 Hey, today we're debating God, morality, and secular humanism, which gives a better foundation for ethics, God, or secular humanism. Thanks for joining us. We are very excited for this epic debate, folks. Do want to let you know both of our guests have their links in the description box. We'd highly encourage you. If you're listening and you enjoy what you were hearing from them, please go down to that description box and click on their links where you can hear a lot more. Also, want to let you know, folks, if it's your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button, as we've got a lot more debates coming up. We are very excited, for example, we'll be live in Los Angeles with Destiny and Vosh, as they will be debating face to face for the first time. That should be a lot of fun, and we've got many more coming up. So, we are a non-partisan platform. In other words, we don't have any stances at the channel itself. We just want to give debaters a chance to debate it out, and then it's up to you guys to decide. So, whether it be in the comments or elsewhere, please, you know, let your opinions be made known. As we, as I said, try to be as non-partisan as possible. So, with that, I'm going to give you the format for today's debate, or discussion. It's kind of a half and half. It's going to be 12-minute openings. We're going to start with David. Then we will go to 8-minute first rebuttals. Then we will have the 50-minute discussion. And then we will have the 5-minute conclusions and 30 minutes of Q&A. So, thanks so much, folks, for being here. It's a true pleasure. And David, the floor is all yours. I've got the timer waiting. Thanks for being here. All right, well, hello, everyone. I'd like to thank James from Modern Day Debate for setting up this exchange and Matt for representing secular humanism. Even though I have complete intellectual contempt for certain positions, I always respect people and organizations that are willing to defend their views and subject them to critical examination. Now, as far as I can tell, in this debate, we're not focusing on whether atheism is true or whether theism is true. Instead, we're focusing on a fairly narrow topic, namely whether secular humanism or theism provides a better foundation for morality. Spoiler alert, theism does. Theism can account for morality quite easily. Non-theistic ideologies can't. And if it weren't for feelings and cultural indoctrination, getting in the way every atheist on the planet would agree with me. But many contemporary atheists, instead of simply acknowledging the implications of their position, try to ground morality in something other than God. Just to be clear, when we talk about morality, we're talking about things like moral obligations. Human beings have a moral obligation to do certain things and not to do other things. Moral value, some things are intrinsically good. Moral responsibility, certain actions make us worthy of praise or blame. Moral improvement, people become better or worse and so on. This is what we mean by morality. Of course, you can always radically redefine morality so that it bears little resemblance to anything we normally mean. But radically redefining morality isn't providing a foundation for morality. It's mutilating it. We're looking for a foundation, not mutilation. Now, I'm going to share my perspective, but I want to do so in a way that atheists can relate to. And if atheists can relate to anything, they can relate to asking people for evidence and being skeptical. So imagine this scenario, atheists. You walk into a church and you meet some Christians. You ask the Christians, why do you believe in God? And they reply, well, we just know that God exists. And we feel the presence of God. You're a little confused, so you ask, but what evidence do you have that God exists? And the Christians respond, evidence. We don't need evidence. We already told you we know that God exists and we feel his presence. We know and we feel. No further questions. Needless to say, atheists would not be very impressed with this response. Atheists would not take Christians saying, I just know or I feel the presence of God as any kind of evidence that God exists. Now, my atheist friends, if you can recall how you feel when a Christian tells you that he doesn't need evidence because he just knows God exists, now you know exactly how I feel every time I ask an atheist to defend the moral claims and moral judgments he's making. Suppose I walk into a meeting of the local chapter of the ultra-rational supersceptic squad or whatever they call themselves these days. And I find a bunch of atheists complaining about God, complaining about religion, complaining about Christians, complaining about Muslims, complaining about the Bible, complaining about the Quran. And so I say, hi, I see you making lots of claims about how bad God is and about how bad religion is and you're making lots of moral claims. And I'm wondering how you might defend this vast array of moral judgments you're constantly throwing around. Let's start with some easy ones. Why do you believe that killing apostates or terrorist attacks or female genital mutilation are wrong? The atheist's reply, well, it's wrong to hurt another person without sufficient reason. And so I say, sirs and madams and everything in between, all you did was defend your moral claims with another undefended moral claim. Why do you believe it's wrong to hurt other people without a good reason? And whether this discussion is long or short, the atheists will eventually proclaim we just know. We just know that these things are wrong and we feel, we know and we feel, we feel and we know no further questions. Now, if you have a built-in inconsistency detector, it should be spinning and flashing. But somehow the world's self-proclaimed champions of reason just don't see the inconsistency. I'm going to explain it with what I call the skeptics' dilemma. It goes something like this. Theists have dozens of arguments for the existence of God and atheists reject these arguments. But on what consistent basis can you reject arguments for the existence of God and then grant arguments for the existence of real objective moral values or real objective moral obligations, values and obligations that go beyond our personal beliefs and feelings? In other words, what arguments are there for the existence of objective moral values and obligations that would survive the same level of scrutiny that atheists apply to arguments for the existence of God? I'm not aware of any. So here's what I see. Human beings have an internal skeptometer. It measures our level of skepticism and we can adjust our skeptometers. We can become more or less skeptical depending on the situation. We turn to arguments for the existence of God and we don't want to believe in God. So we set our skeptometers to maximum until we end up denying obviously true premises like the universe began to exist or anything that begins to exist must have a cause. But then we turn to things like moral obligations and moral values and we don't want to reject those. So all we do is we dial our skepticism down to minimum and we get to the point where anything qualifies as evidence for what we want to believe. This is why an atheist can call a Christian stupid and irrational for claiming that he just knows God exists and then turn around and call himself brilliant and perfectly rational for claiming that he just knows that objective moral values and obligations exist. If we want to be consistent there are only two options on the one hand. We can set our skeptometers high enough to reject all arguments for the existence of God. But if we do that we should examine moral claims in a similar fashion and we're going to find out we can't defend those. We can't defend even our most basic moral claims. So you can reject God and reject the idea of objective moral values and obligations. Alternatively we can set our skeptometers somewhat lower to the point where we can defend the existence of objective moral values and objective moral duties. But wherever we set that such that those things can be said to be real there are dozens of arguments for theism that are going to be able to meet that standard in which case you'd say yes to moral values and yes to God. So we can accept both or we can reject both. That's the skeptic's dilemma. If the skeptic wants to be consistent the alternative of course is to be inconsistent applying one level of skepticism to beliefs we don't like and a completely different level of skepticism to beliefs that we do like. But if your worldview requires this kind of inconsistency maybe it's time for a new worldview. Now with these things in mind God versus secular humanism. Secular humanism is roughly, Matt can expand upon this a bunch. The philosophy that human beings are capable of flourishing without belief in God or religion. I actually agree with that basic claim. You can do all sorts of wonderful things and accomplish amazing feats without believing in God just as you can breathe without believing in oxygen. I have two main problems with secular humanism. First the core moral claims of secular humanists can only be maintained by massively dialing down their level of skepticism. If secular humanists had a drop of real skepticism coursing through their veins they'd have to abandon their position. Second since secular humanism is explicitly non-theistic the implications of atheism are always going to suck the life right out of the philosophy. Human beings generally believe that there are moral truths, moral facts and that we have access to these moral facts. There are only two possibilities here either at least some of our beliefs about moral facts and our access to them correspond to reality or they don't. If a non-theistic view is true are there moral facts and do we have access to them? Well what kind of universe do we live in if atheism is true? According to atheist Pope Richard Dawkins the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good nothing but blind pitiless indifference no purpose no evil no good. What are human beings if atheism is true? Pope Richard the first we are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living. So human beings are machines for propagating DNA in the universe in which there is at bottom no purpose no good no evil. If this is correct where do we get our beliefs that there are moral facts and that we know them? There are only two places to go. You can say one that we're just hardwired to believe in moral facts because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce or two that society has conditioned us to believe in moral facts. But if those are your only sources for our moral experience there are no moral facts. Being hardwired for certain behaviors has nothing to do with moral facts and societies obviously can't be the source of moral facts because societies are often moral failures. So if atheism is true we believe in objective moral values even though there are none. We believe in moral obligations even though there are none. We believe in moral responsibility even though there is none. If our beliefs about morality do not correspond to reality then our moral reasoning faculties are massively defective and can't be trusted. In which case we should either be moral skeptics or moral nihilists. That's not much to prop up secular humanism so maybe we do need God. What about theism? Can theism do any better? Well since atheism provides no foundation if theism can provide any foundation it will do better than atheism. There are two basic approaches we can take. We can either start with a hypothesis and then see whether the evidence makes sense or we can start with the evidence and work our way back to a hypothesis. If we start with a theistic view like God exists and created the universe and created man in his image we shouldn't be surprised that all we shouldn't be surprised at all that there are moral truths and that we have the cognitive faculties to apprehend them and to modify our behavior in light of them. So theism makes perfect sense of objective moral values, objective moral obligations, moral responsibility, moral improvement and so on. If we start from moral experience and reason back to a foundation we get a similar result. Moral properties like rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness are real but they're not physical. And so it seems very strange and unscientific to reason based on these things but that's the kinds of things they are. And if you start looking at what sort of being could be the foundation for goodness or could be the kind of being that would have the authority to issue moral commands over all of humanity you start ending up with something that sounds suspiciously like God. Alright, thanks so much David for that opening statement. We will now switch it over to Matt for his opening statement of 12 minutes. I've got the timer set for you Matt. The floor is all yours. Alright, hi and thanks to David and Modern Day Debate for doing this. I was trying to take a bunch of notes. Sometimes I wonder why I bother showing up as long as opponents are going to try to present both sides in a fictional straw man. This started off as let's do which makes a better account of ethics, God or atheism. And I pointed out rightly that atheism isn't an ethical system at all and that instead I should be defending secular humanism which is in fact a system that addresses ethics and morality. I tried to get this changed a little more clearly to Christianity versus secular humanism because Christianity at least can be presented as if it is a moral system or as if it makes moral pronouncements. Because the fact is God isn't a philosophy. It's not a system. It's not a worldview. It is a proposed entity. Secular humanism is entirely focused on discovering and promoting the best methods of improving human life. No God has been shown to exist. There isn't agreement on which God exists or which one might exist or what it wants or what it thinks. In fact there's chaotic disagreement with countless religions and countless denominations among them. The various God models don't necessarily have human best interest at heart. How do we demonstrate that a God whatever happens to think about morality has any interest in human affairs or what it thinks is right and wrong? What we have is not information about God but speculation about God from human beings and the speculation doesn't agree. In order for something to serve as a foundation for anything, any sort of system, any sort of evaluation, in order to be evaluated as a foundation what we need are some principles, not merely a list of do this or don't do that, but principles that this foundation encourages. Things like individual autonomy, sovereignty, the recognition that we're seeking a better world for human beings, the recognition of what we've learned so far, where we have discovered that we were right and where we have discovered that we were wrong, the recognition that it's about us and it's up to us. Now, morality is often, I don't know, confusingly defined. David wants to say that the atheists are going to completely misdefine it as if it's not morality anymore and I don't know where the word objective came from because the word objective doesn't appear in the debate title nor am I here saying in any way that there are objective intrinsic moral values or truths in anywhere. So I would agree that if I'm going to be skeptical and require evidence for things, if someone wants to say that there is a God who serves as a foundation for objective moral truths, then let them present the evidence for that. But my position is that as far as I can tell, there are no objective moral, no requirement that one care about well-being or human suffering or human flourishing or any of that. There's nothing about the universe that requires that we care about that, and yet we do. This is what we've always talked about when it comes to morality. We are talking about how do humans interact? What are the consequences of our actions? Do those consequences make life better or worse for human beings? There's no requirement that one care about that, but if two people do a care about that, then they can begin to assess what sort of actions one should do to achieve the goal of a better life for human beings. Now, secular humanists and secular humanism aren't saying that we've solved every one of the problems, but the objections that I always seem to get are, yes, but why do you care about well-being in the first place? And we're not just saying that it's objectively, or that it is some truth that, oh, we care about it because we care about it, and that makes it true in the sense of an objective imperative. We're saying it is true that we care about this. I'm assuming that you care about it, too. I'm assuming you'd like to live a better life. I'm assuming you care about how we evaluate interactions between human beings and what would be an action that benefits oneself or others or society, et cetera, but as long as we have to share space, we should work together to find the things that make life better for all of those people who care about making life better. Now, the immediate concern is, well, okay, well, what if I don't care about making life better? Cool, then I'm not talking to you. This is why I use the chess game as an example. Chess is entirely arbitrary. The rules are subjective. We invented it. We came up with the board, the pieces, how they move, how they interact. Once we sit down at the chess game and we decide that we would rather not lose, it doesn't matter if you are the opposition or a teammate or a coach. If we can agree that the goal is to not lose the game, then we can agree non-subjectively about which moves are better and which moves are worse. This is intrinsically obvious. Well, not intrinsically obvious. I know of no refutation of this other than to say I don't really care about chess. I don't care about winning. And the analogy holds that we are in a universe. We are physical beings in a physical universe. And the laws of that universe, the physical laws dictate the consequences of our action. If I slice somebody's throat open or give them a cup of water or give them a sandwich, drinking battery acid is worse for us than drinking apple juice, generally speaking. There are exceptions to all of these. And that recognition that they're exception also helps us make a better world. But if we're going to play the game of life and play it according to the rules and we care about not losing, we care about our survival, we care about having a world that is better, oh, what do you mean better? That's still up for discussion. We can decide. Everybody thinks they're working towards a better world, but the way to resolve those conflicts and disagreements about what makes a world better is to sit down and show where one view of the world that is labeled better winds up with some sort of conflict. Now, when we talk about secular humanism, there have been three different secular humanist manifestos over the years. The latest version, manifesto three, starts with a few basic principles. Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation and rational analysis. Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of evolutionary change and unguided processes. Ethical values are derived from human need and interest tested by experience. There's the foundation for ethics. Life's fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of human ideals. Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. I don't necessarily agree with every interpretation of every aspect of every one of these, but it's at least a spelling out of a foundation. No such spelling out of a foundation exists for God in the abstract or theism in the abstract. You could be a theist and not think that there's any God that cares at all about morality, which is why we continually talk about yes, but can you account for morality? Yes, I can. We live in a world, we, those of us who care about the quality of life, are working to discover the best ways to improve that. That system, secular humanism, is the beginning of an ethical and moral system that is expressly focused on humanity with humans as the actors and beneficiaries of that system. It means that we can adapt to whatever knowledge we learn about what makes the world better and how to achieve it. No one is pretending that we've discovered or will discover one correct way to a utopia, or that a utopia is even possible. We're not asserting there is some intrinsic objective moral obligation in the world. We're only saying that as far as we can tell, we're stuck in this universe. We are interacting. The consequences of my actions not only have consequences on me, but have consequences on other people, that what you do affects me as well. And as long as we're here cooperating, there are more correct and less correct answers to what actually makes life better for people. Aim for the best possible world and you are at least constantly working towards a better world. Disagree about what makes a better world? How do you resolve that? The truth is there is no objection to secular moral systems that is in any way solved by appealing to a God. Secular humanism can correct and adapt and be updated based on new information. We can change and the resolution to those conflicts come from discovery, debate, discussion and desire. Empathy, education and effort are the cornerstones of secular humanism. God may or may not be real. There's no agreement on God's existence, his characters, his goals, or if he's a he, or if he even applies what his desires are, what their instructions are, what their preferences are, and also even if we had some indication of those things, there's no indication that those desires and preferences actually get to the heart of what makes the world better for human beings. But it's worse than that because there's no clear path to agreement on any of those issues about God. And so all we ever have is one human being telling another human being in a lazy fashion that, hey, I want there to be objective moral values and I'm going to appeal to this God that I can't demonstrate because that to me in my mind satisfies this need of a foundation with no indication that it exists, that it's real or anything because God isn't a system. God isn't a path to improvement for humans and may not have human improvement as a goal. In fact, many versions of God expressly contradict human flourishing and make the entirety of human existence, the entirety of everything we ever know we will ever have out to be a cycle of suffering or a trial to determine what happens in some other unproven life. This life is like dirty rags. It is throwing away everything we will ever know in the hope of something else after. It is simply impossible for a non-system to be a better system than a system. A foundation has to be stable. The God concept is less stable than shifting sand, less clear in its principles, goals, and directions than a magic eight ball. The question of this debate is such that only one of the two propositions is even a candidate as an answer. This would have been different perhaps if we had secular humanism versus Christianity or some structured system of morality, but only a bit better because all versions of Christianity depend on the unproven perspective that this life is like dirty rags and the next one is one that matters and that we should trust blindly some version of some human suspicion about what some God wants and that it is better for us than what we can discover through our own dedicated pursuit of what demonstrably leads to a better life if we can just agree that we care about a better life. Thanks so much, Matt, for that opening statement. We will now go into the first and only rebuttals before the discussion section. So these will be eight minutes and I have the timer set for you, David. In my opening statement I share my personal thoughts about God, secular humanism and morality. Normal human beings have what we call varieties of moral experience. People have beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad. What is the status of these beliefs? If you believe that it's objectively wrong to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, does that belief correspond to reality? In other words, is it really objectively wrong to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die or do you merely dislike it? Theism and atheism give us very different answers to these questions and Matt's answer would be very different from mine given a framework of secular humanism. Now I said that atheists never managed to apply the same level of skepticism to their own claims that they applied to the claims of theists. Fortunately we're in a debate so let's take a closer look at Matt's claims. He said God is not a moral system. God is more of like a theoretical being or something like that. But we're not just talking about any being here. We're talking about a being that created the universe, created all of us and who sustains us for every moment of our existence and who is the ultimate ground of moral good and moral obligation. So if you say that kind of being exists and then created us in his image then what it really means, the takeaway message from that perspective is that when we talk about moral obligations and moral values and things like that the sort of basis for the things we talk about when you talk about morality they correspond to reality. There's a basis for them. So I think you can work out a moral system just off the basics if you think that other people are created in the image of God. They are created with certain rights and things like that. Now as far as Matt's view he says he's not saying that there are objective moral values or obligations or truths. So he's saying hey we don't need those kinds of things but I want to point out that when we talk about morality that is normally what we're talking about. So I would regard this as a redefinition here. But we'll go ahead and see whether it's a plausible one. So Matt says there's no objective requirement that we care about well-being. He says we just do. I'm not sure about that. I think it's kind of an equivocation if you say we all care about well-being and then you try to build a moral system out of that because people, I think well-being people's pursuit goes something for many people goes something like this. They care foremost about their own well-being and the well-being maybe of a close circle of family and friends and then insofar as it doesn't conflict with that they are concerned about the well-being of a larger community their country or their race or their religion or something like that and then insofar as it doesn't conflict with that then maybe they would have some slight concern for the rest of humanity. So if you're saying hey we just care about the well-being of all humanity I don't think many people have signed up for that. Matt says if two people do agree that they care about well-being they can start to make rules. I actually agree completely. He says that people who care about well-being can come up with rules like we can come up with rules of a game. We can sit down and make up rules for chess and discover that some moves are better than others and that this would not just be subjective. They can actually be better moves. I actually agree with this completely and Matt says if someone doesn't care he's not talking to them because if you have not agreed, if you haven't agreed that you're going to seek the well-being of other people then you can't be said to have whatever we want to call them obligations to do certain things. If you don't want to play chess then these rules just don't apply to you. There's no talking to you. Now as far as what he just said goes I agree with him completely from an atheistic perspective. What he just said was exactly my view when I was an 18-year-old atheist right before I bashed my dad's head in with a ball-peen hammer and I think what he just said flows pretty naturally out of an atheistic worldview. You don't have to go that way but I think it's pretty natural to go this way, namely if you say, hey, so this is the position that was just stated as far as I can tell, he could correct me if I'm wrong but if you say, hey, I'm seeking the well-being of other people I'm seeking the well-being of other people then if you're doing that then you can say, well, these things follow therefore if that's my goal then I have an obligation to do these things that will help me reach that goal. If you don't seek that goal he says, well, morality has nothing to say to you, right? So think about this. If I do not agree to seek the well-being of all people then what moral obligations do I have? As far as I can tell from Matt's position I have none. I don't have any moral obligations. Now think about that. What this means is that when I bashed my dad's head in with a ball-peen hammer when I was 18 years old I didn't violate any moral obligation. I did nothing morally wrong. I just didn't sign on for this goal that some other people seek. So I did nothing wrong. Now I'm willing to lay this down as a rule. If your moral system says I did nothing wrong and your dad's head in with a hammer I think you need a new moral system. So notice, you could apply this to anything, right? If the morality that Matt is talking about is simply once you decide on a goal there are going to be better and worse ways of getting there and those better and worse ways of getting there will be the only sort of moral obligations you have then notice when you say, hey, my goal is to make a pure white Aryan race. Well, if you think about how to do that your moral obligations might include wiping everyone else out. So notice all I've done is say here's what he said about morality and what it is and I've taken it through to its logical conclusion. Well, I would say that's not what we mean by morality. What people in general mean by morality is whether you've agreed to seek the well-being of mankind or not you have a moral obligation not to bash people's head in with a hammer. Whether you've agreed to seek the well-being of humanity you don't go put a bunch of Jews in ovens. You don't do that sort of thing. So what we want to say about morality is you have moral obligations to do things even if you're regardless of your goals and if your goals are getting in the way of your moral obligations you need to change your goals. Matt's position is no obligations only come in once you've decided on a goal and until you've decided on that goal you don't have these kinds of moral obligations and so I want to say that this redefinition again I said this earlier this is a mutilation of morality this is not a foundation of morality I think I only have a few seconds left but I just want to say if Matt is saying that we just in general people in general seek the well-being of humanity he's old enough to remember the 20th century and we remember what happened with the Nazis with the Soviet Union with the Chinese with the Japanese when they took over the Chinese and what they did in Nanking we remember Rwanda wherever you go in the world massive numbers of atrocities if you're building your moral foundation on the idea that people in general are seeking the well-being of others I think you've got some problems Thanks so much David we will now go into the first rebuttal from Matt before we go into the discussion section we'll give like a flexible 10 seconds as we did for David on that one so Matt I have got the timer set, the floor is all yours So this is unusual because we set a debate topic of which is a better foundation God or secular humanism and David's entire opening was for a nondescript God or theism interchangeably there suggesting that I like there to be objective moral truths secular humanism can't get to that but I think I can do a God a God solves this problem and so essentially there was a single argument in all of that that without a God you can't have objective moral truths and because we agreed at the beginning that we weren't concerned about whether atheism or atheism is true I guess I suppose it's really without people believing that there's a God they can't point to anything that might serve as a foundation for objective moral truths but my view is not about objective moral truths in that sense and despite the fact that I've tried for many years to come up with a number of examples I did this actually yesterday on the TV show where we started with the chess game and then went to physical health and then tried to get to moral health for some reason theists after sitting here during an opening and completely repeatedly straw manning by talking about oh if I went in and asked atheists eventually they're going to get to we just know and you should have your skepticism meter set to a particular level well you don't understand skepticism if you think that all claims require the meter to be set at the same level that all claims require the same exact type and quality and quantity of evidence but more so while we're in a disagreement about what morality is the subject of the debate as it was sent to me was ethics which I was happy with because maybe then we wouldn't say oh morality is just what God says no no no we use morality in another connotation within humanity to talk about what we should or shouldn't do now when I talk about chess as an analogy I'm saying hey once we sat down at the chess board we care about winning but the analogy means once we're alive we care about living are there exceptions to the rule of course there are there are people who are going to be amoral there are people who don't care about morality that doesn't change how the rest of us in society would view the moral obligation nor does it change what obligation they may have in their own mind if they actually care about living there's nothing you can ever do or say to someone who doesn't care about living or caring about a better life that's going to convince them that they are obligated to do so God doesn't solve this problem pointing to a God doesn't solve this problem because if I say hey here's if you and I agree that we're alive do you care about a better world would it have been better for you to not grab a ball peen hammer and take it to somebody's head in hindsight even without appealing to a God wouldn't your life have been better wouldn't that person's life have been better wouldn't the fact that we share this life have been better without that you can go down some path of no I learned a lesson or ultimately it sent me to jail and that's where Jesus fixed me and gave me this new view on life at the end of the day you don't have a choice whether you're playing the game of life you're playing it and so when you point to something like oh well the Nazis