Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Divine?

Drits, one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, and one in theology from the University of Munich. He has authored or edited over 30 books as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology. Known as one of the four horsemen of the new atheist movement, Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers the moral landscape, the end of faith, and letter to a Christian nation. The end of faith won the 2005 Penn Award for nonfiction. Mr. Harris has writing has been published in over 15 languages. He and his work have been discussed in newsweek, time, the New York Times, Scientific American, nature, rolling stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Times London, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris is a co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. The structure of tonight's debate will be as follows. Each debate will take 20 minutes for his opening speech, followed by rebuttals of 12 minutes and eight minutes respectively, and then closing speeches of five minutes each. At the conclusion of the debate, we will have about 30 minutes for questions from the audience. If you would like to ask a question line up behind one of the two microphones in front or in the balcony. We're letting Notre Dame students ask the first four questions tonight, so if you are not a Notre Dame student and somehow find yourself at the front of the Q&A line, please allow a student to go ahead of you. Time will be kept strictly. There is a time keeper in the front who can be seen by both speakers, and once each speaker's time has elapsed, he will be given at most 15 seconds to finish his final sentence before being rudely interrupted by me, the time and forcer. Because we are keeping the time strict, we ask you to hold all applause and other indications of the agreement or disagreement, cheering, crowd surfing and the like and tell the very end of the debate. Please remember that flash photography, videotaping and active cell phones are all prohibited. Finally, remember that Notre Dame is the world's number one institution in the philosophy of religion, and also has one of the world's best theology departments. Any questions you don't get to ask during the 25 or 30 minute Q&A, you can ask if your local faculty in the days and weeks to come, and now on with the show. Well, good evening. It's wonderful to be here at the University of Notre Dame, and I want to begin by. Sorry. I need to, we're going to begin each speech with me checking with the time keeper to make sure that he's ready, and then the time keeper is going to hit go, and then you get to go. So, so you hope when I say begin. Sorry for jumping again. Professor Craig gets the first word in the debate. Dr. Harris gets the last word. Time keeper, are you ready? This is 20 minutes. Begin. I want to begin by thanking the Center for Philosophy of Religion for the invitation to participate in tonight's debate. The question of the correct foundation of morality is one that is not only of tremendous academic interest, but also one that has enormous practical application for our lives. Not a begin with an important point of agreement. Dr. Harris and I agree that there are objective moral values and duties. To say that moral values and duties are objective is to say that they are valid and binding independent of human opinion. For example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil, even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good, and it would still have been evil, even if the Nazis had one world war two and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good. One of the great merits of Dr. Harris's recent book, the moral landscape, is his bold affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties. He invades against what he calls the overeducated, atheistic moral, nihilists and relativists who refuse to condemn us objectively wrong, terrible atrocities like the genital mutilation of little girls. He rightly declares, if only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl cut off her genitals with a septic blade and so do back up, the only question would be, how severely that person should be punished. What is not in question is that such a person has done something horribly, objectively wrong. Question before us this evening then, is what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties? What grounds them, what makes certain actions objectively good or evil right or wrong? It's a nice debate, I'm going to defend two basic intentions. First, if God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. And second, if God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Now notice that these are conditional claims, I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists, maybe Dr. Harris is right, that atheism is true. That wouldn't affect the truth of my two intentions. All that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would then contrary to Dr. Harris not exist. So let's look at that first contention together, if God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Here I want to examine two subpoints with you. First, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral values. Moral values have to do with what is good or evil. On the Theistic view, objective moral values are grounded in God. As Saint-Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being, and therefore the highest good. He is not merely perfectly good, he is the locus and paradigm of moral value. God's own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature loving, generous, faithful, kind and so forth. Thus if God exists, objective moral values exist, wholly independent of human beings. Second, theism provides a sound foundation for objective moral duties. On a Theistic view, objective moral duties are constituted by God's commands. God's moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commandments, which constitute our moral duties or obligations. The far from being arbitrary, God's commandments must be consistent with his holy and loving nature. Our duties then are constituted by God's commandments, and these in turn reflect his essential character. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great commandments. First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your heart and with all your mind. Second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On this foundation, we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice and equality, and condemn as objectively wrong, selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination and oppression. In summary, then theism has the resources for a sound foundation for morality. It grounds both objective moral values and objective moral duties. And hence, I think it's evident that if God exists, we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Let's turn them to my second contention that if God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Consider first, the question of objective moral values. If God does not exist, then what basis remains for the existence of objective moral values? In particular, why think that human beings would have objective moral worth? On the atheistic view, human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature, which have evolved relatively recently. On an infinitesimal speck of dust, call the planet Earth, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On atheism, it's hard to see any reason to think that human well-being is objectively good, any more than insect well-being, or rats well-being, or hyena well-being. This is what Dr. Harris calls the value problem. The purpose of Dr. Harris' book, the moral landscape, is to explain the basis on atheism of the existence of objective moral values. He explicitly rejects the view that moral values are platonic objects. Existing independent of the world. So, his only recourse is to try to ground moral values in the natural world. But how can you do that? Since nature in and of itself is just morally neutral. On an atralistic view, moral values are just the behavioral byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning. Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior, because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival. So their primary cousins, homosapiens, have evolved to sort of herd morality for precisely the same reasons. As a result of sociobiological pressures, there has evolved among homosapiens a sort of herd morality, which functions well in the perpetuation of our species. But on the atheistic view, there doesn't seem to be anything that makes this morality objectively binding and true. The philosopher of science, Michael Roots reports, the position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality, because such an awareness is a biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation, no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, love thy neighbor as thyself, they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory. If we were to rewind the film of human evolution and start a new, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved. As Darwin himself wrote in the Descent of Man, if men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive bees, they can hardly be adowed that our unmarried females would like the worker bees think it is sacred duty to kill their brothers and mothers would strive to kill their children. And no one would think of interferi. For us to think that human beings are special and our morality is objectively true is to succumb to the temptation to speciesism that is to say an unjustified bias in favor of one's own species. If there is no God, then any reason for regarding the herd morality evolved by homosapiens on this planet as objectively true seems to have been removed. Take God out of the picture and all you seem to be left with is an ape-like creature on a speck of dust be set with delusions of moral grandeur. Richard Dawkins, a sassment of human worth, may be depressing, but why on atheism is he mistaken when he says there is a bottom no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. We are machines for propagating DNA, it is every living object's sole reason for being. So how does Sam Harris propose to solve the value problem? The tricky proposals is simply to redefine what he means by good and evil in non-moral terms. He says, we should define good as that which supports the well-being of conscious creatures. So he says, questions about values are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. And therefore he concludes, it makes no sense to ask whether maximizing well-being is good. Why not? Because he's redefined the word good to mean the well-being of conscious creatures. So to ask, why is maximizing creatures well-being good? Is on his definition the same as asking, why does maximizing creatures well-being maximizing creatures well-being? It's just a topology, it's just talking in circles. So Dr. Harris is quote unquote solved the value problem just by redefining his terms, it's nothing but word play. At the end of the day, Dr. Harris isn't really talking about moral values at all. He's just talking about what's conducive to the flourishing of sending it life on this planet. Seeing in this slide, his claim that science can tell us a great deal about what contributes to human flourishing is hardly conversely. A controversial, of course, it can, just as it can tell us what is conducive to the flourishing of corn or mosquitoes or bacteria. His so-called moral landscape, which