The Sean McDowell Show - God, the Soul, and the Gorilla Harambe - Discussion with Peter Singer

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Peter Singer has been called the most influential living philosopher. At 79, he’s still active, sharp, and shaping global conversations on ethics. Singer is an atheist and a secular utilitarian. While we disagree on many fundamentals, we sat down to explore possible common ground on poverty, ethics, and how we treat animals while also clarifying our differences. This isn’t a debate on God’s existence, but an open dialogue between two worldviews. Enjoy, and let us know what you think! WATCH: Dissecting the Animal Rights Movement (and Peter Singer's New Book): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uuFrp8YlBo *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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Life Audio. Peter Singer has been called the most influential living philosopher. He's an emeritus professor at Princeton University. He's an atheist. I'm a Christian. He believes in secular utilitarian ethics. I believe right and wrong come from God. I reached out to Dr. Singer to see if he would come on my show.

He said he's not really interested in debating the existence of God, but would have a conversation. if we could discuss some common cause, find common ground, and maybe clarify some differences. And so I agreed. For now, my thanks to Peter for graciously carving out time to talk. At 79, he is both busy, he's active, and he's very sharp. Please let me know what you think. I'm guessing many of you didn't expect this conversation to pop up in your feet.

Specifically, if we have a follow-up discussion, what would you like it to focus on? Enjoy the conversation. I personally found it fascinating. Dr. Peter Singer, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me, Sean. My pleasure. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. You mentioned an email.

He said, you know, I'm not really interested in debating God, which I totally understand. And by the way, you're at Biola in 2008, and where I teach, had a formal debate on God, which is great. But said you'd be willing to come on for about an hour or so. If we could fit it in and look for areas of common ground, maybe common cause, but also maybe surface some differences we might. might have behind our ethical system. So maybe we could just start a little bit with your background. So maybe just tell us a little about your background and why you chose to go into the field of ethics. Right. Well, I was originally going to be a lawyer. I'm Australian, as I'm sure your listeners can tell from my accent. And I grew up in Melbourne. In Australia, we go into law

school straight out of high school. We don't have a BA first. It's the British system that we're on. So when I finished high school, I applied for law and was accepted. But I saw a counsellor there who looked at my final year of high school results and saw that I'd done well in history and literature. Said, you might find law a little bit dry. You can combine it with a BA if you wish. And I said, fine, that sounds interesting.

Why not? So I did, and in the BA, I had never studied philosophy. You couldn't study philosophy in high school in Australia then. You can today. But my sister, who was six years older than me, had a boyfriend who'd done some philosophy, and I talked to him about it. It sounded interesting. I wanted to go into law because I enjoyed a good argument.

But, of course, as a lawyer, you have to argue for the side that is paying you. And the great advantage of philosophy is you can argue for the side that you believe to be true or right. So that appealed to me and I enjoyed it. And my father said, well, how are you going to ever get a living doing philosophy? But I did at some point abandon the law degree. I never finished it and go on with philosophy. I did manage to make a living in it. And also as well as, you know, I hope doing some good in trying to encourage more.

people to do the right thing. Thanks for sharing the backstory. I found a PBS interview that you did probably, I don't know, 1998, and you said you don't believe in the existence of God and reject that each human being is a creator of God, created by God. What term would you use to best describe your worldview like atheist and naturalist? And would you consider yourself a materialist? Well, I'm definitely an atheist.

I'm very happy to acknowledge that term, and I'm an atheist about the kinds of gods that Christians and Jews and Muslims believe in. That is a God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. Because I don't think such a world, such a God could have created a world that has so much suffering, including suffering of completely innocent beings, including, for example, suffering of non-human animals. That just seems incompatible to me with that. of a creator. But am I a materialist? I think consciousness is something that we don't fully understand and some very good philosophers, Spinoza historically, and Thomas Nagel as a living philosopher, think that consciousness is something separate. So in a sense, they're dualists,

that they think there are material things. Obviously there are material things in the world. But they also think that consciousness can't be reduced to matters. And I think that's a plausible position. So I would not really call myself a materialist because I'm uncertain about that. Naturalism has many, many different meanings. And in ethics in particular, it has a specific meaning that suggests you can deduce values, that morality, from statements about nature.

That is, you can say, you know, well, we evolved with the fittest, surviving, therefore it's right for the fittest to triumph over the others. I don't believe that at all. So no, I would not call myself a naturalist in the strict philosophical sense of the term. Doesn't surprise me you'd raise the problem with evil, and that would take us far aside. I teach a whole class at Biola on that, so maybe another time. Was there ever time you believed in God or thought God might exist, or have you kind of been an atheist pretty much your whole life? I think there was a period when I was an early teenager when I thought God might exist. But I read around that, you could say my earliest philosophical interests, perhaps, were reading around that topic.

