Monday, August 16, 2004

Dennis Prager: You are listening to the Dennis Prager Show, and I’m glad you are. I am revved up for this, because I have a feeling this will be most interesting. A book has just been published, titled “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and Future of Reason.” The author is Sam Harris, and briefly, Sam Harris received his degree in philosophy from Stanford University, where he’s now completing his doctorate in neuroscience. “The End of Faith” is his first book. He has a website, www.samharris.org.

Mr. Harris has written an article in the Los Angeles Times, “Holy Terror: Religion isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” And since I think it is the solution, this should be most interesting.

Sam Harris, thanks for the time.

Sam Harris: Nice to be here, Dennis.

DP: Thank you very much. Where are you located?

SH: I’m actually in Los Angeles now.

DP: How ironic. You could have come into the studio.

The book is “The End of Faith.” Let me begin with this challenge, because you make a strong indictment against using ancient texts, which I believe in, as a source of values. First, why do you believe, since you do believe, obviously, that in secularism and in reason lie the answers to the moral problems of humanity? Is that a fair summary of your views?

SH: Yes, up to a point. I’m actually not discounting the range of human experience we might want to call “spiritual” or “mystical.” In fact, I just think that we can explore that domain well within the bounds of rationality, which is to say there’s never a reason to make claims about the universe that can’t be substantiated, either by empirical evidence in a scientific sense, or by first person, introspective evidence. So, basically what I’m arguing for is intellectual honestly.

DP: OK. So am I. That’s one thing we both are arguing for, so that’s why I was so anxious to have you on – I suspect that does motivate you because, after all, any guy who takes your views and attacks Noam Chomsky at all is OK in my book.

SH: OK.

DP: So, let me ask you this: I believe that if I took a thousand evangelical ministers – the folks that I think you have a certain fear of following their values – and I took a thousand professors in the liberal arts, I am convinced to the point that I would bet every penny I have made, that the moral acuity of the thousand evangelical ministers would dwarf the moral acuity of a thousand liberal arts professors. For which reason Lawrence Summers, for example, the president of Harvard, announced two years ago that the seat – the seat – of antisemitism in America had shifted to the university. The university had been the seat of support for Stalin. The university in Germany was the seat of the place to get Nazi philosophers. Where you get your faith in secular reason is to me unbelievable, given the record of the secular rationalists.

SH: Well, you bring up a very interesting point, and there are many different forces in our discourse intersecting here. First, let me just agree with you that liberal, ivory-tower discourse right now is certainly in many sectors bereft of real moral acuity, and the kind of discourse you have about Israel in particular vis a vis the conflict with the Palestinians – all of that is deplorable, and we might want to get into that.

But your first question, really, it all turns on what you mean by morality.

DP: I’m very precise: Good and evil.

SH: Right. Take something even more precise than that. Just our aversion to human cruelty.

DP: OK. That’s great. I’m with you. Go ahead.

SH: I think that all of us who are well wired neurologically, and do not come into this world with whatever causes, you know, sociopathy – all of us have a predisposition to recoil at cruelty such as torturing other people certainly, and animals, and so forth. And we can all agree on that. I would argue that we don’t get that out of our religious books. In fact, our religious books offer rather equivocal testimony on the moral status of cruelty. There’s a lot of cruelty in them.

DP: I will defend the religious books, but you need to defend the alternative. Why is it that religious folks whom you fear turn out to be more morally accurate today than the secular folks at the university?

SH: Well, actually, I didn’t concede that first point. I think you would find that healthy people are going to be more or less the same across the board. But I agree with you that our discourse about any number of a variety of things right now in academia has really become unhitched from morality, as you and I know it.

DP: I was going to say, “God bless you for saying it,” but ‘Spirituality’ bless you for saying it. And I’m not being sarcastic. I admire the fact that you, who are in academia, would say that. But don’t you ask what the root cause might be? To me it is clear: secularism.

SH: Actually, no, I think the root cause in academia, certainly liberal academia now, is what we call “political correctness.” There are so many taboos in academia and in our culture at large, the one of which that I’m going up against most directly in my book is the taboo around criticizing faith itself, which is something you and I are going to differ on. But, there again…

DP: Oh, no, there’s no taboo on criticizing Judaism or Christianity. There’s only a taboo in the university on criticizing Islam. It’s just… I differ with your read.

