Truth Unites - The Moral Argument Still Works: Response to Recent Critiques

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

In this video I respond to Brian Holdsworth on "A Question Protestants Can't Answer." At the core of the gospel is the glorious truth that Jesus' death on the cross is a substitutionary atonement that enables God to be both just and forgiving. See Brian's video: https://youtu.be/0I05643Pbxo See Sean Luke's response: https://youtu.be/9Ks-2HwuHwQ My video on purgatory: https://youtu.be/YPnNldd9K8c Matthew Barrett's book, The Reformation as Renewal: https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-reformation-as-renewal Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Okay, let's talk about the moral argument. This is the argument for God's existence from morality. This is maybe the most popular way, as we'll talk about, to try to prove God. But I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common for people to be very confident that we don't need God to explain morality. You hear this a lot. Recently, I was watching Joe Schmidt respond to Trent Horn, who was himself responding to Stephen Woodford. And this was the topic of discussion, morality in God. Joe was basically saying you don't need God to explain morality. non-theists can perfectly well ground moral truths in the intrinsic nature of things and character of things and so forth. And he recommended an article in the journal Mind, which develops that view. Now, Joe is a smart guy. Check out his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason.

I'll link to that. So I took this to heart and I thought I want to read this article, which I read and I want to summarize it in this video, as well as some other articles on the same topic. Basically, after that I emailed some other atheist friends that I respect and said, tell me about this. What are the ways, what are the contemporary top-off? options. What are the leading ways that academic philosophers ground morality other than in God? And several people were very helpful, as was Joe inundating me actually with resources. So I've

been reading and diving into this. And along the way, I came across this statement from the philosopher Quentin Smith, who said the idea that morality is founded by God is rejected as nonsensical by all 20th century moral philosophers, be the atheists or atheists. So that was kind of interesting. I thought, that's pretty a strong statement. Is that an overstatement? Is that true? So I do a dive into the academic literature on this topic, reading a bunch of these philosophy journals to basically figure out journal articles, to figure out, you know, is there, what's the alternative? And see if this is true. I was pretty shocked by what I discovered. Fascinating. I want to lay it out for you in this video. What I hope this would be helpful, which you'll get if you watch this video from start to finish,

is basically just an introduction to what might be the central point of clash, what is probably the most popular argument for God's existence right now. So we'll go in three steps. First, I'll just introduce the moral argument and identify and ward off some popular misunderstandings about it. That way, people just joining in can come up to speed. Second, I'll survey the current academic responses that Joe mentioned that article, as well as several others.

And then finally, I'll offer two reasons why I don't find those alternatives compelling, and I think God remains the best explanation for morality. So first, just an overview of the argument. It argues that God is the best explanation for objective moral values and duties. You'll hear these two words, values relating to moral goodness, duties or obligations relating to moral rightness. The key word here is objective. The way William Lane, Craig describes this, is that even if the Nazis had won World War II and taken over the world and killed or brainwashed everyone who dissented, it would still be true that the Holocaust, was wrong. The Holocaust is wrong, even if 100% of living human beings think it was right, it's still wrong. That's objective morality. Basically, moral values and obligations exist independently of human variegating opinion. So this is a form of what we call moral realism, which is kind of a broader term that you will find used with a little bit of variation. But basically, it's the view that at least some moral claims are telling us the truth about

reality. There are some moral facts. At a more popular level, a colloquial way to say it is simply say good and evil do exist. They're out there. They're not just a human construct. Okay, why do I say this is the most popular argument for God? I've always found it fascinating. Why this is, why, you know, people bank on this argument so much. Part of that, I think, just relates to this ancient intuition that the moral realm and the realm of religion are intricately relinked. Intricately linked. Man, I can't. I'm filming this at night, and it's the end of the long day.

