Pints With Aquinas - Reviewing Trent's ABORTION Debate with Destiny on Whatever w/ Trent Horn

Episode Date: July 29, 2023

Matt sits down with  @TheCounselofTrent  to discuss his recent debate with  @destiny  on the  @whatever  podcast. Hallow: https://hallow.com/matt 🔥 Emmaus Academy (2 weeks free!) http://stpaulcenter.com/matt Watch debate between Trent and Destiny here: https://www.youtube.com/live/o6nnaxitKMQ?feature=share @KyleWhittington ​

Wait, wait, and we're live. And we're live. Hey, how are you doing? I'm doing well, Matt. You flying from California last night? Yeah, I left Santa Barbara around noon. Had to lay over at DFW and then got in here, I don't know, like 1130 p.m. midnight. So it's been a day.

It's been a trip. And then what is it like 7 a.m.? Oh, well, my time, California time. Yeah, who knows? Because I left Dallas I flew over there you know two days ago and then to go on the whatever podcast and so it's so weird it's always weird when you see a thing it's like when people come to pints for the first time right yeah it's like you see it on

YouTube and it's like oh my gosh I'm actually here yeah and then you know you're here in the whatever studio but have a nice little setup there. It's in in Santa Barbara, so yeah So I mean I noticed they've got that window that overlooks those palm trees What what kind of building is it? Yeah, that's interesting Brian the host is very intent on keeping the location secret like he asked us not to 100% yeah, well it's it's It's just a multi-use building. So it's there in Santa Barbara, not too far from UCSB, but most things are close to UCSB.

It's funny, I've been to places where I have to sign a non-disclosure, agreement about the location. Oh yeah, he just asked us not to like post selfies in front of the door or something like that. But yeah, it's just this kind of nondescript place and you show up and it's much smaller than you Everybody says that about this this room they walk in they say the same thing Oh, yeah, you get in there and I and I was like, oh is this where you do the normal?

Dating show podcast because it was just the three of us and it felt small. He's like, yeah, it's a tight space So but yeah, it's a it's a it's a beautiful location, right? You know, it's right by the ocean. It's, you know, Santa Barbara, I should say. Yeah. So, yeah. And there's always interesting people, I guess, if he needs to bring them on the show. I think that he gets a lot of people who do the show, they come from Los Angeles, like a two hour drive, but people come and they go on it. And so how did the debate come about? And just kind of recap for those who don't even know what we're talking about. Oh yeah, so the Whatever Podcast is a dating podcast,

secular nature, usually it involves discussions with more traditional men and then with women, a lot of whom are usually like OnlyFans, I don't like calling them models. What are you modeling exactly? Digital prostitute. Prostitution, yeah. I think the word should be used for those

who are selling sex, images of sex. So OnlyFans prostitutes, or it's not always that though. Sometimes it's just like college women or just regular women who come on and they talk about dating and stuff like that a Few how long ago was it me like a month ago? There was a discussion on abortion on the podcast Between destiny who was a well-known Liberal

Commenter, but he has his own views like he really tries to think through things for himself. He's like the anti Ben Shapiro Yeah, he's like a reverse Ben Shapiro, if you will. But he's a sharp debater, talks pretty fast. He does a lot, he's been doing video, he does streaming and commentary on things. And so he came on and he was debating abortion with Lila Rose and Kristen Hawkins. And so they had their discussion.

And I think a general consensus of that discussion was that it was a missed opportunity for the pro-life position, frankly. That's a very, that's a very understated way of putting it. I'll let you put it however you want. It's always hard. I mean, I, being in a lot of different situations, I've been in situations that didn't go exactly as I would have hoped. There's things in my debate, I was like, I wish I probably would have phrased that a little bit differently, but I think in general The tone that was taken the failure to engage some of the arguments I think the general I would say the general consensus among pro lifers who watched that debate

Was that it was a missed opportunity for the pro-life position So I thought it'd be really nice to have a do-over of some kind, you know? So I reached out to Destiny and I thought, hey, do you wanna chat about abortion, basically? And then it was looking- He did a fair, I think, summary of your, that's right, I did a reply.

So I did an analysis of it to show where I thought were the weaknesses in his arguments and the arguments I thought were weaker that Lila and Kristen had offered to say, okay, here's where I think is a good argument and here's where I think, oh, it's not a great argument. And then he actually looked at that and so we chatted a bit.

And then I think I messaged Brian and said, do you want us to come on the show? And he said, yeah. And I've messaged whatever before said you want us to come on the show and he said yeah And you know, I've messaged whatever before I put myself out there like I think was after Michael Knowles was on the show And Laura is so funny. She's like you're so brave. You just put yourself out there and get shot down I'm like that's called being a man. That's I'm used to this. Oh totally. That's yeah I'm like that's the trial by far I have to get to a four. We ended up getting married You don't do that. Like that's what you have to do, right?

She's like, I can never handle being a man, that sounds awful. So yeah, and he said yes, and we worked back and forth to try to get it all together, and then flew out and had the conversation, and yeah, I thought it went very well to show the deficiencies in Destiny's particular view on abortion because people have different, we have to remember people who defend legal abortion have different views on it.

So like Destiny had a debate with Matt Dillahunty on abortion. They both agree it should be legal, but for different reasons. So Destiny thinks it should be legal because a fetus prior to 20 weeks is not a person Matt Dillahunty's argument is more that women have a right to control their bodies And so it doesn't matter if the fetus is a person or not They have the right to control their bodies and you think did better in that back and forth I haven't watched it. I haven't watched the entire thing, but I thought destiny made coherent points I thought he made very good points against Matt on that and Matt Matt, as he typically does, relies more on like bluster to get through it. But to show, no, if the fetus is a person,

then the mother and father have obligations to this person. You have to treat it in a particular way. You cause this person, in nearly all cases, you cause them to be in this position. You owe them care. So he would reject the bodily rights argument. He's more saying, no, it's just not a person. So that were those are the arguments. I felt okay,

that's probably what we're going to talk about the most here is the unborn child prior to 20 weeks a person. Now, when you chat with Brian, were you hoping that a discussion like this would be moderated time speeches, that sort of thing? Because I've, I've hosted interactions that have gone off the rails quickly and in Fairness and props to you and destiny all were really respectful and let each other speak It was actually very enjoyable and I'm shocked actually it hasn't got like ten times the amount of views it currently has well Because it's people like a blood people like Bloodsport Which is also a great movie by the way Jean-Claude Van Damme also if you had a war a holster top or something

That's the whatever podcast tends to tends to have immodestly dressed people. So if you had a dress like that, Laura, I think Laura was hoping to do she was going to record maybe a short for her channel called telling my mom trends on the whatever podcast. It's just like, hey, mom, mom, yeah, you should go watch the trends on whatever podcast. No, no, no, don't click. No, no, don't click on those thumbnails. Yeah, I know. I know. Because, yeah, you look at it is crazy to go to be on a show

where you look at the thumbnails and they're all essentially soft core pornography. It's just women in bikini tops. Did you consider that? Did you consider? I don't want to give credence to a channel that, that platforms porn performers. Well, I guess then should St. Paul have gone to the Athenian square, knowing they offer sacrifices to Zeus there, that the purpose of this is to, you know, serve pagan deities and who are really demons. It is. and who are really demons. It is, yeah, I guess there's trade-offs there, but I feel like it was worth it in that context

to be able to reach a broadly secular audience with one, the pro-life message, and two, to show that a faithful, orthodox Catholic can be a very reasonable person. So it's sort of pre-evangelization for those who are listening who are not religious at all even. I mean I might have mentioned God a little bit here there. There are some Catholics who are critical that I didn't make more of an overtly religious case against Destiny's position. And do you think they have a point? I think they

have a point if you go out of your way to hide religion and you're like you're ashamed of it or something like that But they have to understand that this is not if this were a debate where you have moderated rounds and timed sessions Then maybe I could spend a few minutes making a religious argument or something like that But we the format we decided to make it just the same as what Lila and Kristin and Destiny had, which is just conversation, basically. So it's free flow. So in that kind of a conversation,

I think somebody told me online, well, you should have challenged Destiny's worldview before you showed that he's wrong on abortion. And my response is, do you know how hard it is to or you should show the Catholic worldview is true? Like, have you ever tried to show a worldview is true? Like, it's a pretty daunting task. So I'm going to show God exists. He revealed himself in Christ. He established the Catholic Church and gave us the moral law that we can know through natural law reasoning. Or I think some of you might have wanted me to give an entire primer on, well,

the moral view we should be doing is natural law. And look, there are these human goods, and we're ordered towards flourishing, these are our ends. The problem is destiny would have just kept interrupting me and criticizing every step I'm trying to make along the way. That's the problem. If you try to make a multi-step argument to build a worldview and you got someone

who's always gonna challenge every step, you're not gonna get anywhere. So you have to make the, in an environment like that, you have to have fewer steps in your argument to get to your point, even if you can't put everything out there. But I think that at the end of the day, I find that presenting a reasonable pro-life view

really does show people, there's a lot of people who've become Christian or Catholic because they see the pro-life view makes sense and they think, okay well why do humans have dignity at all? You know, why do humans have value that non-humans don't have? And then they they see, oh wow it's really because here's something that's interesting, like atheists, it's hard to get them to agree on anything, but like 90% of them believe that abortion ought to be legal, which is interesting. There's more agreement

among atheists on abortion than any religious group, right? Because there's a lot of pro-choice Catholics who are out there. So I just find it so fascinating that if it's almost like an article, it's not really, but if it is like an article of faith for atheists, like, oh, abortion's got to be moral, and you suddenly come on the other side of it, maybe I have to now start questioning atheism itself. So, yeah, so I think that I presented a good position, always things that can be improved on here or there, but then also, I think it's good to go on that format. It is hard though, but I would be happy to go back on again though.

I think we have to go into these forums. I think it's bad if we go on and we're not challenging the presumptions that are there. If you're just going on there for notoriety, I don't think that's good. But if you're going on there to say, hey, being on OnlyFans is bad, or hey, monogamy is actually a really good thing.

Don't think it's worthwhile to do. Someone quoted GK Chesterton to me about my interaction with Dennis Prager and they said, I think something to the effect of pornography isn't something to be debated about or to argue about, it's something to be trodden underfoot. And I'm having, I'm hearing more and more Catholics, maybe I'm just becoming more aware of it, saying you should never be engaging with people like this. You should just be soundly refuting them, but don't give them any kind of platform. Kind of goes back to what I said earlier, but are you seeing more of that? Like, don't be debating people, atheists, don't give them a platform, don't let them

speak. Yeah. Yeah. And where's that coming from? And why is it wrong, do you think? I don't know. I think it's, I think part of it might be a nostalgic yearning for a Christian society that was instead of the post-Christian society that we live in. That there was a time not too long ago where things that are put out there, transgender ideology, radical sexual ethics on the whatever podcast, you didn't have to debate. Everyone would just say, that's just reading their transatlantic accents, like, well, that's just ridiculous you see over here.

What kind of nonsense is this? And we all agree, this is, this is ridiculous, this is morally offensive. And, you know, even people that were not full-throated Christians necessarily, you lived in kind of a Christian culture and you just understood these things. And so there is a sense like,

you don't wanna give it legitimacy. You just have the power of culture to say, what's the matter with you? Get your act in gear. It's just more of a denunciation than debate. But are there topics you would refuse to debate? Like someone who is advocating for full-on racism or pedophilia, would you give them a platform?

And if not, what's the difference? Yeah, it's a hard line to draw about what we debate because you're right, there's some positions I'm gonna say, I'm not going to debate that, I'm just going to say it's wrong or I don't want to give you a platform for your insidious views to grow. Holocaust deniers, for example.

Yeah, or I'm not gonna engage in a debate where you are gonna be so bad faith that we're not gonna be able to get to the truth. You're just gonna simply obfuscate the issue. But if there are issues where I am in the minority, really, and I'm trying to reach a lot of people, like I would say we live in a culture that would generally side with the ethics on the Whatever podcast. So, I'm the one who's in the minority that there are

people, you have to be, I guess this would be when Catholics say, you shouldn't even give this legitimacy. How would you feel if people told Brian at the Whatever podcast, Trent Horn is an anti-choice homophobic bigot? Why would you legitimize his views by letting him on your podcast? So what happens when the people who control the culture use that same attitude against us? To say, don't let, Matt Fradd is a crazy person, he says porn is wrong, don't let him on your podcast.

That's a ridiculous thing to say. And then suddenly we get shut out because those who, and they do do this, they do do this and we find it irritating to say, why won't you just hear me out? You know, so I do think we have to be careful in that regard. Now that doesn't mean of course like, well, I would, I want my minority view to be heard. So why wouldn't I do that to other minority views? Well, cause I know that they are atrocious and reprehensible. It would be interesting to see a debate between destiny and someone pro-abortion

regarding abortion after 20 weeks. Yeah, well, there's people who are pro-infanticide or pro-radical bodily rights to say that you have the right to abortion after 20 weeks, the right to not be a parent, things like that. But yeah, I think that I understand the frustration among Catholics to say like, why are we even debating these things? Yeah, it sucks that we're in this position, but it sucked for Christians when they were in the minority

in the Roman Empire, having to convince and persuade others to only worship one God, to not give sacrifices to the emperor, to eschew Roman debauchery and orgies and things like that. We're not that far away. Our position now is kind of like what they had to deal with 2000 years ago. Though we have it easier where no one's throwing us to the lions, not yet anyways. So I think though every case is going to have to be weighed, but I felt that it was fine

to go on the whatever podcast because it's a way to reach a lot of these people. The podcast is gonna go on anyways, whether or not I'm on it. It's not like they need me to be legitimate. They're gonna keep going. But if I can provide an alternative view that most people who tune into it won't hear,

it is funny that one of the comments is like, where are the chicks? So it's like, you know, that, I know people, they tune in for that. So maybe I can share more of those views, get back on the podcast when more of the ladies are present. I don't know. I don't know how they do it.