SH: Right. Well, I actually find that people are very reluctant to criticize faith itself, even when they don’t have it. I mean, in the privacy of their own salon, they’re going to speak wildly about anybody.

DP: Christianity? I mean, everyone who goes to university learns that Christianity is an impediment to progress. I mean, it is part of the liberal arts curriculum.

SH: Right. Well, you know, I don’t think this is at the core of either our agreement or our differences on this subject. I think that the problem we have to face now is, people are flying planes into our buildings because they believe their book was written by God. And it doesn’t seem to me that our proper response to that predicament is to say, “No, no, you have it wrong; OUR book was written by God.” That’s not a basis for dialogue; that’s not a basis for sorting out the excesses of human irrationality.

DP: Yet, ironically, it is really only very strongly religious Christians, by and large – and I’m not a Christian, I’m a Jew – who have been at the forefront of criticizing Islam today. And they are called, by your whole secular liberal world, racists and bigots for doing so.

SH: Right, right. I agree with you totally. I think it’s profoundly ironic that the most sensible statements about Islam to appear in our culture have come from our own religious dogmatists.

DP: It’s not ironic! Sam Harris, that’s where you and I differ, and let me just say, I appreciate your honesty, I really do. You are very rare, and I am happy to know you. But to me it is not ironic! It is their faith that gives them their [values and their] strength to say it.

SH: Well, then, I think we’re seeing it slightly differently. You take someone like Falwell, or Pat Robertson, who very clearly appreciate the danger posed to us by Islam. It seems to me they’re uniquely in a position to appreciate it, because they understand that people really do believe the letter of their holy books. And they’ve read the Koran, and they’ve perhaps read the Hadith, the commentarial tradition around it, and they know that the contents of these documents are antithetical to living in tolerance in a pluralistic world. And what has really hampered liberal discourse, intellectual discourse, ivory tower discourse on this subject is that secular people really cannot get it into their heads that when the guy looks into the video camera and says, “We love death more than the infidels love life,” and blows himself up, he really means it. He didn’t blow himself up for economic reasons.

DP: That’s right! You’re right. I agree with your critique perfectly. So then, where do we differ?

Welcome back, I’m Dennis Prager. Thank you, wherever you might be. I’m speaking with Sam Harris. By the way, Sam Harris, if I write this up, do I have your permission to publish this interview?

SH: Sure. Yes.

DP: OK, thanks. Sam Harris is a thoughtful man. He is at Stanford, where he is completing his work in philosophy, if I have it correctly, and also neuroscience…

SH: Actually, no, my degree is in philosophy from Stanford, but now I’m doing a Ph.D. in neuroscience elsewhere. Given the inflammatory nature of my book, I haven’t yet disclosed where I’m doing that Ph.D.

DP: That’s so sad! That is so sad.

SH: I think you can understand.

DP: All right, fair enough, I won’t mention that it’s Cornell. I’m just joking! I have no idea where you are.

SH: Correct.

DP: All right, Sam Harris believes that it’s time to call a spade and spade and say that religion is the problem, not the solution. I believe that it is the solution and the problem, because always solutions have problems. That is the way it is. But we both acknowledge that the temple of secularism, the university, has been largely a moral failure, is that fair to say?

SH: Yes.

DP: That’s why I respect you. Just as I am utterly, perfectly committed to saying that many people who believe in religion are evil, and many atheists are fine. I have no problem with that fact. The question is: What are the origins of the problem and what’s the solution?

SH: Right.

DP: I think the university is a moral failure because it is radically secular. You think it’s a failure because they’re just weak-willed and politically correct. So that’s one difference between us. But let’s go to your basic argument; there are two of them. One, reason will lead us to a better world, and [two], that religion is a real problem.

Let me begin with the religion part, which is your favorite part in the bulk of your book. Why can’t you say, “Some religion is terrific, and some religion leads to evil?” Why the blanket dismissal? I am guided by religion, and I bet I have very similar values in many areas to you.

SH: Right. Right. Well, the first thing to say is that most of our religious texts have in them propositions that are entirely noble and wise and blameless and brilliant, and of course there is no issue to take with them. You can’t argue, really, in any deep way, against the Golden Rule. It’s a beautiful distillation of our ethical intuitions. But first of all, there are beautiful statements of equal usefulness in many other books.

DP: Like what? I use my Bible as the basis of my values. What book can I look in to learn Sam Harris’s values?

SH: Well, it’s certainly distributed over many books.

