Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Sam Harris Misunderstands the New Theism || SLP618

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Sam Harris Misunderstands the New Theism || SLP618 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts about the likes of uh Ayan Hersey Ali, Charles Murray, and other people right of center suddenly finding Jesus after considering themselves atheists or secular and moving into Christianity while claiming it as the bedrock of Western values?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_05: It just doesn't make any sense.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_05: It's illogical, it's not accurate psychologically or spiritually or in any other way.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Ayan Hersey Ali, who's been on this channel, used to be a Muslim, then was a new atheist.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: She found faith a couple of years ago, and her co-travelers in the New Atheist movement have had to make sense of this.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I came here prepared to persuade you, Ayan, you're not a Christian.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think you are a Christian.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Christianity is nonsense.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Ayan knows why she has become a Christian.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: She also knows why Richard Dawkins doesn't understand it.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ayan is open to the existence of the transcendent.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Dawkins is dogmatically closed to the existence of the transcendent.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Those are two positions that they take, and that's why Richard Dawkins will not understand where Ayan is coming from.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: It has to go back to is there something or is there nothing?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you start with there is nothing.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, for years I agreed with you that there's nothing.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if you come round to the idea that there might be something much more powerful than we are, something that caused everything else, then something like Jesus rising out of the dead or these other miracles, Jesus being born out of a virgin for that higher power is not a big deal.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Dawkins was very quick to respond to Ion's conversion.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Harris has taken years to respond, but finally on YouTube he was asked this question.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts about the likes of uh Ion Herselli, Charles Murray, and other people right of center suddenly finding Jesus after considering themselves atheists or secular and moving into Christianity while claiming it as the bedrock of Western values?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_05: Hmm.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I've avoided commenting on this uh specifically uh in in many contexts.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: He has been avoiding it, but he can avoid it no longer.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: It is a thing.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, the thumbnail for the video is all about the new theism.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: We used to have the new atheism.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now there is a phenomenon called the new theism.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: There is a surprising rebirth of belief in God, or whatever you want to call it.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: There are prominent intellectuals becoming Christians.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is such a phenomenon that Sam Harris now needs to comment on it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think that is significant.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Alex O'Connor last year asked Sam Harris whether the new atheism was just a fad and whether it had passed.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: And Sam Harris basically agrees.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell And people talk about new atheism in past hints these days.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you agree with that assessment, but Aaron Aaron Ross Powell Well, I I think it was I mean I never felt that it was more than it was, which was mostly just a publishing phenomenon.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_05: The four of us had published books in in quick succession.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: The new atheism could be seen as a publishing phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon that has passed.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: So how will Sam Harris now respond to this new thing?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, first he assures us that he has nothing but goodwill for Aion herself.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell Well, I mean, so first, I I never want to say anything uh about uh Aion that is derogatory.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I I think I just Aion is just a straight-up hero to me, and and she should be to women everywhere.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's just I think that's just the the ground truth of of where I uh where I think she should sit in people's um uh minds.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_05: But um she's not perfect, right?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: And I don't I don't think her defense of her conversion to Christianity makes much sense.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_05: Um certainly she didn't give any reasons why she should bel she now believes that Christian doctrine is true.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_05: What you have in the case of many people um is the argument that we as a society need an attachment to Christianity or some other faith to resist uh the slide into uh Islamic theocracy on the one hand or just you know a secular wasteland of meaninglessness and um porn addiction and and distraction and uh you know social media poisoning on the other.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_05: So it's it's how do you how do you have a good life in the modern world and resist the barbarians at the gate?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_05: The barbarians here being the the um Islamist hordes that are uh invading uh Western Europe uh and and uh uh Ion is is especially in touch with that problem.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_05: Many people think you need uh you know good Christian soldiers to do this on some level.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I reject that uh idea.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's it's almost certainly not true.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_05: But even if it were true, it wouldn't give you any reason to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin or rose from the dead or be coming back to to judge the the living and the dead, and etc.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_05: So um it just simply does not provide a reason to believe anything the Christians must believe in order to be Christians.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_05: So that's the problem that that Ayan and Douglas Murray and anyone else who would tend to make these kinds of noises, that that there's a social and civilizational importance for for um doubling down on Christianity as a kind of bulwark against this civil civilizational unraveling on the one hand and or civilizational clash with Islam on the other.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_05: Um it just doesn't make any sense.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: It's ill it's illogical, it's not accurate um psychologically or spiritually or any any in any other way.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: So Harris is identifying a movement of people towards Christianity by intellectuals who are looking at the culture and noticing that it has been built by Christianity and that therefore attending to the roots of our civilization might be the clever thing to do.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: The West has been a God-shaped culture.