Truth Unites - Atheist-Turned-Agnostic Talks with Christian (Gavin Ortlund + Matthew Adelstein)

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

In this video I talk with Matthew Adelstein about his journey from atheism to agnosticism as well as various arguments for the existence of God and for Christianity. See Matthew's blog: https://benthams.substack.com/ Matthew's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@deliberationunderidealcond5105 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Hey, everybody, welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I'm really excited about this conversation. I meant to ask you, Matthew, just a moment ago, do I pronounce your last name, Adelstein or Adelstein? Adelstein. Adelstein. Okay, so this is Matthew Adelstein. He's a really smart philosopher. I was just telling him before we started that he's a better philosopher than I am, more read in the current literature. So, and then he was saying, well, I know church history. So I was saying, well, if I start to look really bad, I'll just steer the conversation into church history somehow or somehow or another, but we're going to have a great conversation. By the way, he has a YouTube channel. Link to that in the video description. We've been talking for a couple of

months now. We had one dialogue on his channel on hell and universalism. And you may have clicked on this video because of the thumbnail talking about that. We might get into that a little bit. But this conversation is going to be a little different because since then I sent you, Matthew, a copy of my book on the existence of God. And then we've had like, for some reason, in our email chain is the same initial email. The first time you email me, so it's like 80 emails deep now. But we've been going back and forth on arguments for the existence of God. And I've, I really find this interesting.

I was just saying to you, I love philosophy and I want to read more. It's just hard to find the time to break out of other things and focus more on philosophy. So this has been fun for me to get into that a little bit. Yeah. Well, I mean, thank you for those kind words. And yeah, I enjoyed the book. I thought it was very well written. raised a lot of interesting points.

And yeah. Awesome. Well, so the narrative is I'm kind of scatterbrained right now, but I'm picking back up. So I sent you that book. Then we've been emailing. And if I understand correctly, you would describe yourself as an agnostic now, but used to think more like an atheist. And what I find so interesting about you is you've got these really intelligent arguments, but they're also, you seem like you're interested in some of the different arguments for God's existence that aren't necessarily the most common philosophical appeals to God's existence, and then some of the more common ones you're not convinced of. So I find that really interesting.

But let me give you a chance. Tell everybody a little bit of where you stand currently on the whole question of God's existence. Yeah. So currently, I'd say I'm about 50, 50, maybe a little bit below then on God's existence. And, yeah, there are a lot of people who call themselves agnostics because they think basically there aren't any good arguments in either direction. So they think that there are no good arguments for God and no good arguments against God. And I have basically exactly the opposite view. I think that there are a lot of really good arguments for God, but then I also think there are a lot of really good arguments against God, primarily from the problem of evil and the fact that I think theism commits you to a lot of sort of controversial assumptions about metaphysics, where there are

just so many things that you have to adopt that it's kind of hard to be confident of all of them. And so I think that the consideration sort of roughly, roughly counterbalance each other. And so as a result, I'm agnostic. Very cool. But yeah, I was an atheist for, I mean, almost all of my life, accepting the last few months. Fascinating. So I want to ask you a little more of what specifically motivated that change. One thing I want to say, too, is one of my values is when there's people who believe in God and people who don't believe in God.

and we're talking because, or even if it's not, don't believe, maybe just uncertain or whatever, because of the history of these discussions, it's often antagonistic, but it doesn't always have to be. And because what you just said, but there's arguments either way, look, everyone who believes in God should take the problem of evil seriously. Because it's taken seriously in our religious traditions. I mean, it's agonized over in books like the Psalms, Job. I mean, our religion, my religion, Christianity, literally has a God being tortured to death and saying, why have you forsaken me? You know, so this is not a problem that should be shrugged at, whatever you say about it. So the point is, I really value dialogue where we can actually try to help each other and have like a

productive, positive conversation. That's one reason I enjoy our emails back and forth. But say a little more about what was it specifically, would you say, that's motivated the kind of atheist to agnostic transition? Yeah, so I guess, I mean, the, The thing that really started it was I was reading, so Andrew Hronich, she has a book in which you argues for Christian universalism. And I was sort of reading it. And basically, over the course of reading it, it struck me that it just sort of seemed like the model of ultimate reality

that was sketched out in the book. What he describes God doing, that sort of seems like the type of thing that a perfect God would do. And so like before then, theism just, it sort of seemed absurd to me. you kind of look at the world and you just see all the bad things. And it's like, how could there be some good reason for all these things? How could there be a perfect God who creates all these things? But reading Kranich's book, it sort of seemed more like, okay, maybe this is a live option. I'm not convinced yet, but, you know, it's at least not totally inconceivable that there could be a good reason to be a theist, or that theism could have something to say about the problem of evil. And then sort of over the coming months, and just kind of thought more about the arguments for God.

And most of these were arguments that I'd thought about before. But it's very easy when you're very confident in your worldview to when there are puzzles, when there are good arguments to think, okay, yeah, that's something I'll get to later. I don't know exactly what to say about that. But, you know, I'm sure there's something to say about it. And so it's not a decisive objection. There's some famous quote about how, maybe you even mentioned in your book about how if you're, if you see an argument for a position, that you like, you'll think, oh, you know, that's convincing. Well, if you don't know how to address an argument proposition that you don't like, then you'll think, oh, you know, that's an interesting

puzzle. I'll think about it later. And so over time, just I sort of thought about more things. I thought about, you know, various different areas of philosophy. And it just seemed like there were all these distinct puzzles of that, you know, how we have moral knowledge. And, you know, I think I'll talk about these things more, uh, how, why it is that, um, that, you know, consciousness is so harmonious, et cetera. And Theism has a really good explanation of all these things, and it seemed harder for naturalism to explain it. And so I relayed this anecdote before. I started to feel a little bit like a younger of creationist. It's like you have to, you know, so many different areas of science are popping up and you like, you need to have some new ad hoc

explanation to explain why, you know, to explain away this piece of data and to explain away this piece of data when it just seems like the better way to go, or at least, you know, a good way to go is to say, look, we have this explanation for all these facts, which is that there's a perfect being that ordains the facts to be as they are. And while I think there's some evidence against that, there are lots of puzzles that it clears up, which gives a good reason to adopt it. Yeah, totally. I'm curious, what role does beauty play, and is you're thinking about this in these different alternatives? And what role does hope play? Do you see atheism as a less hopeful worldview? And if so, is that important to you at all as you think about this?

So I don't think that I agree that atheism is a less hopeful view. The world's much more sort of depressing if atheism is true because everything won't end up, you know, ultimately good on the whole. But I don't think that that's super significant just evidentially where like the only reason it would be evidence against atheism that it's a less hopeful view is if we have some reason to expect. that the world would actually end up hopeful. But I don't think we do have a reason to expect that if atheism is true. So I don't think I don't think that's going to be strong evidence against atheism. But I think in terms of just sort of like opening one's eyes to the possibility of some of some worldview and shifting people psychologically,

where like making people more open to a worldview, pointing out how it's very hopeful and beautiful, I think that that's quite a good way of doing it. So, you know, I think, you know, the things that have moved me from basically thinking theism was a live option to thinking that theism has about a 50% chance of being right. The things that move me from the initial point to there were mostly the arguments, but the things that made me consider theism as a live option in the first place, I think had a lot to do with the sort of grandness and the beauty and the hope of the worldview, where just thinking about it, it seemed like the type of thing that a perfect being might do.