DP: Well, give me five. See, if you don’t have a text, that means Sam Harris is the author of his values. And I don’t trust that.

SH: No, no, I would certainly never claim that.

DP: OK, then, tell me. I tell you the author of my values is my religion, Judaism, or broadly speaking, Judeo-Christian values. Where can I look for your values?

SH: Well, honestly, it’s distributed. You can certainly find many of them in the Bible, in your own book. You can find many of them in Ecclesiastes, say. Or you can find them in the New Testament. I think the Sermon on the Mount is a brilliant and quite a wonderful document, and an ideal that many of us should try to live for, or live toward. But where I want to locate the source of our values is in our free inquiry of the world, in the present moment, and in dialogue with human beings in the present moment, in this generation, in the midst of our problems.

DP: Why does one preclude the other? I believe in the text, I believe it’s divine, and I believe that we have to look at the moment to figure out how to apply the text to the moment.

SH: Yes, but this recourse to the text, I argue, is getting us into tremendous trouble.

DP: Oh, not nearly as much as not having recourse to the text.

SH: Well, see, that’s where we’re not going to agree, and let me just…

DP: Well, but wait, forgive me, but I think we do agree, because you acknowledge that you are getting today more moral truth out of fundamentalist Christians than out of fundamentalist secularists.

SH: No, no, that’s not what I said. I’m getting…

DP: You said it’s ironic, but you said that’s where we’re getting the truth.

SH: No, I certainly didn’t say “moral truth.” What we’re getting out of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell is an accurate appraisal of the threat posed by Islam. Full stop. That’s all we’re getting. We’re getting a lot of other nonsense out of them, like people flew planes into our buildings because God was angry with us for teaching evolution and encouraging gay culture.

DP: I don’t think he mentioned evolution, but that’s all right. I still stand by my statement that I would prefer a thousand evangelicals to a thousand professors, and in my heart I think you would too, to be the guideposts of our morality. But go on anyway.

SH: Right. Well, I think the differences between the moral integrity of those groups of people will be not as startling as you suggest. But the core of the issue here is that we have, in our lifetime, a situation where the ability of one person to destroy the lives of millions is now should be our most pressing social concern.

DP: I agree with that.

SH: And so now we have to wonder how to modify the behavior of human beings.

DP: So who is more likely to feel that there is a clash of civilizations, morally speaking? Secular Americans or religious Americans?

SH: Well, it cuts across both groups.

DP: I don’t think so. Who are the secular Americans outside of Sam Harris who believe that?

SH: Well, you know, Samuel Huntington. You know, he wrote “The Clash of Civilizations.”

DP: That’s correct.. I don’t know if he’s secular, but yes.

SH: It’s certainly a secular argument against viewing this as a merely political or economic problem.

DP: Yes, but my world of religious Americans is far more likely to support that view than your world of secular Americans.

SH: Right.

DP: You have to account for that fact. I judge ideas by their fruit, not by how they sound in a textbook.

SH: Right, but I think you’re locating the problem in secular inquiry at the wrong point. It’s not that secular inquiry has brought us all the evil in the world, or it’s somehow underwriting all the moral failures you can point to.

DP: OK, so where do the moral failures emanate from?

SH: Well, I happen to think that the most pressing moral failure that we should concern ourselves with at this moment is the way in which religious dogma separates this notion of morality from real questions of human suffering. See, I think morality is the answer.

DP: I think morality is the answer, too.

SH: You and I can agree that morality is the answer, but we may not agree on what morality is.

DP: Well, then, that may be a result of your secularism and my religiosity. For example, where does your secular reason lead you to on abortion? A woman wants an abortion for no other reason, no health reason, as in ninety-five percent of the cases, because she did not use birth control and she does not want to come to term. What is your rational, secular view of that abortion? Is it moral, immoral, amoral? I’m not talking legality, I’m talking morality.

SH: OK, let me grant that it’s a difficult question to answer, and there is quite a slippery slope within gestation. It’s hard to draw a line saying, “This is point…” The short answer is, I don’t think we know. It depends on what you think the experience of an embryo or a fetus is, at each stage you’re talking about. And I would argue, for instance, that stem cell research that entails the destruction of embryos at the three-day stage, where they’re mere collections of 150 cells, unorganized by anything, no nervous system, no brain, I mean, they’re literally just cells in a womb or in a petri dish. I would argue that there’s no reasonable intuition to think that, when you destroy that collection of cells, you are inflicting suffering in any corner of the universe.

