HH: Special couple of hours ahead as I continue a series of conversations on the great God debate, what I’ve been calling it for the last two years. It began here with a conversation between Christopher Hitchens and Mark D. Roberts, and it has gone through a number of iterations since then. And today, on the eve of the day we give thanks as Americans, I’m asking the question exactly who are we giving thanks to, and I am doing so with two of the great combatants in the public square over the question of God. Dinesh D’souza has been a longtime colleague in the list on the center-right side of the political aisle. I’ll let Dinesh give you his own biography briefly. He is author most recently of the brand new bestseller, Life After Death: The Evidence. Before that, Dinesh wrote What’s So Great About Christianity. Both books are listed right now at Hughhewitt.com. And opposite him, an old friend of mine, Michael Shermer and I go back to PBS days in Los Angeles. He is the editor of Skeptic Magazine, the author of many wonderful books, including most recently Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened, And Why Do They Say It, as well as Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudo-Science, Superstition, And Other Confusions Of Our Time. Dinesh D’souza, Michael Shermer, welcome to the program. I like to start with biography, so Dinesh, tell our audience a little bit about yourself before we dive into Life After Death: The Evidence, and other related matters.
DD: Hugh, I’m a native of Bombay, India. I came to the United States at the age of 17. I went to Dartmouth College, and this was in the early 80s. I became part of the Reagan generation. A bunch of us caught the political bug. I came to Washington to be part of that, worked for Policy Review, joined the Reagan White House and worked there for a couple of years. For the last dozen years or so, I’ve been at two leading think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and then the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. And my books include A Liberal Education, which was one of the first books to talk about political correctness, the end of racism. So I’ve been a secular writer for the last, oh, fifteen years or so. In the last few years, I’ve focused a little bit on Christian apologetics, and that is the defending Christianity, defending the idea of God, but defending God in a secular way, not by appealing to the Bible or revelation, but trying to draw on evidence from history and philosophy and science. And I’ve had the pleasure of debating several leading atheists, Michael Shermer among them. So my latest book, Life After Death: The Evidence, is an attempt to make a secular argument for life after death that reinforces the faith of the believer, but it’s not an argument based on faith.
HH: Michael Shermer, give us the rundown on the Shermer life.
MS: I’m from Southern California here, Hugh, and I went to Pepperdine University out in Malibu. I was a born again Evangelical Christian in the 1970s, and I matriculated at Pepperdine to study theology and C.S. Lewis, and the Old and New Testaments and so forth. And along the way, I switched majors to psychology. Mainly, I wanted to be a college professor, and it seemed like a great gig, and you have to have a PhD. And to get a PhD in theology, you have to master Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Latin, and I could barely get through Spanish. So I thought okay, I’d better do something I can actually do here with some skill, and that was psychology and science and experimental methodology, and that kind of led me down the road into a different pathway from theology. And I went to Cal State Fullerton and got a masters degree in experimental psych. And I had about a ten year interlude where I was a bike racer, you know, for something completely different. But I was teaching college at night, and eventually retired from bike racing, and got a PhD in history of science, and taught at Occidental College. But then, I just decided I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be sort of an activist or a public intellectual, and write books and do TV shows and radio, and try to reach more people than I could just in a classroom. So that’s when I founded Skeptic Magazine and started doing a lot of TV shows and radio shows like yours and so on, just the sense that if you want to change the world, you have to reach a lot of people through the media. So that’s primarily what I’m doing now, is writing popular science books. And we really are, Skeptic Magazine really is a science magazine, but because of the huge interest in the whole God question the last, I don’t know, five years or so, it’s like we’ve been kind of pushed toward that public debate, just because that’s what everybody wants. And so it kind of seems like we’re a big atheist magazine or something like that. We’re really not. It’s a science magazine. It’s just that we’re constantly asked what’s our position on this matter, so here we are.
HH: So I want to add to that, that I’ve been involved in this debate since I was a sophomore in college and took the natural selection, NatSci3 course from Stephen J. Gould, in which The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was taught, and I’ve always found it a great conversation. I’ve loved the series of exchanges we’ve had on this program. They will continue in the future. But I’ll begin the first question, without being specific to Life After Death or your books, Michael, I’ll ask you both, why has this debate erupted now? Really, I trace it to Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great book when it launched. And since then, it’s been two years of fairly non-stop collisions in the public square by interlocutors and defenders on both sides. Dinesh, why now?
DD: Well, actually, you know, the first of the so-called new atheist books was Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith. And Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, came soon after that. When Harris’ book became a bestseller, I puzzled about why that was the case. And I think the reason it can be summed up in one word – 9/11. In other words, Harris was able to up the ante and basically say look, we atheists have been saying for a long time that religion is irrational, it’s unscientific, there’s no evidence for it, et cetera. But now, we have a more potent accusation. Religion is positively dangerous. I don’t know if it was Harris, but one of the new atheists said of 9/11, this is a faith-based initiative, using George Bush’s famous phrase. So the idea here was to be able to take the activities of the radical Muslims, say that this was characteristic of Christianity and religion in general, and make the argument that our society would not only be more rational, but actually be safer and more decent if it was purely secular. That gave the new atheism a boost, and also gave it a lot of media exposure. Then Hitchens came right on the heels of Dawkins, and then you had a movement.
HH: Michael Shermer?
MS: I think that’s definitely part of it, and Dinesh has the right timeline there. It was Sam Harris’ book first, then Dawkins, then Hitchens. And I do like to think that quality writing also matters, because Dinesh and I are both professional writers, and we like to think that being a good writer does make a difference. And those are well-written books, as opposed to a lot of the atheist books are pretty poorly written and poorly argued. So I think that’s part of it. But going back further, I think the pendulum does swing back and forth between how invasive religion is into public life, and sometimes more, sometimes less. And it just sort of, you know, like the left and the right swings back and forth. And the Evangelical movement that I was part of in the 70s, I think became more vocal in the early 2000s after 9/11. And you know, by definition, an Evangelical, you’re supposed to evangelize. You’re not supposed to keep your candle under the bushel, under the basket. You’re supposed to, you know, go to the top of the hill and tell the world about your religion. And so I think there was, it’s a little bit of a backlash against too much of that.
HH: I don’t think…you’re supposed to go to the top of the hill and tell people about Christ. You’re not supposed to tell them about your religion. But I also want to argue just a little bit with both of you. Sam Harris, very nice guy, fine, it sold a few books, dropped under the waters. Dawkins’ been doing this since 1978. But no Hitchens, no big debate. You guys needed on the atheist side of the aisle, Michael, you needed a provocateur. You needed a big name, and you got it from Hitchens.
