Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Where Do YOU Get Your Morals From? || SLP547

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Where Do YOU Get Your Morals From? || SLP547 · The Speak Life Podcast

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• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Where do you get your morals from?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's a question that can often be misinterpreted, especially if a Christian is talking to a non-Christian and we say, Where do you get your morals from?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: We can be misinterpreted as saying, you don't have a moral system, you are an immoral person, you are bad.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not what Christians are asking for.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: We're asking about the source of your morality, not whether you have morals or not even whether you're good at living up to your moral system, but where does that system of thought come from?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: It would be like if I said to my friend, hey, where'd you get your t-shirt from?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then your friend says, I have a t-shirt.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: My t-shirts are just as good as your t-shirts.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then you say, No, I know your t-shirts are great.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: I I like them.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's why I want to know, where did you get your t-shirt from?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then your friend says, How dare you?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: How dare you think that you've got a monopoly on t-shirts?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Other people can have t-shirts, can't they?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: To which you just say, I know you can have a t-shirt.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: I can see the t-shirt.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to know where it's come from.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's kind of what Christians are doing when they're saying, where is your moral system coming from?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we're not denying the fact that you have a moral system.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, we're pretty sure we've seen that moral system before.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: It looks a little bit familiar.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: It kind of looks like the kind of morals that we wear, kind of the morals that we uh think about and and try to live up to day by day.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: And we just want to know where those things are from.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Now, one answer to that question from within uh a non-Christian worldview is I derive my morals from science.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to press into that in this video.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is it true that you derive your morals from science?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: And is that even a good thing to attempt to do?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to make the argument that no, I don't think you do get your morals from science, and I don't think you should get your morals from science, and I don't think we should even be pretending to get our morals from science.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should let science be science and let our ethical disputes be our ethical disputes.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna interact in this video for the third time with uh Michael Shermer.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: I did a debate with Michael Shermer uh a couple of weeks back on the Premier Unbelievable channel.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Do check that out and have a look at a great dialogue, very respectful.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I learnt a lot.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: Vince Vitali did a great job of chairing the discussion, and we talk about the great morality debate.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: Where do our morals come from?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And Dr.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Michael Shermer, who is the founder of Skeptic Magazine and the author of many, many uh New York Times best-selling books, he wants to make a case for scientific humanism.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: So he's a humanist, he's a moral realist, he really thinks that human rights exist out there as this Platonic ideal.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: He really believes in human rights and the same sorts of liberal values that so many of us in the West enjoy, but he maintains he has derived them from science and reason uh rather than I think I I look at the sort of the moral outfit um of the Michael Shermers of the world, and I think to myself, that outfit looks very familiar.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's been borrowed.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that's been hanging in the Christian wardrobe uh for many centuries, actually.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually the moral systems and the moral sensibilities and intuitions that so many of us have in the West are borrowed intuitions that belong in a Christian worldview.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: They've been taken out of that Christian worldview, and people are welcome to sort of do that and and wear them.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then if you ask them where do your morals come from, I don't think it is legitimate and I don't think it is correct to say that they come from science.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: They definitely don't come from science.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that does a disservice to both morals and science when you say those sorts of things.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: So here is Michael Shermer in our dialogue uh describing how he thinks that our moral ethical sentiments have come to us through science, just defined very broadly.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: What is our source?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I mean, is it revelation?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is it interpretation of scripture?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the still small voice within?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: I claim it's the latter, the still small voice within that we all have.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: You have, I have, you and I are getting our sources of right and wrong and morality from the same same same sources.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we certainly do have those senses of intuition, but what is it that is above our senses of intuition that judge one intuition as better than another intuition?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because I'm a mixed bag and Dr.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer is a mixed bag.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: He had the great phrase throughout the dialogue that we have our better angels of our nature, we also have our inner demons.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: But what is it above here that says, oh, my desire to smash the uh outgroup, to smash the other tribe?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: What is it that says that that is a vice rather than a virtue?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it is a virtue, and maybe in the struggle for survival we should consider that to be a virtue.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: But how are you going to adjudicate between one intuition that says, let's care for the outsider, and the other intuition that says, let's l let's double bolt the door against the outsider?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: What is it that's actually going to adjudicate between those two things?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: There is the still small voice, but you still have to have uh something that is transcending that still small voice in order to say that one still small voice is better than another.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: So Michael Schirmer says in an upcoming book that the ultimate foundation of morality, it seems to me, is the individual sentient being that is our starting point because the individual is the primary target of natural selection in evolution.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna think about that in in a second, but that the number one reason he adduces in support of the idea that the individual is the starting point for our moral reasoning is because it's the primary target of natural selection in evolution.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna get onto why that's not true, just on evolutionary terms.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's the that's not even scientifically true, but it is the assumption that Dr.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Schirmer makes.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: He says the unique individual is to politics what the atom is to physics and the organism is to biology, a fundamental unit of nature.