DP: All right, but that’s not abortion, that’s stem cell research. So let’s…

SH: Right. So as you grow, as this physical system continues to differentiate and gain complexity, then at a certain point it resembles a human life that we should do everything to protect it. And where you draw that line is very difficult.

DP: Well, where do you draw that line? You’re the man of reason. The people of faith have their answer; what is your answer, as someone who wants us to be guided, not by faith, but by secular reason?

SH: Well, it’s nowhere written that every question that should be answered with reason is presently answerable. I’m telling you where I think the answer would be when we’ve generated a clear picture of what, neurologically, is under-riding human experience, and figured out when that experience emerges out of complexity.

DP: Well, so do you believe that it happens at any time in the nine months?

SH: Oh, certainly. I mean, yes, third trimester abortion is nothing anyone should…

DP: So you would be opposed to partial birth abortion.

SH: For the mere convenience of a woman? I don’t think anyone is in favor of it, in that case. You mean to save a woman’s life? That’s an interesting question.

DP: Well, of course. Everybody believes that, to save a woman’s life, you can have an abortion. There is nobody I’ve ever heard who has said no, because [then] the child is like somebody coming after you with a gun. But it is so rare as to be negligible statistically.

SH: Right.

DP: And what about in the second trimester? Since you say you don’t know, wouldn’t you want to err on the side of caution?

SH: Oh, I think we should err on the side of caution.

DP: So would you argue that morality would dictate that a woman, whenever possible, not have an abortion, and give, perhaps, the child up for adoption?

SH: Absolutely.

DP: Do you argue that in your book?

SH: No, the abortion issue, I don’t tackle the specifics of it. But I talk about where a right answer to this question would lie if we only had the power to bring the facts into view, which I think we …

DP: Well, all right, but in light of your answer to me, again, you’re aligning yourself, as you do on the question of the threat of civilizations today, with the Religious Right.

SH: Yes, but for different reasons.

DP: It doesn’t matter.

SH: Well, no, it does matter, because…

DP: Oh, I’ll tell you why it doesn’t matter in this case, because your side keeps coming up with amoral answers. So doesn’t that at some point trigger in you the question, “Maybe faith is needed, or a least a certain type of faith, to think morally clearly, since my team doesn’t think morally clearly?”

SH: No, because I’m not arriving at what I judge to be moral answers based on faith. And everywhere I look, every time I open the New York Times, I see evidence of faith run amok.

DP: Where has faith run amok in America?”

SH: Well, take the question of stem cell research. I think that this is…

DP: I don’t think that’s faith run amok, I actually think there are honorable people on both sides. But you feel it’s faith run amok, stem cell research. OK, prior to stem cell research, which is a brand new subject of which we know very little, and it may lead nowhere…

SH: Right, well, that seems profoundly unlikely, but…

DP: Oh, no, actually, I would make serious bet with you that it will lead nowhere. But that’s a separate…

SH: Well, I would happily take that bet.

DP: All right, fine. OK, just remember the bet by Robert Erlich at Stanford, what he took with his predictions there about… that natural resources would be disappearing, or become extremely expensive in twenty years, and he lost his bet. I am very skeptical about what you folks predict will be the great panaceas. But in any event, it may well be. I have not taken a position on that, but I honor both.

When we come back, I want to ask you more questions about where reason would lead you. As, for example, you write: “Our erstwhile allies are right not to trust our judgment [America].” So, you feel that France and Germany are clearer, morally, than America. Really! Well, I’ll give you the break to figure out how to answer that one.

DP: Thank you for being with me. You’re afraid of religion “run amok,” and I asked you, where is it run amok in America? You said against stem cell research.

SH: Right. That was one example.

DP: Give me another example.

SH: Well, I just think the entire Christian agenda in the sphere of morality – concerns about private behavior of other human beings that doesn’t necessarily translate into public behavior that harms anyone.

DP: Like what?

SH: Like obscenity, consuming obscene materials, pornography, homosexuality, gay marriage, drug use that doesn’t translate into criminal behavior…

DP: Well, let’s talk about them very briefly. The redefining of marriage for the first time in human history. You call it “a trifle” in your writing. To me, it is about as important as anything on earth, second perhaps only to the clash of civilizations we’re undergoing right now. I mean, you see, to me, it’s a classic example of the secular mindset that you think it’s a trifle, redefining marriage, and many of us consider it to be of surpassing importance.

