The Current State of Atheism and Separation of Church and State
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And here's the new book, Contraduction. Oh, you can't see that too good. Contraduction, there it is. All right, Dan, nice to see you. How are you? Yeah, good to see you again. What's new in the world of atheism? Well...

Our group is mainly concerned with state church separation, but we do atheism, you know, a lot of debate. In fact, you and I did that debate in Oxford together, if you remember, a few years ago. That was epic. Yeah. Yeah, that was fun. Wasn't that with Christopher Hitchens' brother, Peter Hitchens, right? That's right, Peter Hitchens. Yeah, epic, yeah. And Annie Laurie's going to debate him in Cambridge next month, actually. Oh, wow. For some reason, he's going to defend feminism in the Bible. I don't know how that's going to work.

Well, talk about spin doctoring and updating scriptural meanings. I just got out of one of our weekly legal meetings here at FFRF where we're talking about, you know, we're suing the state of Louisiana for wanting to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. And we're getting involved in Oklahoma with that crazy superintendent of education who wants to put...

Surprise, surprise, Bibles in every classroom, but the specifications only fit the Trump Bible. The Trump Bible? So he's proposing that the state of Oklahoma spend, I think, $3 million to buy Trump Bibles to put in every classroom.

Right, because it's leather-bound and doesn't it come with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? Yeah, and the Pledge of Allegiance and Lee Greenwood's song. And he's really hopeless. In fact, there's a lot of schools and a lot of churches and a lot of religious teachers who disagree with what he's doing. They think the Bible belongs in the home and in the church where it does, and it shouldn't be a part of the pluralistic classroom system.

How has the separation of church and state changed, let's say, over the last 20 years or so? Well, the Supreme Court has changed it a lot. They're bending over backwards to really to jettison what we used to call the lemon test, which some of the court now says is defunct.

And instead of the lemon test, where secular purpose is a secular effect and non-entanglement, they're replacing it now with what they call the history test or coercion. So that makes all the lawsuits different. And look what they did with Coach Kennedy in Washington State, who was clearly acting as a coach, coercing the students into pray. But the Supreme Court said, well, that's okay. It was private. So they're allowing public money to go to private schools, etc.

And this was the one where the coach was on the football field with the players. Yeah. And they like took a knee right there in the middle of the game or halftime or whatever it was. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And yet they claimed that the conservatives on the court, in spite of the evidence, in spite of even photographs, which Sotomayor put in her dissent. Look, there's photographs of this. They still said, well, it was his own private prayer and he was free to do that.

And so it was a very narrow decision, and it didn't really change much, but a whole bunch of people on the religious right are taking that as a sign. Oh, the Supreme Court's allowing that, so we can get away with a whole bunch more. So...

We're running around trying to put out a lot of these fires from schools, superintendents and schools and principals who think they now have license to go ahead and mix religion in their public schools. Right. And when we talk about the kind of religious shift of the

Supreme Court, and Catholics are Christian, but it's really more Catholicism than traditional, I don't know, mainstream Christianity, right? Well, most of the members of the Supreme Court have Catholic backgrounds. They're either Catholics or they were raised Catholic.

But that's also true for the liberal Sotomayor. She was also Catholic. So it's not so much Catholicism, although that's a big part of it. It's this sort of new kind of mixture of evangelical Protestants and independent Charismatics and conservative Catholics. It's more like a Christian nationalism kind of a thing that doesn't really care what denomination or what church you belong to.

Yeah. I have a podcast guest coming up. Gareth Gore. His book is Opus on the history of Opus Dei, which the extent of my knowledge was what I got from Dan Brown's novel. Didn't you go right? Most Americans know about it, but it's way more influential than I realized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they're powerful. Well, you know, years ago in our country, the Catholics were a small persecuted minority. Right. Back in the 1890s, they were complaining about the Protestant King James Bible being in schools. So the Catholics, as a small minority, they took advantage of the First Amendment to sue over their rights being violated. And they won, and they made some significant decisions that help all of us.

But since around the 1940s, Catholicism became stronger in this country, and now they flipped it. Now they don't need the protection of the First Amendment. Now when you have power, you don't need it anymore. They want to impose. They want public money for their private Catholic schools, for example. They want to

especially in all these Catholic-controlled hospitals. It's the conference of bishops who decide what happens in these hospitals, so they want to control women's lives through their Catholic doctrine, not through actual proven science. So there was a big shift. We can applaud the early Catholics for what they did in this country,

Like what the Jehovah's Witnesses did and what like humanists or Unitarians or even some atheists have done. But once you get power, you want to hold it. And they have power and they are trying to flex it as much as they can.

Yeah, I remember when JFK ran, and he had to give that speech about why he was, if he won the presidency, he wasn't going to allow the Vatican to control the country. Yeah, that's the famous 1960, he spoke to the Houston Ministerial Association to assure them all. My allegiance is not to some foreign pope. My allegiance is to the U.S. Constitution. It was a great speech. The separation of church and state is sacrosanct. Yeah.

So, but back to the, you know, lawsuits and so on. Are there more states like Louisiana and some of the Southern Bible Belt states that are moving in that direction now? Well, of course, Florida and Texas are on the map right now. Texas is a big, you know, what they want to be doing. They want to have...

chaplains in every school, for example. They passed a law for that. However, it turns out that it's up to the individual school district to decide that. And many of them, even though the governor and the state are pushing this, many of the school districts are saying, no way, we don't want these strange, who knows who these guys are coming onto our campus to mix with the kids, you know. And especially Catholic priests with their reputation, do you want them just wandering the halls of an elementary school? So,

And to their credit, a lot of the school districts in a lot of these states where the state's trying to impose religion, they're saying, no way, we get to decide what happens in our district. Now, your organization, Freedom From Religion Foundation, doesn't object to private schools teaching whatever religious doctrines they want, right? It's just public schools.

spaces, public schools, where there's government money. That's right. Private schools have long been free to exist, and we don't object to that. However, many of these private schools now, through the voucher system, are getting public money. And it started off as a small experiment. It actually started off here in Wisconsin with an experiment in Milwaukee to help these disadvantaged students

get out of these failing schools to get into private schools. Actually, that didn't work. Many of them went back to the public schools. But since then, since the foot was in the door, now it's private school students who are already private school students who are children in wealthy families who can afford to send them. They are now getting state dollars through vouchers to send their kids to the school they were already going to. And that's a big push that's happening all over the country. And we oppose...

Not the existence of the private school, but the fact that they're using public dollars. Because where public money goes, public accountability should follow. And it doesn't. Once it goes to a private religious school, they say, well, state church, you can't tell us what to do with our money. And in fact, most of them are doing much more poorly than the public schools are.

And when Betsy DeVos took over the Department of Education under Trump, she was touting vouchers and still does actually from that wealthy Michigan family. They were saying that the results are better. Well, the results came in and they're worse. In Indiana and in Louisiana, the private schools are doing miserably worse in math and English. And so now they're changing their tune and they're saying, well,

So the metric is that the parents are satisfied. So if the parents are satisfied, that means we should still be sending public money to private schools. So they're losing all their arguments, but for some reason they're just digging in their heels. They want private schools to get public money. I don't know that much about this subject. So with a voucher system,

I would still have to pay my property tax, say, for example, depending on the state, I suppose, where the money comes from. But then the state gives me back some of the money so I can spend it on my choice of school for my kid? Well, states have different systems that are set up how they do that. It could be a tax credit or it could be a direct subsidy or it could be that the parents choose but the money goes to the school. There's different voucher schemes.

But ultimately, it's taking money out of the public school system and moving some of that money into the private school system, which is hurting the public schools. The public schools have to follow all these rules. And in fact, a lot of the private schools, when they get these disadvantaged students or maybe handicapped or whatever, they just dump them back in the public schools. They don't have to take them. So a lot of them are able to say, well, look, we have a better educational output because they're selecting who they get to

to enroll in their classes. Are there any more issues like a crash in a public park or a cross on a public highway where somebody died or those kind of issues? Yeah, those things happen all the time. We're complaining about, is it southern Indiana or Illinois? A sheriff's office, they erected a big Ten Commandments monument right in the lobby there, a huge one, you know, like almost as tall as a person.

