Within Reason - #19 Genetically Modified Skeptic - Do We Still Feel the Same Way About Religion?

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Drew McCoy is the host of the Genetically Modified Skeptic YouTube channel, which is, with now over 500,000 subscribers, perhaps the largest atheist YouTube channel in the world right now. The last time we collaborated was in 2017, arguing that as well as being false, religion is also mostly harmful. In this podcast we discuss our current views on that subject, and examine how they have changed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So welcome back, everybody, to the Cosmic Skeptic podcast. Today I am joined by the one and only genetically modified skeptic, real name, of course, Drew McCoy. Now arguably the biggest channel in YouTube Atheism, unless we count people like T.J. Kirk, but I think, I don't think he's as watchable as he used to be. Current channel. I just wanted to start by saying, I'm not bitter about it at all. I don't care that you overtook me in subscribers. We can still be friends. Yeah, I would have talked to you not just for the clout, but just for the, just for the conversation. Exactly. But congratulations on surpassing half a million subscribers. The first of our niche to do it,

I wonder what you attribute that success to. I mean, you've done pretty well. Recently, you've a lot of videos that are doing very well. And I wonder if there's a kind of formula that you're following that's been working recently or what do you think it's down to? I would say the number one thing is that I purposely attempt to do quite the opposite of what I think the majority of atheists YouTubers did before about 2017 or so. There are tons of other atheist YouTubers who have done what you and I have done, which was try to stick to the issues, try to stick to a, a kind and compassionate way of speaking, but not necessarily pulling punches in our arguments. I think before there was a lot of outrage baiting, and there still is, but I think that outrage

baiting people that atheists have been hurt by in the U.S. primarily was the primary goal with atheist content for so long. The fact that I try to do the exact opposite of that really means that I'm reaching a market that has been underserved. And what is the goal of the channel? A lot of people compare us. We're in a very similar niche. Some people even confuse us for each other. This is probably the first time that they've seen real hard evidence that we are not

in fact the same person. Although the camera angles, you know, we're only seeing one at a time. It's very easy to edit this kind of thing, but hopefully we can quell those rumors. But although we're in the same niche and we talk about the same kind of stuff and we're both adjective, skeptic. I feel as though we're kind of doing different things, and I think you'd agree. My goal with the channel has always been something like philosophy communication. I was really interested in philosophical argument, and I think that if I have a talent for anything, it might be explaining things. And I thought, well, here's an opportunity to take these wonderful

arguments that people might have considered but not have understood or maybe haven't come across and just get them into the conversation on the YouTube space. But you strike me as someone who, That's not your goal. We were talking about this earlier and you said that this isn't really the kind of thing that you're going for with your channel. Yeah, I mean, I touch on things like that. Obviously, I give arguments and I delve into philosophy and science and psychology, but I think I'm dealing with the aftermath of people having these conversations with those with whom they disagree strongly. You may deal with the philosophical. I deal with the relational. And so while it's, We're still talking about similar topics. Our titles and our thumbnails may be very similar. I'm trying to speak to the people and the emotions they may have surrounding this topic and deal with that maybe primarily. Are you trying to, if somebody lands on your channel,

are you envisioning them watching your content and through it maybe becoming an atheist? Is it the kind of content that's supposed to do that for people? Or is it content that's made for people who are already atheists? I think that it has to do with, it doesn't, I don't really want to make atheist converts. I want to provide a space where people can think complexly without feeling like if they come to a conclusion on whatever side, that they will be socially punished for doing that. You once described yourself in your Twitter bio, I'm not sure if you still do, I haven't checked, as an atheist activist. Is that still in there? It's not in there anymore.

It was before. I wanted to ask you, what is an atheist activist and how are you defining atheism here? Oh, yeah, that's a really hard one, actually. I don't know that I would consider myself an atheist activist anymore. The reason that is, I used to think that creating a community surrounding the term atheism, however you define it, was a place where when people come out of religion, they can land there, this community surrounding the atheist label can help you, rebuild your life, escape those social consequences that you may have incurred from leaving

religion. The atheist community was supposed to be something that helps people turn over a new leaf and do better. I'm not so sure if organizing around the label atheism or atheist is really the most effective way of doing that. I'm not involved in any kind of non-profits or organizations anymore. I think very highly of the recovering from religion foundation and freedom from religion foundation. But I'm not actually involved in promoting those necessarily. I'll send people there if they need those resources, but I'm not on the board of any nonprofits anymore. I'm just flying solo. And there's a lot of different reasons for that, but a big part of it is I'm not trying to build a community surrounding the label atheist as if atheist is some moral good. I think it's

completely neutral. I would imagine you would still call yourself an atheist. What do you mean by atheists there? Are you taking the kind of lack of belief view here? Or would you say that you think there is no God? Yeah, that's actually really difficult. If I was going to define myself in philosophical terms, I think to be the most cautious, I would say that I'm agnostic. I'm a temporal agnostic. I don't know that we can determine whether there are gods at this time. Yeah, there are Two different forms of agnosticism that are often put forward. One is that, well, the question can be known. You can form a reasonable belief either way. It's just that I haven't done so, so I'm an agnostic. There's another kind of agnostic who says that, well, we just can't know. It's not just that I don't know, but that we can't know, that we can't even really come to meaningfully believe strongly either way, reasonably. Are you making that kind of second claim that you think it's something that really is sort of unknowable in principle? Yeah, as far as I know, it's not knowable in principle. I'm open to having that idea overturned, but that's where I would fall. As far as calling myself an actual atheist, though, it's really just practical. It's not that I am trying to claim that I believe or know that there are no gods. It's just that if you call yourself an agnostic in Texas, people will be like, okay, so you're on the fence about whether or not Christianity is real.