MS: Yeah, I don’t know, Hitchens wasn’t, I mean, he’s not that famous. I think that that book has sold more than all of his other books combined by like an order of magnitude or two. So I mean, he’s a well known social commentator for people like you that do these kinds of debates, but I don’t think that’s it by itself. I do think Dinesh is right on the social 9/11 aspects, and the Evangelical stuff I was talking about. There’s something slightly deeper than that. And yes, the polarization effect, when someone like me writes about religion, I’m much more conciliatory, and that really doesn’t inflame the troops to go out and march in the streets. It’s really the extremists that get the most attention.
HH: 30 seconds, Dinesh, to the break.
DD: Well, the thing is I do think that when Hitchens jumped in the debate, it’s true that a debate got going. The thing about Dawkins is he’s a little bit of a coward. And what I mean by that is he writes very well, but he doesn’t like to get up and debate. Shermer and I have done a bunch of debates, and so has Hitchens, so that’s created a widespread interest, particularly among young people, because they can see both sides.
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HH: A little more biography, gentlemen. Michael Shermer, when did you lose your faith in God and in Jesus Christ?
MS: In 1977, ’78. It wasn’t an overnight deconversion. It was sort of a slow, gradual erosion. And that actually hung on for quite a few years. I really did get into science as a methodology. But more than that, I think it was in part social. When I was at Pepperdine, I was surrounded by nothing but Evangelicals, and so you don’t really get a different perspective on things. Or if you do, it’s of course a biased perspective. And when I was at Cal State Fullerton, it wasn’t that people were atheists. In fact, there was really no such thing. I mean, it was just, it didn’t come up. It was almost never discussed. And so it just wasn’t relevant. And so I just kind of slowly gave up on that. I took some courses in comparative world religions and mythology, and cultural anthropology, and I could see clearly that religions are largely determined by history and geography, and people’s beliefs are based largely on where they happen to have been born and who their parents were, and that sort of thing. That chipped away at it. And then, well, I actually don’t really talk about this, but I did kind of have something of a comeback in the late, in 1980, in which I did try to believe again, because my college sweetheart at the time, a woman named Maureen who I met at Pepperdine who was from Alaska, she got in a car accident and was paralyzed. And I remember sitting there in the emergency room at Long Beach Medical Center, where she’s in a hyperbaric chamber, and thinking boy, you know, what can I do? Nothing except pray. So I did. I tried again for a while to believe. And I got down on a knee and said prayers for Maureen to be healed, and she wasn’t. And it’s not that I blame God for that. It was like you know what? I just really don’t think there’s anybody out there listening to my prayers. It just, on top of everything else, that was sort of the final straw for me. And that was 1980.
HH: Now the audience will want to know, how is Maureen today? Where is Maureen today?
MS: She’s still, she’s still paralyzed. She’s a paraplegic. She has a full life as a mom, and she’s got a couple of kids. She played, actually, she played professional wheelchair tennis for a while, so she built a great life.
HH: How’s her faith?
MS: I…actually, I have no idea.
HH: At the time of the accident, did she…
MS: Oh, I don’t think she was a believer or a non-believer. I think…I mean, she was a Christian when she went to Pepperdine. I don’t think she was a strong believe at the time. I don’t think she was an atheist, either.
HH: All right, Dinesh, in your book, Life After Death, you detail, this was surprising to me, that when you met Dixie, your wife, in the Reagan White House, you weren’t really a Christian, and you became one thereafter. Explain to people how that happened.
DD: Well, I think in my case, you know, I was raised Christian. I’m part of a small Christian minority in India. And I sort of appreciated Christianity in a sort of political or social sense, because the Christians did a lot of good in India. They ran a lot of the schools, Mother Teresa, and yet when I came to America, I looked back on it, and I say, wrote that I was kind of, I believed in what you could call crayon Christianity, which was a very simplified form of Christianity. Of course I had learned it when I was very young. But it got battered in college. What happened to me is what happens to a lot of young Christians. They set foot on a secular campus, and people say to them stuff like, you know, this is ridiculous. How can you believe someone was born of a virgin, and walked on the water, and brought dead people back to life. That’s absurd, that’s insane. And I became a little embarrassed about the things I believed. I found them a little difficult to defend. In some senses, Hugh, looking back, I think I flung myself into conservative politics because it struck me as a more hard-headed way to look at the world. And I built a largely secular career. But when I moved to California about ten years ago, my wife Dixie is an Evangelical Christian, I was raised Catholic, we began to attend a Calvary Chapel church here in San Diego. I found myself renewing my interest and the depth of my faith. And yet my work was in a different area. So oddly enough, it was the new atheism that provoked me to think you know, here’s a wonderful opportunity to take your faith, and take your work, and bring them closer together. And so that’s why apologetics, the defense of Christianity, has been so much fun for me. It’s a chance to take my own deepened faith, and my work, and unite them.
HH: And Dinesh, have you had a “born again moment”?
DD: Well, certainly in the sense that it’s dawned on me that all of this that I learned is actually true. You know, it’s one of those things where sometimes, you sit back and say all the things I was told when I was ten are true, but they’re not true in the way they were taught to you, In other words, God doesn’t sit like Santa Claus on a big throne. He doesn’t have a right hand and a left hand. Heaven isn’t the way it’s exactly portrayed in Christian victoriography. So the facts are there, but you have to have a different way to defend them. And so I’m very conscious, because of my own secular career, about how important it is for Christians to be able to articulate our beliefs in secular culture. We can’t get through to seekers, yet alone to atheists, by simply saying look, it says right here in the book of Revelation, or look, it says right here in the Bible. We need different tools. And so my work is, in a sense, attempting to arrive, to defend the ideas of Christianity, but in a sense using secular language and secular reason.
HH: Now tomorrow, when millions of Americans gather around a Thanksgiving table and they join hands or don’t, if they’re Presbyterians, I tell people I’m a Presbyterian in part because it is a church in which I’m least likely to be hugged, and when I’m at Catholic Mass, I try and find a pew in which there’s no one I have to hold hands with. So I’ll ask you both, what is it that people are doing tomorrow when they offer the Thanksgiving prayer, and to whom is it being offered, Michael Shermer?
MS: Oh, well, I’m thankful for family, and the fact that we live in such a great country where we have so much abundance. And I’m grateful for our troops and our rule of law, and our property rights, and all the things that we’ve built in society that make it possible to have a rich and fulfilling life. And whether there’s an afterlife or not, or whether there’s a God or not, I think is really irrelevant to the idea of sitting together, as an excuse to get together and have a family gathering. I can’t think of anything richer than that.
HH: Well yeah, but tomorrow, people are actually doing it, and they’re giving thanks to God, are they not?