And, um, um, that's unconstitutional. And we have a complainant down there who says, why is that? And it's new under the current Supreme court. If something has a historical precedent, even though we disagree with it, the court is saying, well, it's been there for 40, 50, 80 years, you know, but this is new. It just went up this earlier this year. So we're complaining about that. And, um, it's tough because different judges, different districts, different courts have different opinions, um,

And we win most of our cases. And the ones that we lose, we lose maybe 40%. I'm just guessing more or less. The ones that we lose are usually lost, not on the merits, but on standing.

So we may have won a case. In fact, we've won cases at the court's level and at the appeals level we've won. But the higher court says, well, you didn't have the right to sue in the first place, ducking the issue of whether or not our case has merit. For example, the National Day of Prayer, the only adjudication on that issue was in our favor. But the court said, well, you can't get at it. You're not really injured. You can just look away. You don't have to pay attention to it.

And we even asked, one of our attorneys even asked someone in the court, well, who would have the right to sue over something like that? And they said, well, probably the president himself. The president is ordered by Congress to have this National Day of Prayer. And so the president's the one who would make the decision, yes or no. So if anyone's going to sue, it would be the president. Well, that's never going to happen. We citizens don't have the right to sue over that now, even though we had a...

a decision, a legal decision in our favor in that case. Just curious, how does it work? When you sue somebody, do you have like a list of lawyers in different states and you just contract with them and you pay them independently from your budget and so on? Or how's that? We have 10 full-time lawyers of our own who are brilliant. They're, you know, they're, they have years of experience in constitutional law and,

But yes, usually when you sue in another state, you need local counsel to do the filing and to do all that kind of stuff. So some of them do it pro bono and some of them we pay. And if we win the case, we can sue for costs and then they get their pay actually. So there have been attorneys, an attorney in Nashville, for example, sued over the Bible classes in Dayton, Tennessee. They did it on spec, but they kept track of all their hours.

And so they were working for free. But when we won the case, they were able to sue and they made a ton of money from not just the school district, but from the school district insurance company who paid them off. So we were happy about that. We didn't have to pay for it. And they took a chance, but it looked like a slam dunk case and it was. So it made sense. And a lot of local attorneys complained.

We'll think I can either do this for free because I believe in it or I hope I'll be able to sue for costs and fees. And we also sue for fees, too. We are attorneys keep track of the hours on each case. And even after you win a case like we won the case in Texas with Governor Abbott, who censored our nativity scene, I should say our our secular nativity scene.

He said, what was that? You have Newton and Spinoza in a manger. Well, that's not too far off. There was a nativity scene, a Christian one. And so our members in Texas said, well, we want to put up an FFRF scene. So ours was the it was like some of the founding fathers in the Statue of Liberty.

And they're gazing down at this manger adoringly. But in the manger is the Bill of Rights. And because December 15th was when the Bill of Rights was adopted. So we had a good historical and we had some wording on it because the whole month of December doesn't belong to Christians and Christmas. I mean, it's a big month.

So, and in fact, we had a legislative sponsor for it. And we even went through the approval of all the committees. And it was all perfectly legitimately permitted. But the governor saw it and didn't like it. And so he ordered it taken down. And so it took us eight years. We sued and then they, it was a big ping pong game. And finally we won. But then it was like another year.

for the state to agree to pay us the fees, so all of that. And it was only a few months ago that we finally got the check from the state. The whole thing is done. It's finished. The governor lost. And unfortunately, along with the check, there was no letter of apology from the governor, which there should have been. He really violated our free speech.

So they changed their policy in the meantime, and now it looks like they're not going to continue that open forum. But if they do, we'll be ready to go back in. Yeah. So freedomfromreligionfoundationffrf.org is where somebody could go to make a donation to support this, right? You're a nonprofit.

That's right. Or to make a complaint. If there's an issue in your area, if some teacher's praying with the kids or if you see a nativity scene on City Hall or whatever, there's dozens of things. You can go to FFRF.org and under the legal, you can say, I have a complaint. And you can do it anonymously if you want, because in some communities, you kind of have to keep your head down. You don't want to be the person who's seen something.

And our attorneys will get back to you on that and tell you, first of all, whether it's actionable or not, because some are not. And then additional advice about information that we need in order to proceed with issues. And we get hundreds and hundreds. We get more than 1,000 of those complaints each year, and we respond to them. And most of them are solved by writing letters. We can write a letter to some Mississippi school district and say, hey, by the way, did you know this was illegal? And sometimes they say,

We didn't know that. Thanks for telling us. And they'll stop it, which is nice. You don't have to go to court. You can just send a letter. Often, though, they dig in and they say, well, you're going to have to sue us. And so there was a high school in southern Ohio. They had a big painting of Jesus on the high school wall.

And the principal said, that painting's not coming down without a court order. So we went to court and got the court order and the painting came down. He was able to save face in his community, you know, by saying, I fought for the Jesus poster, but the courts made me take it down.

But actually, his insurance company made it take it down because they said they're not going to they're not going to pay for the next round of a losing lawsuit. We're not going to school's going to have to pay for it. So that'll do it. If your insurance company is going to back you, you better rethink this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first principle of any moral principle is its generalizability principle.

What if it was an Islamic center that wanted to place the Koran in every public school in the state? Would the same people promoting this agree with that? Well, no, of course not. So their argument then is, yeah, but we're not an Islamic country. We're a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation. How do you respond to that kind of argument? Well, that comes up a lot. When we sued in Dayton, Tennessee over the Bible classes,

Their argument, and they lost. We ended up winning that one. You know, the Scopes trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee. I know it well. And the legacy of the Scopes trial where Darrell went against William Jennings Bryan, there's a Christian college in Dayton called Bryan College, named after William Jennings Bryan. So they were bringing students in from the college into the public schools to teach Bible classes during school time.

So their argument was that, well...

This is historical. The Bible is important to our community. Like up in another state, Davy Crockett would be historical. What in our state is the Bible. So this is part of our code. They use that argument, actually. And of course, the court didn't buy that. We pointed out that the plaintiffs, the family who complained, were non-religious students who were being persecuted, really. They actually had to run them out of town because they were not going along with the majority. So

Public schools should be equal to everyone, welcoming of all students, whether they're in the majority or minority. And it's really the minority who suffers when these violations occur. Yeah. Even when, you know, I point out that the founding fathers were not, in fact, mostly Christian. They were, in fact, mostly not Christian.

And especially, you know, near as we can tell from church records and things like that, you know, Americans at the founding time were not fanatical churchgoers and Christians. Nothing like evangelical movement in the last half century. Then the response I get is, well, it's kind of culturally, politically wrong.

you know, socially Christian. You could be an atheist, but you're a cultural Christian in the sense you embrace the Judeo-Christian values of the West, whether you even know it or not. And that's, you know, that's our way of being, and we don't want those other, you know, so this touches on immigration issues and so on. Yeah. Well, even if there were some truth to that, and there is actually, some of the founders were devout churchgoers. Some of them did believe in

And some of them prayed, and some of them even wanted, even Benjamin Franklin asked for prayer at the Constitutional Convention. And they didn't vote him down. They just didn't even second the motion, and so it died. There was no prayer at all. But even if they were, even if they were all born-again evangelical modern Christians, even if Jefferson and Madison, even if that were true,

They wrote a document that is godless, that governs our country. They did not put God or Jesus or religion. The only mention of religion in the Constitution is exclusionary. And in the Declaration of Independence, there's those deistic phrases to nature's God that Jefferson had to put in because that declaration was a letter to the King of England, who was the head of the church. And so they were declaring their independence from that

Royal theocracy or whatever you want to call it. So they calcite in that wording, but there's no Christianity in there. And there's no theism in there. If you think about it, the whole idea of nature's God that they talked about back then was more like you said, more like a Spinoza kind of thing, more like a deistic kind of thing.