I'm very tired. Sometimes I'll watch my old videos and I'll see myself misspeaking. It's the most frustrating feeling because you can't go and change it. Anyway, hopefully if I say something wrong, hopefully the point will still be clear. But you see, so there's this ancient intuition that the realm of the conscience has to do with the divine. So it's tapping into that. But it's not just that. The actual argument is employed by some of the greatest philosophers as the most effective argument. It really is interesting to wonder, especially historically. You know, people like Thomas Aquinas don't use the moral argument as much, but contemporary philosophers do. C.S. Lewis, the book, mere Christianity, that book may be the single greatest apologetics book of recent times, at least in terms of copies sold, you know. And it's amazing to me that Lewis does not give a cumulative when he's arguing at the beginning for God's existence, he just puts all his money on the moral

argument. That's the whole start of the book, just a moral argument. Elsewhere, we're familiar with his famous statements about how a man does not know a crooked line unless he can compare it to a straight line and so forth. William Lane Craig, probably the most influential living Christian apologist, has stated that he thinks the moral argument is the most effective argument right now. And he puts it simply like this, and this syllogism, you can pause the video and read, or you can check the video description. I'll put a great article he has written on this argument. Let me play a little clip of Alvin Plantinga,

who's another leading Christian philosopher on the moral argument. Well, the moral argument, a lot of people, I guess I would be among them, are very strongly inclined to think that if there weren't any such thing as God, you might say a divine lawgiver, then there really wouldn't be any such thing as moral obligation, genuine moral obligation. It's being the case that you really ought to do something or else really ought not to do that thing.

There wouldn't be any such thing if there weren't such a person as God. But clearly there is moral obligation, so I would say anyway, and so lots of people would think. So if you think those two things, then you've got another argument for the existence of God. Part of the strength of the moral argument is it appeals to something that is so visceral within us.

It touches a real human emotion. The realm of conscience is this unique and powerful human experience. There are particular feelings associated with morality that are hard to even explain. You know, people talk about deep conscience as the realm we argue from rather than argue for, where we just know certain things are right and wrong. For example, if you were to try to explain morality to someone who's a sociopath, you would quickly discover how difficult it is to kind of give them categories if they don't already have that experience. There's feelings of guilt and obligation and authority and even transcendence that go on in the

moral realm and the moral argument is tapping into all of that. If you're wanting to get a fully laid out moral argument, you can see my book, Why God Makes Sense in a World that doesn't. It's four chapters. One of the four chapters is on the moral argument. I try to lay it out. And I try to give attention to those kind of emotional considerations in a fair way, I hope. So that might be of interest if you want to get a full case. This is a great book I'll put up of the history of this argument, which is another fascinating question I've kind of already alluded to by David Baggett and Jerry Walz. And why maybe the moral argument might be more powerful in some cultures than others? Fascinating question.

But here I'll just quickly want to try to address three popular level misunderstandings. We just have to get these out of the way first because they crop up over and over and over. Number one, people tend to confuse the ontological ground for morality with epistemological questions about how we know morality. Ontological has to do with the order of being. Epistemology has to do with the order of knowing. So the moral argument is appealing to the first of those, not the second. It's dealing with that.

So when people say things like, oh, we don't need a holy book or the Bible or religion to tell us about the difference between right and wrong, we can get that from reason or science or something like that. Whether that's true or not, it is irrelevant to the moral argument. The moral argument isn't saying anything about how we know morality or like if we need special revelation to know morality or something like that. It's just addressing what we call a meta ethical question about the nature of morality itself. What is the ontological ground for morality itself?

Why are good and evil air? Okay, that's the question. However you might know about them, what are they doing there? That's the question. And other common responses, people will say, this might be the most rhetorically effective and common responses. People will say, but look at all the bad things that religious people do. Or they might say, but there's lots of secular people who are great moral people.

And again, I know this is kind of basic, but I find it helps to say these things. Whether that's true or false, I think as a Christian, you can find lots of great things about atheists and lots of bad things about religious people. I wouldn't really dispute this too much, depending. on how it's stated. But the basic point is it just has nothing to do with the moral argument. The moral argument is not that theists are more moral. That's not the argument. It's about where morality itself comes from. Okay, so it's not a sociological question. It's an ontological question. The third very common response is the so-called Uthofro dilemma. This is one of Plato's dialogues

where one of the characters asks, is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods. And here very quickly, if you translate this into like a monotheistic context, you can see why both horns of this dilemma are going to have a series of problems. For the first one, God is not really then the standard for morality. There's something external to God that he is looking to that makes him love that which is moral. But then on the second horn of the dilemma, morality becomes arbitrary. So, but now I won't address that objection here because I have a whole video on this. And I think basically philosophers like Robert Adams and others have dealt decisively with this.

