them. >> all right. in response to the first part of your question, it is appropriate at this time for you to clap. [applause] >> welcome to booktv. every weekend beginning at this time here on c-span2. over the next 48 hours we'll bring you programs on nonfiction books, authors, and the publishing industry. >> booktv this weekend in one of his first live tv appearances since its publication, 43rd president george w. bush on his memoir "decision points" as the former president discusses the critical decisions on his presidency and his personal life. live from miami-dade college sunday at 4:00 pm eastern on c-span2. >> next, sam harris talks about his latest book "the moral

landscape" in which he argues that science can explain morality and that people do not have to turn to religion to answer moral questions. mr. harris spoke at the texas book festival held annually in and around the state capitol building in austin. this is just over an hour. ... longtime book festival reporter, and i'm really glad to see so many people here late on a sunday afternoon. i'm introducing sam harris, and everybody says, who's sam harris? >> well, of course, he's the atheist, right? is. [laughter] jon stewart called sam harris a professional atheist, "the new york times" says he heads the youth wing of the new atheists. his first book ignited a debate about religion. he gained many fans and, of course, many detractors, and so he wrote his second book in response to the unhappy

so he wrote a second book in response to the unhappy christians and it is called letter to a christian nation. his new book which just came out in october is called the moral landscape and in that he cares down the wall between scientific fact and human values are doing most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. the areas to think of morality in terms of human and animal well-being. the experience of being well and being not so well as the peaks and valleys of the moral landscape. his message is the questions of good and evil cannot be answered by what god says or by what scriptures says or what my culture says. this allows us to be judgmental saying i am more moral than he is because my god says so or

abandoning judgment saying i can't say whether anyone is more moral than anyone else because there are no right answers. instead he poses that there are right answers allowing us to be judgmental but the right answers are quantifiable through science instead of religion. we have to look to science to give us the answers. as john stuart says the subtitle of a moral landscape should be get off your rear, scientists. so who is this man, sam harris, that qualifies us to say science is the judge of morality. he attended stanford, university, as an english major but dropped out. 11 years later, he went back to stanford and completed his bachelor's in philosophy and in 2009 a ph.d. in neuroscience, he is a scientist and philosopher.

he has written in many newspapers and magazines and his work has been discussed even more. he is co-founder and ceo of the project reason, non-profit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values to society and we are delighted to have him here at the texas book festival today. [applause] >> thank you very much. it is a pleasure to be here. i apologize, i am somewhat captive to these microphones. normally i would stand up and walk around and sweat even more than i am about to sweat in front of you. it is hot if you hadn't noticed but it is an honor to be here. first time i have spoken in texas. thank you for coming out. as many of you know i spent the

last few years publicly criticizing religion. when you do that you immediately discover all the reasons why people think that is a bad idea. they are not so many reasons. the first reason is almost never that there's so much evidence for the existence of god, not even fundamentalists tend to lead off with a story about the empty tomb or the textual reasons why the bible is probably written by the creator of the universe. what you hear from people on every point of belief is religion is the only way to think about morality and human values in universal terms. obviously atheists can be as immoral as any religious person.

there are many other reasons to thinks that morality is not best gotten from religion. i will talk about some of those. i am to discover it is not an entirely empty claim because there are many smart people, well educated people in the scientific community, in the academic community more generally, to seems quite confused about how there can be such awho seems quite confused about how there can be such a thing and moral truth. battlers at a conference talking about the link between morality and human well-being and i said the moment you notice human well-being is dependent on the laws of nature or states of the human brain you notice there are right and wrong ways to maximize it. we will understand this more as science progresses but we know

that certain cultures are not maximizing human well-being. as an example life for women in afghanistan under the taliban seemed to me rather obvious the violent misogyny and religious bamboozle the end of the taliban was not the perfect recipe for human flourishing and a fellow speaker at the conference said to me how could you ever say the compulsory veiling of women, forcing women to live in burke as is wrong from the point of view of science? it is wrong because the moment you had met questions of right and wrong have to do with human well-being, it becomes immediately obvious that forcing half the population to live in small bags and killing them when they try to get out is not a perfect way of maximizing it. she said that is just your opinion. i said let's make it simpler.

