Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer Discuss Morality

KEVIN HARRIS: Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. I started seeing him on some of the top talk shows in the 80s. If any of you boomers remember Donahue. He was on there a lot; and some of the other shows. Dr. Stephen Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute Center of Science and Culture. His newest book is The Return of the God Hypothesis. I noticed that there are a lot of people commenting that this exchange – we are going to see some clips from it between these two^[1] – is an example of a very respectful, civil exchange. They stick to their views but they are generous with one another, and they have a good time. Bill, you’ve had interactions with both of these gentlemen. I know that they interact with your work all the time.

DR. CRAIG: Steve Meyer is remarkably irenic. As a defender of intelligent design, he is passionately hated by many people, and he always handles himself with such aplomb and calmness and integrity. I think I first met Steve in 1994 at an intelligent design conference at Queen's College Cambridge which brought together Steve Meyer, Bill Dembski, Michael Behe, Paul Nelson, and Philip Johnson. They were all there. And it was just the beginning – just the nascence – of the intelligent design movement. I was privileged to participate in that. Since then over the years Steve and I have joined forces in a number of different sorts of outreaches. I've only done one thing with Michael Shermer. Years and years ago he and I were on a panel discussion on television with several other people, and we had some brief interaction on that panel. But it wasn't a one-on-one exchange.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let's go to the first clip then. They're discussing Richard Dawkins and morality and they get to the meat of it here. Here's the first clip.

MR. SHERMER: But a second point on Dawkins’ quote, because here I think we're making an error that I call Alvy's error. That is assessing the purpose of something to the wrong level of analysis. Alvy is Alvy Singer (Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall) where I recall in the movie he has that flashback to childhood where he is no longer doing his homework. And his mother takes him to the psychiatrist and says, “Alvy, why won't you do your homework?” “Because the universe is expanding.” He says, “What?” He says, “Well, the universe is expanding and someday it's going to all blow up. So it doesn't make any difference whether I do my homework or not.” And his mother upbraids him and says, “What's the universe got to do with it? We live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn's not expanding.” I use this. This is one of my Scientific American columns because I was responding to one of William Lane Craig's debates that I watched with him and Shelly Kagan about that, as he said here, “on a naturalistic worldview everything is ultimately destined to destruction in the heat death of the universe. As the universe expands, it grows colder and colder and heats up and then nothing means anything.” Because Craig had brought up that godless Nazi torturers got away with it. So it didn't matter. And Kagan is Jewish and he's like, “This strikes me as an outrageous thing to suggest. It doesn't really matter? Surely it matters to the torture victims whether they're being tortured. It doesn't require that this makes some cosmic difference to the eternal significance of the universe for it to matter whether a human being is tortured. It matters to them. It matters to their family, and it matters to us.” And then Craig committed a related fallacy when he argued that without God there are no objective moral values, moral duties, or moral accountability, and if life ends at the grave then ultimately it makes no difference whether you live as Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. I call this Craig's categorical error – assessing the value of something by the wrong criteria, category of criteria. So, for example, we live in the here and now, not the hereafter, so our actions must be judged according to the criteria of this category. Whether or not the category of a God-granted hereafter exists. Whether you behave like a Russian dictator who murdered tens of millions of people or a Roman Catholic missionary who tended to the poor matters very much to the victims of totalitarianism and poverty. Why does it matter? Well, because this is in our nature. We don't want to suffer.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I'm sure there are plenty of things that you want to respond to in that particular episode.

DR. CRAIG: I must say I was really surprised at Michael Schumer's response to these two points that without God there is no ultimate meaning in life and that without God there is no ultimate value in life. Because all he did was simply point to subjective meanings and subjective values. “It's important to me because I'm a victim of abuse” or “It's important to the victims of the Holocaust that they suffered.” But ultimately, which is my argument, it doesn't matter whether the Nazi torturers did this or not, everything ends up the same. Nothing makes any ultimate difference. And similarly, the moral values he suggests are just subjective. For the Nazi torturers, it was good to rid the Aryan race of these Semitic influences. It was good to carry out the Holocaust. So it's just completely inadequate what Shermer says that you can say that these things are subjectively valuable or meaningful to certain people. Nobody denies that. That would be a silly argument to say that. The argument is that these things in the absence of God are not objectively or ultimately meaningful or valuable.

KEVIN HARRIS: I've been trying to think through what it means to commit a category mistake or a category error. He accuses you of “Craig's categorical error.” You would have to put it into context. I mean, if a dog and a cat are not in the same category as far as canine and feline but they are in the same category as far as having four legs and fur and things like that . . . Take that apart for us a little bit.