And, but the proof's in the pudding. They produced a completely secular, godless constitution, even though some wanted it. There was even debate about whether we should put God, and they said, no, we shouldn't. This should be a secular state. And they knew that when you mix government and religion, they both get dirty. They realized we should keep it separate, keep it pure, keep...

Keep total freedom of religion. And that letter that Jefferson wrote a couple of decades later to the Connecticut church assured them that, and that's, in fact, that's the first official phrase of the separation of state and church, a wall of separation. So they understood then that in order to have religious freedom, you had to have complete neutrality in the government.

Yeah. Well, that's mostly worked out good, not only for the state, but for the church. Yeah. I mean, in Europe, most of the religions are in decline because the government has kind of taken over the job that religions do, taking care of the poor and so on. Anyway, that's a separate issue. I guess one reason to transition to your book, Contraduction, and what people actually believe and why they believe things and what their arguments are.

I mean, one reason for the push toward Christian nationalism is they really believe they have the right ideas. Like, our beliefs are better than other beliefs. They're more correct. And this is really better for our nation. And, you know, like the abortion issue, it really is murder, and therefore we really should ban it. And that's what we believe, or, you know, whatever the values are.

that get translated into political action. So, yeah, let's start there. What is it they believe, and why is it they believe that? Well, Christians didn't always believe that abortion was murder. This is really kind of a new thing, even the Catholic Church back years ago. And there's no mention of abortion in the Bible anywhere,

There's no mention anywhere in Christian scriptures about a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, what to do with it. It just never came up, right? So they can't say that that's really a Christian issue. It's a sort of 20th century political Christian issue, but not an actual doctrinal. Of course, they will point to the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not kill, but that depends on whether you think a fetus is being killed when you have an abortion.

And many, many devout Bible-believing, church-going Christians don't think it's murder. It's only an extreme part of the Christianity, extremists who think it's murder. And if they do think it, well, you can understand why they're so motivated. They have a wrong idea, but that motivates them. Luckily, we still live in a democracy where the other Christians and other religions and non-religions can participate in this dialogue.

And at this point, most Americans do not think terminating a pregnancy, an early pregnancy especially, is murder. I saw a booth. I walk home through the University of Wisconsin most days and through the library mall there, and a woman had a booth there.

anti-abortion booth. And she was trying to tell me, it's all science. It's all scientists agree that even the simplest little zygote is a human being and you're killing a human being. So I asked her, I said, okay, suppose this fertilization fertility clinic was on fire and there's this refrigerator with 500 frozen embryos in it and they're about to be destroyed.

They're about to go up in flames. And you rush in there to save those 500 lives. And she's nodding. Yeah. And I said, but when you get in the building, you notice in the next room, there's a little baby girl in a crib who's crying. You only have a split second. Which one do you save? Do you save the baby girl or do you save the 500 embryos? And she said, well, I would save the baby girl, of course.

That's what she said. And then I said, so you get it, don't you? And she's wrinkling her. And I said, why would you save? Why would you let 500 lives die? And just for one, isn't that immoral? And she was thinking about it. And she didn't really say anything. But I think the light went on. There is, you know, there's a gray area. There's, you know, no...

The court has put her into the second trimester, but different religions put her to different places, some even later, some earlier. And so that's a matter of personal choice, whether she would save that one little girl. And she said, well, the little girl is crying and she's hurting. And I said, well, of course, that little girl is a human being who's born. Those frozen embryos, even though the judge in Alabama said, made a decision,

in which he invoked the name of God 41 times, that those frozen embryos are actually human beings. She got it. So Christians don't agree. I don't think atheists even agree. I think there's some atheist anti-abortionists. I think most atheists are

lean toward the liberal side, but it doesn't follow that if you're an atheist, you're necessarily a liberal. Well, most atheists would say it's not okay in the third trimester or, you know, the end of the eighth month, it's okay. No, I would say no, it's not, it's not okay. I mean, unless the mother's about to die or something like this, you know, it seems to me that the problem is, is you have a, you know, a black and white yes or no binary moral system that

you know, grafted onto a continuum where there is no point. And sometimes the law is like Solomon has to cut the baby in half. Sometimes the law has to say, well, where is that? You know? Yeah. It's interesting how that became a right wing Republican issue. I just had Max boot on the show. He wrote the definitive biography of Reagan and he pointed out that when Reagan was governor of California, he passed the most liberal abortion law in the country, 1968. Yeah.

that women could get an abortion, you know, in the case of rape and incest and health issues and things like that. And that was radical, right? Yeah. Well, and look at Biden, a devout Catholic, and look at a lot of devout believers in Congress and in the government.

who they love their God and they believe in their moral system and all of that, and yet they are convinced that it's not murder, it's not killing. It's obviously terminating a potential life, but it's not murder. Yeah. So a point another podcast guest I had on is a cognitive psychologist talking about

different kinds of beliefs. So I use this in my next book on truth, different kinds of truths. So like when a Christian says, you know, I believe that my church has a parking lot. That's a very different statement than I believe that God is three in one and one in three. You know, they can go check the parking lot. It's an empirical statement. And yes, it's there. No, it's not.

But how would you ever check the, you know, three in one? No one has any idea how to do this. You know, the most learned scholars in history write tomes, try to explain how you can have three in one and one in three, and how Jesus can be God and man and all that stuff. And, you know, it's still not convincing. So his argument was that, in a way, you know, that's a different kind of statement. It's a

It's a social signal like, this is my faith. I accept whatever they tell me. It's fine. I don't care. How am I going to know anyway? You know, I'm a Catholic, so I believe this, or I'm a Baptist, so I believe that. Whatever. There's no empirical truth to any of those claims. It's just more of a, I'm a member of this social group, so I'll just profess my public belief in whatever they tell me. And that's good enough. Yeah.

And of course, an immaterial being, a timeless immaterial being, you cannot use the epistemology of natural investigation on something like that. So the phrase isn't really a veridical phrase. It's more of a metaphysical phrase that is, like you say, it's like a symbol. This is what we believe. People, of course, were killed over that. You know, Servetus challenged

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And but it was it was too late for Calvin to change his mind because he already put it in his institutes. He had already written it. And here comes this upstart Servetus who actually knew more than Calvin, telling Calvin that he was wrong, thinking Calvin would happily go, oh, I made a mistake. And again, it got Servetus killed at really at Calvin's order. So we think it's silly stuff, but it's life and death matter for a lot of people.

Yeah. But so much of, just to generalize, there's so much of what happens in the world that most of us, most of the time, really can't check ourselves. It's not really faith exactly, right? It's more like

confidence that the system works pretty well most of the time. I accept what quantum physicists tell me. I don't know quantum physics. I couldn't, you know, derive the equations and all that. So I just kind of take it like they're mostly right most of the time. So, okay, that's fine. But at least you know that there is a naturalistic plausibility to the claim. Others can inspect it and they can show you their results. And you've got some kind of natural metrics there that

Whereas with the Trinity or with the Holy Spirit or with angels and that, what are the metrics? What are we using to determine the truth value of these religious statements? Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story. I've been trying out a new tactic, and you'll appreciate this. So different kinds of truths. So there's literary truths, you know, like the Brothers Karamazov story.

Dostoevsky's great novel. You know, were there really four brothers Karamazov in 19th century Russia? It's like, what are you talking about? I mean, that's like asking, is there really a Harry Potter or a Jane Austen novel character or something like that? You know, but these carry deeper truths about human nature and society and love and conflict and jealousy and violence. And, you know, that's what great literature is about.

What if the resurrection and all the other religious doctrines of Christianity were never meant to be taken as empirical truths, but they're more like literary truths? They're just stories. You know, sort of a Jordan Peterson, Joseph Campbell kind of mythological way of thinking about it. Anyway, so I've been trying this out on different Christian groups, and they're not buying it.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. The resurrection literally happened. Literally? I mean, maybe it's mythologically. No. If it's mythological, then there's no reason to be a Christian. Like, really? And the answer is yeah. Well, that's the thing. Even if it were a literary truth, there are people who actually believe it's literal truth.

