Pints With Aquinas - Does God Exist? w/ Alex Plato

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Alex Plato and Matt talk about proofs for God's existence. Video sponsored by Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd Join Us on Locals: https://mattfradd.locals.com/

So Thomas Aquinas wrote Daily Meditations for Lent. And so what I'm gonna do over on matfrad.locals.com is read those meditations and release them every day throughout Lent. So if you've been thinking, what's a cool way I could prepare for Easter, this would be it. Go over and support us at matfrad.locals.com

and you'll get a bunch of free things in return. One of those free things will be daily meditations for Lent, matfrad.locals.com. Thanks. Are we live? Natural theology. What is it? Whose idea was it anyway?

Yeah, it's a great idea. So I think it comes from, I would say- That's a great question. I would say it's a great question. Of course it's a great question. Thank you. So I would say that if we look at Aristotle's metaphysics, right, then he talks about and he kind of describes what metaphysics is, you might say defines it, right? But one of his descriptions is it's the divine science, because metaphysics is trying to understand the mind of God, right?

So that's divine wisdom. That's, of course, what any philosopher's interested in. So being philosophically already sort of like a metaphysician, you're interested in that level. And so if it's the divine mind that we're interested in, right, then there's a certain sense in which we're doing theology, because it's the mind of God. It's God himself who we're trying to learn about and think about and understand. But it's natural because it's not based on revelation. And so that idea is where that term or notion comes from. So metaphysics includes what we call natural theology. What about if we call it supernatural philosophy?

We can call it supernatural philosophy. I dig it. Hey, I never thought of that. That makes sense. I might have to steal that for you, for my students. Do you get a lot of students at Franciscan asking about proofs for God's existence? Oh, this is to me, this is to me what all of us are interested in at some level. I mean, your son's already interested in this, I'm sure. Yeah. Right. And I had a third grader and when I taught, when I was a camp counselor that asked me, why do you think there's a God? Like, can you give me some reasons? Basically, a third grader asked me that. So I think as

soon as people can kind of frame questions and I realize they can ask them, they want to know. And so I think natural theology is also natural in that sense. It's like we just sort of ordinarily do it. We spontaneously want to know this stuff. And so the theology part is the like ology, right? The discipline, the scientific approach to it, like an order to it. So there's kind of what I would call

old school natural theology. Think of that as maybe in the pre-modern era in the Christian, you know, in Christendom, right, where there's a kind of, you try to deduce the existence of God. You try to make a deductive argument, right? And then once you get that, you try to deduce certain attributes, right, and show how they're all coherent and consistent. So it's a very strict affair, right? And it's part of metaphysics.

And then I think what happened is in the modern period, it kind of, it loosened up because a lot of the deductive arguments were challenged in certain ways. And I think many of them can be overcome the challenges, but there became a lot more arguments that were inductive. So think of like the design arguments, so like Paley and stuff like that. And so then it become a little bit broader. But then I think the modern, the modern era enters a phase where, where deism is starting to become bigger

and natural theology is now taking the place of where revealed theology used to be in our culture. So that used to hold our culture together. But then with the Reformation and the different conflicts within the West, especially, right, you have that unity being lost. And now the new place to find that unity is natural theology. We're not going to talk about differences. And so I think that ultimately leads to kind of a stale deism where there's no religious conviction about it. Right?

It's just sort of like, well, we can kind of know there's a God and then we might get along with our own affairs. Yes. Right. And so it becomes like anti-revelational. Yes. And then it kind of dies out in a certain way. It sows the seeds of its own destruction, you might say. So,

so natural theology has this history to it. And then I think by the time you get to the 1800s, where there was this explosion of knowledge of other religions, it became interesting again. And Christopher Dawson gave some Gifford lectures, which I just recently read, which the Gifford lectures have been going for over a hundred years, and they're lectures in natural theology. So in the beginning, he says, this is the history of natural theology, I just kind of gave you the nutshell version of it. And he says, well, what we need to understand

natural theology today is it's much broader. It's we need an expanded notion of natural theology. It's not just deductive arguments, it's not just inductive arguments, it might be what we call abductive arguments. And there needs to be a very serious historical component that looks at other religions in a very serious way that we haven't before, because we didn't have the knowledge. To sort of bring them on board. Bring them on board, right? In the arguments for God's existence. Yes, and ultimately for Christian theism. Yes. Right? So natural theology in the Christian culture has served as kind of part of apologetics. Yes.

Right. And so it's a necessary step, you might say, like so classical apologetics, you do this stuff first, and then you get into stuff about like the inspiration of scripture, the resurrection of Jesus, right? All that stuff. Right. So you kind of have the order to it that way. So natural theology to me is a kind of the understanding that man's reason is competent

to kind of have a scientific understanding of God, who he is without revelation. So that's correct, but it's expanded because it's not just deductive and inductive arguments, right, but also the history of religion. It's also abductive, all these different things are trying to explain together in this complicated case for for ultimately Christian theism So I mean, I know by abducted it might be helpful to make these distinctions here, right? So induction argues from particular instances to general conclusions method of science Deduction argues from at least one general premise to a particular conclusion by abduction Do you mean arguing to the best explanation from the

facts that you have? Yes, so there's disparate facts that you want to make sense of and so you have an explanation that makes sense of them all as together there as they are. So it makes them more understandable. So if I wake up in the morning and I thought to myself, I heard rain last night and then when I'm pouring my coffee I look out and I see puddles on the back myself, I heard rain last night. And then when I'm pouring my coffee, I look out and I see puddles on the back grass. I assume that the best explanation is that it's raining. That would be an example of abduction. Exactly.

