The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig

Good evening and welcome to the

debate

about God. My name is Malcolm Phelan and together with Joseph Stanfield, our not my cry and the deans, we have organized the

debate

that you are about to see now if you are here tonight to hear an exchange of views. an enlightening discussion or just a good show. I know you're not here to listen to a long speech for college students. First I'll keep this brief. Let me recognize those in the Notre Dame community who made this debate possible. The debate on God was also sponsored. by the Institute of Liberal Arts Scholarship and the Henckles Lecture Series with additional generous support from the College of Arts and Letters the College of Science and the College of Business campus ministry the department of classics the department of history the liberal studies program and chemistry the ILS Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Department of German and Russian the Center for Philosophy of Religion the Center for Undergraduate Academic Engagement the Rooney Center for American Democracy the Glenn Family Honors Program and Learning More beyond the classroom I would finally like to read a quick passage that beautifully summarizes the reason we are here tonight Kenneth Burke writes this in the philosophy of literary form imagine you enter a room you are late when you arrive others have long preceded you and they are engaged in a heated discussion—an argument too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about; in fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so no one present is qualified to retrace all the steps that were taken before you heard a while until you decide you've caught the tenor. of the argument and then you put your or someone responds you respond another comes to your defense another aligns against you for you the shame or God's holiday of your opponent depending on the quality of the help of his allies, however, the discussion is endless, the hour is getting late and you must depart and you leave with the discussion still vigorously in progress, so now join me in welcoming two more to our discussion, Sam Harris and William Lane Craig, and welcome to my moderator teacher.

Mike Ray from the Center for Philosophy of Religion, thanks Malcolm, welcome to the second installment of the God debate. My name is Michael Ray. I am a professor of philosophy here at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion. One of the sponsors of tonight's event is the Center for Philosophy of Religion, founded in the late 1970s with the goal of promoting cutting-edge research on topics in philosophy of religion and distinctively Christian philosophy. One of our goals and sponsorship of the God Discussion Series is to try to bring some of the topics discussed among our researchers to a broader non-academic audience and in a format that will hopefully be fun and engaging.

Our show tonight, as you know, is a debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. They meet for the first time to discuss the question of whether the foundations of moral values ​​are natural or supernatural. William Lane Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is best known among philosophers for his extensive and influential work in the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion. He is known to the general public as someone who is able to articulate and defend the doctrines of the Christian faith in a way that is Very accessible but also philosophically and theologically rigorous, he became a Christian at the age of 16.

He completed university studies at Wheaton College and has two doctorates, one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham and the other in theology from the University of Munich. He has written or edited more than 30 books, as well as more than one hundred articles in professional philosophy journals. and theology known as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Movement Sam Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Landscape The End of Faith and A Letter to a Christian Nation The End of Faith won the pen de 2005 nonfiction mr. Harris's writings have been published in more than 15 languages.

He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone and other magazines. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist and The Times. London The Boston Globe The Atlantic The Annals of Neurology and elsewhere Mr. Harris is co-founder and executive director of the Reason Project, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values ​​in society. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA. The structure of tonight's debate will be as follows: Next, each debater will take 20 minutes for their opening speech followed by rebuttals of 12 minutes and eight minutes respectively and then closing speeches of five minutes each at the conclusion of the debate, we will have about 30 minutes for audience questions if you wish.

To ask a question, line up behind one of the two microphones in front or on the balcony, we will let Notre Dame students ask the first four questions tonight, so if you are not a Notre Dame student and somehow you are at the front of the line one row please allow one student to go in front of you the time will be strictly kept there is a timekeeper at the front who can be seen by both speakers and once each speaker's time has elapsed they will be given 15 seconds at most to finish your final sentence before being rudely interrupted by me, the timekeeper, because we keep time strict, we ask that you maintain all applause and other indications of agreement or disagreement, cheering, surfing to the crowd and the like until the end of the debate, remember that flash photography, video recording and active mobile phones are prohibited.

Finally, remember that Notre Dame is the number one institution in the world for philosophy of religion and also has one of the best theology departments in the world. Any questions you can't ask during the 25 or 30 minutes of Q&A, you can. ask if your local faculty in the coming days and weeks and now continue with the program, good evening, it's wonderful to be here at the University of Notre Dame and I want to start by thinking I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I need to do this, let's get started. Every speech, I check with the timekeeper to make sure it's ready and then the timekeeper will press "go" and then you can continue, so you have it open, I say "start", sorry for rushing, Professor Craig gets the first word in the debate dr.

Harris has the last word timekeeper are you ready? It's 20 minutes. I want to begin by thanking the Center for the Philosophy of Religion for the invitation to participate in tonight's debate. The question of the correct foundation of morality is not only of enormous importance. academic interest but also one that has enormous practical application to our lives now to begin with an important point of agreement dr. Harris and I agree that there are objective moral values ​​and duties. To say that moral values ​​and duties aim to say that they are valid and binding regardless of human opinion.

For example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively bad is to say that it was evil even though the Nazis who carried it out thought it was good and it would still have been bad even if the Nazis had won World War II and managed to whitewash the Holocaust. brain or exterminate everyone who disagreed with them so that everyone would think the Holocaust was good. of the great merits of dr. Harris's recent book, The Moral Landscape, is his bold assertion of the objectivity of moral values ​​and duties that rages against what he calls the list of overeducated moral atheists and relativists who refuse to condemn as objectively incorrect terrible atrocities like the genital mutilation of little girls who rightly declares that if only one person in the world grabbed a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic razor, and gave her the smell back, the only question would be what How severely should that person be punished, what is not in doubt is that such a person has done something objectively terribly wrong.

The question before us this afternoon is what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values ​​and duties, what grounds them? What makes certain objectively good or bad actions right or wrong In tonight's debate I will defend two basic arguments: first, if God exists, then we have a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties, and second, if God does not exist, then we have no solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties. Now notice that these are conditional statements. I won't be arguing tonight that God exists, maybe dr. Harris is right that atheism is true and that would not affect the truth of my two arguments.

All that would follow is that objective moral values ​​and duties would be contrary to dr. Harris doesn't exist, so let's look at that first argument together. If God exists, then we have a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties. Here I want to examine two subpoints with you. First, theism provides a solid foundation for objective moral values. Moral values ​​have to do with what is good or bad according to the theistic view, objective moral values ​​are based on God as st. Anselm saw that God is, by definition, the greatest conceivable being and therefore the supreme good.

In fact, he's not just perfectly good. It is the locust paradigm of moral value. God's own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature. loving, generous, faithful, kind, etc., therefore, if God exists, objective moral values ​​exist completely independently of human beings. Second theism provides a solid foundation for objective moral duties from a theistic view. Objective moral duties are constituted by the commandments of God. The moral nature of God is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine Commandments that constitute our moral duties or obligations, far from being arbitrary, God's commandments must be consistent with his holy and loving nature, our duties are then constituted by the commandments of God. and these in turn reflect its essential character in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

All of man's moral duty can be summarized in the two great Commandments: First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your heart and with all your heart. your mind and second you will love your neighbor Like yourself, on this basis we can affirm the objective rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice and equality and condemn selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination and oppression as objectively wrong . In summary, then theism has the resources for a solid basis for morality, it grounds both objective moral values ​​and objective moral duties, and therefore I think it is evident that if God exists, we have a solid basis for values. and objective moral duties.

Let us then move on to my second argument that if God does not exist then we do not have a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and we should first consider the question of objective moral values ​​if God does not exist then what basis is left for the existence of objective moral values In particular, why do we think that human beings would have objective moral value? From the atheist point of view, human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature who have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet Earth and who are doomed to perish. individually and collectively in a relatively short time due to atheism, it is difficult to see any reason to think that human well-being is objectively better than insect well-being. being or welfare of the rat or welfare of the hyena this is what dr.

Harris calls the problem of value the purpose of dr. Harris's book, The Moral Landscape, aims to explain atheism's basis for the existence of objective moral values; He explicitly rejects the view that moral values ​​are Platonic objects that exist independently of the world, so his only recourse is to try to ground moral values ​​in the natural world. but how can that be done if nature itself is morally neutral from a naturalistic view? Moral values ​​are just behavioral byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning, just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined that it was advantageous in the struggle for survival, so Their primate cousins, Homo sapiens, have developed a kind of herd morality for precisely the same reasons.

As a result of sociobiological pressures, they have developed a kind of morality among Homo sapiens.of herd that works well in the fight for survival. perpetuation of our species, but from the atheist point of view there seems to be nothing that makes this morality objectively binding and true. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse reports that the modern evolutionist's position is that humans are conscious of morality because such consciousness has biological value—morality is a biological adaptation no less than our hands, feet, and teeth considered as a rationally justifiable whole. of statements about an objective something ethics is illusory I understand that when someone says love your neighbor as yourself they think they are referring to the above and beyond themselves, however, such a reference is truly groundless, morality It is only an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory, if we rewind the film of human evolution and start a new people with a very different set of moral values, they could well have evolved as Darwin himself wrote In The Descent of Man, if men were bred under precisely the same conditions as the bees in the hive, there is no doubt that our unmarried females would like the worker bees to think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers and sisters. mothers.