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: We have taken God out of it, now there's a God-shaped hole in Western civilization.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we need to return to the center, or to use a different analogy, if the roots of Western civilization have been Christian, severing those roots has not led to great fruitfulness.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, let's attend to the roots.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Harris does not think that that is any way to conduct an intellectual investigation.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_05: It just doesn't make any sense.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's ill it's illogical, it's not accurate psychologically or spiritually or any any any other way.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: It seems illogical to Sam Harris, but it seems perfectly logical to many other people who are traveling this same journey.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Take Louise Perry, who's been on this channel a number of times.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: She looks at the sociological reality of Christianity and what it has produced, and she pulls at those threads until she finds the supernatural truth of Christianity.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: And she says this.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was for a long time persuaded that Christianity is what I like to call sociologically true, in the sense that Christian societies tend to flourish, and um obeying Christian um directives tends to like be the right choice in terms of the you know, like the fact that marriage is monogamous marriage is uh on net really good for individuals and for societies and for children is one example, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a chapter in the book called called marriage is good on this theme.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um that doesn't necessarily mean that Christianity is supernaturally true.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: If that makes sense.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and observing quite how sociologically true it is was very persuasive to me.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is not an inductive argument for the truth of Christianity, it is an abductive argument for the truth of Christianity.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: It is an inference to the best explanation.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: If we taste the fruits of Christian civilization and they seem to be life-giving, well perhaps the roots are likewise life-giving.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a slam dunk argument, but it might wake you up to the importance of Christianity, you might attend to those roots and find it truthful for other reasons also.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: The God-shaped hole in society might be suggestive of a God who is worth investigating.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Then Sam Harris talks about Charles Murray, another intellectual who is on some kind of faith journey, and his God-shaped hole is a lot more personal.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what he says about Charles Murray.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_05: Charles Murray, I haven't read Charles Murray's book, but I think he's just taking a different angle here.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_05: I think he's you know he's 80 years old or thereabouts and coming to view his life uh the broad sweep of his life, and I think he is um I've heard him talk about his book a little bit.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_05: I think he's just acknowledging that there's a a if not a God-shaped hole, a a um some kind of hole in the middle of um of his life as he perceives it, that that could be could and should be filled by faith.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_05: And I think he's taken instruction from his wife who's who's religious, and and he notices he's always envied her that capacity.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: This is considering the God-shaped whole more personally rather than civilizationally, but Sam Harris does not find that a logical way to reason.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because he has a story to tell about what the universe is like.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: He has stripped bare the universe of supernatural claims and mythology and superstition, and with a universe evacuated of the preposterous, evacuated of sacred texts and supernatural truth claims, he says you can still fill that hole with what.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what he says.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: Anyone who's making these particular claims just strikes me as someone who uh doesn't know how to meditate on some level.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_05: I mean that I mean that's really the it really is the problem.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_05: If you think that you need to believe something about the divine origin of a book in order to get the the juice out of life, there's certain experiences you obviously haven't had.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_05: Right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_05: You're just not you you you don't know how to pay attention sufficiently to recognize that your own mind is the the circumstance of of uh uh real collision with reality uh that doesn't uh it doesn't lack for profundity, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_05: You don't have to go to the old book to to find out what's profound.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_05: You don't have to read the story of you know fictional or or or otherwise of someone else's spiritual adventures and then and then merely place faith in those so as to redeem an otherwise you know fragmented and dissatisfying, unsatisfying you know, life circumstance.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_05: No, there's uh actually you can confront the the the absolute mystery of being directly with your attention if you can only break the spell of your thoughts and and and pay attention.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and that's what meditation is for.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, what one could say in a atheistic context, on some level, that's what prayer is for.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_05: That's what the you know contemplative Christian life is for, or the or the or the Jewish one or the Muslim one.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_05: Um there are disciplines of attention that that any contemplative engages that take them out of the the superficiality of of the rest of their lives.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_05: But the problem with the Christian and Jewish and and Muslim variants is that all of those disciplines are engaged within a context of belief uh that is dualistic and propitiatory and just drenched in in uh myth and uh what I would view as conceptual confusion, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_05: And and the the the need of believing the preposterous there is so front and center and and never really leaves.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_05: All these guys need a couple of psychedelic experiences and then real instruction and how to pay attention to the nature of their minds, and they wouldn't be thinking that you know the the best thing ever written on these matters was in the Bible.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's just there's no way to think that if you uh uh know how to pay attention.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Harris believes what Charles Taylor calls the subtraction story.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: The subtraction story is that really we are fundamentally isolated individuals living within the imminent frame, just what we can see, touch, taste, and feel.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: There is no supernatural.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: He assumes that from the outset.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then Sam Harris's story is that here we are as these atomized, isolated, secular individuals who do only and can only live on a natural plane.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the subtraction story is that foolishly traditional people layered on top of that isolated secular self all kinds of supernatural nonsense.