And to me, the paradigm case of it is Sherlock Holmes. So the way he reasons is actually what's called abductive reason, or inference to the best explanation. Even though when Conan Doyle wrote it, he talked about deduction. It's not a strict sense, but what he's doing is abduction. So the guy walks in his office, right?

221B Baker Street, and says whatever, and he's dressed in a certain way. He's got the Masonic pin, right? He's got the one hand's bigger than the other, the boots of a certain type with certain color of mud, and he like looks at all those facts and knows all about them now. Why he's there, what he wants to,

what the question he's about to say is, he's like a mind reader. We do this all do this all this is the most ordinary kind of reason and this is also the reason of science and Also theology. So when science has a theory, let's say yeah, let's say that the Evolutionary theory right that is supposed to explain a lot of different things and disciplines. It becomes what we call a paradigm Right and so that is a theory at a high level that's explaining lots of different things and disciplines. It becomes what we call a paradigm, right? And so that is a theory at a high level that's explaining lots of different things in different disciplines and make sense of them all. And so then, or the way we do theology is we say,

well, this doctrine best explains all these texts from all these different Biblical sources within the Bible. This makes the best sense, right? And then of course you can have, say, when I was a Protestant, you had the sort of Armin This makes the best sense, right? And of course, you can have, say, when I was a Protestant, you had the sort of Arminians versus the Calvinists, and the Calvinists are going to find certain texts and say, these are explained best by our understanding of free will. And the Arminians say, well, these texts, a different set, right, is understood

by our understanding of free will. And so you have a set of data which is disparate. They're not all linear. They're not related by being the same type of thing, like, oh, there's a white swan, a white swan, a white swan, a white swan. So all swans are white, which obviously is false. But that's a kind of induction that's called enumerative, the same thing over and over again. So abduction is this disparate stuff. So there can be, so when we come to understanding the truth of Christianity, which is apologetics, right, we start with natural theology and we get to the truth of Christianity. So I think natural theology to me needs to be understood because I'm a Christian as yes, it's its own

discipline. It's part of metaphysics, right? We can do that without revelation, but it also folds into our understanding of Christianity being true. So how do we understand that truth? It has to be an abductive case because there's so many different disparate facts as your private experiences. There's the reports of miracles, right? There's the testimony from the saints, right? There's the dogmas of the church, right? There's the scriptural data, right?

There's the arguments from philosophy, there's Eucharistic, there's all this stuff. There's so many different things. Isn't abduction in this sense an admission that the deductive arguments don't work? Because if they did, why not focus on one of those facts and say, that suffices for me? Yeah, so that's a good question. So I like this text by Dallas Willard. So Dallas Willard wrote this paper called A Three-Stage Argument for the Existence of

God. And in the first part he says, what I mean by God is the Christian God, right? That's what I mean. So, the plausibility of that, so like, this is apologetics now, he says, emerges in three stages. And so, there's an order to it. And so, you can fit deductive arguments, or inductive arguments, or abductive arguments in this sort of framework of arguments, and there's an order to it. And I find this to be extremely fruitful and helpful for lots of reasons. I'll try to tell you why.

Yeah, lay it out. So feel free to feel free to take your time. Okay. So the first, the first stage is just, we, we look at every stage you look at a kind of evidence, right? And so I like to say you look at evidence first and then you try to formulate arguments. There's a really important distinction

between evidence and arguments. So the first stage, the evidence you're looking at is just the physical world, the physical world as a whole. So this is where what we traditionally call cosmological arguments would fit, right? So the physical world presents itself a certain way. Scientists study it, we study it, we have intuitions about it, whatever. And so we're looking at that and then we try to form an inference, right, to something beyond the physical world.

So I think the best way to look at that would be, let's say, a contingency type way of reasoning. And I'm not going to spell out the argument, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but you've got sort of this physical stuff, however we cut it up, however we slice it up in space or time, it's dependent. Right? That seems to be the nature of physicality as we understand it. And so, so then we say, well, how could this be if that's all there is? And we of course get to the thing was that it can't, it can't just be like that, right? There's some explanation for it. So we could either run it as an abductive argument, we could run it as a deductive argument and whatever. It doesn't matter what kind of argument you run it in, right?

But you have the same basic evidence physicalities. We understand it. It doesn't explain itself, right? So it has to be something in reality. That's like a self existent right type of being. So that conclusion, of course, as Coquinas would say, we call it God, but suppose you don't know what we call God, but all you know is there's this extra natural reality that stage one. So he says it gets you extra naturalism, right? That's not a personal being. That's not even necessarily one being yet.

