Atheist Slogans You Should Stop Using - Joe Schmid

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Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the twenty-first century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q and A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate.

some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there. Joe Schmid, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. How are you doing, man? We we haven't done this in a a fair amount of time now, but we were just talking about how popular these episodes seem to be. People like overviews, they like lists.

They like comparisons. They like sort of uh I I I I don't know. I don't know what it is about these videos, but people seem to to really like them, so I'm I'm glad to have you back today. I'm glad to be back. I mean I think it's just because I'm like overwhelmingly sexy. That that's that's the only explanation. The the the women are just like swooning.

I'm sure the people in the comments will let us know and now since we said this there will inevitably be TikTok edits of these comments. So, you know, edit away. We're here today to discuss some of the most popular atheist or like counter-religion, counter-apologetic slogans. And this was your idea, because I wanted to do another episode with you and you said, Hey, how about this? I don't know about you, but

all the time on the internet, not just like in comment sections and stuff, but I see like videos. It's either like l people making videos on on social media or it's like clips of someone like Ricky Gervais and they've got these kinds of like one liners and you're seeing people say like Oh well I just believe in one God less than you do. Or it's like the the Ricky Gervais thing went viral kind of recently, right? Of like, you know, if all the books were burned in the world

the science ones would come back and the religion ones wouldn't come back. And it it sort of they turn into these like slogans that atheists use all the time. Now, look, I don't believe in God. I think you don't believe in God, at least the last time I checked you didn't. Um and I think some of these slogans work. Some of them don't, so today let's go through as many as we can do in in a reasonable amount of time and see if we should keep using'em how's it sound?

Sounds good to me. Yeah, I mean these are often used as like thought terminating cliches, but uh or you know, like mic drop moments. So we'll see if we have any mic drop moments uh in defense of them or maybe in responding to them. We'll see. I'm sure we'll have Yes, sir. Okay, well let's start with a claim which is it is it Carl Sagan who first said this? It was someone like that. I I think it might have been Sagan who said that extraordinary claims

require extraordinary evidence. That's claim one. And I think it's because, you know, a lot of the religious claims that that people make are are pretty sort of out there. You know, people rising from the dead supernatural interventions into the world and people like to say, well, we've got evidence for these things.

But for a lot of atheists i i it's maybe you can't say, Oh, well, you don't have any like any evidence at all for this kind of stuff, but it isn't really doing it for me and this is supposed to capture that kind of feeling, I suppose? Yeah, I think so. Um I mean, Sagan talks about not only about religion but also You know, like alien abductions. I remember watching a video when I was in my new atheist phase of Carl Sagan talking about aliens.

Um and he's just noting that like these claims maybe seem to like be antecedently quite improbable. They run very contrary to our ordinary humdrum experience, to the way we generally know the world to operate. Uh and when you have claims like that, Seems like you need some pretty strong evidence in order to believe them. Maybe he would cash out extraordinary in some way other than pretty strong evidence?

But I think that's maybe the most charitable interpretation here. I mean, we actually may might not get sparks flying for this one,'cause like I think there's a very charitable reading of this slogan, which is just like clearly correct. I don't know what about you Well, I've heard people say in response to this.

Like, no, extraordinary claims just require ordinary evidence, right? Like if if your sort of epistemological standards are such that I require, you know, X amount of evidence to believe in a claim

Sh I guess there's something about like the the prior probability of the claim which makes us want to like heighten the amount of evidence needed. So technically speaking, we might be saying something like, you know, if the prior probability of the thing that you're claiming is much lower, like at least according to my assessment, than the like amount or strength of evidence.

goes up. But there is a response to this which sort of says, you know, I I don't know, like should we not just say that if there is evidence for something to be the case, then there's evidence for it to be the case. And if that evidence leads us to something kind of like wacky or extraordinary

you know, so be it. It's it's the same, you know, amount of evidence that convinced us of some other claims, so why should we have to change? Do you think that the strength of a piece of evidence, in other words, actually, like, varies with the like weirdness of of the claim. After all, the weirdness of the thing that we're trying to prove here

It's kind of a product of uh a product of us and our credulity. It's not like a if it's just true that miracles occur in the universe, then that's just a fact, like any other fact. Right? The only thing that makes it extraordinary Is that we as people are a bit more incredulous to that kind of thing. But that doesn't change that it's just a fact in the universe that has evidence in favor of it. See what I'm saying?

I do. Sometimes though, you do need like more or stronger or better evidence to believe these seemingly extraordinary claims compared to seemingly ordinary ones, right? So like you know, my mom might testify to me that she got her nails done or something like that. You know, she's just making one claim. This is one person claiming something. Um but like that seems totally sufficient evidence for me to believe that

you know, my mom got her nails done today or whatever. Um, but like if my mom also testified that, you know, she was at Walmart and she saw the packer of the groceries just start like levitating and flying all around Walmart. Um, I I don't think I should just immediately trust her. I'd be like, okay, did you have some kind of like psychedelics before going to Walmart or something? Or you know, did you misperceived were were there like invisible strings or ropes or something like that? Like

Uh I I would be much more hesitant in that case. So I don't know. And then notice that this is just like the same kind of evidence. It's just testimony from one person. Uh we can specify this the the cases in such a way that like the person seems equally honest in both cases, is equally trustworthy and so on. Um

So like I think most charitably this is just like an instance of Bayes' theorem, right? So like Bayes theorem for the audience, I mean it's just a mathematical equation that tells you how confident you should be in a hypothesis in light of certain information or evidence.

So like I would understand most charitably extraordinary claims as claims with just like a super low prior probability, as you were saying. So like that just means like prior to looking at the evidence and maybe in light of our background knowledge. Uh the claims seem really unlikely to be true. Uh and then extraordinary evidence, I guess charitably interpreted, would just be you know, evidence that's powerful enough.

that's strong enough to overcome a very low prior probability to, you know, make the claims reasonable to believe. So if we understand things that way, then extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. But it is a slightly attenuated sense of extraordinary. Like we're sort of just reducing this to probabilities.

Yeah. I think it's also it's just a good rhetorical tool, right? And I think it does make sense. Like you get what the person who's saying this is is getting at. Christopher Hitchens said on a few occasions, you know, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but religion rather daringly fails to provide even ordinary evidence in favour of its extraordinary claims. Which I think is a good segue into our second and and perhaps more interesting claim.

Which is this. Uh there is no evidence For God. I'm not taking these in order by the way. I've got your Google Doc, but we're I I'm I'm moving them around as I see fit. Um, there is no evidence for God. As Hitchens says, you know, religion provides nothing. People say this all the time. Like when you ask people online, like, why are you an atheist?

What's your evidence for atheism? They say it's it's not really like that. It's more that there's no evidence for the thing that you're claiming. Do you think that's true? Uh no. So like what is evidence? Evidence, at least as lots of philosophers understand it, is some piece of information that raises the probability of a hypothesis. Like if your hypothesis gets a boost in light of certain ev in light of certain information, then that information is evidence for the hypothesis.

Can I ask a question about that definition? Because that's really helpful, right? We need to define what counts as evidence. And that seems reasonable. Like, okay. You said something like uh is it say it again the definition of evidence? Yeah, so i in a s in slogan form, which is fitting, evidence is probability raising. So it's just evidence is information that raises the probability of hypothesis.

Okay, so but I I wonder like i is there a counterexample to this that would seem a little sort of weird? Like I mean, if I said you know, I I've got this hypothesis that there have been alien abductions. And if there had been alien abductions, then I don't know, maybe there would be

some geopolitical influence, like the government would start focusing on that and s things would start going badly elsewhere. And look, like, you know, the government is shutting down or whatever, and and therefore I've got this evidence of alien abductions. In theory. You know, that that evidence is kind of predicted on my hypothesis, and that evidence is, you know, forthcoming, but it would seem a little bit too loose to say that that counts as evidence for alien abduction.

Uh why not? I mean it's just weak evidence, right? And it's evidence that's significantly overcome by countervailing evidence, right? Um So I don't know, I I don't really feel the intuitive poll of saying that that's no evidence whatsoever, because after all, I mean, the hypothesis is boosted by it. Um

I mean listen, there are kind of philosophical challenges to this. I I recognize that. But I would just want to diffuse those intuitions by saying I'm not saying it's conclusive evidence. I'm not saying it's evidence sufficient to believe the claim in question or the hypothesis in question. I'm only saying that it is at least some potentially weak evidence in favor of the hypothesis. It's at least

some reason to think that the hypothesis is true. Maybe it's an overwhelmingly weak reason. Maybe it only boosts the probability hypothesis from one in a trillion to one in a billion. But I take that to be just uh some evidence. Because otherwise, you know, the hypothesis was super duper unlikely, and you just made it much more likely. You gave us some more reason to think that is true than we previously had. Hm. I think when we start saying things like

Okay, technically this is evidence. It's just really, really, really weak evidence. Right. I I this is kind of a line of defence actually. If someone says there's no evidence for God, it's like, No, no, no, no, there is evidence, it's just not very good. But surely

There comes a point when the evidence is like so bad that basically, again, like rhetorically, you can just say there's there's no evidence. Because like if if you pressed somebody in a TikTok comment section who said there's no evidence for God and you said, Really there's not like one fact about the world which even like marginally increases your creed they might go, yeah, okay, but you know what I mean? What I mean is that like

There isn't anything out there which should compel any reasonable person to like significantly increase their, you know, credence in the idea that God exists. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fair? I think that's a f that's a fair rendering of what many people have in mind. I mean, I suspect you underestimate the depravity of TikTok comment sections. Um but

Like I really have come across people who are like, No, no, no evidence and you know, it's like that that video, no pomegranates and they just keep on screaming, No, no, no. I don't wanna see it anywhere. Uh so I think some people really are like that. Um in fact many people.

the more reasonable people uh will grant that the okay, maybe there's like s you know, slight evidence or weak evidence, but like yeah, like no no sufficient evidence or no evidence to compel a belief or something like that. Mm-hmm. Of course, you know, theists will disagree with this, and I think that there's like non-trivial evidence. substantive evidence to make theism a live possibility to people. Uh I certainly don't claim that oh goodness. Uh wow, where to start? Uh well

I mean we could talk about, you know, fine tuning, we could talk about contingency arguments, we could talk about arguments from consciousness. It just turns out there's a lot of people. Right. Uh, you know, count as evidence. And I I think it's helpful to point out to people that In saying that, you know, fine tuning is evidence for God.

the instant response from an atheist, I think reasonably, is to say, No, no, no, like th you know, there are lots of other explanations for this. There could be a multiverse, there could be some necessary reason for those concept and it's like

Yeah, that's that's true. But to say that this is evidence for God is not to say that this establishes the definite existence of God. It's just to say that you know, it it gives us reason to increase l like your definition of evidence is sort of gives us reason to

you know, increase our credence in a hypothesis. But having said that, with something like fine tuning, when we've got like a bit of a stalemate, you know, all of the constants of the universe, the strength of gravity and stuff, they're so finely balanced that it can't be down to chance.

Well, one solution is that God did it. One solution is that there's a multiverse and, you know, that means that because there are infinitely many universes, some of them are going to be finely tuned, and we're in one of those. And because you've got a stalemate here Unless you do have some conclusive evidence to show why one is better than the other, can we really count the like fine tuning as evidence of either of these hypotheses, if it can also be evidence for both of them?

Ah, there's so mu so many places I wanna go here. This is amazing. Okay. So uh one thing to say is that uh some piece of information really can be um You know, like good evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses. So like suppose uh we have a fair deck of cards.

And we have a dealer who we know to be honest and we know the dealer tells the truth. Uh and there are four of us around the table and we each guess the suit of the card that the dealer pulls from the top of the deck and doesn't reveal Um So uh I guess that it's uh a heart. You guess that it's a diamond. And then our two other guests, who are they? You know, Joe Foley Joe Foley and Donald Trump or something. So Joe, um

Joe says that it's a a spade and Donald Trump says that it's a a club. Okay. Uh the The dealer says, Well, I'll tell you this. The suit is red. You know, so it's like it's a red suit. Okay, boom. Instant confirmation of my hypothesis, but also instant confirmation of your hypothesis, which is incompatible with my hypothesis. My hypothesis went from a twenty-five percent chance of being true to now being fifty percent likely to be true.

Likewise, your hypothesis went from twenty five percent chance of being true to fifty percent chance of being true, and we've essentially completely disconfirmed uh, you know, Donald Trump and Joe Foley's uh hypotheses. Okay, so boom, some piece of data that we just gained is evidence, uh, and non-trivial evidence from multiple incompatible hypotheses.

Uh that's just an example of how that can be the case. So that's one of the things that we're going to do. Yeah, you've doubled your initial probability. Exactly. And yet that evidence does that for two mutually incompatible views. So something can be evidence. For two views at the same time, even if both of those views are like competing explanations for the for the phenomena. That's Exactly. Yeah. And I mean things you know, similar things happen with like

suspects in a crime. Like if you have two suspects and they're like indicators for why one of them might be the actual suspect of the you know, the actual uh promulgator of the crime and there's some indicators that the other one is guilty. Um, you know, that can actually be I mean that's gonna significantly raise the likelihood that they're uh guilty compared to just random Joe Schmoe on the internet. Um so that's one thing to say. A second thing to say is that

You know, theists will arguably say that no, actually we don't actually have a tie here, you know. Like there are various reasons to think that God is much more plausible than uh a multiverse. Like Even with explaining fine-tuning, it's not actually clear that uh the multiverse even raises the probability of our most specific evidence here. Our most specific evidence is that our universe, this very universe,

is such that its constants fall within the exceedingly narrow life permitting range. Um but positing a multiverse in which each universe kind of is like a a toss of you know it's basically like a a toss of the the die, whether um the constants fall within the narrow life permitting ranges. Um

That doesn't make it any more likely that this universe specifically would be fine tuned. It just makes it likely that some universe or other would be fine tuned. But it doesn't predict our specific data here. Um mm-hmm. Now, of course, there there are various, you know, this is called the this universe objection to the multiverse hypothesis. There are uh various philosophical

uh responses to this. I don't want to pretend that this is uh decisive. My broader point is just that uh theists do try to wield reasons for thinking that um the multiverse hypothesis actually doesn't adequately explain um the evidence concerning fine tuning. Um and Then the third thing and final thing that I wanted to say was that uh we should also keep in mind that like we want to take a holistic approach to the evidence.

So, like, even if for any particular piece of evidence you can find some alternative hypothesis which would explain it, maybe even would explain it slightly better than theism. Um It may still be the case that theism offers like the best, most elegant, most unifying explanation of a broad diversity of data, you know, like fine-tuning, consciousness, the existence of moral agents, you know, psychophysical harmony.

The fact that there's a contingent universe at all, various things like that. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, do you like to keep up with what's going on in the world? Me too. The problem is that in this internet age it can be difficult to trust the sources of our information. Biased news media, in particular, is something that will never go away, but by using today's sponsor, Ground News,

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is the argument for God's existence from the number of arguments for God's existence. Because th it's like everywhere you look you can construct an argument from Consciousness and Contingency, design, like an argument from beauty, an argument from physics and the extra reason, like yeah, like all of that. So it's it's ki it is kind of kind of crazy. Um and I think yeah, it it it is

rash to dismiss that evidence. But I think a lot of the time when people say there's no evidence, what they mean is there's no compelling evidence that has convinced them that God is a good explanation. But it is worth pointing out, like you say, It should be holistic. In the same sense that like, you know, if I don't know, i if if you were like driving with your wife and you crashed your car

And you said, like, I think that like the brakes stopped working and I said, Yeah, but y you know, it could it it could also be that your wife is like trying to kill you. You're like, Okay, look, in this circumstance it seems far more likely that the brakes just stopped working. That could be true. But then if like as well as that

You got food poisoning after your wife had cooked you a meal. And again, in that circumstance, it's like uh it's way more likely that something went wrong, some of the food was off, then that your wife is trying to kill you.

But then like later that night, you know, you get locked outside of your house in the freezing cold and nearly freeze to death. And aga it's sort of like in any individual instance, if if it was just the one of them, you would say, This extraordinary hypothesis that your wife is trying to kill you is is like the worst option. But when you've got all of these different evidences which at least sort of seem consistent with this more extraordinary like idea,

when they sort of all get put together, they sort of cumulatively give you better reason to believe that your wife is trying to kill you, or by analogy, that God exists. So, you know I think we need a a sort of better a better philosophy of evidence and what counts as evidence and how it fits into an overall picture of a

of our views on the universe. But to say that there is no evidence for God. If you mean literally no evidence, like not even bad evidence, I think that's just trivially false. But if what you mean is something like, oh there's no good evidence I think maybe a lot of people just underestimate the strength of this great tradition of natural theology and some of the arguments that it has at its helm. Yeah. I mean I'm I'm with you there. I mean

We see that there are contingent things around us, things that can fail to exist. They don't have to be included within reality. And, you know, everywhere we look, it seems like contingent things, whether individually or collectively, have explanations beyond themselves. Uh, if you think that there can be contigent things that don't have explanations, it starts to become a mystery why um

You know, contingent things don't just exist kind of all willy nilly, kind of randomly all over the place. Uh, we start to get into potential skeptical scenarios and various other things. And you know, no it seems like no contingent thing could explain why there are any contingent things at all,'cause you're kind of just presupposing the very thing in need of explanation, and so it seems like we might need to appeal to

some kind of necessary foundation of reality. Okay, let's look let's investigate what kind of reality this thing uh produced. Well oh my goodness, it has various striking features, striking seemingly massive coincidences that are kind of coordinated to allow for very valuable things to happen like

virtue and knowledge and love and relationships and whatnot. You look at the you know, the fundamental constants in the laws of nature and it turns out that um you know the the the basic parameters in the laws of nature have to take on very, very specific values in a very tiny range over the full range of conceivable values that they could have conceivably taken on uh in order to give rise to anything interesting uh in the universe.