The dilemma fails because it makes you choose between two non-mutually exhaustive options. In a kind of Judeo-Christian theistic worldview, moral values and duties are grounded in the character of God himself. God is goodness. And that proposal avoids both horns of the dilemma. Now, there's a lot more to that. of course people have points of pushback to that, but you can see my other video on that. I'm just trying to canvas why I'm not going into that here. Here I want to pursue something a little more specific. Now that we kind of have a basic orientation to what the moral argument is, let's ask the

question. You know, when people say, oh, you don't need God for objective morality, there's all kinds of options on the table. There's all kinds of people who are moral realists who have objective, who affirm objective moral values and duties who don't believe in God. Let's work. through some of the literature and see what those options are. So the first article I read is this article in the journal Mind that was referenced in the video I mentioned by Joe Schmidt. And I'll never forget reading this. I was at the hospital in Santa Barbara with my daughter. She'd broken her hip, so I was there for a long time. I had lots of time for extra reading. I love reading philosophy. Philosophy was my first love in terms of learning and study when I was in college. I was a philosophy major. And then I kind of

went more into theology, but I've always kind of missed philosophy and wanted to kind of, so I'll try to stay sharp and read and dip into little projects now and again. And so I'm really curious, you know, what are these other grounds for moral realism other than theism that are just so ubiquitous we are told? Well, one of the things I appreciated about this article is that they note that it's not enough to simply say the basis for morality is human flourishing. Because this just kicks the can down the road to the next question. question is, why is human flourishing objectively good? The article in mind notes how frequently moral realists simply assume that point rather than establish it. They say even if it were a

fundamental moral fact that, say, actions are morally required if only if and because they maximize well-being, such realists have had little to say about why that principle holds. So what's their answer? To oversimplify a little bit, they're trying to ground normativity in essentialism. Let me define those terms. I'll try to break this down with an example to make it really clear. Academic philosophy can get really abstract. So we'll try to just, I would try not to oversimplify too much, but also break it down for the sake of a YouTube video. Normativity just has to do with human judgments that some outcomes and some actions are good and others are bad. And that would include the moral realm. Okay. Essentialism is the idea that an object

has a kind of core identity or an essence that makes it what it is. So you can identify a set of attributes that are necessary for that object. I think essentialism is really fascinating. I'll come back to that. So the big picture of the article is basically saying there are these essence facts. Okay, facts that explicitly register something about the essence of a given entity. And those are the non-normative ground for normative facts. Here, let me break it down with an example.

So they pose the question of why is three a number? And they say three is a number because that's just what it is to be three. It belongs to the essence of three that it is a number. While such an explanation may not be as deep as various other explanations in certain respects, it is robust enough to provide illumination. It is also sometimes a fitting end to the explanatory enterprise. There may be nothing more to say to illuminate the fact that three is a number, then that's just what three is.

In this and many other cases of essence explanation, it may be perfectly legitimate to leave the explanons, an essence fact, unexplained, thereby treating it as an unexplained explainer. Okay, and explanons is just a term in philosophy for the explanation of something else. You have the explanandum, the thing do be explained, and the exponons, the explanation of it. Those are Latin terms, you hear them pronounce differently. What strikes me about this explanation is how brute it is as a way of addressing the problem. It seems to boil down close to saying that's just the way it is, except you're using essences as a way to say that's just the way it is.

Essence facts become, in their terms, the unexplained explainers. So it's only slightly less brute than saying that's just the way it is because you're saying that's just what its essence is. So what makes some action that contributes to human flourishing objectively good? Why was the Holocaust a bad? Because it's of their essence in a way that it's just like the essence of the number three to be a number. Now this seems very thin as an explanation because you just immediately ask, well, what makes the essences that way? Can we really go no further than that? It's almost like you have the explanandum and it goes this far. And then the explanons goes just to the same extent and no further than the very thing that you're trying to