did this okay I suppose I could start by talking about how absolutely asinine it is especially when Nazis marched around with Gottman Unz on their belt buckles and they believed in God and they believed that God was with them and they believed that God wanted them to do the things that they were doing and they believed it for a number of reasons not the least of which is that if you take a look at something like the supposed instructions from one God to run around and kill the Midianites but keep the young virgin girls for themselves or that shout not suffer a witch to live or kill the homosexuals or the disparity between religions that cause conflict so that God is always on the side of people doing that you can justify any and every atrocity by appealing to whatever God you want and opposing whatever God you don't want the God proposition solves nothing now it's true that someone can walk around and say you know what I just don't care about well-being I don't think that that is as common as people make it out to be there may be exceptions to the case I haven't done an exhaustive search of the world but by and large for the entirety of the history of human beings we have cared about surviving whether it's in evolutionary motivation whether it's some instinct that some God put into us caring about surviving is what we do we are the descendants of those people who cared about surviving but even if there wasn't some justification for it the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people live their lives wanting it to be better and while some of them may in fact be incredibly myopic and focused only on their well-being that's not in any way an argument that God is somehow a better foundation or even a fictional lie about a God is somehow a better foundation secular humanism has principles and goals and pathways to not only get a better understanding of the world but to deal with disagreements about what makes a better world that doesn't exist with God that doesn't exist with theism and while it's very nice that eventually in the rebuttal David tried to get a little bit more specific oh we're not just talking about any God here we're specifically talking about the creator of the universe which has nothing to do with whether or not there's some intrinsic moral obligation there's nothing about any of this hey, God could be a moral monster God could be all powerful, create people and be completely apathetic to what happens to us and not care that much about what we do none of that is intrinsically tied to a notion of God and even if there were a God who had those views that doesn't tell us about whether or not those God's views are right so we haven't taken the first step to show that there's a God we haven't showed what this God wants David wants to kind of dodge around and not be specific about God but it's just, let me get just specific enough so that maybe I can claim that we have some moral duty or obligation to this God when we don't there's no way to fix this by appealing to God you either get to divine command theory might makes right, etc can you work out a system based on this creator God David says, I think you can work out a system of moral ethics and moral obligation based on this creator God well it's a shame that you didn't do that or show up with that because that's what the whole debate is about there's no reason to think that there's some objective moral imperative out there what we're talking about is surviving thriving and recognizing that as beings in this universe there are things that we can do that make our lives better and make our lives worse and while there are people who will undoubtedly most people I would argue and I would agree with David on this most people care about themselves first the people close to them second and then begin to care less and less as geography and time expands that distance I don't see that there's anything wrong with that as long as the extent that we're carrying also is proportional to that impact that our lives have on each other I don't care if somebody in a far away land does something that I'm never going to know about that doesn't have any impact on the world I can be myopic all day long but we understand from studying these things and looking at the data and understanding the goals of secular humanism that our myopic views actually are counterproductive it's very easy for the slave owner to say I've got all these slaves look at how much good it's doing me as long as we're myopic but when you look at the bigger picture and how much harm it actually does to you that you aren't recognizing and how much better the world could be if perhaps the individual who would have cured the disease that you were going to wind up with instead of being a slave had been encouraged to go to school and get educated when you see the bigger picture it becomes harder to become mad thanks so much for that Matt we will now go into the open conversation section folks so if you have a question by the way forgot to mention if you feel free or do feel free to fire it into the old live chat if you tag me with an at modern day debate it makes it easier for me to get as many as possible into that list that we'll ask at the end we'll ask as many as we can at the end we can't guarantee we'll get to every question and also super chat is an option in which case you can make a short comment toward one of the speakers to which they would get of course a chance to respond to and we ask that you just continue to be your friendly selves in your questions or comments so thanks gentlemen and I've got the timer set for the open discussion Matt you seem to have a slightly rosier picture of human beings that I do I was wondering what you think of the Stanley Milgram experiment and its follow ups and in the original experiment he found that roughly 65% of people in America were willing to to put out a possibly lethal dose of electricity that could kill the person who was receiving it just because they were told to and that's been kind of repeated around the world variations of that in Germany it was even higher they found that 85% of people if you said push this button that's going to shock this person because he's not learning these word pairs correctly 85% of people were willing to push a button that said this is possibly lethal dose this could kill this person and so if you combine that with just what we learned from the 20th century the 12 million or so that died in German camps that died in the war the communist starving 5 to 7 million Ukrainians death went in there just took all their food, all their seeds had dogs sniffing around to make sure they weren't hiding any food and so on again the Chinese the Japanese pretty much everywhere you go in the world you find these kinds of things and when we find that your average human being your average human being walking down the street is probably probably willing to zap someone if they're just told to do it how much stock are you really putting in this claim that you know we we are seeking the well-being of others and we can sort of build a moral framework out of that incredible stock do you know how many people in the Milgram experiment believed in a god not talking about that I would regard that as a problem if someone can believe that they've been commanded by god it doesn't matter if they've been commanded by god god stop any of them what I'm saying is if people who believe that god has commanded them to seek the good of all people are willing to just zap them I look at that and I say wow if people who believe that god has commanded them are just willing to kill other people what happens if we all become convinced that we're just machines for propagating DNA or something far less than that and so I'm looking at it as wow even given Christianity or Judaism is something like that people can still be killing machines yes I'm looking at that so I'm thinking wait that's humanity you can believe you've been commanded by god to kill and slaughter and god and do it what happens if you don't even believe that we have any sort of obligation to do any sort of good for other people and yet curiously I'm actually advocating for a system that does deal with that position of people who believe this so the god thing didn't stop any of those other things are we suggesting that the overwhelming majority of those people were atheists or just like bad believers I'm talking about human beings my idea is I look at human beings as some really really right but the whole issue here is what is a better foundation for ethics god or secular humanism secular humanism I can point to and say that it has the goal of getting better so when we do something like humanly Milgram experiments and stuff like that and we find out what humans are capable of under very contrived controlled circumstances you can go back before that because this is all predicated on extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds there's tons of you can stand people up facing the other way in the elevator and people conform now if we know that to me that is partially an argument for why we have so much religion people conform to where the pressure is and people out of fear or a sense of obligation will adopt a particular position if we know that people will do that is there a way to get people to recognize why doing good for the sake of doing good should be good enough this is what secular humanism is advocating for that I shouldn't be good to another person because some god commands it or some god wants it to be good to another human being because it benefits them which benefits me and raises all boats pointing to exceptions to the rule pointing to atrocities that people have committed pointing to even human nature from experiments in incredibly contrived circumstances doesn't tell us anything about whether or not the average person generally wants to survive and live a better life I think what it tells us is whatever desire we have for well-being whether it's just our own or wider group or for all humanity it can be overpowered by pretty much anything even just someone saying hey push this button and possibly kill this person that's enough let alone some charismatic leader coming in and just saying hey we're going to go on massive killing sprees as far as none of that gets to the issue the fact that people can do things that you and I both find morally repugnant which is a testament to what human beings can do is in no way relevant to whether or not they were they would care about a better world if you were to have a conversation with any of the people who pushed that button and talk them through the experiment by the way I would like to see interviews done with the people who were pushed to that point but they learned from the experience once they actually understood what was happening and if they were ever likely to do that again because that sort of education process of getting them to exercise empathy an understanding of how they can be manipulated I would think would be one good path to making sure that they were unlikely to be manipulated again and that spreading this information through education so that people don't have to go through the experiment to know what people will do but instead can watch what other people have done and learn from that those are the foundations that require no god to teach people how to live a better life I'm interested in this well, first let's go back to this issue I had another question based on what you were saying this desire for well-being I'm still convinced and you seem to agree that if you have someone come along and say hey this is what we need to do we are not seeking well-being of the world again we saw this over and over again the Nazis were seeking well-being so were the communists the Japanese I guess they were just seeking their personal well-being with the rape of Nant King but Pol Pot seeking well-being they're all striving for well-being and they end up with all these different situations right now you could end up with enough people seeking well-being like if you had Greta Thunberg we must stop all fossil fuels now but you could imagine it happening just hey let's put her someone like her, someone who agrees for those views in charge of just all fossil fuels shut down or something like that my only point here is my only point here is this was nothing to do with climate change the point was just it doesn't have to be people marching out and slaughtering people thinking of just something good hey I want this I want to protect the planet I want to do that I want all kinds of disastrous results but anyway the point is you can go to the entire world and find everyone and they could all say yeah we're seeking well-being but what does that get you you could have asked again the Nazis, the communists you could ask anyone that are you all seeking well-being yes we're all seeking well-being and you get a lot of different results and you get some of the greatest atrocities you could go to a lot of people and say well-being and they're going to say yes and so then you say okay what is your path to well-being and they say oh we want to kill all the Jews and then you can show them how that doesn't actually get to the well-being that they thought they were going to get hang on I'll let you talk for a while if there's an internal conflict it's lip service to say I care about well-being and for me well-being means this people can be wrong and they can be myopic the fact that people can be wrong about what is better is independent from whether or not they're seeking what is better and if you're if they if you and I agree that we're seeking what is better whether it's in a chess game with regard to physical health with regard to societal health or what I would call ethics or whether or not you would just toss morality as a label out the window because it seems to be largely irrelevant but in all of those cases if you and I agree that we want a better world now we get down to what do we mean by better world you can show me that what I mean by better world is actually not better for me that there's a conflict there then I am forced to now accept that I'm either not working towards a better world or I'm forced to change my mind if I can do the same for you like for example I asked it kind of facetiously because I had no interest in bringing this up in the first place do you think that you and the man who you hit in the head with that hammer would have been better off and had a better outcome had you not done that at the time did you actually care about your own having a better world for you and did you care about having a better world for that person and did you pause to think at all about whether or not that person's better world impacted yours no didn't care at all was totally sick of this world you've heard me say basically my view at that time you got this universe where our planet is this little speck where these little blobs of I was thinking of this as blobs of cells or as Richard Dawkins said machines for propagating DNA the point is but you think atheism would do that you think atheism would do that no no no my view is you can live however you want there's nothing in atheism there's nothing in atheism that tells you should live this way which is why I was talking about secular humanism which I agree secular humanism is a but you said in the rebuttal you think it's natural to go from atheism to hitting someone with a ball peen hammer no it's natural it's natural for it's natural from atheism to think that these moral obligations that we think are real that you shouldn't do that are just delusional right and I think I think you agree with that right if I think I have a moral obligation not to hit someone your position is if I decide that I'm seeking the well being of humanity or of other people or something like that then there are right ways and wrong ways to go about that and so there are some rules but as I pointed out if I don't sign on to that if I say I'm not seeking the well being of humanity then there is no moral obligation there's no moral obligation so whether or not you think you have a moral obligation you are part of a society that will impose a moral obligation on you now notice but according to your theory I had no moral obligation I didn't say you don't have one whether or not you think you do see you keep looking at this as if there must be some external intrinsic imposition when the truth is there's nothing that we can point to that's more strong than what we view it now I don't want to I don't want to beat up on this but I don't think it bothers you that much I was under the impression that you grabbing that ball being hammer was a result of diagnosed psychopathy and not of some principled position or unprincipled position of is worth this I'd say it's a combination it's a combination right it's like if you take this and this and this and this you get that rather than just this or just that like I'm still a diagnosed psychopath I don't go around bashing people's heads in because you kind of need a couple of different things but I do have to what is the moral obligation I mean you said it there's nothing in the world or in the universe that says that there are objective moral values but if we have a game and we agree we can sit down and agree to rules and if our goal is winning the chess game is an analogy the chess game has rules it doesn't matter whether