Within Reason - #20 Joe Schmid - Arguments For God Tier List

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Joe Schmid is the owner of the Majesty of Reason YouTube channel, a platform dedicated to the analysis of a variety of philosophical topics. He is the author of "The Majesty of Reason: A Short Guide to Critical Thinking in Philosophy", and in this episode joins Alex to rank eight arguments for the existence of God, and discuss them in depth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of the Cosmic Sceptic Podcast is brought to you by you. To support the podcast, please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic. Welcome back, everybody, to the Cosmic Skeptic. Today, I am joined by Joe Schmidt of the Majesty. of reason, and we're going to be doing something a little bit different. We're going to be taking popular arguments for the existence of God and putting them into a tier list. Now, I'm sure someone's done this before. Once again, it seems I am shamelessly ripping off one of genetically modified skeptics ideas, but one has to follow suit now that he is the most subscribed channel in our

little niche. Congratulations, I guess. So we're going to shamelessly steal that idea and have a conversation about which arguments are good, which arguments are bad, and why. And joining me to do so, as I say, is Joe Schmidt. Joe, why don't you tell the people about yourself? Yeah, so like you said, I'm Joe. I have a channel called The Majesty of Reason, where I have philosophers come on my channel to have discussions, and I also make lecture videos of my own on various topics pertaining to philosophy of religion, apologetics, counter-pologetics, things like that.

And I also do scholarly work in philosophy, so I publish books and papers and so on, actually on various of these arguments. So, for instance, the Kalam, I've got a lot of papers under review right now, and I've also published on it. So, yeah, Joe, Joe's been cropping up kind of all over the place in the kind of YouTube philosophy sphere, and you should definitely be watching his channel. If you have the time, because of course, you just uploaded a 12-hour-long video discussing 100 arguments to the existence of God. 150, yeah. 150, and responding to them. Systematically with, like, actual scholarly content. 12 hours long. So if you have the time, an effort, and interest, then.

then do go and check out Joe's channel. They're not all 12 hours, so it's definitely worth checking out. But let's jump into things. So why don't we begin, Joe, with an all-time favorite of mine, which is the contingency argument. Now, I've never done a tier list before, but I understand we have an S-tier and then A, B, C, D, E, F. And what does S stand for?

It's either superb or superlative. It's one of the two. Like super or something like this. Sublime, maybe. Super. sublime. Sublime. So this would be kind of the

top of the top, the dog's knees. The Crem de la Crem. Yes. As Stephen Woodford would say. When it comes to the contingency argument, I don't really know where to place this. It's difficult in beginning because it's all kind of going to be relative. But do you think the contingency argument is a good argument

for the existence of God? So what we have to do, I think first is probably break it up into two different stages. So stage one, at least of cosmological arguments and in general, arguments for the existence of God, tries to establish some kind of foundation for reality, some kind of ultimate ground, some ultimate explanation, maybe an ultimate cause for various general or broad features of reality. Now, the contingency argument in particular is looking at the fact of contingency, the fact that there are things that really could have failed to

exist. Like you and me, we didn't have to exist. We aren't necessary beings. It's not necessarily the case that we exist. And so in that sense, we are contingent beings. We could have failed to exist. And so what we're asking in stage one of the contingency argument, or contingency arguments, it's a family of arguments, is we're asking, what explains why there are contingent things? You can't, arguably can't cite a contingent thing to explain that. After all, we're wondering why there are any contingent beings at all. It's like, if I'm wondering why there are any apples in the room, you can't say, well, because there's an apple in the room, or something like that. Now you need to cite something outside the collection in question to

explain why there are those things. And so if we have this general principle of explanation, that contingent things require some sort of outside explanation to explain why they exist. Well, then we can say that now focus on the collection of all contingent things. That's going to require an outside explanation per that first explanatory principle. And that outside explanation is going to have to be in terms of something that's necessary. It can't be contingent. Because necessary is just not contingent. Yeah, it exists.

As philosophers say, it exists in all possible worlds. So all possible ways that reality could be. So these are exhaustive categories. Something is either contingent or necessary. there's kind of no other option. There's no other way a thing can be. If something is contingent, it means if it's contingently true, it could have failed to be true. If it's necessarily true, it couldn't have failed to be true. So those are the only two options. Of course, something can also be necessarily false or necessarily not exist. Impossible. Yes, an impossibility like a contradiction. So a married bachelor is something that is necessary in the sense that it's necessarily false. But people would be hard pressed to deny the existence of contingent things. things. It can be done. I've taken that line before, taking a kind of necessitarian approach to everything in the universe. As a determinist, it may be that you think that if everything's following a fixed law of cause and effect, if something is created by a necessary being,

then everything that flows from it would also be necessary because, of course, it's all following a deterministic course. And so you could try to get around the problem by just denying the existence of contingent things. But certainly, logically speaking these things could fail to exist it seems logically possible that you know this plant pot could have could have never existed or could have been a different color or something and so the question is how do we explain this of course if you're trying to explain all contingent things you can't explain it with a contingent thing unless of course you allow for

something within a set to explain the set itself what's the problem with doing that yeah so I mean it depends on what we're trying to explain if we're just trying to explain why there are any contingent objects whatsoever at all. It seems as though you aren't really able to cite some contingent object because that's presupposing the very thing we're trying to give an accounting of, right? If we're asking, okay, why is there any, why are there any blue balls in reality at all? You're not going to be able to cite some sort of blue ball that produce them because you're just presupposing the very thing that we're asking an accounting of. Why is there even that blue ball in the first place? Any of them

whatsoever. So if you're just trying to explain the type contingent concrete object, let's say, or contingent thing, it seems though you aren't going to be able to cite some sort of contingent thing to explain that. Even if you have an infinite regrets, right, you could still ask, why are there any of those things that are infinitely linked up in such a way? Yes, because this is sometimes been called the Hume Edwards principle, the idea that as long as each individual contingent thing is explained, if you have a series that goes back infinitely, then everything is explained. Because, you know, A is explained by B, B is explained by C, and so on to infinity. But the problem with that is explaining

why the list exists in the first place. Why are there any of those elements at all? Right. You still have that question. And I mean, Leibniz responded to that example by basically saying, like, imagine we had a geometry book. I think it was Euclid's Elements. And imagine that that Euclid's Elements was copied by another one.

So the reason why this one exists is because someone copied it from another Euclid's books. And then you can ask, well, why does that Euclid element book exist? Well, because it was copied by another book. And if you go on ad infinitem, it still seems as though you don't really have a satisfying explanation is why even like firstly why is it euclid elements it could have easily have been something else like it could have been the feto or whatever it could have been lots of different things so why is it specifically ukule's elements but also why

are there any such books in the first place yeah even if a book is copied from another book is copied from another book for infinity you've got a problem of still explaining why that infinite set exists in the first place it's a bit like somebody talking about the the train cars you know you kind of have the a car of a train that's being pulled by another one and it's being pulled by another one and it goes on infinitely but this doesn't seem to properly explain why it's why it's moving. That comes up in the argument from motion or of course the paint brush and you're asking why something is being painted and it's just from the motion of the paint brush and that's

explained by motion further back on the paintbrush and you just have this infinitely extended paint brush and that explains why someone that why the Mona Lisa is being painted before you rise. It doesn't seem to do so. We need to step outside of the set of contingent things to explain it, but of course, if something can only be necessary or contingent, one or the other, and you're looking for an explanation that is outside of the set of contingent things, you've got a necessary being.

So the second line of objection you might take is that, sure, this set of contingent things does exist, but it doesn't require an explanation. Why does everything require an explanation? There's the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that anything that's true or in a milder forms, anything that's contingently true requires an explanation for its truth, a sufficient reason for its truth. Do you think that's a plausible assumption to make? I think it depends. So there are a bunch of different versions of the principle of sufficient reason, as you mentioned. There are certain restrictions on the principle of sufficient reason.

Some people restrict it only to contingent things. Some people restrict it still further, maybe only to non-initial things or whatever. So there are different ways to restrict the principle of sufficient reason, but let's just focus on one that is restricted just to contingent things. So it just says contingent things, whether individuals or collections, require some explanation. Why might someone think that that's true? That's kind of what you're asking. Well, one reason is, I mean, firstly, if you just look around us, right, there are contingent things, and uniformly we see that they have some kind of explanation.

And if we were just like walking in the woods and we stumbled upon, in addition to all the shrubbery and all that stuff, we stumbled upon, I don't know, let's say, some sort of orb. This was, I think, Richard Taylor's example. Oh, yes. If we stumbled upon some orb and your friend said, like if you're asking why does this exist, you're trying to inquire. And your friend just said, no reason, it just exists. There's literally no explanation.

It's utterly inexplicable. You wouldn't really take your friend seriously if he said that. And the example goes further to say that if you make the all bigger... Yeah, the size doesn't seem relevant. If it's the size of the universe. If anything, it makes it seem more mysterious and need more of an explanation. And of course, you can make this all bigger and bigger and bigger and then end up with the size of the universe. And that's the situation that we're in.

Exactly. I think you're driving at the idea that science itself, scientific and quixing, requires seems to presuppose the principle of sufficient reason, because when we observe phenomena in the universe that we don't understand, like the speed at which a galaxy is rotating and it's out of rim and we think we don't understand this, scientists aren't willing to just say, well, maybe it just doesn't have an explanation. They don't even take that seriously. The whole scientific enterprise relies on the idea that the principle of sufficient reason

is true, that things require an explanation. Of course, much of this discussion will center around the idea that you can, in principle, just deny the principle of sufficient reason, the PSR, as we'll shorten it, that everything that exists or all contingent things require an explanation, you can do that, but you have to beware of what you're sacrificing, as William Lane Craig would say, or you're demonstrating the intellectual price tag of atheism, a phrase that I've always loved. So if you think that things can just be the case without an explanation, you may have just undermined the entire scientific enterprise. There's also a wonderful skeptical scenario that's brought up.

by saying that things, if the PSR is false and things can occur for literally no reason, which is what we're entertaining here to get away from this necessary being, then suppose it's at least in principle, plausible, possible, that all of your sense experiences are just occurring for no reason whatsoever. That is, we like to think that our sense data is being, is explained by real world objects. I see the plant because the plant is there. But if the PSR is false, we've got no way to combat the view that all of these sense experiences are just occurring for no reason.

And so you have to entertain a new skeptical scenario. You fall into like a kind of Cartesian hole of, but of a very specific kind, which is to say, if things don't require an explanation, then how do I know that everything I'm seeing has got nothing to do with the existence of an external world? nobody else exists, it's just a sense experience that's occurring for no reason whatsoever. Now, of course, this seems wildly implausible. People listening might be like, yeah, but come on, that's obviously ridiculous, like, to think that all your sense data is just occurring for no reason whatsoever.

But that's the point, is that the reason that's ridiculous is because we seem to presuppose in our thinking that actually, this does require an explanation that isn't, these things don't just occur for no reason, but if that's the case, then we're left with this problem of the set of contingent things requiring then an explanation. And of course, this must be a necessary being. And so we're led to something that's starting to look a little bit like God, at least has one of his qualities, that is necessary existence. So for this first stage of getting to the necessary being, what do you reckon?

How's it hold up? There are so many different versions of the contingency argument, and some of them I find more plausible than not, let's say. So I'd say I lean towards thinking that there's some sort of necessary concrete foundation of reality. Just think about it in terms of explanatory payoff. Like, we don't even have to say. Some people mistake, like, a lot of these sorts of arguments,

they think that they have to be like deductive demonstrations or proofs, you have to be certain. But you don't really need that. In fact, for the PSR, you could just say, listen, in general, we expect there to be an explanation. It's a kind of rule of thumb that more likely than not, we have a reason to think that there's an explanation. We don't even have to say that contingent things require an explanation.

You could just say it's as a defeasible rule of thumb. Again, it could be overturned if you're given a sufficient reason for thinking that something couldn't. something couldn't be explained, but in general we expect there to be explanations. It's just a general rule of thumb. And so that gives us some weight of a reason to think that the collection of contingent things would have an explanation. And I do think it's plausible that no contingent thing, of course, could explain why there

are any contingent things at all ever. And so that would give us some way of a reason to think that there's a necessary thing. There's a great paper by Alexander Proust on the Hume Edwards principle explaining why it, why it, if there are people listening who think, who are trying to entertain this idea that something can be sort of self-causing or that, as a, a, a, a, a, a As long as something contingent, explain something else contingent, maybe you have like a circle of explanation or something like this, the Proust's paper on the Hume-Ebb was principle.