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, our moral starting point ought to be the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: There is the foundation for his morality.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: We focus on the individual and their rights to survive and flourish.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um when asked why the individual is this indivisible unit, like a like an atom of moral and social concern, when when Dr.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: Schomer is asked why that's the foundation, he says science says so.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um the individual is the primary target of natural selection in evolution.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I I press him on that because I agree that the individual is an incredibly precious ingredient in our moral reasoning, and we must have a place for the individual in our moral reasoning.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I agree that his moral system looks good.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Where did you get it from?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because it really sounds like Christianity.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll show why in a second.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: It really sounds like you got it from Christianity.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: You're saying you got it from science.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think science gives that to you, and I think there's a big problem in saying that science gives that to you.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, Dr.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Schirmer, where do you get your moral sentiments from?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how he answers.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's a fair question.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I get it from the same place everybody else does today.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're all thoroughly modern uh enlightenment, children of the enlightenment.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Children of the Christian revolution, as Tom Holland would put it.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say, we've inculcated these values from many sources, from culture, from novels, from you know, ideas from our parents and our peer groups, and it's just in well, okay, it's in the air.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: How's that?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: The air we breathe.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: But not the religious air, it's really in the cultural air.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's the air we breathe, right?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's from the Christianization uh down through the ages that we've got this idea of the individual.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: We'll say that in a second, that historically that is where we've got uh prizing of the individual from.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: But where does Michael Shermer think it's it's it's genuinely come from?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is why I try to document the moral arc is that something happened over the last several centuries.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: It happens slow enough, you don't quite see it.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of on the decadal level instead of monthly or yearly where the changes happen.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's hard to discern.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: You have to kind of look at the bigger picture.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You can you could study like the shift in language in novels over the past two centuries.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Just look at the way novelists in the early 20th century talked about blacks and Jews and women that we would today find abhorrent, embarrassing.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: We would just, you know, never want to use that kind of language.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: Even the novel is uh a fascinating development within Western culture.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you could trace it back to Augustine um writing his confessions back in the in the 5th century, early 5th century.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he is giving a fascinating psychological first person insight into his own soul and reflecting on it and drawing you into his inner world in a way that's really a first in literature and and kind of this development of the individual soul and individual rationality, the individual character, the individual psychology, um is something that that comes to flowering in the development of novels.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um but again, it's it's got a distinctly Christian-y kind of a history to it.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: But but Michael Shermer here is talking about how novels have used different language about minorities and language that we would find appalling and egregious.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Nowadays, it used to be okay.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe that's a sense of our moral arc kind of developing over time.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still not getting what is it up here to which we are tending, or what is it from down here that's pushing us?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Where are we getting our morals from?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that just happened over the decades where you know everybody just kind of stopped using certain words or they started using new words, and and a lot of that's just kind of cultural, and it comes from, I think, mostly the bottom up.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the word cultural comes from the word cultus, like this this very religious word.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: From the cult comes the culture, from what our highest ideals are, come our sense of self and our sense of community, and flowing from the cultus comes the culture.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I would just say be more curious about where the culture comes from, where the culture comes from is that we are always orbiting around these totem poles of highest meaning and significance and transcendent value.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: We are constantly orienting ourselves and paying attention to that which is highest, which is another way of saying we're always worshiping, and whatever it is that we worship, that that flows itself out into culture and into language and into society in in myriad different ways.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a spiritual practice first.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: You can pass laws that say you shouldn't do this or that, but mostly we all have our our consciousness raised by just thinking about and talking to other people and that's interesting.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like laws do teach, I think laws do teach a population about what is the good to some degree.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I think Dr.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Schmermer is is correct that laws are not really what's going to transform uh the heart from within.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's a far more social dynamic.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: But again, I'd say let's go deeper than the social dynamic.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's a worshiping and spiritual dynamic that's really at play.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Getting these ideas from our culture.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's kind of my source.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I emphasize the individual for two reasons.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: One, in evolutionary theory, I I don't endorse group selection.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's individual is the target of selection.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's true, Michael Schirmer is not a fan of group selection, the kind of David Sloan-Wilson idea of whole populations being able to evolve.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but he does believe in kin selection.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: We'll we'll get into that in a in a second.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And two, politically, I think it's a mistake.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is mostly a problem in liberals, who uh are, at least in recent decades, placing more emphasis on group identity rather than individuals.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I emphasize the individual.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a it's a big mistake, and it's going against what Dr.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: King taught us.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's going against what the reverend Dr.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: Martin Luther King taught us that we should judge be judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say, your group identity defines you.