That's not anything. It's super modest. That's what to me is so powerful about this argument. It gets you a super modest conclusion, but that's a huge conclusion from the point of view of, of, of a atheist or an agnostic. And what if somebody says, okay, maybe physical things are by their nature dependent, but the past is infinite. And so it's just been a long story of one physical thing giving rise to another physical thing.

Doesn't that eliminate the necessity of an underlying non-physical necessary thing? So then I think you're going to get into some of the particular arguments that have been made to respond to that kind of objection. So the objection of course is to the argument as I formulated it. And remember I made a distinction between evidence and argument. So no matter what you do, if you make that distinction, anybody's left with the evidence that must be explained. You can't get away from that.

Now, when you give an argument, you open yourself up to refutation because you make it particular and you set out certain premises and you open yourself to objection, which is fine and fair. But even if you respond to an argument and say that doesn't work,

you still have the evidence there that you've got to explain. Fair enough. So let's say we hear that objection, we're like, okay, well, could there be an infinite series in the past? Right? And so then you're getting to get to like an Aquinas

or a Scotus or a Bonaventure, like, well, there's different series of different orders of infinity, right? There's an accidental order, like, you know, your parents and their parents and their parents and like the domino chain, right? The domino could have started the whole chain and then that ceased existing, right?

That chain could go on forever in the past, right? According to Aquinas. According to Aquinas. Right? But then that forever in the past, right? According to Aquinas. According to Aquinas. Right? But then that still doesn't explain, right? The physical world as we know it, right? Because you can say- It explains it horizontally, you might say, but not vertically.

Not vertically. So vertically is called an essential order of causes. And SCOTUS does the same thing, similar thing, right? And so you might say with the, if I've got a bat and I hit a ball, right? That ball is hit because the power of the bat was transferred to the ball. But the power of the bat was given by my swinging it,

was given it by me. Of course, all that occurs at one and the same time. There's some process in me that causes something else to have a power, which then there's a process it's in, which causes another thing to have a power, and that's all simultaneous. That's right. Or another example for those at home would be how do you explain the existence of a hanging

chandelier? Yes. And you might say, well, the immediate hook upon which it rests. But that there seems to be more than that. But the whole thing is being explained to the whole, but at the same time it's connected to the roof, which is somehow grounded to the structure to the, to the earth. Right. So I think once you get that,

then you're trying to respond to that objection. Remember, couldn't there be an infinite? So you're like, well, there could be that kind of infinite, but not this kind of infinite. And then of course, somebody who's sophisticated will try to carry out more objection at that point. And then it goes on and on and on. And it gets really difficult and complicated.

Yes. But again, I think what we all need to do is we have to explain the evidence that's in front of us. And we can't take the easy way out which is we reject somebody's argument. And so then we think we've done, we're done. You still have the original thing. How do you explain the physical world?

Yes. Right? So let's suppose we dealt with the objections. It's a lot easier to tear something down than to build it. Yes. And it's a lot easier to poke holes or ask questions than to state something. And if we identify evidence and argument, I think we've done a horrible service, right, to rational thought and philosophy.

If we equate the two. If we equate the two, because an argument is always some formulation and articulation of the evidence in a certain order. And so now we're using the tools of language, which always limit us in some way. They're amazing tools and very flexible, but they will limit us in certain ways,

because we have the experiences, right, and the evidence that's before us, even prior to the articulation in words, you might say. And so we have to deal with that. So let's suppose we did, and we got to the end of stage one, which is he calls it extra naturalism. So then again, that argument is physical things are dependent. They can't exist unless there's something that's roughly explains them. He doesn't explain it in a, what do I say? He doesn't give you a perfectly neat argument there. He suggests that.

When I first read it, I thought he was kind of referring to the Kalam. Then I read it again, I thought maybe he's referring to a contingency argument. Then I kind of read it and I was like, I'm not really sure which one he's referring. Maybe he's not even clear. Is the whole point of his vagueness

so that he doesn't open himself up to attack? And he said that- No, because he deals with a whole bunch of objections. Like the person who says, well, okay, so you think there's this extra natural cause. Well, what caused that? Yeah. Right. And he's like, well, that's like a silly question because we're, cause it's the kind of thing that doesn't need a cause. So it's self-explanatory. Okay. Right. Or self-existing. Right. And he says, I don't, I'm not telling you what that is. I don't know what, if that's a person, if that's a,

if that's a one being or many beings or plurality, I have not telling you what that is. I don't know if that's a person, if that's one being, or many beings, or plurality. I have no idea. All I know is that given our knowledge of physicality. And so another way to put it is an agnostic or something could say, well, just the physical world's eternal. It just has that character in itself. And he'd say, I guess you agree with me then. Because the physical world now has a character that's different than our experience and understanding

of the physical. So has a character that's different than our experience and understanding of the physical. Yeah. Right. So that's an admission. Right. So what you've got now is what he calls an ontologically haunted universe. What he means from an atheist point of view. Now it's like maybe there's more to it than than our scientistic mind thought. Right.