It's a wonderful rebuttal of that view. Yeah, and Proust actually gives a nice example of a cannonball, right? So imagine that you have a cannonball that's fired, and it's fired, of course, from a cannon. And you can look at the trajectory of the cannonball, and you can plot it over time and so on. And what you can do is you can look at the specific time at which it landed, and then basically the time all the way up to, like, right when it was showing. So right after it was shot, you basically cut that time period off. Now, you can actually come up with a fully internal explanation for the trajectory of the

Candleball here. You can explain the Candleball state right here in terms of the immediately prior state together with the laws of nature, the conditions, and so on. And you can do that with the prior state and the prior state and so on, all the way back to this moment. And in fact, you can do this ad infinitum within this series because you can divide up time, right? Yeah, you can keep on dividing time. So the state of the object at this point, a half midpoint, is explained by this midpoint, let's say, together with the laws of nature and the initial conditions, and then you can explain that by the midpoint, midpoint, and so on.

This would be a case where each state within this thing is explained by a preceding state in this kind of infinite explanatory structure. And yet, we don't have an explanation of the, at least an adequate explanation, of the trajectory as a whole. Of why the cannonball is point in the end. Indeed, we wouldn't have an explanation unless we cited something outside the series that fired the cannonball, which was the cannon. Exactly. And the canon, the analogy here with the argument would be the canon would be, the canon would be something like the god in the picture. To break that down, it's a lot of, I'd recommend reading the paper to anybody listening, and there are two other examples that he gives.

I quite like the chicken and egg example as well. If you have this cannonball in motion and we're trying to explain why is the cannonball in motion, Joe is saying that we can explain the position of the cannibal in any time slice. If you take like a moment and say, why is the cannibal there? Well, it's explained fully by the laws of nature, and where it was half a second ago.

And why was it there? Well, that's explained by something a quarter of a second ago and the laws of physics. And we can do that infinitely. So this would be a fulfillment of the idea that every contingent state is explained by another contingent state. But when you try to fully explain a contingent set of affairs with contingent things, you end up without a sufficient explanation. So we seem to require something outside of it, leading us to a necessary being. For me, I think this argument is one of the greatest that exists for God's sake.

existence. I'm tempted to put it in S tier right off the bat. I don't know if you would agree with that. We haven't even gone over stage two though. So stage two, as we remember, we pointed out that stage one just tries to get to this necessary foundation, at least one, right? We haven't even show that it's exactly one. It could be lots more, but at least one necessary foundation that explains why they're contingent things. But stage two is another question. And a lot of the arguments there actually aren't all that plausible by my lights. So I am actually tempted to put stage one. What's the aim of stage two? The aim of stage two is, to identify, so stage one is to say that contingent things require a necessary explanation.

Or we have a reason to think that there's an explanation. Yes, or that we have reason, which, given that we can make that weaker claim, it makes it even stronger as well as in argument, as it functions. Stage two is to identify that necessary cause with something like a god. But I think that in most kind of common philosophical parlance, the argument is really seeking to establish the existence of a necessary being. from this I kind of see it almost as like a separate argument to discuss the nature of that necessary being and we're trying to get it just a necessary being I think this is

potentially the the best way one of the best ways of doing it I think I'm with you with s tier then s tier all right cool so the contingency argument s tier what a great start what a good great start yeah exactly okay so we'll move on and we'll try I mean this is fun I like what we're kind of doing here is we're discussing the arguments we're going into some depth, we're doing a little bit of the dialectic, but we can't spend too long if we want to get through it. But I hope that this video is a kind of useful overview of these arguments, even if not just for the sake of watching us list them and tier them. It's to help inspire people to look into it further, right?

Yeah, because if any of these arguments take your fancy and you haven't heard of them or interacted with them fully before, then we can recommend that you do so. So the next one on our list, we're going to stay in the family of cosmological arguments, like the contingency argument. And we're going to go for an all-time classic. It's one of the first arguments that people come across when they listen to a debate, and it's just iconic at this point. And it is, of course, the calam, cosmological argument. We should start with saying what the argument is, if you're not already familiar. Premise 1, everything that begins to exist has a cause. Premise 2, the universe began to

exist. Conclusion, therefore the universe has a cause. Thoughts? Yeah, so just general thoughts. Um, or thoughts. Thoughts. Thoughts. Okay. Thoughts. Okay. So again, I like to break this down into two stages because it's conceptually good. So you just articulated stage one. And then stage two is trying to identify that cause of the universe with God. Yes. So it tries to say it's space less, time last, immaterial, enormously powerful. Uh, uh, So, yes, I can't believe. Okay, but yeah, so that's basically stage two. Tries to identify that with God, the cause of the universe.

Yes. So you nicely articulated stage one. And actually, the way that Stephen Woodford and I in our Kalam series, the way that we're breaking down the Kalam is in terms of an old Kalam and a new Kalam. So you articulate the old Kalam that's pretty popular, mainly because of William Lane Craig. But the new Kalam is what's a lot of recent work is coming out on, and it focuses on causal finitism, which is the thesis that every causal chain leading up to some effect has to be finite. So every effect can only have a finite number of causes. That's basically the thesis. Which of course

is relevant here. If every effect can only have a finite number of causes, it means that the universe cannot be infinite. That's one thing that they can argue. I mean, you could just start with that premise that every effect can only have a finite number of causes. And if you add that there can't be circles of causes. So one thing eventually, directly or indirectly caused itself, then you automatically get to at least one. Uncaused first cause. At least one. Okay. So that's much more swift, as it were. You don't even have to talk about time and all that stuff. So let's talk about the old calum for a moment. And it seems that one of the reasons why a new calam is being devised here is potentially because of problems that have been pointed out with the original

calam. Of course, William Lane Craig is the man who gave it the name kalam cosmological argument. So it's no surprise that it's the most popular. And it's certainly the one that I think, certainly people, like my viewers, will be most familiar with. And so I wonder what you think of it as an argument. I was incredibly lucky to discuss this with Dr. Craig himself, and it kind of raised my credence in the argument quite considerably listening to him. It also made me start taking myriological nihilism seriously, which was an unexpected consequence. But I must say that this argument, it doesn't seem to move me in the same way as something

like a contingency argument. There's something about it that just feels a little bit less straightforward. And I can't quite put my finger on what it is. There's a lot hiding under the surface. Yes. I think there's something to be said about this first premise. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. My objection to Dr. Craig was to say that the kind of beginning to exist that we're talking

about with God creating the universe is beginning to exist ex nihilo, is genuinely new stuff appearing. If the universe did begin to exist, then that's what it would look like. It would be out of nothing, whereas when we intuitively accept that everything that begins to exist has a cause, you know, like a car beginning to exist has a cause, it's not beginning to exist in the same way because it's not beginning to exist ex-nehalo, but rather out of a rearrangement of pre-existing matter. Exactly.

And so things, and so there seems to be a kind of fallacy of equivocation happening here that when we talk about things beginning to exist without a cause or requiring a cause in the first premise, we're talking about beginning to exist from prior material, whereas when we're talking about the universe beginning to exist, we're talking about beginning to exist X nihilo. And so we're not actually forming a coherent argument here. Yeah, so I think there is a way to construe this objection that is extremely powerful,

and there is a way that I would advise people not to construe it. So I would actually advise people not to construe it as an equivocation, because what you can do is you can actually give a precise caching out of what you mean by begins to exist. And you can say that's common in between the car beginning to exist, even from pre-existing materials and the universe. You could just say maybe the temporal extent is finite in the earlier-than direction, Or you could say there is an earliest temporal boundary to its existence or something along those lines.

So in other words, you could say, if you were trying to defend against this objection, everything that begins to exist, whether out of material or out of nothing, requires a cause. And so then there's just no equivocation. Yeah. And I mean, you don't even have to, that almost sounds like gerrymandered, but you could just say everything with an earliest temporal boundary or something like that. Or everything with an earliest temporal boundary that, by the way, doesn't exist timelessly sans metric time. Because, you know, Craig has his little interesting view about God's innate relationship to time. But setting that aside, let's just say everything with an earliest temporal boundary has a cause,

and then the universe has an earliest temporal boundary. Everything with an earliest temporal boundary. Exactly. Rather than beginning to exist. Yeah, so I mean, that's how I think you'd respond to the equivocation point, because it's the same sense of beginning to exist used in both premises, but you have pinpointed irrelevant to similarity between some beginnings to exist in others. And so the way that I think you can construe this objection in a way that's really powerful is to just give a mirror argument. And the mirror argument, or the symmetry, argument would run as follows. Premise 1, whatever begins to exist is made out of some pre-existing things or stuff. And the pre-existing doesn't actually have to be a temporal pre-existent. It could be

a kind of ontological pre-existent. Yeah, like logically. Yeah, like ontologically or explanatorily prior stuff from which it is made. Just to break that down for a moment, because we're moving through this quite fast, there's a difference here between, you were saying a distinction between a temporal prior existence and ontological prior existence. So, So there are, when we think of something existing prior, we tend to think it happened beforehand or existed beforehand. But you could have, in the, an example that's often given of the reverse is God's foreknowledge and free will.

Yeah. That is God's, God knowing what you'll freely choose to do is temporally prior to you doing it, but it's, uh, explanatorily dependent. Exactly. the, the, the, it's ontologically, uh, posterior to it, yes. So, um, and I mean, you don't even need to bring in foreknowledge. Just think about truth, right? So right now, it's true that tomorrow I'll have breakfast, but, and so like this truth is

in some sense earlier than my having breakfast. Yeah. But the truth, I don't eat breakfast because it's true today. Yeah. It's true today because I eat breakfast tomorrow. The thing that makes it true is eating breakfast the next day. Yeah. So even though it's temporarily prior, it's actually ontological. or we could say explanatorily posterior it's dependent on that so yeah there's there's a

distinction between those two senses of priority so back to the premise right everything that begins to exist comes from or is made from some pre-existent things or stuff and again that pre is either temporal or this kind of explanatory priority that is just as empirically confirmed as the causal principle in will and lane craigs old kalon it's by my life just as intuitive it seems I mean yeah if someone told you like remember we were walking in the woods And we, in addition to all the shrubbery, we saw, let's say, some sort of translucent orb. Let's say that popped into existence, as it were. We would think it was just as crazy if someone suggested that it popped into existence as if

they said, oh, well, it popped into existence. There was some sort of cause, but it wasn't made from any pre-existent stuff. Or if, like, someone told you that they made a log cabin without any brick or mortar or woods or anything. They didn't rearrange that in any way or shape or form. They just created it. They just, like, said, let it be, and pop. It just, bam.

Like, that seems just as absurd. And that seems just as intuitively. I mean, so intuition supports both premises just as much. So to be clear, what you're doing here is you're constructing a symmetrical argument that's like a parody of the calum. So the calum starts with everything that begins to exist has a cause. You're saying, well, let's construct a parody of this argument, a mirror argument that starts instead by saying that everything that begins to exist or has a, what did you say? No, everything that begins to exist has a material cause. And we could say a material cause in the sense of...

You're starting this argument with everything that begins to exist has a material cause because of the fact that if we look at our empirical evaluation of the world, that seems to be the case. When things begin to exist, they have some, they begin to exist out of some pre-existing material. Things are stuff. That's why I don't even like to get bogged down in stuff about material, because like, even if there's mind stuff, I mean, it's not as though, like, minds and thoughts and so on pop into existence without any pre-existing things or stuff.

