Pints With Aquinas - Popular Youtube Skeptic Becomes Catholic (Joe Schmid) | Ep. 593

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

YouTube skeptic Joe Schmid is here to make a shocking announcement. Ep. 593 Enjoy these episodes and other exclusive content ad free, one week early with DailyWire+ : https://get.dailywire.com - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: Majesty of Reason: https://www.youtube.com/@MajestyofReason Ethan Muse on Pints With Aquinas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp1ivUSSz2s&t=3783s  Theotokos Rosaries: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries Truthly 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Today's Sponsors:  Charity Mobile: VISIT HTTPS://CHARITYMOBILE.COM/MATTFRADD  FREE PHONE OFFER WITH CODE: MATTFRADD Exodus 90: Download the Exodus 90 app today, or visit https://Exodus90.com/matt Hallow: Visit https://hallow.com/mattfradd and get three months free PreBorn: PreBorn offers free ultrasounds, practical support, counseling, diapers, maternity clothes, and real hope. If you’d like to help, go to https://PreBorn.com/Matt or dial #250 and say BABY. Relay: Freedom is possible.That’s what Relay is for. Real, lasting freedom from porn. Not shame. https://joinrelay.app/pints and use my code PINTS for your 7-day free trial. Join Relay, today!  Seven Weeks Coffee: Go to https://SevenWeeksCoffee.com/PINTS and subscribe to save 15% forever, plus you’ll receive a free gift. Use promo code PINTS for an extra 10% off your first order, bringing your first order savings to 25%, plus that free gift. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You come on as an atheist agnostic. And then a couple of months ago, I get a call from our mutual friend, Cameron Batuzzi. What happened? What happened? Who are you? And what happened? Why is gay sex impermissible? Why would God send people to hell?

Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is God Zohydden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious confusion? The problem of evil is just so powerful to me. I'm very cautious. Like, it takes a lot to convince me. Yeah.

At this point, I'm like, I don't know, I'm a little bit scared. Yeah. It's just coincidence upon coincidence, on coincidence, on coincidence, on coincidence. Oh no. Catholicism might be true. That's not good. Last time you were on my show,

you were debating Father Gregory Pine. on divine simplicity. And I'm pretty sure you won, which pissed me off a little bit. Did I win? It didn't piss me off either. I was just joking. If I'm defending falsehood, I think I think I lost. No, it's pretty wild. I don't know, it wasn't like a knock him down, drag him out kind of thing. But I remember Father Pine calling me and he's like, because he saw a picture of you and you know, you look kind of young. And he's like, should I be debating this guy? I mean, he's like, I know I'm not one to talk because I look young, but this guy looks really young. I'm like, trust me, he's really smart. It's just, so anyway, you come on as an atheist agnostic

and debate Father Pyne. You did really well. And then a couple of months ago, I get a call from our mutual friend Cameron Batuzzi. And he's like, ah, so Joe Schmidt just converted to Catholicism. So you and I have intentionally not talked about it. Even over lunch, we didn't talk about it. What happened? What happened? I was just, who are you? And what happened? My goodness, I was just inundated with divine grace. That's what happened. I mean, ultimately, conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit, right? So it's not me. It's God working. So what happened? And you, I want to say, too, before we get started, that you have a popular agnostic atheist YouTube channel called Majesty of Reason, which we'll link to below, which I imagine is going to take a different

trajectory. So it's going to be wild to see. And by the way, as we're recording this for those at home, you haven't announced this publicly. Oh, no. Yeah. We're still in private right now. I told my social media guy as we came in. He's like, what? Because he was a fan. All right, I'll stop talking. Go. Yeah.

So right now, I'm a PhD student at Princeton University, studying philosophy, and ultimately it was philosophy and just reasoning about Catholic miracles that brought me to the faith. Now again, divine grace was at work throughout all this,

and this is not my own merit, this is God. But yeah, where do we want to start? Do we want to start with the upbringing, Catholic upbringing? Well, I guess I would begin by asking you, if I had said to you, Two years ago, like, you'll be Catholic one day and on my show talking to me.

Ridiculous. Really? Utterly ridiculous. Really? What are you talking about? Like, I just had so many objections. I mean, hell, like, gay sex, morality. I mean, I was, I had boatloads of objections.

I was like, why is gay sex impermissible? Why would God send people to hell? Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is God so hidden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious confusion? Like, I would have just like, and of course, I would, as I normally tend to talk fast, I got to slow down. I would have just like inundated you with like hordes upon hordes of objections. You know, I have this 12 hour long video where I'm like systematically debunking all the arguments for God's existence.

And it's like my most popular video. So I would, I would not have believed you. I would have thought you've gone insane, Matt. And if I had to say, and you'll also be wearing an al-a-loupe tie in St. Padre Pio's socks. You would have went, okay, just stop making fun of me. Yeah, I would have, you probably, well, as I discovered, you know, skeptics are inclined with respect to Catholic miracles to posit hallucinations all the time and whatnot. Like, these really striking quinquents.

incidental hallucinations like happening all the time. So I would have thought that maybe you were just hallucinating or something. I do want to get into your story, but I also want to ask, how do you think your community is going to receive this when it becomes public? It'll be mixed. So I've got, listen, I've been irenic for quite some time. I've been very cordial and convivial to people who disagree with me because I think that's how we discover truth, right? So I think I've cultivated a community that first and foremost, at least I hope, loves truth. And if they love truth and they recognize that this is at least where I think truth is. I think this should be and potentially a lot of them will be open and receptive to what I'm going to say. Of course a lot of them won't like it.

I've got a lot of friends in the LGBT community. I have a lot of people who are atheists agnostic. I've quothed papers with a bunch of atheists and whatnot. And they're all just going to be like, what, you've lost your mind. Like they're going to think I've gone insane. So I do have a lot of friends who, I mean, maybe we'll become estranged, maybe, I mean, I don't know what will happen. Are you bracing for that? Are you nervous about the potential for out, not because you'll change your mind, but because it hurts to lose friends. It does hurt to lose friends. It does hurt to lose friends, but, you know, like, if they hate me, they hated Christ first, right? So, I mean, before I converted, I did have a lot of these psychological barriers and

whatnot pulling on me and tugging on me. Like, man, dude, I've been like a public critic of Catholicism and Christianity, and like specifically Catholicism. People can look up my papers and books and whatnot. I am just, like, tearing down divine simplicity, divine timelessness, divine impassibility, divine immutability. I'm just like going after the very core of Catholicism's doctrine of God. I've just, I've been systematically cutting that down. I've been videos against like the Bible and various other things like that. So, you know, I was there. So firstly, I need to show some kind of compassion and love to them, right? Because I was there. Yeah. And if one of my best friends converted Catholicism at that point, I'd be like, what? What are you doing? I would also have

had very similar reactions. So I've just got to show love. And again, I think at the time I had psychological barriers. But I think through God's grace, through the intercession of our blessed mother and glorious Theotokos, I've been able to, I've been able to kind of get over. It's so wild to hear you talk like that, man. I'm like, is he punking me? Is he about to destroy my worldview and make me an atheist? Because, you know, you're a smart guy. People should know you're a PhD student at Princeton. I'm glad to hear that you'll be having a conversation with Trent because you'll be able to go a lot deeper with him than you will be with me. He's a smart fella.

Yeah, but I really am. It's weird to hear you speak like that because I'm used to hearing your videos where you and Alex O'Connor are criticizing Catholicism and Christianity. And, you know, always, I thought you always did a good job doing it in a balanced, loving kind of way. I never thought you were hostile or Alex, for that matter. Yeah, well, listen, we're sin abounds, where darkness abounds, where imperfection abounds, grace abounds all the more. Right. So I don't want to go back to your child. Maybe we'll get there eventually. Okay. What I want to get to is, when did the first domino fall and how? And obviously, you could go back to your childhood, but I mean, like, more recently, over the last couple of years, it was an argument for God's existence called the psychophysical harmony argument. So for the longest time, I had been agnostic, right?

I was initially atheist. Well, I was initially Catholic. We'll get back to that. But I was initially, you know, very skeptical of. of the Psychophysical Harmony argument when I came across it in, I think in college, no, maybe the end of college, the beginning of grad school. So I've been agnostic for quite some time.

I thought that the evidence for and against God's existence was roughly counterbalanced. It was hard to tell one way or another which way the evidence pointed. And you know, I had some, I had lots of evidence against God's existence and the problem of evil and hiddenness and confusion and whatnot,

but I had some arguments that I thought pointed towards God's existence, like the contingency argument and certain arguments relating to consciousness. But really nothing tipped the scales. particularly significantly. But then this paper came along, published in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion,

by Brian Cutter, he's a philosopher at Notre Dame, and by Dustin Krummet. And he's a philosopher, I think he's now working at like the Insect Institute or something like that, some sort of effect of altruist cause. And it's called like the argument from psychophysical harmony or something like that.

And they put it up on Philpapers, and I read it. I'm like, oh man, this seems pretty forceful. So years ago, a husband and a wife in Lithuania sent me one of their handmade rosaries, and I was so struck by it, the weight, the quality, the care in every detail. It was seriously the most beautiful rosary I'd ever seen. Now, in collaboration with Theotokos Rosaries, I'm making two of their hand-crafted rosaries available to you over at Dailywire.com slash shop. Italian olive wood, gold, plated brass, micro-braid cord built for a lifetime of prayer,

each one made by hand in Lithuania. not just beautiful rosaries. They can be family heirlooms that you would pass down, use for personal devotion. You could also give them as a wedding gift, ordination gift, confirmation gift, or for graduation. Now, the first batch sold out right away. So, pre-order yours now at dailywire.com slash shop before the next batch is gone. That's dailywire.com slash shop. Can you break it down? Yeah. So. The basic argument? Yeah. So. we got the physical world around us, right?

Things made of matter and motion, described by physical laws and whatnot. I claim that we can at least conceive of a world where it's just like our world down to every last microphysical detail, right, down to these subatomic particles, the way that they move, et cetera, but devoid of consciousness,

devoid of this felt conscious experience of the world. So philosophers call this world, like a pea zombie world or a philosophical zombie world where you and I, not really you and I are doppelgangers, are walking around, they're having a conversation like this, where their mouths are moving, you know, their brain is firing in the same way, all their synaps is firing the exact same way, but it's dark upside, or it's dark up there, sorry. And this world is missing lots of goods, right? It's missing the goods of free and rational agency. It's missing the goods of like meaningful relationships, conscious experiences,

love of God and of each other. It's devoid of significant cultivation and manifestation of virtue and various other things. So consciousness seems to be intimately bound up with some of like the most profound goods. Okay, so like one question is, why aren't we in a pee zombie world? Why is consciousness actually sprinkled around? Why is there something it's like to be in this brain state? I mean, after all, this is soggy gray matter? Why is there something it's like to be in this state? It's very strange. Okay, but things get even stranger. Because not only can we conceive of a world where things are physically just like they are in the actual world, but things are devoid of consciousness. There's nothing it's like. There's no felt sense of,

you know, the smell of lilacs or the taste of chocolate. There's none of that in this world. In addition to being able to conceive of that world, I claim, we can conceive of alternative worlds where the psychophysical mappings are different than they are in the actual world. So what is a psychophysical mapping? It's just a description of which conscious states are associated with which physical states. Okay, so in the actual world, conscious states are associated with brains, right? Pain is associated with sea fiber firing, which, you know, that happens when we get tissue damage and it causes us to engage in avoidance behavior and whatnot. We feel pleasure when we have fitness enhancing stimuli, and that leads us to pursue the things

which caused fitness enhancing stimuli. And more generally, you know, consciousness is associated with brains. But we can conceive of hordes, of alternative ways of mapping conscious states, phenomenal states, as philosophers call them, with physical states. And boatloads of these are just not going to result in any intelligible or orderly or harmonious mental life. So, for instance, it might have been the case that all physical states were associated with just the felt sense of a patch of blue. That could have been an alternative psychophysical mapping. Like the physical world behaves exactly as it does in the actual world, but all physical states are just associated with this sense of blue or something like that. That's a very simple psychophysical mapping. The

psychophysical laws, the laws that connect conscious states with physical states in that world are very simple. It's just the simple universal generalization for any physical state P. It feels like the presentation of blue or something like that. So we can conceive of that world. We can conceive of other sorts of worlds. And just more generally, our mental lives are strikingly orderly, harmonious and just strikingly fortuitous in a way that calls out for explanation. And you're like, just think about this. I mean, think about like a screen, right? And, And think about the pixels on the screen. If you could just randomize which pixels are showing up what colors and whatnot on all the individual pixels,

how many times would you get a coherent, orderly, intelligible image? Almost never. You would almost never get a coherent, orderly intelligible image on the screen. Well, our mental life is kind of like that, right? Think about all the different ways that the psychophysical laws could have paired conscious states with physical states. Our mental lives could have just been like a chaotic jumbling, a mess of like TV static-like experience, which just mimics the microchemical structure of our brains, or, you know, basically any sort of conceivable psychophysical mapping, which wouldn't have

resulted in this kind of profoundly orderly, intelligible, harmonious mental life that we do in fact have. And so just as if we came across a random TV monitor and saw that there was a coherent, orderly, intelligible picture on it rather than just chaotic static, we would infer some kind of design because that's a very tiny sliver of the total possibility space for the ways that you could arrange pixels and colors on a screen. Likewise, the total way that you could arrange conscious states and pair them with physical states, only a tiny sliver of them result in orderly, coherent, intelligible mental lives that give rise to those goods that I mentioned. So this seemed to just call out for some kind of explanation. We kind of hit the psychophysical jackpot,

and I was struggling. How can I respond to this argument? Like, ah, but isn't, isn't God's mind kind of like fortuitously harmonious as well? But then it just turns out that there are very simple underlying principles from which you can derive divine harmony. And I was just really trying to push back. But aren't there so many ways in which it's disharmonious? But those could be easily explained by giving us opportunities for developing our souls or our character. And so I was like, I was trying to push back. But this was the first domino. So it's like the fine tuning argument, but instead of the universe, it has to do with our brain and matter, how our minds perceive. The psychophysical laws are strikingly fine tuned to enable profound goods. So like the

fine tuning argument also was one of the dominoes. I had lots of objections to the fine tuning argument, but they just started falling by the wayside, and I was like, oh, no, the fine-tuning argument probably works, and the psychophysical fine-tuning argument probably works. So, I mean, like, with the fine-tuning argument, right, we have various laws, physical laws that reign in our universe, and they have various constants within them, right? And those constants take on certain values, and we can examine, like, a physically meaningful range in which those values can take on, and we can actually perform pretty detailed universe simulations for what the universe would look like under different ways that the constants could have fallen within the broad parameters

in which they physically could have fallen. And it turns out that only an extremely narrow range in the total range that the values could have taken on would allow for life and anything to develop. So take the cosmological constant. This is a constant that governs the rate of expansion of the universe. If it had been slightly larger by one part in 10 to the power of 120, the universe, like all the matter in the universe just would have been like a diffuse soup of like individual particles that are light years away. If the cosmological constant had been slightly smaller by one part in 10 to the 120, then the universe would have collapsed back in on itself in like picoseconds or milliseconds. And in neither of those cases, do you get anything of

value? Do you get any conversations like this? Do you get any conversions? Any cultivation and manifestation of virtue and love and relationships. And if somebody had said this to you two years ago, what would you have said to it? Oh, I would, well, maybe I would have brought up, oh, well, maybe this is explained by multiverse or something. So if there's like a vast and diverse ensemble of universes, each of which varies randomly in its initial conditions and the constants and the laws of nature, well, then it's going to be unsurprising that maybe somewhere in the vast multiverse the constants would fall within the exceedingly narrow life printing range. That's one thing I might have said. I mean, now I don't find that particularly plausible. There are lots of reasons for that. I mean, one thing

is that like in order to even get a multiverse up in the first place with these sorts of laws and law structures, you need a very striking degree of fine tuning. So it just pushes the fine tuning problem back a step. You also get up with at least lots of standard multiverse proposals, a proliferation of Boltzmann brains. So Boltzmann brains are just these like spontaneously formed local brain-like objects which pop into existence very shortly in the quantum foam and then dissipate shortly thereafter. And actually, as it turns out, Boltzman brains will be the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of observers in multiverses. And the way that you can see this, it's actually kind of intuitive. Imagine we had hordes of monkeys just randomly typing on a typewriter.

How often do you think are they going to type an entire play of Shakespeare compared to how often are they going to type a single paragraph or a single sentence? Single sentences and single paragraphs are going to massively dominate the space of intelligible like sentences or intelligible vocabulary, right? An entire work of Shakespeare, that's going to be much, much rarer. So it's actually going to be exceedingly unlikely that you get this vast array of like a pocket of order and low entropy compared to just localized pockets of order or entropy. So actually, and localized pockets of entropy or high order, that's just going to correspond to like the Boltzman brain compared to this ginormous pocket of order that we have that we see around us for like 13.8 billion years going up to now and then this vast universe with an evolutionary history and whatnot. So, and that, of course, if there are, if Boltzman brains really do predominate observers,

then we are in a skeptical scenario because that basically means that among all the beings which share my current brain state and thereby share all the same experiences that I have, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of them are Boltzman brains that are going to dissipate almost immediately. And so then that just casts us into a skeptical scenario. And so I do think there are pretty significant challenges to the multiverse hypothesis in response the fine-tuning argument. But so these are just the initial dominoes, right? Like, I was still agnostic, but I was like...

I would think that if I wasn't willing to commit to Christianity, much less Catholicism, I would be, I would think I'd be open to go, okay, fine, fine, you read this paper, right? Fine, there's some creator. Why was that a scary thing to come to? I'm not sure if it was scary. Okay. It was more so just, oh, man, maybe I've been wrong all this time. So I actually interviewed Brian Coder on my channel

when I was at a conference in Virginia. And I interviewed him about the psychophysical harmony argument and another argument about why the laws of nature kind of fortuitously match the conditions of the universe. I'm actually doing my dissertation on these topics right now. So that's pretty fun. But I interviewed him that night. And after I pressed him with some of my objections

and he was able to really ably respond to them, it's up on my YouTube channel, people can watch it. I went to bed that night and I was like, maybe God exists after all. I remember thinking that as I went to bed. What was that conscious experience? So actually it was kind of exciting. Because I'm like, wow, I've sort of gone on this quest my whole life.

Like my whole life's mission really has been to try to find out whether God exists. I mean, since I was a child, this has been something that's just been like consuming for me. I debated people on social media way before I had my YouTube channel. I had like Instagram accounts where I was just debating people paragraphs on paragraphs on paragraphs. And then, because like, I don't know, I always just saw reality as this kind of quest. and I was just so interested in what is fundamental, what is ultimate, does God exist? I've always just been so profoundly fascinated by that. And so the prospect that there is this like all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, perfectly loving

being out there who set up the universe, it was, I mean, it was beautiful. So, I mean, it was, I have mixed emotions because, like, I was wrong this whole time. I was starting to suspect that I had been arguing against something that maybe I really shouldn't be arguing against. So that was a little bit nerve-wracking. Now, I would think if I was in your shoes and came to that realization, one of the first things I would do is talk to other atheists and skeptics to help them talk me out of what I feel like I might be being drawn into. Did you do that? And what was that experience? Yeah, oh, definitely. So, I mean, I reached out to a lot of my friends who are thinking also about the psychophysical harmony argument. And it turns out a lot of them who are skeptical at the time, like, Amos Wolin, Matthew Adelstein, these amazing guys, they were also starting to become convinced. And so then they are like, basically like, yeah, I'm kind of a theist now as well. So like we're all just looking at this argument. We're like, oh man.

And of course, I have other friends who have tried to offer responses to it. And I just didn't find the responses at all remotely plausible. Like they're trying to appeal to like, oh, you know, divine psychology is super difficult and like who knows what God would do. And maybe there's just some like foundational natural reality, which just has a kind of brute disposition to put the constants within exactly the life-permitting range and which just has like a brute disposition also to lead to the psychophysical laws

being strikingly fortuitous and harmonious and whatnot. And I just, I didn't find those responses plausible. They succumbed to, for instance, like, this like, imagine that the initial conditions had spelled out in like the atomic soup made by God with love in all the human languages. That would be insane evidence for God's existence. But notice that you could apply lots of these objections

to the fine-tuning argument, to the psychophysical harmony argument, to the world in which we had that as our evidence. Oh, you know, because I would say that's clearly evidence for God's existence. It's powerful evidence for God's existence. But a lot of these objections to the fine-tuning argument, to the psychophysical harmony argument, would also work in that world. It's like, oh, you know, this is no evidence for God's existence.

Divine psychology is really hard, right? And, you know, maybe there's just some kind of, like, natural reality, which just has, like, the brute or necessary disposition to produce exactly that initial arrangement. Like, oh, it's ridiculous. But you would be able to apply lots of the objections to these arguments. to a world in which we saw that. And that was like a light bulb. I was like, oh, man.

Oh, dear. Yeah. So then I started leaning towards God's existence. But I didn't go all the way. Because there were still lots of barriers, right? The problem of evil was just so powerful to me. And this is something I'm sure you have read so much on it. You've watched so many debates.

You're like, where can I go? It feels like the, well, the scale tips in the side of atheism, I suppose, is where you were at at the time. Yeah, so, I mean, I don't know exactly where I was leaning. at the time. There were periods where I was like an agnostic leaning atheist. There were times where I was more of a pure agnostic. I think when I came across the psychophysical harmony argument, lots of other arguments for God's existence, I started losing my objections to the fine-tuning argument. I was a pure agnostic. And then I, as a result of that, I started leaning towards

theism. So that's the first domino, the first light of grace coming into my life, really. And I still couldn't go all the way, even though I thought these arguments were like reasonably forcible. I mean, one reason is because, like, I should still maybe have some higher order uncertainty because there are some smart people who disagree with me and whatnot. But also just, I mean, the problem of evil was so powerful. It was so powerful. Yeah, state it. I could marshal as forcefully as you can.