And they should be sympathetic to the concept at least because even Jesus made up stories, the parables. Was there really a prodigal son? No. It doesn't matter. Did he have a name and a social security number? No. Even if Jesus or somebody who wrote the New Testament and Jesus would have said, well, that doesn't matter if it's a true story. It's the moral lesson. So you could ask the same question about Adam and Eve. And a lot of people think,

Now we know there could not have been an Adam and Eve from genetics and from history. And even if there were, they would have come out of Africa, not out of the Middle East. So we know there's something wrong with the story. So a lot of people, a lot of Jewish friends of mine say, well, that's also just a metaphorical thing. So if that's true, and this played into my deconversion when I was thinking my way out of it, out of that box, if the parables, if the prodigal son is a parable,

And if Adam and Eve are a metaphor, then what else in the Bible is just a big figure of speech? Maybe even Yahweh. Maybe even God himself is just one huge literary meaningful statement that gives some purpose in our lives, at least in the lives of those early Israelites. And they didn't even think that it was necessarily true or false, but they embraced the stories as meaningful myths. Well,

If you're Bible-believing evangelical today, you think that's heresy, obviously. You think there really was an Adam and Eve, and there really was a resurrection. Yeah, so why did that take hold? I would argue because of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason. You're supposed to have reasons and evidence.

for your beliefs, not just I believe one thing and you believe something else and we can live peacefully even though we're in conflict. Yeah. Well, I think we all have a lot of, what do you call them? Maybe not beliefs, but we make a lot of guesswork. You know, we guess what's going on. You know, you have a whole book about conspiracies. People think, oh, I think I know what's happening. And so our brains make these imaginative ideas and then we kind of think, well, I think I really know what's happening because I've thought of that.

So is that a belief or is that just an educated guess or is that a wishful thinking? I don't know. Our brains are very creative, aren't they? Yeah. Well, I mean, I started thinking about this with the creationists. You know, did people in the 17th century insist, you know, that the earth had to be a certain age and it had to, you know, whatever science there was, however crude it was, had to match the biblical scriptures? Or is that really more of a modern thing as science takes on more power now?

and validity in society, then religions feel like, well, we need to get on board the science train and make our religious doctrines somehow empirically true. Yeah. And probably at every age, the thinkers, whatever that class of people who were really thinking

Probably did wrestle with those things, but maybe most people didn't. They just took what their priest said. This has got to be true. Yeah. All right. Contradiction. Let's get into that. I really love this little book, and I really do think it's an important concept. So give it to us. What is it, and how do you apply it? So contradiction is a new word that I made up. And if you get that, do you get the Word of Day email by Anu Garg? You should get it. Every day he introduces a new word and the definition of it.

On the first week of September, he introduced his week of newly coined words, and he started with that word, contradiction. Oh, nice. And he said, and he's got, I think, like a half a million subscribers. I don't know. But he said, it's not in the dictionary yet, but it should be. And, you know, the British philosopher A.C. Grayling,

He read the manuscript of this book. In fact, he's on the front cover. He's got a quote on the front cover. He read it in an afternoon and he said, this is a must read. And he's recommending the book as well. And it's kind of scary to pretend to introduce a new word to philosophy, but contradiction is. And basically, contradiction is a reversal, 180 degree reversal of order, right?

And it can be any kind of order. It can be time or relationship or position or causality. In fact, I gave an example from one of your books about a possible causality reversal. Oh, that's right. I forgot which one it was. It had to do with, I think, with fear and conspiracies. But anyway. Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So the easiest way to explain what contradiction is,

Is have you ever been sitting on a train that's not moving and the train next to you starts to move and you briefly think it's you that's moving? Your brain got reversed. Well, that's a contradiction of position and movement. Because if you look at the world only from your own point of view, as if you were the center of everything, you can get things totally backwards. And the most famous, I think, powerful contradiction is the sunrise.

We human beings think we're solid and still. We think the sun is rising. It's just like the train moving next to you. It's hard for us to shake the fact that it's not the sun that's rising. It's we who are rising. And that contradiction took centuries. In fact, people lost their lives over it. Bruno was burned at the stake. And Galileo was persecuted for this.

Because it went against church teaching. The church taught that the sun goes around the earth. So that was really hard to correct that. And even today in our language, we still use the word sunrise. Because from our point of view, that's what we call it. We know the sun is not rising, but we still use that word and that phrase. So it can happen in relationships, in the book,

Killers of the Flower Moon about Oklahoma, which is an amazing book, and they made a movie out of it too with DiCaprio. There's a photograph in the book of a homeowner and her servant. There's this white woman standing by the door of this summer retreat, and next to her is this dark, really dark-skinned Osage woman. Most viewers of that photograph would assume that

that the white woman is the owner and the dark woman is the servant, but it was the reverse. That Indian woman had become wealthy from oil rights and had hired the white woman as a servant. So that's contradictory. It's a 180-degree switch in our brains today.

I also talk about in the 1700s when European scholars and philosophers and scientists were trying to come up with the idea of race. Because before then, there really wasn't a concept of race. And even today now, most scientists agree race is just a concept. It's not really a thing, you know. We can look at regional variations. But back then, these French, mainly French scholars were trying to think,

What happened to the Africans? What's wrong with them? What's wrong? Why did their skin get so dark? And they came up with all these theories and experience. Maybe it's this hot temperature. And they viewed the black and dark skin as an aberration or a deviation from the norm. And when you look at life from your point of view, you think your point of view is the norm.

When actually, we now know the reverse is true. We all came out of Africa and it's the white skin and the light eyes that are a mutation, a deviation from the normal human pigmentation. The mutation that was necessary to survive in the northern hemisphere to get vitamin D, that mutation basically...

created a failure of the pigmentation to reach its full potential. So that's what light eyes and light skin are. It's a mutated failure. And so that's a contradiction. They didn't know it at the time, but they were thinking totally backward about the relationships. So in Contradiction, I give a bunch of different examples. And the primary example in the book is this contradiction of the fine-tuning argument between

for the existence of God, which a lot of people, and I think even you say it's the best argument that the apologists have. The agnostic physicist Steven Weinberg said, yeah, the constants of the universe seem so perfectly fine-tuned, and if any one of them was off by even a hair, life would not be permitted. So it kind of looks like the universe was fine-tuned for us,

And the example I give in the book is that, well, that's kind of like the guy who's amazed. How did they make all those rivers flow right along the state border? How did they do that? It must have taken a huge, expensive civic undertaking to get those rivers to be exquisitely fine-tuned to the border. Exactly. You know, that must have been design, right? Well, of course, the rivers came first. The borders came later.

And Victor Stenger, you knew Victor Stenger, right? He was the astrophysicist. He died about 10 years ago. He wrote a book called The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. And he concluded the universe was not fine-tuned for us. We were fine-tuned for the universe.

We would not have evolved the way we are if the constants and parameters and ratios of those forces weren't the way they are. So it's a 180-degree reversal, and that's what contradiction is, and it has applications in many, many different fields.

Yeah, it's so good. In a way, it's a kind of counterfactual causality. We start off, this is kind of a Humean explanation of causality, where we associate A with B in time. A happens, then B happens. And our brains are naturally wired just to assume that A caused B.

But as we've discovered through science, you can't make that assumption. Often it's the opposite or there's a confounder C that causes both A and B and on and on you go. So the rooster thinks that, you know, whenever he crows, the sun rises. And so he thinks, whoa, look at the power I have, you know, and then until you silence the rooster. So that's your counterfactual and the sun rises anyway. Oh, it wasn't the rooster. Okay.

So you change one of the variables, I mean, it's a basic experimental methodology, and to see if the effect still happens. And yeah, so I just remember the example you used in your book from my conspiracy. Well, the rooster crowing is an example of post-hoc reasoning. Yeah. But it is also... Is that different from contradiction then? Well, yeah, not all post-hoc is contradictory. Okay, all right. But in this particular case, yes, because...