To strive to kill their fertile daughters and no one would think of interfering so that we think that human beings are special and our morality is objectively true is to succumb to the temptation of speciesism, that is, an unjustified bias in favor of our own species, if there is no God. , any reason to consider the herd morality developed by Homo sapiens on this planet as objectively true seems to have been shaken, take God out of the picture and all that seems to be left is an ape-like creature on a speck of dust riddled with delusions of moral grandeur Richard Dawkins' assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why is he wrong about atheism when he says that there is a bottom, there is no purpose, there is no evil, there is no good, nothing but a meaningless indifference?

We are machines to propagate DNA. Is each living object the only reason for existence? So how does Sam Harris propose to solve the value problem? The trick he proposes is simply to redefine what he means by good and evil in non-moral terms. He says we must define good as that which sustains good. -being of conscious creatures, so he says that questions about values ​​are actually questions about the well-being of conscious creatures, and therefore he concludes that it makes no sense to ask whether maximizing well-being is good, why not, because has redefined the word good to mean the well-being of sentient creatures, then asking why maximizing the well-being of creatures is good is, by its definition, the same as asking why maximizing the well-being of creatures maximizes the well-being of creatures. creatures.

It's just a tautology, he's just talking in circles, so dr. Harris has, quote, solved the problem of value simply by redefining its terms; At the end of the day, it's nothing more than a play on words, dr. Harris isn't really talking about moral values ​​at all, he's just talking about what contributes to the flourishing of sentient life on this planet. Seen from this perspective, his claim that science can tell us a lot about what contributes to human flourishing is not It is controversial. II is controversial, of course, it can tell us what is conducive to corn flowering, mosquitoes or bacteria.

His so-called moral landscape, which presents the ups and downs of human flourishing, is actually not a moral landscape at all, therefore, dr. . Harris failed to solve the problem of values; He has not provided any justification or explanation as to why in atheism moral values ​​would exist objectively. His supposed solution is just a semantic trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic redefinition of the terms good and evil in Non-Moral Vocabulary Second Question Does atheism provide a solid basis for objective moral duties? Duty has to do with moral obligation or prohibition. What I should or should not do here.

Reviewers of the moral landscape have been ruthless in bashing Dr. Harris's attempt to provide a naturalistic explanation of moral obligation highlights two problems: first, natural science only tells us what is not what it should be, as written. philosopher Jerry Fodor, science is about facts, not rules, it could tell us how we are, but it wouldn't tell us what's wrong with how we are in particular, it can't tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions that lead to human flourishing , so if God does not exist, what foundation remains for objective moral duties from the naturalistic point of view? human beings are simply Anam and animals have no moral obligations to each other when a lion kills a zebra, he kills the zebra but does not kill the zebra when a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, he copulates forcibly with it, but not Do not violate it because none of these actions are prohibited or mandatory.

There is no moral dimension to these actions, so if God does not exist, I believe we have a moral obligation to do anything. Who or what imposes these obligations on us? Where do they come from? From the atheist point of view, it is very difficult to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained in us by social and parental conditioning, certain actions such as rape and incest may not be biologically and socially advantageous and therefore , in the course of human development. have become a taboo that is socially unacceptable behavior but does absolutely nothing to prove that such acts are actually wrong such behavior occurs all the time in the animal kingdom from the atheist point of view the rapist who chooses to mock morality of the flock is doing nothing more serious than acting old-fashioned, the moral equivalent, if you will, of lady gaga, if there is no moral legislator, then there is no objective moral law and if there is no objective moral law, then We have no objective moral duties, therefore, dr.

Harris's view lacks any source of objective moral duty. The second problem should imply that a person is not morally responsible for an action that they cannot avoid, for example, if someone pushes you into another person, you are not responsible for bumping into them, you had no choice. but Sam Harris believes that all our actions are causally determined and that there is no such thing as free will. Harris rejects not only libertarian explanations of free will but also compatible explanations of freedom, but if there is no free will, in the end no one is morally responsible for anything.

Harris admits this, although he is hidden in the endnotes of his vol. Moral responsibility says and I quote is a social construction, not an objective reality. I quote in neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than another for the actions they perform. Realizing his thorough determinism means the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties because, in his view of his world, we have no control over what we do, therefore, according to dr. Harris's view is that there is no source of objective moral duties because there is no moral legislator and there is no possibility of an objective moral duty because there is no free will;

Therefore, an honest view despite his protests to the contrary, good and evil do not really exist, which is why dr. Harris' naturalistic view does not provide a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties, so if God does not exist, we do not have a solid basis for morality, which is my second argument. In conclusion, we have seen that if God exists, we have a solid basis for morality. foundation for objective moral values ​​and objective moral duties, but that if God does not exist, then we do not have a solid foundation for objective moral values ​​and duties dr.

Therefore, Harris's atheism does not fit very well with his ethical theory, which I am offering to dr. Harris tonight is not a new set of moral values. I think that in general we share the same applied ethics. Rather, what I am offering is a solid foundation for the objective moral values ​​and duties that we both hold dear. Thank you very much, Dr. Harris you now have 20 minutes of timekeeping. Ready? Start right first. Let me tell you, it is an honor to be here at Notre Dame and I am very happy to debate with dr. Craig, the only Christian apologist who seems to put the fear of God in many of my fellow atheists.

In fact, I've received more than a few emails this week that more or less say bro, please don't screw this up so you'll be the judge now. As many of you know, I have spent quite a bit of time criticizing religion and one of the advantages of this job is that you immediately hear from all the people who think that criticizing religion is a terrible thing and, strangely, the reason people Raise. to the defense of God is not that there is so much evidence that God exists but that they believe that believing in God is the only intellectual framework for an objective and clearly morality dr.

Craig is among them now, the feeling is that without the conviction that there are moral truths, that words like right and wrong and good and evil actually mean something, humanity will simply lose its way, that is the fear and, indeed, I share that fear. believe that this concern that many religious people have about the erosion of secular morality is not completely empty. I once spoke at a meeting about these issues and I said, as I will say tonight, that once we understand morality in terms of human well-being we will be able to make strong claims about which behaviors and ways of life are good for us and which are not. , and I cited the sadism and misogyny of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that was not at all conducive to human flourishing and it turns out that to denigrate the Taliban in a scientific meeting is to generate controversy and after my comments I went into a debate with another guest speaker and this is more or less exactly how our conversation went, he said How can you say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science?

I said it well because I think it is quite clear that good and evil relate to human well-being and it is equally clear that forcing half the population to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science. living in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not a way to maximize human well-being and she said well that's just your opinion and I said well let's make it even easier, let's say we find a culture to literally take away eyeballs to one in three children, well at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being and she said it would depend on why they were doing it after my eyebrows came back From the back of my head I said okay, let's say they're doing it for religious reasons, let's say they have a scripture that says one in three should walk in the dark or some nonsense like that and then she said well then I never know.

I could say they were wrong, okay, so I should know that I was talking to someone who has a deep background in science and philosophy. She has since been appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. She is one of 13 people who advise President Obama on all the ethical implications of advances in medicine and related issues. science and technology and she had just given a perfectly lucid lecture on the moral implications of neuroscience for the courts and she was especially concerned that we might be subjecting captured terrorists to neuroimaging lie detection technology and she saw this as really rape excessive cognitive freedom.

So, on the one hand, her moral scruples were very finely calibrated to recoil from the slightest perceived ethical misstep in our war on terrorism, and yet she was quite willing to forgive some primitive culture its penchant for removing children's eyeballs in their religious rituals. and she struck me as terribly removed from the very real suffering of millions of women in Afghanistan right now, so I see this double standard as a problem and, interestingly, this is precisely the erosion of basic common sense that worries many religious people. I hope that by the end of this hour it will be clear to you that religion is not an answer to this problem.

Well, belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality, it is itself a source of moral blindness. It is now widely believed that there are two quantities in this universe, there are facts, on the one hand, and of course science can give us our most rigorous discussion of these, but then there are values ​​that many people like. Craig believes that science cannot address questions of meaning and morality and what life is good for now, of course everyone thinks that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we should value and therefore , cannot The principle can be applied to the mostimportant aspects of human life, such as how we should raise our children or what constitutes a good life, are now thought of from the point of view of science and dr.