If you don't mind. Yeah. So for hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds, praying on one another, parasitizing one another, languishing, being burned. in forest fires, lying there in agony, crying out. This stuff has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, right? Like, just, I mean, again, just like think about the most brutal kind of death you can imagine. Like, imagine an elephant getting trapped in a tar pit.

It's there. It's wondering where its parents are, where its family is, and then it's trapped there for, oh. What was that? It was a book. All right, we're just going to keep going. Sorry about that, although. Maybe it'll come flying across.

We'll talk to that later. That's never happened before. Oh, right, right. Well, that's what the skeptics say, but there's lots of a, I mean, basically thousands of documented witnesses would disagree with you. But no, let's go on. Maybe circle back to the elephant in case you want to edit that part out. Okay, yeah. So imagine, for instance, an elephant is trapped in a tar pit.

It's wondering where its parents are. It's wondering where its family is. And it's just slowly sinking. A day goes by. it's starving. And then some hyenas come by. They're like, oh, look, it's prey. And they go in and they start eating it alive from its guts outward.

And they tear off its tusk. It's still there. It's whining. It's wailing. It's crying. And basically it gets tortured, let's say, for another 24 hours. And I would just think, like, where is God in this? Where is God in the suffering of the elephant?

This is an innocent creature. It's not like the elephant is like, oh yes, I'm going to develop my virtues in response to this suffering. It's like, that's not what the elephant is doing. They're not cognitively sophisticated enough to engage in that sort of virtue cultivation, right? So these innocent creatures are just being subjected to horrific suffering. And this was going on for hundreds of millions of years with no humans around, none of us to help them or anything like that.

And this was the very means or the mechanism by which God brought about biological diversity in general. in particular. This was the means? This was your chosen means? You couldn't have like created them in 6,000 years like the young earth creationists think God did. You couldn't have maybe made them like photosynthesizers or something, one and all. I mean, it was hard for me to believe that a perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing God would institute that as his divine creative means. That was, that's what initially caused my deconversion from Catholicism. and it stuck with me.

And I was just thinking, like, listen, I could have, I was starting to get a lot of evidence for theism, you know, the psychophysical harmony argument, the fine-tuning argument, et cetera. I could have all this independently converging lines of evidence for something. But for a long time, the problem of evil just seemed almost decisive, right? I mean, we can almost compare it to like, oh, the Jeffrey Dahmer is a nice guy hypothesis, right?

So imagine that, you know, we've got two people that are debating whether or not Jeffrey Dahmer is a nice guy. You know, one of them points out to all these, like, independently converging lines of evidence that Jeffrey Domer is a nice guy. Dahmer's a nice guy. Like, yeah, he served jury duty and he helped puppies and like he cared for this old lady one time and whatnot. But like once you learn that he was like drilling holes in the skulls of his victims so that he could insert hydrochloric acid to permanently zombify them and make them his sex slave, that is just a decisive refutation of the Jeffrey Dahmer's and Ice Guy hypothesis.

And so I thought with the problem of evil, I thought that, okay, yeah, there is lots of independently converging evidence for God's existence. And it's really hard to explain away as an atheist. But we just seem to have this decisive evidence against God's existence from evil. And for a long time, that was a big barrier. So, I mean, and part of what helped me get over it was just like the sheer coincidences that I would still have to posit as an atheist, right? Like, okay, let's step back, right? Firstly, there's a like a physical universe at all in the first place. That seems quite striking, quite surprising. We can easily imagine that Nothing existed under an atheistic worldview.

And that seems much simpler than the world we got. It's just nothing exists. Okay, so we got a physical universe. But now look at the laws of nature. Firstly, the structure or the general form of the laws of nature have to be strikingly parameterized or strikingly fine-tuned. After all, the laws that could have reigned, we can conceive of all different sorts of law structures that could have reigned.

It could have just been a law that there is a single electron and it just like vibes for all of eternity. That would have been much simpler than all the laws that we got And very plausibly, like, scientists rightly have a kind of bias towards simpler laws when we're comparing how probable things are before looking at the evidence. So, like, under atheism, we'd expect a very simple law structure like that. Or maybe it's a law that, like, space time is empty. Or it's a law that, you know, we can imagine hoards infinitely many of these sorts of laws that are even simpler than the actual laws that we got, but which would not enable any interesting or valuable things to occur. Okay, so the structure of the laws have to be strikingly fine-tuned.

Okay, but now look at the constants within law. So let's hold the law. let's hold the law structure is fixed. Let's look at the constants within the loss. And then we see that they had to take on exceedingly narrow values. As I said, in order to allow for anything interesting to happen.

And if we're talking about like one in 10 to the 120, I mean, you're more likely, just think about like that number. There are, I don't know how many atoms there are in the universe. It's something I think I've heard estimates like 10 to the power of 80, right? So you'd be more likely to just throw a random dart, as Robin Collins said,

he's like a scientist who's worked on the fine-tuning argument. You'd be more likely to throw a dart and hit a random, like, to pick an atom in the universe. and to throw a dart and to hit that atom, then you are to get the constants in the laws of nature to fall within the narrow life-pending range by chance. So I'm like, okay, so the constants within the laws of nature

have to be strikingly fine-tuned. Okay, but let's suppose that they are strikingly fine-tuned. Well, then, in order to get any temporal evolution of the universe, in order for the universe to evolve through time after the Big Bang, the laws of nature have to match the initial conditions of the universe. If they talk about mass and charge and whatnot, and they specify how mass and charge and whatnot are to behave, but the universe only contains different physical properties

like Schmass and Schmard or whatever, where these are just alternative physical properties that aren't actually instantiated. Well, then there would have been a mismatch between the fundamental dynamical laws of nature, the laws which specify how the universe is to evolve over time. There would have been a mismatch between those laws and the contents of the universe.

And in fact, given that there are infinitely many possible physical properties that exist, it's very striking that a match between the fundamental dynamical laws and the physical conditions occurs. It'd be like, you know, taking like, basically at random, certain, like, a game board and, like, a rulebook for it, and, like, basically randomizing that. And then if you randomized both the rulebook

and the game pieces for how the pieces are to evolve, like, according to the rulebook, if you randomize the pairing between the rulebook and the game board, it'd be very crazy if you got a rulebook that actually matches the board itself and tells you how the pieces are to behave, right? That would be really striking. So we all want to make a difference. The challenge is that sometimes making a difference feels

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Become the man you were created to be. Okay, so we've got, it's striking that there's a physical universe. It's striking that the general form or the structure of the laws are as they are to even permit interesting and valuable things. It's striking that within those general features or forms of the laws of nature, the constants fall within a narrow life printing range. It's striking that even given all that, the laws match the initial condition. so as to induce temporal evolution,

and we're not even like, we're not even at consciousness yet, right? So then all of that is like insane coincidence upon coincidence, on coincidence, upon coincidence, for the naturalist. And then the naturalist or the atheist, right? And then it easily could have been the case that, again, the universe just evolves

without any consciousness, right? So we could have just had like the P-Zombie world. Or even if there is consciousness, even if there are these laws which specify how conscious states are to interact with physical states, which, by the way, that's like an extra addition to the ontology,

And that seems like unlikely, like under naturalism, we'd expect the universe to be simpler and not to include these extra fundamental dynamical laws. Sorry, these extra psychophysical laws. But even if they do include those psychophysical laws, then we see that they are strikingly fine-tuned to allow for an orderly coherent, intelligent, mental life. Again, if you just randomize the pairing between conscious states and physical states, we would expect our mental life to just be like a chaotic static. Or maybe we'd expect it to be much simpler than the actual psychophysical laws that we got. Okay, even, okay, so now we've got psychophysical harmony to add to the list, the fact that the psychophysical laws even match the contents of the universe. And then we go on to even further striking things.

So like, we have moral knowledge. I know, for instance, that recreationally torturing a baby for fun is wrong. We have lots of moral knowledge. That's not something you can take for granted as a naturalist. Because evolution doesn't care about the moral facts. The moral facts for the naturalist do not play into our evolutionary history. And so imagine, just back, imagine that you had a book and you're reading it talking about Madagascar birds, okay? And you're reading it like, oh, look, there's like a Madagascar bird.

And it was, the population size is X. And it talks about what they eat normally and what they drink and like their mating behavior and whatnot. If you learned that that book was just a hallucination from ChatGPT and wasn't actually explained by facts about Madagascar birds, would you continue believing all the stuff in the book? I would not. No. It would, no, of course you wouldn't. So the naturalist grants that the moral facts

don't explain our moral intuitions and our dispositions to evaluate things morally. And so the naturalist faces a skeptical challenge with respect to moral intuitions. They can't trust our basic moral intuitions. They can't trust our basic moral sensibilities. And, you know, again, we could have easily evolved in any which way,

which would not have been conducive to generally reliable moral faculties. I mean, imagine, for instance, that we had evolved like the honeybees. If we had, we would have thought it a sacred duty to just kill our brethren, right, for the sake of the tribe or something like that. So we easily could have gone astray evolutionarily as well.

So we kind of hit the jackpot. So look what I'm doing. It's just coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence for the naturalist. And I could just keep on listening these. Why not then accept, or did you not flirt with Stephen Law's evil God argument? So if you can't do away with God and you can't do away with the problem of evil,

maybe there's an evil God who wants as much suffering and pain in the world as he can. Maybe he's not as effective as he could be, but did you ever consider that? I wasn't really ever particularly moved by the evil God challenge. I mean, there are a few reasons for that. I mean, one thing is just like, there are various theoretical virtues that we can apply to a hypothesis independently of looking at the evidence. So there are a few criticisms I'd raise here for the evil God challenge. One is just like in terms of the internal feature.

of the hypothesis itself, make it inferior to standard theism. And then secondly, I don't think it fits the data as well as standard theism. So in terms of the internal features of the hypothesis, think about this evil God. It's got lots of great-making features. It's got lots of knowledge about the world. It's omniscient, and knowledge is good. It's got lots of power. It's like, it's got all these independent of things.

It's got all these great-making features. But then, oh, look at this. It's got like a bad-making feature. It's evil. Well, that's a weird kind of tension. It's got all these other perfections are great-making features, like omnipotence and omniscience and assaity and whatnot. But then that like, oh, then you get another one on the list,

another feature on the list, and it's like evil. Like that doesn't seem to mesh very nicely with the other features. Like just in general, when we make inferences about the world, we should think that things are kind of uniform. Like, you know, the sun will continue to rise tomorrow. In general, we prefer hypotheses which have these like simple uniformities to them. But this view, this evil God hypothesis, does not have simple uniformities to it.

Instead, you have this list of attributes, all of which are seemingly great-making feature, great-making feature, great-making feature, great-making feature, oh, and then a bad-making feature, that's weird. So it introduces a kind of tension, and it's not as like a simple or uniform hypothesis as theism. Moreover, under that view, you can't derive all of those attributes from a simpler attribute of the being in question, like perfection, for instance. So under theism, if, for instance, God has, let's say, a simple attribute of perfection, we can derive from that various other individual perfections that follow from it, right?

But under, so like, we just have this very simple, compactly stateable hypothesis that there's a perfect being, a being with every perfection to an unlimited extent. That's a very simple hypothesis, very uniform, very elegant. Nothing similar can be said with respect to the evil God hypothesis. You don't have some like simple, or at least we're not aware of any simple property or simple attribute from which follows all these features and evil or something like that. So that's like one challenge to like the internal coherence of the hypothesis. Could you argue that maybe this is an example where,

our minds don't map onto the reality as the way that they should, because after all, it turns out evil is a perfection, and that's just something you haven't figured out yet? What can't evil be a perfection? Don't you get on board with? We have to define it differently. It wouldn't be an absence of good, but if this is what God wants, could be.

So, I mean, that would seem to, though, require us to be, like, almost in, like, a radical, skeptical scenario with respect to our basic moral intuitions, right? like if evil is good after all or like a perfection, right? So if you want to go in for that route and basically just like vitiate all of our moral knowledge, that seems to be a much larger cost than even the cost that I was just mentioning. So like to go that route, you'd basically have to say that like, yeah, we just went systematically astray with respect to our basic moral intuitions,

which of course leads to like another challenge for this hypothesis. Like this is, you've heard of Descartes' evil demon, right? It's like this thought experiment or maybe there's like an evil demon, which is just feeding us sense impressions and we're just these disembodied intellects. And we're in just this kind of a radical, skeptical scenario where we don't know anything about the external world. That's basically what the evil God proponent is positing, right? They're positing. I mean, of course, the people who run the evil God challenge, they don't believe in the being.

They're just trying to say that there's maybe some kind of evidential parity between theism and this hypothesis. And since that hypothesis is ridiculous, and so is, like, theism. But theism doesn't posit basically a Cartesian evil demon going out that, like, who exists at the foundation of reality. And so if there's a being who is like maximally vicious, we can't count on it to have given us reliable cognitive faculties. We can't count on it to have given us reliable moral faculties. We can't count on it to basically put us in epistemically friendly environment that's conducive to our having knowledge of the world. So basically, I just think you're cast into a radical, skeptical scenario. And that I think is just ridiculous.

Of course I know I have hands. Of course I know it's wrong to recreationally torture children. All right. So then you've got this formidable argument from the problem of evil. Yeah. You're seeing these lines of evidence converging for the, existence of some kind of creator, how then did you reconcile that? How did you overcome the problem of evil? Because the way you put it, it's pretty forceful. And I think about that today, sometimes you

think about evil and you don't just see the horror of it, but it seems like the world is mad or unintelligible. Like you think that maybe there are more people dying in the womb that actually get born. Why would a loving God allow that? Or people are being sex trafficked while we're sitting here talking, watching this video. You think about, I think about that. And then I think, And I think a lot of people would agree that they go, I don't know. It feels like God might not exist. But of course, as what you're doing is, we're less interested in what it feels like and more interested in the way we should think.

So how did you overcome the problem of evil or have you? At the time, I didn't overcome it. It was just a persistent thorn in the side. So I was starting to lean towards theism and starting to maybe more strongly lean towards and I was like where maybe to the point I'm like an agnostic leaning theist. But I didn't overcome the problem of evil until I basically got overwhelming miraculous evidence for Catholicism and Christianity. Come on.

And basically once I got that, it kind of... I see. Once I had that, I was like, okay, I must just be missing something, you know? I must be missing something. And then along the way, there were some interesting and new theodicies or responses to the problem of evil that I thought like, yeah, maybe they have some force and maybe we can go into those. But I only kind of came to appreciate their force after I basically was just inundated with miraculous evidence for Catholicism. I see. So, because like, well, we can get into that.

Oh, I'm pumped. Okay, so we should point out that you are a friend of Ethan, Mews, and we've had him on the show. People should definitely go and watch our five-hour show where he just lays out miraculous evidence for the truth claims of Catholicism. Did you know him at the time? I think I met Ethan when I was agnostic leaning theist. Okay. I didn't know. Is this where he comes into the story? This is actually this is where Ethan comes into the story, basically. So, well, actually, it's a little bit after. So I was initially introduced to certain pieces of miraculous evidence that were just like pebbles in my shoe, thorns in my side, as a result of some people that will mention in just a second.

after that, and I was starting to lean towards these, and I was like, oh man, there is some miraculous evidence. I was introduced to Ethan. And then the miraculous evidence really started, just overwhelming me. So we can maybe talk about some of the initial sparks. Yeah, tell us what you mean by, I know what you mean, but pebbles in the shoe, what were you being introduced to, and why was it bothering you?

So there are a few things here. One is demonic phenomena. and me even saying this right now, go back two years, I would have laughed. It would have been ridiculous. I would have joined the skeptics and be like, oh, this is just ridiculous. What are you talking about, demonic phenomena?

Like, come on, we're prim and proper intellectuals. We don't believe in demons or anything like that, right? That's what I would have said. And I would have laughed it off. I would have thought that you guys are just like primitive, superstitious morons, basically. Yes. But I have a friend, Cameron Bertuzi.

and he started making videos where he just has on a bunch of different exorcists, people who work in deliverance ministry, people who have experienced deliverance ministry, and people like that. And Cameron, we were good friends at the time. And Cameron was like, he started sending me some of these videos, and he's like, Joe, come on, like, watch it. Like, stop making fun of it.

Watch it. Listen to what the exorcists are saying. Hear them out. Listen to what Dr. Richard Gallagher, on the faculty of Colombian NYU, a Princeton alum, listen to what he's saying, okay? And give me your explanation. I demand it.

I mean, that's basically what Cameron told me, in a little bit nicer terms, but Cameron just kept on pushing me. He's like, explain it, Joe. So he would just say, okay, watch this video. And if you don't want to watch the whole thing, just go to this timestamp. And, you know, I go to the timestamp. And, like, the exorcist is basically saying, like,

yeah, so, like, we started the right, we did the litany of saints, and then the person started levitating, and then he was there for about 30 minutes. And I was like, uh, okay. And so I go back to Cameron, I'm like, well, you know, maybe, okay, listen, maybe the dude was just misperceiving, okay, the person had it was like kind of like holding themselves up with their arm and maybe that was being covered by their like dress or something.

Lying, that seems more likely. Yeah, well, lying, that's another potential option. But, um, so I was like, I gave him this disjunction. Like, okay, maybe it's a combination of like, either it's lying or confabulation or something or maybe like some weird. kind of trick or some memory distortion or confabulation or something. And I was like, okay, yeah, and maybe the person was just, as I said, my initial plot was like, maybe they were just holding themselves up because I think, like, I didn't

have any independent evidence for the person lying. And then Cameron's like, Joe, I asked him that two minutes later, go on, and he said he could literally put his head down and could see under it. You could see like a foot up. And I was like, okay. So, and I was like, okay, well, maybe this was a long time ago and the person just forgot or something. Or maybe, yeah, some kind of confabulation.

He was like, Joe, at the beginning of the interview, he said that this was a week ago. And I was like, okay. Maybe he's lying. So then, you know, even there, I'm like, I'm shifting in my seat. Notice what I'm doing. I basically have just divined from the armchair this person that I don't know, who I've never met, and whom I have no independent evidence of lying is a liar. And I'm accusing him of lying because, well, I just have these other, like, arguments or something.

So, like, I can, like, divine from the armchair these, like, empirical facts about the world, even though I have no independent evidence for them. And so I was just, like, I was shifting in my armchair. And, you know, it didn't bother me too much at the time. But then Cameron's like, okay, you thought he was a liar? Well, let's look at this other guy, Dr. Richard Gallagher, okay? I've had him on. And just, like, you go through what Dr. Richard Gallagher is talking about. He has this Julia case, for instance, that Ethan talked about when he was with you.

And, like, the things that he's testifying to are things that are almost impossible to be honestly mistaken about. like he would just be extensive interactions with this Julia person, and then things would literally just be him and her, and something would literally just fly across the room. Or Julia would engage in extensive, fluent Latin and Greek, even though she didn't know it. And Dr. Richard Gallagher knows that because he studied Latin and Greek at Princeton. Or, you know, like, and he would just describe all these different sorts of things.

And I was like, okay. So this guy who has like all the professional credit and reputation that you could want. a liar. It doesn't, yeah, it's gaining power or money through, right. If anything, it's the opposite. He seems to be a cook. No, if anything, people are just like, yeah, people are thinking that he's a coug and they're sort of making fun of him or something like that. And, you know, he's got like all these recommendations in his book, demonic foes from like higher ups in like the psychiatric field. He's seen like 30,000 patients and for none of his patients that he's normally seen for none of them, has he ever suspected any diabolical influence.

He's a professional at detecting when it's, you know, some kind of sex. You know, some kind of psychiatric or mental illness like schizophrenia or, you know, dissociative identity disorder or, you know, various other things like that. He's an expert in that. And like schizophrenia doesn't make, for instance, like, your eyes just like turn completely black instantaneously or your eyes turn into like thin green slits instantaneously, which is what like a lot of these exorcists and deliverance ministers are saying. Being a schizophrenic doesn't make you in the room with like a dozen witnesses. Basically, the room would instantaneously change to like freezing cold such that people can see their breath and then instantaneously change to, for instance, like almost scorching heat

where they're sweating, things like that. It doesn't make you be able to levitate. It doesn't make you be able to have things just like fly off the shelf. And we just literally have hundreds, thousands of testimonies to these sorts of things from seemingly honest people in group settings, individually, contemporaneous documentation. And it's like at some point, am I implicating all these people in a massive lie? Are they all just cosmically confabulating? Isn't it weird? though that you or I or many people who watch this haven't seen things like that, at least to the degree of which we're speaking. Well, I'm guessing a lot of our listeners probably have. I mean, I think these things may very well be more widespread than we're giving credit. But they might be.

