Ep. 4 - Facts and Logic: When They Work and When They Don't (PART 2)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. This is part two of my episode on Facts and Logic when they work and when they don't. And part one, we took a look at the power of logic. We took a look at its limitations. And this part two, we're going to use specific examples. We're going to look at the debate around whether or not to wear a mask and the debate around science and religion. We'll end the whole thing off with a resolution on how to work towards mutual respect.

I think it's going to be a really interesting part two of the episode. Let's get started. So this is part two of my episode on Facts and logic. If you haven't listened to part one yet, please check that out. Now, let's do a really quick recap of where we're at. We began part one by looking at the power of logic, how to frame conversations around the structure of an argument that ends up being the anchor that allows us to make comparisons between what people are saying.

We took a look at deductive and inductive reasoning and of course, we flush that out into valid and valid sound and sound strong. We coach cogent and the take home message, there was look step back from that language and really just understand the structure of an argument when people say something, they are effectively making these grand conclusions and they should back them up and they back them up by using premises that connect to the conclusion.

And then of course, we ended off, uh, looking at fallacies which are errors and reasoning. And then we took a look at the limitations of log. When we understand that the the conversations that people are getting into the debates are really based around the premises. They use to back up their conclusion. Then we can take a look at the epistemic uncertainty that exists around those premises.

We cannot take facts at face value, the facts that we're using to back up premises, the evidence we're using to try to support our conclusion. We can't just take those at face value. And that's a problem that's exacerbated under complexity, the more complex the situation, the less you can take facts at face value, the less you can support your argument. We took a look at the problem of induction.

We saw the Turkey example, Black Swan theory, we connected it to science through poppism and ended off by realizing that while logic is a powerful approach to framing our conversations and should be used, we also have to appreciate the fundamental limitations that come from the certainty around the premises used in logic. So let's take what we know and bring them into some real conversations, some real debates that are happening.

I said in part one that I like to use real examples, even though they might be a bit triggering to some people. And that's because even though we can teach the concepts of logic and, you know, using some simple examples, I want people to relate to these. I want it to be things that are going on right now. So the two big ones we're gonna look at in this episode in part two of this episode is whether or not to wear a mask and science and religion.

So the mask debate is of course around the COVID-19 pandemic, some people want to wear a mask, some people don't or think they shouldn't think they shouldn't, all kinds of opinions around this. And then of course, science and religion is a debate that's been around forever and uh and people have uh heavy opinions about this as well. So what I want to do is we'll take a look at where logic seems to help these debates. We'll take a look at where logic falls short.

And then of course, we'll wrap the whole episode up by looking at what I think is a resolution. How do we kind of strike a balance with these debates? How can we respect what logic is and how it works? And and take it into the structure of our conversations. How can we also appreciate the limits of logic and use that to frame everything with an appreciation of how non-trivial these issues are and work towards some kind of mutual respect. OK. So let's jump into the first debate.

This is about to wear a mask or not. This is obviously related to COVID-19. The pandemic. On one side, people are saying yes, it makes sense to wear a mask. This is what we should do. We should have rules and guidelines in place force this and on the other side, people are saying, no, you, you you shouldn't be able to force this. There's very little evidence that that masks work. I'm not going to wear a mask.

So, so let's take a look at the like really quickly just as an overview, does it make sense to wear a mask? Well, if you think about the virus and it's spreading, it seems to do this predominantly, you know, through the air, then it seems to make sense that you would put a piece of cloth over your mouth to at least slightly suppress the transmission or the ejection of water droplets, right? If you do that, then maybe it's going to make some kind of difference.

We talk about flattening the curve, we talk about trying to reduce the transmission virus, putting a piece of cloth over your face seems to kind of make sense just logically, but the other side of that has some logic to it too, doesn't it? I mean, how effective is the simple little cloth going to be? I mean, people don't have access to the proper N95 masks, they're either making their own or ordering some kind of cheap copy, you know, off, uh, off the internet, which is just a piece of cloth.

Is that really going to make a difference? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence to support that. It's going to really suppress, uh, you know, the transmission of the virus itself. And then what about issues like breathing in my own CO2 or having my immune system be exposed to vi as it's supposed to be, that's what makes a strong immune system. So does it really make sense to wear a mask at all?

And then you start thinking about, uh, you know, beyond just the, the raw science and getting into the economy, the fact that millions of people have been losing their job. And, and so, you know, when we, when we start putting legislation in place to enforce people to wear masks, are we not just delaying the economy from taking off?

I mean, what if we just did not wear masks, even if it made the problem worse because maybe that would work towards some kind of herd immunity and we could get things back to normal quicker and it really gets politicized when you start talking about government control and the removal of, of freedom and liberties, you know, are, are people who are wearing masks just, just doing everything at the whim of the government, even though there's scant evidence that the masks work on the other side are people who are not wearing masks, are they kind of being the Covidiot, as they say, because they're not looking at what evidence does exist and not thinking about the dynamics of the disease and how bad this could actually get and they're just making the problem worse and on and on.

And so it's an absolutely hot topic and it's become very polarized. But what I want to do is is frame it this way.

I don't want to get into the, you know, the liberties and the government control or, you know, whether or not we should be starting the economy because I think even if you're taking that kind of approach or the, or the debate is existing at that level, it still comes down to the fact that if you're structuring your argument and you're trying to support what you're saying, you're probably going back to the science, what you're probably going to say, either there is evidence that masks are working or there is evidence that they are not working or there's just a lack of evidence that they do or don't work.

And you're going to use that to support these kind of bigger claims that you're making uh regarding the economy or, or regarding liberty. So I want to focus on the science aspect of it. Let's take a, let's frame the debate as does it make sense to wear a mask because of whatever evidence you can bring to support that conclusion? Or does it make sense to not wear a mask or not force people to wear a mask based again on whatever evidence does or does not exist to support that conclusion?

Ok. So let's start with the yes, mask side. Someone approaches you and says, I think we should definitely wear mask, uh masks. I think this is something that the government should enforce. And so remember from part one of the episode, I said, you know, any time someone makes what sounds like, you know, a big conclusion, some big statement, get them to back it up and say, OK, well, back up what you're saying, why do you think we should wear masks?

And so taking the structure of an argument, uh we're expecting them, give us one of our premises, right? The premises lead to the conclusion to the big statement. So what are your premises? Ok. So remember in part one where I essentially equated premises to facts to evidence, right? If you're going to be backing up what you're saying, then the the premises that you're using are basically uh calling upon facts and those facts are really empirical evidence, right?

You're trying to go to the studies that exist whatever science or you think science is saying, use that to, to to back up the argument. So if we take a look at the yes mask side, the people who believe that they should be wearing masks. Here's the kind of arguments that you're gonna be seeing more specifically here are the type of premises or facts or evidence that people are calling upon to support that conclusion.

So there was an article in the Lancet which is a popular journal uh that came out in June 2020 that did a meta analysis, meta analysis is where you take a bunch of existing studies and you combine them to try to basically improve the confidence of the results. So they looked at 100 and 72 different studies uh with respect to transmission of COVID-19 as well as SARS and MERS, these other uh viruses and diseases that exist. And they saw a significant reduction in the risk with the use of masks.

And again, the vial transmission reduced significantly when masks were worn. Another one in nature medicine, another journal in April 2020 found that loose fitting masks actually blocked almost all of droplets that contained the virus. OK. So, so even even these masks are not in 95 these are just the loose fitting ones.

Remember I said earlier, how you know, an argument against might be that, you know, well, these are not 95 masks, you know, masks people are wearing even these you know, unprofessional self-made mask can block almost all the droplets that contain the virus. Another journal called cell. He had the journal of cell in May 2020. They were taking a look at how the virus sits in the nasal cavity and, and eventually works its way down to the lungs.

And they saw that the, the, the mask actually prevent the virus from, from entering the nasal cavity or if it is in the nasal cavity, it prevents it from spreading it to other people and therefore causing the problem uh as it eventually goes down the lungs, another preprint journal. So it's not a peer of your journal.

When you, when you want to come up with studies earlier on, you do what's called a preprint, a preprint as recent as July 12th 20 20 basically brought together all kinds of different studies uh that, that supports the uh the notion that there is evidence that masks work. Ok. So what's happening here is that people that take the yes, we should wear masks approach have all kinds of studies that they can call upon. They have the evidence to support the argument that you should wear a mask.

Ok. We took a look at the Lancet article, Nature Medicine Cell. Uh the the recent preprint that came out which, which itself refers to all kinds of studies that have been done that show there is some efficacy to mask wearing and the ability to produce the desired result. In other words, if you do wear masks, then it is showing a reduction in viral spread or how much of the water droplets leave the mouth or how much viral load is in those water droplets.

Or however you want to wear that there is some effect that is significant when wearing masks. So calling upon that evidence is on on the side of people who say we should wear masks, they are able to do that, right? They can look to journals, they can look to studies and there is evidence to support the argument. And so you can just go do a quick search yourself online and you'll you'll just see all kinds of studies that exist across all kinds of journals and they're coming out every day.

And it's the whole idea is that it's adding to the argument that we should wear masks, right? Not no study alone is going to definitively say, obviously, as you can see masks have a huge, huge impact and therefore we should, they're kind of incrementally adding evidence to support that argument, right, to support the grand conclusion that we should wear masks or or maybe even extending that to, you know, the government should enforce the wearing of masks.

And it's not just looking to the scientific journals, these publications to back up the argument. You could also just look at the virus dynamics itself. We know the viruses have this exponential nature to them, right. It might start off seemingly linear where it just kind of takes off, but then all of a sudden it explodes out and it, and it, it increases exponentially.

And so you could actually look at the data, the case numbers across the states and across the world at large, see how these numbers have exploded. And, and, and, and that's true for a lot of cases, particularly where, you know, let's say suppression measures haven't been taken. And again, you can start to compare graphs about, well, this country did this and this country didn't do this and, and you know, maybe it seemed like it was working at first.

But, but the ones who, who didn't take any kind of, you know, hard core, you know, wear masks, social distancing and other preventative measures. Had these numbers explode. So you can kind of pick the data. And you know, you can argue how much of, of cherry picking is happening, but you can choose the data, you can look at the curves, you can have an appreciation for the exponential nature of, of, of the dynamics of how viruses spread. And you can use that to support your argument as well.

So people on the yes wear mask side can call upon uh publications, all kinds of scientific evidence to support the argument that you should wear masks. They can look at the dynamics of how viruses spread spread. They can see how they're exponential. They have these, these, you know, what do you call these multiplicative growth dynamics to them that cause them to explode even if they seem slow at first. And so that's, that's making the situation that much more dangerous.

You can start to look at the case counts across different countries. You can compare them, you can see who took what step and who didn't. And you can start to paint that narrative around the idea that you should wear masks. So now let's do the side that is against wearing masks. What kind of arguments can they make or more specifically? What kind of premises can they use?

What evidence do they have that people don't need to wear masks so that the government doesn't need to enforce the wearing of masks. So we can take a look at some of the general arguments that are made by people who don't believe masks should be worn. I mean, there's things like, uh you know, the shortage of masks.

I mean, if, if everyone's starting to, to get a hold of these masks, then maybe there's a shortage of masks for the people who really need them, the people that are, are caretakers for the sick and of course, the sick themselves, uh maybe if masks are giving people a false sense of security, maybe people are letting up on their social distancing because they think it's giving more protection than it actually does.

And so they start interacting with people more and that could actually make the problem worse. Uh You know, some people suggest that having a mask could, could cause people to touch their face more exacerbating the problem. Uh And then there's arguments around, you know, herd immunity and, and the oxygen levels and whether or not they're dropping when you wear masks and things like this. And, and so we, we've probably heard all those kinds of arguments before, but again, to stick to the science.

If you really want to back up what you're saying, then you're gonna go reach for that empirical evidence. So some of the arguments might be against the studies that the yes mask side we're calling upon to support their argument and they can take a look at the studies themselves and note that, you know, a lot of these studies they're calling upon are observational in nature, observational studies versus something like an RCT, which is a randomized controlled trial.

So just really quickly, the two main approaches to studying, you know, let's say the effect of a treatment uh would be observational versus randomized controlled trial. So in the randomized controlled trial, what you're trying to do is work against these, these biases that, that degrade the results of a study, right?

So if, if a scientist is going to go do a study, they're gonna, you know, select people and put them into groups and, and then study the differences between those groups and there could be all kinds of biases that creep in. You know, you, you, you know, why did you end up choosing those people? Why did these people go into this group and, and they can do it in ways that you just, you're, you're not aware of, right.

So to try to prevent those biases from creeping into this study, they use randomization. So randomization, you know, who gets people will get picked at random, they'll get assigned to groups at random. And that randomization has a way of of hopefully eliminating as much bias as possible. So that all you're left with is the effect of itself.