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, it doesn't.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: You define yourself, you're an individual.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: You define yourself, you're an individual.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um that is just such a profoundly Christianized Western understanding of the self.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: You don't get it from science, though.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: You don't get it from science.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: And if you detach it from an anonymized Christianity, um, and you're not citing your sources, and you're not tethered to the broader Christian tradition, then that individualism will lead to all kinds of political nonsense that Dr.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer himself dislikes.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's it's it's really quite important to figure out where you get your morals from.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's really quite important to figure out where do we get this idea that you are an individual and your rights cannot be traded away for the good of the collective, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: Where where do you get that idea from?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer thinks he gets it from science.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And what I want to say in this video is four things.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think that position gets history wrong, I think it gets ethics wrong, I think it gets the science wrong, and I think it gets politics wrong as well.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um Dr.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer is worried about the politics of a collective approach to identity.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the approach that he takes makes it very difficult for him to propose the power of the individual against uh more collective senses of self.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I think it's a a political misstep.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I think Dr.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer's position gets history wrong, I think it gets ethics wrong, I think it gets science wrong, and I think it even gets that political posture wrong.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: Let's first of all think uh about the history of the individual.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: Where do we get the idea of the individual from?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: And there's perhaps no better place to go than Larry Sidentop.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote the book Inventing the Individual back in 2013, and he does a wonderful job of tracing through the idea of the individual versus the collective from antiquity uh all the way through to at least the the time of the Reformation, and comes to see that the invention of the individual is a specifically Christian idea that happens for very Christian reasons.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Let me just take you through some of the highlights of his argument based in uh a lecture that he gave a couple of years ago, and I'll just pull out some of the highlights from this lecture, which is really worth watching in full.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Larry Sidentop full lecture on Telder's Stitching.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: We'll put a link to uh this lecture in the show notes.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: But um, in this lecture, Larry Sidentop does what he does in the book, Inventing the Individual, where he talks about uh the dominant narrative that people have about where the Enlightenment came from.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the the story that we have in our heads is a story of um really a quite benign classical period, the Greco-Roman world, and you know, every man thinks about the Roman Empire every day, and and usually um in some quite glowing and positive terms.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then we've got this idea of the dark ages that went from the fall of the Roman Empire in the in the West in 410 AD, um, and pretty much this sort of thousand years of darkness until the Renaissance, and then um Descartes, and then the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment thinkers kind of got us out of the darkness, and and it's really this benign kind of uh paradise.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: You you can recognize how biblical this is, actually.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: A benign paradise, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then a fall into great darkness.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then God said, Let there be enlightenment, and there was enlightenment.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, maybe God didn't say it, but uh Emmanuel Kant said, Let there be enlightenment, and and suddenly, because of this Emmanuel, all of a sudden we have you know the sunny uplands of um of our history now.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're committed to that kind of story, you're committed to um thinking of the classical world in very in quite benign or at least neutral terms, and you think of it as a kind of a secular paradise, and then you think of the bad old dark ages where nothing good happened except boils and battles and bubonic plague, and and then you think of the wonders of the enlightenment.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: And what Larry Sidentop is doing is is saying, okay, the the classical world was not secular, it was profoundly spiritual, um, and um there are aspects of it that are morally repugnant to us now, utterly morally repugnant to us, and let us awaken ourselves to that.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then he goes into the Dark Ages and and says there's there's so much more light in there than you imagine, and that actually the freedoms and the humanistic values that you hold now um trace their roots back to the bad old days of medieval Christendom.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, first of all, he does that first move of talking about the Greco-Roman worlds, and uh, and here is um him waking us up to this is not a secular time, and this is not a humanistic time.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: The difficulty we have in telling ourselves a convincing story about our past springs, I think, above all from the categories we conventionally apply to it.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_04: The ancient world, the Middle Ages, the modern world.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_04: Those categories immediately introduce discontinuity.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_04: Since the eighteenth century, if not before, uh the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance have been portrayed as dominated by superstition, ignorance, social hierarchy, clerical oppression.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, the dark ages.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, eighteenth-century writers like Hume, Voltaire, uh Edward Gibbon uh took delight in uh you know applying uh the adjective barbarous to uh the Middle Ages.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_04: They presented altogether the Middle Ages as a period of regression rather than progression, a setback in the story of human progress.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: And even though they were doing that for sort of anti-Christian reasons, they couldn't help but look at history through some pretty Christian-ish lenses.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um do you notice that they've got a creation full redemption narrative?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: And when they look back upon the past, they can't help but cast it in those Christian terms that there was a paradise, there was a fall, and there was a redemption.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, except that their redemption wasn't about Christ coming.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they were the ones they'd been waiting for.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: They were the Messiah.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but they are therefore committed to seeing the Dark Ages as very, very dark, and they were committed to seeing actually classical antiquity as a pretty neutral, um, almost paradisal state.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and wouldn't it be nice if we could get back to there?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, darn it, those Christians ruined everything.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: So Sidentop is going to try and overturn that telling and actually say, you know what?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: In the beginning, um, there was not a paradise.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: In the beginning, classical antiquity had a very different moral settlement, they did not believe in.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Individual.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: They did not believe in compassion and equality and progress and freedom and all these things that we now believe in.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, their moral concerns were quite different.
