is, it doesn't really matter. The rituals are relevant. It's doing the ritual that tells me you're one of our group. I can really count on you in a tough situation. You're a cooperator. If you're one of those rebels that doesn't want to go along with it, maybe you're not going to come through for us in our group. That's where these things evolved. Point three, we're almost halfway there and evolve moral social structure. So basically I'm saying that these things evolve because we live in the social communities in which we have these different competing motives, feelings, emotions that have to do with self-survival, the individual, your own immediate family, your extended family, your kin, your immediate community and so on. One way to look at this, this graph is a little bit complicated. These things are all in the book. Basically this is showing yourself in the middle and who you're most likely to help and who's most likely to help you with expanding the sort of expanding circle of sentiments as Peter Singer calls it. This is a kin selection. This is sort of an evolutionary model based on genetic relationships. So you're more likely to help your identical twin than you are your niece or nephew, something like that. You're more likely to help your own offspring, your parents are more likely to help you than they are an aunt or uncle, something like that. This gets us at least to explain where morality would come from out to the extended family but we have to do better than that because we do moral things, good things, especially for people that have no genetic relationship to us, why is that? We'll come back to that. Another way to look at this is this little pyramid I created. It's just a metaphor, just sort of a way of thinking about these things. On the bottom rung, you have the individual meeting your basic biological needs, food, drinks, safety, sex and so on. It's kind of like, not Asimov, Maslov's hierarchy of needs in this pyramid. Above that the family, above that the extended family and into the community. About halfway up there at this sort of level between the community and the family, there's a split, a divide, this sort of biocultural transition boundary, I call it. On the bottom, this is mostly our evolutionary history. On the top, this is mostly our recent cultural history. By recent I mean, let's say, last 10,000 years or so. This is where all these emotions are operating. There's very few moral emotions operating up here. So the idea of saving the biosphere, bio-alterism, bio-philia, the love of other species, saving the planet, none of these things evolved. These require considerable social pressures on individuals. Because remember, we evolved as the small primate on an African savanna, thinking in terms of days, months, maybe a few years, maybe a few tens of years for the entire lifespan. We're not evolved to think about what the environment's gonna be like in 10,000 years. That requires culture and history. It requires social political systems to make happen. So we have to look at those tensions between what we immediately need for ourselves and what the long-term goals are, which are hard for us to think about. So where would morality then have come from? What we think of morality. So within a rough order of magnitude, I look at the evolution of humans this way. 100,000 years ago, let's just say, homo sapiens, our species begins roughly 100,000 years ago, maybe a little bit earlier than that, 150 maybe, but to say 100,000 to 10,000 years ago, we lived in small bands of tens to hundreds of individuals. 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, in these tribes of hundreds to thousands of individuals. 5,000 to roughly 3,000 years ago, chieftains of thousands to tens of thousands, and then within the last few thousand years, the rise of states of tens to hundreds of thousands of individuals, and most recently, large states and empires of hundreds of thousands to even millions of individuals. And today, one with a billion. Morality, as we think of it, moral principles written down, codified in laws and so on, all happened in that transition there from bands and tribes to chieftains and states. About the same time that religion began and political state systems began. The reason for that is because if you're living in small communities of tens to a few hundred people, and you know everybody, you don't need big complex rule books and law books and political systems in states and police systems and religions and so on, you don't need it because the normal informal means of shunning and shame and embarrassment and guilt and pride and all the positive reinforce, all that stuff works great if you all know each other. Once you live in large communities, none of that works, it breaks down and anemone destroys those informal social systems and that's why you get states. So, why did religion begin? Because it was the first social system to lay down in writing, probably first verbally, but then in writing, how we're supposed to live with one another, conflict resolution, how we get along, that kind of things. If you want to know where morality began as we think of it in the modern sense, began right there in the middle, roughly say just 5,000 years ago or so, as did religion. Point four, okay, we're more than halfway there. The nature of moral nature. You've seen the famous Pogo cartoon, I assume. Yep, son, we've met the enemy and he is us. This actually goes a long ways toward explaining a lot of conundrums in human behavior and human history. That is, if we say by nature, we are both moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and non-virtuous. Now obviously these moral traits vary within individuals. We all know people that are nicer than others, more moral, some are not so moral. Different populations because of culture and history and so on act either more morally or immorally. But the fact is we all have these traits such that most people, most of the time in most circumstances are good and they do the right thing for themselves and others. But some people, some of the time in some circumstances are bad and do the wrong thing for themselves and others. So in other words, humans are by nature, both naughty and nice. You