SH: Right. Well, if you look at the reasons why you consider it to be of surpassing importance, or the reasons why many people of faith allege it’s of such importance, I would argue that no one has given a reasonable accounting of how homosexuality or how gay marriage will translate into the suffering of heterosexuals, will undermine the institution of marriage for heterosexuals, will have any lasting effect on society…

DP: Well, I’ll give you one very quick one, in that adoption agencies will no longer be able to favor a father and a mother for a child. You think that that is insignificant.

SH: Well, but now we have to get into the details.

DP: Well, that is a big detail.

SH: Right. But no, now we have to get into details of why it would be a bad thing for two men or two women to raise a child.

DP: Right. And to me, it is a classic example of the secular mind that you think an argument needs to be made that it is better for a child to have a mother and father. Truly with respect – I admire you a great deal, you really do explore issues – to me, it is a classic example of secular confusion, not secular clarity, that I have to make the case to you that it’s better for a child to start out life with a loving mother and father.

SH: Well, I would certainly agree with you that our default setting here should be, when given an opportunity, to have a loving mother and father, take it.

DP: But we won’t be able any more. With same-sex marriage, you won’t be able to discriminate. So what you just said will be violated.

SH: Well, but you’re looking at a situation where a child is put up for adoption. That’s already downstream of the prior situation of not having a loving mother and father who wanted to keep that particular child. So we’re already in a less than ideal circumstance.

DP: No, forgive me, it’s the one thing you said I didn’t understand. A child put up for adoption can either be adopted by a single person, two people of the same sex, or two people of the opposite sex. When we have same-sex marriage, it will be against the law to discriminate against the same-sex couple.

SH: Right. But there are so many children in this world who are in need of loving parents of any description – single parents, gay parents, heterosexual parents…

DP: With all respect, you’re wrong. It’s just not true.

SH: Well, go to China, and...

DP: We do go to China. Couples to go to China all the time.

SH: Right.

DP: Listen, I happen to know adoption, I know this field really well. It is one of the lies of the left that [newborn] kids can’t find parents. There are parents who line up for children who are born with spina bifida. Christian parents in particular will adopt children with severe brain damage. This absence of male-female couples is a total myth constructed by the defenders of same-sex marriage.

SH: Well, let me say, that’s a fact that we certainly need to agree about to proceed along this particular path. But my core point here is that…

DP: Well, you asked the question: How will it affect society if we have same-sex marriage? I answered you, and you agree with me.

SH: Right. Well, no. But the deeper issue is that faith is a conversation stopper. The moment you can say, “It’s just a matter of faith; I’ve read it in…”

DP: You’re right. For people who say it’s just a matter of faith, it’s a conversation stopper. But I am a person of deep faith, I believe in the divine origins of my Torah, and I am having a perfectly open conversation with you. I have not once resorted to, “It’s a matter of faith.” You have a less rational basis, I think, for some of your positions than I do mine.

SH: Well, but conversation will bear that out, or not. My deeper gripe with faith, if we can return to the core issue here… I mean, if you want to talk about adoption, abortion for the rest of the show, I’m happy to do it, but…

DP: No, I don’t want to, but I gave two examples of where secular reason leads to chaos, and my faith leads to far more prescient positions.

SH: Well, the issue for me is that even if you and I were going to agree that gay marriage really does pose a threat to our culture, or even to civilization itself… Let’s say I’m going to agree with you that it’s profoundly undesirable – I don’t, but I’ll cede that point – I think it should be so far distant a concern for us, given the pressing threats to civilization posed by the failures of our foreign affairs vis a vis Islam right now, that we shouldn’t have the free attention to talk about it.

DP: Well, who do you think wants to fight Islamic terror more? The secular world, or the religious world? We keep coming back to that, and you acknowledge to me this failure of the secular world.

SH: Well, certainly the failure of some of the secular world.

DP: No, the vast majority of the secular world. The religious world, which is primarily the red voters [i.e., Republicans and conservatives], are far more militant, are far more hawkish in fighting Islamic terror. In fact, they’re much more likely to…

SH: Yeah, but there’s militancy, and militancy. We need to approach this all for the right reasons. And having, to cite one example, a president who unreflectively uses words like “crusade” in this dialogue…

DP: It was only tactically wrong, but you yourself want a crusade. You’re the one who said, “We don’t have the guts…”

SH: No, I certainly don’t want a crusade for any reason a Christian would want a crusade.