I read Bertrand Russell, for example, some of the other works in that area. And by the time I was 16 or something, probably I had decided that there could not be, as I say, the kind of God that the monotheistic religions believe in. One question I like asking people who see the world differently, in particular, agnostics or atheists. For example, I asked Coleman Hughes this question, just a brilliant young atheist libertarian thinker. In fact, you love them on your podcast.

I don't know if you've had them on yet or not. We haven't had him on my podcast, but I've been on his podcast, and I enjoyed that experience. Okay, interesting. Really, really sharp. He came on. We had a conversation. I asked him this, and he gave a couple responses. Is there anything about the world that gives you pause and just makes you think there might be a God? Like, is it consciousness you talked about earlier, beginning of the universe? Is there anything that makes you think, you know what? There might be a God. Are you just really confident that there's not? Again, it depends what you mean by a God. There are some people who have very broad definitions of of God. I remember speaking to somebody who said, well, when I say the word God, I mean,

whatever there is in the universe, that is a force for good. And I said, well, that might be some aspect of human nature, for instance. And he said, yes, it might be. So, you know, if you have a very vague definition of God like that, then I would say I would be agnostic rather than atheist. As I say, I'm atheist about the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good creator. But that there are things in the universe that science cannot fully explain at this point, including, as I say, the nature of consciousness. That's possible. I wouldn't deny that. And again, I don't know if you're familiar with Tom Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos. Yeah, he talks about that.

And I think, you know, but yet he says he's an atheist, right? So I don't think that that's incompatible with my atheism, again, about those particular kinds of God. And I maintain an open mind about whether in some sense consciousness is basic to the universe and exactly what that might mean. But the idea of a sort of a personal providential being looking over us, No, I see that as at all possible.

Yeah, mine in Cosmos, I think it was 2011, fascinating book My Nagel, where he says there are certain features in the universe argued by intelligent design like fine-tuning in the origin of life that a lot of people have just dismissed because

of worldview rather than really looking at the evidence. He's not convinced, but I thought it was really fair of him to say that and say, let's have this discussion and that to be I'm curious what you think, Peter, you've been doing this for a number of years, probably five decades or so. How have you seen, maybe let's go back to like the early 2000s when kind of the new atheist burst onto the scene. How have you seen like the larger God conversation or the conversation about spiritual things shift, if at all?

I think it has shifted. I mean, you know, I've lived both in Australia and in the United States, and I think they're very different countries when we're talking about conversations about God. Americans are much more religious than Australians. And I think they're more religious than Europeans in general as well. So, you know, although I agree that the new atheists were sometimes a little blunt, and crude in their arguments. I welcomed that because I thought it was necessary to have more of a conversation about God

than was going on in the US. And I thought that there were arguments that needed to be put and needed to be discussed at in public. So I think that that was a good move in terms of getting things discussed rather more. And, you know, I saw during my time in the United States, I came to the US to when I was appointed a professor at Princeton in 90s. And of course, that was shortly after George W. Bush was elected president. And that was a period where religion seemed to be very dominant in the United States and dominating public policy in various ways.

And my sense is that that is slackened off to some extent. Even though the situation in abortion, you might say, went the other way in that the views of religious Christians in America are now closer to that of what the law on abortion is. But that was a very political move, I think, by Donald Trump. I don't think one could say that Donald Trump is a person of strong religious convictions. So if you compare it with George W. Bush, who I think was to a greater extent. So I think that there's less of a kind of religious belief that I find a disturbing in America, in particular the kind of apocalyptic religious belief, you know,

the people who were saying this was the end of days was coming. That's not something you encounter very frequently in Australia, I have to say, and you encountered it much more frequently in the US. So I think that in that sense, there are more people who, one can have a reasonable conversation with the bad religion, whether they're religious or not in the US now than there were 25 years ago. Fair enough. You've written on a lot of different ethical issues over the years and address them. Of all the ethical issues you've written on, which issue concerns you the most today? And why? Well, there are two issues that I've really focused on throughout my career, two ethical issues. And I've focused on them because they're both issues about which we as individuals can do something and make a difference.

And the first of these that I wrote about way back in 1972 is something that I think all Christians would respond to. It's the idea that those of us in affluent countries living comfortable lives, let's say we're middle class or above, we think nothing of spending money on things we don't really need. We buy bottled water when the water coming out of the tap is safe to drink. We go to cafes and spend more on a cup of coffee than something. people in the world have to live on for an entire day or feed their families on. I think we should be doing, though people like us, should be doing far more than most people are doing to help people in extreme poverty in the world today.

And that's still a big issue. We still have something like more than 700 million people living on the purchasing power equivalent of three US dollars per day. And as a result of that, their children are more like. to die from malnutrition or from malaria because they don't get bed nets to sleep under. And they endure a whole range of other hardships which make it impossible for them to live a life of dignity and fulfillment. So that's an issue that I think Christians have been strong on. And I hope that I'm in alignment with the Christian view. And the other issue is about the way we

treat non-human. Need a daily spark of hope and direction? Let the daily spark of hope and direction. Let the daily Bible app from Salem Media, Be That Spark. This free Android app delivers an uplifting verse each morning, plus reading plans, devotions, and trusted podcasts from leaders like Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren. Prefer to listen instead? The Daily Bible app reads verses, reading plans, and chapters aloud, handy for the headphones moment of your day.

