Anthony or A.C. is a philosopher and author. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities. Anthony is the author of over 30 books including The Future of Moral Values, What Is Good?, The Meaning of Things, The Good Book & The God Argument. He was a fellow of the World Economic Forum, & is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature & the Royal Society of Arts. Anthony is a vice-president of Humanists UK & an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

01:50 Anthony's Intro

- "I agree wholeheartedly with... Sentientism"

- #humanism 

- #Supernaturalism, #naturalism , value & #morality 

03:43 What's Real?

- A non-religious family

- Encountering religions at 13 yrs "preference for one kind of candy vs. another"

- Evangelical chaplain at boarding school "he galvanised me" & provided a reading list. "I've read everything & I simply cannot understand how you can believe this stuff"

- How Christianity remixes stories from other mythologies. "That demolished the pretentions of Christianity"

- "Religions keep their hold mainly by brainwashing the young"

- Malign effects of religion e.g. blocking science; "a kind of mental prison"

- Joining the #NewAtheist debate with #richarddawkins , #christopherhitchens 

- Do gods exist?, should we have a #secular society?, should we have a #humanist morality?

- Why atheists & humanists still hold other dogmatic beliefs

- "All claims should be defeasible"

- "Instead of talking about knowledge, let us talk about rational belief". Belief ratioed to the weight of evidence

- There may be fairies in your garden but "it is profoundly irrational to believe it"

- The ethics of rationality

- "You often hear religious people saying you can't prove there is no god... I'm going to do it now." "in the empirical sense proof means test... like proving steel"

- #CarlSagan 's Dragon in the Garage "the claim turns up empty"

- Standards of "discovery" in physics

20:57 What Matters?

- Spanning the #Is-Ought chasm "I emphatically disagree with Hume"

- "Very few people on the planet like to be cold, hungry, alone, in pain, oppressed... tortured... those few people who do like those things are weird"

- Mirror neurons, theory of mind & #empathy 

- "There is a deeply naturalistic basis to the possibilities of moral behaviour... it takes culture to mess them up"

- Tightly linking the good/bad of feeling with the good/bad of ethics

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.

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