Debate

I watched a debate on Youtube that involved Sam Harris, Dinesh D'Souza, Danniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, Nassim Taleb, Robert Wright and a Shmuley Boteach.  They were arguing for and against religion.  Harris, Dennet and Hitchens were against it.  Taleb, D'Souza and Boteach were in favor.  Wright took a neutral point of view.

Arguing against religion is not a strictly atheistic point of view.  It does not follow from the existence of a supreme being or creator of the universe that any religion that humans practice is valid.  Indeed it is possible that such a being does exist and that nevertheless all human religions are in error.

Boteach argued that many of the claims of science just as implausible as those of religion.  In this I believe he was mistaken.  We have evidence that makes literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis extremely implausible.  In terms of plausibility the scientists are on firm ground and religion much less so.  In order to interpret traditional religious teaching in a way that predicts modern scientific discovery we either need to ignore problematic parts or not interpret them literally.  By picking and choosing which parts we will interpret literally we could "predict" any discoveries.

Then there were the moral arguments, which Sam Harris argued were beside the point.  On this score I suspect that being religious institutes a rightward shift in politics.  Thus religious people were more likely to support Fascism and less likely to support Communism.  By far the Communists committed the greater number of atrocities in the twentieth century.  It has been pointed out that wars and atrocities accounted for one out of twenty-two deaths in the twentieth century.  A rational look at this would be to point out that we need to look into what caused the other twenty-one.  Some of the least religious countries have some of the longest life expectancies.  However, correlation does not imply causation.

It is true that the utility of a belief has no bearing on its validity.  However, the utility of a belief is something that is important in and of itself.  Indeed Sam Harris makes many arguments about the utility of religion.  He believes that it is harmful.  I would argue that it would not be a good idea to assign blame and credit to others on the basis of religious belief or the lack thereof.  We have no way of determining whether an individual believes.  As a practical matter this is what we are interested in.  Arguments about whether the world would be a better place with more or less religion will change the world only to the extent that we apply coercion or disapproval to one side or the other.

Taleb makes an interesting argument that science convinces people to make decisions on the basis of certainty, whereas we need to be able to deal with uncertainty.  He believes that religion better enables people to do this.  Religion has been around for thousands of years.  A long period of survival indicates that there is a better chance that this system of ideas won't lead to some fatal error, or so he claims.

I should point out here that his advice in financial matters is that we should put most of our money in bonds or savings accounts, and take risks only with what we are prepared to lose.  That is we should put it into a zero-risk investment.  However, in reality there is no such thing.  Currencies inflate.  Governments sometimes default on their debt.  Banks have been known to go bankrupt.  Nor can we be certain that the government will be willing and able to insure our deposits.  Everyone could decide tomorrow that gold is just a yellow metal.  While bank deposits and bonds may be seen as close to risk-free investments there is no religious tradition that tells us that this is so.

I doubt the claim that religion helps people deal with uncertainty.  I suspect that it would be much more effective to try a more direct method.  Just as a religious person can say "God only knows" a non-religious person can say "nobody knows".  His point might have some validity when dealing with certain moral traditions.  Their long survival does indeed indicate that they survived long enough to become traditions.  My own attempts at constructing a rational system of moral and ethical values agree on many points with more traditional approaches.  I think that much of what "rational" people have said about sexual morality is nonsense.

The point that I found to be the most offensive was that made by Boteach, who said that irreligion was incompatible with morality.  He stated that if people were not going to believe in God then they should at least be honest, like Nietzsche, and reject morality.  He claimed that the atheists were getting their morality from the ten commandments.  I believe that I have a system of moral and ethical values that does what he claims cannot be done.  My system doesn't depend on the existence of God.  Humans will assign blame and credit to your actions, and there is a rational way of making such assignments.  While it might seem that the best course of action is to merely seem to be good, you are unlikely to be able to fool all of the people all of the time.  Hence it pays to be good.