It's not the rooster that caused the sunrise. It was the sunrise, either that particular sunrise or the millions of sunrises in the history of the evolution of roosters that caused the crowing. It was the other way around. Oh, nice. Yes, right. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Now, I suppose the theist might say that's a good counter.

fine-tuning issue. But what we're talking about is why there'd be any of these parameters in the first place, and that you wouldn't even have atoms. It's not just that life evolved in one direction instead of another direction. There wouldn't be any life, there wouldn't be any planets, there wouldn't be any stars, there'd be nothing if it wasn't these particular parameters. Well, there's

So there's three reasonable solutions to that question. There's actually more than three, but some of them are so outrageous, like chaos. You know, there have been gods of chaos, but there's pure chance. That's one. There's multiverse. That's another hypothesis, which hasn't been proved yet, so it's still a hypothesis. And the third one is that there was a supreme being or some intelligent designer who made –

Somehow this designer stumbled upon this primordial soup of random variables and decided, I'm going to tune this one and tune this one until they all come into focus for life to exist. The problem that the proponents of fine-tuning, proponents of supreme being have, is that at least with chance and with the multiverse, you can come up with a probability. And chance is a very low probability. Some people say it's like one...

1 over to like 10 to the 60th or something. It's a tiniest number, but it is a number. It's not zero. It's a number. And the multiverse, whatever the probability of a multiverse, we know it's plausible. There's nothing keeping the idea of a multiverse alive.

plausibly from happening. And in fact, many scientists are arguing for multiverse, that our universe is just one of many, in which case there's more rolls of the dice, in which case there's more likelihood that one of the universes would end up with a consciousness that would allow human life. But Stenger in his book says it's not even that.

It didn't have to be exactly those exact two parameters. He said it's like if you turn this dial this way, but you could turn this dial this way, you could still keep the whole thing in balance. And it wouldn't be human life necessarily. It would be maybe some other type of life. It wouldn't be necessarily terrestrial life. And then Lawrence Krauss in one of his books said that some of those parameters you can actually change. Like if the cosmological constant

We're lower than it is. The universe we live in would be even more life permitting. It's very low. It's close to zero. But it would be a better bet for a cosmic designer to make that constant exactly zero, but it's not. So there is some wiggle room in there. But in any event, the problem that the theists have is we know we can come up with a reasonable probabilistic solution.

estimate for these other explanations, even if they're tiny, even if they're really little, what is the probability of the supreme being?

If you don't come up with a number for that, how are you going to compare it with the others? Maybe the probability of a supreme being is lower than chance. How do they know? And if they know that it's higher, we ask them, well, explain how do you know that the probability of the existence of some immaterial, timeless being is more probable than chance? They don't know that. Do they admit that they don't know that? Isn't it an epistemological starting point for them? It's a given. There is a deity.

Well, except ask them for the number. We have a number for chance, 1 over 10 to the 60th or whatever that is. And we can make a reasonable estimate.

whatever it is, a non-zero estimate for the probability of a multiverse. If they're saying it's higher, then ask them, what is your number and how did you get there? Because the first two numbers are based on known laws of physics, right, within the natural world. What is their estimate based on? How do they investigate and come up with the idea of a probability of this estimate? They're going to have to fall back, like you say, on faith or on revealed truth. Yeah.

Another one of the great questions, why is there something rather than nothing? My favorite answer to this from a physicist is back to Victor Stanger. I think this is a contradiction. He said the question should be reversed. Maybe something is the natural state of things and nothing would be the thing that has to be explained. Yeah, that's a good way. It is contradictory. Besides that, they never define what nothingness means.

What could it possibly mean? When you really dig into it, which I have, it's astonishing what disappears when you start going down the nothing hole, including platonic ideas, and even the idea of a deity has to disappear. At some point, it's just nothingness forever, but not even forever, because there's no time. There can't be a God. One of the best replies I heard to that is that

state of utter nothingness, we can't imagine it. Because in our minds, we're thinking of it as a what? As a point where there, you know what I mean? Even in our brains. But if there was a state of utter nothingness, it would be a state, right? You're saying it is a state as opposed to something. And this state of utter nothingness, if we allow such a possibility, would lack time and

energy, matter, space, dimensions. It would even lack laws and it would lack a law that says nothing comes from nothing. So a state of utter nothingness is unstable. It doesn't have any controls to it. So there's nothing prohibiting something from coming into existence. And if you want to ask why, that's a different question. But the fact that it could happen is a totally different question.

Of course, when the theist says, well, God created ex nihilo, something out of nothing, and only a God could do that, my response is, well, how did he do it? Because if you can explain how he did it, then apparently it is possible. Yeah, and besides, if there's a God, you can't say there's utter nothingness. There's something already. Yeah, that's right. There's already something. There's a God. Yeah, anyway. All right, how do you apply contradiction to, let's say, free will?

Well, okay. So I precede the chapter on free will with a chapter on reflection or mirrors. Oh, yeah. And so that it sets up the chapter on free will. And most of us think when you look in a mirror that it's reversing left and right, but it's not. If your right hand's to the east, your right hand's to the east, the left hand's to the west. What mirrors reverse is not left and right.

but front to back. If you're pointing at yourself north, it's pointing south. So it's not a left and right reversal. And you have to ask the question, even Einstein asked, why do mirrors not reverse top and bottom? You know, even if you're lying on your side in a mirror, why doesn't it reverse? Why doesn't, you know, so it's a weird thing is because our brains are thinking we're looking at another person looking back at us. And the way I try to picture it is,

If you're holding a picture of yourself on a piece of paper, you'll see yourself like someone else does, where right and left don't correspond. But if you pick up the paper and turn it around and hold it up to the light and look through the back side of it, then you see yourself corresponding like in a mirror. So think of the mirror as not as the person's looking at you, but when you look in a mirror, that reflection is looking with you.

Not toward you, but away from you. It's not looking. It's not like a person staring at you. That person is you continuing as if the light path had not been interrupted by the surface of the mirror. So free will, I think, and, you know, I have a whole book on free will. I wrote the forward for that. Yeah. And I agree with you. I think 99 percent. And even with Sam Harris, I think maybe 98 percent that free will is an illusion.

Although, where he and I differ is that he thinks free will is a pernicious illusion, and I think it's a beautiful, useful illusion, but that's a different debate. So, if you think of free will, the mirror, forward and backward in the mirror, as forward and backward in time.

If you look backward in time from today, we can look back and see, like Sapolsky wrote in his book Determined recently, you can see that it was all predetermined. You can look back and you can see all the previous causes, and it's obvious when you look back. But when you're looking forward in time, you can't see that. When you look forward in time, even if everything was predetermined,

strictly deterministic, which most of us think it was, we don't know it yet. We don't see it yet. And our brains are juggling these options. Am I going to choose chocolate or am I going to choose strawberry? I don't know. After you choose chocolate and strawberry, you can look back and say, yeah, that was predetermined. You can see why because of all these reasons. But when you're looking forward, there's this period of uncertainty that

And our brains are really good at trying to anticipate. That's probably played a lot to do with our survival. If you can anticipate the future better, you have better chances of surviving in the world. And so we play that game always. We're anticipating. What am I going to do? There's a period of uncertainty where you actually don't currently know what you're going to do in the future. That period of uncertainty is what creates this illusion of freedom. You're in it right now and you don't know.

And you're imagining, and so we have this, I think it's a great illusion. I know others disagree with me. But so it's, maybe it's a byproduct of consciousness. Maybe we just have to live with free will because we,

We're beings that are not only aware, but we're aware of ourselves being aware. And that creates this loop, you know, emergent loop. And so that creates this illusion of consciousness. And so maybe free will comes with that, but whatever, we have it. We all agree that we feel it. Even the strictest determinist feels, you know, I've never had a determinist that actually believes it when they're living, when they're actually living their lives. But see, I'm a determinist and I still feel, you know what I mean? Um,

And so I embrace the illusion. I think it's similar to the illusion of the depth perception, which is playing tricks with our brains. But that helps us navigate the physical landscape. And I think free will is an illusion that helps us navigate the moral landscape that we live in. But a bigger question, I think, is if there's a God who is omniscient, that means he knows everything in the past and in the present and in the future. He even knows his own future decisions.