I don't know if I've, I think I would know if a friend had seen someone's eyes turning completely black or levitate. I have some people who've told me stories like that. But you see my point. It doesn't seem that common. We don't seem to have video footage of this stuff taking place. isn't it just shouldn't we just conclude that these people either yeah maybe they're lying just it seems more obvious because we don't have a direct experience of these crazy phenomena and you couple that with the fact that I imagine most claims to supernatural experiences aren't true even Catholics would acknowledge oh yeah definitely so why not just say well then well that

no need to take well this is what's going on in my mind on the one hand I'm thinking it seems incredibly difficult to explain away what they're saying and I mean actually there are some cases where we do have at least putative photographs and things like that that actresses have talked about and shared and whatnot and Cameron's actually done a video on that with like Monsignor Rossetti or something like that. So anyway, this is actually some like kind of tension in my mind where I'm thinking, okay maybe they're they're all just like cosmically lying and confabulating on like cosmic proportions. That's like one hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that they're telling the truth and what they're reporting seems to be things that are very difficult to be honestly mistaken about. like again like a group setting where like multiple multiple of them are like testifying to the exact same thing contemporaneous documentation etc so I'm just thinking like again at this stage I don't actually believe it I'm just shifting in my seat yeah right and I don't know how someone could like see seemingly honest people like dr. Richard Gallagher Adam Bly all these exorcists and like basically pancultural testimony for thousands of years to this phenomena and not at least shift in their seat especially if they actually

listen to the people like Cameron demanded that I do and try to offer some kind of explanation for all of them systematically if you try to explain it. And again, I could, I could at the time. I didn't actually believe it, right? Once I came across this, I'm only at the moment of shifting in my seat. Right? This is a pebble. It's a pebble in my shoe. It's something that's bothering me, right? This is a really good point. And I love that Cameron tried to get you to come up with a hypothesis, because it's easy to be dismissive. It's easy to mock. But there's got to be some explanation. Yeah, well, there's something. Even if it's lying or whatever. So you tell me what you think it is based on this. Yes, and you know, you can just divine from the armchair that there's

basically this massive conspiracy among all the people in question where they're just like saying like, yeah, I was there and like the words were literally being carved on his, like, carved on his skin right in front of us without him doing it. He had his hands by his side. This is like the Robbie Mannheimer Roland Doe case where we have like the contemporaneous taken notes from like the two exorcists at the time. lots of other cases like, you know, in the, in the, see, again, it's not just deliverance ministers and whatnot. In the Latoya Amund's case in like Gary Indiana or something, like a decade ago or something like that,

they had like a whole government report about this. And then we had like testimony from like the workers at the hospital where they literally walk in and they see the child with like, they have this weird grin on the child's face. And they literally in the government official government report that they did for this. We have the testimony from like a nurse or two saying, yeah, I saw him walk backwards up the wall. And like literally, it's like this is a government, like official government report with like a nurse.

Like, okay, is she wrong? Is she on the lie? And so like, again, I'm just shifting in my seat. I'm not convinced yet. Yeah. But again, it's something that's like, what do I do? Okay. I don't have any room in my worldview for this sort of thing.

It seemed ridiculous. But like all these people, all this testimony, contemporaneous documentation, pancultural. etc. And in fact, I could see at least non-silly explanations for why this stuff isn't so prevalent, right? I mean, because you have to recognize that demons under the Catholic worldview are agents. They have goals and intentions. And do you, I mean, one thing that they presumably don't want us to believe in is Christianity or God, right? So if they can hide themselves, especially in a world where we're basically all deadened to the supernatural, then they're presumably going to maybe go out of their way to hide themselves. And of course, maybe God

and His mercy will allow them to do manifestations so that people can get in localized context so that people can get freed. But basically, to all that they can do, they're going to try to hide. And they're only going to show their hand if God basically forces them for the sake of liberating a victim. And you know, of course, this is like an extremely intimate setting. These people have dabbled in the occult. They're basically being systematically oppressed by these spiritual forces. You're not going to take a camera into an exorcism session. Like it's extremely intimate. This is like a mercy.

This is like a ministry of mercy and healing for them. And usually it's extremely humiliating and disgusting and gross of the victim. There are all sorts of privacy things. And I think just like God and his providence is also just like orchestrated things such that, the evidence is a little bit ambiguous. And we'll get back to this

because this is like the divine hiddenness model that started explaining my evidential situation once I learn about all the other miracles and whatnot. So again, at this stage, at this stage, let's like recap. Shifting in your chair. Yeah. At this stage, I'm starting to lean towards theism.

Camon is starting to press me about demonic phenomena. And by press, I mean like he's messaging me, Joe, what is your explanation? I have gotten like a dozen of these people on who they don't seem like they're lying. What's your explanation? Are they just systematically lying? Are they confabulating on cosmic proportions? And what I had to say, I was just shifting in my seat. So I'm uncomfortable.

Okay. Cameron continues to make videos. He picks Our Lady of Zaytune. So here comes a Marian apparition. I'm like, okay, come on, Cameron. Like, okay, you got demonic phenomena, and now you're doing a Marian apparition. Come on, like, the mother of God is, like,

appearing to people, like, what are you talking about? This is ridiculous. But again, he's like, just watch. Watch, listen. Have eyes to see and ears to hear. Listen. Okay, so again, I'm thinking, okay, fine. I'll watch your silly, stupid little video on marine apparitions. And then I go in and I'm like,

whoa, something happened here. So to give you a little bit of context, our lady of Zatun was probably like the biggest mass religious experience event since the parting of the Red Sea. So it happened from 1968 to 1971, atop a Coptic Orthodox church in Zatun, Egypt. I think that's like a suburb of Cairo or something like that. And one night there are these Muslim transit workers. And they look atop this St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church. They look up and they see someone who they think is a nun about to commit suicide. So they start freaking out. Like they literally, we have testimonies from this. Like don't jump, don't jump. They call the cops. But they start to, they start to wonder like, hold on a second. I don't actually think this is a nun because then it

started like floating above the the I know. It literally started floating the apparition thing, which they thought was a nun. Like, evidently, they had some kind of, like, female figure or female shape. And then it started, like, floating up. They're like, okay, what's going on? And some of them started thinking, well, maybe this is like a Marian apparition. So it turns out the person who initially saw it, I forget his name, like Farouk, Muhammad Atwa or something like that. This is in Travis Dumbstay's book, excellent.

It's called, like, Our Lady is Aitone, or the Marion Apparitions is Atoon, an evidential inquiry or something like that. I've had him on my channel as well. but this guy who pointed the Muslim transit worker pointed out to the apparition initially he did it with a finger that was bandaged and was gangrenous so literally a dead finger was scheduled for amputation the next day he goes the next day they open up the bandage completely new finger a dead finger came back to life we have documentation for this okay so I'm thinking okay this is interesting we have documentation for a dead finger coming back to life oh and then of course this woman

this female, luminous female figure continues showing up intermittently different points for about the next three years, sometimes in front of crowds of hundreds of thousands who see her. We have literally thousands of testimonies to seeing this luminous female figure atop the Coptic Orthodox Church, including testimony to the figure being engaged in intentional movements, kneeling before the cross, holding a Christ child, bowing before the cross, blessing the crowd, things like that. Talk about what the government, how they shut the electricity. Yeah, the government literally shut the electricity down at one point. They got like, what's going?

This is ridiculous. And that night, the night where they shut the electricity down to the entire neighborhood, that didn't stay the apparition. And in fact, it was the biggest apparition, stayed there for hours on end, where people could just literally see and witness the Mother of God there. So they see this, like, female figure, luminous female figure, and there are all sorts of other things that are happening in connection with this married apparition. People are seeing luminous, dove-shaped objects spontaneously form around the church,

fly around without flapping their quote-unquote wings, sometimes in the formation of a cross, of which we have at least putative photos. And also they would fly around without flapping their quote-unquote wings, and of course doves don't fly at night, now they do pigeons and whatnot. And they're like luminous as well. And then they would also just like spontaneously fizzle out. So it's like, what is going on? And then of course, like when you look at the testimony,

they're like striking independent convergences or corroborations or undesigned coincidences between different sides of the church. Like there's one night where there was a person on like one side of the church and a person on another side of the church. And they see the apparition phenomena start as like a ball of light, a thin slit of light. They describe it as starting as a thin slit of light, turning into a ball and then taking a distinctive female shape

and then engaging in the various intentional movements. Both of them describe the apparition at the same time, engaging in like starting in that exact way. So like we have tons of independent convergences about this. We have the luminous dove-shaped figures. We have medically documented healings. These are insane. The Coptic Orthodox Church set up a medical commission to examine these,

and we have healings from like muteness, paralysis, hernias, all different sorts of instantaneous, organic, untreatable diseases remitting after praying to the apparition and for the intercession of Our Lady. So it's, and again, we have medical documentation for this. Travis Dumsay goes through this extensively in his book. It's really powerful. And then in addition to all this, we have, like, other sorts of anomalous phenomena.

So, like, there are these anomalous clouds that billow up and that have this huge scent of fragrant incense associated with them, which is, like, cover the crowd. We have, like, a ton of testimonies to this sort of thing as well. And it's, like, one of the testimonies is, like, you couldn't even produce this with, like, hundreds or thousands of sensors. So then it's like, okay, what is going on? Like, I have to say, okay, yeah, dead fingers are coming back to life,

like all these all these like organic untreatable diseases are just like being remitted in connection with praying with this thing like somehow despite there being no power around the neighborhood

or anything like that the apparitions are there people are seeing it with like hours on end there was no evidence of any projectors or anything like that and of course they didn't even have that technology at the time so it's like ridiculous to posit that like you go to my comment section

on my video with Travis Dumson one of them was like well maybe it was just like a complex paper machet thing that people were up there and of course it's like ridiculous And of course, like, it doesn't explain the luminous doves or just like the billowing incense or anything like that. Like, I was shifting in my seat now real big time. I'm just shifting around with Zaytune.

Because, again, we have at some points, there were hundreds of thousands in the crowd. And like literally, we have thousands of testimonies. I'm not exaggerating. We have thousands of testimonies to this. All of which say, like, yeah, luminous female shaped figure. Not, I mean, there were anomalous lights and whatnot. other things that were like associated with it. Again, like there were sometimes like fireworks or not fireworks,

but things that were sort of resembling that or they were like the luminous stuff shaped figures and various other things. But there was overwhelming testimony to a luminous, female shaped figure who would go around and engage in intentional movements, including massive undesigned coincidences, insane, medically documented healings. For multiple years.

For multiple years on end. So I'm just thinking, okay, what am I going to say? I could say maybe it's some sort of like technological hoax. Like maybe there's some sort of, I don't know, the government's just trying to do this to like get people to get tourists or something. But they chose like a Coptic Orthodox church, not like the Muslim majority or anything like that. Because like, you know, the cops at the time are like a tiny minority

and there is actually being persecuted a lot by the Muslim majority at the time. And of course like, okay, also not even invented at the time, whereas anything that could account for like the dove-shaped figures which were like spontaneously form and then fly around without flapping the rings and then spontaneously disappear. And like, I mean, you know,

this government hoax is also making dead fingers come back to life. Or maybe they're just forging all the medical testimony and documentation for this. So you can sort of see, I'm just having to positance upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence

just to explain away this one Marian apparition. And that's in addition to all the coincidences and whatnot, like the crazy confabulations and hordes of liars that I'd have to posit for the demonic phenomena. One of the things

I love so much about being Catholic is our devotion to the saints and hagiography, that is to say, the study or the writing of the saints. So much can be learned through their lives, through their writings. And it's important to realize and to remember that the saints were people, just like us, with doubts and struggles, ordinary lives, who through their yes to God, change Christian history as we know it. If you've been wanting to build a more consistent prayer life, I want you to go and check out hallo.com slash Matt Frad. Now here is something really amazing. A lot of these amazing things that I promote, they'll give you one month for free, which means you try it for 30 days, you don't like it, you cancel it, you don't get charged. Hello will give you three months

for free. You have to try it. I started promoting Hello years ago and I still personally use it. it's that good. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. Get it for free for three months. So every parent can tell you there was a before or after. Man, I still remember the day that my good wife announced to me that she was pregnant and just it felt like the whole world looked different, just before and after. I mean, one little beautiful person changes everything. Your priorities change, your schedule changes, your heart somehow grows larger than you thought was even possible. The tragedy is that so many mothers facing difficult pregnancies never get the opportunity to discover that. They're overwhelmed, they're scared.

Sometimes they simply need someone to slow everything down and remind them that they're not alone. And that's why I'm grateful for the work that pre-born does. They provide free ultrasounds and real support, not only helping mothers choose life, but walking alongside them afterward with practical care. It's deeply pro-life in the fullest sense of the word. you would like to help another family experience that before and after, visit preborn.com slash mat or dial pound 250 and say baby. Thank you for standing for life. Did you consider extraterrestrial life? Uh, not really. This is what's good about what Cameron did with you because it's very easy

to throw a hundred possible objections to a particular proposition. But when you actually have to commit to one, you then see that it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, I mean like, the extraterrestrial thing just seemed to me just kind of ridiculous. I don't know. Like they're simulating like the mother of God. I mean, I guess you could say, you know, and also like they're just like selectively healing certain people. Like they would just have to have insane powers and like we, I don't know. Like if I sat down and I could think about it like, okay, where were they located? Do they locate like in the inside of the earth or like from a distance and they're like zapping so they can like exactly heal the finger

at that exact time and they can like coordinate the movements? Like it just seems kind of ridiculous when you think about it, at least for me. And it especially seems ridiculous when you look at the broader pattern of miracles. And I don't know, I just didn't really take the alien thing seriously. Like if I'm really having to avoid the consequences of the existence of God. Yeah, the existence of God and Christianity by saying, okay, maybe there are aliens who are just like systematically deceiving us by performing all these miracles that like distinctively seem to vindicate or support or authenticate Christian revelation.

I mean, you've lost the plot. And like, am I going to risk going to Jesus? after I die, am I going to risk seeing him and saying to his face, I thought that your mother who was appearing there was an alien? Am I going to risk that? How ridiculous am I going to sound on Judgment Day if there is such a thing? Because at this point, I'm thinking there's some chance that that's going to happen, right? At the time, again, we're still in the initial stages of the conversion. So at the time, I'm not even Christian. And in fact, I'm maybe, I'm not even really leaning towards Christianity, but like these are just massive pebbles in my shoe. Like, the pebbles are

growing in size, as it were. They're starting to become stones in my shoe. And I just didn't, as time went on, I didn't want to risk saying to Jesus's face. Yeah, I just thought that there is this, like, massive alien deception going on. Because, like, we don't do that in any other context. Like, you know, we see, okay, this looks like the prime minister visiting us. It's doing all the things that a prime minister would do, saying it's the prime minister or, you know, things like that. I'm just going to posit that it's like aliens who's trying to deceive us and make it look like there's a prime minister there. Like, no, it's ridiculous. We don't do that in any other context. We take things at face value until we're given like good reason to reject them, right?

So like the miracles at least at face value were indicating Christianity. So, again, at this stage, I'm not a Christian. I was agnostic, starting to lean towards theism as a result of those various arguments that I mentioned. I still got the problem of evil in the background, which is holding me back. And it's also holding me back in addition to some other arguments, but let's be honest, none of them as powerful the problem of evil. So I've got these objections that are holding me back from Christianity, and then I start to get some pebbles in my shoe, and then they start to grow,

or more of them start to get put in my shoe. So it started with the demonic phenomena. Move from demonic phenomena to Our Lady of Zaytune, Zaytune, however to pronounce. And at this point, I'm like, okay, I've got sufficient doubt that I really need to settle this. I need to investigate. So I basically just like,

maybe to the chagrin of, my professors and whatnot, and unbeknownst to them, I sort of like put aside all my academic duties. I still carried them out. But I put them aside and I'm like basically full time investigating the miraculous case, investigating Catholicism, investigating Christianity. Because like, I've got enough doubt now that I'm like, this might be true. I don't think it is. But I need to, I need to find out. I need to have a conclusion. I need to find out. So I can move on with my life. It's his evidence that demands a verdict. So,

all right. I basically start now. We're like full-time investigating the miraculous case. Your parents have any idea about what you're going through at this point? Or is that too big a question to adopt right now? My parents, I told my parents two days ago that I was an atheist and that I was an agnostic and that I just reverted. Hang on. What?

Two days ago from this day? Two days ago. I told them for the first time that I deconverted from Catholicism. They didn't know that? 10 years ago. How do they don't know that? I'm good at keeping things hidden, I suppose. You have a YouTube channel.

But listen, I'm the baby of the family. They are. I love them to death. They're the best parents I could possibly imagine and hope for. They're the most selfless loving people I could imagine. But they don't follow YouTube. They don't follow me on Instagram or social media or anything. And if they did, they'd be like, oh, there's Joe doing his philosophy stuff.

Probably, probably, yeah. So they had actually no clue at the time that I even deconverted in high school, that I was an atheist in the household. And to my shame, I systematically deceived them for about a decade. Okay. They would have been disappointed, upset? Well, so it turns out, so I sat them down. I wrote a letter to them right when I reverted.

And I didn't share with them the letter at the advice of a confessor. But I was like, okay, I got invited onto your channel. I'm like, I'm not gonna let a conversation with Matt Frad be the first time that I revealed to my parents that I systematically deceived them for a decade about being Catholic when I wasn't Catholic. So I wrote this letter, just explaining things. And I sat them down and I was like, you know,

I got something to tell you. It ends beautifully, but there are some really bad things along the way. No, I didn't get anyone pregnant. So then they're like, okay. And so I was like, yeah, listen, in high school, I deconverted. I became an atheist. And then I became an agnostic. And I'm sorry for systematically deceiving you, deceiving the church.

I went through with confirmation, even though I didn't believe. You know, I've confessed all this stuff, thanks to God. You know, work sin abounds, grace abounds, all the more again. But yeah, I sat them down, told them that. And I'm like, you know, ultimately, God works things for the good of those who love him. And this has been, you know, think about my position now. I have lived in the atheist mind. I've lived in the agnostic mind.

I know how they think. I know how skeptics think. I was the skeptic. I thought exorcisms were ridiculous. I thought Amerian apparition was utterly ridiculous. Ludicrous. Like, you guys have thrown your brains away. This is ridiculous.

I was the skeptic. So I've been in their situation. I know how to appeal to them. So it's going to make me a much more effective witness for Christ going forward. and I can empathize with them. I can love them. I was there with you, struggling. I was there wondering about hell and homosexuality

and contraception and all the difficulties for Catholicism and all the difficulties for theism. I worried about that elephant too. I was there. So I know what you're going through. And I love you and I'm here for you and we're going to work through it. So that's what I can do now.

I can do that because I went through that myself. So how did your parents take it? How did my parents take it? I think they were like, oh, okay, we didn't even know you left, but glad you're here. What did they? So, of course, first they hug me, which is beautiful, and said how much they loved me. And they said they were so thankful. They were just exhilarated, really.

And they said, to be honest, they had some kind of inkling or some kind of suspicion because little things along the way came by their footstep. So like, I went, like, this is long after, well, I don't know how long, but long after I even had a YouTube channel way after I deconverted. Someone at my mom's work came up to her and she's like, is your son, is your son Joe Schmidt? He was just on Trent Horn's podcast. And she's like, oh, that's interesting. And of course, that podcast episode was an agnostic response to the case for atheism.

So I think my mom looked it up at that point and she was like, okay, so she had seen me say that I was an agnostic. And they had some inklings here and there and they didn't really know what was going on. So they didn't know how to bring it up once they had seen some of that. And so we were both in this kind of like collective state of unknowing and just silence. Like we're just not going to bring it up. And so they, so they did find out later. I mean, I think they didn't know for a long time.

And but once they found out that I was agnostic, they basically just prayed intensely. They prayed intensely every single day for my reversion and for my faith. That's good. And, you know, talking to God more than talking to you about God. Yes, yes. So literally, I mean, why didn't I tell my mom? Because, you know, like me, she has anxiety. And I don't know, she would have been worried about the state of my soul.

She would have had sleepless nights upon sleepless nights. And my dad is, you know, he got me into thinking very rigorously and argumentatively about the faith. Like every single day on the way to Catholic school, he would play Catholic radio. And this is K through 12. So he'd play this. And I'm just listening to people, like, object to the faith and be like the apollo. all just defend the faith every single day throughout K through 12. Right?

So my dad, and we had a little, some spats in high school. So I was like, okay, this is going to mar our relationship. We're going to have spats upon spats. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't want a sow division in the family. I'm not saying that all this justifies lying. That's not what I'm saying.

No, I was not justified. And I sinned and I, you know, mea culpa, meekulpa, right? But, you know, I just want people to understand. That's where I was coming from. Yeah. And I'm just like, you know, this teenager who is scared and just trying to figure out the fundamental nature of reality. Well, that must have been a beautiful experience sharing that with your family and having them embrace you. Oh, yeah, definitely. Tell you that we're praying for you.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And, you know, my mom, you know, it's just like St. Monica and Augustine, you know, where in confessions, there's somewhere where like a bishop was telling St. Monica, it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish. So I was like, Mom, you are St. Monica. You are St. Monica. And I am a guy. I mean, of course, I don't have the rhetorical prowess or the intellect of Augustine, so I don't want to... No, I get them. Yeah. And yeah, it really was just a beautiful experience. And, you know, what they also disclosed to me. So I have a mass being, they set up a mass being said for me. This is like one of the most beautiful things. It's one of the most beautiful gifts you can give someone. And of course, our home parish is massive. It's gigantic, right? So you have to schedule that, like, at least a year in advance. Do you want to know what day the mass? was said. Which day? Today.

Today, when I'm talking with Matt Frad about my conversion, a mass scheduled a year in advance was said for me today. Isn't that a cool providential coincidence? Beautiful providential coincidence. I love it. Yeah. So that's how they took it. I'd love them.

Yeah. Okay, so you're leaning towards Catholicism. Well, no, no, at this stage, remember, I'm not even leaning towards Christianity. That's right. No, no, that's right. You said you put your academic work on the back burner so that you could investigate the claims of Christianity and Catholicism with more intensity. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm, again, and I'm not even, dude, I'm not even a theist at this point. I mean, this shows just like how, I don't know, how difficult it was for me to change my mind and how careful. I mean, I don't know. I just wanted to be very careful with it. Like, this is not a light thing. I cannot convert or change my mind lightly. I can't be rash. I have to do my due diligence and I have to know, basically. Or at the very least, I have to have to have to have. enough evidence to make a kind of practical commitment rational. So at this stage, even after seeing

all the exorcist stuff and like kind of flailing around for naturalistic explanations that are just like massive cope in the end, even after that, even after Zaytune and like looking into that pretty extensively and talking with like Cameron and Saysar Bernstein, various other people who were thinking about that, even after all that, I was like, yeah, Christianity is probably false, Catholicism is probably false. There are all these different objections to the Bible and to hell and to the magisterial contradictions and, you know, all the moral problems with the church, you know, like all their moral teachings

that seem false to me and seem like just obviously false and various other things. And then even, you know, Christianity, like I can't understand the incarnation. Trinitarianism, there are lots of objections to that and what about like Old Testament violence and various things? So, and the problem of evil still ringed in my mind, right?