No, with specific well-defined gods, no, I'm not on the fence. I see. I guess I'm interested in kind of the sustaining cause of your position, because you can talk about, and you've made videos before talking about why you became an atheist, why you are an atheist at this particular time in your life, but of course you also stay this way. And for myself, I've always been an agnostic, probably an agnostic lean. towards strong A atheism.

I've said that before this was because I thought there were no real good arguments either way. Now I feel like there are good arguments going both ways, but they kind of have equal force. And I wonder which of those positions you take. Do you think that there are good reasons to think that there might be no God, but there are also other reasons and it's all just a bit too complicated?

Or do you just think that none of the arguments really do it for you? Is there anything that you would put forward if you were to defend a sort of atheism? Is there something that does speak to you speak to you that you could put forward and say this is something that that kind of pushes me in that direction. If I was going to try to make a positive case, I would not be doing so by making philosophical arguments necessarily. I think I'd point to psychology and sociology, the creation of gods, that gods are something that began. You know, Yahweh had a beginning, therefore.

Gods were not something that necessarily always existed. We can track the evolution of specific gods at least throughout time, see how cultural influences, governmental influences, change the conceptions of gods. If I was going to make a positive argument, you know, to say that gods do not exist, or that gods more accurately are an invention of man, that's the angle I would come at. As far as philosophy, that's not something that I regularly study in particular depth, and maybe I know more about philosophy than average. but it's, I'm much more interested in psychology, sociology, anthropology. So it's kind of looking at the nature of religious belief as a sociological, psychological construct

that makes you think this seems unreal. And you say it's maybe something to do with the fact that gods seem to have been invented throughout history, that you have this idea of particular gods not existing in the minds of very early human beings, certainly before human beings existed, there was no such conception, and that these kind of came about as a result of the human mind. I think some people would want to ask if, I guess if we kind of like assume the religious hypothesis that there is this God who's always existed.

And sure, he hasn't always been present in the minds of human beings, but the fact that the human mind has this seeming predisposition to, as you would say, create gods, but there seems to be something about the numinous that attracts humans across cultures. Basically, any culture we discover seems to have had some conception of the divine. Now, of course, it's easy enough to imagine that these have just been invented by their minds. There might be something about human nature that makes it such that they need to have some spiritual guidance or something.

But they could at least be an argument that says that, sure, the human mind seems to only latch on to this idea of God at a particular point. But maybe that's just because there is this God who was slowly designing the psychological structure that would come to be able to understand him. And I wonder what you would think to that kind of approach of explaining away this sustaining cause of atheism. If there was data or some kind of archaeological record that reflected that, then I would be happy to say that I think that that's more likely. Sure, that's a hypothesis. I would love to be able to see if we can test that somehow, see if we can back up that hypothesis somehow. But until we can get to that point,

I'm not completely sure if that's as tenable as the idea that gods do actually evolve. Yeah, I mean, I guess we have two competing hypotheses here, and as long as we don't have particularly good reason to accept either, we should remain in a position of agnostic. Yeah, and it's not a sure thing that gods are entirely invented by the mind. I mean, historical and archaeological records only go back so far, and certainly we had the capacity to imagine or worship or commune with gods or have some kind of spiritual experience far before

any of that material evidence materialized. A lot of people have made a great deal throughout history of saying that, yes, gods are invented by human beings, and they're invented in order to control and to oppress and to cause wars and to cause tragedy and to hold people in bondage and unquestionably so I find that a lot of the time when someone jumps on the I'm not convinced of God's existence line of thinking there's this tendency or a temptation to to join a team of you find like a community online and a great deal of that community says that not only is religion untrue but it's also harmful right but of

course these can be pulled apart that you can you can be a a reluctant atheist, a non-resistant non-believer, as I describe myself. I wonder about your views on this, whether you think that religion true or not, is something worth having, at least in some form, or if you would describe yourself as something of an anti-theist. That's what the top, that was the topic of our first collaboration, actually. Even if religion isn't necessarily true, is it useful? I had a different opinion of it then. I was, I don't know if I'd say strongly, but I was happy to call myself an anti-theist then when I had first started. And a big part of it was leaving a team, religious team, and joining a new team, which was the atheist

movement, new atheism, you know, whatever you want to call it. And especially since I've fallen away from being involved with organizations like that, I have not found myself tempted to call myself an anti-theist. And frankly, I just don't think that it can be demonstrated that in all cases believing in a theistic god or supernatural conception of any kind is inherently harmful. And that seemed to be the central claim of those who call themselves anti-theists. I don't align with that now. Do you think that historically a religion has done more harm than good? I'm not sure that it can be quantified well enough to say either way. It's kind of like, has agriculture done more harm than good?