let's say we found a culture that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. would you then agree we have found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being? she said it would depend on why they were doing it. after i picked my job back up off the floor i said let's say they are doing it for religious reasons. they have a script that says every surge a walk in darkness or some such nonsense. and she said then you could never say that they were wrong. i perceive a problem here. this is a person who has a background in philosophy and science, actually a noted bio ethicist, she is on the president's counsel for bioethics. she is one of 13 people advising

the president on ethical ramifications of the progress of medical science. she had just delivered a talk on the ethical problems of using narrow imaging technology as lie detection. she was worried we might be exposing captured terrorists to lie detection techniques and thereby infringing upon their cognitive libri. she had these very fine grained and scrupulous as fickle notions applied to our possible overreach but was quite sanguine about the prospects of removing the eyeballs of children. it seemed to me -- she seemed to be astonishingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in afghanistan. this idea which is actually especially clear example, by the hundreds of thousands in e-mails

and blog posts, many people in our society think something has happened in the last 200 years of intellectual progress that has made it impossible to think about moral truth. the purpose of my book which i will try to persuade you of, is in fact a myth. it is really anchored to this notion that there is a radical disjunction of facts and values, that fact are something for science to deal with and physics and chemistry and biology, but values are thought to be completely different. they are thought to be -- inconveniently, values capture the most important questions, how do we raise children, what constitutes a good life, what goals should we strive for? and it is not that answers here

are purely the product of culture or personal whim, there is absolutely no framework, no intellectual terrain to stand on by which we can say anyone is really right or really wrong. it has long been obvious that we have needed some universal framework for human values because in the immediate aftermath of world war ii value and struggled to put forward a universal declaration of human rights which was quite a sensible thing to do given what happened in europe at that point. yet the american anthropological association came forward saying this is a full's karen. this is merely one culture voicing it entirely provincial conception of the value on the rest of human society. it is intellectually illegitimate. this is the best our social scientists could do with the

crematoria of auschwitz still smoking in 1947. what i would argue is we could understand values in terms of facts. reduced to facts of the well-being of conscious creatures. there are many old and ultimately boring and confusing debate in philosophy that i am going to sidestep here. but there will be a q&a session after a high-speed. if anyone feels i missed the boat philosophically i would like to hear from you. but i will give you one philosophical argument by which to make this case. imagine a universe in which every conscious creatures suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. i call this the worst possible

misery for every one. that is bad. if you don't think that is bad i don't know what you could mean by the word that. if you think there might be something worse than the worst possible misery for everyone i don't know what you mean and i don't think you know what you mean. from my point of view all you have to buy is that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. he immediately that creates a continuum where the worst possible misery for everyone over here and every possible state of the universe which is better by definition. given that conscious experience is riding out how the universe is, dependent on the laws of nature, then you see that there must be right and wrong ways to move in this space. there will be wrong ways to

avoid the worst possible misery for every one. there will be right ways to seek different possible states of well-being and that which can be valued falls into the domain of facts. all facts that determine the conscious experience of conscious research. we have some very ethical intuitions here about our ethical obligations toward other creatures, other creatures and other animals which tacitly track this terrain because we are more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects and we are right to be simply because we have every reason to believe that primates can suffer a much broader range of experience. they have states of well-being that can be cut off by our mistreatment of them. the thing to notice, this is a factual claim. i could be wrong about this. it could be that we are wrong

about the way physical complexity relates to subjective complexity. if we are wrong then maybe the inner lives of ants are far richer than we imagine. there's no reason to believe that but i am pointing out this is a factual claim the tween the relationship between mind and matter. we don't worry about our treatment of rocks because we don't think rocks can suffer. we are concerned about changes in the well-being of conscious creatures when we think ethically. even if you -- your beliefs about morality and good and evil are ultimately anchored to religion, even if you think the real cash value of morality is what happens after death, the experience of an eternity of happiness with god or eternity of suffering in hell, you are worried about consciousness and its potential changes. you just think the most important changes in