I mean, there's lots of stuff going on in our brain, firstly, but yeah, anyway, I just want to, I want to divorce the argument from material specifically and just talk about pre-existent things or stuff. Pre-existing stuff. And so the reason you construct this mirror argument is because if everything that begins to exist begins to exist out of pre-existing stuff, and if the universe began to exist, which is the exact same premise too, it would follow that the universe also came from or was made from pre-existing things or stuff. Now it's had another premise, which traditional theists have to grant if they're being traditional. Theist, which is that the universe does not come from or is made from pre-existent things or stuff, because God is supposed to have created an ex-Nehalo. From that, it follows, that traditional theism is false. So you have an equally powerful argument, it seems, as the Klam, but that delivers

you the falsity of traditional the theism. And what that means is that if you accept the Klam, it seems as though you should also accept this one, because it's the exact same inferential steps, the motivations seem the exact same, and so you can't accept one without accepting the other, of course. So it seems. But yet, of course, there will be responses to this, and there are indeed responses to this. For example, Craig himself seems to, he defends the first premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause, not via an empirical analysis of things that we see beginning to exist, but rather as a point of intuition. Intuition.

So just the idea of kind of, well, if things can begin to exist without a cause, then why don't we see it happening all the time, this kind of argumentation. But if you're trying, at least the intuitive plausibility that most people, upon first hearing the kalam, accept the first premise, is based on when you say everything that begin to exist has a cause, right? They're thinking of things that have begun to exist that they've seen, and they all have a cause, and so they go, yeah, sure. And you're saying that there's a parody argument, which is quite interesting. So, based on this. And again, I think there's a lot more discussion to be had about whether if there is a cause of the universe, it would be. it would be God. I mean, we can talk about it briefly. I just want to make sure that we've got time to get through everything. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that second premise, I mean,

there are different philosophical arguments for it. Of course, we haven't even spoken about that. Yeah, I mean, if people want, they can check out my Kalam playlist and also the series I'm doing with Stephen. We're going to be covering those in extreme depth. Yeah, and we'll make sure everything's linked properly in the description. So we get to this, this cause. So we've already got a problem with the Kalam here, but let's just ignore this problem for a moment and say, you know, it functions. We get the conclusion that the universe has a cause. Now people, a theist, well, again, someone like Craig would say that the universe contains time and space, and so whatever caused it the universe must be timeless and spaceless. Also, if it's timeless, it's kind of infinitely

existing, but the only way that you get a finite effect from an infinite cause is if the infinite cause somehow does something like brings into existence if you have this this impersonal just existing necessary being if it's causally sufficient to bring about a universe the universe should be infinite too because if you have an infinite cause that's causally sufficient for a universe the universe should be infinitely existing but if you have an infinite cause which has a causal sufficiency to bring about the universe but somehow doesn't and then does such that the universe is finite, it seems to be a timeless, spaceless, creative power that does stuff

and interacts with the world. This is God, right? No, it's not. So one thing you could say definitely is that you don't need to have some kind of personal, let's even grant that it's timeless and spaceless and so on. I wouldn't grant that, but set that aside. All this thing needs is to be such that it causes or brings about the effect, and yet it's not causally sufficient for its effect. What that means is that the causal link between this cause and the effect just doesn't, it can't be deterministic. It can't necessarily bring about its effect as a kind of emanation, you know, if you knock over a bunch of dominoes, given the initial conditions of that and so on and given that there are no quantum effects that are percolating up to the macro level,

it's necessarily the case that once that second to that penultimate domino is hit over, it's necessarily going to hit over that next one. So, yeah, I would, I would, we could grant that the cause cannot necessarily cause or deterministically cause its effect. That doesn't get us freedom. That doesn't get us libertarian freedom. All it tells us is that it's an indeterministic causal link. That is the cause doesn't necessarily bring about its effect. In some worlds it does and in other worlds it doesn't.

That gives you a kind of spontaneity. But that spontaneity doesn't need to be a libertarian free action. It could be, we have perfectly coherent mathematical and physical models, for instance, like under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, wherein there is this indeterministic causation, wherein certain states of quantum systems can indeterministically give rise to later states of the quantum system. This gives us a perfectly coherent model of impersonal but indeterministic causation. I say that is all you need to get this temporal effect, finite effect, from this timeless cause.

Again, that's precisely what Craig is appealing to. It can't be sufficient for its effect. It can't like necessarily emanate it out because then otherwise you wouldn't get this effect from a timeless cause. But again, all that tells us is that it's indeterministic. I'm myself, I'm actually personally quite skeptical of the idea of indeterminate causes or indeterminate explanations. Which would be another objection to the Kalam in itself. Yes. So there are, yeah, that's true, interesting. And it's something that I actually hope to do a video about at some point in the future, but we've kind of given a good overview

here at the Kalam. We've talked about some of its problems. We've talked about the different stages, the only question remaining, I think, is where we're going to put it. Now, in my view, I'm trying to shake off my bias because I just love this argument. It feels like an old friend or something at this point. But in terms of the ability it has to convince people, in terms of the immediate viability of the premises, I want to place it somewhere around the C tier. Yeah, I'm leaning towards B tier, because it does succumb to so many different problems, but it's just generated so much literature, and it's captivated the minds of philosophers and so on. Like, philosophers don't dismiss this argument.

They take it seriously. It's got something important going for it. There's something here, which, I mean, it just raises so many interesting questions about time and so on. And actually, when you bring in the consideration that you can formulate new versions of the Kalam, like the new Kalam. New Kalam, which has sparked a whole new literature. Papers are being, I have papers under review on the new Kalam. Then that might be reason then to bump it up to B. So actually, I think I'd agree with you there.

So should we place it in B? Yeah. We'll place it in B. Fantastic. Here it is. All right. Calam cosmological argument, Tier B. Okay.

Next, another pet favorite of mine is the Anselmian ontological argument. I actually just had a quite long conversation with Steve Woodford on my podcast about the Anselmian argument in detail. So if people are interested in kind of my views and how I would like go about defending that argument, you can go and watch that episode that I did with Steve. Of course, ontological arguments famously come in lots of different forms. And one of the reasons why people have invented sort of new versions of the ontological argument is because the Anselmian version seems to be problematic.

I'm actually, I'm quite sympathetic to the view of the Anselm ontological argument being perhaps the best one. Again, we should maybe just give a brief overview. Anselm asks, and it's worth remembering that the project of natural theology only really started around the time of the Enlightenment. Anselm's writing in the 11th century. And so he's not really putting forward an argument in the way that we'd be familiar with today. He doesn't do premise-premise-conclusion.

The proselyonian is actually in the form of a prayer. But he says that anybody, even the fool, can conceive of the greatest conceivable being. Now, we can kind of ask, I think a good way of putting this forward. It's not quite how Anselm does it, but is to ask another person. I'll ask you to do it now, Joe. If you could just conceive in your mind of the greatest conceivable being, and that means that, you know, whatever, I guess let's kind of max out the properties or something. Let's say that greatness just means kind of having lots of, so maximal power, maximal ethics, maximal everything. Does that being exist in reality?

The reason I ask that question is because if you say no, then you're not doing what I ask you to. because if you're thinking of if you're conceiving of a being that doesn't exist in reality well guess what you can conceive of an even greater being and so you're not doing what I asked you to because I ask you to imagine the greatest conceivable being and so by doing that which even the fool is able to do everybody knows that you can conceive of the greatest conceivable being you are automatically conceiving of a being that exists in reality QED there is so much so in this 12 hour video that I just put out gave maybe eight or nine different responses to the argument from people like

Josh Rasmussen, Graham Opie, and lots of others who have criticized it quite forcefully, both theists and atheists alike. Where to start? Let's just go with the famous Gondolo or Guanylo, and people pronounce it differently, but let's go with a Guanylou's parody island. So imagine, now I'm going to turn the tables, imagine, Alex, if you will, the greatest conceivable island. It has the greatest number of coconuts or whatever, the best traits off between coconuts and dancing girls and all these other sorts of things. They got just wonderful lemonade and all these sorts of things.

Now, does that exist in reality? If you say no, you haven't conceived of the greatest conceivable island, because after all, it is better for this thing to exist in reality than in mind alone. And so we are forced to conclude QED that such an island actually exists, the greatest conceivable island. And of course I can run this for, let's say, elves and fairies and... The greatest conceivable pizza. Exactly.

And the idea is that if we accept the logic of the Anselmian argument, we must also accept the existence in reality of all of these crazy things, the greatest conceivable pizza, the greatest conceivable island. But of course, these things do not exist in reality, and therefore there's something wrong with the argument. But how about I answer your question, Joe? You said, imagine the greatest conceivable island. Does this island exist in reality?

And I would say no. Because all of the great making properties of an island are still true of the island that exists in the mind. All of the things that make an island a great island exist in the mind. It exists in that island that exists in the mind. Now, the island that exists in reality is a greater thing because qua thingness, existence makes something greater. But existence in reality doesn't make something a better island.

There's nothing about being an island that is made greater by existence in reality. As long as it exists in the mind, it's still there. Now you might say, you know, it's a better island if you can actually go to it, but we've got to understand how Anselm is thinking about existence in the mind. You can go to the island in the mind. In your mind, it's possible to conceive of an island that people visit and go to. The property of being visitable then exists in the island in the mind. It's like writing it in a fiction book.

Imagine talking about, where's the Lord of the Rings set? Middle Earth. Talking about Middle Earth, this exists in the mind. And then we say, well, can people go to Middle Earth? Well, yes. because kind of within that realm of understanding, they can. Like, it's a place that can be visited. It's a place that has grass.

It's a place that has all the great-making properties of a middle earth. And so the greatest conceivable island, to be the greatest conceivable island, doesn't need to exist in reality. Now, we can say that, sure, okay, it wouldn't be a greater island, qua island. But the island that exists in reality as well would still be a greater island qua-thouac. It would still be a greater thing. But if we're talking about greatness qua thing now, I would say, yes, I agree.

The island that exists in reality is a greater thing than the island that exists in the mind. Even if it's not a greater island, it's a greater thing. But now we're talking about the greatness of the thing. And you know how we can make this thing even greater? Not by giving it omnipotence and omniscience, and making it loving and making it powerful. And so you end up with God.

And so the response to this whole The response to this argument which I love, and I'm indebted to my friend Maximally Great Philosophy, who still only uploaded one video, for making me aware of this line of response to the parody, is to say exactly that, is to say that whereas Anselm's asking you to imagine not the greatest conceivable God, or the greatest conceivable man, or the greatest conceivable table, or indeed island, but the greatest conceivable thing. Whereas the, whereas he's doing that, the objection that Gornillo is putting forward is to say, imagine the greatest conceivable island, which has already limited the scope, and it's limited it in such a way that actually this doesn't need to exist in reality, because it can still be just as good an island existing in the mind. Of course, the only way to make it greater, the only way to make it properly analogous is to say that we're talking about the greatness of an island qua thing.

But once you do that, once you make it properly analogous, you can. make it greater as a thing more so by turning it into God. So in other words, any appropriately formulated parody of the ontological argument will either be actually not appropriately formulated or if it is, you'll actually just be describing God and calling it an island. Yeah, so probably two responses, two or three responses. So the first response is that there may be a clash of intuitions. But to me, it does seem to be a better island, Qua Island, if it really does exist in reality. You can visit it. There really are dancing girls there. It's not just in your mind. I can't even visit the one in your mind. It's privately accessible to you. It'd be better

if it were publicly accessible. If we could all go to it, if you and I could go to it together, and have some fun and talk about ontological arguments actually on the island. That would be a better island. That seems so patently clearer to my mind. So it seems to me I would actually push back on that point. It does seem to be better. Even Quah Island, not necessarily qua thing, even if it were better Qua thing. That's one response that I'd give. The second response that I would give is that let's just suppose that it would only be a better quah thing. It's still better.

So it's still better, in which case you weren't actually conceiving of the greatest conceivable island when I asked you to. Because whatever we're picking out, when we're talking about the thing in reality, it's still better and it's an island. It's a better island, just it's a better island quah thing. But it's still a better island, that's all that I need for my argument. So nothing in my argument hinged on it being a better island quah island. It just needed to be better.