It's like, well, if it weren't for agriculture, we probably wouldn't have climate change. I see what you mean. Well, it's an impossible question to answer in my view, and I'm glad to hear you say that actually, because I guess we both probably would use to have been of a disposition to say that it has done more harm than good. Yeah. I probably would have said so quite confidently. And now, I don't know if it's more good than harm, but at the very least, I think I must remain agnostic on the question. Yeah. To me, saying religion is bad is like saying politics is bad. Politics has caused so many wars, and it drives families apart, and it makes friends fall out, and it makes people excommunicate each other. It's all terrible, and it's just this

construct of the human mind that's used to control and oppress. Yes, politics does that. But it doesn't kind of follow from this strangely vague notion, politics is bad, that there isn't at least one legitimate political view. Most people are not apolitical. And even those who are very strongly politically engaged, if you ask them, is politics a good thing, they'd say no. And so I think that if we look at religious history, if you're a Christian, for example, the majority of people on planet Earth are not Christian.

the majority of people on planet Earth are religious to some degree. And so even a Christian could say religion is bad if by religion we encompass anybody who is nominally religious. But that doesn't exclude the idea of certain religious ideas being actually beneficial, even necessary to human spiritual growth or something like this. I want to take something specific. Christianity is the religion that you and I have a history with. Do you wish that Christianity is, you and I have a history with? Do you wish that Christianity were true? Is it something that you would be glad to be proved to you? Would you be glad to have it proved to you? Hmm. I think it would be really exciting if it was proved just to have the massive metaphysical baggage that Christianity has to be proved true would be extremely

exciting. I mean, the revelation of a lifetime for me, absolutely. It depends on how you define Christianity. So let's take a kind of minimal approach to this. Let's say that I could prove to you that there was a man called Jesus who died on a cross, rose from the dead, and that in some way by doing so, as long as you kind of are confident that this happened and are willing to accept it, you are able to inherit eternal life, kind of happy, non-physical existence or like newly physical existence after you die. And in accordance with the will of the father of Christianity, would you like this? Is hell involved? Are there eternal punishments? Let's say, let's say yes. Let's, I mean, let's try out a different, a few different

ideas. I imagine the reason you ask that is because something about there being a hell would would put you off wanting it to be true. Is that because you're worried about going there yourself or because you're worried about people that you love and care about going there? It has more to do with, at least the Christianity that I came from said that the vast majority of people who had ever existed and will exist in the future, we'll end up there. So as far as I understand suffering, as far as how I think of morality, grounding it in conscious suffering, I would say, no, I wouldn't want that to be true because I wouldn't want the vast majority of people to suffer. If we're talking about a version of Christianity where there is no hell,

which there are plenty of permutations of Christianity where that is the case, then sure. Yeah, if if it would result in more pleasure, more happiness, more euphoria, then sure. At the same time, though, I think a lot of Christians don't necessarily think of Christianity as just it's good to experience pleasure and it's bad to experience pain and hell. Ultimately, no matter what happens, it is justified because God, justices. It doesn't matter if you can make a logical case for that. Doesn't matter if it makes any sense to you at all. It matters whether or not God is as we conceive him to be as being completely and perfectly morally just at all times regardless of what happens. So if I'm granting that Christianity is true,

am I am I granting that no matter what the spread is for how people are suffering that that's good? I think you would have to grant that if there is a hell and there are people in it, they deserve to be there in some very real sense. Of course, it's troubling to imagine people that we love and care about being in this place of torment. But if Christianity were true, and it was somehow just true that the people in hell deserve to be there, I guess it kind of complicates the question. It's difficult to know what it is to wish that that were true. Well, I certainly wish that people get what they deserve, right? And so I guess, trivially, if somebody genuinely deserves anything than I wish that they get it in that respect. I guess the problem would be trying to

defend a view where people do deserve that kind of thing. Yeah. Sinning against an infinite creator, you know, bringing upon yourself an infinite punishment. I tend to think that if I were a Christian, I'd be an annihilationist. I would think that hell is basically separation from God. The wages of sin is death. And so, you know, if you don't have your sin wash from you, you die. I think there's an interesting philosophical approach as well to that, which is that if you take like a contingency argument that God is the ground of being itself. Nothing can exist without God sustaining it in existence. Then if you choose to kind of separate yourself from God or not accept a life with God, you separate yourself from being. You separate yourself from existence

because God is the sustainer of all being. And so this idea of hell as separation from God, I think thought in that term, thought about in those terms makes me more inclined to an annihilationist position. If that were what was going, on. If it were, everybody who doesn't meaningfully follow the will of the father dies and is annihilated from existence. But if you want it, there's this offer to you, Drew, to throw yourself upon another human being's sacrifice on your behalf and you get to inherit eternal glory. Is this something that you want to be true? That's quite enticing. It seems like I already think right now that everyone will be annihilated regardless of their deeds.

And if some people are not and receive something that they would be quite happy to experience for all eternity, then sure. So do you see much of your work as being engaged in sort of taking an approach to the dialectic in the back of your mind thinking that this might actually talk me into being religious again? Or are you making sort of more like social commentaries, trying to create a space for atheists? Because that kind of stuff, it doesn't seem to be engaged in the question of the truth of religion as much. But do you have that kind of driving you, this kind of sense of like I'd like to do things that if I'm wrong, I want to find out about it? Yeah, it's actually something I'm conflicted about.