can't see in the back, this is Virgin Airlines up here and this is not. So we can ask more seriously, what's the moral difference between Captain Willard and Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, which of course as most of you know is taken from Joseph Conrad's book, The Heart of Darkness. And what that book is really about is that we all have this heart of darkness and you recall from the film as Captain Willard is making his way up the river and reading the dossier on the amazing Colonel Kurtz and what a patriotic hero he was and what happened to him, he realizes that war leads people to do some pretty dramatic things and he finds himself realizing that, well I could easily do what this guy did. Anybody could and that's kind of the moral of that story because we do have these things. I remember I had an opportunity to meet Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler's List and I asked him, what's the difference, the moral difference really between Oscar Schindler, the hero of the story and Amon Goertz, who was the commandant of the Plash of Concentration Camp and his answer was, well not much really, they weren't that different as men. In fact there'd been no war, they would have been maybe business partners, drinking buddies, something like that. But obviously somebody made a right moral choice and somebody made a wrong moral choice and so we reward one and punish the other one. Although if you see the documentaries on Schindler and you see the interviews with his wife and particularly his wife, but some of his buddies, he probably sort of morally obtuse at best, but still he did the right thing and so we reward that. So we all have these. I think it's best said by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, maybe my favorite quote in my book. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart. That's a deep quote there. I remember when I was really into the extreme libertarianism and we used to go to these meetings and groups where they'd talk about this island where we'd put all the bad people and then the rest of us sort of free market, rational science, moral people would live. And I just think that's kind of simplistic because I think all of us have that capacity. In fact the whole anthropology wars which we've done quite a bit on in skeptic and I have a chapter in the book on this. This whole darkness in El Dorado about how Napoleon Shagnan and his book on the Yamamata, the so-called fierce people versus Ken Good's book on the Yamamata about how they're the loving kind, peaceful, erotic people. The reason these guys are getting the story wrong is because they're still holding this black and white picture of human nature. They're either good or bad. Well they're not, they're both. Are humans morally or moral? Yes. Number five, okay. So all that's the first half of the book is kind of talking about evolution of morality and what human nature is like. But what people really want more than that is, well then how do you be moral? Well I'm no Dr. Laura with a radio show dispensing moral wisdom and I'm not gonna do that. However we do, if we're gonna provide an answer to this problem, if there's no God, does anything go, you have to have something to say about this. So I argue that moral principles derived from the moral sense are not absolute where they apply to all people in all cultures under all circumstances all of the time. Neither are they relative, completely determined by culture, circumstance, and history. Moral principles are provisionally true. They apply to most people in most cultures, most circumstances, most of the time. I got this idea actually from Stephen Jay Gould. I like this definition of a fact. In science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. That's as good as it gets in science and that's good enough, that's how it works. So I thought well what if we applied this to moral choices, moral principles, which we might be considered analogous to scientific facts, they're provisionally true or false, right or wrong, moral and moral in a sense that confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. Not in some absolute sense and not anything goes whatever you think, whatever I think it's all equal. So in provisional morality it would be reasonable for us to offer our conditional agreement, provisional, conditional, depending on more evidence and whatnot, that an action is moral or immoral if the evidence for and the justification of the action is overwhelming. It remains provisional because as in science the evidence and justification might change. Then I started thinking well then what's the principle you're using? The typical principle almost everybody uses is what I call the ask God principle. This is what's called in philosophy the divine command theory. God commands it, divine command. That's what most people think that they think. I don't actually think that because if you ask them well how do you know God commands that? Did he tell you? I mean are you talking to him? Did you ask him? Did you read it somewhere? Well usually it's, well my parents told me, the preacher told me, whatever. People get this from different sources but that is it, but forget that. Let's just look at this concept in general. Commandment seven is they'll shalt not commit adultery. Well what if he hadn't put that in there? Some people wish he hadn't. If God had not included this commandment would adultery be moral? So here's the problem, if God, if it's not in there in the Bible there's nothing in there about stem cells. Boy you really gotta read between the lines to get something to say morally about stem cells and they do, you still got a reason your way through it somehow. You used to kind of think through it. And once you start doing that you're moving away from the ask God principle. I like this little cartoon here, the non sequitur from Wiley Miller. I don't care what your lawyer said, they're not called the 10 recommendations. Another problem that I won't go into is that absolute moral systems with commands instead of recommendations lead to intolerance. They lead to a certain level of behavioral intolerance of diversity that makes me very uncomfortable. It's one of the reasons I quit