they're arbitrary or objective it's an analogy to life life has rules the physical facts about reality dictate the consequences of our actions bashing someone in the head with a ball being hammer is going to be negative for them shooting a man arena just to watch them die that's going to have a negative consequence on them it's going to have a negative consequence on the shooter it's going to have a negative consequence on society and when we see the bigger picture when we get beyond the myopic view of this is what I want to do right now and we start seeing hey my actions have an impact on this society which will fundamentally change this society so that instead of encouraging let's not kill each other we're encouraging do it if you want to that this for lack of a better analogy kind of raises all boats that this is what results in a better world a world where people are convinced that when we are discouraging willy-nilly murder than when we are saying yeah do whatever and for the goal is to make a better world this is just on its face true it doesn't need any like intrinsic objective universal imposition and the person who shoots that man in Reno learned a very valuable lesson and learned it without appealing to any god actions have consequences and that this was not the better world that they may have wanted and whether they for a brief moment decided I care more about me than I care about it whether they got myopic and care more about themselves than they do a better world if they truly care about a better world they then understand why that action or can't understand perhaps why that action resulted in a world that wasn't better I don't even understand how this is controversial that's not the part I'm regarding as controversial I'm regarding it as you said there's nothing just in the universe that tells us that we have to seek the well-being of humanity and so on then you said but we just do most of us just do and by the way I'm agreeing with that part I'm agreeing with you saying so once you decide hey here's what I'm seeking then you can just like if you said hey here are the rules of chess here's what winning is there are moves that are going to be better for that you can figure that out and it's not simply subjective some moves are better than others I agree with that completely but you're saying that it is all our moral obligations are in that sense conditional there you have agreed to do this not conditional on your agreement to do it conditional on the fact that you are playing a game with these rules see I can talk about what's better and somebody may not say they don't care about what's better or somebody may disagree about what's better somebody who doesn't care about what's better I don't know how to convince them that they should I mean I can try and argue there it's really hard to do because I rarely come across someone I'm not sure I ever have come across someone who genuinely says I don't care about a better world I don't care about a better world for me and so you can begin asking the questions then okay what does that mean what kind of actions are you willing to take and will that actually result in a better world for you will that actually result in a better world for the people whose actions are going to impact your world you can have that kind of conversation that does not mean that you're going to convince someone but it's not like yes if we sit down and decide we're playing chess once we're in the game boom we're playing life whether we decided to or not and so all these people are in this game and the physical facts of the universe dictate what is going to wind up a better game for us and the only should that can come from there is if we're going to talk about morality if we're going to talk about morality as resulting in a better world now we've defined it in a way where there is some world the physical facts of which are superior to this world independent of what any individual may think about it we could all be wrong it could be and just to veer off on the climate change for half a second because I don't know it could be that while fossil fuel use immediately is a massive disruption that causes all kinds of short term loss and yet ultimately fixes the problem or it could be that doesn't fix a damn thing we don't know but if we genuinely have the goal of seeking a better world then the goal is to look at the available evidence and make the best decision that we can with the information that we can and for somebody to sit around and say I don't care I'm not going to be here okay they're not participating in the system they're not getting from it now and the obligation I would say that any of us have is because we've already benefited from the work that others have done it doesn't mean I'm required you can't make me pay it back I can in a way I could but you're right that I can't give you force you to have a motivation to pay back what you've already benefited from and yet if you don't you are not a moral person and when we say that we're not saying you are not living up to an imperative a universal objective imperative we are saying you are not living up to how we have defined morality to be yeah I'm still just really confused on this we might want to move on but I'll just say it sounds like what your position is now when you were giving your opening statement it sounded like you were saying yes there's nothing in this world that would compel you to a person who didn't want to actually seek the good of humanity but once you've agreed that you are seeking well-being then there are certain ways to get there no once you've agreed now we can have the conversation about what is better but you are under whatever obligations you're under from the circumstances anyway I can't force someone to not kill themselves I can't force someone to care about their own life but we also I believe have an obligation and we take some of this seriously I'm okay with and very supportive like the death with dignity idea that when someone wants to terminate their life when those circumstances of their life where continuing to live is dramatically less preferable than dying the people should be allowed to choose the manner and process of their death but we also know that there are people who through mental health issues or short term circumstances will also go down that path of a permanent solution to a problem that we have an understanding is temporary there are reasons why we put people in institutions on occasions to protect them from themselves that is us being responsible to other members of society and we do so in a way because that is beneficial to all of us and that it would like it's it's a good idea to lock me up when I am a danger to others even if I'm unable to recognize it that just benefits everybody and I can sit there and bang my head against the wall and myself forever saying how dare you do this I don't have an obligation to follow your rules or whatever else and I would be completely correct in the sense that there's nothing about the universe that compels me to do that but there's something about the facts that I'm living in a society with other people to do so now now it seems like you're saying going back to what you're saying about you you almost like you have an obligation to repay your debts and you're indebted to the society you're in to repay the society for anything you've derived from that and therefore you have an obligation not to go around doing horrible things well those are two different things where are these kinds of things coming from right because when you are saying hey if you want this then these are the ways to get there I agree completely that makes perfect sense if you lay out what the goal is to get there so the question was well what about people who aren't seeking those things what obligations they have what about people who just don't care about what happens what about people who say look if we last ten thousand years or we last a million years I just really don't care if we view ourselves as like a cosmic accident and why do we think we're so special as compared to other machines for propagating I'm just saying you're a cosmic accident you still care that's true that's true I'm trying to locate the moral obligation for someone who says I just don't care about those things we impose a moral obligation no that's what I mean you're saying society imposes a moral obligation the physical facts of the universe imposes a moral obligation you just said that the universe doesn't impose you said there's nothing in the universe there's no moral obligation the physical facts of the universe dictate what is better and if we're going to talk about morality and define morality as seeking what is better the physical facts of the universe dictate what is better for us it's better for me to live a healthy life than it is to not live does the universe dictate why would the universe care if the virus flourishes or we flourish it doesn't exactly but the physical facts of the universe show that if coronavirus is going to kill humans and I am a humanist and morality is about what humans do and not what viruses do that it's in my best interest to work in opposition to coronavirus I agree it's in your best interest I also agree that it's in the best interest and that's what morality and humanism is about not about viruses I don't give a rat's ass about viruses that are we're exterminating them Speaking of rats rats are in some sense seeking rat flourishing and dogs are in some sense seeking dog flourishing and we're wired to seek our own flourishing Well now you're saying that we're all wired to seek our flourishing when you started off this entire discussion by saying I think that you have too rosy of a picture are willing to do and let me give you some examples of how people can be limited. No, I believe that that people are to some extent limited wired to seek their own flourishing in terms of you're just gonna eat but you're just gonna eat you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna most people are gonna look around for a for a mate or something like that people are gonna do that's what I'm thinking of in terms of flourishing as far as something beyond their own sort of limited flourishing I don't think they most people tremendously by nature care I think they can be conditioned into caring I think I can I think if they think about certain moral principles they can be I do too and I think that that condition can occur both by appealing to some God whether or not that God exists because you can tell someone you need to care about other people because God wants you to and if you don't do it he's gonna send you to hell and if you do do it then maybe you'll get to spend eternity in heaven you can do it with that whether that's true or not you can motivate people with a lie but secular humanism is striving to motivate people with the truth as best we can understand it here is what the consequences of our actions are we are stuck here on this ball interacting and as far as we can tell it is up to us to solve those problems and it's up to us to come up with motivations because let's say you convince someone that they should be good because of a God pick a God doesn't matter what happens when they stop believing in that God now they don't have a foundation at all but if you convince people based on a secular humanist view that they should be moral and then we find out there's a God that doesn't change anything at all about our behavior or morality as a matter of fact as I've said many times if there is in fact a God and he's not a humanist screw him I don't care what he thinks can he squash me like a bug yes that doesn't make him more moral can he send me to hell I will go to hell knowing that I was a morally superior to the thug that sent me there God doesn't solve any of this yeah I'd like to pursue that I'm still I still don't get where the where the moral obligation is coming in for someone who you know if you have a conditional statement if x then y if you're seeking well-being then here's how you get to solve it with God what is what is my moral obligation with your God model oh you know that's actually that's actually very simple do you really by the way do you really not see the difference between let's look I'm gonna I've been around some some shady characters in my life I've been in mental hospitals prisons jails everything and believe me when I tell you there are people who are sitting down across from you they're having a you know they're they're they're talking completely normally but they're sitting there wondering what your face would look like as the blood runs out of you if they slit your throat or what you would you know look like if they started you know peeling out patterns of your skin or something do you really not see the difference between saying what is this person across from me if I asked the sort of the big questions about what this person is how did he get here what is he where is he going what is his purpose asking these kinds of questions get very different answers on atheism and theism I know if you're starting off with well I got here because you know my you know ancestors did a better job finding a mate and things like that where am I heading well I'm heading for extinction one way or another what am I here for well I'm you know this is the most ridiculous fatalist straw man because first of all you went to atheism versus theism and I'm sitting here talking about secular humanism as a foundation versus I'm using atheism as a negation of theism here if you're talking about so you are using atheism as an equate as being equal to fatalism where are you going I'm headed where are you going I'm headed towards extinction that is the most true it's atheism no that's not where I'm going we're not going is it a fact that ultimately humans will probably be that's all I'm saying yes that's all I'm saying okay that's all I'm saying that's that's the end of you are dismissing everything that matters no I'm saying that's why we're absolutely no if you talk about I want to know this person and where they come from where they're heading you just don't just go they're gonna die because you skipped over everything that matters the only thing we know that I included purpose in there I said you know I'm not talking about purpose where we're going what I got it's like talking to a wall let me explain how you are skipping everything that matters okay can I finish my point and then you can explain what I'm missing if your point is to answer the question that I asked which is please solve that problem by appealing to God I am I'm trying let me qualify this by saying all I'm doing is giving my personal view when I was an atheist and a psychopath so don't apply this to to anyone else if I have a person in front of me and I am thinking to myself wow I wonder what this person's face would look like if I slash this throat as the blood rained out of what what what color pale is he gonna turn how quickly is it going to be if I look at that person and I'm thinking what is this person according to this worldview or according to or according to that worldview well according to one worldview which was my personal worldview at the time this person is an accident based on an accident in an accidental universe accident accident accident heading for extinction machine for propagating DNA kind of disgusting because he walks around thinking that everything he does is really really important does he have limited meaning yes does he have people that he interacts with that care about him yes all that's true why should I care about that versus this person is created in the image of God created with certain rights and I'm not allowed to do that sort of thing because I'm created in the image of God too and there is a standard of goodness out there and if I do not see if I do not have within myself some sort of conscience that compels me to behave in a certain way or that would at least incline me to behave in a certain way I'm defective I'm messed up so my view was when I was an atheist and I recognize I don't have the same moral reactions that other people have is I'm just that I'm just gonna you know just wired differently and I'm gonna I'm a different kind of humanity there's nothing where I'm wrong and they're right from a theistic perspective if there is a ground of morality and human beings are created with the cognizance that's that's kind of the difference that I'm thinking of when I'm thinking of theism is if God creates us he creates us with cognitive abilities cognitive faculties our process is for reasoning and so we have different kinds of experience we see things we generally trust our cognitive faculties we trust our reasoning ability we trust our memories we know that they can all be flawed but we generally trust these kinds of things then if if we have moral experience that certain things seem really objectively right and other things seem really objectively wrong and some things seem intrinsically good and other things seem intrinsically bad from a theistic perspective you would look at that as God created this there is a standard of good there's a source of moral obligation and we are created to be able to apprehend those kinds of things and because we are created to apprehend those kinds of things we can trust not all the time we can be wrong but we can trust certain things like human beings are created in