This God knows what he's going to do tomorrow at 12 noon. He knows that, right? So that God doesn't have a period of uncertainty. That God doesn't have that what if in his own mind. He can't have it because he knows what he's going to do. That God can't have free will. If you know the future, you can't have free will. You're like a robot. You're like a predetermined being. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, that's a good piece of reasoning. Yeah, I really like that chapter and that forward I wrote for you. I expanded into a

a chapter in my next book on truth. And here's what I've added to that. So let's take that argument that Sam popularized. It wasn't his invention, but could you have done otherwise? And, you know, he presents different scenarios. You know, the murderer, if you replaced every one of your atoms with his atoms, you'd do what he did and so on.

You know, that's only true if we live in a block universe in which everything has already happened. And we're just, you know, what if you watch the movie from outside, you'd see you didn't have a choice, you know. And so could you have done otherwise if you rewound the tape? Well, if you rewound the tape, if it was a read only memory tape, then no, you couldn't you couldn't have done otherwise because it's just a recording of what already happened. As you said, it's now it's determined.

But we don't live in a block universe. We have the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, and you can't step into the same river twice, as Eric Clyde has said, because the river is not the same and you're not the same. So moving forward, I argue, it's not just that you don't know what the future is. Of course you don't, but the universe doesn't know. The universe is not predetermined, and therefore you can learn from what happened in the past. So...

You can't have an exact same scenario in the future that's atom for atom the same as exactly what already happened. That's not possible. From this point on. From this point forward, right? So you really are making real choices. You know, last time I went left, this time I'm going to go right. Right.

And after you go right, then yes, okay, now it's determined. Then you can look backward through the mirror and you can say, I understand why I made that decision to go right or to have chocolate instead of strawberry. Then you would see it. But before it happens, and I guess people raise the idea of quantum uncertainty. Yeah, but that doesn't get you anything because that's just randomness. It doesn't, except if you re-round the tape,

you might not end up at the exact same. Oh, that's true. Okay. Yes. Okay. That's a good point. Yes. Right. Okay. So then you might be, and I don't, I, and, and even then quantum uncertainty evens out in the brain. I mean, it's not like one slight quantum difference is going to make your thoughts change at all. I mean, there's electrical fluctuations in the brain that are all random and yet we still have coherent thoughts, you know? Yeah.

I find some of those big questions, like why is there something rather than nothing? What do you mean by nothing? You know, at some point, I think we hit an epistemological wall just of what our brains are capable of conceptualizing.

You just, you know, imagine you don't exist. How am I supposed to imagine that? Because somebody's doing the imagining. It's not possible. You know, it's like the hard problem of consciousness. What's it like to be a bat? How the hell should I know? If I was a bat, I would just be a bat. I wouldn't be thinking, oh, now I'm a person inside the bat brain, and now I know what it's like, and it's just conceptually so problematic. Well, see, when I was a preacher, I would have said,

You're just proving that the human mind is limited, but God's mind is not. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, let's play that out. So then God would know what it's like to be a bat. Presumably. Well, I suppose so, if God knows everything. He is a bat. Some people say he's bat crazy, but I don't know if that's... Yeah. I don't know. Again, immortality...

you know, you get to live forever. There was imagine a world where there's nothing, you know, I just, you know, Dawkins calls this middle land, right? Our brains are wired to do certain things on the savannas of Africa, certain size, certain speed, certain, you know, physical concepts, you know, just, you know, our, our physics is kind of a folk physics, you know, even a Newtonian mechanics is a bit counterfactual and,

for our brains and Einsteinian or quantum physics is completely counter intuitive for us. We just can't grasp certain things. Yeah. But we have tools that can amplify our thoughts. Mathematics, uh,

And peer review, I suppose, is one of those tools. All right, what about morality? Are there certain moral principles that we can then apply counter... counter... Contradiction reasoning, not counterfactual. So you cite C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, proposes that since humans universally agree that there are actions we ought to do or ought not to do, we are admitting that we are governed by something outside of ourselves.

Then you quote Lewis. And I bring this up because everybody look around. You can find cars like these on auto trader, like that car right in your tail. Or if you're tailgating right now, all those cars doubling as kitchens and living rooms are on auto trader too.

Are you working out and listening to this ad at the same time? Well, multitasking pro, cars like the ones in the gym parking lot are for sale on AutoTrader. New cars, used cars, electric cars, maybe even flying cars. Okay, no flying cars, but as soon as they get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. Just you wait. AutoTrader. But he cites C.S. Lewis. They still seem to love C.S. Lewis even more today than before.

Okay, again.

Expand on that. So, yeah, we get that a lot in debates. It comes up a lot. You know, the cosmological, the design, and then moral arguments come up a lot in debates. And Lewis is equivocating. He uses the word behind. There's something behind it.

Like the golden rule, for example. I think most of us agree that the golden rule is a principle, some would even say a law, that transcends us, right? It's like transcends humanity. But the word transcend or the word behind or beyond can be taken metaphysically like theists imagine that when something transcends, there's an actual realm up there, right?

Or the word transcend can simply be taken naturally as like when I'm playing jazz piano in a good band, I'm playing these chords and these notes. And what I'm thinking is music theory. Music theory transcends all the notes I'm playing, all the chords. There's this structure of music theory that's bigger and broader. It's above and beyond the actual notes I'm playing, right?

But can I conclude, therefore, that since music theory, should I put a capital M on it? Music theory exists in some music theory realm out there that's above and beyond, you know, our natural world? Or is that just a concept that we're thinking of? And I think that's the mistake that C.S. Lewis and many theists are making is that they think the word transcend means actually transcending in a supernatural way. There's actually a world behind there.

When we look at moral laws like the golden rule or other moral principles, we can say, yeah, they do transcend humanity because they seem to appear in all cultures, right? But does that mean that morality is a big capital M thing that's up there that somehow is existing now?

outside of nature in some way and that's the equivocation you're mixing one use of transcend with another use of transcend and then it's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat aha we have a supernatural world now because there's these things these uh these metaphysical things out there like two plus two equals four or immaterial minds or something that proves that it doesn't prove there's a god but it proves there must be some some super world out there in which a god would live

And I think that's just a simple mistake of logic. So that would be a contradiction then in reasoning? The contradiction would be instead of thinking that morality is bottom-up, you think that it's top-down. So bottom-up morality, whatever your natural moral system might be, and in my case I use the word harm, I think morality comes down to acting with the intention of minimizing harm. And others would use other moral philosophies differently.

But whatever it is,

harm can be measured and you can justify your moral decisions by looking at the real world. How much chemicals should I dump in this river? Or what happens if I do this? Or what happens if we can actually measure real harm in the real world and make moral decisions based on a bottom-up idea of justifying it from the world? But a theistic morality flips it 180 degrees. That's

examine what's above. You can't cross-examine it. It's a man behind the curtain saying, because I said so.

And that's not really a true morality. That's just, that's submission. That's, you know, Islam means submission. And most of the Bible is about, most of the Old Testament especially is about submission. So I think naturalistic morality flips the contradiction 180 degrees and we can firmly ground our moral claims. We might even say moral facts, right?

In reality, in real nature, and that's the mistake that a lot of people make, I think, is surrendering our real natural moral faculties and just giving it up to the orders of a lord or a king. Yeah. Well, I think what you're arguing there is you could derive a logic using, say, game theory behind the golden rule theory.

you know, a should do X to B because you would want B to do X to a in reverse or something like that. There's kind of a logic to it. What's behind what's good for me is actually also good for you using Dawkins terminology. Um,

It's actually selfish of me to do something nice for you, even if it costs me something now, because in the long run, you're more likely to be nice to me when my resources are, say, limited or I'm having a rough patch and I need some help. Now, one more piece of that. It's not enough for me to fake pretending that I like you, Dan, but I really don't. I'm just a psychopath and I'm using you.