So if it, it could be the, you know, the the treatment using a drug, you know, what is the effect of using this drug or what is the effect of people having this particular lifestyle or whatever it is. So that's a randomized control trial. The observational study is basically just taking a look at a chunk of data. So, so a bunch of people might share some characteristics and you might compare that to another group that don't have those same characteristics.

And then you're just looking at the comparison, right? So you're not using any kind of randomization to try to squash out or, or remove the biases, you're just taking a look at the data, noting the differences and then drawing conclusions from it. So the gold standard is the RCT when you're trying to understand these things that, that you want to use randomization to eliminate that bias as much as possible so that you can trust the results.

But of course, RCTS take a long time and uh you know, they're expensive and, and they take a while before you can get the results. So they're not something that's immediately available. So RCTS don't make it possible to do all studies because you might need the results now or it just might be a type of study that is only, you know, amenable to observational approaches.

So the people on the do not wear masks side might just basically be criticizing the studies that are being called upon as so called evidence. They, they're not the gold standard, they're not RCT. And it's, you know, it's understandable in one sense why they're not RCT because not enough time has passed to maybe do that study or maybe it's just unethical to do that study.

There's no way to kind of set that up, set that experiment up in a way that exposes certain people to the virus or not or whatever it is. But the point is is that the RCTS do not exist. So there, it's only observational data that that's a much weaker form of, of, you know, so-called scientific evidence and support that that mask uh you know, do make a difference.

And then of course, they can look at their own studies, those in favor of not wearing mask and go to their own journals and use that as evidence. They can look at, you know, a February 2010 study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that looked at us college students in the 0607 influenza season that saw no statistically significant reduction in illness with the wearing of masks.

Uh There's another one in the emerging Infectious Diseases journal, a 2009 study that also showed no effect and on and on. And so again, you can go online, you can do this yourself, you can go dig up all kinds of studies that show that masks don't really seem to make much difference.

And of course, you know, then then this gets into other debates around, well, you know, these studies are maybe looking at influenza and then now you're assuming that that COVID-19 uh is, is the same or very similar to, you know, the regular seasonal flu. And then maybe that's just not the case. And, and so some people will say, oh yes, it is. And then other people will say no, it's not.

If you look at the reproduction number, you know, it's, it's presumably a lot higher for COVID-19 compared to seasonal flu. And then it's like, well, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty around that, you know, what is that number and, and how, how much different does it need to be and it's only a little bit higher.

But then if you understood the exponential growth process, you'd realize that a little bit higher actually makes a massive difference because a little bit of input leads to a big output. And now we do have some RCT studies that seem to be coming out. And so, you know, either side might point to some gold standard RCT studies and some of them might be in favor of mask and not in favor of mask. And so here we are two sides of the debate.

Both are taking a scientific approach in that they're trying to gather evidence to support the argument. They're trying to gather evidence to support their argument. And both those in favor of the masks and those in favor of not wearing masks, right? Those in favor of getting the government to, to maybe mandate that and those that don't want to see that happen are both calling upon journals, calling upon evidence to support uh you know, an argument that favors their conclusion.

And so here we are here, we are where we've structured it as an argument. We, we've demanded the, the showcasing of premises to support that argument and both sides can do this. They can, they can structure the argument, they can show their premises, they can go about this logically and they can start stacking up the evidence in support of their conclusion.

And we're basically at a game now of who can stack up more truth, who can stack up more evidence to say what we're supposed to do what the right opinion is who might win this debate. And this is showing us the power of logic. Right? It's showing us that it's giving us a way to compare what people are saying. You've got your premises.

I got my premises, we can compare them, we can reason about it, we can talk about the science, we can reach out to journals, we can look at the studies, you know, we can, can compare observational R ac T and on and on and on. Without logic, we wouldn't have that kind of framework, we wouldn't have that ability to structure the conversation around premises, leading to conclusion to compare the premises and to get into that conversation. So there's a real power to structuring this in logical form.

But there's also severe limitations as we know from part one. Ok. Again, if you haven't listened to part one yet, please go back and do that. Now, before you continue, because this is where now we're gonna start picking apart some of the stuff we talked about in terms of the limitations of logic. How does that apply to the COVID-19 debate, the debate around whether you should or should not wear a mask?

Ok. So in part, when we look, we took a look at the epistemic uncertainty around the facts, the premises, right, the evidence that people are using to back up their arguments. So if we look at the yes mask side, they're calling upon studies again, it doesn't matter what level of, of conversation this is sitting at, you might be talking about the liberties about government control, about, you know, getting the aca economy up and running.

But if you're going to back up these big claims you're making, you're probably going back to the science and you're probably going back to these studies, right? These, these, uh, the, the, these evidences that you can collect to back up the claim. And so on the yes mask side, it's these studies that show masks do have an effect, right? They do work. So these are these, these these studies, these evidence or these facts that they're they're using as their premises of the argument.

But of course, there's all kinds of epistemic uncertainty around it. There's the measurement itself. Remember we talked about using the the temperature example versus the voting example, the actual, you know, thing that you're measuring is gonna have some uncertainty. So, so you know, you're saying there's this effect, but you know, we we talked about the observational versus the RCT. You know, how good is the study, how representative is it of the thing that you're measuring?

There's going to be uncertainty around that because again, this is a complex situation. The thing that you're trying to measure is is not going to be direct. And then there's the uncertainty around the narrative that you're piecing together. So as you grab a piece of evidence from a study you're then going, going to place that into your narrative to say, well, therefore, right structure that story together that this is showing that, you know, well, masks are indeed working on the mass side.

And, and therefore we should, you know, implement masks and yada yada and that whole story you put together and the same thing with the no mass side, you might have a study that says, well, you know, it doesn't seem like they have much effect.

And therefore I'm gonna piece together a narrative again, these narratives that we put together have a, a proximity to reality and and the distance between what you are saying in your narrative and the underlying reality is going to increase under complexity, right? The more complex situation there, there's a larger distance or, or really the right way to say that is we have to assume the distance is larger, right?

Your narrative might be close to reality, but we have no ability to ascertain that under complexity. There's this fundamental wall that exists between, you know, what we observe and knowing what drives what we observe or what the, what the true story is of nature, right? When, when it, it's, it's a situation that's exacerbated under complexity. There's this fundamental opacity we can't see past.

And though, and so even if your narrative is true, you'd have no way of really knowing how true it is. So for all intents and purposes, there's this large distance this large proximity between what you are saying in your story and what the underlying reality is. So on either side of this debate, we cannot take these studies at face value. It doesn't matter, you can collect all the studies you want, but we can't take them at face value.

So then you might say, OK, well, you know, because we're taking a logical approach, then why don't we just stack up, you know, the, the truth is on each side and see who has more. OK. So the people that are in favor of wearing masks, if they can call upon more studies, then maybe that, that means they're winning the debate. If the people on the no mask side are, are collecting more studies and maybe that means they're winning the debate.

So we've got this game of logic where we're gonna try to stack up as many studies as we can. But here's the problem that's never gonna end. If the, if, if the situation is complex enough, if there are enough unknowns in the situation, then that's something that's never going to end. Let's take nutrition as an example. So you kind of have an oxymoron called nutritional science, right?

And, and not to say that there's no science in there, but it's very hard to get really scientific or uh about nutrition. Now, why is that? So let's take something like red wine, if I asked you if red wine is healthy. Well, you might say, yes, you might say no, we could get into a debate, we could collect evidence on both sides. We can go look at studies. There's all kinds of studies about how red wine is good for you. There's all kinds of studies that say it's not good for you.

You know, maybe it's ok if it's a, if it's just a glass a day but maybe it's two or three glasses, you know, where does that line sit? And so anything in nutrition is gonna keep flipping back and forth, right? I mean, anything that you are trying to decide upon, you know, is it good or is it not, it's, it's gonna be like, uh, you know, something tethered loosely to some anchor and it keeps flipping and flopping around in the wind and there's no way to really anchor it effectively.

It keeps flipping and flopping. That flipping and flopping is a sign of the complexity of the situation because what you do under complexity, uh, in complex situations is that you can, you can find evidence on either side and you usually, you can find just as much evidence on either side. So in the case of nutrition, whether it's red wine or, you know, maybe dark chocolate or whatever it is.

And you're trying to say, is this healthy, you're gonna be able to, you either side is going to be able to collect all kinds of studies. And that process is never gonna end or it's never gonna end within a reasonable timeframe. Maybe it's into the future, right. Maybe in the future you'll figure it out. But there's no way to know when that's going to be. So for all intents and purposes, it's, it's, it's kind of this undecidable problem at this point, you can collect evidence on both sides.

So we're running into the limit of logic in this situation. It's the exact same thing, Uh In the case of the yes mass no mask, a sign post to a truly complex situation is the flipping and flopping back and forth or the ability to take either side of the debate very easily. And that's what we're seeing. I can take the Yes mass side very easily because I can stack up all kinds of studies in favor of that opinion of that point of view uh of that particular narrative.

But I can stack up all kinds of studies on the other side as well. And I can, I can kind of cherry pick the studies that I want. I can put it into my narrative.

And if I, you know, uh kind of ignore the fact that there's this proximity to reality, that there's this large distance uh as far as I know between my narrative and reality, then I can just buy into that narrative and I can promote it and I can back it up with all these kinds of studies, but both sides can do it, it flips and flops back and forth, just like a debate around red wine, just like a debate around dark chocolate.

If it is a complex situation with many interacting pieces, there's a fundamental opacity that you cannot see past your, we're going to know exactly what this ultimate truth is and it's exacerbated. The problem is worse and worse, the more complex the situation. So the fact that we're seeing this flipping back and forth of the mask debate because there's this high level of uncertainty.

And again, it doesn't have to be a fundamental, you know, high level of uncertainty, maybe two, 345 years from now, the uncertainty, you know, it starts to resolve itself, but there's no way to know how long that's going to be. That's, that's the point, right? There's no way to know. So for all intents and purposes, it is a truly complex challenge. We can stack up truths uh on either side, none of those so-called truths can be taken at face value.

We can, you know, construct all kinds of narratives. And so in that sense, we don't get to a resolution. There is this fundamental limit to logic. There is a power to it because we can structure the argument. It's good to go after studies and to, and to stack them up and to have that conversation. Otherwise you're doing nothing, right? If you don't have any logic at all, then then anything goes and then there's no reason to even listen to anybody on any topic or to have any conversation.

There's no way to kind of have the kind of conversations we're having right now. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to escape logic altogether. I mean, you can try, you know, going through life but there's no way you're going through life, not having opinions or not making arguments. So you can't really, as a human escape logic altogether. We do this, we construct narratives. We take this inductive approach.

You know, we, we even though we might not be doing it very formally, we, we try to, you know, structure arguments by calling upon so-called facts and evidence to back up what we're saying. So you're not gonna escape it anyways and, and the more you know about logic, the more power it has to try to help frame a conversation and to stack up different things side by side and make those comparisons is important. But you have to appreciate this fundamental limitation.

No amount of logic is going to create a winner under complexity. I'll say that again, no amount of logic is going to create a winner under complexity in complex situations. OK? It's not gonna happen, it's not going to happen, right? Or, or, or, and again, if, if it does ever happen and you, there's no way to know when it's going to happen.

So for all intents and purposes, when we talk about something that here and now, and it has a high degree of uncertainty and you're seeing the signpost of complexity, which is this flipping back and forth between either side, then logic alone does not bring about a resolution. And so again, this is the problem of induction under complexity, right? Induction, this idea that you're gonna go kind of from some specific examples and generalize out to a world that you haven't been to yet, right?

Whether that's making a forecast, you know, predicting the future, just saying something about a larger population that you don't really have a representative sample of we're doing induction all the time. But the problem of induction is exacerbated under complex situations in simple situations, you can kind of do it because you can kind of, you know, you see how things are pieced together, you have a good sense of, of what the world is.

Whatever model you have is is presumably kind of complete because the situation is so simple. It'd be hard for it not to be complete, many, many real life situations just don't fall into that category, they fall into the complex situation, whatever model you have is just a thin slice of reality. And, and it's not justified to suggest that your model is some complete picture.

And so because it's only glancing reality at an angle, the idea of using induction, the idea of collecting evidence to support whatever narrative it is starts to break down, it starts to degrade. And it is so much so that the inductive process itself uh is is quite unreliable. Ok? It's quite unreliable. We can't just keep collecting evidence. And again, this is, this goes back to the flipping and the flopping that we see.

You can both, both sides of the yes mask and no mask, both sides of the mask debate. Yes, mask and no mask are taking the inductive approach, right? Because they're calling upon studies to construct a narrative and that that narrative is induction, right? You're calling upon premises as evidence to support your grand conclusion that you should wear a mask or that you shouldn't wear a mask.