the image of God and they have certain rights and we shouldn't trample on them and we should treat people well and things like that if I'm an atheist I don't see how I'm not supposed to if I think that there are moral obligations if I think that there are intrinsic moral goods and I think what possible basis could there be for this on my worldview I can only conclude that certain you know people in general are wired to do this they're what it believing these things help their species to flourish they help their they help the species from survive but there is no reality out there their beliefs about objective right and wrong and good and bad they don't correspond to reality you're just wired to think those or you've been convinced by society to believe those things and so if I'm looking across at a person deciding whether to slit his throat on one worldview you might not do it either way and most people don't do it regardless of their worldview but you could be looking across and say what is this person he's a cosmic accident the universe doesn't care and I don't care some people might care but who cares now I think you want to say well you know you could do that on theism the point on theism is if I were to do that I'm still I'm doing something wrong I'm killing someone who bears the image of God I'm slitting the throat why is that wrong where is it in God as a concept is a foundation that directly implies or states that it is wrong to kill someone who was created in the likeness of God where is that again if we I tell you where it is you pulled it right out of your head it is your preference if for example I didn't pull it on my head there's nothing like that and there was nothing like that by nature in my head somebody put it in there then I agree so if God were to tell you to jump over here and slice my skin off my face would you do it I would regard that as not from God I would regard as like a mental problem I'll leave I'll leave it I'll leave it let me give you an example about what you just said I'm saying I'm so so if you believe that God told you to do that you would well you're saying you just wouldn't believe that God would tell you to do that so were the Midianites created in the image of God when God told them to go slaughter the Midianites your well if you were if you were saying back then before I believe we're the Midianites created in the image of God and did God tell them to go kill the Midianites you want me to explain the the Covenants no I believe people can be I believe God can I believe that God can wipe us all out or did God instruct them to kill the Midianites yeah then why would you not believe that God is instructing you to kill me because I'm under a different covenant right I'm under a Christian covenant okay well maybe you should have shown up with that Christian Covenants because what I asked you to do was solve this problem by appealing to God and you can't because I believe I can because I just gave you a gazillion in one minutes to try to do so and we didn't get that the question is really not that because they're created in God's image and you're created in God's image you are some you are under some obligation to not do so but that obligation doesn't come from anything other than your say so because you didn't present any sort of model you just said you're not a Christian you just said God is and because God is I must not and that is not a model that is not any sort of system at all there's nothing is it possible for there to be a God model that serves as foundation for morality and does not carry an implication that you shouldn't kill someone who's created by God I think that would be more on the lines of theism but theism would generally that would generally be kind of and I've been kind of sticking with kind of sort of a mere theism might be slightly expanded because it's also including created in the image of God but you went to the stateless thing and you noted that as an atheist and a psychopath my view is this and what I tried to explain to you is that you skipped over everything that's important the fact that I'm going to die someday does not mean that the intervening time isn't where the value is and so when you want to know where someone's going you don't just want to know the destination you want to know all the things that they're going to do and contribute to life along the way my only problem there was different different answers from theism and atheism that's everything I just said it is like a brick wall it really okay do you get the same identically yes I'm going to be extinct but you have skipped from the beginning to the end and ignored over everything that matters the only thing that we know matters I don't know anything about a life after this I didn't I noted our present purpose I said our present purpose so I said you get different answers right you gotta you gotta categorize like if I say where I get a different answer if you're an AC if there's a psychopath who who falls into a fatalist model that is not on atheism this it is not because someone will go extinct at some point that's their destination and that's all that I care about you skipped over if you really want to know who this person is where they're coming from where they're going if you really care about their impact on the world the fact that they're going to die someday is irrelevant the point is if you kill them now you limit all of the impact that takes place from the time you kill them until the time they die you don't get to gloss over that and suggest oh well we're all going to die anyway that's that's the atheist fatalism thing you have skipped everything that that person's going to do that is the reason not to kill them now is because of what they're going to do and how it's going to impact you and everybody you care about and them between now and when they would have died otherwise and you skipped right past it I don't know what you do I was trying to be short and I said purpose I said you've got basically where we come from where we're at now and where we're headed right so again theism and atheism give us very different no the answers to theism and atheism give us different answers atheism does not give us the answer that you suggest that's atheism, psychopathy, psychopathy and fatalism and atheism isn't fatalism and atheism isn't psychopathy you already agree that I'm completely right that we are headed for extinction that that that was the that was the only point I rest my case if we're just going to do pedantic and the only point is that we're gonna okay please tell me how making the point that we're all going to die is in any way relevant to whether God or secular humanism is a better foundation the only thing I was saying there is that theism would give you a different answer from atheism on these questions we're not here you're not saying it's not relevant to to you know if I ask where we came from where we are and where we're going that those questions aren't uh aren't relevant they aren't relevant if your answer is somebody had sex and eventually we're going extinct morality is about all the stuff that happens in between and I didn't come here to say atheism says this I'm talking about secular humanism the subject of this debate is is secular humanism a better foundation then no foundation it is absolutely a foundation there's no foundation okay what no I I agree that if you subscribe to secular humanism you can say here here's I have nothing further he's agreed with all of my points and done nothing to demonstrate how God fixes any of these problems at this point we might as well go to questions because we're just beating the same horse um well I would I would disagree you can use the rest of the time I don't know how much there keep in mind Matt when when I when I talk about viewing someone differently from the perspective of an atheist and a theist I'm talking about my personal experience here don't care that's not relevant to this debate yeah it is because I'm telling you it's obviously that how does your personal experience show whether God or secular humanism is a better foundation if given I understand I have other there are other issues at play so I'm not just singling these things out I'm saying this is the relevant change and how I treat people if I go from someone who will decide it's a it's a good idea it's something I'd like to do to bash someone's head in and then I bash someone's head in right and I think they're that pointless and meaningless because I'm looking at it from the big picture of here's the universe here's us do we have meaning yeah rats have meaning rats have meaning in the sense you're talking about rats have meaning mice have meaning we will not hesitate to squash a bug even though that that bug had you know seeks its flourishing we will not hesitate to to step on some some answer we're not we're not yeah we're not we're not concerned about that sort of thing so I'm looking at it from that perspective you've got all these different species you got all these machines for propagating DNA and this one thinks it's so important that we're gonna you know do all these things and seek our own flourishing and who cares what else we trample on I'm looking at and just going it's just it's a joke it's a big it's a big giant joke that we think that all of this really matters again my personal perspective if you think you're in anyway I became a theist I became a theist and all of a sudden wait a minute this person is not just you know this machine for propagating DNA not a cosmic accident there's a purpose behind him you still have all the same things like this person you know is important to that person this person has that relationship but it's built into reality it's built into reality somehow that there are objective moral goods objective moral bads that we have we have moral obligations and even if I'm somehow born without a conscience that means I'm defective and that other people could be right and so if you're talking about if you're talking about god commanding this or god commanding that I believe god could wipe us all out in fact that was my argument as an atheist if god exists if you would wipe us all out we're pretty disgusting characters so I understand I'm messed up so god can do that as far as the covenant I'm under I'm commanded to seek the good of all people to pursue peace with everyone things like that there are exceptions because you have you know people like you know terrorists or hitlers something like that but what I'm talking about my personal so that's why that's why this is so important from my perspective is I'm someone who goes from almost in an almost in an instant I want to kill and slaughter everyone in the world to I don't want to hurt anyone and you can't you can't make me and it's just it's just from viewing people as here's a lump of cells that thinks it's important and isn't versus this person created in the image of god and is an is a bearer of the image of god to say that that's irrelevant you can't get much out of that where did I get it from I wasn't being influenced by other people I was in a jail cell I'm in a jail cell by myself bullshit I heard your story there was a guy who introduced you all this and gave you a bible and talked with you he was just talking no no he was just talking about christianity then I went to a cell then I went to a cell I'm back there in a cell by myself I'm talking about once I convert right the day before I converted I was sitting around thinking about torturing people and thinking about all the people I wanted to get revenge on so I convert and instantly wow I'm it doesn't it doesn't matter if I don't feel this way or that way I'm not allowed to touch these people I'm not allowed to torture these people I'm not allowed to skin these people I'm not allowed to do that sort of thing if you stop believing if for if something were to happen you were stopped believing would you go back to wanting to kill and torture would you actually do it if if I stopped believing in god and christianity yeah would I go back and actually do it I have to say I do understand that you know there might be a different difference between an 18 year old and a forty some year old in terms of you know what they want to do if I had to guess I would say probably yes I can't I can't say I want to keep believing I can't say I can't say I would I can't say I would go around killing people I don't know I would be much quicker I would be much quicker to punch someone in the face than I would be as a christian but notice what you just said there you said you want me to be a christian so it sounds like it sounds like there's a there's a kind of hierarchy here of what people should believe what it sounds like is we have a data point of one and this is the only thing that will work for you because it's the only thing that you will accept because of who you are because I'm not going on my field but that does not mean that god is a better foundation than secular humanism what it means is a david's concept of god and what it entails is the one thing that he will accept that will do this and that is not a case for this is what secular humanism is about it's not just like let's look at an individual let's look at the data and everything else your particular notion of god has no foundation no demonstration that it is real in any way and nothing that will motivate anybody else to share it other than you being able to convince them that it's real but that doesn't mean that it is in any way a better foundation it doesn't fix a problem if you don't agree with secular humanism and I can't convince you okay we're stuck if I don't agree with your version of god and you can't convince me okay we're stuck but at least we both know that what secular humanism puts forward both in the manifestos and from everyone who's advocating for this this system not that there's some authority dictating it but this is the system the goal of a better human life the recognition that we have to solve these problems apparently ourselves and tell some divine being steps in and maybe even after then that we should rely on data evidence reason and that human life has value to us because we're human that's the part of the of the reality that carries with it this seeming objective motivation and the fact that it seems that way doesn't mean it is so there's no real objective no there's no objective not real in the sense that you're talking about where there's some universal imperative people who people who believe that when they're saying you have an objective moral obligation not to bash someone's head in or not to shoot a man in Reno they're kind of kind of delusional objective with respect to the goal just like there's no object moving chess if there's no rules and so if you don't have that goal it's more of a situation where society's going to impose or sort of quarantine you and doesn't even have to be because you did really yes it doesn't have to be because you you actually violated because you are in fact wrong about what is better for you and we are working towards what is better and the people who are wrong about what is better that's we are the only we are the only ones who can step in and seek justice there's apparently no god in concerned or interested in seeking justice justice comes from us compassion comes from us help comes from us we are the actors we are the participants we are the beneficiaries and there's zero reason to think that anybody else no sense of cosmic justice no sense of karma reliving lives nothing good bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and some people do bad things and get away with it and there is no absolute justice that anybody can see it is our duty for the sake of a prosperous better society to impose justice to be the thing that imbues the universe a thoughtless careless universe with justice and until somebody demonstrates another justice that is real it's the only one we have so human beings you've got all these different species creatures and so on different kinds of machines for propagating dna you have machines that are for you know making toast but then you have living machines and they pass on their dna suddenly you get to human beings and one more straw man no no i'm i'm i'm agreeing with you i'm agreeing with you on this part you have all these different species and none of them you know they all seek their flourishing but you get to human flourishing and our job as human beings is to impose justice on a completely a completely amoral world we impose justice yes what i'm here seriously what what i what i'm hearing and whenever you're talking about you know seeking the the the well-being or when you even more so when you're saying that there are that we have obligations that apply to us just because what we've received from society and there's this obligation to go and do certain things and so on but when you especially when you start talking about imposing justice on the world it's just clear that it's just clear that we're so utterly completely different from everything else it's almost like you have a view that would correspond to us being created in the image of god that we are here imposing justice we're these great things and what i'm saying is if you have an atheistic worldview yeah you can say secular humanism and stuff but what are we what are we according to an atheistic worldview we're nothing like that and so man i'm