Craig just expressed this opinion that when we look at the universe all we see are patterns of events, just one thing follows another, okay, and there is no corner of the universe that simply declares that certain of its events are good, bad or correct. or incorrect apart from us, so our minds may declare that certain events are better than others, but in doing so it seems that we are simply projecting our own preferences and desires onto a reality that is intrinsically value-free and where do our notions come from? of the right thing? and bad comes from good, clearly they have been instilled in us by evolution, but the product of these impulses of a fish and social emotions and are then modulated by culture, take sexual jealousy, for example, and this is an attitude that It has been bred in us for millions of years, okay, our ancestors were very greedy for each other even though they were all covered in hair and had terrible teeth and this possessiveness is now enshrined in various cultural institutions such as the institution of marriage, it's okay, therefore a statement like this is incorrect. cheating on a spouse, okay, it seems like a mere sum of these contingencies, it seems like it's an improvisation based on biology, it seems like from the point of view of science, it really can't be wrong to cheat on your spouse, okay?

This is how apes like us worry when we learn to worry with words. Well now this is where religious people like Dr. Craig start to get a little dizzy as I think they should and many see no alternative but to insert the God of Abraham, an Iron Age god of war, into the mechanism. clockwork as an invisible arbiter of moral truth. Okay, it's wrong to cheat on your spouse because Yahweh considers it that way, which is funny because in other states of mind Yahweh is really into genocide, slavery, and human sacrifice. Yes, I must say it's quite funny to hear Craig and his initial comments say that I'm simply focused on the flourishing of sentient creatures on this planet, if that's a sin I'll accept it, one question is what dr.

Craig is focused on now, by the way, you shouldn't trust dr. The fact that Craig read me half of the quotes he provided as if I wrote them were quotes from people I was quoting in my book, and often to different effect, so you'll have to read the book now to claim that values ​​are reduced to the well-being of conscious creatures as I will I am introducing two concepts consciousness and well-being now let's start with consciousness this is not an arbitrary starting point imagine a universe devoid of the possibility of consciousness imagine the universe entirely made up of rocks it is There is clearly no happiness or suffering in this universe.

There are no good or bad value judgments. They do not apply to changes in the universe to matter. They have to matter at least potentially to some conscious system. What about well-being? Well, it is the well-being of sentient creatures and the link between It and morality may seem dubious, but it should not be that way. This is the only assumption you have to make: Imagine the universe in which every sentient creature suffers as much as possible for as long as possible. I call this the worst possible thing. misery for everyone, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, okay, if the word bad applies anywhere, it applies here now, if you think the worst possible misery for everyone is not bad or maybe it has a positive side or maybe there is something worse that I don't.

I don't know what you're talking about, and what's more, I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about either. What I am saying is that the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we must do something in this universe if we must do something if we have a moral duty to do something it is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone and the moment you admit this, you admit that all other states of the universe are better than the worst misery possible for everyone, you have the worst possible misery for everyone here and all these other constellations of experiences arranged here and because the experience of conscious creatures depends in some way on the laws of nature, there will be right ways and wrong ways.

To move along this continuum it will be possible to think that you are avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone, and if you fail, you may be wrong in your beliefs about how to navigate this space, so here is my argument for moral truth. in the context of scientific issues. of good and evil and good and evil depend on minds if they depend on the possibility of experience minds are natural phenomena, they depend on the laws of nature in some way. Morality and human values ​​are fine, therefore, they can be understood through science because when talking about these things.

We are talking about all the facts that influence the well-being of conscious creatures, in our case we are talking about genetics, neurobiology, psychology, sociology and economics. I now see this space of all possible experience as a kind of moral landscape with Peaks that correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys that correspond to the lowest suffering and the first thing to realize is that there can be many equivalent peaks in this space; There may be many different, but morally equivalent, ways for human beings to prosper, but there will be many more ways not to prosper. There will be many more ways to fail.

Being on top. There are clearly more ways to suffer needlessly in this world than to be sublimely happy. Now that the Taliban remains my favorite example of a culture that is fighting mightily to build a society that is clearly less good than many other societies on offer, the average life expectancy of women in Afghanistan is 44 years, okay, They have a 12% literacy rate, they have the highest, almost the highest, infant and maternal mortality in the country. world and almost the highest fertility rate, making this one of the best places in the world to see women and children die.

It seems perfectly obvious to me that the best response to this terrible situation, that is, the most moral response, is not to throw away batteries. acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read now, of course, this is common sense to us, unless you are a bioethics expert on the Presidential Commission right now, but what I say in the The bottom line is that they are also. truths about biology and neurology and psychology and sociology and economics it is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality that the moment we realize that we know something about human well-being we have to say this now, some people with A bit of training philosophy you may be tempted to say, but what if a father wants to burn his daughter's face with battery acid?

Do you know who you are to say he's not as moral as us? What if you have an alternative conception of well-being that is just as legitimate or who's to say we should care about the well-being of little girls this is the kind of email I get it's a net line now moral skeptics of this guy and dr. Craig has essentially endorsed this position in a non-God-thinking way that the only way to judge that one person's values ​​are wrong is with respect to another person's values ​​and all of those judgments have to be on par. Well, this is not true, there are many ways in which my values ​​can be objectively wrong.

They may be wrong about deeper values ​​I hold. They may be wrong about deeper values ​​you would have if you were just a deeper person. It is clearly possible to value things. that reliably make you miserable in this life it is clearly possible to be cognitively and emotionally closed off to experiences that you would want if you were smart enough and knowledgeable enough to want them it is possible not to know what one is missing in life so that Things can be right or wrong or right or wrong quite independent of a person's opinions. Now some of you might worry because I haven't defined well-being enough.

How can something so vague as a concept be the reference point for the objective values ​​that we will consider by analogy? The concept of physical health Physical health is very difficult to define. You know it used to be that if you were healthy you could expect to live to be 40 years old. Now you know that our life expectancy has doubled in the last 150 years. What does health mean? Well, it has something to do with not always throwing up, not being in excruciating pain, not having a fever, okay, but how fast should a healthy person be able to run?

That question may not have an answer, okay, but this does not mean the question of health is empty, it does not make it simply a matter of opinion or cultural construction, the distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is so clear and inconsequential like anything we have done in science and keep in mind that no one is. Have you ever felt tempted to attack the philosophical foundations of medicine with questions like: Who are you to say that vomiting is not always healthy? What if you know someone who wants to vomit and wants to vomit until they die?

Well, how could you argue that it's not that good? As healthy as you are when talking about morality and human values, I think we are really talking about mental health and the health of societies. The truth is that science has always been in the securities business. We simply cannot talk about facts without resorting to values ​​that we consider the simplest statement. In scientific fact, water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, this seems as value-free an expression as what human beings make, but what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition? Well, all we can do is appeal to scientific values, courage. of understanding the world the value of evidence the value of logical coherence What if someone says wow, that's not how I choose to think about water?

Well I'm a biblical chemist and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before creating light, so take that to mean that there were no stars, so there were no stars to fuse helium and hydrogen into elements heavier like oxygen, therefore there was no oxygen to put in the water, so either God created, or water has no oxygen, or God created special oxygen to put. in the water, but I don't think he would do that because it would be biblically inelegant. What can we say to that person? All we can do is appeal to scientific values ​​and if he doesn't share those values, the conversation is over.

If someone doesn't value the evidence, what evidence is he going to provide to show that he should value it? If someone does not value logic, what logical argument could they provide to show the importance of logic? Well, I think this division between facts and values ​​should seem really strange to you at first glance and what are we really saying when we say that science cannot be applied to the most important questions of human life? Well, we are saying that when we eliminate our prejudices when We, when we trust more fully in clear reasoning and honest observation, when intellectual honesty is at its zenith, then those efforts have no application whatsoever in the most important questions of human life. , but that is precisely the state of mind in which you cannot be to answer the most important ones. questions in human life it would be very strange if that were the case Professor Craig now has 12 minutes for a rebuttal timekeeper are you ready to begin?

Remember that in my first speech I said that I was going to defend two basic arguments tonight first, that if God exists, then we have a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties. I first explained that if God exists, then objective moral values ​​are based on the character of God himself, who is essentially compassionate, just, kind, generous, etc., here dr. Harris had nothing to say in disagreement, but I want to clear up a possible confusion. He represented this by saying that if religion were not true, words like good and evil, right and wrong, would have no meaning.

To maintain that this is to confuse moral ontology with moral semantics Moral ontology asks what is the basis of objective moral values ​​and duties Moral semantics asks what is the meaning of moral terms and I am not making any kind of semantic statement tonight good means something as ordained by God rather my concern is moral ontology what is the basis or foundation of moral values ​​and duties to give an example, think of light, light is a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum, but obviously that is not the meaning of the word light. people knew how to use the word light long before they discovered its physical nature and I must also add that they certainly knew the difference between light and darkness long beforeunderstand the physics of light now in exactly the same way that we can know the meaning of the word moral. terms like good and evil, right and wrong, and knowing the difference between good and evil without being aware that good is ontologically based on God, so the position to be defended tonight is that moral values ​​are based illogically. in God, secondly, our moral duties are based on God's commandments, which are necessary reflections of his nature, here the only answer I detected from dr.