I don't want my channel to just be polemics against Christianity or just necessarily an investigation of whether or not that is true. I think there are people on both sides that do that well and better than I ever could. You being one of them. You're making me blush now, Dr. You're too kind. If I'm engaging in trying to debunk Christianity

or just tear Christianity apart, I'm not sure if that fits particularly well with me saying that it's not inherently a problem. to believe in the supernatural or to be a Christian. I think it depends entirely how you define it, how that affects your practice. It potentially could be very harmful to be Christian, and I think that I can point to cases where it is harmful for other people,

sometimes for the individual practicing. But, yeah, I'm conflicted of whether or not I want to convince people, oh, Christianity is not true more than just, provide that space. There's an interesting question here that I that I want to ask is a follow-up there about sort of whether we want to be telling people that Christianity is false or at least that we think it's false because of course this is famously quite meaningful to a lot of people, their Christian faith. And there's a strong culture in some Christian circles that atheism is incredibly dangerous. It's spiritually dangerous. It's socially dangerous. It's

morally dangerous. Of course, we think that they exaggerate, but what are the dangers involved on all of those kind of three dimensions of thought with becoming an atheist? What is it that are there things about becoming an atheist that you wouldn't kind of parade? You wouldn't put at the forefront and say something that's kind of like a negative effect of being an atheist that comes along with it. No, I'm glad that you asked the question because it's something that I have to contemplate every time I make content that is propping up atheism as something that's that's valid. And that is, I don't think that we, at least in the U.S., in the context that I'm experienced in, have very good communities to replace, not to say that religion in every aspect

of someone's life has to be replaced, but say that someone comes out of evangelical Christianity like I did, and they're looking for a place to land. I'm not sure that the atheist community has historically been the greatest place for those people to land. Sometimes it's, It works out great. I've seen people really thrive because of the resources they've received within the atheist community. And some people have experienced pretty extreme bigotry. And having a place to land for people, whether or not we have spaces for people to land, for people to pick their lives back up, really determines my answer on whether or not I think that atheism is something that I would encourage someone to pursue in spite of their previous

religious leanings. I don't think that being an atheist is inherently any way morally or as far as mental health goes. It doesn't have any innate effects, inherent effects on mental health or whatever. But the social context is pretty heavy. at least in the U.S., there's, you don't have places to pick your life back up. And that's, it's something that seriously troubles me. I'd like to create that, but I don't really know how to do it either. What about what might be called something like spiritual health, which I guess is not quite synonymous with mental health, something about the idea of atheism, rationally entailing nihilism,

The idea that if you don't have some kind of objective grounding of being, that if everything is just kind of an accident, a lot of people want to say you get a kind of moral nihilism, there's nothing to ground ethics, but also the idea of purpose, that there's nothing for which you exist, ultimately, except as an accident. It seems to me that there's a strong case that can be made that if you throw off this objectivity, this necessity, this creative power, you end up void of these kinds of things. wonder what you think about that. Does atheism to you entailism? I don't think so. And I think the reason why is that I would say that that spiritual health that you're talking about has to do with your relation to a moral community more than it has to do with your specific position. I mean, there are Buddhists that are in strong, very enmeshed and supportive religious communities or moral communities, but they are atheists. They may not necessarily think there is some, inherent meaning to being, and they may even want to escape being altogether. But because they have

that enmeshed moral community, they feel the kind of meaning they need in order to feel that spiritual health. As somebody who's trying to create a space for people who become convinced that there is no God or become unconvinced that there is one, let's say, creating a space for such people to feel happiness and safety and meaning, would you have any advice to somebody who says to you, I've become convinced, maybe through philosophical argument, maybe they've been watching that cosmic skeptic, they think maybe actually I'm not sure about this whole religion thing. I'm not even sure about the whole God thing. And I'm in a moral community of people who get by. They seem to have moral intuitions.

they follow, maybe it's just a secular culture in which people just have a sense of ethics, but they kind of see through it. They think, all I'm seeing around me are highly evolved apes who are memetically evolved to take pleasure in altruism, even if they don't recognize it as such. And they just see through it all and say, without some kind of guiding principle that exists outside of myself, without a mind that exists outside of the human mind, I just cannot see any reason to be getting out of bed in the morning. I can't see any reason to be trying to act morally where the morals don't align with what I just happen to want to do. And this might not be a problem because maybe their desires do actually just happen to line up with the public

morality most of the time. They don't want to murder people. They don't want to lie to people. They don't want to cheat. But they recognize that that's just something they don't want to do. They feel that like there's no moral import there. And they think that because of the fact that this God has been stripped from their worldview, would you say to them something like, well, you're correct but, or would you say something more like you're incorrect and here's why? And what advice would you give to such a person? Hmm. If the person still has the moral inclinations to live their life in a way which doesn't negatively affect them or society, is there, do I need to give them? advice? Well, this is where I talk about the spiritual health because they could find

themselves, well, they want to, they want to avoid committing crimes, they want to avoid murdering, they want to avoid cheating, but they see themselves as just kind of following their desires. They see themselves as just chasing after the wind, you know, they see it all as, they're happy to engage in it. But much like Kohelet, they kind of chase after pleasures, They deny their eyes and ears, no pleasures that they desire. But upon looking at the work of their hands, they see it all as just meaningless. It's like it's not quite sadness.

It's not depression. It's more just this sigh of there's nothing to this. And it upsets them not in such a way that they're going to start like acting out. They're not just suddenly going to start going against their desires and start murdering people, but they start to feel like a kind of biological machine, just programmed to go through the, emotions and it fills them with a sense of nihilism. So you don't need to intervene in the sense

of there's like a problem because they're about to go around harming themselves or harming other people. But just that there's something inside of them, there's this lack of spirituality that they used to have, which is making them feel nihilistic. I mean, can you relate to that? Do you think that it's irrational? Do you think it makes sense? And do you think there's anything someone can do to get out of it that doesn't just seem like trying to talk themselves out of it for the sake of it. I would say to that person that mental health doesn't ultimately come from some enlightened state that you experience within your being. It comes from your relationships to other people and honestly your daily routine. I think that happiness comes from between,