• 22:09
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• 22:12
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• 22:17
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• 22:25
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• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
• 22:34
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• 22:38
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• 22:42
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• 22:45
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• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: So what Larry Sidentop wants to do in this lecture and in his book, Inventing the Individual, is look closely at the ancient world and to show what is positive about the medieval period and to show how we got to where we got to about the individual.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't through science, right?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't through recovering paganism, it was through Christianity.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_04: So the first thing I do in my book, Inventing the Individuals, is look clo uh more closely at the ancient world.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_04: What do we find?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we find a world that was saturated with inequalities of status and treatment.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_04: The fundamental unit of the social world in Greece and Rome, the basic constituent of the city-state, was the patriarchal family rather than the individual.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_04: That is, society was understood as an association of families rather than of individuals.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get onto the science in a second, but notice already this is very much like what you might derive from just doing biology.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Evolutionary biology would tell you that actually the individual is not the atom, that kin selection works on groups, works on this broader family unit, actually.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what a purely Darwinian ethic looks like, well, it looks very much like what pagan classical civilization would look like.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: They are focused not on the individual, they are focused on the kin, they are focused on the patriarchal family.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_04: And each ancient family was itself a kind of church.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: For the head of the family, the Partifamilius, was not just the chief magistrate of the fact of the family, he was also its high priest.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: The ancient family was a cult, a cult devoted to ancestor worship.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it was not in any way a secular kind of existence.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Spirituality was woven into the fabric of their existence.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that we think in terms of secular and religious now is one of the other fruits of the Christian revolution, that we've had this idea of the secular and this idea of religions.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: To look back into the ancient world is to see a very spiritual world, a very cultic world, a worshipping world, and a very collective world, in which the family, and that's a much broader idea than just the nuclear family, but the family headed up by the Patafamilius, the high priest, the patriarchal figure, um, is the priest of this cult called the family.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: That was the indivisible unit of society in the ancient world, not the individual.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: We cannot, I think, understand the ancient world unless if we fail to notice that the distinction we make between the public and the private spheres is not the distinction they made.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: Their distinction was between the public and the domestic spheres, and the domestic sphere was a sphere of radical inequality.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_04: Little wonder, therefore, that the assumption which dominated ancient thinking ran through all of its forms, really, was the assumption of natural inequality.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_04: This emerged in civic life, where citizens were a privileged caste.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_04: Citizenship was a badge of inequality.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_04: Citizens were what Nietzsche would later call Superman.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: The public sphere was their playground.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting, Nietzsche wants to push back against Christian morality and get us back to a pagan settlement.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: The pagan settlement was not about equal individuals before the law.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was about collectives in which there were those who ruled and those who were ruled over.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: Nietzsche wanted to get back to that in rejecting Christianity.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: But why is Nietzsche wrong?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's not wrong if the pagans are right, and I don't think he's wrong if our ethics are derived from science, from pure Darwinism.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: What is it that makes Nietzsche wrong?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Larry Sidentop will tell us.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_04: And women were hardly more than mere chattels.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_04: Though restricted in later antiquity, the Patofamilius originally had the power of life and death over his family members as well as his slaves.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_04: The Pathophamilius was a god in preparation who would in due course number find his place among the family divinities.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_04: So in holding up the ancient world as an inspiration for a world free of religious oppression, thinkers of Enlightenment looked in the wrong place for religion.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_04: They failed to notice that the ancient family was itself a kind of church.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: So the ancient world was a religious world through and through, it was an unequal world through and through, and it was a collectivized world through and through.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: So what is it that changed?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Flary Sidentop talks about the Christian revolution.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: He talks about this Pauline sense that there is now neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, for we are all one in Christ Jesus, and that spiritual equality in which Christ is the Lord, and we are all brothers and sisters.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: There's no lords in the church except Christ.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we are all equally one in Christ Jesus.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: That spiritual and soteriological truth starts to trickle down into sociological truths, especially as the church starts to have power.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now we'll skip over a lot of the lecture until he gets to talk about human rights in the 11th and 12th centuries.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: How Christians thinking hard about scripture and applying the principles of scripture to difficult church cases, there are these canon lawyers, these canonists, who are deriving principles from scripture in order to make ethical pronouncements, and they start to apply the truths of scripture to society.