MS: Well, I presume some are, whether they’re holding hands or not. I do want to say, I want to add one thing to the previous comment, was that this whole business are you an atheist, a theist, do you believe in God or not, you know, this is constantly asked now. And when you asked me well, what was Maureen’s belief and I sort of stumbled, you know, it’s just something we never asked back then. It just didn’t really come up. And it would be something kind of rude to ask somebody what they believe. I mean, there’s…this is kind of a new phenomenon, culturally, where everybody declares what they believe.
HH: Actually…
MS: You know, my board of directors on Skeptic Magazine, people ask are they all atheists, and my answer is I haven’t any idea. I’ve never asked them.
HH: I’ll come back to that after the break. I do want to finish focusing, though, on Thanksgiving, because I don’t believe it’s rude, and I don’t believe it’s new, and I think I’ll ask Dinesh to talk about that, because conversations about faith and lives have been around since the beginning of time, have always been sort of part of the public square. And they are not oppressive in any way or shape or form, or offensive, or should be.
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HH: Dinesh, whenever I hear that song, I think of the second inaugural of Ronald Reagan, 1984, when it was moved inside of the Capitol, and had to be sung there. But it was such a beautiful and wonderful moment…let me ask you, when we went to break, I asked Michael Shermer what are people doing tomorrow when they gather around and hold hands and give thanks?
DD: Well, I think they’re really doing two things. The first is they’re putting themselves in a great, historical tradition, namely the tradition of the early settlers, who were running away from something, and wanted to come to a better life. It was obviously going to be initially a much harder life, because they were starting with nothing. They arrive in this new country, and they’re astounded at the possibilities. And they feel this overwhelming sense of gratitude that they made the journey, they’re looking forward to a better life for themselves and their children, and they want to give thanks. And who is there to give thanks to? Well, God. They were devout, they believed that God had a plan for their lives, and a plan for America. And this began a providentialist tradition. Reagan was very much a part of it. So was Abraham Lincoln. And even though Lincoln wasn’t, you know, very devout in the conventional sense, he had a very powerful sense that God had a plan for America. And so the early settlers were giving thanks for God’s providence in the world. And I think that some of that continues. We’re aware of that today, but I think more broadly than that, quite apart from the specific landing on America, people have this sense that life is a gift. You know, here we are, flung into the world, and we’ve got something precious. We hang onto it. Even people who are sick, and even Michael’s friend who’s paralyzed, is still hanging onto life. We’re not, we don’t have a high rate of world suicide. So life is valuable to us, and in a sense, we feel like we owe it. We owe someone. We’ve got to give thanks. Someone did this. Where did this universe come from? Where did we come from? Where are we going? I think that the sense of gratitude, in a sense, points to God. The atheists, I feel a little sorry for in a way, because you have this overwhelming sense that life is a gift, that there is a sense of gratitude, but there’s no one to thank. There’s no one out there.
HH: Michael Shermer?
MS: Yeah, baloney. I mean, if you think about, is it religion that gives us all this abundance of food and security and freedom? No. If you got to Peru, 99.9% of the people believe in Jesus. They’re Catholics. They’re deeply religious, and they’re dirt poor. It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with property rights, the rule of law, capitalism, free trade, low taxes, all the stuff that we practice here in America. That has nothing to do with religion. God doesn’t give us that. We create that. Most South American countries are way more religious than even America, and yet they’re dirt poor. It has nothing to do with God. It has everything to do with social structure, and what we create here on Earth, not in some afterlife or what God gives us.
DD: Well, Michael, isn’t that a non-sequitur? I mean, I think you’ll admit that capitalism and property rights and rule of law and contracts and modern science, those didn’t develop suddenly like mushrooms all over the world. They developed only in one culture, namely Western culture, a culture that was for many centuries called Christendom. So how can you say it has nothing to do...clearly, Christian institutions have a lot to do with separation of powers. Christian institutions have a lot to do with the idea of property rights, the idea of the individual. All you have to do is to go to other cultures to find that those ideas are much diminished, if they’re there at all.
MS: Then how do you explain Peru?
DD: Well, here we’re talking about…this is a big debate, as you know. Differences of different forms of Christianity, and the way they’ve been interpreted, also the history of South America and North America is radically different. The Spanish, for example, who colonized the Americas never stayed there. They basically set up surrogate plantations, whereas the Americans came and they settled here. So our culture, read Tom Sowell on this, our culture here has evolved very differently than that of South America. It’s more entrepreneurial, and I think that partly explains the success of North versus South America.
MS: Right, so both have the same religion, and yet one develops in a radically, more productive way than the other. So it’s not religion. Using the comparative method, it’s something else. And setting up a system of property rights and rule of law.
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HH: I want to bring us back, gentlemen, I’m trying to get, though, to the nature of whether or not it is rational to give thanks to a specific God with the expectation that God will hear, and somehow expects those thanks. Dinesh, after all these explorations the last few years you’ve been after, and Life After Death, and we’ll get to this, talks in terms of physics and terms of teleology, and term of materiality. But is it rational for people to sit around and expect that God will hear them tomorrow as they give thanksgiving?
DD: Absolutely it is. I think when we look at our lives in the world, we…it’s difficult for us to believe that all of this is purely accidental. I mean, we can search for a material cause of it. But even finding a material cause is not an adequate cause, because all we’ve done is describe what happened. Yeah, there was a big bang, then we got some planets, then we got a universe. Or here I am, my parents conceived me, so here I am, an evolved creature in the world. Yes, but I think in some senses, science never gets at the bigger question. The bigger question is why do we have a universe? Why is there something instead of nothing? Or ever more deeply, where did we, where did life come from, and where is it headed? What is our purpose? What is our destination? Science has been looking at this, but in some senses, these questions, I think, are outside the orbit of science. At the best, science can give a material description, first there was an amoeba, then there were multi-cellular organisms, then we got here. That’s a description of how, but it’s not a description of why. So I think the positing of intelligence in the universe, a God, the positing of a purpose in life, these are not irrational. In fact, they are the essential, they’re essential answers to the deep curiosity that is built into human nature.
HH: And if I can follow up, that takes us to deism. But how do you go from deism to a Christian God, which is by far the majoritarian belief in America, that actually expects and accepts prayer?
