Within Reason - #36 Peter Boghossian - Having Better Conversations About Philosophy

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Peter Boghossian is an American philosopher, a founding faculty member at the University of Austin, and coined the term "street epistemology" as a method of helping people to change their minds. Peter Boghossian's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@drpeterboghossian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. My guest today is Peter Bogosian, who is the founding faculty fellow, a founding faculty fellow, at the University of Austin, former professor at Portland State. A place we shall not name, good enough. Which we won't go into. And also, I believe, you coined the term street epistemology. Correct. If I'm not mistaken. 2013.

So I have spoken before to Anthony Magnibosco, who is a wonderful street epistemologist. And we actually tried to do some street epistemology together at the time. After when I was in Austin, we went to the university campus and he said, well, let's get out in the street and let's get you doing some street epistemology. Yeah. Because it was the summertime. It's too hot. It was allergy season. And when I showed up today, you know, I was sort of sniffling all over the place because

the weather at the moment I just sort of have a horrific form of hay fever. So I'm either allergic to grass or apparently allergic to street epistemology. I don't know which it is. Well, Austin's an oven in the summer. I wouldn't try to do anything other than eat barbecue there. It's truly horrific in the summer. It was quite an experience, but it's interesting now to sit down with a man who coined the term. Yeah.

People who are listening who might not know what street epistemology is, can you give them the sort of the blurb definition? So, thanks for asking. Street epistemology is a way, and we're actually in the room with the president of street epistemology, read Nice Wonder where we go all around the world and we make videos. So street epistemology is street epistemology. Epistemology means how you know what you think you know. So it's taking epistemology from a formal academic setting and bringing it into the street, hence the street epistemology. And what it is is we ask people and help them clarify their beliefs and how strongly they believe something,

their confidence with the evidence and the reasons they have for something. So it's a very civil, non-confrontational way to help people align the confidence they have in their beliefs with the evidence for those beliefs or the reason. that they hold the beliefs. The thing that I kept getting taught off for by Anthony when we tried to do street epistemology was that I was a little bit too obvious in my own opinions.

Yeah, you can't do that. It would compromise as the integrity to the whole process. Now, I thought that I was being quite neutral. I thought that I was just sort of asking questions trying to get to the basics of why people believe certain things, but he seemed to be suggesting

at certain points that it was sort of slipping through the cracks. Yeah, well, there's a corrective for that And actually Reid came up with this for when we go around the world and we do this, the very last question that we ask everybody is, so we have lines strongly disagreed, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral, and then on the other side, we'll put people on the neutral line, we'll ask them a claim, they'll walk to a line, they can switch at any point as long as they commit to a full line.

Or they don't have to switch at all. They can stay in the neutral line the whole time. And this is like on a university campus or something like that. Anywhere, we've done it here, we've done it. Just out on the street. Just the streets, university campuses, doesn't matter where it is. But the last question that I ask people is, what line do you think I'd be on? Right.

And if they say, I don't know, it's successful. Or if they say, that's the best, I don't know. The next best is if they say the opposite. And the worst is if they know what you would believe. Because then they'd be trying to think or may be thinking that you're trying to persuade them. And it's not about persuading anybody. I take a great deal of pride when I see hate comments of the form on my podcast. When I spoke to Constantine Kissin, and he was talking about freedom of speech, and I'm

pushing back, and I'm saying, but should we really have unrestricted speech, can't words be harmful? Isn't it all just the brain saying it doesn't like a certain experience that it's feeling? And he re-uploaded a clip of it onto his own channel, and the comments are sort of painting me out to be this ridiculous sort of sensorial, you know, wokenist. And I think to myself, like, the fact that I'm otherwise described as a free speech activist, another label that I don't really like very much, I must say that I indulge in a little bit of pride in thinking that I've done such a good job of hiding what my position actually is and my capacity as

an interviewer. I suppose in a way, that's the kind of thing you're trying to do, although not quite as far. You're not trying to sort of represent the opposite position. but rather, hold on before you go on, because let's talk about what you just said before you go into anything new. So that's really important that not only in an interview context, I pretend to be a woke person when I interview people or get into that mindset. But that's a dialectic. That's how you can get to the truth of things. As long as there's a, people have an ability or willingness to revise their belief in the context of the conversation. So that's how people can clarify their own ideas and viewers,

can understand when you push back when you have that dialectic. That dialectic in an interview is very different, or at the very least, it's different than what you're trying to do when you have conversations with people in the street. You need to push back a little bit, but the push back should be in the form of questions and the pushback should be in terms of whether or not. So if you look at it syllogistically, premise, premise conclusion, how confident are you in that? They say they go to slightly disagree, they give you their reasons, is the conclusion that you hold justified by the evidence to the degree that you're on the correct line? Calibrating your belief like that, that is not a simple thing.

That's a very difficult thing to do, because most people, they don't think about that. And belief isn't binary. It's not on-off. It's their degrees of belief. I wonder when somebody puts forward a position in the context of street epistemology, in your efforts to not let your own views come through, do you still sometimes represent another position or is it sort of strictly question asking? What I mean to say is that sometimes questions can be euphemisms for arguments. Like if we were trying to figure out where to go for dinner and you said, why don't we go for pizza? And I said, oh, don't you think, don't you think pizza's a little bit expensive?

Or don't you think pizza's a little bit unhealthy? What I really mean to say is, I don't want pizza. Pizza's unhealthy, you know, if pizza's expensive, I don't want pizza, and I'm sort of wrapping it up in a question. I can understand Wade would want to avoid doing that. Pause on. Sorry to keep pausing you, but so if you wanted to have a genuine relationship with me, you'd just say, I don't want to go to pizza.

I don't eat bread and cheese. I wouldn't say, well, I don't eat bread and cheese. That's right, but people do this all the time. just to be polite, people use euphemistic language all the time. It's kind of like, I suppose so. I mean, you said before we started rolling that I strike you is incredibly British. Extremely British. What is it that gives you the impression?

Oh, your affect or demeanor, the way you use words, language, a kind of formality, it's just extremely British. It's not a bad thing. The accent's got nothing to do with it. It's just being descriptive. No, it's really not. It's not pejorative. It's not positive either. It's just a description.

Yeah. I suppose maybe it is more of a British. British thing. But for instance, I noticed that, I don't know, maybe if I'm on my way with somebody to a destination and I want to stop and get something from the shop, I'll say something like, oh, I might just pop into the shop, by which I mean, I'm going to go to the shop and get a bottle of water or something. But I phrase it in such a way as to say, I might just go to the shop. I might. Why would you do that? I think it's a mannerism and it's an attempt at being polite, but it's a very common thing. I don't know if you would sort of use that

specific example in the US, but that kind of thing pervades the way that all of us speak. Okay, so, okay, so in that sense, that's a cultural thing where it's a code of politeness. I suppose so. So we don't, or at least in my life, nobody I know, I mean, I certainly, I travel everywhere with Reed. I would never say that to him. Would I ever say that to you? No, never.

I'd be like, I'm going to the shop, I'm going to get a bottle of water. Do you want anything? Yeah. But you know what I'm talking about in the, in the abstract here that people often, in, to bring it back to the topic at hand. Before we bring it back to the topic, I think that's important, like that little difference in the way that you interact with people. I mean, my, and then we'll bring it back to the street epistemology, my preferred way

of interacting with people, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it's just to me incredibly blunt and direct, and that way, it could be a context of, emerged from the context of being super busy all the time, but I think that it lends itself, it affords the opportunity to have more genuine relationships because then if I actually need to tell you something substantive, I'm not beating around the bush. I'm just telling it to you. That's right.

And then you can either accept that or reject that. And if you reject that, then there's a possibility that you reject a friendship. But on the street, when you do street epistemology, that's different. You have genuine relationships with the people in terms of, you know, when they say something and you offer a response

or a counter example or a potential objection you're doing that for a very specific reason you're doing that to help them process what you just said in a sincere way there's no gotchas there's no there's no hidden motivations there's no like oh I might just pop into the store no I'm going to the store

I mean people sometimes do this subconsciously as well I think they often do it subconsciously C.S. Lewis writes about this in the screw tape letters he imagines when he sort of figuring out how to destroy this atheist's life. One of the specific examples he gives is the husband who comes home

and sort of says to his wife something like why haven't you done the dishes? Or you know, why isn't dinner ready yet? And he doesn't mean why isn't dinner ready yet. What he means is I'm fed up of living with you. This marriage is sort of tearing me apart and I don't think that you're sort of fulfilling the roles that

I think you should as my wife. But that is sort of condensed and euphemize as as not saying is dinner ready yet but it's in the sort of delivery it's the anger of why isn't the dinner ready yet that's not actually what you mean that represents a different position I feel like people do this with questions all the time yeah and you can tell when you when you look at an interview that's okay I'm sorry sorry so we got two things going on here that we keep mixing together you've got one thing that's in the personal realm like in a relationship yes and I think those are disanalogous to street epistemology so like

In a marriage or a relationship, the best evidence-based stuff that I've seen is the Gottman method. You know, you need to have, I think the relationship in the literature is nine to one. I think it's something like a radically disproportionate amount of what they call turning toward. And those kind of negative undercutting comments don't do the relationship any good. That's not analogous to a street epistemology situation. Yeah, well, sort of the reason that I'm talking about this and what I'm going to go on to say here, is asking how we can avoid this kind of thing in street epistemology. Oh, I see.

That is, if you watch an interview that's a little bit fiery, and maybe a journalist who doesn't really like the person they're interviewing, and they sort of hide behind this description that all they're doing, sort of asking questions and probing, but you can just tell from their attitude that those questions are just euphemisms for arguments or gibes. And I have a feeling that if I were to try street epistemology and somebody says, Or let's imagine, let's imagine that you're debating the resurrection of Jesus and whether it really happened or not. This is an example I've used before.

And I'm a Christian, and somebody says to me, and I say, well, the disciples claim to see Jesus after he died. Right. How do you explain that? And they say, well, I think that the disciples were lying. And my question to them is something like, but why would they, why would they lie? why would they go to death, because the Christian position is that the disciples were put to death for these beliefs. I'm going to say, well, why would they be put to death for something they knew to be a lie?

Right. And that sounds like a question. Right. But what I'm really doing there is representing my position, which is that the disciples wouldn't have done that. Right. But I'm wrapping it up in the question, so I can say, look, I'm doing street epistemology because I'm asking them a question. Well, why would they die for beliefs that they knew to be false? Right.