Or rang in my mind. So I wasn't even a theist at this point. I'm just leaning towards theism. Even after having seen all that evidence after having gone through the exorcist, gone through the demonic phenomena, gone through Our Lady of Zaytune, even then, I'm still very skeptical of Christianity. And then this is where, well, there are a few other miracles that came along the way that started pushing me again more towards Christianity before I even

met Ethan Muse. So one of them was, so like the miracle of Calanda, for instance. So Jimmy Aiken put out a YouTube video based on a paper that Caleb Jackson has on the miracle of Calanda. So this is, I think, in the 17th century, Juan Miguel Pelliser, he's like a Spanish farmer, and his leg gets trampled on when he's out on the farm or something. And so he used to travel, I think, to Zaragoza, Spain to get his leg amputated. Okay, so there are two doctors there that amputate his leg. They go out, they bury it in the graveyard or whatever. And, you know, he has an extensive convalescence there because, of course, they have very primitive techniques, and he has to be there from months on end being attended to by these

doctors who, you know, by this time, they know exactly who he is. Like, you know, they're spending months on months with this person that they amputated his like for. Okay, and then he goes, after his convalescence, he goes and he becomes a beggar because now he can't work. So he obtains his beggars license, we still have that, by the way. He obtains his beggars license, and he basically, every night, I think he, yeah, he, every night he prays, I think, to, like, Our Lady of the Pillar or something like that for, I think maybe for the healing of his leg or something like that. And he was rubbing the oil from something associated

with Our Lady of the Pillar on his stub. And so, you know, for whatever reason he had to cause to go back home. So he goes back home. And like, you know, he's greeted by everyone there because, like, he was known by the village or whatever. And so the people there, they wanted to see his stub and they literally, like, felt his stub, like his stub for his knee or whatever. And then I don't know how long he was at his home.

But one night, I think he, like, had a dream or something of, like, Mary. And he wakes up. and his leg is back. His leg is back. And so, like, everyone's, like, going insane. They have, like, a canonical investigation for him, like, the inquisition trial they had for this, just to make sure, like, is this a fraud?

Like, what is going on? And we literally have, like, the transcripts from that. We had, like, two dozen people from his town testifying to, like, feeling his stump beforehand. No leg. And then afterwards, leg. So no leg. Leg.

We even have, they even sought out the two people who amputated his leg and attended to him and his convalescence. They sought them out and they gave testimonies at this trial as well. They're like, yeah, I amputated this guy's leg. So like we have just dozens of testimonies to a leg being miraculously restored. People can look at the video on like Jimmy Aiken's channel and they can go to Caleb Jackson's paper on academia.edu. I think he may turn it into a blog post on his substack. But like, I'm like, oh gosh.

like this is insane. Like this is much better evidence than the resurrection, for instance. Like in my, in my view, like the resurrection, like, yeah, we have people who, I mean, four or five eyewitness accounts, like accounts that maybe claim to be based on eyewitness testimony. I mean, we think that probably they're written decades after the fact. There's some, they're not probabilistically independent on one another. Sometimes they're like barring from one another. So we got Paul and then the four evangelists. But like, okay, so like four or five testimonies, decades after the fact, compared to, okay, like, very shortly after the fact, like a trial where people are giving sworn testimony, it's two dozen of them saying I felt his leg beforehand,

now he has a leg afterhand, the two people who perform the amputation, et cetera. So, like, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is insane. So the miracle of Kalanda is pulling on me, and you just have to posit, like, the craziest conspiracy theory. How did you come upon that one? Did Cameron say knew that one as well? I don't know. So for whatever reason, I got into some of Jimmy Aiken's Mysterious World episodes.

And this one just like popped up. And I was like, okay, I'm examining miracles. This one looks interesting. And it says... And Jimmy does a great job examining things with an even keel. And it says like regrown leg. And I'm like, okay, come on. Like a regrown leg.

And then I look at it, I'm like, oh no. Oh, no. Maybe Christianity is true. That's a bit daunting because I would have to require a pretty big change in my life. But I'm thinking like maybe it's true. So I'm still actually, at this point, I'm still leaning towards thinking Christianity is false. But again, the pebbles are mounting.

Like my shoe is starting to get stocked full of pebbles. So the miracle of Kalanda comes along, and that kind of bothers me. And I start looking into some other miracles that people like testify, his YouTube channel have talked about, Caleb Jackson. It's like there's a Barbara Schneider case that I found really convincing. She had like advanced multiple sclerosis. She hadn't walked for years. She was sent to like her deathbed basically at home.

And she had all these tubes inserted into her. She had a fully collapsed lung. She had a massive atrophy for her legs. because of course if you don't walk in like seven to ten years or however long it was, you're gonna get massive atrophy. Her feet were like, I think frozen in like planter flexion so she couldn't like walk or anything. She was legally blind.

Her hands were like crinkled in on themselves. What you is this roughly? This is in the 1980s, I believe. And so like she's basically dying. And they have a, her church has a prayer campaign for her and they get like hundreds of letters coming in for the prayer. And so her friend is reading to her these prayers one day.

And when she's reading the prayers to her, she hears a voice, Barbara, that is. She hears a voice saying, get up my child and walk. And she's like, she takes out her tubes, she gets up, she walks. She looks down and the first thing she notices,

as she says, is her feet are flat on the floor. They haven't been like that for seven to ten years. And then she looks at her hands, and they're not crumpled in on themselves. And then, only after that, she notices, I'm not blind. I can see. and like she starts dancing and they had like they start dancing and running around and

her family members are like feeling her calves and like your calves are restored and like we have medical testimony to all this stuff so this is like an instantaneous and permanent remission of advanced multiple sclerosis oh her lung uncollapsed as well she had a collapsed lung in it uncollapsed so all of these things happening at once in connection with what I would have to say is like a hallucination on her part so okay we We just happen to have this hallucination with content, in association with hundreds of prayers, all this stuff is coinciding with an uncollapsed lung,

blindness instantaneously remitting, like muscle being restored, doctors testimony to this. We have medical documentation beforehand, afterhand. What am I to do? What am I to do when you see this? What are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to say?

So like, okay, I guess, okay, I guess God probably exists. So I'm like, now I'm basically like, yeah, Theism is probably true. But maybe God's like just like accommodating to a religious beliefs. Sure, like they're praying to the Christian God and whatnot. But maybe God's like accommodating to our religious beliefs and whatnot. And there are some other heal as well. Like Gregory Spencer, this is another one that Caleb Jackson likes to go through. So he has macular degenerative blindness.

So macular degeneration does not get better on its own. It's natural. It doesn't heal naturally. And he like he's seen by, we have all of his medical documentation beforehand where he's seen. by like an ophthalmologist. He's declared legally blind. He gets all of his legal permits and whatnot. And then he goes to like some kind of Christian retreat. And after he prays for like, I forget, like I think he just wanted, he wanted to pray for some spiritual healing because I think he had some trauma in his life. And then after that prayer, he can see almost crystal clearly.

When was this? This was, I think, in the early 2000s or something like that. Like, again, I'm just going off of memory here. So I think this is in the early 2000s. Okay. And so then he's like, oh my gosh, I can see. So then he goes to the doctor and the doctor's like, oh my gosh, your eyesight is totally fine. This is insane. And the macular degenerative stuff like literally cleared. And it's like, what is going on? And they had to going on? And then, get this, they had to investigate him for insurance fraud because they're like, dude, you just, you just had like all this medical documentation that you were legally blind with macular degenerative blindness. This is insurance fraud. Like, what are you going on? And they had to drop the fraud case because they're like, okay. Yeah, and we have like the government report. It's like, yep, yep, he's healed because they had to go through the medical documentation.

And he's all open about it. He puts the medical documentation online. So like, none of this stuff is like, oh, yeah, I had a headache and I prayed to Jesus and it was healed. Like, no, that is ridiculous. We have, in some cases, like, dozens, hundreds of contemporaneous medical documentation, signed, notarized reports. Deal with it. Explain it. No leg, leg. Accommodate yourself to the fact.

God exists. Accommodate yourself to the fact. So, I was like, okay. God probably exists. It was still a probably at this point. Because I was like, the problem of evil, the problem of evil. I can't get over it, man. Like, again, the Jeffrey Dahmer thing.

The Jeffrey, like, God seems to be like Jeffrey Dahmer. Like, okay, sure, there's so much evidence, but it was still so hard for me. I mean, again, at this point, I'm, like, leaning towards theism. Okay. Ethan Muse still hasn't come into the story yet, but now I'm like, oh gosh, at this point, Christianity, I was like maybe 30% confident that Christianity is true, but Catholicism, Catholicism was like 0.0001%. I was like, okay, maybe Christianity is true.

And there's some kind of, like, liberal Christianity where, like, everyone's going to be saved and, you know, that sort of thing. So I was like, okay, yeah, Christianity, like 30% chance, God's existence, yeah, I don't know, maybe like 70, 80% or something like that, even though I've seen all this stuff. Yeah. It's a testimony too, and I don't want to make light of it. The problem of evil is powerful, and it was powerful really psychologically. And I had other objections as well, but we'll circle back to the problem of evil later.

So still haven't met Ethan Muse. I'm about 30% confident in Christianity, super confident that Catholicism is false. and we can go through my objections later. But okay, again, the pebbles in the shoe are mounting and mounting and mounting and mounting. Now, what comes next is probably kind of simultaneously Eucharistic miracles and Adam Bly, his stigmata case, which we'll get to, and then Ethan Mews. So let's take those in turn. So Matthew Levanya, he's like a Catholic apologist in France. He's talking about like eucharistic miracles

And like Kevin On Tratikad is making videos against them And I'm like, okay, I should probably check this out Because like I'm starting to think Christianity has a really live chance of being true And like I guess this could help me figure out which form of Christianity is true I suppose if there are eucharistic miracles What does your YouTube channel look like right now as you're going through this? I mean you have to post are you posting videos? Yeah, I am posting videos

So like I'm doing stuff on a video with Brian Cutter on psychophysical and nomological harmony I'm doing videos on Like metaphysics I'm doing videos in philosophy of mind Like why dualism is true Why the mind is not reducible to the brain You know one thing we never address that we should address now Is why you haven't gone public

About your conversion until now Oh do you want to address that now Well just I think it's important Because my next question was going to be like Were you playing the skeptic in these videos To placate your audience Since you wanted to keep your conversion Close to the chest

How are you navigating these discussions Without coming out like a form? So this is post-conversion, what I'm doing? Well, no, well, yeah, I guess so. We're sort of the sort of investigative things. Yeah, yeah, post-conversion. Post-conversion. Why is that you didn't choose to announce it right away?

I needed at least six months of the sacramental life of the church under my belt before I was ready for the spiritual attacks and the flack that I would get for my LGBT friends, my atheist friends, my agnostic friends, and various things like that. And I just, I just, I just. just wasn't ready for a public defense of the faith as like a new revert. I need to receive the Eucharist on like a regular basis. I need to go to confessions to heal like all my past sins, you know. I needed to get your prayer life in order. I need to get my prayer life in order. I need to, you know, pray the rosary every day, that sort of thing. I needed to do my fasting and mortification.

I needed to do penances and whatnot, you know. I needed to get all my ducks in order spiritually before I was ready to go public and defend the faith publicly. Okay, but in the time that you converted to when you make your announcement. How are you navigating your conversations on your YouTube channel? You don't want to come out as a theist. You presumably don't want to spread the error of atheism. So what are you doing? Are you just posting less? So I did post a little bit less. I am posting things that are, I mean, for instance, I did one video just on like the nomological harmony argument, which is the one where I said like the fundamental dynamic laws match the content of the universe. I mean, I gave like the rule book analogy. And you know,

it's really striking that like if you just had a randomized rulebook and a randomized game board that they would match each other such that the rules actually tell those particular game pieces how to go. It's really striking. So I just made like a video on that. And I didn't actually come out and say that I was a the the the the atheist at the time and that I was even Catholic at the time. I just made the video. I'm like, I was exploring it. You know, and I'm just presenting the argument. I'm just saying like, and here's how one might object. And here's how one might do this. And that's basically how I carried myself. You know, I went on Miles Donne Hughes podcast, the Uncertainty Podcast. We talked about the fine tuning argument. And I told him in the email.

I didn't tell him why. I just said, you are not to call me an ignorant. You are not to call me an atheist. You are not to call me anything. We were just going to talk about the fine-tuning argument and why it's so amazing in all of its beautiful glory. So I just did that sort of thing, you know, and I just didn't really touch on it. And you know, so we should return to this. But I struggle with scrupulosity, Matt. I really struggle. And we should return to that. Thank you. So I just, I was paralyzed. What am I supposed to do with this channel? Is it a sin to keep the videos up? Should I delete the channel? What do I need to do? And so I had to, thankfully, I have good confessors and spiritual directors in my life. Like, Father Minders, I absolutely love you. You're my hero, Father Minders.

And Father Zach, at Princeton, you're my hero. Priests are my heroes at this point. But they know the scrupulous heart. And so basically, I took down the ones that I think were the most scandalous. So I had some where I think they were very scandalous. I had one arguing against natural law theory where I just think it's way too scandalous.

I had one where I just very vigorously defended like an argument for atheism and divine dyness and whatnot. So I thought that was too scandalous. And for all the others that presented anything contrary to the Catholic faith, basically, I went and I put in the description and an append comment. I did this in March of this year. I said like, hey, my views have changed since then, but this represented my views at the time. Don't infer anything about my current views. And I just left it at that. And dude, I'm getting all these emails.

Dude, I'm getting all these emails, these messages. Oh, Joe, what happened? Why can you elaborate? I'm like, no, I can't elaborate. What are you talking about? And people are commenting like, what happened? What happened? I'm getting messages like, are you a theist now? Are you? And just getting all these messages, I'm like, sorry, bro. Wow. So that's kind of, that kind of what happened. There is a lie that we believe when we fall

into a pattern of sin, especially when we begin to unfortunately love sin, namely that we have to keep this in the dark and everything will be okay. The fear that we have is that if we open it to the light, and what I'm talking about there is accountability, that everything will fall apart for us, that people will walk away from us, that things will get worse for us, which is such a shame, because some things can only be healed by the antiseptic light of truth. And just to say it, frankly, pornography is one of those things. Sexual sin is one of those things. And this is why I am genuinely honored to promote relay. Relay is built around honesty, accountability and helping men move toward genuine freedom instead of carrying

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is kind of silly at this point. Yeah. You're hoping for a liberal Christianity. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. Just some kind of like universalist liberal Christianity where, you know, the Bible. Yeah, maybe it's inspired or something,

but maybe like, yeah, maybe God just in his providence, let it be like error in error, like errors left and right, basically. So I was sort of hoping for that. And I was actually like, starting, again, 30% confidence in Christianity. And maybe I was like super confident

that that would be the kind of Christianity that I go to, and very confident that Catholicism is false. Yeah. Okay. But then, as I said, Eucharistic miracles come in. That's right. Adam Blyse stigmata case comes in, and Ethan Mews comes in. Okay.

So let's take Eucharistic miracles. So I start watching all these videos, watching these debates. I start participating these debates online. I was like, oh, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I remember I debated on Facebook, and I put this in my conversion video that people should definitely go and check out this hours long conversion video that's out now if people are watching it. Maria, we will link to it. Okay, sweet. So I was basically examining these Eucharistic miracles. I went on, I talked with Matthew LaVanya, I talked

with the skeptics of the Eucharistic miracles. I read the best skeptics, the best arguments for it. I watched videos on it. I started kind of engaging in debates and whatnot with like Protestant scientists on Facebook and whatnot, like a very extensive back and forth debates. So I started just like thinking about these. And Matthew LaVanian, it was like, Joe, you've been thinking about this stuff. Pick up Dr. Franco-Serafini's book. A cardiologist examines Jesus. I was like, okay, fine.

I'll pick it up. And so I pick it up and I read it. And I'm like, as I'm going through it, I'm like, oh my gosh. Oh, no. And I remember going through it and I was like, by the end, I was like, oh no. Catholicism might be true. That's not good. That's not good.

So, like, I can tell you some of the things that I sort of discovered when I was looking through that. So, like, he goes through five Eucharistic miracles. Lanciano, Buenos Aires, Tiksla, Sokolka, Lignitsa. Different continents, different time periods. Lanciano goes back. So the kind of historiography is a little bit, like, patchy for the first some hundreds of years. It goes back to, like, roughly the 7th century. But the provenance of the relics here are very secure from, like, I think, the 16th century onward.

And we have like references and whatnot to it in like earlier middle ages and whatnot. Ethan Meuse goes through this in his post on Lanciano, which is excellent. And he, you know, he talked about that in your interview. But anyway, that one is insane. Like Dr. Eduardo Linoli looks at it in 1970s and then again in the 1980s. He determines through lots of different chemical tests that it's real human flesh that is there with no preservatives. He determines that these little like blood globules. They're just like exposed to the air.

This is the most like fragile biological material on the planet in these blood globules, in the open air, in like the Italian climate. And they've just like existed there and persisted for hundreds of years. He does tests on the blood type. They're both A.B. Blood, rarest type in the world. Sorry, they're both like A.B. Yeah, the rarest blood type in the world.

This is insane. And then the preservation, utterly unprecedented preservation with like, especially if you don't use preservatives. Like if you cut out a human heart, because it is myocardium, he was able to tell by the way that the fibers are aligned and by the macular features of the macroscopic features of the relic and whatnot, if you take a human heart and try to pass it off as a relic, it's going to be the most disgusting, putrid thing after a few days.

You don't even get that kind of preservation if you put it in like amazing conditions in like a fridge, for instance. It's going to be putrid, but no, it's lasted hundreds of years. Hundreds of years, utterly unprecedented preservation. It's just, and Ethan goes through tons of reasons why it's not naturalistically explicable on his, on his substack post. So, like, that's already kind of insane. And of course, like, we, you know, skeptics, they'll try to pinpoint, like, all these,

this is another thing. I kept on seeing a pattern in skeptical responses to miracles where they're just trying to, like, pinpoint peripheral anomalies and, like, minor embarrassments for the miracles, but they're not actually addressing the core data. Like, we do have a good prominence for at least hundreds of years. So what's your explanation? for hundreds of years for this preservation. And also the way that the providence of the artifacts,

the way that they were cut, like basically would be overwhelmingly difficult, if not impossible for a forger in the Middle Ages to do. Ethan goes through that as well on his post. So like already, even Lanciano is just insane. And then you go to all these other Eucharistic miracles. And it's like, we have laboratory analyses, blinded laboratory analyses like with Teakslah.

We have pictures of like the priest at the mass. So basically a sister was distributing communion at the Mass, and she looks down in one of them during Mass has this like red kind of congealed kind of seeming like blood on it. She's like, okay, this is weird. She goes up and takes it to the father at the Mass. And he kind of holds it up in front of the audience and says, and they thought at the time that it was a miracle.

And, you know, we got pictures of it. We have like, I think it's like 17 signed, like sworn testimony about like this event. And then they basically send, they take off. little bits of it, the Eucharist, and the little blood spots or whatever, and they send it to two laboratories, blinded. They both determine that it's A, B, blood. They see that there's myeloporoxidase and glycophen A,

which are characteristic of leukocytes and red blood cells. They do tests for human hemoglobin, and they come back positive. And we even have these laboratory reports. You can look at them. I've talked with Father Perez, who worked on the case, and he sent me some of the reports from the doctors who looked at it. And you can literally see in there, like these branching muscle fiber-like structures as well. And they, I mean, they've lost some, because usually it's like suffering myocardial tissue that they'll find in these eucharistic hosts.

You can literally look at the pictures. And you can see a tendency to bifurcate and anastomose. And anastomose basically means joined together. And that's very characteristic of myocardium. So, like, we've got that. We have a histological identification of white blood cells. And again, like, we have these tests, which are immunohistochemistry tests, immunocromatography tests confirming that it's human hemoglobin, we can see the white blood cells

in the images. And you can also see like a phagocyte, which is like a white blood cell, swallowing debris. In the process of swallowing debris, it's like, it's so cool in some of these images. And Dr. Franco Cerraffini has the images from the reports in his book. It's just insane. And you can literally see like the white plant cells of the host outside of it as well. So like, it's just crazy. And it's like, okay, how did human blood get in there? How did suffering myocardial tissue get in there. What's going on? Okay, and that's just like Teeksla, like what is going on? And then, of course, they go later on, like years later and they, they're like an expert in like imaging look at it and they can still detect the presence of human blood. They had

another person do a study, which they determined that the blood comes from inside the host. Like they did all different sorts of studies on this Teke'sla host. And then, like, again, very similar things happen to at Buenos Aires in 1996. Like, we're there, like, you can literally see the image that Dr. Lawrence looks at when they take the host to him. So here's what happened with that one, with Buenos Aires. They, like they leave the host, sorry, they find the host, it was like desecrator or something like that under like a candlestick or something like that. They put it in water and they come back a few days and they see that there are some red growth and whatnot. Now, of course, the church is very cautious. It's very diligent. It is aware,

we're not morons. We're aware that there can be bacteria and fungi that produce red spots and that even produce like a red blood-like substance. So we're aware of that. For whatever reason, Buenos Aires, they waited three years and left it in distilled water. And the blood spots were still there. So that's really weird. And so they have, like Dr. Ricardo Cassinole-Gomez or something come, and he takes a sample of the host three years later, which was in distilled water, in the presence of notary witnesses, recorded, and they send it off to a lab called forensic analytical.