They're able to get people to watch. How do they do it? I just can't figure it out. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna ask you about your, you know, debate preparation and also some of the things that Destiny said. But before we do that, I want to let people know that we're going to be doing a

locals only stream immediately after this interview is done. Matt, Fred.locals.com. Please consider becoming a supporter over there. When you become an annual supporter, you get a free pints with Aquinas beer Stein. We're also throughout the month of August leading a five week study on Flannery O'Connor that Father Damien Ference is going to be leading. And he has his PhD in Flannery O'Connor and Termism.

It's terrific. So matphred.locals.com, please become a supporter over there. It supports all the work that we're doing here. And you'll get to see that live stream right after this. Bit of a Q and A with Trent, as well as a ton of other things as well. We have Father Gregory Pine leads monthly spiritual direction over there and stuff. You can't get anywhere else. So big thanks to all those who are supporting.

I also want to say that Emmaus Academy, who I need to promote and wish to promote, started a digital platform. Do you know this? I did not know this. StPaulCenter.com slash Matt, click the link in the description below. Scott Hahn, Dr. Bergsmar, all these amazing, brilliant biblical scholars have started an online platform to help us love the Bible. So if you're like me and you spend too much time on YouTube and you want to use that time more productively, click the link in the bio in the description. St. Paul's center dot com slash Matt.

When you sign up over there, you get two weeks for free. You can try it out, cancel anytime. Very well produced studies. Ralph Martin did a book study on his book, The Fulfillment of All Desire. Yeah, it's really, really good. It's like surprisingly good. You know, Catholics do things. You're like, wow, look, it's really,

I don't mean to be offensive, but you know, sometimes Catholics aren't good in that department. And this is terrific. It's always her when you say, I would have never thought this was Catholic. Yeah, I know. I thought the first time I ever listened to Jason Everett speak, it was on a CD, if you remember this, and it was to a public school. And I thought this can't be

Catholic. It's too good. It's kind of like when people say, I would have never thought you were homeschooled. It's like, thank you. Okay. Yeah. So stpoolcenter.com slash Matt. Thanks very much. Okay. Tell me about the preparation for this. Um. Because I had someone reach out to me and ask me if they should engage Destiny. And I would say for like 98% of people who approached me and asked me that question, I would say, definitely not. Because you can do a great deal of harm to the Catholic position by not being a good debater,

but having more confidence than you should. And maybe your heart's in the right place, but I would like you debate him and I'd like Stephanie Gray debate him, but that's about it. It's difficult. He's, well, he understands, he has a decent knowledge of philosophy.

He makes arguments very quickly. He talks very quickly. So one, yeah. To the point though about Catholics not engaging in debates that they're not going to win. Yeah, no, you got- Why is that important? Oh, yeah. Yeah, to the point though about Catholics not engaging in debates that they're not going to win. Yeah, no, you got- Why is that important? Oh, yeah, well, you don't want to make the faith look bad or unreasonable.

Now, you don't always want to think like, oh, you should only do a debate or a dialogue where you have a 100% chance of just absolutely destroying the other person. Like, that's not how it works. I mean, there's people out there who are very intelligent and bright non-Catholics. So there's going to be a clash of ideas,

not necessarily going to be like, oh, you will soundly refute every single point the person brings up so that anyone watching will agree that you're right. But you definitely shouldn't go into a venue where you're outmatched by the other person intellectually knows more than you or has better debating technique,

is able to string arguments together faster and have these better debating techniques. So like with somebody who would engage destiny, I mean, I've done a lot of debates and informal dialogues and had philosophy training. So someone who's like never done a debate before, it's like, you don't wanna be trying out your mixed martial arts skills with John Danaher

or someone or your jujitsu skills with him or he was always gonna give back to jujitsu if I'm here. So, you don't try out your boxing skills on Mike Tyson, even still Mike Tyson. He was always gonna give back to Jiu Jitsu if I'm here. You don't try out your boxing skills on Mike Tyson. Even still, Mike Tyson. Have you seen videos of him boxing today? How old is he? I don't know, Thursday, I figure, I was like 50s probably?

Like late 50s, but you see him still train. Unreal. He is so fast when he's still, he has still absolutely can pummel people. You don't go into a match to kind of show the glory of Australia, let's say by defeating Mike Tyson and then get demolished. Right. Your first engagements. Like if you want to do I, I really want more Catholics

who can get out in the public square and do these kinds of debates. And in fact, I am kind of I mean. I don't know, I am sad, concerned. I wish there were more people that could just be like, oh, if I can't do this, whether it's pro-life or atheism, even the Catholic Protestant issue. And we have some good people at least. Catholics, I find online, like you probably see this

in stuff we cover, Catholics really like arguing with Protestants about stuff, I guess. But it's not as popular to engage, I guess if I had to rank a lot of the theology debates, it's like Catholic Protestantism, atheism, the historicity of the resurrection, the deity of Christ, like that stuff, I think like there's mostly Protestants who do that stuff.

Like, I mean, I've done debates on resurrection. There might be a few, I think maybe Albrecht has done some stuff on that, but a lot of Catholics don't go out and do debates on the foundational Christian doctrines, some of the moral issues. I wish there were just a lot more. I wish there were just so many people out there. It's like, oh good, they got this covered.

Like I do this because it's like, I don't want the limelight. I just wanna make sure the truth gets out there. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I know you've done a lot of research. You've written books, you've debated abortion before. How was this interaction different and how did you specifically prepare for it?

It's just listening to destiny a lot. When you do these kinds of debates, like the person gets kind of stuck in your head. It's almost like by the end of it you're like, I am done with this person. Because you listen to that person, like I listen to his reply to me, how he's engaged to other people, you know, what he said to Kristen and Lila, and you get a sense of what his argument is, what he's trying to put forward. That way you can understand it and then offer replies. And what I also tried to do is just at the very beginning, and people can have different views

on whether it's the most prudent strategy. I just wanted to show people, some people might tune into a three hour debate and only watch like the first 30 minutes. So I just wanna say, you know what? I'm just gonna try to get down to brass tacks. This is your view. It leads to these consequences.

So is that a view that we should endorse when we say, no way that's, that stuff is beyond the pale, which is why I said that if his view is that a fetus is not a person prior to 20 weeks, then there's nothing immoral about taking a healthy fetus and making it brainless. And then doing all sorts of things to it. I was, why not keep growing it to harvest organs? Yeah. Oh, okay. Harvest organs. Cool. The other thing like,

Oh yeah, we don't talk about that. Oh yes. Use it for, well, you watch it. Please don't. Nefarious purposes, sexual nefarious purposes. Yeah. Well, but I said that because there would be, and he say, yeah, in principle, it's not wrong. This is what's interesting. When somebody has a coherent view, which it seems to me he does, like his view is coherent. So it's not about showing the logical inconsistencies necessarily like you might with atheism. It's more perhaps, correct me if I'm wrong, about showing where his consistent worldview leads to and why that's something he shouldn't want. Yeah, I don't think it, and as I said in the debate, I don't think it's as consistent as someone like Peter Singer,

because Destiny, in his position on abortion, he's always leapfrogging between humanity and consciousness. So he will say, look, the reason fetuses aren't valuable is because they have not had a conscious experience yet. Consciousness is what makes us valuable. So he'll jump on consciousness to disqualify the unborn child. But then when people say,

yeah, but animals have conscious experiences, why don't they count? Ah, but they don't have a human conscious experience. So he'll jump back to the human thing. They don't have, and then when people say, well, yeah, but what's the difference between, you know, someone, the example that I gave, a newborn who is disabled and stuck

at the newborn level forever being conscious, why do they get special protection versus an animal that will have higher ordered stuff for the rest of its life, like a pig, a mature pig? Right, and here he tried to say that even though it's perhaps on the same level as a pig, it's not a human consciousness. What did you make of that argument? And did you expect it?

Oh, of course. And I think that it becomes ultimately arbitrary, that what is doing the work in his argument is the human part. The killing of a 24-week-old fetus, like I would say, what is so bad about that? What's bad about killing a conscious being? Normally, it's because, well, you frustrate that being's desires. Especially,

let's say you anesthetize a pig or a 24-week fetus. What's so bad about killing that thing that it ought to be illegal? I guess it's you frustrate a 24-week-old fetus's desires. Okay, well, what about a pig's desires, a rat's desires? They're aware of things. And I think if you watch his engagement with Alex O'Connor, who is a vegan, by the way, or at least he endorses veganism, he really shows if consciousness is what matters,

you're really gonna have to start including animals. But if you use humanity as a criterion to get rid of animals, well, surprise, surprise, unborn humans, fetuses and embryos, they're human. So the consciousness argument, if I had to phrase it this way, he uses a symmetry argument to say,

look, if you stop existing when you no longer have consciousness, like for him, if you're brain dead or in a persistent vegetative state that you will never awaken from. You're not a person anymore, you've died. So you only become a person when you start being conscious. And that's why in the debate I offered another symmetry argument. I said, well, why couldn't you do this instead? I'll phrase it this way, which is probably an easier way to grasp it. You could take his

argument and do this. So Destiny, you're saying that you are not a person if your future no longer contains conscious experience. Correct. Okay, so then you are a person if your future does contain conscious experiences. Well, almost every healthy human embryo or fetus has a future that contains conscious experiences. So, like if you were in a persistent vegetative state and you're gonna come out of it

eventually, well you, you know, if we knew you're in a reversible coma, the fact you can't be conscious now, you will be conscious later. And he might say, yeah, but I had a conscious experience before and it's gonna continue later. But that's not relevant because every conscious being is going to have a first conscious experience. It doesn't follow you come into existence at your first conscious experience. That's just the first experience that you have

as a conscious being, but you existed prior to it. So that's where I show with his symmetry argument, even if you used that reasoning, it doesn't work. Because he said, even if, and that's where I show with his symmetry argument even if you used that reasoning it doesn't work because he said Even if and that's why when you make arguments I try to appeal to other people's positions even if you do believe and I don't believe someone who permanently loses consciousness is not A person I think they're a disabled person for a variety of reasons But even if that were true if you permanently if your future no longer has conscious experiences, you're not a person.

Fine. The symmetry of that is if your future does contain these experiences, you are a person, even if you have to wait several months in the womb before you're able to have them. So yeah, I think his position is not as coherent as someone like Peter Singer. Like Singer would say, look, what makes you a person is that you have rational abilities beyond a non-human animal. That's what a person is. You can do things non-human animals can't. If you can't do those things, you're not a person.

So infants can't do those things, they're not persons. With those kind of views, you just kind of have to bite the bullet. And I'd say to people, now there's other philosophical arguments you can make against these views beyond just biting a bullet. But for many lay people, you could say, do you think infanticide is wrong?

That babies have a right to live? Well, yeah, then there must be something wrong with Singer's argument, just for a lay person at a basic level. And then I would make other philosophical arguments, like look, if you're saying an infant is not a person because it doesn't have rational abilities yet. You know, what if we, that makes us,

Singer's argument is based on the idea that if you treat one species better than another, that's speciesism. If you say, oh, well, infants matter because they're human. We shouldn't make distinctions among species any more than we do among races. But we do need to make distinction among species to determine what species are flourishing.

The fact that a rat, let's see, like a pigeon, flying rats, are not rational. They can't engage in rationality. Doesn't mean they're disabled. Like I say, I have an example. Let's say I have a pill that I give to an organism that allows it to read a book, okay? Do I give it to a dog,

or do I give it to a 10-year-old illiterate human child? Both of them can't read, but only one of them is disabled. And it's the human, because humans by their nature are supposed to be able to read. At least humans who live within society that has developed literacy.

The fact that we ought to have certain abilities in accord with our nature, well, I think that really collapses the kind of arguments that Singer and others would write, would put forward. So yeah, I think Destiny's Position has some incoherencies, and I brought that out in the discussion. But also at the beginning, I just wanted to point out, hey, it leads to these morally repugnant conclusions. And I think a lot of people might say, I categorically reject those conclusions. You'd have to reject his view. So is, if consciousness is not necessary for personhood, then what is a person and do we need to distinguish it from human? Well, we need to say when you say consciousness is not necessary I would say we have to distinguish being the the kind of being who has a rational conscious nature and

Having the immediate capacity to be conscious. So there's a difference between an Immediate capacity and a natural capacity. Okay, right. So I have the immediate capacity to speak English. I've said in my review, I have the natural capacity to speak other languages, but you know, your fancy pints of the Aquinas mug has neither capacity. You know, a rock, a rat, a dog, they don't have either capacity.

So what makes humans valuable ultimately lies in some kind of capacity they have. And it has to be a natural capacity because immediate capacities are things you can lose. So for example, if the claim is you're a person, because some people will say this, Matt, they'll say, yeah, what about when you're sleeping? You know, you're not conscious then, are you not a person?

The claim is, well, no, you have the immediate capacity to be conscious when you're sleeping, you're not conscious then, are you not a person? The claim is, well, no, you have the immediate capacity to be conscious when you're asleep, someone can just prod you and you wake up. It's like a car, it's like if someone said a car is a car if it can be driven, like, well, my car is not being driven right now. Well, yeah, but you could turn the key and it'll turn on. But if it doesn't have an engine, it's not a car.

Someone might say something like that. So the idea is that you have to have all the brain components to be conscious to be a person, would be the view. And that is what makes you a person. But I would say, okay, but what about somebody who, to give us a hypothetical then, what about someone who suffers a brain injury

and their brain has to be rewired or regrow, their brain part, physical rewired or regrow, their brain, physical constructs in the brain have to change before they can be conscious. There has to be a physical change in their brain to heal before they are conscious again. That is no different from a 19 week fetus who must have a change in physical constructs

before it becomes conscious in the 20 to 24 week range. So if you're not a person at 19 weeks, cause you haven't had that physical development yet, then it would seem our brain injured fellow in the hospital is not a person. They're not a person anymore. They have no right to medical care. We could just kill them. That doesn't seem to destiny say in response to that. I cannot remember his reply to that particular example.