just i'm just saying really when i sit down with an atheistic worldview has nothing to say about what we are or what we value or anything else every time you keep going back to atheism and you do the we're just we're just machines for replicating again i'm contrasting that well you are putting up the massive straw man because i care about human beings and that's all that fucking matters i don't need a god to care about human beings didn't say he did i granted that nobody does and appealing to a god to say if somebody thinks oh there's no god or there's no reason to care about human beings appealing to a god to say oh here's why you should care about human beings when there's no demonstration of a god doesn't get you anywhere but appealing to secular humanism to show people how and why they can and should value other human beings because it is in their best interest you can get to the appearance of altruism through nothing but selfishness you can get to the appearance of altruism selfishness like out of selfishness for yourself therefore you should you can get to the appearance of altruism and a better world through purely selfishness selfishness yes selfishness is i said you can i didn't say it is the single motivation so kind of if because if i want my life to be better i need a good way if i want my life to be better i have to help other people as well because what they do impacts my life it's not a myopic selfishness of i want to get laid right now so i'm just going to for sex on somebody it is a broad viewed selfishness there's nothing wrong with selfishness and you can't get to anything that says there is with god no my only point is if you're really doing it out of selfishness and you think well i need to obey all these more you know all these you know it's basic morality because if i don't and the world's going to be you know much worse i don't think it is i think you can walk down the street you're on i think you can walk down the street gunning people down it doesn't really change the world walk you put it on the street gunning people down is not a broad view of selfishness of course if i walked on the street gun people down it's not in my best interest i'm just saying that is not selfish that is another straw man of selfishness i'm i made it very clear you can get to the appearance of altruism and a better world i agree through selfishness i agreed with all that i'm going with the implication so the one implication i would see is if you're at if your motivation is actually selfishness and you're doing this to sort of a get a good world just for myself for my own benefit it kind of follows that if you're ever in a situation where you think you really have a good chance of getting away with something and you don't think you'll get caught then and your motivation is selfishness and it's not really going to change the world much if you if you do it then you might as well do it and i just say pretty much every everyone i was in prison with had that exact same you can't fix that by appealing to a gun of course you can of course you can no you can't we know that for a fact do people who believe in god do bad things yeah but they're acting in consistently done your objection is that no your objection is that there may be scenarios in which you can convince yourself that it might as well do it because i'm going to get away with it isn't that what everybody is doing who believes in god that they think they're going to get away with it they're going to go to confession and get forgiven for their sins they're going to bout prostrate themselves and repent at some point get forgiveness of their sin that is what they're all doing they think they can get away with it your the problem you're you're addressing first of all is an outlier in the normative behavior of human beings it's generally not hey let me see what i can get away with because we don't know what's going on and we don't necessarily know the full impact of our actions but encouraging a society where people are encouraged to do whatever they think they can get away with demonstrably leads to a worse society doesn't it i think you missed the entire point of what i was saying if you take selfishness as a model right this is why i'm i'm helping create an altruistic society or something like that or this is why i'm going to be altruistic or something like that if selfishness is the model then you can be selfish and do other things and there's nothing that's within your selfish selfishness based world view that would that that says that that's wrong i just i literally just described it to you three seconds before you told me i missed the point and that is this you didn't i absolutely did and that is this if we encourage a sort of society where people can do something because they think they can get away with it so i'm not i'm not saying do that i'm saying just you i'm saying just you if you encourage suppose your your motivation is selfishness and you want people to behave in a certain way because that's in your best interest if you think you can get away with you're not talking about encouraging society you're not talking about any side you're talking about my actions encourage things in society not i'm saying if you think you if you think no one's going to find out about you think you can get away with it i mean let's change it let's vote you know let's we can have a play-doh scenario republic scenario where you get the ring of geiges and you know you could get away with it should you do that anyway well if your motive is selfishness if your motive for what you do is selfishness and you know you can get away with it's not going to affect anything else then there's nothing in your world view that actually says you're wrong yes there is and i've described it over and over and over again you're not going to get away with it my actions have an impact oh if i steal from this and nobody knows like i don't get caught in going to jail that is not the only way that it has an impact prices go up the markets change you're going to pay for that one way or another in some sense it is absolutely not completely false okay if you if you go and steal a coke prices of coke are not going up nothing's changing if it's not changing the record you do is not going to change the world wow i mean if you go and steal something if you got away with something it's not changing the world you could do something it does it's it may be a largely negligible negligible impact for that particular thing but it does selfishness is your motivation why not go for it but it does change the world and the reason to not go for it is because this isn't first of all selfishness isn't the foundation that i came here to present i was saying that it is one possible foundation you can get to a sense of alter you already agreed with that the secular humanism thing recognizes that we should be acting in accordance with what we're encouraging others to act that i'm not special that i don't get to make special exemptions for me and if we encourage that sort of behavior and everybody else in society then the consequences are minimized well how's god fix it how's god fix what any of this stiff any objection you appealing to god solves nothing again you are you're talking to someone you're right now you are speaking to someone who said who is convinced that god changed them how does that solve the problems you point out in morality you're talking to someone who went from being completely willing to bash someone's edit and wanting to kill almost everyone he came into contact with to not wanting to hurt anyone that there was some sort of change there the biggest part of the the matter of fact the only relevant change there was a change in belief and you're saying god doesn't do any of that belief in god doesn't do any of that or god doesn't do any of that and i'm not i'm telling you there's a belief in god can do that has done that for you i said that multiple times that you can convince people to be better with a lie and be better with something that's not true the question is which is a better foundation and you started with god and theism completely not defined no propositions no system no nothing and as we proceed through the discussion we get to well i'm talking about god who's a creator and that implies that if you're creating the image of god and i'm creating the image of god that implies that i shouldn't kill you because you're creating the image of god and you have some rights where the hell did that come from that wasn't anything in your argument for god and by the way the fact that god created somebody does not necessarily impose this this idea that they shouldn't be killed because they're also in the image of god and for somebody who follows oh i'm in a different covenant sorry god used to be a dick but now he's not god used to say don't kill people who are like me but now he does or it didn't use to say that but now he does there's nothing about that that serves as a foundation there's no agreement on what the goals are there's no agreement on what god wants that's a reason there's thousands of denominations that all identify as christian not to mention all the other religions that have their version of god and god in this nebulous sense this is why i was trying to say which is a better foundation some particular christian model that you put forward or the secular humanist model that i put forward but like always we argue some nebulous nebulous god concept and put up strawmen saying well if you're an atheist you just believe you're going to go extinct and you can be selfish but you're never going to get there and you can't you can't do this you have no you cannot solve a single problem that you're objecting to and the proof of that of course again is that i don't believe you so it wouldn't work on me that's the proof of it that's exactly the same thing you're trying to do to say god changed me so it must work work is not the same as better yeah as far as i think i think we covered this but if we're talking about god right so if we just start off with what human beings normally mean by morality right that they would say hey you know shooting this man bashing this man's head in something like that we have sort of moral intuitions that certain behaviors are wrong we can we can we can violate them we can be wrong about all kinds of things but we believe that certain moral obligations even if it's just seeking the well being of other people and so on that we have certain moral obligations and we look and we can see hey this person is violating a moral obligation and that's why he is to be punished so we have these beliefs if we believe that we are created by god again then if we believe that we are created by god then we also believe just as part of the definition of god that god is good by nature and so on he's the foundation of goodness however people want to put it but then he creates us if we're in his image and we're also bearers of that goodness and it gives us a different perspective on moral intuitions where these things are not just illusory they're not just something that helped us helped our ancestors pass on their their genes more these are actually giving us insight into reality and we can take them seriously and work through them try to come to agreement try and figure out what they are and clear ourselves from error but they correspond to reality certain basic moral truths are actually part of morality if we have a different worldview we might come to very different conclusions I have moral if a person has a moral sense and believes that certain things are wrong according to certain worldviews they would regard that as some sort of delusion that it doesn't correspond to reality yes it might help my species yes it might this but it's not an objective moral wrong it's something different entirely you've agreed with that you've said yes there is no moral obligation there's no moral obligation there the only sorts of things you could call obligations are once you've agreed to seek a certain goal there are things that you know can help you get there and so on again that is very different from what for what people said that three times now I think probably it's not it's not that you agreed you're playing the game no matter what you might not think you have any moral obligation but the go ahead we've got a at some point pretty quick we've got a if one of you is willing to defer to the other for the last word and then we can I will defer to David for the last word all right again ladies and gentlemen other people I understand most people can most people can live perfectly normal lives and so on and plenty of people would be willing to agree with Matt on that and as far as getting along in this world if you you know if you if you Christian and so on you believe in certain moral commands like seek peace with with everyone and do good to others and to all people and so on then I believe you could get to pretty good pretty good system of morality if you're seeking the good of the whole now Matt seems to be along the same lines you're seeking the good of the whole but at the end of the day as far as a basis for that seeking the well-being of our of our species I think we all do that as soon as you start talking about imposing justice on the world and so on I think you're ending up with a more theistic view of human beings not something that flows out of a different kind of worldview so so is that the last word in the discussion or was that the closing I interpreted it as that was maybe your closing statement oh no I thought we were just ending the discussion yeah because I thought we were both you had conclusions on there gotcha so what we'll do is go into the five-minute conclusions and thanks so much for all of your questions folks we'll try to get through as many as we can but realistically with only about twenty five thirty minutes tops for the Q and A we do want to respect the time of the debaters so we honestly won't get to all of them but we'll sure try so we are going to start the clock for five minutes for David's closing oh I wanted to give him the last word he's starting he went first you should go he should go last first and last it's because there's a disadvantage it should be very much plus I only need two minutes okay so we'll get it going you bet you can have moral intuitions and they can be wrong you can be wrong about what you want the world to be it feels like there's some objective obligation how did you rule out that this is your natural instinct for survival coupled with societal pressures and the fact and the recognition that you have to share space with other people and that empathy and cooperation are demonstrably in our best interest there's no demonstration that there is in fact some objective moral imperative or that there could be or that there's anybody here or there to impose that this is the foundational recognition that secular humanism begins with as far as we can tell we are the ones that are going to have to seek justice because nobody else is going to do it for us we are the ones who are responsible for the life we live and its impact on other people and so secular humanism sets up a system that says we are going to move forward based on empathy based on education discovery discussion and data we have this as a goal and we can manipulate and redefine the goal as we need in order to make sure that we are constantly moving towards a better world there is no demonstration of that in the single god word label personage theism there's not even really much of that in the slightly better defined to god as the creator thing that we eventually got to after the opening statement did nothing but talk about how secular humanism kind of count for something that i wasn't defending in the first place how can something that isn't a system doesn't have any demonstrable properties ever be a better foundation than something that is a system and does have demonstrable properties and goals it can't this debate was over the second that the subject was set gotcha thank you very much matt we will now kick it over to david his closing statement thanks so much all right as far as the part of matt's view that i agree with in his opening statement he said that that there's nothing really in the universe that would that would require you to seek the well-being of humanity agree with that he said that but if we um actually establish some goals and so on there can be right ways of getting there i i agree with all of that and as i pointed out that was exactly exactly my view of morality when i was an atheist and when i was doing some some very very bad things that yes if i were to agree to seek the well-being of humanity then i would be required to do these things but i'm not i don't accept it so i pointed out that implication of what he just said and that according to him i did nothing wrong after that he got into a lot of things that i just i i disagree with i started trying to come up with moral obligations from you know if you're a part of society you owe a debt to society and so on and these things are going far beyond far beyond those initial claims that you know if you're doing this then we can figure out what gets to this if you're talking about we have a you know moral obligation to impose justice in in the universe and things like that where are you getting those from so i think he went from actually laying out something that