religion in the first place. So I just sat down and dreamed up three moral principles, whatever. The ask first principle, the happiness principle and the liberty principle. I just sat down for a couple of days and tried to think through this a little bit. So the ask first principle, I got thinking about this. If we can't ask God, who can you ask? Geez, I'm about to do this. Is this a moral thing to do? Who can I ask? Well one answer is the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In a way, this is by asking how would I feel if this were done unto me? You're asking how would others feel if I did it unto them. But you're really asking yourself. You're not asking that other person. The golden rule therefore has a severe limitation. What if the other person thinks differently than you do? What if you wouldn't mind having action x done to you, but somebody else might? So the ask first principle is to find out whether an action is right or wrong. Ask first. Not yourself, the potentially affected moral receiver. And I'll give you an example of this. This is an experiment done about 10 years ago. This is the data from this experiment. It was basically how men and women differ on certain things. The experiment was this. It was done on a college campus and a stranger approaches you. The stranger approaching you is a shill working for the experimenter. And they ask one of three different questions and then the response is recorded. When they did this, a lot of different college campuses, different age groups, they controlled for attractiveness and this kind of thing. The first question is asked, would you go out on a date with me tonight? And that's represented, the data is represented by the first block of on the left there. 50% and 50% between the two groups, men and women, have responded positively. Yes, yes I would. In the second question, would you go back to my apartment with me tonight? That's in the middle block of data there. One group, only 6% answered yes and 69% answered yes. I'm not telling you who, but you could probably figure it out. The third question was, would you sleep with me tonight? That's represented by the third block of data where 0% of one group said yes. Not one member of this gender said yes. Not one. Whereas 75% of the other gender said sure. Did you want me to bring a bottle of wine? So you can guess the difference there. It's obviously the million we're only too willing. We really are built quite differently and there's probably deep evolutionary reasons for this. I look for a graphic and I found this. This is the reason for that data set. For those of you in the back that can't quite see, on the top label man, it's just a little toggle switch in a very upright position there and this is all the other stuff there. Still trying to find the manual. I threw it away, unfortunately. I went online to get it and it wasn't there. Well, the point is this is that, so let's say you're a guy thinking, okay, do unto others, how would I feel if this woman asked me if I wanted to have sex tonight? Well, I'd be pretty happy about that, but she might not. So you can't just ask yourself, that's the problem with the do unto others is you would have them do unto you. You have to ask somebody else. Now, maybe you can't really ask, but you can at least do the thought experiment or ask somebody who you can ask. How do you think she would feel if I asked or asked your sister or your friend who you're not romantic with or somebody that might be honest with you? Something like that. That's the idea of the ask first principle. Ask, win in doubt, ask. The happiness principle, okay. One of the fundamental drives of human nature is that we all strive for greater levels of happiness and we avoid greater levels of unhappiness. However, these are personally defined. It's just kind of a, I'm going for the emotion. These are emotions which evolved as part of a suite of emotions that make up the human psyche. Humans have a host of moral and immoral passions including being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, so on, nasty and nice. It is natural and normal to try to increase your own happiness by whatever means available even if it means being selfish, competitive and nasty and we all do that. Fortunately, evolution also created both sets of passions such that by nature we also seek to increase our unhappiness by being selfless, cooperative and even nice once in a while. So the happiness principle states simply that it is a higher immoral principle to always seek happiness with somebody else's happiness in mind and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else's unhappiness. Now by the way, these are just kind of theoretical concepts, I'm not claiming I practice this better than anybody else. These things are hard to actually live up to. Simple in theory, difficult in practice. However, with training, obedience training for humans, maybe that's my next book. You do have these strong impulses to act a certain way and that's why we have culture. It is really seriously one of the reasons why we have religion. It is in many ways a set of rules of behavior control. It's a recognition that look, we know what people really wanna do and that's why we're telling you every week you shouldn't do it as a reminder because it's hard to overcome those deep impulses. And finally the liberty principle, I can say it's even a higher moral level to which we can strive and that is freedom and autonomy or liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness. So the liberty principle states it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with somebody else's liberty in mind and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty. It's trying to find a visual for this and here's one. We have to give people the freedom to pursue their happiness and autonomy in whatever ways they want. This guy, if you can't read that in the back, he has need cash for alcohol research. At least he's honest and I should know parenthetically. I guess the liberty principle really, it needs a political system. It is, it doesn't really even begin. The concept of liberty, particularly political liberty doesn't really begin until the rise of states and the concept