And so we still get this absurd conclusion, it seems. So that's the second response that I would give. The third response that I would give, and if this is actually a response that Alexander Proust is given to Anselm's ontological argument, it's a version of the existence is not a predicate objection, but I think it's better formulated. And so this is an objection to ontological arguments more generally,

not ontological arguments more generally, but Anselm's argument. So not necessarily in the context of a parody. But it's actually not clear, by my lights, that existence in reality is better than existence in the mind. So no, God actually wouldn't be better if he existed in the reality than in the mind. Why is that? Well, because when we're talking about the greatness of, let's say, non-existent things, we're talking about the greatness that they would have, were they to exist? So when we're arguing about the greatness of Superman versus Spider-Man, we're talking about the greatness that Spider-Man

would have, were he to exist? And Superman would have, were he to exist? After all, they're non-existent things. They don't have greatness. Non-existent things don't have properties. They don't exist, so he's to even have properties in the first place. So we're talking about the greatness they would have, were they to exist in reality? So then if you're asking me, to compare this greatness that the greatest conceivable being has only in my mind versus in reality, it's the same greatness. It's the same thing which is such that were it to exist in reality, how much greatness would it have? So if we're comparing the being which is in reality versus the being which is just in my mind, so long as it's like the same description of the being,

right? Which Ansel needs for his argument to get off the ground. So long as that's the case, it's the same goodness. It's the same greatness. It's the greatness that the thing would have were it to exist in reality. And so even if it just exists in my mind, it's the same greatness as the thing that does exist in reality, because it's conditional. It's conditional. So I actually think that that's a quite forceful objection to the argument as well. Yes. Of course, there are things that I want to say in response to this, but partly for reasons of time, and partly because I did discuss this argument in more depth myself in a very long video with Steve. I think it would be a good time to get down to business, the whole

reason we're hearing in the first place after all. How good is this argument? Well, it spawned a huge literature of ontological arguments, which is to be said in its favor. But I do think it succumbs to so many different problems. And even by theists and atheists alike, it has almost been well now universally rejected. So I'm tempted to say C. You wouldn't put it lower, because the way you talk about it is... D or C, but I mean, see because it's so important in the history of thought. And Anselm really is hitting on something.

Like, I think he's hitting at modal ontological arguments, especially in his proselygian, later on. So, I don't feel... What should be our metric here, you know, is it like the fact that something spawned a great deal of literature? We said that with the Kalam, but we said that this is because it does seem to drive at something that people think, yeah, there's something in there that's true, but with Anselm's argument, most people think it's just trash the first time they hear it.

They think it's a joke. And so I don't know what our metric should be. I guess it also depends on kind of what would be an example of an F-tier argument. I mean... The banana argument. Yeah, like, what's our bound here? Like, I mean, of the ones that we have, it may be the worse and therefore maybe should be F. Exactly. This is all subjective.

But I'm imagining like an F-tier argument would be kind of something like, I don't know, like the banana argument. Yeah, the banana argument or like, or like, how can you say there's no God? Just look around you. Look at the trees, man. Or somebody saying, well, you know the Psalms say that the fool in his heart says there is no God. Or like, yeah, I took some like psilocybin last week. I guess, yeah, maybe. I guess like, I didn't.

I guess like F-tier. argument would be just like something that's circular or something, you know, just like God exists because the Bible says so and the Bible's true because God exists. Like that would just be F'd here, right? So imagining that's the case. It probably wouldn't be quite that bad. I like the argument, but I recognize that I'm quite unique among certainly among atheists and even among religious thinkers in thinking that it's a thinking that at least the Anselmian version is good. So I'd be tempted to put a bit higher, but I'm willing to be dragged down. To sort of the CD level. Okay. Well, because all the arguments that we're going through are actually like taken seriously by philosophers. Let's put it in the D tier just because we're not going to be any banana arguments or anything like that. Yeah, since since we're kind of bottoming out with we're not kind of bottoming out with like the banana argument. Yeah Then and you know we maybe we should flash the premises on the screen just in case people aren't familiar the banana and the hand are perfectly made one for the other. I guess I mean it pains me, but I understand that if I were to try to argue to drag it up much higher,

we'd just end up getting into a debate about the argument. And I recognize that certainly most people are going to see it that way. I just want to clarify, I think it should maybe go a little bit higher. I mean, if I were doing this on my own, I'd maybe put it in, you know, I'd maybe put it in S tier. It's just so, the fact that you can just establish God's existence just by thought, you can just sit in a chair and God just, you just know God exists by virtue of the very thing that you're doing.

S for ambition, yeah. Yeah, but... It's beautiful. It is. There's something, there's something kind of magical about it. Yes, you're trying. Painfully, I recognize that it's not done well in convincing many of my friends and colleagues. So, well, dear tea.

Deity. Deity. Deity. Deity. Deity. I was actually just, it's a funny drink that we drink in England. I was just seeing if we had any. Deity.

Deity. Deity. How ironic. It's a Freudian slip there, I think. Yeah. Tier D. Yes. Is where it should be.

So Anselm... I'm always going to cry saying this. Anselm's ontological argument, tier D. Okay. So the next argument, again, we're going to stay in the broad family of ontological arguments for the time being, and we're going to talk about the modal ontological argument. It's a pretty difficult thing to kind of get into and discuss quickly. The idea is based around...

where it was originally formulated by Alvin Plantinger. And I guess I'm trying to think of the most kind of simple way of putting this forward. Here it is. Premise 1. Possibly there's a necessarily existent perfect being. Conclusion. This does follow in a pretty standard system of modal logic. Conclusion.

There actually exists a necessarily existent perfect being. And that possibility is a metaphysical possibility. That's not just like epistemic. Like, oh, for all I know God might exist. Like, I'm not certain. That's not what we are talking about. We're saying there is a possible way that reality could genuinely have been such that this necessary, existent, perfect being exists.

So let's break this down because you're right that the simplest way of putting it forward crudely is to just say those premises, but most people upon hearing them are just like, what are you talking about? The argument is often, because even more simply, it's often framed as if it's possible that God exists, then God exists. Premise 2, it's possible that God exists, conclusion therefore God exists. That is a valid argument, but it just seems. ridiculous. Why is it the case that if it's possible that God exists, then God exists?

This relies on an understanding of necessity and contingency again in terms of possible worlds. To say that something is necessarily true is to say that it's true in all possible worlds. So we discussed earlier the idea that if something's necessarily true, it can't fail to be false. Possible worlds is a linguistic tool that's been invented by philosophers just to imagine in the way that things could have been. So when I say that it's possible that this plant could have been blue, one way of representing that thought

is to say there is a possible world in which it is blue. I don't think that there is actually like a multiverse, another universe that exists somewhere in which there's a blue plant, although some people take that view. It's just kind of a linguistic tool. When I say there's a possible world

in which the leaves are blue, I mean that it's, it could have been the case that these leaves are blue. But there is no possible world in which there's a married bachelor. There is no possible world in which two and two make five. These things are necessarily true, which means that they're true in all possible worlds. Now, God is defined for all intents and purposes here as a being that if he exists, he exists, he exists necessarily necessarily. So if he exists, he has to have always existed. And if he doesn't exist, he can't come into existence.

If he doesn't exist, he necessarily doesn't exist. So the question to ask then is quite simply, is it possible that a necessarily existing being exists? Now, a necessary being is one that exists in all possible worlds. But remember that when I said if it's possible something to be the case, it's the same as saying it is true in a possible world. If it's possibly true that there exists a necessary being, then that means that there is some possible world. in which there exists a necessary being. But of course, a necessary being can only exist in all possible worlds or no possible worlds. And so if we accept the premise that it's possible that the necessary being exists,

that means it exists in one possible world, but since it exists in all or none, if it exists in one, we know that it has to exist in all of them, which would include the real world. Therefore, this necessary being must actually exist in reality. Okay. Thoughts? Yeah.

So there's a lot to say here. I mean, one thing you could do is you could challenge the underlying modal logic that applies to this. I mean, it's actually somewhat of a standard system that both theists and atheists alike are pretty cool with. I mean, there are the theists who don't accept the system of modal logic. Modal, by the way, is just modal logic is the study of valid inferences concerning possibility and necessity.

So both theists and atheists, a lot of them agree with this underlying system of modal logic in which this inference is valid from possible. necessary to, it is actual, it's actually necessary, necessarily the case that the thing exists. But there are philosophers who challenge it, like Nathan Sam, for instance, is a philosopher who rejects and gives reasons for rejecting this underlying metaphysics, or underlying, excuse me, underlying system of modal logic. But it is relatively standard. So that's not the move that most atheists would take. The move that most atheists would take is just to say, well, hold on a second. Why should I accept that premise, that it's possible that God exists? I mean,

In this system of modal logic, you can see, because it's a valid argument, to assert that is, in essence, just to assert that God exists. Because if God possibly exists, then we just know it's a valid inference in this system that it follows that God exists. So why would the atheist ever grant that first premise? Why? I mean, to grant it is just to grant that theism is true. No atheist would ever grant that first premise if they're being a consistent atheist. And so it's just dialectically toothless. So you don't think an atheist...

Of course, the point is that for the atheist, well, any deductive argument is basically a restating of a conclusion in two premises, trying to make it, you know, more plausibly acceptable. Or in this case, one premise. Yeah. So, like, could not the atheist sort of upon thinking about it in these terms thinks to themselves, well, I don't think God exists, but then somebody says, is it possible that God exists? And they could be like, well, hmm, actually, when you put it that way, now they know that, yeah, if they grant that first premise, you know, they're basically granting the conclusion.

but that's just because the first premise entails the conclusion. So what you're doing is posing a challenging argument because the atheists will look at that and say, well, actually, maybe I do think it's possible that God exists. But if I do, then that entails that God does exist. So I'm not really sure here. So, like, of course, no atheist is going to grant it after considering the argument and still being an atheist.

But it's perfectly feasible that an atheist could hear this argument, grant the first premise, and in doing so, become a theist. Yeah, but the question is whether or not it really gives them a reason to do so. Like, whether it gives them, like, why, why are they granting that premise? I mean, does it just seem possible to them? I mean, this is where we get into the kind of reverse modal ontological argument, because it seems as though anything that they say with respect to that first premise could equally be said with respect to the reverse possibility.

Okay, so let's slow down, let's make sure that everyone's on the same page. I'm sure your audience will be drenched in familiarity with this stuff, and so are mine, probably, but for the sake of clarity, much like how we constructed a parody of the kalam cosmological argument, say, hey, if you accept the kalam, you should accept this other argument, which says God doesn't exist. We can construct, and there has been constructed, and a parody of the modal ontological argument, we were talking about necessity and possibility. Consider the following argument. Is it possible that God does not exist? Now, again, people might intuitively think, yeah, it's possible that God doesn't exist. what that means is there's a possible world in which God doesn't exist.

But God, being a necessary being, either exists in all possible worlds or no possible worlds. And so if we find a possible world in which he doesn't exist, we know that he exists in no possible world, including the actual world, therefore God doesn't exist. So you have two parallel arguments. It's possible that God exists, therefore God exists, and it's possible that God doesn't exist, therefore God doesn't exist. And this is, when we talk about, you know, symmetry and symmetry breakers, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about the fact that these seem equally plausible, at least on first reading.

And what we need in order to defend the modal ontological argument is a symmetry breaker. We need to show why these arguments are actually not the same. Here's one way of doing it. We could say that if God is a necessarily existing being, if this is what God is being defined as, you know, because Flanthinger doesn't quite use. the terms of God. He talks about like maximally great being, this kind of stuff. So we're not really talking about God. Of course, we are, but we're avoiding that language in order to just establish something a bit milder, which is a necessarily existing being. If we say it's possible that a necessarily existing being exists, this makes sense. It might be kind of circular,

it might presuppose the conclusion, but it's consistent. But can you say, as you need to with the reverse modal ontological argument, it's possible, to say it's possible that God doesn't exist, is to say it's possible that a being that necessarily exists doesn't exist. And so actually the reverse, the first premise of the reverse modal ontological argument doesn't get off the ground, because you've just stated a contradiction. No, you have not stated a contradiction. You're just saying it is possibly not the case that there exists an X such that X is a necessary. being. When you're saying that it's a necessary being, you're saying, if it exists in any world, then it exists in all, right? And so if you're saying, it's possibly the case that there is no such thing. All you're saying is that, yeah, no, it's possibly the case that there is no such thing

which is such that if it did exist in any world, then it exists in all worlds. And that's not itself a contradiction. The way you put it was a little sly, but I know you're just trying to defend it, but, so yeah, no, it isn't a contradiction. And to see that is just to say, like, let's just get the stronger claim even than possibly there is no necessary being. Let's say there actually is no necessary being. That's not a contradiction. You're just denying that there's a necessary being, but you're still saying there isn't something which is in all possible worlds. Like, when you put it like that, it sounds like a contradiction, but it's not a contradiction. So should we see what the slyness is, I think, is that I said, God is defined as a being

that exists necessarily, but that's not quite right. Yeah. I think God is defined as a being which if exists, exists necessarily. So if you say that God by definition is a being that necessarily exists, then you can't say that God possibly doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. But if you say that God is such a being that if he exists, he exists necessarily,

then you can say it's possible that he doesn't exist. Yeah, well, and taking that first route is just disastrous because you can define anything necessarily existent and then you'd be able to prove absolutely anything really. Well, now... I could just say that the necessarily existing cup. It's defined as that. There's an interesting claim.

