Pints With Aquinas - God, Atheism, and Religious Epistemology w/ Dr. Logan Gage

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Logan Paul Gage is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Dr. Gage received his B.A. in history, philosophy, and American studies from Whitworth College (2004) and his M.A. (2011) and Ph.D. (2014) in philosophy from Baylor University. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Trent Dougherty, was a defense of the phenomenal conception of evidence and conservative principles in epistemology. It won Baylor University’s 2014-2015 Outstanding Dissertation Award(Humanities Division). His philosophical specialties (and the majority of his publications) are in epistemology and philosophy of religion. But he also has broad interests in ethics, metaphysics, history of philosophy, philosophy of science, and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Support the Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com Show Sponsors: Strive21: https://strive21.com/matt Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  

I think of, you ever played Mortal Kombat as a kid? Oh yeah. Johnny Cage? Oh yeah. You were low and gay? Yeah, yeah. It's a really cool name. Yeah, yeah.

But thank you very much for being on the show. You bet. So you teach philosophy at Grand Siscan? Yeah, yeah. I've been here about 10 years and I work mostly in epistemology and natural theology. As a kid, did you have a conversion, an intellectual conversion at some point? Yeah, yeah. So my dad's actually a Southern Baptist pastor and, and between the years of 14 and 16,

I had kind of a religious conversion. And so I've always been interested in whether God exists, whether religious beliefs are justified or reasonable, how we can know whether they are, that sort of thing. Those have always been pretty personal questions. And yeah, and I've always been interested, especially because I grew up Protestant. I guess I wasn't as interested as an evangelical in like sorting out every

detailed theology, but more of these big picture questions, right? Like is there God in the first place and can religious beliefs be reasonable more so than like, should I be an Armenian or a Calvinist on this or that point of doctrine or something? Cause I, you know, in the evangelical culture that I grew up in, it didn't feel like really we had a way to sort out all the true doctrine really easily.

Like everybody had their take, but I was just more interested in the big picture question sort of atheism versus theism. Because if God doesn't exist, the rest of the questions don't matter. Yeah, yeah, and it felt like those were more tractable to me than some of the finer details of theology. If you don't think there's a true church, right,

how are you ever gonna sort out all those fine details? It felt like speculation to me than some of the finer details of theology. If you don't think there's a true church, right, how are you ever going to sort out all those fine details that felt like speculation to me? So when, like, 14 and 16, was it more of an intellectual conversion to the belief that God exists? Or did you become Catholic then? No, no, I pretty much always thought God exists, but I just had more of a personal sort of experience with God and thought, thought, yeah, okay, this is real. this is something that would affect my life more than just like, yeah, there's a God, I guess. And so, yeah, I actually went to a youth group in Carmel, Indiana that was really sort of influential for me and just met other people that were sort of living for God in a winsome

way that I never thought was possible. And so, yeah, yeah. So when did you become Catholic? I was 14 years ago now. Okay. And your dad's still a Baptist pastor? Yeah, yeah. So he's sort of duly ordained with the Southern Baptist and the American Baptist. Yeah, yeah. He took it, he took it the best of all four of our parents probably. All right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just because he knows more what Catholics believe probably just having more of a theological education than our other parents. Just because he knows more what Catholics believe, probably just having more of a theological education than our other parents.

I think he didn't think we worshiped statues and stuff. He was less horrified. That's a great one. He was putting the bar very low. When you were looking into questions about God existence back in the day, what was out there that you were looking at? Oh man, well, my sort of heroes in the evangelical world were always like, I started reading J.P. Moreland

and William Lane Craig and those guys. And I just found that really, really helpful and interesting. I read everything C.S. Lewis ever wrote when I was about, when I was in high school and everything I could get my hands on. And so I just, I found that stuff really, really compelling. And I thought, oh, I want to study philosophy and theology

when I go to college. Then I realized I wasn't interested in theology, at least as an evangelical. The questions that mattered the most to me were these really big picture questions about God's existence and stuff like that, because it just affects so many other things, right? I think Mortimer Adler said that

nothing else has as many consequences. No question has as many consequences. No question has as many consequences as the question of whether God exists. Because it just touches so many other things. Yeah, like who am I? Where did I come from? How should I live? Where am I going?

Yeah, yeah, what's valuable. Yeah. Totally. And I've never been convinced by the atheist who say we can do away with God and still keep all these things. Yeah, yeah. That's been my intuition since I started thinking

about these things too is we gotta go all the way with it in the other direction if we're gonna go in the other direction. And I've kind of looked at it in the face and found it horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever have a bout of atheism or agnosticism?

Not really, but I think I've taken it on as seriously as it's humanly possible for me to do in terms of thinking like, okay, I put myself in that mindset and then I don't like it. I don't like it. And not just personally, like I don't happen to like it. I mean, I think it has consequences

that just aren't true, right? I mean, when I read Nietzsche for the first time, I was blown away and I thought, whoa, this is like a really consistent sort of atheism. It wasn't this halfway, like you said, get rid of God and act like everything else is gonna be the same, right? I think Nietzsche is so powerful for that, for seeing a certain kind of consistency, right?

If God doesn't exist then, I mean, so for instance, one of the things Nietzsche talks about is like, our whole culture has to change, right? I mean, it isn't just like, well, we just keep doing all the same things. Like, you know, what fest, what'll be our festivals? What will we celebrate? What will gather us as a community?

What would our calendar be like? You know, all those sorts of things that you just really, you know, when you think about it, whoa, Western civilization is totally shaped by this one idea. And we'd almost just have to replace it if we, you know, and then here's the hard part. On Nietzsche's view, nothing's really intrinsically valuable, but everything's given value by

us. So not only do we have to replace everything, but we have no criteria by which to replace it as better or worse. We just have to choose, you know, and I just think, oh no, that's horrifying. And I just don't think it's true either. I just don't think it's true. I think just things are actually valuable. And I need a really good argument before I'm convinced that things

are intrinsically valuable. Do you think it's reasonable that children believe in God before they become atheists? Like, it seems like the studies show that kids begin. Yeah. And they just assume that there's meaning to life. There's reasons for the. Well, there's this crazy thing where the atheists think that that actually supports their view. Right.

I mean, so I remember I think it's Paul Bloom, the psychologist at Yale says something like when he when he started to discover some of these mechanisms in the brain that he thinks automatically lead children to believe in God or something like God because this is cross-cultural and it's and kids tend to believe very early on in something like In not only God or gods but in terms of like omnipotence, omniscience, that sort of thing, God with that kind of qualities. And Paul Bloom said something like,

once he found this out, he's like, I got God by the throat, something like that, you know? Cause they thought, oh, see, therefore it's all a trick of your brain. But think about how that argument goes, by the way. The argument is something like naturalism is true, so your brain was built by mindless mechanisms. So the mechanisms I find there that lead you to God are not truth conducive. They don't lead to truth. So God doesn't exist. I mean, to me, it just felt totally circular, right? So for instance,

I think the more natural take would be something like this. Whoa, we have mechanisms in our brain that naturally lead us to God. I mean, assuming that's true. I mean, there's various questions about whether this is true. But assuming that whole cognitive science of religion paradigm is true, that's exactly what I thought we would expect to find if God existed, that he would make it easy and natural for us to believe in him by making clear pathways in our brains that make it easy and natural to form the true beliefs. It's actually surprising

to me that on naturalism, we would be tricked into such a crazy fundamentally wrong belief naturally. And if it is the case that studies have shown that children naturally believe in something like God, then it would seem like there needs, you need to become an atheist for the same reason the cat What am I gonna say here that Like when you speak to a Protestant, right? Yeah in a way the onus of proof is on them. Like what are you protesting? Where do you get off the ship of history, right? You need kind of reasons and it seems to me that if children are naturally leaning

towards these, they're gonna need a reason to think that atheism is true. And if a compelling one can't be given, then why is it wrong for them to go on believing what seemed natural to them when they were young? Oh, totally. And if you don't have that kind of common sense approach to epistemology, like take the things that come naturally

until you have a good reason not to, you're just automatically already in skepticism, right? You just wouldn't trust anything and then you can't ever get started and you can't form any arguments and so forth. Yeah, so that whole cognitive science or religion paradigm, I do think it's true. We have multiple studies, tons of studies saying

kids naturally form these beliefs. The part I'm a little less convinced about is whether it's really these particular mechanisms that they think that they've identified in our minds that cause that. But also notice that just the basic findings that kids naturally believe in God is the exact opposite of the whole 19th century naturalistic view, you know, which was basically saying no, you had to be sort of educated or encultured into theistic belief.

And I think it's the exact opposite. You basically have to go to college and get talked out of it. Yeah, and it's not just, you know, someone might say, well, you know, Darwinism has now put that to rest. People look at a mountain and children look at a mountain and they might come to different conclusions as to why God made that so that animals, yada yada. But there are other things too.

I mean, children ask why, why? And you keep giving them an answer until you've hit metaphysical bedrock. Yeah. And so they seem to be saying this, if they could articulate it, it might be like, it seems like there should be an explanation outside of which there is nothing else.

No other explanation. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. I think even Richard Dawkins in one of his books, I think it was the one that has rainbow in the title, I forget what it's called, Unweaving the Rainbow or something like that. I think his daughter asked him, or he asked his daughter something like, why are there

flowers? And she said, well, obviously for the bees. Kids just naturally give those kinds of teleological type explanations that things have purposes in it and so on. And that's what leads us to do things like science, right? But somehow when it comes to wanting ultimate explanations, then our scientific naturalist friends just kind of get off the train.

It's difficult to interrogate ourselves to see why it is we hold the beliefs that we do. Yeah, for sure. Because we have a lot invested in the beliefs that we hold. Even if we pretend that we don't and we just say glibly, I'll follow the truth wherever it leads, not realizing the kind of trauma that that might bring about. But I don't know if I could believe that God doesn't exist, even if I wanted to. Yeah,

if I'm to be quite frank with you, there were times that I was dealing with a great degree of scrupulosity and fear of hell. And I remember hearing Richard, not Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens speak once. I just thought, I kind of want there not to be a God, because the God I'm believing in seems really horrible. And I don't like this universe. But even then, when I was really looking for reasons, I couldn't disavow myself of believing God. Now someone might say, well, of course, because you have, it's in some way comforting to you. Maybe you've built this podcast based on this. It was well before that, but like, you have a lot vested interest. So you're not really looking at this reasonably,

but I don't know if I could. Yeah. Yeah, what am I to do? What am I to do if I can't believe the thing you tell me I have to believe like atheism? I know. I mean, the same thing is true with the atheist. The atheist is like, look, I want to believe in God.

And I actually believe there are atheists who are men of goodwill, women of goodwill, and they want to believe in God, and they just can't seem to. Yeah. It's a difficult predicament. Yeah, it's so, it is hard because we just get, we get trained in so many, so many different ways, right? I mean, we, we just get used to certain ways

of looking at the world, I think. And, and that's true for us. And that's true for our atheist friends. Neither one seems to automatically have some advantage because of that to me. We all just have ways that we get used to looking at the world. And I think, so I think our atheist friends can be justified in not believing in God very often, because, you know, maybe they grew up with a lot of other atheist people. Maybe the intellectuals they respect are all atheists.

Maybe when they went to college, all the smartest people there told them that it was stupid to believe in God. Maybe they looked at some of the arguments and just didn't find them convincing. And then, you know, you get used to this non-God way of viewing the world and then everything you see looks kind of godless, you know, just like, but I don't think that's the natural view. I do think that's something you have to be trained into a little bit. But I think the same is true for us, right?

I mean, there's just evidence for God everywhere once you sort of take on that view, right? And then you see God's creation as God's creation and not just as this accidental thing, and you see events in your life as purposeful and you see, you know, so it becomes all this evidence sort of everywhere. I mean, I feel like I've been very fortunate in my you see, you know, so it becomes all this evidence sort of everywhere. I mean, I feel like I've been very fortunate in my life that, you know, just being involved in philosophy for so long and especially with these kinds of questions, I've just been fortunate to be around the kind of people

who are constantly talking about these kinds of arguments and talking about the finer points of them. And to me, there's just so many reasons that all sort of converge in the same direction. And so the way that I tend to think about these questions is not like the killer argument, you know? I think a lot of times when people want, because this is actually how I approach Catholicism. I was like, well, that argument isn't good. That argument doesn't bowl me over. That argument doesn't bowl me over. That argument doesn't

bowl me over. So it all stinks, you know? Like, that's obviously an unhelpful way of looking at anything. I mean, if you're looking for the killer arguments that are going to force you to believe stuff outside of what? Mathematics, like basic math or something. I just think that search is in vain. And so. So, yeah, I guess I think there's just so many different reasons that converge in the same direction for me that, yeah, I, I,

I could never be an atheist at this point. I don't know. There's things in the Christian community that drive you crazy. Maybe you could kind of be talked out of that just because, I don't know, we're all human and you realize the church is full of human beings and, you know, all that kind of stuff. You could easily get disillusioned, but at least I could, but yeah, not on God's existence. There's just too many things pointing in the same direction for me that I have a hard time seeing the world in any other way now. That's interesting. When you say that an atheist can be justified

to not believe in God, what do you mean by that? I just mean that I think you can have evidence from your perspective that indicates that God doesn't exist sort of grounding the belief. But what do you mean by justified? Yeah, so the view of justification that I take in it so in epistemology is different views of kind of what constitutes knowledge and On most views of knowledge you need some sort of justification like a reason to hold your belief some sort of something that grounds it

So if I believe if I believe there are there are an even number of stars. Yeah What is that's not knowledge. What is that? Yeah, so that could be, so even if it were true, I think it wouldn't be knowledge because it seems like it's just based on what a stray hunch you have or something like that or a lucky guess.

So it seems like luck and knowledge are kind of opposed. And so all the way back since Plato and beforehand, even in Parmenides, right? Like knowledge just isn't lucky. It's a kind of stable relation between your mind andmenides, right? Like, knowledge just isn't lucky. It's a kind of stable relation between your mind and the world, right? You've got some kind of stable grasp on the truth. And it seems like that has an anti-luck condition

built into it, right? Like, you just can't get lucky in stably grasping the truth, you know? You could grasp the truth, luckily, but not in that kind of stable, almost permanent relation, right? Even if I was to guess next year's lotto numbers, exactly, one after that, then one after that, one after that.

Yeah. Unless I have a time machine or something like that, I could say it's knowledge, but other than that, it was just a lucky guess. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Although if you did it a couple of times in a row, I think we would all start to say, whoa, does he have a special power?

And then if you, and that would give us a good reason to think you have a special power. And if you do have that, then maybe you are reasonable or justified in your belief. Right. So I tend to think that, I mean, justification is just about being reasonable, having a sort of intellectually respectable belief because it's grounded in some sort of reasons. Yeah. So, I mean, we don't have reasons for everything we believe. I think we do. Or do we? I think we do.

Yeah. So, so tell me why you why you think maybe we don't like, do you have an example of something? Well, okay. So as I said, I think I know the answer. But here's what I was going to say. We can't have an argument for everything. That's true. Because if I offer you a syllogism, and then you tell me to explain those two premises,

and then I come up with another argument, it goes on infinite and infinite. 100%. But I suppose if I was to say, well, I believe that you exist and are not a cyborg, I don't have an argument for that. I don't even really infer it from some other truth. I think it just appears to me so,

but that in itself would be evidence. Yeah, so this depends. So basically, yeah. So we wanna kind of like stop that regressive reason somehow. And- And could you maybe articulate what I just said? I know you could say it a lot better.

No, no, no, I think what you're saying is, well, maybe we don't need reasons for everything because if we did, I mean, if you need them for literally everything, then you need one for that one, and then one for that one and that one, you know, on all the way down in a kind of infinite regress where you have, the reasons would never end

and therefore it's kind of a fool's errand. I mean, so the way traditionally this has been tackled has been with a view known as foundationalism, just meaning that at some point we get down to stuff that's somehow a special kind of belief or reason that doesn't need further reasons. And so there's some kinds of beliefs that are sort of somehow special.

Now, the view known as classical foundationalism basically said those need to be sort of like self-evident truths, you know, like Descartes, Koji To that, you know, you can't doubt your own existence, that kind of thing. Some sort of foundational belief that is like indubitable, you couldn't possibly doubt it. Now, I think that's too strong,

but I do agree with the idea that we need to get down to some foundations of things that somehow are bedrock or given to us. But what I think that is, is not another belief or a special kind of belief, like a self-evident belief. I think that it's experience. Okay. Like I think your experience is just given to you.

Like you're not trying to see me over here. You're just experiencing the world as though I'm here. Is it possible it's all a big hallucination of yours or aliens are projecting some 3D hologram? I'm dreaming. Yeah, are you dreaming? That's all possible. But the point is is that it's just given to you. or aliens are projecting some 3D hologram. I'm dreaming. Yeah, are you dreaming? That's all possible. But the point is, is that it's just given to you.

Now, so I'm what's called a moderate foundationalist or a modest foundationalist rather than a classical foundationalist. The classical foundationalists again thought we had to have these self-evident, indubitable beliefs at the bottom of everything. So real quick, why couldn't this be a self-evident experience that I'm having? Is it precisely because I could say it could be a dream?