we're used to is so new it's only a couple centuries old. However, I'm pretty optimistic actually. Although recent history always seems kind of discouraging but if we look at the long run, say the last 400 years, there has been more autonomy, more liberty for more people and more places, more of the time and I think that's good human progress. In the long run things are getting better. Point six, two to go, provisional justice. Well, okay, so the theist says, all right, there's no God and anything goes and so on. Well, where's their justice? I mean, Hitler just got away with it. Is that it? Is that what you're telling me? Bad people just get away with it. So we have to deal with that. The fact is good things and bad things happen to both good and bad people. We always remember when bad things happen to good people but things happen to everybody. There is no absolute and ultimate judge to meet out rewards and punishments at some future date beyond human existence. There just isn't, so we can't count on that or if there is, we can't prove it to you. We won't know until we get there and we're not there so we have to deal with it now. But since moral principles are provisionally true for most people, most of the time in most circumstances, there is individual culpability and social justice within human communities that produce feelings of righteousness and guilt and meet out rewards and punishments. I think the rebuttal to that, as it were, if it needs one, comes from Darwin himself. I love this quote from The Origin of Species. When I view all beings, not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seemed to me to become ennobled. And I just liked that word, ennobled. It's a nice word, it's an uplifting word, ennobling. In fact, evolutionary ethics is ennobling. It's more ennobling than a theistic system, I think. In fact, if there is no outside source, how much more important it is that we have standards, that we practice now. The idea that, well, yeah, maybe he gets away with it now but he won't in the long run, then what? You're not gonna deal with it now? The here and now is what really counts. So morality exists outside the human mind, this is my argument, in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, us in the room, but it's a human trait. It's a human universal. And that evolution created these moral sentiments and the concomitant behaviors over hundreds of thousands of years so that today, even though we agree, that humans created morality and ethics. It's not us who creates these, you and I sitting here in the room. It was our Paleolithic ancestors who did in those long gone millennia. We simply inherit them, fine tune and tweak them according to our cultural preferences and apply them within our unique historical circumstances. So I'm gonna wrap it up with a sort of a long quote here, this is from a review of my book in the Washington Post, the review of how we believe from Michael Novak, he's really a beautiful writer. But he sets up, I think, the problem and then allows me to give the answer to it, which I did at the end of the book. Science is a method for gaining important forms of knowledge, he writes. Scientism is the reduction of all forms of knowing to scientific method. Shermer certainly comes periously close to the latter. Still he tries valiantly to maintain a sense of the sublime, the sacred, even the mystical, as in describing his exchange of eternal love with his soul made over lit candles inside shark cathedral. Or standing beneath a canopy of galaxies, atop a pillar of reworked stone or inside a transept of holy light. When, quote, my unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint and was emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition and unyoked from the rules written for another time and another place for another people. Close quote, quoting me. The beauty of being Shermer is that he faces no judge, undeceivable, transcendent of nature, and within him as well as beyond him. And he stands in no long pilgrim community, struggling down the ages, falling, rising and throwing cathedrals like shard up against the sky cathedrals. He is a free writer. Well, at first I thought, yeah, I'm a free writer. Yeah, because that feels good. I'm going to get on my bike and go. However, I'm not really, really none of us are, whether you believe in God or not. I am a free writer, but only in the freedom from one set of cultural traditions usually gathered under the umbrella of religion. But like everyone else, I face judges that are in their own way transcendent and powerful, family and friends, colleagues and peers, mentors and teachers, and my society at large. My judges may be lower cased and occasionally deceivable, but they are transcendent of me as an individual, even if they are not transcendent of nature. As such, together we all stand in a long pilgrim community, struggling down the evolutionary and historical ages, trying to live in love and learn to temper our temptations and to do the right thing. I may be free from God, but the God of nature holds me to her temple of judgment no less than her other creations. I stand before my maker and judge not in some distant future ethereal world, but in the here and now, in the reality of this world, a world inhabited not by spiritual and supernatural ephemera, but by real people whose lives are directly affected by my actions and whose actions directly affect my life. Therefore, this is really the best we can do. May not be ultimately satisfying for the moral absolutist, but since there's no convincing scientific evidence that an outside source exists to provide that absolute moral verification, then provisional morality and provisional justice is the best we can do. If you want more, if you need some source of moral verification and objectification outside of yourself, your society, and your species, then you're living in the grip of a supernatural illusion. Fortunately, provisional morality is enough to lead to a moral humanity because a moral nature is part of human nature. It exists independent and outside of any individual because it belongs to the species. As long as humanity continues, so too will morality provisional, though it may be. Thank you.