DP: Neither did he! That’s totally dishonest in evaluating what he said. I want a crusade against evil, and so do you. He doesn’t want a crusade to change the world to Christianity.

SH: Right. The conception of evil in a religious sense is not helping us here, however.

DP: Oh, on the contrary. It’s the only conception of evil we have. That’s why Europe doesn’t believe in good and evil, because they’re so secular. Back in a moment…

DP: Hey, everybody, Dennis Prager here. We’ve got calls from, let’s see, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, California… and I’m going to try to take a lot of you guys next hour, but I’ve got to finish here with Sam Harris, because you know, time flies when you’re havin’ fun.

SH: Indeed.

DP [laughing]: Actually, I’d love to meet you one day.

SH: Sure.

DP: Sure, meaning sure, you would love to meet me, or meaning I would love…

SH: No, no, likewise!

DP: I know, I was just ribbing you a little bit. You have, on the jacket of your book, “The End of Faith” a positive blurb from Peter Singer, professor at Princeton, university professor at Princeton, of human values, and he argues, if I’m not mistaken, that parents have thirty days in which they could morally extinguish the life of their newborn if they feel that the child is sick enough. And that’s what reason, and preoccupation with the issue of suffering, has led him to believe. Do you agree?

SH: Well, actually I don’t know that particular position of Singer’s, and, you know, there’s much that Singer believes that I don’t happen to agree with, but he happened to like my book, so…

DP: OK, fair enough. I’ll tell you something that I would love to bounce off you. One of my fears of secularism run amok, just as you fear religion run amok – the equation of humans and animals in terms of their importance and value. Right now, I would say that almost half of America, if asked, would you save your dog or a stranger first, would answer their dog.

SH: Right.

DP: This is a classic example of secularism, insofar as the reason that I would save a stranger before any of my dogs – and I do love my dogs more than I love any stranger – is that I believe that humans are created in God’s image and dogs are not. Do you have a secular reason? Give me a secular reason to save a stranger before my dog that I love.

SH: Sure. Sure. I think there are some intuitions here that are very serviceable, and very rational, that we can talk about, and they are not cashed out by any religious beliefs. When you’re driving home today, and you notice that you hit a bug on your windshield, that’s very unlikely to ruin your day. It’s certainly not going to ruin your life. You may feel something, but you’re not going to feel all that much.

DP: Yeah, but we can’t base morality on feelings. It didn’t bother Germans to run over Jews. They were bugs.

SH: Well, yeah, and there’s a reason why not. But here, just follow me with this example. If you hit a squirrel, you’re gonna feel a little worse, presumably. If you hit a dog, that’s probably a very bad day. And if you hit a human child, you could spend the rest of your life, in some sense, atoning for that.

DP: Yes, but that’s a feeling. Tell me the reason.

SH: It’s based on our sense of the experience that you have extinguished.

DP: But the sense of experience of those who love their dog – remember, it’s their dog, not an anonymous dog – is that they would grieve more if their dog drowned than a stranger.

SH: Well, grieving’s one thing. Who you would save is another…

DP: Well, [the decision] is based on grieving…

SH: Obviously there are rational reasons to save the person first.

DP (hearing the bumper music): All right. Sam Harris, “The End of Faith,” thank you for your time.

SH: Thank you, Dennis.

Beginning of next hour:

DP: You’re listening to the Dennis Prager Show. Thank you for being with me. We just had a great dialogue there. There is no subject that is more dear to me than debating with folks who believe that religion is the problem and secularism is the solution. When you have a man like my last author, who clearly cares about human suffering, and whom I enjoyed immensely…you know what he is doing? He is pursuing something that 200 years ago they pursued, and I would have been much more receptive then. “Ah, reason will take us to goodness.” But it doesn’t. It doesn’t. You need reason and God. God without reason doesn’t work and reason without God doesn’t work. It took me a lifetime to figure that out, but that is the way it is, because the God-folks who dispense with reason frighten me, and the reason-folks who dispense with God frighten me…

That, by the way, I believe is an hour you should send to kids at college, your nephews, nieces, grandchildren, cousins, uncles at college, because that is what they’re taught there: “Religion is the problem! We here have the solution.” But my guest, Sam Harris, to his great credit, acknowledged that what I said is true: that academia is probably the most morally confused place in America. So, if secularism is so good, how come it doesn’t work? Why is the secular temple – the university – so morally confused? Why can’t they see evil?