consciousness happen after death. i don't think religion offers a different framework. just a different time line for thinking about changes in consciousness. many people worry arguing that well-being is the basis of value and morality, somehow arbitrary and unless we could define well-being really rigorously, this is an illegitimate thing to do. by analogy i asked to consider the concept of physical health. this is a concept that changes over the years. it is difficult to define. when this statue was carved the life expectancy of a human being was 25 or 30. now is 80 in the developed world. maybe we will one day live to have completely different expectations of the normal range of human health. we may live to see a time when you could expect to be able to

regrow a missing limb like a salamander. if you couldn't do that you would go straight to the hospital because there's something terribly wrong with you. the fact that health as a concept is open ended and can change based on our progress in science does not make the distinction between health and disease any less clear or consequence when the distinction between life and death is perfectly clear and consequential and there is a science of human health, medicine, and the elasticity is not a problem for science. what you never hear in the face of this concept of health is fundamentally skeptical challenge of the sort that i get in talking about morality. someone will say how are you to say that well-being has anything to do with morality? what if someone wanted to torture every person on earth to the point of madness who is to

say they're not being as moral as you are? that is the kind of philosophical challenge i get but you never hear someone say who are you to say that someone dying of terminal smallpox is not as healthy as you are? how could you convince someone with smallpox who fought he was healthy is not healthy? yen every year the philosophical underpinnings of madison challenged in this way. another way to see the distinction between fact and values make no sense. to look at how we make the most basic scientific claims about the nature of the world. we have a substance called water. it is two parts oxygen and one part hydrogen. what if someone says that is not how i choose to think about water. chemistry for me is what ever

confirm the book of genesis. a person is free to use the word chemistry any way they want but no one is under any obligation to take them seriously. they are simply not talking about chemistry. when you have to convince someone that water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen and the most basic fact will claim of the nature of matter all you can do is appeals to values. you have to appeal to scientific values like the value of understanding the world or the value of evidence. if someone doesn't respect evidence, what evidence are you going to give them to prove that they should respect it? if someone doesn't value logical consistency, what logical argument are you going to give them that will demonstrate that they should? there are people who, based on

alternate the values, placed themselves outside the conversation of science and it would be the same with any scientific understanding of human values but it is no different. if it is not a problem in chemistry it shouldn't be a problem with morality. so too with any other scientific value. respect for mathematical elegance, these are value terms. another way to bridge this gap between fact and values is to look at what belief is and how we form beliefs about the world and what it is to try to represent reality in our thoughts. we form beliefs about facts and this constitutes science and history and journalism and every other domain where we talk about the way the world is but we also form beliefs about values and this captures all of the juicy

questions in life. meaning and morality and spiritual experience. it always seemed to me that these two operations, many people think they're quite different, are the same. we gave statements to read in an m r i scan of drawn from different categories. some was mathematics. and geography and ethics and religion. very similar content areas. the difference between belief and disbelief was the same. on the left you have all the categories together and you get the signal in the prefrontal cortex in front of the brain. we separate mathematics and

ethics which are dissimilar content areas. it is good to torture children. completely different content and yet accepting the proposition is true. it is essentially the same. if the brain is doing the same thing, whether it is about jesus being born of a virgin or mathematics. we are hesitant to describe radically different categories, and in our conversation with one another. belief is our best effort to map

reality in our thoughts. the claims about how the world is survived every test the world can of row at them. we call it knowledge. there's no difference between belief and knowledge. knowledge is a category of belief that we take seriously. and we have high confidence in. the continuing of fact in which we can be morally aware or confused, that relate to how human communities flourish. we know it is possible to live in a failed state where everything that can go wrong does go wrong where mothers can feed their children or strangers can find no basis to cooperate with one another peacefully. look at a place like condo where people's daily concern is avoiding getting murdered by drug gaveled soldiers and women

are being raped by the tens of thousands continuously. we know there is something to be known about human communities moving out of those conditions towards something quite a bit more idyllic. something more like the lives we tend to live. where we can value creativity and have intellectual interests and read books and conceive of going to a book festival. all of this is taking place on the basis of real gains in civil society. there's something to be understood about that. those processes can be understood on the level of biology, the types of genes that predispose people to trust one another. we can understand psychopathy and positive social emotions like compassion and empathy.

