This is a TED Talk by Sam Harris, an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist, arguing against the illusion that “science will never answer the most important questions in human life… like ‘What is worth living for?’ ‘What its worth dying for?’ ‘What constitutes a good life?'” I found this to be relevant to the question of if “society would be better off without religion” because of the morality factor.
An argument made by Dinesh D’Souza in an Intelligence Squared debate entitled “Science Refutes God” was basically that science can’t measure morality because there is no quantifiable way to distinguish between “what is” and “what ought to be.” While Harris doesn’t directly attack this perspective, he does ceoncede that there is a misconception that “because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres… It’s often thought that there’s no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be.” He continues that values are a particular sort of facts pertaining to the “well-being of conscious creatures.”
According to Harris, while “we (may not)… have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question… But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.” He alludes to corporal punishment in 21 states where thousands of children are exposed to legal beatings by a teacher “with a wooden board, hard, and where these beatings are allowed to raise large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin.” After pointing out that the “rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious,” he asks the audience if they believe that this is healthy for emotional edevelopment of the child… and the audience nervously laughs. But he points out that that is a real question and one that matters. Getting a question like that wrong because of blindly following a set of standards is wrong and counterproductive to proper development.
My favorite portion of this speech is when he makes an analogy comparing food to religion.
“Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there’s nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, “What is food?” does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.”
He continues by alluding to women in eastern society being mandated to be covered up. He poses the question of “who are we to tell them how to live their life?” He points out the atrocities committed on women and then “180s” and asks “Well, who aren’t we to say this?” Voluntary wearing of a veil is not the same as being repressed and condemned to wear a veil because someone else is forcing their will upon them. He concludes by saying that once we admit that these moral questions do have right and wrong answers is when we can have serious breakthroughs.