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where I wrote the book Animal Liberation in 1975 that I think helped to trigger the modern animal rights movement. And the really big issue that I'm particularly concerned about with regard to animals is factory farming, industrial animal agriculture. because the vast majority of the animals that people eat in affluent countries, including the United States, never get to go outside. They're crowded into confined dim sheds with very little room to move around.

They're not in a kind of social group that their nature is suited for. So, you know, you have 20,000 chickens crammed into a single shed. They can't possibly identify other birds or know their position. in the pecking order as they would with a small farmyard flock. And I think it's clearly wrong for us to inflict miserable lives on literally billions of animals each year. I mean, billions just in the US alone, in fact, if you talk about worldwide, you're talking about more than a hundred billion vertebrate animals that are raised in unsuitable conditions.

I think this is an appalling practice. and we could stop it simply by refusing to buy these products. But unfortunately, people are not doing that. You brought me to the next question, which was what you think we have in common across a Christian like myself, atheist like yourself, and you said poverty was one of them. Your chapter, by the way, in writings on an ethical life, I picked up that book.

Your chapter, it's called The Singer Solution to World Poverty. it's a short chapter. But there's a ton in there I was reading this that I think you and I have huge common cause on, maybe for different reasons and we have different ethical systems we can get to. But some of the stuff you write in here, for example, I'm going to read it. You said comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10% of their income to overseas organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens. And I won't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more.

nevertheless, they should be doing much more. I think we do have some common cause on that one, and I think Christians ought to read that chapter and might even be convicted in many ways by it. Before we come back to the animal liberation question, oftentimes you have activists and you have academics. You're an academic and you're an activist. Is that your personality? Where does that come from, that you're not just writing, but you're not just writing,

you're trying to lead this larger change. What motivates you in that way? Well, it really comes from the ethical position that I hold, which is that the right thing to do, basically, is the thing that will have the best consequences for all of those affected in the long run. And so if I simply published my views in an academic journal where they were read by,

at the most, a few thousand people, that would not be the best thing that I could do on this issue. The best thing that I can do is to, write for a larger audience. The chapter that you mentioned from writings on ethical life was actually written for and published in the New York Times Sunday magazine. So it was read by a very large audience. And since then, I've tried to reach the largest audience with these views. I wrote a book called The Life You Can Save, and that led to an organization of the same name. Again, the life you can save. and in fact what I really would like your listeners to read

is to go to that website at the life you can save.org and they can download absolutely free a digital or audio copy of the book, The Life You Can Save. And I put that on the website and made it free because I want more people to read it. And it will not only give them the message that you would get from the article you mentioned,

but it will give them specific recommendations about the most effective charities that will help people in extreme poverty. So in other words, if people have a certain amount to give, surely they want to do the most good they can with that $100 or $500 or $5,000 or whatever it might be. So I think that's important for people to know. And that's the way in which you're quite right. I am an activist as well as an academic.

I do still write for academic journals. I'm no longer at Princeton, so I'm not actually giving lectures to classes. But when I was, you know, it was a somewhat different thing to do. I was then, of course, you have to present the whole range of arguments. Education is not indoctrination. It's giving people the materials from which they can think and make up their own minds. So that's what I was trying to do. If you read the life you can say, it's, I mean, it's not that I don't consider some objections.

that's the kind of person I am as a philosopher. But I'm definitely trying to persuade people to do more and to do what they do more effectively to reduce the amount of poverty that still exists on this planet. One more question before we come back to the animal liberation question. I'm curious if you think Christians like myself and you can find common cause about concern with what's called wokeness. and by the way, there's Christians who will approach this very differently.

There's some that more in the left, some more in the right. But I was reading the back of your book and this jumped out to me, and you were writing this long before kind of the modern, woke, critical theory debate. But you said, see if I can find this, it would not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression, or social conditioning. Some will be, but not all. some people define wholeness as just if you have if you don't have equal outcome then it's because

of discrimination you're in part saying that might be some of it but not all of it is the fact that there are fewer women chief executives and men maybe do to men's being more willing to subordinate their personal lives and other interests to their career goals. Biological difference between men and women may be a factor in their

greater readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of getting to the top. Some of their atheists you've interviewed you like Stephen Pinker and Sam Harris has spoken out and taken some criticism on this. Do you share that concern? Have you spoken out on that issue? Or is that just down the list on where your focus is? No, I have spoken on that issue. I'm a strong advocate of freedom of thought and discussion. In fact, again, I've not merely spoken about it. I've done something about it. I'm a co-founding editor of a journal called the Journal of the Journal of the Journal of

controversial ideas and then we founded that we're now in our fifth year I think we founded that because we were concerned about some articles which were this is this is in philosophy and ethics which were putting forward ideas that were considered politically incorrect by those who consider themselves woke and we're not getting published in in good journals although they were well argued not necessarily right but well argued articles that deserve to get an air So together with a couple of colleagues, we founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas and we publish articles that are not politically correct.