features the highs and lows of human flourishing isn't really a moral landscape at all. Thus, Dr. Harris has failed to solve the value problem. He hasn't provided any justification or explanation for why on atheism, moral values would objectively exist at all. His so-called solution is just a semantics trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic redephination of the terms good and evil in non-moral vocabulary. Second question, does atheism provide a sound foundation for objective moral duties? Doody has to do with moral obligation or prohibition, what I ought or ought not to do. Here, the reviewers of the moral landscape have been merciless in pounding Dr. Harris's attempt to provide a naturalistic account of moral obligation. Two problems stand out. First, natural science tells us only what is not what ought to be the case. As philosopher Jerry Foder is written, science is about facts, not norms. It might tell us how we are, but it wouldn't tell us what is wrong with how we are. In particular, it cannot tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions which are conducive to human flourishing. So, if there is no God, what foundation remains for objective moral duties? On the naturalistic view, human beings are just animals and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it doesn't murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcefully copulates with a female, it forcefully copulates with her, but it doesn't rape her. For none of these actions is forbidden or obligatory. There is no moral dimension to these actions. So, if God does not exist, why think we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who? Or what imposes these obligations upon us? Where did they come from? It's very hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning. On the atheistic view, certain actions such as rape and insist may not be biologically and socially advantageous. And so, in the course of human development, have to become taboo that is socially unacceptable behavior. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that such acts are really wrong, such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. On the atheistic view, the rapist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably. The morally equivalent, if you will, of Lady Gaga. If there is no moral law giver, then there is no objective moral law. And if there is no objective moral law, then we have no objective moral duties. Thus, Dr. Harris' view lacks any source for objective moral duty. Second problem, ought implies can. A person is not morally responsible for an action which is unable to avoid. For example, if somebody shoves you into another person, you're not responsible for bumping into him, you had no choice. But Sam Harris believes that all of our actions are causally determined and that there is no free will. Dr. Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts of free will, but also compatibleistic accounts of freedom. But if there is no free will, then no one is morally responsible for anything. In the end, Dr. Harris admits this. Though it's tucked away in the end notes of his volume. Moral responsibility, he says, and I quote, is a social construct. Not an objective reality. I quote, in neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than any other for the actions they perform. His thoroughgoing determinism spells the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties because on his worldview, we have no control over what we do. Thus, on Dr. Harris' view, there is no source of objective moral duties because there is no moral law giver, and no possibility of objective moral duty because there is no free will. Therefore, on his view, despite his protestations to the contrary, right and wrong do not really exist. The Dr. Harris' naturalistic view fails to provide a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Hence, if God does not exist, we do not have a sound foundation for morality, which is my second contention. In conclusion, then, we've seen that if God exists, we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and objective moral duties. But if God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Dr. Harris' atheism thus sets very ill with his ethical theory. What I'm offering Dr. Harris tonight is not a new set of moral values. I think by and large, we share the same applied ethics. Rather, what I'm offering is a sound foundation for the objective moral values and duties that we both hold dear. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Harris now has 20 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Well, first let me say it's an honor to be here at Notre Dame. I'm very happy to be debating Dr. Craig, the one Christian apologists who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists. I've actually gotten more than a few emails this week that more or less read, Brother, please don't blow this. So you will be the judge. Now as many of you know, I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing religion. And one of the perks of this job is that you immediately hear from all the people who think that criticizing religion is a terrible thing to do. And strangely, the reason people rise to the defense of God is not that there's so much evidence that God exists, but that they believe that belief in God is the only intellectual framework for an objective morality. And clearly Dr. Craig is among their number. Now the sense is that without the conviction that moral truths exist, that words like right and wrong and good and evil actually mean something, humanity will just lose its way. That's the fear. And I actually share that fear. I've come to believe that this concern that many religious people have of the erosion of secular morality is not an entirely empty one. Now I once spoke at an academic meeting on these themes and I said, as I will say, tonight, that once we understand morality in terms of human well-being, we'll be able to make strong claims about which behaviors and ways of life are a good for us in which aren't. And I cited as an example, the sadism and misogyny of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that was less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing. And it turns out that to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy. And after my remarks, I fell into debate with another invited speaker. And this is more or less exactly how our conversation went. She said, how could you ever say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science? I said, well, because I think it's pretty clear that right and wrong relate to human well-being. And it's just as clear that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not a way of maximizing human well-being. And she said, well, that's just your opinion. And I said, okay, well, let's make it even easier. Let's say we found a culture that was literally removing the eyeballs of every third child. That birth would you then agree that we have found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being? And she said, it would depend on why they were doing it. So after my eyebrows returned from the back of my head, I said, okay, well, let's say they're doing it for religious reasons. Let's say they have a scripture which says every third should walk in darkness or some such nonsense. And then she said, well, then you could never say that they were wrong. Okay, so I was talking to someone who has a deep background in science and philosophy. She's actually since been appointed to the president's council on bioethics. She's one of 13 people advising President Obama on all of the ethical implications of advances in medicine and related science and technology. And she had just delivered a perfectly lucid lecture on the moral implications of neuroscience for the courts. And she was especially concerned that we could be subjecting capture terrorists to lie detection, neuroimaging technology. And she viewed this as really an unconscionable violation of cognitive liberty. So on the one hand, her moral scruples were very finely calibrated to recoil from the slightest perceived misstep in ethical terms in our war on terror. And yet she was quite willing to forgive some primitive culture its fondness for removing the eyeballs of children in its religious rituals. And she seemed to be quite terrifyingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan at this moment. So I see this double standard as a problem. And strangely, this is precisely the erosion of basic common sense that many religious people are worried about. I hope it'll be clear to you at the end of this hour that religion is not an answer to this problem. Okay, belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality. It's it's it's it's self-assource of moral blindness. Now it's widely believed that there are two quantities in this universe. There are facts on the one hand and of course science can give us our most rigorous discussion of these. But then there are values which many people like Dr. Craig think science can't touch. Okay, questions of meaning and morality and what life is good for. Now of course everyone thinks that science can help us get what we value. Okay, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. Okay, and and therefore it cannot in principle be applied to the most important questions in human life. Questions like how we should raise our children or what constitutes a good life. Now it's thought from the point of view of science and Dr. Craig just gave voice to this opinion. That when we look at the universe, always see our patterns of events, just one thing follows another. Okay, and there's no corner of the universe that that declares certain of its events to be good or evil or right or wrong. Apart from us, our minds we declare certain events to be better than others. But in doing that it seems that we're merely projecting our own preferences and desires onto a reality that is intrinsically value free. And where do our notions of right and wrong come from? Well clearly they've been drummed into us by evolution. The product of these eight-fish urges and social emotions. And then they get modulated by culture. We take sexual jealousy, for instance. And this is an attitude that has been bred into us over millions of years. Our ancestors were highly covetous of one another, despite the fact that everyone was covered with hair and had terrible teeth. And this possessiveness now gets enshrined in various cultural institutions like the institution of marriage. So therefore a statement like it's wrong to cheat on one spouse. It seems a mere summation of these contingencies. It seems like it's an improvisation on the back of biology. It seems that if in the point of view of science, it can't really be wrong to cheat on your spouse. This is just just how apes like ourselves worry when we learn to worry with words. Now here is where religious people, like Dr. Craig, begin to get a little queasy as I think they should. And many see no alternative but to insert the God of Abraham and Iron Age God of War into the clockwork as an invisible arbiter of moral truth. It is wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh deems that it is so. It which is curious because another moods Yahweh is perfectly fond of genocide and slavery and human sacrifice. I must say it's pretty amusing to hear Dr. Craig and his opening remarks say that I'm merely focused on the flourish in of sentient creatures on this planet. If that's a sin, I'll take it. One wonders what Dr. Craig is focused on. And incidentally, you should not