But really, that's just an argument. So how do we avoid that kind of thing? Right. just trying to ask questions. Yeah, that's a good question. So in the interview so far, you've said some stuff to me and then I've pushed back and then I've maybe rudely, maybe not, hopefully not rudely interrupt to do. Those, so that's appropriate in this kind of a context. So street epistemology, you're creating a very particular, in an almost, dare I say it, a special environment and so you do see and i i certainly have seen for myself exactly what you're

talking about people have asked questions to lead other people to a certain conclusion in fact there are since you mentioned the the um great coolocks i kind of i haven't read his book for a while um and frank turak and others um i'm trying to think what is the name of that book um tactics that's right tactics. He talks about that and it's not asking people questions because you want to help them align their, the evidence they have with the confidence in their belief. It's asking them questions to lead them toward a belief. And I think that once you do that, the integrity of the process is compromised. And what you're trying to do is also compromised. Yeah, it's like that famous clip of Ben Shapiro talking to the student about, it's got something to do with the transgender

stuff and Ben says, how old are you? And the student says, you know, I'm 19 or whatever. And he goes, why aren't you 60? And everybody starts applauding. Because what he's ostensibly doing is asking a question. Yeah. He's not asking the question in the spirit of, hey, let's sort of investigate your beliefs and get to it. It's a point that's being made in the form of a question. yeah so the fact that a question can get an applause is a is a strange concept yeah correct really betrays that it's not really a question at all okay so what what's operative in that condition in that situation is the idea that the room is not the room so are you asking the question because you it's on video and then you want everybody to applaud and cheer you are you asking the question

very sincerely to help somebody really think about what it is that they believe, and the question that you ask would be different depending on your goal. And I also think it's important to understand that people ask questions for many different reasons. When you teach, for example, you never really know why someone asks a question. You can't assume that someone asks a question because they want to know the answer. Maybe someone asks the question because they want you to know how smart they are. Maybe someone asks you a question because they're attracted to the person sitting next to them and they want to show them how smart they are, or that you're paying attention. So you never really know why someone asked a question.

And so the condition that you're trying to create is a very specific one. And we know from the literature about why people change their beliefs or why people would start to doubt things to be even more specific than change their beliefs. they don't change their beliefs because they've been humiliated. I know that some people like Pendelet and others would have anecdotal evidence against this, but the literature is pretty clear. They change their mind from the position of psychological safety. That's how people change their mind.

So you want to create environments that are as safe as possible, and you can watch these on the videos. There's no, I don't think, I don't want to say there's no gotchas ever because I'm sure I've made a mistake and I'm not perfect and I do the best that I can. But when you watch these, there's really no gotcha questions. There's no like, oh, you know, I made you look like an idiot. In fact, many times I've actually moved people to lines further from what it is that I believe. But that's how you maintain the integrity of the process.

Yeah. So what's a better question in that context? If the belief that you were talking to somebody about was the resurrection. Yeah. And they said, I think that the disciples were lying. And in your head, you think, ah, well, I know that Christians would say, say that they wouldn't be lying because they died for these beliefs right and so why would they die if something they knew to be false how do you how do you sort of try to get that idea to

arise in that person's mind without essentially just making the point in front of them what kind of question do you ask in that so i mean and that and that i would have i mean my my my my my personally what i would have said would be something like the salem witch trials for example you You familiar with those? Yeah. Yeah. I never really know what you're familiar

with over here in the Jewish of U.S. history. But so in those, I can't remember what university. So we actually know the addresses of the people. We know the, we have the court records

for the people who were convicted of, you know, for the witnesses who alleged that people were, which is, where do these people live? of what are their addresses?

How much, what evidence do we have for the fact of their very existence? You know, Bart Ehrman, you mentioned Bartram before we started, he debated a buddy mine price about whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. I think almost all data seems to point, to the fact that Jesus was. So I would have approached that from a different point of view,

like how confident are you that there were disciples if you don't have any evidence about those disciples that are extra biblical. So it just depends on the questions you ask. The questions you ask, so if you're asking somebody questions, part of the idea when you ask them questions is that you want to, or at least this is what I do, I ask them questions in such a way that if they're a sincere inquirer and they're thinking about what it is that you're asking them that it will cause them to question whether or not they're on the right line so what does this look like in practice like i mean if you were sort of approaching somebody and saying you know we want to do some street

epistemology and and you say what's a what's a view that you hold oh yeah and they say you know i believe that i believe that the earth is a globe or something you know okay that's that's that's that's their belief. Like, what's the kind of, because in the context of the Earth is a globe, presumably you agree with this, but you still think it's probably worthwhile sort of re-evaluating how we know that. You know, why is it that we believe that? Absolutely 100%. And so what kind of questions are you asking here? How do you get into a conversation that begins to get somebody to reevaluate their belief that the Earth is a globe? Um, okay. So I just want to say before, I tell you that that's a great example because it doesn't have to be with it can be with

anything the earth is a globe the earth is not a globe whatever it doesn't matter what the claim is so you start on neutral you explain the rules and what I try to do is I try to build rapport with people for a minute or two because part of the difficulty is you have so many people out there who want to make people humiliate people and make them look bad and that's not what this is about in fact that's literally the opposite of what this is about and so many people are inherently skeptical when they see cameras and such because they think they're going to make them look like an idiot or gotcha. So I spend a minute or two trying to build rapport to let them know this is simply not what that's about. And sometimes they talk to it, read or other people. And then I explain

the rules of the game to them. And I'll say, if the Earth is a globe, they start on neutral. And let's say they move to strongly agree, agree. Yeah, I mean, I would presume they're standing on strongly okay so let's say they so then you ask them for their evidence you know what evidence do you have and you'd be surprised even with pretty obvious and conspicuous empirical phenomenon like that people don't they don't have an they don't have evidence to justify their confidence in fact almost never even with something like the earth is a globe and so what you do is you try to ask them targeted systematic socratic questions to help them re-evaluate how they know that the earth is actually a globe. Like, what would someone say to that? Okay, so somebody says, well, I've seen

pictures of it. I mean, we've flown rockets into space, taking pictures of the Earth and we can see that it's a globe. It's pretty hard for me to say anything to that because it's such an obvious claim. I imagine you wouldn't say that. No, no, I would definitely not say it. Well, I just ask questions, you know, like, well, have you? So I had this guy on my science and pseudoscience class. His name is Mark Sargent. And he said, why? Mark Sargent, the flat earther. Yeah. Yeah. He wrote a book. I read most of his book. But he said, at some point in this conversation, you ask a disconfirmation question. What would it take for you to change your mind?

What would it take for you to move from strongly agree to agree? You've got that a disconfirmation question. Yeah. Well, it's actually called the defeasibility condition. But the feasibility is a big word. You're just trying to disconfirm. Which is what is it that would make this belief false in your view? Well, not even false.

Or would make you not believe it? Not even that. That would lower your confidence. Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. So that's a much easier cell. What kinds of things would count against this belief? Yeah, that's a much easier cell. So if you say like, what is it that would make you disbelieve that? Well, that would have to be, in the case of the earth being a globe, that would have to be very considerable. But what would it take you to drop your, like, you know, from strongly agree to agree, that's a much easier cell. Yeah, much easier. So then I asked him that

question, or one of the students in the class asked that question. He said, This is Mark, you're asking this to Mark Sargent who believes the other. I didn't ask one of my students. The students asking to a flat earth. Yeah. And just for the record, I almost never asked my guest ever, any questions. I teach the students how to ask questions. The guests come in, they do in our lecture,

like Christians, literally anybody, UFO, conspiracy, anybody you can think of would come in. I teach the students how to ask those questions, and then they ask the questions. So it's not me asking Mark Sargent. Yeah. So somebody asked him, disconfirmation question, okay, so what would it take? And he said, somebody would have to send a

rocket up with a camera on it, high-deaf camera that we got from multiple angles, and you'd have to see the world spin like that. And he said, there's never been anything like that before. And so I said, if you could, okay, so that's a disconfirmation question. And then you reiterate it. So if you were shown that, would you change your mind? Because then you can see if somebody actually believes their own disconfirmation criteria, right? Again, I want to stress the deep. Because they might say something like, well, I'd assume that it was fake or something like that. That's why you, you, so this is really important. So that's why before you ever are in a conversation with somebody, don't just present your evidence, right? I'm, I can't be out there presenting my evidence.

I mean, actually, to be crystal clear with you, I have literally zero evidence that. the Earth is not a globe, like nothing. But let's say I had what I thought was evidence. I cannot present you with that evidence unless I know that you would consider that sufficient to change your mind about something. What if somebody said to you? That's a really important point.

Like, I need to figure out what evidence, what you would accept this evidence before you would change your mind before I present any evidence that I have. Isn't it fair to say that many people simply won't know? that is imagining somebody who likes what you're doing. They say, I really like the street epistemology thing. I don't really want to talk about anything to sort of topical or controversial.

I just want to really get to grips with the method more than anything. So why don't we shoot for a really obvious belief that I hold and start evaluating it? So I say, the earth is a globe. And you say to me, okay, you strongly agree? I say, I strongly agree. You say, well, what kind of thing would change your mind?

And I say, honestly, I just, I don't know. I believe this so strongly and so clearly that I can't even think of the kind of thing that would make me change my mind. How do you proceed in that conversation? Okay, so that's a really good question. So my golden rule is when I do these, and you can see this on video,

whenever anybody says to me, I don't know, I always say to them, that's a great answer. Because it is a great answer. If someone says they don't know, so the way you want to create cultures in which people don't pretend to know things they don't know is by rewarding, them when they say, I don't know. If I ask you a question and you don't, can I swear on your show?