So they're both doing induction and that is, you know, kind of the story of science as, as we're told, right? Science works by induction. Well, then why isn't it working? Why is science not able to resolve this here and now? And for the COVID-19 example, we really kind of do need here and now don't we? Because every day or week or month that goes by without some kind of resolution that leads to a policy could be thousands of lives, right? Th those could be costing real lives.

So the impact has to be taken into account as well. The inability to resolve a situation through logic alone could quite literally be costing lives. So not only is it complex but the impact of what's happening is severe. So that has to be taken into account. So in COVID-19, we can't wait around assuming that we know when we're going to collect enough evidence to go make a good policy decision, right?

Because again, that fundamental opacity that exists where you can't see into the system of, of, of a truly complex situation is forbidding it. It's precluding the possibility that you're going to be able to know when you have enough evidence. This is the problem of induction, collecting more evidence is not there to support a narrative, it's not there to support some grand conclusion in complex situations.

OK. So we saw when we looked at poppism and, and how science is more properly framed the collecting and and again, this is particularly true as the complexity increases evidence is there to to go against incumbent models, right? It's it's not there to, to support what you think is correct. It's it's there to test the survivability of a current theory or model or idea about how the world works.

And so if we're going about utilizing populism as we should, which is a better framing of science, it's telling us how to use uh evidence appropriately, then we see that the people on the yes mask side are better off looking at the evidence that the opposite people are using, right?

Those studies that show that maybe there's not that much efficacy to the wearing of masks because that's degrading the power of the model that would suggest you should wear masks right, the model that, that supports this narrative that underlies the nar of that mask wearing helps right there, there's rebutting evidence that goes against this and just the same the people on the the the the no mask side that says don't wear masks, they should be looking at the studies that the yes mask people are calling upon because that's rebutting evidence to any model that underlies the idea that you shouldn't be wearing masks, right?

If you have scientific studies showing that masks do seem to work, that's going against whatever model underlies your narrative that you shouldn't wear masks. And if you have a, a bunch of studies that suggest masks maybe aren't that effective, then that is rebutting evidence that goes against whatever model underlies your narrative that you should wear masks. And so by following Popper, we are degrading both models, we're degrading both narratives.

We've got this flipping and flopping on each side of the debate, they both have their models, they're both collecting evidence inductively. But because it's a complex situation, they're doing it incorrectly, they should be actually looking at the studies on the opposite side and using that as evidence in the appropriate way. AOP that shows that their current model doesn't have much survivability. There's something wrong with their approach.

They're never gonna come up with a model that really shows mask wearing works and it's absolutely what we should do and they're never going to come up with a model that really shows masks don't work and that we should definitely not wear them and all the implications that follow there from. So by looking at poer as a proper way to frame signs under complexity, right?

Again, complex situations demand that we, we take that porous approach, that pops approach because it's about the falsifiable of a model. The strength of a model is how testable it is. You want it to be very testable, which means you want to collect evidence for the sake of trying to destroy it. And if you're trying to destroy it and it does get destroyed, which seems to be the case on both sides of the COVID debate, then neither of those models are good, neither of those models are good.

The strength of your model is not how well it is supported by evidence. The strength of your model is how testable it is because that means it's either going to live or die, right? That it's, it's a really important point to make that, that, that, that populism is not about collecting evidence to support your narrative. Your narrative is only there to be destroyed and if it's not destroyed, then that's its strength you, that the purpose of putting forward an opinion is to have it destroyed.

And the idea that it is a good opinion is because it hasn't been so so your role as a scientist, particularly under complex situations is to collect things that can destroy your narrative so that either it does and therefore you need to switch it or it hasn't and that's its strength. So, of course, this kind of begs the question. Well, what are we supposed to do? Because if we, if we can't get a good model on either side of the debate, then we have no model, right?

Basically, what we have is a situation here where if you think of a model as being your slice of reality, right? How much of a grasp of reality do you have? Because then you can go use that slice to, to to, you know, make forecasts, you know, make predictions, sit decisions on top of them. But if that slice is so thin because the uncertainty is so high, then you effectively have no model. You don't have a model on the mas side and you don't have a model on the nomad side, on no mask side.

So what do you have? What do you have? And that when the, when the slice of reality is so thin that you effectively have no model, what narrative does that support? And what kind of decisions can you make? Because it seems like there's no model to underlie. So that's what we're gonna talk about in the final section. When we look at how, what the resolution is here.

OK. We we know that there's a power to logic help structure the conversation it does in some sense, make sense to go collect evidence. But as the complexity increases, we realize we kinda have to reframe what that evidence means. It's not there to support the narrative, it's there to try to basically kill off whatever narrative exists. And if it can't, then that's the strength of the argument, that's the strength of the narrative. So logic makes sense. It's powerful.

We have to use it, but we got to use it in this right way. We gotta follow populism particularly under complex situations. But then we're ultimately left with this limitation. So logic has served the purpose to have the conversation to stack up the evidence, even to do it under populism, even to do e evidence correctly. But it's left you with this situation where by following that approach under complexity, we don't have a model.

We realize that the uncertainty is so high that whatever slice of reality we can take is so thin that we're left with no model. And so how are we supposed to make decisions? How is this supposed to be practical? How are we supposed to have some sense of what's coming? And so that's what we're gonna talk about in the resolution section.

But before we do that, let's start our other debate on science and religion because we're gonna see uh some, some striking similarities between the example in COVID and the example between science and religion. We're gonna see the power of logic. We're gonna see the severe limitations. We're gonna talk about that pop and, and how to use evidence correctly.

And then we're gonna realize that we end up in this, this, this kind of same situation where, well, wait a second, we kind of don't have any model here. What are we supposed to rly on? How are you supposed to make any decisions in life? And the resolution section? We'll bring that full circle. So let's now deal with science and religion. So this comes down to whether or not there is a God, obviously a debate that's as old as time, right?

As soon as humans looked up to the sky and wondered, you know, where do we come from and what's our purpose and how do things work? Why do we feel what we feel and see what we see and on and on. You can, you can either ascribe that to some kind of supernatural power or deity or, or a group of deities and, and which, you know, in some sense, obviously makes sense. I mean, these are things that we don't know the answer to. I don't know how things come about.

So there must be, you know, some, some wonder thing that's kind of like us, but more powerful that can do that. And so we would call that God. And then on, on the science side of things, what we now call science, it would be more kind of a mechanistic look at or objective look at nature. And let's, let's see how things add up. Let's see how, you know, forces come together and materials come together. And let's try to understand that by picking it apart and putting it back together.

And, and so that's kind of a, a godless if you will way of trying to understand nature, so you can ascribe kind of that kind of agency to things that we see via a supernatural power or you can do that through, you know, the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology. And so there are some real world implications to this. I mean, what gets taught in schools, what happens inside government, uh you know what we teach our Children, what statues get shown and things like that.

Now, it's not as charged as something like COVID-19, right? The pandemic is related to lives that could be lost on a daily basis or weekly or yearly, depending on the decisions we make, right? What kind of policies are implemented and how does that affect people's lives?

But there are some real world implications in terms of teaching, in terms of government, in terms, in terms of our, you know, the world view that we want to promote and that might especially be the case if it's a particular religion or some group of people might think that it's holding them back somehow or it's a type of indoctrination or, you know, it's, it's impacting their lives directly.

It depends on the religion and maybe which country you're in and maybe you think science is holding you back, right? Maybe you think there's this, this overly objective view of, of trying to pursue truth and you think that's somehow limiting your ability to live a spiritual life. I mean, whatever it is, I mean, we can, we can't speak for everybody. But the point is there are real implications to this debate but, but, but less so in terms of its impact or immediate impact to COVID-19.

So it's more about the world view, right? It's more about how do you think the world works and, and what is a good way to go about trying to pursue truth? And, and is, is there a limit to doing that just with science? Does it make sense to bring religion in, is one better than the other? Should one replace the other? Are they kind of the same thing but expressed in different ways? Do they have an overlap to them? So there's all kinds of ways to obviously frame this debate?

But, and so just like the COVID-19, we have to strike this debate at a given level. For COVID-19. We did uh at the level of science, right? Uh we didn't, we didn't take into account all the other, you know, economic implication or you know, the the liberties being stolen and things like that. We just said, OK, stick to the science and we will collect evidence for against the use the, the use of masks and so on.

The science of religion, we're going to do this at the level of God does exist or God does not exist. Ok? You either believe God exists or you believe that God does not exist. So we'll strike it at that level and, and not think too much about maybe the other implications or, or different ways of framing the debate.

Now, I want to point out here that I'm saying science and religion uh as opposed to science versus religion, I don't want to go in with this, this general assumption that they're definitely different. I mean, there are obviously different ways of looking at the world but it, it, when you say science versus religion, it kind of bakes in almost an implicit assumption that these are at loggerheads with one another, right?

That, that science is diametrically opposed to religion, that these are fundamentally entirely different ways of, of viewing, uh you know, the world, they, they're just completely incompatible. So that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that is the case or that is not the case, but I'm, I'm avoiding the word versus there. Uh So that I don't kind of bake in that implicit assumption that, that, that going in, we should assume that these are completely different.

We're not going to assume that we're just gonna, we're gonna take a look at the arguments uh for God on the religious side, then we're gonna take a look at the arguments uh against the belief that there is a God on uh on the science side. OK. So again, it's not that science is, is definitely diametrically opposed to religion. It, there's no comment here that they cannot work together or that these are fundamentally incompatible.

Uh I will speak a little bit more to that when we look at uh you know, the, the, the limitations of logic and get into the resolution. But I'm not going in to this debate with that assumption that these are somehow diametrically posed or that, that, that, you know, one person couldn't have both, right? It's just taking a look at the for God and the against God debate itself. So I hope that makes sense. So let's start with the, is a God side of the debate.

OK. So this is somebody going in and saying, yeah, I really do believe there is a God. You know, I am religion. This is the religious side. What uh like any grand claim you might ask them. OK. Well, why don't you back up what you're saying? Right. Let's, let's try to structure this around logic. We want, you know, you're making a very big claim, perhaps the biggest that there is, you know, something or someone or this entity out there that is a God. So I want you to, to back that up.

I mean, if you were trying to convince me, what would you say and so they can go ahead and structure that like anything as an argument. It's ok. I've got this grand conclusion. Well, here are my premises and, and I'm not gonna pick apart specific premises, but these are the kinds of things that would be discussed. So one obvious one would be that science cannot explain the beauty that we see in the world. Ok. So this is not kind of a hard stop.

Like out of all the beauty science can't explain it, but we see all kinds of things in nature, this amazing variety, you know, the the, you know, the animals under the sea and, and above land and you know, the the the flying birds and the different colors and, and the complexity that we we encounter every day there is, you know, you go on, you can watch youtube videos of all these different animals, you know, like an octopus doing its camouflage or the giant squid or, you know, mollusks that have this ability or the iridescence on shells or whatever it is.

And you could say that even though science can explain a lot of that, there's no way it can truly explain all of this beauty that we see. I mean, how does it really all come together and, and and really what this argument kind of gets down toward this premise would be, you know, life itself, right? Science, you know, we can't recreate life in the lab, we can't recreate all this amazing beauty that we see around us.

And so in that sense, it can't really be explained not at the detail by detail level. So there is this this this missing piece that science never seems to be able to reach. And so I think that there must be a higher power, there must have been, you know, something beyond human consciousness that could create human consciousness itself and, and all this amazing variety that we see around us.

There's too much beauty, there's too much intricacy, too much complexity for science to possibly explain that. OK. So that might be one, one side of it and that kind of relates to the fine tuning. So you're kind of getting into these fine tuning arguments.

So cosmological speaking, I mean, if you look at, you know where the earth sits and its distance from the sun, how the solar system operates, or if you look at the gravitational constant or you look at all these kind of constants throughout the universe and these, you know, the physical laws and, and how they have to be to actually have us here today talking about them, they see.

So they, they, they seem so amazingly fine tuned, the precision seems so high on it that it it it it's hard to imagine that this came about randomly, right, that this just happened by chance. And you could even try running the probability calculations, right. You could actually try to calculate what, what is the likelihood, what is the probability of all these, you know, constants and everything coming together exactly the way they are for us to be here.

And you get this really, really low numbers or like what are the odds of this happening by chance? And as you can try to strengthen the argument that way, and so of course, we can really unpack this, right, we can get into all the, the theistic arguments and the atheistic arguments and everything that goes between. I mean, Richard Dawkins has his so called milestones on a spectrum of theistic probabilities.