And so then it becomes easier to sort of explain data. So in other words, I don't think it's super evidentially significant, but I do think that it is significant in terms of helping one appreciate the evidence that there is and not be psychologically disposed to reject it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So for people who've clicked on this because of the thumbnail, which has the word universalism in it, they can see more about that in the video that we did on your channel. if they want a longer discussion about that topic. But just to give them a little bit, before we dive into these seven arguments, just to give a brief statement about that, people might be curious to know, what is the role of universalism for you? Maybe I could ask it like this.

Is universalism kind of a necessity for you, if before embracing theism, or is it possible that maybe theism could be true, but something like annihilationism or something like that for you? Yeah, I mean, I think that if theism is true, almost certainly universalism is true. So if I were convinced that Christianity was incompatible with universalism, I think that would be a very powerful argument against Christianity. Okay. So that may be something at the end. If we have time, we can return to that. We can also, I would love to just continue dialogue, you know, in whatever way we can. So we don't have to cover everything right now. What we can maybe do now is dive into these, you would set me seven or eight arguments. I'll just read them off so people know.

argument, the moral knowledge argument, the argue from psychophysical harmony. That's a fun one and not as crazy as maybe it sounds, people can understand it, fine-tuning, the anthropic argument, the Kalam argument, and the argument from eternal love. And I can only hope that we will quote the great philosopher Olaf in the movie Frozen 2 when we get to that one. But, and we'll explain all these as we go, but just so people can look in the timestamps and see where we're going to go. At the end, I would love to add on a historical argument to talk about, and that's the Lord Liar Lunatic Legend argument. And then, you know, but we don't have to spend a lot of time on it. It just might be interesting to touch upon it. I think I might be leaving one off, but that might be enough just for today anyway.

Because- I think you left off the eighth one, which was the contingency argument, but I'd be, yeah, I'd be happy to skip a community argument if you want. Okay. Well, we'll see, we'll see how much time we have. We might be able to get to it. And if there's anything else that comes up, if we get sidetracked, that's fine, but this would be a good discussion. So the goal here is basically, let's just work through these arguments and see, you know, what do you find convincing about them, what is not convincing? How do they move the needle, if at all? Maybe we can start with the moral argument here, and I'd like to set this one up if I can, because I think, I've been listening to

a lot of David Baggett, who's a great philosopher who addresses this argument a lot. I think commonly, when we think of the moral argument, we think of this phrase, objective moral values and duties. And so the focus really is on objectivity, and a lot of times it's put as a deductive argument. I like what David Baggett has talked about is basically making a more cumulative case argument from the human moral experience wholesale. So the entire range of human moral experiences, making a cumulative case argument. So when I talk about the moral argument, that's where my mind,

where I like to put the focus, even though I know I might be cutting against the grain. And I like to do it as an abductive argument, more than deducted, meaning inference to the best explanation. So then we're talking about not just moral objectivity, but moral significance, moral rights, moral freedom,

moral knowledge. I know we'll get to that one, moral hope, intrinsic value of individual human beings, things like that. So that's all kind of in the background. But having said that, I do think the objectivity of morality is an important consideration. And, you know, you see this at the popular level, you think C.S. Lewis is mere Christianity. That's his main argument in the whole first book of that book.

So like the first section of the book. And then at the more technical level, you can see lots of philosophers still defend it, though I know there's a lot of pushback as well. So maybe we can focus on that. And tell us what are your thoughts about the moral argument. What do you mean by that term? And how do you assess this argument? Yeah. So I think, you know, when I say the moral argument, usually I mean roughly the argument that theism that says either if theism requires objective, that if there is no God, then objective moral values and no dues don't exist, but they do exist to their to God. So I think, I mean, the reasons I don't buy the moral argument, I think will

apply more generally to most moral arguments. So there are, as well we'll talk about later, there is a version of the mortal argument that I like, which is the moral knowledge argument. So I mean, the reason I don't accept the mortal argument, well, so for one, I think that, uh, that it's vulnerable to youth of fro's dilemma. And I, you know, there are like a million things to be said about youth prose dilemma. But the basic idea is, so they, what the yes, will do this, they'll say that the good is rooted in God's character. And so the question is, were God's character to be different than, uh, then would God, then would morality be different? And it doesn't seem like it could be. It doesn't seem like, you know, suppose God's character were such as to, you know, prove of torture.

Well, it doesn't seem like that could make torture, uh, permissible. Now, the thought generally, what they say in response is generally, well, but God's character could, be different. And then the question is, okay, what makes it so that, well, I mean, two points. The first one is that if they say that you can't entertain impossible, like impossible thought experiments, or they say, you know, if some scenario can't arise, then it doesn't even count as an experiment, then that undercuts the mortal argument at all because they think that God is necessary. And so then you can't even entertain what would happen if this necessary being didn't exist. And

But the second point is I think unless you think that good exists outside of God, you don't have a good explanation of why God's character couldn't be otherwise. So, you know, I think that God, to the extent that he exists, his character couldn't be other than it is, because then he wouldn't be perfectly morally good. But if you just say good is whatever corresponds to God's character, and there's nothing that's limiting what God's character must be.

And so there's nothing that makes it so that God's character couldn't be otherwise, there's nothing that prevents the good from just being radically different. And I think the concern more broadly is that it seems like morality. So, you know, I accept moral realism, but it seems like morality is, depends on features inherent to a situation. So when you consider a case of excruciating agony, I think that the thing that makes it bad is just what the agony is like rather than, uh, it doesn't seem like, like it seems like it's an intrepid to the situation rather than depending on something further like God's character. There's more to be said, that out. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me extend a thought that I don't know exactly how it intersects with what you're saying, but I'll put it out there and we'll see how things keep unfolding. I do like the moral argument myself. So I guess part of what comes in with your comments is this question of the necessity of God as as a necessary being. Could God be different? And seems like to me, a case.

could be made that if God exists at all, he exists as a necessary being who could not be anything other than what he is. And if that's the case, then his character, that that response that you anticipated that, well, God couldn't be different. Seems like it's at least a logically possible response. But I want to hear more of your thoughts on that. But the other thing, just to throw out here, and this is what I don't know how it intersects, partly what to me is so gripping about morality is the particular quality of moral feeling. And when I have moral feelings, like when I have moral regrets or when I have guilt or when I have a sense of moral happiness, like the way you feel at the end of a movie when good beats evil and you feel really good, these feelings have a particular kind

of quality to them. So there's a difference between moral bad and non-moral bad. If I'm walking down the street and a two by four randomly falls off a building and hits me, by accident, that's bad because it hurts. But it's not morally bad. But if a thief comes up and hits me and steals my wallet and he does so deliberately, that's a moral bad. And I'm going to feel differently about those two things. I'm going to feel about the moral bad. If it's a random two by four falling, it's a non-moral bad, I'm going to be upset. But I won't really feel as indignant in the same way. You know, I won't feel this sense of, have been that there's been an injustice.

That's a particular kind of feeling. And so people talk about the Anscombe intuition. So Elizabeth Anscombe talked about this sense of basically the law-like character, basically the authoritative dimension to moral feelings. When we have, when we bump up against morality, we feel as though we're bumping up against something that has a genuine authority or law-like character. And so then the question is, well, where does that come from, you know? And I like to do it as an abductive argument to basically say, you know, on atheism, you have some options.