Because you are tuned to being sensitive to being manipulated and taken advantage of by psychopaths. So you look out for that. So you look for clues. Does Schirmer really like me or is he just saying that? And we're pretty good at judging other people this way. Not perfect, but we're pretty good at that. So you actually have to believe it. I really actually like doing nice things for Dan because he's my friend.

And that's a form of, well, I don't know the words again, objective, absolute, transcendent morality. I'm not, it's not a calculator. It's not a utilitarian calculation. I'm doing this for Dan because in three months, I'm hoping he does this for me. It's not that it's that I actually like doing it. And then you sense that from me. Well, I think it's that exactly, but I think it's more than that. I think it's also evolved instincts. I remember I was,

You know, we do it for people we don't even know. Even for people we don't even like, we will be kind and good to. I was in the airport in Detroit. I was flying to be on the Phil Donahue show for the second time. And I was in line. And back then, you could go to the gates. It was totally different. And there was a couple of the line next to me. They had a little baby in this baby carrier.

on top of the suitcases, on top of this luggage carrier, about three or four feet off the ground. And the father must have wandered away or something because the corner of my eye saw that baby kick and that carrier started rolling off. And I saw myself reaching out. It wasn't like I decided. I reached out and I took a step and I just caught it with the end of my fingertips just in time. And about a second later, the mother grabbed the other side and

That baby would have fallen on this hard floor and she would have been too late. So there was no calculation there. There was no game theory there. There was no do I like that? I don't know. They might have been Republicans. I don't know. They might have been. Who knows what? Who knows if I would have liked them at all as people, but something instinctive.

naturally happened. And I think it goes back to just this simple idea that those ancestors of ours who were not stopping babies from falling were less likely to reproduce and breed to survive into the future than those. So I inherited these instincts from

From my ancestors who survived because of those basic ideas. And why do you hold the door open from the person behind you? You don't know who that is. You know, why are you doing that? You know, who cares if you didn't? You wouldn't even. But there's something in us naturally, instinctively that.

doesn't replace but kind of precedes logical thinking and game theory and moral systems. Yes, yes, yes. I see what you're saying. I completely agree with that. Natural selection has done the game theory calculations for us, and we're left with emotions. The analogy I use is the evolutionary psych findings about waist-to-hip ratio. 0.67 is what men prefer in women. Women prefer the kind of pyramid-shaped men, broad shoulders, narrow waist, and so on. I like my...

Yeah, like you. It's like you, Dad. But no one walks around with calipers doing measurements, right? We just look and go, oh, that looks nice.

and I find that attractive or whatever. And, you know, it's natural selection did all those calculations later. These are proxies for health or, you know, whatever it is, something like that. You know, so when we come back at it to the theist, well, here's why, here's the basis and use game theory. Say it sounds kind of utilitarian and calculating, but it's not in that instinctive sense, as you mentioned. Yeah. But at least what happened there was avoiding harm.

In my moral system, I think most of the time it comes down to some kind of harm in the real world that you can measure. Even psychological harm is harm. So, you know, do no harm. Try not to hurt others. And when you do unto others...

That's actually not a very well, not a good way to state it because you might do something to others that you would like them to do unto you, but you might have really bad taste or have kinky habits or something. People are different from you. And, you know, Bailey Harris or L. Harris in their books, you know, the Stardust books, they say, they call it the platinum rule. We should...

do unto others as they would have done unto them. You know, so Jesus said it okay, but there's better ways to formulate that philosophy. I call it the ask first principle. So my favorite example is, again, back to evolutionary psychology and male-female differences in sexual, I don't know, number of partners and

and promiscuity and so on, everybody knows men would like to have more partners with women. Women are more risk averse than men. And so on that famous experiment where, you know, the one student walks up to the other student and says, you know, I found you attractive.

and was wondering if you'd go out with me. Second scenario, hi, saw you standing there, found you attractive, wonder if you'd come back to my apartment with me. The third scenario, hi, so on and so forth, I'm wondering if you'd have sex with me tonight. Total strangers, right? So when men ask women, of course, it plummets dramatically for the last one. In fact, it goes to zero.

Uh, but for the opposite one, you know, if a woman asks a man that, you know, hi, I found you attractive. I was wondering if you'd like to have sex with me. Most of the guys, it was like 60% said, sure. And, and some of them actually made excuses. Well, I can't tonight, but how about tomorrow night? Right. So, you know, uh, just to, to, to ask yourself, how would I feel if a total stranger woman walked up to me and asked me to have sex? Well, I would be just fine. Thank you. Uh, but women don't feel that way. So you have to ask first. Yeah.

Well, it's true. There's so many other factors there, too. And we all vary across the species. Some are more than others. Cultural differences and so on. And I guess it depends on your mood and what the other person looks like. Who knows? There's all these other factors. Yes, of course. But here I quote from Abraham Lincoln's, As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. And in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.

I found this other example he used of countering arguments for slavery. 1854, unpublished note, he made the argument to what our modern ear sounds like a perfect articulation of behavioral game theory.

If A can prove conclusively that he may of right enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave A? Oh, well, you say, well, A is white and B is black. It's color. Then the lighter having the right to enslave the darker. Well, take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own.

Oh, you don't mean color exactly. You mean that whites are intellectually the superior of blacks and therefore have the right to enslave them. Take care again. By this rule, you are to be the slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. Or woman, yeah. Or woman, yeah. Well, of course, he's writing back in the day when they just used men. But you say it's a question of interest. And if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. Then if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. I mean, that's pretty basic reasoning.

But almost nobody believed that back then. Yeah. Well, it probably comes down to power. If you have the power to do it, many people would just do it. Yeah. But back to the morality thing and the theists and your, you know, contradiction. There seems to be, yeah, the sense that if there's not an outside source saying this is right, this is wrong.

It doesn't feel like there's something real about it. Like, yeah, but it still comes down to your subjective feelings about things. And if I want to murder people, then it's okay. Who are you to say that it's wrong without an outside objective transcendent source like a deity? Well, because murdering causes harm. People say what Hitler thought what he was doing, Hitler believed it was right.

But we can objectively measure those actions and the consequences of them and see, did it create more harm than was necessary? Or was it intentional harm? And we can then, if we choose to be moral, you don't have to.

Some people choose not to be. But if we choose to be moral, then we need some kind of a metric. And I think a consequentialist metric is one good way to do it. There might be other ways. Utilitarianism can be. Although that's really tricky. How in the world are we supposed to

measure the greatest happiness for the greatest number that's like an impossible thing to do maybe even governments can't do that but yeah but in your daily life a baby falling onto a hard airport floor i think it's pretty clear you want to stop something like that right and in our daily lives we can see what and even if we can't see if it's if it's our intention to try to end up with less overall harm in the real world then we are acting morally and

But then another question the theist and the apologist will raise is, well, okay, but then why ought we to be moral? Where does the ought even come from in the first place? And the only thing I can say to that is that ought is not a thing. Ought is only one half of a conditional statement.

If we wish to live in a world with less harm, then we ought to act in ways to minimize it. We don't have to, but if there's enough of us who consider morality to be important, then we ought to live more.

by that principle. Yeah. Here's how philosopher Robert Penick put it to me when I sent him my writings on the naturalistic fallacy fallacy, I called it. I think the argument from is to ought is a very thin one. Here's what he wrote to me. The way the argument works is to say if you want to get a moral conclusion, you need at least one moral premise.

It's not that there aren't factual premises, and I took this to be your main point, that science gives us some moral premises that make a difference, like do no harm. And that's exactly right. But the naturalistic fallacy doesn't say you can't have factual premises. It says you can't have only factual premises. You have to have something that has an ought,

such that together with the is, you can get an ought in the conclusion. And I would say that the way you make your argument is actually bringing in oughts into your premises, and so you're not actually denying the naturalistic fallacy. Really, you're accepting it, but building in some ought premises from the beginning, and that's the right way to do it. This was like, for example, would you rather live in South Korea or North Korea? Everybody would say South Korea, of course. Why?