I think I brought it up, but it might have been brushed past. Even approximate. I can't remember. He has I think he I think it also came up with Lila and Kristen a little bit something like that. But his reply is usually something like, yes, but the brain injured person already had consciousness and it's going to continue. But that's irrelevant to the question.

If, I think that's his general reply. I think that's what he said in our discussion as well, that yes, but prior to the brain injury, I existed after the brain injury, I will continue to exist, is a psychological continuity view of human identity. But my point is that has nothing to do with your definition. The definition is a person has the immediate ability to be conscious, has the physical accoutrements to be conscious that are in the brain.

And this brain injured person in the example does not have that yet. So that that's just one example to put forward there. So I think ultimately grounding our value in an immediate capacity for consciousness will lead to the exploitation of disabled people. It will ultimately lead to that and or justify causing pre-conscious fetuses to just cause, make them brain dead, make them disabled or make them unconscious, I should say. So I think there's no incoherency

in saying that every human being has intrinsic values simply in virtue of their humanity because they belong to a rational kind. What would he say to the argument? It's always wrong to kill a human being and abortion kills a human being and abortion kills a human being, therefore abortion is always wrong? Like why even bring personhood into it?

I think what he would say is that we don't value human beings biologically, we value persons. And his primary reason for that would be that we end life support for people who are brain dead and we oftentimes remove food and water from people in persistent vegetative states. And so that's where he will say that that saying it's wrong to kill human beings doesn't accord with our intuitions.

But even there I would say that this is wrong because we still don't directly kill people who are brain dead or even in persistent vegetative states. Most people are not in favor of just directly killing. They will say, look, medical care for this person is futile, so we're going to withdraw it. But I would say in nearly all cases, food and water are not medical care.

They're the basic things we ought to give human beings, unless the food and water is causing more harm than good. Like somebody who's dying in hospice, if they can't digest food anymore, you stop feeding them, but you don't stop feeding them because you're trying to starve them to death. Now, one question he asked you after he said, you've asked a bunch of questions

that have made, to try to make me look silly, so here's a question for you. Fair for him, yeah. Yeah, it was something to the effect of an embryo and a Petri dish, you're gonna keep this thing alive indefinitely, maybe put that question, state it better than I just did. Yeah, so his claim is that if, so it, and this is one point I said in the debate was,

so you're saying that the worst thing about my view is I care about human beings too much. And he said, well, that's just one way you can phrase it, I guess. So that's the try, he's doing, and to be fair, that's what you do in a debate, you try to show your other guy's view is absurd. So he's trying to do that to me.

Now my view doesn't lend itself to, and that's why I asked him, does my view have less examples of killing and exploiting human beings than your view? Clearly it does. I gave a ton of examples where his view can lead to unjust killing, unjust exploitation. And the best you could come up with is that I exploit women

by saying they have to be pregnant, except of course that's something something that's a debated issue. We all are. That's what we're debating right now. Uh, so that's not a universally morally repugnant thing like growing brainless human beings. The other would be that I would require all manners of life sustaining care to be given to any embryo who is in danger. Now I do think that embryos who are in danger in the womb do have a right to medical care.

So that's why I think if your wife has experienced a miscarriage, she should be able to go to the hospital and get progesterone. But what was his argument? His argument was, yeah, but if you go so far, does that mean we have to extract these embryos and keep them in Petri dishes and then keep them in a Petri dish alive forever?

I wanna know the answer to that. My answer to that is no. And what I was explaining to him that it got cut off at one point was that just because someone's a human being doesn't mean you have to give them all manner of life-sustaining care. For example, in an argument,

a reply that I gave to him that wasn't addressed was someone could say, look, your five year old has this terrible disease, but we could save their life if you cryogenically freeze them for 200 years. And in the future they might be able to save his life. So certainly don't, aren't we obligated to do everything that we can and we can keep them alive and cryogenics and someone can help them in the future? No, you're not obligated to do that. You're just obligated to provide someone proportionate.

To what's proportionate medical care to the embryo and the Petri dish, what is that? Well, one, I think it would be not putting them in the dish in the first place. In fact, at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, we're editing an anthology on human embryo adoption. And one of the arguments there is that on human embryo adoption. And one of the arguments there is that it's wrong to take human embryos, it's wrong to

impregnate people outside of the marital act. Where we all agree IVF is wrong and even abandoned embryos, people like Father Tad Beholchek will say, no, a husband should impregnate his wife, not a lab technician. And so these embryos, they are in a tragically unjust situation and there's really nothing that we can do for them. But if you have an embryo who is in danger in the womb, now here's my thing. If we have the technology,

there's nothing wrong with taking an embryo or fetus out of the womb, treating them, and then allowing them to continue to grow and develop. We do it like 19, 20 weeks, we can do in utero spina bifida surgery. So maybe we would take an embryo out, treat them, put them back in the womb and allow them to continue to develop. Okay, so I see your point that they shouldn't be in the petri dish to begin with, but suppose it is in the petri dish, what is the sufficient medical care that you think we should- Well, we don't have to- also I would say that we're not able to keep them alive indefinitely.

If they're not able to, you can't grow and develop them there. Now there maybe there will come a point where you have artificial womb technology and there we're gonna have to debate, is it obligatory care to take a embryo or a fetus who is sick, place them in an artificial womb and allow them to continue to grow?

But we don't have that technology yet, so we're not really broaching those kinds of questions. But I would say that we would have to look at what is the cost of the care, what is the prognosis, if it's a very expensive care, and the embryo is just going to forever be at the 64-stell stage, and it's not going to continue to develop,

and it's not gonna treat, so it's gonna be futile in treating whatever is wrong with the embryo, why he or she, this child, cannot continue to grow. If the treatment is not able to fix the pathology, we would call it futile. And so we're just not able to provide care for this person, just like you're not obligated if someone is brain dead to keep them on a heart-lung machine

In fact, they're they're not they're not alive anymore I would say that example you're just now it would be similar to the case of putting your five-year-old in cryogenic suspension You're not obligated to do something that extraordinary, but ultimately we just come back to, even if we disagree about what is the level of care we ought to give to this person, it doesn't follow that we can't all agree what are the harms we should not inflict upon this person, that we shouldn't directly kill or exploit this individual. Now, if I was an atheist, what's wrong with this argument?

There are no moral facts, and therefore what we mean when we talk about morality is what we feel disgusted by or attracted to. And as a society, we've come up with these sort of rules and taboos. Maybe they've been programmed into us by evolution or something, but now that we know that, we as a human community can decide what we do with what has been programmed into us by evolution. Therefore, we have decided as a human community that there is a class of humans that we can kill and those humans are unborn humans. What's wrong with that? Well, it makes morality dependent on human convention where most people-

But if it is dependent on human convention, what's wrong with the argument? Like grant my assertion that morality is based on that, then it seems like we should be able to kill. Well, the argument would say that if morality is determined by majority opinion, then abortion ought to be legal or illegal. Well, I would say that it's a fundamentally flawed position, but even if that were true,

it wouldn't necessarily even get you to a complete pro-choice position. Like, if you look at most Gallup polls, a majority of people will say abortion ought to only be legal in particular hard cases. But if that changes? If it changes? Yeah. Yeah. But if it changes, you have no grounds to say, and this is an argument I brought up

in the discussion, if you want to hold that view that morality is determined by human convention, you've lost any grounds to say that society has made moral progress or not. Like for example, fashion is something determined by human convention. You know, 100 years ago, we would have top hats and tails and the clothes we wear changed throughout time or what's fashionable.

That's not right or wrong, it's just what's popular or unpopular. But we don't say that even if it might have seemed hideous, though I am partial towards it, like fashion from the 80s, women's shoulder pads and jean jackets. We don't consider people morally blameworthy to have dressed like that. It's just that's what they liked back then. But we do consider it morally blameworthy 150 years ago that people enslaved other people, or that 80 years ago you could sterilize someone

for any reason if a court said they're a feeble-minded individual. So you can't say that society's getting better. You can't say that the Allies, you can't say that other countries besides Germany, ones who did not engage in Holocaust genocide against innocent people, those cultures, I guess you would say, yeah, whether it's Nazi Germany or Rwanda, whatever it may be, but you say, look,

a culture that practices genocide is morally inferior to a culture that opposes genocide. But if you say it's human convention, all you can say is they're different cultures, not that one is superior to the other. But what if I set an arbitrary standard and it says something like the greatest flourishing for the greatest number?

Right, and so that gets in there. Then there would be moral progress. I do wanna make one note though. You said if an atheist says, you know, it's just relative or it's just personal opinion. There are atheists who accept moral realism, by the way, which is the view that there are, that there are moral truths. There are truths that are not dependent on human conditions.

Destiny's position is one that's called non-cognitivism. It's the idea that when we say like murder is wrong, we're not expressing a truth statement. When I say murder is wrong as a way of saying, murder, boo, I don't like murder, eww, murder, I don't like that. And one argument against that is it makes what seem to be normal arguments completely incoherent. Like if we say, for example, if murder,

if adultery is wrong, then it is wrong for Bob to commit adultery. But if these statements don't have truth values, then you can't make an argument, an if-then argument, because it's just emotion, therefore another emotion. Just because you feel, just because you might have a feeling about a certain action doesn't mean I should have that same feeling.

We might have different tastes. So that's an argument against the non-cognitiveist view. And the other view is that, well, yeah, but if morality is objective, why do people disagree? First, I would say the disagreement is highly overrated. In most cases, in fact, some people criticize me saying, why are you using moral intuitions with destiny?

People don't have agreement on moral intuitions nowadays. Everything's all messed up. Well, on some things, that should be basic, we disagree. But I think on a lot of things, people have a lot of agreement that courage is better than cowardice. It's wrong to rape and torture children for fun. I do think there are are a lot of it's wrong to directly kill an innocent human being for no reason. I Think there's a lot of agreement on this base things. You'll say yeah

That's wrong. My point is go ahead if I set an arbitrary standard say the greatest good for the greatest number For this class of humans or something, then I can say we've made moral progress according to my arbitrary standard. Well, and then you could say, well, if it's arbitrary, why should one follow it? Or you could say this is the correct standard. So if it's arbitrary, we can just say, oh, well, why should I follow that? It's like I can make another standard saying the standard of a good society is the one that has the most alpha males. So, obviously society is getting better

because we have a lot more alpha males. And yeah, maybe by that standard, but why in the world should I think that should be our standard for what a good society is? But then you might say, okay, I'm going to give a standard that is not arbitrary. And yours is a classic utilitarian standard, the greatest good for the greatest number, though that be now that

one, we can philosophize out a little bit. Those they're contradictory what you're trying to do. This leads to I think it was Derek Parfit who coined this the repugnant conclusion. So what do you do? Let's say you have a society, you know, you've got the society and people are at 100% happiness and there's a million people. What if I could snap my fingers and make it two million people at 99% happiness?

Should I do that? Greatest good for the, so we've taken the good down a little, but we have a greater number. I see, then it would seem yes. Then how about 3,098,000? See where this is going. But then what if we get to, all right,

but then eventually it's not really a stopping point. So what if, and the idea here is you get down to a point where life is still worth living. I had a philosophy professor that called it Musac and potatoes. That life, you know, Muzak is like that elevator music you hear, and potatoes. And he said, and if you take away either the Muzak

or the potatoes, they'll kill themselves. But as long as they have that, they still think life is worth living. So you have 200 million people on Muzak and potatoes. Is that better than a million people with 100% happiness? The greatest happiness for the greatest number. So that's called the repugnant conclusion. So it challenges your intuition

that that should be the standard for well-being. It's like, oh, but that leads to a repugnant conclusion. So then, but then that leads to saying, okay, well, we wanna have the highest average happiness instead of the totality, which can lead then to other things like, oh, well, if I'm going to do something that might cause temporary sadness for me,

that will decrease average happiness. And so we ought not do that. Utilitarianism runs into a lot of problems like these because its central focus is about this kind of principle rather than persons and their ultimate good, which I think ultimately that a Christian worldview better explains that God is our ultimate good. That we do have this desire for infinite happiness.

It can't be satisfied in this life, but if we're ordered towards God and we live in accord with the natural law, we can have some semblance of that goodness and happiness, at least in this life. Well, did destiny bring anything up that you weren't expecting or didn't know how to answer as well as you may have? No, I think that the reductios on the question of how we ought to treat unborn children, I could have been a little bit clearer on that or have made

my answers pithier before we moved on in the conversation. But otherwise, I think I anticipated what he was going to bring up and made the replies that I wanted to, both to show the conclusions of what he was saying and also the incoherency in his own position. And I think ultimately the engagement was received very well. I'm always interested to read comments from people who are not Catholic or not pro-life and seeing people who said like, yeah, I think I'm on your side now after this.

And this is diverse. Even I find it good to say that was the most reasonable defense of the pro-life view I've heard. Because most people, when they watch a debate, unless their guy just collapses and vomits and has, you know, and just urinates on himself. Explosive diarrhea for no reason at all. They'll say he won.

Like most people have their guy, right? Well, that reminds me of that debate between Obama and Mitt Romney. Remember that one where Romney just, it was the first debate he did. Terrific. There was still people saying Obama crushed it. Like, I really don't think. Yeah, was that what Candace was that with Candace Crowley?

I was the second one, I think. I remember she's like Governor Romney, Governor Romney. But, you know, Mitt Romney, I mean, yeah, when he gets up there, though, he's like he kind of reminds me of a guy smiley from The Muppets. Yeah, but he's just so clean cut. And you know, I love it. So, yeah. Yeah.