explain. It kind of reminds me if when my kids ask me a question about nature and I don't know the answer, so I'll just say, I'm not sure. That's just the way the world is. I haven't really given them much information in saying that, right? Not only that, not only is this account explanatorily brute, but it seems to raise a new question of how do you have essences, because now you've got to explain that. And I'll never forget, reading through this philosophy book on metaphysics by Edward Lau, he was a professor of philosophy at Durham. I like his writing because he's very clear, and just being struck by how even traditional metaphysical categories seem to be more slippery and more arbitrary in non-theism. How do you retain essences in a reductively physicalist or naturalistic

worldview? That is a tricky question. He goes on for a long time about it. That's something I'd like to address in another context sometime, talking about basically angels and how angels affect the question of essentialism. But that's another thing. The point for now is I'm kind of underwhelmed by this article, even though it's a very smart, very smart people, it's technically well executed. Nonetheless, the explanation seems pretty brute. Okay. So now I'm starting to go through other articles. You know how it is. You read one thing, you pull on one string, and a bunch of other things start coming out. I'm finding the same thing in a bunch of other articles. Here's another article by a commonly cited figure working in this area in the journal of Religious Studies, which is another

reputable journal. And this article is basically opposing William Lane Craig's moral argument. He's going on and on poking holes or trying to in Craig's argument. And I'm wondering, okay, what's your explanation? Finally, toward the end, it comes up. He says, why are love and justice and generosity and kindness and faithfulness good? What is there in the depths of reality to make them good? My own preferred answer is nothing further. If you like, you may say that they are the ultimate standard of goodness. What makes them the standard? Nothing further. Possessing these characteristics just is good making full stop. And then he's basically going on to say, well, that's no more arbitrary than theism. So I go to my third article. This is written by one of the leading philosophers on this

question who's written numerous books and articles on it. And he comes to the same basic point. He's basically saying some moral facts are simply brute facts. But then again, the existence of God is a brute fact, so that doesn't fare any better either. Quote, of the ethical states of affairs that obtain necessarily, at least some of them are brute facts. I call such facts basic ethical facts. Such facts are the foundation of the rest of objective morality and rest on no foundation themselves. To ask of such facts, where do they come from, or on what foundation do they rest, is misguided in much the way that, according to many theists, it is misguided to ask of God, where does he come from, or on what foundation does he rest? The answer is the same in both cases.

They come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence. Now, elsewhere, I might try to have more time to address why I think God is a better candidate for the kind of primal reality that explains all other reality, the kind of stopping point for explanation. This is what you get into in the literature on this topic and it gets really abstract, so I'm not going to go down the rabbit trail here, but basically, God is uncaused and infinite. Moral facts are not infinite, and it's very far from clear that they're uncaused either. God is also a singular entity, whereas moral truths are multiple. So it seems much more parsimonious to give God this role of the sort of unexplained explainer with respect to the moral realm.

However, I can talk about that more sometime, even if someone disputes that. The point for now is just to observe that again, this response is explanatorily brute. That just means as a way. In other words, colloquially, it's a way of saying it's just the way it is. It's like when I tell my kids, I don't know if that's just the way the world is, you know. In his words, basic ethical facts, quote, come from nowhere and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence, and quote. Okay. I won't go through other articles. I might draw up my research on this into an article myself sometime if I can find the time. But suffice to say, these three representative examples are leading articles in this field. They're not misrepresentative. Some of the other ones will even say things like basically you have to have. Moral Truths must be brute. One of the articles I read starts off saying anyone who believes in moral truths at all must believe that they are brute. There are brute and inexhaest. explicable ones. Later, he compares this claim to the idea that explanation has to stop at some point.

Now, my response to this is like this. So here's my experience to the third section as I finish up and respond to this. I'm being told on the one hand, oh, you don't need God to have objective moral values and duties. There's all kinds of other possibilities. All kinds of people are moral realists without God. But then I go to these other possibilities and I'm finding them pretty thin. They're just saying it's kind of a brute fact. And the question that arises for me is, why are we so content with bruteness and inexplicability? My dictionary defines brute as characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence, and inexplicable as unable to be explained or accounted for.