You can try to explain that. But a lot of them, they always, and this is why I like to appeal to the full range of moral experience. They always feel so diminishing because so much of what we take for granted feels like an illusion. There isn't the kind of significance to our moral feelings that we tend to just function by and society tends to live by. They don't have any sort of transcendent significance. That law-like character to them is illusory. It's tricking us because it helped our animal ancestors survive. On theism, it's not a trick.

It's a window. You know, we're actually seeing something really real. Conscience is telling us the truth on theism. And so that, it seems much more workable on my end. But so that's, I guess I'm sort of backing up and kind of giving a larger statement about how I approach this topic. and just the because I think we have to appreciate the nature of morality to really appreciate why I am so dissatisfied with these efforts to ground moral realism just in the intrinsic

qualities of things. And they always, I did a video on this last summer. And so I have read a little bit about this topic. And a lot of the journal articles and other philosophical treatments of this, they do feel very brute. They're just saying, that's just the way it is. Now, I understand that theism has its own kind of brutality because it's saying, well, that's just the way God is. But I think God just makes a better terminus, makes a better end point for the explanatory process

than this whole realm of moral truths that are multiple. It feels kind of bloated to have this whole realm of just brute facts, this brute moral truths. So I'm backing up and not really necessarily commenting on everything you said, but giving some framework comments there. Let me pause and see if that any thoughts about that? Do you want to extend things forward at this point anyway? Yeah, I mean a few things. One of them is, so I agree if you think that God is necessary, then you'll think he can't be otherwise. But I didn't think that this can be an explanation of, so if you think that what goodness is,

is just whatever is in correspondence with God's character, then this seems a little bit like answering the fine-tuning argument. Then to use this to explain God's character is circular, where you can't say, the reason the reason God, the reason love is good is because it corresponds with God's character. And also the reason God is loving is because it's good because then that explanation goes in a circle. And so, and I think it's a little bit similar to imagine if you try to say, you know, you're confronted with a fine-tuning argument and you say, well, the explanation for fine-tuning is that just that fine-tuning is necessary. It couldn't have been otherwise. That's not a good explanation because the theory that it's necessarily the case that Constance will be fine-finding. tuned has a very low probability given that the universe could be necessarily any other way.

It's equally epistemically probable that the universe would be any other way. So if all you knew was that it's whichever way the universe turns out to be it's necessary, you wouldn't know from that that the way that it happens to be necessary is necessarily fine too. And similarly, this provides a core explanation of God's character because if all that you knew is that good is whatever God's character is, you would have no antecedent reason to expect God's character to be loving, rather than hateful or for God's character to be, you know, for him to support the things that we normally think of as good. Briefly, I mean, for the, you said, well, you know, if God is necessary, then it doesn't make sense to ask, well, what if he were different? Because he couldn't be different.

But there are some cases where a scenario is technically impossible, but where you can still invoke it in thought experiments. So, for instance, if presumably you think that God is necessary, but you still think it's reasonable to say, as defenders of the moral argument, have to, that, well, if there was no God, then objective moral values and duties couldn't exist. In that case, if you think God is necessary, you're really talking about an impossible scenario. But there are still some impossible scenarios that can be meaningfully discussed. And so my claim is that the technically impossible scenario where God's character is different is one that can be meaningfully discussed, and that theism has unacceptable implications in that case or to consider another one. I think it's necessary that the law of non-contradiction

holds. But I think it's reasonable to say, you know, even if Graham priests and the people who think that the law of non-contradiction has exception, even if those people turned out to be right, it would still be wrong to torture people. So even though I think the case I just described is probably impossible, it still is coherent to say, well, but if you just imagine, imagine it being the way reality is, then it seems like this would not be other implications. And so I think similarly, as you can meaningfully talk about the impossible scenario where there is no God, I can meaningfully talk about the impossible scenario where objective moral values, or sorry, where God's character is staffed. Okay. Let's slow down and maybe work through the first of your two points

there because I want to make sure I understand it. So the inference being drawn in the moral argument, there was a comparison to the fine-tuning argument, right? So the fine-tuning argument, which we'll get to in a second, is generally not saying fine-tuning is necessary. It's saying, No, it could have been other words. We can easily imagine a universe that isn't fine-tuned, and then it's pretty improbable that it would just be chance. So then it's positing a designer. So I'm trying to figure out with the comparison here.

Go ahead. So the idea is I wasn't saying that it's analogous to the fine-tuning argument. I'm saying it's analogous to one particular, I think, unsuccessful response to the fine-tuning argument. So one response that people give to the fine-tuning argument is they say, well, maybe fine-tuning is just necessary. And the point is, just as you wouldn't think it's satisfactory to say, you know, why do you keep getting so many royal flushes in poker every game?

Oh, it's just necessary that it is. You know, that's not a good explanation. Because even though, even though, like, if they're right, it would in fact be necessary, the odds that the thing that would be necessary would be that in particular are so low as to be, as to make it very improbable. And so just as it's not satisfactory to say, well, the reason, that there's fine tuning is that it's necessary that there's fine tuning because it could be necessary away so many other ways. Similarly, it's not satisfactory to say, well, the reason why God's,

why God is loving and why God, you know, helps those in need and so on, is because it's necessary that he's that way is because it seems like it, it could be necessary in an epistemic sense that he would be any other way unless there's something like the external goodness of those things that makes it so that God's character couldn't be other way. The disanalogy I see is that, excuse me, fine-tuning, generally speaking, most people would acknowledge the laws of the universe don't have to be as they are. We can easily imagine different laws. The cosmological constant could be different. You know, we can easily conceptualize that.

Historically, God has been taken to be a necessary being. So if we say God is necessary, I guess you're, I, I, understand where you're coming from in that we always end up upon some necessity. There's something that we get to where there's just a brute fact where this is just the way it is. I think God is the best kind of excellent ending point for that. I'm curious, do you see moral truths as necessary truths? And do you have any of the same concern at ending at like a plurality of moral truths as just, that's just the way it is or that's the kind of ending. point for explanation.

Yeah. So I think, I do think that the moral facts are necessary. And I agree that theism and I think that theism and atheism, or at least theistic grounding for morality and an atheistic ground, the end of morality, are explanatorily on a par in that respect. Because the atheist is going to say, well, you know, it's just, it's a necessary fact that God, that, you know, God is good. And so goodness is just whatever corresponds with his nature. The nationalist is going to say, it's a necessary fact. that, you know, whatever they think the fundamental moral facts are. Maybe, you know, maybe if you're a utilitarian, you say it's a necessary fact that you should maximize the

balance of pleasure over pain or if you have a more complicated ethical theory, you'll say that whichever ethical theory that one is, is necessary. But my claim is that even if you're a theist, I think you shouldn't ground morality in God because so both of them, even if you ground morality in God, you're going to have to posit one root unexplained fact, which is that the goodness is what corresponds with God. character. But then you have there isn't a good explanation of why God's character is what it is, why God's character is loving, why God's character is, you know, is such that he, you know, helps out those who are struggling and so on. Well, I think if you think that goodness is what

it is apart from God, that God, that the thing that makes, you know, it being bad for people to be in pain, it's not that it corresponds with God's character, but rather God doesn't want people to be in pain because he's good. So the explained correlation goes the other way around. Then you have an explanation for why God's character is as it is, because goodness requires these things and God is a maximally good being. So as a consequence, God has to, God's character has to be such that he, you know, is loving and so on. How would you respond to the opinion that it's superior to have a singular infinite entity, in which to ground moral truths,

