Within Reason - #45 Graham Oppy - Atheism Requires Justification Too

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University, CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, Chief Editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review, Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and serves on the editorial boards of Philo, Philosopher's Compass, Religious Studies, and Sophia. He is one of the best known atheist thinkers in academia. You can buy "Atheism: the Basics" here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To succeed in the future of work, forward thinkers use AI to deliver measurable results. Workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that frees you from the mundane, so you can focus on more meaningful work. Workday, moving business forever forward. Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Graham Opie is an Australian professor of philosophy at Monash University. He's one of the best known atheists in contemporary academia and is the author of a number of books, including ontological arguments and belief in God, the best argument against God, and atheism, the basics. He joins me today to discuss atheism, what it is, whether it has a burden of proof,

and whether people can think that they believe certain things, but be mistaken and not actually believe those things at all. With that said, I hope you enjoy the following conversation with Graham Oppy. Graham Opie, thanks for being here. It's a pleasure. You have been described by some as at least one of the most formidable atheist philosophers currently in the academy. You're well known for your defense of philosophical atheism. Why do you think it is important to talk about the philosophy of the existence of a god that you don't think is actually real?

Why do you spend so much of your life, so much of your professional career talking about it? okay so i mean i guess the first thing is it's not just one god i don't think there are any gods right and so the the target here isn't just some particular version of the christian god it's gods in general and the reason why it's important is because on the first of all most people are religious and most of the people who are religious believe in at least one God. And on the other hand, at least historically, the position of atheism has not been regarded favourably by many people who are religious, and in particular by religious authorities, and the struggles there continue in many parts of the world. So as you know, for example,

there have been atheist bloggers in various countries who've been hacked to death and so on in the last decade. So it's not like the kind of struggles that happened way in the past in places like the UK have disappeared altogether from the planet. Yeah, I mean, your work is mostly sort of academic philosophy. You're talking about arguments and syllogisms and this kind of thing, but am I interpreting you correctly in saying that although that's the area that you work in, the motivation for doing so isn't just a sort of love of, you know, academic philosophy, but something a bit more real world? So I think so.

And I've spent quite a lot of time in the last decade, maybe more so in the last five years, trying to take my philosophy to a wider public audience. And maybe initially, when I got into philosophy of religion, I didn't think that that was the direction that it would go in. I was just intrinsically interested in the kind of highly local. debates in the philosophy of religion journals. But I've come to think that there's more to what I'm doing than that. I think that the most boring question that people often ask in the context of

theism and atheism is how best to define atheism. Because there seems to be this large semantic debate about whether atheism is the belief that there is no God or just a lack of belief that there is one, sometimes called lack atheism. And I have a suspicion that the reason why people like to advocate for the lacktheism definition is to absolve themselves of a burden of proof for their position. That's generally been my assessment. That's not to say that it's a sort of illegitimate position to hold, but I think to call it atheism sometimes gives the impression. It relies upon the idea that most people interpret that term slightly differently to the way they're using it. But when pushed, you can just sort of

fall back on saying, well, I don't have the burden of proof here. I know that you've advocated for a definition of atheism that makes the claim that there are no gods. I was wondering if you could tell us briefly why that's the case, but also why it is you think that the lacktheism definition is so popular in sort of colloquial atheist circles. So you don't want to make a fetish out of words. So what really matters is the positions that are being adopted. But it also matters what the linguistic community, how the linguistic community that you belong to uses the words. And in academic philosophy, it's just the way that the word atheism is used, that it's a denial of the existence of gods, that it's just the claim they're under gods. That's what atheism is.

And then atheists are people who believe that claim and reject its denial. So they say there are no gods and it's not the case that there are gods, right? There are two propositions here that are contradictory and in a well-thought-out position. You're going to have an attitude towards both of them. So that's now one question then will be, what about this position that just says all I do is deny one of these claims? No, all I do is not accept one of these claims. So I don't accept the claim that there are gods. Question, what's your attitude to the proposition there are no gods?