not from within. Yeah. I mean, I can, I can, I'm thinking of something. somebody who thinks to themselves, let's say you're kind of in this nihilistic rut, and somebody says to you, well, did you know that if you were to start eating breakfast at a regular time every morning, waking up at the same time, getting exercise in, making sure you get outside, you'll feel a lot happier. And they said to you, well, the problem to me isn't the happiness. I know full well that I could do that. The problem to me is that whether I'm happy or sad seems to be of no consequence. It's a very kind of specific kind of despair and trouble that a person goes through because it's not quite wanting to be happy, but recognizing a kind

of indifference towards happiness and an ultimate meaningless in being happy. And so they know full well that they can make themselves feel a bit happier by running through these motions, but they see it all as hevel. Do you, I mean, is this something you've ever? have a experience at anyone being an atheist? Yeah, absolutely. It's something I've experienced. And I can only speak for myself, but for me, that experience was missing something that I once had that I had come to rely on, this piece of technology, basically, that I was using in order to help myself get through things emotionally. I missed that when I stopped engaging in that, or when I stopped believing it.

And it was really difficult, but the longer I went without it, the more the skills that I developed in maintaining my own mental health filled in that gap. And maybe you could say that there's still a gap there. I don't know if it's completely filled in or not. I haven't had any moments of really intense despair in quite a long time now. If somebody were to say that they're not really convinced that God exists,

But they're willing to take a kind of Pascalian wager. That is, they say, well, I figured out that if I just go to church every single week, join a prayer group, study the Bible, read only Christian literature, specifically avoid listening to criticisms, unsubscribe from your channel, the likelihood is, I'll end up talking myself into Christianity. This is just how human psychology works. I'll end up believing this in some way or another, and I think I'll be a lot happier doing so. But in this position before I take this step, I know that I'm essentially fooling myself. but at that point it won't matter because I'll just be convinced that it's true. And I'm about to do this. I'm about to just fool myself into believing something that I don't think is true

for the sake of my own spiritual well-being. How would you react? I don't think I would scorn them in the way that some people might expect when I've advocated for skepticism and more rationalism in the past. I would understand why they would want to do that. I don't think it would necessarily be a harmful thing for them to do. For some people, that might be the optimum existence. That might be good for some people.

For me, I don't feel like it is, but I can't speak for other people. It would be difficult to warn such a person of the moral pitfalls of putting on the blindfold, of engaging morally and getting your moral understanding from, something that assumes the supernatural, it would be really difficult to warn them of how they may hurt other people in doing so. It sounds like in that scenario that I wouldn't necessarily be able to warn them off of it. So practically speaking, what I would say is I think that danger and extremism harming your outgroup often comes from having a seriously insulated existence. You're only engaging with people who confirm your biases. You're not engaging with people who challenge you

both morally and cognitively, logically, however you want to put it. So I would say go ahead and if that gives you meaning, if that makes you feel better, sure, do it, but I would ask you not to cut off all influences from the outside. I wonder how you react in real life situations. I you know I I I do philosophy I'm kind of a philosophy enthusiast I like having arguments but I I'm on the practical side it's difficult to know when to bring this stuff up when to discuss this with people when to sort of advise people that you think they might be going wrong yeah relative to the harmfulness of their beliefs as you perceive them on the on the plane over to Austin from Houston

it was about a half hour plane it was very short but I there was a woman next to me trying to look like she was trying to go to sleep so I so I tapped her and said you know if you like you can you can close the window if you're trying to get to sleep and she ended up just talking to me and she told me that she was a Bible teacher in Mexico I thought well that's interesting I was reading a book on consolation that was looking at the letters of Paul at the time and we were talking a little bit about the Bible and it was an edifying conversation and she said oh well I've this website you know we have this website you should go and check out it's jw.org and i didn't really know what to say yeah because running through my mind are the thoughts of the friends that i have who have been excommunicated by their family the people who have died because they're refused blood transfusions this this is just flashing through my mind and we're kind of having a conversation it's not like just out of the blue we're talking about oh so you're a jehovah's witness because of course that's what the website is our listeners might not not have

realized that but she was a Jehovah's witness and they have these beliefs which I consider to be incredibly harmful and in that situation on that flight I don't know whether to to I might be the only person that she has an opportunity to speak to that could maybe plant some seed of doubt yeah equally maybe I don't want to be like I don't want to kind of try to plant seed of doubt but I want to indicate that I'm not all there for it I might kind of be like oh yeah, no, I'm not really sure about that, or whether I should just kind of be like, cool, yeah, yeah, I've heard of Jehovah's Witnesses.

What do you do in that situation? Oh, I've been in that exact same situation before, actually on a plane, but that it was coming back from the UK. And I think that what I did in that was to be kind to that person, say, oh, yeah, no, I've heard of that. but then tell them about what I do, just not exposing them to what I do in a way of, I'm trying to convince them that what I'm doing is great and is better than what they're doing, just simply exposing them to a different perspective.

Because again, I think that extremism often comes from untempered perspectives stemming from an insular moral community with no checks and balances. you can't I don't think that you can argue someone into having major doubts within one plane right especially a 30 minute one coming back from Heathrow you know it was like nine hours but maybe I could have done a little bit more I think the best thing to do is is probably just to show them that you are someone who has some different values and that you are as human and as kind and compassion as they are capable of being, that is the biggest seed of doubt you can possibly plant in someone's mind if they come from an extremely insular moral community to show that you are moral as well. Has there been any point during, I want to say the course of your channel, because that's probably where you've been mostly engaging with people on this level, but I guess since the

beginning of your atheism as a whole, have there been, has it ebbed and flowed? Have there been any points at which you felt yourself being even marginally pulled back to war? theism or Christianity in particular, or have you always been quite steadfastly atheists since the day that you became one? I think as far as my confidence that the supernatural or specifically gods exist, I have always been about the same. Really, the thing that's changed has just been my orientation toward the question of, is it harmful to believe those things if I don't think that there's good reason to think that they're real.