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they start to invent the individual, and they start to invent the idea that humans don't merely have obligations to other humans, but because I might have an obligation to the poor person, actually the poor person has a right to provision and protection.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: And Larry Sidentop, having opened our eyes to um some of the negatives of the classical world, he's also going to open our eyes to some of the light that is shining very brightly in what some people fallaciously call the Dark Ages.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_04: But the third innovation resulting from the work of canon lawyers would later, I think, prove decisive for the development of what we know as liberalism.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_04: Canonists converted the theory of natural law into a theory of natural rights.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_04: Rights inherit individuals because of their intrinsic moral status and power.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas natural, ancient natural law had rested on the assumption of natural inequality, everything in its place.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_04: Natural rights rested on the assumption of moral equality and reciprocity, relying, in effect, on the golden rule to provide the foundation for a new sense of justice.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: Justice for an ancient person meant enforcing the natural inequalities that are woven into nature.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Justice in a Christian sense means looking at inequalities as something that might need to be remedied, that there might need to be an intervention into nature such that the poor might be lifted up, that the lowly might be given dignity.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Do you see the very great difference?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um the ancient world was very, very keen on justice.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Just just read Aristotle on politics and you and you'll see.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Justice is his burning concern.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: But justice means enforcing inequality in the ancient world.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas justice means for the Christian, quite often, lifting up the lowly, okay, and and healing the sick.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're the Good Samaritan, you see the guy by the side of the road, you you need to like heal the wound.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And if you spot poverty, you you might need to give arms to the poor.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if there are infants perishing on the rubbish dump because they've been exposed as those who are worthless in the ancient world, then justice doesn't mean leaving them there.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: An ancient person might say, well, the gods probably want them on that rubbish dump, right?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: Or society wants them on that rubbish dump, or the probably the patafamilius, the head of the household, wants that child on that rubbish dump.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Who are you to intervene?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Who are you to equalize?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, but no, if that child is the bearer of inviolable worth and dignity and intrinsic value, um, that is not based on how weak they are, on their social standing, on their class, on their riches, if it's not based on their race, if it's not based on their gender, but simply by virtue of being human, they are the possessor of a right to liberty and life and the pursuit of happiness, right?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: To put it in 1776 terms.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then there is an obligation now to equalize that injustice, to e to equalize that inequality, and that then becomes what justice is, right?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: A radically different vision.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: And Larry Sidentop goes on to talk about how these ideas that began in the church trickled out to the culture and became the air we breathe in terms of the individual sentiments that we all now have.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: I could go into this uh so much more, it it is a fascinating lecture.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Do check it out.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Larry Sidentopp, full lecture.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's on the channel Telda's Stitching.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um But the first point, therefore, that I want to make in this video is if you think you have derived your moral understanding from science or from the Enlightenment, you've got history wrong.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Just ask Larry Sidentop, just ask Tom Holland, just ask Rodney Stark, just ask Jürgen Habermas, just ask John Gray, just ask any number of people who are actually paying attention to what the ancient world was like and what the Middle Ages were really like.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: The idea of the individual is a profoundly Christian idea, and of course it is.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: It traces all the way back to the first page of the Bible, in which Adam and Eve are king and queen of all creation, they are made in the image of God, and they are breathed into with the breath of life.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have a soul, and if you have the capacity for our relationship with God, then you are a person, a person who is non-interchangeable, a person of inviolable worth and dignity.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: These are profoundly Christian ideas.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: They've come to us through a profoundly Christian history.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: So where have you got your morals from?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: You haven't got it from science.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: If you think you've got it from science, I I think you've got your history wrong.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um second, I think you've got your ethics wrong.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: Vince Vitali, in our conversation on Premier Unbelievable, he puts this question to Michael Shermer about where do your morals come from?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's a very clarifying question.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm interested to know, sort of on each of your belief systems, how you think about that, what that truth maker might be, that thing which is equally true of every single person, in virtue of which every single person can be equally valuable, which seems to be at the foundation of our deepest instincts and intuitions about uh morality.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Michael, I'll I'll throw it to you first.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say in response to that?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, um you know, you talked about or um Glenn quoted um Bentham about rights to being nonsense and natural rights being nonsense instilled.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I disagree with that.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like Bentham's comment.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: I disagree with his utilitarianism at that extreme level.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are born with rights.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now if you how far down can you drill?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Where where are these rights?