What's your attitude to that one? If you don't have an answer to that question, then you just don't have a well-thought-out position at this point. And so the people who call themselves Lacteus have to give an answer to that question. And there's several ways they can go. One way is they can say that they suspend judgment about that one. too. But then that just sounds to mean like a position that's intermediate now between

atheism and theism. You're suspending judgment about two propositions, one of which is accepted by the atheists and the other of which is accepted by the theists. And so the idea that the position that you're defending now is a atheistic one rather than theistic one seems kind of odd. The other thing that you might do is you might say, say, well, I reject both of these claims, right? But that's going to be just inconsistent. Sorry, I mean, sorry, we agreed you that you were suspending judgment about one of them. If you reject the other one, though, now your position starts to look incoherent, right?

because you're rejecting the claim that there are no gods seems to commit you to the claim that there are gods. So the suspension of judgment position to be coherent has to be suspending judgment about both of those propositions. Now, that's all on the kind of semantic side. Forget about that. There's also this question about whether, supposing that the position was coherent,

there would be some dialectical advantage you would gain by just saying, well, I suspend judgment about that proposition. But in philosophy, when we're thinking about positions that you might take, that's a position that requires defence just as much as advocating for atheism or for atheism. It's not like in philosophy of religion, agnostics have no obligations to try to defend the position that they're taking on. What they're going to have to say is something like this, that the balance of considerations favors neither atheism nor theism.

And if you just say the balance of considerations doesn't favor theism, you haven't fully articulated a position at that point. Sorry, that was a bit rambling, but that's my answer to your question. I'm interested in something you just said about agnosticism and agnostics having to defend their position. That is, I'm imagining there are, well, I know that there are different kinds of agnostics. There might be the kind of agnostic that says something like, you know, I sort of think there's good evidence either way and I can't make my mind up. There might be an agnostic who says, I don't think there's any good evidence either way and therefore I sort of remain sat on the fence. But also there might be agnostics who sort of say, well, I haven't really given it much thought, I don't know, I don't really believe either way, I don't really care about the question.

It seems to me that at least in that last case, and possibly even in the second, a person isn't in a position of needing to defend their agnosticism. It's just a position that they find themselves in for sort of want of arguments to push them away from it. So I think the first two, both are in need of defense. The third one, if you just say, well, look, I don't care and I don't want to think about it. it that's let's grant that that's a defensible attitude to have but it takes you out of the conversation right though yeah if that's your view you're not going to be in a discussion with atheists and fears well maybe it might be somebody who this could be their first time sort of discovering this or

talking about this and we think to I mean it seems strange is what what I'm trying to say here it seems strange to say that a position of essentially withholding judgment requires some kind of burden of proof because the act of withholding a judgment seems to be contrary to that intuition that it's something that needs sustaining and propping up with argument and reason.

So I guess I don't see it that way. Like suppose that you say I withhold judgment about the shape of the earth. I'm going to think there's something pretty weird about that because there's a bunch of considerations that speak in favor of holding a particular view and there's really nothing that speaks against it. What's the justification for your withholding of judgment here? Now, you might say, well, look, I'm withholding my judgment because I just know nothing about the topic. And then I'm going to say, well, that's fine. But, you know, that really does

remove you from any kind of interesting conversation. Here's an entry point. Go away now. If you want to be part of a conversation about this, go away and learn some stuff, right, learn what the relevant considerations are, and then rejoin the conversation. That's roughly what I want to say, I think. Sure. I mean, I've heard this before. I mean, I remember somebody once asking me in the context of the burden of proof, like, if you said you don't believe you have parents, and I said, well, that's a bit, that's a little bit weird. Why don't you believe you have parents? And you say, well, what do you mean? Why don't I believe I have parents? It's you're the one who has to prove that I do. You're the one making the claim. It does seem that in certain context,

if certain evidence exists and is provided, then there comes a point at which you have to say, what is your reason essentially for rejecting those considerations, for rejecting that evidence? In the context of the flat earth, it's a useful example. You say, okay, maybe, you know, if you know nothing, then withholding judgment is the most appropriate view and also one that doesn't need defense. But if I provide photos and scientific considerations and boats disappearing across the horizon and this kind of thing, there comes a point at which if someone keeps saying, I just don't buy it, I'm just not convinced. I'm just not convinced by that, that it seems sort of, I don't know, is it philosophically accurate here to say that they adopt what we would

call a burden of proof for their withholding of judgment? Is that the right terminology to use in that context? So I don't like any talk about burden of proof because I don't think there are burdens of proof. It's just that there's something going on here where they're not, if they're not even acknowledging that there are considerations here to be weighed, then it's not clear that there's much point pursuing conversation