So a very strong theist will be someone that has uh believes there's 100% probability that God doesn't exist. Uh And, and then on the strong atheist side would be, I know there is no God and with the exact same conviction as the strong theist, right, which is in the opposite direction. And then there's things in between, there's de facto theists, there's people that lean towards theism. There, there's uh impartial right in the middle.

And then there's people that lean towards the atheism or the de facto atheist. Uh that, that really think there's a very low probability, but not necessarily zero that there is a God. So there's kind of things in between, right? Um So we can look at theism and atheism and pick apart the different ways of approaching it, the different positions people have. There's, you know, there's positive and negative atheism.

Of course, there's agnosticism, as I mentioned, that sits in the middle, there's strong agnosticism, weak agnosticism, this agnostic theism and, and you know, it just kind of breaks out from there. So, so we know that there are tons of philosophical issues.

Uh there, you know, the the so-called problem of the supernatural that comes into play and different philosophers have kind of weighed in on this and, and theologians obviously, uh you know, there, there's the looking into the nature of relevant proofs and arguments and things that exist inside Western thought and outside Western thought and on and on. But what we want to do, just like I said before, for the COVID-19 is kind of slice this at a level.

Uh Otherwise, it's just, well, you know, well beyond the scope of the talk, and I think the way that I'm slicing this is going to kind of subsume all these different philosophical issues into kind of a coherent, you know, proper level with which to speak about. At least that's, that's what I think. And so let's look at the arguments for the existence of God, right? Specifically the logical arguments that are made. OK. So we can start with Aquinas five ways.

So Thomas Aquinas is the Dominican Friar, the philosopher, the Catholic priest, you might recognize his name wrote Zuma, the logic. And so he wasn't trying to prove the existence of God, but he has these five ways that he thinks make for a good starting point that it's related to something called the unmoved mover the first cause the necessary being the argument from degree and the argument from final cause of those five things. So let's start with the unmoved mover argument.

So the unmoved mover argument, what he's saying is that if we take a look at everything, we see that there must have been an initial mover, right? So whatever is in motion always comes because something else, you know, banged into it or started it or caused it to come about. So acquaintance is arguing that whatever is in motion must have been put in motion by another thing. And you can call that the unmoved mover.

So you can kind of see how that would if you, if you take that, you know, aggression all the way back to the beginning, you'd say, well, what, what was the very first thing, right? What was the original uh unmoved mover? And then, so that that would be an argument in favor of God and the argument around uh the argument from the uh first cause, sorry, the argument from first cause is, is very similar. It says that it's impossible for a being to cause itself, right?

Otherwise it would have to exist before it caused itself and that's impossible. So there's this infinite chain of causes and, and that would cause a result in infinite regress, right? There would never be a resolution to the, to, to this idea of, of what was, you know, what caused what, right. It just keep going back and back all the way. So there must have been a first cause which was itself uncased. OK. And then there's the argument from necessary being.

So acquaint is arguing that if everything can possibly not exist, then there must have been a time when nothing existed. And since a bunch of things exist now, there must exist a being with necessary existence. And that's what we regard as God. And then we have a quietness argument from degree where you deal with the degrees of goodness. So he believed that things which are called good must be called good in relation to a standard of goodness, right?

There must be some maximum thing that is good. Otherwise, how are you making that comparison? Right? What is the juxtaposition? How do you know if something is more good and, and something is less good? So that the idea that there are degrees of goodness suggest that it's being compared to something. So there must be some maximum goodness and that maximum goodness is, is that which causes all goodness. OK. So you can kind of get a sense of where God is coming from in that argument, right?

This this sense of maximum goodness that must exist. Otherwise, how would you have degrees of goodness? And then finally, there's the argument of final cause which is asserting that non intelligent objects are ordered towards a purpose. OK. So Aus is arguing that the objects cannot be ordered unless they are done. So by some intelligent being, so there must be an intelligent being to move objects to their ends, right? And that intelligent being is God. OK? So those are a Quintus five ways.

And then we have another category called cosmological argument, which is very similar to what we've heard in the case of a Quin. So it's, it's this idea, it's also called a first cause argument, right? So it's that everything that begins to exist has a cause and the universe began to exist. And, and therefore, the universe must have had a cause which was itself not caused, right?

So again, just taking that causal chain all the way back, if everything causes something, then there must have been some ultimate first cause. And then we would identify that as God. OK. Um And so if you actually structure that officially as an argument, uh you know, Christian apologist, William Lane Craig did this where he says, OK, well, one, whatever begins to exist has a cause. OK. Two, the universe began to exist.

OK. Therefore, the universe had a cause and that's what would be interpreted as God in this case. And so you can see that the structure of logic is there, right? Go back to episode one, we talked about the premises leading to conclusion we're doing this and that's called the cosmological argument in this case. And then there's the ontological argument. So this one has a really rich history. It goes all the way back to Saint Anselm, sorry of Canterbury.

And it's related to this idea of a being in which no greater can be conceived. So let's try to walk through the reasoning here and see if you can follow. So Saint Selm is reasoning that if we take something like a being in which no greater can be conceived, so some ultimate being, and we say, if that fails to exist, then a greater being than that, which itself would be a being in which no greater can be conceived and which exists, can be conceived.

OK. So if you take the ultimate being that you can think of and then you say, well, that doesn't exist, then there must be something greater than it. But the thing greater than it would itself be a being in which no greater can be conceived. OK. But that's absurd because nothing can be greater than a being in which no greater can be conceived. So, did you follow that? So basically, you imagine the absolute and you say, well, the absolute isn't going to exist.

So there must be something greater greater than this concept of the absolute. But now you're, you know, you're, you're comparing something after the fact and saying, well, that thing that's even greater would have to be greater than the original concept of something that couldn't have had anything greater than it.

So it's a little bit hard to follow, but basically, it's trying to show that you, you end up in this kind of contradiction and, and he says that that is going to lead to a being in which no greater can be conceived and therefore God exists. So it's pretty hard to follow. And of course, you could challenge that in many ways, but that's kind of the original ontological argument by Saint Anselm. And many other people have weighed in on this ontological argument.

You got Des Carte, you got Leibnitz, you've got gel and a of big names thinking about what its meaning is and, and what its implications are. So those are the three kind of broad categories of logical arguments. You got acquaintances five ways, you got the cosmological argument and you got the ontological argument and then you get into subjective arguments which kind of argue from historical events, right? Uh Who was doing what?

And when you can try to argue it that way, you got arguments from testimony, arguments grounded in personal experiences and uh and on and on. So now let's do the other side of the argument, the idea that there is no God.

So on this side, uh I'll do the same thing that I did for the, the Yes God side, which is just kind of give some general overview of the type of thinking that people on this side might have and then we'll go into the specific uh structured logical arguments that people make against the existence of God. So let's begin with just some of the thinking that kind of underlies uh or that might underlie someone's approach to viewing the world in a way that they do not believe God exists.

And so one would be related to falsifiable. So if you remember in part one, we talked about populism when looking at how to use evidence, how to use evidence in science. You know, what makes a good model is the fact that it's testable, that it's falsifiable, it can be destroyed, it can be broken, it can be rebutted, right? It, it doesn't make sense to have a model that you can't challenge because it could never be wrong. Ok? It could never be wrong.

You don't want to deal with things that are not even wrong, you want to deal with things that could be wrong. And in fact, the more wrong it could be is actually its strength because the only thing we can really know particularly in complex situations is that if something is good, it's because it's survived, right? So this idea of survivability has to be in the thing that I believe in. Otherwise I, I have no way of, of judging it. I have no way of testing it. I can't know that it's real.

And so if you were to take the approach, uh where on the side of the debate where you do not believe in a God, this falsifiable kind of thinking would most likely pop up. You know, I'm, I'm not going to believe in something that's not falsifiable. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. Uh, when we took, when we take a look at the limitations of logic with respect to the science and religion debate and when we look at the resolution, but the falsifiable is definitely underlying that.

And then there's this thinking that, you know, look, we didn't know things in the past, but we know them now. OK. So if you go back to the Yes God side of the debate, they had this, you know what, what they sometimes call the God of the gaps argument, right? They were saying that look the the, you know, the earth is so complex.

Life is so complex, so intricate, it's got so many precise, you know, constants and forces and materials are that, that, that are present in the universe that what are the odds of this happening from chance? And, and, and if we try to, you know, create life ourselves, we can't do it. If we try to explain everything, we can't explain that there's always this gap in science.

And so I choose to believe uh if, if you're on the Yes God side that, that God exists that, that I choose to believe that God is filling that gap, right? There's always going to be a gap and, and I believe God is filling that gap, we can kind of take the same God of the gaps, argument on the science side, except instead of God of the gaps, it would be science of the gaps, right?

You're saying, look, we didn't know a lot of things in the past and yeah, we don't know them now, but we figured things out through time. Right. We, you know, we, we didn't have, you know, antibiotics back in the day, we didn't know, you know, what gasses were brewing on the inside of a sun or what a sun even was before, what a star was or, or on and on and anything in nature, we didn't have those answers.

We had to, you know, do all kinds of guesses and then we figured it out and so that's going to, to happen. Now, we're eventually going to figure it out. If I'm taking that kind of scientific view. And I believe in science, then I don't require the belief in a supernatural being because even though there is this gap, I think science is going to fill that gap. Ok. So you can kind of take the god of the gaps argument.

You can take the science of the gaps is kind of the same argument, but it's, it's what you choose to fill the gap with. And so again, just the, the, the thinking of someone on the kind of the science side as we're framing, as we're framing it in this episode that, that you do not believe that a God exists, you know, you believe most questions are eventually going to be answered and science is the way to answer those questions. Ok?

And then there's this idea that religion has been working against science through history. So if you don't believe in God, some of, of what might kind of underlie that, that thinking is that look if, if science throughout history, as long as it has existed has been trying to pursue truth, it's been trying to figure things out. And if you look at that history, you know, religion was kind of working against it.

Of course, the famous example is Galileo looking at the Heliocentric theory and coming off of what Copernicus was doing and, and, and you know, he was famously trying to, you know, understand obviously, you know how the planets revolved around the sun and promote this idea and, and history has this kind of tale that religion was actively working against that, right?

And uh and what and what Galileo was doing was blasphemy and or blasphemous and and, and he got punished for it and we all know the story there and, and there's definitely some debate around this, you know, was it really the church working against Galileo? Was it Galileo kind of being his own worst enemy and working, you know, against himself with his ego and the way he was going about it and you can read all kinds of versions of this.

I mean, there are people that believe a lot of that, that science itself wouldn't have even been possible without religion that, that western civilization and progress wouldn't have been possible without religion. So you can kind of get into that debate. But we know this, this idea that whether you believe it or not, that, that religion is kind of working against, has worked against science and maybe still does to this day.

Because if you try to pursue something and then it goes, you know, against the word of God, it goes against what was written in the Bible or, or, or you know what another text of another religion. If it goes against that word, then, you know, it's considered blasphemous and, and, and therefore it must be wrong and, and you're gonna be kind of looked down on maybe by the religious community, maybe even punished.

But, you know, if this was back in the day and so that history that apparent history of religion working against science might underlie, you know, your disbelief in God because, you know, if God was real and he was, he was about pursuing truth and it made sense to pursue truth by believing in Him, then why would it be something that would work against the pursuit of truth itself when I try to measure things and, and understand the world doesn't seem to make sense. It seems to be a contradiction.

So, so there's that um and then uh you know, you might say to someone, look, unless you say how God actually works, saying God exists, doesn't explain anything. You, you're telling me that God exists, doesn't explain anything, right? It's not, it's not telling me how the world functions. It's not telling me how, you know, atoms come together to form molecules and molecules come together to eventually form, you know, life and different organisms.

And you're not telling me about the forces and the, and the, you know, the planets and the energies and, and all the things that go into our understanding of the universe. I mean, none of that is coming along in the package of God, right? You're not, you're not explaining anything, you're just kind of saying God exists, right? And again that this is obviously that, you know, that that gap that would exist that isn't part of science. So in that sense, it kind of makes sense, right?

But, but if you're not telling me anything other than God exists, OK. Which I think someone on the on the God side would say, well, that's not the only thing we're telling you, you know, you kind of have to unpack what that means. But, but if there's no kind of mechanical explanation of the universe coming along with what you believe in, then what is it you're really saying? Right. So they might kind of think like that.

Um And then there's the idea that design, I remember in the, in the first part of this debate, we said how, you know, precise the universe is, how everything seems to be so balanced and complex and perfect. Well, some people don't think the universe is actually designed that well and, and they don't think that life is actually designed that well. Right.

So, so if you look at, you know, we, we can't eat and breathe at the same time or the birth canal is not big enough on a woman or whatever it is. Uh People don't necessarily think design is that great. There's all these kinds of examples where it actually, it kind of seems inefficient and actually this could work a lot better. I mean, we could already see that this would be better and on and on. And so if you don't believe design is that great?