DD: I think you can. And I do think it takes a couple of steps, but I’ll just suggest one step. I mean, look, we all say things, we all believe that things are not the way they should be. In other words, we all believe that we live on two levels – the level of, you might say, the way things are, the lower level of humanity, and then the way things ought to be – absolute beauty, absolute perfection, absolute goodness. So you’ve got these two levels, the bottom level and the top level. Let’s call the top level the Divine level. And I think all the religions of the world are attempts to build ladders to go from the lower level to the top level, ladders that you climb through diets and regulations and codes and commandments. This is common, for example, both in Judaism and Islam. I think what Christianity does is it basically says look, this gap is too large. Man cannot climb his way to God. God has to turn around and come down to man’s level. So God has to condescend if this chasm is to be closed. It has to be closed from above. So that’s the radicalism of the Christian message, namely that Christ, if you will, is God’s ambassador or emissary, coming down as a man, and closing this awful gap between the level we live at, and the level we know things ought to be. So this is, you know, you’ll notice I haven’t given an argument from the argument. I’ve given a fairly direct description of the human problem, and the unique Christian solution to it. I’m not proving the Christian solution is right. But I’m saying it’s a different, it’s a unique solution different than that of the other religions, and it seems to make sense to me.
HH: I think the last step is that once you get to Christ as that ambassador, then you read His instruction manual, which suggests that thanksgiving is indeed the appropriate response. Michael Shermer, your response to both my questions and Dinesh’s responses to those?
MS: Well, first of all, I think it’s, what’s rational is to give thanks to the actual source of the abundance of food and freedom that we have. Why is it, if God is the source of these, and we’re thanking God, and praying for more and so on, that all those people in Africa and Rwanda and the poor people in Peru that I mentioned, they believe in God. They’re praying to God. They give thanks to God. How come they’re poor? If God is the source, what’s your answer to the counter explanation that in fact, most people are not abundant?
DD: Well Michael, can I flip that on you and ask you this question? Why do you think they are doing it? Because they know they’re poor. They know they don’t have food. Yet they don’t seem to follow your logic and say they don’t have God to thank. They’re thanking God. Are they nuts?
MS: Yeah, they don’t understand the actual source of food and material goods. It’s not God. It’s productivity, it’s capitalism, it’s property rights. That’s the actual source. You want to know the source of abundance, that’s the only way to get it. But praying, you know, turning to the secret, and asking the universe for money, or asking God for food, that’s not how you get it.
DD: I don’t know about doing that, because people have had scarcity since time immemorial, and there were times when prosperity wasn’t even on the horizon. I think people are giving thanks for something deeper than just hey, I don’t have a big house, I don’t have a big car. They’re giving thanks for existence itself. They’re giving thanks for…
MS: Well, that may be, but that’s a different thing. Hugh asked was it rational to thank God for the food. No, it isn’t rational. It’s irrational. It’s rational to thank the actual source of the food.
DD: Well, but the pilgrims who got here, they knew that they’d have to go out and get the food. They knew they’d have to kill the turkeys themselves, that God wouldn’t just provide it at the Thanksgiving table. They knew all that. But their point was they were thanking God that they were in a place where they could do that.
HH: Michael Shermer, I am much more curious about why people who don’t believe in God thank anyone for anything, other than perhaps, you know, you might have some self-interest involved here, but that doesn’t require the elaborate sense of gratitude.
MS: Well, and what does belief in God give you for that?
HH: I’m not asking…I’m just asking why…
MS: I mean, you’re doing it so you can get a reward?
HH: No, I meant…
MS: I mean, doesn’t it seem…
HH: You’re not…you’re not answering my question, Michael.
MS: I am answering it rhetorically.
HH: My question is why...why do people…okay.
MS: I’m answering it rhetorically. Doesn’t it seem…
HH: But as opposed to rhetorically, really, why do people do it? Just a straight out, why do you think they do it?
MS: Because they actually feel it. We have deep, evolved emotions, because we’re a social primate species. We care deeply about our fellow group members. It’s part of our nature. You have to get away from this. You guys are always citing The Selfish Gene and Dawkins like that’s the only book every written on the evolution of emotions. I mean, have you read Frans de Waal’s works? Or mine…
DD: Sure.
MS: …in which we show that in fact, we have a deep, evolved, social conscience. We have…I mean, Adam Smith knew this. We have a sense of empathy. We care about other people. It’s part of our nature. God didn’t give that to us. It’s part of who we are. Whether God used evolution, okay, maybe. But it isn’t something that needs a supernatural entity to reach in and plant it in our brain. We have that. It’s natural, normal.
HH: We’ll be right back. I’ll have Dinesh’s response to that. I thought I heard a huge door open. We’ll find out if Dinesh walks through it when we return.
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HH: Dinesh, when we went to break, at the conclusion of this hour, Michael had offered up an explanation as to why people give thanks. It’s evolutionary. Your response?
DD: Well, first of all, that would still not explain why people give thanks to God, because God is not in front of us. You know, if someone gave me an apple, and I say thank you, I feel a direct sense of obligation to the guy who gave it to me. What Michael hasn’t explained is God is not, you can’t look out of the window and see Him. In a sense, all cultures from the beginning of history have posited that despite the fact that we’ve never seen God, He exists, and moreover, despite the fact that we’ve never met a dead guy, that there’s life after death. So in some senses, the interesting and deeper question is why did these beliefs evolve? Why did belief in God and religion, and then the afterlife, evolve if they aren’t true? From an evolutionary point of view, it makes no sense, and here’s why. Why does it make sense to posit another life that doesn’t exist, and invest resources, scarce resources, think of the early Egyptians putting implements in with, when they buried the pharaohs. Or think of the early peasants building cathedrals with money they didn’t really have. So why, from an evolutionary point of view, would you invest in the next life and take away your chances of survival in this one? This is widely understood to be a serious problem for evolution. There are a couple of attempts to try to explain it, but nothing very satisfactory as of yet.
HH: Michael Shermer, you get the last word this hour.
MS: Well, not everything that evolved has an adaptive purpose. There’s things called spandrels, or just sort of accidental byproducts. Lots of human life is just sort of an emergent property of something that came before that has nothing to do with its adaptive purpose way back when we were evolving. And I think belief in God and belief in the afterlife are emergent properties of having a large cortex, and nothing more. There’s no adaptive purpose to it, it’s just something we do.
DD: Well, but Michael, isn’t that, you’re just positing that? I mean, the point is, I agree theoretically there are things that can sort of come along for the evolutionary ride.
MS: Yeah, like music.
DD: But it’s hard to say that such a central feature of humanity is that. I mean, that’s like saying consciousness is a spandrel. Why isn’t belief in evolution a spandrel?
MS: In fact, something like music appreciation or the ability to do higher math. I don’t think there’s any evolutionary adaptive purpose to that at all. It’s just an accidental byproduct, and I would place belief in God and afterlife, Heaven and all that, something on the same realm of, say, the appreciation of music.
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HH: Gentlemen, in hour number two, I want to go back to my Thanksgiving theme today. Tomorrow, people will gather around the table, and we talked about giving thanks last hour. They’ll also be missing people, people who are dead. The holidays are very, very hard on people, especially people who’ve lost loved ones, and good friends in the last year. And people think about them, and they tell stories. And the question arises, Dinesh, and it’s the question at the heart of your new book, Life After Death: The Evidence, are they alive? And will you see them again? What do you say, Dinesh?