DR. CRAIG: Our listeners, I think, need to understand that these are just made up fallacies of Michael Shermer. That's all. There is no fallacy here. My argument is that in the absence of God everything is doomed to ultimate destruction and non-existence, and therefore it does not make any ultimate difference what you do or think or say. It doesn't ultimately matter whether that little boy does his homework, even if it matters to his mother. It doesn't ultimately matter whether it matters to his mother. Ultimately, it all comes out the same. That's the argument, and there's no category mistake here whatsoever. If there's any mistake, it's his mistake in thinking that the affirmation of subjective meanings and subjective values is somehow sufficient to give life ultimate meaning and ultimate value.

KEVIN HARRIS: Exactly. Let's go to this next clip then. I believe Stephen Meyer has some response in this one. Here's the next clip.

DR. MEYER: Well, it matters to the individual person. But the idea of morality, as you point out, is that it is universal and it must be transpersonal. One of the problems with tyrants is that there was no principle that they acknowledge that applied not only to themselves but to the people they tortured. I know this is a deep question in moral philosophy, but I think that the underlying all ethical propositions are beliefs about values, and I think if you want an objective system of morality that transcends our individual opinions about what is valuable, there must be a valuer who has a claim on his opinion counting more. I think if there is a Creator who made us all with certain design parameters then if there's a moral law that is offered to advance human flourishing and I think the theistic account enables us to have that objective morality and have it grounded. There's a ton more to say about this. We won't settle this one. It is not an argument I make in the book.

DR. CRAIG: Good for Steve. He really nailed it. What morality requires is a categorical demand upon all persons – normative demands. And similarly with regard to ultimate significance and meaning. It can't just be individual and personal if it's to be objective. Shermer's view one might think lands us in socio-cultural relativism – that every society has its own values and no society can judge another. You can't judge apartheid South Africa for its values because those are the ones that seem right to them. You can't judge the Soviet Union for its values because it was right for them. You can't judge Nazi Germany for its values because they seemed right to the Nazis. But in fact Shermer’s view is even worse than socio-cultural relativism because for him it is individual, personal relativism. Every individual picks his own values and his own meanings for life. So it is complete relativism of the worst kind, and does not provide a basis for objective meaning or for moral values as Steve Meyer so rightly explained.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip. I believe they get back to Dawkins a little bit on this clip. Here's the next clip.

MR. SHERMER: But one final point on that. Dawkins himself is not a moral relativist. As you know, he has no qualms about criticizing Islam and say female genital mutilation as being objectively wrong. This is horrible, and he rants about this. So clearly even he, with that famous quote . . .

DR. MEYER: That implies the female persons are valuable, and that begs a question. The grand “says who?” Are they valuable only to the female persons who are being mutilated, or only to Richard Dawkins, or are there objective principles above us all to which we can appeal that reflect a valuation that is not derivative of our subjective opinions?

MR. SHERMER: I say the latter.

DR. MEYER: I think theism says, “Yes, there is. And I can tell you where that comes from.” The Harvard Law Professor Harold Berman said underneath all ethical systems is an unspoken question which he said “The grand says who?” question. And if “The grand says who?” is always answered by “me” or “you” or “I” or “thou” then we're going to get a lot of different moralities coming out of that. I think for those of us who accept moral objectivism, I think that's a problem. And I think theism solves that problem. I don't think an evolutionary account of morality does. I think we end up realizing that . . . Once we understand that the moral principles or our sense of what's valuable has been programmed into us for survival only, and my survival interests depart from the group, I have no compelling reason to continue to go with the dominant morality of the group.

DR. CRAIG: Here Meyer exposes so beautifully the contradiction in Shermer's own views and in Richard Dawkins’ view. Dawkins wants to affirm moral nihilism, but then he finds himself making all sorts of moral judgments about others. Shermer wants to affirm personal relativism, but then he also wants to make all of these personal moral judgments about others. And there's no basis for doing that once you have either nihilism or personal relativism because every person's view is right for him. So Shermer is caught in a deep, deep contradiction here of sensing the objective demands of morality upon his life and yet having no basis for it other than this personal relativism.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. He says underneath all moral systems is “says who?”

DR. CRAIG: “Says who?”

KEVIN HARRIS:  That is this unspoken question.

DR. CRAIG: And Shermer’s answer is “I do.” “I say.” And that's all he's got. But of course the Nazi says “I do” and so does the Soviet communist. They all say “I do. I'm the one who says.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, this was a long exchange. I think it went something like an hour and a half. But you come up again a couple of times in this. So in some future podcasts we may look at some more clips. In fact, there is some pretty cutting edge stuff.

DR. CRAIG: OK. It is really interesting to see Steve Meyer discussing moral philosophy, but he did a great job.^[2]