Fantastic. And I have to say, I was really impressed with Destiny's, yeah, behavior. I didn't know him before, right? I hadn't seen him anywhere else. So I he could have been as many people are in debate, snarky, you know, and I think what people say is that he mirrors the demeanor of his opponents.

I see. So I think when he was engaging Kristen and Lila, when at some points they might've gotten more heated towards him. He responded in kind. I think he turned up the gas a little bit on them. I see. And we had heated moments.

It was an interesting engagement, but I felt like we had vigor, but it was still cordial, if that makes sense. Absolutely it does. What was the most heated moment of the debate? I don't know. Maybe just saying, you know, accusations that you're not answering my questions.

Like you would say that to me or like you would give- I've seen you, you've ticked them all off. I answered all of your questions, answer this one. Right, yeah, you're not answering my questions because he would like give an answer saying like, do we have to support a 64 day old embryo, 64 cell embryo, yes or no? Do we have to do this, yes or no?

And this has happened to me, this happened to me in my Matt Dillahunty debate when he just asked me about testimony. And what will happen is people will say they're dodging the question when I'm trying to give a sufficient answer to a question that cannot be answered, yes or no. Like if I said to you,

are non-Catholics going to hell? Yes or no. Right. And I'm like, well, I mean, it depends. Oh, yes or no, Matt, yes or no. Let me answer the question, right? I need to be a little bit more nuanced, right? Yeah, and people will treat that as you're dodging

instead of saying, no, I will give a, now you can filibuster. That is, some people will do that where they will just talk endlessly to get out of the question. And my intent was not to filibuster at all. It was to present, first off, to also present where I think what Destiny said was,

I said, well, there's multiple responses one might give. And he said, I just want to hear what you think. Yeah, I remember that. And what I, my point there is saying, no, I want to defend the pro-life position. And you, you can hold, the pro-life position is very wide tent. Like, you can hold the pro-life position without holding Catholic morality. So, you can hold the pro-life position without holding Catholic morality. So, you can have the pro-life position and say, abortion to save life, the mother is worth it to save two rather than one and not even have to use double effect reasoning because you're just, you're not Catholic, you don't hold to that morality. You could be an agnostic or a non-religious person like Don Marquis, who does the future like ours argument,

who says, well, abortion is wrong. And I gave this at the very beginning of the discussion with Brian. I gave that argument, because I find it's helpful for people who are non-religious to say, look, killing is wrong because it deprives us of valuable futures.

Killing a pig doesn't have a valuable future. You, me, infants and fetuses do. A future like ours. That's why killing is wrong. Why wrong to kill humans, but not non-human animals. And destiny caught onto that well and said, yeah, but what about someone who's gonna have a really bad life?

Someone has an illness or this or that. And I said, you're right. That argument doesn't explain why all abortions are wrong, but I think it explains why a great many of them are wrong. And so it can be useful for people who might say, you know what? Yeah, that makes sense to me. Maybe some abortions are okay, maybe, you know, if you're never gonna be conscious again, blah, blah, blah.

But this does show most abortions are wrong. I can't be in favor of that. So I believe in giving people as many different reasons as possible to hold a view. Even if I don't necessarily endorse them completely. But if they're helpful for someone, I want to put them out there for the person. Yeah. Now, at one point, he kept talking about something pumping intuition, pump, and you were ready for that. That was like, I know we don't want to go for Mike drop moments, but it seemed like if there was one that felt like it.

Well, yes. In listening to destiny, he accuses people when they use certain thought experiments, he says, your intuition pumping. That is a phrase that was coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in a work he wrote back in the 1980s, where he accuses... Now, what's interesting here is that I believe Destiny... So Dennett used that to critique a thought experiment offered by the philosopher John Searle called the Chinese Room. The idea is that could a computer be self-aware, right? If you talk to a computer, you chat GPT or Google's Lambda or whatever,

if you talk to it and it can talk back to you, and you're like, wow, it's a person, it can talk back to me. It must understand what it's saying. Well, Searle's thing is, what if you go to a room and you slide in a text, a paper with Chinese writing, and out comes English? You might say, oh, it must understand Chinese. But inside there's a guy who has instructions,

and when you see this Chinese character you do this English word Here you go. He doesn't understand Chinese He's following he's following instructions and he's saying that a computer that could respond in such a way It's following instructions. Well, but it's it doesn't know It's not conscious just like the man in the room doesn't really know Chinese So the point is Dennett says well, on, there's problems with this thought experiment. It's created to get us to a certain intuition. It's an intuition pump. But later Dennett, though, he clarified that statement in his book, Intuition Pumps and You Know How to Think Clearly, where he

says, look, I criticize Searle for this, but I think intuition pumps are a good thing. I think when Destiny and other online commenters are critical sometimes of some thought experiments, they'll say, you're just intuition pumping, as if it's always a bad thing. But then it says, no, no, no, no, in some cases it's misleading, but in other cases, a thought experiment will,

yeah, wait a minute, that really makes me think about that. And so we really should do that. So I brought up the quote to show, no, you can't just dismiss my argument and just call it an intuition pump and that's the end of the day. You have to give a reason to show why what I'm saying is misleading.

And so that is why in our engagement, I was very careful to use neutral language. Like, I don't think I ever said baby in the conversation. I don't think I ever said it's the conversation. I don't think I ever said it's a baby. It's an emotional term. I talked about human being, infant, newborn, newly born human being to say, look, I'm not using prejudicial language.

I'm just using accurate language that will instigate powerful moral intuitions in us. Why shouldn't we listen to those? Why was it important for you to have that book of photos? Yeah, I am a little, I'm not on the fence. I'm still glad that I brought it. It's tricky, right? I think when people talk about the issue of abortion,

it can become very abstract. And so it's easy to not treat it with the gravity and not to consider this individual living thing that we can kill via dismemberment. Is that right or wrong? When I, for many years, so this would have been 15 years ago or so, I used to go to college campuses with big pro-life exhibits

with pictures of the unborn before and after abortion. And it was very helpful when I would be on campus to say, so this is what you're talking about here. And I point to the abortion photos or you're saying this human being does not have rights and point to a second trimester unborn child. Now I'm not doing that to try to say, look, this is a person, can't you tell right here?

Because there are things that can look like persons that are not, like AI. You know, there's fake Instagram models now. And there are human beings who are disfigured, who don't look very human, but are human. So I'm not using it as a primary argument. But when we make arguments, you have ethos, pathos, and logos. Authority,

reason, and emotion. So you have your authority, here's why I know this, logos, here's my rational argument. But it's fine to have pathos. Here's something to help your emotions be attached to this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And frankly it's so funny some critics who say he's just using emotions, this is irrelevant, he's appealing to emotions, will then say, look at those pictures of a two-celled embryo, that's clearly not a human being.

So they'll say it's illegitimate for me to show pictures of an older child, well then they'll show the early embryo and say, look, that's not a human being. But I will say that that is the drawback, right? Do I show, and I was honest, I'm like, look, here's two cells, here's heartbeat, here's first, second, third trimester.

Do I show the pictures knowing that people will use the early photos to dehumanize the unborn, knowing that the older photos may help humanize them? Ultimately, I think like these are, they're true facts. And so I feel like they are pertinent to the discussion and should be brought in to help make it less abstract. It sounded like you weren't sure though, if you had maybe you have some regret of bringing that book.

It was a bit awkward or what? No, it's just always hard to hear people use the evidence you've brought against you. You know, when someone says like look at that picture of a two-celled embryo or a heartbeat, like that's clearly not human. Why, why did you not bring a photograph of an early second trimester aborted fetus and show that I thought I thought about that. But then I thought that when people accuse me of emotionalism, that that would really skyrocket off of their sensors. I also worried about it being able to allow the video to be shown on YouTube. So that that would really skyrocket off of their sensors. I also worried about it being able to allow the video

to be shown on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that would completely drive someone off the wall to say, oh, he's definitely, it's just emotions for him. So I think that's why I thought about that. I brought a book, I didn't get a chance to read it there. I brought a textbook on how to perform abortions and I highlighted passages from it

that say here's how to do it as a verbal description. But yeah, I felt like that would have been not as productive. I think I would have still made my same points, look at this human being, let's talk about how should we treat him. I think of a comparison to say an ad hominem attack. If I respond to your argument and in so doing, take a swipe at your character,

it doesn't mean I've committed the ad hominem fallacy, or at least I can't be accused of only doing that because I'm responding to your argument. So too, if I only make an argument from emotion without making a logical case, that's an argument from emotion. Yeah, it's not ad hominem. If you say like, he's he's manipulative, so he's wrong. That's ad hominem. He could still be right. If you're saying he's manipulative. So don't trust what he's so you have to be careful what he's saying. That's just an observation. Yeah. How did the debate end? When it when it started wrapping up, we like I've got so much more to say. I really know it went pretty long.

I was impressed. Almost three hours. But it was, I think it was a testimony to the fact, testament to the fact that you can have these good discussions with people who are of good faith. And I think destiny is of good faith. That he, some people accuse him of just manipulating conversations and trying to own people. And I didn't get that sense from him at all.

I felt like we were, I have had conversations where I feel like it's like talking to a brick wall with people. But him, we were able to engage each other's views. And what shows is that Brian didn't have to say, okay, we're done. We talked, we hit all of our points, we summarize each other's views, it naturally ended. Yeah.

We covered our bases. Do you think he did a good job steel manning your position? Yeah. I think that he said that ultimately what my position is about is that it's based on the nature or telos as he said of a human being. They have this rational end and so we ought to protect that human being. I think he could have added that that is the best way to accord with why we protect all humans regardless of their rational abilities and we don't give non-human animals the same kind of treatment.

The fact that his steel man of your position had to do with teleology and not nature, I thought slightly missed the point. Maybe, I mean nature is, you know, what you tend to do, right? So you can also describe it as what you're ordered towards. So I don't know if that was, I mean I think it was basically on kind of the same point. That, I mean, what I said in the debate was that you're valuable not because of your abilities, but because of what you are. And what you are is a kind of thing who is ordered towards certain abilities,

which is teleological in nature. Okay, fair enough. I wanna take some questions from our local supporters, but before we do that, I wanna let people know, hello.com slash Matt, not slash Laura Horne, not slash Laura, none of that. Hello.com slash Matt. And when you Horn, not slash Laura. None of that. Hello dot com slash Matt. And when you sign up for we're doing to show that.

What do you I don't understand you. You talk when I understand it and then when I need you to understand you, I can't. What are you saying? Break. Are we going to? No, I see what you mean. I should have got that. That was pretty good. We have cue cards with like letters. I don't know. Do you break or you good? No, I'm fine. Hello.com slash Matt. Excellent app. Best,

most downloaded Catholic app in the solar system, as far as I know. And so go download them by going to hello.com slash Matt. When you sign up there, you get three months for free. And so in the three months, you don't want it. You can cancel. I have it. My wife has it We play sleep stories for the kids at night. It helps you pray the rosary. It has beautiful Daily exegetical things to listen to it has my lo-fi music It's an excellent app support them out by going to hello.com slash Matt And when you sign up there as opposed to in the iTunes store You'll get it for free for three months in that way Apple doesn't get any money if you sign up over there as well Link will be in the description

We have supers and then I also slack to you a question that I have that I think is interesting and would make a good clip. Sure. Well, let's start. Let's start a question. Let's start with your question. And if you want to just put in your super chats into the slack, I'll go. I'll go locals preferential and I'll go to super chats. Yeah. If there is a 64 cell human that cannot develop,

should we baptize it? Should we baptize him? Oh, like if we have this human being in a Petri dish. Right, and it's not gonna develop, there's no chance of it developing, should we baptize it then and there? Well, I don't see why we would not do that. The older code of canon law, I think the 1917 code,

recommends baptizing in utero children if possible. So I don't know if this has come up yet with frozen human embryos. I wonder how you could do that without damaging the embryo. And if someone's frozen, the water doesn't directly touch them. Yeah, because that would be the other problem here. I mean, I'm not a IVF lab technician, so I don't know if-

Right, but I'm asking what you think, Trent. I'm asking you, you in front of me. Yeah, well, I would say that baptism is for any human being. So if you have a prematurely born child who is alive, if you were to baptize them without haste, like anyone, anybody can perform an emergency baptism. So if you had a child who was born prematurely in a hospital and who is at risk of dying,

then yes, you should baptize that person. So I think that would apply also if we have a human, I think that could apply to the human embryo case. I'm not aware of any formal discussions on that, but I guess it also comes to the question if that kills them in the process. But I guess if like I was allergic to water and I needed baptism and I'm gonna die,

of course he was allergic to water, right? But that's where it gets problematic when we take embryos out of their natural environment. But I would say that if it's capable of being administered. Certainly if you think it's about, if this person is about to die. Of course. Yeah. So I had a child in the ICU and-

I think that if you have a prematurely born human being and you're capable of baptizing them, then you should do that. Yeah. Mitchell Godfrey says, great job, Trent. And by the way, some of these questions, maybe things we've covered, so feel free to answer them quickly.

Yeah, sure. Do you wish you would have pressed him more that he failed to ever define what the earliest form of consciousness is? His entire argument rested on this. You did a great job pointing out how he was smuggling inhuman to justify his middle position.

Yeah, I think though I brought up in many cases, I asked him what makes human consciousness unique and he really could not answer that. But I think that he would be on decent ground empirically to say that the earliest conscious experiences for human beings might be 20 weeks, maybe 12 weeks at the earliest. I would be very hesitant.