trust Dr. Craig's reading of me half the quotes he provided from me as though I wrote them or quotes from people. I was quoting in my book and often to different effects so you'll have to read the book. Now in claiming that values reduce to the well-being of conscious creatures as I will, I'm introducing two concepts, consciousness and well-being. Now let's start with consciousness. This is not an arbitrary starting point. Imagine a universe devoid of the possibility of consciousness. Imagine a universe entirely constituted of rocks. This clearly know happiness or suffering in this universe. There's no good or evil value judgment to don't apply. For changes in the universe to matter, they have to matter at least potentially to some conscious system. What about well-being? Well, the well-being of conscious creatures and the link between that and morality may seem open to doubt, but it shouldn't. Here's the only assumption you have to make. Imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. That calls us the worst possible misery for everyone. The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word bad applies anywhere, it applies here. Now if you think the worst possible misery for everyone isn't bad, or maybe it has a silver lining, or maybe there's something worse. I don't know what you're talking about. And what's more, I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about either. What I'm saying is the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we should do anything in this universe, if we ought to do anything, if we have a moral duty to do anything, it's to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. And the moment you admit this, all other states of the universe are better than the worst possible misery for everyone. You have the worst possible misery for everyone over here, and all these other constellation of experiences are right out here. And because the experience of conscious creatures is dependent in some way on the laws of nature, there will be right in wrong ways to move along this continuum. It will be possible to think you're avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone and to fail. You can be wrong in your beliefs about how to navigate this space. So here's my argument for moral truth, the context of science. Questions of right and wrong and good and evil depend upon minds. Have they depend upon the possibility of experience? Mines are natural phenomena. They depend upon the laws of nature in some way. Morality and human values, therefore, can be understood through science because in talking about these things, we are talking about all of the facts that influence the well-being of conscious creatures. In our case, we're talking about genetics and neurobiology and psychology and sociology and economics. Now, I view this space of all possible experience as a kind of moral landscape with peaks that correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys that correspond to the lowest suffering. And the first thing to realize is that there may be many equivalent peaks in this space. There may be many different but morally equivalent ways for human beings to thrive, but there will be many more ways not to thrive. There will be many more ways to fail to be on a peak. There are clearly more ways to suffer unnecessarily in this world than to be sublimely happy. Now, the Taliban are still my favorite example of a culture that is struggling mildly to build this society that is clearly less good than many other societies on offer. The average lifespan for women in Afghanistan is 44 years. They have a 12% literacy rate. They have the highest, almost the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality in the world and almost the highest fertility. So, this is one of the best places on earth to watch women in Afghanistan. It seems to me perfectly obvious that the best response to this dire situation, which is to say the most moral response, is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls with a crime of learning to read. Now, of course, this is common sense to us, unless you happen to be a bioethicist on the President's commission at this moment. But I'm saying, at bottom, it is also, these are also truths about biology and neurology and psychology and sociology and economics. It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality, that the moment we notice that we know anything at all about human well-being, we have to say this. Now, some people with a little philosophical training may be tempted to say, well, what if a father wants to burn off his daughter's face with battery acid? Who are you to say that he is not as moral as we are? What if he has an alternate conception of well-being that's just this legitimate? Or who's to say that we should care about the well-being of little girls? This is the kind of email I get, this is not one. Now, moral skeptics of this kind and Dr. Craig has essentially endorsed this position in a way without God. Think that the only way to judge one person's values to be wrong are with respect to another person's values and all such judgments have to be on a par. This is not true. There are many ways for my values to be objectively wrong. They can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I hold. They can be wrong with respect to deeper values that I would hold if I were only a deeper person. It's clearly possible to value things that reliably make you miserable in this life. It's clearly possible to be cognitively and emotionally closed to experiences that you would want if you were only intelligent and knowledgeable enough to want them. It is possible not to know what one is missing in life. So things can be right or wrong or good or evil, quite independent of a person's opinions. Now, some of you might worry that I haven't defined well-being enough. How can something this lose as a concept be the benchmark of objective values? Well, consider by analogy the concept of physical health. Physical health is very difficult to define. It used to be that if your health you could expect to live to the right bowl of age of 40, now our life span, our life expectancy is doubled in the last 150 years. What does health mean? It has something to do with not always vomiting. They're not being an excruciating pain, not running a fever. How fast should a healthy person be able to run? That question might not have an answer. But this does not make the question of health vacuous. It doesn't make it merely a matter of opinion or of cultural construction. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we ever make in science. And notice that no one has ever tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like, who are you to say that not always vomiting is healthy? What if you meet someone who wants to vomit and he wants to vomit until he dies? How could you argue that he is not just healthy as you are? In talking about morality and human values, I think we are really talking about mental health and the health of societies. The truth of science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values. We consider the simplest statement of scientific fact. Waters, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This seems as value free and utterance as human beings ever make. But what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. What do you have understanding in the world? The value of evidence, the value of logical consistency. What is someone says, well, that is not how I choose to think about water. I am a biblical chemist and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light. So I take that to me that there were no stars. There were no stars to fuse helium and hydrogen into heavier elements like oxygen. There was no oxygen to put in the water. So either God created special oxygen to put in water. But I don't think he would do that because that would be biblical and elegant. What can we say to such a person? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. If he doesn't share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? So this I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face. And what do we really say when we say that science can't be applied to the most important questions in human life? Okay, we're saying that when we get our biases out of the way, when we most fully rely on clear reasoning and honest observation, when intellectual honesty is at its zenith, well then those efforts have no application whatsoever. The most important questions in human life. But that is precisely the mood you cannot be in to answer the most important questions in human life. It would be very strange if that were so. Professor Craig now has 12 minutes for a rebuttal. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin. You'll recall in my first speech that I said I was going to defend two basic contents tonight. First, that if God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. First, I explained that if God exists, then objective moral values are grounded in the character of God himself who is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, generous and so forth. Here, Dr. Harris didn't have anything by way of disagreement to say, but I do want to clear up a possible confusion. He represented this by saying that if religion were not true, then words like good and evil right and wrong would have no meaning. I'm not maintaining that. That is to confuse moral ontology with moral semantics. Moral ontology asks, what is the foundation of objective moral values and duties? Moral semantics asks, what is the meaning of moral terms? And I am not making any kind of semantic or claim tonight that good means something like commanded by God. Rather, my concern is moral ontology. What is the ground or the foundation of moral values and duties? To give an illustration, think of light. Light is a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn't the meaning of the word light. People knew how to use the word light long before they discovered its physical nature. And I might also add, they certainly knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Now, in exactly the same way, we can know the meaning of moral terms like good and evil right and wrong. And know the difference between good and evil without being aware that the good is grounded in God ontologically. So that is the position I'm defending tonight is that moral values are grounded ontologically in God. Second, our moral duties are grounded by God's commandments, which are necessary reflections of his nature. Here, the only response I detected from Dr. Harris was to refer to the atrocities in the Hebrew Bible. But I think this is quite irrelevant tonight's discussion. There are plenty of divine command theorists who are not Jews or Christians and place no stock whatsoever in the Bible. So this isn't an objection to divine command theory that I'm defending tonight. Now, if you are interested in biblical ethics, I want to highly recommend Paul Copeland's new book, is God a moral monster, which examines those passages in the Hebrew Bible and light of the ancient Near East, and I can guarantee you it will be a very enlightening and interesting read. But this issue is strictly irrelevant in tonight's debate. So we've not heard any objection to a theistic grounding for ethics. If God does exist, it's clear I think, obvious even, that we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. Now, what if God does not exist? Is there a sound foundation first of all for objective moral values? Now here, Dr. Harris said, you don't need religion in order to have universal