Oh no, oh my goodness, lo and behold, the consets do indeed fall within those narrow life breeding ranges, you look at the basic uh laws of nature. They're very strikingly elegant and simple. Um they actually successfully apply to the contents of the universe when conceivably they could have failed to apply to the contents of the universe and failed to induce temporal evolution from the initial state.

That's Nomological Harmony. That's a recent paper by Brian Cutter and Brad Saud. And then, you know, uh the universe of all is and oh my goodness, we don't have just like zombie creatures who aren't conscious. It actually consciousness is sprinkled around. There are these conscious beings. That's kind of crazy. Uh and that's like seems like pretty valuable.

Uh and also, you know, the consciousness is linked up with the physical universe in ways that make rational sense. Our conscious lives are strikingly orderly, harmonious, and intelligible when conceivably they might have failed to be that. And then lo and behold, we have tons of moral knowledge when it seems like

if evolution and naturalism are true, if there is no God behind the process, it seems very, very striking and surprising that, you know, our beliefs would be our basic moral sensibilities and intuitions that beliefs would be like by and large

uh truth tracking, uh because evolution after all only cares about survival and reproduction. It doesn't care about giving us true moral beliefs specifically, and this extends of course to other a priori bits of knowledge. So like you can see what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to like actually defend these things. Bye.

who created God because that's the thing that you're not that's the thing that you're not taking into consideration there, Joe. That is actually gonna be our next our next uh our our next claim, but that's quite extraordinary. I think like If I said to you, can you just as an atheist speed run Like proving God's existence.

I think that's probably the the the best attempt I've ever heard at that at such a thing. So congratulations on on coming up with that off off the cuff. I mean, you did just speed run proving God's existence, which is pretty impressive. Um and and yeah, I mean like l listen, like

to to what Joe has just said, everybody. There's a lot in there and it's interesting and it's powerful. Now you might think in any individual case, like, Yeah, but that's not gonna make me believe in God. Okay, it doesn't have to. But to say that they're to say that if I just took up

all of the all of the facts about the world which even marginally increase the likelihood that there is some kind of designer, and you said that that just would have zero content, that there would just be nothing, no evidence whatsoever. I think it's probably a result of either confusing what we mean by evidence

or just not realizing like how deep some of these arguments go, even if they ultimately fail, which an atheist is, you know, um, condemned to to believe. Um, but I think having proved the the the the mass of evidence, the mass of potentially mediocre evidence that's that's there for God's existence, I do want to move on to that next claim, which is

Who created God? Who designed the designer? It takes up sort of many forms. Richard Dawkins, uh, in The God Delusion, had a chapter called Why God Almost Certainly Doesn't Exist. rare for new atheists, I think, is to is to really make a proactive philosophical case against God's existence.

And Dawkins said, Well look, you know, if the universe is really complex and therefore requires some kind of complex designer, because that stuff just doesn't come up out of nowhere, what you're not considering is that the designer themselves would have to be more complex than the complex thing that they've created. You know, it's not like a it's not like a a a a simple like chess computer can build

a MacBook Pro, you know? But a MacBook Pro could build a chess computer. The complexity of the creator has to be bigger than the thing created. So even if we accept all of these arguments for God's existence, yeah, contingency first cause, there must be a designer. Who designed the designer, Joe? Wow. You know what? That that I've just basically convinced me of of atheism. I mean, I'm gonna I mean I literally just as you were talking, I was ordering my Fedora. Um

Uh but anyway, yeah, so who who designed the designer? That's yeah, like very, very good question. I mean I do want to say like and who created God. Like I don't want to be little people who, you know, raise these questions. Like these are good questions. Um what is the relevant difference between god and non god things? Which explains why non God things require an explanation, but God doesn't.

That's a very good and deep philosophical question. So I don't want to like And it feels it feels like special pleading, right? Like we're we're kinda being funny here and you're you're right. We've spent I mean, I spent like what, ten years with these discussions and I actually use that as a bit of a joke. Like anytime anyone makes any argument related to religion, I just am like people

But but who created God? Because it it's just it's such a sort of common thing to hear, which sort of throws theists into a frenzy because they're like, that's not how it works. But it does feel like special pleading. It does feel like someone saying, Well, you, Mr. Atheist, you need explanations for contingent objects and you need design.

But g God oh no no no god God doesn't need that. God doesn't need a designer, God doesn't need a beginning, God doesn't need a cause. And it does sort of feel like you're just carving out this space for a thing

and having a different standard for for your idea than for anybody else's. So like you said, for the theist to use God as an explanation for things like causation and design, but say that God himself is immune from causation and design, you have to show that like in principle there is some kind of difference Which allows us to do that with God, but not with like the universe or something. And do you think there is such a difference?

Yes, so I mean it's not like I can pinpoint any particular difference and say that I'm basically like absolutely certain that this particular difference explains why God uh would be immune from these calls for explanation. But I think that there are just like a sufficiently large range of like reasonably plausible candidates that

The theist really shouldn't be worried about this sort of question. So that's my like broad take on this, and I can get into some of those candidates. So like, you know, one thing is that at least traditionally, God is conceived of as a necessary being. He exists necessarily. He could not have failed to exist.

Um this is quite different from contigua things, things which really could fail to exist. There's nothing, as it were, about their nature which demands that they be in reality. Now At least to a lot of people and certainly traditionally, um, theists have held the following. There does seem to be some kind of relevant difference between contingent things and necessary things in terms of kind of calling out for a deeper explanation. When you think of a contingent thing,

Its nature is, as it were, indifferent to whether it falls on the side of existence or non existence. I'm speaking to the case. Yeah, so it's a thing that does not have to exist. It doesn't have to be in reality. So, you know, um Alex's dildo that he just purchased, you know, that's a contingent thing. Uh it didn't have to exist. It didn't need to be in reality. It can be destroyed. It was created at some point.

People didn't have to create it, it didn't have to be included within the world. By contrast, consider the the claim that one plus one equals two. Well That's not only true. That like must be true, right? It's not like one plus one could have equaled 17 or something. Like that's just not even possible. Uh so it's necessarily true. And at least

A lot of philosophers and certainly theists within the theistic tradition think that, you know, necessary things like one plus one equals two, it's like, does that really kind of call out for a deeper explanation? It's like, oh, there's so such a mystery as to why one plus one equals two. My goodness, we need to deposit something like uh explanation. Like no. Um

it it just could not have failed to be the case. Uh there there's no deeper reason there's no deeper demand for there being like some kind of explanation for why it's the case. Um, and if God is like that, as opposed to, you know, the aforementioned dildo, um, then it seems like there could be a principal difference between God and the dildo and various other things. Like again, like This water bottle.

Could have could have been in existence, but also could have failed to exist. So there's like this pressing question, why does it exist? What accounts for why it falls on this side of the dichotomy when it genuinely could have fallen on that that other side of the dichotomy? We also have ample experience with contingent things and we uniformly see that they have deeper explanations. Um but like

We don't have similarly ample experience with necessary things, uh having or even calling out for deeper explanations. And in fact the necessary things that we do tend to have acquaintance with, as I was just mentioning, like laws of logic and math and whatnot. Like actually there's a much less less of a call to give some kind of like So that's that's just one that's just one candidate relevant difference between God and other things. There are lots of other people.

And stuff always needs a cause or an explanation. And then the atheist can say, but what about God? Like God is a kind of stuff. Then you're saying he doesn't need an explanation? No, because the theist is being more specific. They're saying contingent things. require an explanation. Like you you need because it could have failed to exist, because that water bottle could have existed or not existed, the fact that it does, there must be a reason why it does and said it doesn't. Whereas if you

construct an argument which proves the existence of a necessary thing, then if you were to ask, well, why does it exist? It's like, what do you mean why? Like that that's just That's what it means to be necessary, is that it just does exist. Existence is a part of its very essence. You know, you can't separate those two concepts. And that's a bit like asking, why is one plus one two?

Which you can literally ask, and it might be a kind of interesting question, but the only real answer you can get for that is that it's it's kind of just self evident. It's just true by definition, you know. And so if a theist sort of treats God that way, then yeah, to ask, well, what caused God is just a category error. However, The next move for the atheist would then be to grant that and say, Okay, fine, so God is just a necessary thing that doesn't require a cause but

Why can't I just say that there's a necessary thing? Maybe the laws of physics are necessary. Maybe the existence of the universe is just necessary. Yeah, we've got the Big Bang, but maybe the Big Bang was just, you know, the end of one universe and the start of another. So like Okay, there are some things that don't need a cause, but yeah, wh why why's that why's that gotta be God?

Well that's a very good question. Uh and I mean so like I I could try to put on, you know, my theist hat and uh respond. I mean I think this is a a very reasonable rejoinder, that's one thing to say. Um but I mean theists will probably say, like, listen, um

Not all things are equally good candidates to be like the necessary foundation of reality. I mean, you know, like Do we do we seriously think that like, for instance, like a Disney princess might be like the the fundamental, necessarily existent explanation for everything else?

I don't know. Uh that seems kind of implausible. Um, it seems way too kind of I don't know, arbitrarily limited in various ways. Uh it could conceivably have been totally different. It you know It has various features that we've got.

really do seem to cry out for explanation. Like why is its hand only this shape instead of like a slightly larger shape or a slightly smaller shape? Why is it this size? Why is it only like eight inches tall instead of like eight point one or seven point nine or something like that? Like there are various features of this thing which

really do kind of seem contingent and seem to call out for deeper exclamation. We can conceive of them being radically otherwise. Um and like Theists will typically say that um God isn't like that. God does not have various arbitrary limits on his power. It's not like he can do everything except for create like, you know, blueberry pancakes or something. Like no. Um God just has unlimited power.

A very simply, compactly specifiable property for a being to have. Um, God is unlimited in perfection. He's unlimited in knowledge, he's unlimited in value. Um And so God doesn't seem to have all these various like very highly precise, seemingly coincidental, um

arbitrarily limited properties or features that cry out for deeper explanation. And so seems like God may be relevantly different from, let's say, the initial state of the universe or like, you know, laws of physics or whatever, uh, in terms of being like a a reasonable candidate for the necessary foundation of reality. And again, like think of think of the other things we know to be necessary. They are

almost uniformly, distinctly non arbitrary. There's nothing like arbitrary or me seemingly coincidental or conceivably otherwise about one plus one being two, or like, you know, it is not the case that P and not P as a logical law, you know, like, etcetera. So, uh We might think that like God seems to maybe more naturally fit on that side compared to a Disney princess or the highly specific and seemingly arbitrary arrangement of the initial conditions and whatnot. Uh conversation to

uh devolve into a conversation about the arguments and the the evidence because we'll be here forever. But I think it's just it's just worth pointing out that there are there are reasons to say that There are things in the universe which can be immune from rules which apply to other things in the universe or outside of the universe. Things like causation, design, explanation, all of that kind of stuff. Um but I mean I suppose we should give

Maybe a short hearing to Daorkin's point about complexity in particular. Like it does seem that you know, complex things beget complex things. And so are we just imagining that we've got a sort of really complex God whose sort of attributes and stuff

are just like necessarily that way. Because again it it sort of once you start imagining a complex God who like has complex ideas and plans and wants to send his son to save people from a foreseen human tra it starts to get a bit sort of complex and it uh like you just said, like, you know, i could something like a Disney princess or whatever, like, be like necessary, it seems a bit too arbitrary. People could say the same thing about a a complex God with a complex plan.

Ah, perhaps they could. And perhaps that just means we should accept that God is not complex. God is quite simple. Um, you know, maybe uh so you know, there's this huge tradition within philosophy, um, like the classical theistic tradition which conceives of God as Yeah, a very you know, perfectly simple being. He's not built up out of more fundamental components which make him it's not like he's got a brain or anything like that. It's not like he's got these like

discrete ideas that he has to like first he has to represent in his mind and then like deliberate how to create and then create in accordance with like the super complicated plan that he came up with his mind. Like, no, God is just a ver a simple, pure Perfect. infinite unlimited consciousness, right? He's just like this unlimited foundational mind with no deeper parts, no it's not like there are complex interconnecting related things within God's mind. Like no, he just very simply, um

you know, wills the good for the good's sake, uh, and he's perfectly sensitive to reasons and it's not like he has to represent very complex things in his mind before doing them. No, he just kind of uh exerts a direct intentional control over his effects. uh without those kind of intermediaries that very finite and limited creatures like us have to make do with. Um

So I don't know, th it kind of neglects this long standing classical theistic tradition on which God is just like pure perfection. You know, he's just this unlimited, simple being, uh Yeah, I I think there there's some sense in that. I mean the divine simplicity thing is a bit sort of weird to wrap your head around, but it it's at least worth pointing out that

a lot of theists just believe in a God who is not complex, who's actually the actually the opposite of complex. Because for something to be complex It kind of implies that it's got like lots of parts. that all kind of work together in various ways. But for something to have like parts seems to imply that it kind of has limits.

like limitations on its part, and if God is this like unlimited, pure act, you know, being, you wouldn't expect him to sort of be gerrymandered in that kind of way. Um but Given that there are so many different you know, ideas of what God is like. You know, some people think God is simple, some people think God is complex. Um some people think that God sent his son to die on a cross. Some people think that God's final messenger was a man called Muhammad.

Uh, some people believe that God has many manifestations in different sort of, you know, pantheistic deities. The atheist, surely. just looks at all of these gods and says to the Christian, you know, you don't believe in the Muslim God, you don't believe in Thor, you don't believe in any of these other gods. All I do is go one god further. You already know what it's like to be an atheist in respect to 2999 gods. I just go one more. So there, what do you think of that?

Brilliant. I mean yeah, that's on that's unexplained, by the way. This is the it's the it's the Ricky James bit, you know? Yeah. Well yeah, the one less god thing. Um yeah, this is So again, I want to emphasize that there's something good and valuable about this slogan. I don't want us to lose that, right? You know, it's an appeal to consistency, maybe, or like non-arbitrariness, like you shouldn't be carving out

arbitrary exceptions for your own views. Uh you know, and it's just in general an injunction against special pleading. Right. And and that that's good. That's a good kind of injunction. But in terms of like an argument for atheism or scoring dialectical points, at least against sophisticated theists, I think it'll fall flat. Um I mean it may work if all gods had an equal likelihood of existence, so that if some gods like very likely don't exist, like Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster or the

Disney princess god, um, then, you know, neither would the monotheistic god of traditional Abrahamic religions, because all gods are equally likely, and so those gods are super duper unlikely, so so is the uh traditional god of Abrahamic religion. But of course The traditional theist is going to say that not all gods are equally likely. Right. We have we have good grounds according, at least according to the traditional theist, um, to say that.

There's a single, perfect, necessarily existing, unlimited being at the foundation of reality, uh seems to be much more kind of intrinsically plausible than these other candidates. Uh, for the various reasons that we'd be going over, you know, it's not like arbitrarily limited. We have reasons to think that there's some kind of necessary foundation to reality. Um, it's a relatively elegant hypothesis that could be quite compactly described in terms of um

These very uniform properties like omnipotence, all power, all knowledge, all goodness, and whatnot. It's not carving out any arbitrary exceptions. And moreover, they'll say that in addition to being quite intrinsically plausible and much more plausible than these other candidates like um Zeus or Thor or the flying spaghetti monster, we do indeed have lots of evidence for the existence of such a traditional monotheistic God from in like

fine tuning and consciousness and various other features of reality. And maybe even they'll sprinkle in some miracles for their favored theistic tradition. Um but that's, you know, an optional add-on for the uh connoisseurs. Yes. Well, I wanna say one thing in defence of this claim, which is that I think it often comes up in a context where people are like, um

I know, so somebody kinda says like how could you be an atheist? Like ha like psychologically almost. Like w wha what is that even like? Like how can you go around not like thinking that this is like all has a creator? And in a way it's it's a way of trying to get across like At the very least, you kind of know what it's like. to be unconvinced of a certain proposition, right? Like you know what it's like to be unconvinced.

That it's raining outside right now, right? And it's just sort of take that feeling of not being convinced by the evidence. Like, why are you not convinced? Why, why is sort of one sound you hear outside that could potentially be rain. Why is that not enough to convince you it is raining?

I don't know, it's just kind of not in a way that I can't describe. And the atheist kinda wants to say that's kind of how I feel about arguments to the existence of God And I think that's fair enough, you know, that this is just what it's like. However As like an argument, as like a sort of, you know, there are all of these gods, right? And like what is it? Christopher Hitchens used to say, like.

Yeah, it it's since they can't all be true, you know, it's far more likely that none of them are true than one of them is, or just s something just nonsense, j it was just ridiculous. Um but he said it with such charm, as as he always did. Um I think this fails for like

so many reasons. Firstly, when we talk about like these thousands of gods, right, and then we're including things like Thor or Athena, not to mention the fact that like the Greek gods and the Roman gods are like the same gods, right? So if you're double counting, you know,

these these gods. That that that shouldn't be allowed, you know. Um but also yeah, you know, if you've got like Jupiter and you've got Zeus. It's like, nope, same same God, just you know, different different words for the same for the same being. But also like These are not the same kind of thing as like the unlimited foundational creator of the universe.

Right. David Bentley Hart writes quite compellingly about this in The Experience of God. Like when people are talking about gods with like a small g, they are not talking about the same thing as the conclusion of the contingency argument, right? Because imagine that you were like living in ancient Greece and you believed in like all of the pantheon of gods, except Athena. You're like, no, I I I don't believe I don't believe in Athena. You know, that's the only one I don't believe in.