Why do we make peace with bruteness and inexplicably inexplicability? There's a word so easily. This seems like just a hard lunge into mystery. Maybe what some people are thinking is, well, bruteness and morality is okay because we just don't need an explanation. Everybody knows that some things are just wrong, and you don't need to try to explain that to people. But I want to finish with by giving two reasons why I think that is naive,

and I think we should be uneasy with bruteness as an explanation for moral realism apart from God. number one is this kind of easy assumption of moral realism apart from God is at variance with much of historic atheism. Today, many of the new atheists like Sam Harris, many other atheists will speak more confidently about moral realism. You get these claims, you know, like the Quentin Smith quote I started with. In Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape, I've quoted this, that's an amazing book, he's just taking it for granted that things like philanthropy and individual human rights and compassion,

these are good things. He thinks you can establish these things by reason alone. Now, I've addressed that in my book, but what I want to point out is just that way of thinking is relatively novel in the historical development of atheism. In older iterations of atheism in the 19th century and the 20th century, it was much more common to see atheism as unleashing a kind of moral chaos and devastation. You see this in the existentialists, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous essay on existentialism, rejected the efforts of earlier French atheists to retain objective morality apart from God,

calling it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. He doesn't really argue for that. He just kind of takes it for granted. Later on, he compares morality and art. It says morality and art, are both matters of invention and creation. And for people who find that self-constructed values, like artistic morality, is not a real morality, his response is blunt and yet honest. I am very sorry that it should be so,

but if I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. Now, in my book, I discuss the articulation of a similar position by Dostoevsky's character, Yvonne, Karamatov in the book the Brothers Karamatsov. If you want a dramatic vivid, I would say honestly, it's worth the time. I know we don't read these long novels anymore. We just watch YouTube videos. That book will change your life. It is worth reading. It is profound. It will make the moral dilemma vivid to you and poignant to you like nothing else can. It's an amazing piece of literature.

In that book, Yvonne Karamazov has this famous dreadful statement, if God does not exist, all things are possible. This is a statement often cited in the context of these discussions. That statement was cited approvingly by Sartre, as well as by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose conception of the death of God, I also discuss in my book as another example of a moral anti-realism, similar to Sartras, but with a different kind of twist or flavor. It has a more kind of despairing undercurrent to it. Nietzsche was a kind of moral nigham. list. He basically said there are no moral facts and moral judgments are absurd. You can pause the video and read this very juicy quote if you want. It's pretty amazing. But there's lots of people

like this. Sartre and Nietzsche are two kind of major figureheads, but you can find this all Bertrand Russell's another one. So especially as you go back older. So what I'm finding is there's this discrepancy between this kind of tendency toward moral despair in atheism in the 19th and 20th century, especially in Europe, whereas today there's much of more of a sense of buoyancy and even self-righteousness at times in the attitude on these questions. If you want to trace out this really interesting question of early modernity versus late modernity on these kinds of questions, the Cambridge Companion on Existentialism, that occupies that book as a theme. It's really interesting. Even just in the introduction, it kind of takes up that question.

But the point for now is just to say this. You can say that the older age, that the older age atheists like Sartra and Nietzsche were wrong, but you can't say that we all just know that some things are evil. You can't have a kind of complacent appeal to bruteness because we don't all know that. Atheism as a tradition of thought doesn't bear that claim out. Many of its most eloquent proponents didn't think that claim was obvious. We don't all just know that some things are wrong. for many leading thinkers in the atheist tradition that was very far from obvious. The second reason I think that we should worry about a kind of easy assumption that bruteness is fine as an explanation for moral realism is our evolutionary history

and our relationship to the animal kingdom, just for the sake of this argument, assuming evolution for the moment, as a valid scientific theory, which I broadly accept. But just saying you don't have to accept that to see my point here. The arbitrariness of moral realism without God can be seen in how it treats human morality as qualitatively different from animal morality without a clear justification. So here's an example to get us into this. There are violent wars among different communities of chimpanzees. This is kind of amazing. People didn't believe this when it first came out, but you can read about these online.