Some pro-life said, oh, brain waves are at 40 days. Well, there's electrical signals. Doesn't follow that their consciousness or brain waves like you and I have. So I don't think that he's often the timeline in human development, but I think I did engage him enough saying, what do you mean by human consciousness? And that was never really explained. Trinity Radio gave us $5. Thanks. He says, Trent did fantastic. I was very satisfied. Thank you for doing it, Trent. Shredder, who gave us $5. Thanks. He says Trent did fantastic. I was very satisfied. Thank you for doing it. Trent shredder who gave us $5. Thanks. As one of the most frustrating parts of the debate was Destiny's flat refusal to steel man. Any of Trent's arguments, any

thoughts from Trent on that? Well, I mean, it's my job to make my arguments, I guess, but I don't think he ever misrepresented my arguments. So I think he engaged them. And so I was, I think he understood my points and a lot, if people can do that, that makes me happy, at least, at least for that. Local supporter of the Schaus house says, I was recently approached with a hypothetical in which pregnant mothers seeking abortion are placed in camps to prevent self harm and foeticide, as if I would support this as As someone who worked in psychiatry and has involuntarily held many people

for suicidal, homicidal thoughts, I agree, but I feel that I only conceded ground in their attempt to impeach my morality, reasonability to our audience. How would you answer this? Yeah, so this is the idea, and Destiny brought this up in the debate, that if the unborn are persons, then we have to do all of this crazy stuff

to make sure that they don't die. And so clearly they're not persons because we don't do this crazy stuff. Like monitoring pregnant women, keeping them in hospitals so they don't miscarry, investigating miscarriages. My point is, no, we can treat the unborn as humans, just like we do with any other human being,

but we don't have to, for example, like the questioner there, why would we put pregnant women in camps so they don't hurt themselves? By that logic, do we have a police officer in every home with a stay at home mom to make sure she doesn't hurt her kids? Like, you know, we don't do that with born children.

If a child has died by abuse and we have evidence of that, then we investigate it. But most miscarriages, we don't even, we don't know why they happen. It could just be a genetic abnormality with the child. We don't know what might cause it. So when Destiny is saying that we could just investigate everyone and prosecute, that's just, that's silly.

That's absolute silliness. But we couldn't, but we can investigate like, hey, this baby is addicted to crack cocaine, clearly at your prenatal checkup, you've been doing crack cocaine your whole pregnancy, that person should be held liable for what they're doing. But that doesn't mean, the fact that we would hold some people liable doesn't mean that we treat everybody,

every pregnant woman, as some kind of criminal, or something like that. No more than we treat parents like that with their born children. And the point I brought up in the debate with Destiny was that, like even when born children die, we have a very high standard to prove child abuse. We can have evidence that looks like shaken baby syndrome, like, oh, you shook your baby to death. But there's all kinds of natural diseases that can make it look like a child had those same symptoms. And there have been parents who have been falsely convicted of abuse when the child died naturally. That'd be way more compounded with miscarriage where it is

a much higher fatality rate. Just because I'm saying we shouldn't directly kill innocent human beings doesn't mean that we have to have just this crazy ridiculous unbalanced justice system to protect them. Just treat them like anybody else. Along these lines, should a woman who commits abortion be tried as a murderer? Yeah, I think that we should treat though, the question is, when we put into the law like how we ought to treat different people, and this is a point that I brought up in the debate, it's not always always gonna be the exact thing

that we would want in principle. That's why I gave the example how after the Civil War, the Union didn't throw all the Confederate soldiers in prison for treason. You know, why? That would just start the second Civil War. We live in a society where there's still massive, massive disagreement on the issue of abortion.

And so in order to advance the cause of the unborn, the consequences that might be put out may not be the most ideal ones, but they are the most feasible ones. Another example I gave in the discussion was we could agree that prostitution is bad for society, it harms society, and we ought to punish those who are involved in it.

But we still have many jurisdictions where we understand there is a difference between the men who seek out prostitution and the circumstances that lead women to offer it. And so in many cases, it's only illegal to buy sex, not to sell it, which would seem inconsistent, right? It's like, you know, that's inconsistent. No, we're just understanding

the different circumstances involved and trying to promote the wellbeing of society the best we can. So many of the laws we have now focus on those who perform abortions, not those who seek it, because we live in a society where women, you know, we have politicians, scientists, doctors,

lots of people who say there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's much different than we live in a society where basically everybody agrees and fantasize is wrong. And so you should really, you have no excuse for thinking that this could be okay for you to do that. But we still live in a massively divided culture when it comes to abortion.

However, I think as society progresses, it will make sense to hold women accountable for choosing abortion, just as we hold men accountable for the harm they cause to wanted fetuses. The problem here now is the reason we hold men accountable but not women is because people have a schizophrenic inconsistent worldview on this.

Everybody agrees, oh, you shouldn't do that to a pregnant woman. Society is just broken and inconsistent in that regard. So I think we have to fix these consistencies before we can start to consistently meet out consequences for obtaining abortions. Integrated with Angela Erickson, gave us $5. Thank you. She says, what are Trent's thoughts on using the equal rights argument and or 10 second apologists for lay conversations? I think they're good.

These come from my mentor, Steve Wagner, came up with the 10 second pro-life apologist. If it's growing, it's just you say, look, if it's growing, it must be alive. If it has human parents, it must be human. And human beings like you and me are valuable, aren't we? It's a great way to refocus the discussion and get it going.

It doesn't end the discussion, but it gets you really focused. And then just to say, I can't formulate this one succinctly because I'm vaguely familiar with it. My friend Josh Brom came up with the equal rights argument, and that is just saying, you know, well, why do humans have, I think it's why do humans have equal rights at all?

There must be something equal about us, because if our rights are contingent on rationality, that comes in different degrees, for example. Now you could say, ah, yes, but being rational is categorical, you either are rational or you're not. Like pregnancy, right, you could be really pregnant or you could be far along in pregnancy or kind of along, but you're either are pregnant or you're not.

So rationality, you either are or you're not. But even there you have non-rational humans like infants, but they have equal rights. What's equal about us is our human nature. I think it's a good one. Yeah. Tasha W says, obviously in the context of this debate on abortion, you were right to move the conversation

with destiny away from discussing whether morals are objective or subjective, but say you weren't debating or discussing abortion, how can we make the argument that morality isn't subjective? How do we know things are objectively right or wrong? Yeah, I think here that this is interesting because some people have said to me, well, you shouldn't use intuitions to show morality is objective because people have disagree on intuitions, their emotional responses. Uh, we, we shouldn't use that. Um, but I disagree because ultimately when you're trying to show there is objective

morality, you're going to try to show that there are just statements that just seem self evidently true and they're not mere intuitions. Like you have statements that are like you have statements that are logical analytic truthsevidently true. And they're not mere intuitions. Like you have statements that are, like you have statements that are logical analytic truths. You know, there are no married bachelors. If you know the meaning of the terms, you know that's true. And you've got other things that seem self-evident,

like there are no objects that have color but not shape. If you just start thinking about it, like, no, it's gotta be true. But other things may not be, they seem clear, but they're not as clear to everyone. Like, I think there are other minds beside my own. We can't prove that, but it seems highly intuitive. And so we accept it. Yeah, we have no good reason to think it false. Yeah, so I would just say there are similar intuitions that we use when it comes to morality, that to prove morality is objective, all you have to prove is that at least one statement is true.

One moral statement is true. There could be other moral statements that are subjective. Some people think that if you're proving morality is objective, there's nothing subjective about it. Well, that's not true. You could have cases where an action, whether it's like culpability, whether performing an action,

a person is morally blameworthy will depend on how much the person knew about it. You know, we think of this as a mortal sin, right? Grave action, full knowledge, full consent. So that's a subjective element to evaluating that moral act. Just because some of it's subjective doesn't mean that all of morality is subjective. So you would show with objective morality, I think that pointing to moral truths

that nearly everybody agrees with is a good starting place. And people who would say, no, you should show that natural law is true. Even there, you're gonna have to start with the most basic things like, it is better for a thing to flourish than to wither, or there's objective goods, there are human goods. There's always gonna be an intuition that like,

friendship is good in and of itself. Well, why do I believe that? That's just an intuition you have because you watch PBS and Sesame Street and friendship. And blah, blah, blah. So ultimately you are gonna start with some kind of just what makes the most sense of these kinds of intuitions. And then there's other arguments like the logical argument I gave earlier saying like if morality

isn't objective, you can't make multi-step logical moral arguments, stuff like that. Do you think he responded to that when you brought up the you can't make progress in morality if it's not objective? I know that came up. Yeah, I'm trying to remember the exact reply that he gave to that, but he said something to that. I mean, when it comes to abortion, when somebody says morality is an objective, my quick rejoinder is to say, all righty, so you're saying that, is this a fact? Is this a fact?

Women have the right to have an abortion. If they say it's subjective, no, it's not. So if we all agreed women don't have a right to abortion, they would not have that right, correct? Oh, that's good. So then it's like, now what are you going to do? How can you ever be in a position? The other problem with subjectivism is how can you be the courageous reformer who says society is wrong if morality comes from society?

Right. So if it's just your opinion, who cares? Right. What in the debate could you have done better? Obviously all of us could do better, but was there a specific part that you thought? I think in having just pithier replies on the claim that we treat unborn, that under my view,

unborn humans would be treated with grossly disproportionate care, or how ought we treat those, what should be the legal punishment for those who obtain abortions? I think I could have developed, have pithier answers in reply to that. But the problem is those are complicated questions.

Like I think that if you look at our different consequences, my consequences involve things that are a bit difficult. Like when we meet out legal punishment, it varies widely even among born people. There is no, everybody who kills a human being, they don't get the death sentence or life in prison. It varies widely. You're like, when you look at when women kill

their own born infants, there's wide degree of variety of punishment that's offered there. So I can't give, so the problem is, I could have given a pithier answer, but in a lot of these cases, there is no pithy answer. It's a complicated issue, but it doesn't take away from what I'm saying. So at least trying to get as pithy as possible on those particular issues, I think that would be helpful.

But I think ultimately in comparison, like on my views, like yeah, it's hard to determine whether we should, what care should be given to unborn humans or what should the punishment be for choosing abortion? Those may have some complicated issues, but I think that's far better to have than the position that you can do

where Destiny is very clear, you can do all kinds of horrible things to unconscious human beings that most people would consider to be beyond the pale. Bossman BDC says, morning gentlemen, I thought Trent aced the first half of the debate. I am curious why later on you didn't just say women who were bought at any stage ought to be prosecuted as a rule and then add qualifiers.

It came across like you were sidestepping a difficult question. Thank you both for the recap. Right, but that goes back to where I'm saying here is that right now we have laws that don't necessarily prosecute people who obtain abortions because we live in an extremely divided time. I think the laws that target abortion providers specifically are just laws and I do support them. So that's why I'm not saying oh well those we shouldn't have those laws we should have other laws. I think it does depend much like I love when it comes with my prostitution example is just saying well just say the prostitute should be

thrown in jail. Well no like when we're trying to get rid of the scourge of prostitution that you, there's other factors here. So I think it is hard that some people will see when someone is trying to provide nuance to a difficult question and saying, oh, well, he's sidestepping it or he's not right. When some questions are very difficult, others just aren't. Like when it comes to how we should treat the, like what kinds of violent actions should we take towards the unborn? Speaking of preparation for the debate when you prepare for debate you can obviously always keep preparing

So but then you'll exhaust yourself So do you kind of prepare and then a few hours before just try to stop thinking about it and do some just kind of hang out It's always hard it gets in the back of your mind, so it's hard to work on other things and stuff like that. So that's the one part of debates I don't like. Like right before, it's like, oh, I'm distracted. But OK. Devin says, it seems destiny conceded the debate when he twice admitted he had no justification

for human consciousness being so special as to be uniquely deserving of rights. The fact on which his whole case rested, do you feel you exposed this thoroughly enough or do you wish you would have pressed him more? No, I think I showed that when I asked him, I showed that just because human consciousness is unique, it doesn't follow its worthy of legal protection. All consciousness experiences are unique. If it is special because it allows humans to do certain unique things like rational thought, then that would only apply to some conscious humans,

not others. And so it's either a non-sequitur or it would lead to things like infanticide. Liesl asks, was there a moment when you felt Destiny was doing better in the debate? Where do you think he was at his strongest? Yeah, I think when he's trying to show the absurdities of my view,

anytime the same as what I would do for him. Like if you're a good debater, you just try to focus in. And that's why I said at the very beginning of the debate, when we discuss moral positions, every moral view will ultimately entail, here's the problem, when you have a moral system, it's always gonna end in some kind of a hard or difficult case if you were consistent.

If you're just totally arbitrary, like, ah, I don't care about that. You can keep changing, yeah. You can just change it, but it's arbitrary. If you're consistent, it will always end, and oh, that's difficult. Everybody has those. So the question is not what view doesn't have difficulties.

The question is what view has the most tolerable difficulties and is most rational. So I think that's important here. So once again, I'd rather have a view that cares too much about human beings than one that cares too little. Now this this guy really goes after you here. His name is Kyle Whittington. He says, guy. Yeah, he says, who do you think would win in a fight? Superman or Goku?

You dodged that one pretty hard During the debate I did I did dodge that I said that a person is not morally blameworthy Based on the position that they that they choose Maybe they would fight and then realize they have to team up to face a bigger threat some kind of crossover between Do you take the worst DC villain and the worst Dragon Ball villain and they merge together as a hybrid. And then Superman and Goku, I think they would,

they'd ultimately, they'd fight and it would go to a, maybe it would go to a draw and then they would team up. And then we'd always wonder. And then at the very end, let's try one more time and then cut to black, so. Good, okay. Will Fitzmra says, what does Trent think about burden of proof in arguments on modern social issues,

such as abortion, homosexuality, et cetera? It seems we typically allow the burden of proof to fall on us when our position has been the norm for over a thousand years. How should we push back in these situations? I think the burden of proof is on the person who tries to change somebody else's mind. So if you try to get someone who says they think abortion is okay, I have the burden of proof to show them no, that's wrong. You know, and I think they would have a burden of proof if they're trying to show that I am wrong about something. Well, why should I believe that? I don't think that we necessarily have to defend every action.