and we might even say other necessary truths as well, as opposed to having just what, it seems less intuitive to have just multiple floating entities out there that are necessary. You just wonder, you know, how did they get there? How, you know, this is one of the concerns that comes up is the ontological bloatedness concern of just, you're having to posit a lot more necessary truths in that,

way of looking at it. What do you think about that? So I think that the number of things that you have to posit as being necessary is actually the same between the two worldviews. So Theism is going to have to posit, actually I think Theism will have to posit one more necessary fact. So to illustrate this, let's imagine that Theism, you know, just to make things simple, let's say Theism says that there's only one moral fact, which is that love is good. And atheism also says that. Well, the Theist has to posit two fact. First, that whatever it corresponds to God's character is the good. And second, that God's character is such that he supports love. On contrast, the naturalist just has to posit one effect, which is that love is good. And so in both cases, you're positing necessary facts. The the theist is

just positing necessary fact without God's character. Well, the atheist is positing necessary facts about morality. And to me, it seems like positing necessary facts about morality, that seems more satisfying because like it seems more mysterious why God's character would have the specific properties that it does on theism where it's like what you know if if the reason God is in favor of love is not that love is good it's that love is good because God is in favor of love and so the explanatory connection goes otherwise then it's just totally inexplicable why God is in favor of love but to me the question of okay why is it good for people to be happy and bad for them to be miserable. That doesn't seem like the same kind of mystery. That doesn't seem as as mysterious

or to call out for an explanation as much as the explanation of why God's character is a certain way. I would disagree that Theism has one more additional explanation because thinking of the role of God in this way of thinking as additive, as something extra. To me, it's like, you know, a baseball comes crashing through the window, smashes the window. One person says, I don't know how it happened. It's just there. The other person says, somebody through it. And then somebody says, well, if you believe somebody through it, now you have an additional thing to explain. But it's not an addition. It's the actual, the very explanation itself. You know, think of it in the animal kingdom. In the animal kingdom, you have it's not the case that love is always has that and scone intuition that law-like character we don't we don't

think that when there's chimpanzee wars and they're brutally violent and they brutally there's brutal harm we don't think oh um there's some law that's been violated or there's some deep moral regret that is a valid feeling in response to these actions but we do think that with human beings so the question is, where does that come from? I don't know. We may not make a lot of progress on this. I'm just thinking out loud here, but it just still seems to me, and I'm sympathetic to reconsidering this. I definitely agree the moral argument can be stated very clumsily. As I look at it, it just seems more parsimonious to have theism as kind of the ultimate backstop that's grounding the ontological nature of morality, whereas if you're looking at it from an atheistic point of view, it just seems

like you've got this much more expansive set of truths you have to posit as just sort of brute. But that's just how I'm looking at it. Yeah. I mean, to go back to the baseball example, I think, I think that the, it's true that the theory that the person threw the baseball, that posits more stuff because it posits that there's the person and that they, there's the baseball being thrown. And the other one posits just the baseball flu. It posits one fact. But the baseball being flying is a much worse explanation because, was that like we know that, like, we know that it's a very ordinary thing for people to throw baseballs. And so when evaluating the probability of some explanation, you don't just look at

how many things it posits. You look at the type of thing that it posits. And so positing a much weirder thing, that's a mark against the view. As for the claim about moral significance, well, I think that, you know, if suffering happens in the animal kingdom, I think that's bad, but I don't think it's mortally wrong. And the reason it's not morally wrong is I think moral rightness and wrongness is a property of the decisions of agents that can understand morality. So you wouldn't describe it as being morally wrong for a newborn baby to like, you know, do something, do something bad because it doesn't have the ability to understand morality. But I think you would describe it as wrong if, you know, you or I did something bad because

we're able to understand morality. Okay. Well, let me just ask one other question on this whole moral realm. And of course, as we're going through these, we're not going to resolve all of these issues, but we just have a great discussion about it. But one other question that we get to the moral knowledge argument, I mean, stepping back from questions of proof and evidence to questions of sort of how do we live, put more pragmatic considerations. When I think about atheism, I do feel a kind of moral despair. I do feel this sense of, oh boy, good isn't going to beat evil. And the life

of Adolf Hitler and the life of Mother Teresa will have ultimately the same consequence. if you just wait long enough. That is kind of dismal. It is kind of brutal. What do you think about that? Do you have any intuitions about that? Or do you think that's not even relevant to these kinds of conversations?

Yeah, well, so I mean, I think the Hitler versus another Teresa case, it's not quite, it's not quite true that they, that their actions have the same consequences if you wait long enough. It's true that they won't have additional consequences. Like, like their additional consequences will stop after a certain point. But forever into the future,

it will be true that Hitler was responsible for huge amounts of suffering and that Mother Teresa was responsible for huge amounts of good. Now, I agree that theism, it's a more hopeful worldview and that it's sort of like, you know, I sort of, I want theism to be true. It would be, it would be kind of nice if it's true. But, you know, sometimes, sometimes reality is depressing. And, you know, the mere fact that something, that it would be nice if something is true, it doesn't give you a reason to think that it is true. So I think, yeah, I mean, I think the atheism, I mean, you know, maybe I don't think it should fill us with that much despair. I think, you know, there's a solid case to be made that the universe is good on the whole, even if atheism is true. It's a little bit hard to know. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think that that's super evidentially significant just because the fact that something is a nice

story doesn't increase it. Oh, sure. No, yeah. And so when I say the same consequence for Mother Teresa and Hitler, um, It's true that nothing will go back in time and unmake that, but if eventually you get to a point where there's no more memory of it, of the consequences, then with respect to human beings, it seems as though it sort of nets out in terms of the concerns I'm raising here pragmatically. And, you know, definitely, yeah, the desirability of something itself doesn't tell you a whole lot. It is interesting, though, and this, I do make this appeal to people at times. if we find ourselves living in such a way that is inconsistent, like maybe we're living in such a way that we actually think that, like, love has some kind of transcendent value.

And then we stop and we think about it, we realize there's actually no basis for that. Then in those kinds of ways, these considerations become relevant because suddenly we're realizing, well, if I want to hold onto this belief, I need to find a way to ground it. So that's the way I tend to use these kinds of appeals. is to just sort of press people on points of inconsistency based on what they've already accepted.

But yeah, I mean, it is interesting. A lot of the historic atheists like Nietzsche or Jean-Paul Sartre and some of the existentialists, they really bit the bullet on a kind of moral. Well, with Nietzsche, I can just say moral nihilism. I mean, he just says there are no moral facts. I mean, he, so I find it interesting to just talk to someone and see, you know, what are your moral beliefs? and then you go from what they've already accepted to try to figure out the best explanation.

That's kind of the way conversations often go. So in that spirit, let's talk about your moral knowledge argument because this is something you find interesting and I find it fascinating and you know a lot more about it than I do. For people watching this, if you want to get more on this, Mark Linville has a great discussion of it in the Blackwell Companion book. I'll put a link to that in the description if people want to check it out.

But why don't you talk us through? This is an argument if I understand. understand correctly, you find this argument a little more having a little more possible value to it? Yeah, I think that is a very good argument. So the idea behind the moral knowledge argument is that theism is a better explanation of moral knowledge than atheism. So here's a plausible principle. Suppose that the reason you believe something has nothing to do with the fact that it's true. So I think that there's a desk in front of me, but it turns out I'm hallucinating the desk. So I would think there's a desk in front of me, even if there were no such desk.