DD: I say they are, and we will. And I say that this is something that most people around the world believe solely on the basis of faith. But today, there is evidence for that, that didn’t even exist before. I would specifically refer to evidence, empirical evidence, the only empirical evidence we have, we can’t interview dead people. But what we do have is the evidence of people who’ve come very close to death, via near death experiences, people who were in some cases, clinically dead, their heart has stopped, or there is no measured brain activity at all. And yet, they report that experience and consciousness continues. Now this is not a handful of people, you know, having drinks on a Texas night. These are people all around the world, there are tens of thousands of them. There’s a whole body of scholarship that studies them. And what…and there’s a certain uniformity to their experience. They say look, we were pulled through a tunnel, we saw a bright light, we encountered deceased relatives and friends, we felt our whole life flash before us, the so-called life review, we felt in the presence of a celestial being. So you’ve got these now identified ingredients of the near death experience. And if these experiences are valid, then they suggest that consciousness can survive the breakdown of all bodily functions. And needless to say, the atheists are a little nervous about this kind of evidence, and have been trying for really twenty years to write it off, through various candidates for dismissing this evidence. But I don’t think that those explanations of the near death experience hold up very well. So I don’t want to make too much of it. It doesn’t tell us whether we have eternal life, but it does make a very important point, namely that our immaterial side, our consciousness, our free will, and so on, is different than the material parts of us, and it’s possible that when the material parts of our bodies break down, the immaterial part lives on.
HH: Michael Shermer?
MS: I do think that nobody really believes that 100%. I think there’s always a level of doubt. If it were, if that were not the case, then why is it that Christians and deeply religious people at end of life employ all the technologies that everybody else does, and they hang on and struggle and fight, and they’re just as sad and crushed when they lose somebody that they love. And so I think there is a sense somewhere in everybody’s brain that maybe, this is really all there is, and therefore, I do feel bad when I lose somebody, or I do want to hang onto my life until the last possible moment. And even the suicide bombers, always given by atheists as examples of people who really believe in the afterlife, and they’re going to get the 72 virgins, I actually don’t think that. I think that’s a secondary benefit. In their minds, they’re really doing it probably for political reasons, and for the cause that they believe in, that sort of thing. So I think there’s always a level of doubt, and even though Dinesh’s book nicely summarizes all the evidence, and I know that literature pretty well, I think he did a good job presenting it all there, I think even so, there’s still an element of doubt where you do have to take that Kierkegaardian leap of faith to really fully embrace it. I don’t think you can prove it.
HH: Someday, wrote D.L. Moody, you will hear that D.L. Moody of East Northfield is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment, I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old, clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body fashioned like unto His glorious body. One of the perfect statements of Christian belief, Dinesh. You have an obvious, long pedigree here looking into it. Is it rational for people to believe that D.L. Moody is correct?
DD: I think it is. I think that when we look at not only the evidence of near death experiences, which I mentioned a moment ago, but even if you look at the field that would seem as remote from all this as physics, you know, if we lived a hundred years ago, and someone were to say to us, you know, as Christians, what do you believe, and we say well, we believe that there’s an eternal realm that is outside of space and time, we call it Heaven, God lives there, in the Newtonian universe, this would make no sense. How can you have a realm outside of space and time? Space and time appear to stretch indefinitely in all directions. And moreover, if you said that as a Christian, we believe that we’ll have not only a soul that survives, but a soul united to a resurrected body, a body that is material in some sense, but can nevertheless live forever, is incorruptible. Again, in the Newtonian framework, this seems kind of crazy. People would say well, you know, we know what matter is, we know what bodies are, and they deteriorate like all other forms of matter. So this idea of an internal body just doesn’t make any sense. But today, my point is that modern science has totally changed the equation, totally widened the horizon of possibilities. Scientists will routinely speak about hidden dimensions, multiple realms, multiple universes. And what do we know about multiple universes? Not a lot. But what we do know is that if they exist, they have laws radically different from the laws of our universe. And moreover, scientists today will speak about dark matter and dark energy. And what do we know about dark matter? Not a lot. But what we do know is it has qualities or attributes different from any matter that we know, or that our scientific instruments can detect. And if you add up the total amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, what percentage of total matter and energy does is make up? Well, the answer is 95%. So right away here, the atheist objection, which is gee, we can’t have material bodies that last forever, because we know what matter is, the answer is sorry, pal, you don’t. All the matter that we know is a mere 5%.
HH: Let me ask you, Michael Shermer, on Page 89 of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, Life After Death, is this paragraph. “So what does modern physics have to say about Eastern and Western conceptions of life after death? In Newton’s time, the verdict was decidedly negative. Today, however, the situation is completely different. Modern physics has expanded our horizons, and shown how life after death is possible within an existing framework of physical reality. The materialist’s objection is proven to be a dud. In fact, modern physics calls materialism itself into question. In a crucial area, and sometimes against the intentions of the scientists themselves, modern science has proven itself not the foe of religious believers, but an unexpected ally.” You’re a historian of science, Michael Shermer, your reaction to that graph?
MS: Well, you know, the idea that there are hidden dimensions, or that 20th Century physics has discovered things like dark matter and dark energy, yes this is all true. The universe is stranger than we had imagined, and perhaps there is even more mysteries we can’t even conceive of. Yes, that’s possible. But here’s where Dinesh does a nice job of summarizing what the particular science is, then he makes kind of a leap, saying therefore it’s possible there’s an afterlife. Yeah, it’s possible there’s an afterlife of just misery, and that’s where we all go. Anything’s possible. There could be, it could be that C.S. Lewis had it right with Chronicles of Narnia, or Tolkien had it right with his Middle World. The fact that we can imagine fantasy worlds, and that physics tells us that there are unimagined, mysterious forces in places we don’t know about, doesn’t mean they’re both true. You see what I’m saying? The fact that Tolkien can conceive of a trilogy of a Middle World land with hobbits, doesn’t mean they actually exist.
HH: Dinesh, 30 seconds.
DD: Well, yeah, you know, the way my book is organized, it’s divided into three parts. The first part is why it’s possible, the second part is why it’s probable, and the third is why we should go for it. So in the chapter on physics, I’m trying to show that something that seemed outside the possibilities of physics is now completely within it. And then I switch to biology and to brain sciences and philosophy, and make positive arguments for life after death.
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HH: I want to go now to what Dinesh said as we were leaving last hour. The first part is, and I think we agree, what we know about physics says there could be a lot of things we don’t know out there. And then Michael countered yeah, but that doesn’t mean that there’s Tolkien, and I don’t think anyone argued that there was Tolkien, but that Dinesh, you then said there are parts two and three. Let’s get to those parts two and three.