Though I do think though, when someone challenges us and says, hey, what you're doing is wrong, as rational beings, we don't have a burden of proof to change their mind, but we do have a burden. So we don't have a burden of proof to like prove that they're wrong, but we at least have a burden to show, okay, I don't have to prove they're wrong, but is anything they're saying correct about what I am doing?

Or at the very least, because they could still be incorrect and I could still be doing something wrong. They could say, you're doing action, when you do action X, that is wrong for Y reason. But it turns out Y reason is bunk. But X could be wrong for Y reason. But it turns out Y reason is bunk. But X could be wrong for Z reason. Like, oh wait, it actually is wrong, but for a different reason, you know, or something like that.

So I have the burden to say they say what I'm doing is wrong is what I'm doing wrong. Like any action we take, if we're given some kind of indicator this is not right, whether it's another person or our own conscience, we should do some kind of investigation to show, all right, is this right or wrong? And if we should do some kind of investigation to show, all right, is this right or wrong? And if we're really in doubt, we should refrain unless we have some really

extraordinary exigent circumstance. Andy P says, a bit off topic, Trent, I've noticed several times, including recently, that you've engaged with arguments concerning infinities and mathematical arguments. Have you heard of the surreal numbers? This construction of numbers allows for clearer definitions of infinity and I think philosophers would find them useful if they knew them. Yeah, I think there's a mathematician named Jay Conway who puts forward surreal numbers. So I remember that the puzzles about infinity are often used to show the past must be finite because the past cannot be actually infinite. And I know Graham Oppie, who is a well-known atheist, probably, I don't know

he's really well known, but he's probably one of the best atheist philosophers out there. One of his retorts to the infinity arguments of the past is that you can have infinity with Conway's surreal numbers, but I think he says that ultimately even when you use them, they can't really be mapped to the real world itself. It's about infinity in the real world rather than just abstractly. So yeah, so I don't think it provides a way out for infinity can exist abstractly. You get a lot more problems and exist concretely in the real world, but I am working now on having a dialogue with Jimmy Aiken on the Kalam argument. So I-

Terrific. I hope it goes better than the one we did on my channel with Craig. Well, I mean, I still thought that was a very interesting one for sure. Just cringey. Why do you say that? Because both seemed quite frustrated with the other. You texted me halfway through the debate and said, this is like watching your parents fight and not wanting them to divorce.

Totally. I'm like, dad, dad, stop it. Leave other dad alone. It's okay guys. It's okay. Like, look, these are two people that like you look up to. Like I've looked up to Jimmy for a long time. I looked up to Craig for a long time. Then when you see them fighting, it's like, please don't.

Why can't we be one happy Christian apologetic family here? So yeah, I think there was a little bit of that tension there. But like when Jimmy and I will engage, what will be interesting, it won't be like a replay of what you have with William Lane Craig, because my views on the Kalam argument have been evolving since I've been defending it.

And I just did an episode recently on what I think is wrong with Craig's argument, how to improve it. So I think there are ways to improve his argument, but it modifies it a fair amount. So I find those arguments to be really fascinating to still show from reason alone, the past is infinite, or at least that past causal series are finite.

Uh, so, uh, we're going to try to record that at the conference. The Catholic answers conference. That'll be amazing. Yeah. I like doing these more in person too. I've got a lot of debates scheduled in the future. Yeah. I'm trying to do all of them in person cause this is more fun. It is. Yeah. Speaking of two dads and abortion and stuff, there's been some popular people who have engaged in surrogacy.

I'm thinking of Dave Rubin and others. Oh, yes, yeah. So I wanna ask you why surrogacy is immoral. I think that I've thought about writing a book actually, one day when I can settle down, maybe when I'm not in the podcast game anymore, I can sit down and write my really thick books. I wanted to write one called human rights before birth.

It's not just the right to life. I think the right, an unborn child's right to life, also it includes essentially his right to life is just the right to reside in his mother's womb. So I think children have a right to reside in their mother's body. So for example, I think that if we did invent artificial wombs,

it would be immoral to take a child out of the womb just because a woman no longer wanted to be pregnant. I think a child has a natural right to exist in his mother's womb. We might take them out temporarily, maybe to do like a spina bifida surgery or something for the child's good,

but they have a right to exist there. They have the right, a child also has a right to come into existence as an act of love. A child has a right to not come into existence through an act of fornication, prostitution, adultery. They have the, children have a right, how they come to be. Artificial insemination?

Yeah, definitely heterologous artificial insemination. That would be if you're using another person's sperm to impregnate a wife, but there are discussions about could you, for example, if the husband and wife use a porous condom in the marital act and there's a problem with getting the sperm to the egg, in the marital act using a porous condom in the marital act. And there's a problem with getting the sperm to the egg. In the marital act, using a porous condom, extracting the sperm, and then inserting it into the wife's body.

Many Catholic moral theologians would say that that can be licit, because it is assisting the marital act, it's not replacing it. I don't know how you can make that argument. It certainly seems to be replacing it. But you have the marital act, it then ends, you've got some argument. It certainly seems to be replacing it. You have the marital act, it then ends. You've got some syringe or something, you're replacing it.

Well, would you agree though, that it's different than a husband engaging in masturbation and using the sperm to fertilize an egg and putting it in the woman's body? That's replaced the marital act. I don't know if I would agree. But one of them has the marital act. One of them has the marital act,

but then something else happens that isn't the marital act that impregnates the wife. Right, would you say it assists what is happening, that the marital act takes place, sperm is emitted during intercourse, and then some of that sperm is then placed within the woman's body to allow pregnancy to occur? It just seems like two separate acts to me.

I'm obviously more sympathetic to it, but it's a separate act. The marital act ceases, and then something artificial occurs to impregnate the world. Yeah, so I think the term that is used for this is called gamete. So the church has left this an open question. It's called gamete intra-Phalopian transfer, gift.

All right. Who came up with that little? I don't know, I love people that can come up with good acronyms. Like good for you. So that is something that the church has left as an open question rather than saying whether it's permissible or impermissible. Similar to embryo adoption, Magisterium has not officially given a teaching on that question. So I think that one could make an argument that like you're making that it is two separate acts.

It's some kind of artificial fertilization of some kind. Or someone might say, well, they have engaged in the marital act. This is just helping to overcome some kind of a disability that's preventing the sperm from reaching the egg or something like that. But any who, but back, but surrogacy though, that in Dignitatis Personae, I believe,

talks about the wrongness of surrogacy and defines it. Now here, this would be, I'd say would be clearly wrong, that this would be often how this occurs is you create the human being outside of the womb in vitro, then you place them in the body of a woman who is not their biological mother to allow the pregnancy to continue, they're born, and then they're adopted by someone else.

So with the case of Dave Rubin, well here you can have five people involved in the parenthood of a child. You can have the sperm donor, the egg donor, the gestational surrogate, and then the adoptive parents, who I guess in this case are of the same sex. And here I would say that this fundamentally violates a unborn child's right to come into existence as the fruit of the love between a husband and wife through them fully giving violates a unborn child's right to come into existence as the fruit of the love between a husband and wife

through them fully giving themselves to one another in the marital act. Oh, by the way, when I said the gift thing, there was an important, I said porous condom. I know, yeah, yeah, just to clarify. Yeah, it's not, because there, that would be contracepting. That would be, that would replace the act. But the fact is, it does continue.

Some sperm gets through. And if it got through and fertilized the egg, happy trails. Good. We're not trying to prevent that at all. It just hasn't been working for that couple. Okay. So if surrogacy is immoral, can a gay couple adopt? Or do you think that's also immoral?

Well, I think here that when we talk about the morality of adoption, when you say gay couple that's different than same sex couple. A homosexual couple in an engaged in a homosexual relationship. Right. Like Dave and his husband or quote unquote husband. Right. Because we need to parse everything out carefully. Because for example, it could be the case the best household to raise a child might

be his mom and her sister. That's a same sex couple. They're not a union, but they're raising this child together without a masculine influence. Whereas like the mother and the sister versus more estranged man and woman who are relatives. That there it's like,

yeah, it's nice to have the masculine presence in the home, but it's better for the child to be with his biological mother, even if there is no masculine presence in that home, or just raised by a single mom than necessarily who can care for him or her. So when it comes to adoption, what we always try to do with adoption, I guess I would have two arguments here. One would be we try to replicate the lost mother and father as best we can. We can never duplicate, we try our best to get close. So the ideal is going to be mother and father.

And we try to get as close to that as we can. So I think that a same-sex couple in general, that's gonna be very far away, and only in an extraordinary case, would you have a same sex, two individuals of same sex. But I also think that children should be raised, ideally in a home that is free from moral disorder.

Ideally, yeah. Yeah, ideally. But if there's a zombie apocalypse and the only people that exist are three. Or Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin. I'm here reporting on the apocalypse without liberal bias. Yeah, him, his fella, boyfriend, and then they find some kid in the street. These are not living challenged people. They're zombies. Language is met.

In that situation, I think everyone would understand, well, of course, having a gay couple take care of this kid because there's no other option for it. Yeah, better than leaving them to the zombies, sure. But I think we can say that yes, brain eating zombies are gonna have more, they're gonna be more disordered than those who are engaged in sodomy. So yeah, like I said, when you get in these cases,

you're always, sometimes you're choosing the least bad situation. But ideally there are, but especially when it comes to infants, there are thousands of people who are waiting to adopt infants. We have no shortage. Yeah, people want to go to other countries to adopt infants. So we have absolutely no shortage.

And here, so no shortage there. But then also the other problem here is it's not just the adoption. That's not just, that same sex adoption. With surrogacy and IVF, it's are we gonna manufacture kids for people, for adults? Children are, no one has the right to a child. That is, that's like slavery.

Saying that I have the right to have a child. Nobody has the right to another human being. Now people have the right to marry and attempt procreation. People have that right. They have the right to pursue marriage with other people. But you don't have the right to a child as if like you have the right to a job or the right to certain property.

It's a person. The child is the one who has rights. They have a right to their mother and their father. We have a question here from Traditional Catholic Preservation Society. Thanks for the super chat. I hate modernists, but go ahead. Trent, sounds very modernist. Your belief that we are better off than hunter-gatherers is totally false. Read an ethnography. is that what that is?

Ethnography and stop parroting frauds like Pinker. We're better off than hunter gatherers. That is, I- Could you articulate that? I mean, it was very- I will do the best. What do you think he meant? Well, that's really rad-trad.

We need to go back to 20,000 years ago when we were just hunting and gathering. That's probably the most rad trad position I've heard yet This is you know, it's just something you talked about on the I have I have argued before that Humanity has made moral progress in a lot of areas like we live in one of the least We live in at least one of the we live in one of the least one of the least, we live in at least one of the, we live in one of the least violent times in world history when you talk about things like let's say armed conflict or wars. Now I will say we do live in one of the most violent times in human history given the widespread

proliferation of abortion, for example. But part of that is due, the reason that abortion is so widespread is because we have better gynecological tools, interventions. We also live in one of the times where pregnancy is now one of the safest, it's the safest it's ever been in human history, which is a good thing. You know, that it's not the norm

for children to die in childbirth or women to die. It's a tragedy. I mean, it was always a tragedy, but it's something that, you know, honestly, I think throughout most of human history, women understand they're getting married. You would have that feel and having children is a feeling of like going to war. Like when men have a feeling of going to war, this sense of I'm going to do this and there's a chance I might not come back. There's all kinds of maternal mortality throughout human history, things like that. So when you look at, let's say, like wars and armed conflicts,

society's gotten much more peaceful over time. Slavery was once the norm in human civilization, and now it is much less. And where it does happen, we recognize it's a crime we ought to stamp out. So this comment, I mean, so there are other people who say to me like, no, we had it better a thousand years ago and medieval Christendom and there were things are better. The fact that blasphemy is that people understand generally that it's awful, that was better to have that then than the way it is now.

But I also think that understanding that slavery is something we ought not do anymore, understanding that marital rape is real, you ought not rape your spouse. It wasn't marital rape to not become a crime in this country till like the 90s, the 1990s. You know, it took court cases to prove a husband could even rape his spouse.

So what he says here about hunter gatherers, I don't know how you could hold that it was better to live in a hunter, especially as a traditional Catholic, to live at a time where people only had the faintest idea of who God was, and half of all children died by the time they were five. And there was monogamy,

but also probably rampant adultery as well. And I don't know. Things, there were things that were better in the past. Frankly, I miss the nineties. I miss them. I miss playing Pogs, eating Otter Pops and- Drinking Mountain Dew. Yeah, drink-

Too much. Nesquik. I was more of a Nesquik kid. Put in all the powder I wanted into the cup. And then like, I felt like race relations were way better in the nineties. Like you could just turn on TV and there are black led comedies everywhere. And I mean, obviously there was still race problems. You know, we had a Rodney King and had these issues, but I felt like we weren't on our phones on all the time. It was, you just went to the park and skateboarded and it was awesome. But then you look back and there were things like, oh, that actually wasn't that great.

So there are things that are good in the past. We got to be really careful about rose colored nostalgic glasses. Jim gave us a $10 super chat. Thank you. Although is that Canadian CA? So that's like, check. Are you looking at it? It's 50 cents. I'm just joking. I'm joking, Canada. I love you, Canadians. I love watching these two discuss the issues. Thanks so much. That's nice.

Let's see. Fetrib one, probably not their real name. Says the trip. Yep. OK, good. They're like, this is a family name. Jaqueline. Aaron. Hey, Trent, I liked how you argued pro-life.