100%. Yeah, yeah. It just seems, no, no, it is self-evident in one sense. I mean, it's utterly evident to you and clear that I'm here, but is it possibly mistaken? And of course, Descartes and these other people were worried, oh no, if I'm mistaken, then I haven't hit rock bottom. I haven't hit the kind of sure foundation that we want. I really like Descartes and he seems to be arguing, okay, I exist. That seems incorrigible and doodlable. But then he tries to make some case for God

that I don't find convincing. And then from that shows why we can't be tricked. We can't be fooled. The external world must exist. Is that the point where a lot of epistemologists after him were like, that's crap? I'd get off the train even sooner. So I don't like the stuff about his own existence

being so indubitable. I mean, I take it what he means is I am an individual immaterial thinking substance. It's like, well, is that certain? Couldn't you, I mean, if we're gonna be skeptic, I mean, I actually don't think he's skeptical, but he's rather using skepticism as a kind of tool to try to find what's most foundational

and what's indubitable. And so he doesn't say that if you can doubt it, it's false. He's just saying if you can doubt it, we should treat it as false, set it aside till we find the really certain stuff. But yeah, there seem to be two foundational problems, two fundamental problems there. Yeah, if you wanna be play the hyper skeptical game,

I'm thinking, well, how do you know you're an individual substance? I mean, right, Hume doubts this later that you are sort of an individual substance in the sense that Descartes thinking of. I'm thinking sci-fi, you could be like part of a hive mind, but not know it or, you know. What does that mean? I donfi, you could be like part of a hive mind, but not know it. What does that mean?

I don't know, like you're part of some larger mental thing, but you're just a part of it. You think you're an individual, unique self, existing substance or something. And also, I'll just say one more thing. I also think that at the very beginning, he doesn't doubt the laws of logic. He, by the way, says you can doubt math. And I'm kinda like, well, if you can doubt math, you could doubt the laws of logic. He, by the way, says you can doubt math.

And I'm kinda like, well, if you can doubt math, you could doubt the laws of logic, I guess. And notice that once you do, you can never build any beliefs back up through any arguments. And so the lesson to most epistemologists, and certainly to me, is something like, we've got to start somewhere.

So I basically think you should start with everything that seems true to you and then adjust and work your way out of certain beliefs and into others. And you got to sort of adjust as you go, but you should take the world as it seems to you on until you have a reason not to. So this is a tradition called common sense epistemology from Aristotle on up to Thomas Reed and others. Is it the same thing as a philosophical conservatism or epistemological conservatism? Is it the same thing?

I think that tradition, that view of justification, which is my view, fits naturally in this tradition. Just take the world as it is until you have a reason not to. So remember Descartes is searching for what's absolutely certain, and so he because he thinks the foundations have to be 100% certain. I just don't think they have to be. I mean, why do they have to be? I mean, think about it like this. So say his whole project succeeds and you have some belief, your own existence

that's absolutely indubitable and couldn't even possibly be mistaken no matter what. Then what? Then you got, like you said, you got to build up some other arguments. And even if some of his work, he's not 100% that he has a body. He's not 100% sure that his mother loves him.

He's not 100% sure on any of this other important stuff. So I just can't figure out why it's so important to have 100% certainty about the foundations because you know you don't get it higher up later on, right? Mason Hickman I mean, did it come out of the time in which he lived? I mean, after the Protestant Reformation coming to the conclusion that maybe we should be a little bit more humble in that epistemic. Yeah, well, Descartes himself

in the beginning of the meditation says he traveled around widely. So first of all, he's traveling around Europe and that gives him exposure as it does for many of us through travel to many different kinds of people. And you realize, wow, we don't all believe the same things. And so that makes him a little bit shaken. But then of course you've got the reformation

and you've got this new physics, right, from Galileo and others. And he's trying to sort of like protect the things that he thinks is most important, right? Basically God and the soul, he wants to kind of remove out of the realm of this empirically uncertain realm and kind of remove them and set them on a new foundation. I think he's actually sincere about that.

I think there's a lot of stuff he's not sincere about, but I do think he's actually trying to protect God and the soul from the new science, you know, where suddenly we might realize, oh no, we don't need that anymore. We don't need the soul anymore because of this new physics that's just describing atoms in motion. But I just don't think we need certitude at the foundations. I mean, I don't think that's the natural human view and I don't see why it's necessary.

And I'm also skeptical that it's possible. I mean, the beauty of Descartes is he tried this and it pretty much doesn't work. And so, and here's one other thing you might worry about is absolute certitude required for knowledge. And I think if it is, we're in trouble because we just don't have a lot of that at the very least. So at the most you could claim we know only a few things.

So I'm in the camp that we call fallibilists, right? These people that think that knowledge doesn't require 100% certitude. It might require certitude in our ordinary sense. Like I'm certain that I'm here and I'm certain of what I ate for breakfast, but you know, not 100% like Cartesian certitude. And yeah, so I, and I worry a lot actually that we, we then take Descartes notion of certitude and we sort of import that back into our own tradition, including the Catholic

tradition. And so when we talk about the certitude of faith and stuff, we act like it's this Cartesian 100% you couldn't possibly mistaken, given your evidence type thing. And I think that leads a lot of people to be real scared. They're like, oh, I don't I mean, I'm certain of it. I mean, I'm highly certain of it. But like, I don't have that thing. I don't think it's indubitable.

I don't think everyone who disagrees with me is a complete moron. And it's funny you say that. I remember a preacher once saying, like, do you believe that God loves you? Do you know that you know that you know that you know? And it was like, and if you don't, you haven't yet met him. I'm like, oh shit. I know.

Oh, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That kind of stuff. And by the way, I find with my students that they breathe, they go, oh, thank God. Like if, you know, when they talk and think some of that through that they're,

so in art, we definitely have something called the certitude of faith, but we shouldn't, like the church has talked about certitude and the whole scholastic tradition talked about a long time before Descartes, and we shouldn't read that notion of certitude back into. And unfortunately, that happens a lot in a lot of our intellectual circles. I just think it happens too quick.

And I don't think that's what faith requires And I don't think that's what faith requires. I don't think that's what anything else requires really either. Like I'm sure you're here. Am I 100% in that Cartesian sense sure that you're here? Well, no, because I can think of some scenarios where I could be mistaken, but there's so such remote possibilities

that I don't think I need to whatever rule out really absurd exotic hypotheses before I can know that you're in front of me. I Just a psychoanalyze kind of daycare a bit. I thought of an analogy. I wonder what you think of it Imagine if I am a man is single and he starts dating this woman But he's been hurt before and so he refuses to believe anything She says to him unless he can be certain of it. That would destroy his relationship with this woman.

And I wonder if Descartes has a similar approach because he's been hurt before, that might be too strong or too emotionally loaded a word, such that he kind of ruins his relationship with reality because he's not willing to give himself over to it. Yeah. Pick that apart though. No, I think there's something right about that.

I mean, there just is a mode, in fact, not just Des a car, but that any of us can get into and that I'm, you know, have some sympathy for because I just want to be careful about my beliefs. I mean, I see a lot of kind of lazy believe whatever and it kind of scares me that I want to be, I want to be as careful as I can about stuff. And when you're, yeah, when you're burned in the past, you sort of want to be more careful in the future. But again, I will say, I guess in his defense, I do think that he's using skepticism as a method, as a tool. So oftentimes in philosophy, people call it a methodical doubt. So he really, I don't actually don't think he views himself as saying, hey guys, let's

doubt everything. It's more, guys, let's use doubt as a tool to find if there's something that's not doubtable. Right? And, but I do think there is something to that where he traveled around Europe and he, as he describes himself, I think you're basically right. There's something there where he feels like a little disoriented by all the disagreement and he thinks, man, can I be sure about any of this stuff? God and the soul. And it just didn't. And of course the Aristotelian paradigm is collapsing in physics. And so he's like, oh no, what about all those Aristotelian arguments for

God and the soul? And that's why he feels actually a weight of responsibility. I've got to create new argument. He basically says I have to raise everything to the ground, which is kind of arrogant, right? But I have to like destroy it all and then I can build it back up. I think he's sincere in that, but yeah, I do think it stems from a certain kind of, yeah, fear of, oh no, everything could be wrong that we've thought before. Greg Foss I think one way to show people that they have sufficient belief in God and don't need to be anxious about it is to show them arguments against things that they currently hold as absolutely true, to show them that the arguments you're about to give them will put them in doubt of things that otherwise they would have been completely certain about. Yeah, do you have an example of that? What are you thinking of?

Well, and I know this might be old hat for us, but I'd like you to help me explore them for those who this might be new to. But a couple of examples might be, you know, maybe every day you're a different person and you receive all those memories like a baton in a relay race. And so you're a new person every day. Or maybe the external world doesn't exist, but you're a brain and a vat. Maybe the past was created five minutes ago with the appearance of age memories of things. We never experienced food in our stomachs. We never ate. You just start looking at Hume's arguments for why you don't

exist. Now, if I, if, so all these things, we just go, no, if anything's true, these things are true. Yeah. But then if I was to come to the average lay person or even myself and present these arguments, you go, oh gosh, oh gosh, I now don't know that the external world is real, that the past is real, that you're real, that I'm real. And then when you realize, okay, but who the hell cares? Like I actually don't think I need to be able to answer these objections unless you can give me a reason to doubt them.

Then why not the same kind of approach with God? Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I used to ask my students when we studied at CART, how many of you know that you have hands? And people would raise their hands and the cute students would raise too, you know? And then I would say, no, but how many of you know you have hands?

You know, just change the inflection a little bit. And then, yeah, the hands start going down because, and I think there's a little bit of a trick there. I think I started to ask you what you know. And then with the different inflection, I didn't just ask you what you know. I was asking what you know for absolutely certain that couldn't possibly be doubted. And if you think you know, and then with the different inflection, I didn't just ask you what you know, I was asking you what you know for absolutely certain that couldn't possibly be doubted.

And if you think about that, those are just two different things, right? But yeah, your examples there of, especially something like, how do you know the world wasn't created five minutes ago? Yeah, maybe pick one and explore it with me. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, so how do you know the world wasn't created

five minutes ago? I mean, if all of your beliefs have to be based on some sort of like indubitable proofs or self-evident truths I just don't know how you could rationally believe that Because I mean what evidence would you give everything you give the skeptic could say yeah That was implanted in your brain five minutes ago or in your mind this YouTube video It's now been playing for more than five minutes. You only started watching five minutes ago and then the rest was. We uploaded the rest to you or something.

I don't think that we should just fight that on empirical grounds. I mean, I do think there are things we can say to various skeptical hypotheses. So for one thing, they tend to be overly complicated. You know, I mean, but basically here's what it shows to me. Number one, you don't need to have like indubitable proofs to be highly certain of something, right?

Cause you're highly certain the world was not created five minutes ago with all your false, with a bunch of false memories in you. But- But I can't prove it. That's, I think that's right. You can't prove it. But by the way, like, I don't know,

proving anything's hard. The word proof itself is kinda hard, right? But I do think there are things we can say, say in favor of your, so to me it shows you should start with what seems true to you. So here's what I think has happened. You've experienced the world in a way where it does not seem as though the world

was created five minutes ago. Like you positively have experience of the world as not being created five minutes ago. Like you positively have experience of the world as not being created five minutes ago. Now it is true that your experience is compatible with the skeptical scenario, but that doesn't mean your experience evidences the skeptical scenario. Like you don't have any evidence that like,

I don't know. I mean, here's an example. So like take like the matrix type hypothesis that you're just sort of in a computer program. I mean, even in the matrix, remember there was like a glitch with the black cat where the black cat kind of glitches in out of existence and it kind of signals that they of in a computer program. I mean, even in the matrix, remember there was like a glitch with the black cat where the black cat kind of glitches in out of existence and it kind of signals that they're in a computer.

You know, I mean, think about that. There could be evidence such that reveals that the world was created five minutes ago or that you're in the matrix. With players in a computer game that's going to be invented in 10,000 years from now. Yeah, so there could be evidence, but guess what? None of us has ever seen any.

And so number one, you naturally take yourself to have experienced the world and the past in a way that evidences its reality, and then you don't have any real good reason to believe the skeptical scenario. And in fact, you can think of some evidence that if you had it would evidence the skeptical scenario and you clearly don't have it.

And I don't know if that one's true. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I mean, what kind of evidence would I have to see? Yeah. Well, I mean, what if God just said, hey, it like reveals privately to you that the world was created five minutes ago. I just wanted to let you know, you can be, you know, so so hypothetically, there's things you could hear or see or the aliens come to you or whatever the scenario is. But for everything you offer, it can be doubted.

Oh no, I agree. Yeah, so I wasn't thinking that that was indubitable evidence of those skeptical hypotheses, but I think you could have some evidence for it. But, and I'm saying specifically, we don't have that evidence that we could have for it. So we don't have a good defeater of our natural belief that the world wasn't created five minutes ago

and so forth. I went through a stage of solipsism as a teenager without knowing what the word was. Oh, that's great. Never heard of it. Did you really hold that belief? No, I was scared. I was scared that it was true.

I've shared this on the show before, but I remember standing in my bedroom and quickly opening the door because I thought maybe nothing outside this room exists and I could catch the Void yeah I said to a friend at high school in the library that I was afraid he didn't exist and that when he left for home How the hell do I know he was very worried? That's amazing He actually said to me I promise I do because he was worried for me and I said well

That's what you would say and then I thought and I thought to myself later on. That's what I would make you say Yeah, exactly. And I thought later on after I came to belief in God, I thought, well, and then I was binging William and Craig debates like everybody does. And then I started to worry, you know, as I would hear objections to God's existence and things. And then I thought, well, there's an analogy here. You know, suppose I believed I was the only one

that existed and then suppose there was, you know, debates online. I don't know who'd be on solipsism. I don't know who the person thinks they're debating. But if I went down that rabbit trail, it would really interfere with my, with Blythe. And likewise, if it is the case that God exists, and I've got some reasons to think that's true, and I went down this rabbit trail of atheism

and atheist memes and atheist books and atheist charums, that would naturally interfere with my relationship with God. And I think that's what it does for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a great story about solipsism. So solipsism, as you said, is this view that you're the only one that exists and everyone else is sort of a projection of your mind.

When Alvin Plantinga got to Wayne State University, where he held, I think, his first position, when he got there, he heard there was a guy who was a solipsist in the physics department or something. And he thought, I gotta go talk to this guy. I've never met, this is like a view we came up with in philosophy, because it seems like a fun, exotic possibility.

And he said, I've never really met one, I gotta go. So he goes and knocks on the physics department door and meets the secretary and says, hey, I'm here to talk to Bob. I heard he's a solipsist. And the secretary says, yeah, we take real good care of Bob because when he goes, we all go. I've heard him say that.

I love Plan Tinker so much. He is so dry. He's fantastic. And charming. And I really like him a lot. Yeah, so that's pretty good. I suppose maybe where we start to get concerned is when we think, well, I really like him a lot. Yeah, so that's pretty good. I suppose maybe where we start to get concerned is when we think, well,

I've just somehow talked myself into this because I want it to be true. Yeah. Don't you think it's, you know, yeah. But I think we have some grasp. I mean, we all have, maybe that's a worry for us because we all have some experience of doing that. You know, on small things, maybe in hindsight you realize,

I just wanted her to like me, so I assume she did, or I don't know, some sort of self-interested belief. I don't think we're great at examining all our motives for things, but I guess that just cuts, like vis-a-vis God's existence, it just feels like it cuts both ways, right? I mean, and even within your very self, you probably have some reasons by which you really

want God to exist. You want ultimate meaning and purpose in life and all these sorts of things. You probably have some other ones selfishly that are like, it'd kind of be nice if someone wasn't looking over my shoulder and I wish I could do what I wanted sometimes and wasn't really ultimately accountable or going to be judged. And so I just feel like, so philosophers tend to mostly, it's not that those things aren't real, but we just tend to kind of throw our hands up at it because it feels like kind of a wash

and who knows what all our deepest motives truly are. And notice that we could do that with anything, you just want there to be a real material world and I don't know, we could psychologize you or make up reasons. So it just doesn't feel like we make progress doing that. So we just gotta try to come back to the reasons as best we can, unless we notice that in ourselves, I have this inordinate desire that seems to

be motivating my reasoning or pushing away something. Yeah. Yeah. I had a fella come up to me at seek the seek conference. And cause I gave a talk like this and he said, yeah, I'm really afraid God doesn't exist. I know what to do. I'm like, okay, well just believe in God. What are you talking about? Just just just believe in God then. Yeah. I said, does it seem to you that the evidence is equal? It's like, yeah, I don't have to do it. I'm like, just believe in God. And he said, well, that's that would be kind of like lying or something. I'm like, who cares? Why if God doesn't exist, why would it matter? Yeah. So just try. Yeah. Yeah. And see what happens. But of course, we don't want to be insincere. And I understand that, and certainly that's not a place we wish to remain. Yeah, and that's one of the objections to Pascal's Wager

is something like, yeah, but would God really, even if he did exist, would he be real pleased with you if you just chose to believe when the evidence was 50-50 or something like that? My own sense of, for instance, Pascal's argument is not so much an argument to believe. So by the way, there are just objections to the view that you can just choose to believe things, because it seems really hard. Like your example earlier, like, can you really, if you could you actually even really believe that there were an

even number of stars in the universe? I mean, you could say you did and you could try to hold it and you could tell other people you do, but do you really? So what, then what do you think of Pascal's suggestions? He's not saying just believe, he's saying take holy water, receive the sacrament, pray. Exactly, so I think he's saying put yourself in a position to gather the evidence, right? And start doing the things that could open up that to be a real genuine option for belief to you. And in fact, so I think he's saying number one,

like hang out with religious people, read religious books. I mean, you can't make yourself believe, but you can put yourself in position to gather good evidence and so forth that would lead to your belief. The second thing I think that's going on with Pastor Collins Wagers that I think is really cool is like certain sort of, in that Augustinian tradition, we get this self-examination, like, wait a minute,

the evidence is pretty counterbalanced, he says, for sake of argument, at least to you, from your perspective, and yet there's like an infinite payoff if God exists and you don't really lose that much if he doesn't, I think that's supposed to mean, here's my interpretation, I think it's meant to turn us back in on ourselves and say, wait a minute, what is it in me that is leading me to be so practically irrational?