Harris was going to refer to the atrocities in the Hebrew Bible, but I think this is quite irrelevant. In the discussion tonight there are many divine command theorists who are neither Jews nor Christians and do not place any importance on the Bible, so this is not an objection to the divine. Command theory I'm defending tonight. If you're interested in biblical ethics, I want to highly recommend Paul Coppens' new book, "Is God a Moral Monster," which examines those passages from the Hebrew Bible in light of the ancient Near East, and I can guarantee it. It will be a very insightful and interesting read, but this issue is strictly irrelevant to tonight's debate, so we have not heard any objection to a theistic basis for ethics.

If God exists, it is clear, I think it is obvious, even that we have a solid basis for objective morality. values ​​and duties now, what happens if God does not exist? Is there a solid basis, first of all, for objective moral values ​​now here dr. Harris said you don't need religion to return to universal morality. That's a confusion, of course, you don't remember that the Nazis, for example, could have won World War II and established universal morality. The problem is not universality, the problem is objectivity. and I maintain that in the absence of God there is no reason to explain the existence of objective moral values ​​now dr.

Harris says, but we can imagine creatures in the worst possible misery and obviously it is better for creatures to flourish, the well-being of sentient creatures is good, of course, that is not the point, we agree that, all things being equal. conditions, the flourishing of conscious creatures is good, the question is rather if atheism were true, what would make the flourishing of conscious creatures objectively good. Sentient creatures would like to flourish, but there is no reason about atheism to think that it would actually be objectively good now here, dr. I think Harris is guilty of misusing terms like good and bad, right and wrong, equivocally;

He will often use them in non-moral senses, for example he will say that there are objectively good and bad moves in chess, but that is clearly not a moral. Using the terms good and bad simply means that you are not fit to win or produce a winning strategy, it is not bad what you have done and similarly, in common English we use the words good in bad man in various non-moral ways. . For example, we say Notre Dame is a good team, now we can expect them to be an ethical team, but that's not what the win-loss record indicates, that's a different meaning of good or we say it's a good way. of being killed or that's it. a good plan of action or the sun felt good or that is a good route to East Lansing or there is no good reason to do it or she is in good health, these are all non-moral uses of the word good and dr.

Harris's contrast between the good life and the bad life is not an ethical contrast between a morally good life and a bad life, it is a contrast between a pleasant life and a miserable life and there is no reason to identify pleasure, misery with good and evil, especially in atheism. so there is simply no reason given in atheism to think that the flourishing of conscious creatures is objectively good, but dr. Harris has to defend an even more radical claim than claiming that the property of being good is identical to the property of creaturely flourishing, and he has offered no defense of this radical identity claim; in fact, I think we now have a devastating argument against it.

Bear with me, this is a little technical on the following last page of Dr.'s book. Harris forcefully admits that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be as happy as good people, then their moral landscape would no longer be a moral landscape, but would simply be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and good. . Bad people or evil people alike. The interesting thing about this is that it appears earlier in Dr. Harris's book that about 3 million Americans are psychopaths, that is, they don't care about the mental states of others, they enjoy inflicting pain on other people, but that implies that There is a possible world we can conceive of in which the continuum of human good-being is not a moral landscape.

The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people, but that implies that in the real world the continuum of well-being and moral landscape is not a moral landscape. are identical because identity is a necessary relation; there is no possible world in which some entity a is not identical to a, so if there is some possible world in which a is not identical to B, then it follows that a is not fact identical to B now, since it is possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it necessarily follows that human well-being and goodness are not the same as dr.

Harris has stated in his book that it is not often in philosophy that you get a knockdown argument against a position, but I think we have one here by admitting that the well-being continuum may not be identical to the moral landscape. . Harris's view becomes logically incoherent, and all of this underscores my fundamental point that in atheism there is simply no reason to identify the well-being of sentient creatures with moral goodness. 8 The ISM cannot explain the objective reality of moral values. What happens to objective morality? duties I first argued from the car station that there is no basis in atheism for thinking that we have moral duties Vout and here dr.

Hare says that if we have a moral duty to do something, we have a duty to avoid the worst possible misery, but the question is the antecedent of that conditional. If we have a moral duty to do something, what I am arguing is that in atheism we don't see any reason to think that we have a moral duty to do something. Moral obligations or prohibitions arise in response to imperatives from a competent authority, for example, if a police officer tells you to stop, then because of his authority, who he is, you are legally bound. stop, but if a random stranger tells him to stop, he is not legally obligated to do so now in the absence of God, what authority is there to issue moral orders or prohibitions?

There is none on atheism and therefore no moral imperatives. For us to obey in the absence of God there is simply no kind of moral obligation or prohibition that characterizes our particular lives, we were not morally obligated to promote the flourishing of conscious creatures, so this distinction seems to me one that is fatal to the Dr. Harris's position has been widely recognized as such by critics of the moral landscape, but secondly, the problem that is even worse is that the problem of duty implies kinship, in the absence of the ability to do otherwise, there is no responsibility morality in the absence of freedom of will.

We are just puppets or electrochemical machines and puppets have no moral responsibilities machines have no moral obligations but in dr. Harris' view is that there is no freedom of will in either a libertarian sense or a ballistic sense and therefore no moral responsibility, so there is not even the possibility of a moral duty in his view, so , although I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris's assertion of the objectivity of moral values ​​and moral duties, at the end of the day, his philosophical worldview simply does not ground these entities that we both want to affirm. If God exists, then we clearly have a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and moral duties. but if God does not exist, that is, if atheism is true, then there is no basis for the assertion of objective moral values ​​and there is no basis for objective moral duties because there is no moral legislator and there is no freedom of will and therefore It seems to me that atheism is simply devoid of the proper ontological foundations for establishing the moral life dr.

Harris now has 12 minutes of timekeeping. They are ready? Started well, everything was very interesting. Ask yourselves what is wrong with spending eternity in hell. Well, I'm told it's pretty hot there for a single dr. Craig does not offer an alternative view of morality. Well, the goal of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Fortunately, there is absolutely no evidence that Christian hell exists and I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework this theistic framework in this world and what these moral foundations would actually be well 9 million children die every year before they turn 5 years an image of an Asian tsunami of the type we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people one of those every 10 days killing children under 5 years old okay, that's 20 24,000 children a day a thousand per hour 17 approximately per minute, That means that before I can get to the end of this sentence it is very likely that a few children will have died in terror and agony.

Think about the parents of these children. Think about the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying right now for their children to be saved and their prayers will not be answered. but according to dr. Craig, this is all part of God's plan. Any God who allows millions of children to suffer and die this way, and their parents to suffer this way, either can't do anything to help them or doesn't care, and is therefore powerless. or evil and worse than that in dr. In Craig's opinion, most of these people, many of these people will certainly go to hell because they are praying to the wrong God, think about that, okay, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture where they got the wrong theology and Me.

I lost the revelation. Well, there are 1.2 billion people in India right now. Most of them are Hindus, most of them are therefore polytheists, okay in Dr. Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are damned if you were, if you are praying to the god monkey Hanuman, you are doomed, okay, you will be tortured in hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence of this? No, it only says it in Mark 9 and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14. Maybe you remember that from the Lord of the Rings it says that when the Elves die they go to Valinor but they can be reborn in Middle Earth.

I'm just saying that as a point of comparison, okay, God. created the cultural isolation of the Hindus, okay, he designed the circumstances of their deaths in ignorance of the Apocalypse and then created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in the fire, okay, on the other hand, the dr . The story of Craig, your run-of-the-mill American serial killer, well, who spent his life raping and torturing children, he just needs to come to God, come to Jesus on death row and after a final meal of chicken fried, will spend an eternity in heaven. after death, okay, one thing should be very clear to you: this view of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral responsibility.

You may notice the double standards that people like dr. Craig used to exonerate God from all this evil. Okay, we're told that God is loving, kind, just, and intrinsically good, but when someone like me points out art, there is obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering. on innocent people on a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath. Well, they tell us that God is mysterious. Well, who can understand the will of God? Well, and yet this is precisely that this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use.

To establish His goodness first, if something good happens to a Christian, some feel some joy while praying, saying, or seeing some positive change in their life and they tell us that God is good, it's okay, but when there are children around tens of thousands. They are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, they tell us that God is mysterious, okay, that's how you play tennis without the net, okay, and I want to suggest to you that not only is it boring when intelligent people talk this way, but it is also morally boring. reprehensible, okay, this kind of faith is really the perfection of narcissism.

God loves me, don't you know, he cured me of my eczema, he makes me feel so good while singing in church and just when we had lost hope, he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage, okay , considering all that this god of yours fails to accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery being imposed on a helpless child right now, this kind of faith is obscene, okay, to think about it. this way is not to reason honestly or not to careenough for the suffering of other human beings and if God is good, loving, just and kind and wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? us a book that monitors us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft now of course there is a way not to take these questions seriously according to dr.