Forensic analytical does some preliminary tests. They're unable to amplify DNA. And they also just use like a very simple light microscope, where you wouldn't. wouldn't be able to see any like, microchemical features, you wouldn't be able to identify the species or something like that. And so they weren't able to identify anything.

But then they sent it off, so forensic analytical then forwards the sample to Dr. Lawrence. Dr. Lawrence prepares a slide and looks at it on the slide, and we have a recording of him looking at it on the slide. And he's there, and we can see it, and he's pointing out the red blood cells, and you can see these like striations around them.

And we can literally compare independently. We can compare what he saw with characteristic pictures in textbooks of myocardial infarction. and they look almost identical. They look almost identical. And people are saying like, oh, yeah, but it's just a bacterium. Oh, it's just a phlegelum.

No, I'm not, you're asking, like, you're asking me to disbelieve my eyes. I can see what Dr. Lawrence is looking at. And then, of course, they bring it to some other doctors, and they have some difficulty identifying it because it's not a heart muscle in its normal state. It's lost its fragmentation. It's lost its centralized nuclei. And basically, it's in a kind of stress state.

So it doesn't look like a characteristic picture of what you would normally see from a, like, a heart in, like, a textbook. And so they bring it to actually, like, a heart expert, Dr. Zugabe. They don't tell what it is. And he's like, yeah, that's from the left ventricle. And he can literally, like, point out exactly where it is. And, like, it's just insane. And it's like, again, people, like, all these scientists are mistaken.

Like, they can't tell rod-shaped bacteria from, like, suffering myocardial tissue. They can't tell, like, spore-shaped fungi from heart tissue. And again, like, I have eyes. You're relying on me not looking at it. Like, you skeptics are. relying on me not looking at it, using my eyes and comparing what I see on the video Dr. Lawrence looking at with a myocardial infarction. Again, you can put them side by side and they look almost identical. You can see the white blood cell influx around the red fibers and whatnot, which have

lost their centralized nuclei, which have that fragmentation, which have the characteristic anastomosing features and whatnot. It's just insane. Okay, so then that, and then you just go, again, you just go to the other Eucharistic miracles, and it's like a similar story where they see like suffering myocardial tissue, white blood cells, various other things, inside of a host. Okay, this was very difficult for me, as you can imagine. I try to think, like, maybe there's just like some crazy string of frauds that just happened on different continents

with different scientists on different occasions, or maybe like there's some really weird kind of misidentification happening or something like that. Because I knew, Matt, I knew that if I granted Eucharistic miracles, it's game over. It's game over. A Catholic priest, prays over some bread, and it becomes suffering myocardial tissue.

Am I just supposed to go along with my day? Am I supposed to go along with my day? No, and dude, like, I imagine. Imagine going back to the Reformation debates, right? And you're there and all the Protestants, they're like, yeah, I know that this is like a completely novel view that has never popped up in 1,500 years, but let's just deny that the mass is a propitiatory sacrifice

and that, you know, this is a sacrificial representation of Christ's sacrifice as a propitiatory sacrifice. You know, they're all denying that, even though it's been like the perennial teaching the church for 1,500 years, like, they're just manifestly breaking away. But imagine that one of those debates, after we've interminally debated with Luther or Calvin, church history, you know, we've pointed like, dude, read Ignatius. And it's like, what are you doing? Or like read John 6th. Like, what are you doing? We've engaged in these internal debates about church history and the

Bible and whatnot. And I just, we can't agree. And I say, dude, what would it take to convince you, Martin Luther or Calvin? And we could imagine them jokingly saying, okay, here's what, Here's what would convince me of the Catholic view. Five different times on different continents, a priest preys over some bread, and it turns into suffering myocardial tissue, okay? Oh, and yeah, have that happen on different continents. Oh, and when they do blood tests,

have it be A, B, blood, across multiple Eucharistic miracles, because that's the rarest blood type. Okay, across multiple Eucharistic miracles, have it be A.B. blood. Oh, and, yeah, make the blood type match the Sudarium of Oviedo in the Shrout of Turin. Make that happen, too.

Oh, and put in some human blood as well, some human hemoglobin and that as well. Put that in. We would think that they're joking because that's like an unrealistic demand. You guys, okay, you're only going to become convinced when it happens like multiple times across multiple different continents

and blinded laboratory tests find that like, yeah, priest prayers over some bread and it turns into suffering myocardial tissue. And it's like, yeah, it's like the rarest baby blood type across multiple egressic miracles and it happens to match the shroud and the oviedo. Like that's your demand,

Martin Luther or Calvin? That's what it's going to take to believe. you're joking, right? Well, Matt, it happened. It happened. It happened. Their view has been refuted. God has refuted Protestantism. So will you read the book? So no, at this point. You close the book. Yeah. Are you just not sleeping at this? No, no. I'm just like, so no, no, I close the book and I'm not yet convinced, right? Because it, I don't know, I'm very, I'm very cautious. Like, it takes a lot to convince me. Yeah. So I, but at this point, I'm like, I don't know, I'm a little bit scared.

Yeah. Catholicism is true. Like, how could Catholicism be true? And even now, like, I still think, okay, maybe Christianity is like 40% problem. Maybe Catholicism is like 2% problem or something. Like, I got a massive boost for Catholicism map reading this. But again, like, listen, like, come on, like hell, this is ridiculous. Like God's punishing people eternally, eternal suffering.

That's ridiculous. Like, come on, like, like two gay people who seem to love each other, they can't, like, they can't get married like that. It's ridiculous. It seems ridiculous. Or, you know, various other things. just seemed ridiculous about the church. So like, I can't get there. And I was scared because I was like,

I don't want to have to believe those things and I don't have to change my life. Like my life would have to be radically upend itself. I mean, I've been like a public critic, as I said, of Catholicism and Christianity for a decade actually. Because like even going back before my channel, I had like Instagram accounts

where I would like systematically defend atheism and things like that. I had a blog, which was initially called naturalistically inclined, like a naturalist, but then I changed it to majesty of reason. So, like, I've been a public critic. I'd have to, like, that's very humiliating to admit that you've been wrong the whole time. I'd have to admit to my parents that I've systematically deceived them. I'd, you know, I'd have to just stop engaging in lots of behaviors that I really want to engage in that I really like.

That's difficult. It's a difficult ask, and especially intellectually, like, the docility. Like, I'm a free thinker. I'm like this, I'm intellectually autonomous. think what I want. And you're asking me to be like docile to the Magisterium, like a teaching authority. Like this is ridiculous, you know, like saperea outa, nulios and we'reba, nothing in words, like, dare to know, dare to question, nothing in words. I mean, ultimately that spirit took me to Catholicism. But still, it's a spirit that's sort of fundamentally at odds with a kind of humbled deference

and childlike deference to Christ in the Magisterium. So like it took a radical intellectual reorientation to get to that stage. And I just, I wasn't ready for that. And I also just wasn't ready for believing in hell, believing in all these moral doctrines and whatnot. So, after Eucharistic Miracles and looking into that book and, like, talking with the skeptics and reading the skeptics, I've read them. And typically what they focus on is these minor peripheral anomalies?

They're like, well, what about in these cases that they tried DNA tests and the DNA didn't amplify? Hmm? It's like, okay, the DNA didn't amplify. But I have eyes. I can look at it and I can see that, like, in Legnica, for instance, we have the pictures. Like, that's not a bacterium. That's not a phlegelum. Are you saying that that's a phlegelum? Are you, are you saying that that's a phlegelum? Because it's not. I have eyes. So, like, they don't explain the core data, I don't think. And to the extent that they do, it's just like, you know, the craziest frauds or conspiracies that happen across multiple continents, multiple people, like, it's not, it's not plausible. So, like, I looked at that and they don't, and like, of course, there are all sorts of humdrum explanations for the DNA might not amplify, like, I don't know, the scientists themselves. themselves usually say that like it's because the tissues are too degraded, for instance.

Sometimes it was, you know, left in water, for instance, for like three years or something. Which, by the way, it's insane that you could have identifiable white blood cells after three years submerged and distilled water, naturalistically inexplicable. So they tended, the skeptics, that is, tended to focus on minor peripheral anomalies. And I was just seeing this crop up over and over again. Or they're like focusing on how Dr. Ricardo Castino-Gomez has some weird views and other domains and whatnot. But it's like, dude, all he had to do here was like, take a piece of a host, put it in a vial and ship it off. It's like, what do you say? So I don't know, they're just trying to cast clouds

of uncertainty and unknowing. And I was like, but you're not at getting to the core data. And also there are lots of reasons that we'll get to the hiddenist model of divine activity. I think there are lots of reasons why God might sprinkle in these peripheral anomalies so that people can cling to them if they want. So we'll get to that later. But even at this stage, I'm just like, okay, Catholicism might be true. I'm really scared. I really don't want that to be true. That would be disastrous. I would really, I actually kind of wanted Christianity to be true, this kind of universalist liberal Christianity. Christianity maybe now is like, yeah, 30, 40% probable to me. Maybe Catholicism's like 1%, 2%, something like that, even after the Eucharistic Miracles.

But that's a massive boost from 0.000000-1 or something. Like now, Catholicism is scarily it's a live option. And that isn't good for me. So that's Eucharistic Miracles. And there's much more that can be said, and that I say in my conversion video. Okay, then I start reading this book by Adam Bly. Okay, tell me about this book. I don't know. So it's a book called like the Catholic Guide to Miracles. Okay. So Adam Bly, he does like deliverance ministry stuff, so he's done YouTube videos and whatnot. He's this very gentle soul, this totally unostentatious individual. And he seems like he wouldn't hurt a fly. And he just really has a heart for people because like he's been through, as he says on his website, like between like a thousand, like two thousand

exorcisms or something like that. So he does deliverance ministry stuff. He was initially getting he got his, I think, a degree in psychology, then he did substantial PhD work in psychology or psychiatry, but then he just felt called to go to the deliverance ministry. So he went down that route. He's also done lots of work in like forensic criminal settings and whatnot. So he writes this book on a Catholic guide of miracles. And so I read through it and whatnot. And, you know, a lot I wasn't really convinced by a lot of the stuff in there at the time. I was still, again, really skeptical. But I got to this one section where Adam Bly himself testifies to a contemporary stigmatist case. And he's very shy on the details and he says, hey, like the church hasn't looked

into this, you know, be very careful. This is like private stuff. You don't have to believe this or something like that. He's very careful. Like the way it reads, it's just very careful. But it just shook me, like down to my core. Like, it was just weird because he's just, and I later interviewed him because Cameron is, Cameron's like, I guess, acquaintances or friends with him to some extent. And so Cameron put me in touch with him, and I sat down with him for about an hour to interview him about this stigmatist case. And it turns out that over the course of a year, almost every Thursday and Friday, he was assigned to console this individual, this stigmatist, where she would miraculously relive Christ's passion. So starting on Thursday night, this is Adam's testimony. Starting Thursday night,

she would literally spontaneously sweat blood. She would walk around pacing and whatnot. She would be having these mystical kind of encounters during this. On Friday, she would relive the passion. And it was very difficult for Adam to watch this. He testifies to seeing, again, every Thursday and Friday, over the course of a year, to spontaneous lash wounds, six inches long, spontaneously forming out of thin air on her back and her legs, not self-imposed. He's literally there watching this in perfectly, totally conducive perceptual circumstances every Thursday and Friday over the course of a year. And so she's reliving that. She even goes through like the crucifixion and like, you know, she's like tossed around at various points. And she's like saying things in Aramaic that like,

what's really interesting is he has this funny story where she's like, she says some things at one point in Aramaic and he didn't know what it meant. And I don't even know if she knew what it meant. but I want to look up Adam Bly just to see if I know who this is I feel bad that I don't so he basically wanted to look up what she was saying and so he found it in a song and it turns out it was like part of like the Our Father or something like that and so he plays the song in Aramaic and she's like well hold on a second that it's slightly different from what the song actually says yeah and so he goes and he seems what kind of Aramaic it was and it was actually like a different sort of Aramaic that was a local dialect

that was different from the one that Christ would have actually said. And so he goes to the one that Christ actually would have said and then she's able to sing along and go along with it. So it's like, it's just like insane. Yeah. Now again, this was, this is only one person testifying to this. So I'm not saying like this is the end all be all. But Matt, this caused so much cognitive dissonance in my mind. Yeah. So much cognitive dissonance. Because dude, how can you be honestly mistaken? How can you be honestly mistaken about over the course of an entire year, Thursday and Friday, in totally perceptually conducive circumstances.

You can only be a liar. Yeah, no, you could only be a liar. Or unless he's confabulating on cosmic proportions in a way that's like utterly absurd. So again, I just have to devine from the armchair that Adam Bly, you're a filthy liar. Even though you believe that lying will send, like, especially in this case where like he's writing this in a book and promulgating it on behalf of Catholicism, I mean, and like telling me this and knowing that it'll kind of affect my conversion, And this is a serious lie. It may even go to mortal sin territory if it were to be a lie. So does he not believe Catholicism?

Even though he's obviously a Catholic? Because he would just be having to engage in like mortal sin upon mortal sin upon mortal sin upon mortal sin. Like it's ridiculous. So, and I can just sit in the armchair and know that he's lying. Like it's just so weird. Like it's just this weird kind of epistemic move where I'm like, okay, I've got all these independent objections to Catholicism based on my intuition. And from that I can infer that Adam Bly who's sitting right next to me or standing right next to me, like,

I can see him right here. He's utterly unastentatious. He presents it in a very reserved kind of way. The way he puts in the book, it's not, like, flashy or anything like that. He's obviously not here to sell things. In his interviews about demonic phenomena,

he's like, I'm just here to warn you guys. Like, I care about your souls, you know? I'm here to warn you. Like, he's not flashy, ostentatious. He's not doing this for money. Or at least, at the very least, it's what's screaming to me.

Like, just as much as I know that, like, my friend is not doing something for money when I talk with him, I just had that kind of, of moral sense, just a moral sense talking with them. And I almost felt like morally opposed to just saying, I know that you're a liar because I intuit something about hell. Yeah. It sounds ridiculous. So then that caused so much cognitive dissonance. I was like, I called Cameron afterwards. I'm pacing around my room. I'm like, Cameron, what am I supposed to do?

I've got so many objections to Catholicism. It can't be true. But like this stigmatist case. And of course, this is like, you know, a victim. Like, this is a victim soul, really. If this is true. This is like redemptive, participatory, vicarious suffering, being united to Christ's passion. Most Protestants don't believe that. It's like distinctively Catholic doctrine. Like this is, for instance, what, like, Sean Luke has a problem with, like, lots of things regarding Fatima because they were doing, like, penances and like vicarious, repartory, participatory, redemptive, suffering, uniting it to Christ's passion. There are these distinct sacrifices and whatever. or like this is precisely what Protestants disagree with Catholics about,

but God is like screaming, Catholicism is my church. So God is like screaming that. And so I don't know, I was like, dude, Cameron, I can't take it. Like it was just gnawing away at my mind. And again, I recognize that it's only one testimony. And maybe people, I just, for whatever reason, Matt, this one just stuck with me, for whatever reason. because I just, I couldn't say that,

I couldn't get myself to say that Adam Bly is a filthy liar who's mortally sinning despite all of his own beliefs and whatnot. I just, morally, I couldn't get myself to that. And so this, now we're in real hard drive. I gotta figure this stuff out. I've looked through the Eucharistic miracles. I've listened to Adam Bly,

what am I to do if Catholicism is true? So then I don't know what my credence here in Catholicism is, but again, I'm taking things slowly, maybe it's only up to like 5% or something, maybe 10%, because I still have so many barriers. It's so difficult. It's so difficult. It was so difficult for me at the time

to think Catholicism is true. And we can get to why later when we get to the more personal side. So the Eucharistic miracle is the Adam Bligh case. Now maybe Christianity is up to like 50% or something. Like I'm thinking, okay, yeah, Christianity, real live option. And maybe God's just like accommodating

to their beliefs or something. even if Catholicism is false. So, you know, sorry, even if yeah, even though Catholicism is false, maybe God is just like accommodating to their beliefs or something. We'll get to why I don't. Reaching out to the Catholic.

Yeah, we'll get to why I think that's not plausible at all later. But I was like, okay, maybe something like that is happening. But in comes Ethan Mewes. Right. How did you meet him? Is he?

So he's at Rutgers, so he's like right down the road for me. How did you first? I don't really even remember. I think maybe Caleb Jackson was friends with him or something like that, and I just had heard of him. Or maybe I came across, like, his Fatima post or something, and I emailed him, and I was like, hey, let's grab dinner or something.

Like, I'm curious, we should talk about miracles, because I've been thinking about this, and I'm curious what you think. Can you, like, help me? Can you, like, I'm curious. And I remember, like, we had our first dinner, and he was like, do you think you could convert to Catholicism? And I was like, no, it's probably very, it's not really a live option. I think this is probably a little bit before I got through like the Adam Blyke case and whatnot.

So I was like, no, like, it's extremely unlikely that I become Catholic. But like I am starting to really take Christianity seriously. And then we had this like five hour dinner where we were just going back and forth and back and forth on all of my objections and whatnot. And he'd make a point and I'd a parry and he'd repost and then I'd rejoined. And then, you know, we'd just go back and forth. and then, you know, we enjoyed talking with one another. Yeah, that was after his Fatima Post. So it must have been the Fatima Post that led me to talk with him.

And then we just started having like four hour long conversations in the evenings about miracles and my objections to Catholicism and various other things. So that's where, yeah, that's where Ethan sort of comes in. And then the next kind of stage in the journey. So now, again, let's take a step back. When I meet Ethan Muse, I'm like, this is probably before Adam. and I'm kind of going through the Eucharistic miracles at this point. And Catholicism still seems really implausible. Christianity is like, you know, 30, 40-ish percent or something

like that for me. And Theosome, yeah, maybe like, 70, 80 percent likely to be true. Have you prayed yet? Yes. So actually, for quite some time, I have prayed prayers as an agnostic. Actually, as far as I can remember, I've prayed prayers. And they've just been conditional prayers of the form. God, if you exist, please help me to come to know you and love you. It's like basically that's what I did because I think, I mean, listen, I think it is, I mean, I was going to say, I think it's irrational for agnostics and even atheists to not pray conditional prayers. So like, Matt, imagine that you are stranded in a forest, okay, and you've been there for a week, you need help, okay, and you're in a dire, dire circumstances because you just ran out of food,

okay? So you're stranded in a forest, and you've got a flare gun, which basically allows you unlimited flares, and that you can shoot up. Doesn't take much effort, maybe take just a few seconds to just shoot up a flare into the sky and it would alert anyone who's potentially looking for you. I mean, you know you have friends and family who hopefully care about you. I mean, I care about you, Matt. So maybe I would be looking for you at the very least. So, you know, you think maybe there are helicopters out there looking for me, maybe there are search crews on the ground looking for me. In that case, I say, even if you think there's like a 2% chance, a 1% chance, a 0.5% chance that there's someone out there looking for you when

you're in this dire circumstances, you should shoot the flare. It would be irrational not to shoot the flare when you're starving, basically, right? Of course you would shoot the flare. Everyone would shoot the flare. Well, conditional prayers for an agnostic or atheist are shooting the flare. So, premise one, if you, like, you should shoot the flare in that case, even if you're pretty confident that no one's out there looking for you and who might be willing to help you, even if you're like 1% confident, you're 99% confident that there's no one out there who will help you. You should still shoot the flare because it's effortless and it has been a massively potential payoffs and the stakes are high. So you should shoot the flare. Premise do, if you

should shoot the flare, then even an agnostic or even an atheist, you should shoot the flare. You should shoot up conditional prayers to God of the form that I just gave. Conclusion, agnostics and atheists should shoot up conditional prayers to God. Because, after all, the stakes are dire. Yeah. The stakes are dire. You know, there may very well, according to you, like they're, even if it's unlikely, even if it's 1% chance, 0.5% chance, there may very well be a God out there who's willing

to help if you ask. So just shoot the flare. It's effortless. Just wake up every day for three seconds. And say it with honesty and sincerity. say, God, if you exist, help me to know you, love you, and serve you. Amen. Every day. Do it every day. See where it takes you. Beautiful. See where it takes you. Yeah. Love the analogy. See where it takes you. It might take you to Matt Frad's studio. So, yeah, I had been praying conditional prayers.

Gosh, I wish I was a fly on the wall listening to you and Ethan Mues talked for five hours. that must have been wild I mean typically to be completely honest you know as a mortification of my pride it was a series of just me being utterly utterly intellectually mocked

by Ethan Mews just like just like yeah massive mogging left and right and left and right and right like it's so hard to get a point on him and like you know you'd be like a fourth of the way through a point

and he's already seen like four steps of the dialectic ahead of you so he's already seen four steps that he's like yes I know your objection then he articulation it to you, like much more succinctly and clearly than you could have. And it's even more forceful than you could have done it. And he even gets like to the heart of what you're saying. And then he's like, yeah, but that fails for at least four reasons. Then he systematically lists

through those four reasons. You're like, oh, gosh. You're right. Oh, man. So. Wow. Praise God. I know. It's a grace. It's a grace. It's a grace. Unmerited grace. Oh, come on. Let's rip the band-aid off. How did you, how did you accept Catholicism? Well, okay, no, no, no, we got to get there. No, no, we got to get there. We're going to tear her back slowly. Yeah, it's going to hurt because it did hurt. I just can't wait to hear about when you prayed your first rosary. When I hear about a seeker or a Protestant praying their first rosary, I'm like,

all right, set the timer. It's not long. No, no, our lady will get you. The beautiful Theotokos does not neglect her children. So she loves us so much. She'll bring you around. She'll bring you around. Okay.