with them anymore. Once they've acknowledged that there are considerations to be weighed, then if they haven't weighed them, again, at this point, there's no point continuing the conversation, the kind of minimum requirement for entry into the conversation is going to be that you've made an attempt at weighing the considerations and you've got some way of something that you can say on behalf of the view that the considerations come out kind of equal. Is it enough for somebody to say, I'm thinking of someone like Matt Delahunty who would would host, I don't think he does it anymore, but on an almost weekly basis, this call-in TV

show, where people would call in and give arguments for the existence of God, and he would constantly just say, look, I'm just not convinced by what you're saying, for whatever reason. Now, you can't accuse him of being someone who hasn't engaged with the arguments, who hasn't listened to them and considered them, but a lot of the time, the argument, sort of, there's not so much an argument to the opposite, there's not so much an argument for atheism, it's just saying, listen, I'm listening to this argument, and for whatever reason, it's just not moving me like it's moved you. Is that enough to sort of fulfill this burden that you're talking about, to say, look, I withhold judgment, because everything I've heard in either direction, just sort of doesn't do it, that doesn't do it for me in a way that I can't quite explain. I just know that it obviously hasn't changed my beliefs.

So I think for speaking, so I'll put my philosopher hat on, that's not going to be satisfactory. What we would like to do is to dig a bit deeper and be given some reasons that were so that you can display the reasons that were operative when you were weighing the relevant considerations. So, you know, how much weight were you attaching to this particular point? How much weight were you attaching to this one? Why was it that this one you just sort of were able to just completely dismiss and so on? There's something, of course, as a stance, you can imagine the equivalent, someone having

a television show if there was an audience for it about flat earthism and just whatever comes up, you say, well, I'm not moved. What's the interest in that, right? There's often stuff that you can say about particular considerations. There should be quite a lot that you can say. So, for example, if, so let's imagine that, though, that host is a theorist, and there's somebody who comes on, let's say it's Michael Toole or somebody like that, talking about evil.

Responding to Michael by just saying, I'm not moved, isn't going to cut it, right? There's a whole lot of considerations here about evil, and if you're kind of seriously engaged here, there should be stuff that you can say, response. Of course, I'm not saying there's nothing that you could say in response. I'm just saying, right, that's just what the engagement should look like. That's not to go back from the earlier point that you could just be not interested in this stuff, right? That's fine, but then if you're not interested, you're not interested and you shouldn't be hanging around the conversation. Yeah, if somebody's either an agnostic in, and I think your terminology,

or a lacktheist, that is the kind of atheist that just lacks belief in God. And you say, well, I don't have a burden of proof here. You can imagine the conversation that somebody has. It might be like, well, here's the, here's the Calam cosmological argument. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe begins to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. And the agnostic lacktheist might say, well, I don't see why that cause would need to be God.

I don't see why it would need to be any specific kind of God. Therefore, I'm not convinced by that argument and I remain sort of unconvinced. what they've done there is provided a reason for their withholding of assent to the proposition. It's not as simple as just saying, well, I'm just not convinced by that. You can actually give a reason as to why you're not convinced by that. And that's what this TV show, The Atheist Experience, consisted in. It was sort of responses of the form of why I'm not convinced by this particular argument that you're putting forward. And so a reason is being given.

Interesting. I hadn't really thought about it in the context of whether such a reason needs to be given, that a withholding of belief needs to be legitimized in this way. It's something that, as I say, someone asked me about it before in the context of parents, but I think it's perhaps something of a controversial claim to say that withholding of assent requires justification. Is that something that you found when talking about this? So I guess I don't think that it's particularly controversial. But I also haven't discussed it much.

I don't think. It's not really a topic that comes up in the philosophical interchanges, that is the interchanges between professional philosophers. And people take it for granted that part of the project is to try to articulate as clearly as you can. The reasons you have for the various claims that you make, and if you're making claims about it's being permissible or required that you withhold judgment on a particular point,

there'll be stuff that you can say to support that just as much as there'll be stuff to say, you know, given these considerations, you really should be accepting this other claim. It does seem to me that there is an asymmetry here, though. I mean, if I told you that sort of in the other room next to me, there's a grizzly bear, and you sort of just don't really believe me

based on your knowledge of what the normal world is like. And I started providing considerations. And maybe they don't start that sort of convincingly. I say, well, I'm hearing a lot of noises coming through the wall. And you say, well, I don't really buy that. I mean, for a start, I think it's difficult to pin down. If I asked you, why do you not find that convincing? If I said, you know, I'm hearing some noises next to one.