morality. Again, that's a confusion. Of course you don't. Remember the Nazis, for example, could of one World War II, and established a universal morality. The issue isn't universality. The issue is objectivity. And I'm maintaining that in the absence of God, there isn't any reason in the explanation for the existence of objective moral values. Now, Dr. Harris says, but we can imagine creatures being in the worst possible misery, and it's obviously better for creatures to be flourishing the well-being of conscious creatures is good. Well, of course it is. That's not the question. We agree that all things being equal, flourishing of conscious creatures is good. The question is rather, if atheism were true, what would make the flourishing of conscious creatures objectively good? Conscious creatures might like to flourish, but there's no reason on atheism to think that it would really be objectively good. Now here, Dr. Harris, I think, is guilty of misusing terms like good and bad, right and wrong in equivocal ways. He will often use them in non-moral senses. For example, he'll say, there are objectively good and bad moves in chess. Now that's clearly not a moral use of the terms good and bad. You just mean they're not apt to win or produce a winning strategy. It's not evil. What you've done. And similarly, in ordinary English, we use the words good and bad, you know, a number of non-moral ways. For example, we say, no-terdam as a good team. Now, we can hope it's an ethical team, but that's not what's indicated by the win-loss record. That is a different meaning of good. Or we say, that's a good way to get yourself killed, or that's a good game plan, or the sunshine felt good, or that's a good route to ease lancing. Or there's no good reason to do that, or she's in good health. All of these are non-moral uses of the word good. And Dr. Harris is contrast of the good life and the bad life is not an ethical contrast between a morally good life and an evil life. It's a contrast between a pleasurable life and a miserable life. And there's no reason to identify pleasure misery with good and evil, especially on atheism. So there's just no reason that's been given on atheism for thinking the flourishing of conscious creatures is objectively good. But Dr. Harris has to defend an even more radical claim than that. He claims that the property of being good is identical with the property of creaturely flourishing. And he's not offered any defense of this radical identity claim. In fact, I think we have a knockdown argument against it. Now bear with me here. This is a little technical. On the next to last page of his book, Dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his moral landscape would no longer be a moral landscape. Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people or evil people alike. Now what's interesting about this is that earlier in the book, Dr. Harris explained that about 3 million Americans are psychopathic. That is to say, they don't care about the mental states, of others. They enjoy inflicting pain on other people. But that implies that there's a possible world which we can conceive in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there's any possible world in which A is not identical to B, then it follows that A is not in fact identical to B. Now since it's possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and goodness are not the same as Dr. Harris has asserted in his book. Now it's not often in philosophy that you get a knockdown argument against a position. But I think we've got one here by granting that it's possible that the continuum of well-being is not identical to the moral landscape. Dr. Harris's view becomes logically incoherent. And all of this goes to underlying my fundamental point that on atheism there's just no reason to identify the well-being of conscious creatures with moral goodness. Atheism cannot explain the reality, the objective reality of moral values. What about objective moral duties? I first argued from the is-autistinction that there is no basis on atheism for thinking that we have any moral duties. And here Dr. Harris says, if we have a moral duty to do anything, we have a duty to avoid the worst possible misery. But the question is the antecedent of that conditional, if we have a moral duty to do anything, what I'm arguing is that on atheism, I don't see any reason to think we have any moral duties to do anything. Moral obligations or prohibitions arise in response to imperatives from a competent authority. For example, if a policeman tells you to pull over, then because of his authority, who he is, you are legally obligated to pull over. But if some random stranger tells you to pull over, you're not legally obligated to do so. Now, in the absence of God, what authority is there to issue moral commands or prohibitions? There is not on atheism. And therefore there are no moral imperatives for us to obey. In the absence of God, there just isn't any sort of moral obligation or prohibition that characterizes our lives in particular, we're not morally obligated to promote the flourishing of conscious creatures. So this is auto-station, seems to be to be one that's fatal to Dr. Harris' position and has been widely recognized as such by reviewers of the moral landscape. But secondly, the problem that's even worse is the auto-implice can problem. In the absence of the ability to do otherwise, there is no moral responsibility. In the absence of freedom of the will, we are just puppets or electrochemical machines. And puppets do not have moral responsibilities. Machines are not moral obligations. But on Dr. Harris' view, there is no freedom of the will, either in a libertarian or a compatibleistic sense, and therefore there is no moral responsibility. So there isn't even the possibility of moral duty on his view. So while I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris' affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and moral duties, at the end of the day, his philosophical worldview just doesn't brown these entities that we both want to affirm. If God exists, then we clearly have a sound foundation for objective moral values and moral duties. But if God does not exist, that is if atheism is true, then there is no basis for the affirmation of objective moral values, and there is no brown for objective moral duties, because there is no moral law giver and there is no freedom of the will. And therefore it seems to me that atheism is simply bereft of the adequate ontological foundations to establish the moral life. Dr. Harris now has 12 minutes. Timekeeper, are you ready? Well that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity and hell? Well I'm told this rather hot there for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. The whole point of Christianity or so it is imagined is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now happily there is absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be. 9 million children die every year before they reach the age of 5. Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every 10 days killing children only under 5. Because 24,000 children a day, 1,000 an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. But according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God's plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way and their parents agree in this way, either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr. Craig's view, most of these people, many of these people certainly, will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Think about that. Okay, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation. Okay, there are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. Okay, in Dr. Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey God, Hanuman, you are doomed. Okay, you'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9 and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14. Perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valinore, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. Okay, so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus. Okay, he engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. Okay, on the other hand, on Dr. Craig's account, you're one of the millsero killer in America, who spent his life raping in torturing children. Need only come to God, come to Jesus on death row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in heaven after death. Okay, one thing should be crystal clear to you. This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability. Okay, and please notice the double standard that people at Dr. Craig used to exonerate God from all this evil. Okay, we're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good. But when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath. Okay, we're told that God is mysterious. Okay, who can understand God's will? Okay, and yet this is precisely that this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian. Some he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we're told that God is good. Okay, but when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious. This is how you play tennis without the net. Okay, and I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. Okay, this kind of faith is really the perfection of narcissism. God loves me. Don't you know? He cured me of my exima. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we had given up hope, he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage. Okay, given all the, all the, all the, this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others. Given the, the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. Okay, this, to think in this way, is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good in loving and just in kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft? Now, of course, there's a way of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr. Craig's divine command theory, God is not bound by moral duties. God doesn't have to be good. Whatever he commands is good. So when he commands that the Israelites to slaughter the amalgichites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. Okay, well, here we're being offered. I'm glad he raised the issue of psychopathy. We're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It's psychotic because this is completely delusional. There's no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster yaway. But it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings. This so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Okay, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up. Okay, convinced that they are agents of God's will. There's absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can say against their behavior in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good on divine command theory. Now, I'm obviously not saying that all the Dr. Craig or all religious people are psychopathic and psychotics. But this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own. Okay, if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley. Okay, you have lost your mind. Okay, but if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic. And I'm not the first person to notice that it's a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. Okay, if you live 2000 years ago there was evidence galore and he was just performing miracles, but apparently he got tired of being so helpful. Okay, and so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrines and plausibility and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all