You know, it's like if you had steak in front of you and dog food, there's just something practically irrational about going after the lesser, why is it, what is it in you that isn't just automatically inclined toward the overwhelming good? And so I think what he's saying is, can't you see there's, the Christian story's true within your own soul.

You're at enmity with God in a certain way. There's like a, there's a barrier, resistance in a way to God naturally, because how crazy would it be on any other issue? You'd be like, yeah, I want the good one. I'm going after it. Ho-ho, you know? Like, um... That's exactly right. Yeah.

Because the other thing, I mean, for Pascal's way to get off the ground, it seems to me that the evidence has to be 50-50. I also think in order for it to get off the ground, you have to be discerning between two things, not 800 different worldviews, but two worldviews. So if I'm looking at them both, and I'm like, I don't know what to do, but yeah, I do like this one more.

Why is it that I don't, that's a great question. Why is it that I don't, it's like this fear of being fooled, fear of looking like a fool, fear of investing my life in something that will embarrass me. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Yeah, but the practical suggestion seems right to me. I mean, if it doesn't really seem counterbalanced to you,

then go gather more evidence. I mean, this is all obviously important. And that's the other part of it, right? It's such an important, he's kind of saying it's an important eternal, possibly an important eternal issue. Why aren't you, what also is in you that's like not making you figure this out?

And what do you think it is? Let's go after that. I think it's again, a certain resistance to God. Like I don't necessarily want this. It involves obligations on my part. And so there can be just a resistance to, and other things get in the way too, just laziness and you know, other goods sometimes consume our lives. The way I read Pascal, he isn't directly talking about eternal hell.

And you correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the two things he's weighing up are like a life of meaning or a life without meaning. Yeah, yeah. But if you do read it as hell or not hell, then it seems to me that the resistance might be either going to put in work now for something that might not be there, or just give free rein to my passions and maybe I'm right, right, man. So the immediate thing is more appealing. Yeah, yeah. the immediate thing is more appealing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe those were the only two live options to him. But yeah, I guess, I mean, my sense of how it works

is what that, that there's a sort of infinite payoff to not only believing in God, but committing your life for God. I think is what he's really talking about. Sometimes people just frame it in terms of belief too. And I don't think that's what he's really after, is just mere belief. But I think he's talking about a kind of commitment to God.

Living life for God. And yeah, there's sort of infinite payoff. Why wouldn't you err, at the very least, why wouldn't you even slightly err toward that side? Isn't there something in you that must be keeping you from that? And I think he thinks that's, you know, you realize that you have this sin nature inside of you.

I mean, he has this cool apologetic, right? Where he just thinks, no, look inside yourself. The whole Christian story is sort of in there. There's a certain kind of resistance to God. There's a sort of greatness and a sort of terrible side to human beings, right? So we have this like former glory, it feels like, and yet it's kind of tainted. So he just thinks if you really think back on the nature of the human person inside your own soul, you'll see like something like this story has got to be true. I mean, so for instance, why would we ever be so miserable if we weren't meant for a kind of eternal happiness, you

know? He just thinks, well, that's just best explained by the Christian stories. It makes total sense of all these conflicts you find and contradictions you find within yourself. You know? I want to talk about abduction at some point, but before we get there, I mean, you and I are about the same age. I grew up before the time of the internet. And I think for people then it was like, am I, can I answer the people in my town

who were telling me atheism is true? And if I can, then I kind of go, okay, well then I'm right. But now there's this fear that however smart I think I am, like there's someone online who's smarter than me and could actually argue me under the table. Like unless you're one of the top guys, but even them, you know? And so then you go, well, if I'm unable

to answer objections given to me, then I really shouldn't be putting stock in this thing. I think a lot of people feel that way. Yeah, I totally understand that. And I think I hadn't thought about the way that the internet expands that reach of people you sort of need to worry about, you know? I think you're, I hadn't thought about the way that the internet expands that reach of people you sort of need to worry about, you know?

I think that's right. I guess, I guess I would just say, make sure you're treating all your beliefs equally unless you have a reason not to. I mean, what's so special about the God belief? I mean, here's my sense is no one really worries about that with politics. Everybody just holds their political views so firmly

and they don't really worry that, oh no, there's someone else in Delaware that could, you know, like, you know, ruin my, some smart guy that could ruin my political beliefs. I mean, we don't really keep it from happening there. I wonder why it is somehow we feel like with this issue, it's so sensitive. But I guess I would say in response to there's,

that should do something for us. But I don't think the right answer is, oh no, if I'm not the smartest person in the room at all times, I'm not allowed to have any convictions. I mean, first of all, that's just not possible. You have convictions about all kinds of things and you'd kind of be lying to yourself if you didn't, if you said you didn't.

But I guess secondly, but I do think it should lead to be more humble about them. I mean, sometimes the way we talk about any of our beliefs just scares me, right? I mean, it feels like sometimes, I don't know, if you're this kind of person, everything you hold is with 100% conviction. That seems bad to me and vicious, right?

Like some things you should hold more firmly than others. Or if you're the kind of person that doesn't suspend judgment on anything, you just have a belief, you know, those people have a belief about everything and they're so anxious to tell everybody all about it. I'm like, man, I don't know. I don't have any beliefs about global warming,

really, unfortunately. I've just never looked into it, never studied it. I don't know, I hear conflicting things. And then people yell at you for not having their firm conviction. Yeah, the people are like angry that I don't have their view. And I'm like, well, listen, I mean, if I needed to, maybe I would, I don't know.

Maybe it's a bad example because maybe you think I need to, but I guess I just think. Teenagers are sort of like this. You may have been like this. I think I was like this. Like you know absolutely everything. And then you kind of grow up, you're like,

I know like nothing. Like I don't know how plastic is made, but I think I know that God exists. No, I've certainly felt this way a lot in the last couple of years too. I mean, even with the whole pandemic stuff, right? Like I guess I didn't think that, I didn't think that all my friends on different sides think that, I didn't think that all my friends

on different sides of things, I didn't think that any of them was necessarily like irrational. I was just like, wait a minute, there's different responses to things. And there's different, like my conservative friends are responding to certain values and my liberal friends are responding to other ones.

And they're both, if you think about them, valuable. So this idea that like everything has to be, I don't know, it just scares me. I don't wanna be the kind of person that, I wanna have convictions. So this is the balance I feel like we gotta walk. I think I've studied on some things enough to have good convictions about them

and I could still be wrong, but I think I've earned the right to have some opinions on some things. On other things I try to hold loosely and just say, I don't know, I don't know. I have thoughts about that and I have inclinations, but I've never really looked into that. I don't know.

That's really good. I like that a lot. But it's hard because we want to resonate exactly with my own experience. Like I'm supposed to have an opinion on like whether the election was stolen or whether, and I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I have an inclination,

maybe because we're in the same camp, but I don't know. Yeah, exactly. How would you not know? I don't know, because for whatever video have an inclination, makers were in the same camp, but I don't know. How could you not know? I don't know, because for whatever video you show me, there's probably another video and I don't have time to sort through all this. But I think for some of us, we can't live in a state of chaos, right?

Like that's terrifying. So we gotta settle these things. And it exhausts you. And I think what happens is, for some people in our lives, it feels like we're on a free fall. Like there's nothing to grab onto and we don't know how to make heads or tails of life, reality, death.

And once we find like a foothold on the side of a mountain, and maybe that foothold is like our favorite political pundit or religious pundit, again and then if someone comes and attacks your political opponent, you turn on them with viciousness because you can't be falling again. You can't fall into a state of chaos again. Right, right, right. Or a little group within the church, right? Like whatever we little group we identify with within the church, you know, we got all the right views on everything. That's right. Yeah, it's a dangerous temptation. Yeah, like I mean, I would say over the last several years, Oh yeah, it's a dangerous temptation. Yeah, like I mean, I would say over the last several years, uh, I, I, I am maybe embarrassed to say this, but like I feel convicted in my Catholic faith, but I have a lot less sort of triumphalism is a prejudicial language, but I have a lot less of that than I once did. And that's in part because of the abuse scandals, it's in part because of

the confusion coming out of the Vatican. Um, it's in part because of the confusion coming out of the Vatican. It's in part because I see the holiness of certain Protestants and certain Orthodox. And, you know, it's like, I don't know what to do. And I don't even know if I have time or interest to reassess everything. So maybe if it fell onto my lap, and it started to make sense of my reality in a way, maybe then I'd be inclined one way or the other. But then even to say that is to feel shame because you need to be part of the tribe. If you're not part of the tribe

and you're not fully championing the tribe, you're a traitor and- Yeah, that's why I felt I'm not like that or I've tried to be not like that. And so, and my inclination is just like, wow, but those are both reasonable groups of people. And so, yeah, I felt on the outside a lot of a lot of groups in the last couple of years, right?

I mean, you know, even our friends here in town that they know exactly what all the right views on the pandemic are and like, I don't, I don't know. I mean, there's some evidence on one side and some on another, and you try to do what's reasonable. Has it troubled you? Cause it troubles people and it may not you because you're an epistemologist and you've probably come to the conclusion that it's okay that you don't have

absolute certainty on these things. But for most of us, we feel very troubled. I am okay with not having absolute certainty on those things, but here's what bothers me is when I see people, like this is just in our own community, right? I mean, we have a wonderful community, great Catholics, we've talked about this earlier. We just, you know, we love this community.

But when I see Catholics go out on a limb, I mean, like, so for instance, oh, mass don't work. Oh, really? No, like, yeah, yeah, what's your evidence for that? Oh, there's a Swedish study. I'm like, did you read that Swedish study? No, like, yeah, yeah, what's your evidence for? Oh, there's a Swedish study. I'm like, did you read that Swedish study? No, but someone told me about it. I read the abstract.

It's on the internet somewhere. And do you know what I mean? It's that kind of stuff where I'm just like, wait a minute, then when they tell me that they're so certain about the faith and blah, blah, blah, I get like, it actually harms my faith because they are so confident about all this extraneous stuff

that clearly they've never really looked into that much. And then they have that same level of certitude in the church. And I'm like, oh no, like, is that the way, is that how loosely you treat all your stuff? You're 100% certain of stuff that you've never really thought deeply about or like, then it makes me think, oh no, it makes me,

actually it makes me nervous about like the church. So it actually has harmed my faith to see everyone be so certain about all this stuff that they don't know anything about. Oh my gosh. Like it's really harmful to me, you know? And so now that doesn't like get rid of all my convictions or make, you know,

make me forget like what I think evidence I think I have for these things. But yeah, it like turns me in, it turns me from the outside a little bit, like in turmoil on the inside, you know. So we just got to be careful of the stuff, the way we treat all this stuff, you know. Well then how do you plant your flag in a particular area without holding that white knuckled certainty? So for example, someone is Protestant.

I know I've got a very good friend right now who left his job as a Protestant youth pastor to his credit because he had no other means of employment, but he came to believe in the church and he knew it was either orthodoxy or Catholicism. He got received into an orthodox church and now he's like going to a Coptic church and he's still open to becoming Catholic. And he may never, and I'm sure there's a lot of people viewing who think to themselves, I don't know if I'm ever going to have the level of certainty that people seem to have, and I envy them for having. So now what do I do?

Because it's one thing to not have a conclusive view on whether masks work or not, but it's another thing to go, am I in the right religious group? And what does it mean for me if I'm not? And what does it mean for me if I can't feel certainty about this very foundational? What do I do with that? Yeah, I guess the thing I would caution about is to go back to the thing we said earlier.

I mean, it partly depends on what you mean by certainty. We shouldn't push overly high standards that we wouldn't agree to on other matters, right? So I don't think it should bother you that you don't think you can prove in a sort of strict deductive manner from self-evident axioms that the church is the true church. Because nothing in this life is really like that except for basic math, right? So if that's what you mean, I'm thinking, oh no, you need to just calm down, have lower standards epistemically, or rather be consistent in your epistemic standards, because I bet

you don't treat other things that way. That's a scary almost. No, I'm not saying you don't need an increased level here, because I mean, especially if you're forsaking friends, family, jobs for the sake of Christ and his church, then you ought to have a really high degree of certitude about that. But again, it's never going to reach that Cartesian, absolutely self-evident type thing. And faith itself is like this, right?

Faith itself is not sight, right? Faith involves an element of trust, so it's like by definition not the 100% thing. Now I think it can have lots of evidence. So for instance, Albert the Great says that faith is a persuasion on one side through many probabilities. The evidence is overwhelmingly on this side, but it's not like you just see it. So for instance, the classics don't think faith

is certain in that sense, in that Cartesian kind of sense, for a couple of reasons. Number one, faith is meritorious. It's precisely because it's not as evident as whatever that I have hands that it's kind of meritorious for me to believe in the direction of my evidence to trust God when I see Him. Another sort of reason, I mean, so for instance, Aquinas talks about, says Jesus doesn't have faith because it's a defect. Faith is a defect of a certain kind. You don't see the truth in a self-evident way. So like we won't have faith in heaven. No, exactly. And think about it, in fact,

if faith in this life was so Cartesian-ly certain, what would be so great about the beatific vision? Like you wouldn't even gain any knowledge. You have it all already on 100% conclusive sort of evidence. And so, so I think there's a lot of reasons to think, okay, let's come down, like faith isn't like that. But I do think the balance to walk here

is that we still need really good reasons for, I mean, on anything, I just think we need good reasons for what we hold dear, and especially if you're talking about something that has such life consequences, you need really good reasons for it. So I think we pray and we trust and we say, God, so, you know, for your friend, God, if you want me to become Catholic, you're going to, I will do the work, but you need to make it more evident to me and bring the people in my life, you know, to lead me where you want me to go and just be open to that every day. And I think you do that kind of thing. God leads you over time in small ways, you know? Yeah, this is, this is such a healing conversation, I think, for a lot of people because, yeah,

you do feel pressured to hold a degree of certainty about the topic of the day. And yeah, I just know nothing. And now I feel like an idiot because I know nothing because everybody else seems to pontificate about everything they Promise me is true. Yeah Yeah, we I think there's a lot of pressure within our our Catholic community on this sort of thing, right? People read Vatican one and they're like we'll see it just says you can know God with certainty That's like well, wait a minute. There's several things to say there I mean number one don't assume that what they mean by certitude is Cartesian certitude

Yeah, so for instance in our Thomistic tradition, we have, I mean, if you go back and look at all the manuals, they'll have like seven levels of certitude. They like have all kinds of levels of certitude. So it's the Thomas. Yeah, exactly. So, and so, so number, number two, it doesn't say that everyone can hold that with certitude. Like you said earlier, right? St. Thomas says it was fitting that God's existence be revealed precisely because the proofs are so darn hard. You need, I mean, basically in that Thomistic,

from Thomas, in that tradition, they think, yeah, you can prove God's existence with years and years of study where you really understand all the fundamental metaphysics and you've worked through all of it slowly to weigh the options and you build up this larger structure in which then you can see the proofs very clearly and then you've studied objection. You know, like they think within that larger structure you can in that sense prove God's existence. But again, not with the Cartesian. That's really interesting.

Not with Cartesian certainty. I mean Aquinas and the church makes it clear that we can know God with certainty and that the faith is we can know to be more reliable than what science reveals. And the catechism is really good about this. When the catechism talks about proofs, it literally qualifies it and says these are proofs for God's existence, not in the sense of mathematical proofs, but in the sense of converging and convincing evidences, which by the way, at least in the edition I have, they don't cite Newman there, but that's 100%, they're channeling John Henry Newman there. Talk about Newman and what he had to say

about epistemology and certainty. Yeah, I've been working on Newman a lot the last couple of years, and I just think he's so helpful precisely because he has this, for a couple of reasons, he has a broad and humane view of evidence, I think, where he just thinks evidence doesn't exist only in these forms of deductive proofs and arguments, but lots of things in your life experience constitute a kind of evidence for

you that all add up to a kind of proof, but not a syllogism. So for instance, he says, you're as certain as anything that like you're gonna die someday and that Great Britain is an island. But those are just clearly not demonstrable, provable facts or something in some scientific syllogism type thing. And so that was when Newman's question, how is it that we're so certain about that stuff?

And Newman's answer ends up being, this goes to your thing about abduction. I think that he has a kind of underlying notion of cumulative case reasoning, right? Where you're bringing in lots of different factors from lots of different places. I mean, think about all the ways you know that Great Britain is an island.

It's like, well, you've never circumnavigated it, I know that, right, probably. So, how do you know that? Well, every book you've ever seen has said that. Your teachers told you that, you know, you think we have, you have what you think are satellite images of it and so on and so forth. Right, even if you could drive north,

the south and west to east, it doesn't show that it's not connected somehow. Totally. Or, well, and what if someone really wanted to be a skeptic about it? They're like a Great Britain Island skeptic, you know? I mean, you could, what would you say? And Chester has this great line in orthodoxy.