we can also understand at a collective scaled the influence of economics and political ramifications on human beings individually and their collective behavior. but all of these facts potentially within the purview of science. we are talking about genetics and psychology and sociology and economics. i am arguing that the truths that spell the difference between abject human misery and the kind of flourishing menopausal in this world, these truths fall in an ongoing scientific understanding of the human mind. this is easier to see if you imagine two people living on earth.

imagine adam and eve and no one else. clearly there are right and wrong answers to the question of how they might maximize their well-being. they could smash each other in the face with a large rock. clearly that is not the best answer to the problem of how two human beings can thrive given an opportunity to live in this world. how does the situation changed when you add six billion more people to the experiment? i am arguing that it doesn't. it gets more complicated. the difference the tween right and wrong answers is entirely preserved. what i am asking you to visualize is a moral landscape where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and

the valleys correspond lowest depths of misery. the first thing that drops out of this model is it is likely there are many peaks. there may be many different ways for communities to thrive. that are not equivalent and not compatible. very dissimilar ways to organize human societies. so as to produce the kind of well-being that is possible for us. clearly there are many more ways, many worse chances than any of those. the fact that there are many right dances to the question of how to produce human flourishing isn't a problem and by analogy i ask you to consider food. i would never argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. clearly there are many right answers to the question what is

food. the difference between food and poison is absolutely clear and it is clear even though there are exceptions like some people are allergic to peanuts and will die if they eat them. we can understand all of those cats in the context of chemistry and biology and every science related to cumin nutritiohuman . so too with principles. many argue that if there is an exception there's no such thing as moral truth. it is wrong to lie than it always has to be wrong to lie. if you can find a situation where it is right to lie, there is no such thing as moral truth. but we don't do this in a game like chess. if you want to play good chess don't lose your queen is a very good principle to follow but clearly admits of exhibitions.

there are moments when it is absolutely essential to sacrifice your queen which is a brilliant thing to do. and get a chest is the prototypical situation of right and wrong answers and not losing your queen is one of the best principles you can follow. this notion of a moral landscape allows for the prospect of what we call spiritual or mystical experience. there's no question there are contemplative incites people can have, maybe require a lot of training and talent to have. it is possible there is such a thing as moral genius. people have in sight into the kinds of priorities they should have or ways they should live. and experienced kinds of well-being that people are not

aware as possible. i used to be in the habit of say and undoubtedly there is a tiger woods of compassion out there somewhere. for obvious reason that analogy doesn't quite ring true. in any case positive mental states like compassion are now viewed as skills. they are trainable to some degree. people have talents with regard to being aware of the emotions of others and being able to be motivated out realistically and undoubtedly there are right and wrong ways to raise children to be as compassionate as can be. all of this falls in love purview of a growing scientific understanding of the human mind. how many of you who can see this photo recognize it? this is a photo of apparently

happy nazis. there was a photo album discovered in the auschwitz album and these were entirely on marked. people did not know who they were and little research reveals that these -- this was the staff of auschwitz in its heyday as a killing factory. this is how they were amusing themselves on their weekend off close to the death camp. essentially these people are enjoying accordion music and other photos where they are eating blueberries and sunbathing under the plume of human action coming out of the crematory in auschwitz. my notion of a moral landscape admits the possibility of pathological islands of relative happiness like this where i don't doubt these people are really smiling. these are not fake smiles. they are not all psychopaths.

probably normal people who love their kids and pets and went home and listened to wagner and shed a tear. yet they have a belief system that has wall off their moral concern from the rest of humanity so clearly this is not a peak on the moral landscape and it seems to me that challenge we all face as a global society is to extend our circle of moral concern to the rest of humanity. and obviously ideology's make that difficult or impossible. the want to talk about islam. i want to talk about why religion is not the proper source of our moral norm at this point. the reason it shouldn't be becomes excruciating we clear when you focus on islam.

i want to do that for a moment. i want to be clear about the spirit in which i do this. i am not talking about all muslims and i am not talking about races of people or ethnicities or nationality or arabs. i am talking about the ecological and behavioral consequences of certain ideas. the doctrine of islam. the one of thing to notice is we have this one word, religion which is a suitcase term that is not very useful. religion is a word like sports. there are sports that are entirely safe that entail no physical risk at all and there are sports that are synonymous with violence like badminton and boxing, basically nothing in common apart from breathing. religion is a lot like that. there is a religion of peace in this world.