Trying to reduce it to our understanding of physicality. That doesn't work. So now you have an openness. That's stage one. And it doesn't work again, because physicality doesn't explain itself. Exactly, that's the heart of it, I think, the nature of physicality, right?

And you can run that in lots of different versions of it. There's versions of the cosmological argument, as you know. Some of them are better, some are not. And there's many versions of the same types, like many people interpret Aquinas's first and second way differently. Yeah. Right, okay. So that's the first stage. The second stage, he says, let's consider not the

nature of physicality overall, but the order that's in the physical world. Okay. Right. There is order in the physical world. So how do we explain that? That's the evidence. What does he mean by order in the physical world? So processes, according to like sciences, looking at the things that are law like processes, corruption and change if you're using Aristotle, right? This these things that have a kind of order to them or maybe an order in them, like even physically,

like the fractal patterns in shells or flowers or whatever, like there's order at all different levels, right, both in time and in space and in beings and how they relate and everything. There's a way it works. There's a way it works, exactly's a way it works. Exactly. And there's from a scientific point of view, there's like laws that can generalize on that order. Um, so then we say, well,

how do we explain this order? And so we, of course we can say, well, one obvious thing is to say this order came from other order. And that's a normal way, right? How did this, how did this gamete, right? Get ordered to become this thing? Well, it met this gamete and something happened, where this other order was made by these orders combining in some ways that's amazing and interesting. Of course, we can then study that down at the level of chromosomes and genes and epigenetics

and whatever else. But we can see, well, that order came from an order. Somebody say, well, what does order always come from order? Can order come from disorder? And so then at that point he, and this is the way he is. If it could, my house would be perpetually clean. Yeah, there you go. Or at least potentially. So he says, he said, he, he quotes Richard Dawkins who says, yeah, order can come from non-order. And Richard Dawkins is example that Willard quotes

is the, the, the, the pebbles and sand on a beach, right? So the waves are this disorder, just like striking it at random, right? And then you can look at the pebbles and they're like organized in a certain way by density or whatever. And so he thinks, he puts that forward as an example of disorder causing order.

And Willard's like, that's dumb, right? That's not disorder causing order. It's one kind of order causing another kind of order, right? Because the waves, right? The vector, the weight of the molecules, the speed, et cetera. Yes, it's astronomically difficult to imagine all that, but of course, physically, we can understand how science could show that

and predict that it would be that order based on this kind of order of the waves action and the weight and et cetera. So then he says, then he lays down a principle, which is order only comes from order. And I'm gonna hold this principle until you give me a counter example. I see, and this is the second stage of the argument.

This is the second stage. So man, it's again, how do we explain order? That was the evidence. The evidence is the order. How do we explain that? So if I throw paint at a canvas without any sort of specific intention, except to throw it, that's still order coming from order.

Yes. So the order would be like, if you knew the physical force of that, right? Of course the guy isn't trying to order it. The guy, let's say he just wants random, right? It's random relative to his thoughts and relative to what he knew. But if a scientist knew all the weight of the angle and all that kind of stuff, it would be predictable. Right. Um, and so, so he says order only comes from order. And so he says, well, where did all the order that's in all of the cosmos as a whole come from then? Right. If we just keep going prior States, right.

That's not going to explain the order. So he says the only option we have, and this is the argument part, right, is that that extra natural reality that we already had from stage one, that's part of reality because we've completed stage one. And so then we can imagine in a, in a, in an alagas way to a mind, right? A mind can put order out right on a thing. So this thing is mind like, that's what he calls stage two theism. If it wasn't mind like, what would it be?

It, it would be non mind like, but then we wouldn't have an explanation of the order. I see. We might, we might have a basis that explains physical reality. It's existence, but yeah, I see. So again, somebody could reject the explanation seeking question. Like I don't need to explain order. Yes. But then if you're a person who's trying to explain things and that seems to you as a good explanation seeking question, right? Then the best explanation is what you should go with so that this is an ab seems like an abductive kind of argument When he as he phrases it, but again, I want to make the distinction between evidence and argument So allow there to be other ways to formulate this that's how he forms late So it's a kind of teleological argumentation

formulate this. That's how he forms it. So it's a kind of teleological argumentation, but he wants to be sure that he's, he calls it an argument to design rather than an argument from design, because of course the design is the mind, right? So that's what you get to in the end. You don't start with design and say, so there's a designer, you start with order and say that comes from somewhere, right? If it didn't come from other physical States forever, and that doesn't explain it had to come from some other source source and we already know that reality has this other character, maybe that's a mind-like thing. So then he goes through history and talks about all the ancient Greek, Roman, Catholic, non-Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, other religions, philosophers who agreed with this

conception. This is roughly the God of the philosophers, right? The stage two. So a divine mind, right? A kind of cosmic intellectualism, that's what he calls it. And so that now we have this God, we haven't touched religion, right? Not per se. And so then stage three is where all the action happens, I think. That's where the difficult stuff happens. That's when we enter the course of human events and human experience. And so now, again, he's

trying to show the plausibility of Christian theism. So you're at stage two, Christian theism is no more plausible than Islamic theism, right, than Judaism, than deism, right? They're all consistent with a cosmic mind. Right? So how do we get to Christianity? He says we have to look at human events. So what we would call the history of religion, right? Comparative religion, the philosophy of religion, right? Private experience, experiences of God, how do we interpret that? How do we deal with the problem of religious pluralism? All these very difficult questions, right? And so he says that's the realm where we have to do all that hard work. And what he says is we've already finished stage two.