Well, then it seems like I don't have a good reason for thinking that there's a desk, because the thing that I'm basing my belief on has no bearing to whether there's in fact a desk. And so I think this principle is just a general principle that if the reason you believe something has nothing to do with it being true, and you know that, then that undercuts your justification for having that belief. And then the question is, okay, so which, so then I think, we have moral knowledge. We know some things about morality. We know you shouldn't torture people. And then the question is, okay, how could that explain, how could the fact that it's wrong to torture people explain why we believe it is? If you have a kind of like naturalistic picture

of reality, then you'll think that the thing that makes us have beliefs are just the movements of atoms in our brains. But that's not the type of thing. Like the moral facts do not have the ability to move around the atoms in our brain. They don't have the ability to push atoms around. And so the idea is that if the reason why we have our moral beliefs is simply because of the behavior of atoms in our brain and that that's totally unrelated to the moral truths themselves, then that would undercut our justification for believing morality. So it would mean that we don't have moral knowledge. But I think we do have moral knowledge. I think, you know, we know some things about morality. And so that gives us a good reason to be a atheist.

A few things to note about the argument. one of them is I don't think that the argument is specific to morality. So you can make a similar point about mathematics or about certain modal facts, like the fact that there can't be married bachelors, where, you know, how in the world does the fact that married bachelors are impossible? How does that move around the atoms in my brain? It doesn't seem like it could do that. Now, I think that what an atheist should say in response to this is they should say,

okay, you know, I think I think atheists should already think that consciousness is not physical. They should say, okay, consciousness is not physical. And through our consciousness, we have the ability to sort of grasp the modal facts and the mathematical facts and the modal facts and so on. And to have justified beliefs about them. So we have the ability to think about them and form beliefs based on them. So one can think about pain and come to the belief that it is bad. And crucially, the reason they come to the belief that it's bad is because it really is bad. They're really able to think about it in a deep way and come to conclusions about it. So on this account, our moral beliefs are not just explained by the movement of atoms in our brain.

They're explained by our ability to sort of, of our immaterial mind to grasp things. But then the question is, okay, I agree that's what the atheist should say. But what's the best explanation of why we would have a non-physical faculty for grasping moral and mathematical and modal truths? Well, I think Theism is a much better explanation of that. You would expect that on atheism while naturalism. That's really weird. He would not expect that at all. Yeah, yeah.

It's really interesting. And it raises a question for me that will can be posed for this argument and the next argument as well of psychophysical harmony. And that is what's the relationship of these arguments to arguments from consciousness more generally? Are they, do they have any kind of relationship? And maybe to start, I'd love to hear your thoughts. thoughts on that, but also could you just explain what is the argument from psychophysical harmony? I think a lot of people watching my channel might, those words might make it seem like, oh, that's some really obscure thing. But actually, I think people can understand this pretty

intuitively if you break it down. And it's a really interesting argument. Yeah. So the argument from psychophysical harmony, I think that this is one of the best arguments for God. I think it's maybe second or third on the list. And the basic idea is that, so, you know, we're conscious. And not only are we conscious, our consciousness is very rich and varied. Our consciousness, you know, we have this very accurate perception of the world, right? So I, you know, I think I am having a conversation with Gavin and voila. I am in fact am having a conversation with Gavin. I'm able to think about things in a deep and rigorous way.

I, to the extent that I have a desire to move my limbs in particular ways, they move in that way. Okay, so it starts by noting this. And then the question is, okay, what's the explanation of that? What's the explanation of why our consciousness is rich and varied and why there's a harmonious pairing between our consciousness and the physical world? Why it is that when we think, you know, I'd like to make my arm go up, my arm goes off rather than just like doing something else. And claim this is that theism is a much better explanation of that fact. So think about the simplest in science. generally people think that simpler theories are better.

I think that the simplest ways the physical could be paired with the mental. Well, here's a very simple way. Maybe just like consciousness is just a function of the amount of information in the brain. And it's just sort of like the intensity one's experience is just how much information. And, you know, that would be a very simple rule.

But if that were true, you know, we would have no valuable experiences. We would just have this very simple experience of having either a very mild, their very intense consciousness, there would be nothing of value. And so the fact that there's this harmonious pairing between the mental and the physical is very, very unlikely that, you know, when our thoughts line up with what happens in the physical world, what happens in the physical world is mirrored in our mental map, a helpful way of thinking about it is. So when there's

this pairing between the mental and the physical, like, you know, when I, you know, when I scratch my arm, let's say, three things happen. First, there's some physical state, A, which is some state of my brain, then that gives rise to mental state B, which is some mental state. So the thought, I'd like to scratch my arm. And then that gives rise to a third physical state, physical state C, which is me scratching my arm. But the point is you can switch up mental state B with any other possible mental state. You could switch it up with an infinite number of other mental states, and I would behave in exactly the same way. And so then the question is, given that the pairing between the mental and the physical is not needed to explain behavior, because you could

have the same physical behavior with a very different psychological state, the question is, why is there such a rich and a strict, tight correlation between the mental and the physical? And theism has a very good explanation of this, which is that this pairing between the mental and the physical is required for life to have any meaning or value. So of course, God would design it that way. You know, if you were just, if you just had this very basic experience where you couldn't think, you couldn't act in the world, you, your story of your experience was totally disconnected from the world where your life wouldn't be valuable at all. So we observed this thing that's really valuable and is really improbable.

He has a good explanation of that. Well, and I really, I find this fascinating with you. And I can imagine maybe some people being initially kind of skeptical because of the simplicity of the appeal. But I think a lot of that initial skepticism, because here's the thing, I mean, when you get into this, it really is hard to explain. We just, I think that. initial skepticism from people might come because we just take it for granted that we can think

and that there's a relation between the mental and the physical. But if you really think it through, if mind is more basic to reality as you have in theism, it makes, there's all kinds of mechanisms to explain the way we experience the mental and the physical interplaying. And one of the things that makes me take these kinds of arguments really seriously is just seeing top philosophers take them seriously. They're puzzling and they're not easy to explain. So I appreciate your comments on that. But let's, is it okay with you? Go ahead, please. Yeah, I mean, just briefly. And yeah, I think that that's one thing that's good about the argument. And I remember sort of like, this is something that lots of atheist philosophers of mind really puzzle over. So they think, you know, why is it that there's this miraculous pairing?

And very often, if you'll read their writings about it, they'll say like, now if you're a theist, you can some of us, but Theism is obviously crazy, and they sort of brush it aside. But this is a problem that the atheist philosophers do pick up on. And I remember, you know, when I was sort of, you know, very convinced of atheism, I thought this was a real puzzle. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's, the, the point is, this is not just something that you think is a puzzle if you're a theist. It's something, and it really becomes clear how big of a puzzle it is, the more you delve into philosophy of mine. Yeah. The more I think about arguments like this, the more I think the only, the only attitude towards reality that's remotely acceptable is a deep awe because whatever conclusion

you come to, the world we live in is absolutely amazing. I was thinking about this when I went. I took out the trash last night and brought the trash to the curb and was looking up with the stars. And I was just thinking, okay, whether it's atheism or theism, either way, you know, we live in a pretty amazing and mysterious world and it's, it justifies spending our whole lives pursuing answers and being absolutely humbled to the dust with awe that we even get to think about these things because it's so interesting. But let's talk about the fine-tuning argument. If you don't mind me kind of keeping us moving along so we don't get too bogged down, though all of these we could spend so much time on. This argument has to do with the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, the initial

conditions of the universe, physical constants like the speed of light, the cosmological constant, the gravitational constant and so forth. You basically, these values don't seem to be physically necessary. We said earlier, you can easily imagine them being different, and yet they're set with unimaginable precision such that the universe can be life-permitting. And it really is interesting to say, you know, do we just get lucky or what's the explanation for this?