I think it's a grisly bear. And you say, well, I'm just not convinced that it is one. And I say, why is that the case? It's quite a difficult thing to understand why your brain is not sort of assenting to that proposition. And as the evidence gets better and better, there comes a point where you start going, maybe this has got something to it. And I think it's quite difficult to actually pay attention to what the difference is in your mind between those two kinds of evidences.

So I'm not sure. You've got quite a lot of information, I'll say knowledge, about, first of all, the kinds of animals that are to be found, sometimes found indoors, the kinds of animals that people keep as pets. Because what you said initially was in the room next door. So that there's a fully grown crocodile or a fully grown elephant or a fully grown grizzly bear in the room next door, given that you're in a kind of apartment block on the seventh floor or whatever.

But a priori, that is, I shouldn't say it completely a priori, but just taking everything I know into account, that's pretty unlikely to be true, right? That's, and that's a reasonable presumption to bring to the conversation. Now, you often hear noises through the wall, and often enough you can't tell what they are, but as a hypothesis that it's a bear, that's going to be unlikely. Of course, you could, there are ways that you could show that actually it's true,

And it's clearly not impossible that someone's got a bear. People do all kinds of weird and crazy things. But all of that stuff is going to be on the side of the reasons that you've got for initially thinking that it's unlikely. And then it depends what sort of evidence. All right, if there's a little peephole and you can open it up and you can see that there's a bear in the next room, well, that's going to make a lot of difference. Yeah. The reason that a moment ago I described it as an asymmetry or acted as though I was about to present an asymmetry is because as I'm doing this, as I'm presenting this evidence to you, increasing in its plausibility that there might be a grizzly bear next door, of course, you're going to be considering those reasons and you're maybe going to be offering some responses.

Well, couldn't many other things have made those noises? Well, couldn't there be someone playing a video behind the hole and fooling you? But it seems like we're not engaged in the same thing here. It does seem like I'm making a claim, I'm defending that claim, and you're sort of poking holes in my defences. I understand the idea that there needs to be some justification on some level for your withholding of assent to my proposition that there's a bear next door. But it does seem like there's a meaningful sense in which I have the more proactive task

and you have the more defensive task. If it's not to be described in terms of I have the burden of proof and you don't, how should we analyze that difference between us? So I guess it depends. So maybe in this case, given that you've said there's a bearer and I'm skeptical, if we want to push this further, you're going to have to come up with some better evidence than you've provided so far to persuade me and that's fine. If you want to talk about a burden of if anybody defending a position of any kind is going to have a burden of proof might be something that will be appropriate to say at this point.

So it depends what you do, whether it's fine for me to just go on being skeptical. Sure, but you walk into the next room and, you know, if there's a door, you open it up and you walk in there and I can see you getting mauled by the bear. I'm going to be convinced, right? Yeah, but, you know, suppose you still said you didn't believe me, then that's the kind of situation in which you were talking about, someone would rightfully say, well, what's your justification for not thinking there's a grizzly bear? It's right in front of you. And although you have adopted something there, it seemed like earlier you were saying, this isn't best

described in terms of having a burden of proof, these positions still don't feel equal to me. It still doesn't feel like, you know, we're both engaged in this equal task of both putting forward some kind of proposition or worldview or something. It seems like one person's putting it forward and one person is considering it and you know whether or not they accept or reject it there does seem to be some kind of difference between these two people and i guess i'm trying to figure out what that difference is if it isn't that one has the burden of proof and one does not so there's a i think that there's a kind of obligation that everybody has to believe as well as they can you might something like that and that creates um you might think doxastic obligations of various kinds

If somebody tells you something, that may or may not be a reason, there may or may not be a reason for you to believe what they say. And the kind of exchanges where people tell other people things is only one of the ways in which worldviews or belief systems, whatever you want to call them, are going to get updated. And it's not like if you tell me something, I have an obligation to believe it straight off. And I suppose maybe for some other kinds of evidence,

sometimes I see something and I'm inclined to think, I can't be seeing that. But it does seem as though the status of testimony is a bit different because there's lots of unreliable informants. There are lots of people with vested interests and so on. And if the topic here is, okay, so what are our relative obligations when you're testifying to something and I'm trying to decide whether to believe you or not?