And we've made that journal also completely free. It's open access. Just because of small donations we get from a number of people. And it's pretty cheap to produce an online journal. There's no print journal. So you just go to Journal of Controversial Ideas.org and any of your readers can see what we're publishing. I imagine that some of them will like some of the things that we're publishing and some of they may not like other things we're publishing because we publish

controversial ideas that are both controversial to the left and controversial, some that are controversial to the right. Well, you certainly haven't ran from controversy in your career. That's a fact. I don't think that's debatable. Let's shift back. You said we've got common ground on at least some concern with wokeness, common ground on issues of addressing poverty worldwide. What about the issue of animal liberation? You probably didn't see this, but I did a review on a separate podcast that I have with my co-host on your recent book, Animal Liberation Now. And we have some pretty significant worldview differences.

There's no way around that. But I read a lot of it and really took some key insights away that I had to be. not really thought about the mistreatment of animals, et cetera. So do you think we have common ground there? Have Christians reach out and build common ground with you? Or has that been one that not so much? No, some of the Christians have reached that. I would particularly like to mention Professor Charles Comosi, who is the author of a book called For Love of Animals. He's a Catholic. He taught at Fordham. He's now, I'm sorry, I've gotten exactly where he is. He moved, but he's, again, I think, still at a Catholic University. He's a professor of Christian ethics, basically. And,

you know, I originally got to know him because when I, as I was saying, when I taught at Princeton, I wanted to present the students with diverse views. So I wanted to present them with people who are opposed to my views about abortion, for example. I'm a liberal on abortion. I'm a liberal on voluntary assisted dying. And so I invited him to my class, to speak to my class. And I thought he did a good job and we had a debate on that. But on the question of animals, we're pretty close really. And he would support and agree with what I just said about factory farming, for example.

Again, he would come at it from a different view. He would say, this is not the way to treat God's creatures. It doesn't respect the nature. And if you think of them as God's creation, you should respect their nature and not regard them as essentially commodities that you've produced 20,000 of them in a single shed. So he's brought in some other Christians as well.

He's tried to rally support in the Christian and the Roman Catholic community for regarding the way animals are treated as something that is a serious wrong that we should not support. So there is some common ground, but it's certainly not universal. And you couldn't say that Charlie Comosi's views have received the same kind of general support in the Christian community that, for instance, he would receive for his opposition to abortion. Yeah, that's probably the case.

I think that's undoubtedly for probably philosophical and theological reasons. I think you laid out, I think, pretty well what a Christian ethic would be for caring for animals. I mean, I just pulled up some passages in the Old Testament. I was just curious how many would jump to the top. And you have like an Exodus 2010, the commandment to all animals to rest on the Sabbath. Exodus 23.5. It says, interesting enough, if you see the donkey of someone who hates you, fall under its load, do not leave it there be sure you help them with it so even help people with their animals even if

they hate you i thought it was interesting i had not registered that one before return lost animals duteronomy 22 animals are to eat while working geronomy 25 and then proverbs 12 10 is fascinating the righteous care for the needs of their animals the righteous care for the needs of their animals Now again, you and I have radically different worldviews, but caring for creation and caring for animals is something that Christians, I think, need to take pretty seriously. I'm curious from your ethic, how would you ground the duty to care for animals in an atheist worldview? you. So for me, it's the fact that pain and suffering are intrinsically bad, right? And I say intrinsically bad, obviously instrumentally, they can be good, they can build character in some way, or just, you know, the pain that the dentist inflicts on me in giving me an injection is good,

because otherwise I would get more pain from the toothache or from the filling without the injection. So, you know, it's not that we should always try to eliminate pain. But But if a being is suffering and that suffering is not necessary to prevent greater suffering or to produce some very great good, then I see that as something that is intrinsically wrong. And I think that's, to me, an objectively true judgment. I'm not a relativist about ethics or a subjectivist. I don't think it's just my opinion versus yours. I think if we reflect on the idea, we can think about our own suffering, for example,

and recognize that we would prefer not to suffer. And then we think about the fact that, well, I'm just one among many beings in the universe capable of suffering, and there's nothing special about me that makes my suffering uniquely important, whereas the suffering of someone else doesn't matter. So I think we can get from a secular ethic to the idea that other things being equal, we should seek to reduce suffering and prevent further suffering occurring. And as non-human animals are capable of suffering, that's the crucial thing, of course, that we're not the only beings.

We humans are not the only beings on the planet capable of suffering. Therefore, we should avoid causing suffering or causing unnecessary suffering to non-human animals. By the way, I appreciated your critique of moral, relativism, that how do we make assessment if one society adopts slavery and another one doesn't? Clearly, we know the one who adopts slavery is wrong. You also talk about it's called the moral reformer's dilemma, that if morality is rooted in a society, then you can't have a reformer come in and tell the society that it's wrong because it's disagreed with the society. Martin Luther King, Jr., gone to you site. You would consider yourself a moral reformer.