That wouldn't be like significant. It that wouldn't like change the ontology of like how the universe exists or like it wouldn't remove or or or like add any mystery as to why the universe exists as a whole, any of that, it would kind of be a little bit irrelevant because Athena is a different kind of being to the unlimited creator of the universe, right? So

Really, when we're talking about God with a capital G, the only other gods which should be comparable here are those that take up a similar position. And I'm not even just talking about like Zeus. who is like the top of the pantheon of gods. I mean the thing that gives existence to all of those things. So in the same way, like in uh in Hinduism, you've got all of these different gods, right? With all these different arms and like elephant heads and stuff, except There's only one like

creative principle behind the universe, which is Brahman. Right? And and all of these sort of gods, small G gods, are like manifestations of Brahman. But any Hindu will tell you that essentially they are monotheistic. They believe in one unified, like limitless, indescribable, animating principle of the universe, and it's called Brahman. So on once again, you've like limited your scope. There are not thousands and thousands of gods in the way that we need there to be.

There's actually only a few. And then you've got to contend with the fact that all of these different gods, so to speak, like the Muslim God and the Hindu Brahmin and the Christian, you know, Yahweh, Like, are these actually different gods? Or are they just like different interpretations of the same thing? Like they're all saying there is some kind of like limitless animating principle behind the universe.

And the Christians say, Yeah, and I think that that thing is a trinity. And the Muslims say, Ah and I think that thing is like tarweed, it's like unified. And you know, the Hindus might be like, Oh, and I think that thing is is you know difficult to put into words but manifests in this way or that way, you know.

But maybe they are kind of talking about the same thing. And the obviously I'm not doing the whole all religions are the same thing, but the thing that's different about them is in their doctrine, their response to this sort of divine, you know, creator of the universe. And so really there's kind of only one God that you can either believe in or not, and that's the God who is the, you know,

uncreated creator of the universe. It's like you either believe in that or you don't. It doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter if you think it manifests as, you know, Vishnu or whatever. Like it's basically on or off. It's a binary, right? And even if that weren't the case, I I this turned into a bit of a rant, even if it really were the case that there were like thousands of different gods to choose from and you only go one god further, there is a big difference.

between like believing in ten versus eleven gods. and believing in one versus zero God. Right? Because if there if there does need to be some explanation for the universe, you might say, Oh well, there must be a god at least. There could be ten, there could be fifteen, there could be a hundred, I don't know. But there has to be something, right? To say that there's zero is not just like

another trivial, oh, minus one, minus one. Once you get to one and you then do minus one again, you've actually just like deleted an entire like realm of explanation. So I would compare this to Imagine that like I was sat round with my three brothers, right? And we had our mother had had us via a sperm donor and we didn't know who our dad was, right? And I said, You know, I think I think our dad is is American.

And, you know, my brother said, Well, I I think our dad is from Australia and the and the the the third guy goes, I think he's from France and then the fourth guy goes, Guys, you know what, like, I don't think we had a dad. And you're like

What? Like, hold on, what what what are you talking? Of course we have a dad. We need to create it. Like we that we wouldn't exist without a dad and he goes, Oh well go guys, guys, guys Like, you know, you don't believe in the Australian dad, you don't believe in the French dad uh I just go one dad further.

You'd kind of look at him like he'd lost his mind. And I think that when this argument is used in that kind of argumentative form, that is unfortunately the amount of force that it has. Like there is a God or there is not. And however it sort of manifests, It's not like the invention of a bunch of new creative principles of the universe. It's just just different interpretations of the same thing. Do you agree?

Yeah, I mean I'm over here like sweet. I'm like a you know, I'm having a religious experience over here. I I I also think it's funny that you were able to Impli you know, unintentionally tie in the like atheists have daddy issues trope um into your example, which I quite appreciated. But anyway.

Yeah, so I think we can put that one to bed. I mean, people might disagree with us. This is of course an invitation for people to to comment if you disagree with us because It will hurt our feelings, but it's good for the algorithm. So do let us know if you think we're missing something, but I I just think that

Again, but the annoying thing about these these slogans is that they are like good rhetorical points. And they often get like an applause because it kind of sounds sensible. And again, if you just mean like psychologically, you know what it's like to not believe in, you know the truth of the Quran. That's how I feel about the Bible. Yeah, that's fair enough. That's totally fair if you're just trying to explain why you're not convinced of a particular tradition.

But to say that you have good reason to think that there is this like fundamental, like metaphysical, ontological question, is the universe created, can be answered in the same way, I think is a mistake. Anyway, um It's difficult to even know like where to take this. Um all right, let's go let's get let's get a bit more cultural. Um

Here's a claim. I can't remember who was the originator. It might have been someone like Richard Dawkins. Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. Yeah. Yeah this is Ah man, I should have had the neck beard with this one. This is a this is a good one. I don't know. So it's like, yeah, science also creates the atomic bomb, right? Um and also flying you into buildings, I don't know, that seems to just be like a perversion of religion. Um

I don't really have much to say about this. Like w what is exactly is this supposed to be? Like a rhetorical point? Like science is better than religion? Uh, I guess it just depends on how you like use science. Science is a collection of tools to investigate the natural world. Religion is maybe a collection of spiritual tools to investigate the spiritual world or something like that.

You can misuse the tools in either case. You can misuse the tools of science by creating an atomic bomb and then politically weaponizing it and then dropping it on tons of innocent civilians and whatnot. Um W and you can also misuse the tools of religion. You can try to interpret verses that aren't supposed to be interpreted it's a certain way, to, you know, dehumanize others, to justify racism, sexism, violence, terrorism and whatnot.

But you know, sophisticated adherents of the relevant religions will just tell you that these are perversions of the relevant religions. And for the religions for which it's not the case that these are perversions, then I would just say so much the worse for those particular religions. Um but I think uh again the the more sophisticated versions of the religions don't have these like nasty consequences. Um, but That's just my point.

uh i there's this conflict thesis between science and religion, that they're somehow in conflict with each other. And I think that that is often the case. There are particular religious claims or uh doctrinal affairs which run in the face of scientific understandings that we have of the world. But it kind of led to this, I think at the height of New Atheism, it had this.

like we're on team science, you're on team religion. And the point is like science is great. Science does all this cool stuff for us and it takes us to the moon. But religion is evil. And the difference is like yeah, people want to point out

But yeah, like science also gives you the atomic bomb, sure. But the scientific method doesn't like tell you to drop it on people, right? Science is like a key that opens the door to heaven and hell, as I think Richard Feynman had had talked about in his He like learned it from a Buddhist or something, I'm not sure.

Um you know, it's j it's just a it's a tool and and you can use it to sort of do whatever you want. That the thing that you need, because reason is the slave of the passions of course, you need some kind of motivating principle on how to use it. And the the point is that For a religious believer who, you know, flies into a building, like

They they had to quite strongly believe that there was going to be an afterlife, that there was an overarching reason to be doing this, otherwise they wouldn't have done. That's not something science can get people to do. You need this This belief in the

in the ultimate correctness and the divine authority of your behaviors in order to commit such in incredible acts. And that's something that if you if you're just a scientist who doesn't believe in religion, You know you're you're not gonna be you're not gonna be beholden to that. I know you're doing your hardest, you're doing your darndest, but you said some false claims there, so uh I gotta I gotta step in and save the day, I suppose. Yeah. Um

You don't need religion to, you know, get people to do these heinous things, right? And you don't need to have some kind of like divine purpose and whatnot. Like You'll find uh non-religious terrorists, you know, various socio-political explanations can be offered for the resortment to terrorism, right? Uh there's nothing I just think there's like nothing really unique to religion here. Yes, religion does have this.

potential to galvanize people to violence, or at least to provide a post hoc rationalization uh for violence. But the same happens with politics. Political ideologies. Right? You know, the Nazis. Nazis, uh you know, they did some very, very, very, very, very, very terrible things. And uh a lot of it was like motivated just by like this political ideology, um, and like this deep tribalism.

and this festering hatred for other human beings spurred by, you know, propaganda and and various dehumanization tactics and whatnot. Um, and sure, you know, like you'll find some religious stuff making its way in there, but like a lot of this really is just like about, you know Expansionism, we're the superior race, like at bottom it's just like racism and hatred and whatnot, uh, and and like political power. Um, you know, politicians.

Politicians do lots of really bad things. So politics can get people um doing bad things. You don't need religion. It happens with corporations and business owners. Money will get you to do these sorts of really, really, really bad things. You don't need to feel like you have some kind of like divine institutional

purpose or whatever. And hey, even hold on, even the institutional pressures of science, like publisher parish, right? Like uh the pressure to get tenure, um securing grants and whatnot, can get people to do Really bad things like fabricate data, plagiarize, mistreat, abuse subjects of experiments and whatnot. Um It also I think it depends on what you mean by science, right? Because like when when we say science, I think what what somebody wants to mean is like, oh science is just

how we understand truths about the world. And yeah, that sounds great. Whereas religion is this set of doctrines that you have to follow that flies you into buildings. Okay, yeah, that that sounds pretty bad. But like you could just as easily say that like Uh people use s like w like during the pandemic people say follow the science or you know, on on debates about gender people say that someone's not being biologically accurate or whatever. Like

Science, like the science and and science is like a process, becomes a prescriptive thing. It's not just, hey, we're trying to understand truths about the world. It's like science is telling us what we should do, right? And and I think that happens more often than than um people in this context give it credit for. And you could say, Oh yeah, okay, but that that's just when people are like misusing

science or or really the core of science is just understanding what's true. And yeah, if people want to then come up with doc if if political parties want to then use yeah, okay. But then I could say, yeah, but religion is just a is just an approach i is just the soul's response to the divine in the universe, right? And and then if individual religious groups want to come up with doctrines that allow them to go around, you know, killing people, then then fine. But they're they're just you know

You could do that for both. Um yeah, I t I think that th th that science Like, we had this idea that i in the Manhattan project when people were like building the atomic bomb as quickly as they could, that what they they w they were just doing that because they just wanted to like

figure out the truth about how atoms work. They just wanted to understand and marvel at the beauty of like no, like we know why they were doing that, right? Like it's quite clear that in that case this like scientific method is like created and justified and motivated and enacted upon with a particular intention, which is the development of a bomb. Uh, governments aren't doing that for the fun of it. They're doing it so that they can use them at least as a deterrent, right? And you know

religion is is kind of doing the same thing. It's it's it's telling you to do a particular thing, but I think it's it's fair enough to just say that the uh especially like if if it was something like, you know, like Molecular like chemistry helps us develop medicine, whereas Wahhabiism, like, as a doctrine, sometimes flies people into buildings or or something like that, right? Maybe. But then it becomes a lot less um catchy. You know, if if you want to

if you want to sort of generalize religion to be bad, then I think you have to generalize science in the same way and you you run into all kinds of problems. I've often said that saying religion, like as a thing in its entirety, is bad is like saying politics is bad.

Like yeah, y you you can say that and that makes sense. Yeah, politics sucks, man. Politics causes wars, politics drives families apart, po like n can you name me one war that wasn't caused by politics? No, you can't. And yeah, if you were to then say therefore

I think there is no correct political position and I think we should all just be apolitical. That doesn't like follow from that, right? Like religion as a whole can of caused wars and been really bad and and whatnot, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a correct way to interpret like good religion. In the same way there can be a way to do good politics, even if you can simultaneously say, I hate politics and politics is bad. That's that's what politicians say, who are trying to like

run the country in a new, like, way that they see as more like empathetic and true and and and honorable, they will they will say, like, oh, I hate politics. That's why I'm trying to fix it, you know? And I think religious people do this all the time. They say, I just I hate what religion has become in the popular understanding. I just wanna like

meditate and like spin around in a circle drinking lots of caffeine until I like experience unity with the divine. I I'm not I'm not on with this whole suicide bombing thing. Um anyway, which is a relatively recent invention as well. I mean like suicide bombing within Islam only really sort of cropped up in the last hundred years or something and it's a it's it's not exactly the most theologically grounded of of doctrines, uh, within Islam. So you know, it it is un unfortunate the the

uh the the way that it's it's so easy and compelling to generalize. But I think we just need to be careful. And that's not to say that you can't y you you can say if you want to, like, I don't like Islam. I don't like Christianity. Yeah, I think these religions preach evil things and it's no wonder that b you can say that.

But I think you ha just have to be more specific. What are you talking about? Are you talking about particular doctrines? Are you talking about the religion as a whole? Are you talking about the holy text? Are you talking about the way that it's been like culturally received? Just be more specific. Um which is never good for sloganizing, I suppose. This is true. Yeah. I mean it just looks like I guess the general trend that I see here is that.

maybe not religion per se, but putting people in positions of authority over others, right? Uh that just can significantly raise the likelihood that people do very bad things. Um and also, you know, giving people the power to exploit others. Um and also being significantly exploited and trampled on by others.

All these sorts of things can galvanize violence and often you know, religion will of sometimes be used as a pretext or postoc rationalization. And this is not to say that there aren't any, you know, truly religiously motivated wars or whatnot. But uh I just think when you when you delve into the evidence with a careful eye More often than not, you will at least find that it's these more socio political explanations of violence than religion.

And I but you know, I I still you know, I still want to be able to say Like yeah, religion is like bad and does In various ways, yes. Yes. And it does sometimes fly you into buildings. Like it it it it does do that. But you know, a as you say, like it's complicated. It's it's not as simple as like, you know

Like nine eleven happened because, you know, Muslims wanted to kill the infidels. It's it's just like just no way that that is like the correct interpretation of why nine eleven happened. Um And there is a there's there's probably a version of nine eleven which happens without strictly speaking religious influence. It's hard to know people would be willing to like send themselves to no afterlife, sure. So the specificities. But the idea of like, you know, attacking America

as a terrorist. The idea that that was purely like religiously motivated in the strict sense, I think is just a is just a mistake. So I I wanna still be able to say, yeah, religion does sometimes do these things, but I think sometimes is the operative word there. And like

if you're able to treat religion, even though it's a a relatively inert descriptive term, as this thing which motivates and is responsible for the things that religious people do, I think you can kinda do the same thing with science. Like science. is also responsible for all kinds of of you know death and destruction. Really it's neither of those things. It's um at least not in their totality. You kind of need both. Like religion without science.

doesn't get you the aeroplanes to fly into the building, right? And Some people say that science without religion doesn't get science off the ground in the first place, but that's a whole conversation for another time. At any rate I think we should move on. And I would like to ask you about a claim

Which I've I've used a lot and it is a bit of a slogan um that people throw out as well, which is that again, we're we're atheists here, right? And we're speaking to the religious person and we say, Okay, so you're like a Christian or you're a Muslim or something. But if you'd have been born somewhere else in the world, you'd have a different religious belief. Like, yeah, you're a Christian because you grew up in like

you know, Kentucky, right? But if you'd have been born in Iran, chances are you probably would have been a Muslim. And given, you know, like if if God exists Then given that he probably wants to come to know everybody. Why would he allow people's like likelihood of being saved to be dictated by where they happen to grow up? So if you were born somewhere else, you'd have a different religion, therefore, that gives me reason to to distrust the truth. of the religion to which you belong. Thoughts.

Yeah, so this one is one that I just think conduces to lots of really cool and fun philosophizing. So like this is one that I just I've got like a soft spot for this one,'cause it's like It really does get people thinking and it's a really interesting point. And y you kind of I think we all sense that there's like something at the core here which is like interesting and right in some kind of important way. Um

Now it is kind of hard though to find what exactly that is. Okay, so like it can't just be that w had I been born elsewhere, I would not have believed that P is some kind of like defeater for P. So it kinda somehow like undermines my justification or grounds for accepting P. I mean, listen.

Had I been born elsewhere, I would not have believed that I was born in Indiana. I mean like had I been born in Ohio, I would not have believed I was born in Indiana. That doesn't mean I should just like start questioning like whether I was born in Indiana or something. Yeah. Like okay, that general principle

Can't be true. Um, okay, so maybe we have to modify the general principle. Is it something like had you been born elsewhere and used the same like method for belief formation that you in fact used? Uh, so like deference to religious authority or something like that, then you would have believed something different. Um Maybe that's like the modified principle and maybe that's supposed to like undermine the belief or something like that.

In theory, this is a version of the genetic fallacy. Right. So so the genetic fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy. Which says that because the means by which you came to believe something were faulty, the thing you believe must be false. So I I might want to say, Oh, y y you only believe in Christianity'cause you were born in Kentucky, right? Like, okay. Um but somebody could say, Yeah, but I I only believe that the earth is a globe because I was taught it in school.

That's that's not a very conclusive reason. Like that's a bad reason. And so does that mean it's false that the Earth is a globe? Because my reason for believing this true claim were a bit sort of yeah, faulty or weird? It's like, yeah, well if you'd have been born a th two thousand years ago or You would have thought that the earth was flat. I don't even think that's True, by the way. Um suppose it were. You know, that that's not depend depends where, I suppose.

But like, you know, you could have been born at a certain point in human history where you would have thought the earth is flat, right? And you know, so if you'd have been born elsewhere, you would think the earth is flat. Therefore, you know, can we really say the earth is a globe if you only believe that'cause of where you happen to have been born?

So it seems fallacious to say that because you've got bad reasons to believe something, that thing must be false. However I think that when you're talking about God's existence This doesn't apply. I I was gonna write a piece on this called the genetic fallacy fallacy, right? Because people bring this up all the time.

And it's like, yeah, okay, so for for just things that just happen to be true about the universe, like where you happen to be born or, you know, whether the earth is a globe or whatever Yeah, like you you could be it would be expected on theism or atheism or whatever, that there would be some people who just don't know those facts, you know? Like if if you were born In like

some rural, like Asian town three thousand years ago, you wouldn't know what the capital of France in twenty twenty five is. Right? And that that's just like that's not a problem. Like, yeah, that's just that's just true. However, If my philosophy was that there was a creator of the universe who intentionally created people so that they could enjoy the knowledge that Paris is the capital city of France in twenty twenty five.