So if we finish stage two, then we can use that evidence against any religious claims that contradict it. So for example, some forms of Buddhism cannot have that divine mind. So those forms in so far as they say that are false, right? So then you can use the past stages to limit yourself down to smaller and smaller things. So the next stage in within that, right? So that's his basic framework, those three, right? And then like my teacher Doug Guyvitt

divided up into further stages. So when you get to stage three, you're gonna consider things like the resurrection of Jesus. And so you might say, look, this is consistent with monotheism, stage two. But what I'm interested in is revelational monotheism because I have a religious sensibility. And I think that this world isn't as it ought to be, right? So there's got to be some sort of

correction to this that comes from the outside. So I'm looking, I expecting and looking for a revelation. So now deism is off the radar screen for me because I'm looking at religions now because I think there is possibly a solution to the human conundrum. So you have to first conclude that things aren't the way they ought to be in order to open yourself up to the possibility of revelation? Yes.

So what if I just say, well, I don't see there being a need for any sort of correction to how things are. Yeah, then I would say, but then you need to explain away the rest of human history, which thinks there is a way. I see. So you can enter in different arguments to keep people on the path. That's part of the strategy and framework.

So the way my mentor, Doug Guyvitt, did it was, after stage two, you can consider the nature of evil. And that's another form of teleological argument. Like things seem like they're not that way. And if you don't analyze evil that way, then give me some other alternatives. So now for his evidence, let's say the beginning of stage three is evil, is a kind of evidence that we have to deal with and explain. So

then by the time he explains that he's generating an expectation for revelation, I say, right. And so once you get that, then you're going to look at the history of religions like you, you want, you're looking at revealed religions now. So all the religions that don't have revelation that you're not interested in those first, I'm sorry. It's still not clear to me why we need to have revelation. So even if I decide and I think it's a bit of a jump to say that evil is a problem. Maybe I just say, look, I look at the animal kingdom. It doesn't cause me any grief when I see an animal kill another animal. Um, we have, uh, more evolved brains. And so the evil,

what we say is evil is more difficult for us because we confront it in a way that a rabbit doesn't have to but This really isn't a problem. It's only a problem because We don't like feeling pain or something like that. And so we've given words to immoral actions, but okay fair enough There's something at the basis of reality that justifies the existence of material things. There seems to be order having been given to it. And I'm happy just with that.

Yeah. So maybe that's like the deist point of view. Yeah. But even a deist is going to say, well, I think now I've got the moral law and everything set up and now we need to live for justice. Like think of a John Stuart Mill may, maybe like the whole, the whole way to fix everything is like perfect education. Right?

No, I see. Yeah. So he still thinks there's something we need to do. All right. But he's going to do it without revelation. That's fine. Then we look at history like, well, how successful have people been who have tried that? In other words, it's natural to human beings. So now I'm arguing from the history of religion. It's natural and appropriate for human beings to seek help, right?

Through prophets and divinations, priests, right? Kings, whatever, they need help, right? To- Ordering a sort of thing we want to get. And so now if a person doesn't buy that, I'm not really sure what to say. Fair enough, well suppose I agree with that and say there is a way that things,

I would like things to be better than they are. Yes. But I still don't see why I need revelation. Yeah. So then I think that how you get somebody to the point where they have their engaged in their religious nature, right, is they see that not only is the world full of misery and corruption, right, and there's luck, right, that's bad. You might say your friends die, right, things that don't make sense, right? And then you look in yourself and you're like,

I have these qualities, right, do not measure up. So you're seeing that you're a sinner. You might not use that word, right? But you're like, I can be a greater human being than this, right, but I can't fix myself. So that religious part, engaging in that, I'm not sure how to get somebody to capture onto that if they don't already have certain basic experiences

which normal human beings have. But I would gesture to normal human beings in the study of, of history to say this is natural and appropriate to human beings. And for oneself, you should be interested in yourself, right? For becoming, right, happy, right? How do we become perfectly happy? Seems like all the attempts for us to do it, right? Have included religion. And of course now you're into the history of which religion and why, what are they trying to do. But we've already at stage two. So we've already limited down the selection a little bit. So you see at least that the stages

create an ordering. I see the stages create an ordering, but I'm still not getting the why I have to be open to revelation in order to be open to Christianity? Why can't it be the other way around? Why can't it be there exists a necessary thing that orders things? And oh, look, over there is a claim that someone rose from the dead, which apparently vindicated his claims. OK, now knowing what I know about that, perhaps it's possible that this necessary ordering thing has made himself known. Like, why can't that be the way to go that way? So his stages are only three, right?

