Matt Dillahunty EXPOSES The Flaw In Glen Scrivener's "Secular Morality Is Christianity Light"

[00:00:00]I have yet to find anybody presenting an objection to secular morality that is in any way solved by appealing to a religious one. The the big thing that you get to is well what's the the foundational source and why should I care about it? Hey everyone, welcome back. Genuinely glad you were here for this one because this debate is something else entirely. So, what we have here is Matt Dillah Hunty, one of the sharpest voices in secular philosophy today, going head-to-head with Glenn Scriber, a Christian communicator who has spent years making the case that Western morality simply cannot survive without its Christian roots. The question on the table is whether atheism and secular humanism can actually deliver a better world or whether they are just borrowing from a foundation they quietly threw away. What makes this conversation so compelling is that neither of these two is willing to back down. And the further it goes, the more uncomfortable it gets for both sides. Make sure you stay all the way through because the moment this debate reaches its conclusion is genuinely one of the most jaw-dropping exchanges I have seen in a long time and I do not want you to miss it. Also, I am really curious. That's where in the world are you watching this from right now? Drop your city or country in the comments. It is always amazing to see how far this community reaches.

[00:01:29]All right, let us get into it.

[00:01:32]>> Is secular humanism new? Um, in one sense, yes, quite new. In in another sense, it's I think it's a repackaging of Christianity light. I I I I do think I do think nature's uh critique holds that uh secular humanism tends to be um Christianity where God is swapped out for the good. Um, >> but to the extent that's true, can we just say that Christianity is the Hamarabic code swapped out or upgraded or changed or that all of this is derivative? At some point, we're talking about human beings and how they choose to try to answer the questions and live lives cooperatively. whether you're going back to animism and some tribal uh struggle then this becomes a more codified sort of language and when people aren't paying attention to it and the the village elder is no longer a sufficient authority we appeal to one outside of there I mean this would also be a sufficient explanation for the the history of religion so to say that secular humanism is a new newly packaged light modified version of Christianity >> re really isn't relevant if Christianity is a modified version of other things that all tie back to the human being, >> which is a big if and I don't think it is at all. I think what what you get when you look at human civilizations, what you get when you look at the Hammurabi code or when you look at the enumerish, when you look at any number of the ancient neareastern texts, when you look at any number of Greco Roman understandings of the world or Persian understanding of the world or Muslim understandings of the world, uh it is basically that in the realm of the flesh, in the realm of biological reality, it is survival of the fittest, you know, and and therefore sacrifice of the weakest. And I think what you get absolutely uniquely in Christianity is the reverse of that. You you have in Christ the the fittest who is sacrificed for the survival of the weakest. And what you get birthed out of the Christian movement is a a a unique uh preference for the poor, the marginalized, the weak, the outsider to draw them in such that obviously in every society there's tit for tat and there's let's cooperate and let's do all that kind of stuff. But who is we in that sentence? Let let us cooperate.

[00:03:43]Well, who's the us? You know, it could be just you and me and not Justin or it could be just me and Justin and not you, right? Um who are the people on planet Earth who are actually saying uh it's actually all of us, even our enemies are those who we include in the circle of humanity and who we grant equal human dignity to and who we say they must never be marginalized. No matter how weak they are, no matter how ineffectual they are, no matter how maladapted to survival they are, um they are ours and we will, you know, we will grant them a universal human dignity. That's a thoroughly Christian idea. And I and it's it's not, you know, it's obviously it's found on the first page of the Bible. Um so it's it's there in Judaism, but it's it is a uniquely Christian idea um that I think secular humanism has taken on. But I don't think you derive that secular humanism anywhere else but in Christianity >> and Judaism.

[00:04:38]>> Let's call it the the Judeo-Christian worldview or whatever.

