What follows is what Sam Harris had to say on the last day of the Beyond Belief conference on the subject of religion, science and morality. I thought it was worth transcribing and repeating:

"I want to try to focus us again on this question of the relationship between morality and religion, because I think as I said before that this is really the keystone myth in our society that keeps religion in such good standing among otherwise rational people. So I really think this is the place where science should apply pressure, even more so on than on the issue of evolution and other points of conflict.

It seems to me quite simple, the argument here is not complex. This not rocket science, but paradoxically it's both easier than rocket science and harder. It's easier because there's really nothing complicated that needs to be understood to run the argument that we don't get our morality out of religion, but it's harder than rocket science apparently, because you can often find rocket scientists that don't see that we don't get our morality out of religion. It's a problem of discourse that certain ideas remain in good standing and remain immune to criticism.

Previously I spoke about the problems that beset any claim that any religious doctrine is true. These being that if religion really were a genuine branch of intellectual inquiry, it would function by the same rules. We would have people's certainties about the religious doctrines scaling with the evidence and the arguments that can be marshaled in support of those ideas, and we fundamentally find that that's not what's going on in religion.

So briefly, my argument on that subject is that where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith and where we don't have reasons, or where we have bad ones, we really have really lost our connection to the world and to one another. Here I'm not talking about faith in the sense that Paul Davies was talking about faith -- in the sense that sun is going to rise to tomorrow, or faith that the laws of nature in some sense rationally apprehendable -- I'm talking about the faith that allows people to accept gratuitous and very specific claims about the way the world is -- that the universe is 6,000 years old, that a book is the perfect word of the creator, etc.

There's another way that religious people rise to the defense of God, and that has nothing to do with claiming that their religious doctrines are true, [but] the claim that their religious doctrines are useful and the way they're imagined to be most useful is in providing a foundation for morality.

The claim really is that religion makes people moral, and the fear among the religious people of the country, not just people like Ted Haggart, but far more moderate people is that without faith, we will lose something essential to us in the moral sphere, we will lose any purchase upon durable reasons to treat one another well, to find meaning in our lives, and we will just plunge into some kind of state of nature, where selfishness and the purest creaturely antagonisms will be the norm.

There's a political version of this morality that our society has been founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and the implication being that without these principles there would be no way to write just laws. This is ubiquitous as you all know. The first thing to point out is that it should be rather obvious to everyone that the we can find reasons to treat other human beings well, to help them in times of suffering that don't require that we believe anything preposterous about the nature of the universe. We don't have to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin to help people.

I think that perhaps Richard [Dawkins] pointed this out, that it is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, or will reward you doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. So one problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it actually gives people bad reasons to help other human beings, when good reasons are available, and I think this must be pointed out.

The idea that we get our morality out of religion begins to look immediately suspect when we actually read the books. This is has also been pointed out, [Harold] Kroto has pointed this out I believe, as did Richard, the truth is that not even fundamentalists like Haggart can take the God of the Bible at his word, given how sadistic he is in certain books of the Bible, like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus and second Samuel. The vision of life that is preached in those books is so needlessly horrible, it is so hostile to creating a sustainable society where basic human happiness is even possible, that if you're going to draw your to-do list out of Leviticus, you're going to make Mullah Omar of the Taliban look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is not a vision of life that even our fundamentalists subscribe to.

So even our fundamentalists have effectively edited the Bible by their neglect of many of its passages. How do we do this? We edit the Bible, we cherry-pick it, based on our own ethical intuitions and in larger conversations about ethics and human happiness that has developed in the last 2,000 years. I believe [Patricia] Churchland also pointed this out.

So that when we go to the Bible and we see a precept like the Golden Rule as a brilliant distillation of some of our ethical impulses, we do that on the basis of our own intuitions and this larger conversation, and we reject the barbarism. Our own ethical wisdom is the guarantor of the wisdom we find in the Bible. This is also something that needs to be pointed out to religious people.

As Richard pointed out, there is no question that our morality precedes our humanity. We have experiments where mice are shown to be more disturbed at the sight of suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar mice. We know that monkeys will withstand starvation to keep their cage-mates from receiving painful shock. We know that chimpanzees demonstrate fairness in the allocation of food rewards. These are the kinds of findings that you would expect if our morality were somehow an emergent property of biology.

Let me tell you briefly what I think is most wrong with this linkage between religion and morality, and this I think gets to some of Joan Roughgarden's concerns about how we can have a generalizable morality based on reason that doesn't plunge us into any kind of moral relativism.

It seems to me that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for human and animal suffering, for the suffering of conscious beings. If we could build computers that we thought were conscious, we would have moral obligations to them as well. Insofar as a system can be made happy or made to suffer we have moral obligations, and this is why we have no moral obligations towards rocks, because we don't think there's anything we can do to make rocks suffer. This makes sense of why we have gradations of our moral concerns. It is right to be more concerned about the experience of a chimpanzee for instance, than the experience of a cricket. It is right because the complexity of the chimpanzee nervous system provides more of an opportunity for happiness or suffering.