Craig's Divine Command Theory God is not subject to moral duties God does not have to be good, everything he commands is good, so when he commands the Israelites to massacre the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he does it. He ordered, well, here we are. I'm glad he raised the issue of psychopathy. They offer us a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. She's psychotic because this is completely delusional. There is no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster, Yahweh, but we do. It is psychopathic because it is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings, which is why the killing of children is so easily rationalized.

Well, just think of the Muslims right now who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God. There is absolutely nothing that dr. Craig can say against his behavior in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim, that they are praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good according to divine command theory. Now obviously I'm not saying that all dr. Craig or all religious people are psychopaths and psychotics, but to me this is the true horror of religion: it allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.

Okay, if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few words in Latin over your pancakes will turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, okay, you've lost your mind, okay, but if you think pretty much the same about a cookie and the body of Jesus, you're just Catholic and I. I'm not the first person to realize that this is a very strange kind of loving God who would make salvation dependent on believing in him based on bad evidence, okay, I mean, if you lived 2,000 years ago, there was abundant evidence and he just doing miracles but apparently he got tired of being so useful, okay, and now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the implausibility of the doctrines and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and ourselves and what we know about The Origins too humans of the Scriptures become increasingly difficult and it is not just the generic God that Dr.

Craig recommends to be God the Father and Jesus the son, it is well Christianity in the dr. Craig's story is the true moral wealth of the world, which I hate to tell you here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that sells that reputation and repudiates human sacrifice, it is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as if it were effective God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son John 3:16 the idea is that Jesus He suffered crucifixion so that no one has to suffer hell except those billions in India and billions like them throughout history. okay, this is this, this is astride this doctrine, it is astride a despicable history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism, we come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods, if we just think about that.

There are a large number of societies in which people would bury children on poles, people like us thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from tearing down their buildings. These are the kind of people who wrote the Bible if there was a less moral moral framework than the previous one. Dr. Craig is proposing I haven't heard of that Professor Craig now has eight minutes for a rebuttal timekeeper are you ready to begin? The least moral framework is atheism. Atheism has no basis for objective moral values ​​or duties and it is interesting that in that last speech I was disappointed to hear no defense of that second crucial argument I offered against dr.

Harris's view remember that we are talking about the problem of value I gave what I consider a devastating argument to show that the moral landscape is not identical to the continuum of human flourishing we are talking about objective moral duties these verses must be distinguished the flies of autumn cannot have any problem of these have been answered, so if you want a really desperate moral system, try atheism, there is no foundation for objective moral values ​​and duties. What about theism? Works better? In the last speech we heard some attacks on my first argument that God provides. a solid foundation for morality unfortunately it seems that most of these were red herrings a red herring is a smiling old fish that is dragged across the hounds path to distract them from their real question so they get distracted and leave following the dead fish and I am Let's not get distracted by the red herrings that were offered in that last speech, for example in response to my claim that if God exists, then objective moral values ​​exist, we hear that I haven't really offered an alternative to his point of view because the goal in theism is to avoid hell honestly, it just shows how poorly Sam Harris understands Christianity.

You don't believe in God to avoid going to hell. Believing in God is not some kind of fire insurance. You believe in God because God is the supreme good. The proper object of worship and love is goodness itself which is to be desired for its own sake and that is why the fulfillment of human existence is to be found in relationship to God is because of who God is and his moral value that is worthy of worship has nothing to do with it. do with avoiding hell or promoting your own well-being, then answer, but there is no good reason to believe that such a being exists.

Look at the problem of evil and the problem of unequal angel eyes, both as I explained in my opening speech that are irrelevant in tonight's debate because I am not arguing that God exists, maybe I am right, maybe these are insurmountable objections to Christianity or theism, it would not affect any of my claims that if God exists, then we have a solid basis for moral values ​​and duties; if God does not exist, then we have no basis for objective moral values ​​and duties, so that these are false leads. Now I have written about each of these problems, the problem of evil and the problem of inequality.

Angels and you. You can find much of what I've said on our website, Reason Faith org. If you're interested, go ahead and look at that or, as Michael Rea suggested, talk to one of your philosophy professors. Michael has written extensively on the problem of evil and me. I'm sure he would love to have a conversation with you about those things. Secondly, I would like to say that evil actually proves that God exists because if God does not exist, objective moral values ​​and duties do not exist. If evil exists, then it follows that objective values ​​and duties exist, that is, some things are evil, so evil actually proves the existence of God, since in the absence of God good and evil as such would not exist, so we cannot insist on both the problem of evil and the degree with my statement that if God there are no objective moral values ​​and there are no duties because evil will actually be an argument for the existence of God note what dr.

Harris no longer has grounds for saying that Christian beliefs are morally exokernel because he has no grounds for making such a judgment. If atheism is true, what objective basis is there for claiming that one point of view is exha: another is not? There is simply no basis for such judgments. so if he wants to have a debate about theism, I'd be happy to engage him in one, but that's not the debate tonight. He also says it's psychopath to believe these things. Now that comment is as stupid as it is insulting. It's stupid. I think that people like professor peter van inwagen here at the University of Notre Dame are psychopaths or that a guy like dr.

Tom Flint, who is the nicest Christian gentleman I have ever met, is a psychopath, this is simply below the belt, so it seems to me that we have been given no refutation of the view that if God exists, then its essence, its character. It is decisive for the existence of objective moral values. What about objective moral duties? Here I explained that God's commandments must be consistent with his nature and dr. Harris continues to press the point, oh, but the Bible supports slavery again. I will refer you to Professor Anne Cope's book, which shows that this is a serious misrepresentation of ancient Israel which did not, in fact, promote slavery as we understand it in the light of experience. in the American South, but again, that's just not irrelevant because I'm not, that's not relevant because I'm not defending the Bible tonight.

What I am saying is that for a theist, Jewish, Christian, Deist, Hindu moral duties will be based on the divine. orders that are based on their nature, he says, but what about people like the Taliban who say God has ordered them to commit certain atrocities? I would say the same thing to the Taliban as Dr. Harris says God didn't command you to do those things, that's exactly what Dr. Harris would say the reason he thinks that is because he doesn't believe God exists, but I would say that because I think Talley got God wrong, that in fact God has not ordered them to commit these atrocities and, in fact, God will only issue orders that are consistent with his moral nature and for which he has morally sufficient reasons, so I don't think this first argument is really at issue tonight .

I think it's obvious that if God exists, then objective moral values ​​obviously exist. Regardless of human opinion, they are based on the character of God and there would be objective moral duties if God exists because our duties arise in response to the moral imperatives that God issues to us, so the real debate is over what second argument the atheism. a good basis for objective moral values ​​and duties, and I think we have seen powerful reasons to think that it cannot be. Harris now has 8 minutes of timekeeping. Are you ready? Starts off well, you may have noticed that Dr.

Craig has a charming habit of summarizing his opponent's points in a way that they weren't actually made, so I'll leave it to you to figure it out on YouTube. Needless to say, I didn't call those esteemed colleagues their psychopaths like I did. of course in any case dr. Clay Craig has simply defined God as intrinsically good, i.e. if you want to accuse someone of merely semantic games, put your shoes on the other foot, there is no reason I can see why there couldn't be an evil God or several, okay, him, but his God is intrinsically good, goodness is based on his own nature, which is a defining move that he has made.

I have made a positive case for grounding an objective morality in the context of science and thinking about moral truth in the context of science. It should only pose a problem for you if you imagine that a science of morality has to be absolutely self-justifying in some way. that no science could be right. Each branch of science must be based on certain axiomatic assumptions, obtain certain fundamental values ​​and a science of morality would be on the same footing as a science of medicine, physics or chemistry, one only has to assume that the worst possible misery for all is bad and worth avoiding and in fact is the worst case scenario for conscious life, and if science is unscientific this, if it has a value assumption at its core, makes science unscientific, which who is now a scientist, dr.

Craig is confused about what it means to speak with scientific objectivity about the human condition, he says things like from the point of view of science we are just constellations of atoms and we are no more valuable than rats or insects, okay, like if they were the only ones. The scientifically objective thing that could be said about us is that we are constellations of atoms. Well, there are two very different senses in which we use these terms: subjective and objective. Well, the first is epistemological and relates to how we know and when we say. we are reasoning or thinking objectively in this sense we are talking about the style in which we think we are talking about the fact that we are seeing through our prejudices we avoid work, that is, trying to get rid of prejudices we are reasoning in a way that is available for data our minds are open to counterarguments now this is the absolute foundation of science and this is what opens such an odious chasm between science and religion the difference here In this approach to objectivity, but science does not require that Let's ignore the fact that certain facts are subjective, ontologically subjective, there are facts about the human condition that science can understand and study, that are first-person facts, facts about what it is like to be yourself and and we can study these facts and our study of them reveals how much deeper, richer and more meaningfulare our lives than the lives of cockroaches, so this is a false reductionism that is omnipresent here now, so there are subjective facts if you have to burn alive an intact nervous system it will be unbearably painful, the pain of pain is a subjective fact about from you, okay, what my argument implies is that we can speak objectively about a certain class of subjective facts that go by the name of morality that relates to questions of good and evil and that depend on the well-being of just creatures , especially our own, and in this light we can see that it is possible to value the wrong things if you think you would rather be neurotic and in pain and unable to do creative work and completely disconnected from other people there is something wrong with you it is okay objectively wrong with you yes it is well in that york you are closed to higher higher states of consciousness with respect to the highest as further away from the lowest possible state of consciousness the worst possible misery for everyone okay it's the worst possible misery for everyone really bad once again We've hit the philosophical foundation with the shovel of a stupid question.