If you don't believe it's, it's so intricate that it's actually kind of messy and it's, it's, it's uh it's, or more specifically, it's missing something and it could have been done better than this idea that there's this great creator that designed everything starts to not really make sense because you're seeing these apparent deficiencies in the designs itself. And then just uh on the last one before we get into the specific logical arguments, there's evolution, of course. Right.

So the idea that, you know, you might be someone who believes evolution is, is actively or definitely kind of goes against the idea of a supernatural being because it's not required to explain the things we see. Ok. So we take a look at again, again, going back to the, the rich uh variety that, that exist in nature, the complexity, you know, all the different animals and their colors and their abilities to adapt. And it's just this amazing world.

Well, you can explain that through evolution, you can explain that through the massive, you know, variation that exists uh among organisms all the way back to the genetic level and how you get all this different variation. And then out of all that variation, there's going to be certain pieces that survive and certain ones that don't because of their fitness and, and through heredity and, and uh an iteration eventually, you know, the, the the most fit are going to survive.

And that's why you end up with something that looks like it's really designed, it looks really good because it's been doing it for millions of years, right? If you take a bunch of different options and you throw those options at an environment and only certain of those options are going to survive, then the ones that do survive are gonna look like they're perfectly fitted for the environment and that's gonna look like a design, right? So that's why it looks so designed.

That's why it looks so perfect. That's why it looks so good. If you look at the human body, if you look at any other animal, yeah, it, it is very well adapted to its environment. But that's because there was all kinds of different designs that weren't good and those got tested through time and, and what survived is what we look at today.

And so evolution, the evolutionary process and you know, natural selection as the mechanism and adaptation and all this, they can describe the process that underlies what we see today. So it's really maybe not that mysterious, no less interesting, no less exciting, but it's not that mysterious. It doesn't require a, a supernatural deity to, to, you know, bless us with their grand design, we can see how the process works. OK?

So now we're gonna take a look at the specific arguments made against God. Everything up until now has kind of just been the thinking that underlies or might underlie someone not believing in God, right?

So this idea of falsify this idea that science is eventually going to figure things out the, the the history of, you know, religion apparently working against science, uh you know, saying God exists, doesn't really give me anything, maybe design isn't even that good or if you do believe it's good, evolution can, can describe it anyway. OK. So there's, there's some of the kind of common thinking that exists on the No God side. But now let's get into some specific arguments that are made.

OK. So the way these work is they, they basically attempt to show that a creator is unnecessary or even contradictory, right? It's at odds with what we know about science, what we know about history and, and, and basically, there's just insufficient proof that a God does exist. There's that P word, we'll come back to that, but there's insufficient proof that a God exists. So we have three main categories.

When we talk about the arguments made in favor of there not being a God emir arguments, we have logical arguments and then we have subjective arguments. Uh We talked about some of the logical and and subjective type arguments on the Yes God side. What's new here is the empirical argument that should be kind of obvious, right? We're talking about the science side. So there are going to be some potentially empirical arguments.

So what would that mean though, when you're trying to use empirical arguments to say that God might not exist or that God does not exist? Let's take a look at those now. So because these are empirical arguments, they're actually relying on observations or experimentation to yield a conclusion that there is no God. OK. So the first one would be argument from inadequate revelations.

This is where you are identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures or within a single scripture and the things that we know by fact, right? And, and so there's that word fact, but basically, if you're looking at nature, you're looking at science, there are things that we presumably definitely know. And then if that contradicts what you read in scripture and something is off, right.

So there's an a an argument from inadequate revelation that whatever is being revealed through religion, right through this belief in God is not lining up with what we already know. And so something's wrong with it, right? Argument from inadequate revelation, something related is the argument from parsimony. So this is related to Ockham's razor. Uh Ockham's razor is, is basically uh kind of a way of thinking. Uh it's used in science quite often.

It's not, it's not like an, an actual theory or principle or something that's falsifiable itself. It's just this kind of attitude that you bring to science that the simplest theory is the correct one. So whenever you have a bunch of competing theories, you know, just, just look for the the simplest one and the reason is it's, it's actually related to pop, right? The simpler the theory, the easier it is to test, right?

Because if you're very complex and you have all this kinds of epidemic uncertainty, then you have tons of competing explanations. And as long as you have that, you know, flipping and flopping like we talked about earlier, there's many, many competing explanations that it's hard to, to refute it, right? It's hard to get rid of it. It kind of just has this persistence through time. And so the simpler theory is easy to, to rebut, right? It's easy to throw something against and actually kill it off.

And then that's what you want. So you want a highly testable theory. So when you're looking at different explanations, when you have different theories about how the world works, it should be simple. So the argument from parsimony related to the God does not exist, we contend that, uh you know, since natural theories adequately explain the development of religion and the belief in God that, you know, the actual existence of a supernatural agent is not needed, right? It's superfluous.

OK. So in other words, we, we, we, we have simple theories or, or it is simpler to have a theory about how people just develop religions and believe in God. That's simpler than saying there is a supernatural being, right? There is some deity out there which invites in all kinds of epidemic uncertainty and complexity. And now that's something that again just goes back to falsifiable. So you can kind of apply Ockham's razor to this idea of, you know, arguing that there is no God, right?

That's called the argument from parsimony. Um Kind of ironic thing is, is Ockham's razor that actually comes from a, an English Franciscan uh Friar called William of Ock. And, and he was actually a, a philosopher and theologian. So he was using uh uh this kind of idea as a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles. So it's kind of funny that, you know, it kind of got repurposed for the argument against the belief in God.

Another one that falls under this category is the argument from poor design of the universe. So we already dealt with uh with this a little bit earlier, this idea that um you know, a creator would not have created life forms, including humans, which seem to exhibit poor design.

So if you do believe that there's a lot of poor design in the universe itself and in life forms, then you wouldn't think that uh you know, a creator would have introduced flaws like that uh related is this idea called the problem of evil. And you probably heard this before, it basically argues that look, if there was a God, why would you permit the existence of evil and suffering? Right? There's so much suffering in the world, there's so many problems.

If there was a supernatural being that's presumably, you know, caring and, and uh you know, benevolent, why would he allow all this suffering to take place? And so that falls under the argument from poor design? And so those are the so called empirical arguments because they're looking at, you know, how science works or, or, you know, things that we think that we know about nature and using that to argue against the idea of a belief in God.

And so now we can touch on the logical arguments themselves. And so this is kind of in parallel to what we were doing with the no, sorry, with the Yes God side, right? If you believed in God, we had those, you know, like acquaintances five ways. And we had these number of logical arguments that you could piece together. So now let's do the same thing, but against the idea that there is a God against the idea that you should believe in God.

And so these arguments attempt to uh basically deduce through self contradiction, the nonexistence of God as a creator. OK. So the first example would be related to just asking the question, who created the universe and say, well, if the answer is God, then you're really just deflecting the question because then the question is who created God, right? So there's no answer to the question. You haven't really, you know, provided anything.

And so so, so people will say that, you know, it's within the realm of science, you don't have to invoke a special being. Science as a process has a cover to try to figure out where the universe came from, right? Just just providing an answer as God, it just kind of deflects the process of trying to understand because then you're just, you know, begged the question, well, who created God, right? So it's kind of logically that kind of sets up this contradiction.

You could also take the approach that there just is no scientific evidence for God's existence, right. It's, it's never been found. And therefore the scientific consensus is that God does not exist or, or, or, or at least it cannot be known. So it goes against the idea of a belief in God because no evidence has ever been found to suggest that that is the case.

And so if we take science as the process with which to pursue truth and, and the consensus must be that there is no God because there is no evidence. OK? You got a lot of words in there, right? You got, you got the evidence, you've got consensus, you definitely got words that are problematic in there, but we'll touch on some of that later. But, but just as a logical argument, that's how it's put forward. OK?

Another one is, is uh kind of related to cosmological argument that, you know, things cannot exist without creators, but that would also apply to God. And so you get, you set up this infinite regress. So we saw some of these kind of infinite regress ideas when we were looking at uh the for God arguments, right? This idea that there is a data, data, you can, you can construct logical arguments such that, you know, well, what caused that and then what caused that?

And you go all the way back and then you kind of just have this infinite regress of causes. And so therefore, there must be a God.

Well, now we've got that same argument applied to the idea that there would be no God, another one related to the infinite regress would be, you know, let's say you're looking at evolution and you're saying there's all this variation in fitness and iteration and heredity and all that, you know, through natural selection, through these mechanisms, it's gonna lead to all this complexity.

But again, we're looking at earth and it's so complex and so there's no way evolution could possibly lead to that. So that might be, you know, a kind of thinking that underlies the no uh sorry, the Yes God argument. But on the no God side, you could say, well, again, getting into that infinite regress problem, wouldn't that also apply to God? I mean, wouldn't God kind of be the ultimate complexity, right? Wouldn't he or she or it still have to be designed by someone or something, right?

So there's that counter argument there that, yeah, you, you, you can say everything is too complex for, you know, something like evolution to lead to. But then wouldn't that also apply to God himself? I mean, wouldn't there need to be a creator for the creator? And then there's other ones such as theological, non cognitive argument that, you know, words like God are kind of uh irreducible definitions. They're kind of circular that you can't really do anything with it.

There's um you know, the burden, the idea that the burden of proof of the existence of God should lie with the theist rather than the atheist. And so that's actually kind of an extension of Ockham's razor and on and on. And then as I mentioned earlier, there are subjective arguments like we said, for the, for the side as well. So you can go take a look online of all these arguments. I mean, they really get fleshed out and you can imagine the people have been debating this for many, many years.

OK. So we have the power of logic and we have the limitations of logic on the power of logic side with respect to science and religion, we have a framework with which people can structure their argument. If I ask someone why they believe in God. And they just said, that's how they're raised, that's not very satisfactory. If you ask a scientist, why they believe there is no God. And they say, well, that's just kind of how science works or I assume that's what all the other scientists do.

And so that's kind of the consensus. Well, that's not anymore satisfactory. Is it? I mean, people need to up what they're saying, they need to put some thought into it. Let me know that you have put thought into your opinion, whether it is believing in the existence of God or not believing in the existence of God. And so that's what logic gives us.

It's a framework, it's a structure, people can make any grand claim they want, but you tell them to back it up with premises and then show me how your premises lead to the conclusion. So that is the power of logic, regardless of whether or not you reach some kind of resolution, regardless of which side of the bait you take.

The structure of logic allows you to have that conversation, to build an appreciation for why someone believes what they believe, to give the person making the statement a, a way to structure that argument and, and, and to build their own, you know, belief around which side of the debate they're on or to, to, to perhaps switch their opinion if, if they believe the other person makes a better argument, but it's giving us the ability to structure that argument to make those conversations, you know, uh anchored in something more than just a grand statement.

So that is the power of logic you want to do that. But in the science of religion debate, we see the same thing with the mass no bask uh debate in terms of it flipping and flopping, don't we? I mean, both sides are using premises to support a conclusion. Now, in the case of the mask, no mask is quite different because they're not in the mask, no masks, they're using studies, right? They can call upon actual empirical evidence in the case of religion and science. It's, it's quite a bit different.

We don't really have studies obviously to call upon. There's not not, you know, direct measurements you can call upon. So, in the case of science and religion, it's really just strict logical arguments. How do you know, premises lead to conclusions? But we do see the same flipping and flopping because what we have here in the case of science and religion is that they're using the same premises in a lot of ways to lead to a different conclusion. Right.

The same premises are kind of leading to the opposite conclusion. So, for example, you know, if you're on the for God side, you believe there is a God, a deity out there, you, you, you know, you might use this infinite regress with cause argument, right? Where you're saying, uh you know, well, well, everything has to have a cause and so no matter what it is, something caused it and something caused it and you go all the way back. And so eventually there must be an end and that end must be God.

There must be some, you know, original cause, right? Some master cause that started at all. But you can use that exact same premise to, to, to lead to an opposite conclusion. You can say if you keep taking the infinite regress back, something caused something, something caused something, then wouldn't that continue for God itself? I mean, wouldn't there be something that caused God? Right?

So you're kind of using the same infinite regress causal argument to get an exact opposite conclusion and then we saw that kind of with Ockham's razor, right? It was originally introduced as, you know, the simplest uh theory or model would be to simply believe in God. I mean, wouldn't that be the simplest? But then on the scientific side, you're saying, well, the simplest theory would be the most testable and, and the, you know, the theory of God is not testable.

And so actually the simplest thing to do would be to not believe in God. And so again, you're using the exact same premise to lead to an exact opposite conclusion.