Can you do that? Again, there's another kind of response. This is a bit like the Cartesian ontological argument. People claim that Descartes just defines God into existence. And one of his contemporaries, I can't remember which one now. I can't remember who it was. But in the sets of objections, I know what you're talking about.

Talks about the existing lion. Yeah. Is it, Mousseau? Yeah. No, that was the guy who conveyed the information. No, that was like the messenger. He was like the Google of the day, basically. Oh.

People would... At any rate. Okay. It might have been him. In response to Descartes' ontological argument, which he's accused of just defining God into existence. And you're saying here that if we take this first route of just defining God as a necessarily existing being, you can just define anything into existence that way.

This was problem was raised to Descartes. Somebody said, imagine the existing lion. The definition of this existing lion is a lion that exists. by definition. And so this lion must exist, right? This seems ridiculous. Descartes had a way of getting around this by saying that you can imagine the lion without its existence, but you can't imagine the God without the existence because God is kind of, because existence is like a property of God. It's a bit of a weird way. I don't really like that. A better response might be to say, well, can you talk about the necessarily existing cup?

Let's just try this. Let's just say, there's a problem. problem with defining God as a necessarily existing being, because I could just define the necessarily existing cup and then say it must exist. Well, what is a necessarily existing cup? Well, it's a cup that exists in all possible worlds. There's a possible world in which there's no matter. And so if this cup is necessarily existing, we would generally think that in order to be a cup, it has to be made of matter. But you're talking about a necessarily existing cup, which includes its existence in a possible world where there's no matter. So you've got a, you've got a a kind of spaceless, formless cup.

I mean, the very fact that I define it as a necessarily existing cup, would, if we can go with this reasoning, would show that, no, there isn't a possible world in which there is no matter. Okay, yeah, you could, you could construct an argument like that that says. And also, we don't have to focus on cups,

we could just talk about different kinds of deities or something like that. Like, we could talk of the Islamic god, the Hindu god, the Neo-Platonic 1, Tao, Prana. It's a little confusing talking about, you know, different monotheistic gods, because they're kind of the same god

just understood differently. We could specify, well, we, I know, there's a distinction between sense and referent, right? But we could actually specify that we're just talking about the thing that exactly satisfies this description. In which case, you're guaranteeing that they're going to be separate. And just describing necessary existence to it. Well, in any case, we've probably gone along for, or a lot while for modal ontological arguments. So what are we thinking? I mean, it depends whether or not we're including symmetry breakers within it.

Yeah. If we're not, then I'd say it goes really low. So we haven't really talked about the different symmetry breakers that are on offer, but it does seem in the case that we're, when you first hear the modal ontological argument, I remember thinking, like, wow, that's really clever. I can't remember when it was, you know, years and years ago, but I remembered thinking, like, wow, that's really cool. And then somebody presents the reverse, and you're like, oh, well, I have no idea, which is, so I'm exactly where I started, no idea which, which route to take. So, based on that, I think it would potentially be something like,

something like D or E tier. But, but then it's worth bearing in mind that planting a, didn't present, didn't want the argument to be an attempt to establish God's existence to a non-believer. He just wanted to say that if you do believe in God, here's a way to give yourself rational grounding. Because if you already believe in God, then do you accept the premise that it's possible that God exists? Yes, you do. From which it follows that God exists. So in other words, it allows you to defend a weaker claim. Now you don't have to defend this claim, God exists. You just have to defend a weaker claim that it's possible that God exists. So, for that purpose of making life a little bit easier for someone who's already a theist, it kind of does a pretty good job.

But if we're talking about arguments for God, and I think it's fair to say that most people will assume in this context, we're talking about arguments which establish God's existence to somebody who doesn't already believe in God. Or give someone a reason. Like, even if planning himself didn't try to develop this, I mean, planning himself says in his book that this is not a demonstration of God's existence, this doesn't really give, this isn't a good reason for the atheist, let's say. So maybe it should go into the E tier.

Of course, there are attempts at symmetry breakers. Which, we're not, let's not include those, because if we did, I'd bump it up way farther, because some of the symmetry breakers are really interesting. And we discussed one on Cameron's channel, so. Oh, great. And the conversation that you, that you had with Cameron. It was you and me. We discussed my explanatory, yes.

Yeah, yeah. So, I almost forgot that Joe and I have had a whole conversation on ontological arguments before on Capturing Christianity. We'll put the link to them in the description as well. But, okay, Sons. explanatory cemetery breakers and other sorts of symmetry breakers we'll put it in E tier but don't you think they need to be considered because they do exist like there are symmetry breakers it's almost like those are different arguments they're like

coming into supplement once you notice the S5 it's like you supplement it with a different argument I see so the argument it just depends on your categorization the argument on its own is just a bit terrible but firstly it doesn't establish God's existence as Plantinga says himself and also there's a reverse argument which seems at least given just the arguments equally plausible we'll stick it Okay, Plantanger's modal ontological argument, E tier. Yeah. Okay, next we're going to talk about the fine-tuning argument. This is a whole universe unto itself. It's in a whole different category of arguments from what we've discussed so far. We've done cosmological and ontological

arguments. This is a teleological argument. It seeks to establish God's existence through an observation of the world around us. What is the fine-tuning argument? Yeah, so there are different versions of the fine-tuning argument, there's one popular presentation by Craig where he just says the various constants of the initial conditions of the universe and the various constants of the universe, the laws of physics, they have certain parameters in there where they have to be in a very, very narrow range, like a sliver, a super-duper small sliver, and they give these numbers like 10 to the power of negative 44 or something like that. But they have to be in a very narrow range, narrow range, in order to support the existence of embodied conscious creatures. you and me and so on. Indeed, even for life to exist. For instance, the cosmological constant,

right, if you increase the size of it just ever so slightly, the universe would like collapse back down on itself. And if you decrease the size ever so slightly, things would expand way too far apart that the closest two different particles are like light years apart. Yeah, atoms couldn't even form. So in neither of those cases, do you get anything like life? And so you get nothing like conscious creatures, conscious embodied moral creatures like you and me. And so what this tells us is that it's extremely improbable just by chance that you'd be able to get a universe where that supports life and conscious creatures and so on by contrast if you have a designer hypothesis that's not at all improbable right god would god sees the value in creatures like this and so god would be able to

fine-tune the constants or a designer at least and the intricacy seems to point the intricacy yeah the very fact that it would be so overwhelmingly improbable by chance it seems to give us a reason to think that there's so someone actually tinkering but they actually fine-tuning it to be clear here, we're talking about the constants of the universe, by which we mean things like the expansion rate of the universe, the strength of gravity, the strength of the strong nuclear forces, these kinds of things, the amount of force that they have. Also distribution of matter, anti-matter in the early universe, low entropy state, things like that. So taking a simple example like gravity, we're saying that the thing under discussion

here is the strength of gravity. It's something about like the value. That is, if gravity were stronger than it actually is, then as the universe were expanding, there'd be too much gravity and it would pull it all back together again. If gravity were any weaker, then the universe would be expanding too fast. There'd be nothing to pull it to restricted. It would be expanding so fast that everything would get ripped to shreds.

And the argument is that the strength of this thing, the strength of something like gravity, has to be very precise. It was only a tiny bit bigger or smaller, but it's not just that, but each individual constant on their own are very finely tuned, but you need to have all of these constants, all very finely tuned. If any one of them were to change ever so slightly, then life couldn't exist. Now some people have said, well, maybe life would just exist in a different form. Maybe we'd have non-carbon-based life or something that doesn't require water, but this version

of the fine-tuning argument is saying that like atoms themselves... Yeah, I mean the closest part could not exist. way. Yeah. Like there's no way that anything resembling, anything like we are aware of could exist. We're not talking about a world where, you know, planets are kind of ovals instead of sphere. I mean, they are kind of ovals already. But you know what I mean?

We're not talking about a universe in which, well, planets are just squares instead of circles. Matter doesn't form if these constants are even so slightly changed. And so given the fact that they're not slightly changed, that they're all very precisely tuned, doesn't this give us an indication that somebody has done the tuning? Because as you say, by chance, there's nothing logically preventing any of these constants from being any value. And so in theory, they could be any value. So why are they this particular value? Well, it can't be chance because the chances are tiny. So design? Yeah, there are so many different ways that people have tried to respond to this. And it's actually, it's difficult to really wrap your mind around

because the literature is so vastier. But one response to some people give is, A multiverse response, right? So if you have a multiverse, let's say a bunch of the different universes with different initial conditions, different constants, and so on, given that you have a sufficiently vast number of these and a bunch of different permutations of the initial conditions and so on, it's almost guaranteed that you're going to get life to arise in some of these. And in that case, it's not very surprising just by chance that you get it because you have so many different trials, as it were.

So that's one response that some people try to give. Another response that some people try to give is that we have to ask, how expected is this data of fine-tuning under naturalism or something like atheism, and how expected is it under theism? Now, just the claim that God exists, or there is a designer, doesn't really lead us to expect that the value of the cosmological constant would be like a six point, I don't know what the values, but like 6.4384, you know, that, what? How do you get there? So there's actually a question. How do you get there from just design? It's actually not clear that the design hypothesis. predicts the data significantly better than a non-design, a relevant non-design alternative. Now, of course, you can try to fix that by saying, oh, well, God desires to bring this thing about. So you're building in stuff into your theory. You're kind of front-loading your theory, your hypothesis, to be able to predict the data.

You're saying, well, God desired it to be that value, or God desired to bring about such conscious creatures, and so on. Once you do that, it seems as though the naturalist, or the atheist could likewise front-load their theory in some sort of way that also predicts the data. They could posit, this is what Alex Melfast, for instance, he has this stocking. horse objection, the naturalist could equally well posit, let's say, some sort of disposition or some mysterious disposition on the part of the foundation of natural reality to give rise, let's say, to conscious creatures, or to set the values at precisely those, or set the constants

at precisely those values. So if the theist is able to front load their theory by building in a desire to get around this problem that theism by itself, as a hypothesis, doesn't predict the data. Surely you couldn't have a natural world that, from its very initial conditions, desires to bring about conscious life in the same way that a God can. Because suppose we're just, we're trialling just two hypotheses here. One is atheism. One is, let's say, something like Christianity.

That is, a God who does love human beings and wants to bring them into existence in order to love them. The fact that you've got constants that are tuned for the bringing about of conscious life seems to be much more expected on, let's say, a loving God than atheism at the very least, right? But it probably just depends on the hypotheses in question. I mean, how are we flushing out this Christianity? I mean, like, are you building in these desires in your hypothesis? Because by itself, just the mere fact that theism is true that there's this God, let's say,

who's omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, and necessarily existent. That doesn't really get you to expect that there would be embodied conscious moral creatures like us. I mean, there's nothing in the hypothesis that entails that, firstly. Within a loving God, do you mean? Yeah, I mean, God would be perfectly self-sufficient in himself. He doesn't have to create or anything like that. is something that requires multiple agents. Does it, though?

Well, I think, at least plausibly, it could be said to do, right? God could have refrained from creating, couldn't he have? Well, that's a difficult theological question. I mean, I think we'd have to say yes. But God would still be loving in such a scenario. It's difficult to, well, he might be loving because he's part of a Trinity, for example. This is one argument. This is Richard Swindler depends the Trinity on the basis of love, right?

So it's the idea that because God is loving and because love requires multiple agents interacting with each other, you get something like Trinity. I can't even begin to describe how terrible I think that that argument is. Yes, I know. I agree. But there's something to this idea that in order to love, you need someone to love and to love you back. So, you know, disregarding a Trinity or something, let's imagine like a god of Tarweed. And we say this God wants to love conscious creatures, wants to have a relationship with conscious creatures. then of course it would make sense for him to fine-tune the constants to bring about conscious creatures.