So my agnosticism or my atheism hasn't changed much. And in fact, I would say that I think I understand more about the evolution of God as we were talking about. And that further entrenches me in the, well, I don't think that it can be said that that these things definitely are supernatural. It puts me more firmly in the I don't know. You said that your channel is more about the practical import of religion and the social context of becoming an atheist, particularly in the United States, than it is discussing the philosophy

of religion or even discussing the truth of religion. Would you agree with that? Yeah, and I would say that my channel has become that progressively over time. I don't think it was so much that at the beginning. There was some of that, some of both, but I think it's become a little bit more about the social context. to becoming an atheist. Yeah. I wonder if this is something that's true privately as well, as in do you semi-regularly engage in these arguments, not in, because when we're doing it professionally, I suppose, you

might engage someone in argument in front of a crowd, or you might be presented with an article that you're expected to respond to in some way, but I think it's very useful to read these philosophical takes and not allow yourself to be in that. mindset and just think let me just read this as a person yeah and see what I actually think is that something that that you still do as much as you used to or as your channel moved away from that do you do you not do that as much oh I think I do it more I think I do it more now I I think it's actually something that has made me more sympathetic to religious perspectives is is doing that

putting myself in the shoes of someone who's trying to come at this again like maybe maybe for the first time or just coming at this like a, as a person, like you said, not as a content creator or as an atheist necessarily. I think I've, because I've done a lot of healing with my own trauma in coming out of religion, I'm able to be more sympathetic. I don't want to say that I'm less biased because the moment you say that, you come off like a moron. Maybe I am just as biased, but I can appreciate the attraction to these ideas more and can find them beautiful, even though I don't necessarily accept them. I haven't come closer to accepting these ideas as true, but I can appreciate their

value. That's what I was about to ask when you say something like, you said something to the effect of I'm becoming sort of more sympathetic towards theism. That can be read in two ways. There's the sympathy of the kind of saying, I understand why somebody would think this. But to me, to say I understand more why someone would think this. I'm more sympathetic to people who believe this must come from, in some sense, an increase in credence. It must come from something like, oh, well, maybe this is slightly more reasonable than I gave it credit for, and so I understand more why people believe this.

So I wonder if you can separate them out in this way. You said that you're more sympathetic towards why people believe, but your credence for God's existence hasn't really increased. How do you square that? There is a bit of that. I do find some arguments. I used to find every single argument completely irrational and, oh, this is completely logically fallacious or whatever. And I don't think that way so much now. Actually, a lot of that has come from just a few good conversations with a polytheist friend of mine, Ocean Keltoe. I'd have to make sure and shout him out because he has influenced me to take a second and third and fourth look at a lot of these arguments. Maybe that's why I'm more sympathetic to polytheism than monotheism as well. But sure, I find some arguments rational. I think that there are rational ways to come to theistic positions.

Do I think that that means that they're true, necessarily, no. The main way I've become more sympathetic, though, is understanding the psychology of religious belief. That's actually my main interest. People may have seen on my channel that I dive more into religious history and a bit more into religious psychology lately. That is the thing that has really tempered my view. I understand why it seems like the vast majority of people for the last few millennia have come to believe in some kind of theistic conception. When you just talked

about speaking to Ocean, giving you a kind of second and third look at particular arguments that you now give slightly more credence to than before, I know that you did this. You did this arguments for God tier list before. So you probably already talked about which arguments you sort of find the most compelling and least compelling. But in terms of the change, is there like an example of the kind of thing that someone like Ocean or someone else or anything else in this journey of discovery? Is there either a particular argument or like a line of thought or something that's significantly changed since maybe, well, as recent as possible, is there things that have changed in the past few months, the past year, the past five years?

Are there examples that come to mind? I think that I used to call it a rational to base one's belief in God on personal experience. And the reason why I said that is because I got a degree in psychology and I was very interested in studying the psychology of religious experiences. And I thought it's just so incredibly obvious that if you have some kind of spiritual experience, it's uncontrolled. You don't know all the factors that are going in there and the brain is a powerful thing. make you experience things that are taking place entirely within your brain, but feel as if they're not. And so I would call arguments from personal experience, or maybe more specifically, someone's belief in, in God's, irrational or unreasonable, because I knew that the brain could

simulate something like that. Now I say that, and maybe it's semantics, but I, it's, it's not irrational, it's not unreasonable to conclude that gods exist or that you're having a real spiritual experience that's taking place, not just entirely in your own brain, if that subject is not something that you're extremely well-versed in the vast majority of people are not. For me, it might go against certain bits of information that I understand to believe that I'm experiencing or I'm communing with gods when I'm experiencing something spiritual, but for the vast majority of people, that's not the case. At the same time, I'm sure there are many subjective value claims that are going into my understanding of the

entire issue of what a spiritual experience is, what that looks like. And so it's not that I think that there is some extremely convincing argument for God, or I've examined, you know, the work of William Lane Craig, and I think it's more convincing, I used to. It's more like I just think that there are different brain states than my own, and I don't think someone's being irrational for coming to a different conclusion if there's is different than mine. It doesn't mean that I think that they're correct necessarily, but calling them irrational and just flatly delusional in a very the God delusion kind of way is not me anymore. Yeah, there's this religious experience element of confusing, I think,

somebody coming to belief through religious experience, which I think makes perfect sense, and is, in my view, the only real way that I think I certainly would ever be able to come to religious belief would be through some personal experience. And that's oftentimes when you ask somebody, what would convince you that God exists, even when they answer it sarcastically and say, well, you know, God writes his name across the sky or something, this is a form of religious experience. And so people seem to implicitly recognize this. And you imply that you've become a bit, Well, so there's confusing that with using religious experience as an argument as to why other people should believe in God. In the debate context, if somebody says, well, here's a religious experience that occurred, either to me or to the apostles or to, you know, Saul of Tarsus. And from that, we can conclude that the best explanation is that religion is accurate or that God exists.