If you like, I'll use a shorthand. If I ask you a question and you don't know the answer and you say, I don't know, I say thank you. And if I ask you a question and you think there's going to be some price to be paid for you saying you don't know, then you're just going to BS me. Then I'm going to have to be caught up in whatever nonsense you just told me. So we need to create cultures in which saying, I don't know, is actually valued and rewarded. And the way to do that is if someone's on the line and I'd say, well, what would you take a change your mind, no matter what line they're on, they say, I don't know, that's a great answer. Okay, great. So we've got as far in this conversation as, I strongly agree that the earth is flat. You say, what might change your

mind? I say, I don't know. You say, that's a great answer. Yeah, that's a great answer. And then I can try to think of some, again, this is an extreme example. But is it an extreme example in that it's a way of, as I say, examining the process of street epistemology much more than the topic themselves, the topics themselves, which is kind of what we want to do here when we're talking about what street epistemology is. Correct. However, there are, I mean, if I said to, you know, this is a hand, what evidence would constitute against it, the more conspicuous or obvious the thing, the more extraordinary I have to fabricate some kind of potential thought experiment. So I would say to them, okay, so how likely is it, you know, I'd say, well, what

if I, what if I showed you pictures of the earth being flat? What if I had testimony of experts come in? What if I had, you know, so, so I would try to think about ideas that I could come up with to the best of my ability to make them think, okay, well, this is possible. And the moment they say this is possible to something I say, then if we had a hundred gradations of belief and they were at 99, the more likely something is possible, the more likely it is that they'll go from 99 to 98. Like any time they say that something is possible, it has a potential of undermining the confidence in the claim. Yeah. Okay, so you're quite right that the flat-earth example is a difficult one. I mean, when you said, well, it's like saying this is a hand, whatever this you have against that. I mean, I can imagine in the context of street epistemology, I might try to ask something like, you know, how, well, why do you believe that there's a hand in front of you? Correct. You might get something like, well, because you can see it. And then you might ask. Because I feel it. Well, why do you believe that your eyes are giving you an accurate representation of the world or something like that? But to me, again, this feels a little bit like it. diverging on a point. It sounds like I'm not saying, well, why do you believe that your sense data is accurate? Rather, I'm saying, like, well, haven't you considered that your eyes

might be deceiving you? It feels like I'm sort of representing a position. But that's nothing wrong with that, right? There's nothing wrong with you representing a position provided that if they were standing on the exact opposite line, you'd represent the opposite position. Sure. So how does this look on a question like if I approached you and said, I think that God exists? And you have hundreds of those. You'd probably ask why. Yeah. And I say, well, because... We just did one of those just the other day here in London. And how did it go? It went great. He started on the strongly disagree. Yeah, so... That God exists. Yeah, so here's an example. So I'm an atheist. I've been accused of being pretty hardcore atheist. I'm an atheist. He started

on to strongly disagree, and we'll release these video. We'll send you the link if you want. Yeah, we'll put it in the description. Yeah, yeah. So he started on the strongly disagree. he moved to the disagree and then he said to me did he move to the slightly disagree i can't remember i can't remember and he said to me are you going to try to get me to move to the strongly agree and i was actually going to try to see if i could keep moving along the spectrum but then i thought since he said that let's see if i can move him back to that degree let's see if i can keep giving him doubt about the fact that he's on the right line and had an existential crisis yeah he went home and had an existential crisis. And he moved, he eventually moved back to the, to the strongly disagree. But if he hadn't said

that, I was going to try to nudge him to the slight disagree and then to the neutral. But in each case, what you're really doing is you're, by providing contra examples, and I think your claim is a good, I don't think there's anything wrong with representing a position in your question, provided you're willing to do that no matter what line somebody is on. What questions, Because again, we're talking about questions here. We're talking about probing, asking about somebody's beliefs, not making points. What are the kind of questions you can ask a person that causes them to go from, I strongly disagree that God exists, to I kind of disagree that God exists,

back to I strongly disagree, just by asking questions. Well, I just say it took me, you know, I'm 56, almost 57 years old. It took me over a quarter century to figure out to figure out how to do this stuff. A lot of reading, a lot of studying, a lot of, you know, working in the prisons, public schools, it took me a lot of time. There is no, okay, look, the most important thing that you need to do is you need to really listen to what someone says to you. Like, you need to truly track the conversation. That's why often, after I do these, I'm just exhausted because it just takes complete and total, like utter focus. So once you really, really understand, like once you grasp what someone says, then you need to understand why they believe it.

And once you understand why they believe, they believe it, then the formula is pretty clear. So in this particular example, what were the turning points in both directions for this atheist? Well, I thought of that because of something that you had asked me before. God exists he goes to the strongly disagree I asked him why he strongly disagreed read if I'm screwing up my memory of the conversation please tell me and I said well give me your your reasons for that he gave me his reasons for that and remember the reasons that somebody gives you may not be the reasons they actually believe it so there could be many things going on and they could be processes

ideas. I mean, it could be, he got molested by a priest. I mean, it could be literally, you just have literally no idea why anybody. So, so the only thing you have to go on is what they tell you. And so then what I do is I repeat the claim back to them. Now, okay, so it's called Rappaport's First Rule. So I repeat the claim back to them. And what I'm looking for for them in the idea world is if they say that's right. That's from the literature on hostage negotiations. Now, the thing that I never talk about, is what I'm really doing when I'm doing that besides understanding that is I'm trying to figure out if that's the reason that they actually believe it. That's a very complicated thing.

You've got to read subtle cues, et cetera. I mean, you can do this without knowing how to do that at all. I've never said that before, but it is also what's going on in my mind. How can you tell? How can you, if somebody, if I, if I, if you ask me why I think that God doesn't exist and I say, oh, well, I think that the problem of evil is a pretty powerful argument. And you sort of relay that back to me and I say, yep, that's it. How can you tell if that's not really what's motivating? Decades of doing this, how they pause, what their face looks like, where their eyes go, if their body language is one thing or another. If they have somebody else with them who also believes it, it makes it much more tricky because they want to save face. But let's talk about

how you move someone. So he strongly disagree. I said, why do you believe that? And he said, you know, the universe, et cetera, et cetera, you know, how did the universe get here? Whatever the claim is. And so a common one that I use for God, you know, 20% of the time or what have you, is that, so one explanation is that the universe is that there's a God. What about Victor Stenger's explanation that the universe always existed? Is it possible that the universe always exists? The moment that somebody says yes to that,

it's just like a formula you just subtract it just like reason one reason two reason three if reason one is god and reason two is the universe always existed then you have to subtract the possibly likelihood that it always existed from reason one to give you whatever the summation is and then that is that sufficient to move right to a line so reason one god reason two the universe always exists i love victor schenger reason three um nothing is inherently unstable from laurence cross is a universe from nothing. So let's say that even if you want to say it's just a very small likelihood, each of those possibilities are a small likelihood. Number two plus number three is minus whatever it is that subtracts from the God, the likelihood that it's God, and that is

sufficient to move one to disagree. Because you've got this sort of this explanation that God creates the universe. Correct. And you're saying, well, here's a, here's another potential explanation. And even if you don't think that's as plausible, say it's 20% as plausible. 2%. That's all you need. It means you sort of have to shave off that 2%. Correct. From the principal explanation that they believe, which takes it from 100 down to 98. Correct. Or 70 down to it. And if you give another one, a third explanation and you say that's 2% to 5%, then that's 10% or 4% or 10% off of the original explanation. And then that must mean that you, A rational person would not, do you watch the question, right?

So, me to you in an interview, a rational person would, but in a street epistemology, would it be rational, then, for an outside observer looking at this to say, well, it's only this percent, therefore it can't be strongly disagree. It has to be disagree. And most people, if you frame it in terms of that outsider, it's called the outsider test for faith from John W. Loft. Just look at the belief as if you're an outsider.

If you frame the belief like that, then they'll move to disagree. So that would be one way to move them to disagree. But is it a zero-sum game like that? I mean, is it sort of like, if you think something's got a 60% probability of being true? Is it not possible to think that another hypothesis maybe has 55% chance of being true? Which, of course, you know, you've got more than 100 here, which implies that the arguments aren't sort of competing for the percentage space. sure so it might not be in other words that if you think that you know if you're like 90% sure that the universe was created by God and somebody says well couldn't the universe exist just

necessarily and they say I think that that could be true maybe sort of 30% plausible well then then if that's the case to take away okay well yeah by definition it has to take away because there's only I mean by definition would have to but sometimes if people want to make sure that the if not the belief isn't dislodged then at least the profession of the belief isn't dislodged then they'll attribute a vanishing

likelihood to whatever alternative plausible explanation say well it's possible but it's 0.001 then you then you street epistemologize to use that as a verb how they would know that so the problem is

you'd street epistem epistemologize how they would know that okay so so let's just say that you do that and they're not and they say okay well it's just it's vanishing it's you know it's point zero one the other one's point zero one uh and and i was a hundred percent but okay so fine and now i'm 99 nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine to the to the to the um to the disagree so then you would say okay so give me the top what's your top reason for belief what is it now who knows what they could say right testimony, personal experience, their parents told them,

longevity of the belief, calm, cosmological argument, some other kind of metaphysical argument, Aristotle's, five, I mean, it could be, you know, quine, I said, who knows what it could be, it could be anything. And then you would ask, of course, okay, so if you took away that reason, like let's say that it was, God had to create it. Like if you took away that reason, where would you be on the spectrum?

That's an incredibly powerful question because then you could see what role that actually plays. Now, here, think about this. So let's say they said to you, okay, this is the overwhelming majority. The reason I believe this is because God had to create the universe. That's why I believe it. So let's say that then I would say, okay, so let's take away that. If you took away that and that was proved to your dissatisfaction to not be the reason, you just remove it from the equation.

Where would you be on the line? When you do that, you see the role that the belief actually plays in their belief life. That's an incredibly powerful question for people. Can we meaningfully ascribe probabilities to credence of beliefs in this way? I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and discussing this with friends. If somebody asks, like, what sort of probability do you assign to God existing? What probability do you assign to this argument being true, or this explanation being the case? And I think to myself, is that the kind of thing you can stick a number on?

I mean, what really is the difference between being 60% sure that God exists and 62% sure? Dawkins does that in a God delusion. Dawkins does a lot of things in the God delusion. Well, I mean... That I wouldn't necessarily endorse. Okay, well, I mean, so you can use this as a heuristic. Am I... What likelihood, you know, LSD is colorless, tasteless, and odalous?

What likelihood do I assign that this is LSD in extraordinarily small, but not a non-zero? For our listeners, you are, in fact, not holding up a tab of LSD, but a glass of water. No, I'm a bit, but it could be, it could be, for all I know, it really could be LSD, but it's such an infatestinely small likelihood. But we go through life and we assign numerical probabilities to something, We don't give a verbal conscious description of those possibilities, but I don't, not only do I not see a problem with it, but I think it helps people articulate, at least to themselves, in their own belief life when you assign a possibility or a probability to a belief. And I think that's part of the

scientific method, right? So we want to hold hypotheses as provisionally true. Belief isn't binary. I'm more certain, for example, that this is, I'm far more certain that this is a hand than that this is an LSD right so we i'm far more certain that the that the world that the world existed before i was born that's like one of my chief beliefs yeah ah and here's a chief belief that i this is kind of a from a play on on Descartes um i think therefore i am has been criticized as being solipsistic but charles sanders purse the american philosopher had something something that I found utterly fascinating. One of the things that you have to be certain of

is that there was a pre-existing linguistic community because there's no way you can't just develop language, right? So if I were assigning probabilities to things in my life, that would be 100, right? What specifically, sorry? Well, that there was a pre-existing linguistic community that preceded my existence. A pre-existing linguistic community that preceded your existence?