Of course it would. That's because you're building into your concept of love that he loves conscious creatures. I mean, you could equally just say on the naturalistic foundation there's some sort of disposition. And it's a non-conscious disposition, but a disposition to produce conscious creatures. So this would be something like the approach of necessity. Because we have three options here, right? We have what explains the constants of the universe? It's either chance or its necessity.

They just somehow had to be the way that they are. or its design, and you're saying, well, maybe there's something about the universe which just predisposes the universe to have these constants. Or I'm giving that as one response someone could take. This is just like saying necessity. This is just like saying, well, they're this way

because they kind of have to be in some way. There's something about the nature of the universe which makes these constants have to be the way that they are. Only because that's what you're building into the concept of love in your response. But there seems to be, okay, because somebody might say, well, there's nothing, it's logically possible that the universe

could have all kinds of different constants, and you might want to say it's like, logically possible that God could be loving and not bring about conscious creatures. It's an interesting response, I think. It's actually, it's one that I haven't heard of. I guess we could reframe the argument to say that the three potential explanations are something like chance, necessity, or desire. Disposition. And what you would say is that the kind of disposition slash desire slash design words like this

that might be found in a creator, God, could also be somehow found in the universe? I mean, I'm just giving malpasses, stalking horse objection. And it's not a desire, it's not anything like that. It's just some sort of disposition on the part of natural reality. I mean, salt, for instance, is disposed to dissolve in water. You know, that's one of the salt's dispositions. But surely that that disposition, you know, that... I mean, it's a theoretical posit to explain the data.

The tendency of, like, salt to dissolve in water is an example of the kind of physical event or law or constant that we're seeking to explain. So if you say there's something like within the universe or about the universe that explains why the universe is very finely tuned, you've got a bit of a problem of circularity here. Yeah.

How can something that exists within the universe or is a part of the universe, which itself requires the fine tuning, explain why the fine tuning is... or why the constants are so finely tuned. This doesn't seem to work. God sits outside of this picture. And so there's no problem

saying that God designs the constants of the universe. So surely these are disanalogous. Well, you could equally say, you could just say that the naturalistic foundation is in some sense metaphysically or explanatorily prior to the universe, something like that. Maybe there is some sort of non-spatiotemporal universal wave function with this relevant causal disposition. So there's a, sorry, there's a, a kind of spaceless, timeless, creative power with a disposition to bring about conscious creatures.

But it's not God. It's not God. I mean, this is the stock, naturalistic stocking horse. I'm not here defending this position. Aren't you just describing God and calling it a wave function there? No, because it's not conscious. It doesn't have any loves or desires or anything like that. This is a physically describable...

It has dispositions, which are unconscious. Religious language, as Thomas Aquinas would have us believe, is all like an analogy. Anyway, it's all analogical. And so, when we talk about God being conscious, we don't mean he's conscious. God is not, according to the Thomistic view, God is not loving, God is not good, God is not powerful, because these words are like human words, they're just analogous words to the kind of thing that God is like, and something like conscious is the same. So when you say, yeah, well, this being isn't conscious, it just has, ah, what would you call it, like a disposition,

that's not quite right, like a desire, that's not quite right. A disposition is just a causal power, an ability to produce something, basically. So it has that, But you understand why somebody might kind of laugh at the suggestion that you say that a way to escape the conclusion that God designed the constants is to say that instead they were kind of designed by a spaceless, timeless, creative entity that has a disposition to bring about conscious beings. Or just to set those constants in that way, not necessarily with foresight into the conscious creatures. I mean, it could be black holes or something like that. But you understand why this is... Well, firstly, I mean, it doesn't... I mean, I gave that as an example. when you were asking if the circularity problem

with being in the universe. I mean, you could equally say that it's something within the universe, but it is, let's say, at the very beginning of time, it's the initial singularity of the universe. And then the constants come about as a result of that singularity, basically immediately after it or something like that.

So it could be in the universe. I gave that as example just to get around your point. Or it could be, maybe the, you know, you've probably heard of this priority monism where the universe is in some sense prior to its parts. In that sense, the universe as a whole, would be able to explain, be more fundamental than it,

explain various features of itself, within itself. And so you don't have to go with this kind of spaceless, timeless thing with a disposition. It could just, again, there are various naturalistic proposals. And again, this is just a stalking horse objection. It's to illustrate that, it's illustrating how theism by itself doesn't have the predictive power that many people take it to have. You need to build in stuff to your hypothesis. You have to build in these sorts of desires and so on. You have to build that in in order to predict the data, so it seems, or so this kind of line of response says. But once you're allowed to build up, build that in.

I mean, firstly, you're making your hypothesis more complex, but you're just front-loading your hypothesis to be able to predict the data, and the naturalists can equally front-load their hypothesis to predict the data. And there are naturalistically friendly, acceptable ways to front-load the hypothesis that don't involve desire, involve some sort of causal disposition. And things have causal dispositions that have nothing to do with desires and so on. Salt, as I said, has a causal disposition to melt or whatever, not melt, but dissolved when put in water, or, you know, things like that.

So anyway, it's definitely an interesting argument. And, I mean, I've only surveyed two different responses, the fine-tuning and then the predictive power problem for theism. There's the fine-tuning argument. Yeah, you mean the multiverse. Excuse me. Yeah, you said fine-tuning again. Oh, my bad. So we've surveyed two responses.

Yeah, the multiverse. Yeah, surveyed two responses, the multiverse and the predictive power one. So there are lots of other responses. Some people challenge the fine-tuning thing. We actually only have access, epistemic access, to universes that share our law structures and that we just, modify the little constants in them and the parameters, but we have no clue what it would be like if you change the law structures themselves. So it's actually unclear if the universe is truly fine-tuned for life. But that's three different responses, I guess. So this all said,

where's it going? Because one final thing that I would say about it is, separate from the kind of actual discussion about the viability of the argument, it just moves me the least. I can't explain. Now, a lot of people have. have said the opposite. There's a clip of Christopher Hitchin saying the same thing. He's asked by Doug Wilson in the back of a car, what he thinks, you know, is a good argument for God. And he says that the fine-tuning argument, the constants, and he, I think he's a bit drunk in the clip, actually. He's kind of, he's like, you know, the fact that if they were different by, you know, well, a hair, a hair of differences, and he never, he never

actually says the point, he never actually says the argument, but he's kind of like, it does, you You know, you have to work on it. You have to work on it. He's just saying these kind of vague things, but he's implying that this is something that troubles him. At some point, certainly, we all asked, well, which is the best argument you've yet come up against on the other side?

I think every one of us picks the fine-tuning one. It's the most intriguing. The golden locks, yeah, okay. Fine-to-fine tuning that one degree, well, one-degree, one hair different to nothing. But even though, It doesn't prove a design, doesn't prove a designer, could all have happened without... You have to spend time thinking about it, working on it.

It's not a trivial. We all say that. For me, I don't know, I think it's so, I'm so detached from it. It feels so kind of science-y, it's constants and numbers and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure it's very clever, but something about that realm of discussion, just... Maybe it's because I'm not a scientist. Yeah. It just kind of doesn't...

Sometimes speak to my heart. Yeah. But you say it's the opposite for you. Yeah, no. I mean, this, I have to be honest, like, it does strike me as a potentially plausible line of argument for theism. I mean, I think it's one of the more powerful ones. I do have a worry. We should say, by the way, I mean, I just realized that I didn't even say at the beginning for people who are, like my views, who are familiar with you, Joe's an agnostic. Yeah, an agnostic through and through with, like, we didn't even specify that at the beginning. It'd be interesting, if anybody's watched this far and didn't know

who you were, I'd be really interested to see whether they, sort of, what they think your view was after saying about. Yeah, that would be interesting. But you're an agnostic. Agnostic, which, I mean, for me, what that means, an agnostic is defined differently, but how I kind of articulate it. It's basically just by my lights, the research that I've done and so on, the evidence seems roughly counterbalanced. The weights of reasons seem roughly counterbalance for a theistic view and, let's say, a naturalistic view or an atheistic view. By my light, there just seems to be roughly counterbalanced evidence or weights of reasons. And so things like some contingency arguments do,

by my lights count as evidential chips that fall on one side. Similar with, I mean, I articulate some difficulties for fine-tuning arguments. I go through Neil Senebababu's paper Electrons in Love, where he talks about altering the psychophysical laws where actually you could have conscious moral creatures in that universe where there are particles

just light years apart. God is omnipotent. He can make psychophysical laws different. Psychophysical laws are laws that connect. psychological happenings, mental happenings, with physical happenings. And of course, if you're a theist, you already think that there's a non-physical mind. So this is perfectly fine with fusing. And so what that means is that even those particles that are light years apart, when they go like,

let's say, another light year apart, they could be singing praises to God. When they go another light year apart, they could be in a different mental state, where they're in heartfelt love and communication with one another and so on. That might sound science fictiony, but for an omnipotent God to be able to do this, just altering the psychophysical laws. Of course, in our kind of universe, with the psychophysical laws that we have, you need complex brain structures to have consciousness. But if you alter the psychophysical laws,

you could have completely different. And so God actually would be able to create life and life. You'd be able to create these good values of conscious moral creatures in universes like that. So Neil Sinabababu talks about that. I go through Neil Manson's paper where that's actually an attack on Theism's predictive power, being able to predict the data just because, I mean, God's omnipotent. He could do literally anything.

And so on. So in my video, the 12-hour long video. Yeah, I go through, and I'm going to break it up in a part. but I go through different responses that people could give. But anyway, it does pull on me. So I would actually... Where do you want to put this? If you're asking me, I say A tier.

A tier. Yeah, but we can, I mean, I'd be flexible. I think, I will say that although it doesn't move me because it feels a bit detached, as I say, the reason it doesn't move me, I suspect, is because I don't have a firm grasp of the science. But if you ask me to respond to it in a debate, it would probably be the hardest of the arguments. Yeah. But maybe that's just because of, like, my... expertise and complete lack of expertise in the area of science but it seems to

be probably the hardest one on the list for me to come up with a convincing response to I think it's probably true I think it seems to be it seems to have this effect on all kinds of people including Christopher Hitchens and and if it upsets Christopher Hitchens then it upsets me exactly because any foe of Hitch is a is a foe of mine I can understand it and I think I think I'm I'm willing to grant that fine-tuning in A-tier. I mean, it's a tricky one. It's a tricky.

And that could, I mean, some of the responses could put it down to B, but I think A is, I think it's fine. It depends on the purpose of the argument, because if it's supposed to convince, then for me, it just kind of just doesn't really do anything for me, and so I'd put it way down low. But as an argument in terms of what to have in your list, if you're trying to establish the existence of God for somebody, it seems to be a powerful one. So I just something about me wants to put it in B tier because like the Kalam is in B tier and it seems to me the Kalam is much more powerful to me than than the fine

tuning argument but I don't know it's different for me it's different I just think there are so many different objections to the Kalam that's true actually maybe the Kalam is just kind of it does have more responses that seem more plausible yeah I mean yeah you can respond to fine fine tuning arguments by talking about atoms light years apart to have like relationships with each other. And remember, I mean, we're talking about under thees in there. It just seems, it just seems a bit less plausible. I mean, it almost, it tells us something's, I don't know, something's up,

something's going on, something strange about our universe, maybe. Something, something about the universe is, is, is in a way that it could very easily have not been, at least epistemic, that seems difficult to explain. Yeah. Then, okay, sure, you know what? Fine. A tier it is? A tier it is.

Fine tuning argument for the existence of God. Tier A. Okay, next. We'll try and rattle through this quickly because we've been going for a long time. The moral argument for the existence of God. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. But objective moral values do exist. Therefore, God exists.