I find this argument really strong. I have no idea what you think about it, and I'm curious, what do you think about it? this one. Oh, I think the fine-treating argument is a great argument. In particular, I think the version of the argument that I find most convincing is, you know, very often the argument can get bogged down in very technical details about physics, where you're like, you know, if the Higgs constant, whatever was finely tuned by this much, then life couldn't arise. And I do think that that's convincing where it is pretty remarkable that the constants of physics are on a

razor's edge where if you tweak them very slightly like couldn't arise. But I think that there's just a more fundamental thing, a more fundamental version of the argument, which is just the universe has stuff that's interesting and valuable. And if you think of the vast majority of possible ways fundamental reality could be, you would just have nothing that's remotely valuable. They would not have anything that's complex. So for instance, here's a universe that's much simpler than ours. You just have a bunch of particles and they don't just move in a circle. That's way simpler than our world. That would result in nothing interesting. Or maybe they just sort of bounce around. And they have no complex interactions. And so if you if you think about it, you know, there is there's a famous

if people are curious, you can Google the John Conway game of life where you start with, you place some dots down. It's a computer program and then apply some rules and you get complicated arrangements of things. But John Conway had to look really hard to find to find a set of rules. where you would place dots down and get an interesting arrangement. The vast majority of possible sets of rules would just result in nothing interesting happening. And so the fact that the universe has, is sort of in this Gold B-Glock zone

where we happen to get one of the vanishingly small set of laws that result in anything interesting, I think it's really strong evidence for it. Well, let me try to play the other side as much as I can, even though I don't agree with this response, but someone might say, what about the multiverse hypothesis? What if our observable,

observable universe is just one tiny part of a massive reality or even other universes that we don't have access to. And so we just happen to be in the right universe that has these particular laws. How would you interact with that question? I mean, or that concern. I mean, I've always felt like, you know, if nothing else, because this is a common response, but if nothing else, if people have the intuition that, like, theism is the strange worldview, with lots of inexplicable things you can't observe, and atheism isn't. Responses like this certainly puncture that mentality, because it's like any way you go,

you've got a lot of things that you can't observe or explain rationally or explain scientifically and so forth. But how would you respond to the multiverse response? Yeah, so I think that this is the best response. And I think it's especially effective against the traditional version of the fine-tuning argument, But I think against the version I presented where it's just it's the more fundamental fact that the laws are such to produce anything interesting. I think then it loses some of its force because there are kind of two ways you could have the multiverse. The first one is the one that's more popular among physicists where they say, you know, maybe there are some fundamental laws, you know, particles following certain equations.

And they say if you have laws like this, you'll just a bunch of universes will pop out naturally. And if that's the view, then I think that can explain fine, you know, then that can explain fine tuning perfectly well. But it doesn't explain the version of fine tuning that I talk about where just like the vast majority of ways that we have fundamental reality could be would not result in a vast and complicated multiverse. The vast majority of simple laws. Like suppose you are just writing a computer program at random to have dots move around. What are the odds that would result in this complicated multiverse with universes popping out and so on? the odds are really, really low. Now, the other way you can do it is you say, well, they're just like a million different universes. It's not that there are some set of fundamental

laws that produce them all. You just have a bunch of different universes with no unifying explanation. But generally, we want explanations to be simple, at least in the fundamental stuff that it posits. So, you know, a theory is good if you have some, there's something that's very simple, and then you use that to explain a lot of different things. But if you just say, you know, there are, you know, a hundred quadrillion different universes with different sets of laws. There's no deeper underlying reason for them. That's not a simple explanation at all. That's very complicated.

So that'll be a bad theory. And then I also think that, you know, the multiverse has some other problems. So if you look at, and, you know, I'm not, you know, knowledgeable about physics, but if you look at what a lot of the businesses say about this is that many of the, many of the multiverse models actually do have finely tuned values. So they'll have, you know, all of these laws. but if you teach the law slightly, then you wouldn't get a multiverse of any sort. And they also have another problem, which is called the Boltzmann brain problem. So there are a lot, you know, you could have a universe where there are what are called Boltzman brains,

which are just these minds that just pop into being for one second and then, you know, disappear. And I think, you know, we have reason to think that we're not Boltzman brains. But on a lot of these multiverse models, unless you really finally tweak things, you just get the presence of huge numbers of Boltzman brains. And so then if, you know, if you know that most beings in the universe that have your current experiences just like blipped into existence in deep space and will die one second from now, then it seems like you should think you're probably one of them because most people who have your current psychology are just these beings that pop into existence for one second and then, you know, get destroyed rather than part of these, you know, stable, eco-economic. systems like on Earth. But, and so yeah, so the most one brain problem is a, is a tricky problem to resolve of how

you get a model of a multiverse model that doesn't result in the vast majority of beings with your current set of experiences, just being these short-lived observers who pop into being for one second and then I have asphyxiation. Tell us about the anthropic argument because this is another interesting one and you're working

on a paper on this, currently writing a paper or maybe it's done now? I'm currently writing, working on a paper with it on it yeah so this is my favorite argument personally but uh so the basic idea is that so you exist uh that that's the that's the fact that it starts by noting okay you exist uh and then the question is what's the best explanation of you in particular existing well here's the thought suppose there are more people the odds that you would be one of the people created are higher just as you know if there are more squirrels in the world like you're more likely to see

any particular squirrel. And so if there are more total people that exist, the odds that you in particular would be created are much higher. And so then the question is, okay, so how many possible beings are there? The answer is, you know, there are some technical proof that the number of possible beings is this really, really huge infinite. There could be a huge number of possible beings. And so if you only have a few million of them be created or even a few billion or even

an infinite number, the odds that you would be one of the lucky ones that gets created are zero because 0% of the total possible of the total possible beings are created. So it would be incredibly unlikely you would be one of the lucky field. And so then from this we conclude, okay, probably all possible beings exist, given that if all possible beings exist, it's guaranteed that you exist. But if all possible beings don't exist, then it's very unlikely that you would exist. And then the question is, okay, so from this we've deduced that all possible beings exist. What's the best explanation of that fact? Well, on atheism, it's really hard to get a story of why every possible being would exist.

That's not what you would expect if all you knew is that there was no God. You wouldn't expect every possible soul that could be created to actually be made by God. But in contrast, on theism, I think you have a good reason to think that every possible being would exist, because it's good to create someone and give them a good life. You know, there are all sorts of philosophical arguments for that. You know, if you create someone, you know, we all just sort of intuitively, or at least most people intuitively recognize that, you know, having a child, if you give your child of existence, there's something worthwhile about that. And so the idea is that on theism, God

would be likely to create every possible person. And so then the odds of your existence would be very high. On naturalism, the odds of your existence or would be very low. And the view that if theism was true, God would create every possible person. It's a kind of weird and out there view, but it's definitely not, you know, it's, this is a view that. Alvin Plantinga adopts and there are various other people who adopt it. And now you might think, whoa, but if every possible person is created, where are all the people? You know, I don't, I don't see every possible person. But the idea is that God would have, like, if God would put, would have a very large multiverse that has all the possible.