Yes, there would have to be. I'm more certain of that than I am that I'm not in a simulation. Why is that? So run it by me again. Well, because I couldn't develop language. You can't develop language independently. You have to buy into an... There has to be a community of language users.

Even if you're not a real person and he's not a real person and I'm in some weird parallel reality, which everyone's an automaton, or even not an automaton, you know, beam of light or what have you. But the larger point is that we assign, or we can assign, at least in principle, likelihoods to things that are possible. And when you go farther out, those numbers drop significantly. And I think it's a very helpful tool in one's cognitive and epistemological life to think honestly and sincerely about how likely things. things are, particularly as it spills into the moral domain. How likely is it that this belief that we happen to have that happens to be morally fashionable now is true? I mean, assuming you

believe in moral truth or moral facts, if you don't, then that's another question. But I think it's a very useful exercise. I hate to disappoint. You do or don't? It's a bit out of fashion these days, but I consider myself an emotivist. Okay. So I'm afraid not. I'm fascinated though by this point you were just making about language. Okay. The idea that in order to exist, there must be a pre-existing linguistic community. Correct. Including if you're just...

It's not my point, that's Pierce's point. Sure. Including that if you're a brain in a vat. Correct. If I'm understanding you correctly, it's something like... If you're a brain in a vat and you use language to process the world, words, I could be a brain in a vat. There has to be a pre-existing linguist community. Outside of the brain in the vat.

It has to be. Okay. Cannot not be. Let's explore that. Why, why, well, shall I street epistemology you and ask why you believe that? Why I believe that there has to be a pre-existing linguistic community or why I believe that the world existed before I was born? Why there has to be a pre-existing linguistic community?

Victorstein has this thing called a private language argument. Oh, you know about that? Yeah, but I've so some of our. listeners may not yeah he sort of asked this question well can there be such thing as a yeah as a private language a language that only exists for one person right um and in a sense it's this is even more fundamental or more basic than that um by the way his answer is his no correct that is there can't be a language that only exists within one person for one person if you were the only person on planet earth with no communication with anybody else you couldn't invent a language right so

when when you came in reed asked you if you wanted still or sparkling water and then you said still water and so i guess it depends if you you look at it from the early wittgenstein you know that um words refer to things in the world like there are little extra linguistic hooks or the the latter Wittgenstein in which words take place. They don't hook to things external to themselves. But you said still water.

And the fact that you said still water, Reed knew that you wanted still water. He looked at the bottle. He said still water. I wanted still water. We have still water in our glasses. So there was a communication there that hooked on to something called water and it had an instrumental value

in it. Again, Again, far afield from shoot epistemology, but this is where you wanted to take it. So in order for that to happen, that can't come ex-Neilo. That can't just poof appear all of a sudden. There has to be something that preceded my existence in your existence in order for you to even make that declaration

for you to get the water. I think I'm understanding what you're saying. I think in the context of me saying to somebody in this room still water, and they're being this prior understanding that we're all going to know what that means. Of course, if the person I'm talking to in the environment we're in and in the still water itself are themselves creations of my own mind

because I'm just a brain in a vat. Then you couldn't even have... So if you were a brain in a vat and like in the matrix or if that's easy for people understand or something in which there's no actual water that it hooks to, you still couldn't make the utterance. How could you? Well, language evolved from somewhere.

Yeah. We didn't begin with language. Correct. Which I imagine is sort of the next step that this argument sort of has to address, right? You answered your own question. Language evolves from somewhere. Right. There was a time where there was no language, where whatever, whatever creatures we were,

however far back we need to go, even if we need to go back to sort of the bacterial origin. Wittgenstein says that with the word slab, right? There's a slab, boom, slab. Yes, this is sort of how language starts to exist. You pointed a slab and you go slab. Right. That seems like a form of primitive, rudimentary language. It doesn't seem to require the existence of another person.

And it certainly doesn't need to, it certainly doesn't necessitate the pre-existence of a linguistic community. Yeah, I don't think that's right. So if your argument then is that it's going to be a foundational structure that if you yield one word, then you're going to have to have. have another word. Slab, slab means two slabs or slab means heavy slab or what have you. But even then you, so there are two arguments against that. I never talk

about this stuff. So there you go. You can't talk about something else. You wouldn't know that your memory is a valid guide to what it is that you referred to. Okay. Right? So you wouldn't know, like if you're the only person and The reference to the words, referent to the word, a reference to the words could change. So if you have a pre-existing linguistic community, then you just adopt the language of the linguistic community. If you don't have that, what you just, I mean, what would you do? You'd just be making Simeon, like, grunting or even the grunting and groaning might be problematic.

But even privately, if a human being sort of spring, I mean, you can imagine a human being, even who's born today, who has absolutely no social interaction, just having no conception of language, and they sort of sit in a room like the room where right now. There are cases like that of people born in poor countries and orphanages. And so someone like this sits in a room, like the room we're in right now, point to this object, and let's say by sheer coincidence, goes glass, and point to this object and goes, table. Okay. It'd be extraordinary, but okay, I'll give it to you.

No, I'll give it to you. That's fine. They could point it and go, you know, Booger. Okay, that's fine. That's what I mean. That's fine. Yeah. They give them sort of labels in their heads. Is this not language? I mean, what is language, if not just sort of terms that have reference to objects or concepts?

I guess it depends what you mean. It's a, you know, it's a kind of, it's a point of ostension, too, right? From the bottom of my, my finger, you extend a line to object in the world in which you're referencing, is that a language? I mean, I don't know. I mean, usually when you talk about a language, it's not a, I mean, by definition, language is public, right? It's not, it's not something that it's, you, you couldn't even have an internal monologue. I mean, how could you even have an internal monologue? I mean, that sort of begs the question against private languages, if you say language is public by definition. I mean, an internal monologue might be something like, you know, when you think, people, people think differently. Some

Some people claim to really sort of think in words. But there are at least some thoughts that don't seem to sort of take the form of sentences. For example, when you think of an objection to what I'm saying right now, you don't think out every word of the objection because you wouldn't even have the time to do that. The idea is in your head and then you try to express it through the language. But the actual content of the belief, the actual sort of dialectic in your mind, is not sort of represented one to one by the words that you choose to use to communicate it to me. You could still seemingly have ideas going back and forth in your mind,

even if you didn't have this sort of public language to describe them. I guess then it's, I guess then the, and it's funny when you said that, I wasn't even thinking of an objection. I was trying to understand your point. But I think then it's a question of how you define language. So if you want to define language, is it's something private that nobody has access to that you can somehow, I don't know, you wouldn't really have. writing but somehow you could record it so that you would have some kind of consistency

and it would have I don't know would have a grammar but so I guess I guess it would be you would have to say I mean Chomsky has Chomsky talks about this but I guess you would have to say that then is if you if that's how you define language but that's not the common way that either philosophers of language have used it or you know if you want to adjudicate it by looking in the dictionary that's just not languages by definition a kind of a currency that people use to communicate in the world i guess what i'm trying to the definition i'd want to go with is whatever the thing is that you think requires the existence of a pre-existing linguistic community so whatever it is you think that we're doing that that that you're calling

language here such that even in a brain in a vat we must require outside of that vat a language community. Yeah, you couldn't, you couldn't even have a brain, you, I mean, even a brain and a VAT would require some level of technology. Yeah, it seems like it's an argument of that form, as what I was about to say, is that it, it feels a bit like saying, well, even if you're a brain in a vat, there has to be the VAT. There has to be like something sort of, you still have to presume the existence

of a physical universe. So if you're a brain in a vat, let's just run with that for a sec, because that's a good example you gave. So if you're a brain in a vat and you're talking to yourself and let's say you're actually talking to yourself you're using whatever language you're using words

now the words don't hook to anything because you're in a vat even in that case they would have had to be a pre-existing linguistic community because how did you get those words they had to come from somewhere I think that's kind of like the same question as asking how did you get the

vision of a table or the anything that the brain is invented That is the things it sees, the things it hears, the things it feels are all just sort of in this brain in a that scenario, mysteriously being created by the brain. I don't see why language is a special case. Let's take a look at that. So let's look at it phenomenologically. So you're a brain of that or you're, let's just run with the brain of that thing.

And you think you see a table, but you don't actually see a table because you're a brain of that. So pumped in the phenomenological characteristics, be the atomic. characteristics like discrete things like glasses etc and so is your argument then that you can tag a what you think is a sound because it's not actually a sound because it's your brain of that you would tag what you a word you know uga moga kuku and then you would remember those and then you would make up a syntax and a grammar to go with those, and then that would be a language? I'm saying that in the brain and the vat scenario, the idea is that your brain does all that,

but it also invents the other people that you end up communicating with. That wouldn't be language. So then if you are a brain in a vat... That would be a delusion. Yeah, but this is what the brain in the vat is. It means that it's that everything you experience is essentially a delusion, including the other people you interact with. No, no, the very fact that you would think that you're communicating,

you wouldn't actually be communicating because you wouldn't have a language by which to communicate. How could you? I feel like that's kind of saying, it's kind of like saying if you were a brain and a vat, you couldn't even sort of imagine a table or a glass because where does that idea even come from in the first place? I don't see why language is special.

So I guess maybe my sticking point is, so let's say you're a brain a vat or you're, you know, you're an orphan in a horrifically starved environment. And so the phenomena that you come in can be mutually experienced. Oh, but it's different. The brain in the vat and the orphan are totally different because in the orphan case, we're presuming that there is an external world

that just impresses itself upon the orphan. In the brain in the vat scenario, the external world that it experiences, the phenomena of sights and sounds and touches, are all completely illusory. I was trying to give you the... I was trying to steal matter, because the orphan makes it your argument much more likely to be true but let's go let's go

with the brain of that so you you wouldn't actually be given that there are no entities there it wouldn't even be clear if you could be delusional about having your own language i don't think you could be delusional about having your own language because you would need a language by which you would be delusional to have the idea that you could be delusional about your own language. So I don't even think that's possible.

If ideas have to be represented in language, maybe. No. I mean, how would you even... The only way you could possibly make that work and if I'm not understanding your argument, let me know, is if you had a way to categorize or some way to affix

symbols with perceived objects because that would be a language like if you had a way like this symbol is you know whatever is in Mandarin or what have you know this symbol and then you could kind of place

these symbols or maybe you mean Victor Shine talked about this you know you place the symbol for glass above the symbol for table if that's is that your argument because that's the only way I can think that you could make that work

oh what is it you said a moment ago In order to even be deluded about having a language, you'd need to have a language in which to be deluded. Correct. But I don't know, like, can you be deluded about seeing a table? If you're in the matrix, a brain in the bat, you're deluded in thinking that you're seeing a table in front of you. You don't seem to require a language to be deluded about that. Yeah, that's different because that's why I use the word phenomenological. That's different because that's a phenomenon.