[00:04:40]>> Sure. Let's credit the Abrahamic God with everything. And when I look at it, my my issue is if there if there is an Abrahamic God. Okay, that's an important question which I guess we're going to somewhat sideline because at the end of the day, uh, this notion that human beings who care about human beings are not going to come up with multiple different ways of structuring a a society. and that some of those which may be consistent with your view and understanding of Christianity which I would argue is perhaps different than some other people's view and understanding Christianity. I don't I don't think that's particularly contentious at this point.

[00:05:25]>> Doesn't mean that this is Christianity light and modified and updated or that it's all derived from Christianity as the original source because that presumes that there's something other than human beings that are the original source for those ideas.

[00:05:43]The fact that they became popular within Christianity, you know, that you have somebody talking about blessed are the meek. Um, did that ultimately lead some people to the United Nations Universal Code of Human Ethics type stuff and secular humanism? Sure. Because we're all together on a planet and these ideas get passed around. And my my take on it has always been take the best ideas wherever you find them and get rid of the rest.

[00:06:08]>> This is the moment right here where Glenn Scrivener reveals exactly how he thinks about secular ethics and then it tells you everything. His argument is that secular humanism is basically Christianity where God is swapped out.

[00:06:25]That is his opening position. And look, I want to be fair to Glenn because he is clearly intelligent and he makes his case confidently. But the second he said that, Matt Dillah Hunty was already three steps ahead of him. Here is what people do not realize about this argument. When someone tells you that every good moral idea you have secretly came from Christianity, what they are actually doing is making an unfalsifiable claim. It cannot be tested. It cannot be disproven because if a good idea existed before Christianity, they call it foreshadowing. If it came after, they call it borrowing. There is no version of history where that argument loses.

[00:07:05]And that is not philosophy.

[00:07:08]That is a thought-terminating move dressed up as one. Matt's response is genuinely sharp here. He points out that you could trace Christianity itself back to earlier civilizations, the Hammurabi code, ancient Neareastern texts, Greco Roman frameworks, and suddenly the whole chain of credit falls apart. Glenn says that's a thoroughly Christian idea when talking about universal human dignity.

[00:07:36]Matt essentially says, "Well, who gave Christianity the credit for being the original source?" That presumption only works if you already believe there is something beyond human beings driving these ideas. And that is the very thing that has not been demonstrated.

[00:07:54]What Matt lands on is something I find genuinely compelling. He says, "Take the best ideas wherever you find them and get rid of the rest." That is not laziness. That is actually intellectual honesty. You are not locked into a system. You are not forced to defend the parts that cause harm in order to keep the parts that help people. And that flexibility is exactly what Glenn cannot offer without his entire framework collapsing.

[00:08:23]>> And so from, you know, the Bible, I can pull out some really good ideas and I can get rid of its support for slavery or genocide or misogyny or any of those things. I don't have to hang on to the baggage or claim that I'm doing it because there's >> in a sense though you're getting rid of everything including God obviously in in the process of doing that and it is your argument Glenn that there's a danger in doing that you can't simply have the ethics without some of the supporting foundations presumably that you think >> which is nature's critique as well yeah absolutely that you you get rid of the god of Christianity and you must get rid of the ethics of Christianity as well because uh it is founded on the God who took flesh, who became the weak one in order to rise up again and and and bring us weak ones into his family. Um and and he uniquely gives to the entire human race, a dignity, which you can kind of secularize that term and and call it the universal declaration of human rights, but that's basically the amo day. That's basically the image of God from Genesis chapter 1. So, so on one hand you seem to be saying you can't remove God and still maintain these things and yet you're you're accu claiming that secular humanism has done exactly that.

[00:09:36]>> Secularism has done exactly that or hasn't done exactly that >> has done exactly that. That when I when I advocate for secular humanist principles when I when I do that that I'm basically taking the principles that you see in Christianity and just removing God from it.

[00:09:48]>> So clearly you can do that. You can do that. But on what grounds now is every human being in the image of God or now in this new updated term is every human being now included in the universal declaration of humanity.