Is it just completely random? Is it relativistic? We just happen at this moment in time in history to prefer democracies over autocracies? I would say no, no. People really prefer freedom and choice and autonomy versus being enslaved in a dictatorship. Well, why? Well, that's built into our nature. You know, we evolved to have those propensities, but why? And so on. At some point, you know, you just have to build into some moral premise. I'm starting with this point.

like do no harm i don't want to suffer i'd prefer to be healthy than diseased i'd prefer to be free than enslaved and so on yeah yeah yeah i think that's true and i think just by nature every living organism recoils from harm i mean that's

You don't even have to think about it. You stick your hand in the fire. You don't say, now, should I withdraw my hand from the fire? If I keep it in here, those cells are going to be damaged and it's going to create, it's really going to compromise my ability. I'm going to reason to pull my hand out. Well, obviously, as...

living organisms in a natural environment, we recoil naturally from things that are harmful. And so any moral system you come up with, maybe mine's not the best, but anyone has to take harm and

into account in some way. And it's, and with more freedom, uh, you have more of a chance then to avoid the harm than in a country or a place where you don't have that choice. How do you deal with the, so yours is a consequentialist utilitarian calculus. So, you know, the counter, uh, trolley problem is the, um, you know, the, the physician has five dying patients, uh,

in five different ORs and there's sitting in the waiting room is a healthy guy and he can, you know, sacrifice the guy, take all five organs, save the five patients. You know, what's wrong with that? Well, if you live in a society that values individual human rights, then it's obviously wrong to violate someone's, someone's rights. You've introduced rights. Well, yeah, if you live in a society that has that, some societies don't and didn't, you know, but we have come to a place where we do, we do value rights and,

I think a lot of these trolley problems are manufactured. We're never going to see them in real life. I mean, if you can base your life on some weird, you know, and some of them, there actually is no right answer. And I think one mistake we make with morality is insisting there has to be a right answer to every moral question. Sometimes there's not. Sometimes you have to make a calculus that, for example,

should you pull the switch away from five people on the track to one person on the track? By doing that, you have deliberately killed that one person, but you saved five lives, right? Most of us would go with the math, with the numbers, and we'd say, well, it's better to save five than, you know, it's better to save the one, better to save the five than the one. But suppose it was a bridge going over the tracks and, you know,

The way to save them was by pushing this big, heavy person over the bridge to stop the train, right? Then it's the same mathematical calculation, but it's psychologically totally different because now you're actually looking in the eyes of another human being and you're having to make that decision. Most of us would not push the person over. Most of us would say,

That's not my problem. You know, I didn't bring the train. It's a tragedy, right? Most of us, but you could have saved those lives if you had done that, right? So just by nature, I mean, could you take a gun and put it in someone's face and pull the trigger? Psychopaths can do that. And that's why they want the psychopaths on the front lines of the military to do those deeds. Even if I was commanded to do that, I don't think I could physically, emotionally, psychologically do something like that. But

So a lot of these moral questions depend on who you are as a person and what your psychology is.

Do you know that person that you're going to push over or not? I don't think there's always a right answer to a lot of those questions. By the way, yeah, there's even a book called Would You Push the Fat Man Off the Bridge? Yeah, yeah, I think I've seen that. This is a funny story, Dan. I just recorded an episode a couple days ago with Joshua Green from Harvard who pioneered the fMRI brain scans while subjects were presented with the different trolley problems to see which areas of the brain were lighting up.

And so he has this kind of two system theory of moral judgment in the brain, rapid cognition, like system one, system two. And system one is rapid cognition, which is, you know, I'm not going to push the fat man off the bridge versus system two, where it's more calculated like the

you know, sacrifice the one to save the five kind of thing. Anyway, the funny bit about this story though, is as he's presenting the, the, the scenario, he says, it's a guy with a big backpack, a heavy backpack on the bridge. Would you push him off? I'm like, you mean the fat man? He goes, no, no, no, you can't say that anymore. It's a guy with a backpack. I went, what? It's ableist. Oh, okay. That's how far we've come. You can't even use it in a scenario. Yeah.

Anyway, that's really fun. Okay, let's finish up here. Contradiction and the question of what's the purpose or meaning of life. How do you think about that? So there's no chapter in that book about purpose and meaning. It deals with contradiction. But in my book, Life Driven Purpose, which you probably know is a contradiction of Purpose Driven Life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Rick Warren's book. That's why I brought it up. So...

I think purpose comes, there is no purpose of life. If there were a purpose of life, that would cheapen us. But that's not to say there's no purpose in life. And I think that's a mistake a lot of theists make, that purpose has to come from above, from the orders of a commanding officer or a slave master or a king or your parent or whatever tells you what to do. And then you dutifully, oh, I'm going to do what I was told to do. And that's my job. Well, if you're in the military,

then you do have a purpose. You do what your commanding officer tells you, and you do that, and you report back that you did, and then you've fulfilled your purpose. But that's not really your purpose. You're following someone else's orders, right? In most theistic systems, purpose comes from following the orders of the boss, right? Where I think in real life, purpose is not top-down.

Yeah, I should have had a chapter on that in Contradiction. You're right. Purpose is not top-down. It's bottom-up. Purpose comes in life, not of life and meaning of life. Purpose comes from working to solve problems. You have problems to solve, you know, eating and finding a mate and escaping predators and building a good life and doing this. And problems can be...

drastic or they can be simple things what's the best way to do my artwork or what's the you know whatever the problems are and we find immense joy and meaning in our in working to solve those problems to better ourselves

So if you live in an environment where there's no problems to solve, you have no purpose. Heaven's going to be a purposeless existence because there's no problems to solve. And we really get off as human beings on striving and working and struggling and trying this and trying to make things better, to build a better house maybe or to resist the

I don't know. I wish we had more attention to global warming, for example, or natural disasters or war or whatever the problems are that threaten us. And there's hundreds of them. If you'll pick one of those, pick something in your life. Maybe your brother or sister died of a rare disease. Well, pick that and work to stop. And now you're trying to solve a problem and your life has purpose and it has meaning. Purpose doesn't come from flattering the ego of the slave master. That's

That's their purpose. That's not your purpose. So if you want a purposeful life, you have to get rid of the master and live bottom up instead of top down. I always like Christopher Hitchens' description of the Christian heaven as a celestial North Korea. The dictator knows everything you're thinking. Oh, no! And if you look at the biblical definition, you know, in Revelation, it's this big cubic city with one street in it and...

these mansions and there's no marriage or sex or any of that going on. The whole purpose of that is to praise the king for eternity. You're just there. And apparently that street is not for vehicles. It's just for the, you know, for the monarch to parade down and say, I'm great. You all need to praise me. So is that, will that be an exciting existence? There are people who think it is. There are people whose mindsets are

That my Lord, my father, my master is my everything, and I give it all. And you see them in church with their hands raised. Yes, Jesus. And they think praising God for eternity is going to be the most beautiful thing in the world. Yeah, the other thing from Hitch I liked was when he was dying, actually. He wrote that series of essays in Vanity Fair.

in which he said it's like getting a cancer diagnosis, stage four, there is no stage five. It's like being at the party and being tapped on the shoulder saying, you have to leave now. Like, but I'm having a good time. Sorry, you have to leave now. So then he carries it out. He goes, okay, so you're bummed out about that, but let's say you're at the party and you get tapped on the shoulder and you're told you can never leave the party. It's like, well, wait a minute. It's a nice party and everything, but at some point...

He was brilliant. It's so good. Yeah.

All right, Dan. Well, congratulations on the book and the new word. Contraduction. Contraduction. I really love it. If enough people say it, it'll get into the dictionary. And by the way, Steven Pinker has a blurb on the top there. An ingenious word for an invaluable concept. Very nice. And you know, Steven Pinker is the editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. Right, right. So maybe it'll get in there. Maybe. The 2025 edition will have it in there. Hey, I love your work, Mike. You're amazing.

a great asset. All right, Dan.