You can be diluted about a phenomenon. In fact, if I stuck a pencil in that water, it would look like it's good. So we can be deluded all the time. Sure. But to have the concept, you would have to have the concept of language to begin with before you could be deluded about having a concept of language, whereas you wouldn't have to be diluted about a phenomenon

because you could just, you can imagine any phenomenon that doesn't lead to a logical contradiction. You can imagine a gold mountain, but not a round square. Because if you're looking at a glass, you can say, I don't think that glass is really there, but you can't, but you can't use language and say, well, I don't think I'm actually using language. Correct.

That's interesting. And like you say, it's kind of Cartesian because it's got that air of undeniable where Descartes' entire point is to say, well, I can imagine that is the table actually there. Well, no, because sometimes I imagine it when I'm dreaming. You know, maybe the table's there. Correct. And then he asks, well, do I exist? And he says, well, maybe I don't physically exist. I don't have hands and a head and stuff.

but he says, you know, is there like a self, my self, can that not exist? And he says, the very act of asking the question is an instantiation of the self. And so you can't doubt it. And the language thing is a bit like that because the moment you are even sort of thinking that you're using language, that just is what it is to use language. Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, so Descartes was criticized because it's a kind of solipsism or some people even oddly enough criticize it like a rugged individualism

or an individualism but that's why I like that that I like Pursa's argument so much is because it does assume that there was this thing beforehand and you know we could get really weird and sci-fi about it and talk about everybody's dead

and it's all AI, it doesn't matter what it is or there are layers of reality or you're in a major but even in those cases you still need a pre-existing linguistic community It's not an argument I've come across before, and I'm fascinated by it. It's super interesting, isn't it? It's this idea of saying that, like, it doesn't make sense to say, well, I think I'm using language, but I'm not. Right.

It's like saying, well, I think I'm in pain, but I'm not. Even worse. If you think you're in pain, that's just what it is to be in pain. And if you think you're using language, that's just what it is to use language. Yeah, it's something like that. yeah it's similar the the the the pain thing you know if you look at the the arguments for animal rights um and there's something i struggle with as well you know what does it mean to suffer what does it mean to be in can you can you be wrong about being in pain can you be in pain but

not know that you're in pain can you can you people use you know do you need a concept of to have a concept of suffering you need a concept of the past and the future to imagine a point in which there is no suffering and people use these justifications to say that animals can't suffer Dawkins has actually said because you have no concept of the future that makes the suffering even worse

and so that makes the cruelty even more morally horrific I don't know if you said the last part or maybe I add it down. Animals may sort of it's sort of conjecture in terms of trying to think about whether they feel more pain, less pain it's quite a hard thing to quantify anyway I mean I've made the point in the past

that dogs have a more acute and intense sense of smell, hawks have more acute and intense sense of eyesight, they experience it in a way we can't even understand because they're more reliant upon those things for their sort of crude survival. We have reasons, so we rely on these things less. We also rely on our sort of crude feeling of pain a lot less. And so it would be possible that the animals feel it in a worse way.

But trivially, I think, to say, I don't think I'm in pain I think if you're in pain but you don't notice that you're in pain that just means you're not in pain you're not in pain it's kind of like if I'm sort of undergoing an operation and they sort of you know

pump me with morphine or anesthetized me or something and I'm sort of there going like well I am in pain I just I just sort of don't think that I am I've been like fooled into thinking I'm not in pain by the morphine no the morphine has actually made you not be in pain anymore right and so I think it's impossible to say

I think I'm in pain, but I'm deluded about that. And so, you know, you couldn't make quite the same sort of, you don't get the same Cartesian argument. You get something like, as long as I think I'm in pain, I know that pain exists. Yeah. I know that, like, I am actually in pain. That doesn't prove the existence of anything sort of prior to you.

Right, right. The language thing seems similar in that if you think you're using language, that's just what it is to use language. But you're sort of adding onto this, this idea that in order to use language in the first place, it needs to come from somewhere. Yeah. If you, yeah, it's even, it's interesting, even as you were, and I'm just thinking out loud now, even as you were talking, I was saying to myself, okay, so what would, how would you even

get the idea to think you're using language? Yeah. But there is a problem of, of regress, maybe, that sort of it has to start somewhere, right? Because you could say, well, you know, there has to be some pre-existing linguistic community outside of this brain in a vat, but, you know, that, there has to be a problem. a pre-existing language community outside of that as well. And it has to stop somewhere. And I don't see why it, if you can say it stopped somewhere outside of the brain

in the bat, why it can't stop at the bat. Okay. So, if I may, this is something that one of my philosophy professors years ago literally yelled at me and raised his voice at me. And I stand by this. I don't understand why there can't be. So let's throw away the language argument for something. I don't want to talk about that for a moment.

if you're yeah yeah yeah actually i think we can i think it's interesting i was going to say i want to do a lot more thinking on that i hadn't i haven't heard of this before i haven't found it interesting but i find that fascinating but yeah let's let's shelf that let's talk about yeah let's show that regress in general i don't understand why there can't be an infinite regress why can't there be turtles all the way down why does it have to be a first turtle i think it kind of depends on the on the context it depends on what kind of regress we're talking about for example an explanatory regress yeah no no i'm talking about a metaphysical like a physical like victor stang and God in the multiverse argues that, you know, Valenkin's argument and this idea that there's a

big bang, et cetera, Craig is always, I thought about, I thought about Valenkin, could you mentioned Craig, William Lee and Craig, he argued that the universe always existed. And I don't, I don't see, I'm not a theoretical physicist. I don't, I know I'm virtually nothing about theoretical physics, but I don't understand. So, so two things with that. One, why can't? There can't there be an infinite regress, not an explanatory regress, but a physical, actual regress? And a buddy of mine, I was telling him this argument, and he said, yeah, he thinks it's, I thought this was the great phrase. He said he thinks it's academic superstition. And the way that you would figure that out, and I think this is my problem with much of philosophy, is that you don't get those answers through theology or philosophy.

You get those answers through science. so this idea that you could kind of reason your way to the underlying structure of reality I think that's complete nonsense first of all there may be no underlying structure of reality there may be no unified field theory but even if there were you would get that from science you wouldn't get that through sitting in a room thinking about it I don't I mean I think these are sort of equally important here you see I don't you make an observation you need to sort of contextualize that observation. You need to place it somewhere in a world view. You need to understand what it is that you're seeing there. Contextualize it? So this is Lawrence Krauss's

point, the physicist. You need to contextualize it or you need to give evidence for it? I mean like the evidence itself, like it's sort of meaningless outside of some philosophical worldview assumptions. Yeah. And it's useless without some worldview philosophical implications. You switch the cause on me there though. So you went from the worldview So I'm talking about the way that you would figure physical phenomenon out, you can't reason to it. You need empirical data to inform or even think about what our observation or inform your worldview.

And the problem is that I don't think there are, and I could be wrong about this. So I ask your viewers to look it up. I don't think that there are literally any philosophy programs. maybe MIT the last time I looked at didn't but that have that teach people in methods that teach people about how to understand um you know to take actual science courses where they look at data and they inform their worldview that way i think that there's a lot of unevanced or under-evidence speculation that people are putting forward as explanatory models for the universe and i published something in Scientific American about this with Victor Stinger and James Lindsay years

ago and I just don't I don't not find that that helpful I think that it could um I think that that it could be responsible for people lapsing into delusion and the reason I think that is because you have groups of really smart people getting together reading journals about you know whatever it is how many this isn't an actual example but it makes the point how many angels dancing ahead of a pin right so you need to inform whatever worldview you have by the evidence and constantly hold that as provisionally true and shape it by the evidence that continues to come into the best available you know you have to the best job you can do sure but there's not like a primacy of uh of when you say evidence i presume you mean sort of physical evidence what's what's the word um empirical

Empirical evidence. Yeah. Because I mean, we could maybe sort of imagine a concept of like philosophical evidence. People might use that language. But you're talking about sort of scientific enterprise. Correct. But this sort of like we're talking about regresses, right? I mean, somebody might just sort of sit in the chair and think to themselves, well, maybe informed by what we've seen, informed by things that we see. We can create analogies. We can say that there are. You know the problem there though? the problem with that is that to use language again Dawkins we're going to see Dawkins Friday so we're thinking about I've been rereading and stuff but

you know your brain evolved to hunt gazelles in the savannah your brain didn't evolve to figure out what happens inside of black holes you know that whole body of work by Romanusian

that's right you're so that the whole double slit experiment and particles you know I'm just reading this thing about quantum computing. Your brain didn't, I mean, that's just so alien to you. So you can't assume that the reasoning process you use

about empirical phenomena in the Middle Kingdom generalizes to other domains. But haven't you sort of shot yourself in the foot there? It's an argument that I've brought up in a few podcasts now, which is Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. I'm sure you'll have come across this. By saying what you've just said, which is that, look, your faculties didn't evolve

for anything other than survivability. For, you know, hunting, surviving, not dying, avoiding painful things. That's why we make instruments. That's why we make infrared. That's why we make telescopes. But you say to me, even if you invent a microscope and you look down or you find a way to sort of observe quantum phenomena, It doesn't matter what sort of instrumentation you use.

You said a moment ago to me that your brain is just not built to understand the quantum. It's not built to understand Blackholt. I stand by that. What I'm saying is that if your brain really did evolve just to hunt on the savannah, then your brain is not built to understand any of this, any of this scientific enterprise. It's not built to understand. That doesn't follow. Neither does the non-naturalistic explanations for naturalistic phenomena.

apply why so you you all of these things the examples that I gave these are still naturalistic phenomena we're not talking about metaphysics of angels or demons we're talking about developing the tools scientific tools and instruments from which we can turn the faculties of reason and then form models that's what we do we're model form form yeah but I mean forget the sort of the the the supernatural stuff the angels Oh, okay. But what we're talking about here is the difference between sort of, let's say, pure rationalism. It's sort of a typical sort of rationalism versus empiricism debate.

We're talking about pure philosophy. Okay. Which you seem to be suspicious of the idea that there can even be such a thing. No, I think it exists. I think it's damaging people. I think it's a terrible thing. And you're talking about having, no, like empirical scientific observation-based thinking. Correct.