Then given that he created a universe in which many people were born not knowing that I would think that would be disconfirming evidence for the existence of God. So it's not the fact it's not just the fact that, oh, if you'd have been born elsewhere, you know, you wouldn't have believed in God, but also that if there was a God

who was like a particular god, like a Christian God, and he wanted everyone to be a Christian, then why would he set up the world in such a way that people could be born elsewhere and not have that knowledge? So in this way it's a version of divine hiddenness. It's it's a way of saying so you wouldn't just say like I can't remember how you how you formalised it a second ago, like, you know

y you you've got uh y you only believe P because you were born in the country that you were, therefore P is false. That obviously doesn't work. But what if we say something like, you know, premise one

There is a God. Premise two If there is a God, then God would want everyone to become a Christian, you know? Change it to Christian God if you like. And then premise three might be something like If God wants everyone to to become a Christian, he would not set up a circumstance in which many people were precluded by, you know, their cultural condition from becoming a Christian.

And then the next premise would be something like some people are born into countries where they believe other religions. And when you put all of that together you get this contradiction, right? Which is that it couldn't be the case that you're only a Christian because you were born in Kentucky, if there is a God who designed the universe to make sure that everyone came to know him, right? I think that's actually quite a powerful observation.

Yeah, so I I agree with that. I think that's a powerful observation. I wanna say a few things here. Um Some in defense of that observation, some maybe attacking a little bit on behalf of the theist.

Um well one thing to say is that uh I mean, I think the points about a genetic falla you you know, the points about the genetic fallacy and whatnot are fair, but I I think that the best proponents of this style of argument are not trying to show that, you know, your belief is false because like had you been born El Sura you wouldn't have believed that P. Instead they're really just trying to like

remove your grounds for believing that P to try to like show that you are not justified in accepting that P. And in fact, like, facts about the origin or the provenance or the etiology of our belief can indeed undermine them in this way, right? So if I if I pick up a book on Madagascar birds and it's got like

seemingly realistic pictures about Madagascar birds and it's got all these descriptions about, you know, their their their weight and their diet and like where they're located and whatnot and their like mating procedures and whatnot. Um you know, and I formed the various beliefs on the basis of this seeming tech about Madagascar birds. But then if I learn that the origin of this textbook is like a chat GPT hallucination.

Right. Uh like this is not explained by or connected up with in any appropriate way facts about Madagascar birds. So like even if the facts about Madagascar birds had been different, I still would have been reading the book and it still would have said all the same things. Uh and like the facts about

what the book says are not explained by facts about Madagascar birds. Once I learn that information, once I'm apprised of that information, I should suspend all my beliefs. I should stop believing everything that I just formed uh on the basis of the testimony of of the book. So facts about the provenance of your beliefs can indeed undermine them. And I think that's really what this objection is trying to get at. It's just trying to like undermine the the theist

Or the Christian or the Muslim or the Buddhist or the Hindus beliefs. Um so that I just want to briefly say that about your point about like genetic fallacy. Um I mean one thing to note, as a as an aside before I get to what you said, uh I just find this topic endlessly fascinating. So I want to say some stuff.

Like this argument would arguably also apply to the atheist, right? Like had you been born in like seventeenth century France, you would not have been an atheist. Like I can guarantee you that. Okay, maybe not seventeenth century, but like

Twelfth century Italy. Okay. You would be Catholic, like trust me. Yeah. I I agree. I well, I am a Catholic, even though I was born when I was, because there's no way to officially leave the church except for one twenty-six year period, I think, between the eighties and two thousands. Um weird weird little history that. Anyway, um I get what you're saying. Yeah, because people say this in response. They're like, Yeah, but if you were born elsewhere, you wouldn't be an atheist.

Yes, which is expected if there's no God. Right? If there's no God, then I would expect that what you believed about the world would just be a product of your cultural conditioning. Atheists think that religions are just like localized mythologies essentially. So yeah, if atheism is true, we would expect that people would believe whatever their local society told them to. So the fact that if you were born in Saudi Arabia you'd be a Muslim, is totally in accordance with atheism.

But if we assume theism, if we assume that there's a God who created the world intentionally wanting everyone to become a Christian, then you would not expect that everyone's beliefs would just be a product of their cultural environment. So when I say to a Christian, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim.

That's a good reason to distrust Christianity. But when the Christian says to me, Well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be an atheist, that's not a good reason to distrust atheism. There's a there's an asymmetry there, I believe. Oh yeah, so I think that's I think that's right with a uh with an asterisk. I'll get to the asterisk in a second. I was just

I I don't know if people who like put out the slogan have this in mind, like this comparative expectation of like the distribution of religious belief conditional on theism and conditional on atheism. I suspect that at least a lot of people who

proffer this uh slogan, instead have in mind this kind they're trying to like undermi they're trying to say that people aren't justified in believing what they're what they believe just because, you know, had they been born elsewhere, they wouldn't have believed it. Um

So I suspect that they're not making this evidential argument that that you're giving. And I think what I say what I said earlier is kind of a response to that more undermining defeater approach to the slogan. And I I think uh this is a good segue then to talk about the kind of more expectation based argument.

Okay, so like one thing I wanna say is I I'm I'm sympathetic to this argument. I think this is some evidence for atheism and against theism. Um But like I think the evidence we shouldn't think that it's like overwhelming or like particularly strong because we can at least see some inklings of a reason for why God might permit.

there to be such doxestic discord concerning the true religion and whatnot. At least At least if we have a view of religion on which, like, you're not being burned alive for eternity for getting the wrong beliefs about God. Um okay. So like what are some of those reasons? Well, I don't know. There are lots of like really great goods that can come about as a result of um inter religious dialogue and as a result of trying to help each other come to learn stuff.

um about the divine. Uh so there's a really interesting paper on this very topic by Dustin Cromet. It's in uh the journal Faith and Philosophy. It's called like We Are Here to Help Each Other, Divine Hiddenness and Something. You'll find it if you search what I just gave you. Um and you know, his basic thesis is that like there are various great goods that um can only be realized if there is, like, some ignorance about

um what God is like, about God's nature, uh, and about various things religious. Like we can be difference makers in each other's lives. Like we can make the difference to whether or not they come to have a knowledge of of God and whether or not they, you know, come to have True beliefs about religion and whatnot. And so if if there's this like great good of us being, you know, responsible for one another and helping each other.

come to learn important truths about religion and also just to like increase our empathy and our understanding of um differences, you know, like loving people across idea deep ideological barriers, um, serving people across deep ideological barriers. Uh there are just various great goods that

are only possible if you have this kind of doxastic discord, um among relevant religious factions. And so we can at least see an inkling of why God might do this, he why he might have some reason to do this. Um and why he might sort of deputize us in various ways to

help others come to the knowledge of of God and come to knowledge of religious matters, which will require a lot of people to have mistaken and false beliefs about God and whatnot. Um now again things get Things get as always, in philosophy of religion, your views just get like monumentally more difficult to defend if you think that like you have to have the right like

State of mind before you die in order to avoid hell. Because, like, there are just like so many isolated people who didn't even have the chance of being evangelized. Uh you know, like isolated shit. The idea that it's like what you believe at the moment you die is what's important.'Cause like you know, like I I know for example that if if like judges in court

are hungry, they're like more likely to send someone to prison. Right? Like the the the content of your belief can be can be so sort of volatile and based on such contingent factors that the the idea that that moment is is what is what matters is is so strange. And also you kind of have to address like how specific does the belief have to be? Because we w we're sort of quite trivially saying, like, Oh, well if you were born in Saudi Arabia

you know, you'd be a you'd be a Muslim. But like, you know, I I could be talking to a Catholic friend and say, Well, if you were born in a particular place in America, you would probably be a Protestant. I could say to a Protestant, you know, if you were born in the town over, you'd probably be a Lutheran

I could say, you know, if you were born to the family who lives next door, you would have this one like really specific disagreement with your current theology. You you know, you would think that I dunno, whatever, insert the most minor trivia. You you would think that, you know, John chapter twenty one is a later edition and it was not in the original gospel. And it it like you kind of have to for this to work

You kind of have to define like how different the belief has to be for it to be like unexpected that God would allow you to believe that falsehood. You know, would God allow you to go wrong on like you know, uh uh like are the birth narratives historical? Or was Corinius the governor of Syria at the same time that Herod was king of Judea, you know?

Maybe, yeah. But it it seems weird that God would allow you to go wrong in like not believing the entire Bi you know that the entire Bible. Like I think you have to be a bit more specific about about what is like the extent of the the wrong belief that you would have if you were born elsewhere. Yeah, and and I I just think the force of this argument will It will just depend on one's soteriology or like, you know, one's views about salvation. Um because again, like if you have a view on which

Um, salvation either everyone's eventually going to be saved, or even if not everyone is eventually going to be saved, salvation is much more closely tied to your actions and how well you you know, you loved others and served others in this life. Um, then We can kind of

I don't know, at least to me, it's not like super unlikely that that God might allow this doxastic discordant ignorance to prevail simply because he's deputizing us and there are various great goods that result from deputizing us to, you know, help each other come to knowledge of God and you know and whatnot. Um but if y instead you think that there are these dire eternal consequences for getting The belief's wrong, then this looks hopelessly implausible that uh you know people would just

I'd be almost at the whims of whether or not like a missionary r reached them. Yeah. But but also it depends on what you mean by belief, right? Because I th I think the big thing that often gets unspoken in this particular conversation.

is that when we say, you know, you would be a Christian or you would be a Muslim, we mean nominally. We mean that that that's like what you'd be calling yourself. Like if you grew up in Saudi Arabia You'd be like, Yeah, sure, yeah, I'm a Muslim, yeah, I I believe in God, I believe But like

Can we guarantee that the contents of your belief would actually be like theologically inaccurate? That is to say, like, you know, i if I go to a to some random town in America that's full of like evangelicals and they say, Well, we're all Christians And then I go like across the road to a bunch of people who are like Buddhists, so they don't believe in God. But when I observe their behaviors, they're like

you know, helping each other out and they're they're sort of they're they're giving alms to the poor and they're treating everyone as their brother. And the Christian evangelicals across the road are being like fiery, political, like divisive, that kind of stuff. I'd be like, well

Like, are you are you gonna be saved because you call yourself a Christian, because you've got that name, or do you get saved by like doing the will of the Father? Because if the way you actually get into heaven, which I think is what Jesus taught, is doing the will of the Father then you've actually got a lot more of that going on with the Buddhist.

Than you do with the evangelicals over here, right? I don't mean in like actually Buddhists and evangelicals, I mean in my particular thought experiment, right? And so you could say, like, well. Yeah, if you were born in Saudi Arabia you'd be more likely to call yourself a Muslim than oh to be a Muslim in the in the sense that you sort of follow the Quran, but

You know, maybe if you actually added up all of the people who broadly speaking like do the will of the Father or actually do the stuff that gets you into heaven, it might actually be like fairly balanced across the globe. And there's kind of no way to test for that really. No, I mean that that yeah, that seem that seems right to me. And I just you know, I think I've said this before and I might have even said this in

um one of our previous tier list videos, but I just think it's kind of beautiful and I want people to appreciate this more. I want I want atheists to see that this argument maybe isn't as forceful against certain views of God. And I also want theists to maybe like adopt these views because if they don't then um They just face some pretty serious challenges. So I just want to like lay out the the beauty of this picture, right? So like even consider the non-theist, right? Like if God exists.

Seems quite plausible to me, at least that like nontheists could be a in a kind of implicit relationship with God by loving and deeply pursuing, you know, truth and beauty and goodness and justice. Since you know, if God exists, these things are intimately bound up with him or his nature in certain ways. And so like arguably you'd be getting closer to God, even if you don't recognize it, by doing these various actions. And, you know, you mentioned uh Jesus in the gospel.

I think it's in Matthew, right, where um the people who fed the hungry and clothed the naked said to Jesus, uh, Like Lord, w when do we do these things for you? And Jesus replied, Well, whatever you did for one of these Lee's brothers of mine, you did for me. Mm-hmm. Um and I mean it's just pretty beautiful when this comes out in C. S. Lewis's um like some of his last lines in the the last battle. Um

I'll just quote this. Actually I don't I don't recall if these are the last lines, but there's some beautiful lines and I brought that I pulled this up'cause I think it's beautiful and it it I want theists to consider this. Okay, so a little bit of background. Emmet is this uh character. Emmet is actually Hebrew for truth, I believe. I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly, but who cares? Um and Emmet was serving

Tash, the evil character. And you know, there's Aslan, who is of course, you know, like the Christ figure in the story. Um, so I'll just quote this. Then oh, and Tash kind of at the end of his life, as it were, is In the Eschaton, meeting up with Aslan for the first time. Um by the Eschaton you mean like the sort of the afterlife Yeah, the end times. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so the here's the quote. Then I fell at his feet and thought Surely this is the hour of death.

For the lion, who is worthy of all honor, will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the lion and die than to live and not to have seen him. But the glorious one bent down his golden head and touched my forehead and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I'm no son of thine, but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.

Then, by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the glorious one, and said, Lord, is it then true, as the ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The lion growled so that the earth shook, but his wrath was not against me, and said, It is false, not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take the services which thou hast done to him.

For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not. and it is I who reward him. And if any man does a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves, and by Tash his deed is accepted.

Dosh that dost thou understand, child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also but I said also for the truth constrained me. Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the glorious one, unless thy desire had been for me, thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly, for all find what they truly seek. I know, it's like this is what I propose this picture to you. If you want to avoid this very serious argument against your view that Alex has articulated.

I think this is the picture that you need to go in for. It's worth pointing out that that Uh, we've talked about how there are people who are sort of not nominal Christians who yet have like, you know, served Christ or insert whatever religion. But also like Jesus says the opposite as well. He says that there are many people who will come to me essentially in the eschaton.

and say, you know, Lord, Lord and he'll say, Depart from depart from me, I never knew you. That's quite a famous line from the gospels, as if to say There'll be people who call themselves Christians, but they don't know me. I don't know them, you know, because they who cares what you call yourself? It's about what you do. And you've got this flip image of people who

Like are like w wha when did I when did I do something for you? And he's like, Oh, you didn't even realise but you were you were by helping these people, you were helping me And so it does seem to be like not a necessary requirement in my reading of Christianity, to like really know exactly like what your like doctrinal commitments are or whatever. I I don't think that's what that's what matters. I mean it seems crazy to me that you would get to the Pearley Gate.

And God would sort of check his notes and go go like, you know, like, Okay, right, so you're a good person, you gave charity, you know, you're Christian, you go to ch Oh you're You're a Lutheran? Oh man, so cl so cl never mind, back you know, back back you go. It j it just it's it's obviously sort of nonsense, I think.

Yeah, yeah. No, you get the theology exam and it's like homoousius or homo weus and you're like, Oh my gosh, like, oh no And then you you take the wrong one and you just immediately start burning into flames. Like this is just Yeah, you need like one hundred percent on the test. Yeah, but the thing is right, so I've used this argument and I I will continue to use it. It's this sort of geographic location thing. But this isn't so much an argument like I kind of regret saying that this is

strictly speaking an argument against like God's existence. I think it at the very least shows that the understanding of Christianity, or any religion, but I use it against Christianity in particular, that Like your doctrinal commitment. are the things by which you're saved, are the things that matter. That like you need to

It's not just that, you know, no one comes to the Father except through Jesus. But no one comes to the Father except through knowledge of Jesus and like precise details about exactly how he was incarnated and stuff. I just don't think that's the message. And so This argument still works and if someone's willing to turn around and say, you know what, fair enough, Alex, like that is a bit weird, so I guess

like what you're saved by is not like being a nominal Christian or believing this or believing that, but just sort of, you know, being a being a good dude and living in in accordance with the will of the Father, then I would probably have to say, Okay, fair enough then, this problem at least shrivels, you know, by comparison to what it was. But I just think there's still some some truth in there. It still just does seem a bit a bit weird. Um but it goes away if you have a a non doctrinal

approach. Or also if you're if you're some kind of theist who Maybe you're just like a pantheist.

where you kind of believe that the universe is made out of consciousness or something and it's like, yeah, you call yourself a theist, but it's not like you don't believe in like a God who's gonna send you to heaven or hell and wants you to do particular things. There's just kind of a

a creative, you know, essence behind everything. Yeah, I mean ma maybe then you just sort of stumble into whatever you stumble into. Like there are there are ways out for the theist. But I I I I want to say that it still remains to me like a powerful sort of question mark. I'm like, really? Like, really there's a God who exists?

And yet, like allows entire nations to just, you know, become beholden to demonic pagan entities. I dunno, man, it just seems weird to me. Seems unexpected, shall we say, in a in a Bayesian sense. Yeah, I think we've exhausted what uh what we both want to say on this. So Okay, so let's move on. I I wanna talk about evolution and evolution disproving God, because we said that there were going to be some new theologicies to to explore. But before we do that, because that might be a bit lengthy,

Let's quick fire some of the and and by the way, these are these are kind of arbitrary. I I I don't know if you just like came up with these like from some thought. I don't know if you asked Chat GPT or whatever, but whatever the case, we've we've probably like missed A few important slogans, but there are a couple left which I think deserve a mention. Um okay. So relatively quick fire, right. Claims are not evidence. What what does that mean? Where does it come from and why is it on this list?

What does it mean? That's a good question. It's slightly unclear what it means. I think it comes from uh Matt Dillahunty. Matt Dillahunty, right? I think so. I think that's like his biggest motto, like claims aren't evidence, and then you know he like

hangs up on the call or something. Um yeah. Uh you know, it's a it's a that's a nice way to end your calls. Um yeah, so I think a maybe a a claim that approximates what people are trying to express with this slogan is The following The mere fact that somebody claims that P does not provide evidence for P's truth. I think that's what they're getting at.