the religion of india has something like ten million adherents at this point. their core principle is non-violence. the more extreme you get, the less we have to worry about you. the problem is not -- we hear of a problem is religious extremism, the problem is not religious extremism. the problem is the actual ideas in specific religions. extremist janes are basically paralyzed by their pacifism. they are vegetarian needless to say. they drink every sip of water to filter out any bugs they might swallow. they don't take their eyes off the ground in less they tread on an insect. islam is not remotely a religion

of peace. that is a problem we are taking refuge in the euphemisms about it. for a minute i want to talk honestly about the doctrine of islam. you may recognize these men, osama bin laden and colleague shake muhammed. whatever they disagree about political your personally they really agree about the nature of reality. i would think these 3 men agree about those core questions more than any three people in this tend. they are on the same page because they are literally drawing their world view from a book. this is a book they imagine was fixated by the profit mohammad in a cage by the archangel gabriel. i apologize for the cartoonish nature of this illustration but illustrations of law, are difficult to come by. for reasons we are familiar

with. but the net result is we have a book, the koran, which is believed to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe. and it is a profoundly mediocre book. is not the best book humanity has ever produced on any subject. that is a fact that awaits the attention of anyone who wants to take a weekend to read the book. there are many problems, is a relatively short book. it is not like the bible. you can't cherry pick it with the same ease that christians and jews can cherry pick the bobble. christians can cherry pick the new testament and get jesus in half his. and come away with a truly benign belief system. it doesn't mean it is factually true but they come away with a savior who is essentially a

hippy who got crucified. who gave the sermon on the amount and wonderfully benign and specific messages. there is no sermon on the mound in the koran and the basic message in the koran is the infidel is fit only for the fires of hell and nothing can happen except die in defense of the one true faith. mohamad's example is different. he didn't get crucified. he was the alexander the great of the muslim world. he was a conquering general. these are differences that matter and the challenge of our time is to figure out how to inspire a renaissance in the muslim world. the challenge of a great one. we are talking intellectual -- the arab world especially is isolated in a way that few people can appreciate intellectually. the country of spain translates

more of the world's literature and learning into spanish every year than the entire arab world has translated into arabic since the ninth century. the arab world is only 25% of the muslim world but it controls a majority of the mosques and the arab world is the engine of the world that is islam. the proper attitude to live one's life on the basis of this doctrine is in perpetual supplication to this invisible deity who gave us a this perfect book. this is a photo of muslims in kashmir worship in at a shrine believed to contain a single beard hair from the prophet mohammad. i do not mean to make light of how difficult it might be for muslims in kashmir at this moment. and i don't mean to denigrate the kinds of positive

experiences you can have practicing in this way. devotion is a positive mental states and having a strong community is positive. but it seems to me given all the challenges these people face in this world. and the prospects of real collaboration a society can discover these people have something more important to do with their time than worse of the beard hair of a person who may have been a schizophrenic. another message that comes out of this doctrine which is truly unavoidable low you can dance around the fact is the status of women is secondary and the ultimate expression of that at this moment is life for women

fully veiled under burke. it is a great failure of liberalism at this moment. i consider myself a liberal on basically all questions but it is a great failure of liberalism that we hear sanctimonious appeals to religious sanctity that it is wrong to criticize this practice when there is no sensitivity to what life is actually like for women forced to live this way. sensitivity is misplaced if we are worried about offending the men who want their wives to live this way. we should be concerned about the women. yet even feminists in our society take issue with any strong condemnation of this practice. another result of this world view is it has become an engine of a death called in our time especially noticeable in our time given technology and our collision with the muslim world

but this does called has existed since the time of the profit. the and this suicide bombings that we see are an expression of a theological expectation. this is what certainty of paradise gets you. this photo is the aftermath of a bombing of shia muslims in pakistan by sudanese. the city's consider shiites to be apostates and regularly bomb their mosques and funeral processions and pilgrimages. this has nothing to do with foreign policy. this is muslim on muslim violence. the only difference between these people is religious, nothing to do with israel and the plight of the palestinians. this is sunni waking up in the morning, deciding it is worth