Stage one, stage two and stage three. And so you can fit like how you get into stage three to me is the messy part. Okay. Right, because that's human history, human events. I see. Like miracle claims, whatever. So I think the fast track is, right?

The resurrection, because you're like, well, if we need revelation, let's say you get to that point, well, I'm going to be looking at revelational monotheisms. And the revelational monotheisms are, you know, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Right? I mean, maybe you can say Hinduism has some kind of revelation. You can maybe argue that. But at any rate, then you're gonna see that the resurrection is the test for all those all at once. So you might as well test it there.

I see, yeah. Because if you falsify that, then you're left with Islam and Judaism. But if you have confirmed it, well then you just eliminated those two. Right, so then you can look at that claim, right, of the resurrection. You can imagine Bill Craig, the way he orders things,

that's kind of the next thing. And then you go to the historical reliability of the gospels as maybe part of arguing for that, right? Not necessarily inspiration, right? So maybe that's kind of a sub step. But how you organize that is another matter. But I think it's employing a framework of order to the argumentations which occur at all different levels and places. And so I like that idea. I wrote an article once called, And so I like that idea. I wrote an article once called the an apologetic mansion. Okay. And so here was the idea. There's this building and there's three stories. The first story is theism. The second is Christian theism and the third floor is Catholicism. I'm trying to think this through and I'm thinking, okay, so the goal of an evangelist is to say, lead someone to the summit of this mansion, the fullness of the truth, which I think is

found in Catholicism. But often what we do as Catholics is we argue about things that people haven't even begun to accept, or they haven't begun to accept the thing they need to accept that thing to even be considerable. It would be like in the analogy, it's like shouting out the third window about transubstantiation to a fella sitting by a tree and he would represent an atheist. Well, of course you wouldn't believe that. Or if someone, or somebody approached me after a lecture and they said, I don't believe in God because of all of the different incoherencies and contradictions in the Bible. It's like, well, how does that follow? Maybe the Bible's false.

Maybe the Bible is a man-made book that has nothing helpful to say about God. You've got it. So you need to go back a level. So it's like, okay, let's go down to the first level. Yeah. There's an order to the evidence and to the arguments. And I think we need to understand that, right, to make the most of the plausible case. Because the case, it seems to me, for Christian theism has to be a big abductive one.

But that doesn't mean there's no order at all, right? Because you can still logically order the evidence. It's not like that you add it as a last thing, Catholic theism, right? And so, with my mentor Doug Guyvitt, on the last stage that he gets to is somebody who's considered all the reasons, let's say, for Christianity generically, right? Then they're in a position where, let's say, they can't affirm it, but they can't deny it. Right? So they're like in a Pascalian wager situation. Well, the mind just gets exhausted too. It gets afraid that it's making steps too quickly and then sits down. Yes. And so I think I like the idea of putting it on the Pascalian Wager thing, because that raises the possibility that some evidence might only be available to

you if you do something, right? It might be dependent on your will. So Paul Moser, right? A well-known philosopher talks about volition dependent evidence. So you might have to do things. You might like Pascal says, go pray, go like kneel next to a Catholic. Use holy water. Like if you do this stuff, then you might gain access to evidence that you wouldn't otherwise have access to. And in trusting God, oh Lord, help me with,

despite my unbelief, right? Help me believe despite my unbelief. That's the right prayer for a Pascalian wager, which Guy that I like the name he uses, he calls it a devotional experiment, right? Where you want to believe. And so you start doing things like people that believe because you've already done the evidential game.

Right. So two points and it's, and it's equal. Sorry. So you can't do that if it's not equal. So people try to use Pascal at the beginning of the argument. Yeah. I would say two points. One, it's not hypocritical if the evidence seems equal to you on both sides, atheism

and theism to even if it were hypocritical, I'm not sure I have a problem with that if I doubt God's existence and objective morality anyway, so why not do something hypocritical? That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that, um, I think that the best version for the wager is the, the, the, the epistemic, what do I call it? Equiprobable, like, or epistemic parody. The conditions you're in is, this is no more probable than this. And that's when to do. And I don't know what to do. Yes.

That's precisely when you have to act. Yeah, so it's only after you've concerned yourself with evidence should you use it. Because I think if you put it in at the beginning and you say that evidence doesn't matter, then the objection to the wager, the most famous and called the multiple claimants objection, follows. And you're like, well, why not believe in the spaghetti monster the wager, the most famous and called the multiple claimants objection follows and you're like, well,

why not believe in the spaghetti monster God who tells me that if I believe in Christianity and I go to his health. Yeah, so it's a wager between two live options, not 800. Yes, so you have to whittle it down to two in order for the wager to get off the ground. And I think that it gets complicated in our scenario because of our religious plurality,

but I still think that you can, you can get there because you can consider other, so Keith Yandel, for example, considers Buddhism and makes a famous argument, right? That, that there's certain claims within Buddhist thought that are contradictory or incoherent. So we can't, we can't believe that. And so we need to do that to lots of religions, right? Is if we're trying to limit it down to Christianity, we have to consider other religions to a degree that when they're inconsistent with

themselves or inconsistent with the previous stages I've established, that it's rational to move beyond them and look for the answer, right? And speak a bit about how choosing not to make a decision is a decision, because it might seem like the more enlightened view to say, well, look, this all seems a bit too complicated, and I don't want to to be narrow-minded and maybe there's things that I haven't considered So I'm not going to I'm not going to move on this. What do you say that? Yeah, I? Guess two things one is I think sometimes we do that too hastily And sometimes we do it at the right moment But there might be a situation where you need to then make a choice because of that so when we do it too hastily

I think we we then think that when I withhold judgment about a proposition, right? Cause let's say the proposition's God exists. So you can affirm it or you can deny it or you can withhold. Those are the only logical possibilities. So people think that when they withhold, now they don't have a responsibility to the evidence anymore.