Now I want to take a brief moment to talk about these higher possibilities because it's often thought that non-believers like me are closed to some notable experiences that religious people have. That's not true. that's not true there's nothing to stop an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, ecstasy and wonder that transcends themselves there's nothing to stop an atheist from going into a cave for a year like a true mystic and and and doing nothing but meditate on compassion, they say that what atheists do not tend to do is make unjustifiable and unjustified claims about the nature of the cosmos or about the divine origin of certain books based on those.

Now I have experiences that the prospect of someone becoming a a true saint in life and inspiring people long after his death is something I take very seriously. I have spent a lot of time studying meditation with some very wise and learned old Tibetan yogis and lamas who I have spent decades in retreat, they are really extraordinary people, okay, people who I really consider spiritual geniuses of a certain kind, so I can well imagine that if Jesus was a spiritual genius, you know, a palpably non-neurotic, charismatic, wise person. Imagine the experience of his disciples. I can well imagine the kind of influence he could have on their lives.

Okay, no, we don't have to presuppose anything with insufficient evidence to explore this higher ground of human well-being. We don't have to do it. Let's take anything on faith, we don't have to lie to ourselves or our children about the nature of reality, if we want to understand our situation in the world along with these deeper possibilities, we have to do it in the spirit of science, it is well, given, given that people have had these remarkable experiences in all contexts while worshiping one God, while worshiping hundreds and worshiping none, proving that a deeper principle was at work in the sectarian claims of our various religions cannot be true in that context and all we have What is the human conversation to capture these possibilities?

Can we have a 1st century conversation dictated by the New Testament or a 7th century conversation dictated by the Quran or a 21st century conversation that leaves us open to all the richness of human learning, please. think about these things now let's move on to five minute closing speeches timekeeper are you ready? Well, let's start with my closing speech. I'd like to try to pull together some of the threads of the debate and see if we can come to some conclusions first. I argued that God, if he exists, provides a solid basis for objective moral values ​​and duties at the time of the ultimate refutation of him, the only argument I heard dr.

Harris's offer against this position is to say that you are simply defining that God is good, which is the same fallacy I accused him of committing. I don't think this is the case at all. God is a being worthy of worship, any being who is not. worthy of worship is not God, and therefore God must be perfectly good and essentially good. Furthermore, some saw that God is the greatest being conceivable and therefore he is the very paradigm of goodness itself, he is the greatest good, so once you understand the concept. From God you can see that asking why God is good is like asking why all single people are single;

It is the very concept of the greatest conceivable being being worthy of worship that implies the essential goodness of God and I think it is evident that if God exists, then we have objective moral values ​​and duties. Second, I argued that if God does not exist, we have no basis for objective moral values ​​or objective moral duties. I showed that, from his point of view, it is logically impossible to say that the moral landscape is identical to the landscape of the flourishing of conscious beings and that therefore his vision is incoherent. that dr. Harris never responded in the course of tonight's debate in her last speech, she said, but we simply have to rely on certain axioms, well, that's the same as saying you have to take it on faith and if these axioms are moral axioms, then I think You are admitting my point that in atheism there is simply no basis for believing in the objectivity of moral values ​​and duties, you simply take them as an act of faith, you say well, there are different meanings of the word objective, yes of course, and in my opening speech I said I made clear the sense in which I was defining the term, I mean valid and binding independently of human opinion and moral values ​​are not objectively binding and valid that way in atheism, it says that science You can study subjective facts, for example pain is a subjective fact.

That's true, so my question is whether the wrongness of an action is a subjective fact in a theism. It's hard to see how it couldn't be more than a subjective fact, in which case it can't be said as Dr. Harris means, and I agree with him, that genital mutilation of little girls is objectively wrong, not just an opinion subjective, he says well, but if you are a psychopath, a neurotic, something is wrong with you, I agree that something is wrong with you, but the question is about a theism, if atheism were true, would there be something objectively morally wrong with Do what the psychopath does?

He has failed to demonstrate that there are in fact no moral duties from his point of view and remember that he himself admitted that psychopaths could occupy the peaks of well-being in his so-called moral landscape and that it is therefore not a moral landscape not at all, in conclusion I want to quote a notable article that appeared in the Duke Law Journal by Arthur Allen that called indescribable ethics a natural nature. doctor of law less difficulty is the same as dr. Harris wants to find a basis for moral values ​​and duties, in this case the law that would be independent of human opinion would be objective and in the world, and he cannot find any, he says, any attempt to ground values ​​in the world. open to the playground bullies they retort who says and this is how he concludes his article all I can say is this it seems like we are all we have only if ethics were something indescribable to us that is something transcendent could the law be unnatural and therefore indisputable the way things are now everything is at stake however napalm in babies it is evil to starve the poor it is evil to buy and sell one another it is depraved there is something in the world called evil now says who God help us and now dr.

Harris has five minutes as timekeeper. Are you ready to start? I'm curious how many of you consider yourself devout Muslims. Seeing your hand raised does not mean pointing at anyone, but not many. Now everyone knows, of course, that the Koran. exists and claims to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe, you are aware that once you have heard this possibility and reject it, you will all go to hell for eternity. I mean, it goes without saying, dr. Craig and I are going to hell if this view of life is true, the problem is that all the dr.

Craig has said tonight, with some modifications, it could be said in defense of Islam, in fact, it has been said in defense of Islam. If the logic is exactly the same, we have a book that claims to be the Word of the creator of the universe, he tells us. about the nature of moral reality and how to live well within it, what if Muslims are right? What if Islam is true? How should we view God in moral terms? How would we see God in global terms? or should I say Allah. Well, we have. Born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, given the wrong culture, given the wrong theology, it's worth saying.

Craig is condemned, Christianity has completely confused him. I mean, I just appreciate the poor position he's in now to appreciate the true Word of God. Science has completely fooled me. Where is Allah? Is compassion right and yet in a tree it is in it? he is omnipotent, he could change this in an instant, he could give us a sign that would convince everyone in this room and yet he is not going to do it and he will wait and hell awaits our children because we cannot help but deceive our children. Okay, now just keep this vision in mind and first appreciate how little sleep you have about this possibility.

It's okay, just feel in yourself right now how carefree you are and you will continue to be faced with this possibility. What are the chances of that? We are all going to hell for eternity because we have not recognized that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. Know that this is exactly how Christianity appears to someone who has not been indoctrinated into it. Our Scriptures were written by people who, by virtue of their location in history, had less access to scientific information and facts and basic common sense than anyone in this room.

Well, in fact, there is not a single person in this room who has ever met someone whose worldview was as narrow as the worldview of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, and most of these people, with a few exceptions, had had a Moral worldview that was more or less indistinguishable from that of an Afghan warlord is fine today and yet dr. Craig insists that the authors of the Bible knew everything they needed to know about the nature of the cosmos and how to live within it to guide us through this moment. Well, I want to suggest to you that this view of life cannot be possible. true, okay, but just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality, whatever is true about our circumstances in moral and spiritual terms can now be discovered and talked about. in the language.

That's not an absolute affront to everything we've learned in the last 2,000 years. Well, what we are left to discover are the facts in each domain of knowledge that will enable the greatest number of us to live a life truly worth living this way. Can we build a global civilization, a viable global civilization now destined to have 9 billion people with a maximum number of people actually thriving? That's the challenge we face, sectarian moral denominations, okay? A broken world, balkanized by competing claims about an invisible God. is not the way to do it, apart from the fact that there is no evidence compelling us to take that view in the first place, the only tool we need is honest research and I would suggest to you that if faith is ever right about anything in this domain it's by accident thank you very much it's been a pleasure talking we start 15 minutes late so I'm going to allow us to go until 9:15 which gives us 30 minutes for questions as I said at the beginning .

At first we are going to let the Notre Dame students ask the first four questions. After that, the microphones are open to anyone. We would like to keep the question at a fast pace, so please limit your questions to about thirty seconds. I have asked debaters to limit their responses to about two minutes. I will take the liberty of urging people to get to their point quickly if these time limits are violated. We have microphones here and here. I think we have a microphone. Oh, well, I can. See the microphones on the balcony, so I'll make a circuit, thanks dr.

Harris if dr. Kraig could link your objections about the problem of evil and the problem of choosing the right religion so that those weren't really problems, those didn't work, that debate, where does that put you dialectically right? How do those work in the debate? You mean if I was given good reason to believe that Christianity is true or if I could show that choosing a particular religion was not necessary for the basis of morality, just that the fact that some religion was true was enough for me to there was a basis for morality and that the problem of evil somehow had a good answer.

