Skeptic: Promoting Science and Critical Thinking

On Science Religion & Morality

Shermer tackles two of the deepest and most challenging problems of our age: (1) The origins of morality and (2) the foundations of ethics. Is it in our nature to be moral, immoral, or amoral? If we evolved by natural forces then what was the natural purpose of morality? If we live in a determined universe, then how can we make free moral choices? If there is no outside source to validate moral principles, does anything go? Can we be good without God? Shermer peels back the inner layers covering our core being to reveal a complexity of human motives—selfish and selfless, cooperative and competitive, virtue and vice, good and evil, moral and immoral—and how these motives came into being as a product of both our evolutionary heritage and cultural history, and how we can construct an ethical system that generates a morality that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative, a rational morality for an age of science.

This DVD is one of five available from our Science Symposium held at Caltech in 2011. You can also order these other Science Symposium lectures:

1. The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer (av233)
2. The Future of Science, Technology, and Education, by Bill Nye and James Randi (av235)
3. The Belief Changing Kit, a 3-DVD Set with Audience Q&A, with Nye, Randi, Dalton, Prothero
   (av236 includes av233, av234, and av235)
4. Mr. Deity and Friends, with Brian Keith Dalton (av237)