two human origins of scripture becomes more and more difficult. Okay, and it's not just the generic God that Dr. Craig is recommending it is the is God the father and Jesus son. Okay, Christianity on Dr. Craig's account is the true moral wealth of the world. Well, I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that that that that that reputeer, reputeiates human sacrifice, either as a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. God so love the world that he gave his only son John 3 16. Okay, the idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer hell, except those those billions in India and billions like them throughout history. Okay, this is this is a stride, this doctrine is a stride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used a very children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. I mean, just think about that. There are vast numbers of societies. People would very children in post holes. People like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible. If there is a less moral framework than the one doctor Craig is proposing, I haven't heard of it. Professor Craig now has eight minutes for a rebuttal. Timekeeper, are you ready? Begin. The less moral framework is atheism. atheism has no grounds for objective moral values or duties. And it's interesting that in that last speech I was disappointed to hear no defense given of that crucial second contention that I offered against Dr. Harris's view. Remember we talked about the value problem? I gave what I consider a knockdown argument to show that the moral landscape is not identical to the continuum of human flourishing. We talked about objective moral duties. The is versus auto-stinction. The autumn-fly's can problem. None of these have been responded to. So if you want a really desperate moral system, try atheism. There's no foundation for objective moral values and duties there. Now what about theism? Does it do any better? Well in the last speech we heard some attacks on my first contention that God provides a sound foundation for morality. Unfortunately it seems to be that most of these were red herrings. A red herring is a smelly old fish that's dragged across the half of the blood hounds to distract them from their true query. So they get distracted and go off following the dead fish. And I'm not going to be distracted by the red herrings that were offered in that last speech. For example in response to my claim that if God exists, then objective moral values exist. We heard that I haven't truly offered an alternative to his view because the goal on theism is to avoid hell. Honestly that simply shows how poorly Sam Harris understands Christianity. You don't believe in God to avoid going to hell. Believe in God isn't some kind of fire insurance. You believe in God because God as the supreme good is the appropriate object of adoration and love. He is goodness itself to be desired for its own sake. And so the fulfillment of human existence is to be found in relation to God. He is because of who God is and his moral worth that he is worthy of worship. It has nothing to do with avoiding hell or promoting your own well being. He then responds but there's no good reason to believe that such a being exists. Look at the problem of evil and the problem of the univangilized. Both of these as I explained in my opening speech are irrelevant and tonight's debate because I'm not arguing that God exists. Maybe he's right. Maybe these are insupable objections to Christianity or to theism. It wouldn't affect either of my intentions that if God exists then we have a sound foundation for moral values and duties. Then we have no foundation for objective moral values and duties. So these are red herrings. Now I have written on each of these problems. The problem of evil and the problem of the univangilized. And you can find much of what I've said at our website reasonablefaith.org. If you're interested, go ahead and look at that. Or as Michael Raysugest had talked to one of your philosophy professors. Michael has written extensively on the problem of evil. And I'm sure he loved have a conversation with you about those things. Notice, secondly I would want to say evil actually proves that God exists. Because if God does not exist objective moral values and duties do not exist. If evil exists, it follows the values and duties do exist. Namely some of the are evil. So evil actually proves the existence of God. Since the absence of God, good and evil as such would not exist. So you cannot press both the problem of evil and agree with my contention that if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Because evil actually will be an argument for the existence of God. Notice the Dr. Harris has no moral foundation for saying that Christian beliefs are morally extrograble, because he has no foundation for making such a judgment. If atheism is true, what objective foundation is there for affirming that one view is extrograble and another is not. There's simply no basis for such judgments. So if he wants to have a debate on theism, I will happily engage in one with him, but that's not the debate for tonight. He also says there's a psychopathic to believe these things. Now that remark is just as stupid as it is insulting. It is absurd to think that people like Professor Peter Van Inwegan here at the University of Notre Dame is psychopathic, or that a guy like Dr. Tom Flint, who is as gracious a Christian gentleman as I could have ever met, is psychopathic. This is simply below the belt. So it seems to me that we've not been given any reputation of the view that if God does exist, then his essence, his character, is determinative for the existence of objective moral values. What about objective moral duties? Here I explained that God's commands must be consistent with his nature. And Dr. Harris continues to press the point, oh, but the Bible supports slavery. Again, I'll refer you to Professor Co-Pans book, which shows that that is a gross misrepresentation of ancient Israel, which did not, in fact, promote slavery as we understand it in light of the experience in the American South. But again, that's simply not irrelevant because I'm not defending the Bible tonight. I'm saying that for a fierce, whether Jew, Christian, deist, Hindu, moral duties will be grounded in the divine commands, which you're based in his nature. He says, but then what about people like the Taliban, who say that God is commanded them to do certain atrocities? I would say the very same thing to the Taliban that Dr. Harris says, that's not mentioning that God did not command you to do those things. That's exactly what Dr. Harris would say. The reason he thinks that is because he doesn't believe that God exists, but I would say that because I think that the Taliban has got the wrong God that in fact God hasn't commanded them to commit these atrocities. And indeed, God will only issue such commands as our consistent with his moral nature, in which he has morally sufficient reasons. So I don't think this first contention is really in much dispute tonight. I think it's obvious that if God exists, then obviously objective moral values exist, independently of human opinion, they're grounded in the character of God, and there would be objective moral duties if God exists, because our duties arise in response to the moral imperatives that God issues to us. So the real debate is on that second contention. Can atheism provide a good foundation for objective moral values and duties, and I think we've seen powerful reasons to think that it cannot. Thank you. Dr. Harris now has eight minutes. Time to keep her. Are you ready? Again? Well, perhaps you've noticed Dr. Craig has a charming habit of summarizing his opponents' points in a way in which they were not actually given. So I will leave it to you to sort it out on YouTube. Needless to say, I didn't call those steamed colleagues of his psychopaths as I made clear. In any case, Dr. Craig has merely defined God as being intrinsically good. If you want to charge someone with merely semantic games, the shoes on the other foot as well, there is no reason that I can see why there couldn't be an evil God or several. Okay, but his God is intrinsically good. Goodness is grounded in his very nature. That is a definitional move that he has made. Now, I have presented a positive case for grounding an objective morality in the context of science. And thinking about moral truth in the context of science should only pose a problem for you. If you imagine that a science of morality has to be absolutely self-justifying in a way that no science ever could be. Every branch of science must rely on certain axiomatic assumptions. Certain core values. And a science of morality would be on the same footing as a science of medicine, or physics, or chemistry. You need only assume that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding. And indeed, the worst case scenario for conscious life. And if science is unscientific, if having a value assumption at the core, render science unscientific, what is scientific? Now, Dr. Craig is confused about what it means to speak with scientific objectivity about the human condition. He says things like, from the point of view of science, we're just constellations of atoms, and we're no more valuable than rats or insects. Okay, as though the only scientifically objective thing that could be said about us is that we're constellations of atoms. Okay, there are two very different senses in which we use these terms subjective and objective. Okay, the first is epistemological. It relates to how we know. And when we say we're reasoning or thinking objectively in this sense, we're talking about the style in which we're thinking. We're talking about the fact that we're seen through our biases. We should say trying to jettison bias. We are reasoning in a way that's available to the data. Our minds are open to counter arguments. Now, this is the absolute foundation of science. And this is what, this is what opens such an Nvidia sculf between science and religion. The difference here in this approach to objectivity. But science does not require that we ignore the fact that certain facts are subjective ontologically subjective. There are facts about the human condition that science can understand and study. There are first person facts. What it's like to be you. And we can study these facts and our study of them reveals how much deeper and richer and more meaningful our lives are than the lives of cockroaches. So this is a false reductionism that he's pervane here. Now, so there are subjective facts. If you happen to have an intact nervous system being burned alive will be excruciatingly painful. The painfulness of pain is a subjective fact about you. What my argument entails is that there are, we can speak objectively about a certain class of subjective facts. There is no one who can go by the name of morality that relate to questions of good and evil and these depend upon on the well-being of conscious creatures, especially our own. And by this light we can see that it's possible to value the wrong things. If you think you prefer to be neurotic and in pain and incapable of creative work and completely disconnected from other people, there's something wrong with you. Yes. In that you are closed to higher states of consciousness, higher with respect to what? Higher as in further from the lowest possible state of consciousness, the worst possible misery for everyone. Is the worst possible misery for everyone really bad? Once again, we have hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question. Now I want to take a brief moment to speak about these higher possibilities because it's often thought that non-believers like myself are closed to some remarkable experiences that religious people have. That's not true. That's not true. There's nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self-transending love and ecstasy and rapture and awe. There's nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year like a proper mystic. And doing nothing but meditate on compassion. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustifiable and unjustified claims about the nature of the cosmos or about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences. Now the prospect of somebody becoming a true saint in life and inspiring people long after their deaths is something that I take very seriously. I've spent a lot of time studying meditation with some very great wise old yogis and Tibetan llamas who've spent decades on retreat. It really remarkable people. People who I actually consider to be spiritual geniuses of a certain sort. I can well imagine if Jesus was a spiritual genius, a palpably non-nerotic and charismatic and wise person, I can well imagine the experience of his disciples. I can well imagine the kind of influence he could have on their lives. Okay? We do not have to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence in order to explore this higher terrain of human well-being. We don't have to take anything on faith. We don't have to lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality. If we want to understand our situation in the world along with these deeper possibilities, we have to do it in the spirit of science. Given that people have had these remarkable experiences in every context, well worshiping one God, well worshiping hundreds, well worshiping none, that proves that a deeper principle is at work. The sectarian claims of our various religions can't possibly be true in that context. And all we have is human conversation to capture these possibilities. We can either have a first-century conversation as dictated by the New Testament or a seventh-century conversation as dictated by the Quran or a twenty-first-century conversation that leaves us open to the full wealth of human learning. Please think about these things. We're now moving to five minute closing speeches. Time, keeper are you ready? Okay, begin. In my closing statement, I'd like to try to draw together some of the threads of the debate and see if we can come to some conclusions. First, I argued that God, if he exists, provides the sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. By the time of his last rebuttal, the only argument that I heard Dr. Harris offering against this position is to say that you're merely defining God as good, which is the same fallacy I used him of committing. I don't think this is the case at all. God is a being worthy of worship. Any being that is not worthy of worship is not God. And therefore God must be perfectly good and essentially good. More than that is an ensemble. God is the greatest conceivable being. And therefore he is the very paradigm of goodness itself. He is the greatest good. So once you understand the concept of God, you can see that asking, well, why is God good? It's sort of like asking why are all bachelor's unmarried. It's the very concept of the greatest conceivable being, a being worthy of worship that entails the essential goodness of God. And I think it's evident that if God exists then, we do have objective moral values and duties. Secondly, I argue if God does not exist, we have no foundation for objective moral values or objective moral duties. I showed that on his view there is it is logically impossible to say that the moral landscape is identical to the landscape of the flourishing of conscious beings and that therefore his views in coherent. We also looked at the is ought distinction and the autumn plies can to which Dr. Harris has never replied in the course of this evening's debate. In his last speech he said, but we simply must rely upon certain axioms. Well, that's the same as saying you've got to take it by faith. And if these axioms are moral axioms then I think he's admitting my point that on atheism there simply is no ground for believing the objectivity of moral value. And duties he just takes them by a leap of faith. He says, well, there are different senses of the word objective. Yes, of course. And in my opening speech I make clear the sense in which I was defining the term, I mean valid and binding independent of human opinion. And moral values are not objectively binding and valid in that way on atheism. He's a science-constitty subjective facts. For example, pain is a subjective fact granted. That's certainly true. So my question is, is the wrongness of an action a subjective fact? On atheism it's hard to see how it couldn't be any more anything more than a subjective fact. In which case you cannot say, as Dr. Harris wants to say, and I agree with him that the general mutilation of little girls is objectively wrong, not just a subjective opinion. He says, well, but if your psychopathic and erotic there's something wrong with you. Granted, I agree with that. There is something wrong with you. But the question is, on atheism, if atheism were true, would there be anything objectively morally wrong with doing what the psychopath does? He hasn't been able to show that. Indeed, there are no moral duties on his view. And remember, he himself admitted that psychopaths could occupy the peaks of well-being on his so-called moral landscape, and that therefore it is not a moral landscape at all. To conclude, I want to quote from a remarkable article that appeared in the Duke Law Journal by Arthur Allen, left called unspeakable ethics, a natural law. Dr. Leph's difficulty is the same as Dr. Harris's. He wants to find a foundation for moral values and duties, in this case for the law, that would be independent of human opinion, would be objective and would be in the world, and he can't find one. He says, any attempt to ground values in the world is open to the playground bullies retort, who says. And this is how his article concludes. All I can say is this. It looks as if we are all we have. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, that is something transcendent, could law be unnatural and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless, nay-pollming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked, buying and selling each other is depraved. There is in the world such a thing as evil. All together now says who God help us. And now Dr. Harris has five minutes. Time for are you ready? Begin. I'm curious, how many of you consider yourselves to be devout Muslims? Let's see, I show up hands. Don't be the single anyone out, but not many. Now you're all aware, of course, that the Quran exists and claims to be the perfect word of the universe. You're aware that once having heard this possibility and rejecting it, you're all going to hell for eternity. I mean, needles to say Dr. Craig and I are both going to hell if this vision of life is true. The problem is that everything Dr. Craig has said tonight with a few modifications could be said in defense of Islam. In fact, has been said in defense of Islam. The logic is exactly the same. We have a book that claims to be the word of the Creator of the universe. It tells us about the nature of moral reality and how to live within it. But what if Muslims are right and what if Islam is true? How should we view God in moral terms? How would we view God in moral terms? Or I should say Allah. We have been born in the wrong place to the wrong parents given the wrong culture, given the wrong theology. Needles to say Dr. Craig is doomed. He's been thoroughly confused by Christianity. I mean, just appreciate what a bad position he's now in to appreciate the true word of God. I've been thoroughly misled by science. Where is Allah's compassion? And yet in a church, he's omnipotent. He could change this in an instant. He could give us a sign that would convince everyone in this room. And yet he's not going to do it. And hell awaits. And hell awaits are children because we can't help but mislead our children. Now just hold this vision in mind and first appreciate how little sleep you have lost over this possibility. Just feel in yourself at this moment how carefree you are and will continue to be in the face of this possibility. What are the chances that we're all going to go to hell for eternity? Because we haven't recognized the Quran to be the perfect word of the greater universe. Please know that this is exactly how Christianity appears to someone who's not been indoctrinated by it. Our scriptures were written by people who by virtue of their placement in history had less access to scientific information and facts and basic common sense than any person in this room. In fact, there's not a person in this room who's ever met a person whose worldview was his narrow as the worldview of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Muhammad. And most of these people with a few exceptions had a moral worldview that was more or less indistinguishable from that of an Afghan warlord today. And yet Dr. Craig insists that the authors of the Bible knew everything they had to know about the nature of the cosmos and about how to live within it to guide us at this moment. I want to suggest to you that this vision of life can't possibly be true. But just as there's no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Whatever is true about our circumstance in moral terms and in spiritual terms is discoverable now and can be talked about in language that is not an outright of front to everything that we've learned in the last 2000 years. Okay, what remains for us to discover are the facts in every domain of knowledge that will allow the greatest number of us to live lives truly worth living in this world. How is it that we can build a global civilization, a viable global civilization of now destined to be 9 billion people, where the maximum number of people truly flourish? That is the challenge we face. sectarian moral denominations. Okay, a world shattered, Balkanized by competing claims about an invisible God is not the way to do it. Apart from the fact that there's no evidence in the first place that should be compelling to us to adopt that view. The only tool we need is honest inquiry. And I would suggest to you that if faith is ever right about anything in this domain, it's right by accident. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to talk to all of you. We started 15 minutes late and so I'm going to allow us to go until 9.15. That gives us 30 minutes for questions. As I said at the beginning, we're going to allow Notre Dame students to ask the first four questions after that the microphones are open to anyone. We'd like to keep a risk pace for the questions, so please limit your questions to about 30 seconds and I've asked the debaters to limit their responses to about two minutes. I'll take the liberty of urging people to get quickly to their point if these time limits are violated. We have microphones here and here. I think we have microphone. Oh good, I can see the microphones in the balcony. So I'll just go in a circuit. Thank you. Dr. Harris, if Dr. Craig could link out of your objections about the problem of evil and the problem of choosing the right religion. So that those weren't really problems. Those weren't functioning in the debate. Where does that put you dialectically? How do those function in the debate? Do you mean if I was given good reason to believe that Christianity is true? Or if Dr. Craig could show that choosing a particular religion wasn't necessary for the grounding of morality. Just that some religion being true was sufficient for there being a grounding from morality and that the problem of evil was somehow answered. I would never be tempted to dispute that we could make up a religion that if true would be a grounding of morality. Those imaginary schemes are there for the asking. We could make them up. In about five minutes we could make up a better religion than any that exists. You just take Christianity and cut out Leviticus and Deuteronomy and already you've done great work. So we could rewrite the ten commandments in less than five minutes and improve upon it. So you know, being kind to add being kind to children and swap out a bit about the grave and images and you've already made it a much wider document. So that's not the point. The point is that one point I made which he never really addressed is that you're smuggling in a concern for well-being in any case. You just have a different timeline. If Christianity were true, it would be part of my moral landscape. If someone like myself is going to suffer in hell for eternity based on what I'm currently thinking, then I clearly am doing the wrong thing. I would want that information and I would think, that would be a revelation to me, which I would take seriously. And I would do everything I could to get into heaven. That would be heaven is that if eternity in heaven versus eternity in hell is really the landscape that we're living on. Well that's part of my moral landscape. It's just changing its temporal characteristics. There's just no reason to think that that's the universal living in. Thank you. Up into my left. Hi. Professor Craig, you made an interesting analogy. You said that long before we could explain scientifically where light came from. We could distinguish between light and dark. And that the same could be said for a good and evil. But to me that analogy seems dangerous because long before we could explain scientifically, or light came from, we said it came from God. Could the same be said for morality and then also how do you explain shifts in moral consensus over time? I'm not sure I understood all of the questions, so I might need our moderator to help me hear that. The last part of the question was shifts in morality over time. Don't confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology. Moral ontology is the foundation in reality for objective moral values and duties. Moral epistemology is how we come to know the goods that there are and the duties that we have. And clearly affirming that there are objective moral values and duties doesn't mean that we always know them infallibly. Clearly over time there are such things moral growth and moral development. When I look at my own life, I look back at my life as a young man and I can see certain attitudes and things that I had that I now would be ashamed of. Morally I think I've experienced moral growth. So there's no reason to think that the objectivity of moral values and duties implies that there isn't such a thing as moral growth or a clearer apprehension of the good. Or sadly in some cases a moral degeneration of a society and turning away from good. So these are two different problems and my concern is moral ontology. Now I didn't catch the first part of the question. Mike, did you? Yeah, tell me if I misrepresent you, but I take it that she's asking you. You say that we understood light and dark before we understood the physics of light. She says, but we positive supernatural explanations for light also at that time. Why not think moralities in the same situation? Yeah, again, I think you misunderstood the analogy there that I'm making. What I'm saying there is distinguishing moral ontology for moral semantics. And what I'm seeing is I'm not offering a moral semantics theory about the meaning of the words good and evil right and wrong. I'm talking about their foundation and reality. And so the example of light was simply to give an example of where people understood the meaning of the English word light. Even if they didn't know it's physical nature in terms of electromagnetic radiation. I get that you're arguing that there needs to be a source for good and evil. That makes sense. Why does that source have to be God? Could it not be that we just haven't discovered what the source is? Well, that would be my second contention that in the absence of God, I can't see any foundation that would be left for affirming the objectivity of moral values. And particularly the value of human beings and conscious life on this planet. And then that second problem about objective moral duties is especially serious. The is ought distinction and then the autumn-wise can problem no free will. So that would just be to reiterate the arguments of already given us to why I think in the absence of God. There wouldn't be objective moral values and duties. I allowed the follow-up only because there is misunderstanding just so you know. Up to my right. Yeah, I've got a question for Dr. Harris. So a lot of the arguments I guess I felt like it's been a lot on the definition of good and bad right and wrong. And I wanted to ask you if you thought it would be possible for there to be. So I've got a two-part question for there to be a hypothetical God that so to scratch everything you know about today is Christianity. Hinduism create your own new God. If it would be hypothetical for this God to perfectly align with your definition of moral theory. So say that this God says in commands that good and bad are dependent on the well-being of conscious standards. And then simultaneously to that question whether you think a God of love does just that. It seems to me and in my experience and looking at history that there is no greater continuum across human history than the presence of love. In the fact that we've had marriage whether homosexual heterosexual transgender from the moment we've been living in this. And so that really is the root of our well-being. And how does it got love not promote well-being? Yeah, well, well, love clearly has a lot to do with with our well-being. And if there were a God of love who was really acting like a God of love and was making, the problem of the existence of God doesn't really add to the moral stature of love in that case. Because the moral stature of a good, I mean this goes to the 5th road dilemma that we haven't spoken about probably, mercifully. But I mean if it's either intrinsically good or it isn't and for God to say it's good doesn't make it more good. It's not good by the odds. So either saying it's good because it is good in which case we can just deal with the fact that it is good or it's just good because he says it's good, but then he can say any evil thing is good which Dr. Craig Scott does rather often apparently. So, but love is clearly something we desperately want in our lives and we're right to want it. We're deeply social creatures. And the fear that is sort of circulating here that well-being somehow leaves something out that's important. I think and I argue it's some length of my book is quite unfounded because whatever you bring to me which is truly important. You say, okay you're talking about well-being but here I'm talking about self-transcending love. This is really important. Well self-transcending love is a, probably at the core of the deepest well-being that we can experience as human beings. And but likewise if the Christian hell exists and waits me well-being in the end is predicated on avoiding those flames. And so all of that you're smuggling in a concern about consciousness and its future changes. Whatever you bring in the moral domain. And so I'm saying we must be honest about that. We ground this in consciousness and then we can talk about how human beings like ourselves can, and thrive and I would grant you that love is probably on the top of the list. Down here to my right. Mr. Harris, from my personal experience and from my faith I find that Christ's first commandment was the love of Abraham, you know, that God. And I believe that if you are a Muslim then you follow through with that. If you are to about Muslim and you care about the well-being of all mankind. And that's kind of in relation to my next question which is like how would a naturalist respond to amazing miracles by God, which like say the miracle of the sun which was witnessed by 30,000 to 100,000 people in Phatoma, Portugal in 1917, as well as miracles of the Eucharist in which the Eucharist actually starts to form veins and bleed. And where this blood is actually tested in its found to be AB positive from the left ventricle of the heart. And it's actually been researched under leading pathologists in New Zealand to actually be throbbing and living as it was in its his laboratory for the 30 days. Okay. Well, the problem with miracle stories are that they truly are a dime a dozen. The miracle stories that cash out Christianity are miracle stories set in the context of the pre-scientific context of the first century Roman Empire, attested to by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts that have thousands of discrepancies. Now, their miracle stories that you can find in India today attested to by living eyewitnesses. So you look at the people surrounding someone like Satyis-Ibaaba. Thousands of Western educated people go to India spend time with Satyis-Ibaaba and come away claiming that he's performed a variety of miracles. In fact, if you add up all those stories, every miracle attributed to Jesus, including the resurrection of the dead, is attributed to Satyis-Ibaaba. And millions of people think he's a living God. These stories from our point of view don't even merit an hour on the discovery channel. Okay. And yet, 2.3 billion people think that the miracles of Jesus are worth organizing your life around. And that I think is an intellectually unsustainable disparity. Now, I'm not closed to the evidence of miracles, and it would be trivially easy for God to convince me of his existence, or the powers of psychic powers of saints, or whatever it is. If you can tell, I've got a 20-digit number written on a piece of paper in my mouth. I'm sorry. Okay. But if you tell me what that number is, then we have a very interesting miracle on our hands. I can't let the envelopes continue. Sorry. We have a whole bunch of people lined up. Yes, over here. Dr. Craig. I know you wanted to kind of stay away from the epistemological questions, but I need some advice. Because it's something in objective good. I guess where do we go from that practically? Because something happened to me last night where I've been a Christian, but last night got appeared to me. And he told me that homosexual love making was every bit as beautiful and loving and good as heterosexual, pro-creative sex in the system of marriage. And he said, come and let everyone know that. I said, no God. They won't believe me. They won't. They will not believe me. How do I. Where do we go from here practically with divine revelation? Do I leave my church? No, I'm not going to address it. I didn't mean to offend you. Sorry, we aren't doing follow-ups with the question. I allowed the one up there because there was a misunderstanding. But the question is come out. It's received a answer. So this question is for Dr. Harris. Unfortunately, my own will be as funny. So it seems to me that there's a distinction in your argument that I'd like you to