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the Enlightenment project, Enlightenment with a capital E, is a project of stripping away the superstitious accretions of pixies and sprites and demons and demon possession and angels and god and sacred texts and preposterous stories.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: We subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract until we get to bedrock.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: But this bedrock is very stripped bare indeed.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, what is Sam Harris offering to the Ion Herssiellis of the world and the Charles Murray's of the world and to you and me?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: What he is offering is meditation.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: He wants us to pay attention to the barren landscape of the world that he has painted for us.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_05: No, there's actually you can confront the the absolute mystery of being directly with your attention if you can only break the spell of your thoughts and and pay attention.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Harris claims not to understand why people are taking the journeys that Ian has taken, that Charles Murray might be taking, that Louise Perry has taken.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I think we should all be able to understand it when you recognize that the alternative is Sam Harris's dogmatic assertion that all we live in is the imminent frame, that the spiritual stories and the heroic journeys that other cultures have oriented themselves by are superstitious nonsense.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: We just need to clear that away and we are left with what, psychedelics?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: An absolute confrontation with the bare mystery of the cosmos?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Can you not see that compared to Jesus, this is not a compelling vision?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: But Sam Harris is so dogmatically convinced of his subtraction story, he thinks it's the future.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: He thinks it's a turf war between the transcendent and the imminent, and the imminent is taking ground every day, and there will be an irreversible and ineluctable triumph of the imminent over all superstition.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: So he's asked this.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: So you don't think we'll ever outgrow religion?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: So if you know AI delivers utopia.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_05: I think we will.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think we, you know, I certainly think we it it has eroded and will continue to erode.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_05: There are hundreds of questions upon which religion used to be an authority, but that authority has now been ceded to science or you know, a secular understanding of what's real.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I would say there are no questions that used to be the in the province of science and secular rationality that have been ceded back to religion as the authority.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the secular story that Sam Harris is dogmatically attached to.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: There are scientific explanations for everything.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Those scientific explanations are the most foundational explanations to life on this planet.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Those scientific explanations are increasing all the time.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: They are taking ground from supernatural explanations, and there will be a victory, there will be a triumph of the scientific over the supernatural.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: That is, forgive me, Sam Harris, an absurd thing to think.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: To think that the scientific explanation of life on this planet is the most foundational, that it is the most satisfying, and that it occludes all other explanations of life on this planet is an absurd thing to think.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: The scientific explanation of the self, or of consciousness, or of freedom, or of morality, or of beauty, or of rationality, the scientific explanation of all these things is in no sense more satisfying than more storied accounts of the world.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, a scientific account of any of those things, freedom, morality, goodness, love, beauty, consciousness.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: None of those things have more satisfying scientific explanations.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: And there is every reason to think that in principle scientific explanations of things like consciousness cannot be the whole story.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember when William Lane Craig debated Peter Atkins at the height of the New Atheism?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Peter Atkins seemed to think that scientific truth was the only kind of truth that's worth dealing in.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: William Lane Craig came up with all sorts of things that science cannot itself prove.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: It was a real moment for the old theists right at the heart of the new atheism.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_04: But do you deny that science cannot account for everything?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, I do deny that science.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_04: So what can't it account for?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I had you brought that up in the debate, I had a number of examples that I was going to give.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: I think there are a good number of things that cannot be scientifically proven, but that we're all rational to accept.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_04: Let me list five.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_04: Logical and mathematical truths cannot be proven by science.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: Science presupposes logic and math, so that to try to prove them by science would be arguing in a circle.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_04: Metaphysical truths, like there are other minds other than my own, or that the external world is real, or that the past was not created five minutes ago with an appearance of age, are rational beliefs that cannot be scientifically proven.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_04: Ethical beliefs about statements of value are not accessible by the scientific method.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_04: You can't show by science whether the Nazi scientists in the camp did anything evil as opposed to the scientists in Western democracies.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: Aesthetic judgments, number four, cannot be accessed by the scientific method because the beautiful, like the good, cannot be scientifically proven.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_04: And finally, most remarkably, would be science itself.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_04: Science cannot be justified by the scientific method.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: Science is permeated with unprovable assumptions.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: For example, in the special theory of relativity, the whole theory hinges on the assumption that the speed of light is constant in a one-way direction between any two points A and B.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: But that strictly cannot be proven.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_04: We simply have to assume that in order to hold to the theory.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: There simply isn't a turf war between science and other forms of knowledge unless you are dogmatically committed to the imminent frame, as Sam Harris seems to be, as Peter Atkins certainly is.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the insistence that everything is finally molecules in motion, that is the dogmatic approach to life.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Take this example that Sam Harris gives about demon possession and epilepsy.