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Where are they?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking around, I'll see them anywhere.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, well, I have them in America.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's that's because we have a constitution and we have an army.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: The drafters of the constitution um would not be happy with that answer, right?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um they they did not say, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that um we have the right to overthrow the king and we're just gonna confer on ourselves these things called human rights.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't say that.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: They said we have been endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: And they're unalienable because they are pre-political.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it's not that a gu a government does not grant you human rights.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: If a government grants you human rights, then they are at the whim of the powerful, which is precisely what human rights are there to guard against.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: Human rights are there to guard against the powerful who override the individual.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Human rights are not in the gift of governments to grant to their citizens, because then that government could maybe withhold rights.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they are pre-political features of the human person, or they are nothing.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's what the founders of the American Republic believed.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why Dr.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer has human rights in America is because the founders of his nation really believed in a creator who had endowed us all with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the founding of the American Republic was a profoundly Christian thing of the 58 signatories to the Declaration of Independence.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: The vast majority were Orthodox Protestant Christians.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, there are a couple of Catholics thrown in and a deist or two, but it's a profoundly Christian movement, and they all believed in God, and God was there four times in the Declaration of Independence because he is the one who guarantees human rights, not governments.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a really dystopian vision to think that it's governments that actually are the source of human rights.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I would have thought that Michael Shermer, with his very libertarian instincts, would see the danger of thinking that governments are the source of human rights.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: That makes governments like God.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't think a libertarian thought that governments ought to be like God.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, Dr.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer continues.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we have police and we have, you know, uh the rule of law and and so on, courts and and whatnot.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: So for some profoundly Christian reasons and and the the history of all those things is a profoundly Christian history.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you could always say, well, it's possible that, you know, if uh if we lived in in North Korea, you wouldn't have any rights.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's right.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why no one wants to live in North Korea.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: You can see my face there at that point.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't know what to make of that.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Vince doesn't know what to make of that.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't think Dr.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Stromer is saying that North Koreans do not possess uh human rights.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: I I guess he is saying that such rights are being ignored and trampled on in North Korea.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I charitably I I hope he's saying that.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, here I I make the move of saying, you know, let's use history and psychology and political science or whatever to see what people actually want to do.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: What people actually want to do.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: Which people, and why should we listen to all of them equally?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, where would you rather live, North Korea or South Korea?
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: Where would you rather live?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, East Germany or West Germany before the unification?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: People vote with their feet uh and their dollars and so on, because why?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is it possible that um you know my cultural relativist friends uh you know are are correct and that you know maybe there's some other society and centuries hence where slavery will be embraced by everybody, except the slaves, I guess, uh, or where you know female genital mutilation is perfectly natural and normal and everybody endorses it, and you know, Jews don't mind being exterminated in gas chambers and blacks don't mind being enslaved.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I you know is it possible, I suppose, but not likely.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Notice what he's doing.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: He's making the personal preference of every member of a society, no matter how marginalized and weak they are, every preference of every individual counts and should be listened to.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: But that is a moral presupposition that's baked into his system.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing in somebody's DNA that says we should listen to everybody.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing in science that says we should listen to every single member of every single species and equally weigh the preferences of each member of every society.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: That instinct to honor the preferences of every single minority and every single weak and marginalized voice.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: Where did you get that morality from?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: It looks familiar to me.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think you might have taken that out of the Christian wardrobe and you're wearing it, and I'm really glad that you're wearing it.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Where did you get that morality from?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: You did not get that from science.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't derive the kind of ethical system that Dr.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer is talking about simply from science.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: You get it from a whole bunch of moral intuitions that have been given to us through Christianization.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this is not the rational, enlightened, scientific humanism that Dr.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer presents it to be.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: He is assuming the individual all the way through this.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: But where do you get the individual from?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because in so uh our human nature leads us to want to be free, autonomous individuals with control over our bodies and choices.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, a classical thinker like Aristotle would say, Well, doesn't nature actually teach you that some people are very good at ruling and some people are not that good at ruling and need to be told what to do?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: They can't get their lives in order.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so actually, the the existence of slaves as living tools and the existence of masters who can care for their slaves is what nature teaches you.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um he is looking at nature and getting a radical sense of inequality.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer is looking at nature and and he is somehow getting a sense that everybody is equal.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, equal how?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: He says it's in our desire to be free, but why is that desire to be free binding on anybody else?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: What gives the marginalized weak, poor slave a voice that should be listened to by the strong?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that weakness actually confers a kind of privilege and strength is a profoundly Christian idea.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's not really what science teaches, it's not really self-evident, if you ask me.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you only have to look around the world to see what people actually want.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: What people actually want.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Dr.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: Sherman mentions female genital mutilation.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you go to the UNICEF website uh uh about this horrible practice, which I absolutely disagree with, um, in the 16 countries for which we have data on both male and female attitudes to female genital mutilation, men disfavor it more than women in 12 of those 16 countries.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: And out of 30 countries listed, 13 have women who are more in favor of it than against it.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: So even if we just listened to women about female genital mutilation, then there are at least 13 countries in the world where women are saying they want it.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's largely a practice that is kept in place by female pressure.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um but does Dr.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer think that therefore makes it right, even though people are choosing it?
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I recognize that in these situations the word choice uh means something very different than it does uh in the serial aisle of a supermarket where you're trying to figure out whether you want rice krispies or cocoa pops.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, choices are incredibly pressured things.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: But that goes to my point, really.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we privileging this thing called choice?
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: That, as Larry Sidentalk will tell you, has come about through a profoundly Christian history.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: So Michael Schirmer has been asked a very straight question about what is it about humans that actually gives them human rights?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: And what is it that makes human rights applicable to every single member of the human family?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just not getting any ethical substance here.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: Are you getting any ethical substance here?