He says something like, about things that you're that, you're firmly convinced about, there's a kind of utter helplessness against extreme skepticism, because it's just so obvious, because everything sort of proves it. Every conversation you've ever had is assumed, Great Britain, you know, about,

Great Britain assumed it was an island and so forth, it just feels like you have millions of lines of evidence. And the beauty of that kind of reasoning where you're convinced of a conclusion because of just numerous converging lines of evidence, the beauty of that kind of reasoning compared to like a lot of deductive reasoning

is that it doesn't lean with its whole weight on one thing. It's like a million strands. And that's why, and I think this is the way we normally operate as human beings. We just gather lots of information from lots of places. Newman says we have something called an illative sense, but I don't think he means we have a special faculty. I think he means just the way our minds work

is that we can sum up numerous and disparate lines of evidence really, really quickly. Not with exact mathematical, we're not doing mathematical calculations, but we just have this innate ability to see where the weight of the evidence lies when it's overwhelming. And the beauty of that, like I said, is that,

because sometimes in apologetics, we want these like killer proofs. And when I first got into philosophy and apologetics, I thought, oh, we want these killer proofs. But here's the thing that's dangerous about those. Like, if they don't work, you're screwed, you know? I mean, it's like the beauty of an abductive case for stuff is there can still be lots of reasons for something,

even if one of them turns out not to be that great. So I don't know, if it turns out that some piece of information on which I've based my belief that Ronald Reagan was president turns out to be fake news, it was Russian propaganda or something. So what? I have millions of other pieces of data points and evidence that point to Ronald Reagan

having been president in the 80s. And if you were arguing with a skeptic, any of those individual pieces, you may end up doubting, but it doesn't matter. Sure, exactly. But it doesn't matter to the overall cumulative case. And that's this notion of abductive reasoning, or sometimes called inference to the best explanation, is that we can have multiple

converging lines of evidence. And sometimes we also weigh different hypotheses against each other. So it isn't just a matter of like, I'm gonna prove my view and then prove your views false, but like let's compare the two. That's that real notion of abductive reasoning is like, give me your overall view and I'll compare it to my overall view and we'll get a sense of yeah Yours might be better on some things but mine might be better on the whole weight of the evidence or something like that So so I like that kind of reasoning a lot number one because I think it's really natural to us as human beings kind of Comparative reasoning and and and this kind of sense of cumulative cases with multiple lines of evidence. I just think that's how our minds naturally work. And this is, and for our atheist friends that are listening,

like, this is why you might get frustrated if you're like, but the problem of evil, you know, and there's like, I got this killer argument. It's like, yeah, but like think about from a theistic point of view what that looks like. If we think we have like dozens of good reasons pointing to God and then you have this one really thorny thing, which is genuinely really thorny, and I'll admit it as a piece of evidence against God's existence. I hope you can see sympathetically though that if you think you have dozens of reasons pointing to something and one that doesn't fit very well, then it's kind of an anomaly. And obviously there's some things

we can say about evil itself to mitigate the force of the argument. But even for what remains left over, the way we really work in real life is we compare our best options, right? We don't just like, I mean, imagine how would science proceed if every time there was an anomaly you just had to give up your scientific theory? Anytime there's any counter-evidence you're like, well I'm not believing in gravity anymore. You know, you just can't do that. That's not the way these things, that's not the way anything really works outside of like pure mathematics or something.

We're just trying to weigh the things against each other. And similarly for our friends that are like exploring Catholicism, it's more like that, where you say, wait a minute, over time you start to see that Catholicism just fits better with all these different truths you've learned. It's not that you've like

demonstrated it with a strict scientific demonstration or something or from first principles you can just deduce its truth. I mean nothing complicated is like that, you know. Yeah, so I love that form of reasoning. I think Newman's great about that. And so here's what's cool. He can avoid fetalism on the one side, this like believing without evidence, because he thinks you have tons of evidence. But he can also avoid a kind of rationalism. And I think that that's the one that our community is more likely to fall into,

where we just wanna prove everything. Because again, we've grown up, I mean, in our age, we've grown up with like all different kinds of relativism and skepticism about a lot of things, about morality and other things. And it's very tempting for people of our persuasion to be like, we wanna combat it with these syllogisms and come over the top.

I am 10,000% certain of everything I believe in the face of your dumb skepticism and relativism or something like that. But I think that's a mistake. And I think the solution is to say, no, we have good reasons for things, but they're not in the form of like strict proofs. It's lots of lines of converging and convincing lines of argumentation. So we have reasons without saying, oh, it's all just a bunch of syllogisms and arguments

all the time. And then if the atheist says to you, okay, but every one of those proofs that you think you have all fail. And it's like, so it would be like saying I have a bridge that gets me here to that side. But if every one of the planks is going to break, you actually have nothing. Yeah, I think there's something fair about that. So JL Mackey basically says that in his great book, The Miracle of Theism, which is my favorite atheist book. He basically says, hey, 10 leaky buckets, don't make a great bucket or something like that.

You know, like, cause you might say, no, I have this cumulative case from all these 10 lines of reasoning. And Mackey's like, yeah, but there's holes in each of your buckets, like that's not. And I can show you how each one of them, and you won't be able to respond. Yeah, that's right.

But first of all, I think, well, you don't have to be able to respond to everything. I mean, this isn't everyone's profession that they spend their lives studying this stuff. I think there's things I can say to each of those 10 things. Like I've been through Mackey's book many times carefully and I'm not super convinced, right, of his objections to things all the time, or at least I think we can evade the force

of many of them and so forth. But I guess I would say something like this. I mean, having thought a lot about these arguments, like arguments from contingency and that sort of thing, are there cool technical objections you can raise? Yes, but one thing you learn when you're in philosophy long enough is, dude, you can raise objections to everything.

Like, I know that for maybe people who don't spend their lives on this stuff, you're like, oh no, there's an objection somewhere. Guys, there's an objection to everything. Like, if you say anything, this is what's so cool, by the way, about just high-level philosophy. Like, if you go to a good graduate school and you're studying philosophy and you are in a room with super, super duper smart people that got, you know, 1600s on their, on all

their exams and stuff, like, if if you say anything you learn really quickly that there's a myriad of counter examples to everything you've said you know like so it makes you a lot more careful and which is good it's just good habit training for the mind that you become a little more careful about what you say and and so forth and you don't you aren't loosey goosey you try to be more careful and that's that's really good training but you also should learn somewhere along the way oh oh gosh, objections are like a dime a dozen, there's objections to everything, so what? Like you said, people have objections to your own existence.

So what? Do you think you don't have a right to believe in your own existence? Give me a break, right? And so to say like, oh, well, there are objections to each of those arguments, that shouldn't move you that much. There are objections to everything.

And so I guess that doesn't move me that much. And are objections to everything. And so I guess that doesn't, it doesn't move me that much. And I still think, so for instance, are there things Graham Oppie and these guys can say about an argument from contingency to God's existence? Yeah, but should you find it overwhelming such that there's no core truth to that argument? No, I just find it bizarre that everything should be contingent.

I actually don't think that, that just seems impossible. It seems clearly impossible to me. I guess Appie technically agrees, but then he's gonna just call the universe necessary. So here's an objection. Well, doesn't that have to be God the universe or the initial state of the universe could be necessary. Okay, but why would anyone ever think that?

I don't even know what it means actually. This is like the smartest atheist apparently alive according to many people. It's funny we've just talked about two Australian philosophers. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, it was a great Australian tradition of philosophy for sure. But what does it even mean to say the universe is necessary

or the initial conditions are necessary? It seems like it's a physical configuration of some kind. So if it's this way, couldn't it be that way? Or couldn't one piece be missing? Or couldn't one of the laws be different? I mean, it just doesn't seem, like any physical configurational state doesn't seem like the kind of thing

that even could be necessary. So should it bother you that Graham Oppie, a really smart dude, smarter than both of us combined, has these objections? I don't think so. I don't think it, I don't think we don't get to believe something because someone's smart out there.

Also, when you start hanging out with really, really smart people like this, you realize they have all kinds of crazy views about everything. Also when you start hanging out with really, really smart people like this, you realize they have all kinds of crazy views about everything. And you know, so you take it with a little bit of a grain of salt that they have an objection to something. They have objections to everything. So when somebody says to you, are you certain that God exists?

What do you say? I would say yes. I take it what that question means is in an ordinary sense, the sense of like, I know my mother loves me a certitude and that there are kangaroos in Australia, even though I've never been there. Yeah, I'm certain mother loves me a certitude and that there are kangaroos in Australia, even though I've never been there. Yeah, I'm certain of it in that sense. But what that means is highly certain. It doesn't mean indubitable.

I couldn't possibly think of, I actually can't, by the way, think of a way in which God doesn't exist, but again, that could just be a failure imagination on my part or something. And so I don't, but I reject the idea that in order to know something, you have to have that Cartesian certitude about it. I just don't think that's true the idea that in order to know something, you have to have

that Cartesian certitude about it. I just think that's true. That's not true in other matters. So this isn't special pleading for God or something. Yeah. Yeah, that's really helpful. When you first started to realize that you didn't have Cartesian certainty about things like this, did it trouble you?

I don't think it ever did. Did you never buy into Cartesian? I never bought any of that. I never had like your solipsistic worries or any of that kind of stuff. I've always just been, I only later found out there's this whole tradition in philosophy, right? From Aristotle to people like Thomas Reed and G.E. Moore, this common sense tradition in epistemology and philosophy.

So here's one of Aristotle's principles is something like, we ought to just start philosophy with what seems evident to us. Start with the phenomena, start with what, start with the appearances, what seems true. And then you work your way from there. And you might have to work, you might have to end up giving up a belief

that seemed so obvious in common sense. So I don't know, I guess apparently this table's mostly empty space. I guess that was a belief we had to give up, but you shouldn't give that up unless you absolutely have to. Do I have to give that up? I don't know that you do

if you don't believe atomic theory or something. But I don't even know what atomic theory is. Yeah. I mean, I have a vague idea in my head, but I haven't read anything about it. I haven't been persuaded. I don't even know what I need to know in order to conclude that.

Yeah. I actually wonder, I suppose you didn't even start with the belief, I mean, did you start with the belief that like there's no empty space in here? Probably not, right? You know wood is a kind of porous substance already. And so maybe you don't even have to give up that much.

But, but, but comment in other words, but we could learn things that make us give up some beliefs that we thought were pretty ordinary common sense. But what I love and what I think, what I think Aristotle is right about is like, don't give those things up unless you have to. But there's another way of doing philosophy and it's popular on the internet

and a lot of other places, but something like philosophy is just this like unfettered search for whatever man, you know that kind of like. Yeah, you go into a bookstore in metaphysics, it's just books on the new age. Yeah, right. And it just feels like there are no boundaries toward discussion.

So for me, the really interesting discussion, for instance, is like why skepticism is false, or how we know it's false. I'm not really that interested in like, whether skepticism is true, like in terms of like material world skepticism, I just find that bizarre. Unless you give me an amazing argument for that,

I'm never going for it. And by skepticism, you mean that we can't know anything for sure. I was, yeah, I had in my mind specifically skepticism about like the external world, like there are no physical objects. It's all just mental stuff or something like that. I just think, no, that's a completely non-common-sensical view. And unless you have a clear and persuasive argument for that, why would I ever go in for it? I mean, so could I be wrong that I exist as an individual, unique substance?

Yes. Could I be wrong that there's a material world? Yes. But I shouldn't accept those views unless I have just really clear and compelling, overwhelming evidence and argumentation for that kind of thing. Hold on.

So for instance, here's a really good principle from G.E. Moore, the British philosopher around the turn of the 20th century. He said something like this. Basically, here's what I think it boils down to, something like, don't give up the more obvious for the less obvious. Yeah.

That seems like a great principle to me. That's really good. That's kind of how I feel about the moral argument. You know, so I know the moral argument might say something, God does not exist, then objective moral facts don't exist, but objective moral facts do exist, therefore God does exist. So then you might say, well, no, actually, objective moral facts don't exist.

And that seems less clear to me. That seems less obvious to me than this. I mean, I suppose I could talk myself into it, and I might feel kind of clever, because now I'm different than most people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, Gene Moore was giving the example of, here with his, I mean, basically, yeah,

or actually, so Thomas Reed, who came before Gene Moore, who's definitely in this common sense tradition too, basically, you know, this whole tradition from Locke to Berkeley to Hume kind of ended in a certain kind of skepticism about, like, can we really know, I mean, they were trying to be empiricists and really pay attention to our empirical experience.

And yet ironically, it ends with them thinking, we don't have good reason to believe in the material world if all we have are these like sensations. And Thomas Reed basically says, okay, well, here's the argument. If your whole understanding of ideas, they have this complex understanding of what ideas are. If this whole theory of ideas is they have this complex understanding of what ideas are, if this whole theory of ideas is true,

then skepticism follows. You think the theory of ideas is true, so skepticism follows. And G.E. Moore was famous for turning these arguments around so, and Reed does this too. So we call this the G.E. Moore shift, where he basically says, Thomas Reed says something like this,

if the theory of ideas that you have is true, then skepticism follows, yeah, like your first premise is right, but skepticism is obviously false. So like your theory of ideas must be messed up, which I think he's totally right. The beauty of it is, so the G.E. Moore shift says something like this,

one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tolens. You've heard this sort of thing before. Yes, but lay those out for people. So these are just forms, the argumentative forms that we give fancy Latin names to. But it basically says if P then Q, P therefore Q. Right. But you can just flip that around and you could agree with the first premise. If P is true, Q is true.

But Q is not true. So P is false. And in other words, so here's the argument, so peace falls. And in other words, so here's the argument, something like this, are you more sure that some complicated epistemology of ideas is true, or are you more sure that you have hands? Right, yeah, I'm more sure that I have hands. That's using Moore's principle, right? Don't give up the more obvious for the less obvious.

And this is why it's helpful when examining a deductive argument to realize that you don't need to have absolute certainty, whatever that means, about each premise. You just have to believe that this premise is more plausibly true than its negation. Is that the same way of saying it? I think that's right.

Yeah, yeah. So like take the Kalam argument, everything that begins to exist has a cause. Are you certain about that? You're like, more certain than I am that things can just come into existence without a cause. So I'm gonna go ahead and live that. Totally.

And it partly depends, that way, that approach probably depends on what you want the arguments to do. Like what work are you trying to put them to? Are you trying to put everyone who disagrees with you to shame and utterly demonstrate, you know, everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot kind of thing? Or are you trying to put everyone who disagrees with you to shame and utterly demonstrate, you know, everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot kind of thing? Or are you trying to just like,

is the function of arguments in our lives to make the conclusions more probable than they were before? And if that's, and I tend to think that's generally our goal of these things. Like we want the Kalam to kind of like, again, give another indication in the direction of God. And it looks to me like it certainly does that.

And that's again, why the, some technical objections don't bother me that much. Like if it looks something like the universe had a birthday, had a beginning. That surely evidence is in favor of God. Right? I mean that. So I don't, yeah. So like small technical objections, like, oh, that's interesting. That's something we ought to work through philosophically.

If somebody wants to do a whole dissertation on that little objection, that seems cool. But don't tell me that if the universe began to exist, then it's not more likely that there's a God. Surely that's the case. And we clearly have some indications at least, some fallible indications that the universe began to exist. What's interesting is a lot of this is based on argument from authority, which is a legitimate kind of, what would you say, argument? authority, which is a legitimate kind of, uh, what would you say?

Argument? Yeah. Yeah. Form. Yeah. Uh, form. Um, but it seems to me that like, uh, post COVID, there's this big, if you're an expert, you're probably wrong. You know, unless you say what I already, whatever Ben Shapiro has already told me is true. We like choose our experts based on what they're thinking on Ben Shapiro. Just picking any political pund We like choose our experts based on what they're saying. There's not me picking on Ben Shapiro, I'm just picking any political pundit. That's scary. 100%. Because now when someone says, well, all these people said evolution was true.

Well, we don't have to take that anymore. So it can't be true. And the universe might be young, probably is young, is young. There was an NFL football player Thursday, see if you can look this up, who just recently came out and said he doesn't believe in space.

I saw this. Space. And again, what does he mean by that? How do I know space beyond the earth exists? I guess I don't, except that everyone tells me it does, and I've seen, you know. So I mean, most, a lot of the things we believe is because people have told us.

Yeah, oh, totally. That's gotta be a legitimate way of coming to know things. Testimony has to be a legitimate way of knowing things. Otherwise, you know almost nothing. I mean, think about it, you wouldn't know anything about history because you weren't there. Yeah, I don't know if my parents are my parents. Oh, totally.

And if I say, if you say to me, get a paternity test, well, I don't do the test. I don't know how to read the test. I have to rely on the evidence that someone's telling me that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, testimony's got to be a legitimate way to know things. It's gotta be a legitimate grounds.