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: The notion of demonic possession to account for epilepsy, right?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_05: It's like we we didn't understand neurology at all.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_05: We say see someone flopping around on the ground, we assume that's demonic possession because that's you know, we're in a pre-scientific, religiously bamboozled context, and that's how we describe it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_05: But once you get a science of neurology, then you now understand what's happening here.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_05: There are some stragglers, there's some people still left thinking, well, maybe that is demonic possession, you know, even if we uh though we now call it epilepsy.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_05: But no, actually, we know enough about epilepsy now that that that's never getting seeded back to religion, right?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, for somebody who is not a Sam Harris, somebody who is not a Peter Atkins, somebody who thinks there is more than one level of reality going on in life, we could draw you a Venn diagram in which there is one set of people who are called epileptics, and there is one set of people that are called demon-possessed.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we can certainly admit that those two sets can overlap.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: What some people down through history and around the world today might call demon possession might in fact be cases of epilepsy.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: I have absolutely no problem in saying that.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a very healthy thing to say.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: But Sam Harris is making a very dogmatic claim.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: He is saying that that Venn diagram is in fact a circle.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: That the set of all people who have ever been called demon possessed is identical to the set of all people who suffer from a neurological condition called epilepsy.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Harris is making the dogmatic claim at that point.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: He is saying that those two sets are identical.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: That is his naturalistic dogma speaking.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: But not only is he saying that those two sets are identical in terms of who is in them, he is also saying that the level of explanation between the neurological and the spiritual is identical.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: That the neurological explanation for somebody's behavior is in fact everything relevant to say about somebody's spiritual condition.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that there is nothing beyond the neurological to say of any importance about somebody's behavior.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: That might be true, but that is at this point only an assertion.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's a dogmatic assertion of a naturalist.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: To say that those two sets of people are the same sets of people and that those two levels of explanation are the same level of explanation.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: But this is life in the imminent frame.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: This is life when you've told the subtraction story and all you're left with is neurology.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: And Sam thinks that the subtraction story we've told about demon possession is a subtraction story we will keep telling to the very fringes of human experience until the naturalistic triumphs.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_05: And there's going to be a thousand more things like that, where it's just a unidirectional conquest of real estate that you know where a scientific or secular understanding of what's going on is going to claim the territory and never give it back.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: There is a unidirectional conquest of real estate, and it is happening, and the scientific will win.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: But don't worry, after the scientific has evacuated the landscape of everything supernatural, you've still got psychedelics.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: You can still meditate on the mystery of existence, but it's a mystery of existence that has been stripped of the storied.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: And in stripping the landscape of the storied, you are also stripping the landscape of the things that make life worth living the personal, the self, the conscious, free will, morality, goodness, truth, beauty, love.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: But pay attention, says Sam Harris.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Meditate.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Contemplate the mystery of this barren existence.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: That is what Sam Harris is offering.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Can you blame the Charles Murray's or the Ion Hersey Uli's or the Louise Perry's for saying, I don't think so?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And just a final thought, I am not saying, ah, the truth of Sam Harris's worldview is too austere for people, and so they need to go to the superstition of fairy tales.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying that.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm saying that Sam Harris's view of the world is just not true.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: His atheism forces him to tell us that the world is a barren wasteland stripped bare of the supernatural, and yet that supernatural pokes in at us from every direction through consciousness and morality and freedom, goodness, truth, beauty, love.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: It pokes in at us and says there's a God-shaped hole in us.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: There's a god-shaped hole in the world.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: And all these things are telling us that Sam Harris's story of the world is false.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's not that his story of the world is true, but we would prefer the fairy tales, thank you very much.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: The Christian says that the story of the world that the new atheists were telling is not the true story of this world.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that in every aspect of our lives we can look to the macro, the civilizational, we can look to the micro, to the personal, and we will find that the new atheist story just does not stack up.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad that Sam Harris is noticing that the new atheism was a moment and that a new moment has arrived.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'd invite him to pay attention to why this is happening.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Christian vision for reality is not only more interesting, it is not only more beautiful, it is also more livable.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And many are discovering just that.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to discover it for yourself, why don't you go to 321course.com and you can see life according to Jesus.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: In eight sessions, we're going to take you through Jesus' vision for God, for the world, for you.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: We think it will make sense of your world in a way that nothing else can.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: Go to 321course.com.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's entirely free.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: We'd love you to do that.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: If you've got this far on the video, it surely deserves a like.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: And why don't you share it around?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And please do subscribe to us so we can see you on the next one.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: God bless.