They think, oh, I only need to get evidence if I affirm or if I deny. I think that's a mistake. That's hasty. You should only withhold if the evidence to you is balanced at that moment, not well, it might be balanced or there might be an objection in the future that's going to balance me. No, then you're not being honest with the evidence you have right now. Right. Does that make sense? So you, so your cognitive attitude,

affirmation denial or withholding must always be in accord with the evidence you have right now to the best of your ability. That's being honest. But in the past, in the wager Pascal doesn't give the option of abstaining. Cause to abstain is to, yeah. That's the next point. So you're right. So if you did it without evidence, that would be a stupid decision. Cause you're not adjusting. You're withholding to the state your evidence is in. That would be irrational. Right. And so then, then suppose

you do and you're at a balanced state. Now he says in this situation, your withholding is an action. So when you withhold, it is an action that you're doing. So now how are you going to act if you act in the way that you're not, if you're acting in a non-Christian way, then it's the same as acting as a non-Christian. Right. And so you're, you're betting as if Christianity is false or you can act in a way as if Christianity is true. So your action must be one or the other. That's why it says your life is a bet. You can't avoid it being either Christian. Like, yes. And so you can't not bet in this scenario, right? Even if you, if, if you withhold your judgment, you can do either one action-wise.

And so the argument of Pascal's Wager is that prudentially you ought to act as if Christianity is true. Prudentially. That presupposes that cognitively or epistemically you're withholding judgment because the evidence you have is balanced, counterbalanced, counterpoised. So then it's wise because of the prudential calculation that what are the ramifications if your choice was mistaken and you want to minimize the risks, right? So if you bet on non-Christianity in this scenario, right, and you're mistaken, what is it that you risk? Well, you risk- A meaningless life. Yeah. You risk. Where my actions don't seem to matter and there is no purpose. Yes. You could do that. Or you could say what he says is what you're risking if you're wrong

and you bet on non-Christian is you're risking missing the beatific vision. That's your risk. Or to put it in a more provocative terms, eternal damnation. Right? So that's if you're mistaken and you live not as a Christian, then you bet on there being no God and there isn't one, or sorry, there is one, because you're mistaken, that's the assumption. That was a big risk. Now suppose you act as if you're a Christian, right?

And we're presupposing you're mistaken to test the risks. Yeah. What did you miss out on? You lived a virtuous life, right? Maybe you were more abstemmias than you would have been otherwise, right? So you missed out on some earthly goods. Yes, you did. You did. There was a sacrifice. But that loss, that risk is tiny compared to this risk. Yes. So prudentially you ought to take this risk and not this risk. And that's why you should bet on God. Does that make sense?

Absolutely it does. It might be helpful as we think through these things to consider ourselves on our deathbed. Listen to the clock ticking. Sense the family members who would much rather be in the cafeteria than sit with your boring self. You're about to die. Make a decision. Because I think for all of us, I think we have this suspicion that everyone else will die but me. Yeah, there's this like weird bit in us that seem to think well that's true of everybody else Yes, and of course we would never say that we all know we're gonna die, but we just don't really know that we're all gonna die

We don't we don't contemplate it We don't we don't if you were on your deathbed and someone's like okay time to make a decision You might understand the necessity at that point well. You're on your deathbed now, so make a decision Okay, so what advice would you give to someone who's watching right now? And they're like, All right, look, Plato, Matt, I really want to believe this. If it's true, give me some practical advice. What, what should I do? I mean, I think you should try to find good people that are Christians, find good community Christians, so you see what they're doing, why they're doing it and try to behave like them. Now, if you're not in the place where you feel like you can authentically do that, maybe it's because of the evidence. So you consider the best apologists right on both sides, you might say.

And if you can get yourself into that devotional experiment after engaging in the evidence, I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe you consider the evidence and that's enough to just already make you change your mind and you don't need to use the wager because the evidence is like for theism already, Christian theism. But suppose you do all the homework and it's still counterbalance, well then the wagers for you, live with the Christians you like, live their life, gain the values that are in there,

and ask God to help you in your unbelief. And I believe, I believe the promise in the scripture, if you seek, you will find. But if you're honestly seeking, God will give you that evidence. But it might be dependent on you engaging in a certain way. I imagine it might feel painful to certain people listening who are like, it's easy for you to say, because it sounds like an unfalsifiable claim at that point.

