Sam Harris at UC San Diego

Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values made a stop at UC San Diego last night, and it was great. If you have a chance to see Sam Harris on his speaking tour promoting his new book, DON'T MISS IT.

Harris makes an excellent case that science does have a right, and even an obligation, to participate in the debate about the origins of morality.

Religious leaders have argued for thousands of years that morality can only originate from God. Harris starts his lecture by thoroughly debunking this notion. He begins by showing that there is no plausible justification for the claim. Then he completely devastates the argument on practical grounds: religion's abysmal failure to show moral leadership in any important period of history makes their claim to moral leadership a joke.

Harris then goes on to build a very clever series of logical steps that ends with the