Yeah, so that's the basic idea behind the argument. I have a blog post that, that I read about it. But I think this argument's convincing because, I mean, this is another one where, where like philosophers who don't believe in God will sort of will sort of accept most of the assumptions that you need for the argument. And they'll be like, but you know, clearly, clearly God, you know, doesn't exist. So, you know, there are lots of philosophers. So there's a famous case that people give where they say, you know, by this reasoning, couldn't you establish that the universe is really, really large just because if it's really

large, then you would exist. It's called the presumptuous philosopher case. And lots of people say, you know, some people think that the presumptuous philosopher case. Clearly, it's absurd that you could know that the universe is large just by the fact that you exist. But there are other people. And I'm inclined to go this way. Say, no, actually, the presumptuous philosopher reasoning is perfectly correct. The fact that you exist is more strongly predicted if there are lots of people.

And then, but and so then the question is, okay, so if some huge number of people exist, if potentially infinite people, if potentially infinite people, uh, and potentially a very large infinite, you know, some infinites are greater than others, uh, people exist. Theism has a really good explanation of why that would be the case. Well, this is another case where naturalism has to just add some extra ad hoc explanation to try to explain that away, which I don't think there's a natural explanation on naturalism of why that would be the case. It's a really interesting argument. Now, I want to go as fast as we can. I want to get through as much as we can here. My wife is texting me and I don't have tons more time, but let's do as much as we can here to push forward. So quickly an objection.

what if someone said this argument seems to presuppose that there's value in creating more persons and what if someone denies that and says basically they're like a nihilist and they don't see any value in that whatsoever does the argument presuppose that and how would you respond to someone who if they're an atheist who just denies that there's value in persons at all two things first i mean i wouldn't go into the detailed arguments for it but I have a paper that argues that there's at least something valuable about creating persons. And I think you can deduce this from really meager assumptions. And second of all, I think that this argument gives you a reason to think there is something valuable about creating persons.

Because if the ism's true and there's something valuable about creating persons, then it would be very likely that I would exist. But if theism is false, or there's nothing valuable about creating persons, then it wouldn't be likely that I would exist. So this gives up a reason to reject the NILES view because the NileS view is not a good explanation of why I exist. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to link not only to your YouTube channel, but to your blog as well, so people can see some of your writings on this, too. Real quick on the Kalam, I've, over the years tended to move away from, so for people, this is one version of a cosmological argument. Cosmological arguments generally argue for God is the first cause of the universe. So it often will be stated, you know, the universe began to exist, and everything that begins to exist has a cause, and therefore the universe has a cause.

I've tended to move away from this argument myself just because I find it gets so into technicalities. And basically you get into, did the universe begin to exist? How do we know it didn't come from another universe or something like this? And you have to go down that rabbit trail. And also, I just think other cosmological arguments sometimes are a little better. Matthew Levering is a great quote that I quote in my book where he basically says, even if we discovered that this universe didn't begin to exist, we'd still have, full force of lots of different cosmological arguments because you still have contingent realities

that need to account for their own existence. So I tend to put the focus on other cosmological arguments. But what do you think about the Kalam argument? I mean, this might be one of the most common arguments for God out there. And I'm guessing you're not a fan, but I don't know. I'm actually curious. Yeah, I'm not a huge, I'm not a big fan of the argument. I think, I mean, the big problem with the argument is in order to think it works, you have to accept lots of different controversial things. and I think it's not very strong evidence because several of these things are things I reject. Some of them I accept, but I think it can't be that strong of evidence if it has so many different moving parts to it where you're not very confident in either. So just to, so the argument says everything which begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist. So the universe must have had a cause. If the universe had a cause, it must have been God. So it must have been God. I think that I don't think that everything that begins to exist has a cause. I do think that the universe began to exist. I do accept that one because I don't think you can have a past infinite for sort of the reasons that lots of people give.

Alexander Proust has a good book about this where he argues for causal finitism that you can't have things in an infinite number of things causing, causing things going infinitely far back. But yeah, so I don't see a good reason to accept that everything which begins to exist has to have a cause. What people like Craig often talk about is they say, you know, well, you know, if universes can pop into being from nothing, why not Beethoven or roof beer? But I think that's a misleading way of framing it where it's not that like there's nothing sitting around and the universe pops into being. It's that there just isn't anything. So a universe doesn't come from anything, not that it does come from nothing.

And so I don't see a reason to accept that. And then I have a view called the B theory of time. I know we're pressed for time. So I won't get into the details there. But I think if you have the B theory of time, then the argument probably doesn't work. And then even if you think that you accept that the universe had a cause, I think that that establishes that something outside of time in some way, like brought about time. But I think there are other views of how something outside of time brought about time.

Okay. All right. Well, and I apologize that we're having to rust through some of these, but there's, but we are probably looking at this one differently because I do like the particular premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause. I am, I do think that's a very intuitive and powerful point, but I still try to make, try to wield this argument differently. So maybe that's one we could return to and talk about some other time too. But the last one of the ones you sent me, just real quick, give us an argument. So, all right, the argument from eternal love. I sent you my book and you said this was maybe, because I had an argument from love, and this is why I referenced Olaf earlier in his statement, love is permanent, which is a fascinating philosophical statement, and something to think about,

is love permanent. But it sounded like in response to that, not necessarily directly, but this provoked some other thoughts about this argument. So tell us how this came about and what this argument is. Yeah, so I was reading, you know, I was reading your book and you have this quote from Olaf where, and froze in where he says, you know, you know, one thing that is that lasts forever to love.

And I think, you know, I think you could actually just make an argument for theism from, from that premise where, so, you know, if theism is true, we would expect loving relationships to last forever. You would expect for at every moment of time us to be in a position to have loving relationships. Well, if atheism is true, you would expect love to sort of, at least, you know, for any of us being in loving relationships, you would expect that to be only temporary, only occur for 0% of the total existence of the universe. But so the fact. So suppose that love does last forever,

well, then it's guaranteed that there would be love going on now. Well, if love doesn't last forever, it's very unlikely that there would be love going on now. Just as suppose that it is, it rains every single day for the entire history of the universe. Well, then it's guaranteed that it would be raining today. Well, if it only rains once in the history of the universe for 40 years and then the rain goes away,

then it would be very unlikely that at this very moment, it would be raining. And so similarly, if love is just sort of this fading temporary thing, the odds that it would be going on right now are very, very low. And so the fact that loving is going on at this very moment is strong evidence that love is eternal, which in turn is strong evidence for theism. Yeah.

I see, I personally love arguments like that. Love. I think it's fascinating. And it appeals to my, because I love philosophers. but I recognize a lot of people. I think a lot of these arguments we're working through are pretty philosophical and abstract. So let's talk about a historical argument because I think the best, especially to touch the most needs out there, but also just for ourselves personally, the best way to pursue truth is by look at every possible avenue by which we might discover truth.

And there's these historical arguments that come up. I was surprised when I wrote my book that I sent to you. these, I did not expect these to be strong. I hate overly triumphalist apologetics that's acting like everything's a slam dunk. I didn't expect these to be strong. I thought they'd be like, oh, you know, 55, 45, 45 in favor or something like this. I was surprised there I would put them much more. The argument for Christ's resurrection. And then the, it used to be called the trilemma, Lord liar lunatic argument. And then, of course, the big criticism of C.S. Lewis, when he makes this argument in the second section of mere Christianity is that there's other options. So you're assuming that Jesus did claim to be God.

