Two weeks ago Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson

Met in person for the first time on stage in Vancouver

Two nights ago the three of us got together for the first time in Dublin and it's a huge thrill for all of us

To now be here with you in the o2

As I said to Travis when these events were planned I'm not moderate enough to be a moderator

But I'm going to do a little bit of

fielding to begin with

so

Let me start by saying a little of some of the ground. We are going to be trying to cover here tonight

We're going to be dealing with the conflict between science and reason

We're going to be addressing the legitimacy did I say science and reason

We're not addressing that

We're going to be looking at the legitimacy of holding on to religion in any form and

We are also going to be addressing the fact that we need to hide in a sports stadium

to address serious issues

But I think to begin with I'm going to hand over to Sam and he's going to kick us off properly

Thank you. And first thank you all for coming out. I you really can't imagine how humbling this is

Be here with you

You really just should just take a moment to appreciate this from our side because

Justin Bieber is not coming out to sing and in the middle of this as amusing as that would be

and you know though we

Put a date like this on the calendar with apparent confidence

There's really no guarantee that you guys are going to show up and we will never take this for granted

So it's really an immense privilege to be here with you. So

I thought I could start by

first acknowledging how fun this has been to have this these series of dialogues

With Jordan now, this is the fourth event. We've done and the second with Douglas and

We clearly share a common project we are trying to figure out how to live the best lives possible

both individually and collectively and we're trying to figure out how to

build societies

that safeguard that opportunity for as many people as possible and I think we each have a sense that

Ideas are really the prime movers here

That is it's not that the world is filled with bad people doing bad things because that's what bad people do

Oh, there's some of that it it is mostly that

So much of humanity is living under the sway of bad ideas

And it's bad ideas that can cause good people or at least totally normal people like ourselves

to do bad things all the while trying to to

Live the best possible lives and that really is the tragedy of our circumstance that we can be that confused

So this is where the difference between Jordan and and me in particular opens up

Which is how do you view religion in this in this contest of between good ideas and bad ideas and for me religion?

emphatically

gets placed on the side of bad and old and and

worth retiring ideas or ideas worth retiring and

I

Guess I but by analogy I would I would

Ask you to consider astrology right now Hannah. Maybe I can just get a sense of what I'm talking to

What percentage of you I want to know believe in astrology which is to say but who among you and you can signal this by?

by applause or howls of

Enthusiasm what what percentage of you let me just spell it out. So I know you know what you're committing to

And you know how crazy your neighbor is in fact

What percentage do you believe that human personalities and human events and the difference between good and bad luck and a human life is the

result of

What the planets are doing against the background of stars?

Let's hear it somebody out there

Okay, so then you should know that something like 25% of your your neighbors believe that

There you go, so the

I'm here. Wait, wait wait, I'm hearing I'm hearing a heckler among the astrologers is that

Is the FIR the first?

Astrological heckler I've heard haha

You must be an aries, sir

So it won't surprise you I have a related question which is

What

what percentage of you I want to know our

religious which is say well who among you believe in God a

Personal God a God that can hear prayers a God that can take an interest in the lives of human beings and occasionally

Enforce good outcomes versus bad outcomes

What who among you and now again, I want to hear applause or silence believe in it that sort of God

Okay, so this is my concern is my concern with with what Jordan has been saying and right in

lo these many months

I

Feel that you're in danger of misleading these the second group of people that the way you talk about God

has convinced and will continue to convince some percentage of humanity that

It's it's fine to hold on to this old sword of God this God that can hear prayers and they can intervene or not in

the lives of human beings

And you know as we've begun to explore that I think there are a lot of problems with that kind of belief

If nothing else there are many such gods on offer and there and and devotion to them it becomes irreconcilable among the true believers and

My concern is it you could do

Exactly what you do with religion with astrology, right? It would be it would be no more legitimate to to

Obfuscate the boundary between clear thinking and and

superstition there because

the

This traditional God and the and the doctrines that support him or are no firmer ground

Than astrology is now today an astrology

Almost everything you say about religion

It's the fact that his organized human thinking for thousands of years that it's a cultural Universal

that every every group of people has has given rise to some form of it that it has archetypal significance that it

has powerful stories all of that can be said about astrology and it and in fact some additional things can be said about

astrology that are would argue in its favor for instance astrology is

Profoundly egalitarian, you know, there's there's no bad zodiac sign every whoever you are. Everyone's got a great zodiac sign and

You know, it's just a inconvenient fact of the discipline that if I read you Charles Manson's horoscope

you know 95% of the audience would find it relevant and

and that's just that's how easily falsifiable stralla g is but

My concern is that we could live in a world

Where societies are shattered over things like, you know different zodiac

Interpretations and we don't live in that world for good reason because we have beaten

Astrology into submission and I would say that religion in terms of revealed religion and belief in a personal God

is over the centuries getting the same treatment by science and rationality and should be and it is a a

Preferred circumstance that we live in a world that is that is shattered by religion

So, I think what I'll do first is adopt the

Exceptionally difficult and likely counterproductive position of saying something

Not so much in defense of religion, but in defense of astrology

knowing

knowing full well that that's fundamentally a fool's errand but there's something I want to point out is that