dying for the privilege of blowing up shia apostates. i want to linger over these details because i fear it is difficult for secular people to connect with how deeply these beliefs are held. they bombed a procession of shechem but then they sent another suicide bomber to bomb the hospital when the ambulances came in with the casualties. this is actually outside the hospital where doctors and nurses and casualties were bombed by another suicide bomber. just imagine the scale of this misspent human energy. creativity and a smart idea on the suicide bombers's part, but someone had to volunteer for this. just look at the aftermath.

this is smallpox for the mind. there's nothing good about this. the crucial point is it is not on scientific to say this. the fear that there's something and scientific about saying this is tantamount to saying that we know absolutely nothing about human well-being. it is identical to saying -- we have 150 years of brain science and psychology and sociology behind us and we made gains in the treatment of women in society but may be blowing up shia processions and blowing up mothers and doctors is as good as anything we have come up with. i have too many slides.the at

the the sense that merely focus on the problem of islam, i want to say that the disconnection between religion and the real details of animal and human well-being as office and many other ways. so for instance, the catholic church assembly is working there and about stopping contraception at this moment than stopping a the rape of children. it's more concerned about gay marriage. this is a diabolical set of priorities. and what i would suggest to you at the moment you link questions the orality to disconnection between religion l and the moment you link to questions of animal well-being the use of the terminology, about talking about the moral problems of contraception is a false use. for church can talk about the ee

physics of the transubstantiation or the tiati. he cou physics that allows the holy thg ghost to be here, there and everywhere but no physicist no a would have tveo t take that discourse seriously.riously that is a misuse. of the word physics.ics. we define our terms in physics to the detriment of anyone who d wants to talk abou t the physics so we can of the eucharist. do so we can do this on the subject of morality as well. finally i y so finally i would say to you, t the only prospect of building a global civilization where we can convert on the same kinds of wet answers to the most important life, the sa questions,me same environmental political and political goals, isg for us to come up with a framework in where we can talk about values r and right and wrong and good and evil in universal terms. think n

and honest discussion about the about the prospe prospect of human animal well-being is that framework. framework. very much. [applause] >> we have a few minutes for questions. and there is a microphone right here. if you have a question if you will come up to the microphone. >> tell us what your opinion is of france implementing the breakup band. >> asking about the wisdom of banning the burke of legally. i am not sure. i am not sure.

my bias is passing laws of that sort is the wrong move because people should be free to wear whatever they want. the reason i am not entirely sure in this case is clearly there are women and girls being forced to avail themselves. it is hard to see how you provide a context in which they can be free to make the choices they want without passing a law. there is a law passed in austria and germany as well that makes it illegal to deny the holocaust. that is an idiotic law. thome lever you want to live in public opinion is not a law banning that idea. we don't need laws banning bad ideas. we just need to criticize that ideas but the burke cabane may be more difficult. >> i was wondering how you

differentiate your idea of the moral landscape from utilitarianism, getting the most good for the most people and how you might defend the moral landscape against criticism of totalitarianism. >> good question. the traditional presentation of utilitarianism has been certain criticisms. when you present a narrow focus on pleasure or happiness people are led to believe if it is all about pleasure why not take care when all day. that is really pleasurable. but clearly that does not meet the test for anyone's best possible life. i think a fully searching notion of utility is actually not fall

terrible to those kinds of criticisms. but the categories of utilitarianism versus for chew ethics and a lot of debate that happen in philosophy have broken down on false distinctions and arguments that don't have to be continually rehearsed. i am a consequential distance of sense but i don't think my argument is vulnerable to the traditional claims against utilitarianism. as i go into it in some degree i try to sidestep the lot of it because a lot of it is frankly a necessary. you also get -- if it is just about maximizing well-being, what if your doctor was aware -- he has some genius in the back room who is going to do great work but he needs new kidneys and liver and lungs so your doctor decides to go into the