Now, that's not a symmetrical situation, right? because there's something happening here, there's a kind of transaction, you're saying something to me and I'm trying to work out what to do with what you're telling me. So I certainly don't want to insist that that kind of situation is symmetrical between the two of us. Rightfully or not, I mean, I think we probably both want to say unrightfully, that it's not the case. but many people characterize religious arguments as if they are just sort of ridiculous or just senseless or they just none of them makes sense, you know, all these arguments for God, they don't prove God's existence, you know, unintelligible to me.

Now, we're going to say that they're wrong, I think, but presuming they were right in that analysis, imagine that I said there's a bear next door and you said why, and I said, I think there's a bear next door for a reason that just had so little plausibility to you that it almost didn't make sense, you know, I mean, I say something like, you know, I see a sort of black mark on the wall and I think it's more likely that the black mark is there because a bear walked through here earlier and pushed something into it or something. And I think that raises the probability there's a bear next door now. If we're talking about this level of evidence, would you say that there is still some kind of burden on the person who says, I just don't believe you. I just don't think

that that means there's a bear next door, that they still have some kind of requirement for justification for their withholding assent? Or is there a point of which the evidence becomes so poor that they can reasonably say, I don't have a need for providing reasons here? So, I mean, there's two things here. One is saying something. to the other person and the other one is the judgment that you're making yourself right so thinking about it from my point of view in this scenario um that there's a mark on the wall a tiny black mark on the wall as evidence that there was a bear present is just at a kind of a negligible consideration

right? It just isn't a reason for believing that there was a bad run. Now, whether I want to say that to you depends on whether I want to say that in response really now depends upon kind of contextual factors about the conversation that we're having and whether, because there are going to be lots of conversations that are just not worth having. There are people that it's not worth investing lots of effort in talking to them. And if you, we're confronted with somebody who's going to make an argument like that, you probably just want to extricate yourself from the conversation and go and do something more profitable with your time, I think.

And that depends on other things. Like if it's a family member, it's getting a bit trickier. We're all familiar with all the ways in which this can be complicated. But there are lots of cases where it's just not worth arguing with somebody because of the kinds of things that they're inclined to say. Now, shifting gears slightly, if somebody is 100% certain that there is a God, then they are a theist. If somebody is 100% sure that there is no God, or there are no gods, then they're an atheist. If somebody's 50-50, you sort of have an epistemological balance here, we'd say they're an agnostic.

What I wanted to ask you is, what are the bounds of agnosticism here? Like if somebody says, you know, I'm sort of, I don't really know, I've considered the evidence, it's not swaying me massively, but I'm slightly more inclined towards theism, sort of 5, 10% or something. How far do you think that that uncertainty has to swing towards 100 or 0 to say that that person is a theist or an atheist rather than an agnostic? So we have, it's sort of familiar that there are two different ways of talking about beliefs. or maybe actually we're talking about two different things, but for now, let's think that there's one thing that we're talking about in two different ways. So one thing is belief is an all or nothing matter, right?

So there are three grades here you believe, for any proposition that you've considered, either you believe it or you disbelieve it or you suspend judgment with respect to it. Now, on that view, it can still be that there are kind of variations of belief. So I kind of weakly believe it or I strongly believe it or whatever. But still, the basic division is there are these three things. Different way of thinking about things is you have credences for propositions.

So every proposition gets a value between zero and one, zero for complete rejection, one for certainty that it's true. So zero for certainty that it's false. and 50-50 for being right in the middle about whether it's true or false. And notoriously, it's very hard to map these two things onto one another, right? There is no neat way, most people think, of mapping the kind of all or nothing conception of belief onto the credence conception of belief. So given that there isn't any neat way of doing the mapping, there's no really neat way

of answering your question. Suppose that someone's credence is a right. between 40 and 60. What are they? Well, maybe in that case, they're an agnostic. Maybe if you've got a kind of symmetrical interval around 50, that's enough to make you an agnostic. What if they're 40, 61? Well, now we just don't have an answer to that. That just doesn't map on to the kind of neat atheist-theist agnostic frame. So I'm sorry, that's not a very satisfactory answer because it rejects your question rather than giving you a straight answer to it. But I think that that's the right thing to say.