And so I agree with your critique of moral relativism. I think where we part is over whether or not a utilitarian ethic can be an objectively grounded ethic. I think that's where we're going to part. And so if I may, let me push back and you clarify a little bit where you're coming from in this one. You wrote, you said, it's on page 326. You said the case for animal liberation is very simple. is that animals can feel and have interests. I would agree with you on that.

I'm not one who doubts that animals can feel or doubt that animals have interests. That's an observation about animals. So I'm going to argue. I think we're moving from what Hume called the is-aught fallacy, that there are animals who feel a certain way to have interests. Then you write, there's no reason we should, there's the ought, give less consideration to their interest, than we give to similar interests of members of our own species.

I think so. Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's Word every day. The Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor, a fun way to learn and share a smile while growing in your faith. Get the Daily Bible Devotion app for free on both iOS and Android. start and end your day with God's Word.

Search for the Daily Bible Devotion app in the App Store or Google Play Store and download it today. But he can reason that way. But if there's no God and like you write on page 269, ethical truths are not written into the fabric of the universe, where does that ought come from? So I think the ought comes from the judgment. that suffering is a bad thing. As I say, you know, take a case of somebody who is in agony.

You know, maybe your biblical case is probably, you know, the ox has fallen under the cart or something like that. Sorry, the donkey, was it? I think the donkey is fallen under the cart

and is, you know, in pain there. And even though you hate the person whose donkey it is, and you should help the donkey because that pain is a bad thing. And I think that that, you know, I would rest my judgment on that. We don't need a God to tell us that that pain is a bad thing. We directly feel it in our own

case. And then we recognize that something in some way similar, of course, it's not identical when we're comparing a donkey suffering with ours, but in some way there's something similar going on. And we recognize that that is also an intrinsically bad thing. So I do think that that's an objective moral claim that we're entitled to make. And that's the foundation of the, well, it's the foundation of classical utilitarianism, I guess, which says the suffering is a bad thing and pleasant states of consciousness, positive states of consciousness are good things. I think there's something common sense about that, like going, hey, I don't like pain.

You know, of course, we have to ask what is meant by a bad thing, a morally bad thing, an experience I don't like. What do we mean that pain is a bad thing? Of course, that's how we feel. I don't like pain. I see it in others. But it seems to me there's a step going from, I don't like pain to I now have a moral obligation

to therefore work towards somebody to alleviate their pain or another being's pain. In a theistic ethic, that obligation is there, of course, because there's a God who's made us. He's built that into the universe, and he's directed us to live a certain way and love one another and care for animals. So there's an oughtness built in. It seems to me in a naturalistic universe, I recognize I don't like pain.

I recognize that other people don't like pain, but I don't see where the obligation comes from that I'm immoral if I don't follow it. Okay, so I would argue that that comes from our capacity to reason. our capacity to recognize that if we have the opportunity to avoid something that is bad, and again, I will use this term bad, to prevent something that is bad, we ought to do that. That that's, you know, that's the judgment of being in a universe which has good and bad possible states.

And I would say that that's the basis of ethics. And then the question is, so do you? Do you want to live to create a universe which has fewer bad things in it and more good things in it? And that's where I derive my aught statement from. So it's not the naturalistic policy of going from is to aught. It's not just saying animals can suffer. It's rather saying there are values in the universe that are objective. And so that's where the value judgment comes in.

is derives from that value judgment. It's not simply an is judgment. It's an account of something being a positive value. So I think that's where I'm not clear. I'll just push back one more time and then we'll go on. You're right. We can reason. I think we totally agree on that.

Now, you and I would differ over why we as beings can reason and what accounts for that. But that's an observation. That's an is that we are beings who can reason. When I say I ought to reason in a way that now values other animals and human beings, that's an ought that doesn't seem to arise from the mere fact that we can reason alone. That's getting arguably something from nothing, I would say. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's like that essay you're writing. I don't remember what, know what date it's from, but it's at least 25 years ago, right?

It's early. Yeah, so update us. Right. So I have changed my views on that. And I have actually, you mentioned the phrase, the point of view of the universe, which is taken from a 19th century British philosopher called Henry Sidgwick. And I have written or co-authored a book with that title, The Point of View of the Universe, together with a Polish philosopher, Katagina de Lazari Radik. And it was published, I think, in 2014, if I remember rightly. And, you know, we were working through those questions about reason and ethics in that book. And I think I did over that period shift my position, partly in writing that book, partly there's a great Oxford philosopher called Derek Parfit, who died a few years ago, who wrote a book called On What Matters, in which he argued for objectivity and ethics. and I had seen the drafts of that book already some years earlier and been influenced by them.