I'm similarly concerned. I mean, I guess some of the reaction in our sort of conservative Catholic community to COVID stuff was a kind of extreme skepticism about science. And I'm just like, gosh, I mean, I have disagreements with some major scientific theories, but like, I feel like I've earned a ride

over a certain number of years of reading and thinking about these things to like have a critique, but a kind of knee jerk reaction, a knee jerk sort of skepticism, I'm like, that's not healthy. So I'll tell you, for instance, in my philosophy of science class at studentville here, I used to have to, when I first started teaching this stuff-

Sorry, here we go. So it was Tyler Owens prospect from Texas Tech. Yeah, that's good. If you're able to find his exact wording and throw that up, I'd love to read that at some point. But that's great. When I first started teaching, sorry, sorry, let's zoom in on this because this, this was wild. Can you read that? I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to resolve revolve around the sun and stuff. But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like,

this is kind of interesting. Um, I am real religious, so I think we're alone right now. I don't think there's other planets and other stuff like that. Yeah. Oh yeah. Sorry. Thanks. So it's like, like that's, you know, yeah. Oh, my dad, my, I love my dad. He's a good man. He got big into the nine 11 conspiracy stuff for a while. I'm from Seattle and like everybody was into it. So I had to go down the rabbit hole myself on that. Yeah, I mean, the problem with that is like,

if someone's into a conspiracy, they almost certainly know more than you do. Totally. About that thing. And you will not win that argument. Yep, yep. I know, I know. I mean, we might just need to push down to the foundations and just talk about, well, how do we decide

any of this kind of stuff? Or how do we know who to trust? Cause it isn't that they're not trusting authority, they're just trusting different authorities of some kind, probably. I mean, they didn't do any experiments on the whatever, the metal coming out of the World Trade Center and so forth. Yeah, this kind of skepticism scares me too.

And again, like I was saying, it kind of scares me in terms of our own religious community. When I see people being sort of selectively skeptical or overly skeptical, I'm like, oh no, I mean, is that how we treat these things? I thought we were on this team where we were all thinking, no, there's some good converging, convincing evidence here. So for instance, 10 years ago when I started teaching philosophy of science here at Steubenville,

I used to have to help people have a healthy skepticism about science. I felt like part of my job was, because there's a lot of cool stuff in the philosophy of science literature about like, hey, be real careful when you just say science says this and says that. So for instance, like the majority of studies are never cited again, ever. And of those that are, there are some meta-studies of these studies showing that like the majority are overturned, that are cited overturned or within or have contradictory results within 10 years. Wow. So there's this whole group in philosophy of science that called pessimistic inductionists. Okay. And they basically think we have as good of a

track record as we could possibly have that all of our scientific theories are False because all the past ones have been overturned So anyway, that's no I don't introduce that to them to like make them science skeptics But just to like wow Yeah I want them to read some of some of the literature in philosophy of science where people are have developed at least a somewhat healthy skepticism of just right rather than just whatever science says you just yeah, I mean I was a kid I was like You know, it's that scientistic idea that I only believe something if science can show us true,

which, of course, can't be shown true by science. We know that. But but it's I think this is true of me when I was a teenager. It's true of most people. If you were to say to them on the street, what is science? They wouldn't know. Yeah. They would just say something like, well, it's how we know things, which is true. It's why we can come to know things. But the idea that it's how we know things, which is true. It's the way we can come to know things, but the idea that it's a method of investigation,

we invented to discover truths about the natural world that has nothing to say whatever, one way or the other about the supernatural directly. Like that's like people, so science has just come a shorthand of saying truth. Totally. Totally. Science shows it, oh, and we just sort of, but now it's like the opposite's happening.

Well, as I say, during COVID, then it flipped, and I felt like my job was to help people realize, well, no, that there's a healthy middle here between just like anything you hear on NPR that science supposedly says now you ought to believe, that's one extreme, and the other extreme is something like any science that doesn't fit my preconceptions about my current political convictions is BS, you know, my preconceptions about my current political convictions

is BS, you know? But that's not helpful either. So I feel like now I have to push in the other direction just to bring them back to middle, like a healthy, you know, healthy sense of things. Yeah, do you think that maybe like our desire to be part of a tribe is more powerful than our and more advantageous than our desire to know what's true.

I think it's hard and sometimes got to be checked. Because I really want people in this town to like what basically like me not love me, but I want to fit in. And everyone's like that. I mean, this is why people tend to vote the way that their neighbors vote. I think it's typically we have this desire to be part of a group. And so if the group starts saying, masks don't work or masks do work or whatever, we really quickly wanna agree with them so that we're not ostracized.

I think there's some of that for sure, although that's hard to separate out from something that is similar but is a lot more rational, right? I mean, when you're around a group of people and they all keep saying stuff, you hear it a lot. And so it feels like there's a lot of evidence or reason to believe that. And so I think we could interpret that

in a more rational way, but I do think you're right that like going against the crowd doesn't feel good and we gotta, but I don't know, the best we can do is check ourselves and say, man, really examine our beliefs when we're alone. First of all, try to be alone sometimes without your phone and things, but then try to examine ourselves and say, man, really examine our beliefs when we're alone. First of all, try to be alone sometimes without your phone and things. But then try to examine ourselves and say,

is that what I'm doing here? Like, now I have, there's an opposite fault that I'm prone to, which is like- Overly introspective. Oh, you believe something? I don't. You know, like, oh, the whole group believes that? Oh, that makes me like, that actually makes me-

Oh, I like that. I'm like, yeah. I think Mark Twain said something like, you know, if you find everybody believing something, that's a great reason to doubt it basically. And I think that's the way I feel most of the time. But I gotta check that too. That's just another tendency we all,

you might have that you gotta check. Where you just, I get nervous when everyone just thinks something so obvious and everyone that disagrees with us must be dumb. And I almost wanna just run the other way. And so I gotta check myself and bring myself back to center too and say, okay, I gotta be fair as best I can. I mean, I'm not gonna be perfect. No one's gonna be perfect at that. But you got to check yourself a little bit and your motives for things. What's cool is that my grandma, Margaret Harris, one of the best woman you'd ever hope to meet, never had a conversation like this and would have never understood it. I mean, I don't mean to demean her. Maybe she would have understood some of it, but this idea of how do you know that you're certain and what's your view of

certainty and what are you talking about? I just need to feed my kids. And again, that's one of the things that quietness comes up within the contra gentila is like people have stuff to do. Yeah. They can't be. Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. In that case, thank God we have revelation and other means of knowing God's existence and even when Vatican I points to like the certitude but with which God's existence can be known, I mean it doesn't say by whom it can be known with certitude or by what method, it doesn't say Aquinas is five ways or anything, but what it does point to it seems to echo Romans 1, right, that there's just something evident about the creation that sort of cries out in the direction of God, overwhelmingly.

And I bet your grandmother might've had that. Well, I'm thinking of, is it the wisdom? I think it's May. Wisdom 13. 13, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which prefigures the language of Romans one. Yeah, so the Protestants don't have this in their Bible,

but because of the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their creator. So again, it's not even like an inference. It's just like, this seems to be the case. Yeah, it's just evidence somehow. Yeah, for our Protestant friends, you gotta go look at wisdom 13 and compare it to Romans 1

and Paul's obviously channeling that chapter. Yeah. Yeah, so all right. So if somebody says to you, like, I just, I don't know, it seems like God exists. Do you think that's a good enough reason to believe that God exists? I do. And here's, well, it's, I guess I don't even view that as the reason that was the response. Is that really their reason? No, they probably have a thousand underlying reasons, right? Like

if they were so, so, so I, I guess I get worried that we press people and then when they don't have a good response, we're like, see, people don't have good responses. They must not have good reasons. I did that to my mom. What if bad things happen to good people? It's a mystery. Yeah, right.

Can't be true. And it's like people's inability to come up with or to articulate their reasons in a like skeptic satisfying manner, that cannot be the criterion by whether they actually have any good reasons. For instance, I mean, you probably, you talk to people all day long,

you're probably just way more skilled at it than other people. And it wouldn't be fair for you to go to someone who isn't practiced in sort of rhetoric and articulating their views and say, oh, well, you must not have any good views because you can't explain them to me in a systematic, syllogistic form or something.

That feels very inhumane to me. And I think that people have all kinds of reasons that they can't articulate well. And that's what I think Newman was getting at when he was sort of saying, I mean, so like, I think there are kangaroos in Australia. I'm like really certain there are kangaroos in Australia. I've never been to Australia.

Why am I, I don't even know if, I mean, what would I, I could articulate some things. Do you have seen some photographs? But they all sound lame. And that's, that's Chesterton's point. Chesterton's point is like, when you're just, when you try to prove something obvious, it always sounds lame.

And by the way, Aristotle said this too, like you try to prove super obvious things. They always sound lame because you have to point to something less obvious than the thing itself to prove it. So it sounds stupid. But how would you prove the law of non-contradiction? Well, I felt that way just to get back to this,

but I felt that a moment ago when I was like, you don't believe in space. And I believe in space. And I'm like, oh gosh. Why do I believe in space? I guess I've seen, like I watched a movie once, but that was like a sci-fi kind of fiction movie and crap. Maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah, there is no space. I agree with that guy. Yeah, Chesterton, in that passage I was talking about earlier from Orthodoxy Chesterton says, ask a man on the street why he believes in civilization over savagery. Why does he think it's better? He's like, I don't know.

He says, the man starts looking around. The bookcase and the coal and the coal scuttle or whatever, he's like, everything proves it. That's why it's hard to like, he says basically about these things that are overwhelmingly proven, there's a kind of helplessness because each reason is small

and doesn't really prove anything and it sounds stupid to point to, but they clearly can add up in this overwhelming sort of way. So if someone just says, oh, it just seems like there's a God to me. I mean, unless they've been trained to articulate those reasons

or to reflect on their experience well, I mean, this is part of like what reading books does for us is we hear other people's words to describe things in our own experience, or we hear some of their reasons that help us articulate some ones that we have, or listen to a podcast, right? Maybe as we talk about reasons,

somebody might say, oh, I thought something like that. You know, so it isn't fair to point to somebody though and say, well you can't articulate it well so you don't have any good reasons. My guess is that if someone just says it just really seems evident to me, there probably are things. But in fact, they've been told that their reasons aren't good reasons because they aren't syllogisms. They aren't arguments. But I think, so what? You don't need arguments. You just need good reasons to ground or justify your belief, right? So when you look out at nature, it just looks to you like so overwhelmingly beautiful,

gratuitously beautiful, that you just don't think science is gonna somehow explain that away. When you look at your own children, you're like, man, I just, I see a value in them that goes beyond what natural selection would have to instill in me to keep me from eating them or something dumb, you know? You, you know, but it mainly is just like

looking around at things. It just looks like a kind of God inspired world, right? A God caused world at every level. And, or you felt God's presence in prayer sometimes, or you've maybe over time seen God answer some prayers, or you know, people think they aren't allowed to point to those things because they're like private. But so what? We're talking about grounding your belief, and so it seems to me that your experiences and reasons are relevant to that.

Who cares if someone else hasn't experienced that? So that might not be a great argument for them, but it's a good argument for you to ground your own belief. So I think people shouldn't be embarrassed. So why do people actually mostly believe in God? Because they look at nature and it's like beautiful and seemingly well designed and they can't think of a reason why anything should be here at all if there's no ultimate cause of that and they think the world's full of value,

moral value, aesthetic value, all these sorts of things and it just feels like that just fits better with like a creator God. That makes total sense to me. I mean those seems like good reasons and just because they couldn't articulate in a syllogism or even if they did it wouldn't sound like a great syllogism. So what? I don't care. We're not trying... there's two different projects. One would be justifying our beliefs to someone else in a way that would somehow like make them change their mind. That's one thing and that's a hard task on anything, right? I mean, have you ever tried to like give someone your political convictions? It's kind of hard.

But another task would just be to figure out is do I have good reasons for my belief? And it seems to me like that's a much humbler task. Just think through why do I think these things? Will So if somebody comes to you and says, I'm open to believing in God, what would you say to them? I don't believe in God, the atheism is true, I read the God delusion, I've seen some smart atheists online, they seem really reasonable, they seem wise, I've seen some response videos to theists that just make the theists look stupid. So I think atheism is true, but I'm open to believe in God exists. Yeah, sure. Well, you mentioned the Dawkins thing. I have what I take to be a devastating published argument

in reply to his main argument in The God Delusion, so you can look that up. But no, I guess I would again start with this approach of like, listen, I'm not gonna like bowl you over, but guess what? Your arguments don't bowl me over. Like I've thought hard about them. Like it isn't like evil bowls me over.

So I would say there's just multiple reasons. I mean, you pointed to some of them earlier. I just, I can't understand what it means that there are real moral facts and moral values in our world without some sort of ultimate, like ultimate goodness. I can't understand. And I, and in fact, I would, I think on naturalism, the most likely story is, is that all of our moral beliefs are just false. And that seems crazy to me. It's just evident that I'm not allowed to treat you however I want. That's so evident. There's almost nothing more evident than that to me. So I think there are a lot of moral reasons to believe in God. I think, like I said earlier,

I can't understand it at all. It seems to me that there has to be a necessary being. And it seems like the options are like the universe or the initial state of the universe. Why does it have to be a necessary being? and it seems like the options are like the universe or the initial state of the universe. Why does it have to be a necessary being? Well, it seems to me that not everything can be contingent and dependent on other things, right? And to be contingent means you don't have to be here. And everything we've experienced doesn't have to be here.

It seems like none of it has to be here, and certainly no individual thing has to be here, and I can't think of any reason why collectively it it has to be here, and certainly no individual thing has to be here, and I can't think of any reason why collectively it all has to be here. So each thing is sort of dependent on other things for bringing it into existence, and I just don't understand how that kind of chain can go on forever.

And the problem isn't like an infinite amount of time. You could have an infinite amount of time with an infinite chain of things generating other things, but I still don't understand why the whole collection of contingent things would ever be there in the first place, or certainly doesn't need to be there. So it feels like you need an ultimately necessary being that's not just part of the contingent chain of events. Mason Hickman I'll put you on the spot here.

I'll ask you this question. So okay, so I'm open to like different things are contingent on other things, right? And so this thing explains this thing, right? Why can't there be multiple chains that go up to multiple first causes? So why does everything have to kind of all kind of come together at this one cause? Maybe there's reasons things exist and it goes all the way up to the top and there's several things that are necessary. Is the idea that there are multiple necessary beings at the bottom of reality?

Yeah, good question. I mean, at first glance, that's like- But the problem if I do that, you're like, okay, so multiple gods exist. Well, exactly, you definitely could say that. I think we would just wanna think, well, what kind of thing would a necessary being be like? So first of all, it seems to me

it can't be a physical thing, whatever it is. Because anything physical is configured in this way or that way. It could be here or not be here. It feels like it needs a cause to make it this way or that way. So it seems to me that the necessary beings that we're imagining here can't be physical things. And then if they're not physical,

I'm like, well, what is it exactly on your view that like separates these things? Because maybe you're thinking about them as multiple beings, but there's really one, what sort of separates them. And there's gotta be some sort of difference in them. Also notice that it has to be the kind of thing that's not only necessary, but seemingly has this power

to create things out of nothing. That's a very special kind of being, whatever it is. Or at least hold them in existence. Or at least hold them, and or both at every moment. So it has to be a special kind of being. And so both Aquinas and Aristotle have reasons for thinking that would be more complicated to go into, for thinking like,

it depends on how you conceive of change and their whole view of change about act and potency. And so to kind of get there, we have to go there. But I guess I would challenge people to say, are you just imagining these beings as separate? Or are you sure like, so for instance, to be a difference, I mean, to be different beings, there really has to be a difference between them.

And I would wanna say, well, what's the difference between these things that you're imagining? And then one thing you might ask is, even if somehow those things are causing these other causal chains, do they need any cause of their own existence, right? And then you might think, cause you might think, yeah,

there's multiple things that cause this universe, but then still there's one further being and you just haven't gone back far enough. Because remember to be different, each of these beings has to be really different in some house, so there's some sort of composition in them or some sort of like parts that are different. Otherwise there's really just one and we're imagining them to be to be different. But if there's parts in them, I'm worried that you haven't really reached the ultimately

truly necessary being. Right. And so you need a further cause and then you just push the problem back a step and now you need a single necessary self-existent being. What do you think is the best argument for atheism and why do you think it fails? Yeah, it's clearly problem of evil and its variance, like problem of divine hiddenness and so forth.

I take it as just variance on the problem of evil. I tend to think that theists have like a lot of really good reasons pointing in the direction of theism. I think dozens of them, to be honest, and new ones all the time, by the way, that are just, you know, weird and new, but it seems to me that atheists have one really, really powerful argument, and it's that the world

sometimes just doesn't look like a, or rather, kind of positively looks like a godless place. It positively looks like a godless place. A godless place, yeah. You know, I mean, you just see some child murder rape thing and you're like, what in the world? I just feel, you just look at that and you think, is there someone in charge of this show?

Yeah, animal suffering, right? Because the Christian might say that there's some redemptive value to suffering. That one doesn't bother me as much, maybe. I don't, maybe I'm heartless. But hiddenness of God is good. I'm much more worried about like deep, just like moral suffering of innocence.

Yeah. You know, I mean, so for instance, I guess it just doesn't bother me. Like you're telling me the Holocaust, not that big a problem, but that Bambi deer in the forest, you know, that's what keeps you up at night about God's existence. I'm like, no, I know. I see what you mean. It just doesn't bother me in relation to the horrendous suffering that really exists in the world. It doesn't mean either accept that when the Christian tries to justify why God might permit the Holocaust. Yeah. He'll say something like... About free will and whatever.