Basically, like in Tanzania, in the 70s, there was like this four years. war among these communities of chimpanzees. Okay, it's very violent. And obviously, it disrupts chimpanzee well-being, right? Okay, but we don't regard the instigators of these wars as morally blameworthy and punishable in the way we think of Stalin and Hitler and people like this who provoke human wars and human violence. We don't put the violent chimpanzees in jail or give them the electric chair or something like this. We recognize there's something qualitatively unique about human beings with respect to morality. Now, in theism, you have various possibilities for explaining that. The big idea is not just creation in God's image, but there's lots of things that,

from a theistic worldview, for most theistic worldviews, there is some basis for a qualitative difference between human beings and animals. You see this all throughout history in the Declaration of Independence, the statement that we, the verb endowed. They are in. endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So there's an endowing process that comes from the creator to human beings that doesn't go to the animal kingdom, and that explains this qualitative difference. In the Bible, Genesis 3, you've got the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Okay, so this is trying to explain this difference, qualitative difference between human beings and animals with respect to our moral knowledge. You also have the idea of future divine judgment, which interacts with our intuitive feeling about the significance of morality, that whether you spend your life like Hitler or Mother Teresa matters in some transcendent way. We have that intuition. And theism has various ways to account for that and explain that and even validate that. And the idea of judgment or recompense after this life is over is one way of doing that.

I'm not trying to say that's all correct right now. I'm just saying that's a way to explain that. In atheism, it's very difficult to explain why there should be any qualitative difference between human morality and animal morality in the way we intuit that. The behavior from chimpanzees in these wars that I just described is basically how the entire animal kingdom works, the strong devour the weak. We never think of animals mistreating each other as like sinning or something like this, or in the way that we think of that with human behavior. So the question is, why does morality suddenly start to change once you get to human beings? How do you account for that on atheism? Now, someone might say, well, we just know.

It's just a brute fact. We just know that certain things are wrong with respect to the moral, with respect to human behavior. But here's where this gets really tricky, and I'll kind of finish off the video by talking about evolutionary psychology a little bit. Our knowledge, our perception of this as just a brute fact is itself, a product of the evolutionary process. It's the accidental byproduct of survival of the fittest and random genetic mutation, this winnowing effect of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary struggle that have produced our conscience as we know it. And there's nothing in atheism outside of that process directing it, because you can believe in God and evolution. But in atheism,

evolution is the reductive explanation of everything about us. So those who are advocating for moral realism without God often will admit that our morality is accidental. It could have been different. So Wielandberg, for example, says that our moral properties are important, but it could have been other. He says, quote, if, as I believe there is no God, then it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do. Okay. So in other words, if the evolutionary process had gone differently, we would have completely. completely different moral intuitions. We might regard infanticide as not only morally acceptable,

but morally obligatory in certain conditions, as happens a lot throughout the animal kingdom. Sexual cannibalism, which is common among praying mantises, octopuses, various kinds of spiders and scorpions. We obviously, we see it as a brute fact that that's wrong. If you rewound the evolutionary tape, things played out differently, it could be a brute fact that that is a noble and dutiful act. Darwin himself talked about this. We call these Darwinian counterfactuals. I talk a lot about them in my book. He gives this example. If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters,

and no one would think of interfering. The point is this. In an atheistic worldview, what we regard as an obvious brute fact, needing no explanation could easily be very different. So to sum up, I would say the idea of objective moral values and duties as just brute facts is a very precarious concept, is not well supported by the history of atheism, or our evolutionary history in the non-human animal world behind us. We might perceive some things as obvious from morally obvious today, but only because of highly contingent circumstances in our evolutionary history. And many historic atheists have recognized that that's not an obvious perception. At the end of the day, moral realism is extremely mysterious on atheism.

It's not something, in my opinion, you can just affirm with a shrug of, oh, yeah, that's no problem at all. it's a difficult question. And if atheism leaves you with just brute explanations, why not consider theism as an alternative? That's my closing question. Now, to fully vet that alternative, we've got to keep talking. So let me know what you think in the comments. This video is on topics that I normally haven't done as much on, though I plan to do more in the future. And I actually have in the past when I first started on YouTube three years ago in 2020.

I love philosophy. I'm going to be doing philosophy stuff now and again. I won't stop doing the other things I'm doing, but every now and again I'll have a philosophy video. So if you know of someone who might find this useful, the algorithms probably won't naturally take it everywhere. It may need to go. So if you could help me share this, pass it along, talk about it,

that kind of stuff. That always really helps. Thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'll try to remember to put everything in the video description if you want to follow up on things, and I'm sure we'll talk about this again some time here on my channel. Thanks for watching everybody.

God bless.