I neverI would be tempted to question that we could invent a religion that, if true, would be a basis of morality, perhaps we could, those are those imaginary schemes that are there for the asking, we could invent them. We could in about five minutes create a religion better than any that exists. I mean, you just take Christianity and you take out Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you've already done a great job, so you know we could write, we could rewrite the Ten Commandments in less than five minutes and improve it so that you know how to do the kind of beam to add the Kind of get the kids and swap the part about the carved images and you've already turned it into a much smarter document, but that's not the point.

What I mean is, just one point I made that he never really addressed is that you're smuggling in a concern for well-being, in any case, you just have a different timeline. If Christianity were true, it would be part of my morality. landscape I mean, if someone like me is going to suffer in hell for eternity based on what I'm currently thinking, then I'm clearly doing the wrong thing. I mean, I would, I would want that information and I would think that I mean, that would be a revelation to me that I would take seriously and do everything I could to get to heaven.

I mean, that would be heaven. If eternity in heaven versus eternity in hell is really the landscape in which we live. well that's part of my moral picture, it just changes its temporal characteristics, there's just no reason to think that's the universe we live in, thanks to my left Professor Craig, you made an interesting analogy, you said that long before that we could explain scientifically where light comes from, we could distinguish between light and darkness and that the same could be said about good and evil, but to me that analogy seems dangerous because long before we could explain scientifically where it came from the light we said came from God.

The same can be said for morality and also how ships are explained in the moral consensus over time. Well, I'm not sure I understood all the questions, so I might need our moderator to help me here since the last part of the question was changes. in morality over time do not confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology moral ontology is the foundation in reality of objective moral values ​​and duties moral epistemology is how we come to know the goods that exist and the duties we have and clearly state that There are objective moral values ​​and duties. It does not mean that we always know them infallibly and clearly.

Over time, there is something called moral growth and moral development when I look at my own life. I look back on my life when I was young and I can see certain attitudes and things I had that I would now be morally ashamed of. I believe I have experienced moral growth, so there is no reason to think that the objectivity of moral values ​​and duties implies that moral growth does not exist. or a clear apprehension of the good or, unfortunately, in some cases, a moral degeneration of a society and a turning away from the good, so these are two different problems and my concern is moral ontology.

Now I didn't understand the first part of the question, Mike, did you? Yes, tell me if I misrepresent you, but I assume she is asking you. You say we understood light and darkness. Oh, before we understood the physics of light, she says, but we postulated supernatural explanations for light then too, so why not think about morality? Same situation, yeah, again, I think you misunderstood the analogy I'm making. What I am saying is to distinguish moral ontology from moral semantics and what I am saying is that I am not offering a moral semantic theory about the meaning of the words good and evil, right and wrong, I am referring to their foundation and reality, so The example of light was simply to give an example of where people understood the meaning of the English word light even if they did not know its physical nature.

In terms of electromagnetic radiation, I'm sorry, I understand that you are arguing that there needs to be a source for good and evil that makes sense, so why does that source have to be God? Couldn't it be that we just haven't figured out what the source is? Well, that would be my second argument that in the absence of God I see no basis left to affirm the objectivity of moral values ​​and particularly the value of human beings and conscious life on this planet and then that second problem. about objective moral duties is especially serious, the distinction is duty and then duty implies a kinship problem, there is no free will, so that would simply be reiterating the arguments I have already given as to why I believe that in the absence From God there would be no objectives. moral values ​​of duties.

I allowed to follow up just because there is a misunderstanding, just so you know, above and to my right, yes, I have a question for dr. Harris, so a big part of the argument is that I felt like it depended a lot on the definition of good, good and bad, right and wrong, and I wanted to ask you if you thought it would be possible for that to be the case, so I have a two-part question because there would be a hypothetical god who, to eliminate everything you know about ISM, Christianity, Hinduism, creates your own new God and if it would be hypothetical that this God would perfectly align with your moral theory definition of morality.

So let's say this guide says in the commands that good and evil depend on the well-being of sentient animals and then, simultaneously with that question, if you believe that a God of love does exactly that it seems to me and in my experience and to the look. story that there is no greater continuity throughout human history than the presence of love and the fact that we have had marriage, whether homosexual, heterosexual, transgender, from the moment we are, we have been living animals, and If that is truly the root of our well-being, then how can a God of love not promote well-being?

So in response, yes, yes, well, love clearly has a lot to do with our well-being and if there was a God of love that was actually acting like a God of love and was doing, I bet the problem is that the existence of God doesn't really increase the moral stature of love in that case because or the moral stature of a good, I mean, that is: it goes to the Euthyphro. dilemma that we haven't talked about probably fortunately, but I mean, whether it's intrinsically good or it's not and God saying it's good doesn't make it any more good and it's not, it's not good for Fiat, so either he says it's good because he is good, in which case we can just deal with the fact that he is good or he is just good because he says he is good, but then he can say that anything bad is good, which dr.

Craig's God apparently does it quite often, but love is clearly something we desperately want in our lives and we are right to want it. They were deeply social creatures and the fear circulating here is that well-being, somehow leaving out something that is important. , I believe and maintain it in a certain extent of my book. It's pretty unfounded because whatever you bring to me, which is really important, you say, okay, you're talking about well-being, but here I'm talking about love that transcends itself, this is really important, well, love that transcends itself. itself is probably at the center of the deepest well-being we can experience as human beings and, in the same way, if the Christian hell exists and awaits me, well-being in the end is based on avoiding those flames and that means everything.

Smuggling is smuggling in a concern for consciousness and its future changes, whatever you bring into the moral domain, and that's why I say we need to be honest about we base this on consciousness and then we can talk about how human beings we like ourselves. You may prosper and I would grant you that love is probably at the top of the list here to my right, um, sir. Harris, um uh, from my personal experience and from my faith, I find that the first commandment of Christ was to love your neighbor and know your God, and I believe that if you are a Muslim, then you should fulfill it if you are a devout Muslim and I am concerned about the well-being of all humanity and, um, it is related to my next question, which is how does a naturalist respond to the amazing miracles of God, such as the miracle of the Sun, which was witnessed by thirty thousand two hundred thousand. people in Fatima Portugal in 1917, as well as the miracles of the Eucharist in which the Eucharist actually begins to form veins and bleed and where this blood is actually analyzed and found to be a B+ from the left ventricle of the heart and has actually been investigated. under the leading pathologist in New Zealand to be palpitating and living as he was in his laboratory for the thirty days.

Well, the problem with miracle stories is that there really is a diamond there. Do I mean the miracle stories that make money off of Christianity? miracle stories set in the pre-scientific context of the first century Roman empire, attested by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts that have thousands of discrepancies. Now there are stories of miracles that you can find in India today, witnessed by living people. eyewitnesses, then you look at the people around someone like Satya Sai Baba, thousands of Western educated people go to India, spend time with Satya Sai Baba and come back claiming that he has in fact performed a variety of miracles, yes you add up all those stories every The miracle attributed to Jesus, including the resurrection of the dead, is attributed to Satya Sai Baba and he and millions of people think that he is a living God.

These stories, from our point of view, don't even deserve an hour on the Discovery Channel, okay, and yet 2.3 Billion people think it's worth organizing their lives around the miracles of Jesus and I think that's an intellectually unsustainable disparity. Now I am not closed to the evidence of miracles and it would be trivially easy for God to convince. tell me about your existence or the psychic powers of saints or whatever, maybe if you can tell that I have a 20 digit number written on a piece of paper in my wallet, sir, I'm sorry, it's okay, but if If you tell me what that number is, then we have a very interesting miracle on our hands and I still can't allow the follow-ups to continue.

Sorry, we have a lot of people lined up. Yes, this way, dr. Craig, I know you wanted to stay away from the epistemological questions, but I need some advice because, accepting the objective good, I guess where do we go from that pretty much because something happened to me the last time where I am, I mean, I've been. I have been a Christian, but last night God appeared to me and told me that this homosexual sexual act was as beautiful, loving and good as heterosexual procreative sex in the system of marriage and he he said come on and let everyone know that I said no God no they will believe me they will not believe me they will not believe me how do I do?

Where do we go from here practically with divine revelation? What do I leave my colleagues like your feigned sincerity about this? You know, listen, fooling anyone is not the topic of tonight's debate. I'm not even going to address idle questions like this. I didn't mean to offend you. I'm sorry. They are not following up with the one that is quite allowed because there was a misunderstanding, but the question came up and received an answer, so this question is for dr. Dr. Harris, unfortunately mine won't be funny, so it seems to me that there is a distinction and in your argument I would like you to discuss what is the conceptual possibility of the most miserable world and its material possibility, so basically what I am asking is if it is You can cite some evidence to believe that this is not the most miserable world or not, so if you can't assume that this is the world with the material conditions for the most misery to exist, then we would.