[00:10:02]>> Yeah, this is this is the the thing that I keep running up against is I have yet to find anybody presenting an objection to secular morality that is in any way solved by appealing to a religious one.

[00:10:13]The the big thing that you get to is well what's the the foundational source and why should I care about it? This is where when Sam writes moral landscape and people are like, "Well, you haven't fully explained well-being." Of course, we can't. We haven't. I mean, this is the process where we uh we're continuing to discover things. Well, why should anybody care about well-being >> is is the big question that Sam always gets asked.

[00:10:34]>> And that and that this question also applies to why should anybody care about what a god says. And this is one of the things where whether or not there's a God, I don't necessarily see any evidence when I look at um Christianity in particular, at least the way I understood it when I was a Christian, that there's a God who has human interests at heart. It's humans who have human interests at heart. So, not only would secular humanism stand with regard to AA's razor, but the thing that we're appealing to is the very thing that we're seeking to do, which is we care about us. Why do we care about us? We care about us because we're us. Now, when you have when you add in the God of Christianity, you get the notion that no, God's got a plan. You are a part of that plan. And okay, he loves you and he's making a place to either torture you or or rescue you, too. And he can serve as a foundation that we can point to so that we don't have to point to ourselves. But nowhere in there is there is there any sort of guarantee that that there either is a God or b that that God has the actual best interest of humans at heart. It's just an appeal that God understands these things better than we do. And so when it seems like God doesn't have the best interests of humans at heart, that's just our failure to understand it, which is really facious reasoning.

[00:11:51]>> Uh except that Christianity is about God the human. I mean foundationally Christianity is Christ. It's it's foundationally God the Son has become God our brother. We've just celebrated Christmas. It's it's the the the time at which the word became flesh, which is just a stunning a stunning religious idea that is found nowhere else.

[00:12:10]Disgusting to my Muslim friends. You know, it's disgusting to the Greco Roman mind. Uh and and yet the Christian claim uniquely is that God took flesh and even became a single cell in Mary's womb.

[00:12:22]This is the part that genuinely blows my mind every time I watch this exchange because Matt Dillah Hunty says something here that Glenn has absolutely no clean answer to. Matt says he has yet to find anybody presenting an objection to secular morality that is in any way solved by appealing to a religious one.

[00:12:45]Read that again. He is not saying religion is useless. He is saying religion does not actually solve the foundational problem it claims to solve.

[00:12:55]And here is why that matters so much.

[00:12:57]The classic religious counter to secular ethics is always, but what is your foundation?

[00:13:04]Where does your morality come from without God?

[00:13:08]Glenn pushes that exact line, but Matt flips it immediately. He points out that the same question applies right back.

[00:13:16]Why should anyone care what a god says?

[00:13:18]You still need a reason to care. You still need a foundation beneath the foundation. And at that level, both systems are standing on the same uncertain ground. What Matt says next is where it gets really interesting from an educational standpoint. He points out that it is humans who have human interests at heart, not God. Humans. And when you think about the history of how moral progress has actually happened, the expansion of who counts as fully human, the abolition of practices that were once considered divinely sanctioned, it was almost always humans pushing back against the dominant religious framework of their time. Human conscience moved first. Institutions followed. Glenn's response is to double down on the incarnation, God becoming human, becoming weak, dignifying humanity from the inside. And I understand why that is theologically meaningful to people who already believe it. But Matt's point cuts right through it.

[00:14:24]He says, "Nowhere in that story is there any guarantee that a god exists or that this god actually has human interests at heart when the evidence seems to go against it." The answer is always that we just do not understand it well enough. Matt calls that facious reasoning. And honestly, it is hard to argue with that. Um became the weak and despised thing for the sake of all weak and despised things. And I think from there you get the principle that humanity in and of itself has a dignity because God has so dignified it.

[00:15:02]Otherwise it's us elevating humanity to a certain you know position. Why should we elevate humanity to a certain position? Why should there be such a thing as human exceptionalism?