I don't get the disagreement proves there's an objective truth or something like that. Can you explain? So when you talked about moral disagreements prove objective. Right. So the idea here is. Then one argument against moral realism, that there are objective moral truths, is that people disagree about morality. So how could they be objective if people disagree? And I would say that doesn't follow at all. Like if people try to solve a math problem,

they will disagree about the correct answer, but there is still a correct answer. People once disagreed about the shape of the earth, but there was a correct answer. The fact that there is disagreement, and even if intractable, we're not sure how to resolve it, it doesn't follow that there's no correct answer or no fact of the matter, just because people disagree.

Now, he brought up, yeah, but there is disagreement where there is no fact of matter. That's true. There is disagreement where there is no correct answer, like arguing about fictional characters or subjective preferences or things like that. But the fact that disagreement itself does not disprove objectivity or objective morality.

And my further argument is, I think that disagreement in the moral realm, it is what we would expect if we are trying to seek out an answer. The fact that we disagree, but it's not like the kind of disagreement when you argue comic book nerd stuff or what tastes better or this or that. The fact that we hold each other morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for getting the right answer and saying, no, you need to believe this. You can't believe this kind

of stuff. The fact that we try to convince each other in spite of our disagreements, that we have a duty to do that, I have a duty to show you the light and you have a duty to listen to me, that doesn't really make sense if there is no objective fact of the matter we're trying to get to.

That's the point I was trying to make. Yeah, and what if someone were to reply, to try to make a strict analogy to say fashion? Because we all understand we don't do that with fashion. Like you need to be wearing flared jeans. See the light. Right. However, when it comes to what we call moral issues,

this has to do with whether or not sometimes we're gonna live a happy life. And so the stakes are a lot higher, even if the stakes are relative ultimately. So therefore it makes sense why I'm trying to convince you to something that is relative. But it's meaningful. There's a bit of an analogy here with health.

Now, it's funny as Sam Harris makes this analogy and tries to say that morality is just like medicine. It's just a science of human wellbeing. Now I think that he is incorrect to reduce it to that amount, but he is correct in that morality is about human flourishing and that they're objectively good and bad ways for us to flourish or stagnate as human beings. Okay.

We got a super chat here from Up The Monks. Good. What resources would you suggest for folks that want to hone their skills debating social issues important to our faith, for example, abortion or homosexuality? Yeah, well there's a variety of books here. In my book, I wrote it with Leila Miller, Made This Way, it's about how to talk to kids about morality. I think there's a reading list in there. But authors I'd recommend, I mean, it just depends. My book, Persuasive Pro-Life, just got its second edition. So that's available now.

It's shop.catholic.com. I think it's a good book on abortion. If you want a good philosophical book, Chris Kasor's book, The Ethics of Abortion, is very good. William May has a great book on Catholic bioethics. I believe it's Janet Smith and I think it might be Chris Kaser as well, did a book on life choices. It's just a nice little short bioethics book, Q&A. Another, when it comes to sexuality issues and morality issues, Ryan Anderson has a lot of great books. His books on when Harry met Sally on transgender, the future of marriage. He just did a book with Alexander DeSantis on abortion. Anderson's got a lot of great stuff.

So a lot of good stuff to recommend there. Okay. And then I get a question that has nothing to do with what we've been talking about. How has Laura's fame affected your marriage? It is hard to live in the shadow of my colossally famous and funny wife. No, all the time I get emails, someone will email me about something and then they'll say,

by the way, I love your wife's channel. It's been fun. It's hard though, and you know how this goes. It's hard when something starts as like a hobby and then it's like, oh, we gotta get a video up. It's been two weeks. It's like treated like a job. And it's like, you don't want it to like ruin the fun

That you have with it, but we we still get to have a lot of fun with it It is hard though with I think this summer was hard because like with the kids are home It's like where do you find the time to like film this stuff? Like they want to be in it or they they always want something like I'm hungry play with me We're making YouTube videos here. Come on I was once giving a talk at a legata summit and they asked me to be the emcee and I've never emceed before and I will Never do it again. It's not good at it. I don't like it. I feel weird So I'm getting out there and I'm doing the emcee thing and then eventually my wife came up. We did it together

I'm like, you know, you just you just do it because she's really good Yeah, and then someone came up to me one of these kind of like bold short rich looking guys He's like hey to me. Hey, we're chunkle money bags the guy from Monopoly. Yeah, that's him. Here's Lamonical But Fred I don't talk to you about Baltic. I'm he said he said hey, you're not funny you you're fantastic Oh god, I know that that's why she's doing it You don't have to tell me he and he gave it to you on a community chess card that said you are not funny. You go to jail. So do you have people stopping you recognizing Laura and not you?

I'm sure. Yes, I have had, um, they're like, you're the weirdo who had the pacifier in Laura's video. Correct. Yes. I'm also married to this woman. Totally. Uh, yeah, I, I, I love it. It's been fun. I like to think of myself as kind of the straight man in the routines, like in comedy duos. What was it?

It was Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, I think. They were a comedy duo, Jerry. Lighty, hi, lighty. And he's the more zany one, and Dean Martin's kind of the more reserved one. And so Laura is kind of the more zany one. And when I'm in the videos, I just kind of have the more solid beats to play off of.

And so it's fun to do that. What do you got upcoming? Lots of stuff. I have like five dialogues or debates. I'm working, I have two books I'm working on. Then after that, it'll be a break for a long time. One on a comprehensive defensive theism about the new arguments for God. I'm going to call it the new case for God. Might end up replacing answering atheism. I don't know,

but stuff I've been working on. And then a book on, I was going to call it Protestantism at the Bar of History, because there are Protestant apologists in the past and more recently Gavin Ortland, Matthew Barrett and others saying that church history supports Protestantism more than Catholicism. And I'd like to treat that in a long extended book. So that'll be a thick book that I'm, I'm excited about. So those are two, those would be a few years away. Oh, I did submit a book for publication though, against liberal Catholicism. That's been sent off to the printer, to the editor, I should say. So that will deal with Father James Martin and other people that don't outright say the church

is wrong, but confuse people. And I want to call out that confusion and show what's wrong with the arguments that they're making. So that shouldn't be a controversial book at all, right? And then just debates and dialogues. So I'm gonna talk to Jimmy about the Calm Argument at the conference. After that, Ali Beth Stuckey on Catholicism. Wow, she agreed to debate you? Yeah, well, it was really funny.

I sent email a while back, didn't hear anything, and her producer reached out to me and wanted to see if we could do it in August. But I had the thing with Destiny. So and that will not go well for her. I don't mean to be rude. She's a bright and I don't doubt she's bright. I don't doubt she's lovely, charming, moral, brighter than me. I'm willing to concede all of that. But it still seems like a spoon to a knife fight.

I mean, she went up against George and George did better than her. And George isn't a full time an apologist like you are. Well if she wants to have a conversation I'm glad to help her and I don't think that it would be unfair. I thought she brought out some standard arguments that many other more skilled Protestant apologists would bring up. But I think that she has a very large platform and she's willing to engage these issues. So if she's willing to do it, I'm willing to have a good conversation with her. Did you watch that debate between Jimmy Akin and the other Paul? I watched a little bit of it, but didn't get a full chance.

That was a spoon to a gunfight. Oh my goodness. And props to Paul for having the courage to get in the ring with Jimmy. He probably went in knowing this isn't going to go well for me. And he was right in that assessment. Oh wow, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Jimmy's at a- Jimmy's a terrifying guy to interact with. Well, think about this. If I said, I'm not gonna debate Ali Beth Stuckey

because this just wouldn't be fair. What if Jimmy is like Trent, I just can't talk to you about Kalam. It wouldn't be fair. You and your baby spoon have no match against me. Like I wouldn't want Jimmy to say that to me, Matt. So he could- It wouldn't be true either You and your baby spoon have no match against me. Like I wouldn't want Jimmy to say that to, to me, Matt. So it wouldn't be true. Either. I don't know. That's just two guns. That's two guns. That's just me and him with two guns and everyone has a gun and it's a Mexican

standoff. What if he pays you to to lose and vomit on stage? Trent, it's really important to me that I look good in this debate, that I win this debate. Here's a bag full of cash. I'm gonna need you to vomit and start weeping. I gotta pay for Catholic school, so I might seriously think about that. So yeah, oh, I have a few others to check out.

Mike Gendron, we're gonna do one on do Catholics preach a false gospel? So that's gonna be, he's done, he didn't like to be a swore, but he's willing to do this with cross examination, by the way. Kyle's like, yes. So he said, yeah, we're gonna do it in person

at a church in Dallas, cause he lives there. And then what else did I have? I was reached out, modern day debate reached out to me to do a debate with Dilla Hunty on atheism, which is because we debated the resurrection. Yeah, and I made an argument for God that he ignored. So we didn't get to talk about the existence of God in our debate on resurrection, so we could debate atheism.

Oh, and James White has accepted to debate offers. What? Yeah. With you. Yes, finally. What are you gonna debate? So I said I would debate him on Sola Scriptura, and then to, out of fairness, I should take the affirmative on some Catholic thing. So I offered to debate him on what I Scriptura, and then, out of fairness, I should take the affirmative on some Catholic thing. So I offered to debate him on what I thought was a good parallel, which is apostolic

succession. I don't think it's really wise. I don't believe in doing debates where you're far removed from the other person. So I don't think it's very fruitful for Catholics to debate like the papacy with Protestants. Because if you all, or like, let's say the bodily assumption of Mary with a Protestant, if you're, if the other person is basically going to use a sola scriptura lens the whole time, it's not as fruitful. Similarly, like when I see Christians debate biblical slavery with atheists, like is the Bible wrong on biblical slavery? They get torched. All the atheist has to do is just read these really uncomfortable passages from the Old Testament. And good luck explaining your way out of it

without just saying, you can't, we're presupposing God's morality, you can't say that he's wrong. You either come off as unsure or just totally unhinged from reality. But I do believe you can explain biblical morality and understanding it as progressive revelation and that not everything in the Old Testament was ideal. Pope Benedict talks about this in Verbum Domini, but it takes a lot of time to explain that,

that you just don't have in a debate. So just as a Christian shouldn't do that with an atheist on a controversial issue, I think Catholics, it's not as fruitful in debate if you're too far away. Similarly, Jimmy Akin gives the example, he's not going to debate whether Christ had two wills with the Jehovah's Witness, who doesn't even believe Jesus is God. Like you're just so far apart from that person. So the papacy, like to me, you can't wrap your head around the papacy unless you already believe the authority of the apostles has been given to successors. Like Catholics and the Orthodox can debate the papacy, right? Because we're just wondering,

yeah, we agree that the authority of the apostles are with the patriarchs, does the Bishop of Rome have unique authority among them? And even the Orthodox will say, yeah, he's the first among equals, but what does that mean? Well, now we can debate, we're much closer, but you can't just start with like, well, where's the papacy in the Bible? But because you can make, now some people are trying to make that argument, but I think it's gonna be hard

in a constrained time-limited debate. But I do think apostolic succession is a fair topic. So I offered that to White and he said he didn't like that topic, which is interesting because Gavin Ortland has debated that topic and has said he'd be happy to debate me on it. So maybe one day in the future. So I said, I gave some others, he liked purgatory. And that's one I feel like, yeah, we can offer biblical and historical and logical evidence for that. Because purgatory itself is not a distinctly Catholic doctrine. I'm just going

to be defending what might be called mere purgatory. The idea that believers are purified of sin after death. And it may be the case that some temporal punishments of sin, if they are not suffered in this life, are suffered in the next life. And by debating purgatory in a general way, you're not going to have to get into indulgences, right? Because you say, maybe it's the case. Because I would say that the Orthodox,

even though they don't believe in, they don't use the name purgatory, they wouldn't talk about, the fire of purgatory was a very common image used by medieval theologians in the West. But the Catechism says that it uses this language, but it's not a part of the teaching that purgatory is some kind of literal fire that cleanses you. So like the Orthodox say, we don't believe in fire that

cleanses you, but they pray for people for the 40 days after they've died. And as I said, like Lewis believed in a kind of purgatory. Jerry Walls is a Protestant, has a book on that. So I think it's a doctrine that is something that is defensible, limited in scope. And I think there is really good evidence for. So I said, yeah, let's, let's debate that. Cause I think the last debate he had was with like father Peter Stravinsky's on, on purgatory. And he did debate Peter. He's this guy, Peter Williams or Williamson in England, on indulgences. And the debate he did there was do indulgences contradict the gospel. So that's interesting. So like the Marian dogmas, I debated Steve Christie, a Protestant apologist,

on the Marian dogmas, on your show. But the phrasing of that was very particular. on the Marian, on your show. But the phrasing of that was very particular. I defended the claim that they don't contradict scripture. That's one, I've even thought about writing a book on that. Like, do Catholic doctrines contradict scripture? Even if you can't prove them all explicitly from scripture because we don't believe in sola scriptura, a Catholic can firmly say nothing the church believes

contradicts what is taught in scripture. The argument would be more that it's not found there, but nothing we say is contradicted by what is in scripture. That's a debate I'll gladly have on a topic. Did you see, I know you did, the debate between Michael Jones and a Muslim fella on child brides? Yeah, there's one. It's like, do you wanna give people a platform or not? But it's like, it's an awful view that is put forward. Yes, I watched part of it because,

oh, this was in an episode I did on an argument for the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which I think is a really interesting argument that I want more people to explore. And it's Jack Handler? It's escaping me at the moment. Or no, Jack Mulvane, Mulaney, not Mulaney. I'll have to look it up in a sec. But he's a philosopher who's defended this view. And the catechism actually alludes to this, that in order for Mary to freely say yes to allowing God to impregnate her, she had to be able, in order to fully consent,

her yes could not have been done out of fear in any way. So like, did Mary say yes to God only because she was afraid, because imagine this, do you want God, the God of the universe telling a 14 year old Jewish girl? I want you to bear the Son of God and That 14 year old Jewish girl says I'm gonna say yes because the God of Israel does Pretty bad things to people if they say no to him. What if what if well, let me just finish so

That would be coercion that would make God akin to a rapist. But if the reason that Mary says yes is because she always acts in accord with God's will, and so she's never afraid that a decision she makes will disappoint him, then she is free to say yes or no. So the idea here is that Mary must be in a position to say yes to the annunciation, where that her yes or no, that she would know that either would be pleasing to God,

either would please him, no would not disappoint him or sin in any way in the slightest, that she could be truly free. And to do that, she would have to be completely detached from sin. And so that would give an argument that Mary was given a special grace by God to be free from sin so that she could freely assent to, um, to the, um, uh, virgin birth to the annunciation.