Proof. Well, one thing you could do is you could just challenge that to that. second premise. No, there are no objective moral values and duties. You could go a subjectivist route. You could say there are moral truths and so on, but the truth of them depends on our stances, maybe depends on whether or not we want certain things to happen and so on. Or you could just go at an erytheist route where you say, no, moral claims like you ought to do this, or that this is good or that this is really bad. You could say, no, those are uniformly false. You could go a bunch of different routes with that second premise, and philosophers

do take those roots. Now, the majority of philosophers, actually, as shown by Philpaper surveys, are moral realists, so they would agree with that second premise. So, just setting that aside, that just people can challenge premise too. Yeah, because of course that's, that's like a very easy way. If you just, it's basically saying if there are objective values, then God exists. You could just say there are no objective values. Yeah. That's one way out of it.

That is the route I would take, for example. Yeah. And what they're going to say is that there's a, you're biting a bullet there. If you're not able to say, for instance, that, you know, torturing someone just because you want to hear them squeal, that that's not like really stands independently wrong. Now, why did you say squeal there instead of scream? Are you trying to speak to me? I mean, I'm trying to think of things that squeal. I don't know why you might have chosen that.

Yeah, I wonder why. But I'm kind of quite comfortable to do that, to bite that bullet. But I understand why a lot of people wouldn't be. But that's quite like a simple response. It's quite straightforward. That's how you get away of the argument. But you say, put that to the side. Let's just say that's the one response that people can give.

Objective moral values do exist. Let's grant it. Does it follow that God exists? It does not, because there are so many different non-theistic alternatives in this branch of philosophical meta-ethics, where you're studying the nature and foundations of moral truths and so on. So there are lots of different non-theistic foundations,

things where you can ground the truth of moral statements without appealing to God. But can you? Because I know that there are lots of attempts to do this, but it seems to me, and I would say this as an atheist because I don't believe in objective values, that I know lots of people claim that objective ethics can exist without God, but I just don't see how it can.

Well, what's God adding? God, whenever he command something or whenever he says something, he either has some reason for commanding what he does, or he doesn't. That's exhaustive. He either has some reason or he doesn't. If he has some reason for commanding what he does, well, then it's surely that reason, which is undergirding the rightness or wrongness or badness or right, like the goodness of something, right? If God's commanding you not to rape because there's something wrong about rape in and of itself, maybe because you're violating rights, maybe because of the suffering of the victim, whatever. If God has a reason,

it's surely that more fundamental reason. That would exist outside of God and so there would be an objective ethic that exists without God. Exactly. It's surely that more fundamental reason, which is doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to the moral properties. This is basically the Euthyphro dilemma. Yeah, it's a version of it. I think it's a more powerful version. I'm not talking about what makes right actions right and so on.

I'm just talking about whether or not God has a reason for commanding what he does. And if he has no reason, that's arbitrary. It's completely arbitrary. That's what arbitraryness is. You have no reason whatsoever to forbid rape as opposed to commanding that you go out and rape people. That's just absurd.

If you grant that, that's not a moral realism worth wanting. I mean, if that's what you're going to say, I'm going to reject premise too then, because that's just, that's absurd. That's not true moral. Of course, that quite heavily relies on intuition there. Just the idea that it being arbitrarily objectively true that these things are wrong is somehow like troubling.

Yeah, but their argument for the second premise crucially relies on intuition. They're appealing to your intuitions by saying, don't you intuitively, doesn't it intuitively seem that it's really objectively wrong to torture someone for fun? If you kick out that intuition, then you're kicking out the justification for the second premise. Interesting. That's a good line of defense.

So, I mean, again... But of course, doesn't this depend on what we kind of mean when we're talking about God's relationship to goodness, because, like, there will be views of goodness that say that goodness is just that which is more like God. And there's kind of, there's no reason, there's no rhyme or reason about this. It's just that those things that are more in accordance with God's nature are those things that we call good. We've given it this word good. But again, like as Thomas Aquinas would say, it's not quite right because good is an analogous term. But when we talk about objective morality, what we're talking about is closeness or in similarity or distance from God. When you read religious scripture, it often talks about people being distant from God.

Their sin distances them from God, as it to say that to be good is just to be more like God. This seems perfectly objective. Yes, but why? What is it about being more like God? I mean, if, let's God's immaterial, right? Am I better if I'm immaterial? What? That doesn't seem really right. You have to talk about the moral properties of God.

If you more, if you better resemble God's moral properties, and yeah, you're better. But now you're bringing in the moral property. Like, it's the lovingness. It's the goodness and so on. It's that, which is good, which is about God, right? It's because you're getting more loving. It's that. It's the lovingness.

It's the kindness. It's the virtue. It's the honesty. That's what's doing the explanatory heavy lifting here, not God. God's acting as an intermediary here. The truly intrinsically valuable things here, that's the virtue, that's the kindness, it's the love, it's the intellectual and moral virtues. That's what's doing the heavy lifting here with respect to explaining why something is good or bad or whatever.

It's an intermediary. That's fascinating. So what do you think of a response then instead? We'll try a different, right? Because I think that's a wonderful objection to the objection. What if we say something like, okay, well, goodness, we take a kind of functional account of goodness. This is a good chair because it fulfills the criterion that the designer had for it, which is for people to sit in it. Now, I could say that this is a good chair and it is at the same time a bad table.

That seems a little bit weird. Like, people don't usually speak like this because they recognize that, of course, I could say that I'm making a table and make this. And then you would call it a bad table. And you could say it works fine as a chair, but it still would be like a kind of bad table because I designed it to be a table. And so we already use language of good and bad in a kind of non-moral sense, that is to say, like, there look, I said it. That is to say.

That is to say. I was looking it before you even said that. That this chair is a good chair because it just fulfills the criterion that it's designed for it. Now if human beings are designed by a God, and that God has arbitrary desires for them, even if they're arbitrary, if goodness is just fulfilling the criterion that a designer has for something it creates, and even if it's arbitrary, it is still objectively a good person who fulfills the criterion that the designer created that created thing for. And so, surely, this is the goodness

and badness of objective ethics, is just doing that which God designed you for. Okay, now I reject premise two. Now premise two is false because, no, I mean, I think you can have objective goodness and badness and so on without defining it as what the designer intended it to be or do or whatever. And again, you're kind of biting the bullet almost in saying that it's arbitrary. I mean, like, if God had done this with rape, then it really would have been the case that rape was good. But presumably, yeah, I mean, it's tricky. Because it's constituted by God's desire. Like, there's no antecedent, antecedent God's giving his desires. There's no moral facts that he's looking out upon and choosing to design it based on. And so it is just constituted

by his choice. And so I really do think that this is a quite plausible response. And so if that's, I mean, again, if that's how you're defining goodness, then I reject premise too. There's no objective moral values and duties in that sense, because that requires there to, in that sense, it's just like stipulatively defined as, like, what the designer is intending you to do and so on. But I can still have objective star moral goodness and badness, which is a goodness and badness worth watching, I say. One of my favorite ways of responding to this particular approach of talking about functional goodness, people comparing a good person to a good chair or a good table, is to

say, again, I think there's an equivocation going on here because when people talk about moral good, this is actually, I think the same thing as what you're saying, which is that when people are talking about moral goodness and badness, they're not talking about fulfilling a desire of a creator. That's not what the goodness and badness is consistent. And the way to see this is to say that, like, if this were designed to be a table, it would be a bad table. It wouldn't be an evil table. Yeah, that's true.

Right? It wouldn't be an evil table. And yet, if you say that somebody is a bad person, this is usually kind of used interchangeably with evil person. When you're talking about morality, you tend to be talking about goodness and badness in a way that can be translated as virtue or evil or these kind of terms. Whereas functional accounts of goodness, I think, is just no equivocation. Sure, this is a good chair, but what we really mean is it's a functional chair. We don't mean it's a virtuous chair. We don't mean that it's an evil table.

That just doesn't even make sense, right? And so I think that response probably fails as well. So the moral argument, in my view, it just kind of doesn't really have much going for it. No, I really, I don't think it does either. How low can we put it, though? Because, you know, we haven't put anything in F yet. And the thing is, it does have some intuitive force at least in the beginning, right? like people, lots of people, like when you tell someone you're an atheist, especially people

who've never really thought about questions of God's existence before, one of the first things that they'll say is like, well, like, where do you get your goodness from? And they are suspicious of people who are atheists because they think they have no moral basis, as if to say that there's something intuitively within them that thinks that having objective ethics requires God as a guiding force. I kind of have an error theory of sorts with respect to that sort of intuition. I mean, people are just brought up thinking that, like, God is to use, I think, what is it, Peter Berger, his phrase, that God is the legitimator of morality.

Like, in their mind, he's so intimately tied up with it because they've grown up with this. And they can't conceive of their being goodness without God. But that's simply not because they have some insight into the nature of reality, of the nature of goodness and badness. But it's because they've just grown up associating these things so closely with one another. that they find it so overwhelmingly difficult to imagine a world view in which you sap out God, you're like sapping out the motivational center of their lives, you're sapping out this thing around which their lives are oriented. That's the source of all goodness and beauty and so on for them.

And when you do that, it's almost like they think that, where's the beauty in the world then? Where's the goodness and where's all that? I say, the flowers. Look at the flowers. Look at the trees. That's where the beauty is. Look at the suffering of those humans.

That's where the badness is. And animals. And animals. Yeah, exactly. That's where the badness is. It's not located in this weird extrinsic fact. It's in the situations themselves. So that's where I say look intrinsic to the world.

That's where you see the badness, goodness, beauty, and so on. So I think that's a mistake that they're doing. They're almost like confusing this, or they're legitimating all these concepts by reference to God. So where do we put it then? Do you think it's like real trash? No. Because some people have that.

I don't really know. The modal, I just think by itself was, this has got to be better than modal. You think this is better than the model and I think it's probably on par with the metal. So maybe we could do F tier, your E tier as well. You think E tier? I would be kind of slightly intuitively prone to taking it higher, and so maybe E is like a good compromise between the two of us.

Okay, that's right. Okay, if you're happy with that, I think I'm happy with that. I'm happy with it. All right, the moral argument for the existence of God is going in tier E. Cool. Now, we could talk about the resurrection if you want, or we can end it there. Do you have much to say on it? I actually don't have much to say, to be honest.

Do you have a brief, like if I just ask you straight up, which tier you'd put it in? I think it'd go mid-tier, see? Oh, really? I mean, C or D? I mean, listen, it's got a really low intrinsic probability. But I do think it has some explanatory payoff. Like, if you accept the resurrection, it does explain certain data. I mean, it does explain why the Apostles...

you have the gospel accounts why the apostles believed as they did despite being persecuted and so on it explains why we have at least reports of seeing the risen Jesus so it does explain some data I mean there are alternative explanations like in terms of hallucinations and so on and those are intrinsically more probable but do they I don't know like what what makes we're just doing it now we're just doing it we're talking the the final argument that we wanted to consider that we weren't sure if we were going to consider it or not but but we'll give it some brief mention is an argument for God's existence from the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There appear to be accounts in the gospel of resurrection appearances, the writings of St. Paul,

which are the earliest sources that we find in the New Testament, which seem to attest to historical facts that a man claimed to be the Son of God, predicted that he was going to die and rise again, was killed, was actually dead, and then was seen by people after he had died, and they believed so strongly that it was the same man that they were willing to be persecuted and to death for that belief. How do we explain this? Well, because he rose from the dead, and what explains that, that God rose him from the dead. That's the argument that we're just talking about. Now, you said that there are other alternatives, such as like maybe when the disciples saw the risen Christ, they were hallucinating.

Or, you know, one of them was hallucinating, and then social contagion effects took on, and, you know, some of them had certain expectations for it. They're in a state of grief. Because, of course, St. Paul talks about Jesus having appeared to a group of 500 people at the same time. Of course, that's one report. Yes. Yeah, it's not very well attested to. But all, well, three of the Gospels, because the first gospel doesn't contain any, I mean, Mark's gospel, the earliest gospel, doesn't contain any post-resurrection appearances in the earliest manuscripts. But all of the others report group appearances to the disciples on multiple occasions.

In the Gospel of John, we have Jesus appearing to the disciples. and Thomas isn't there. And then they go and tell Thomas, he doesn't believe them. So Jesus appears again, and this time Thomas goes up and famously touches the wounds and believes. Like, I think that the report of this is a bit mythological. This only story only appears. It does seem to develop over time. There are aspects of that.