So I did alter my position and I would now say that, yes, at a deep level, if you recognize the suffering of another, you recognize that it is suffering similar to yours, but you just say it means nothing to me or I don't care about it, that that's an irrational position to take. It's a position that is relatively common because, after all, I believe anyway, that we are evolved beings and we evolved in a world in which our ancestors had to think of themselves first to survive and then to reproduce. And if they didn't think of that, well, they wouldn't leave any genes in future generations. And so we know that we have descended from people who had to think of themselves in those ways, but could also cooperate with others to some extent. I also had social instincts.

So I recognize that one strain of human nature is this self-centered concern for oneself, but I actually think that that's irrational. I think we also evolved the capacity to reason, again, because it helped us to survive and solve problems. But having evolved that capacity to reason, we can see that others are like us, and we can see that their suffering matters as ours does, and to fail to recognize that and to act on it is a form of irrationality. Yeah, I guess I don't see why someone would be irrational and immoral if they said,

you know what, I don't want to cooperate with people. I've evolved this thinking and reasoning. I'm going to live for myself and my interests. I don't see why we might say, oh, that's not wise. That's not best for society. But I guess I don't see why that would be irrational and why the person would be immoral in an objective sense in a world in which there's no God. Now, you can jump and respond to that.

I feel like we could go down that rabbit trail for a long ways. Can I ask you a different line of reasoning here on this one? I heard you're welcome to ask, and I would invite people who want to follow this more deeply to take a look at that book I mentioned, the point of view of the universe, where we argue for that at much greater length. Fair enough.

That's totally fair. I'm really curious. You had an interview with Sam Harris, which I enjoyed, was fascinating. And you pushed back on him on, he denies free will, has written a book on this, and he gave his case for it. And you seem to push back on him and not be convinced. And in a lot of your writings, you sure seem to talk about how we have certain moral obligations to act a certain way. And, of course, Kant said, ought implies can. If I say, somebody ought to give more to the poor, if I say somebody ought to care for animals, I'm implying that they can do so. And you just described changing your mind a while ago, which seems to imply kind of thinking

and reasoning. So I was taking from this that you differed with Sam Harris on free will. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. So you tell me, where do you land on the issue of free will? And how does that fit into your atheist worldview? you. Yes, I do differ from Sam Harris on that. We only talked about that relatively briefly in a wide-ranging interview. Again, if your listeners want to hear more, there's a scientist called Robert Sapolsky, who's written a book called Determin, right, and he's a strong opponent of free will.

And we had him on our podcast. I want to say we, I co-host a podcast with the co-author. I mentioned Katagina de Lazari Ruddick. And the podcast is called Lives Well-Lived. So if your listeners want to hear me arguing against Sapolsky, that's a good place to go. In brief, I differ with both Sam and with Sapolsky because I'm a compatibilist on the free will determinism question. In other words, I think that it may be true that if you had perfect knowledge of the universe

at some prior time, knowledge of absolutely, you know, everything in the universe, every position of every atom in the universe, you would be able to predict the future of what people do. But that's, of course, completely irrelevant to our decision-making because nobody has that kind of perfect knowledge and we can't predict ourselves and we make choices. And I think it's also blindingly obvious that we make choices. Now, Sopolski and Harris,

say yes but those choices are determined and I would say well um maybe in that sense that I just described they're determined they're predictable by a perfect perfectly informed predictor but um we are responsible for the choices we make and there are circumstances in which we could have chosen differently and we could have done something better than we've done and we're responsible then for having not done the better thing but having done the wrong thing so um That's the kind of free will that I believe in, that we are being capable of choosing. The choices we make obviously affect what we do, and we can be held responsible for those choices. When you described the person who could predict our exact behaviors, of course, I would say that's God.

I know you don't believe in a personal God in that way. But one of the ways I would talk about the reconciliation between free will and God's sovereignty is that, just because somebody could predict or know what we might do, doesn't mean that person is determining or our choices themselves are necessarily determined. Those are distinct things. I actually did a critique of Sapolsky's work. Maybe I should have them on. I have a lot of people on with different worldviews. But I am curious how the idea of a responsibility weighs into your atheist worldview, because you're very clear in some of your writings you reject the soul. At least you're not convinced by any evidence for it. So from an atheist worldview,

I had Michael Shermer on, for example, really thoughtful, skeptic, and he believes in free will, pushes back on Sam Harris. And basically describes it as an epiphenomenon. Like he describes it, like it just kind of pops into existence, consciousness does, kind of like inflation emerges in a complex economic system. I took issue of that, but I'm really curious. What would your explanation be for a kind of free will and responsibility in an atheist world? Yeah. First, let me say, though, since you mentioned the idea that God has perfect knowledge and is determined, I mean, that, of course, is a famous problem in Christianity, isn't it? And the Calvinists, for instance, thought that it was predetermined who would go to heaven and who would

go to hell, you know, who would be the elect. And therefore, that, in a way, what you did wasn't going to be relevant, which was a popular view. I understand in the early New England colonies of the United States, but not that widely held perhaps today. So I think this whole issue of free will and determinism poses problems for Christians as well as for atheists. You're right. I think there is a problem for certain strains of Christianity that hold certain views about God's sovereignty. this is a theological issue, which is a little different than the philosophical question. I think Molinism is a very, I think it's a very adequate way of having human free will and God's sovereignty. It's at least a logically possible way of reconciling the two of them.