Jack Mulder Jr. Jack Mulder. That's it. Thanks. I'm like Maloney, John, John, Jack, Maloney, John Malaney. But if you don't mind me just asking a pointed question here, in that response video you did, not a response video, but on the Immaculate Conception, you had pointed out that Pope Francis has talked about upping the level of marriage for women from 14. But if you have a moral problem with that, isn't that an argument against Catholicism

that Catholics would allow 14-year-old women to marry? I don't think that it's a problem because when you have social doctrine, when you have its application over time, sometimes there are situations that are going to change how these moral teachings are applied. And this goes back to the death penalty debate, right? Is it the catechisms, revision of the death penalty penalty saying, how can you say the death penalty is wrong? Even those who defend the use of the death penalty today, they have, they would not believe the death penalty should be carried out today like it was a thousand years ago in a medieval kingdom. So a thousand years ago, you could be given the death penalty

for hunting on the Lord's land for grand theft. I think that I'm trying to remember, I haven't fact checked this, but there was a pope who I think said that adult, that the death penalty should be given to adulterers. And so I need to check that to make sure I haven't fact-checked that completely. But suppose it were true, like I would ask, even those Catholics who defend the death penalty today, most of them would say that the death penalty should not be given to adulterers, it should not be given for grand theft. So our application of it, society, that maybe there was a time where, and this goes back to Old Testament law, right? We don't, those Old Testament disciplinary laws on blasphemy. Well, capital punishing is necessary for blasphemy in that time because if someone blasphemes, what if they lead Israel astray to worship other gods

and God's chosen people are ultimately in danger because of this? From these pagan tribes that are around them, you know, they're in a very precarious state where you have these very severe laws in a very lawless time. But we live in a different context. So I would say they're even, so when it comes to the death penalty, allowing feudal societies, slavery, and then the question of when can people marry. Well, if you live in a society where people enter into adulthood fairly early, where there is no concept of adolescence, where people are marrying at 14 or 15,

that you need to have some kind of law that that can't allow would have never sanctioned like a five-year-old marrying somebody because you're not ordered towards the end of marriage, which is procreation. You're not ordered towards having sexual union. And especially you don't have, and you don't have the mental fact, even if you were precocious, even if you had precocious puberty, you don't have the mental faculties ordered towards the unitive and procreative ends of marriage, like

being a mother and father, being in a lifelong union and consenting to this. So if you had lived in a society where 14, 16, 18 year olds are entering into essentially adulthood for that society, then you might allow marriage in these cases. So you're not against that in principle, a 14 year old girl? Not in principle. There might be cases, rare now, more common in the past, in the distant past, where that's something where people needed. That's when they started adulthood. But thankfully society is advanced where we recognize, no, actually at those ages, your brain is still developing. You don't have great foresight on things.

And it's good as a society. It is bad if adulthood gets delayed to like 30. That's what I was about to ask. So that's bad. New canon law. You have to be 30 to like 30. That's what I was about to ask. You know, so that's, that's bad. New canon law. You have to be 30 to get married. No, yeah. So that, that, that would be, that's bad when it, it gets delayed and say, no one's expected to be an adult. But as we grow in our knowledge of understanding and society has changed so that people can have more of an extended childhood to grow and develop

to become fully formed adults, then I, then the church can keep track of that. But it's the same way. I mean, canon law, it used to be younger, I think in the 1917 code, it was even younger, or you had the age lower, maybe 12 or 13. So that itself has changed from the 1917 code to the 1983 code. I'm sure we can look this up probably.

So to raise it again to even to 18, honestly like, sorry I don't wanna go on too long, but whatever, that's what this show does. It's funny when people talk about the transgender stuff, they'll say like, well you're against kids getting transgender surgery, why aren't you against 16 year olds getting breast implants? I am against 16 year olds getting breast implants. Se am against 16 year olds getting breast implants.

Seamus, did you see Seamus' video? If you're against drag shows, why aren't you against taking kids to Hooters? I am against taking kids to Hooters. You're for that. You're projecting on the bait. So like when people say these kinds of things, like no, I don't think that a 16 year old

should get breast augmentation except maybe the rare case like it's the one 16 year old that had breast cancer and had a double mastectomy like the one case in the medical literature or something like that but otherwise no I think that it's fine being consistent here that we shouldn't have cosmetic surgery at least serious reconstructive surgeries like that from minors. Or, and honestly, I don't think kids should get married under 18 here in the US. I don't think we should have, the argument for that is

what if a 16 year old gets pregnant? Isn't it better for her to be married to her 19 year old boyfriend? At least they're together to raise the child. I know, I don't have a firm view here, but I highly lean towards, I don't think that's a great idea. I don't think people can really consent well to this anyways, and that we should have other resources there. So yeah, I'm all in favor of raising that, I guess.

The 17 code has it at 14 for girls and 16 for boys. Okay, I think I think even because even, in church history and in other jurisdictions, I think it's even been 12 throughout church history. Right. But yeah, I just, yeah. No, that's, that's fine. You specifically mentioned the 17th. So that's what I was checking. You know, that's fine. I do think though earlier in church history, it's been even younger than 14. Yeah. Brandon says, thanks for the super chat.

I'd argue more people are intellectually lazy in condition by their phones and media to not think very hard. Hence sloganism and memes and decreased attention spans going off the Hunter comment, Hunter and gather comment. So I guess he's, I don't know. Well, I would say no, because for example, it's interesting in one sense, social media has caused us to have poorer attention spans. Maybe it's caused people to be more interesting

so that we can finally be attentive. No, but we've also developed, for example, we've made moral progress in that we're in a unique time in human history where people are able to engage in empathetic and abstract reasoning. And for example there was a guy who gave a TED talk a while back saying like he was trying to explain to his grandfather like why racism is wrong and so he says look what

if one day you woke up and your skin was black and everybody mistreated you like if that would be wrong for them to do to you, isn't that wrong for you to do to a black person? Now does that make sense to you? If I would say to you that? Well, here's his response. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. How could I ever wake up and have black skin? It's because the idea of even engaging a hypothetical just made no sense to him.

That could have been because of his low IQ or something. No, we've done studies on this in hypothetical and empathetic reasoning. We've gotten much better at that now than when people are tasked to do that 100 years ago. Even honestly, for many of us, our moral reasoning has changed for better or for worse because we're more familiar with fiction.

We're more familiar with reading books or watching movies and seeing things from other people's points of view. Whereas throughout most of human history, that people just weren't cognizant of that idea of being of what would life be like from another person's perspective. It just didn't occur. So I think that you're correct that modern technology has

debilitated us in some ways, but hunter-gatherers, they couldn't even really do math. When you had sheep, when the sheep would enter the pen, when the sheep would leave, you would pick up a stone for each sheep. And then when the sheep would come back, you would lay each stone down to know that all the sheep were back. But you didn't have things like, well, multiplication tables or being able to do even just basic algebra that we could do with a sheep herd or something like that. That was just beyond people of a hunter-gatherer time. And in hunter-gatherer times, you didn't have video games where you could be a hunter or gatherer and not be eaten. Right. So. And I think also our spatial awareness, like video games have improved, at least for men,

I think have really helped their spatial coordination and abilities to time. It's so funny when Laura and I do stuff, we go driving, she's like, she's like, it's all scary. Like, I'm like, no, it's fine. It's like, you know, you're driving, like you gonna hit that I'm like I am NOT going to hit that It's just cuz you've spent a lifetime practicing in a video game And a lot of video games the basic mechanic you're practicing is Object is moving this way. Where is it going to go based on its speed and trajectory? It's gonna be here and you're just you're just

Mario jumps, where is he gonna land based on speed and trajectory. So you spend years and years practicing that. Also women are inferior. In some respects, women, no in some respects, women have inferior spatial reasoning skills, but in other respects, women are superior in things like verbal reasoning skills. It's funny you say that. So men and women have superior cognitive abilities in different ways.

It's funny you say that because whenever we're driving down the highway and we're looking at the little navigation system, my wife is seems, I love her, she's brilliant, she seems incapable of knowing, no, that's this road. Can't you see that it's that much distance? It's got to be that road. She'll always go one too far or want to turn one too soon. Yeah. So no, I think that just comes from how human beings back to the hunter gatherer times that men needed to have really good spatial coordination for hunting activities. And women used a lot more verbal and interpersonal reasoning. So I think when you've when people have done study on the cognitive abilities of men and women, men and women are different and they each have different gifts.

And that's why men and women are complementary to each other. It's a good thing. Bigot. OK, you have a weird. This is I don't think a lot of people know this, and you might be able to explain the neurological reason why. But I think it's this thing that we're talking about here. There is a like so you know there's like men's and women's leagues for sports a lot of times right one of the things that's separated that not a lot of people know about that doesn't make sense when you think when you first hear it is that there is a women's international

chess organization like the men's and women's. That is interesting. Why would that be the case? Federation International Day. So, yeah. Are there other? There's a women's FIDE and they have a separate championship. And there's only ever been one woman who has made top 10.

In the men's. International chess association. Yeah. I wonder if that has to do with the spatial reasoning. Men's International Chess Association. Yeah, I wonder if that has to do with the spatial reasoning. They keep moving the porn threes instead of two. No, not like that, but like the spatial pattern recognition. Cause that's a lot of what you're trying to say. Yeah, I wonder, I'd have to look into that,

whether there is a biological reason about that particular game, or whether there's social conditioning that men just get more practice at chess in a lot of cultures than women do. And so, I would be curious as to, whenever we look at the differences between men and women, we do have to always,

I do think there's a lot of biological and social features that are intertwined. Some I think lean pretty heavy in biology. Like there've been a lot of studies about men's throwing abilities versus women, even in like aboriginal societies where you don't have the socialization. But others though, I do think that socialization

does play a key role. But I'd be curious, but I wonder if there are other games where men and women just kind of equally compete. Like, I mean, I don't know how women do with like poker or other things like that. Yeah, that's what I was about to ask. How do they do in poker? I don't know, but they would be interesting to look at.

But I do think that when we notice the differences, we do have to be careful in how we examine them. So we don't want to be rash, but we also don't want to say, no, there are no differences. There are clearly biological differences between men and women, including in cognitive abilities. But when people try to take that to say men or women in general are cognitively superior to the other,

then I think that's an unjustifiable inference. Speaking of hunter gatherer societies, I shot that zebra out there. I killed that. Very nice. All right, as we wrap up, wanna let people know over on- You killed an unruly horse.

That's right. You can't domesticate zebras. Right. They can can't be so they might as well be rugs great quote wasn't there a movie about a zebra horse racing I'm sorry that is totally off topic but I think there was a movie about a zebra horse racing I don't know mattfradd.locals.com we're gonna go do a quick live stream over there please go support us mattfradd.locals.com Trent thank you so much for being here we're gonna put links to your excellent podcast below people can see it right there it's already there in the top line the council of Trent please if you haven't already go follow Trent

subscribe. I always enjoy when you put out a new video because I always know they're really well thought out and I always enjoy them. Yeah I'm trying really hard now it's so funny a few months ago three or four months ago I started kind of scripting and producing them, like having more video clips and treating them like little video essays almost, because honestly, it's so funny, there's kind of a, the extended hot take, I think is what Fazer called it,

not to get into all that drama, but there is like, turn on the camera, here's what I think about this. And I think that that's fine. Some people really like doing that. I have moved away for, I don't want to do that anymore. And then the main reason is I want to give people really good information and knowledge and edification.

And I want to be as respectful of their time as possible. So I want to be efficient. And just what I might give someone in a 20 minute scripted video would take me maybe an hour if I was going off the top of my head and just talking about it. You always do that when you speak extemporaneously. So that's why I'm excited to build up the episodes

that I do to treat them like twice a week as interesting video essays almost, essay in podcast form to help people learn. What kind of teleprompter do you use? The one that has a see-through glass plane. I use, yeah, so I've got a program here, and it's funny actually, I've had people say like, you use a teleprompter?

I didn't, because it- But once you realize you're using a teleprompter, you can see that you're using a teleprompter. Oh yeah, like when I see other people, other like atheist channels who talk into the camera, I'm like, oh, they're using a prompter. You could just tell by how smooth it is. I use this app just called Teleprompter.

So I load the scripts in here and it just goes on the front of a DSLR camera. I put the phone here, there's a glass plane over it, and I just hit. And then you're slowing down as you go? I have not invested. I really, there's so much stuff I gotta keep upgrading with my, I don't have a nice,

one day I'll get there, one day. Yours really looks terrific. Oh, it's getting there. We're gonna do another remodel soon. But I need to get a remote right now. I just set the speed and I hit play and I just go and I talk and I will cut it in different places. But I may add a remote soon.

I think that would, that would also, there's so many, you know how it goes. You do this like, I need this, I need that. And you slowly get the gear. All right. Thanks everybody. We're going to go over to matphred.locals.com. Thank you Kyle Thank you, Thursday. We should give Kyle a shout out Kyle. We're drinking. This is Kyle's mug here Kyle Whittington, we share a YouTube channel. We might as well. Yeah, so

He makes our YouTube content engaged but not enraged So Kyle's a friend and he's got a great Catholic YouTube channel. We'll put a link. Is that okay? He put a link in the description. Yeah, I got you dog. Nice. I don't know why I said that We just push finish now, yeah. All right. Bye