This article was initially published in the August 2017 issue of the journal Theology and Science under the above title and subtitle. It was commissioned by Ted Peters, Research Professor Emeritus in Systematic Theology and Ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Center for Theory and the Natural Sciences. Even though Ted and I disagree on a great many things, we share a love and respect for science, for the question of extraterrestrial intelligence and for what such a discovery would mean to humanity in general and religion in particular. When Ted invited me to make the best case I could for a scientific defense of objective values and morals, I could not resist the challenge. My 2015 book The Moral Arc is a much longer and thorough defense of this worldview – especially my claim that science and reason can determine moral values – but herein I offer some new strategies for addressing the Is-Ought barrier problem to avoid the naturalistic fallacy that one cannot derive an ought from an is. And I relished the challenge of doing so in a more succinct statement.

Following the publication of the article in the journal Theology and Science, the journal received a well-reasoned critique by the physicist George Ellis, which they published in a subsequent issue of Theology and Science, along with my response, which appears here. These two essays constitute my manifesto of Enlightenment Humanism through the worldview of Scientific Naturalism and, in fact, are the cornerstone of an even larger worldview I am working on now, hinted at in the subtitle of this book, Scientific Humanism.

This essay was penned in response to the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that took the lives of fifty people, and the subsequent response to not only ban assault rifles but to ban speech as well – hate speech that is. Banning hate speech will not work, especially in the age of Internet access to virtually all of human knowledge, and in which almost anyone anywhere can set up a web page and publish their ideas, no matter how hateful. You can combat evil, as when police forces catch criminals and military services counter terrorists and challenge insurgents and threats. But the idea – and it is an idea that can only be heard in an environment of free speech – that one can simply ban bad, dangerous, or hateful ideas has a historical track record of failure to do so, while snagging it its net good, useful, and productive ideas and their human generators. As I conclude, following the old saying that the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy, the solution to hate speech is more speech.