So Christians differ over this, but I'm more asking the philosophical question of how free will could emerge and the responsibility that you talk about in an atheist universe. Oh, well, free will emerges. Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's Word every day. The Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor, a fun way to learn and share a smile while growing in your faith. Get the Daily Bible Devotion app for free on both iOS and Android.

Start and end your day with God's Word. Search for the Daily Bible Devotion app in the App Store or Google Play Store and download it today. Once you have beings who are capable of making choices, and incidentally, I don't think that's only human beings. I think certainly some of our close and non-human relatives make choices. Maybe a whole lot of animals make choices. Many people who live with dogs, for example, or cats. will say that their companion animals make choices, and I think that's true.

But we obviously are more self-aware. We can think more about our choices, and we can be held responsible for them in a way that we probably don't hold dogs and cats responsible, although to some extent we might. And also with our very young children, you know, I'm a father of three children, and it was really interesting to me to see how gradually they develop

this sense, where you feel they are responsible for what they do. You don't feel that babies are responsible, but as they get older at some point, whether it's two, three, four, you start to hold them responsible in a different way. And I think that that's because by holding them responsible,

we seek to influence their choices. So we attribute to them responsibility because we want them to try, harder to do the right thing. And we believe that by trying harder, they will more often do the right thing. So in that sense, they're not powerless. They can form a will to live ethically, to understand what it is to live ethically and to do it. And we want to encourage them to do that. And we want to praise them if they do that. We want to blame them if they do the wrong thing. So this type of free will that I think is important is.

is the recognition that people make choices that lead to different actions and that we want them to do the things that are socially desirable and that won't harm others and that perhaps will lead to them also to have a better life, of course, especially if they're our children. So attributing responsibility of them is important as part of that process of making them better people. I guess my question is not so much what do we do when kind of free will and consciousness emerges, but in an atheist universe, how you get consciousness and how you get free will, that's more my question.

And I think, I mean, one answer could just be, it's a mystery. We have no idea. Fine, we can move on. But it seems to me this is an area that poses a significant challenge for. an atheist worldview, how possibly, it's one thing to explain how bodies change and evolve. That's one question. But free will itself doesn't seem to be a problem if there's a soul and a consciousness and a thinking immaterial self that reasons.

It does pose a challenge for atheism. And that's why I think people like Sam Harris and Sapolsky just bite the bullet and are like, we're determinists. But if you're going to have free will, it seems to me there needs to be an adequate account of where that comes from. I don't quite understand why it's a more difficult problem for an atheist than for a theist, because a theist also has to say consciousness is part of the universe, you know, that it exists. Atheists may say that it always exists, but, you know, possibly, as I said,

Tom Nagel, who's an atheist, may also say that consciousness has always been there, present in some way, or at least latently present, requiring beings to have certain kinds of brains, certain kinds of structures to become conscious. And we don't fully understand, I agree, how exactly it is that material objects develop consciousness, and that's a deep philosophical issue. But the question of, you know, if you're a theist and you say, well, God is conscious and God was always there,

the question of still how that consciousness interacts with the material beings that we are seems to. me to remain a problem on any view. Can I shift and ask you, have you done any writings on that where you go into depth where people could see your explanation for this or have you focused on other stuff? I've focused on other stuff, really. Okay. I've been interested in that, but yeah.

Fair enough. Let's totally shift in. So really my last question for you is I'm wondering if you can kind of flesh out how you'd make sense of the 2016 incident with the Silverback gorilla. Harambi. And I'm sure you know the story of thought about this. And in many ways, I think this is just going to highlight some of our differences here. There was a three-year-old boy climbed into a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. And this gorilla, I mean, it's a strong silverback, just powerful, beautiful gorilla. And it's just moving this thing around like a rag doll.

and zoo officials made the harrowing decision to shoot Harambe to protect the boy. Now, I think the gorilla is a part of God's beautiful creation and has value and we want to care for it. But I completely think they made the right call because I think humans are made in the image of God. How do you process a situation like that? So I think the facts were not totally clear, although as you say, the gorilla was very strong and and was dragging the child around, but the gorilla was not intentionally harming the child. In fact, you know, maybe the gorilla was actually caring for the child. So the question is how great was the risk of harm to the child?

And secondly, was there an alternative, if there was a, you know, so if, if in fact, it was likely that the gorilla was going to kill or seriously harm the child, then I agree something has to be done. Then the question is what is available? could you use a tranquilizing doubt rather than a lethal bullet? If so, then I think that would clearly have been the preferable thing to do. But, you know, I'm not saying that if, in fact, there is a non-human animal and its choice between the life of the non-human animal and the life of a human being, in this case, a child, also with a mother, of course, who was presumably a father, but I think there was the mother who's present.