waiting room and vivisect everyone waiting to save the genius in the back room. because your organs could be better used in him apparently. a narrow focus on the well-being of society seems to think that might be an ethical thing to do but who would want to live in a society where any moment your organs could be stolen because some very bright person needs them? there are very obvious reasons not to do that. when you have a sufficiently broad conception of well-being and the kinds of principles that maximize it, many of the things critics of utilitarianism fear are not captured like notions of justice and fairness and having a clear conscience. the cash cow you of all that is in well-being at the end of the day. i don't know if that deals with

it completely. >> what you said today that stood up for me was something about even for people with strong faith in an afterlife, still objective facts about well-being to be found there. >> if it exists. >> i see the utility of that in making the case. but the effect is so justified that even if it would apply to an imaginary place, in your last book, one of the most popular quotes from it was one about certainty in the next wife and

seemingly poor ability of people who have such strong face in the afterlife are able to be tolerant. is it worth making that case that even for those with faith in the afterlife -- >> certainty is dangerous. there are no good reasons to be certain of the afterlife. anyone pretending to be certain about the afterlife is lying to himself or herself. and with incompatible cervantes, a non negotiable way, these seventies have shattered our world into separate communities. there are hundreds of examples of this. a clear one is if you are really going to be a christian you have

to believe that jesus was divine and if you're going to be a muslim you have to believe he wasn't. you can honor jesus but in two places it's as if you think jesus will define you will spend eternity in hell. this is a deal breaker. this is a coin toss. >> a huge portion of the population the sacred scriptures, probably an even broader or larger portion of the population for who in the real deal breaker is this universal sense of hope and something waiting for us after a life of struggling and suffering. >> it is easy to see how that helps people in certain situations. obviously believes -- if you can

believe that, there are certain occasions where it relieves your suffering. atheists -- it is undeniable. your child dies, and you really believe she has been taken to be with jesus and in a few short years you will be reunited, that solves a problem. >> it is so wonderful and -- >> that comes at a tremendous cost, the anodyne affect of faith. the costs are so large and the geopolitical level, the collision between incompatible faith. there are obvious opportunities

that are forsaken in light of that. the thing we can be sure of his we are in a circumstance now that can get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse and what we need is truly intelligent, open-ended, non dogmatic conversation about how to do that. religion nine times out of ten is a glaring obstacle. even when it is providing comfort to people in certain situations. >> i am glad that what you said today about that -- [talking over each other] >> thank you very much. >> one of your four horseman said reality was in a to. would you say your perspective is education through science etc. allows you to have a certain morality and if that is

the case are you very pessimistic as far as you would say -- i assume you say education, college, etc. for your knowledge of philosophy, what do you bring to the table now? -- are you apologetic for religion now? >> nothing has changed in terms of apologizing for religion. this claim that morality is in a can be confusing. clearly we have moral emotions and reasoning that are emerging out of our biology and at some level modified by culture. think of language. we'll coming to this world ready to speak a language.

than you learned the language based on what culture you happen to arrive at. we are all ready to speak chinese but we don't because we are not raised in china. we come into this world ready to recognize morally salient situations. we feel discussed in response to certain things. we have notion of non harming the. something like a golden rule that is probably by the fault where we wind up in ethical terms. all this can get modified by culture and there are people -- psychopaths don't feel empathy for other people. that is something we can understand neurologically. science up until this moment has limited itself to understanding all of that descriptive of the. you can tell an evolutionary story why we are social primates and come to be the way we are based on millions of years of

negotiating rather harrowing social encounters with each other. and we can understand how of this type of reasoning arises in the brain. what does it have to do to notice morally salian situations but science is descriptive. solution doesn't care about our well-being or what we say and we care about. it doesn't care about novels or music or mathematics or science. it cares about successful reproduction of the species. we have blown the perch that has been prepared for us by evolution and we do that with

the brains we evolve with but the prospects of human flourishing can be understood scientifically. we can talk about orality and human values in the context of that conversation. that is not a descriptive conversation but what we can and should do to maximize well-being. many scientists fear you forsake your scientific dispassion the moment you start talking about the way people should live. but we don't do that. people shouldn't get smallpox. we don't do it on chemistry. people should rely on evidence and coherent argument. when you see that morality translates into psychological and social health in the end, then the stigma around making