What I'm saying is that the scientific enterprises as a whole, a prerequisite of that is philosophical assumptions about what the world is and how it works and how observation works. Because for example, if your brain evolve for survivability... I give it to you, I completely agree. You have to have a philosophical assumption that the thing that in this instance is obviously sort of helping you to survive by believing is more than that. It's true. That belief you hold with this brain that you've evolved is actually true. That's a philosophical assumption. So we're talking about two different things.

I'm talking about the way philosophy has become institutionalized in the academy. And I'm talking about, and I published a piece about this in the Philosopher's Magazine, the problem when you get really smart people together who come up with ideas, not hypotheses, because they're inherent, testability. You know, like the infinite regress argument would be one, right? Or the idea that, you know, when I was in graduate school, the big fad was, was, you know, not in the sense of, you know, Udnung de Verklichke, Heisenberg's ordering reality,

or not in terms of kind of these constituent particles or what have you, what flavors they have. I'm talking about, and I was thinking about a specific conversation, even the very idea that there's an underlying structure of reality. Now, I do want to say that, you know, if Brian Green, the string theorist is correct, and even that idea that all of the string theory

might be a really good waste of math, right? So unless you have some, when in this case, people would say literally any, like as in a particle, I think that we have, getting back to the street epistemology, we need to be very mindful that we do not extend the confidence in a belief beyond the warrant of the evidence.

and there is a kind of hubris that comes with that's almost baked into our humanity and I think when you get groups of really smart people working together and creating journals and reading those journals they delve down rabbit holes like again you mentioned Christianity it's the only reason I bring it up like NT writes history of the resurrection

you're pulling from other people who have cited other people who already started to believe in the resurrection beforehand and then pretty much before you know it you're creating a body of corpus of literature and the resurrection and then people assign beliefs beyond the warrant of the evidence but the evidence isn't actually the evidence it's just something that's been it's been kind of it hasn't been manufactured whole cloth but it's been built upon a process that is inherently unreliable and we need to be mindful of that particularly we need to be mindful that are at root we have to anchor our beliefs in evidence.

Of course, but I mean... Well, we don't, right? There are entire disciplines that don't do that. Well, we started talking about this infinite regress thing, and your question was something about why they can't just be an infinite regress. And then we sort of talked about how we can only really inform this question with evidence.

But, I mean, can you understand somebody who thinks, for example? I mean, an example that I think comes from Ed Faser is to imagine the sort of tip of a paintbrush, and it's painting the Mona Lisa. Yeah. And you're imagining just the brushes themselves. You say, well, what's what's making them move? What's making them draw this picture? And you say, well, it's attached to this like bit of wood that makes sort of the handle of the paintbrush.

Okay, that's what's making it move, because that's moving and it's moving the brushes. Okay, but what's making that bit of wood move? Right. Well, a bit of wood just further up on the handle. That's making that. That's moving, which is causing this to move, which is painting the Mona Lisa. We say, well, what's causing that to move? And we go back and back and back and back and back. And somebody wants to say, well, I think this sort of has to terminate somewhere. And I say to you, but why? Why can't there just be an infinite regress? Why can't there just be an infinitely long paintbrush that is painting the Mona Lisa at one end? It goes on for infinity at the other end. And whenever you ask, well, why is the paintbrush moving in this particular way to make this particular movement? you say, well, because the bit further up is moving and causing it to move. And that explanation just goes on back and back and back and back along this infinite paint brush.

If somebody were to say... You're making an argument against free will? I know, I'm making an argument against infinite regresses. Oh, okay. I'm saying that this doesn't seem to be something that's also informed by evidence. It seems like the kind of thing that somebody would sit down and think,

okay, if there were a paint brush, painting the Mona Lisa, and somebody tried to explain why the brushes were moving in that particular way by saying, well, it could just be that there's an infinitely long paint brush. That just completely insufficient. It would be weird to say, well, why can't that be the case? Sure, no, I mean, sure. I mean, the difference is we know there's not an infinitely long paintbrush. Whereas my original comment was... Well, we don't, well, we don't know in this case. We don't know. The only information that we actually have available

to us right now, imagine, is that we know that some brushes are sort of moving. Let's say that maybe the paintbrush sort of goes out of this room and we can't see where it ends up. Or maybe we're just hearing about this and we don't actually see it ourselves. I'm not following like we know that paint brushes have an end to them. Well, maybe this one doesn't. Oh, I mean the one that's painting the universe? No, the one that's painting this, this Mona Lisa.

It's not, you know, Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa. Someone's painting a copy of it. So have you created a parallel world and you're asking me to participate in a thought experiment? It's not so much a parallel world. Like I say someone's doing it next door. It's a thought experiment, yes. But it doesn't be a parallel world. So if someone's doing it next door, then we would see the paintbrush extends through the corridor.

Someone's not doing it. We just know that there is a paintbrush painting this, painting this Mona Lisa. Okay, so explains to me. There is a paintbrush somewhere in this reality in which you and I are participating. And it's painting a Mona Lisa. And your claim to me is how do we know that the paintbrush doesn't go on for infinity? That's right. You might say because we could just get up and look at it.

Well, no, because if an object extended to infinity, I think we, we, I mean, I'm, I mean, clearly there is no paintbrush that goes to infinity. Why not? Well, because we have telescopes, we would see it. It would, it would be very bizarre if a paintbrush were going through this room, everybody would say, everybody is a cell phone that'd be taking pictures of it and be like, holy shit, there's like this infinitely long paintbrush. somewhere outside of our observable universe, that is... Okay, well, that's why I asked if it was... Okay, now... Now we can go into this.

Or even if it's not outside of our observable universe, it could just be sort of existing somewhere in space that our telescopes haven't looked yet, but growing away from Earth. So it just need to cut through our atmosphere or anything. Got you. Can there be such an infinite paintbrush? Yeah.

And there's one question just to sort of ask whether there can be an infinitely long object. Yeah. But the point of the force of Ed Phaser's point is to say that to just hypothesize, well, the paintbrush is infinite, seems to completely disregard that that leaves us utterly wanting in explaining why it's painting the Mona Lisa. Okay, so that's a second question.

The first question I think underscores my point. That's why you'd have to formulate your beliefs in the base of evidence as opposed to, it's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize infinitely long paintbrushes, no regresses, infinite regresses. The original point, I don't know how articulate I was that I was trying to make, was that when you get, you want some more water? Oh, sure. When you get really smart, when you get really, see, that was a very British thing right there.

What's that? An American would have just reached down and picked up the water, but a British person would have been like invited to do it. Like Americans, I think they're just more in your face about stuff. Yeah, I mean, I was kind of half considering it, but then we are in your hotel room, so I... See, that's all right. It feels strange not to ask.

Thank you. That was very unbreddish of me, wasn't it? Not pouring yours first. No, well, I actually made that because that was a kind of an American gesture I was trying to make. Again, I don't think these things are bad. I just think it's kind of interesting. No, but that's why we need to be, so people can hypothesize or speculate about anything. We can, and I, so I also think that there's some, that there is some to give philosophy a nod.

I do think that there's some benefit to having these conversations to thinking about infinite paint brushes Can I just say that the point that I'm trying to make there it's not so much about whether there can be an infinite regress or not

but rather that the person who I think plausibly sits down and says if there were brushes painting the Mona Lisa it would be absurd to try to explain that with an infinite regressive paint brush I agree that doesn't seem to me to be empirically informed

That seems to me to just be sort of a philosophical argument. It's informed in the sense that the example that we've given uses, you know, a canvas and a paintbrush, which are physical objects. But when I said earlier that, well, we sort of have observations and experience and we look at things and we can sort of create analogies using them. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. You could be technical about it and swap out any sort of physical objects to only sort of rational concepts and come up with a similar sort of thought experiment. It's why it would be absurd to suggest regress. But this is an easy way to explain the point in the context of religious philosophy.

But the person who sits there and says, no, I don't believe that such an infinite explanatory regress can exist. You switched on here. So the reason that we... They're not doing it on the basis of empiricism. They're doing it on the basis of philosophy alone. So you got two things.

So we know that there's no reason to believe there are infinite paintbrushes. We've never seen an infinite paintbrush. we can assign an extraordinarily low confidence value to that. Now, you know, you could go back and that's why I asked you about the parallel worlds. But the infinite explanatory recess, that's a different question, right? So my original claim, I was kind of thinking to myself, and I'm not saying there is an infinite regress or not.

Of course. I have actually no idea. But I just, it's possible, right? It's possible. I brought the point up because it was just an example of something that, you know, people just accept by fiat and it's not clear to me that it should be accepted by fiat and even if it were it would have to be accepted by fiat because you had overwhelming evidence to get you there to rule out other possibilities in the first place as opposed to just kind of

thinking thinking your way to it you think it's just accepted by fiat i mean did you think people just just sort of accept this is essentially a dogma because whenever i'm infinite regress i do yeah whenever i've asked a philosopher who uh specializes in in this area or in an area where this is relevant, they haven't answers to that question. I say, well, why can't there be an infinite regress? I mean, even just a temporal regress, like William Lane Craig's answer to me was to say, if I remember rightly, was to say something like, look, if there were an infinite past, it means that there will have been an infinite number of past events.

And in order to get to the present, we therefore would have had to traverse an infinite number of events. By definition of infinity, you can't traverse anything. It's kind of Zeno's paradox. And yet we end up where we are, right? And even if you think that's wrong, it's not... James Lindsay wrote a whole book about that called... Yeah, so it's not just being accepted by fear.

This is something that philosophers have thought out, reasoned, provided arguments for. Maybe like if you ask a student of philosophy of religion, they'll have heard the dialectic and they'll say, well, that argument doesn't work because you can't have an infinite regress. And you say, why not? And they say, oh, you just, come on, man, you just can't. I'm sure people would do that. So Craig... But it doesn't mean that the arguments don't exist. No, so Craig, as Krause has pointed out, is not a physicist.

I think in one of his debates, Krauss said, come back when you get a physics PhD, then we can have a conversation about that. So that's a really good example of attempting to reason to a conclusion. And I'm just going to bracket it, but I'll say it, in which you want to forward a particular conclusion about the historicity of Jesus and the personal and the resurrection and the salvation, etc. And so, I, even if you bracket the idea that that's motivated reasoning from the get-go, the way, you don't reason to those conclusions, right?

You don't, you, you, you, Craig does that absent any evidence whatsoever. You don't think Craig could have said to Lawrence Krause, well, you come back to me when you have a PhD in philosophy and we can continue this conversation. What we have here is a meeting in the middle. And the reason why these two people are an interesting mix is because you have a, let's say, the philosophical expertise of Craig, and the physics expertise of Krauss coming together. That's the problem and that's the hoodwink. The questions aren't solved by philosophy. They're solved by science.