Do you think there's any wisdom in the suggestion of people like Jordan Peterson that what you believe is better revealed by the way that you behave rather than what you report when asked? So there's an interesting discussions going on in philosophy at the moment about whether there's a common source for your behaviour and that your non-verbal behaviour and your verbal behaviour or whether they actually have different sources. So we're quite used in philosophy because we've done it for a long time, that beliefs are involved in both so that if you believe something and you're being sincere

and other conditions are satisfied, then what you say has the content of your belief. And we also think that the standard sort of functionalist story, beliefs and desires are the source of action. If you believe there's beer in the fridge and you're thirsty, you go to the fridge and open the door to get out of the beer, right? Now, maybe those two things, what you say and what you do. do actually have different sources and calling them both beliefs is kind of muddling things together. Supposing that that's not the case, suppose that there's a kind of single thing here,

a single state that's both the source for your assertions and for your behaviors, it's not clear why you would think that one of them was a better indicator of what you believe than the other, right? People can lie, but they can all. also deceive you with their behavior equally well. And so it's not clear why you want to say that one is clearly a better indicator of what their beliefs are on the assumptions that we need to put into the story to start with. I think it's because, at least for someone like Peterson, he's not talking so much about deceiving other people, but deceiving yourself.

That is, if you actually think to yourself, you know, I don't believe that there's any food in the fridge. I believe there's just no chance that there's some food in the fridge. But then you find yourself maybe out of, you know, desperate starvation going to check anyway. You go and have a look. And you think to yourself, well, if I really believed there was no food in the fridge, then I wouldn't go and check. And it does seem to me like what it is that reveals what the person truly thinks there. or what they sort of truly believe is how they behave rather than if you ask them and they said, I don't believe there's any food in there, because they're going to check.

And that seems a bit more sort of one-directional than trying to deceive other people. In terms of kind of standard decision theory, though, there's a kind of different explanation here. They're credence for whether there's beer in the fridge isn't zero. It's close to zero. And if you raise the stakes high enough, then they're going to go and check. because it's worth doing, right? So once they're thirsty enough, right? You, the, it's not like there needs to be any inconsistency here.

It just depends on what we're, how we're going to interpret what they're doing or what they're saying. Well, maybe you've just identified the inconsistency. Maybe they tell you, I believe there's a zero percent chance that there's food in the fridge. And you say something like, no one has a zero percent credence in this thing. Maybe they don't quite understand what you're saying, but they say, no, I think there's just a zero percent chance, and that's what they believe. And then when they go and check the fridge, you say to them, see, you were wrong. That isn't what you believe. What you told me you believe is actually not what you believe, and you were mistaken about your own sort of mental state there.

So maybe, but maybe the first thing that you said, they didn't really understand what they were committing themselves to when they said that there's zero chance. And the kind of charitable way to interpret them is they thought that there was kind of epsilon chance where epsilon is pretty small, but there are certain circumstances where you're going to act on a belief that's so tiny, that you might have thought, for practical purposes, it was zero, but then the circumstances turned out to be such that actually we could see that it wasn't really zero. It wasn't that they thought that there was absolutely, for example, there was nothing that could make them change their mind about this, because if it really is probability zero, then no amount of evidence can shift you from there, right? Well, what if the door just falls open and you can see that there's a whole lot of beer in the fridge?

If you're credence zero, that's not going to shift you, right? Yeah, yeah, quite. credence epsilon, but if it's credence epsilon, it will, right? So you were just making a mistake when you said that the probability was zero. But could the same mistake be being made when people are talking about their belief in God or gods? Because to take it back to what we were talking about a moment ago, you know, somebody might say, look, you know, I'm kind of 50-50, maybe 60-40 on God's existence. Then you observe their behavior and you find that they're sort of hedging their bets by going to church and then maybe in the morning they feel sort of compelled to pray in a way

that they can't quite describe and you know they have they nearly get hit by a car and they find themselves just immediately saying you know lord forgive me for my sins because they think they're about to die little things like this little behaviors that come through and you sit them down and you say you know I know you said you're sort of on the fence here but your behaviors seem to suggest that you might be giving a little bit more to this theism thing than you're giving to the atheism thing and in that way it's really the behaviors that we should be looking at rather than, you know, the answers to questions and determining whether someone's an agnostic

or more theist or atheist-leaning. So you could be right about a case like that, I suppose. And there's lots of different states that people can be in and people who are in a kind of undecided state. So, I mean, there are different kinds of agnostics. There are the people who are just sort of convinced agnostics, and they're sort of settled in that position, and nothing really is going to budge them from their agnosticism.