So, yeah, let's go back to, so Eucharistic Miracles, Adam Bly. Yes. Now I'm really struggling. Like the cognitive dissonance is on full throttle. Okay, so I've got complete cognitive dissonance at this point. Catholicism may be true, but I've got all these psychological barriers and all these rational berries as well. I just can't accept it.

But yeah, Theism at this point is looking like, yeah, 80% probable. I'm really starting to lean towards theism. Christianity maybe 50% probable, something like that. And, yeah, Catholicism after the Adam Bly and the, you know, Eucharistic miracles, maybe we're at like, somewhere between two and five percent or something like that. I mean, I don't know exactly where. These are just really rough ballpark numbers. I mean, I don't think we have like super precise credences up here, you know, or confidence levels. So what came next? Well, because Ethan Muses in the picture, Fatima came next.

Yeah. So, so we'll put on the table. It was Fatima lureds, a bunch of different like canonization healing miracles and Padre Pio. So let's take them in those in that order. So Fatima comes first. Yeah. And so I'm reading Ethan's post and I'm like, oh gosh, the evidence here is staggeringly powerful. It is staggeringly powerful. So like of course, you know, people have watched the people should watch the five hour long interview that you had with him. But I mean, just to recap things, you know, there are three shepherd shepherd children, Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco. And they start to have kind of these mystical encounters with this beautiful lady who later identifies herself as Our Lady of the Rosary. And they start, they have an apparition.

I think it's on like May 13th, 1917 is when the first time. This is in Fatima, Portugal. These are rural shepherd children. And Our Lady basically starts appearing to them. They start having these visions of this beautiful lady. And they go into these kind of like mystical trances where they kind of conversations in a conversational cadence with this lady. Actually, only Lucia has a conversational cadence. I think Jacinta can hear her and see her, but doesn't speak. And then I think Francisco can only see her.

And so like, you know, basically on the May 13th apparition, the lady tells them to return to the Kova, at this spot near the Holmoke, there's like an oak there, every month going forward. So every month on the 13th. So they do that. month they come on June 13th. Is this 1917? 1917. It's the year of the Russian revolution. Yes.

It's wild to think that in that year is when she said that the eras of Russia will spread throughout the world. Yeah, and then it literally happened. So yeah, and so they come back, repeated, predictable schedule. They just enter into these like, almost like trans-like states where they're like, and of course, word gets out. And, you know, her parents. their parents, Lucia's parents, their parents think that, like, you need to knock this off. Stop the gig. And so people start hearing about it, that Our Lady is appearing to these Shepard children. A bunch of people start showing up at the Kovah.

There are all these, like, weird and anomalous phenomena happening while the children go into these, like, mystical trances where they talk with the lady. Like, there are just, like, seemingly miraculous conversions and healings. And, like, there's, like, seemingly sourceless, sometimes colored clouds of smoke that happen at the beginning and the end of apparition near the home oak. On August 13th, when the children are detained, because, like, the local authorities were not happy with this sort of thing. They're like, what is going on?

And it turns out that after lots of these apparitions, the children were detained and interrogated, both individually and collectively. And so, you know, when they were detained for, I think, the August 13th apparition, people still showed up at the Kovah and like these large booms and like these sourcedless booms,

almost like cannons were heard and people scattered. They were freaked out. So like, okay, like, what is going on? And so then, you know, they're, while during these interrogations, You know, the children, the way that they describe the lady is like in exceptional detail. They have like these striking undesigned coincidences about like which direction exactly the woman came in, what exactly she's wearing, her exact posture, which way like her head is tilt, where she leaves, what exactly she's saying.

We can like, we can like independently confirm that like what the people around heard the children say or heard Lucia say, like matches up with Lucia's recollection during these interrogations. And like you look at the skeptical, I mean, they're like diverting their eyes. They're like shielding their eyes, whatnot because like, oh, it's blinding me. It's blindingly bright. So like, look at what the skeptics have to say. And lying is not at all plausible. These children were threatened with death. And they were saying, knock it off.

And like the local authorities tried all these different police tactics and came away with basically just like utterly convinced of the children's sincerity and honesty. And so like if you look at even the naturalistic explanations of the apparition phenomena themselves, they're kind of just like flailing. I mean, you know, like these, like, people, like, these children are going into either, like, at a predictable schedule, at predictable times exactly at noon on the 13th. And no other times, they enter into these what, like, either group hallucinations or, like, these weird, multimodal, like, delusive trances where they can't tell a difference between imagination and reality, even though they're well past the age where they can tell it and they can tell it on all other occasions. and it's happening on these like, yeah, these predictable predictable foreseen schedule in advance. And like they're basically infallibly transmitting

the contents of these to each other. Oh, and like Francisco, he didn't get the memo that the person is talking, like what? That the lady is talking. And then, you know, there are all these undesigned coincidences between their like very complex and diverse multimodal experiences that they're describing both individually and collectively when they're interrogated. And like, using goes through all the reasons why, like,

even the apparition phenomena themselves are very difficult to naturalistically. explain. But then they predict three months in advance that on October 13th, there will be a miracle for everyone to see and so that everyone may believe. That's what the apparition said. We'll perform a miracle so that everyone may believe. Okay. So word gets out. All like the secular newspapers show up, all like a bunch of different skeptics show up, atheists show up, anti-clerical people show up. Catholics show up at noon. And it happens. Like literally, a spontaneous, localized emitter forms in the lower, lower atmosphere bathes people in multiple hues of color. We have people describing the object as distinct from the sun, detaching itself from the

sun. This happened for 10 minutes. People are saying that they can painlessly stare at the object. And sometimes against what 15 out of 15 witnesses who described clouds said that this object was against a clear blue cloudless sky at various points. And yet was nevertheless painless to stare at. This is when the sun, this is noon. This is a solar azimuth. You cannot look painlessly at the noon midday sun against a clear, cloudless blue sky. It's impossible. And we have people who are like avoiding optical effects by literally refusing to look at the sun,

looking backwards, and they literally see the environment around them bathed in multiple hues of color. And it's also just like the phenomenology, they describe it as being out there rather than in here. So like, you know, they're saying that, oh yeah, the lights are like reflecting off of like hats in the environment and whatnot. So, and of course like the, the, the,

The naturalistic mechanisms that could make the sun itself painless to stare at are things like cloud coverage and things like that. And that doesn't result in the sorts of effects that you need for retinal overstimulation to get a colorful phenomenology. So even the naturalistic explanations for making the light source painless to stare at would remove the phenomenology that everyone is reporting. There's like a crazy, massive degree of convergence around these phenomena, even like the best skeptic who's published on this on Substack and Ethan responded to him. even he, Scott Alexander, says that there's an impressive degree of convergence among the testimony here about what you'd expect from a real objective event. So we just have like hordes of testimonies as distant witnesses who, like Albuhratel, they're not looking towards the sun, they're looking towards the cova.

And they describe there a threefold descent of the sun. And that just happens to independently corroborate what people at the cova say when they say they saw this object rear towards them three times. So we have distant witnesses. We have skeptical witnesses. It's just insane. And people's clouds also, we have a bunch of different witnesses who said that their clouds just,

their clouds, sorry, their clothes just instantaneously dried. And then you look at photo, and we know that it was raining. We have meteorological data mat. It was raining all the way up until the miracle. And then the rain stops and the clouds part. And then this spectacle happens in front of everyone. So it's just insane. And we even have images of the crowd

where you can see these selective drying bands. So literally it's just like soaking wet at one point, but then like a completely dry part. And that's like, it's insane. So like that would just be like thermodynamics impossible for it to dry it that quickly. And we just have tons of testimony that. So the testimony just happens to like independently corroborated exactly what's seen in the images. It's, it's insane. It's naturalistically inexplicable man.

So Fatima was like, wow. Oh, and of course it just turns out that like directly in connection with this, there are oodles upon uddles of healing miracles which are insane and medically documented afterwards. so God's like going out of his way to basically heal people in connection with this apparition. Yeah. It's insane. So again, they've got the apparition phenomena, which the naturalistic explanations are already sort of having to flail to explain away. These like utterly unprecedented, unknown to science, like a scheduled, delusive trances where these children can't tell a difference from imagination and reality.

And they're like diverting their gaze because it's like hurting them. And they have like crazy independent corroborations among their like highly detailed descriptions of this multimodal experience. And then they predict three months in advance a meteorological phenomenon over which they have no control. And then it happens. It happens. And it's seen by distant witnesses between 30,000 and 100,000 people at the Kovah. We have healing miracles in connection with it. We rapid drawing.

We've got all the testimony about like the sun detaching itself. And it's just it's naturalistically inexplicable. So photographic evidence. We have newspaper articles written by the enemies of the church. Yeah, the Osechalo. I mean, literally the enemies of the church are literally saying, yeah, I went there. I went there to kind of just debunk it, but it happened. You literally, in Osecollo, they talk about that.

And it's just insane. And like, another thing we haven't mentioned is like, you know, there's a photogrammetric analysis where you basically, you just perform some trigonometry on light cues. If you're interested, people should check that. Ethan News, spoke about that. Exactly. And he had images to prove that.

Yeah. And so what that shows is basically it's a non-solar elevation of the light source. So it wasn't actually the sun. It's a localized emitter, which, I mean, it's just, it's incredible Matt. And of course, like, okay, so I find out about Fatima, and now, okay, let's look at the implications

for Catholicism, Matt. Oh, boy, oh boy, what is happening here? Well, we've got the mother of God seemingly appearing to Catholic children enjoining them to pray the rosary. That's one of the biggest messages. She identifies herself as Our Lady of the Rosary. And she's enjoining people, pray the rosary,

pray the rosary every day. if you pray the rosary, the war will end, et cetera. Like you need to pray the rosary. The rosary meditates on what? Various mysteries that only the Catholics believe in. The assumption. Vindicating the assumption. We have miraculous vindication of the Catholic doctrine of the assumption.

Mary's saying, get the Holy Father to consecrate Russia, a principally orthodox nation to my immaculate heart. Hmm. Immaculate heart. That's a reference to the immaculate conception. Hmm. only one Christian sect has dogmatized that.

It's only the teaching of one Christian sect, the Catholic Church. And the Holy Father, what's up with that? What does that mean? It's the holiness of his office. And he's a spiritual father to the universal church. And Mary is requesting him to do something outside of his jurisdiction, according to the Orthodox.

So he's doing a formal religious act, a consecratory act, on behalf of things outside of his jurisdiction, and Mary is calling him the Holy Father and getting him to consecrate Russia to her immaculate heart. So we've got the Immaculate Conception. We got the papacy, the Holy Father,

the holiness of his office, the fatherhood to the universal church, his universal and ordinary jurisdiction. We've got the assumption, we've got the rosary being commended, all this stuff. We have the children doing all these reparatory acts of penance where they're uniting their sacrifices

to Christ's passion. to bring about to be meritorious causes of grace. This is utterly suffused with Catholic vindication, which is why Protestants have to go in for the demonic explanation, because otherwise God's a liar. God is a liar. Mary isn't the immaculate conception. The Pope isn't the Holy Father.

He doesn't have jurisdiction to do that. No, you shouldn't be praying the rosary, et cetera, and the rosary is meditating on all these false things. So, like, oh, and of course, like Mary's obtaining conversions to Catholicism, they give requests to her, and she's explicitly granting requests to convert people to Catholicism. So we have the mother of God,

appearing to Catholic shepherd children, granting requests to convert people to Catholicism, saying, basically vindicating, authenticating, confirming the immaculate conception, the rosary, the papacy, etc. God has disproven Protestantism. Now, of course, you might go in for a demonic phenomenon, but of course I think that,

that doesn't work for a million reasons that Ethan goes through. in his debate with Sean Luke. And if, I mean, you know, like, just like, let's step back. You know, like, a demon is introducing into the rosary, a Marian devotion, something which is like Christocentric, oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. Yeah.

Sounds like demons to me. Totally sounds like demons, right? And of course, you know, like Christ is saying, I mean, you know, There's just a million reasons why, I think, just a demonic explanation doesn't work. And especially when you bring in all the miraculous evidence. Now, you had heard of Fatima and Lewards in these different apparitions while you were an atheist or agnostic. I guess you just didn't pay them much heed. No, I mean, in fact, I responded to Trent Horn at one point when he brought up Fatima,

because I have a lot of responses to Trent Horn. I even have a response to Trent Horn playlist. Come on. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So I go into that playlist in one of my videos, I talk about Fatima, and I'm just like, well, you know, maybe they just stared at the sun and, I don't know, had some weird phenomenology effects or something.

which is just like utterly intentioned with all the evidence. So I don't know, I just sort of waved it away. Anything at the time seemed more plausible than the father of God. Yeah, oh, exactly, exactly. But we can get back to like alternative explanations for the miraculous evidence later. But like now I'm starting to think like, and just like given my background, give my upbringing, I'm like, if I grant Fatima. Yeah.

Eucharistic miracles. Eucharistic miracles, Adam Bligh, you know, like all this stuff, the ectrisms and whatnot. And if, yeah. And then if I grant this, then it seems like it's going to be over. So then that was bothering me. I didn't grant it yet. How did you deal with hell and homosexuality? Well, maybe let's get to that after some of the other stuff.

Are you cool with that? Yeah. So then after Fatima, that really bothered me. And I was like, I was trying to think of, maybe there's just some like unknown naturalistic explanation. You know, I don't know. I was like holding, I was trying to hold off. Or maybe like, oh, maybe God's trying to do some kind of accommodation.

but then I started coming across other cases. So we have lords, other canonization miracles, and Padre Pio. And maybe after that we'll talk about how I dealt with some of the objections. Maybe we'll skip lords if that's okay and go to Padre Pio. Okay. Because he was off the top ropes. Well, the Padre Pio one, the reason why I say that last is because that's where my conversion happened. Okay.

So that's what led to the conversion. So do you want me? to go through those two and then Padre Pio or what? Can we maybe just do Padre? Okay, we'll just do Padre Pio. I'll have you on a whole other talk. No, no, no, we don't. So in February of this year, no, it was February of this year.

Ethan was writing his post on Padre Pio. Yeah. And I'd already, at this point, I'm like, Catholicism is very, very live option at this point. I'm thinking like, yeah, I don't know, maybe Catholicism now at this point after Lords and all these canonization healing miracles and after Fatima, maybe Catholicism is like 30% likely, 40% likely or something like that.

And maybe Christianity's like, I don't know, 60% or something. And theism is maybe like 90% or something. I don't know, or like 80%. So I just felt like maybe I was one miracle away. I don't know. I just had that kind of sense. It was just like one massive. Are you talking to other Catholics?

Are you emailing? Oh, yeah. You don't have to say who they were. No, I mean, I was talking with Jimmy Aiken, Swan Sona, like lots of different. different people working through lots of my other objections. Because I had biblical objections, I had all different sorts of objections. So I was definitely- That were helpful?

Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, all these people are like partially responsible for my conversion, so it's wonderful, wonderful. Okay. But in February, I sit down with Ethan Mews when he's writing this like 20,000 word blog post on Padre Pio. And we sit down for like four, I think it was four hours. And he just walks me through the evidence for Padre Pio. So it's just, it's just insane. Okay, so Padre Pio in, is it like 1918 or something around there?

Like somewhere around the 19-teens or something, 1920s. He has a mystical vision of Christ after Mass, and where Christ says, I unite you to my passion. And thereafter, immediately, he has Christ's passion wounds in his palms. He has a laceration wound on his side, and he has wounds in his feet. Okay. Okay, so we have testimonies beforehand, after hand, he didn't have it before,

he had it after, okay, what's going on? So then, you know, he had a kind of, I guess, kind of difficult relationship with the church at certain points. The church was like a little bit skeptical. They sent a bunch of like scientists to investigate him and whatnot. And like we have like seven different scientists

who investigate his hands like up and close. And like we literally have like the letters written like right afterwards of these people describing, in meticulous detail what they saw. So they're like, okay, there's no edema or swelling around them. They're like basically entirely circular, which of course we also have photos of this. We have videographic evidence of this. We have, you know, one of them is like, yeah, I palpated his hand, so I felt it.

And I could feel a palpable void. There were just thin membranes and I could touch my fingers on the other side. We have these doctors saying that one of the doctors said that earlier on. So like they have a kind of, they change in interesting ways throughout his life, basically. And one of the earlier doctors, when he looked at, he said, it was a complete perforation such that I can see things on the other side. And then like the way that changed was then a little kind of membrane formed. And so that's where he have, I think it's Dr. Fester who was like palpating his hand and saying,

yeah, there's a void in there. There are various reasons why this is just like utterly naturalistically inexplicable. So like he's got stigmatical. He's supernaturally reduplicating the wounds of Christ. Like, what am I supposed to do? Like, of course Christianity is true. Like, it's just like manifestly evident when I look at his case. He's a living icon of Christ.

How can you not be Christian, at least, if you see this? So, like, he's taking you through all this evidence, Ethan, that is. He's just reading to me the reports of the scientists, and I'm like, oh gosh. And then, you know, he's got all this, like, miraculous blood loss. And, like, literally, like, dozens of people, like, are taking his temperature in sequence with, like, multiple different thermometers, spontaneously and whatnot. They'll take it with like a mercury thermometer. It'll shatter. Then they'll get out a professional bath thermometer.

And then it'll go up to like 125 degrees naturalistic Linux book. You couldn't possibly have that. And we have like the doctors like, we still have, you know, you saw the picture when Ethan was here. We like have doctors signed reports. Like, yep, I took his temperature. It was like 120 or 125. Very southern naturalistic lennox like little things. Like again, is this something you can be easily mistaken about?

Like you put it, you put a thermometer here and you read a number. Oh, and this just like happened. So maybe they just all systematically misread it. maybe all of the thermometers, even in sequence, are just systematically in error, like, dozens of times in, like, dozens of different contexts. It's ridiculous. And, like, he has so much blood loss. It'd be naturalistically impossible for him not to get hypers, not to get anemia. It's just, oh, my gosh. And then the aroma of sanctity. So people are just, like, smelling this beautiful, fragrant scent associated with his blood and his relics and whatnot. And it

persists for literally months, sometimes years on end. Sometimes it just, like, washes entire rooms, it just floods them instantly with this beautiful scent. It's just insane, which is something that I forgot to mention with the stigmatist with Adam Bly also had the odor of sanctity and neither she nor Padre Pio could smell it. So that's interesting. But yeah, Adam Bly would say like, yeah, we'd come into the house and then like it would, even though there were no flowers anywhere or any sense, it would just smell like a floral shop. Like it would just inundate us, like a scent of flowers. So just all these mystical carisms that Ethan is just going through and he's giving me all the evidence and the testimony on that four hour interview. And

there I was like, I submit. Like I can't, I can't fathom looking, risking, looking at Jesus after I die and saying, yeah, I know that Padre Pia was a living icon of you, supernaturally reduplicated your passion wounds. I know that happened, but I didn't believe. Where are you when you're given up, as it were? Like, he's reading you these things. I'm in my room. I'm in my room. I'm in my apartment I'm on, uh, yeah, no, it was like a Zoom meeting. So I'm like, zooming with him. And you, you can look at me in the thing. And I'm just, at some points, I'm just like, I literally just like throw up my hands. I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this? As Ethan is just like ringing out the explanation, like the testimony is one after another after another after another

to like a lot of these things where it's just naturalistically inexplicable. And he's giving his like cute Ethan chuckle. Yeah. This is ridiculous. You know, he's like, and he's like, he's, and after you described all the other phenomena, he's like, oh, and like, think about what you'd have to say is the fraud hypothesis. So, like, somehow he's, like, using carbolic acid and it never gets infected, and there's no swelling on it at any point, which all the doctors agree to, and he's, like, crucifying himself as well. And then he's like, in addition to all of that, he just happened to go out of his way to try to fake hyperthermia for dozens of times on dozens of different occasions. It's like, he's like, he's already convinced people, right? What's he doing? And like, especially

with this risk, it's just, like, insane. I love it. Um, yeah, it was that kind of, it was just insane. Like, I couldn't not be Christian at that point. So, what? So, what? What's really funny is that I was convinced of Christianity before Catholicism. So at the end of that conversation around like we had 30 minutes left or something like that, I was just convinced of Christianity. I was like, listen, I can't do it. I can't imagine even risking saying to Jesus after I die. I didn't believe even though there was a living icon of you.

Not going to risk that. So I was basically, okay, listen, I got to be Christian. I told Ethan Meuse that, like on that interview, that, that form. hour thing. I was like, I got to be Christian. What do I do now? And so, Ethan, I just talked through, like, what would you have to say as a Protestant to all this stuff? So, like, God is going out of his way to manifestly vindicate distinctively Catholic doctrines where it's like, you look at the Protestant miracles and it's like healings or felt sense of presence. It's not like manifestly vindicating particular Catholic doctrines. The Immaculate Conception, like Lourdes,

she said, Mary, I am the Immaculate Conception. And then God just concentrates the most insane, medically documented healing miracles, like the most insane, unprecedented string of miracles associated with that apparition specifically, and they're all different sorts of, like, crazy phenomena with Bernadette Subaru there as well. So, like, okay, we've got the mother of God appearing to people. We've got, like, Catholic priests praying over bread, and it's turning into suffering myocardial tissue, and we've got, like, Padre Pio being united to Christ's passion in a kind of vicarious participatory redemptive suffering that a lot of the Protestants don't believe in. We've got, like, at any point during this examination,

did you think to yourself, well, maybe there's other miracles of note from other religions that might cancel these ones out somehow? Yeah, I mean, I was thinking like maybe there were, I hadn't heard of any, and Ethan had like looked into a lot of them. And I also like, I mean, like a lot of them are also just totally naturalistically explicable. Like people will talk about like this Hindu milk miracle where it's like capillary action or, you know, various other things like that. And we can get into potentially alternative explanations to the miraculous data later. But at this point, I was like, I got to be Christian, but what am I supposed to do? I don't know, it almost, it really just did seem like God was going out of his way to manifestly vindicate distinctively Catholic doctrines where like the intention behind the miracles was to promulgate a specific message with specific content. Like, I don't know, in Eucharistic miracles, it's simulating the exact ontological change that only Catholics believe in, transubstantiation, and seems to be only happening in a Catholic context as well.

