Joe Rogan | Is Religion Responsible for Morality? w/Richard Dawkins

When you look at human civilization and you go back to the origins of religion and you look towards the future, do you envision a time where humanity is free of what you would consider irrational belief systems or belief systems are not based on fact? I do. I'm not sure that it'll come soon, but I do and I look forward to that time, of course. I think we're moving in the right direction and the figures bear that out in even in America, which is off the scale of Western civilizations, even in America, the number of people who now subscribe to a religion is dropping dramatically and the number who say they have no religion is now about 25%. That's a lot. That is a deal. That compares to any one particular Christian denomination. And yet, politically, that group, the nuns, the no beliefs, have no lobby. They have no powerful pressure group. So politicians will go out there and suck up to, I don't know, the Irish lobby, the Polish lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Catholic lobby, et cetera. But the atheist lobby hasn't got his act together or is only just now beginning to get his act together. Well, politically, I think people are terrified of the concept because it's such a long branch to go out on. One of the things that you brought up in the God delusion was the willingness of people to vote for a gay candidate for president, a black candidate for president, a woman candidate for president, but then an atheist, which is, I believe, 40%. They think that you've got to have a belief in some kind of higher power in order to be moral. But the weird thing is that it doesn't have to be the same higher power as the one you believe in. Anyone will do as long as there is one. But if you don't believe in a higher power, you must be immoral. And that is totally ridiculous when you think about the horrible immorality of, for example, both the Bible and the Koran, which are horrific in the sense that if you actually got your morals, if you got your moral values from the Old Testament or the Koran, and they share them a great deal, of course, you would be stoning adulterers to death and stoning people to death for breaking the Sabbath and doing sacrifices, human sacrifices and animal sacrifices, all sorts of horrible things, which of course do go on now in Islamic countries, especially gay people getting thrown off high buildings and women being beheaded for the crime of being seen with a man, not their husband and that kind of thing. So that we can see what you get when you get your morality from an Abrahamic scripture. And yet there are still people in this country who say you cannot be moral unless you believe in a higher power. That do you think, let's extract this concept of a higher power, let's get rid of it, let's get rid of it. Where do you think people get their morals and their ethics from? Now that's a profoundly difficult question. We clearly don't get them from religion and yet we get them from somewhere and you can demonstrate that by the fact that the moral values of any particular century are markedly different from those of other centuries, even decades. So in the 21st century, we here now have moral values which are really significantly different from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago. And within any one of those centuries, you could take people who are in the vanguard of moral progress. For example, in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley would have been on the liberal progressive end of the spectrum and other people would have been on the opposite end. But even Abraham Lincoln, for example, made a speech that I quoted in Outgrowing God in which he said, of course, nobody would seriously think that black people are the equal of white people. Nobody would seriously say that black people should be allowed to vote or should be allowed to marry white people. This is Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and was, as I say, in the forefront of progressive thought. Charles Darwin, again, was in favor of freeing the slaves. He was passionately anti-slavery. But he too thought that there was no question about black people being the equal of white people. And he learned, and Thomas Huxley, again, Darwin's bulldog, thought the same way. Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say. Today they would still be in the forefront and they would be horrified to look back on what they said in the 19th century. Well, something is changing as the centuries go by. In Outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, which of course doesn't explain anything. But what I mean by that is that it's not literally hovering in the air, but it's a collection of conversations between people, dinner party conversations, parliamentary decisions, congressional debates, judicial decisions by judges, juries, newspaper articles, journalism. All these things together can spy together to produce something in the air, something that defines a given century or maybe even a given decade with the moral values of that decade. Trevor Burrus The knowledge base, which is just so superior today in terms of what the general public has access to in terms of what we understand about human beings. Which is different than it was back then. And it continues to be different. And now with the internet, we have so much more access to these conversations. It's not just about being at a dinner table with the right people. You can watch YouTube videos of yourself debating religious scholars. Peter Dalmaris So that progress of something in the air has, as it were, taken on an accelerated pace because of the internet. And I think that's a very hopeful sign. Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose. I think there's a kind of asymmetry there because especially if you look at benighted areas of the world like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where until recently, the idea of being an atheist was simply inconceivable. It was off the radar. They didn't even consider it. It wasn't something that they thought was possible. Now they do because they got the internet. And we've got a project in CFI of downloading free of charge as PDFs, several of my books, including The God Delusion, and will be Outgrowing God as well. And these are being downloaded by large numbers of people. The first PDF download of the Arabic edition of The God Delusion was downloaded 13 million times. Arabic edition, 13 million times. So now they are being exposed to the possibility of atheism, which wasn't a possibility. Of course, the internet is also exposing them to Islamic propaganda. But they've had that all along from Imams, Mullahs, and the Madrasa schools. But now they've got it coming the other way as well. And I have great hope that the internet will mark a turning point. Thank you.