Am I right? And and and this comes up in the context of the resurrection, right? Because uh Matt will be debating a Christian and they'll say, Look, there are all of these people who claim to see Jesus after he died and Matt will say, Claims are not evidence. I need evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Yeah. Um so I in my view, this is this is just clearly false. I mean, like very often the fact that someone claims that P is evidence for the truth of P.

This is just called testimonial evidence. Uh namely you know, evidence you get for the truth of a proposition from the fact that someone testified to its truth. That is that they told you that it's true. So for instance, you know, my friend claimed that he bought a new soccer ball. This provides pretty strong evidence that he did in fact buy a s a soccer ball. It doesn't prove it. He could be lying.

Right. Or he could have like misperceived a soccer ball and he thought that you know he thought that it was a soccer ball, but it was actually like uh cleverly disguised basketball or something. Um but still

It provides strong evidence that he did in fact buy a soccer ball. Or, you know, again return to Alex's new dildo, you know, he he testifies that he bought a new one to add to his mounting collection. Uh and that's I don't know, that's a pretty good evidence that he did, in fact, buy such a thing, right? Um And like listen, science science.

crucially hinges on testimonial evidence. If you throw testimonial evidence out the window, we are all screwed. Right? Like science relies on saying, like, hey, listen, I performed this experiment. Like Here is the picture of the experimental results. I didn't fabricate this, right? I am testifying to you. I'm claiming that this is a real picture that I took of my stuff. Um, you know, I'm testifying to you that I have sixty seven participants in my study. And that I measured these things, right?

Science is a big game of testimony. Um and you know, of course there are ways to like try to independently corroborate that by having other people produce studies, but again, that's just adding more testimonial evidence to our body, a big body of testimonial evidence. Of course, very like systematically and carefully curated testimony and whatnot. I'm not saying that there are no differences between this and the resurrection, but like

At bottom, this is ultimately just testimony. It's just people saying things, right? It's just claims. You just they're just claiming that they did these things. Uh and we have to have a kind of basic trust in testimony in order to get any of this inquiry up and running. So listen, testimony is evidence.

Testimony is claims. Uh claims are evidence. Uh deal with it. Testimony is claims. Yeah, deal with it, Matt. I think um I I th the the problem here is it it seems to be kind of making a category claim. It's like, look, yeah, they made a claim but they didn't sort of make evidence.

Like you might want to say, I don't think that for the resurrection the claims of the disciples are strong enough evidence, right? But like we discussed earlier, they might still be bad evidence. But like they're evidence. Like it might be bad evidence, but it's still evidence. Um and also th it's this idea it's like a category thing. It's not just well, in this instance I don't think these claims count as evidence. It's like claims are not Evidence. When, like you say, sometimes, at least.

Like, yeah, they are. There might be bad evidence, they might not be enough evidence, but they're evidence, you know? So That's that we can we can we can wipe our hands of of that particular slogan. So next, because we're gonna try and take this relatively quickly, um oh, you can't prove a negative. Right. So so like'cause the the theist the theist will say will say, Oh, can you prove like that there's no God?

And the atheist says, well, you you can't prove a negative. You can't prove that something is not the case. You have to prove that it is the case. It's not possible to prove a negative. Right? Oh boy. Uh yeah, so this is one of the ones where I I do it just experience unparalleled amounts of pain thinking about it. Um, okay, so yeah, this claim I think is firstly self undermining. It is itself a negative claim, right? You can't do something. You can't prove a negative.

No. There's no proof of a negative right. So like it's still fundamental. It's like if it were true, like he couldn't prove it. Um now maybe they're saying, Oh, you know, I'm not talking about proving it. I just mean like giving justification. Well then you know then you just can't give justification for this claim. Anyway, I think it's self undermining. I think there there's literally an entire method of proof in logic called reductio ad absurdum, expressly dedicated to proving negative.

Okay. So yes, you can prove it. What are you talking about? You can suppose a hypothesis is true and derive a contradiction from it and thereby negate the hypothesis. So yes, you can prove a negative. We can also disconfirm the existence of entities, even if we can't like decisively disprove them on certain occasions. So for instance I think we just have like excellent evidence, excellent reason to think that Yetis and unicorns do not exist on Earth.

Okay, why is that? Well because listen, if they did, we would very strongly expect to see traces of them, which we don't. Okay, and that just is strong evidence that they don't exist. These are very particular kinds of things that would have to exist. So already we should be kind of suspicious that they would be around, right? Um that's a very sp specific way for reality to be. Um and

We would expect if they were to exist that they would leave traces of various kinds. We'd expect to find them. We don't. That means that's evidence against their existence and that's some kind of disconfirmation. We have reason to believe that they don't exist. Um and I should also I mean again, I know I'm uh on my high horse, but just like

Uh this is exactly what nontheists do, sophisticated nontheists I should sh I should say. Uh this is what sophisticated non-theists do in the case of God, right? They say that hey, if God did exist, Well, we'd expect the world to be different in various ways, like maybe containing much less evil or something. Uh so

I don't know. This is never strict struck me as remotely plausible. Well I I wanna sort of clear something up because when when you say, Well, we've got good evidence that like yetis don't exist on Earth. Somebody will probably want to say, Ah yeah, but but you you don't know that there isn't one like hiding out somewhere, like in a forest.

And so you can't actually prove that th this is what they're getting at. It's like, yeah, you could you can say it's unlikely or whatever, but you you can never like prove that something isn't the case. In a way that if you saw a Yeti, you could go, Yes, there is a Yeti, I can prove there is a Yeti. But What do we mean by prove? Because if by prove you mean prove with one hundred percent certainty

And actually even seeing a Yeti would not be enough because I could say, Yeah, but how do you know that your sense data is is accurate and that you're not sort of hooked up to a simulation, right? Like clearly when we say proof, typically we're talking about like really good evidence or a sufficient level of evidence. So so fine. But y like at the very least you have to accept that you can have really good evidence for a negative.

You know, there's really good evidence that there are no and and even if you sort of go like, well, technically you can't prove that there's no yet, it's like, how does that make you live your life? When you when you go out and sort of you know, camp in the forest, do you bring like Yeti like anti Yeti like weaponry just in case? Like no. The the the level of disconfirmation you've got is high enough that like for all intents and purposes

You don't think it's true. I know you don't think it's true. And so yeah, like the same thing's happening here. And also, very helpful to point out reductio ad absurdums. Um the reduction to absurdity, where, as you said, you take A claim like the way that you test a claim. It's a it's a little bit complicated, I guess, to think about without like an example, but you just you just if you want to prove that something is false. You assume that it's true and

you show what that like true claim entails, and if it entails something which is false, then the claim must be false in the first place. So you sort of assume it's true as a as a way to prove that it's false. You know, like, well I'm g I don't think it's raining right now. I'm gonna prove it's not raining. I'm gonna say if it were raining, I would, you know, be wet right now.

Um premise two, I am not wet right now. Concl there's another one for the TikTok edits. Uh conclusion, therefore, it's not raining outside. I I've sort of proven that something is not the case by assuming that it is and showing that at least there's something false. So yes, yeah. Why are we even spending any more time on this? I'm just repeating the It's just no s I mean, you know, here's a c here's a negative claim. There uh there is no adult elephant in this room right now.

Yeah, I thought of that. I obvious I know that that's the case and I can show that that's the case. Okay, can I prove with like absolute decisive certainty?

Well, like note I can't prove that I have hands with absolute decisive certainty. I'm like like come on. Like I I can know and justifiably believe that there is no elephant in this room right now, because if there were, I would certainly be aware of it and I'm not. Yeah.

So Th there has there has been no female president of the United States of America. You know, like it's just you can just multiply this. There are no positively charged electrons, you know. It's just true, man. It's just true. Like there there are no there are no like instances in which three individual objects total four. You know? Like th like it's just, you know, we can we can do this all day. And I would love to. I'd love to spend a day

Right. Just just doing that. Just doing coming up with negative, like trivially proven negative uh claims. But yes, turns out you can prove negative. Um okay, how about this? So called Hitchens razor. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

That's a another popular claim. And and the idea is that you know that that certain like religious claims or whatever are kind of asserted without evidence. Oh, I just trust the Bible, I just think it's true. Well, if you can assert it without evidence, you can dismiss it without evidence. Yeah, so the there's I there's something to this. I mean like generally speaking it seems like we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence.

So that, you know, i if if someone is just like blithely asserting something, uh at least if it's not obvious and they're not providing any evidence for it, um, I'm under no pressure to accept it. And in that sense, it seems totally r fine for me to dismiss it in in the sense of like not accept it and, you know, not give it any more weight than I previously gave.

Okay. So like in some sense I think this is fine. I mean there are you know the the philosopher in me likes to nitpick everything, right? So I see this as like a universal generalization, like for literally anything that can be asserted without evidence, it's fine to just dismiss it without evidence. I don't think maybe that that's probably not right. Um like we have various

non inferentially justified beliefs. So that is beliefs which are justified. So, you know, we have We're within our rights to hold them, like we we have good grounds to hold them as it were, but they're not justified inferentially, so we don't infer them from other beliefs that we're justified and accepted.

So like here's here's a belief right now as suppose I stub my toe. Uh I form the belief that I'm in pain. But I don't like infer that from other beliefs. I'm just like directly aware of my pain. And so I might I might then like assert. uh without providing any other beliefs from which I infer it, like without providing evidence in the traditional sense, I could just assert that I'm in pain. Um but like

You know, you you that should not be dismissed. Like So I could assert it without even assert it to yourself. You could like assert it just in your own head. You could just go like, oh, I'm in pain right now. And so but then I guess the evidence for the for the for the claim that you've just made is that you're feeling pain. But if if you think of it as the belief is not the propositional content. Oh, I feel pain

It's true that I feel pain and the justification for that is the pain in my foot. The thing that you're cognizing is just the existence of the pain in your foot. Like Th there's no further evidence for it, it's just there. Um and yet you you it would be great, wouldn't it, if you could go, Ah, but remember Hitchens razor? Because

I just feel pain and there's no like reason or evidence that I do, I just do. And so great news, I can just dismiss that and I can just not feel pain anymore. That would be great, but we we can't do that. Right. slogan is misused, right? So it kind of goes back to like the claims aren't evidence thing. So like sometimes an assertion can itself be evidence. Whoa. Isn't that kind of cool? Well

It's very ordinary. It's called testimony, right? Like where you assert something to be the case. Like, hey, I I um you know I was mowing my lawn earlier today. That's an assertion. And I didn't provide you any evidence I didn't provide you any like other independent evidence for that assertion. But that's not something that you could just like dismiss comfortably. I actually just provided you evidence by my very assertion. That I mowed my lot.

Right. So like the assertion itself can be evidence and doesn't need to be pro like I don't need to provide oftentimes evidence for my assertion. My assertion itself carries enough evidential force or weight to legitimate you believing the content of the my assertion. Um so actually it's not true that what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Um and there are also there are also cases in which we seem to believe things without evidence like

the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, that other people exist, right? Like these are things which strictly speaking I can't justify. I I can't know that I'm not a brain in a vat somewhere. I I can't prove that the the external world exists.

And yeah, and and and maybe, you know, you can still hold to the slogan and say, Well, you know, like whatever, but I think most people want to say, but if you claim that these things are false, If you say, No, you are living in a simulation or something like it, or or you y you know, the external world isn't real or other people don't exist. You'd want to say, Well, what's your evidence for that?

And this person could say, Well, look, I mean what what can be asserted with evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And maybe they're kind of right, but it would be A sort of unhelpful philosophical move. For what it's worth, I think that this is again like a rhetorical tool that isn't actually trying to establish a philosophical principle. All it's really doing is just like complaining that evidence hasn't been provided. You know, it's like a quit.

But the true bit of the quip is not actually this principle that oh well without evidence we can assume. is just as a clever way to point out you haven't provided any evidence. You know, that's really, I think, just what's being said here. If if Hitchens were trying to establish, you know, uh universal philosophical principles, um

I think most of his philosophical principles didn't even apply in the unique cases that he was using them, let alone universally. So I think we'd be a bit pi a bit stuck in the mud there. Um yeah, I think we'd like to make it. Yeah. It's like technically. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah, nice. Awesome. Okay. So next. Um fa I think we've got

We'll probably do th like th we'll we'll see how we do. What about um uh faith is belief without evidence? Or faith is like pretending to know something that you don't? Th this idea that faith is like contra like justified belief. What do you think? Do you think that's true? Well, as a generic statement, well, Kevin, actually the Kalam cosmological argument starts with the premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Space less. Time less. Immaterial enormously powerful. Okay, I'm not sure. We should have done principle of credulity last last time so we could have had the swimbo. Um never mind. Never mind. Okay. Anyway, I I got a little bit too excited there. Uh where was I going? Uh I was going to say listen, I don't think this applies to like generically to faith as such? No doubt. Many people who have faith

To have evidence. Maybe maybe they indeed are pretending to know what they don't know. No doubt, like this applies to many people. Um, and no doubt many people will just. Many people have a mistaken conception of faith on with faith just is kind of like blind trust or something like that. But I don't think that this is like essential to the notion of faith. So

I at least view faith as the following. It's roughly speaking something like a trusting commitment to someone or something. Okay? Uh and what what will that trusting commitment involve? Well plausibly it'll involve at least two components. So firstly, I think it involves a cognitive component. So it that could simply be a belief. Um, but it might be something weaker, but still belief-like.

So for example, maybe at least some level of confidence that the like the object of faith is true or exists or will occur. Right. So for example, like if you have faith that your friend uh will win their upcoming basketball game Well then at the very least you'll think that there's like a not absurdly low chance that they'll win. Um it doesn't make sense to say that you have faith that your friend's team will win if like you're absolutely convinced that they're definitely going to get crushed.

But you arguably don't need full-blown belief. That they will in fact win in order to have faith that they'll win. Um And likewise, you know, you might actually just think it's like somewhat improbable that you make it through a marriage or like finish a project on time. But you might still have faith in those things, right? Uh so maybe faith doesn't actually require

belief. So that's something that I want to know. But like I do think one component of faith is going to be a cognitive component. It's going to be something having to do with judging something to either maybe be a live option or like sufficiently probable or maybe like belief worthy or something like that.

So that's the first component, a cognitive component. And then I think there's a second component of of this trusting commitment, which is faith, which is something like a cognitive or desire-like component. Okay, so it's going to involve something like A desire for or, you know, like a positive evaluation of or maybe a hope for the object of faith. So if we return to the case that I gave of like the basketball game, um, if you have faith that your friend will win their game, well then

Yeah, you you like you want them to win. You regard that as a good thing. You hope that they win. You've got some kind of like positive, positively valenced attitude towards it, right? Um, in addition to the more belief-like component. Yeah. It would be weird to say like Yeah, yeah. Like, oh man, I really I really don't want that that team to win, but I I've just got I've just got faith that they will.

It it it like it you can kind of make sense of that. It could be like, Oh, I I don't think they're gonna win. I really don't want them to win, but I uh maybe they w but to say something like, But I've got faith that they will it sort of seems to necessarily imply a like a a a positive evaluation of the thing. Right, exactly. And so given that faith is a trusting commitment with these two components, I think it's quite plausible that uh

Faith is compatible with believing on the basis of evidence, and indeed with believing on the basis of evidence sufficient to render the belief rational. Right? So like here's an example that I oftentimes like to give. Um somewhat recently Well, this actually wasn't recent. This is when I was back at home. Um, but you know, it is what it is. Somewhat recently I was uh my dad told me that he would get home with the car by noon'cause I didn't have a car.

Um he told me that he'd get home with the car by noon so that I could, you know, get to my appointment. I need to leave at noon to get to my twelve thirty appointment. Um now I had ample evidence that he would fulfill his promise. Like suppose that, you know, my dad may have made these promises many times in the past. He's very dependable, he's very reliable, he almost always comes through with it.

Um so I had ample evidence to think that he would come through on this occasion, and enough to make it rational to believe that he'd get home by noon. I think I still had to have faith that he would pull through. And you know

As I sat there anxiously waiting at like eleven fifty nine and he's not yet there, I do indeed have to have some faith there. Um even though I have good evidence that he's gonna get here by noon. And then lo and behold, I see him come in and you know, he's there basically right at noon. I'm pulling up into the driveway. So I think I had to exhibit faith in that circumstance. I had to have a kind of trusting commitment. I had a positively valence attitude towards it. I had um

the relevant cognitive component of faith. Um and also I had enough evidence, I think, to legitimate belief in this case. So I just don't think faith requires belief without evidence or in spite of evidence or no faith just must be blind. Uh that's my take.

Yeah, I tend to think faith the way that I see people using it'cause people people always say like, Oh well you have faith that the chair you're sitting on is gonna hold you up and you have faith that your your wife loves you and stuff and I'm like I know what you're getting at, which is that I can't prove that this chair isn't gonna collapse, but s for some reason I believe it anyway. And I've come to realise that I think w a way that people tend to use faith is like

belief in something without evidence of that particular thing, but with good like background evidence to sort of trust in that thing. So like I don't have evidence if I walk into a new restaurant I don't have any like direct evidence that when I sit down on the chair it won't just collapse under me. But I've got good eviden I do it's not like I've got zero evidence like that's relevant at all,'cause I've got evidence that every other restaurant I've been into

has chairs that haven't fallen over and maybe I sort of know that roughly there's probably some kind of like law in place where they'll get sued if I'm gonna be yeah. But still I I I still don't like know I can't prove if someone asks for evidence of that of that chair not falling over, they're like, No, no, but like you don't know any you don't even know what it's made out of. You don't know like if it's attached, you don't know who put it there, it's like

That is actually true, but I still believe that it will hold me up in a way that technically speaking, yeah, i it's not really justified in this instance. But it is also kind of justified by all the background stuff. And I feel like faith is used in that way. Like when someone says, Well I've just got faith

that, you know, God has good reason to allow suffering. That sounds really weird, because you're like, well, you've got no justification to explain why suffering exists. But they go, but yeah, but look, I've got all of these reasons to think that God exists. I've got all this other evidence that there's this God who's good.