Like, where are your Orthodox Eucharistic miracles? You don't have them, or at the very least, we don't hear of them. and what, you know, what is, like, Protestant things. Like, we don't have those either. So, Mary's appearing to people. She's granting requests, like, saintly intercession. Like, if you're Protestant, you don't believe in saintly intercession. Again, like, God has refuted you. He's gone out of his way time and time again to grant miracle upon miracle as a result of

saintly intercession. That was the miracle of Kalanda seeking saintly intercession. That was all the, like, Lord's healings. It's all the, like, lots of these different Fatima healings. It's the miracle, like the Zaytune healings, et cetera. It's the canonization healing miracles. Like, God is literally just manifestly vindicating this practice, saintly intercession, which, according to at least some Protestants, is either idolatrous or worship or in some other way illicit.

God has told you that you're wrong. So conform you intellect to that. So, I don't know, I just think when I look at the miraculous evidence and I look at the broader pattern, when I look at the particular miracles, and it seemed like God would have to be basically performing deceptive miracles if Mary really isn't immaculately conceived. well then like what's the deal she's saying I am the immaculate conception so is God basically facilitating deception that would be very bad for various reasons if you think that God is a deceiver okay so then what did you do oh well so either I don't know I was just

toying around with me can I be like Orthodox or something can I get some kind of accommodationist model and why did you want to be Orthodox because I didn't want to be Catholic but I mean orthodoxy condemns homosexual acts and teaches the existence of hell just like seven people might say. Yeah, I was about to say. It depends. You could go in for a more liberal version of orthodoxy where you're like, you have universal salvation

and maybe you're a little bit slippier with some of the moral teachings and whatnot. I don't know. Also, it was the popa? Stumbling book? No, not at all. And I mean, again, like, I think Fatima kind of serves as sort of vindication of that.

So I don't know. Listen, I was toying around with this for like 30 minutes because I had thought of this stuff previously, but I was like, okay, now that this is real, I have to become Christian. Yeah. We spent like the last maybe hour or 30 minutes of that interview just like talking through. When you say interview, is this public?

No, not interview. Sorry. It's just like a conversation with Ethan Mews. Yeah. Last 30 minutes. Yeah, the last 30 minutes to an hour, we're just going over like my last remnants of trying to hold on to non-Catholic explanations. Like I was already aware of lots of difficulties for various accommodationist models for various demonic models. And Ethan was just like really hounding me on like, yeah, math. Matthew 16 and like church history and like the early mono-apiscopacy and various reasons why

like Protestantism probably is not it. And like all the Catholic vindicatory implications and like it would almost seem like betrayal. If like the thing that's convincing me of Christianity is like distinctively Catholic miracles to then not become Catholic. So then I don't know, it was the last remnants, the last fight, the last battle, the last like 30 to 60 minutes of that conversation. So after the conversation, I was like, okay, I've got to be Christian. I'm leaning towards Catholicism. And then the next day I was like, I was sort of basically snapped into my senses

and I was like, okay, there aren't plausible alternative explanations of the data. I've got to become Catholic. So then looked up when the next confession time was and made a decade-long confession on Saturday, I think February 7th. So on Friday the night before, I did like a two or three hour examination of conscience

and just made this huge document. Did you let the priest know? that this was going to be long? Oh. Or do you show up? No, I showed up and, yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I should have, like, scheduled one. But, no, I showed up and it was going to be long,

and it was long, and it was very difficult. But, I don't know, it taught me a lot about myself. You know, there was a lot under the hood. I was a lot worse than I thought I was. Wow. Yeah. But, and it was difficult, you know, basically peeling back a decade of your life and just.

Okay, just practically speaking, although this is clearly the least important thing about what you're saying, did you just go in and say, hey, just I haven't been here in 10 years. This is going to be long? I said, yeah, this is a, like I said, my last confession was a decade ago or something like that. That's what I said.

And was he welcoming? Yeah, oh yeah, he was welcoming. And he just, he's like, just listened in. Wow. How long did it take? I don't remember exactly. It's probably like maybe 45 minutes or something. Yeah.

People loved you in line. I'm so sorry to people. No, they can go and confess if they judge you. Yeah, no, no, you know what that? I was like, whenever I'm in confession lines and now I'm, I'm going to be like, oh, praise God that it was a long confession because that means like someone was returning to God, you know? Yeah, yeah.

So. Gee whiz. What was the phenomenological experience of having a sins forgiven and walking out and going about your day like? I mean, I don't know, it was, it's just a new beginning. It was beautiful. It was peaceful, you know. It was like a sense of kind of comfort and peace, knowing that I'm a child of God and that

God loves me and that he's forgiven me of all my, my decades. of debatery and decadence and depravity. How wonderful and merciful is God that it's that simple? It is that simple. That's it. Just go in there, come out, done. In a way, I would imagine it might have been easier to kind of become a Protestant or an orthodox just to go through some big ritual to make it feel appropriate to what you're going

through internally. Do you know what I mean? And not that it wasn't a big deal confessing 10 years of sin. But that's what you've got to do. Back in union with the church. Yeah. And then back into the same. sacramental life of the church. Yeah. Did you just start going to Holy Mass? Yeah, started going to

Mass. Started, you know, I mean, it was right before Lent, which was great. And I definitely made that like a special end, you know. And yeah, just started then praying the rosary every day. And I mean, even before then, when I was like, you know, inching closer and closer, I started maybe praying like a decade of the rosary a day on Ethan's advice, which is like something that I would advise, like all, everyone who's listening to this, like, dude, a decade takes two to three minutes. The stakes are massive. Pray a decade of the rosary every day. Just like do it every single day, two to three minutes, and grace will flood your life.

And do it like honestly with sincerity. You can even meditate on a mystery or something like that. But even if you don't believe, if you're Protestant right now, please, like, pause this and commit to praying a decade of the rosary every single day. Well, I think they've got to overcome prayers to the saints before they do that. Right, but that's why we went through all the evidence that prayers of the saints is efficacious and God has basically put a stamp of approval on it. Although I would say, fair enough, although I would say that just praying the first half of the Hail Mary, the angelic sultan, that's how the rosary used to be, right? So you could start with that.

Yeah. I always like to stoop to conquer. Yeah. To mention those words that the angel said to Mary, which turned hell up. I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, you know a Protestant could also do is, um, listen, if you have objections to saintly intercession, I mean, again, like, I think that God is sort of, yeah, you shouldn't, but, um, the second thing is just that, um, listen, God knows your heart. He knows your intentions, right? So just pray beforehand.

Mm-hmm. God, if this is against your will, I'm sorry, please forgive me. And then pray it. God knows that you're just trying to seek him, right? That was Dr. Hahn. He did that. Really? Yeah. And then afterwards you can be like, God, if that was idolatry or if that was against your will, I apologize. And you know my heart and you know I love you. So just say that. And it'll be fine. So that's what I would recommend. Yeah, very good. I mean, we could talk about getting over my barriers. We could talk about hell. We could talk about the problem of evil. Let's talk about hell. Let me throw an objection at you. It seems unreasonable to think that someone should suffer for eternally for a finite number of sins.

Why would a loving God exclude someone from his presence, as it were, for all eternity? For five years, sure, okay, they can be down with that, someone might say. But this just seems unreasonable. It seems like it was a belief born out of a more brutal time, especially when you read the likes of Dante and others, that we've kind of, we've actually progressed in. We realize now that God's love is greater than our sin. And if God's to be victorious,

then surely it's not going to be the case that most people are going to be, or even many people are going to be damned. And then have you read, I don't believe in any of the things I'm saying, just to everyone who's watching, have you read, who's the Orthodox philosopher? David Bentley Hart. Yeah, brilliant fellow, but who clearly is a staunch opponent of, eternal conscious torment. What was your kind of response to what I said be and then maybe if you

can flesh out maybe a more sophisticated argument that David Bentley Hart has put forth and why you disagree? Yeah, so I mean I haven't looked into David Bentley Hart's stuff in too much detail. I've looked into some of like the like more mainstream like philosophy of religion, academic literature on this. But yeah, so I mean, hell was one of my biggest barriers, one of my biggest objections along with various other moral problems, you know, with homosexuality and things like that. So yeah, how did I work through this? Well, two things to say at the outset. One is that even if I don't have a response to the problem of hell, there's just so much evidence that just utterly inundated me for Catholicism that basically I just felt like it was irrational for me to cling to those

objections, especially when, I mean, like, again, imagine that you're sitting there with our Lord before he's crucified at the last supper. You've seen all of his miracles. He's raised people from the dead. You've seen them with your own eyes. He's raised people from the dead. He's given sight to the blind. And then you watch him get crucified in bloody fashion. Maybe you even watch him get interred in the tomb. And then you're sitting there in the upper room with the apostles, and he's there in bodily form. And he invites you to touch him. And you reach out and you literally poke his side. you're feeling his side. And he's breathing on you.

He's like, he's like, uh, he's literally breathing it. It's a very bodily thing. And then he's with you for 40 days. And he's eating fish. And he's going out there and he's like, Simon, do you love me?

And you're hearing all this. You're there. And you've seen all of this. Imagine that happened. And imagine, as is the case that Christ teaches that there is everlasting punishment in hell for people who are unrepentant

to mortal sinners. I think if you saw all of that, it would be ridiculous. to think, no, I'm not going to go with this Christ guy because I've got some like highfalutin abstract theoretical objection that I can't quite work through with hell. Even though I've seen this guy raise people from the dead, give sight to the blind, I've now just like indirect with him after I saw him interred in the tomb. Like, okay, maybe, maybe there's some sort of story that I'm unaware of. But I've just got to be docile to this guy because he has been manifestly

vindicated by God. And that just overcomes my abstract theoretical objection. Like again, and I mean, the sort of evidence that we have for these Catholic miracles, like, we are like one person removed from palpating a reduplication of Christ's passion wounds. We have direct eyewitness testimony from like a bunch of people. We have photographs. We have videos of Padre Pio. We also have a photograph the day that he died and he didn't have scars, despite the fact that it was like deep wounds for 50 years, naturalistically inexplicable. We have photos. So I had to accommodate myself to the facts. I had to accommodate myself to the facts. And so basically the evidence I thought was very similar in kind and very force.

very similar in kind to the sort of evidence I would have if I saw Christ basically with my own eyes and then Christ taught hell and in that case I should not be clinging to my own I objections. I just think okay there's some way to respond to this maybe I don't know how maybe it's difficult but listen philosophy is difficult you put a hundred philosophers in a room and you're going to get 307 answers to a philosophical question or puzzle because you know they're applying methods with applying their taking their intuitions and trying to get to verdicts but they just radically go astray all the time so like humans were not the greatest at these abstracts speculative theoretical philosophizing. And so it wouldn't be surprising at all if I just am making some mistake in my assessment of the hell arguments.

Because those are just like, it's theoretical speculative philosophy. And I don't know, maybe there's something I'm missing. And still, I wanted to dent its evidential force in my mind. And there were various things that did that. But fundamentally, how I got over it was, I am a finite, limited, fallible creature. God has manifestly vindicated his church.

And maybe I'm not. I don't know exactly how to respond to it, but I submit my intellect and will to what is being manifestly promulgated to me as truth with divine stamp of approval. So that's like the fundamental response that I have. Now, again, how did I accommodate hell to my worldview? How did I really just get to the point that I could do that? Yeah. There were a few things.

So there was this paper by Brian Cutter, the psychophysical harmony guy that I mentioned earlier. It's called hell and proportionality. Because this is ultimately the biggest kind of, I think, worry with hell is like, how is this a proportionate? punishment. And you mentioned it. It's like we have the various finite sins while on earth. How does that merit a kind of infinite punishment? Doesn't that seem disproportional? Right? So the objection would just be like hell is a disproportional punishment. God wouldn't inflict a disproportional punishment because that's unjust and God is just. Therefore, there's no such thing as hell. So that's like probably the steel mad version of the argument.

And what Brian Cutter points out in that paper. So I mean, there are a few, there are a few ways you could go. One, you could say that basically, no, the sins actually aren't finite in terms of their gravity. They're infinite in terms of their gravity because the one that they offend has infinite merit, sorry, infinite dignity, infinite glory. And like just it is an intuitive, commonsensical thing that like the kind of thing that you harm matters a lot to the gravity. So like think about stepping on the head of an ant. Yeah, there you go. Listen, you shouldn't wantonly step on the heads of ants. Okay, don't do that. But that's not, that's no near as bad is stepping on the head of a puppy. That's much worse.

You should not step on the head of a puppy. You know what's much worse than stepping on the head of a puppy? Baby. Stepping on the head of a baby or a grandma. That's much worse because of the kind of dignity or the kind of being that you're wronging, right? And so if you just extrapolate this to God's case, this is being of infinite dignity, your biggest benefactor, everything you owe to God.

He is due a kind of honor that is utterly incompatible with the decisive, rejection of him and the decisive turning away towards something that you know is gravely wrong and opposed to his law, opposed to love of him, your biggest benefactor and someone who is infinitely valuable, infinitely worthy of honor and dignity, and you say no to that. You valued, let's say, stealing a pack of gum over relationship with this infinite being. And I don't know, it wouldn't be given that principle that like, you know, the gravity of wrongs may very well scale in some way with the dignity of the one being offended. Maybe it is indeed a infinite harm. Maybe it is something which is infinitely grave in its matter. You know, if you

decisively reject with full knowledge and deliberate consent, with fully knowing that you're doing something gravely, seriously wrong, you stared clear-headedly at evil, something opposed to God, which evinces a hatred of God, and you chose it, you chose it. Maybe I'm just wrong in my intuition that that doesn't have infinite gravity. Maybe it does have infinite gravity. Wouldn't be the first time my intuitions were wrong about things. So that's one way you could go. Of course, there are lots of objections to that. But okay, you have objections to that.

Then there's this huge disjunction of other things that I could say. So this is where hell in proportionality, Brian Cutter's paper comes in. Maybe indeed, over the course of the afterlife, the sufferings of hell are only in aggregate, finite. How could that be? Well, maybe the intensity of the suffering decreases by a geometric proportion at certain periods. so that maybe you have like, I don't know how to calculate it, but maybe you have a, you know, let's say a thousand units of suffering for the first hundred years.

Then you have 500 units of suffering. Then you have 250 units of suffering for the next portion. Then you have a, you know, 125. And you just decrease it by half over time. If you add that up, it's a provable mathematical fact that that only adds to 2,000 units of suffering. So notice, it is everlasting suffering. It is everlasting because you've sort of decisively rejected God.

You've stared clear-headed at evil, and you've chosen that. You've conformed your will to evil. So God will respect your freedom to do that. But if we adopt this model where the suffering geometrically decreases, then this total suffering is finite. And so if you think that the crimes are only finite in gravity, the punishment is only finite in gravity as well.

So you can get around that. Or you could think that maybe I don't know what the church says about the following. So I fully submit my intellect and will to the Magisterium. If what I say is against the Magisterium, then take a lighter and burn it, put it in a hard drive, burn it, and I will be the first there to celebrate the burning. Okay. So, but maybe hell is like a timeless state. Maybe it's not temporarily unless. So it is endless. It is kind of like, in some sense, it doesn't end. But if it's timeless and you only have a finite amount of suffering, then it's never ending and it is suffering, but it's only finite. So it's a finite

punishment for what the objector thinks is a finite crime. And there are lots of other models you can go through, you know, Jacques Mertain or whatever it is. He's this, I think, 20th century Thomist. He proposed this model called like the reverie model or something like that, where basically God mitigates the suffering of the damned over the course of time to the point that after they've been meted out just punishment. And maybe even this is totally unmerited, God basically decreases their suffering, decreases their suffering to the point that at some point they only experience the pain of loss of the beatific vision, but nevertheless, in terms of their senses and their natural happiness,

they reach a state of natural beatitude. So that's an example of what Jacques Maratain has proposed. I think Cardinal Avery Dolis has a post on first things about like the population of hell where he says, as far as I can tell, this is consistent with what's in the magisterium. I've talked with Father James Dominic Rooney, who has a really good book on hell with Routledge. He talks about that model and he says, as far as I recall, that that's totally consistent with magisterial teaching. I'm not saying that this is true. My point is that here's a disjunction of things.

Like, you could say this, or you could say this, or you could say this, or you could say this, or you could say this. How confident can I be that all of these different proposals are false? not very confident, especially given that this is a speculative, abstract, theoretical domain, where I've made lots of mistakes in the past, where philosophers applying their philosophical methods to the same stock of intuitions, reach radically divergent conclusions, so we already know that we're kind of unreliable at this sort of reasoning. It's just different in quality, the evidence here, compared to no leg, leg, okay?

No leg, let, like, I just have to conform myself to the facts in that case. So, I don't know, there are, there are, I guess, non-silly models, non-silly ways that you could see the, a decisive, clear-headed rejection of God, an embrace of evil being infant in gravity. There are ways where even if you think it's finite in gravity, there are models on which hell could only be finite in terms of the suffering that's inflicted on the damned.

So I don't know, I was able to just sufficiently mitigate the force of the problem of hell in my mind that I could see myself accepting it. And again, I just returned to this point about Christ. I'm not going to be clinging to my own kind of, my own kind of philosophizing with like, this sounds like clinging to human wisdom, as Paul says,

rather than like a manifestation of divine power. You know, like, I'm just clinging to my own understanding of things where God has kind of just shown his hand. And I trust you, God. I'm just going to become childlike in your presence. And I know that whatever you do, God,

is going to be just and it's going to be merciful. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if God's surprised. us with his mercy, how merciful he is to creatures. So like, I think Padre Pio even claimed it as, I could correct me if I'm wrong, people know, but I think he claimed it as a private revelation that there's anti-mortem opportunity. So at the moment of death, let's say between the bridge and the water, at the moment of death, there can be divergences between how long things seem to you in psychological time and how long in objective temporal reality the duration is, such that,

in that moment, God can give you the great. of let's say perfect contrition, a sorrow for your sins out of love of him above all else. And if God can give people the resistible grace, not saying this is like an irresistible grace that God's giving people, he's not determining people, but he may very well be able to,

and I think Padre Pio claim this is a private revelation, that he gives people an anti-mortem opportunity at the moment of death, one last chance. Do you embrace the evil that you've been embracing so far, or do you embrace me, the ultimate love of your life? Now, perhaps some people still stare clear-headedly at that and reject it. I mean, as Christ said, with respect to the Pharisees, they saw his works.

It was manifest to them. And out of the evilness of their hearts, they rejected Christ. I think the same thing, too, of the Israelites who were guided with the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire, because we often say, well, if it was more evident to me, then I'd believe. And yet we have an example of the Israelites where God's existence was very evident. And yet their hardness of heart, they rejected him. and they made a golden calf and worshipped it. Yeah. And I mean, that's what sin is.

It's worshipping the creature over the creator. You're choosing a pack of gum that you stole over a relationship with God. You're choosing the finite pleasure of like masturbation over union with the infinite God of the universe. I mean, what do you expect? So anyway, yeah. Yeah, that's helpful. What about gay stuff and LGBT stuff? what has been your opinion of the Catholic Church's teaching on these things?

I presume you've looked into them in greater detail. Yeah. I'm sure you were too smart and wise to realize that the church didn't have the character she's often attributed as having, namely, we hate gay people. When you read what the church teaches, it's really beautiful about our love for those with same-sex attraction, the idea that we're all in this together. We all struggle with disordered sexual desires that we have. have to rein in and and just improperly ordered desires in other cases as well. I mean,

you know, when you when we say disordered, right? I mean, Catholics are talking about it's not properly oriented toward the good, right? So it's, you know, all of our actions, they have a kind of direction or orientation. Are we orienting ourselves toward the good or, and even our desires have a kind of orientation? Are we desiring an object which is genuinely valuable or genuinely good, or is it disvaliable or bad? So that we're not, you know, we're not trying to like, or at least I'm not trying to medicalize things at this point. This is a moral category. This is a moral category. This is a moral category, whether you're directing something to the good or whether you're directing it away from the good. So, yeah, I mean, at the outset, whenever I talk about this, I just want to

emphasize that I would, I would die. I would take a bullet for anyone in the LGBT community. I would take a bullet for them. And I'm not lying. I'm not lying. That's how much I want to love them. That's how much I do love them. So that's, I want to start with that so that people know that, that like, and this is just like, this issue matters a lot to me, right? And I've thought a lot about this. So, and I struggle with it. I struggled a long time with it. So how did I get over these hurdles? Well, one thing, again, return to the, I mean, it is a good point. Like, return to the point about Christ. If you're sitting there with Christ, you see his miracles, you see him miraculously duplicate all the loaves and the fishes and whatnot. You're like, you see him heal people. He's like,

get up and walk. You know, he's like, so you know that the son of man has authority to forgive sins. Get up and walk and the person gets up and walks. You see all that. You see him crucified. You're there next to the Blessed Mother and John at the foot of the cross. You see him. And then later on, you're interacting with him in his glorified body.

You see all that. And it just so happens that he has some moral teachings that grate against your moral intuitions. It's ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous. If you're in that epistemic situation, it's ridiculous to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ. He's been manifestly vindicated by.