Yeah, free will or, you know, all evils will be turned into good in the afterlife and you'll be compensated for whatever you endure. But Christian, if you're saying that the animal has no afterlife and you've got this, you know, deer or kangaroo lying under a tree suffering for days, there's absolutely no reason. Yeah. There doesn't seem to be any reason at all. Yeah. Not even for humans.

Yeah. Like, forget the animal, doesn't seem to be. Yeah. I think we need different kinds of reasons to respond to different kinds of challenges. So that problem of natural evil, I mean, I just think largely, I think it makes sense that if God's going to create a world, you know, let me just think about yourself. You somehow had all this power. What kind of world would you create and what kind of goods would you be trying to accomplish?

And it just seems like having regular orderly laws and you're not just always manipulating everything directly seems like a really good feature of the world. And it just looks like God set up the world in a way where like meat eaters eat meat and so forth. And I actually worry with some of the animal suffering stuff that we import a lot of our psychology onto those animals. So I don't know the animals suffer in the exact same way that we do, certainly not the lower level animals.

They don't have the same, you know, neural system and so forth. And so I'm, I worry a little bit that we import too much like of our, I mean, think about it, like the Bambi could be in pain. I'm don't think Bambi's like, well, is me, I will never see my grandchildren. And you know, that kind of like deep anguish about, and why God? And like, I just don't. Yeah. And I've heard that Bambi might be in pain, but not know that Bambi's in pain.

There is, there is some evidence in that, in that regard. God and I just don't. And I've heard that Bambi might be in pain but not know that Bambi is in pain. There is some evidence in that regard. I don't want to go down all the way down that view that with some people like Michael Murray and other philosophers have basically have a kind of Neo-Cartesian view of animals where they think they don't. I mean, I agree with them that like they don't have the same kind of consciousness that we do. But some people want to basically say animals aren't conscious beings and things, which

I think is crazy. I think they're conscious in some sense. They have they have obviously awareness and memories and things like that. But I think so. I think there's a lot of things we can say. Number one, God wants kind of stable, natural laws and also right. I mean, God gives us free will when it comes to sort of our moral choices.

I also think a big part of the story is something like this. God allows there to be so much suffering in the world because he wants to remind us this isn't our home. Like this isn't what we're meant for. And there's something just like about this seemingly random chaotic and nasty nature of evil that really shocks us out of it. I mean, imagine we set up the world in the way that some of my atheist friends want and like only the bad people got tornadoes tearing apart their house or something like, then the rest of us would think we're all just awesome people

when we're not. There's something about the chaotic and like, at any moment you could go type nature of reality that makes us even desire something even, you know, like pushes us beyond ourselves. I think back up to God, hopefully, is the right response to that, right? It doesn't mean it automatically happens.

You can still just be like, ah. But I think God also wants us to develop our character over time through making significant choices. And part of that is like, we help other people and they help us and we realize that we're dependent. I think sometimes people don't appreciate the virtues of our interdependence, right? The way that we can grow,

not only by helping others is the way we normally think of it, but also like lowering your ego to be helped by other people. This whole world that makes it something that makes us interdependent on each other. Or even the virtue of evangelizing a brother. You have to be part of bringing him to the truth, which wouldn't be a virtue

necessary if God's existence was so plain. And then there seems to be some deficiencies that would result if God's existence were so plain. Or maybe I don't know. That's the other thing. If you showed me footage of my wife robbing a convenience store while speaking Russian, I might not know how to fit that into what I know, but I can still know it didn't happen. And you go, well, how do you know?

And I don't try to explain that, and it is problematic, but it's not problematic enough for me to do away with all the evidence I have of my wife and that she doesn't speak Russian and that she doesn't rob convenience stores. And so it might be the case that I think I've got some good reasons to think God exists and I have absolutely no way of reconciling the problem of evil. 100%. And it's very uncomfortable for me, but I have to live with that. Yeah, so the way I would approach it is say there are a lot of different things that we can say in reply to various aspects of the problem of evil and

To some degree we can understand what some of God's reasons would be Yeah, which is what you were doing there. So right and but and by the way I don't I don't like this whole view that a lot of Christians philosophers like called skeptical theism I don't like it at all is which is that it's basically the view that It's not just it's saying something like this We aren't aware of the kinds of like, we aren't just aware, are not aware of God's specific reasons for allowing evil, but we might not even be aware

of like the kinds of reasons, the kinds of goods God might have in mind, all this stuff. It ends up being a little too skeptical about our ability to my mind, it ends up being too skeptical about our ability to know something about why God would do things. I agree that there's a basic point here just from like the book of Job, which is like, hey, you're not in the same position,

epistemically as God, don't pretend like you would know all of his reasons if, you know, like, you're just, we're so different and so limited that we shouldn't expect to know all God's reasons for things, now that's totally true. But I worry when we get to end up being too skeptical about like our ability to know any of God's reasons about anything, Now that's totally true. But I worry when we end up being too skeptical about our ability to know any of God's reasons about anything.

For one reason, that might ruin a lot of our other arguments for God's existence. So the fine-tuning argument depends on us thinking, God thinks human beings are valuable and would want to bring them about. But I don't know if we just have to be skeptical about all God's reasons for stuff. But why not take Plantinga's approach

where you just say God may have morally sufficient reasons to pay evil and suffering. And that refutes the argument. Well that refutes one version of the argument. That refutes the logical problem of evil where someone is trying to prove that evil is utterly incompatible with Gaza's essence. But to say that there's so much evil that it's highly improbable. Exactly.

That's where the argument largely is today, what we call the evidential problem of evil, where they aren't trying to say evil is strictly incompatible with God, but rather evil evidence is against God. But to your point, I basically agree. But in a way, I still feel like that premise works though, because when you say God may have morally sufficient reasons, what you're saying is I'm not in an epistemic place to know. Now, I can speculate still.

Yeah. No? Well, I guess I would say, I guess I would say that that doesn't seem to me, I mean, to say that God can have some reasons for things doesn't make it like, doesn't seem like a sufficient reply. If I'm saying the proponent of the argument from evil is saying the preponderance of evidence is against there being a god because of the amount and kinds of evil that there are. And if you're like, well, God could have reasons. I mean, I do think it's fair

to remember that God could have reasons. And that mitigates a little bit the force of the argument that you wouldn't expect to know all God's reasons and he could have some, but that doesn't... what this person is saying is there's so much evil, it's just implausible. Of course, in other words, they agree with you that God could have reasons. They're just saying it's just improbable because of the amounts and kinds of evil and the random distribution of suffering and so forth. So at that point would you then seek to give a somewhat satisfying answer to each particular evil that the person brings up. I actually think that's the hardest thing to do. I think most of what we can do

is give some kind of global reasons. Because actually to me, the problem of evil is at its strongest when you're like, but why did this girl die this way? To which I think the only answer is, I have no idea. I think the best we can do is kind of give global reasons for why the world order is set up the way that it is and talk about what God wants in terms of love.

So he needs free will. He wants soul building and virtue, at least the possibility of it, which means we're gonna be heavily interdependent and evils can befall any of us. Also, we can talk about consequences of sin in our Christian view. But I still think there's

a remainder. I mean, here's my own view. I think there's just a leftover problem, and I'm perfectly willing to admit that. And when I really focus in on particular evils, I feel it very strongly. There's still a problem. The world at times does not look like there's an all-proprovident God who's directing the show. And I think that counts to some degree against God's existence. But that isn't the end of the story either.

I would still want to say something like this, but I feel like I have dozens and dozens of other good reasons that are all converging on the idea that there's a God. And so I call this the swamping solution. It just gets swamped. Like, I mean, that bit of evidence from evil, at least the remainder that's left over after we have stable natural laws, free will and so on, the remainder that's left over looks to me like it gets

swamped by all our other evidence for God. And we all have to do that in all our worldviews, right? Even with a scientific theory, there's always gonna be problems or anomalies within the theory, but you just still want the best overall view. And then you say, I'm willing to live with that problem over there. You know, that's what we have

to do on everything, especially science. Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering if that was like the analogy I use that I have multiple lines of evidence that my wife doesn't speak Russian and doesn't rub. So I don't know how to deal with this. And maybe I ask her about it. Maybe she's got no idea what it is. And maybe that just has to be kind of like a thorn in my side or something? Well, and we all do that all the time, right? I mean, we shouldn't act like the other view has no problems. I mean, our atheist friends, if we're going to be generous and say, well, of course, like

there are problems with our view, there are problems in the sense of like, not utter contradictions, but like anomalies, difficulties. There's problems in all the views. I mean, that's the thing that philosophy again should make you realize is like, difficulties, there's problems in all the views. I mean, that's the thing that philosophy again should make you realize is like, man, there's like anomalies in everything. And there's anomalies in scientific theories that we don't fully know how to work out yet.

And so whenever we encounter a difficulty with any of our views, whether it's a scientific view or theism, I think we have to, we either suspend judgment on it and like set it aside for future research or we, if it really bothers us, we try to wrestle it to the ground and make more sense of it within the system.

But whatever you do, you're not forced to, this is just a wrong way of thinking about the world that we all inherited from the enlightenment, that anytime there's a problem for our view, we ought to just give it up. And that's just crazy. That's not the way anything works. That's not the way science works. That's not the way science works.

Like scientists, I mean, think about it. If a scientist, you know, this whole group of scientists, you know, publishing papers on one theory and then someone criticizes it in a scientific journal, they don't immediately say, oh gosh, I guess we should abandon our research program and close up the lab. Like, no, we all, we do either do further research

or we set it aside for the future, or we say, yeah, I admit it's a problem, but it gets swamped by everything else we know. So I don't know how to solve it yet, but it will be worked out in time. So this isn't special pleading. And I just hope I'd beg our atheists and agnostic friends to like realize that's not special pleading for God. That's just the way everything works. That's the way all reasoning works is we have to hold some things in tension and we do the best we can by, you know, with God's grace to sort through things, right? I mean, just the way reality works.

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Would you want to? No, no, it's not my thing. I talked to William Lane Craig a really long time ago. This was 20 years ago. And I remember him saying, this isn't for everybody. You know, like he was like an high school championship debater. I'm glad we have guys that are doing that.

I'm glad for our Catholic answers guys that love that stuff. That's just not my thing. Yeah. It's really important that you know that, isn't it? Yeah, totally. Because it's really, you can do damage to the faith by putting yourself out there with a lot of bravado and then you get trounced. Yeah. I think it gave me a lot of anxiety too. Just like, Oh no, did I say the right thing? Or am I going to say, you know, I just, it's just not my thing. I remember when I watched Christopher Hitchens debate with Emily and Craig, I was nervous because it was during that stretch of Christians just getting crushed. It seemed to me, maybe I was just watching particular debates and like, I just can't watch another Christian get decimated, you know?

And then Craig just destroyed him. Oh, he's so good. He's so good. Yeah. Well, what bothers me too about debates is it's usually, you know, unless someone can really keep people on task, it's usually, you know, the funniest person kind of wins, like the Bill Maher type, you know, 10 second little one-liners.

And I just, that's just not serious. I mean, that's fun, but that's not serious intellectual stuff to me. What impressed me about Craig's debate with Hitchens was that I knew Hitchens was funny and winsome, but I didn't realize that Craig was just as good in that regard. He has some really great one liners.

If you're wanting to watch a debate, I would highly recommend checking out Jimmy Aiken's debate with Bart Ehrman. Oh yeah, yeah. Because he wiped the floor with him. Oh man, I remember the one with William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman. Yeah.

When was that? 15 years ago? Yeah. When I first saw that, that blew my mind because I realized that there was this whole problem with the argument for miracles and all this stuff. Anyway, I loved it. That was really good. Craig has this way of saying your name and reducing you to boyhood. He'll be like, Bart! Or the way he says it. And he just like, I don't know. Yeah, it's a gift for sure. Can you think of a good debate? One that you've it and he just like, I don't know. Yeah, it's a gift for sure.

Yeah. Can you think of a good debate? Like one that you've watched the like, oh, this was that was actually the first one I thought of was was Airman and and Craig so long ago. Hmm. Can't think of anything else off the top of my head now. Well, we have questions. Yeah. Local supporters, which you have not seen and which, you know, you may have, we may have

already covered so we can move on or you can take another swing at them. All right. So this question comes from cell rack who says, what is the level of teaching of the statement that the catechism makes that it is possible to demonstrate the existence of God? So his point is it like dogma, definitive doctrine. We've kind of covered that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the only thing I wanted to add. I mean, it's clearly it's part of vacuum one, right? I mean, it's clearly definitive church teaching, but it's possible to demonstrate the existence of God. But I love what you said there that we, we, we now read demonstrate or prove through Cartesian lenses. We do that. We do that and then we could too quickly

say things that it doesn't say. Like everyone can do this, which St. Thomas clearly denies. And so on and so forth. Yeah. Yeah, just cause phaser can, doesn't mean you're supposed to be able to. Yeah, with a 63 premise syllogism.

Yeah, oh my God, my head is spinning. I'm like, I'm sure someone's following this. I'm good for that. Yeah, oh my god, my head is spinning. I'm like, I'm sure someone's following this, I'm good for that. Quick, Silber says, how does sin change or impact the way we think? And he says that Holy Scripture often draws this connection, maybe how it darkens the intellect. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's definitely part of our tradition, although our Catholic tradition has not wanted to go as far as many in the

Protestant community. So I think St. Thomas, for instance, it seems to me, and again, I'm no expert, but it seems to me that St. Thomas thinks the problem is fundamentally in the will is darkened more than the intellect, or sort of, I don't know, malformed more than the intellect after the fall. So it isn't that we just can't know anything anymore, but it's that our will sort of turns our attention to worthless things, or sometimes we engage in motivated reasoning because our will is turning.

I always think of like the, remember that line from my big fat Greek wedding where she says, the man is the head of the household, but the woman is the neck that can turn the head. And I think our will is like that sometimes according to St. Thomas, right? That the will can kind of misdirect or focus, lead us to focus in on things

that we shouldn't be focusing in on. It can kind of direct the intellect. And, but we have to hold things, we don't wanna go so far with that, and be like, well, we can't know any truth. And, you know, we have to hold things we don't want to go so far with that but we can't know any truth and you know, and I think it's an important part of our tradition, too, and that grace sort of perfects and elevates our nature more than just like just, you know, sin destroys it.

And then it's got to be overridden, you know, with some or with some new mechanism that God's giving us or something. It's more like, well, listen, they're both fallen, especially the will, because we just don't always want what we ought to or to the right degree and so forth. But we're still capable of knowing truth, which is, again, why we don't have to deny that all of our secular friends, like, know a lot of truth, because the will isn't, the intellect isn't so darkened that we just can't perceive any truth. It's just that sometimes we spend our time on worthless things and sometimes we engage

in motivated reasoning and don't end up in the right spot. So it's clearly a factor, but it's also a factor for all of us, right? Yeah. All right. Thanks. This is a good question. What is the first thing humans know and what is the first thing they forget? So they start doubting God's existence, he says.

Oh yeah. I suppose there's two ways to take that question. Well, there's always this question in like medieval philosophy about like, what's the first object? And you know, you could mean temporarily the first thing we come to know as a baby or whatever, or you could mean the sort of most proper object of our knowledge or something like that. And yeah, what's the first thing we come to know? I mean, from my observation, it's something like, there's stuff, being, as the philosophers would say,

being, you know? I mean, because think about it, if you don't have all these concepts yet that you gain over time, I mean, it's so funny when babies don't know that these are hands, let alone their hands, you know, when you see that. But we are built right away, we know from cognitive

psychology that we're built right, and developmental psychology, we know that we were built with kind of like, we're not total tabula rasa in the sense of, we are tabula rasa, I think, in the sense of not having content of concepts, but we do have tendencies and pattern recognition software, if you will. Right, right.

So we have hardware, the software, the hardware receives the software. Yeah, so we're set up basically to recognize faces as patterns. We're set up automatically to recognize human faces. So I've done tons and tons of experiments on babies, and that's why you're not mistaken when you think, they've locked in on me. Yeah. And so for're not mistaken when you think they've locked in on me.

And so for instance, if you notice, they can lock in on a face in a way that they can't lock in on a lot of other things. And so we are built for like human connection from the very beginning. So what's the first thing we probably know? Probably very loosely, stuff. But without the concept, it's hard

because you don't really have the concept of thing or stuff. Yeah. But without the concept, it's hard because you don't really have the concept of thing or stuff. Right. But you do know you're you're directly aware of their stuff and then probably something like you know, your mom is what you know. Yeah. Yeah. I Peter Crave has this great analogy when we talk about what's heaven going to be like.

Yeah. He says it's like twins in utero. Oh yeah. Saying so you think there's life after birth? And the other one's like, I don't, I don't, I don't think so. So I do. What do you think it's going to be like? Well, I think it's probably going to be a lot more spacious. You know what I mean? This, this umbilical cords can be a lot more. Yeah. We have no freaking clue. Yeah. And that's, that's wild to think about. Yeah. I said life after birth.

That's good. Here's a question. Yeah, is there life after birth? That's good. Here's a question. Yeah. Suppose someone was born without this is a radical thought experiment. So go with me here without the sense of touch, taste, sites, like all the senses. If someone's born like they come into existence without any senses and then they're delivered and you just you put them on a bed. What do they know? Not very much. I think you're not going to gain almost all of the ordinary concepts that we have. How could you know anything though?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the inner monologue is like because it's hard to like, you don't have these universal concepts to like structure, you know, I am doing this. Although I don't know, I mean, you can have an inner, very loose inner monologue, but it's hard. If you don't have language and you don't have the concepts from experiencing them, I don't know. I don't know what you're gonna come out with, but it's not gonna be a lot.