It is not moral to destroy everything, to destroy all consciousness, so I wonder how you would distinguish that this is not the worst possible world, well, it may be the only world with conscious life. I think I doubt it, given the billion-fold universe. We are living, but we don't have any evidence of life elsewhere, much less of conscious life, but this your question refers to the question of do you know what happens if it is about well-being? Why don't we know? killing all the unhappy people in their sleep tonight, okay, why wouldn't that increase the aggregate level of well-being on Earth and your infinite number of thought experiments like that you can think of seem to drive this concern well? it's just about suffering, well you can eradicate it painlessly for people and you've increased net well-being, but all those thought experiments ignore all the cascading effects of living in a world where we do those kinds of things where the consequences of do that, so why don't we do it?

Why don't we do it? In the classic experiment that everyone brings up, what if you're a doctor and you realize you have someone who could benefit from organs? You know you have five. people who could benefit from the organs of a person sitting in yourwaiting room, so you go into your waiting room, knock them out and sacrifice them, vivisect them and give them away as an organ, okay, it seems like it's a net benefit. to five people, but if we all lived in a world where at any moment your doctor could vivisect you and steal your organs, that would have pretty obvious dire consequences that none of us would want to subject ourselves to and there are our intuitions about the sanctity of human life to care for. people to treat people as ends in themselves rather than means to some other end, all of that preserves the intuitions that we have about trust and its importance in life and all these ways that we are united as a community and and ways in which Those of us who only rise or fall together, I mean, in a very important sense, our happiness depends on the happiness of others and we are not atomized beings who are radically separated, so this idea of ​​​​killing everyone first everyone would simply eradicate all suffering, yes, but it would also exclude all the happiness they would have, it would nullify all possibility of experience, so if you think that a universe where the lights are on is better than a universe where the lights are off, then turning off the lights. lights is worse, but I can imagine a universe where turning off the lights would be worth it.

I mean, Christian hell is one of them. You know, you would be doing people a lot of good if you know that Sorry, there are no follow-ups. I'm going to be very strict with this. This is the question. Well, I'll answer your question. If this is the only world, then it is, by definition, the most miserable and the happiest, and everything in between. Now I just have no idea what else is on my right, Dr. Craig, when he talks about Islam and more specifically the Taliban, he said they have a wrong view of God. I assume their violent attacks are based on jihad and so how do you know you have the right God and if you have the right God, what?

Can you offer an explanation for authorizing the Crusades again? This is not the topic of tonight's debate, but let me tell you that one of the secondary areas in which I specialized during my theological studies in Germany is Islam and I am convinced that there are better reasons to believe that God has revealed himself. decisively on Jesus of Nazareth by raising him from the dead after his crucifixion, while Islam is committed not only to the fact that Jesus was not raised from the dead but was not even crucified, which is the only historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth who is universally recognized by New Testament critics across the spectrum and that is why, with all the best will in the world, he could not be a Muslim.

I see many common points. I applaud the monotheism of Islam. but in the end i think the muslim faith is wrong about jesus, so dr. Harris, I think you've posted some interesting challenges to Christianity and theism in general, but I want to get back to the debate about what is the greatest objectivity of morality, so you say that the more you can base objective morality on the assumption of that the worst possible world is bad, so I think we can all agree on that statement that it is bad, but what does it mean that that's not just a subjective statement, that it's something based on human opinion?

I don't see any reason to think that's a goal. Well, I tried to show you in my opening remarks why that particular concern is not interesting or necessary. They can play that same game with everything we think is objective, so why 2+? 2 doing that seems to us to do it, but how do we know that it is not just a human intuition? I mean, what's wrong with a logical argument that contradicts itself? Because? Because? Isn't self-contradiction a good way to make a good argument? it just doesn't seem to work now, you can always try to back that up as an epistemological skeptic or logical skeptic and say well, that's how you monkeys are programmed to think and there are interesting ways that science is ahead of the curve.

This creates some of that tension. There are ways in which our logical expectations start to break down in physics, but we use other scientific intuitions and, in this case, mathematical intuitions to try to support them. You have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. somewhere it's okay, it's better than tearing you down for them, so you have to every objective paradigm has to take a first step has to come to light based on some axiomatic judgment that is not self-justifying a faja demonstrated it in logic and this is true for arithmetic, it's true for much more complicated things and arithmetic.

I am saying that it is a recognition that this universe offers a spectrum of experience, on the one hand, truly intolerable and, on the other, sublimely wonderful, and that we all know that movement along the spectrum towards the sublime is better than the movement towards the unbearable and meaningless suffering. Now, again, you might ask: what about suffering turns out to be good in the end? What about the suffering of you know, the stress of learning to play a musical instrument or whatever, that's not a counterattack, I mean, they're tight, there are ways to escalate, we might have to go down a little to climb to a higher place in this landscape and that we can make sense of that kind of struggle and that's why I don't equate good with mere pleasure in a way that dr.

Craig suggested it thanks, fun here, yes dr. Craig in his rebuttal of mr. Harris, you rely heavily on the distinction between is statements and all statements where you could take the entire choice of known is statements and never be able to logically derive an ought statement, so I have a question for you: the statement God exists and a is statement. or an "ought" statement that is an "is" statement, so no objective moral duty can be derived from it, not just that, then you have an unstated premise: "yes, in your arguments, well , you did not express them clearly, I said that they are based on the commandments of god and that moral obligations and duties arise in response to imperatives issued by a competent authority and therefore I would see that our moral duties are based on the imperatives issued by good itself, okay, actually I just added a piece there because I want to bring back this notion of psychopathy because it seems even more relevant to me now than I thought, so this is this idea that morality just comes from mere. issue from a competent authority.

One of the characteristics of psychopathy is the inability to distinguish true moral precepts that relate to the well-being of people and things that simply emanate from a competent authority if you, yes, children sitting in a classroom, is it okay to have a soda in class if the teacher gives you permission? most of them will say yes, if you ask them Is it okay to punch your neighbor in the face if the teacher gives you permission to immediately recognize the distinction between moral infraction and a mere conventional rule and this and this are children very young but children at risk for psychopathy don't do it? risk of zakappa they think that the rules are simply given by the authorities or the teacher tells you you can hit a child in the face you can hit a child in the face Opposite, this is again, I am not accusing religious people in general of being psychopaths , but there is a psychopathic core to this moral worldview, this divine command theory that dr.

Craig is making the case and suggesting that if God just tells you that Accra Phi is your firstborn son, it's a good thing to do, that's where the goodness comes from, which is why there are people waking up in trailer parks all over America suffering from some kind of mental illness that is destabilized. them and made them vulnerable to this way of thinking and there are people who kill their children thinking they are Abraham who just wasn't interrupted by an angel and this is the type of morality that you get from a divine command Theory that again offers no other response to jihadist I'm sorry but Buster, it turns out you have the wrong God, but that is exactly your response Sam, the 30 seconds in which God has not issued such an order and therefore you are not morally obligated to do so .

If God had been evil, I mean, I can back that God up if God is issuing that command. Well, it is a process that is seen in atheism, it has no basis for making that type of moral judgment. I have tried it. to give you a background, sorry, we have time for one more question, this is for dr. Craig, I wanted to ask you about consensus, above what consensus, yes, so if we were all looking for the same answer to a question, I think we would value a consensus and the idea of ​​a consensus is something that is highly valued within scientific thought.

So, if God is the basis of morality, it seems that it would be easy to reach a consensus and yet, within Christianity, among Christians who read the same Bible and worship the same God, one finds an absence of consensus on questions as if evolution is true. Or is homosexuality wrong? There are a wide variety of debates within Christianity, almost as many as there are between Christianity and secularism, and yet in the secular world we have found consensus on these issues and they have generally been set aside. So is consensus valued and how? Do you take into account the lack of that consensus?

Well, consensus on doctrinal issues is not relevant here. I would have to be talking about a lack of consensus on moral issues and I think there would be largely a consensus on moral issues, as I said in my first speech that I am not offering dr. Harris a new set of applied ethical values ​​I think we largely agree on the issues of applied ethics, what I offer you is a solid foundation for the moral values ​​and duties that we both cherish and recognize, so any disagreement about The perception of moral values ​​is an epistemological question, not an ontological question.

My argument is that, according to atheism, human beings are just animals, their electrochemical machines do not even have free will and therefore there is no objective moral duty, there is no objective moral value for them and If we want to have a basis for the common moral truths that I think we all recognize, we need to have it in a transcendence that is beyond nature, beyond the changing meaning of culture and opinion, and that is rooted in a being that is goodness itself and whose commands then reflect that kindness towards us who have come to the end of our time dr.

Craig and dr. Harris will be available later in the lobby to sign books. I'd like to take a moment to recognize Arnoff Dutt, who spent a good portion of the debate manning the PowerPoint, which I believe by faith was me and Aaron Rey, who is our timekeeper. Was there a PowerPoint? Very good. Oh, now let's thank our speakers. Thank you.