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I'm missing something.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: You can tell me, tell me about it in the comments.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, therefore, I you know, I think we do have a moral obligation to help people in other countries that uh are being oppressed, you know, to the extent that we can.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: We can't do everything.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: But um, and I think that comes from discovering what these actual rights are.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: They really are there in the same way that maths are there, or Platonic concepts of like logic or you know, beauty, truth, the circle, the triangle, whatever.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these things are really there.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: The circle really exists and human rights really exist.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: But like, like where?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: And if that's true, that's a profoundly theological universe that we live in.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the previous video I did about this dialogue, I I get into this issue of if human rights really exist the way the circle exists, then Dr.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer thinks we live in a profoundly theological universe, and that theology is a profoundly Christian theology, actually.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm still not sure where he is deriving this from.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: Where where is he getting it from?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and this is the the problem of trying to derive your ethics from a naturalistic worldview.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: You can't get an ought from an is, as Hume says.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer says he doesn't like this is ought dilemma that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh David Hume articulated, but I don't see how he escapes from the problem.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: He he's wanting to have human rights existing just like the circle exists, just like these other Platonic ideals exist.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: But he also says we just live in a naturalistic universe and we can derive it all from science, broadly conceived.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't get it.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't get it.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I I don't think it works historically, I don't think it works ethically.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it works scientifically either.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um Dr.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer says that the individual is this indivisible unit of social organization, just as the atom is to physics, so the individual is to ethical concern.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's just not true scientifically.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean Richard Dawkins says we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so who who are we on the selfish gene model of Richard Dawkins?
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um we are not the indivisible unit, actually, our genes are, and we are the carriers of genes, and therefore what natural selection is targeting is not really me as this inviolable individual.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: What natural selection is targeting are my selfish genes.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I need to be a carrier of those genes and to preserve those genes.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, really, when you ask science, like what is the indivisible unit that natural selection is targeting, it's not the individual, it's genes.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, if you want to think about uh a more macro target than just um the genes, you don't actually end up with the individual, you end up with kin, right?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: You you end up with the fact that my genes will be propagated through my children, um, but also to my nephews and nieces.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, I've got a a far wider kin group than the individual.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you either go more narrow than the individual, or you go far broader than the individual when you just ask Darwin or you just ask Dawkins what is the target of natural selection.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: What you never get is this inviolable sphere of sovereignty called the individual when you just consult science.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: You you simply do not.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think if you claim that you are deriving your ethical system from science, I think that gets history wrong.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: You're actually getting it from Christianity.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think it gets ethics wrong because you can't get an ought from an is, and it gets science wrong, right?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: This this is not what science is teaching you.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: So why is Dr.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer such a believer in the individual?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he likes the Christian settlement.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: He likes where we've got to in kind of Christendom, the Protestant version of it, the classical liberal version of that, the sort of the libertarian version of that.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_02: He he likes the particular branch of this intellectual tree that he is perched upon.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: He is denying the fullness of this intellectual genealogy, and he's sort of soaring at the branch.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: But there are two kinds of reasons why he believes in the individual.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: There's the reasons that are invisible to him, and that's all to do with the Christianization of the West.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the reasons that are more visible to him are the political reasons.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: And he he wants to live in the kind of colourblind egalitarianism that Dr.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: Martin Luther King Jr.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: kind of espoused when he says you should be judged by the content of your character, not by the color of your skin.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: But let's remind ourselves what Dr.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer says.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I emphasize the individual for two reasons.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: One, in evolutionary theory, I don't endorse group selection.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's individual is the target of selection.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: Which is not true, as we've seen.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: It targets the gene or it targets the kin.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't target the individual.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: And two, politically, I think it's a mistake.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is mostly a problem in liberals, who uh are, at least in recent decades, placing more emphasis on group identity rather than individuals.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I emphasize the individual.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a it's a big mistake and it's going against what Dr.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: King taught us, you know, to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say, your group identity defines you.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, it doesn't.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: You define yourself.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're an individual.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's why I emphasize that.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I was so fascinated to read um that that kind of history of you with Scientific American and um and your your columns there are just a model of communication, not just of science, but of but of anything.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I I learned so much from reading many of your columns.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he's a very good columnist, um, Dr.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Sherman.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think I mean on your side, when you know you you wrote an article about the colorblind egalitarianism of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and they sort of pushed back on that, and there was a question.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_02: That was my demise.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was your demise, wasn't it?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because identity politics was kind of trumping um science in in that sort of sense.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think we can see with Scientific American, they they they seem to you know call mathematics is Eurocentric, apparently, and um clownfish can teach you trans ideology, and apparently Scientific American can tell you who to vote for in November.