Empirical, scientific questions are solved by science. Whether there is an infinite regress or not. Again, I have no idea. But we would solve that. And again, Stangler has God and the question of whether this. People have answered this question. You answer the question through science. You don't answer the question through thinking about it

and hoping, or through God. The answer is not found in an ancient text in which they didn't even have, you know, lens technology. The question of whether there is an infinite regress in your view then is a scientific one, not a philosophical one. Absolutely. And any empirical question is an empirical question by definition.

So do you think any philosophy of religion that takes place prior to the advent of the modern scientific method is just useless in answering the question? Like, do you think the existence of God is a scientific question and, like, not a philosophical? Yeah, I put out a tweet about that, and then John W. Laugh just wrote a whole book about it. Interestingly, it was a good book. It's been a while since I read it, but... I know this is something Dawkins argues in the God delusion.

He says, no, actually, the question of God's existence is a scientific question. And I think depending on who you're talking to in the context of the conversation, it can be. But I think it can equally be a philosophical question and a purely philosophical question, as can the question of whether regress is connected. So if it's a philosophical question, are you putting it forward as a universal truth? Am I putting what forward as a universal? Like if someone says, I've deduced the idea of God's existence from, I don't know, Aquinas is five proofs, whatever it is. Yeah. Is that put forward as a universal truth that God exists? I guess it depends who you're talking to, but I think in most cases, yes.

I mean, Aquinas, at least some of Aquinas' arguments there are informed by, seemingly informed by empirical observation, but rely on philosophical principles that are sort of separate from those. And so if you have a sort of philosophical principle, God existing is an important one because usually, I mean, for instance, if you speak to a philosopher of religion who thinks that God is a necessary being. God is that being necessary to exist. There are many people who believe that.

Then yes, when they philosophize to a conclusion that God exists, it's a universal truth. Right. And actually that's an example of the kind of purely philosophical thinking, like ontological arguments, for example. For example, somebody thinks about the ontological argument. They think, okay, I'm convinced by this. I think God exists and he exists necessarily.

So it must be a universal truth, yes. Yeah. And so I'm not really sure where to go at the, conversation, but I guess one place you could go with, is it disconfirmable? Are there defeasibility criteria for the belief? Like, what would it take to undermine one's confidence in the belief? Are there alternative explanations that are equally plausible or nearly equally plausible would be another way to look at it? What's entailed by the belief would be another way to look at it. So you have a lot of things going on there.

I think that we need to be not only cautious but humble when we start positing in like really big truths about the universe. Like that, I was just with my buddy Faisal Omutara the other day and he was, he was, he's a guy, he is very, become a very, very good friend of mine. He runs ideas beyond border where they, borders where they translate enlightenment text. he's a remarkable human being but you know he was telling me he he got a telescope and he's been looking at the stars and he said to me it's amazing you know the universe is so vast and so wondrous and when you look at specific religious traditions they tell you where to put your penis as if the creator of the universe could possibly care less about where you or we're one put to one's penis.

But I think that we need to be incredibly mindful before we think that we've derived necessary truths about the world not only in a metaphysical sense, but in the sense that those truths govern behavior and ought to be responsible for how society is structured and organized. And that's a pretty big, that's pretty big. And so I think that the way to think about it is if we shifted our minds to thinking about, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, I used to talk about this, and I think it's fruitful, to thinking

about our minds instead of rationally deriving truths that have been, I'm thinking of Stephen Jay Gould's overlapping magisteria, you know, science has its domain, religion has. its domain and those two magisteria don't overlap. I think that we need to be incredibly mindful about the role that facts and evidence play in our belief lives. And I think we need to be more honest and more humble about the fact that we are,

now I'm just like a theologian, but we really are fallible and there should always be a question of of humility or an incompleteness of what it is that we know, you know, and Socrates talks about you know, if, basically, if

I had your genes, of course, anachronistic, but if I had your experience, it's only because you have a certain set of experiences that you formulate belief. And so we all have psychological propensities and dispositions and we live in cultures that have certain adaptive beliefs.

And so these things shape what it is that we believe. And so I just think we need to be incredibly mindful before we come to the conclusion that we've derived universal truths about the nature of reality. I certainly agree on the humility point. I should flag on this point about why would the creator of the universe care

what you do with your penis? I understand the force of that question. I think there's a similar question that could be asked of like, you might think about the necessary being the god of the creator of the heavens and the earth and then sort of look at this glass of water and say well if everything's created by god you might look at this sort of puny little object and say like would god have created this this tiny little thing it'd be a bit of a weird question to ask because you'd be like because it was

created by humans because well no I'm thinking because god creates everything yes he did create you know that singular blade of grass seems kind of weird and a bit amazing but I in other words I think the moral questions there can be analogous where it does seem strange that this grand creator of the universe and looking at the stars and thinking, would he care who you have sex with? Well, maybe the answer is yes, but like there's a misalignment of grandiosity here because God cares about everything, including the stars and the planets and the... But he also cares about the minutia too. It would be a pretty hyper-specific thing to care about.

I mean, I don't know. It just seems... Also, treating it quite casually there, sort of talking about sexual relations as what you do with your penis. Again, that's sort of a euphemism. Like, everybody recognizes in modern culture that sex is an incredibly important thing. Like, it's one of those things that when it goes wrong, it goes wrong. It's really bad.

It's something very significant that humans recognize is... It's not just like, you know, giving someone a high five or hanging out at the park. It's a very special, particular kind of experience. And we recognize that because it has its own sort of legal and moral category. It's a different kind of wrongness if somebody assaults somebody or somebody sexually assaults somebody. We recognize that there's something about this particular behavior that is incredibly special. And so it doesn't seem that strange to me. It doesn't seem strange to you that the creator of the universe would put that in a book.

like let's think about the Quran does it seem strange to you that the creator of the universe would put in a book about something about the testimony of women being less than men in a court of law or inheritance because if you looked at it

a Muslim framework that doesn't seem strange at all you could make the identical argument that you made that the creator of the universe should put that in the Quran as legitimacy for that's right that's why what I really want to criticize there is sort of the form of the point rather than the point itself. If you said something like, you know, I was considering the grandiosity of God, and I thought, why would God prohibit me from having sex with another man?

I think that's an important question that I don't think is very easily answerable. But to frame it in terms of sort of like, why would this God care about, like, who we're having sex with just generally, or what humans are sort of doing in their daily lives or whatever? I don't think that works. I think it makes sense that God would care about those things. But I agree that the criticism can be made. I just think if we're going to make that criticism, it should be about, the criticism should be

that the things he seems to condone and condemn are a bit mismatched with our moral intuitions. Not that he's condoning and condemning things to do with human affairs in general, which is kind of what I was getting from you saying, oh, why would God care about where you put your penis? Like, well, I can think of a few reasons why he might care if you put it in the wrong places, but our criticism of God here or of the Christian or Islamic tradition would be that

what they consider to be the wrong places are in fact not. You know, I guess you said so many things, you pack so many things in there. One, which we can go back to later, is the idea about our moral intuitions don't accord with God's moral intuitions or what God's. It's kind of a version of the youth of fro dilemma. But the first thing you said was interesting, I wish I could play it back, but it was like, you know, you said something like, I think this is a really important point where I don't think it's important even remotely. Like I don't, I don't think who people have or choose to have sexual relations with, even to think that the creator of the universe of, an all-knowing omnipotent being who created space and time itself to demean that being

in terms of to take it from deism to theism and to take it from moral edicts and pronouncements either that seems to me to be a kind of reasoning that's so dishonest or to make this shift, you'd have to say that the moral intuitions we have, we can't understand, which we did, we can't understand why, we can't understand this because our moral intuitions don't accord with God. That's exactly the type of move one would have to make to substantiate or justify the argument that's so prima facie idiotic. There are two, there are two arguments to separate out here. Firstly, I don't think it so much demeaned. God to think that he cares about human affairs as it elevates the human.

I mean, in the monotheistic tradition, the end goal of the creation of the universe in the first place is conscious human experience. And so it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the grand creator of the heavens and the earth cares about sort of trifling human affairs. It's like that's why the universe was created was to allow for humans to interact with each other in various ways. That's because those were written by people. those that's because that's the lens through which it's operative that's that's of course the atheist

uh no that's just that's just that's just unless you want to say like your painting before like the work of kavaggio or something is you know the secret hand on or the invisible hand on god which paints the painting of of whatever if what i mean to say is if god did create the universe with the intention of bringing about human interactions the kind of universe we'd expect to find is one in one which God cares about human affairs. Why? Because I'm supposing here that God creates the universe with the intention of bringing about human affairs. I know, but why would you suppose that? What I'm saying is that... Like, that's putting... That's... A moment ago, I think you begged the question against Christianity. Yeah. When I said that, you know, God, like, God cares about

human beings and that's why this sort of like we have this strange phenomena where things like who you have sex with are relevant to the creator of the universe it's because God cares particularly about human beings and you said but we only think that because it was written by human beings

well the claim that God cares about human beings comes to us from theological text in which it is claimed that God cares about human beings but that's the question begging. Of course on a Christian, at least a Christian understanding, yes, humans wrote the holy text, but the word

of God is not the Bible in the way that the word of God is the Quran in Islam. The word of God is, is Jesus, right? And so it's not that the, it's not that we've sort of got human beings writing in a book and sort of claiming that this is the word of God. We've got human beings writing in a book what they claim to have seen and the thing they claim to have seen is the incarnate word of God. Okay. So is it not question begging to say that we know God cares about human beings because it's in the Bible, which was created by human beings? That seems to be the ultimate question beggar. Yeah, I mean, if that were the form of the argument that I was making, then yes. What is the argument? What I'm trying to respond to,

is you put forward, again, kind of slightly euphemistically, because you didn't put it in syllogistic terms, but you put forward something like an argument that you casually dropped him, which is why I picked up on it afterwards, where you said something like, you were talking about your friend, looking at the stars, and thinking, you know, why would God, you know,

care what I do with my penis? As if to say that there's an argument that if there were a God who existed, then he wouldn't care about human affairs. And I'm saying, that seems perfectly possible to me that there could be a God who cares about human affairs. And now you've said, but what's your reasoning for that? Like, aren't you begging the question? No, no, I agree with you.