First of all

Astrology

was astronomy in its nascent form and

astrology was also science in its nascent form just like alchemy was chemistry in its nascent form and

so sometimes

You have to dream a crazy dream

with all of the error that that crazy dream entails

Because you have an intuition that there's something there

To motivate you to develop the intuition to the point where it actually becomes of genuine practical utility

now when we look back on the astrologers and

we view their contributions to the history of the world with

contempt we should also remember that the people who built Stonehenge for example, and the first people who decided

determined that our fates were in part written in the stars were people whose

Astrological beliefs were indistinguishable from their astronomical beliefs and you might think well in what sense is your fate?

written in the Stars and I would say

It's certainly the case insofar as there are such things as cosmic regularities

so it was the dream of

astrology that there was some relationship between the movement of the planetary bodies and the fixed stars and

Human destiny and that's what drove us to build the first

astronomical

observatories and to also determine that there was a proper time for planting and a proper time for

Harvesting and a way of orienting yourself in the world for example by using the north

It's also the poetic

ground that enabled us to identify the notion that you could look up and orient yourself towards the heavens and that there was a

Metaphorical relationship between that and positioning yourself properly in life and at a deeper level

The the the cosmos was the place that the human imaginative drama was

Externalized and draped itself out into the world as something that was essentially observable so that we could derive great

orienting fictions from the observation of our imagination and so

Part of the problem that that Sam is pointing to is the difficulty of distinguishing

Valid poetic impulse from invalid poetic impulse and that really is a tremendous problem

You you see that arise also in people who have religious delusions attendant upon manic depressive disorder or schizophrenia

but so much of what eventually

Manifests itself is hard core pragmatic scientific belief has its origin in wild flights of poetic

Fantasy and it's also the case by the way that that's actually how your brain is organized

As far as I can tell that when you and and it isn't just me. I actually it's it's there's a very large

What would you call it research literature?

Outlining the relative functions of the right and left hemisphere and it certainly appears to be the case that when we encounter something. Absolutely

unknowable or unknown

What we do is drape that unknown thing in fantasy as a first pass

approximation to the truth and then refine that fantasy as a consequence of

Iterative critical analysis and so Sam believes that what should happen

Is that the the poetic and fictional domain should be some planted by the rational domain?

Well, let me just close the loop there

it's not quite I think we we need poetry and fiction and then there's there's more to engage in with reality than being a

Scientist in a white lab coat, but we need to be able to clearly distinguish

fact from fantasy or fact from mere merely fertile flights of the imagination and

we want to be rigorous there and rational there and it's not that it's not that there's no place or

Mere creativity. That's not well, I guess well

then the rails of rationality look fair enough then but I mean then then partly what we are disputing is the the relevant the

What the relative import and the of those two domains?

Let's say the heretic and the fictional and the rational and status of religion now in that

Well, I have a hard time reconciling that to some degree with your with your more

What would you say formal statements about the problem?

because your mechanism the mechanism that you put forth above all outside of truth is

Rationality and it isn't clear to me if you're willing to allow the utility of spiritual experience

which you do and and and if you're willing to make

What would you say allowances for the necessity of the poetic imagination?

exactly how it is that that is also

Encapsulated under the rubric of pure rationality see

Let's see and here's something you can tell me what you think about this

And I've been thinking a lot about what Sam and I have been talking about by the way, you know

So I'm making the case in my writing that the democratic institutions not only grew out of the judeo-christian substrate

but that their that that they're properly ensconced within that substrate, but I'm also perfectly aware that

not every religious or poetic system gives rise to democratic institutions first and also that there are

Christian

Sub structures may be the most obviously in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church. Where the same

metaphysical principles apply but out of which a democracy did not emerge and so it does seem to me that

what we have in the West is the consequence of the interplay between the

fantasy predicated poetic

judeo-christian tradition and the

rational critique that was aimed at that by the

Enlightenment figures and that seems to me to mirror something like the proper balance between the right hemisphere and its poetic imagination

and the left hemisphere and it's critical capacity and

Then I would say that part of the way so one of the questions you brought up was. How do we

Decide which let's say religious in

Intuitions are valid and I think we do that in part through

negotiated agreement, you know because people have

Look even even among the Catholics say in the medieval time. There was an absolute horror of heresy

So if you were some mendicant monk

And you had a profound religious vision?

the probability that you were going to be tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake was extremely high because even the

gatekeepers of the religious tradition realized that

religious revelation untrammeled by

Something like community dialogue something like that was something extraordinary

Danger and so I would agree with you that

The poetic imagination and the ground of religious revelation is something that can lead people dangerously astray

But I would say at the same time that it constitutes the grounds of our initial exploration and that it's actually in a radically necessary

Okay, well briefly address that and I want to ask a question that brings Douglas directly in here

I I think this is an instance of what's called the genetic fallacy the idea that because

Something emerged the way it did historically

As a matter of historical contingency, it is the the the the origin is in fact good and worth maintaining

or that it was in fact necessary that we couldn't get these good things like democracy any other way or were unlikely to and I

Would say that that there's no Abrahamic religion

That is the best conceivable womb of democracy or anything else

We like science that were a great place to get Douglass involved so it but but I would just add one other category of

Thinking here we have what we think is factual and

Methods by which we derive facts and I would put rationality there and an empirical engagement with with reality

then we have

other good things in life like

Fiction and and flights of fancy that are pleasing for one reason or another and could be generative

toward the first category, but then we also have

I know I would acknowledge we've spoken about this before

Useful fictions and cases I would you know, hope rare cases where where fiction is

more adaptive or more useful than the truth right that there's a

Sometimes the truth can can be not worth knowing and I would argue that they you know, there are those cases

Okay

But they're not so they're few and far between but we should focus on that but some degree of so