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: Very obviously a politicized kind of view of science.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I think everybody can recognize that that is an illegitimate sort of politicization of science.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I guess my question to you, Dr.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer, is perhaps you're part of it.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's just you are on the classical liberal side of that political divide.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: You've looked into the mirror of science and you've discovered the individual.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: You've discovered human rights, uh, you've discovered that there's a moral arc that's bending towards justice, you've you've decided you've discovered a kind of a colorblind egalitarianism within science.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_02: Different people have looked into science and have discovered actually that what's staring back at them is pretty much their own political presupposition.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, my claim is that he's not really deriving it from science.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's actually picking it up in the air we breathe, that's a particularly Christianized air we breathe, and then going into science.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what he has done is claimed to be deriving that politics from his science, whereas actually it's isegesis, not exegesis, it's reading into the science rather than reading out of the science.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so progressive liberationists might, you know, see themselves in science.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: Scientific racists can look into science and they can they can discover that racism is somehow, you know, um dictated to them, you know, b because of science.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I I wonder whether we're in this kind of problem of the politicization of science, because it's it's kind of the only place we've got now to tell us our morality.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think we're we're we might we might be going to science to tell us our morality when science wasn't really intended for that.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe we need to go back to Stephen Jay Gould, who I know is a great hero of yours, and the the non-overlapping magisteria of of science or religion, and and and let us have our values discussions and our political and moral discussions in one register, and let's just go into the lab and do good science over here.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I think imagining that we can go into science and derive from it some kind of libertarian settlement um is is probably to play a political game that's it's that's gonna end up biting us on the backside.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: You see the point.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think so often when we claim to be looking into science and describing science, what we're really doing is like narcissists at the edge of the lake looking down upon the lake, and we might claim to be studying the aquatic environments beneath the surface.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, if what we want to do is read off from science something about the world, then we're just catching our own reflection.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: We're just seeing ourselves.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: Now, there's a lot of good science that can be done by looking into science, and narcissists at the water's edge, he might have been obsessed by the aquatic ecosystem underneath the waters, and that would have been great.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, unfortunately, he wanted the lake to tell him about the world beyond the lake.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so what ended up happening was that he was addicted to an image of himself, and he he just saw himself staring back.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: And there are all sorts of people who claim to be looking into science, and they they claim to be just doing good science, and science teaches me because there are clownfish, therefore there is trans ideology, right?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: Or or they could look into science and because there is group selection, therefore identity politics.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: Or um scientific racism, as I discussed.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: And since the publication of The Origin of the Species, for about the next hundred years, there was a very strong movement of scientific racism.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Remember the subtitle of Charles Darwin's work in 1859 on The Origin of the Species, the preservation of favored races in the struggle for survival.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: And for about the next hundred years, it was a very popular, very robust, very scientific movement to search for the missing link and to have human zoos, and to capture tribespeople from Papua New Guinea or from South America or from Africa and bring them into European and North American zoos.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: Millions of people went to see the lions and the elephants and the tigers and the tribespeople of the Congo, and and they would put like tribespeople into enclosures and have them wrestle with orangutans and things like that.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_02: And there were signs up outside their enclosures saying this is the missing link between humans and our pre-human ancestors and all this kind of stuff.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you know who the chief voices against such inhumane treatment were?
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: It was the church.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was the Church of Jesus Christ that was standing up against the scientists who looked into science and they saw the survival of the fittest.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_02: So they just thought, well, perhaps the fittest should survive.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: They looked into Darwin's world and they saw the preservation of favored races.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_02: And guess what they saw?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: They saw that I guess white people must be superior.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_02: And they read out of their science a moral and an ethical settlement that, of course, we recognize as appalling.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: But while that is an egregious example of what can happen when we derive our ethics from our science, that problem persists even if you're just trying to derive classical liberalism from your science, or you're just trying to derive trans ideology from your science, or you're just trying to derive group identity and identity politics from your science.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's happening all the time, and it's a huge tactical mistake.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: It gets the history of where we've had our morals from wrong, it gets the ethics of uh how we derive morals from descriptions of the world, it gets science wrong, um, and it gets our politics wrong.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_02: It gets our tactics in these political discourses wrong.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: And Dr.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: Shermer got into a battle with Scientific American, not because they were illegitimately politicizing science and and he wasn't, I think they were both using science politically, and they were looking into the mirror of science and they were discovering their own reflection.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: We did not get our morals from scientific analysis of the world.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: We cannot get our morals from scientific analysis of the world.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if we claim to have derived our ethical settlement from science, we are not telling a true story about history or about ethics or about science or about politics.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is my video for today.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: I want to know what you think about it.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: I also want you to go and check out 321.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: Have you checked out 321course.com?
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: There you can get to grips with the fundamentals of Christianity.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's made for Christians and non-Christians alike to take a look at Jesus again, see his vision for God and his threeness, the world and its two-ness, you and your oneness.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't know what those numbers mean, you need to go and do 321.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_02: Go to 321course.com, start your account and get in there.
• 55:47
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• 55:48
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• 55:52
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• 55:54
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• 56:00
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• 56:02
  SPEAKER_02: Bye bye.