that i can i can understand and grasp to something that is let's face it these these moral values are just and and obligations are just hanging out in the middle and nowhere as far as as far as god as a foundation for morality i think we're just looking at this in two very different ways matt is looking for some sort of like system of rules and i don't i don't know how else to describe this it's it's almost that it's a view i find very commonly among my muslim friends who they believe like they need a rule for everything they need all this massive sets of rules or they just can't figure out anything and as far as they're concerned you don't know how to go to the bathroom unless god tells you you just don't know what to do god has to tell you how to step into the bathroom how to wipe yourself things like that so we need all of these we need a you know all of these lists of rules we need this entire system in place whereas i'm looking at it very differently saying okay one kind of experience that human beings have and very interestingly part of the strongest most internal experience to human beings it you know is their experience of belief in moral obligations and their moral judgments and their belief in moral values and so on especially that the moral value of human beings they have this internal experience that in in a way is is closer to their closer to their core and more important to them than a lot of the their their experience of the world it's some of some of their most internal experience how are we to look upon that experience right how are we to look upon our beliefs about moral obligations about human rights about other people having rights well if we have a certain view and i'm again i'm speaking from experience here and we think about how we came to our views from an atheist perspective not this is not secular humanism just to be clear from this is the negation of theism from an atheistic perspective where did we get those you can either say we were wired to believe them in which case that's not giving you anything like what you believe your moral beliefs are it's not giving you anything like that you would have to conclude if you if they arose from being wired in a certain way you're kind of delusional right you're delusional a lion that moves into another pride of lions will kill off all the baby lions to make room for its own offspring it's wired to do that has nothing to do with whether it's good or bad likewise if i'm just wired to behave in certain ways that tells me nothing about whether my behavior is really good or bad i'm just wired to do that alternatively you could be influenced by society to have these moral views well society is not a foundation of anything like objective moral truths either right society can be nice a society can be horrible doesn't tell you what your moral obligations are the society can't do it the society can influence you but it can't be the source of anything like an objective moral obligation so from an atheistic perspective my moral beliefs come from one of those sources they come from one of those sources they either i'm sort of indoctrinated to believe them or i'm just wired to believe them nothing that has nothing to do with what i believe about morality or my moral experience saying that no some things are really wrong it's really wrong to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die from a theistic perspective from a theistic perspective if i'm created by god and i'm created to have sort of reliable faculties reliable reasoning faculties reliable cognitive faculties reliable sense perception and reliable moral faculties then when we're talking about these moral obligations just from the perspective of general theism then we'd say that i'm created to comprehend and understand these moral values we can be wrong about them just as i can be wrong about what i'm seeing but that's where we that's where we strive to actually work through this and figure out what the true moral obligations are but the point is that realm the moral realm corresponds to reality it's not a delusion thank you very much both of you gentlemen for your closing statements now folks we will be going into the q and a so this is going to be like i said we are going to try to get to as many as we can so starting off with philip thanks so much for your super chat ask question for david how can it be that god actually cares about morality if you're ultimate fate i.e heaven or hell depends only on your belief in him not what you have actually done during your life i don't believe that your ultimate fate depends on just belief in god so that's my answer you bet thanks so much andrew handlesman says thanks for your super chat andrew they say hope everyone is safe and secure thanks so much appreciate that andrew the solidarity there and we are in a like fairly good-sized room it's empty we next time for future debates we'd always love to invite people in but just because of the circumstances we are in an empty room today so we hope everybody else out there is safe jonathan thanks so much for your super chat ask question from matt what rules would a god who cared about ethics make well despite what david was saying i don't think it's merely just about rules or that we know what the rules are it's about the goals and then you discover what rules or what norms work towards those goals it's to me this is like hey there's a hundred people who went and started a town out in the middle of nowhere and there's nobody coming to help them should they just let anarchy prevail or is it in their best interest to get together in cooperative we're glaring on some rules and set up a sheriff to enforce those rules it's not just a pure legalistic thing it's about here's what actually works better for all of us and the one person who says hey i don't care if it works better for you that's not a solution so what what would a god do as i pointed out if there's a god and he's not a humanist someone who cares about the human experience and wants it to actually flourish i don't care what his rules are because i'm a humanist and that's what my concern is because that's what benefits me and us and so a god would either come up with essentially if they were decent see that's the problem is that you get to this point where you just say oh we're gonna we're gonna go with god and we're gonna say that god is defined as good and therefore whatever it is that i think that god's gonna do is good so it was good when he encouraged people to slaughter people and then when he decided he wasn't gonna do that anymore that was good too i mean the and by the way yes that only deals with a handful of religions christianity and judaism and islam but i'm pretty sure we're not trying to appeal to anything beyond an abrahamic styled god and so it would a god create a rule that says if a man lies with another man as he lies with a woman there they've committed an abomination they're deserving of death or that shall not suffer a witch to live not as far as i can tell now that none of that is consistent with humanism none of that is consistent with what is best for human beings it's defining best as that which is consistent with what this particular god view wants well first i need a demonstration of what god wants and why i should care what a god wants and if he doesn't want to set up rules that are consistent with actually benefiting human beings i don't care what rules he sets up i can't do anything to stop him but might doesn't make right thanks so much next question michael mccaffrey this is a great question so i pushed it to the top of the list because it's really good so with the challenge of each speaker trying to summarize in 30 seconds that's a tough one but michael asks can you each steel man your opponent in other words if you're not familiar with the term just give like the strongest case for your opponent on their behalf sure we have this moral intuition that there are things that are objectively wrong and if that's the case then there must be something that serves as a guarantee that that's actually the case and whatever that is sounds a lot like god thanks so much david we're here in the world this is the only world we've got this is the only life we've got we want to get the most out of it and we can we can figure out how we can get the most out of this life and once we sort of put those rules together and the things that we know from experience from all of human history once we've figured that out then we can continue getting better and better and better and better and learning thanks so much gentlemen next up jshi thanks for your question they asked why ought we increase well-being why is that good and then they said there is a categorical imperative I think they're maybe saying like does this fit with the categorical no I think he's saying that is a carrot that's not a I think he's saying he can he can correct me if I'm wrong but if he's saying seek well-being you got a couple of positions I think Matt's position is we just we just do it that we we just by nature we do it but I think he's saying that a conditional imperative or a hypothetical imperative is if you want this then this is the way to get it whereas a categorical imperative is do this right it's not if you want this so I think he's saying if we say we have to seek well-being whether we care about it or not or whether we want to or not we just have to do it then that's a that's more of a categorical imperative but and I think he's saying how would you reconcile that with with your view so I think that's what he means I see and my my view is there's not a categorical imperative gosh you're thanks so much it is conditional Ryan Farigno thanks for your super chat asked David assuming that you accept the history of the Bible what do you think of God condoning the death of other tribes with God in line with morality I mean my view is God could wipe us all out if he wants to right that's my view so as far as again this goes down to covenants I don't believe that it's wrong for God to kill a bunch of people or for God to who knows here's what will happen with this group or that group to call for their deaths and I don't think that's that's terribly inconsistent if you take Matt's view seriously and think of God as someone who knows all the future maybe that God knows hey this group that's practicing child sacrifice and so on it's in the best interest of human flourishing down the line that that something happened that something changes right here so yeah that's not my view my view is from the from the perspective of a Christian if you asked me to do that I would say there was a covenant that was tied to a particular piece of land there were harsh penalties there were harsh penalties but there were extreme blessings God says if you do this then you're not gonna have any miscarriages you're not gonna suffer all these things he goes down the list he's gonna protect them in every way so massive blessings but you they agree they agreed yes if you're going to bless us like that then we'll be do we'll do these things and then they didn't do those things the Christian covenant as the the covenant that I'm under as a Christian is different it's not tied to a piece of land or to maintaining that piece of land or to fighting anyone Christians are again seek peace with all people to always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people that's 1st Thessalonians 515 if you want to look it up we're told to honor all people that's 1st Peter 217 so honor all people seek the good of all people strive for peace with everyone these are the commands that are directed towards me so the point of my point is as far as a Christian is you know as far as a Christian perspective I'm not in a position to be able to go out and kill anyone I would have to I would I would be out of line with the commands that are directed towards me and I find this all curious and frustrating because the original proposed topic was which is better that was asked they asked me the question oh wait wait no are you asking the original proposed topic was Christianity so the original proposed topic was God versus atheism and I pointed out that neither one of those are a system and so I suggested Christianity versus secular humanism and what I got back was it would take me two more weeks to prepare if I were to switch to Christianity versus secular humanism and so we went with God versus secular humanism there's another verse first Peter 315 which is to be prepared at all times to give the defense of the faith and so I find it curious that we show up and the entire opening is about how secularism can't do this but God theism can and then the further and further and further and further we get the first time you propose anything that is about a sort of system where there are actual instructions that would be moral in nature is where you start talking more and more about Christian we gradually worked from a generic God which I told you started bringing up the Bible didn't you start bringing up the Bible what about this what about that and then if we're and then if we're talking about me that's relevant but no that as far as as far as the reason for for you know secular use humanism versus Christianity I said I'd be willing to do that but it's just that the the topic foundation of morality right foundation of morality I don't believe that Christianity is a foundation of morality right I believe it historically it's been an important foundation of morality in certain areas of the world but if I'm talking about a foundation of morality I believe the Hindu but just now you were saying you don't have a Christianity commands you to seek peace I was asked about the Bible but you said the Christianity commands you to seek peace I was asked about the Bible I was asked about Bible I expected God commands you to seek peace I was asked about the Bible I'm answering a question okay and I'm pointing out how disingenuous it is for you to be here as a Christian as someone who's going to cite the Bible for your own views to not just say I believe that in the Bible God commands us to seek peace and that is why God is the best foundation this is this this is the sort of we could have had a discussion about again again I I'd be I'd be happy no I'm saying I'd be happy to have that discussion you were talking about two different things one we're talking about you know Christianity as a system of ethics yeah I'm a I'm a philosopher so if we're talking about like a moral argument dispute that but that I'm a philosophy yeah I'm a phd in philosophy and okay so I'm I might be a philosopher I put it this way I've studied a lot of philosophy I'm thinking if I talk about God being the ground that I agree if I talk about God being the ground of possibility or God being the ground of morality or something like that that's those are philosophical arguments like if if Immanuel Kant were to say he even had a he had an entire book where he argues that God must be the foundation of all possibility and so if if there's possibility then God exists and so on if you were to lay out that argument and someone were to come along and say you know but I I don't like the Bible I don't like Christianity there's lots what are you talking about I'm talking about a philosophical a philosophical argument right there so if I'm talking about there's two there's two ways of looking at a foundation of morality right I'm thinking of if there is a necessary standard of goodness that's that's something like God that's independent that's independent of Christianity being true and that's something that even according to Christianity people around the world can have can have access to that whether they have all sorts of other religions or not so that's where I was going with that said I do understand hey if you're thinking about a system of ethics and comparing to you know a religious system with secular humanism or something like that I understand that and I said I'd be willing to do that but I'm just saying I would I haven't even thought through I haven't even put together my thoughts on it you know what I mean and yet you are I just asked about it and yet you are how can you not have put together are you saying I should have answered the question I should have said too bad how can you I'm saying how can you identify as a Christian and then say you haven't put through your thoughts on Christianity and ethics compared to secular humanism it's a different thing that the original thing the original thing that I said to to James was I'm traveling I'm basically traveling non-stop I have no time to prepare any to prepare for anything I have a background in philosophy so I can do something along the lines of the moral argument as far as you know thinking through the whole Christian system of ethics and so on I would at least want to you know to put my thoughts together so that I could actually present my thoughts on it the point is philosophy I did that for years I haven't really spent much time presenting a case on Christian ethics versus secular humanist ethics we've got another question from alpha Ben this one's from Matt they asked what why do you think that intention is not required for anything to move toward a goal for example non-living to living things does this not give evidence towards a creator like God can you read it again because I'm not convinced that it has anything to do with this subject