It's in the latest gospel. It's also kind of, it seems the most like moralizing. It seems to make sense as a later development. But if we were to grant that it was a historically accurate. report, this couldn't be explained by hallucination at any rate. This would be then explained by the Gospels being written wrong. But you said that something like people hallucinating has a higher intrinsic probability than that a man rose from the dead. How can you justify that? I mean, people hallucinate all the time. I mean, we know post- bereavement hallucinations

are actually somewhat common. But the problem is saying that the intrinsic probability of Jesus rising from the dead is like that is so low because of the fact that it doesn't, it's not something that we see happening all the time, that's because it can't happen all the time. Because of course, if God is using this as a vindication of Jesus' divine message, it has to be something spectacular. It has to be something that doesn't happen all the time. If resurrections happened all the time, then it wouldn't be special. And so does it actually affect the intrinsic probability of this being the case? I mean, if God were wanting to vindicate Jesus' message, then it would be more

probable that we wouldn't see resurrections happen. Yes, that's true. But the very fact that this, we never see this happen, that we always uniformly see dead people stay dead, gives us reason to think that God doesn't have that want, right? This is something that Jews, for instance, point out. They point out that, no, like the very fact that, I mean, well, firstly, Christ goes against what a lot of the messianic expectations were at the time and so on. But, I mean, the very fact that God seems to have a very strong preference not to resurrect almost absolutely every single human of the tens of billions of humans, maybe it's even up to a hundred billion at this point, billions of humans that have ever lived, gives us reason to think that God doesn't, after all, have that desire. Yes, if he did

have the desire, that's what we would say. Wait, which desire? The desire to what to raise. Vindicate Jesus's ministry and so on. But the vindication of Jesus' ministry wouldn't, wouldn't consist in raising other people from the dead. It consists in raising specifically Jesus in such a way that's very unusual as a means to vindicate the claims of Jesus? Yeah, but the point is just that, like, the very fact that we see so many people stay dead after they are dead, why are we picking out Jesus in particular? Like, you have to think about the prior probability, or the intrinsic probability, rather, of this hypothesis.

Like, why would God pick Jesus, let's say, as opposed to these billions of other people and so... Why would... Because Jesus is, like, according to the Christian message... Now you're going to a little bit special as compared to other human beings. I mean, I mean, if God, if the purpose of sending Jesus on to earth in the first place was to have them eventually crucified and then raised in order to die for the sin of man or whatever, then saying, look, you've got this Jesus guy that God's put on earth, and why would he have any more reason to raise him than to raise anybody else who died?

Well, because anybody else that God could have risen would have been a sinner in their lives. And according to Christian theology, we require a sinless person to be killed and then resurrected, and he needs to be God in this kind of. Of course, God couldn't resurrect someone else. When you say, well, why did God resurrect Jesus and not any of the other 100 billion human beings that have ever existed? Surely, that just doesn't even make sense.

Of course it would be Jesus, because Jesus is the son of God, and he's supposed to be the vindicator of the message. What's the reason for thinking that he's the son of God because he rose in the death? There's a very question of issue, but okay, let's set that aside that circular reasoning. I mean, the difficulty here, I'm trying to think of a good analogy,

but like if let's say we're all tossing coins or something and someone gets um let's say someone gets 10 heads in a row or something like that and everyone else no one else does someone might say oh well you know god was god was intending me to get 10 heads in a row i mean it's like and onto that hypothesis that probably that i get it is is one so this is really good really good evidence for that i mean that's super improbable but just by chance but like why is it you who's getting the to the 10 as opposed these other people. And like, why is it ten heads, not ten tails, and these other sorts of things? Like, the very fact, the very fact that, like, this is the sort of thing that's, like, improbable. I'm trying to think of analogy. Maybe you can help me. But, I mean, my brain is tried at the end of this.

I think that there's a, there's an interesting point in what you were saying. I mean, like, like, imagine this situation in which someone flicks ten heads. And we say, and he says that it's because God intended him to. And I say, well, I think it's just because, you know, you got lucky and he says, well, why? And I say, well, because getting lucky has a higher intrinsic probability than, you know, God making somebody flip, according to ten times. And then he might say, ah, but like the fact that it's so unlikely for this to happen is, is required because God is seeking to make this a special event. And that would be problematic. And they're saying, oh, this is special, but it's like, you're reasoning for thinking it special is a very... But I think it might be

different with Jesus, because Jesus predicted that this would happen to him. He claimed to be the fulfillment of scriptures which seem to describe the account of the resurrection. Or at least we have later writings which say that Christ did that. I mean, it's unclear whether or not that's, I mean, we have to distinguish between what's our evidence base. Is it reports of X happening? Or is it X happening? A lot of people mistake those. We also have to distinguish between the objections we're making. We were considering the hallucination hypothesis and talking about its intrinsic probability. You're saying that, well, the reports might be wrong. Now we're kind of talking about a different objection, which is the objection that the disciples didn't

hallucinate, but that the stories were kind of... Well, my point about the reports was when you said, no, Jesus made these certain predictions that came true. That's what I was responding to in that point. I wasn't really going to a different objection. I was responding to you, your point there, which I was saying, well, those actually might have been... I mean, again, we're trying to come up with global hypotheses

that explain the data. And of course, see, the very fact that we're getting the weeds here and that it's difficult, I think attests to why this shouldn't be in the F or E or D tier. I mean, maybe this should be C. I think it's about middling because I think there's a reasonable disagreement about this sort of thing. For the audience, I'm not like here subscribing to the hallucination hypothesis. I mean, it could be any combination of things that have an intrinsically much more probable than a resurrection. I mean, it could be socialization, expectation effects, grievance, post- bereavement to hallucinations.

And those only have to happen to like one or two other people. And then social contagion effects take on and other people have certain expectations and other sorts of things. And then later embellishments of the story and so on. You don't even have to have group hallucinations, but anyway, my point is that the very fact that this is so complicated It leads me to think that it should be gone put in the C tier Well, I was quite surprised when you when you said originally Because I don't know we kind of leant forward so we might have to cut the video out but we were discussing whether or not to do the resurrection and I said well You know at a at a glance which tier would you place it in and you said C tier and I was like

Seriously because I just expected that you would you would place it a lot lower I mean, myself, I think it's low, but you are right that it, as Hitchin said, of fine-tuning, you know, you need to spend time thinking about it, you need to work on it. This is a serious thing. Yeah, it seems quite, and also, of course, like the number of reports, or the number of, like, manuscripts for the, for the New Testament that we have, that are feasibly close to the source from a kind of secular history point of view, are just, unbelievably more numerous than comparative events and reports and stories and writings from

similar times and earlier times. So there is like an argument to be made here that makes it stronger than I think putting it in like F tier or, I mean, look, is it a better argument for the existence of God than Anselm's ontological argument? Of course, Ansela. No one take, okay, Listen, scholars basically uniformly reject Anselm's argument. I mean, in Josh Frasn's in one of his reviews of another book, he pointed out how the trouble for Anselm's ontological argument is finding out precisely where it goes wrong. Nearly all theists and atheists agree that it goes wrong. So it's like, it's almost dead in the water, I want to say.

It just seems, you know, I'm looking at the tier list and it just seems so, I don't know, like, you know, should the modal ontological argument be lower than Anselm's, maybe without symmetry breakers, it should be because we're going to be moral argument. Like, are we really going to say that the resurrection argument is stronger than the modal ontological argument in a subject of people? Yes. Even, and not even like from a Christian perspective, but just like from the perspective of somebody who's like just an atheist and has never heard of Christianity. And we say, hey, look, we've got these manuscripts that speak about this guy. And so there's probably this thing called Christianity that's true.

But like, just just look at the, look at the reports here of this man who apparently died in the Roach and the Dead. Look, God must exist. I mean, it's a probability, I mean, can that, can that be stronger than the modal ontological argument? Well, it could certainly be stronger than the modal. I mean, I really think that's... Or like the moral argument? Like, is that a better argument than the moral argument? Like, really?

I mean, people use the moral argument all the time, but people... That's because I had my error theory. That's what they're confusing. Yeah, but that's the case, isn't it? I mean, because intuitively you want to say that the moral argument is... Something happened. I don't know. I'm not saying, like, a resurrection happened, but, like, something made...

maybe like post-brievent hallucinations. Like we know Jesus existed. Something weird happened, as you say. Yeah, something weird happened. And the very fact that there's reasonable disagreement here. I mean, because even if a bunch of people hallucinated, that's weird. Or I mean, even one person and the social contagion effects. I mean, we know that these sorts of things happen. And I think it's really, I'm not going to say obvious. I think it's really plausible that has a greater intrinsic probability than resurrection. And some of the earliest gospels, some people have tried to date them to quite close to the life of Christ. I think we have creeds really close to the life of Christ. Yeah, so like in the

Lesser St. Paul. And so, you know, it could be that somebody just kind of made all this up, that something was written down by mistake. But then it seems strange that there were people alive who would have seen Jesus who didn't think to correct the mistake. So, yeah, there are these other hypotheses. But as you say, there's something weird going on. Yeah. It'd be weird if somebody just made all this up. It'd be weird if a bunch of people conspire to lie about this. Well, and I mean, it's mainstream scholarship. I'm going to say we know that Jesus existed and that Jesus was crucified. Those, at least, we know, happened. Something after his death, something happened. We know Christianity exists. We know that a lot of people at least sincerely claim to

have witnessed. In which case, you think, what, C tier? C or D? I mean, I'd be fine with either of those. Just, I mean, it is so, I mean, we're overlooking the elephant to the room. This is such an intrinsically low probability hypothesis, I mean, by my lights, that these other hypotheses these are so much more intrinsically probable than just someone like literally rose from the dead. I mean, you firstly have to have like something like God in there to be able to do that. I mean, something beyond naturalism. And that in and of itself, it's a huge ontological commitment. But also, even if you have gotten the picture, God evidently has a very strong preference

not to resurrect almost every single person. So, but there is reasonable disagreement here. I'm sort of like that particular argument. But like, I see what you're getting at. I'm thinking I'm thinking maybe maybe D yeah I mean so if I run my own I put C if we're with you you put D you've satisfied to put things in my way you know yeah like I'm yeah like I don't I still don't like that Anselm was all the way down there it feels weird to put them next to each other but we've kind of we've kind of

dragged them together in a way yeah I think I think D would be better okay I'll if you're happy to put it in D then yeah I'll put it in D then we'll say that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth the alleged resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, there's an argument for the existence of God, is tier D. And with that, I think we are finally done. We are done. There are, of course, lots of other arguments for the existence of God, but we wanted to just go for some of the more popular, one of the ones that you're here discussed. And there are lots of other considerations and objections to the arguments that we considered, and responses and counter responses and so on, which is just all the more reason to

look into your channel, my channel, and so on, because I go into lots of these arguments. And so this is where our little journey into philosophical exploration. shall end. Thank you, Joe Schmidt, for coming on the podcast. As I said earlier, do check out his channel. I'll leave a link in the description. Watch that 12-hour video. I mean, if any of you actually managed to watch the whole thing in its entirety, then, you know, send us an email or something, because I'm sure we can, we can reward you in some way or another. I'd just be, do you think, has anybody said that they've watched it all the way through yet? So my patrons, yeah. I gave it to patrons early and some of the whole thing. It takes over a few days. I mean, they watch maybe an hour

a day, and it's like a 30-minute commute to their school or whatever, and 30-minute copy-pack. I guess it's about the length of, like, a short audio book, really, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So it's something that can be... And I'm going to break it up into cosmological arguments. That's only like an hour and a half. Yeah, only.

Well, yeah, so check it out. There's lots of wonderful content, even just in that one video, let alone on the whole of Joe's channel, so make sure you check it out. But with that said, I want to remind you that all of the work that I do is supported, like Joe's, it seems, on Patreon. So if you like the work that I do and want to consider helping it to grow, please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptics, so we can keep increasing the size and quality of the videos. Of course, this video has been filmed on location in Houston, and so it's got a slight different stylistic effect.

But of course, you are helping me, my patrons, I mean, to fund those kinds of trips as well, to be able to justify going around the world and talking to lots of interesting people in person. So thanks, as always, especially to my top-tier patrons for making this possible. But I think that's everything. So I have, as always, been Alex O'Connor. Today I've been in conversation with Joe Schmidt, and you've been listening to The Cosmic Skeptic Podcast. Thank you.