Because if somebody says to you, but Plato, I have been seeking, I have been asking, you can maybe say, well, you haven't been seeking or asking in the appropriate way, or he will eventually you just have to hold on. But sometimes that's not people's experience. They've done everything they know how to do and God's not showing up. I think there's an ineliminable vagueness there because we're talking about psychology now. Like how people see themselves and how they think about themselves is there is no whatever logic of that. I mean I would sympathize with somebody who said that if they said, I've tried all this,

I've been, I've been praying, I don't, I don't experience God and I would want to go back to that kind of use that general order as a philosopher and say, well, but do you think there is anything more than physicality or not? And if they have no conviction about that, well, that's a source of the issue. Right. I said, they don't have any conviction of that in the first place, right? Right. But if they have't have any conviction of that in the first place, right? But if they have a very strong conviction, they're certain, right?

That there's a divine mind that explains all the order in the world, right? Then there's a kind of different foundation. And now I would want to explore other religions with them and say, well, don't you want there to be a meaning and purpose in your life, right? That connects you with this ultimate real, right? And if they say yes, then they're in a good real, right? And if they say yes, then they're in a good state emotionally and morally. If they say no, and they want to reject religion to me, that's abnormal and bad. Um,

so I would, I would go there. I would want to, what I, I'd want to be in a friendship with them in order to talk about why they feel that way. And I, because I would believe, right, that that has to be either a problem with evidence or a problem with their will or some combination. There's no other options, but I would want to be charitable and think it's maybe the evidence first. Yes, that's a good answer. So you've said a couple of times that you have to act according to the evidence that you have at your disposal right now, as opposed to saying, well,

one day I may have enough keeping God up on the chalkboard as it were. Why is that important? opposed to saying, well, one day I may have enough keeping God up on the chalkboard as they were. Yes. Why is that important? Um, I think a lot of people in our society, we, we, we were a skeptical society, which is to me the root of the relativism that's at large. To me, relativism is just skepticism confused at itself. So, so the skeptic sees like, oh, well, this guy's an expert and this guy's an expert and they disagree or this religion, this agrees with this religion or whatever. And so they think, well, this guy's an expert and this guy's an expert and they disagree or this religion disagrees with this religion or whatever.

And so they think, well, it's all just equal. There's no rationality cannot decide in this case. So that peer disagreement or expert disagreement, they just assume there's no way for reason to go forward. And yet people wanna continue living the way they do and thinking roughly what they think. And so they just think that's true for me. And they don't have any reason to investigate or really what happened is they

skepticized. But my question is whether or not their skepticism is correct. Right. So skepticism is the right move or withholding belief if the evidence is counterbalance. So I want, and I want to say, well, you said two experts disagree, but how do you understand them? Cause I can say, like I can look at Aquinas and listen to him on divine simplicity, right? And disagree with him, but no, he's far more expert than I am, but I still have to be honest with what I just understood

him to be saying, right, to me. And I can't just ignore that. And as you said in a previous conversation, your reason is the only reason you can use to discern these things. You can't use my reason, can't use William and Craig's reason. Yes, but now this becomes complicated because as I was talking with Neil, right, is that your reason sometimes includes

somebody else's reason as better than yours, but that's what you've discovered by reason. So to me that's the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is more reasonable than I am in its theology. If I can think of the Catholic Church as like a big person who teaches theology, right? It's more reliable on issues than I am. So if it comes to a matter of trust where I have to decide between them, I'm more reliable on the transubstantiation debate or the Catholic Church. And if it comes to that choice, right, and I come to that point where I make a choice, well, to me, it go with the most reliable one. So I'm using my reason to trust a reason

that I believe by my reason is greater than mine. So the analog is what I use as my sister. My sister has an amazing memory. I trust her memory to tell me what I said in the past because my memory sucks and I know it does. So I'm still using my reason, but I'm trusting her memory for the content of my judgments. Does that make sense? So it gets complicated when you bring in authority and trust. Great discussion. Thank you so much.

People want to learn more about this. Is this book a place to go? I mean, this book is a great book. I use it in class. It's edited by my, my mentor Doug Guyver and his friend, Brendan Sweetman. It's called contemporary perspectives on religious epistemology. And it has that bit by Guyver in here. Talks about an article of his, or is it the whole thing from a, it's a contribution of Willard to a different book that they extracted from that book, right. And put in there, this book is about different views of religious knowledge, how we understand religious knowledge. So it's about religious epistemology. And so you've got the planting of version, right it's about religious epistemology. And so you've got the Plantinga version, right? The

reformed epistemology idea, right? You've got the natural theology idea in there. You've got the Wittgensteinian idea, right? Which is sort of like religion is about the usefulness of these dogmas within a practice. Yeah, something like that. So that's what it's contrasting it's about. Excellent. And if people are interested, there are two articles you can see that I've written. One was that Apologetics Mansion. If you Google that, you'll find it with my last name. And then I also wrote an article on Pascal's Wager, which you might be interested in. Just type that in and type in Fred. Cool. Thanks so much. That was awesome. Really appreciate it. Hey, I want to say thank you to the greatest prayer and meditation app in the history

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