So I think that we have some very serviceable moral intuitions about who to worry about the most in the animal world, and this makes sense of why we tend to privilege human beings over most animals. The problem with a religious foundation for morality is that religious conceptions of right and wrong systematically separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Religious people tend not to focus on suffering and happiness, this is why we have a nation that can debate gay marriage as if it were the great moral issue of the time, while genocide and massive forms of suffering are occurring on a daily basis.

I'll give you a case-in-point that I brought up briefly yesterday. The fact of stem cell research (as many people in this room are probably aware) ... is one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies, and it is not being funded at the federal level for reasons that are religious, because we have this idea based on rather vague notions of theology, that in every fertilized ovum there is a soul, and that you can't privilege the interests of one soul over another, even if one soul is in a petri dish and the other is in a man with Parkinson's disease.

A lot has been said in this conference about science not being able to answer questions of morality, well I think this is question of morality that science has answered. If you look at the details, if you look at the human embryo that is destroyed in stem cell research -- what is a three day old human embryo? It is a collection of 150 cells ... that may sound like a lot of cells and to laypeople it does, but there are 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. It seems to me if our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three day old human embryos. This may sound like a very provocative claim, [but] I would argue that it shouldn't, if you look at the details.

Many people of course will argue that the difference between a fly and a three day old human embryo, is that a three day old human embryo is a potential human being. This runs into problems. Every cell in your body given the right manipulations -- every cell with a nucleus -- is now a potential human being. Literally every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a holocaust of potential human beings, so the argument for a cell's potential doesn't get you anywhere.

But let's take this a little bit further. Let's say we grant it that every three day old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. There are other problems that await this description. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into what we call identical twins ... now is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into what we call a chimera and many people in this room could have developed in this way ... I suspect that there are theologians that are trying to figure out what has happened to the extra human soul in such a case.

It's time we realized that this arithmetic of souls doesn't make any sense. It's intellectually indefensible, but it is morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings ... and because of the respect we accord religious faith -- not even just people of faith, but advocates of stem cell research afford this faith respect [as well] -- we can't have this dialog in the way that we should.

I submit to you that if you think that the interests of a blastocyst -- a three day of human embryo -- may just trump the interests of a little girl with a spinal cord injury or a person with full-body burns, then your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics. This is a kind a kind of blindness that is very well subscribed in our society and it is a blindness that goes by another name, it goes by the name of "religious faith" and we have been cowed into respecting it.

In conclusion, I just want to point out another issue. I want to return to this question of truth, the truth of religious doctrine, because it's interesting to notice that even if we got our morality out of religion, even if religion was supremely useful, this would not be an argument for the existence of God. Just imagine if atheists really were reliably immoral and religious people were exquisitely moral. Would this argue for the specific truth of Christian doctrine, or the doctrines of Islam?

Faith could function like a placebo, the idea that a God could be perfectly vacuous, and yet incredibly useful (and I think there is much evidence to suggest it is not, but even if it were), this is not an argument for the truth of religious doctrine. This is surprisingly hard for people to see, and it is amazingly easy to see when you change the subject from God to some ordinary proposition:

Just imagine if I were to claim that I am one of the fastest people that has ever lived, and that I could've won many Olympic gold medals in track and field had I only tried. Let's say I maintain this even contrary to the evidence, even in the company of Olympic sprinters who can run circles around me. You ask me why I believe this. What if I said, "Being the fastest man alive has brought me immense satisfaction."? Or what if I said, "Winning a gold medal in the Olympics is one of the highest human honors and just imagining those medals around my neck just makes me feel fantastic and gives my life meaning."? It's pretty clear what is wrong with these answers ... the fact that it would be nice if something were true, or the fact that believing it to be true gives you some positive effect in your life, is not a reason to believe that it is true, and we readily understand this is every area of our lives. This is why we have phrases like "wishful thinking" and "self-deception" and "delusion".

My argument to you across the board is that a person that believes an invisible and all-knowing deity is taking an interest in their lives occasionally doling out good fortune, should not be free to say this because it gives his life meaning, because it makes him a better person, because he values the experience of going to church on Sunday -- these are non sequiturs.

In conclusion, I think we have to acknowledge that these two approaches to morality really are in competition. Either we can focus on questions of human happiness in a very fine-grained way, bringing all of the last 2,000 years of human insight and human discourse to bear and have a 21st century conversation about morality, or we can have a conversation born of the 1st century, as preserved in the New Testament, or the 7th century, as preserved in the Qu'ran. It is amazing how many intelligent people find this to be a difficult choice.

The challenge for us is to really expose time and again that the opportunity is for human conversation and it can either be modern with everything useful brought on the table, or it can be fixated on the past in deference to certain books.

Thank you very much."