I think that confusion is an important one because you can say that that form of argument is terrible and indeed irrational. without saying that forming a personal belief on the basis of a personal experience is itself irrational. Right. I wonder if there's anything in this entire realm of argument, which I know you say you're kind of moving away from or don't talk about as much now, but if you say you're kind of looking at it privately, I wonder, maybe there isn't, I'm not sure, but of any of the kind of approaches, you know, contingency arguments and fine-tuning arguments onto logical

arguments, is there anything that you think is somewhat plausible or is there anything in that body of thought, not in terms of the rationality of another person coming to belief from a psychological perspective, but in terms of your own views, is there anything that's changed in that arena, something that you used to think that for yourself, this, this, this, this is never going to convince me. And now you think, well, it still doesn't convince me, but maybe I need to give it a bit more thought. Yeah. I can't think of any specific arguments for theism that I found more credible in the way that we're talking about, not just for an individual, but largely. For you? Yeah. I wouldn't say so, but that also may have to do with the fact that I study those

things less now and I study the psychology of it a lot more, the history of religion, the psychology of religion more. That may be something that I have to get back to you on. Sure. And so you're the sort of future of the channel of genetically modified skeptic. Can we expect to see you more in terms of psychological analyses of religious belief, more about, you've been doing a lot on like history recently, the history of the canonization process and the gospels and this kind of thing. Is that what we can expect more to more of or is there other stuff that you've got kind of in the works? Like what's the approach that you see the channel going in. Yeah, I'll definitely be keeping the personal approach,

talking about my own experience and my own healing process. That will remain in my content. But in speaking about the history of religion, yeah, I hope to ramp that up quite a bit. And a big part of that is not just doing all the writing myself. I've worked with a scholar, Dr. Ian Mills, who is actually a Christian himself. in making religious education videos. So intertwining my personal journey, the narrative of my personal journey with telling stories about religious history

and explaining the mechanisms of religious psychology, that's what you should expect. Hopefully I can pull it off in the way that I'm envisioning in my head. Yeah, yeah, one can hope. I wonder, because producing the kind of content that's supposed to normalize atheism, as I say, make people feel safe in being an atheist. You encouraged earlier people to make

sure that they keep one foot in both camps, at least a little bit, to make sure they're not being too insular. Yeah. But of course, for a lot of people, especially if you're religious and questioning and you find a lot of meaning in Christianity, I guess there are two questions that I want to put to you. The first is if somebody says that they're maybe they're a Christian, but they're something of like a fragile Christian, and they think that if they start exposing themselves to other arguments. It might just undermine their Christianity, but they're incredibly scared. Maybe they've looked a little bit at some of the work of atheists, and they've started to kind of get to them a bit, and they've stopped, and they said, I need to be careful here, because

I might end up as an atheist. They just don't want that for themselves. They really, really, they're terrified. Does that person have some kind of like obligation to keep engaging with it anyway or do you think they're justified in becoming a bit more insular? I mean, I guess I'm asking how far does a person have to go? I mean, you could be, you could be a Christian who watches the atheist experience every Sunday and say, yeah, you know, I like to keep up to date with the atheist argument. Like, is that like enough? Is that a bit too surface level? Like, but then you wouldn't be advising people that they haven't done enough until they've like read every entry on the

the SEP on the relevant arguments it's like how can you know if you're doing enough and what if there's somebody who just doesn't want to do that for fear of losing something very important to them addressing the first bit of that is difficult because i don't think i can propose a model of perfect epistemic responsibility but to the person who is incredibly afraid of engaging with things outside of their moral community and maybe tempering their views a bit. I would say that that fear is something that comes from your insular moral community itself. And rather than coming from a genuine, your brain or whatever, genuinely warning you that something might be wrong, there might be a real threat, that's a, it's a bit of technology, it's a bit of social

technology that insular moral groups use to keep people insular, to keep people in those groups. So I would say that, you know, if you engage with people outside of your group, you temper your views a bit, that fear will actually subside. It seems like it's going to get worse. You know, when I first started really questioning, I felt like I was dangling over a pit that I couldn't see the bottom of. But once I decided, you know what, I'm going to let go of this branch and drop into it, I realized my feet were kind of on the ground already. There was no real drop. That's what I want to tell someone that is struggling there. Perfect epistemological responsibility, I can't. I can't dish out. I can't tell you how to do that. But being afraid to question what you think is, I don't

I think it's particularly warranted. What advice would you give to somebody who is, maybe they're on the fence, but for kind of want of trying, they just haven't really engaged with this kind of stuff before? Maybe they're a devout Christian or a Muslim or some other religious persuasion, and they just, they think to themselves, yeah, you know what, you're right, like, okay, maybe I should start questioning this kind of stuff. What does this look like in practice? Where does a person start?