And so in this particular instance, yeah, I know I I have no idea why he allows suffering, but because I've got all this background stuff that tells me that yeah, there is some answer that God has.

I just believe that he does have an answer. I think that's actually quite like a reasonable position to take, but I wouldn't want to call that like reasonable belief, because you're admitting that you don't have good reason to believe this particular thing. And so we have a word for this, and that word is faith. Yeah, interesting. See, I I sort of even see that trusting commitment as compatible with you know reasonable belief.

I don't know. I think I'm totally reasonable when I go into the restaurant and I you know Sit down. in in b even believing that I'm not gonna just like fall through the chair. Like I mean, like, come on. Uh I I could see all the other people in the you know, this restaurant seems to be evidently well well kept, right? I mean the other re uh people in the restaurant they're sitting there

Um, you know, like restaurants would get sued if they had really bad chairs, like um you know, I know I have a lot of information about other restaurants and chairs and whatnot. Um and I th I like you said, I do think I have to exercise a a degree or modicum of faith in this case. But it's it's reasonable. Like I don't know, and I I have a reasonable belief here. Like it's I have a trust and commitment. Um I don't have decisive evidence.

So I maybe that's a requirement. Like that's maybe what we're getting at. Like you don't have decisive, conclusive proof in the thing in question. Or like something thereabout. Um but I think that is compatible with reasonable belief. Uh Yeah. But I do think that when people use the word faith, especially in the context of like, well, I've got faith in God, but you're an atheist and you have faith in all kinds of things. You've got faith in this, you've got faith in that.

If that's what you mean by the word faith, then maybe faith just kind of is a form of like wheat. rational belief. It's just like one of the weakest forms of rational beliefs that you can have. But I I think that that's not exhaustive because I'd never considered this before, but I think you're right that faith has to come along with like the desire. To have faith in something implies you want it to happen. So maybe what faith is, is what I'm describing, which is like

belief in the absence of direct evidence for that thing but with good background evidence at the same time as wanting it to be true. Maybe if you have all of those components put together, you get something which is sort of best described as faith. Like I don't think anybody has faith just like right off the bat. It's like somebody just says like, Oh, I I believe that uh th th the universe was created by a a sort of cosmic spider

I say like, Oh, why do you believe that? They're like I've just got faith. I'm like Uh okay, uh fair enough, but like Like why a why a spy? Don't you know what faith is? Fa faith isn't like reasonable evidence, isn't it? Yeah, but I'm like, but there's gotta be there's gotta be like some

reason why, even if you don't know this for sure, there's something about this spider. There's gotta be some reason. Like faith can't just be like belief in something without evidence, like on its own. There has to be some kind of background reason or evidence or something that like

provides the basis on which somebody can stand before taking that venerable leap into into faith. So, yeah, I don't know. But I d I don't think it's I don't think it's fair to say faith is belief without evidence, like as a as a strong point.'Cause usually there is, like I say just then, like some kind of evidence involved. It just might mean that faith is belief without direct compelling evidence of the particular thing that you're having faith in. Maybe we can agree on that.

Yeah, I think I would at least for for the moment lean

Okay, well look, I promise we're we're nearly done. I I'm looking at your list here. We're gonna we're gonna do that'cause I I was gonna say we we've got we've got good people do good things, bad people do bad things, people Well this is what I was gonna say. This this is what I mean. I w I just wanna like'cause people might be like, Where are these claims, right? Like to get good people to do bad things

that takes religion. It's the Steve Weinberg quote. But because we've kind of already covered that with, you know, r religion flying you into to to planes flying you into planes. Uh so I I wanna there's also this other claim, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, which I d have we kind of have we covered that? Like you know, like the fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence that there is no God.

Uh yeah f I mean I don't know, like maybe quick quick words on that? What what what do you think? Yeah, I mean

So I mean typically this will be combined with the claim that there is indeed an absence of evidence for God's existence and we addressed that earlier on. Yeah, exactly. There's no evidence for God. But the fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence against God's existence, which I think if that evidence were to be expected and you didn't find it, that would be true. Um so yeah, yeah, fair enough. Um in that particular circumstance. But anyway, like uh

Like I say, I I I'm trying to get through these quickly. There's only one other one on the list apart from the Ricky Gervais one, which is theism is unfalsifiable. Uh so sometimes atheists will get frustrated'cause they'll say, Well I I don't believe I don't believe God would allow suffering and they go, Ah yeah, but God's got this super secret special reason to allow suffering.

Oh o okay, but then, you know, why would he allow that if he was a loving God? And theists might go, Oh well, you know, I'm a theist, but maybe God doesn't have to be loving, you know, God could be, you know, a morals o okay, well then you know, w how does God sort of fit into fit into, you know, this or that? And they're like, Oh well, you know, God's it's like they've always sort of got this alley to run down. It's like

there's nothing in principle that could be true that would make the theist go, Yeah, fair enough, that's incompatible with God. Because instead what they'll do is they'll just adapt their conception of God to make the evidence fit, right? And so therefore, this hypothesis of theism is unfalsifiable. There's nothing I could say that would prove it false. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fair? Um

Not quite. I mean, in some s like, given what you were just saying, like it sounds like we take a theistic hypothesis, but then we modify it to a different hypothesis. Given that it has kind of been falsified, right? Uh so like we take these hypotheses, which do indeed make some predictions about how we'd expect the world to go, right? And then we find that the world doesn't go in those directions. And then the theist, as you were depicting it in this

switches to a different theistic hypothesis. And like, okay, in some sense it's still theism. Um but like we've we've switched hypotheses. And the original hypothesis was indeed falsifiable, or at least it was liable to confirmation and disconfirmation based on the predictions that we can tease out from the hypothesis. Um so like in my view, like generic perfect being theism or like traditional

Monotheism does indeed make predictions about how we'd expect the world to go or not go. Um, and that just means that it's liable to confirmation and disconfirmation. So it's not unfalsifiable uh in that sense.

But I think this just applies to basically any theory, right? It applies to atheism, it applies to standard scientific theories. You can always um, in the face of disconfirming evidence, retreat to a different version of your theory or append onto your theory various implausible auxiliary hypotheses. Um, you know, like with the atheist, you know, they they come across fine tuning and they'll maybe they'll just pause it like a multiverse. They come across um

potentially well evidenced miracle claims and they'll just say, Oh, you know, like it's some kind of misperception or misidentification or hallucination or something like that. And like, oh, you'll they'll come across Um contingency. They'll be like, okay, maybe there's some like atheistic necessary foundation of reality. Like maybe it's the universe or something.

And then they come across consciousness. And they're like, oh well, maybe, you know, consciousness doesn't exist after all. Maybe we're eliminativists or illusionists about consciousness. Or or you know, they'll they'll posit something else. Like, oh maybe they're just these like brute emergent powers of brains or something.

The atheists will will also be able to just make all these additional pauses to save their theory. Uh so I don't know. I don't really see anything distinctive with theism. Yeah, I I think this is a a criticism that shouldn't be levied against theism, but against particular theists.

'Cause I can understand when someone's having an argument and they go like, Oh, fuck there's nothing I can say that won't just make you retreat, your position is unfalsifiable. It's actually maybe just that person is like not granting like falsifying um you know, criteria that they just keep retreating. But it's not unique to the position of theism, a as you say. I mean there there might be some versions of it, like you know, if you have like an ontological argument.

which says that God just exists by definition, that God just has existence as part of his essence and it's like, well, well, what what could I do to prove that false? What would have to be true for that to be false? And And the theist just goes, Th there's nothing'cause God just is existence. That's just what God is. You you're asking me how how could you falsify that two plus two is four? Right. And in that circumstance that version of theism would be unfalsifiable.

But to the theist that would be justifiably so. It would be like saying, Oh yeah, y your your maths, your two plus two is four. It's just unfalsifiable, isn't it? And you're kinda like Y Yeah. Like Kind of, yeah,'cause I it's j it's almost just like a a point of definition. It just follows from and some theists see God in that way. So I think that form of theism would probably be unfalsifiable, but not in

like a necessarily unfair ki kind of way. If you accept the ontological argument that is, of course you're gonna think it's unfalsifiable. So worth flagging. But it it depends on the theist. It depends on their behaviours and which arguments they're employing, right? I think so. So before evolutionary uh considerations against God. There's one more here.

from that great theologian Ricky Gervais, which seemed to have gone like viral again recently on the internet, even though it was fr from some time ago. Where Ricky sort of he's talking to like Stephen Co Colbert or someone like that, and they're kind of debating religion and and Ricky goes, Look, here's the thing, man, here's what you gotta understand, right?

if you were to just burn every single like r like book, every every book, every bit of information is just like erased from human society. And we all had to start again. You know, we go back to being cavemen like on day one. Then in a couple of thousand years or so, all of the science would come back. All of our scientific understanding would come back exactly as it is. But none of the religious texts would come back like exactly as they are.

And I think even Colbera's like, Yeah, fair point and he gets an applause and it's a Yeah, it's a d is an i it's an interesting thought. Yeah, like science would come back, but religion wouldn't,'cause religion is full of hyper specific stories that had to be made up in a particular way, whereas science is like, you know, gravity. Things would still fall to the ground and we'd still mathematically describe that eventually. So

That kind of gives us reason to think that the science stuff is trustworthy, whereas the religious stuff that you find in the scripture is not,'cause it's like arbitrary and c you know, c contingent on sort of historical circumstance. Right? Yeah, so I've uh I've got three responses to this one. Um so first How does Ricky know that none of the religious texts would come back basically with the same contours? I mean, after all.

If God exists and is behind one of the religions, presumably if we completely lost his crucial revelation to us, I don't know, maybe he'd touch base again or something Uh so how does how does Vicky know this? Uh and in fact it this almost starts to sound

Moses smashed the t ten commandments on the original tablets and then God just sort of like wrote them down for him again because you kinda needed them. So, you know, why not? Yeah, you're right, it it's question begging. It's like you have to assume this is on the assumption

that there is no God who would like replenish the religious stories. On that assumption, yeah, of course the religious story wouldn't come up in the but then you don't need that argument'cause you just assume that God doesn't exist in the first place. Okay. Right. Right. So that's the first response. The second response is that like

If this were some like devastating objection to religion, um, it would also be a devastating objection to what? Like the entire field of history? And like also like literature and like various other things. I mean, like come on, if you destroyed all the history textbooks and like our evidence of what happened in the past

A lot of st a lot of that information is just lost to the past, right? Like we would lose tons of letters, descriptions of battles. Like there's like no way that we could reconstruct um like what the precise details of certain battles and the years in which they occurred from like certain archaeological findings and whatnot. Um, so I don't know. Uh do you does Ricky really wanna like

think that the whole field of history is, you know, untrustworthy from this kind of test about d this destruction test, as we could put it. I don't know, it doesn't seem plausible. So that's the second response and then the third and final response is Um it's not actually clear to me that's not a good thing.

science would come back again exactly in the same way. Uh I don't know, dude. Science seems kind of institutionally and theoretically contingent in various ways. Um there are there have been in the history of science. predictably very successful and practically very useful false theories. So I mean how's he sort of ruling out that we uh

Might land on some kind of very predictively successful theory, but which just nevertheless happens to be false and different from the ones that we have currently landed on. And also like bear in mind that like scientists often adopt different values or standards for judging competing theories. Right? So scientists in general have a kind of

balance or trade-off, a theoretical trade-off between simplicity and explanatory power, right? So like oftentimes we'll posit new entities to explain various phenomena. And we posit new features of entities to explain various phenomena. Um, but like, I don't know, we can imagine future scientists or scientists on an in an alien civilization having different views about.

Theoretical virtues are more important, or how to balance these theoretical virtues. Maybe future scientists will actually be much more reluctant to posit new entities in order to explain phenomena. Like they just are much more attached to parsimony than we are. Um and like these are extra scientific considerations'cause these are like considerations about how we weigh and compare scientific theories, right? So it's not like science itself could kind of solve these issues about how to best

uh weigh up the theoretical virtues that scientists deploy. Um so I don't know, like maybe future scientists would have different uh theoretical weightings. Um And yeah, so there there are a number of things, many things wrong with what he says.

So I wanna I wanna disagree with some of that and agree with the bulk of it. I I wanna disagree with I mean you said about like I I do think it would W to the extent that religious scriptures like cover religious history, you know, the s the story of the Jews or whatever.

Like yeah, th the fact that we lose that and couldn't get it back is not like evidence that it didn't happen or like reason to think that that that didn't occur because we wouldn't be able to rediscover it. However, I think what Ricky's getting at is like the sort of the eternal truth claim stuff, like the stuff that's good, the stuff that's bad, it's it's immoral to do this, it's it's but uh th uh even then it's like w but then if you make it s sort of so

generalize. If you're talking about that stuff.

then ma maybe that kinda just would come back. Like people kind of mm probably managed to work out, yeah, you should like love your neighbour and like, oh, even though that person is like from from the tribe over, you should still be nice to them. I mean maybe not, right? Because some people think that you know, if you if you listen to like Tom Holland and his sort of Christian follow followership who think No, no, no, like Christianity uniquely, like without Christianity, you know, like the

the treatment of women and slavery and this kind of stuff, like you needed this particular Christian story to come along. Like maybe there is something unique about that, but it's not like out of the question for me that you know, love your neighbour and treat people equally. Could could not arise within the next few thousand years somewhere. And then if it works, it works and if it's successful it g it's it sort of takes off.

Um, but if if you are talking about the more specific stuff, like the the historical claims about like the resurrection of Jesus or something, like you say, like Okay, suppose it actually happened and they wrote it down and then we destroyed all of the records and we couldn't find them. Yeah, like But I just wanted but then you said like, you know, it would also undo like literature. I don't think that's true because literature

the the utility of literature is not connected to the truth of the things that it's saying. Whereas in history it is. Like the the thing that that's useful about history is that it tells you what happened, right?

So and y you just sort of mentioned that in passing. I don't know if you actually believe that or if it's I meant like Shakespeare studies. That's what I was talking about. Oh sure, sure, sure. Okay, cool. Yeah, so yeah, then fair enough. I think that's that's definitely true. But also I really want to like think about this this fact that like Yep. Oh yeah, science would just come back. Okay.

Like no like no. I just do I just don't believe it for for a number of reasons. First is that like we know that throughout the history of our species, as you say, we've had like false false theories. Or theories that we've improved upon. So famously like Newton has his Newtonian mechanics, and then Einstein comes along and says, You're kind of actually thinking about it all wrong and instead There's like, you know, this space time thing, right?

Which of these would come back? Would they both come back in the same order? And also, given that we know that Einstein corrected Newton, surely within the next thousand years or so, somebody's going to correct Einstein. So when you say that science will come back, There's gonna be a lot that we're wrong about right now. And it's unlikely that the stuff we're wrong about would like come back again. Because it's like it's like wrong, right? And if it did come back again

Then you're saying that like stuff that's wrong could come back again. In which case if the implication of your argument is that like, oh, the true stuff would come back, would just be false. Not to mention the fact that the most important kind of science that we're doing at the moment, like the cutting edge of science right now is of course quantum mechanics.

and nobody even can agree like what's going on down there. Like, you know, we've got all these different interpretations. You've got like many worlds and Copenhagen interpretations that rely on a particular like language of mathematics that was like invented by particular individuals, you know. like Newton and independently we've got some evidence that like, you know, calculus might have come up because Newton and Leibniz and I think somebody else had like independently come up with it.

But like even that like relies on a p particular kind of mathematical notation. Like i surely the ideas of like calculus, the kind of the the the stuff at the core of it would would be like rediscovered. But what do we count as the science? Because you know, words. a future society that erased all of its knowledge and then had to start again, would they come up with atomic physics, for example?

Like maybe not,'cause like now we're we're kind of doubtful that atoms really exist in the way that we traditionally thought, with the the little proton and the electrons going around. It might be that they just have no conception of atoms. You kinda got two options here. You either say

Yeah, but atoms are an integral part of science, and that wouldn't come back, in which case Rookie's wrong. Well you say, Well yeah, the atoms wouldn't come back because the atoms are something that although is part of our scientific lexicon, it's just incorrect. In which case Ricky is saying that, oh, incorrect things will will reoccur, like pha yeah, who cares? You know what I mean? Um I I just I just I really struggle to believe.

that if we actually started again, then a thousand years from now, people would Like with certainty be debating whether the wave function collapses when the observer looks at it or whether there is a multi w yeah. Maybe one of those is correct and that will be rediscovered, but the idea that the

And maybe you want to say, Oh, that's because we haven't worked it out yet. But once we work out what the truth is, that's what any society would do in the future. But like there's no like end point of science.

There's no like point where we're like, Okay, we're done now, like we understand fully and coherently. We don't even understand anything about like si we don't know what an electron is, right? Like we we we literally have no idea what an electron like actually is. We only describe what it does. I talk about that all of the time.