If there is something, wouldn't it follow that it's not true that all truth comes through the senses? I don't think so. And again, and I definitely don't, I actually, I think it's false that all truth comes through the senses. It would have think so. And again, and I definitely don't, I actually think it's false that all truth comes through the senses. It would have to be something like all truth begin, like all our knowledge begins with the senses, something like that.

But not, it's not like all truths are empirical truths, right? Yeah. But rather you need some experience in order to gain certain thoughts. So for instance, yeah, I mean, you're not going to know what zebras are, right? But I do think it's, but I don't know. I mean, like, so for instance, psychologists and philosophers are really divided on like theories about how language affects our thought,

like whether all thinking is sort of propositional, propositional structure with language and so forth. That's not my area, so I don't really know. But some people think, yeah, thinking doesn't have to happen in language. And so I'm very hesitant to say, oh, well, you wouldn't be having any thoughts or something like that, because you didn't learn language

and you didn't gain the concepts empirically. I don't know what concepts you, maybe you would have minimum, maybe you could have a minimal concept of self. I don't know. Yeah. But again, that would be from your inner experience. Yeah.

I guess the point I was trying to make is, if it's true that all knowledge begins with the senses and somebody's born without any sense that gives them access to the outside world, then presumably they would know nothing. If you think it is that they could know something, then it wouldn't be true that all truth begins with the senses.

Well, but even Laku comes up with that experiment of thinking, well, wait a minute, from sense deprivation, basically, we could learn that you don't have any innate ideas that you're born with. Even he is gonna allow a sort of introspection, a sort of inner monologue you're having. Now, normally what you do is you gain concepts

from the outside and then you mold those over in your mind, but I don't know that you couldn't have minimal concepts. I mean, once you have the concept of self, could there be, you might think could there be more or something? I don't know. I don't know what, I don't know what minimal concepts you could gain. It's a very hard question. We've never had to. Yeah, it's very hard. It's very hard. All right. Flip Z or Philip Z says, how can we separate perception of God from our personal emotional conditions,

like wishing for the suffering to make sense, associations, gut feeling, what feels right, personal experience? Should we even separate them? Oh man. I'd say a couple things. I mean, the first thing I want to say right away is the fact that you even have a desire for God that could be shaping your thoughts itself is a piece of evidence, right? If there is no God, why is it that you have this desire for God? Why is it that you...and also, why do you even want him to exist if the universe is a totally value-neutral place?

Why do you long for ultimate goodness? Why do you want there to even...I mean, that itself, the fact that we do want that is a piece of evidence that it probably does exist or at least it's reason, you know, it's one small piece of evidence in that direction. Cause it's just weird on naturalism. Like we're here for no reason, but we like long for ultimate goodness.

And we want our lives to make sense when they aren't even supposed to make sense. That's really weird, actually. I think naturalism has a harder time explaining that than theism obviously. But in terms of sorting out your inner monologue, I mean, part of me says, hey, don't be overly introspective and just because you know how we get lost in our own heads and we're like, I mean, but why do you believe anything?

I mean, it's really hard. It could be because you ate spicy salsa last night. Like we don't know. The best you can do is try to be honest and say, okay, I know I have a desire in this direction. Does my experience and my evidence and what I've learned, does it support it? Like are my desires consonant, are they in the same direction as my general evidence? And if they are, then, you know, great.

But if you really, I do think you could introspect and say, man, I don't have any good reason for this. I think I just want it to be true. Or I think I'm just going with the crowd or my friends, or I don't want to disappoint my mom. If that's all there is to it, then maybe you shouldn't believe something, but it's really hard to tell, first of all,

that that's the only thing going on. And the fact that you want it so bad itself could be, again, a piece of evidence. Okay. Seth Woldensky says, "'Any advice for someone coming back to the faith from atheism who sometimes struggles with the idea that there could be some unheard argument evidence

that this proves God's existence or Jesus divinity that hasn't been found yet? I believe in God and Jesus, but this thought troubles me often.'" Yeah. Thank you for the question. See, my first thought on that kind of stuff is, again, let's not create a special theory for Catholicism or for theism. Let's just talk in general. I mean, I think you could

have that worry about anything. Like, oh no, what if it turns out, you know, the Romans didn't really exist or whatever and it was a plot of the Greeks to, I don't know, you know what I mean? Like anything could happen in the future such that something you've never heard of or something we haven't discovered overturns or all of our basic scientific theories could be overturned. I mean, but that shouldn't, because it doesn't paralyze us there, I'm just not so sure it should paralyze us here. The best we can do is by our own lights, you know, and just by the, we receive from God, do our best, right? I

mean, yeah, I don't know, what would you say? Oh, I think that's nothing better than what you just said, because I mean, the bones of Jesus could always show up and we could be wrong. So I guess the argument is, or the sort of motivation is, I'm only willing to invest my life in something that cannot be disproved. Yeah. And that's what I was getting at. It was like, that's, but I guarantee you for whoever, I don't know this person, but that's not true in the other areas of their life.

And it's not just true about abstract things that don't bother us or like the Romans. It could be like that my wife is faithful to me. Like it could be things that if it weren't the case, I would be devastated, but to walk around all the way, you know. So I suppose this person could say, well, I'm looking at the arguments for, let's just say the resurrection of Jesus, and I'm looking for the arguments against the resurrection of Jesus. And given what I already kind of believe about God existing and Christianity and the growth and spread of it, I'm gonna go ahead and believe this. I guess what he's saying is, how do I go from,

maybe what he's saying is, how do I go from 60% certainty to 100% feeling like I'm all in? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the evidence at least needs to get high enough that it makes it reasonable to make that commitment, but I think it's super important to remember that faith is not just belief, right? Because the demons believe, but they don't have faith. So faith involves an intellectual component, right?

Thinking that something's true, believing it, but it also involves this volitional component of your heart and saying, I'm investing, I'm all in, like I'm living for God come hell or high water and there will be some fluctuations in my evidence and I could learn in it and it's at least possible that things will get completely overturned. But I'm investing 100% because I think that it's reached a kind of threshold of reasonableness that it'd actually be unreasonable for me not to commit. I would just be too fearful and too hung up, right? And you're gonna miss out on all kinds of good things

in any area of life if you are just saying, well, I'm never willing to commit to anything because things could turn out badly, you know? So I definitely think you have to have a high enough sort of evidence to be willing to fully commit your life, but that's sort of separate, because I've had friends that have been really, really high and just still unwilling to give their lives, you know?

And it's interesting to think that if Christianity is true, Satan is more certain than anyone on Earth that the resurrection took place and yet is damned. It's pretty wild. Yeah, yeah, so it's not just a matter of our intellectual evidence, there's also this commitment, right? But that's the way everything good is. That's the way relationships work.

So this is why it's meritorious to, not again, because it's a blind leap, but because it's an appropriate willed response to the truth of what you see. But I mean, if you're just not there yet intellectually, you gotta keep reading, talking to friends. Like Pascal said, put yourself in a position to gain more evidence and think these things through and listen

to more of your past podcasts with Jimmy Akin and whatever, you know? But keep working until you get to that point, but recognize that there's a separate movement of the heart, right, toward committing your life to God, and that's just different. Yeah, the other thing that's kind of interesting, and I say this kind of in a way that's funny, but let's say we're considering two viable alternatives and we forget the rest. So Christianity and atheism. All right. We die. Okay. The atheism doesn't know that he was right. The atheist doesn't know that he was right. If God exists, the Christian knows he was right, but the Christian will never know that he's wrong.

Yeah. None of these are good reasons to believe one way or the other. It's just, no, there'll never be an atheist going, see, I told you so. Yeah. Yeah. You're not to be afraid of that. Yeah. Uh, since the magisterium needs to be interpreted like all things with its meaning often disagreed upon by Catholics, isn't it just as subjective as solo scriptura as an epistemological starting

point? This comes from Jonah. Yeah, I think that's a fair question. I used to think something like that. And I thought, well, I mean, but notice that there's two senses of subjective, right? I mean, one sense of subjective is just that there's a subject, me doing the thing. And I agree, like, I can't believe in something unless I believe in it, you know? I can't, there's gotta be, there's something going on in me. But not necessarily a subjective in the sense of, like,

anything goes, there's no higher authority. So it is true that I have to give a certain subjective response in the sense of me, the subject, has to respond appropriately. But there's just a fundamental difference between Thinking that there's an authority that can Authoritatively decide these things versus what each believer just trying to do the best they can by their own lights in light of their tradition and Yeah, I'd also say that of course we we interpret things in life, you know tradition no matter matter what. So it isn't like a choice between the magisterium and no tradition.

You just end up in some little subgroup in evangelicalism or wherever else, and they're doing a lot of the interpretive work for you. You just don't recognize it. And of course, the difference between the magisterium and scripture is that magisterium can actually clarify itself in a way that scripture can't. It's a living. So if I've misunderstood you, and if enough people misunderstand you, then there can be further clarifications in the way that they can't. So if I've misunderstood you, and if enough people misunderstand you, then there can be further clarifications in the way that they can't be with scripture.

Exactly. When I was converting, a big problem for me was thinking through, well, the biggest issue for me was actually the canon of scripture and thinking like, wait a minute, is there any good Protestant account of like where in the world the Bible comes from? Because it felt like soul scripture didn't matter if we didn't know what the collection was that supposedly, you know, we had to rely on that alone in no tradition. But it's really a big problem that the reformers created in a sense of if they can't point to anything outside the canon, like the hardcore reform people are really smart about this, and they just think, hey, if we pointed to anything above the canon to like the hardcore people are really smart about this and they just think,

hey, if we pointed to anything above the canon to determine the canon, then it's authoritative above and over the canon. And that's a problem because they're saying the Bible's like the sole and final and highest authority. And it turns out to just be a really thorny problem. They have to say weird things like it's somehow self-selects or self-assembles or self-interprets or anyone could just read it and just see and I'm just like, it's so implausible. Christ says my sheep will know my voice

and so we read the scripture and we know it's the will of God and like, ah. Yeah, I find it super implausible. In fact, I remember the, one of my heroes, the FF Bruce, the evangelical scripture scholar, he said at one point, he said, I doubt that we get, if we gave a new believer believer Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus that they would ever know which one was part of the Bible.

I thought that's exactly right. I'm like, Bruce, how's that not a problem for you? Do you think part of our discontent with only feeling somewhat sure is that we remember a time when we felt absolutely sure and that felt terrific. Like what sort of circumstance? What do you think of? I remember when I worked at Catholic Answers and just kind of responding to Protestant objections and being surrounded by brilliant people. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this this is so obviously true.

Now, I still believe it's so obviously true. But I also have a lot more compassion for people who have questions or what they believe to be evidence on there You know to me. Yeah. Yeah, and you're like, I remember that was cool. We were just like kicking ass and taking names We were like, you're so stupid. How do you know? How do you know realize this just listen to this Tim Staples debate and you finally become Catholic I'm like everything's so black and white and clear. Yeah, and then you feel like oh crap Maybe it wasn't so black and white and clear. And then you feel like, oh crap, maybe it wasn't so black and white and clear.

And then, oh, what does that mean? And what does that say about me? Right. No, that's good. I guess I think, but that's the way everything goes. I mean, anything you were highly confident in, right? I mean, like think about maybe, doesn't everyone go through stages of political belief

that are like that, where they just think, I'm so confident, it feels so good, and then you realize, oh, but things are at least harder. Even if I still retain the core of all those beliefs, things are just harder, and I ought to think about, why would someone have a different view about social security than I do? And then you start to have, I think,

more compassion and grow. To me, that's growth. I mean, that sounds healthy to me. That on one hand, you had this really high level of assurance, but I think you still have a deep level of assurance, but start to understand how other people could view the world in a different way. That feels like a healthy maturity to me,

not something like, oh no, I don't have the 100% thing I had earlier. And I also think that, I think that we gotta be careful here too. Like what we're really talking about, we're talking about these percentages, fundamentally I think is about how much evidence we have and not just like random emotional feelings.

And we need to separate those out a little bit. They're very deeply connected, you know, but it could be that you go through periods where you're just like, I'm not feeling this. I go to mass and I'm not feeling it. Well, then I think you ought to ask like, yeah, but has anything changed about like what I think is true? Has anything changed about my evidence?

Do I have any better alternative theories? Do, or is this just like, hey, we all go through fluctuations in moods and we change with different seasons of life and we have different hormones and, you know, and it's always hard to separate those things out, but they at least ought to be, we ought to think about what we're talking about.

We say, I don't feel the same. Is it just a feeling or is it really a deep intellectual thing going on where you see a new truth or don't see an old one clearly? Yeah, I'm thinking of that quote from C.S. Lewis who says, without faith, a man can neither be a good Christian or a good atheist because he said in his atheist days, he had moods where the whole Christian story seemed rather plausible. And now that he's a Christian, sometimes it seems implausible. And unless he's going to be like a ship tossed about by the sea, he's going to need to kind of ground his decision in something deeper

than his fluctuating emotions. Oh man, that's something I think about all the time, right, when I have frustrations with our own Christian community and I think, oh man, I can't believe we all think this or some horrible thing. Then I remember, oh man, but there's other groups of people, it's not like I'm going to be more satisfied with them. And I don't want to be in like secular academia right now. I would not enjoy it. The other thing that I find really fascinating is, yeah, like it is, you know, during these

confusing days in the church, there is a temptation to just like leave it in search of a more perfect communion where I can feel what I once felt. Something like that. And then you join it and then if people are honest with you they're like, it sucks over here too dude. Like it sucks everywhere. I know, I know. I have a hard time with this because of course I think Catholicism is true and you know, you and I both have friends that are exploring it and it's a hard balance to walk because I don't want them to come here thinking,

well, we don't have any problems. And, you know, we don't have any, I don't know. I mean, I do think our community is so much better on so many metrics. I mean, you know this, the way our children grow up compared to how we grew up, the way most, the vast, vast majority of all the relationships that you and I know are stable and healthy, even if you, but that doesn't mean people

aren't suffering with depression. It doesn't mean people don't have problems. It doesn't mean people don't make poor decisions. So it's just not some perfect community that is gonna fix all your problems, but it is true. And the more we follow the basic precepts of the church, the more in harmony we live with each other and the more beautiful it is.

But yeah, I don't want anyone to come thinking, everything's gonna be, it's gonna solve all your problems. No, you might need like medication, man. You know? And that's true of all these different communities. Cause it's kind of like a man may be married and happily so. And then he sees a woman now the corner of his eye and she appears to be to him the unfallen Eve, you know, things could have been better if I was with her.

But then you get to know anybody for five minutes like, Oh, you're just as wretched as me and her. Everybody is no one you've ever met for long as I've watched my friend, some friends, relationships fall apart over the years. Their marriages, I just think what on earth are you thinking? I mean, I can just sometimes I can see the blindness, right? Like you really think that the grass is green? Are you kidding me?

Have you ever lived with anybody? Like you live with anybody and it's hard. Do you remember having roommates and you'd get in fights over dumb stuff about who left the peanut butter and jelly out? And you know, like living with anyone is hard. And I just think, oh, what a mistake. You know, like you're actually unhappy and it's driving, you know, certain wedges between you and your spouse. And you're

still going to be unhappy. But when the second or third marriage, you're going to be unhappy because there's a lot of just problems that you just haven't dealt with. And yeah, what a mistake. Wherever you go, there you are. Yeah. Something about the superficiality to keep the analogy of the woman that you can interpret her however you want. And I think something's true. Open possibilities. Yeah. With different religious communities, something's true there too. So you might be going to a parish that you don't like.

The Pope just said something you think's ridiculous. The bishop was just accused of this. And then out of the periphery, you see this beautiful YouTube video or this church up the road. And again, it's kind of similar. It's like things, okay, this could actually be it. And it's not to say that things can't be better or worse in different communities. But it's just to say that I've known people who've left or who would like my mate earlier, I was saying discerning between these two things and when one way he's honest enough to be like, no, it sucks.

Like it's tough everywhere. They kind of infighting and like the's honest enough to be like, no, it sucks. Like it's tough everywhere. Like there's the kind of infighting and like the politics and the parish. It's like, that's true here. It's true. It's. Yeah. That makes sense. Rob C wants to know,

how do you respond to atheists that bite the bullet and simply say, okay, fine, the universe is eternal. So there's no need for God. So he's talking about a column argument. Well, a lot of the arguments for God don't depend on the universe having a beginning. So the argument from contingency that we were talking about a column argument here. Well, a lot of the arguments for God don't depend on the universe having a beginning. So the argument from contingency that we were talking about earlier doesn't at all depend on the universe having a beginning in time, because even if it was always here and it's

contingent, it needs a cause or an explanation for why it's here. And this is Aquinas' argument, so we'd like to see that. Yeah, Aquinas' arguments, for instance, don't depend on the sort of temporal nature of the universe having a beginning. Yeah. What are the short list of necessary truths, asks Anthony, that are essential for basic human knowledge? For example, the principle of non-contradiction

is something we utilize as the ground of logic, but itself seemingly cannot be proven by deductive logic or any logic. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, maybe inductive logic, but itself seemingly cannot be proven by deductive logic or any logic. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, maybe inductive logic it can be proved by, but... Well, there might be two different things they're asking. I mean, there traditionally are something called the three laws of logic, and then that's one of them, right? One of these fundamental presuppositions of all good human thinking, right, is that?