So just from a purely strictly logical standpoint, not even talking about, you know, evidence in the scientific sense, you know, the empirical evidence, just from a strictly logical standpoint, you're getting into this flipping and flopping back and forth so much so that a lot of your premises are actually the exact same, but you're just arriving at a different conclusion. So again, there's that contextualization, right? It's not the fact that face value, it's how you are interpreting, right?

How you're contextualizing the fact, how you're stitching it together, how you're creating your own narrative with it and how you're interpreting what that stitch together, set of facts means. And you can do it in totally opposite ways even though you're using from a lot stamp or in the same facts itself. OK? And then we can try to get into proper and say, you know, just like the mask no mask, mask, no mask debate.

We got into this problem where you know, well, yeah, you can stitch together but you can't take it at face value and there's this contextualization. And so really what you should be doing is using evidence properly, right? There's this problem of induction that gets so bad, so exacerbated under complexity that it almost becomes useless, right? That you can't just continue to take facts and, and build it up to try to strengthen your argument.

And so really what you should be doing is using evidence appropriately, which is kind of rebutting evidence, right? So whatever I collect, I'm trying to kill the narrative that I have now. And if I can't kill it, it's got, you know, good survivability. And if I do kill it, then I should switch it, right? The problem though is that while that does work in the mass no mask debate because you're still within the realm of science, right?

Evidence on both sides of the debate is considered to be the same thing, right? Evidence is evidence, it's empirical, it's something that you measure, it's something that you use based on observation. But in this case, while the science side of the debate understands evidence in that fashion, the religious side doesn't really think of evidence in that sense, right? They're not studying God in the lab, they're not setting up experiments, they're not trying to measure God, right?

I mean, that's just it be be kind of taking like lowly human approach to try to understand something supernatural. It just doesn't make sense. It's just not how they take evidence. And so on the religious side of things, they're not going to consider, you know, lab measurements or purely observation as something that justifies the belief in a God because that's not how the evidence works. It's subjective, it's based on testimony, it's based on a rich personal experience.

And so they're not gonna take the science version of evidence. And on the other side, it's the same thing, right? Like science is not going to take uh you know, the the subjective testimonial experience based evidence because it can't do that. That's not how science works. Science needs something that is objective, something that tries to eliminate the human bias, something that doesn't allow human lying to play a role right now.

Again, it doesn't mean that people on say the religious or the yes God side are lying. It's just that there's no way to know and that's the point, right? It might be totally true and it might be, you know, it's, it's not to downplay the rich experience. It's not to say that that isn't, you know, on a personal level, uh you know, something that can be considered evidence, but science can't do something just on a personal level. It has to be something that is objectified, right?

Has to be something that is as free from bias as possible. It's not to say that it's completely free from bias, but there has to be an approach to try to eliminate the bias. It cannot be something that's just personal experience. We got to measure it. Those measurements have to be reproducible. Uh the theories that they, that, that, that, that they're used in science have to be, you know, falsifiable has to be able to be knocked down.

And so we have this issue that if, if you know, on the one hand, just from a purely logical standpoint, we're flipping and flopping. And if we try to take this poppism approach where we use evidence uh to try to, to try to kill off our current narrative, but we can't even do that, right? Because we're not considering evidence the same on both sides, right? Religious evidence is very different than what you would consider evidence on the science side.

And so we've got this, this problem where that kind of poer approach to trying to kill off the, the the incumbent narrative just isn't gonna work. Ok. I can't use a bunch of religion to rebut, you know, let's say my scientific model or I can't use a bunch of science to rebut my, my religious model, my belief in God, it just doesn't work like that. We're not even considering evidence the same thing. So there's nothing that can kill it off both sides kind of have this permanence, right?

They, they, there, there's nothing that can kind of kind of go against it because anything that, that that is brought to bear is not considered evidence by that system that's trying to be killed off. Ok. So again, on the mask, no mask side, both sides at least agree on what evidence is. It's still within the scientific realm. And so you can get into this kind of situation of populism where you try to rebut, you use rebutting evidence to kill off a narrative.

If it doesn't kill it off, it survives. If it does kill it off, we switch to a new model, but we can't get into that with science and religion. Evidence means something very different. Neither side would concede that the other side's version of evidence is something that they can use to to kill off an incumbent model, right? Can't use religion to kill off a scientific model. I can't use science to kill off a religious model.

So that kind of back and forth rebutting evidence just simply doesn't work in the case of science and religion. And then we had that line that I mentioned in part one, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. On the God side. You might say that look evidence, uh sorry, absence of evidence that there is a God doesn't mean that there is evidence that there is no God, right?

The absence of evidence that there is a God, the fact that you can't, you know, show that there is or is not one doesn't mean that there is evidence, there is no God, which is true, right? Logically speaking, but you can do the same argument on the no God side, right? The same thing to, to reach an opposite conclusion. So the absence of evidence that there is no God does not mean that there is evidence of a God, right?

Absence of evidence that there is no God doesn't mean that there is evidence of a God. So even if you were somehow agreeing on what evidence means, neither side, you know, can, can suggest that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, regardless of what conclusion you want that to reach to uh to reach.

OK. And so here we are with, with severe limitations of logic, we, we, you know, again, in any situation, you can say, look if, if deduction or induction is going to work to the point of a resolution to the point where you could stack up a winner in a debate, stack up as many premises, see who has more and have a winner that's only gonna work in simple situations, right?

Where you have a really good model of reality, you have a really, really large slice of reality, you think you get how the pieces come together. And so you could stack it up and, and, and, and in most real world examples, this is just not going to be the case. And we saw that in the mass, no mass debate, we saw that in the science and religion debate. OK. Contextualization of the facts means it's going to support either narrative. You're going to get this flipping and flopping back and forth.

That's a sign posts, right? That's the red flag to a truly complex situation where you can use facts, stitch them together, stack as many up as you want, but on either side, you're gonna do it just as well, right? And at any point in time, there might be a slight kind of winner, a leader, but in very short order, it flips to the other side and it's more or less just even. So we saw that in the mass debate, different studies support opposite narratives.

We saw that in the God debate, different logical premises support opposite narratives. And so we get this kind of failure of logic and, and even if you try, you know, to apply poer to it to see what survives. Whereas in the mass debate, you, you know, you can kind of use opposite sides evidence via their studies and, and you can do that. But you, you get to this point where you kind of don't have a model, right?

So if you're on the yes mass side and I use the no mask evidence, then I realize that my model is so bad on the ss side, that's pretty much unusable and the same thing on the no mass side, right. I use the mass side evidence and it kind of rebuts against my no mass model. And so my no mask model is so bad that I basically don't have a model.

So on the on the mass no mass debate even applying pop kind of gets you to this point where neither side really has a good model because the uncertainty is so high, right, the complexity is so large, so exacerbated the problem of, of unknown, right? Of, of uncertainty is so bad under complexity that neither side has a model. And in the God debate, it's actually even worse, right? Because uh you, you don't even have evidence to use via this kind of poer approach, right?

Pop it is not even gonna work because we're not even agreeing on what evidence is. Science thinks something, evidence is something quite different than, than what religion thinks evidence is, right? In, in the way that it's being used in this debate, right? It doesn't mean a scientist can't understand what a religious person, uh thinks evidence is and it might even be the same person, right? A scientist could be religious and a religious person.

It's not that they don't understand how evidence is used in science. Right. Again, that could be the same person, you could be religious and scientific. But in this debate, any evidence that you tried to call upon will be interpreted very differently, right? Either you're not gonna call upon evidence because it's just strictly logical looking at causality as it goes back. And therefore there's my conclusion.

But if you tried to be empirical at all, you know, you, you on the religious side, it's very subjective. It's very testimonial. It's very, what's going on in my life and the things that I've experienced, it's not something that I measure. It's not something that's projective and the science side, it's the opposite. Right? It's very objective. It's something, it's something that I can measure. And on.

So we understand that there's this fundamental difference between how evidence is actually being interpreted in the God debate. And so the problem is even more exacerbated, right? The mass, no mass debate gets you no model. Uh and the God debate kind of the same thing but but not even by using this populism approach, we're kind of just at this complete standstill. So in both cases, you reach a type of standstill because of complexity, right?

The epistemic uncertainty that accompanies highly complex situation is precluding the possibility that a strict logical approach can be used to stack up facts to get to a winner. So people talk like this all the time. So you might have an atheist saying, well, I use facts, I use science, right? To, to kind of back up this idea that there is no God. Well, it doesn't make sense because that's not how science works. Science is not able to comment on whether God does or does not exist.

It's just not able to comment on it. Right. It's an unfalsifiable theory and if it's unfalsifiable, then there's, there's no measurement, there's no evidence of the scientific type that we can gather to try to make a comment on whether God exists or not. It's got no falsifiable to it. Ok. And so we can't get into the poppers and we can't get into using evidence. Evidence isn't considered the same thing. So there's just no way to comment on it.

So if you actually understand how science works, it makes no sense to, to say that you're calling upon science to back up your atheist argument, right? You can be an atheist perfectly fine. That's your right. Right. Anybody can be an atheist. Anybody can be religious, but it's, it's, it's not a good argument to say that, you know, I'm going to use science to kind of back up what I'm thinking because there's, there's nothing in science that can comment on it, right?

We know that there's no such thing as proof in science. We talked about that earlier, right? There's something, there's such thing as a proof in math, but there's no such thing as a proof in science. There's no such thing as taking facts at face value. It's always contextualized, it always gets stitched together into narratives. Those narratives have a proximity to reality. You can use the exact same premises to uh to uh to, to lead to a completely opposite conclusion.

You can use uh nothing but facts to tell a complete lie. There's nothing in the logical framework that's going to, to allow you to be a winner on one side under complexity. If you look at how science works, right. The fact that that something has to be falsifiable so that you can test it so that it can survive means anything that is so extreme in, in its uncertainty that it can't be falsified, it can't even be wrong that it, it, it's officially in the realm that science can't touch.

There's just nothing that, that there's nothing to survive. There's no way to use evidence for or against it. Right. So, so that, that example where an atheist might be, you know, trying to use science to back up their point of view doesn't make sense because that's just not how science works again perfectly right? Or, or fine to be an atheist perfectly fine to have that belief.

But of course, it's a belief, it's not backed up by anything but it, it has to be backed up just as just, just as religion is, right? Just as a belief in God is, it has to be backed up by a belief. So, so there's no such thing as proof in science. Uh science doesn't work by consensus. We saw the word consensus earlier, I think, well, there's such thing as scientific consensus again in a really simple system. Sure, because there's a good understanding of how the reality works.

A model has a good chunk of reality. So it might make sense to have consensus on it. But with the epidemic, uncertainty is really high that we don't use, you know, induction in that sense, we have to use rebutting evidence in science to knock down the incumbent model. And so science doesn't work by consensus. It works by the opposite of consensus, right? It works by something that all of a sudden pops up and knocks down the incumbent model, right?

The the the this idea that consensus is what drives progress in science is just not the case. OK? And then we get into this problem that, you know, if you try to say, well, there's no, there's no evidence of God. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, you can go to either conclusion that way. And so it just doesn't make sense. So an atheist might be trying to call upon science.

And we can see that as kind of an extreme example where, where it's just not gonna work because we have two completely different systems. And of course, you can go the other way as well. You know, a religious person might be trying to call upon religion to say something about science. So I think a good example of this would be intelligent design. This is the idea that, you know, if you take the science that we're teaching within the curriculum, right? The science curriculum across the nation.

That why don't we have an alternative, you know, creationist theory? So you can, you can talk about evolution, you can talk about all these things in science. But why don't you also say there's this alternative theory that maybe God created what we see? So the complexity and all the, you know, constants and everything that we're looking at in the universe. I mean, maybe that came up uh about because of a creator. I mean, why can't we teach that?

I mean, we know there's this gap, we know that science has yet to figure a lot of things out. We don't know how much of that they're going to and not going to be able to. So why don't we just have this alternative theory that a creator created the things that we're looking at? Well, this again violates this respect. We need to have for what a system can and cannot do. Science is not able to comment on whether or not a God exists because there's nothing falsifiable.

There, there's nothing uh in terms of evidence that would be that would be used the way science use uses evidence, right? There's no, there's no measurement, there's no observation, there's nothing experimental or, or empirical that can be set up to strengthen or weaken the argument that there is a God. So science can't be, can't, can't be brought to bear on that question. So since science cannot be brought to bear on that question.

Then it doesn't make sense to bring in the alternative theory of a creator that there is a deity that there is a God into the scientific curriculum. Now, we ought to be clear here. We're not saying there is no creator. We're not saying you have no right to believe in a God or not believe in a God. There's nothing about, you know, the, we already saw that both sides can back up their argument, they can do it with logic, right?