what's the first thing about the belief to question, and where do they go to question it? I think the first step of that is not surrounding yourself with people who exclusively confirm your biases. It's not going and learning about logical fallacies or cognitive biases or something. That's really not what critical thinking looks like. I think that atheist YouTube has been responsible for perpetuating the idea that you're a critical thinker if you understand logical fallacies, which people of all stripes are able to understand those quite well and apply them well. Having a community around you that differs in their paradigm about whatever important issue

you want to become a little bit more objective on. So the first step is surrounding yourself with people with a diversity of views. from there reading a diversity of literature hard for me to exactly recommend how to find something that's particularly reputable

but I think I guess I'm imagining somebody sort of watching at home who says okay like yeah I want to question this but maybe they just live in an insular community because you can say well you know

start hanging out with atheists or something but they don't know any atheists. Where are they going to find an atheist? And even so, how are they going to like just inject themselves into their like social groups? So maybe for some reason that's kind of off the cards. And all they really have is like the internet. You know, they have an internet connection. Maybe they have access to a library. It's like, it's short, so you could read a book about the psychology of religion. You could read a book about the history of Christianity. You could read a book about philosophical arguments to the existence of God. You could read a book about philosophical arguments to the existence of God. You could read a book. could read a book or watch a video or a podcast about whether there can be objective morality without God because maybe that's one of one of your big big problems I wonder what you think somebody should start with mm god this is me seriously tooting both of our own horns YouTube is actually not a bad place to start starting with educational content on YouTube is it's kind of great. It's extremely accessible to people that are of various levels of education. And there are

people out there that are trying to reach diverse audiences, have people like this in mind when they're creating their educational content. So starting on YouTube with, if you want to learn about the history of religion, the YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast, taught by Dr. Andrew Henry, fantastic place to start. If you are a Christian, you want to learn. learn about some of the, I wouldn't say skeletons in the closet, but some things that were a little bit more inconvenient for mainline sex to talk about. Look up esoterica, fantastic channel Dr. Justin Sledge. If you're an atheist, check out reasonable faith, you know. I think starting on YouTube, starting with that content, the content that is popping up faster and faster now

is great and you will find pieces of literature that are a bit more fleshed out from there. I mean, I only found out about the work of Jonathan Haidt because some YouTubers recommended it to me. I consumed a bunch of psychology videos and eventually found out about the righteous mind. And if anyone can't tell based on what I've said so far, the righteous mind, Jonathan Haidt's work, has seriously influenced me and actually kind of almost single-handedly turn me from being an anti-theist to not so much. That almost preempts my next and probably final question, which was going to be about essentially a book recommendation. I was going to say if there's one book that you could put in the hand of a believer, and I suppose maybe one book or other kind of literature

that you could put in the hands of an atheist, and I'm imagining an atheist who hasn't really engaged and a believer who hasn't really engaged, what would they be? Would it be the righteous mind? I think it would be the righteous mind for both. Yeah, it's specifically for the atheist, at least. Reading the chapter, religion is a team sport near the end of the book, the last third of the book, is fantastic. There's quite a bit of information that if you really want to absorb what that chapter says that you learn beforehand, which precedes that chapter in the book, but can change you from thinking that religion is just a set of pernicious memes and acts solely as a parasite in the way that I think the god delusion made a lot of us think

to thinking, oh, religion might be adaptive. And that doesn't mean that religion is perfectly acceptable and great and we shouldn't criticize it in any way for any reason, no, just tempering your perspective and realizing maybe religion is a bit more complicated than I originally thought I should engage with this in a more nuanced way, realizing that deconverting people isn't necessarily the moral good that I was thinking that it was. Well, I will make sure that the righteous mind is linked in the description, so that anybody watching this on YouTube can go down and purchase it if they haven't read it already.

As I will also make sure that any other things that are referenced or talked about that are relevant will be linked in the description, including, of course, your own channel. Genetically modified skeptic, people can find you on YouTube if they haven't already. And, of course, other social media accounts, Twitter. I don't know if you're a big user. I'm basically off other forms of social media. I've really just focused on YouTube for a while.

Good for you. Social media is a hellhole that I'm trying to dig myself out of every single day. But YouTube's the main place. And I'll make sure that's linked in the description. and Drew, thanks for coming on. I can't believe it's been this, this long before having you on the podcast. I think we planned to record a long time ago, but for various reasons, like not being able to come out due to COVID, the pandemic, and I'm glad that we got to sit down and do it

in person because I think it's a much more meaningful conversation that way, and hopefully people will stop saying that we're the same person now, but you never know. Maybe we're just, maybe we're just encouraging people. That's pretty good timing, isn't it? that the camera seems to have just died. But that's fine because they don't need to see your face anymore because I'm about to my outro. I'll just say, I appreciate the challenge.

This was being challenged by my contemporary in this, my main peer in this niche is fantastic. I think we should be challenging each other. Yeah, that's what we like to do here at the Cosmic Skeptic podcast and Patreon account, which you can support via the link in the description. Seriously, everything that I do, as I like to remind you at the end of these videos, supported by you on patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptics. So if you like this kind of content,

please do consider becoming a supporter and allowing me to keep traveling around the world and talking to wonderful people. And a special thanks as always, of course, I nearly forgot to my top-tier patrons who really do help to keep the channel afloat. With that said, I have, as always been Alex O'Connor. Today, I've been in conversation with Drew McCoy, and you've been watching The Cosmic Skeptic Podcast. Thank you.