Principle of self-identity. Yeah, so what are they? And what's the third one? Contradiction and something. The other one's really similar to the law of non-contraction, right? So every proposition is either true or false and not both. So the law of the excluded middle. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So yeah, there's basically three laws of logic that you can sort of look up, but they're just so basic that we actually can't really give much of an argument for them because there's nothing more basic from, there's nothing more obvious or more basic

that we could argue from to get to that conclusion, plus we would have to use those laws in an argument to argue for anything. So they're actually just bedrock basic laws of- Like the law of non-contradiction can't be proved, right? Like you can't- Well, there's nothing more fundamental which to prove it from,

and any argument would presuppose it. So our only real options are not having any arguments or rationally structured beliefs or assuming that those are true. So for instance, different logical systems all assume those to be true as axioms. We don't prove those because how would you? You couldn't. But again, that used to bother me. Like, wait a minute, the bottom of all our thinking is this

unprovable stuff, but then you think about it and it's unprovable because it's so obvious. So I shouldn't bother you. Mason- In Craig's debate with Sam Harris, Sam said something that I thought was so funny, and I've used it multiple times. You keep asking questions. Why, why, why, why? You know, why is the Lord of non-contradiction true? He's like, eventually, this was his line, you hit metaphysical bedrock

with the shovel of a stupid question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great line. You eventually get there. No, she could have been asking, well, I think it was a she, right? I could have been asking about like the necessary conditions for knowledge.

And of course that's really disputed among epistemologists, right? Our world got rocked in 1963 when Ed Munghetti published this dumb little paper that ruined our view of knowledge. Really? Yeah. I had no idea about this. So basically knowledge had been thought

at that point to be something like a justified true belief constitutes knowledge. But then he gave all these counter examples where you have a justified true belief constitutes knowledge. But then he gave all these counter examples where you have a justified true belief. I know, totally. Where you have a justified true belief, but you clearly don't have knowledge. And so what most people thought was,

oh no, we gotta go searching for a fourth condition. What's an example of a justified true belief that's not knowledge if you can remember? So like if the clock on the wall stopped yesterday at exactly this time and then you look up at it, and you're like oh, it's 352 and But it stopped yesterday It seems like you have a true belief, so it is right It's true, and you believe it and you have a good reason for it right because if that's not a good reason

You should never trust the clock. But clearly if the clock says a certain time, that's a good reason in general to take it. So you have a justified true belief, but something about your evidence there doesn't like connect to the truth of the thing in the right way. Or a friend gave me an example where he came out of the mall

and he saw like a gray Honda Accord sticking out and he said, my car's in this row, but he got up to that one and that wasn't it. It was literally behind that one. Yeah, okay. You know? And so you have a good reason to believe it and it was true.

And you did believe it, but it's not really knowledge. And so it turns out that it's a little bit trickier to define them we thought. And then that leads people in the wake of that being really hard to solve, because at first it just felt like, well, we can just solve it really quickly. We'll add a little condition. But no fourth condition on knowledge has really gained wide acceptance. And so that's where we get all these different theories and epistemology arising in the late 60s, 70s and 80s.

And so we start to get causal theories of knowledge, reliableism, we get planning as theory of We start to get causal theories of knowledge, reliableism, we get planning as theory of proper function and so forth, and part, a lot of it is motivated by like, oh no, we couldn't give necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge the way we thought we could and so forth. So dare I ask you what knowledge is then? Yeah, I don't know what the right fourth condition is, but I'm much more interested,

this is part of why I'm much more interested in justification, because I'm never more interested, this is part of why I'm much more interested in justification, because I'm never going to give up the view that you need reasons or evidence or justification for something to be knowledge. And notice that knowledge depends not only on these internal factors like having good evidence and believing, but also knowledge depends on external factors being right. Like the truth of something is like not something in my head. It's a correspondence or relation to things in the world. Combination of thought and thing.

And similarly, whatever the fourth condition is, if there is one on knowledge, is an external kind of condition that you're not immediately aware of. And I just think it, but it's clearly a necessary condition on knowledge for me that you have good reasons or evidence or something along those lines,

good reasons for belief or justification. So I'm just much more interested in that because I feel like that's the thing we can control. Like the thing I can control is like, I mean, not perfectly of course, but the thing that is under our control largely is over time, are we forming beliefs in a healthy way that's responsive to whatever light he's giving us to see.

Right, like are we responsive to the evidence? I feel like that's what we can control. And so I don't, and I really don't like these views in epistemology that don't have anything to do with evidence and so forth, like Plantinga's view. Okay. Yeah. Which I think you're more attracted to, right? Or do you like it?

Well, yeah, I guess let's talk about that. I love Plantinga, just because he's so beautiful. He has this great line where he, just to kind of demonstrate his dry sense of humor, he's referencing Aristotle and the sentence is Aristotle once said in a flash of genius, memory is about the past. I just love that so much. My favorite is his definition of fundamentalist. Did you ever see this? No. Okay, we can't say it on air. It's so good though. You just got to go look it up. It's really good. Well, I love what is philosophy, thinking really hard about a thing or something. It's so excellent. Yeah. No, I think what I liked about Plantinga is it what he had to say about properly basic beliefs and God being in that category. Is it sort of,

it's sort of like when you read a poem and it expresses what you knew but couldn't express. I was like, yeah, that's right. Like I believe in God and I don't think I have arguments. Now I do think I have evidence because I feel is that the difference? That's the difference. Yeah. So the seeming. So, so initially he was fighting in it. So he has this wonderful trilogy, right? And in the beginning, what he's, what he's fighting is this is basically like Descartes, classical, Locke, classical evidentialism, where if you have a good reason,

it's like an airtight syllogism type, it's either self-evident or you have a great demonstration of it, as Locke would say. And so in response, he's like, yeah, but wait a minute, that would like rule out a lot of our beliefs being rational. Like, I don't have a great argument for what I ate for breakfast. I don't have a great argument that the Romans existed,

like, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I think he goes overboard in trying to develop a theory on which you don't have to not only have arguments, but you don't have to have justification, reasons, evidence. And I think there was a conflation early on in Plantinga that worked itself out by around 2000. He became better at this, but like there's just a conflation of having arguments

and having evidence. And I just think that's just a fundamental mistake because I think you're gonna have lots and lots of evidence without the ability to articulate some sort of formal syllogism or something. Do you think that now he might agree with you and say of course you have evidence. Well, there are some hints in,

yeah, there are some funny things he says that go pretty much unnoticed in Warranted Christian Belief, the third member of this great trilogy, where he talks about impulsional evidence and so forth. So he starts to come my direction in that sense, but I just don't like theories that exclude these first person reasons for belief. First person reasons for belief.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Why, Devin asks, Devin Stewart, why is a simple God more aptly labeled necessary? Other theists say their non-simple God is necessary and some atheists will posit some necessary physical reality. Why are they wrong and we justified in calling a simple God necessary rather than those other things? Yeah, great question totally fair question so

Okay, so simplicity and and necessity was that the other Yeah, other theorists say their non simple God is necessary and some atheists. Oh, yeah. Okay, good So so and other people would say it's a physical reality their non-simple God is necessary in some atheists. Oh yeah. Okay, good. So, and other people would say it's physical reality. Well, as I said earlier, I just don't even know what it means to say a physical reality is necessary. I mean, it sounds to me like Appi and these guys are just calling something necessary

that doesn't make any sense to call it necessary. I mean, to me, necessary means you could not have been otherwise, but any physical configuration clearly could have been otherwise. This part could have been over here and vice versa or one part couldn't be missing. And that goes to the simplicity thing about parts.

If you thought that there were two immaterial beings, right? And you thought, hey, they could both be necessary even though one's simple and one is not, I think that's again a mistake because even if something doesn't have physical parts, if it's got any division within it, multiple parts, it looks like you need a cause of that thing. So you haven't gotten to the ultimate necessary reality.

You need some sort of cause of that thing, right? Because say something is tripartite, it has three parts. Well, couldn't one of them have not been there? Or could they have been arranged in a different way? So if your God has a complex psychology, like Freudian, id, ego, et cetera, well, couldn't it have been otherwise, that maybe he only had an ego or whatever?

And so you just haven't hit the fundamental stopping point yet, which is a completely simple being that doesn't have composition of any kind, so it doesn't need a cause or an explanation of why it's composed or put together in that way way And it seems to me that only that kind of being could be strictly necessary in the most firm sense, right? It just doesn't have any other way. It could be All right. So as we wrap up here, I know you mentioned earlier that Dawkins argument was bad and It was so obviously bad

I mean whatever else he said in the book that was well-written or maybe convincing emotionally, when he comes to this argument and calls it the central argument of his book, you're like, all right, well, this, here's the leader of the new atheism, here's the central argument of the leader of the new atheism, this better be bloody good. And it was hopeless, it really was hopeless.

Well, not only that, but I think with the, like in the four central new atheist books, right, you got the two from Sam Harris and the one from Daniel, or rather, you have what? Letter to a Christian Nation from Sam Harris, you had God is Not Great by Hitchens, you had the Dawkins God Delusion, and then you had the Daniel Dennett book,

whatever it was called. I read it, but basically those, here's what's really scary. There's very little direct argumentation against God's existence at all in those books. Yeah, and you saw that. And Sam Harris eventually had a second book, but it didn't make any difference.

There were five of these books. And this was, to my mind, when I read all five of those, as I was thinking through these things through, Dawkins' argument was actually the only actual, like clear sustained argument of any kind. I mean, there's lots of himming and hawing at like, well, Aquinas' arguments aren't good. And then there was lots of-

He clearly never read them. The vast majority of it was like, look at all the bad consequences of religion in general. And that kind of stuff. Mother Teresa's awful. Okay, fine. Okay, yeah, Hitch's obsession with Mother Teresa was crazy. Yeah, if Mother Teresa is a problem for your view,

your view has a problem. Oh, that's really good. So yeah, mother Teresa is a problem for your view, your view has a problem Really good. So Yeah, so the Dawkins argument was to me the central argument where he actually argued in some kind of sustained way That you shouldn't believe that there's a god or how did he put it? There's almost certainly no god or something like that, right? Yeah, Thursday was just pulling it up and my sense of the argument was that it basically said just pulling it up, and my sense of the argument was that it basically said, if there are possible naturalistic explanations of like the design, the apparent design of our world, that's like one condition, like if there are some possible naturalistic ones, I mean it's a really low bar, if there are some possible naturalistic explanations, and then two, if there are no

plausible arguments for God except the design argument. Right. And God's not a good explanation of design, then there's almost certainly no God, right? Like there are no other good arguments. This is what it all assumes. I don't even know if he's cognizant of that. The design argument stinks. Yeah. He seems to think that this is the only one on the table.

Yeah, because he thinks he's just really dismissed in like, what was that, a couple of pages? Like the five ways that he doesn't, I hate saying this, because I feel bad. I feel like I'm bullying him or something, but like he just doesn't know what the traditional arguments are. And I feel, I kind of feel awful saying it.

You don't have to. It's like low fruit. You don't have to, let's quote Ed Faizer. I feel like I'm swatting flies or something. Ed Faizer says Dawkins wouldn't know metaphysics from Metamucil. Oh, that's pretty good. So he can say it, You don't have to, let's quote Ed Faizer. I feel like I'm swatting flies or something. Ed Faizer says Dawkins wouldn't know metaphysics from Metamucil. Oh, that's pretty good. So he can say it, you don't have to.

Well, I think I remember Michael Ruse, the atheist at Florida State, hardcore Darwinian philosopher of science. He said something like, I read the God Delusion and it made me embarrassed to be an atheist. I was like, oh no. But basically I think he thinks, listen, there are possible naturalistic explanations

and your design explanation can't be any good because... It raises another question. It raises a further question. You've only increased the complexity of the things to be explained. Yeah. And I just think, yeah, I just think this is a mistake. You're you've only increased the complexity of the things to be explained. Yeah And I just think yeah, I just think this is a mistake. I mean the key sort of premise here as we had it was like God's not a yeah, God's not a good explanation of the world's organized complexity

Yeah, so here's what I think fundamentally is I mean people can read my article responding to Dawkins. What was it called again? The Improbability of... What was it called again Thursday? Oh yeah, is the God Hypothesis Improbable a response to Dawkins? People can find this for free if they just search the internet in my name. But basically, he seems to hold an, he seems to unconsciously hold a principle like, God can't be a good explanation of the world's organized complexity

because he himself would have to be complex. Yeah. Like somehow he himself is like this big thing. And there is a fair point underneath this, I think, which is something like this. When we're explaining something, we don't wanna introduce a brand new kind of entity that's even weirder and harder to explain

than the initial thing we're trying to explain. Like we don't wanna unnecessarily sort of just multiply things that need explaining, because then you don't really make progress. I think he's right about that. That's just a general principle of simplicity. Like don't introduce hard explanations unless you have to. Yes, you have to.

Does that make, like, so, but here's the other, I would say a couple things to that. Number one, we didn't introduce God to just like take care of one little problem. God explains like the contingent nature of the world, why it's here at all, why there are moral laws, why there are abstract objects, you know, etc., etc. And the design of the world, the beauty of the world, like God explains so many things. We didn't introduce God, which admittedly is kind of like a kind of hard thing that

we don't just see every day in the world, like, you know, our water bottles. But we didn't introduce him just to explain the world's organized complexity, like the design in the world. So I'd say that first. So I kind of agree with him, yeah, don't introduce unnecessary stuff. But without God, it just feels like we don't get stuff at all, let alone organized stuff. So it doesn't seem so unnecessary to me, but he also seems to be presuming a lot about God being complex in a lot of other ways, right? And which obviously as the question indicated earlier,

right, we have a notion of divine simplicity, God being in some sense the simplest thing that there could be. There's no arrangement in him that needs further explaining. But I think Dawkins just thinks you're not making progress. By introducing God to explain the world, you haven't made progress. And I just don't think that's true.

I mean, you explain why there's a world at all and why it's beautiful and why it's organized and so forth. Mason Hickman I think Craig's point too was even if I have to then explain God or the cause of the world, to say that you can't point to an explanation because then you have to explain that explainer is not true. Yeah, that's just not true. And then that's clearly, like, here's an example from science, right?

So what did they do? They like hypothesized that Pluto was there or Neptune was there because of some perturbations in Uranus or vice versa. And like we like have some reason to believe in this new entity, cause it would explain what we're seeing in something else, right? And I think we have to do that all the time. So even if we didn't have an explanation of, you know,

the new planet and where it came from and its unique orbit and its unique atmosphere and composition, it still could be used to explain something we do see, right? And that's a great case in science too, like the fact that science all the time actually has to posit unobservable entities, right? Like we hadn't actually seen this thing before, we just posited that there must be such a planet because it would explain

something. So I think, yeah, Craig's point is exactly right. Sometimes we have to introduce new things to explain the things that we see, even if those new things need an explanation. Yeah, I think the example he used is if we found, say, like, I don't know, arrowheads under the surface of Mars, well, that bloody is very complicated. And now you're gonna have to say,

well, it seems like some intelligent thing is responsible for this. And you go, well, don't do that. No, when did erosion? Because then you'd have to explain what created, well, some, it seems like some intelligent thing is responsible for this. You go, well, don't do that. No, when did erosion- Because then you have to explain what created, yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, I have a whole response to Dawkins' summary of the five ways online.

Oh, good. Maybe you can link to that Thursday below, because I thought I did a pretty good job. It wasn't that difficult, actually. I mean, quite honestly, I don't think he read Aquinas' arguments. It seems like he read someone's summary of Aquinas' arguments, because he made some very basic errors.

Anyway, I mean, look, there are Christians like me and others who say silly things and make bold claims, and so we're not trying to say that only atheists are making stupid. No, for sure. But! But it's bad. But when you come out swinging... Yeah. Yeah, you kind of deserve what you get. But! But it's bad. But when you come out swinging. Yeah. Yeah, you kind of deserve what you get. I don't feel that bad.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's really good to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks. Where can people learn more about you? I keep my writings at a place called PhilPapers, P-H-I-L, papers, where people can find, yeah, lots of articles, I've written academic stuff. I would say, given the stuff we talked about today,

that my article, Response to Dawkins is there. And I have an article there on Newman, and trying to explain his basic epistemology called The Saint for Our Times, that I think people could easily read. And then, yeah, I'm at Franciscan University, so if people wanna take undergraduate philosophy with us, we've got a great department.

We've got a really cool department. People studying phenomenology, Thomism, analytic philosophy, it's a really cool department, people studying like phenomenology, Thomism, analytic philosophy. It's a really cool department right now. And are we able to announce what's coming in Franciscan? And I don't know. Okay. I don't know.

Then we won't. But and then for those of them who are at the graduate level and just want to take a course with us, we got lots of cool stuff in Catholic studies run by Andrew Jones and I teach philosophy there too. Basically intro to Western philosophy, natural theology stuff. People want to go deeper in these arguments. Just take a course, have fun. If people don't live in Steubenville, can they? Totally. It's all online for the Masters in Catholic Studies. Yeah.

All right. Well, thank you very much. It's been fascinating. Yeah. Thanks.