[00:15:11]>> Why shouldn't there be?

[00:15:12]>> Is is that just a power play? Right.

[00:15:14]>> I mean I don't I'm not just asking that to like you know.

[00:15:18]>> Do you have an answer? Like what do you think about human >> exception? I don't I don't really see any reason why it shouldn't be. Of course, we're going to be concerned about our own well-being.

[00:15:25]>> You talk about Yeah, there's a [clears throat] >> moral though or or is that just a power?

[00:15:29]>> So, this this is the thing when we talk about what is moral. So, quite often they'll say, "Well, the thing you're describing that's all well and good, but it's not morality." Fine, then I don't care about morality. you need to tell me what what you're going to because if the only thing you're going to count as morality is some sort of, you know, divine command or uh a supernatural being that serves as a grounding for whatever you want to do.

[00:15:52]That's not what I think anybody's ever really cared about from morality. When we talk about morals, we talk about this, we're evaluating the consequences of our actions with respect to some goal and does it ultimately increase, decrease, or have no effect on our well-being. Which is why I think Sam went with well-being. I didn't used to use that. I used a different language when I did my talk.

[00:16:12]>> But you fundamentally agree with Sam Harris that that's something we can objectively measure through say scientific means as long as we know what benefits what generally humans want in their lives. I think you can do objective assessments, object objective evaluations with respect to a standard.

[00:16:28]You don't have an objective reason why you care about that standard just like you don't have an objective reason why you care about a god. If there was a god, he should come along and kind of clarify all this. I would think that would be a duty. But the the the beautiful story that you're talking about where, you know, the most powerful being comes down and becomes a cell, becomes one of the, you know, one of the weak, one of the fallen in order to save them. That's an incredibly nice way to package it. But that's I have I guess a completely different take on it. Uh because the story is a little different. The story starts in Genesis where God creates everybody and then it all screws up and then he tries to fix it and it screws up and he tries to fix it and it screws up. It's this parade. It's this comedy of errors. And then you get to a spot where God, who's been demanding that we slaughter animals and burn them because he likes barbecue, is now decided that he's going to come down and take human form and sacrifice himself to himself for a weekend to fix everything for everybody.

[00:17:32]That's not that's blood magic. That is sacrificial blood magic thinking and nothing to do about human value.

[00:17:42]>> The moment Matt said fine, then I don't care about morality. You need to tell me what you're going for. Something shifted in this debate because what he was exposing is a game that gets played constantly in these conversations. The word morality gets used as if it only counts when it comes from a supernatural source. as if humans caring about humans does not qualify. As if reason and empathy and shared well-being are somehow less real because they do not have a divine signature on them. And then Matt does something that I think is one of the most memorable moments in this entire debate. He retells the Christian salvation story, not with contempt, but with a kind of forensic clarity. He walks through it step by step, the repeated failures, the animal sacrifices, and then the conclusion that God came down, took human form, and sacrificed himself to himself to fix a problem he created. And he calls it blood magic. Now, I know that phrase is going to upset a lot of Christians watching this, but here is what I want you to actually sit with. Matt is not mocking faith for the sake of it. He is pointing out that when you strip away the poetry and the theology and look at the raw mechanics of what is being described, a cosmic debt paid through sacrifice, that framework does not actually ground human value. It grounds human value in a transaction. And transactions have conditions.

[00:19:21]What secular humanism is saying at its core is that human beings have value because we say they do. Because we are here, because we feel, because we are capable of suffering and joy and connection. You do not need a cosmic backstory to justify treating people with dignity. You just need to actually care. And that more than any argument made in this entire clip is what Glenn never fully answers. Because the moment you need God to tell you humans matter, you have already outsourced the most important moral question there is. So, what do you guys think of this? Leave your thoughts down in the comments.

[00:20:03]Please like and subscribe, and I will see you in the next video.