Like so what is it that would actually come back? Like if you like if the theory of gravity is just a mathematical description of the fact that objects fall to the ground, like Yeah, like we start again and oh look, we notice that objects fall to the ground. Uh d do we really think that we're gonna like

take the exact same course to to describing like why that happens. I mean, I don't even think we have that explanation now. We don't know why things fall to the ground. You know, th this is this big passion of mine. We we we don't have Like things don't fall to the ground because of the law of gravity. We have a law of gravity because things fall to the ground. And people forget like

Oh yeah, like Isaac Newton discovered gravity. Like no he didn't. Like people knew that objects fell to the ground before that. The only thing he did was like mathematically describe it and realize it's the same thing that keeps the planets in orbit. Like Yeah, maybe somebody else would realise that and and realise that it's true but I don't know. Like I I just feel like the extent to which I'm not sure.

Okay, maybe we wouldn't invent the same mathematical notation and we wouldn't use the same conceptual tools, but the core of what's like going on in physics we'd probably rediscover. You can just say the same thing about religion. Okay, yeah, maybe you wouldn't get like

a particular like named set of deities or like, you know, particular angels doing particular things or the particular story of Jesus or whatever. But the core of what that religion is about, yeah, that would that would reemerge. I j I just think it's like, you know I just I just don't I'm just not confident that it's that it's true. Anyway, I I'm ranting again. I'm ranting again. And I think we're probably in agreement here. I think we're largely in agreement, yes. But

Quick segue, brutal segue, like almost to I was trying to find a way to make it work, but it's it's just there's no other way. I'm just gonna have to sort of brute force it here. Um evolution disproves God, doesn't it? Well, uh, let's start with Young Earth Creationism,'cause it might disprove young earth creationism. I mean

But even there, so this is not one of the theodices I I told I told Alice beforehand for the audience that I wanted to maybe talk about two potential theodicies for evolutionary animal suffering. This is not one of them. Okay, this is not one of them, I want to emphasize that. But uh there's actually a potential way to make young earth creationism compatible with evolution. Uh and it's really very metaphysically spooky and kind of crazy, but philosopher Hud Hudson speculates.

that uh oh and I I should say it's not like he claims to believe this. This is like a speculative model that he proposes on behalf of others who want to hold young earth creations. Okay. Um so philosopher Hud Hudson speculates that Perhaps there's such a thing as hypertime, which is basically an extra temporal dimension at some point in which our timeline is located, but over which our timeline can itself change.

So basically it's like a it's like an additional timeline within which our timeline is located. Uh so basically then, like the contents of history, if we have hypertime, the contents of history can themselves change over the course of hypertime. And so, maybe at an earlier hypertime, So earlier on in the hyper timeline.

Our first order timeline, like our history in our universe, actually includes an earth and a garden of Eden created immediately by God six thousand years before twenty twenty five, and and then maybe there was like a fall. uh from our primordial parents, and then as punishment for the fall, God changes the course of our actual history, our timeline, so that at a later hyper time, Our first order timeline includes a brutal evolutionary process occurring over billions of years. I see your face.

So like I okay, I I know you're not quite finished here, but but I mean I'm a little confused by this this hypertime concept and what it means I'm I I I don't really know how to how to how to picture this. Like what what what you're talking what you're talking about. Help me. Help me out here. Like that what is this hypertime thing? Yeah, it's just um listen, it's

So th you know, think of the three spatial dimensions. They as it were travel through time, right? Imagine that. You know, like things in space change over time. Well hypertime is basically like The temporal dimension, along which

the timeline itself can change. So like the past can genuinely itself change. It can new th new events can be added into the past that didn't happen at a previous hypertime. So like Just as if like the universe and physical stuff in three-dimensional space changes over time. our universe's time can itself change over the course of hypertime. So at one hyper moment Yeah, I know. At one hyper moment, the the course of our history, our timeline might look a certain way.

And then at a later hyper moment, in this broader temporal dimension, the course of history looks different. Like it might include additional times or it might have different times and whatnot. This is very crazy, but like hey, you know Particles are supposed to be like somehow waves and particles at the same time and like you know, like things don't have like a definite position and momentum and it's the same time and whatnot.

I've got I know I've got time for it. I I think yeah yeah this is interesting. Yeah, if you like. Um but I think it It's like okay, this is an exercise in trying to like make consistent like young earth creationism. Which yeah, maybe this does but Like with other sort of like like what's mean like a multiverse or something. I think if if this idea of hypertime

only exists as a response to this particular problem, then like cool, very clever, like great job, but probably not gonna take it on board. If there's some like other reason to believe in this thing called hypertime and we can then apply that to this and and have it work as the theodicy, then great. But that is that is interesting. Like the the punishment for the fool is not just like, you know, animals sort of

suffering and and humans becoming, you know, more prone to sin or whatever. But literally a rewriting of human history to be like or like animal history to be like billions of years old with I I guess why not? Like why why why couldn't God just I mean that would be horri like imagine if like, you know, you really wanted to punish someone. Like if I wanted to punish you

But I had this power to do basically anything I wanted. Yeah, sure, I could just make your life a misery now. Or I could say, You've wronged me so badly that I'm literally going to rewrite time so that for the past thousand years you've been being like, you know, laugh. that would be pretty pretty metal, you know? I mean that that's that's quite the

Quite the punishment. It is quite the punishment. I mean so there actually are some so uh let's see, Tyron Goldschmidt and Sam Liebens, two very good Jewish philosophers, have um written on Hypertime and its ability to like help with the problem of evil, they don't even take like this fall stuff. They go in for various other sorts of proposals where like God can literally like rewrite the past and make it so that like

we never actually sinned and like bad things never actually occurred. Um, at a later hyper time. So okay, at an earlier hyper time, okay, bad things occur. But at a later hyper time, literally, the timeline is perfect. So he kind of like splices in

um, like the good things that we do and the various other things and he kind of uh there's there's a like a movie director who does this, right? Like he has people just like act out uh some people in the audience will put this in the description right now. There's a movie director that has people um Has the actors just naturally do stuff? And lit he'll just like maybe give them slight guidance, but like he'll just have them act out various different scenes and whatnot. And He will just literally

splice in stuff that he liked from what they did. He'll maybe have them redo certain scenes and whatnot. And at the end you basically have just like a composite product of literally like natural acting. They they weren't given scripts or anything like that. Um and he just kind of like

splices it. So like God can actually work like that in this kind of picture. I Sam Liebins and um Tyron Goldschmidt I think have a paper on this called The Promise of a New Past. I think it's an ergo that's a journal. But anyway, so like this stuff can be used. wielded um by the theist to do lots of theoretical work. Uh

And so like, okay, I know it's a bit crazy. I know this is out there and I'm not saying I believe I I don't believe this, okay. But I just thought it was kinda funny because you know people are like Yeah, I know people like evolution disproves young you know, young earth creation is like, well, disprove is a little strong. Like how are you ruling out this hypertime proposal? Okay. Um okay. But now on, you know, like w why why not? Why not?

Right. I mean, it's very metal, as you said. Uh that should be like one of the classic divine, you know, perfections, like the degree of metalness, you know? Yeah. Metality, metallicness. Uh and you know God's maximal with respect to these perfections. Metality. Yeah, I I guess I guess God would have to be maximally metallic, uh, under the ontological argument. Um I mean but yeah, I mean that that is that is that is brutal and

sort of horrifying.'Cause it also it it opens up other possibilities to me. Like, you know, when we sort of think about eternal punishment in hell, what if it's not just like you go to hell and then every day for the rest of your life is suffering? But like

when you go to hell, like your entire past history is also now suffering. That would suck, man. It would suck. But also like listen, this w this would provide people who are proponents of eternal conscious torment, like a way to make their view less less unpalatable. Uh I mean their view is already very unpalatable, but you know, you could say, listen, yeah, at this at this one hyper moment where our whole timeline is here, yeah, you've got an eternity of suffering ahead of you. Um but hey

There are hyper-future moments in in the hypertime where, uh, you know, your future is perfectly fine, and in fact you're in heaven. And maybe actually, there's like a hyper-endless series where at each hypertime the local timeline includes you just like in an infinite state of bliss. But you know, that's in the hyper future. Unfortunately in the hyper present, you're stuck you know, you're in this timeline where you're gonna be tortured forever. But

You know, it's only hypertemporary. Um it's eternal, but it's hypertemporary. Uh that should be like that should be my motto. Like listen, the suffering is eternal, but it's only hyper-temporary. Like that's Um Yeah. You gotta be very careful when you're talking about hypertime with like the various things. I don't remember this bit I I I don't remember this bit of the Bible, if I'm if I'm gonna be if I'm gonna be honest with you, mate. I don't remember Was this Mark or was this Luke? I can't

Can't remember. What was it you were saying about predicates? I yeah, I think it was uh acts or something. That's that's where it is. Um yeah, okay. So th where we're really getting with Evolution Disproves God is, of course, you know, an argument from evolutionary animal suffering. So as your audience already knows at this point, because you talk about this all the time. All the time. Natural history took a very grotesque

Of course, animals have been preying on one another, parasitizing one another, ripping each other to shreds, natural disasters have wiped out what, like ninety nine point nine nine percent of all species. Basically, the course of natural history is

is a bloodbath. Um and I don't know, that seems like like extremely surprising under theism. Like this is the very means or the mechanism by which God creates biological diversity in general and humans in particular, the very engine of creation is the suffering and death and discarding of the least of these, of the innocent fawns and and baby elephants and whatnot, like

This is disgusting. I mean like what are you doing? Like you God could have he could've created it in so many other ways. He could have made the universe a young Earth creationist universe. He could have created six thousand years ago, done away with this massively brutal process. He could have made photosynthesizing animals. He could have made chemosynthesizing animals. He could have made

like anesthetic in the claws and teeth of predators so that you know the prey aren't feeling like uh like agonizingly brutalized to death. Like he could have altered animals' mental states when they face the moments of death and whatnot when they're being burned alive so that they don't experience excruciating agony. Like he could have done ton of stuff that seemingly he did not do. And this seems very, very, very surprising under theism, and much better predicted uh uh on a picture on which

Yeah, listen, dude, the natural world result there is it's not being benevolently guided and uh, you know, as a result, the course of evolutionary history is going to just look indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient creatures. Um, so it does seem to be pretty powerful evidence against theism. Um Yeah, I mean like I as you say, I've used this argument before. It just seems unexpected, right? Like it seems

Kind of unlikely. I mean strictly speaking, it's only really unlikely if there's like a god who cares about suffering, who you especially I I think it's this picture of a god who is good and doesn't want innocent creatures to suffer, but also kind of created the universe for the sake of human beings, as many major religious traditions

sort of uh assume that it's all about humans, that it it kinda took us a really long time to show up, and the sort of the the the pre drinks for the human party was this like billion year bloodbath. It just seems like, you know, God sort of suffers from a

a a lack of economy, if you like. Um but, you know, technically it doesn't sort of exclude the existence of a, you know, unactualized actualizer who is the necessary foundation of contingent things, right? But like it definitely does something powerful. against traditional conceptions of God.

So, given this, given how unexpected it is that God would have chosen this mechanism and that there's so much suffering and suffering which like it seems like, you know, people have theodicies, right? You've used that word.

attempts to reconcile suffering with a good God. And people say, Oh, well, you know, evil exists or suffering exists because of human free will, or because it allows people's souls to develop, or because there are higher order goods you can attain like bravery, which can only come about if you allow things like fear.

The thing is none of that seems to apply to animals. That doesn't apply to the fawn, does it? It it seems like that's totally random. It's like it's definitely not down to human free will before humans ever existed. Um it also seems like

you know, these animals don't really have souls that develop in the same way. Maybe they do, maybe they get to go to sort of doggy heaven. Um that's one option for people, you know. Uh but th it's particularly this like arbitrary animal suffering That seems like incoherent with the nation of God. You promise me that you have some some new theodicies that that might change my mind on this.

Uh yeah, that that was definitely the content of the promise. No, I mean like the audience knows that this is it by my lights probably the most forceful argument for um atheism. So, you know, and I I think that, you know. It's gotta it's gotta deal with force. So U understand this as like an exercise in like trying to give the theist their best shot uh in response to this.

And uh that that that should that should be how I've interpreted going forward. Okay. I'm gonna put on my theest hat, I'm gonna try my hardest. Don't automatically assume that I believe what I'm about to say, but um I will proceed. So there are maybe two theodices that I want to try out, but

I at least want to try out the first one'cause it's kind of fun. So this is called the omission theodicy. This is proposed in a recent paper proposed and defended in a recent paper by um theistic philosophers Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson.

Um just a heads up, I might not do full justice to their paper, so I recommend the audience to check out the paper for themselves. It actually won the Mark Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion and that's like that's kind of a big deal, so it's a pretty good paper. Um so the key idea is that apparent cases of natural evil Can be traced to the omissions of free agents. Who had the power to prevent them, but culpably failed to do so.

Okay. So it's it's an example of what philosophers call a subsumption theodicy where we're subsuming natural evil into moral evil. So natural evil is evil that doesn't seem to be the result of um the free actions of moral the free actions or omissions of moral agents, whereas moral evil is um evil which is the result of the free actions or omissions of moral agents of free moral agents. So there are a few different ways that we could run the omission theodicy, and I'll just mention two.

So one of them is called like these are just different like stories or different ways that the theist might take the theodicy and flesh it out a little bit. So one is called Alien Aband sorry. And angel abandonment, okay, that's one of them. And the other one is called alien isolationism. Okay. So hear me out, okay? This is gonna get crazy, but hear me out.

Okay, so let's start with angelic abandonment. They actually call it Archon Abandonment. It's actually I'll go with that. It's the Archon Abandonment Theodicy. Archons, that's the word for like I think the powers in the powers and principalities in uh you know, the the b Bible verse that we we f battle not against flesh and blood, but the powers and principalities of this world. So it's supposed to be like fallen angels. Okay, so here's the thought. Cheer me up.

It isn't particularly surprising, under theism, that God would create beings like much higher than us on the chain of Where like there's a lot of value in their being like

Creatures with an intellect and a will. Um and I don't know, it's just it just wouldn't be terribly surprising if, you know, in addition to us and all the various lower beings, you know, with uh lesser capacities, non rational beings like the animals, Um, it wouldn't be terribly surprising that God might create in addition to us Um let's say purely spiritual beings who are also, you know, intellectual, rational beings capable of free choice.

There's just lots of value in beings like that. They can have relationships with one another, they can have relationships with us, they can have relationships with the rest of creation, they can have relationships with God, and it's gen in general it just seems good to create good beings. Um It also doesn't seem particularly surprising that conditional on God creating beings like that. that God might appoint them to be caretakers of lesser beings.

After all, like, you know, God, uh at least according to Genesis, God has appointed us to be caretakers of the rest of um the earth. in our kind of earthly reign. Um, right, we were to be earthly stewards, we're to be stewards of this place, not let it get polluted and take care of the animals. And I don't know, like there are just lots of goods that come about as a result of delegating

um the task of being a caretaker of other beings to um certain higher beings. Okay, so that that doesn't seem like super duper unlikely, conditional on theism. And so the thought is that God delegated to some of these angelic beings the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and predation and parasitism and natural disasters. But unfortunately,

They freely abdicated their divinely appointed role. They said, Nope, I will not serve. I will not uh perform this plan that that you've given me. I renounce my role here. Um and as a result, they freely omitted to benevolently steer evolution. Uh and so evolution took a course that's a little bit more than a little bit you know, seems to be indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient beings. Much like how negligence on the part of governments leads to

A seemingly indifferent distribution of goods and ills befalling citizens. It's not like there are active agents, active government agents targeting people. It's just like an act of omission. It's negligence. So, like the course of evolutionary history would indeed. Under this view, we'd expect it to take a kind of indifferent looking Uh it would we'd expect it to have an indifferent looking character.

So like, why might God do this? Like doesn't this seem to be like an irresponsible policy on God's part? Like uh doesn't that seem to be kind of implausible? Well, I don't know. There are some important goods that can be achieved by this divine modus operandi. So like

by delegating the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process to these archons, um, he allows them to be creaturely co-creators with God. He allows them to kind of cooperate with God in bringing about, um, in freely bringing about A good universe. Uh it's arguably good for the archons themselves to be caretakers of less beings, um to have that kind of responsibility for others. That's good for them. Uh it might help them develop various character uh traits.

Um maybe it's arguably good for other creatures to be cared for by higher beings, even if they don't know about it. So, like think of the squirrel, right? It might be kind of pretty cool and valuable that like I don't know, there's like an angel looking out for the squirrel or something like that. That could be valuable for the squirrel, even if the squirrel doesn't know it. Um And maybe most importantly, um, there does seem to be something pretty good and valuable about

There are being creatures with this kind of difference making responsibility for how well other beings' lives go. And in fact, this might actually have God delegating this task to these creatures might actually have infinite value in expectation. And why is that? Because if these archons had exercised their freedom to make a positive difference in our lives and the lives of the evolutionary you know, the creatures in the evolutionary process, arguably

that has a decent chance of improving our relationship with these archons for all of eternity, right? Like in in an afterlife, say. So like, uh, we would basically be more closely aligned with that. You know, like it's as if someone saved you from a very significant disaster. Like that could very much improve your relationship with them. Um and so like if the archons are given this task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process, um

there's at least a decent chance that that might improve our relationship with them and uh the animals' relationship with them um for the rest of eternity. So basically at each moment you get additional value if the archons had

successfully implemented their policy, right? If they had freely chosen to make the difference to our lives for the better, at each moment of the afterlife, we could have had a better relationship with them. And that's going to aggregate, arguably, to a kind of infinite value in expectation. So like

At least if it has infinite value and expectation, arguably that can justify the finite risks uh of finite suffering that the archons would be um that God would be risking by placing the archons in this. Decision situation where there's like some chance that they freely omit to perform their divinely appointed task.