They can, they can take the inductive approach, but where it fails to kind of work in the same sense is, is, is on the evidence level, right? The way science understands evidence and the way a religious person, uh a person of faith understands evidence is fundamentally different. And again, what I, what I really mean here is the way they use evidence, right? It's not that both sides don't understand the difference between evidence and science and religion.

It's just that on the religious side, you are using evidence differently fundamentally differently than, than if you're on the science side. Ok. So it's, it's not suggesting some inherent incompatibility that uh you know, in, in terms of, you know, one person couldn't be both science and religious. It's just saying that the systems themselves are two fundamentally different things. The way they approach an understanding of nature is fundamentally different.

So just as it doesn't make sense logically scientifically, for an atheist to try to use science to back up what they're saying simply because science cannot comment on whether or not God exists or a God exists. So too does intelligent design not make sense in the sense that you, you, you can't bring a uh a creationist theory into science because creationist theories just don't work in science, right? Not in the way they're being framed, right?

You could say, well, you know, he's in the Big Bang kind of a creationist theory, you're not calling upon something that you can't test, you know, with, with the Big Bang, you could still look at cosmic uh you know, microwave background radiation, you can still take observations, you can still kind of extrapolate and interpolate and you can do things with observations to try to piece together your story. But you're not gonna be able to do that with a creator.

You're not gonna be able to do that with a deity. So there's simply no place for the alternative kind of creationist deity type theory to fit into the realm of science. Again, let's be clear, we're not saying it's wrong. We're not saying that you cannot believe in a creator, you can believe in a creator, you cannot not believe in a creator. You can be spiritual, you cannot be spiritual. But in terms of the systems that are being used to pursue the truth, they are fundamentally different.

They use evidence in a fundamentally different way And so in that sense, you're, you're just as wrong as bringing, you know, a creat theory into the scientific curriculum via intelligent design because it just the religious system, the, the system of faith doesn't work inside the scientific system. And, and you're just as wrong as an atheist trying to say, well, science shows or strengthens my argument that there is no God. No, it doesn't. It can't, it's incapable of doing that.

There's nothing baked into the system that's going to allow it to comment on whether or not God exists. So we have these two extreme ends, right? You can be an atheist. All you want, you have every right to, you can back up your arguments in different ways, but you can't use science as a mechanism to comment on the existence of God doesn't work like that.

So that's one extreme man, the other extreme man being someone who's trying to maybe fight for intelligent design again, you could still maybe teach that curriculum within schools outside of science. But if you're trying to bring that creationist theory, that deity into the mechanism of science into the actual curriculum of how we teach science and the scientific process, that approach to understanding nature, then that's wrong, right?

Not because there is no creator, not because you don't have a right to believe in it, but because it just does not simply work within the system of science. Ok. So let's wrap this whole episode up on the resolution section. Now, how do we resolve these two really big debates? So let's just do a really quick recap of everything. This is a two part episode, you know, we must be, you know, a good three hours in, in total. So, if you're still with me, congratulations.

Uh, I know this is a bit of a heavy topic. There's been a lot to go through at the very beginning. We started with the structure of logic. We flushed all that out, we understood its power.

Hopefully you're able to appreciate uh you know, its ability to anchor our conversations around something that makes things comparable, get people to back up what they're saying, get them to flesh out their premises, understand how, you know, the deductive and inductive approaches are working very, very powerful.

It's important you got to be able to have rational conversations, but it is not an answer in and of itself, it is not a total final, you know, kind of recipe you can use to pick a winner because as I said, you know, previously, uh you know, stacking up more truths on one side doesn't give you a winner in complex situations, right?

Logic itself is going to kind of break down or more specifically run into a wall related to epistemic uncertainty that doesn't allow us to pick a winner, it doesn't matter. And, and, and again, we see signposts of this, right? You get into these debates uh, like the mask, no mask, like the science and religion.

And you start seeing this flipping and flopping back and forth and it might be, you know, just at the logical level, people are flipping and flopping back and forth because they can use the exact same facts, the exact same premises to paint entirely different narratives, reach opposite conclusions. You know, or if you are calling upon actual studies again, it flips flop, flips and flops back and forth.

So, you know, the mass no mass debate, you know, the dark chocolate debate, the red wine debate, anything in nutrition, you know, MS G things like this, things that are so complicated and so uncertain here. And now that you got the signpost of complexity through the flipping and flopping. And so there's this degradation of how of logic itself, right? Again, you want to use it, it is structure if you don't have it. Uh It's, it's just you got nothing to talk about, right?

You want people to back it up state the premises, but look for the flipping and flopping. Look for those signposts of complexity have an appreciation for the epidemic, uncertainty and go from there. And so we use the two examples with the national mass debate and religious science debate. So what I want to do now is take a look at the resolution of those two debates. What does that look like? OK. So with the mask, no mask debate, we had this problem, right?

We, we, we, we saw the problem of induction get exacerbated under complexity. And then we, we took the poppism approach and said, OK, let's use evidence, kind of the opposite side, evidence to see if it can kill off the narrative. But then it happened to both sides and we were essentially left with no model, right? So there's really no good model here. And now that would suggest we definitely should wear masks. There really is no good model here.

And now that suggests we don't need to wear masks. And so how do we make decisions? How does this turn into policies? What are we supposed to do with this? So I want to give you an example of what you can do when there is a large amount of uncertainty, but you still know exactly the decision to make. So let's take water bottles as an example. OK, water bottles, they have expiration dates on them, right? It's usually 1 to 2 years, an expiration date on a water bottle.

So this could be, you know, just the regular water bottles that you buy at the store. Well, why do they have ex expiration dates on it? Does that even make sense? It's not like water goes bad, right? Why would a company choose to put an expiration date on that? And you might try to argue, well, maybe the plastic of the bottle leaches into the water, maybe over time, you know, this, this starts to contaminate. Now, now, I don't know if that plastic is necessarily toxic, but maybe it is.

And, and then you can kind of try to guess, well, how much time needs to pass before, you know, the plastic is leached into the, into the water. What, what, you know, what concentration of plastic would there have to be in on? No, you can start, you know, getting into a debate about water bottles, should there or should there not be an expiration date on it? You can go call up on studies or do your own studies.

Let's look at the leaching of plastic and how much it takes and whether or not it's toxic or what dose would you have to be to be toxic? And of course, it's gonna flip and flop back and forth and yet we know the right decision to make here, the right decision is to put an expiration date on the water bottle. Now, why is that? Well, let's think about the situation if you're a company and you want to protect yourself from risk, right?

You wanna protect yourself from somebody, you know, drinking poisonous water or, or, or toxic water or maybe even just filing a lawsuit against your company because they think that they can taste the plastic in the water and now they think it's toxic and they're gonna go, you know, look at studies that show that's the case and kind of build a case around it. Ok. So how do you protect yourself? Well, the obvious answer is just, just put an expiration date on the water bottle.

Ok. It's usually 1 to 2 years. If we know that there's, there's, there's, there doesn't seem to be any danger, you know, let's say two years in that, that there's going to be toxic levels of plastic there then just put a two year expiration date on it. So you, you stop yourself from the worst case scenario, which is maybe someone 7 to 8 years for some dumb reason.

They've held on to a water bottle that long, they crack it open, they can taste plastic and then they get into a lawsuit or they actually get sick, you make it a non-issue and this is the point under really complex situations with very high degrees of uncertainty. What you want to do is make something a non issue. Ok? So let's think about the 22 sides of this. The absolute worst case scenario that could happen is, you know, somebody drinks the water and dies, right? Like absolute worst case.

Now you can try to figure out if that's going to happen using evidence. But again, you're going to get into this flipping and flopping. You don't know, you know what level of toxicity, you don't know how long the water ball is supposed to last and it's just gonna be a big mess. But you know that fund that that kind of theoretically that that could be the worst case scenario, right? Or maybe the worst case scenario is just a lawsuit.

But the other side of that is what is the cost of putting an expiration date of the bottle? Well, you know, a few cents a bottle or something? You know, not even. Right. It's just the ink and we're already doing that with all the other food products. So the FDA decision here, which is to just put an expiration date on all food products, regardless of what it is, is the right decision, right? It's the right decision because the worst case scenario is really bad.

If, if something, if something happens where you don't put it on, but if you do put it on, what's the worst that can happen? Uh I can't even think of it, right? A little bit of extra cost maybe to actually print the label on the bottle, but there's really not much cost to it. And the cost is nowhere near what the cost would be with a big lawsuit or somebody actually dying, right?

So when you have this massive amount of uncertainty in the situation, this epistemic uncertainty, you do know the right decision to make and it's not because you have evidence to back it up. It's not because you have a bunch of information you've collected that's guiding you towards the answer. It's because you can look at what the worst case scenario is and then you can take a look at the cost of doing the opposite and say, well, I'm just gonna do that.

It doesn't matter whether water expires in this case. Ok. So it seems to actually talks a lot about this. He has something called the, the, the precautionary principle. And there's other examples like like the water bill that you can, you can look at, you know whether it's, it's the government doing, you know, the FDA is doing something where there's so much epidemic uncertainty that if you think about the risks involved, the decision to make is actually quite obvious.

OK. So you can probably see where I'm going this uh you're going with this with respect to masks, right? Let's take a look at the mass no mask debate. Now we can get caught up in trying to collect all kinds of evidence of whether or not masks work. There's all kinds of epidemic uncertainty here. It's a complex situation. We don't really know.

You can keep trying to grab all the evidence you want, you can stack it up on either side who can get more, who has more truth and try to, you know, get a policy in place. But guess what? It's not gonna happen here. And now maybe down the road, we get enough evidence, maybe, maybe we, we start to resolve through that uncertainty and we get the evidence that suggests, oh, look, masks really do work or, or we don't really know if they work, you know, they definitely do. They definitely don't.

But right here right now, particularly when, you know, the, the, the decision making can cost lives, the right decision should be obvious. It costs almost nothing to wear a mask, almost nothing. Right. You got to pay for the mask, maybe a dollar $2. Right. We, we gotta make sure there's enough masks, but we don't even need the N95, right? We just need something to cover. We can even make this at home at a cloth right now. Do you know if a cloth mask is going to be effective?

No, you don't, you don't. Again, you can, you can go collect evidence to try to support that narrative, but you can support the opposite narrative too. So for intents and purposes, you don't know, you don't know yet, you know exactly what you should do. You know, I, I remember Nasim Taleb mentioning something at the end of his five books of his, of his insert, which is, is the five books he's published so far.

And he, he kind of came to this realization, this succinct realization and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's something along the lines that uh along the lines of, you know, the less you know about a situation, the more you know exactly what you're supposed to do.

Ok. It sounds kind of counterintuitive like the less you know about a situation, the more you know, exactly what you're supposed to do again, I'm paraphrasing, but the idea is absolutely solid because if you have so much epidemic uncertainty, then the decision is obvious. Why would you take the chance that the worst case scenario could happen?

When, if you, when, when doing something that mitigates the possibility, even if it does or does not work is such a low cost, if it costs almost nothing to wear a mask, even though you don't know if it works, that is the right decision to make 100%. That's the right decision to make because you simply don't know whether they do work or they don't. And you know that the worst case scenario is, is drastic, right?

It could be, you know, everyone in the world dying or millions of people dying or you know, or even hundreds of people dying, right? That's too much. So why would you not just wear the mask? You don't need more evidence. Evidence isn't going to help. The problem of induction is exacerbated under complexity. It degrades, it falls apart. Logic helps us to a point to have the conversation.

But the complexity of the situation precludes the stacking up of evidence on either side until you get a winner, until you know the policy until you have the right decision. And so the right decision is known right from the onset, this is a highly uncertain situation. There's all kinds of epidemic uncertainty, right? The lowest cost option here is just to wear the mask just to wear the mask. It doesn't matter if it works or not. Right?

Unless you had some overwhelming evidence that mask wearing was really, really unhealthy. But again, we don't, and we don't really have strong reasons to believe that. Right. You might have some people with health problems who try to argue. Well, I have asthma have breathing problems. Maybe there's issues with mask wearing.

But generally speaking, if you look at the worst case scenario of what could happen, if, if, if, if you have an option to do something very low cost, very easy and it could help mitigate mitigate it, then that's the choice. That's the choice. Now, you might suggest that, ok, does this give us a winner in a way? Because now we're, we're taking the yes mask side. But we have to think about this as, as, as a resolution and a way of achieving mutual respect between both sides, right?

It's not about and we mentioned earlier that, you know, if you're on the Nomas side, even though we're striking this debate at the level of, you know, kind of uh the evidence it still kind of revolves around revolves around this idea that, you know, government control liberties are being taken or getting the economy up and running.