I might have those facts wrong. But anyway, with parents who grieve terribly for the loss of their child, I'm prepared to say that sometimes it's justifiable to kill the animal rather than allow the child to die. I'm not, you know, I don't deny differences between humans and animals. And as I said, I'm more concerned with cases where there's absolutely no necessity for harming the animals because we can feed ourselves perfectly well, even better without factory farming than with factory farming.

So I don't know that you and I will necessarily disagree on what was the right thing to do in that particular situation in the Cincinnati Zoo. I think you're probably right that we agree on that, that try to do whatever we can to protect the child, if there's another way to tranquilize the gorilla, great. Some of those details, there's still some debate about it, how much danger it was actually in. One of the provocative things you've said, and you obviously believe it, is that, and if you shifted on this, then just correct me and tell me where you're at, is that up to like 28 days, a parents kind of have a decision if they're going to keep their

infant or not, that this is a decision parents can make because of certain developments in their brain and understanding. Like if Harambi somehow had a three-week-old infant, would it have been wrong to shoot the infant and protect Tarambi? Like if we change the circumstances and put it earlier, would you assess it differently? Well, firstly, that 28-day thing,

I think that actually dates from 1984. So we're talking about more than 40 years ago when I said that, and I did abandon that particular distinction, you know, that line, you know, quite more than 30 years ago. Okay. I think, but I, and the other thing

that I need to say is I was talking about parents making decisions for severely disabled newborns where they judged that it was the best thing in the interests of their child that the child not live. And after all, you know, that decision is being made in intensive care units for newborn babies across the United States all the time when babies are born severely disabled. Parents are offered, are asked whether they wish to put them on a respirator. And they have that choice. And if they say, I don't think it's the life of the child is going to be sufficiently positive for it to be better for the child to live, the doctors will either not put the child on a respirator in the first place or remove the

child from a respirator, which they know is effectively ending the child's life. So I think the values that I'm holding there are not so dramatically different from those that, doctors use in intensive care units for babies as people might think. But yes, I mean, it would depend on the attitude of the parents and it would depend on the prospects of the child's life. So I don't think that the fact that this is a human being automatically means that this life is more important than the life of a non-human animal, even if it's a human being who has irreparable brain damage or irreparable genetic abnormalities, which mean that this child will never have a life that is one that contains

significant positive experiences. So in that case, you know, at least conceivably, if you have to save a child or a gorilla, I might say save the gorilla rather than the child. But it would only be in those cases, and it will also only be where the parents also accept that judgment because that's very important to me that it should be the parents who make this decision. They're the ones who are going to have to look after the profoundly disabled child and care for it and try to give it a good life. So they should be able to make those decisions in the medical situation. And if the parents, if this was a child that the parents loved and

wanted and cared for us, fortunately most parents do want and love and care for their children, then that could make a big difference. And that might be a reason for preserving the child's life rather than the gorillas. Peter, I have a ton more questions for you, things. I love to explore and talk about in some ways we just scratched on the surface. And I'm guessing some of my viewers are losing their mind going, push back on this and challenge that. And I'm sure some of your viewers are going, wait, push back on the Christian here.

But I just want to remind people that you agreed to come on and talk about common ground here and talking about some of these ethical issues. Let me push back a little bit, which I appreciate. By the way, I'll plant the thought in your mind. It looks like at about a year and a half. A good chance I'll be coming to Australia and maybe Melbourne. If so, you don't have to answer now. Maybe we could sit down for a more in-depth conversation. And rather than pepper and a few of these, we could go into depth on some of these differences. And really, the worldview issues behind them, You and I have pretty radically different worldviews, but one thing I appreciate about your book is you talk about what we believe about God, what we believe about things like Darwinism, about the soul. These are the big issues that are going to play themselves out in our ethical practice.

And we've got to land some of those first as they play themselves out in the way that we live. So I suspect you and I could sit down and have a very long conversation, maybe somebody to moderate. it back and forth. But you don't have to answer now, but I'll probably shoot you an email and see if you're open to it when I come back into Melbourne. Regardless, thanks for your time. Really appreciate you coming on and be willing to talk about this. And you mentioned your podcast of Life Well-Lived. I've been listening to it, Peter. I enjoyed many of the conversations. Very, very interesting. And I appreciate that you don't just talk to atheists, although you bring on Stephen Pinker and Sam Harris, but you've had people like

Arthur Brooks on, who's a Christian, and let them share their story and their perspective as well. So, Peter, either in Melbourne or we'll have you back, and we will push into some of these issues some more if you're willing to do so. But thanks for coming on. My pleasure, Sean. Thanks for having me on your program. Those of you watch and make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other shows coming up and we love to have you come study apologetics at Biola at Talbot. We have full classes on ethics where we go into depth on this. We'll see you soon.

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