DD: Well, a good way to start would be to look at biology for a moment. And again here, we’re moving from possibility to probability. And I look at evolution itself. And I say look, here we have evolution, and evolution is a transition. It’s a movement. Well, a movement from what to what? The evolutionary story is we began with the universe, and there was almost nothing in it, just a few gases, hydrogen and so on, and then we got some planets and galaxies, and then much later, we got the Earth, but no living creatures on it, just the Earth. And then some unicellular, or single celled organisms, then later multi-cellular organisms, and eventually, not just man, not just us, but you may say mind, a mind that can turn around and observe and understand the universe, and understand evolution itself. So here we have in nature itself a very interesting transition. We have a transition from physical matter to immaterial mind, because mind is not the same thing as matter. Nobody can say you know, what does you mind weigh? What are its length or width or dimensions. Mind is essentially of a non-physical character. And here we have in nature itself this beautiful transition from the perishable, namely matter, bodies which break down, to the imperishable. And then I say well look, here we are, we’re part of nature. And if we look within ourselves, we find the same two ingredients. We find matter, our legs, our arms, our lungs, but we also find mind, our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness of ideas, of free will. And so the question then becomes can we find in evolutionary biology itself a clue that there is this great transition from one to the other, so that when our bodies deteriorate, as they surely will, it’s again possible, and there may even be a clue in nature that this is the case, that the non-physical part of us will live on.
HH: Michael Shermer, author of Why Darwin Works, what’s your argument with that?
MS: Why Darwin Matters, actually.
HH: Oh, I’m sorry.
MS: But he does work. And on that, I mean, let’s just take something really simple like why are male guppies so colorful, and the female guppies are not colorful. And the answer is because of the sexual selection. The females are selecting the most colorful males to mate with, and they have more colorful babies. Now everybody knows this is true. No intelligent design creationists say ah, colorful, male guppies, that’s where the intelligent designer swooped in and supernaturally created these colors. No, they just say well, of course, that’s just nature. So the problem of like explaining the origin of cells, and things like that, it’s in the same category. The fact that we don’t have a consensus by scientists of how that happened three and a half billion years ago doesn’t mean there won’t be one. So the God of the gaps argument, wherever there’s a gap, that must be where God acts, is not a good place to put your faith, I think, because what are you going to do with your faith when the gap is filled. So that explains the origin of life problem, the cells, and all that. On mind, we have to be careful of these words. These are loaded words. Mind is a word that just explains what the brain does. When we think about our behaviors, which are driven by brain activity, and our thoughts, which are neurons firing, we use words like he thought, or he deduced, or he/she understood, or she felt. But those are words just to describe internal states. It’s still just brain, because if you take out a part of that brain, that part of the brain through surgery or stroke or brain injury, that function is gone forever, unless some new neurons can be grown. So without the neurons, without brain, there is no mind.
HH: Dinesh D’Souza?
DD: Oh boy. Well, we’ve now jumped into neuroscience. I want to finish the point about biology, first, and that is Michael made an answer that didn’t meet my original point. In fact, he raised a point about guppies that I agree with completely. Nowhere am I appealing to any God of the gaps. I’m not saying that we can’t account for the Cambrian explosion, therefore God did that, nothing like that. I’m rather answering a point that the atheists have been saying for a long time that there’s no plan in evolution, that ultimately, this is chance and natural selection, and that’s it. Stephen J. Gould wrote a famous book about this, saying that the evolutionary process is in a sense unplanned or unguided. And I’m not even saying that there’s an external, supernatural designer. I’m simply saying there’s a plot within evolution itself. It’s right before our eyes. It’s a plot that goes from the simple to the complex, and from the material to the immaterial. Now you can’t deny that. That’s there. And I’m interpreting that to say that nature is giving us a clue that we, who are a part of nature, might like nature itself be moving from the material to the immaterial, so when our bodies die, a part of us can live on. Now on the issue of neurobiology, it’s certainly true that the mind and the brain are interdependent. I think Michael is assuming that interdependent means that one caused the other. But let me give an analogy to show why that’s not the case. You know, if you think of your mind as a kind of software program, and your brain as the hardware on your computer, obviously the software program needs the hardware to function. If you smash the computer, the software won’t run. But that doesn’t mean that the computer caused the software, that the hardware in a sense created the software. No, the software’s actually independent of the hardware. It can run on a different computer, or it can run on my i-phone or a different application, the point here being that there’s a second possibility we have to consider, namely that the brain is a transmitter or a receiver for the mind. You need the brain for the mind to function, but it doesn’t mean the two are exactly the same thing.
HH: Michael Shermer?
MS: I think you’re positing a dualistic entity that exists outside of brain, but where would that be? In some sort of quantum state? Is it in some multi-dimensional field? Without the brain, and where does it go? Why is it that you know, when somebody strokes out, the mind is gone?
DD: But Michael…
MS: You can’t just say it’s hiding in some multi-dimension.
DD: Well, when you say where is it, the truth of it is science all the time deals with things that can’t be seen.
MS: But that doesn’t mean it’s true.
DD: Look at something as simple as gravity. How does the Earth reach out and pull on the Moon so that the Moon and the Earth exercise a gravitational force on each other? Newton was very worried about this. He called it action at a distance. Or consider space and time. We live in space and time. Nothing could be more obvious. And yet where are they? We can’t find space under a microscope.
MS: An equally rational argument would be that one of the things our brain does is it posits agents, hidden agents, spirits, forces, ghosts, gods, aliens. We just tend to think there’s somebody behind the patterns we find. I call this agenticity, the tendency to find hidden, secret conspiracies and animistic forces and so on. That’s just what our brains do, because we have a big, large cortex. We find patterns, and we put agent behind them. And the soul is something like that. But if you think what the soul really is, it’s just our pattern of memories and personality and who we are. And when we die, how does that get transformed to some other platform into the future?
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HH: I want to go back to the question I posed at the beginning of the hour, Dinesh. People will be remembering their loved ones who are not with them this Thanksgiving and this Christmas, and they’ll be wondering if they’re going to see them again. You mentioned, and in our book is catalogued, the research into NDE’s, near death experiences. Can you summarize that research, those authors, Moody, et cetera, and what your conclusion was having surveyed the whole field?