discuss, which is the conceptual possibility of the most miserable world and its material possibility. So basically what I'm asking is whether you can cite any evidence to believe that this is not the world that is most miserable, or otherwise. So if you can't let's assume this is the world with material conditions for the most misery to exist, then wouldn't it be moral to destroy it all? Destroy all consciousness? So I'm just wondering how would you distinguish that this is not the worst possible world? Well, it may be the only world with conscious life. I think I doubt that given the truly unfold universe we're living in, but we don't have any evidence of life elsewhere, much less conscious life. But this your question cuts to the issue of, you know, if it's all about well-being, well why don't we just kill all the unhappy people in their sleep tonight? That wouldn't that raise the aggregate level of well-being on honor. And there's an infinite number of thought experiments like that you can come up with it seem to push on this concern. Well, it's just about suffering well, you can just eradicate it painlessly for people and you have increased the net well-being. But all of those thought experiments neglect all of the cascading effects of living in a world in which we do that sort of thing. The consequences of doing that. So why don't we, why don't we, the classic experiment that everyone tries out is, what if you're a doctor and you realize that you have somebody who could benefit from the organs of, you know, you have five people who could benefit from the organs of one person who's sitting in your waiting room. So you go into your waiting room, you knock him out and you you've been eyesome, you live a sect him and you give away his organs. Okay, that seems like it's a net benefit to five people. But if we were all living in a world where at any moment your doctor could live a sect you and steal your organs, that would have rather obvious ghastly consequences that none of us would want to submit to. And there's a, our intuitions about the sanctity of human life, caring for people, treating people as ends in themselves rather than means to some other end. So all of that concerns intuitions we have about trust and its importance in life and all of these ways in which we are knit together as a community. And ways in which only we only rise or fall together. And so it's a very important sense are happiness is dependent upon the happiness of others. And we are not atomized selves that are radically separate. But killing everyone, first of all killing everyone would just would eradicate all the suffering, yes. But it would also foreclose all the happiness. It would nullify every possibility of experience. So if you think that the universe where the lights are on is better than the universe where the lights are off, then turning the lights off is worse. But I could imagine the universe which it would be worth turning the lights off. And I mean the Christian hell is one of them. You know you'd be doing people a lot of good. Whether you know, sorry no follow ups. I'm going to be really strict about this. It is the question. Well to answer your question, this is the only world, well then it is by definition both the most miserable and the happiest. And everything in between. And I just have no idea whether what else is out there. Up on my right. Dr. Craig, when discussing Islam and more specifically the Taliban, you said that they have the wrong God, citing I assume they're violent hacks based on Jehod. And because of that, how do you know that you have the right God? And if you do have the right God, what explanation can you offer for him, authorizing the Crusades? Again, this isn't the topic of the debate tonight. But let me just say that one of the side areas that I specialize in in my theological studies in Germany is Islam. And I'm persuaded that there are better reasons for believing that God has revealed himself decisively in Jesus of Nazareth by raising him from the dead after his crucifixion, whereas Islam is committed not only to the fact that Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, but that he was not even crucified, which is the one historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth that is universally acknowledged by New Testament critics across the spectrum. And so with all the best will in the world, I could not be a Muslim. I see a lot of points of commonality. I applaud the monotheism of Islam, but in the end I think that the Muslim faith gets it wrong about Jesus. So Dr. Harris, I think that you've posed some interesting challenges to Christianity and to these in general, but I want to return to the issue of the debate, which is the more the objective of morality. And so you say that your basis, you can base objective morality on the assumption that this worst possible world is bad. So I think that we can all agree on that statement that it is bad, but what's to say that that's not simply a subjective assertion, that it's just something based on human opinion. I don't see any reason to think that that's an objective. Well I tried to show you in my opening remarks why that particular concern is not interesting or necessary. You can play that same game with everything that we think is objective. So why does two plus two make four? How seems to make four to us, but how do we know that's not just a human intuition? I mean, what is wrong with a logical argument that contradicts itself? Why is self-contradiction not a good way to argue? Well it just doesn't seem to fly. We could always try to get behind that as an epistemological skeptic or a logical skeptic and say, well, this is just how you monkeys are wired to think. And there are interesting ways in which science edits forefront does create some of that tension, or ways in which are logical expectations begin to break down in physics. But we use other scientific intuitions, and in this case mathematical intuitions to try to get behind them. You have to pick yourself up by your bootstraps somewhere. It's better than pulling yourself down by them. So you have to every objective paradigm has to make a first move. It has to step into the light based on some axiomatic judgment that is not self-justifying. The portal proved this in logic, and this is true for arithmetic. It's true for things far more complicated than arithmetic. I'm saying that a recognition that this universe offers a spectrum of experience on the one hand truly intolerable and on the other, is a more sublime way, wonderful, and that we all know that movement across this spectrum toward the sublime is better than movement toward the unindurable and pointless suffering. Now, this, again, you might ask, well, what about suffering that actually turns out to be good in the end? What about the suffering of the stress of learning to play a musical instrument, whatever? Again, that's not a counter. There are ways to climb. We might have to go down a little bit to go up to a higher place on this landscape, and that we can make sense of that kind of struggle. And so I'm not equating the good with mere pleasure in a way that Dr. Craig suggested. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, Dr. Craig. In your reputation of Mr. Harris, I don't know what to do. Did an authority. même if you ask children sitting in a classroom, is it okay to drink a soda in class if the teacher gives you permission. Most of them will say, yes, if you ask them, is it okay to punch your neighbor in the face if the teacher gives you permission? They immediately recognize the distinction between moral infraction and a mere conventional rule. And this is very uncholudent. But children at risk for psychopathy don't. Children at risk for psychopathy think that rules are just given by an authority. So the teacher tells you you can punch a child in the face, you can punch a child in the face. This is, again, I'm not accusing religious people in general of being psychopaths. But there is a psychopathic core to this moral worldview. This divine command theory that Dr. Craig is advocating suggests that if God only tells you to sacrifice your first born son, it is good to do it. That's where goodness comes from. And so you've got people waking up in trailer parks all over America suffering some form of mental illness that's destabilized them and made them vulnerable to this way of thinking. And there are people who kill their children thinking they're Abraham who just didn't get interrupted by an angel. And this is a kind of morality that you get out of divine command theory that again offers no retort to the geodest other than sorry but Buster you happen to have the wrong God. But that's exactly your retort Sam. The 30 seconds that God has not issued such a command and therefore you're not morally obligated to do it. No, God, God, God did he would be evil. I mean, so I can get behind that God. If God is issuing that command, he's a prophet. Well, he's a prophet. You see on atheism, you don't have any basis for making that kind of moral judgment. I've tried to give you a basis. I'm sorry. We have time for one more question up there. This is for Dr. Craig. I wanted to ask you about the consensus. What? Consensus? Consensus? Yes. So if we're all looking for the same answer to a question, I think we would value a consensus. And the idea of a consensus is something that's very much value within scientific thought. So if God is the basis for morality, it seems like we'd be easy to come up with a consensus. And yet within Christianity, one Christians who are reading the same Bible and worshiping the same God, you find an absence of consensus. Where questions like this evolution true or it's homosexuality wrong, there's a vast variety of debate within Christianity almost as much as there is with Christianity and secularism. And yet in the secular world, those questions we have found consensus and they've generally been put to rest. So do you value consensus and how do you count for the lack of that within the Christianity? Consensus on doctrinal issues is not relevant here. You would have to be talking about a lack of consensus on moral issues. And I think there would largely be a consensus on moral issues. As I said in my first speech, I'm not offering Dr. Harris a new set of applied ethical values. I think we'd largely agree on the issues of applied ethics. What I'm offering to him is a sound foundation for the moral values and duties that we both hold dear and recognize. So any disagreement about the perception of moral values is an epistemological question, not an ontological question. My argument is that on atheism, human beings are just animals. Their electrochemical machines, they don't even have free will. And therefore there is no objective moral duty. There is no objective moral value to them. But if we're to have a basis for the common moral truths that we, I think all recognize, we need to have it in a transcendent source that is beyond nature, beyond the shifting sense of culture and opinion, and is rooted in a being who is goodness himself and whose commands then reflect that goodness to us. We've reached the end of our time, Dr. Craig and Dr. Harris both will be available afterwards out in the lobby to sign books. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge Arnaud Dut who spent a good portion of the debate operating the PowerPoint, which I believe on faith was going on behind me. And Aaron Ray, who is our timekeeper. Was there a PowerPoint? All right, good. All right, good. Let's now thank our speakers. All right, thank the speakers. Thank you.