God has been accredited to you as a divine legate. So submit your intellect to him, right? Don't cling to your own understanding. Submit your intellect to him. And that's actually the rational thing to do in those circumstances. I think it is positively irrational. If you see all of that to then be like, oh yeah, but he had some teachings on morality that I just, I sort of disagree with. Yeah, I mean, it's not like, what popular cultures says. Yeah, go against what popular culture says. And again, like, it's not like, at least to me, it's not like he's saying that, you know, like, good is evil or you know like it is permiss you are morally obliged to recreationally torture children for fun or like one plus one equals 12 like okay that that that's discrediting but when it's

these other things we're like I don't know the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of time has thought these things are morally impermissible and I don't know like the arguments here are in a kind of speculative abstract domain and where it's really easy to see how our intuitions could be cognitively penetrated that is be affected by our prior beliefs and prior desires So basically, cognitive penetration is when you can either gain an intuition or lose an intuition, including in the moral domain, as a result of your prior beliefs or worldview or desires. Yes. And moral intuitions are overwhelmingly susceptible to cognitive penetration.

I mean, I've just been able to, like, throughout this process, my moral intuitions have themselves just literally changed. Like the way things seem to me change. They're so malleable, right? Yeah, they're so malleable. Like previously I have certain moral intuitions for or against something, but then just, as a result of changes in my background beliefs, like I just no longer feel that like the intuitions, like the way things seem to me.

So like intuitions are highly cognitively penetrated. They're super prone to framing effects. There's significant interpersonal disagreement with respect to moral intuitions. It's really easy to talk yourself into an intuition or talk yourself out of an intuition. So like, I don't know, this just does not seem to be the sort of evidence that stacks up against leg,

no leg, leg, you know, like that sort of thing. So and given that they're so susceptible to cognitive penetration, I don't know, that's like a non-truth-tracking factor that could easily be explaining why I'm going awry with respect to the moral domain. And I mean, this is another thing. Catholicism seems to have an intram, like a plausible bi-Catholism's own lights

internal explanation for why I would have those intuitions and would go astray. Why would have intuitions about the permissibility of homosexuality? So this is called like a debunking explanation of intuitions. Basically like if you adopt a theory which goes against certain intuitions,

it's good to have a kind of explanation by the lights of your own theory, why people would go wrong with respect to their own. intuitions and that actually mitigates the evidential force of those intuitions because then it's not surprising under the theory that you would go astray with respect of those intuitions. And I just think that Catholicism has plausible internal explanations, plausible debunking explanations of these contrary intuitions about hell and about homosexuality and whatnot, namely the noetic

effects of sin, both original sin and personal sin. So it's just like, I think it's unsupertly, we have darkened intellects. They're not totally destroyed, right? We still have a natural aptitude to discover things and to know things, but our minds are indeed broken. Our intuitions are indeed broken. And it's utterly unsurprising under Catholicism that some of our minds would be darkened in precisely these ways where it comes to like sexual sin and it comes to like my ultimate fate and other people's ultimate fate where it's kind of like not something I want to happen or I have to kind of stop engaging in certain behaviors that I find

pleasurable. It's like it's not very, it's not very surprising that the noetic effects of sin might kind of manifest in these sorts of ways. So I started seeing that Catholic has an intern. And again, And this isn't even like, you don't have to be a Catholic to recognize that this is a dialectically forceful point. Catholicism, by its own lights, without having to add-hizabeths that are ad hoc, already has an internally coherent debunking explanation for why you'd have contrary intuitions to it, for why some of us would go pretty seriously astray with respect to some of our intuitions. Totally.

So, and I just didn't, so Catholicism, it was just basically a, and this also just goes to like the divine hiddenness model. So let's talk about this divine hindness model, because I was just, my evidential situation was being called out by Catholicism. So like, this, you know, Ethan Mews kind of introduced me to this. But basically, the divine hiddenness model is a model for how kind of God generally interacts with the world.

So it's about God's like general modus operandi with respect to both general revelation and special revelation. And the thought is that he epistemically fine-tunes the evidence so that there's enough objective evidence out there to make the ascent of faith rational and perhaps even rationally obliged, but also enough kind of darkness, enough sort of counter evidence,

enough kind of peripheral anomalies sprinkled in, enough counter, like intuition sprinkled in to preserve the psychological possibility of doubt. And there are lots of, I mean, for starters, this just like explains a lot of the miraculous evidence. It explained my, sorry, let me take a step back. There are lots of reasons why God might adopt this model. It preserves the freedom of the assent of faith.

If there are psychological and sometimes rational considerations pushing against Catholicism, but the objective evidence is also very strong in favor of Catholicism, when you're in that sort of situation, you can kind of like almost freely embrace the truth of Catholicism or reject it. But also, if there's a little bit of obscurity like that, where there really is a psychological possibility of doubt, that enables various goods. So, like, making a difference in the lives and salvation of others.

Yeah, evangelism. Evangelism, right? Think about like how beautiful my stories with Ethan Mews and Jimmy Aiken and Swan Sona coming to me and just basically in a kind of secondary derivative participatory sense saving me, right? So like think about how beautiful that is. And that can actually, in fact, improve our relationships for all of eternity, right? So that could reap an infinite benefit throughout all of eternity. So when I thought about that hiddenist model, it was almost calling out my evidential situation.

I was like, I had so much evidence for Catholicism, but then I had these like rational and psychological barriers pushing me the other way, like, ah, but what about these intuitions? It's so hard to give them up about homosexuality and hell and things like that. And, you know, I had these psychological barriers, you know, like I had built up this whole public persona of being the skeptic and like criticizing Catholicism and Christianity and theism and whatnot. And that was pulling me away. but then I just like, God was manifestly vindicating his church. And so then there was this tug of war. And so Catholicism, in that model in particular,

it was just calling me out. It was calling out my evidential situation. It made perfect sense of my evidence. And it also made perfect sense of lots of these miracle cases where they're like, as we said earlier with the Eucharism miracles, there are peripheral anomalies where you can cling to them if you want. How many debates have you done with Christians? Public debates or reporting debates?

Oh, not many public debates. Because, I mean, have you gone back and watched your debate with Father Gregory Fine to come full circle? That'll be fascinating, eh? Yeah. We've got to get you on the, uh, on his podcast to discuss this. Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah, that'd be awesome. That would be amazing. I'd love that. We have to begin wrapping up here. Okay. So how do we do that? I mean, this is beautiful. Thank you, first of all, for sharing your lovely story and glory to Jesus Christ for your conversion and the good work that he's going to do through you, despite your best efforts to thwart it.

That's a joke, but almost not. Okay, let's, maybe we could wrap up with the, the hiddenness of God. I just want to start there. You can close how you want to as well, but the hiddenness of God thing, right? Because we see people that we really respect and admire and look up to, a friend of yours, Alex O'Connor, for example.

And he would make the claim like, okay, I want to believe. Like, I'm not lying to you when I say I want to believe, and yet I don't see the evidence sufficient to make that claim. What do you say? What have you said to him? What might you say to him? Yeah. So I mean, someone like him if we don't want to call him out specifically. Well, I mean, one thing to say is that I don't think that this is a problem that's like probabilistically independent of the problem of evil. Once you conditionalize, once you put in your

background knowledge that God has allowed the Holocaust, for instance, then it just becomes much less surprising that he would allow other bad things, for instance, like people to be in a state of non-belief, say. So like, I just want to say that this is not like an additional piece of independent evidence from the problem of evil. And once you recognize that, you start to see that actually, a lot of the objections to theism. It's a sub-argument. Yeah, a lot of the objections to theism are probabilistically dependent in ways

that really significantly temper their evidential force. Because like once you take into account evil, for instance, once you put that in your background knowledge, and even like one instance of horrific evil, then it becomes much less surprising that there would be other bad things. Because it's just much more likely.

Once you have that in your background knowledge and you conditionalize on theism, and you take theism as well. Because like we have to evaluate competing hypotheses, so we examine how likely the evidence is conditional on theism with our background knowledge. And then we examine how likely

and how likely the evidence is conditional on atheism in our background knowledge. And then we see how well they predict data. And then we gain evidential points if one of them predicts it better than the other. But like, again, once we take into account evil, well then there's already going to, once we conditionalize on theism and evil,

there's gonna be half, there's gonna have to be some sort of story that God has for allowing bad things to occur. Right? In which case, that's very plausibly going to transfer over to the problem of divine hiddenness. And so then it's significantly dense

the force of divine hiddenness. So again, like even if I don't have a particularly strong thing to say in response to this, like there's just significant countervailing considerations that we've gone through, lots of things that we haven't even gone through, which are very powerful, all the arguments for theism, et cetera, and then the probabilistic dependence of these arguments. So that's one thing. I guess we also didn't, well, I'll make a few points. One is that, again, I think if there are some people who are in a state of non-belief

concerning the existence of God, that enables lots of very profound goods, like sincere seeking after God, like helping, like us having a kind of high stakes responsibility for helping each other come to knowledge of God and knowledge of the truth, right? In order for us to be able to make a difference to one another, to like actually be able to help each other unto salvation, there have to be some people who are kind of in that state of obscurity or something like that, right? So that's another thing that you could say. A still third thing you could say, some people try to to appeal to various models on which actually people who don't yet believe in God can be in some kind of implicit relationship with God that maybe they're not aware of and that maybe can kind of

come to fruition at, let's say, the moment of death or something like that. And maybe that can enable lots of profound goods for various reasons. Like, I don't know, there's something, there's something beautiful about the fact that, like, you know, when I was an atheist and agnostic, I still had this, like, adoration almost of, like, truth and, like, reason and whatnot. That's why I called my channel the majesty of reason. I was swimming in the logos without knowing it, you know? And in my book, in my Majesty of Reason book that I wrote when I was like 19 or something, I had in there like, I included a line where it was like, we should love, dare I say, adore the truth or something like that.

And that's when I was either an atheist or an agnostic or something like that. So I don't know, I was sort of swimming in the depths of God kind of without knowing it. And, you know, now I've kind of looked back and I see, oh God, it was you all along, right? It was you all along who I loved and I adored. And maybe, you know, even still then, I was probably in a state of like mortal sin. So maybe I didn't have a kind of supernatural love of God. But even a kind of like natural love and kind of cooperating with pervenient graces, I think, can be incredibly valuable and can form some kind of implicit relationship with God. So, and you know, this argument from dry and hiddenness assumes that people like can't be in a relationship with God or a valuable relationship with God if they don't believe.

Yep. So that's good. Yeah, that's another thing that I would say. So I don't know, there are lots of, lots of responses to that. And then in terms of the problem of evil, which we should briefly say, because I gave a very forceful presentation of the problem of evil, to which we have not. Answer the problem of evil. Once and for all. Three basic responses.

Okay. One, it wouldn't be just terribly surprising, given God, given that God is infinitely wise. So under theism, it just wouldn't be terribly surprising that maybe there are just reasons that God has of which we're unaware for allowing various evils that there are. And notice, I'm not saying that we're just, we're totally in the dark about, about God's reasons. That's not what I'm saying, because my various natural theological arguments

for God's existence required me to make some judgments about comparative judgments, at least about divine psychology. So I'm not saying we're totally in the dark about God's existence, but we do need to have some kind of epistemic humility. And that requires us to assign a non-negligible credence or a non-negligible probability to the hypothesis

that maybe there are just reasons that God has for allowing various evils that I'm unaware of. And so long as that's the case that will significantly dent, at least dent the evidential force of the problem of evil, to the point that like, it could really be, overcome by like no leg leg. So that's one thing to say. A second thing to say is that, well, yeah, I mean, you could just say it actually is very, very, very, very, very, very strong

evidence, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, so that's the thing that I would probably make. And then the third point that I make is just like, I don't know, there are so many theodysies out there in the philosophical literature, which identify various goods that God may have, that justify in him in permitting various evils. And if we take, like, the massive disjunction of those, like either this good or this good or this the odyssey or this the odyssey, I think that very significantly dense the force of the problem of evil, because then like the problem of evil to run it and to make evil very

surprising under theism, you'd basically have to deny systematically each and every one of those theodicy. So like one example of theodicy for evolutionary animal suffering. Yeah, good. I was going to ask that. Yeah, no, there are a few. So, I mean, Trent Doherty has this book on the problem of animal pain, theodicy for creatures great and small, where basically there will be a kind of afterlife for animals, you know, where the sufferings that they experience in this life actually are going to be, they're going to form part of an integrated hole, which is better on the whole as a result of the sufferings that they underwent. And basically, their cognitive capacity is going to be elevated to some extent in the Eschaton in the end times

so that they can appreciate their role in God's providential plan. No, mosquitoes. Depends on whether or not they're conscious. You know, so if they have to be conscious. Oh, maybe not. So maybe the mosquitoes too. I mean, the lion will lay down with a lamb, right? Like, why not those very lions and lambs that existed throughout evolutionary history? say. So maybe they actually do kind of have some kind of like narrativeal development in their life and maybe they actually can cultivate some kind of virtue that outweighs the sufferings that they experience in this life as a result of things in the next life. Is this his primary argument to go against Thomas and saying that animals will be in heaven? Well, so when you say be in

heaven, like I don't think we should say they experience the beatific vision. No. But like, yeah, but I did think Aquinas says there'll be animals in heaven. Okay. experiencing the divine, sorry, the B2V vision or otherwise, but that's not church teaching. Right, right. So as far as I can tell, this is totally consistent with the magistral teaching. So that's one way you can go. Yeah, it is, it is consistent. But is that his primary, is that Trent Doherty's primary argument that? I think that's one of his major responses to the problem of evolutionary animal suffering. I mean, there's a more recent one of Brian Cutter again. He's one of my favorite philosophers. And Philip Swenson,

it's called the omission theodicy. It's a paper that won the Sanders Prize, a very, very, very like, esteemed, renowned prize in philosophy. And it's published in Oxford studies in philosophy of religion. I think it's actually forthcoming. And the thought basically is that we already have in our background knowledge that God has given us very high stakes moral responsibility for how well the lives of other creatures go, like other animals, but also for other human beings. Like he's basically put us in high stakes moral circumstances where either through our omission to help or through our helping, we can make a massive difference to how well the lives of others go. And why might why might God do that sort of thing? Well, because if we do indeed help the

person, that can reap infinite benefits across and across all of eternity, because that at least enables a better relationship between me and the person that I helped for all of eternity. Like, you saved me or you saved me from the, I was drowning and you saved my life. Think about like, if that improves our relationship for all of eternity, that good can kind of aggregate and be an infinite good. So that can, the possibility, enabling that kind of infinite good can justify risking finite harms of us omitting to help other people. Now, so we already have in our background knowledge that this is kind of God's MO. This is something that like God may very well plausibly be interested in doing, giving us high stakes more responsibility. But then just apply that to

the evolutionary process. Maybe there are various beings, non-human agents who are delegated with the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and suffering and languishing and death and whatnot and towards a more kind of kumbaya symbiosis. But they freely, omitted to intervene. And again, the reason why, so maybe these are like angels, for instance, and some of them said, no, I will not serve and I will not guide the evolutionary process in the direction of, in a kind of benevolent direction. And so again, this can be justified by the fact that if they had done their divinely appointed task, that could enable infinite goods for all of eternity. And again, the point with these different theories isn't

that they're the correct one or that you're saying that they're correct one? Yeah, I'm just trying to give an accommodation, right? I'm just trying to say like, Sure, maybe this is like, this isn't, oh, and this is another thing. Like, this doesn't, this story doesn't need to be plausible to the atheist. The point is like conditional on theism. That's right. Conditional on Theism, because we're trying to predict. We're trying to see how probable is the evidence of evil, conditional on theism, right?

So given Theism, is this at least a non-negligibly likely story to be true? And I think it is non-negligibly likely. For starters, we already have significant empirical evidence for the existence of demonic phenomena, for these non-human intellects. Secondly, it's good to create good creatures. you know, what's up with this ginormous gap between us and God, right? Like the intellects of us, with these puny influx, it wouldn't be surprising at all if God created hordes of even more intellectually capable beings in us so that even more beings can experience the beatific vision and help each other. We already know in our background knowledge that God gives people,

at least us, this significant high-stakes moral responsibility, such that if we omit to take our moral obligation seriously, that can have very drastic consequences in the lives of others. And so, like, we already have in our background knowledge, like significant testimony testimonial evidence to demonic phenomena. This is not at all an ad hoc hypothesis. We already know from the Bible, you know, that like, it's already said in the Bible. So this isn't some ad hoc posit that, like, Satan is the prince of this world. He's the prince of the powers of the air and things like that. We know that, like, we can see why there may very well be infinite goods enabled by this difference making responsibility over the course of evolutionary history by

giving these angels this kind of providential governance over the rest of creation. And even like Aquinas said that, yeah, God gave the angels certain tasks in the providential ordering or governing of creation. We, yeah, I mean, so I think that, like, conditional on theism, it's not at all surprising that God might create beings like this. It's not at all surprising, given the infinite goods that it enables that he would give them this difference making responsibility. And it's, yeah, it's just not at all ad hoc.

We already have significant evidence for demonic phenomena. So I just take this to be like utterly non-ad hoc and just not actually very surprising under theism. And again, the evolutionary horrors that we see are finite bads, right? However bad they are, they are finite. And God basically allowed the creatures to be able to have that high stakes moral responsibility. The angels or whatever, he gave them this divinely appointed task to providentially govern the creatures. And if they had, if they had gone through with their divinely appointed role,

that would have been improved the relationships between them and the creatures for all of eternity. So there was an infinite payoff. And God was justified in basically risking them using their free will and abusing their free will in that kind of way. so that they freely omit to guide the evolutionary process. And notice, this is not like demons are like tinkering with the tectonic plates or like setting ablaze forest fires. So this is totally compatible with our best scientific evidence. This is, it explains why lots of the evolutionary evils seem to be kind of like randomly or haphazardly distributed. So I don't know.

I think that this can like at least dent the force of the problem of evil significantly. So like we, and again, just I'll just take the disjunction of these various different theodicies. So like either animal afterlife or, you know, this difference making, like, angel abandonment theodicy, or this kind of, you know, maybe there are reasons of which I were unaware, or this. And you just put all this together. And I don't know, it's, it can significantly dent the evidential force of the problem of evil. So. All right. Well, you have a five-hour show that's up right now over on your channel.

I don't know how, yeah, how long it is. We don't know how long it will be. I suspect it'll at least be five hours. I don't know, is it? What are you thinking? Yeah, it'll probably be. at least five. It's terrific, dude. You should make it the longest video, 10 hours, I say. And just have Ethan Muse bringing you an espresso. Yeah. But anyway, we will put a link to that.

We'll share this video with you so we can post it together and people can go check out Majesty of Reason and support your work. And then do you currently have a Patreon or something? I do have a Patreon, yes. Well, that'll be interesting. It will be interesting. Let's ask people who are watching right now to consider support your work. I'd appreciate that. You should get your tears in order. I should get my tears in order. Yeah. You know, right now. They're kind of in order. Who watched this could go over and support.

I appreciate that. Who knows? I might lose patrons who were like atheist agnostic. This is like when I interviewed, did you ever watch the interview with me and Cameron Batuzzi? Oh yeah. You should have flown me out to the Vatican. I'm kidding.

Should have. No. I'm just messed up. But we did the same thing. We promoted his thing right there and invited people. That's really cool, dude. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing all of this.

I know you have so much more to say, but. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me and, you know, praise God. This is all God's grace, right? It's God working through me. And Mary working through me as her instrument. Okay, how about we end with this? There's going to be mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who watch this,

who have a loved one who's away from the church. And it doesn't seem possible that they'll come back. What's your one piece of advice to them? I mean, pray, right? Pray fast. Give alms in support. And like basically fly to our blessed mother. I mean, pray rosary upon rosy upon rosy upon rosy upon rosy upon rosary, upon rosary.

And God won't neglect our prayers. Well, I feel like the example you laid out earlier of your parents who spoke to God about you more than they spoke to you about God. And this like peaceful surrender is what we're called to. We're not called to be like the disciples in the boat who freak out, wake up Jesus and say, don't you care that we're perishing? That's how we often pray. And he rebukes them after he rebukes the wind and the waves for praying in that way. But instead I think what's good, I know it's easier said than done.

I'm aware of this. But a peaceful surrender, Lord, I give you this person. trust that you love them and want they good more than I do. Yeah. That's the ticket. And don't, I mean, you know, sometimes we are a little light on fasting. So like, you know, consider fasting for this. I mean, like, God, you know, it's a, if you're in a state of grace, it's a meritorious cause of grace.

So like if you give up a breakfast or you take a cold shower or, you know, you have an intentionally bland meal or, you know, you have a black fast or something like, don't underestimate the power of fasting. You combine fasting and prayer daily, say at least, one decade of the rosary for them a day. God will inundate them with grace. I like what you said there about just giving up breakfast or something. Because often we kind of think,

well, I can't do anything heroic, so I won't do anything at all. You can do so much heroic. You could not eat for a day. You could not eat for a day. No, I understand that we're capable of acting heroically, but my point is when we're invited to do something heroic, we often shrink back.

My point is what you just said, fast from breakfast. Do something. Just do anything. And even if you don't eat, I understand. A lot of people have, like, dietary restrictions or they're like professional athletes.

they don't fast. But you can eat a bland meal, right? No, I couldn't. Yeah, you can have an intentionally bland meal. So instead of putting the sauce and the pasta, just have the bland pasta. There's something beautiful about fasting in a way that is unbragworthy. Yes. Like if you say, I didn't have that second cup of coffee, no one will clap for you. But it's something. It's a little thing that you can do. Yeah, all right, yeah. I took my sister to a Marian apparition site while she was still an atheist and agnostic, and I fasted like a coward for her. But with great desire for her conversion and love, But I did. I mean, I could have been way better than I was.

But I did fast from X, Y, and Z. And she came to Christ on that trip. She just went to confession. Like my sister, who dresses in black and is just, like, upset at the world, she went to confession. Wow. Praise God. Praise God. All right.

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