DD: Well, I think in the 70s and 80s, the near death experiences were anecdotal. Moody collected 150 of them. And for a while, it was easy to dismiss them, because the atheists would say things like yeah, but look, this is what happens when you take hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. You’re going to have some pretty weird dreams and so on. But what happened is as the near death experiences become more codified, and people began to study them in other cultures, and it became clear that there was a universality and a uniformity to these experiences, this argument collapsed, because after all, you give 100 guys LSD, they may have weird dreams, but they’re not going to have the same dream. So a more sophisticated interpretation became necessary. In recent years, a psychologist, Susan Blackmore, has argued for what she calls the dying brain hypothesis, the basic idea of being that she argues that as the brain breaks down, it goes into shutdown mode, and your visual pathways constrict, and that’s why you see a tunnel, and your sense of identity or self is dissolving, and that’s why your life seems to flash before you. And your brain generates a kind of special effects, and that’s why the bright light and so on. So this has been the favored atheist explanation for these near death experiences. I think it’s problematic for a bunch of reasons, but I’ll mention just one, namely that the tens of thousands of people who have near death experiences, well, where are they? The answer is, they’re living among us. They drive to work, they are computer analysts and engineers, they live in families. So if they have been victims of a dying brain, how have the neurons in their brain repaired themselves? How have their brains healed themselves so they are now able to function normally? For this reason alone, although there are others, I think the dying brain hypothesis doesn’t really hold up that well. And the near death experiences appear to be some sign that consciousness can survive the breakdown of our material body.
HH: Michael Shermer?
MS: Well, Sue Blackmore’s dying brain hypothesis is just for people that are actually dying. The whole other set of people is hypoxia, oxygen deprivation to the cortex, which happens in near drowning experiences, heart attacks, surgeries, anesthesia, car accidents, things like that. And we know from research by a U.S. Navy pilot trainer, a physician that accelerates pilots in a centrifuge so they can train them not to black out by constricting their neck muscles and so on, he just accelerates them to high G’s, and they all eventually pass out. It’s part of their training program. One out of five of the pilots have out of body experiences, and it’s strictly from loss of blood to the cortex. You can see with the little video camera that they’re just sitting there passed out. But one of out five, 20%, report having this out of body experience, so that’s hypoxia. That’s oxygen deprivation. The other thing is temporal lobe stimulation, Michael Persinger, has a lab, this little God helmet he calls it, and I went up and did it, and the effect wasn’t strong for me. It was pretty subtle. But I did have a sense of presence in the room, and felt like I was floating out of my body, just from stimulating with electromagnetic fields, my temporal lobes, just above my ears. And so we do know that those kinds of experiences that people report in NDE’s are directly related to neural activity that you can replicate in a lab.
DD: Right, but Michael, isn’t that a bit of a fallacy? I mean, look at it this way. If I went out and said hey, the Sun is very bright outside, it’s blinding me in the eyes, and you go no, that’s an illusion of your brain, look, here’s a flashlight, I’m going to flash into your eyes and show you I can do the same thing, well, that’s true, but remember, the people who have near death experiences don’t have Persinger’s helmet on them. The point is having the experience very often when they are near death on the operating table, now you’re right about the out of body experience. That feature of the near death experience does occur. And you know as a cyclist, I mean, you can be at high altitudes. There are way to have an out of body experience by itself. But it doesn’t account for the other features of the near death experience. I mean, presumably, the guys who are, the people who have the out of body experiences that you’re talking about, don’t see celestial beings, or feel their life come before them, or any of the other elements of the near death experience.
HH: Michael?
MS: Right, well, so then we’re left with this, again, that gap, that leap of faith, that either you just sort of settle in and say well, you know, this is just where we’re at now with the neurophysiology, this is what we know happens with brains. Maybe Dinesh is right that this represents something else, maybe he’s not. And at some point, you just either say okay, I really want to believe in the afterlife, or my religion tells me I already believe in the afterlife, and I’m looking for evidence to fit it. And if you don’t have that worldview, then this doesn’t become a piece of evidence.
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HH: I want to conclude our conversation in this segment, Dinesh and Michael, by asking you, you know, are we better off believing than not believing, because on this Thanksgiving, it seems to me, Dinesh, you conclude your book with a very strong, practical section on why belief in immortality is good for our society and good for our lives. You want to give a summary on that?
DD: Sure. Well what, you know, I think that this is a topic on which you can make, and I do make, a case for life after death. And I think I prove it by a preponderance of the evidence, kind of the I meet the civil standard, if you will, in a legal trial. I can’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt for the simple reason that this is an event in the future. It’s something that is or is not the case, and we are sort of like detectives, and we’ve come on this crime scene. Now there are no eyewitnesses, that we can’t talk to dead people, but there are a lot of clues. And at the end of the day, I say we’ve got a strong case for it. And if we can’t be absolutely sure, we have to use practical arguments. In other words, does it make sense to believe? Is it good for me to believe? Now earlier, Michael was saying that a lot of our higher facilities, our appreciation for music, our sense of love, our sense of transcendence, all of this is just a kind of evolutionary carry-along, a spandrel, as he puts it. Well, what a bleak view that is. It’s essentially saying that the distinctive features of our humanity have no significance or purpose. They’re just sort of evolutionary accidents. And if there’s no life after death, we are sort of like passengers on the Titanic. In other words, we can turn up the music and rearrange the deck chairs, but the ship is going down. Essentially, all our past achievements, and our current projects, and our future plans, are going to be annihilated by this great wrecking ball, death. By contrast, if there is life after death, then we can first of all face death better, death is not total annihilation but a gateway to another and perhaps better life. We have a reason to hope that good will be rewarded and evil punished. In other words, there’s cosmic justice in the world. We have a way to teach morality to our children. We have a sense of meaning and significance in our everyday lives, which are now part of a larger transcendental drama. So I think when you weigh the practical arguments, there’s absolutely no contest. Not believing in life after death is a kind of recipe for nihilism, whereas belief in life after death gives you a lot of very practical benefits that make your life a lot better.
HH: Michael Shermer, I think, I anticipate your argument, which is I don’t want to believe in something that isn’t true. But how do you respond to the utilitarian argument that even if you didn’t believe, you’d want other people to believe?
MS: Well, first, your first point is not a trivial one. I mean, the question of whether life continues after the death of the physical body is a legitimate scientific one. And it may not be ultimately provable, I think probably not, but whether I want it to be true or not, that is, people often ask me what my position is on the afterlife, and I always say I’m for it of course. But that doesn’t make it true. There’s a lot of things I’d like to be true, but that doesn’t mean that they are. And so it’s sort of, this whole discussion is sort of irrelevant as to whether there is an afterlife or not, and that is to say whether I believe in it or not is irrelevant.
HH: But that’s not my question. My question is is it good, is it utilitarian that people do?
MS: I don’t think so, because I don’t think people do that in any case. If they did, I would find it rather shallow. That is to say…
HH: Now what you think. But just objectively, Michael, is it good for the world, as Dinesh has argued, that people believe in the afterlife?