Well, I'm not, I'm not saying that that is the case. I agree with you. That undermined the ability to say that, well, if there's a creator of the universe, then, you know, why would he care what you do in your daily affairs? No, I'm, I'm, I'm agreeing with you. If there is a creator of the universe, I guess it's possible he cares about what you do. with your penis. It's possible he cares about, I don't know, what kind of headphones I buy. I mean, I guess it's, I mean, guess the moment you start admitting something for which there's no evidence, then anything can follow from that. No evidence at all. I don't, I don't see any

evidence for the existence of God whatsoever. Not even bad evidence. Now, what's the, bracketing what you mean by bad evidence for a second, like what would be an example or of evidence. When you use the word evidence, are you using it to mean something like empirical evidence, like scientific evidence? Well, obviously there's no evidence for that

whatsoever. So, I would even extend that and say, I don't even see what... So we have evidence in the strong sense, so yes,

but we also have reason. So I don't see what reason one would have to believe in God. Do you think there are reasons either? Do I think there are reasons for... Reasons to believe in God? Well, you know, you said what about bad evidence? Yeah, I mean, a bad evidence would be,

Reid would tell me, hey, you know, I had this apparition appeared to me last night, and it's... Well, let's say that you should believe that's bad evidence. Non-establishing evidence, that is, it's not enough to actually establish conclusion, but move you in that direction. In other words, what I'm asking you, is what's the kind of thing that would make you move from

strongly disagree to slightly disagree? I actually, it's funny as he's come up like five times in this conversation, I actually did an event with Richard about that and I think that the best way to answer that question is to tell you what it wouldn't be. Presumably Dawkins, Richard Dawkins.

It's to tell you what it wouldn't be and then tell you what would move me only after you knew what wouldn't move me. It seems to me strange because we began this conversation talking about the flat earth. Yeah. I said, you know, I think the earth is a globe and you said what kind of evidence might disconfirmed it.

And I said like, or it was the other way around. You said something like, well, look, to be honest with you, I just cannot see any good reason to think that the earth is not a globe. Right. Now you're saying the same thing. Any good reason, that's right. Yeah. Now you're saying something similar about the existence of God. am I expected to interpret this to mean something like you're about as certain that there is no God

as you are that the earth is a globe? If I would choose which one I'm more certain of the earth is a globe or the existence of God, I would say I'm more certain that the earth is a globe. That's why I wanted to tell you what wouldn't move me before I told you what would. But I can just jump to the point, but I do think it's illustrative if I tell you what wouldn't move me but is that is that like close for you if i'm like belief one the earth is a glow belief two god doesn't exist do these two beliefs that you hold like have sort of sort of similar credence uh so if i would have put those on a scale i think that would help so if i would

put that in a scale and you you would have asked me on a scale from uh this is a great example of um the you know darkens puts on a one to seven scale yeah and then he changed it subsequent to He was six, and then he's like 6.99, I think a one to seven scale isn't sufficient. I think I need a one to 100 scale. Yeah, let's say one to a hundred. A little more granular, I think it would help tease out the belief. I am, in assuming that I can only do an integer, I wouldn't want to say that I am 100% positive about the globe, but I'm as close to 100% as one could reasonably get.

But given that I've made the condition that I can only make it an integer, I would say that I'm 99% certain that the earth is a sphere or a globe or what have you. The likelihood, what is the possibility for the existence of God? I would put it below 99% that God does not exist, but not significantly. Not not, I'd have to think about the exact number, I would say. Like more than 95? Yeah, probably. Something like that.

Sort of, yeah, sort of like, maybe like, 60% sure that it would be over 95% sure. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would have to parse that out. I'd have to parse that out, but probably I would say something in the high 90s. It also depends what you mean by God. Like, do you mean by deism? Do you mean by theism? Do you mean, is it a, what kind of a conception of God is it? But yeah, it would be in the high 90s. I'm, uh, I'm going to refrain from attempting to answer that question. for fear of remaining in this room forever. Okay.

It's... You mean what your percentage is? No, I mean defining God. I think we... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what's your percentage? Of... Of God's existence.

God does not exist. How confident are you? Like I said earlier, I'm suspicious of an ability to put a number on this kind of thing. I don't know... Like, when I said earlier, I don't know what the difference is

between sort of 65% and 67%. I'm also not really sure what the difference is between like 60% and like 80% or 90% like realistically that's a very difficult thing for me to like think about in my head put it on that but I understand why it's like a useful question yeah well put it on the strongly disagree disagree disagree slightly disagree neutral slightly agree agree strongly agree where'd you be bearing in mind that when we were talking about god earlier you began talking about holy books you began talking about the bible and the theism theism so if we're just talking about theism and we're not talking about sort of deism

Christianity or Islam Just the idea that there is a god that exists And one that is sustaining the universe Or somehow cares about human affairs or something Yeah, the latter The probability that that is the case That there is such a god Yeah, that's maybe, I don't know

Maybe like 45 Okay Okay Something like 45 can high Okay I mean it's higher than most atheists Which is why I think I have a bit of a reputation recently for going a bit soft

on on on theism if you'd have asked me you know four or five years ago I'm not quite sure what I would have said but I probably would have been more under the the new atheist influence and therefore the Dawkins scale I may have been a bit more like no no I'm you know I'm sort of at least at least it would have been more like 70 or 75 or something but but now I I remain quite comfortably agnostic on the question what what what push there were changed? Probably my eventual abandonment of a few things. Firstly, I think I used to agree with you in many ways about the primacy of empiricism.

If you look at some of my earlier videos when I'm sort of like 17, 18 in my bedroom, like this is sort of quite a while ago now, but I'm constantly talking about empirical evidence and talking about scientific evidence. And I look back now and I sometimes think that's not really really really. I've sort of smuggled in this, this word that people respect in this community. I say, is there any scientific evidence for that? Is there any empirical data? And people hear that term and they go, that's a term that we respect that we want to see.

But I think I was bringing it up in context where it wasn't entirely relevant. So I began to realize that actually philosophy has a bit more going for it. So you did that because, and you now think that it's outside the domain of evidence? And so that's... No, I think maybe the particular question I was answering then would have been. Okay. You know what I mean? And then I think I was strongly analytically inclined, like in terms of the kind of philosophy

that I enjoyed and the kind of philosophy that I was interested in doing, it was analytic philosophy. It was premise, premise conclusion. If you can't do that, then you're not saying anything meaningful. More recently, I've been not quite abandoning that, but been much more open to the idea that there are important things about human experience. and the way that the brain interprets the world that are beyond what can be condensed into a syllogism.

I think that what I'd essentially been doing is spending a number of years trying to understand a painting by studying the brushstrokes instead of sort of standing back and looking at the picture. So is it a kind of epistemic versimilitude or cognitive for similitude where you're constantly getting closer by reflecting and thinking on the things you believe?

No, I think it, you know, you sort of go back and forth and back and forth, but it's not like, I mean, there might be a tendency or a temptation to think, well, when I was 17, I was really sort of edgy atheist phase, and now I'm a bit softer on that, so maybe I'm moving in that direction. Now, I think I would interpret this as saying that a vague agnosticism is probably the best position to be in and the most reasonable position to be in. Of course, I would say that because that's my current position. But if that is the case, then it's no surprise that I've moved in that direction, but it doesn't imply that I'm going to move any further. Likewise, I think if I'd have started, you know, I know, I know five years ago would say the same thing about being sort of, I don't

know, like a Christian fundamentalist or being an evangelical who now, maybe they still believe in God, but they're much less sort of reliant on the Bible. And they're not quite sure about the Trinity or even if Jesus, you know, claimed to be God or was God. But they're still a theist. And so they've moved in that direction. I wouldn't necessarily say, ah, that means that they're sort of moving towards atheism. Yeah. Maybe we're all just sort of moving towards the center of gravity,

which is agnosticism. I think when you have these conversations for long enough, you realize that you're saying the same thing over and over again, you're debating the same points over and over again. And when you start looking for new things, you have to step outside the entire sort of, the entire format. You have to step outside of analytic philosophy itself.

You have to start really considering, If I think it's ridiculous to suggest that you could believe in God through anything other than rational argument, then why do so many people do it? And I can look at that and observe it, but I really have to spend the time to actually get to grips with it. You know what I mean? And so doing that has sort of shattered my illusion that analytic philosophy is what it's all about. If there's something that like all of this, if there's something that it's all about, it's not about syllogism. And I think that religious traditions recognize that.

You don't find a syllogism in the Bible. It's not in there. If there was something about being a Christian for which it was important to understand argument and rational discourse and debate, then that's what you'd find in the Bible. But you don't. You find poetry.

You find, you know, nihilistic outpourings of ecclesiastes. You find struggles with God and Job. You find sort of the character of Jesus who isn't going around debating people or doing street epistemology. He's just sort of being a physical, manifestation of love. And so I think to myself, if I'm making criticisms of these religions on grounds that they don't even sort of claim to be based on, then aren't I doing something

wrong there? And I think maybe that that is where it's going wrong. Well, not necessarily that you were doing something wrong, but that embedded in those systems were reasons to believe that an independent neutral observer would not buy into or that if somebody were asked to adjudicate between competing belief systems without accepting any of the fundamental premises of either belief system, they would be unable to do that. And so then you'd have to move away from whether or not the system was true to whether or not the system was beneficial and look at it that way. And we spoke, so that's another discussion entirely.

We've been talking for a long time. That's right. I actually meant to wrap up a little while ago, but we've just sort of opened this little avenue talking about the probabilities. Maybe this is the place to do that. Maybe this is the place to wrap things up. I know we've gone a little bit sort of off topic.

I wasn't quite sure what we were going to talk about. No, it's quite surprisingly wide-ranging, I think. Yeah, no, I think it's good. We don't have an agenda and we just talk about whatever came up. We've sort of done a bit of everything here. I enjoyed it because no one ever wants to talk to me about that stuff. Everybody always wants to talk to me about the same stuff. I get sick of talking about it over and over again.

I think the golden rule of a good interview is, well, there are two. Firstly, don't ask questions that people can find out from Google. Don't be like, so, you know, tell me, you know, where were you born or where did you go? Unless it's like relevant to the conversation, don't ask questions. that Google could answer. And don't ask questions that this person was asked in another interview.

Certainly not an interview within the sort of previous month. So my question, first of all, thank you for the interview. I appreciate it. My question to do I seem very American to you? You know, I spend so much time talking to Americans.

Most of my audiences, the biggest proportion of my audience is American that I don't even quite know what that means. I mean, it comes through in your accent. I'll give you that. But apart from that, I'm afraid to say I think we'd need to spend a bit more time together for me to make a

well hopefully we'll do that at dinner tonight final adjudication but yes I'll um I'll let you know in a few hours I'm buying so that should motivate you to come Peter Begozian thank you so much thanks for having appreciate it Thank you. Thank you.