So the basic idea here is we have to have some way to account for Jesus of Nazareth. Some people have said there's more than even four options. So you could say Jesus was claiming to be God in like a pantheistic sense or something like that. But all of those options that I can conceive of other than these four options seem very improbable. Because Jesus was a first century Jew. I don't think it's likely at all that he was talking about God in that sense. So you've got these four options, legend, liar, lunatic, or lord. The liar one seems most improper. Those do seem to me to be the main four options.

Any other option for interpreting Jesus of Nazareth seem really improbable. These seem the before best. But the liar one also seems very improbable. I mean, think of the level of malevolence involved. If Jesus is saying things like, if you give your life for me and for the gospel, you will live forever, and that he's just lying. I mean, he, you know, what would the motive for that be for him, and he's getting crucified for it, and think of just how sheerly malevolent it would be to induce so many people to give up their lives

and be tortured when you know they're doing it for a lie. The legend option that Jesus didn't really actually claim to be God, I think is really problematic, when I go through, even if you take a very skeptical view of which parts of the Gospels go back to the historical Jesus, everybody admits some passages like Mark II, where Jesus is claiming the son of man has authority to forgive sins, and he's claiming that in response to the charge of blasphemy that he's claiming to be God. So, you know, people like Bart Ehrman have to try to say, well, Jesus isn't even referring to himself when he talks about the son of man there. He thinks the son of man is somebody else. And so that, to me, that option is.

is really problematic, actually. It does seem like Jesus, if you read him in a first century Jewish context, it does seem like Jesus is claiming divine authority in his actions, then the lunatic option. And it just seems kind of implausible on its face that the largest religion ever would be founded by a lunatic, especially if you give the word lunatic a broad meaning. So I actually think this as an abductive appeal is a pretty forceful one and a relevant one in these questions. What do you think about a like a historical set of reasoning like that? Yeah, so I think this is probably going to be some evidence. I think, I mean, a few ways to go.

One of them is I think probably the best way to go is the legend option, where you say that Jesus made more minor claims, where he sort of, you know, maybe he claimed to have some heightened authority, but over time, the stories grew, especially if you think, you know, something, you know, something occurred to make it so that all these stories started raising about empty tombs and about him rising from dead, that sort of over time the stories get grander. And this explains why Jesus' claim to divinity is much grander in John than it isn't marked. It's much more explicit in John than it is in Mark. So, yeah, so I think I think the legend option, I mean, for this one, I'll be. just plead ignorance. I need to do more historical reading about this topic. I need to read Bart Erman's book where he argues for the legend option and to see that. I think another option that's

interesting is if you're if you're sympathetic to theism, then you might you might have this fifth option, which is just like, you know, Jesus was genuinely subject to some divine intervention, but he himself was not was not actually God. So, you know, God might be reason for raising Jesus from the dead and for, you know, allowing him to carry out miracles and so on, because on the grounds that doing so would, like, like, you know, I forget the name of the, there's some as Tom Holland, who he has a book called Dominion where he argues that Christianity had this really positive effect on the world, especially in the early years. So it might be that, you know, even if God, you know, even if Christianity is false, God would just think Christianity is a good thing.

want the movement to begin. And so would as a result raise Jesus from the dead, especially if Jesus had, had significantly valuable teaching. I think that, you know, that's a more sort of unconventional option. And then I think the lunatic option, you might sort of combine the lunatic option with the legend option.

So you might think that, you know, Jesus, he had some mistaken views. So maybe Jesus genuinely did claim to be the Messiah or the son of man or something. something, but then over time, the legendary claims of his divinity grew. And, you know, there there have been various characters who throughout history who have claimed to be the Messiah, but who have not, at least, seem to be, you know, raving mad. So I don't, I don't think that there's like no option for the, for the naturalist to explain it away. But I do think that as

part of a cumulative case, this is at least some evidence where it is kind of surprising that the guy who, you know, there are all these reports of him rising from the day. And and maybe his tomb was found empty and so on, that this guy, like, he claimed to be God, and unlike most people who claimed to be God, he wasn't either crazy nor did he seem to get anything out of it. So, yeah, I think there was a reasonable abjective case from it, but I don't think it's single-handedly.

Like, I, yeah, so I think it's some evidence, but it's not the same. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's fascinating to, and to hear your other options that you put out there, too. That's interesting. I hadn't thought of one of those that you mentioned, so that I need to think more about that, too. Well, Matthew, I really enjoy talking with you, and I respect you a lot as a thinker and philosopher. So thanks for talking, and I hope we can keep dialoguing and just, you know, talking about stuff.

I really learn a lot from reading your blog post, too. Final question, I just curious to know, if you said you're somewhere in the ballpark of like 50-50 right now, what do you think would have to happen for you to get to like 60-40 in favor of theism? Could you anticipate what kind of steps would need to, what dominoes would need to fall for that to happen? Yeah, so, I mean, I think, you know, if I had a, like, very profound religious experience, maybe that would make me, maybe that would make me above 60, 40, perhaps, if I, like, I think there are, there are lots of, you know, things that can be said about the problem of evil. but if I was really convinced that there's a very successful objection to the problem of evil that really sort of makes it still sort of difficult psychologically, but at least really defangs it as strong evidence against theism. I think then I would be pretty confident in theism.

Yeah, so I guess those are those are the two main ways I could see it happening. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, if we do get a chance to talk again, that might be an interesting topic to give some attention to is the problem of evil. sounds like that's one of the major things pushing in the other direction. And that's, I mean, that's the big one, right? That's the big, the biggest objection to belief in God, probably. So that would be fun to talk through if we get a chance to talk again. But thanks for the great dialogue.

I really enjoyed it. Let's see, I was about to say, God bless you. But then I'm like, well, I don't know if that's presuming too much to say, God bless you, if you're going to say, oh, I don't know. But I'll say this. 50% chance that. Yeah, yeah. Tell people where they can find out more about you.

I'll put, well, I'll just put a link to your YouTube channel and your blog. Do you call it a blog? And then is there anything else you want people to know about you and the work you're doing? Yeah, I mean, it's a blog. You know, nothing in particular, I guess, you know, check out. I think the blog is better than the YouTube channel. But, but yeah. I guess check those out if you think I have interesting things to say. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Gavin. I've enjoyed both of our discussions. I think you're quite a thoughtful guy and I enjoy talking with you. So yeah, thanks. Awesome. Well, let's keep talking and keep the email thread going to and keep dialogueing. And I won't want to... Pretty soon it'll have like thousands of emails. I know, and then we'll turn that into an argument for the existence of God somehow. I don't know how, but we'll find a way.

Well, maybe it can actually support atheism. If the causal chain gets infinitely, long then that history's call to finish them and so i think that all right in that case we'll start a new email Shane i don't want to get i don't want to i don't want to i don't want you to going down from 50 50 to like 45 55 so i got to do everything i can here um but anyway yeah yeah i'll the first link in the video description will be for matthew's blog um he's putting stuff up there like almost you know just from looking recently it's like almost daily sometimes these really high level philosophy posts so it'll be interesting to see to where Matthew keeps doing philosophy and what all philosophical work he keeps doing throughout his life. I could imagine you being a very successful philosopher or whatever

you end up doing. So anyway, thanks for watching everybody. Let us know if you wanted to hear another dialogue, maybe on the problem of evil. And we'll see you next time.