or what they're even asking you got it I'm glad I wasn't the only one confused alpha alpha and we'll give it one more shot and then we'll move to the next one they asked for Matt why do you think that intention is not required for anything to move toward a goal when did I ever say anything remotely like that I have not only so I have not said anything like that and it's not remotely relevant to this debate whether or not intention is required for something to move towards a goal actually I think I can sit here even though I haven't spent a lot of time preparing for this particular question intention is required to move towards a goal a goal implicitly a goal implies an intention a goal is almost definitionally an intention there so I didn't say that and I believe the opposite so next you got subtracted thanks for your or super they asked hey David what model of good are we perceiving God on are we perceiving the goodness of God based on our definition well speaking from a philosophical perspective it's I mean you could you could think of it in different ways if we're talking about you know light versus darkness darkness is the absence of light cold is not some independent entity it's it's the absence of heat philosophers especially medieval philosophers they're thinking of God's goodness as sort of connected to God's being actually they were they were indistinguishable right so you think of being versus non-being goodness versus non-goodness or or badness if you want to call it um light versus darkness and so on and so it's uh it's it's not it's not our concept it's it's like there if you if you say there's a ground of of being or God is the ultimate being or something like that not precisely clear exactly what that means but you can kind of get your your your mind around mind around what it's what it's aiming at God is the ground of of all being and so uh sort of God is the ground of all good and you that's distinguished that's distinguished from whatever is not good which would be like whatever is is non-being so I understand that it gets it gets kind of shaky and again it sounds you know it sounds mysterious and things like that but that's what you're dealing with when you're dealing with morality if you believe that you know they're actually objective moral values and that there are objective moral obligations these things are very mysterious you don't you don't again you don't find them with a telescope you don't find them with a microscope they're different kinds of things they don't seem to be physical at all if these are actual obligations and so you need something that kind of transcends the physical world you need something that transcends humanity if it's able to issue commands over all of humanity and so yeah it's it's going to be mysterious but that's because the topic morality is mysterious as far as what these things are now if you're saying they're all a delusion then that's a different case that's pretty easy to understand but if you actually believe that our our moral are that there are moral facts that correspond to reality then you're going to deal you have to deal with some sort of foundation of of good which makes it ultimately circular God by definition is good therefore God is good and we would be judging God by God's standard of good because God is the standard of good this is what happens when you begin with the intuition that there are objective moral facts that have a grounding in some objective moral foundation and I don't actually bother to demonstrate it you wind up in a position where you just say that sounds a lot like God which we've heard over and over got a question from cosmic skeptic Alex is asking Matt say he says is Matt saying that the majority view makes for moral truth is ethical truth a democracy no are not exceptions in fact quote counter examples no because the majority can in fact be wrong it is it is the goal of getting better we've discovered where we've been wrong before and we've been monumentally wrong a lot of us what the current model is for society in a given moment of time does not mean that that is right it just means that that is the best representation of our understanding at that moment of time and the instant that we discover our error as we have many times over in history with regard to equal rights between men and women and slavery and all these other things once we do that that becomes the new high bar of understanding it is not the society's current understanding that is the moral ideal it is society's current understanding is their best approximation of what a current of what the moral ideal would be and the constant pursuit of that moral ideal is what allows that to change and morph until we discover how to be better and the entire goal of secular humanism secular moral systems is to get better at getting better with the humility and understanding that we're going to get it wrong it's not like I'm going to say ah this is my current moral belief and I cannot be wrong that is not in any way skeptical that is not in any way tied to science because science doesn't make proclamations about truth it has tentative models based on our best understanding it is I wouldn't call it a science because you know scientists would get irritated but it is science-ish in the process and that is there's a recognition that we're not going to know everything we're not going to get it right but if our goal is to honestly pursue better answers at all times then improvement seems likely thanks so much anamorphic mind thanks for your question this one's for David they asked why were the worst atrocities done to people done by religious figures such as Hitler a christian and Stalin a catholic oh my goodness oh boy I'd say that's completely wrong the fact that that's the fact that the biggest moral atrocities in history as far as sheer numbers are concerned were primarily done by atheist regimes I don't think is I don't think that reflects on most atheists but Hitler as far as him at certain times saying positive things about christianity we have his what's it called Hitler's table talk where the people who actually knew him put his comments together he despised christianity he lamented that the german people had inherited christianity and not a more war-like ideology and the ones he mentioned were Islam and the religion of I think the Japanese but he was lamenting that they did not have a more more violent ideology that could do a lot more good in the world so he despised christianity he despised the doctrine of the trinity he called it you know christian flabbiness and meekness and he thought that it it brought about weakness Stalin indisputably and an atheist if you look at the the chinese regimes none of these none of these groups are christian and for as for any christians being involved right like you you would have had christians you know in germany and so on they're clearly they're clearly not operating in line with jesus command to love their enemies and things like that or to always strive after that which is good for one another and for all people or to honor all people again I don't I'm not applying this to to atheists in general but I I think you're massively misunderstanding something if you're saying these atrocities were somehow christian in in nature thanks so much Dean Meadows thanks for your question they also weren't secular humanists so it's not relevant I agree I agree completely Hitler was not a secular humanist thanks so much and in private identified as catholic and in private also identified as anti-christian and in private Hitler was a hot mess and while one could view this as a particular I'll go with perversion of some ideas that could be spawned by christian there you could get from the from the story of Jesus through some perversion to make the jews be the enemy and that happened a lot jews and christians were in conflict muslims and jews were in conflict Protestants and catholics are in conflict well you can see this all there but this oversimplification of the worst atrocities were either done by christians or done by atheists is simply irrelevant and wrong and it's often just a bunch of internet glurge when the real issue here is what were the guiding principles because even in soviet Russia which was atheistic it was imposed atheism it was we are going to outlaw religion and actively persecute people with religion which by the way doesn't represent any modern atheist or atheist you know mentality of any note and definitely isn't remotely consistent with secular humanism it is though consistent with some god views because god views wind up competing and the only way for god views to evidently resolve those competing disagreements of my god said wipe you out my god said wipe you out which i realize he'll put under another covenant covenant in antiquity but what's the solution ah go enslave them secular humanism has no even hope of getting to kill them because they don't agree with us that is not anything you could get to and yet you can get through there with selective readings of the bible and the koran and i don't know pick the punish shots probably but i i should probably shouldn't say that because i'm not sure that i'm up on the punish as far as if you want if you wanted to nail down yeah i think hitler is a massive mixture i think he's he's if you if you want if you wanted something i think it would be closest closest to um certain claims of Nietzsche and some adit some added comments by Nietzsche's sister who tended to put a a more anti-semitic spin on things combined with a some racist ideologies and and so on that were they were just circulating at that time anything he was having anything anything else is i think going to be secondary he was heavy into witchcraft and superstition the occult stuff like that this is not this is not somebody who understood skepticism humanity and in despite the fact that i'm pretty sure that in hitler's head he thought he was bringing about a better world and i had this conversation with glintz governor scrivener when i was in london and they kind of scoffed at the oh your solution to hitler would have been to sit down and discuss with him whether or not he had a better world and i'm like no once once once people are being exterminated the war starts i'm not a pacifist and i'm not an idiot about what action is required then but if you could take someone like hitler who's developing views about what they think the better world is and sit down and actually have a discussion you at least have the opportunity to show that the better world they think they're creating isn't the better world they get with the actions they're taking now a little little side note is just a question hitler was announcing what he wanted to do beforehand now you're saying you don't kill someone based on you know differing you know having differing views is it it's only after he starts the killing that you would you would want to intervene or could it be before if in other words if a person's views were dangerous enough i get it this is this is a legitimate question it's something that we have through the course of human history learn how we've gotten it wrong when we've acted too early when we've acted too late and so that it gets down to to basic principles of my right to swing my fist in somewhere before it gets to your face because we're you know secular humanism can start with this principle of individual autonomy and and sovereignty but we dispensed with this because we understand that humans have a desire for justice that will also push them towards vigilante justice and that not there there needs to be due process and this is why an individual deciding you know what I think Hitler's dangerous let me go kill him is fundamentally different from governing bodies who are working together in cooperation who may disagree on other things but recognize that this is going to kill us all unless we stop it and then deciding this is the best course of action sometimes that best course of action is going to be war sometimes it might be an assassination sometimes it might be imprisoning or you know whatever else it's not one answer for everything and each situation needs to be judged it's a risk assessment assessment it's like at what point is the house so on fire that we stop reaching for the fire extinguisher and run outside I mean if there's a kitchen fire you know and all we've got is water well you throw a towel over it and you get the hell out of there you know there's water on the grease fire but if you've got a fire extinguisher handy you grab that rather than just immediately running because there's a fire but if the entire kitchen's on fire and there's smoke you get out and so not all the situations are equal or are the same I suppose not equal thanks so much and let's see I think we might have one more question here and Dean Meadows thanks for that super chat they asked Matt do all human beings in and of themselves have value or do they add value I'm a little bit confused just because at first it seems like it's maybe maybe do they do they somehow make value or something like that like that like oh okay so like so so there are they in somehow intrinsically valuable or do they create their value as they as they live or something so it's a matter of kind of at what resolution are we talking the universe there's no reason to think the universe cares at all about human beings or anybody else and so if that's what is required for someone to have intrinsic value that they have in value value even if there's nobody else and no mind and no thinking and no nothing just the universe then I don't see any reason to think that humans have that kind of intrinsic value but that doesn't mean that humans don't have value they have value to themselves to others both in what they can do and it can be positive value and negative value I mean the this sort of thing is we look at this and say gosh it would be really useful if humans had intrinsic value because that would give us an imperative to value humans and what we don't often realize is that whether they have intrinsic value or not they can and should have value to us because our lives are entwined I don't just care about my girlfriend because we have sex or because she's a person or because she's an intrinsically valuable human being not just because of what she can directly do for me there are things that I will do for her that don't that don't seem to directly impact me but if they make her life better my life benefits from it as well and so that value that I have for another human being which I also have for David and I have for James and other people it's not well granted I'm not sleeping with you guys but there's different degrees of this value and this is why we will say oh and we kind of touched on it earlier most people are going to care about themselves most and the people close to them and yes of course and the problem is what is wrong with that if I have a baseline with secular humanism that all humans start on the positive side of value with respect to hey I value all humans enough to work towards the betterment of all humans and not just run around slaughtering people but there's a handful up here that I value slightly more that doesn't mean there's something wrong with that it is a sensible understanding in the same way that just because there's a small fire on the stove isn't the same as a big fire it is all we always are going to prioritize you're not a bad person if you care about yourself more as long as you don't take a myopic short term view of what is immediately in your interest of self-gratification without the recognition that your immediate self-gratification can have long-term consequences on your long-term benefits which is why I say you can get to the appearance of altruism through purely selfishness as a foundation but I don't advocate for purely selfishness as a foundation I am and this I don't know how this ties into it between mine and David's disagreement I am a huge proponent that empathy is you know we look at love and we look at empathy oh those things are irrational so what they're human and they're valuable and they lead to a better we know that being empathetic towards people causes them to be more prone to cooperation and the betterment of other people it's not like empathy just because it's not rational or I can't bottle it or I can't say why I'm empathetic is somehow a bad thing that's not remotely in the ballpark of what I was saying thanks so much with that folks we do want to say thanks so much for being with us today it's been a true pleasure huge thanks to our speakers their flexibility this they're terrific to work with I can tell you personally they're they're very personable and it's uh we want to say thanks so much to them as the debaters are the lifeblood of the channel I mean they're what makes it fun to watch so it's been a true joy today to get to listen to this we hope you enjoyed it whether you be Christian atheist one of the strange many creatures in between we hope you feel welcome here thanks for hanging out with us we'll hopefully see you tomorrow as we'll be live with Vosh and Destiny in Los Angeles and once again want to say thanks so much gentlemen for being here I will elbow bump in the interest of coronavirus instead of handshake actually I'll I'll fist pump your elbow because I uh there you go I deal with jihadis on a daily basis so coronavirus isn't too scary