MS: I don’t think so.
HH: Why not?
MS: Because if you’re doing it for the shallow reason that you want to get bonus points in the next life…
HH: That’s not the question. The question is…
MS: I find it…well, okay, you may argue…
HH: …utilitarian, and you understand my question.
MS: You may argue…
HH: You understand my question. Is the world better off with people believing in the afterlife?
MS: No, I don’t think so.
HH: Why not?
MS: Because it’s a higher…
HH: We lost you there, Michael. Michael? Oh, Dinesh, we lost him.
DD: Yeah, I think he was a little lost intellectually as well on this one, because look, I’m not saying that because it’s good to believe, therefore it’s true. I spend 90% of my book examining whether it is true. And at the end of the day, I say that there are some questions in which we can’t be sure. You know, Hugh, it’s a bit like if you were dating a woman, and you’ve dated her for five years, and now you’re deciding whether to propose marriage, sure you bring all the reasonable arguments to bear, but then you say what would life with this woman be like for the next thirty years, or the next fifty years? And the truth of it is you can’t know for sure. So you can say well, I’ll be an agnostic, I’ll wait for the data to come in, but that’s the dumbest position of all, because if you’re just waiting and waiting, she’ll marry someone else, or you’ll both be dead.
HH: Great. Michael, you’re back, and so I wanted to go back to this argument as to why you say it doesn’t make any sense, it’s not good for the world for people to believe in the afterlife.
MS: Well, okay, I guess you could make the argument, sort of a simpleton argument that people are stupid, and they need a little policeman in their head, or else we won’t have a civil society. Come on, I think that’s a pretty shallow argument. Don’t you think what civil society is doing…
HH: This isn’t about shallow or deep.
MS: …is tapping into…
HH: It’s a question of…
MS: …our propensity to be good when we have the inclination to be so, and not. If you really believe that the afterlife, belief in the afterlife leads to a better society, then why would you bother, Hugh, as a lawyer, to have a rule of law in a society? Why do you care about justice now? Why do you care that the 9/11 conspiracists are put onto trial?
HH: I will answer your question by answering I don’t answer the questions. I moderate. But Dinesh, I must tell you, it is always a frustration of mine that when I argue with the atheists, even nice ones like Michael, they refuse to answer the utilitarian questions, and I think it’s because in that argument dissolves all of their objections to faith.
MS: No, I don’t think so, Hugh. Come on.
HH: Go ahead…I asked Dinesh that.
MS: That’s not fair.
HH: I asked Dinesh that.
MS: You’re asking does it help society to pretend to believe in something…
HH: No, I didn’t. I didn’t say to pretend. I said does it help society.
DD: Well see, Michael, remember, most people in society don’t see themselves as pretending.
HH: Exactly.
DD: That’s your interpretation of it. They see it as real. Now here is the point that I think Hugh is getting at, which is this, that however much we believe in laws and justice and courts, the truth of it is terrestrial justice is imperfect. We all know that sometimes, the bad guy ends up…
MS: But Hugh, I don’t think you believe it, or else you wouldn’t practice law.
HH: Right, when I come back after break, we’ll go into the last segment, I will explain what my question was about, and ask a final question of our guests, Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza.
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HH: Thanks to my guests, Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer. Their books are listed at Hughhewitt.com. A quick and then a long question. Dinesh and Michael, are we agreed that belief in the afterlife is not irrational? Michael Shermer?
MS: Well, it depends on what you mean rational or irrational. But I thought of a better answer to your previous question, that is…
HH: Michael, please, work with me. Just the question. I’ve got three minutes. Is it not irrational?
MS: Everybody in Peru believes in the afterlife, and yet it is not better for their society. That’s…
HH: But stop, stop, stop.
MS: That’s the answer to your question. Therefore, it’s irrational to believe in that.
HH: Dinesh, I don’t know how you do it, because whenever you get onto a line of questions with one of the atheists…
MS: Hugh, I answered your question.
HH: They will not answer the questions.
MS: Hugh…
HH: And Dinesh, I don’t know how you do it.
DD: Well, Michael’s a decent guy.
MS: Hugh, you’re leaving me out? I just answered your question.
DD: And here’s the thing. The reason he’s hesitating, and I think…
MS: I’m not hesitating, gentlemen.
HH: Sure you are. You’ve dodged it four times. It drives me crazy.
MS: No, I gave you an answer to the question. No, it is not better for society. Everybody in Peru believes…
HH: That’s not the question I just asked.
MS: …in the afterlife, and it is not better.
HH: Dinesh, give me your example. Tell me how you can do this time and time again, because they do not argue honestly.
DD: Well, here’s the point.
MS: Hugh…
DD: The point is…
MS: Oh, come on. This is, this is really bad.
DD: …that the vast majority of people, no, Michael is an honest guy. He’s not being dishonest.
MS: Hugh, you asked me is it beneficial to society to believe in the afterlife.
HH: No, I asked you at the start of this segment is it not irrational. That’s what the question was. Whenever a question confronts an atheist, I did it with Dawkins, I’ve done it with Hitchens, I’ve done it with you, again and again, when you get up to the cliff and you cannot deal with a hard question, you guys dodge. And Dinesh, I don’t know how you do this for a living.
MS: Okay, wait. Didn’t you ask me is it beneficial to society to believe in the afterlife? Isn’t that what you asked me?
HH: No, I began this segment with the question is it not irrational.
MS: I would say it’s neither rational nor irrational.
HH: And that’s not the question. The question is simple. It’s a yes or no question. Is it irrational to believe in the afterlife?
MS: Yes.
HH: Dinesh?
DD: Well see, I think the reason Michael hesitated is because he is a decent guy. He knows the vast majority of people from the dawn of mankind have believed, and even today do believe in the afterlife. So it’s a little difficult to write off the 99% of humanity as irrational. So the point here is this. It’s not irrational to believe. In fact, it is the most rational thing in the world. Most people do believe on the basis of faith, because there is residual uncertainty. We don’t know for sure. And that’s why we call ourselves believers. We don’t call ourselves, knowers, because there is an element of faith involved. But it’s a faith that is not opposed by reason, but it is a faith that is supported and corroborated by reason.
HH: And the second argument is, if it is objectively true that the world is better off believing in God, then those who argue against belief are objectively engaged in an evil project, Michael, because if you are destroying belief and belief is good, whether or not it is true, then you are involved in an objectively immoral enterprise.
MS: And I believe I just gave you an example where 99% of everybody in Peru believes in the afterlife, and yet their society is not better for that.
HH: And again, didn’t answer the question, but we’re out of time. I’m sorry about that. Michael Shermer, Dinesh D’Souza, thank you. Everyone, have a happy Thanksgiving. And thank God for it.
End of interview.