But the thought is it may very well arguably be worth it, um, because of these various great goods, the goods of difference making responsibility, creaturely co creatorship, um, etcetera. Okay, so that's the Archon abandonment version. There's also an alien. Do you well, do you want to lay them both out or or are they different enough? Because I've got like obviously a billion questions. But yeah, I want to hear the aliens.

thing. Okay. So like if people don't like archons, you know, like you know, maybe Long before life evolved on Earth there were intelligent aliens who developed in a process devoid of predation and parasitism and without pain being the kind of motivator, uh

being their motivator, right? So like instead of, you know, stubbing their toe and being motivated by pain, maybe they're motivated by varying amounts of pleasure or you know, they just they just almost like their their pain is just kind of like an unconscious reflex to them. Um so like maybe their evolutionary process was much more benevolent. Uh and Uh, God basically created the universe in such a way that beings who evolved like that are given the responsibility um for.

you know, ensuring that other creatures elsewhere in the galaxy, say, uh, don't develop through a horrific evolutionary process. So maybe like these scientists you know, these alien scientists are poking around in the lab and they like discover pain, right? So like they stimulate themselves in some way and they're like, oh my goodness.

that was really intrinsically bad state to be in. And they start to wonder, like, oh my goodness, could this state have evolved? Could this have been the motivational like what motivated creatures on other planets in our galaxy. Oh my goodness. So like there's this Dugitter faction that like that pops up. And so l you know, this Dugeter faction among these aliens are like Hey, we should go through the galaxy and like steer back.

planets away from pain and suffering. Like this is very serious. They're basically like the EA techno bros of like the alien civilization. I'm like, guys, this is like a really serious moral thing and we need to go through the galaxy and steer planets away from pain and suffering. But alas There's also a large isolation isolationist faction among the alien civilization and uh the civilization as a whole and various individuals within the s civilization just culpably omit to

go out and steer evolutionary processes in the right direction. The isolationists went out culpably and they culpably committed this wrongdoing. And that was what is responsible for um the suffering and death on our planet. Okay. So listen, we're just going for a theodicy which is not supposed to be like

hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, and which together with theism renders the data not super surprising. So like the thought is like this story, these stories, the disjunction of them, is not like Conditional on theism, right? Conditional on theism. These are not totally out there and they predict the data, you know, they render the data not terribly surprising. Okay, so what do you think? This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast.

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No, I'm kidding. Um I look I can't say I can't say I'm convinced, uh exactly. And I I also like the sort of the the almost sort of desperate um uh uh like uh apologetic there is like I'm not saying that this is like true. I'm not and and on you've got to already assume theism. Like I get it, yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean I think that in order to expla I mean the big problem with with the problem of evil is

probably the the existence of natural evil as opposed to moral evil, right? So people kinda want to easily say that evils that people commit are just down to free will. But why would there be the natural stuff like hurricanes and and whatnot that we can't control, right?

And as you say, one sort of strategy here is to say that actually what we think are completely disconnected from, you know, free choices of conscious beings are actually a result of their choices. So some people say that, you know

hurricanes exist because of the fall, for example. We live in a broken world and that includes all kinds of like horrible natural disasters. This is of course a little bit different, but it's kind of doing the same thing. But I think it suffers for similar reasons, which is like firstly you said you know, these archons or whatever, um, just uh just just didn't sort of fulfil their duty. They freely chose not to guide evolution on planet Earth to be

you know, painless. Uh but this was this was worth it. But my question is if God could foresee that that was going to happen, would that actually be worth it? Like and then you're you're sort of back to the same like kind of conversation that you have around like moral evil in general. You know, if God could foresee that Adam and Eve were going to sin,

uh would it be a good thing to uh to allow them into existence? Well yeah,'cause you can also plan for Jesus to come and to come and save us as well. But I think that that question of like, why would it be worth it if God just knew that these creatures would freely choose to not fulfil their their ethical obligation and cause untold amounts of suffering. Maybe you kinda have to be a Christian here and say, Oh, because he's got some sort of plan to

to make up for it with Jesus somehow. But it just seems to me so extraordinarily unlikely that God would know what was going to happen. And go, because if these angels made a different choice that I know in fact they are not going to make, there would be these good things that could happen.

I'm going to allow it to happen. I mean, ma maybe there's like good stuff that that we still get, like you're talking about I I can't remember the exact examples you gave of the good stuff that we get by allowing these angels this but why were these angels given this particular prerogative over this particular sort of earthly realm?

when God knew that they were not going to fulfill that ethical obligation, like what is it that's supposed to be like worth it about bringing that situation into existence? Okay. Yeah. So listen the just not worth it objection is I think the most serious objection to any free will theodicy. So and like listen, that that's that's one of my biggest reservations. But

Uh so I'll just say that at the outset, right? Like I I I think I'm convinced by this, you know, response. Uh but I mean to put uh again, to keep my theist hat on, um I probably would say a few things. So one of them is like, I think you might be bringing in background assumptions about

How divine providence works and how it relates to freedom of creatures that the theist need not accept. So, you know, many theists think that, uh kind of explanatorily prior to so like earlier in the explanatory chain, before, as it were, God places free creatures in certain situations

In that explanatory moment, he doesn't know what they're gonna do because they're free, right? Like they could either go one way or the other, and nothing is determining them to go one way or the other. God doesn't know what they're gonna do in that explanatorily prior moment. So it's not like he creates these beings.

knowing explanatorily prior to putting them in the situations that they're gonna screw up, right? That would be that seems to be terrible. Uh right? Uh but like that's not the picture. At least that's not the picture that theists need to take. They could be uh

I hate to get too technical for the audience, but they could either be an open theist or they don't even need to be an open theist. So open theists think that God does not have exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. He and in particular he doesn't know certain contingent

things that will occur uh or that might occur in the future. Um but they don't even also have to go for in for open theism. They could go in for a kind of simple foreknowledge view where God does exhaustively know what happens in the future, but his knowledge of future contingents the free creatures in a given situation, explanatorily prior to that. Uh, he doesn't know what they're gonna do. He doesn't know if they're gonna screw up or not. And so God just kind of has to, as it were,

take a bit of a risk. He sees the value, the immense value, maybe the even the infinite value, as I mentioned, of implementing this policy of giving archons difference making responsibility for how well the lives go of lower creatures.

Um and again, the reason why it's supposed to have infinite value is because like it would enable us and various other animals throughout an endless afterlife to have a better relationship at each moment with these archons. Because you know, they they made such a great difference to our lives earlier on. Um And he so he sees that infinite value and judges that I know that there's a risk. that these guys are gonna screw up. Um

But I judge it worth it because, well, that's only risking finite suffering and there's infinite like there's really infinite goods on the line. And he you know, God knows that he can create us in such a way that we can have an afterlife. And in fact, maybe God has like

a background policy. Like maybe God has um obligations to particular creatures not to let them live lives that are bad on the whole. And so maybe like for the animals as it were that seem to be thrown under the bus under this picture, um, maybe God does give them some kind of afterlife, you know, where the lion lays down with the lamb. Uh and their evils are defeated, so they come to

see kind of their role in God's providential plan. Maybe he boosts their intellectual capabilities a little bit so that they can kind of endorse their role and endorse their kind of they wouldn't wish away their suffering and they see their suffering fitting into a kind of integrated unity or integrated whole which is on the whole kind of very good. Um so anyway, uh there are various things that the theist can say. I know that this is looking kind of desperate, but Well, you know, uh I I

It's what was it we were talking about earlier that was similar? Like or or you were talking about like the hypertime thing and It's it's it's like I think these are these are these are clever and they're interesting, but it does fit you can imagine why somebody listening to this Huh, that's kind of fun and interesting and what a what a fun like thought experiment. And there are people who go like, you know

w this is nonsense, who the hell cares? I don't think there's a camp of people who listen to this and go Yeah yeah. Oh gosh, yeah, fair enough actually. Yeah, that that that explains it. Do you know what I mean? I think there's a a small camp who might be like that. If that's you, let it let us let us know. Let us know'cause I I I I don't know, it just feel I mean, I guess if you've already got enough prior like assumptions, or obviously, you know

If you're speaking to an atheist, all of this is gonna sound like absolute skills, as it were. I just want to say this is what people misunderstand about um theodicies. Because the argument from evil In its best versions, is Bayesian. It's looking at compare, it's comparing different hypotheses and seeing how well they predict the data, how much they probability. So when you're running this argument. You have to say.

Under theism, holding theism fixed, how probable is the data? So you have to put on your theistic goggles and think about the probability of these various hypotheses. Given that theism is true, you can't then say like, oh, but I'm an atheist and this all seems really ridiculous to me. Like, no, you're supposing that theism is true for the sake of this argument and then trying to tease out. How likely is it that we would see a seemingly indifferent evolutionary process?

Uh and the thought of this argument is that listen, conditional on theism It doesn't seem like Prohibitively unlikely that God might create beings that are higher than us and give them certain divinely appointed tasks of governance over the rest of creation or portions of creation. Uh and given the relevant goods involved, especially if we've already conditioned on the fact that God has created us and given us certain responsibilities, which doesn't seem terribly unlikely.

I dunno, like i it does this seem hopelessly unlikely conditional on theism holding that fixed? And putting aside your kind of atheistic, naturalistic skeptical assumption. I don't know. Um and and so long as you can at least Make it so that it's not hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, then while we arguably will have evidence against theism here from evolutionary animal suffering, I don't want us to lose that. We will have evidence.

The point from the theist's perspective is to put dents in that, to say that this is not overwhelming evidence. Because I can tell um a story that is not prohibitively unlikely, conditional on theism. Uh which would render the data, you know, somewhat expected. Um, and that means that, yeah, you're gonna get some update in favor of atheism here.

But it's not gonna be overwhelming and this shouldn't basically be like a silver bullet for you guys. You guys are also gonna have to take into account all this fine tuning stuff and contingency and various other things. Um so You know, you can't just cling to the problem of evil and say, like, it's the end of the day. This is decisive. Um it's just to put dents in the problem of evil to say, like, this is not as decisive as you guys might have initially thought.

Yeah. And also it's not like you are just creating these entities out of nowhere. Like if Like in other words, religions believe in the existence of angels. It's a little unclear exactly what they are, but they seem to be at sort of higher level than than humans. It seems to kinda goes animal to human, like angel

God, if you ask me. And yeah, like like that that makes it a little easier to say, like, well, let's let's investigate what the nature of these angelic beings might be, where they fit into this

sort of story of humanity and evolution and and yeah, like maybe that's that's why it happened. Like it would be a lot less strong I think still if there were no such thing as angels in religious scriptures and you kinda had to invent these hyp hypothetical creatures in the way that you do with the aliens, where you're like, Well, maybe there's this like alien thing

That that will maybe land better for a for a for an atheist, but as a religious person who already believes in the existence of aliens, the question is o of of of uh angels. The the question now is just like, well, w where do those angels like fit into this story? And it's yeah, it's plausible. Maybe they had some kind of dominion over the the the crawling featherless biped.

Right, right, exactly. And I mean this is uh this is something that Cutter and Swenson point out. Like actually there are this is not like some like Totally ludicrously ad hoc postulation just to save theism, just to save a theory. Like um, Yeah, but you know, when someone's saying that when when someone when someone is saying about their own argument, you know, just so you know, this isn't a totally ludicrous ad hoc tri it's it's seem seems a bit ropey.

Listen, they don't say quite that. I s uh this isn't me putting words in their mouth. Their point is like listen, this is not an ad hoc posit that's totally foreign to, you know, independent theorizing and relevant religious traditions.

They point out that in the Bible, like, you know, Satan is described as the ruler of this world and you know, like we're we are battling against these powers and principalities and whatnot, and like this is like an age of darkness and um various other things. You can even look like

Aquinas are you know argued way back in the thirteenth century that um you know the role of angels in creation, like God actually did just give them certain roles Um, like some of them are appointed to be the angels, uh, on top of, let's say, um or like assigned to

do certain things. Um so like there are various precedents within um church history, within the Bible, within various things. And like, you know, now we're r really getting into the wheel, you know, we're really getting kind of crazy here. But like I think that a lot of Christians will say, like, hey dude, like we just have like lots of independent evidence from like direct eyewitness testimony across cultures and across times for the existence of like a demonic type phenomena, you know, like

Seemingly honest witnesses testified just like, you know, seeing people you know, levitate speak languages that they don't know, you know, like objects just like randomly flying across the room in broad daylight and perfectly conducive perceptual circumstances in front of the tons of different witnesses. So they'll say, like, okay, listen, like this doesn't prove anything, but like

We have some independent evidence from like direct first first hand eyewitness testimony that these things may very well exist. Um I dunno, you know, y y I'm maybe just digging myself deeper and deeper into holes. As I said I have my theest hat on. It's worth a it's worth a hearing, you know, and and I'm stranger things have been said by you know um by your guests. People who actually believe Yeah, on occasion, on occasion. Especially, you know, the last time we spoke.

Um I yeah, I I don't know. Like it o obviously this does not have any like like Uh th this is not compelling to me, is what I mean to say. But like it's an interesting thing. It might do something for someone out there and I'd be interested if it does. Like has this paper is this paper like quite niche? Like uh d you d is this one you said won the prize?

It's a very good paper. That's the thing. Like it's pointing out the v uh like various different goods that come about as a result of this. Is this is this the one that run r won won the prize you were talking about, or is that the hypertype? Yeah, Mark Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion. It's published in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion or rather it's forthcoming.

Um it's called Yeah, the omission theodicy I think by Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson. Let it not be said that cutting edge research is is not being done in the theology department at the University of Oxford. Right, right, exactly. So I mean listen, this is not the only approach that the theists are forced into. I mean, again, as you said, like Trent already has this approach on what

Um, animals may very well be able to have an afterlife where their the the evils that they suffer in this life are defeated. There are various other considerations that people raise. You know, um Michael Murray has Uh this book Nature Bread in Tooth and Claw, where he tries to give like a number of different theodices. Um, various things can be said in response to these

things. But I just want to like point out that like hey, the theists aren't totally silent here. But then let's take a look at the the claim under discussion here, which is evolution disproves God as like a as a claim. People typically They might be talking about evolutionary animal suffering, they might be talking about like the uniqueness of humans. They might be talking about particular doctrines like young earth creationism that evolution just flies in the face of like all of these things.

I think it flies in the face of the uniqueness of humans because if we're just the result of this like gradual sort of evolution from some kind of common ancestor, then if you were to like resurrect all of the missing links between a human being and a chimpanzee, say, 'Cause they'll sort of on a graph they'll sort of converge like this until we we find our common ancestor, however many millions of years ago that was.

Uh, you could take all of those creatures and you could bring them back from the dead and you could stand them all like in a line and you'd sort of go right, chimpanzee, chimpanzee, chimpanzee, chimpanzee, and you'd go all across these like millions and millions of creatures. And by the time you got to the end, you'd be like a human being. But there's no point at which you go, chimpanzee, eh now you're a human. It because it's gradual, although those sort of missing links are all dead now.

They're like real creatures who like walk to the earth and it would have to either be that God like arbitrarily just like chooses a point and goes, Now you're humans and now I'm gonna give you the the breath of life or whatever. Maybe that's what it means to breathe life into Adam's nostrils or whatever, but it seems a little bit unfair that now One creature. Who has exactly the same, like, genetic makeup as his mother.

It it's the same species. You put them together, they're the same kind of animal. But this one, because he was born, you know, today, gets to inherit eternal life and benefit from the salvation of Jesus. But his mother, who's exactly the same genetic creature No, no, no, because you know, she didn't have the the breath of life breathed into or whatever. It it just seemed like a really again like unexpected thing. So

Anyway, we know this, right? There are lots of reasons why evolution s sort of seems to rub up against religion in in a negative way, but the claim that it disproves God what do you think? Okay, I mean that's surely f that's surely false. I mean like these are at least consistent. Like theism and evolution seems consistent. God could have created by way of evolution, uh I don't see any any like incoherence. موسیقی

Yeah, but then we don't want to be like too trivial here. We don't want to say like well technically they're consistent and so uh you I you're right to say you know, if you didn't interrupt They're like strictly consistent, but my own view is that uh evolution provides Serious, non trivial, substantive evidence against God's existence.

Um that must be reckoned with and must be balanced against those various other reasons and considerations that I mentioned earlier that arguably favor God's existence. Yeah. And as with all of these claims. I think that oftentimes i if we just analyze them on like

face value, we can always kinda go, well, you know, technically that doesn't apply or technically but like people are like getting at something, right? Slogans are supposed to be like representative of a broader view. The slogan itself is never supposed to be the like entire extent of the position. And so

Yeah, like evolution doesn't disapprove God. But you know what someone's getting at when they say that? They mean that evolution poses a big challenge to some of the assumptions that a traditional theist might have. when someone says that like, oh well you I just believe in one less God than you do, that's like a bonkers reason to think that God doesn't exist. But maybe they're just trying to get us across like a psychological condition. You know, I think with all of these things It's worth

I as I say, th they are representative of broader positions and I'm glad that we've I suppose taken the time today to just try to analyse what those broader positions actually are, so that the next time you hear one of these things you don't dismiss it out of hand and instead you dismiss it um with, you know, sort of

thoughtful critique. Or maybe you think that some of them are true. I I I don't know. I can't remember. We we didn't do like an official like, so this one's good and this one's bad, but there's probably a a relatively clear up and down. I think most of them have been like knows, right? Like there have been a couple that we've endorsed, like the um Geographical distribution thing. But whatever, you know, who cares?

Um, Joe, Joe Schmidt. Your your channel Majesty of Reason will of course be linked in the description and uh yeah, e extraordinary in depth dives. I I always have fun talking to you. You seem to You're just like a you're a brain and you're a you're you're an encyclopedia, but you're not just that,'cause you know how to convey the ideas and how to pull them together and we're all very grateful for the time you spent.

sat in a little box on a screen in front of me for for this podcast. So thanks again, man.