And so if you're very much, you know, like gung ho, let's get the economy back, you know, the the the economy failing is gonna be costing lives or I don't want the government telling me what to do. Well, we can see that the the decision making process isn't really about that, right? Because if, if the government told you, you definitely don't need to wear a mask, then that would be just as wrong, right?

Don't need the evidence to suggest that we know from the onset that wearing mask is better, but not because the government told us, right? And in fact, we saw this right, the World Health Organization originally said not to wear masks, right? They said they weren't going to make a difference. Well, that was stupid. That was idiotic because nobody had enough epidemic, certainty of the situation to be able to make that call. You didn't need to stack up the evidence, right?

You just need to know that the worst case scenario was, was, was very, very bad and that viruses tend to, you know, propagate through the air. And so the right decision without a doubt was to wear a mask. Even homemade, doesn't, you know, even homemade, right? Because the cost isn't that great. So it's not about the government telling you what to do because if they told you the opposite, then you also shouldn't listen. It's not about listening to the government, right?

It's about understanding the the uncertainty of the situation and being uh paranoid about it because the paranoid survive. And we can also say it's not really about holding back the economy either, ok, because you can view this in both ways. You might think that, you know, ok, wearing mask and social distancing in general, you know, that's going to make it harder for businesses to do their thing.

And so you're holding back the economy and so people are losing their jobs and, and of course, a lot of this is all true, but there's also the other side of that, which is look, we have this virus, it is going to slow down the economy. People are going to be more paranoid about things and wearing masks is actually a way to get the economy getting going back faster, right started sooner.

Because if we, we wear masks, it means at least businesses can operate at some level, we can get into grocery stores, we can get into restaurants if we have social distancing or we can do it on the patio, we can get into parks, we can, we can do things even if it's, you know, 70 80% of capacity of what we used to do, we can still run our businesses, we can still slowly get back.

So the decision to wear a mask in the absence of evidence of whether or not it helps or not is not only the right thing to do because the worst case scenario is so bad. It's actually, you know, kind of kind of lubricates the economy, right? It allows us to, to still at least somewhat go about life as usual and get the economy back. So, so this is the point you can make the kind of decision right from the onset, that one makes it not really about the government. Right.

It's not about them saying what to do because if they tell us the opposite, it's still wrong. Right. It's, it's, it's just the fact that it's the right decision given all the uncertainty and it's not about holding back the economy because it can actually help us get back to a functioning economy sooner. So it's not about being for, against the government or for against the economy. Right. That's the wrong way to look at it. It's, it's agnostic to those types of decisions.

You can have whatever feelings you want about the economy and about the government. What this comes down to is the right decision to make, given the uncertainty. So it's a proper reframing of the situation, regardless of your political leanings. Now, I'm not going to suggest that this is gonna make both people agree. Right.

I'm not gonna say that, you know, people are just going to see the light of day and they're going to reframe this and now they're gonna understand what the right thing to do is. And now isn't this great, you know, people aren't about to give up their, you know, political opinions because of, of a reframing of a conversation. But I think it does help us strike the debate at a better level or to have a better debate. Right?

It's not about the economy, it's not about the government, it's about what's the right thing to do, given the uncertainty, right? Le leave the other decisions uh uh as a separate debate as a separate issue.

And I think it helps us work towards, you know, a mutual respect because you, you can understand the side that doesn't want to wear masks because they're right when they say there's not a lot of evidence to support it, and you can understand the side that does want to wear masks because they're right that there's, you know, this, this explosively growing virus and maybe covering the mouth kind of makes sense and, and it's not about stacking up the evidence.

So you, you, you kind of work towards a mutual respect for both sides. You can see where it's both coming from. Again, the power of logic is that you get to see that back up your arguments, back up the grand claims you're making, let me see how you're doing it and you'll see that both the yes mask and no mask side are doing a pretty good job of it, right?

They, they are, they, they can call upon studies, look at the lack of evidence or look at the overwhelming amount of evidence, regardless of the conclusion that you're drawing, you can do it. Now, I can see where you're coming from. I can see why you think the way you do, you're not just taking it at face value, you've hunted after studies. But we can also mutually realize that given the high levels of uncertainty, there is this fundamental limit to the stacking up of studies side by side.

It's gonna be this flipping and flopping and with respect to the mask, no mask debate, worst case scenario is a lot of lives. And so the right decision right now, regardless of your politics, regardless of, you know, what you think the economy should be doing or regardless of how you think, you know, how much control you think the government should have over your lives. It's, it's not even about that.

So let's try to strike the debate at a level that it should be at, you know, and then you can start to work towards compromises, you know, maybe you don't have to wear a mask every single time, like when you're on a hike all by yourself, maybe, you know, we really need to enforce it, you know, uh, inside stores when you're indoors. Right.

And, and obviously you're gonna mix that with, you know, proximity where there's going to be social distancing or maybe it has to be, you know, the 2 m apart as well as wearing mask inside. Maybe there is kind of a balance to strike there that respects people's freedoms to understandably if they're by themselves, not wear a mask, but also make sure that they are doing it when they're around people.

And, and again, I'm not saying this is a full answer, but I think it does allow us to definitely, you know, again, use the power of logic to build a mutual respect from where people are coming from. Understand how to make a decision with such a high degree of uncertainty and, and have that uh with an understanding that's irrespective of, you know, regardless of what you think of the economy, regardless of what you think of um government control. It's not about that.

So let's have the debate at the right level. Let's have a mutual respect. And let's start to work towards policies that can be made even though there's such a great deal of uncertainty in this complex situation. And then finally, we have the science and religion debate. So we kind of came to this realization that these are fundamentally different systems. There, there are different ways of trying to pursue truth of trying to understand our place in the world. They're different.

The question is, are they incompatible? Does it really make sense to say science versus religion? Are these at loggerheads? Can the same person be both a scientist and a religious person? So again, I think that we're going to work towards a great deal of mutual respect between the science and religious side. When we get, when we frame things as logic, people will make these grand claims God does exist God does not exist. You can back up your premises.

You can see that you're being logical about it, regardless of which side you take, you're not taking things at face value. You are backing up what you say and you can do that quite well, either side can back it up logically quite well. Logic affords them a mechanism by which to do this. And that allows either side to see where they're coming from, right? Or maybe it's an internal debate, may maybe, you know, a scientist is struggling with whether or not they should be religious or vice versa.

Right? So, but, but either way that, that seeming tension between science and religion, if you start to break it down on logic, you realize you can back it up both ways and then you see that here we go again. Well, logically we're flipping and flopping a good sign posts of just how complex the situation is. I mean, in some sense, it's the most complex, right? Because the level of uncertainty is seemingly infinite. I mean, we just do not know whether there is a god or not.

Ok. Now again, a religious person might say, well, I do know based on my experience, but that's, you know, different than a scientist would say. Again, we got these differences in how we take evidence and how we, you know, the the epistemology, right? How do you know what, you know, you can subjectively interpret that, how you want, but stepping back and looking at that objectively, we don't know. Of course, that's why it would be called a faith on the, on the religious side.

And so, and so we don't know. And so we don't know, we have this massive uncertainty so much so that not only are we flipping and flopping logically, but we can't even get into kind of a popper type approach where we use evidence to try to kill off our narrative, to try to work against the model of science or work against the model of religion. Because these are just two completely different systems and they don't understand evidence the same way.

So you can't use evidence in that kind of pop approach. So we have two completely different systems. So, so what does that mean? What does that mean as a resolution? Well, I think you do have, I think you must have a mutual respect for both sides because you can't knock the other person down, right? You can't, a scientist is not able to knock down the belief of a religious person because there's nothing within the mechanisms of science that can do that.

It's not able to comment on it because it is a fundamentally different approach to pursuing truth. They don't use evidence in the same way. They can't comment on things that aren't falsifiable, they can't comment on things that are quote unquote, not even wrong, right? They're not right. It's not about being right. It's not about being wrong. They just can't comment on it. There's no way there's nothing in the mechanism of science.

You can talk about religion as, as a, as a practice, as a structure, as something that comes out of civilization. You could talk about that scientifically. But again, let's not forget about what this debate is about. It's not about the practice of religion, right? We're, we're framing religion as the belief in God. Science is not able to comment on the belief or, or, or the existence of a deity, whether or not there is a God, there's just nothing in the system that can do that.

So there's a mutual respect there. As a scientist, you can respect that. If I can't knock you down, then you have every right to believe what you believe. And on the religious side, you know, again, that other extreme example might be something like um intelligent design right there, there has to be a respect that look, you, you can believe in a creator all you want. But, but to put that into the scientific curriculum, just simply doesn't make sense.

Not because it's wrong, not because one person can't believe both approaches, but it's just not scientific, it's just not the way to use evidence. Again, it's just not falsifiable and all the problems that we talked about so far. So I would argue that there's definitely a mutual respect there because both sides have a right to pursue truth in their own fashion and you have to respect that. And not only that, I think there should be a realization that these cannot be incompatible.

Ok. Now, they might be incompatible to an individual meaning, you know, someone who is a scientist just might, you know, stake out their beliefs through science and then think that religion somehow goes against that or vice versa. A religious person just might, might get so much of what they do out of their own kind of, you know, experiential spiritual, you know, quote unquote evidence, right, that they have in their life and they don't see that this objective approach to science helps someone.

And so for maybe for the individual that's kind of an incompatibility, but fundamentally, stepping back objectively and looking at these as two systems, they're actually not capable of being incompatible because they can't comment on each other, right? If two things don't overlap, then you don't have friction, period. If they don't overlap in their approach, then there's no way that they can have friction. The Ven diagram doesn't overlap. So they can't comment on each other.

They don't use the same mechanisms to pursue truth. So how can there be friction? You see, you would have to overlap in order to bump into each other. So in that sense, they can't be incompatible again, they might be incompatible to the individual based on their own beliefs, but that's their beliefs, right? The way that they want to approach life, the way that they, you know, realize truth in life.

But fundamentally as a way to pursue truth, you, you, you can't truly argue that, you know, one person couldn't have both or that two people aren't doing a, uh, an equally valid way to, you know, maybe approach nature or try to understand the world. You know, they, they can't be incompatible, they don't bump into each other, they can't comment on each other. There's no way that they could have friction. Ok. It's all, it all comes back to this epistemic uncertainty. Ok. So that was quite a ride.

Thanks for sticking with me. I hope you found this episode. Both parts interesting. Uh It's probably an episode you could go listen to again. We, it was a lot of stuff we, we covered, but we took a look at the, the structure of logic, how to frame an argument. We, we hopefully we understand the power of that, right. It anchors our conversation. People can back up their claims. You can use it yourself. You can call upon other people to do that.

When you hear other people's premises, you can work towards a mutual respect because you see where they're coming from, they're not just taking it at face value. So I think it's, it's something that everybody should think about when you get into these debates is how to structure that argument, how to back up what they say with premises and how to use that to gain a mutual respect.

But also in that having a fundamental understanding of the limitations of the logical approach, how stacking up, you know, evidence on one side more than the other, it becomes very problematic under complexity and you can't really get a winner. The more complex the situation. We took a look at the mass, no mass debate. We took a look at science and religion. We stepped back, looked at these objectively and framed them in terms of where logic helps and where we run into problems with it.

We work towards, I think in both cases, a level of mutual respect, we understood how to make decisions despite high levels of uncertainty. And I think in the end, not that this answers everything, not that we're, you know, expected to agree on everything. And I think this is really the point. We don't have to agree on everything. We just have to be able to frame our conversation so that we can respect where the other person is coming from. We allow people to back them up.

We understand the limitations of that structure. And I think this is really a problem in the world today. We're having issues, a lot of problems trying to strike conversations, right? We, you know, people either take the hard logic approach and that's kind of off putting because they think facts alone are gonna be what, what wins the case. And that's just not, not the case, right? That's not gonna happen.

Or you dismiss logic, you dismiss rationality altogether because you don't think it leads to a resolution. And so you just kind of make everything about subjectivity, everything about your personal experience. I think both sides of that are wrong. You, you don't want to dismiss logic.

It has a way of anchoring our conversations, but you do have to appreciate the contextualization around the facts, the the proximity of anybody's narrative to reality and the fact that there is this fundamental limitation to logic. You got to have both and through that we can reach mutual respect, we can strike conversations at better levels and work towards more productive conversations on today's hot topics. So thanks again for sticking with me.

Uh you know, most of the episodes I do are not two parts, they're not that long, they're usually just under an hour. So I know there's a lot of topics jam packed into this. Hopefully gave you something to think about. You can find me on Twitter, Sean A mcclure Sean underscore a underscore MCC lure. Reach out if you have questions, ideas for future episodes. Again, thanks for joining me and I'm looking forward to the next one. I hope to see you there.