And then there are people whose agnosticism is quite brittle, and they can easily be shifted one way or the other. And if you're in that kind of position, or if you, well, let's consider somebody, who is in that kind of position, it might well turn out that after a while if they're not paying too close attention to their kind of own state

where they might think of themselves is still an agnostic, but they've actually kind of budged a fair way, one way or the other. And I do, I mean, to go back to the beginning of this part of the conversation, They're interesting questions about self-knowledge and self-deception that clearly relevant here. So some people had thought that you just can't be mistaken about what you believe.

You have this kind of special access to it. Whereas there are lots of people in the last 20 or 30 years who've explored the idea that actually you can be mistaken about what you believe. And you don't necessarily have special access to it. And in particular, you can say things. And it turns out that you're wrong, as in you report that you believe something, but actually you don't.

Now, there's a whole lot of stuff to unpack in that area, which I guess is clearly relevant to the position that you were attributing to Peterson. I'm wondering if we can have an example or two of the kind of things that it suggested a person can be mistaken about when it comes to their own beliefs. I mean, of course, the intuitive position is that if you believe something, then of course you're going to be aware that you believe it. You're going to know that you believe it because it's your own belief. It's your own head that, you know, you have direct mental access to. So what's an example of somebody who might believe that they believe something? they'll be wrong? Right. So the one case that comes to mind, so George Ray has this very well-known

paper in which he argues that religious believers are all self-deceived. They think that they believe certain kinds of things, but they don't. And the way that you can tell that they don't is by looking at their behaviour, right? So the kind of example that he will give is they think that when you die, you go off to this magical resort, and yet people are desperately unhappy about the fact that their relatives have gone off for this glorious holiday. What gives? Now, I'm not supporting that as a good argument. I'm just saying that's a kind of illustration of the case where, and something that Peterson might take to support, you know, the position that he was arguing for you look at their behavior and that shows that they really don't believe the things that

they claim that they believe because interesting i mean peterson usually argues in the opposite direction he says you know people say they're an atheist it's like you think uh and sort of lists off the ways that people behave you know they sort of have a moral code and they have a value hierarchy and all of this they're acting as if god exists but here's a good example of the exact reverse which is yeah people say that there's an afterlife and that there's a soul that outlifts the human body, so why is it that people get so drastically upset when someone they love manages to shuffle off this mortal coil? I think that'd be an interesting question to ask him. But I'm interested what you think about this view about self-deception

and whether you think it's possible to be deceived about your own beliefs. So I think it depends a bit on the stance you take on the other question about whether belief is a unified category or whether there are different sources for things that we say and things that we do. If you think that there's kind of different categories here, then of course there can be, it then doesn't seem so hard to understand how they can be mismatches between what you affirm and what you do. But if beliefs are unified category and you think that we kind of have this immediate access to our beliefs. It's much harder to see how you could be mistaken about your beliefs in that case. It seems like on that kind of classical picture, it's just going to turn out that

you're, for whatever reason, you're lying about what you believe, not that you're deceived about it. It's just seen that some people can be seemingly deluded. I'm imagining an example of like a grieving parent. I'm sure this has come up as a famous example and I won't be able to attribute it to the right person because I can't remember who came up with the idea. But I'm imagining, you know, a parent whose child has died in a shipwreck or something.

You know, the ship's gone under the water and they've discovered absolutely no survivors and it was in the middle of, you know, the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah. And so they know that, you know, their child's dead, realistically. But they just sort of can't bring themselves to, to accept it. So they'll sort of go around, they'll, they'll, um, they'll talk about them as if they're still alive. They won't use the past tense. And if somebody suggests that

they're probably dead and they need to move on, they'll get angry and they'll say, you don't know that. There's no way to prove it kind of thing. But at some point, maybe they just sort of snap out of it. They break. Someone gets through to them and they, and they sort of let out a big sigh and go, yeah, okay. Yeah, I, I, you know, it's like it's in there somewhere. But there's some kind of psychological barrier that causes a kind of conflict within someone's own head? Right. So lots of our believing is not very good, right? And that you might think of that is just a case, right? There may also be such a thing as kind of motivated believing as well. I mean, your believing may be affected by your desires. You can think of that as an example.

perhaps in some cases at least of kind of not believing very well and you could use that to explain what's going on in this case I assume it's um you know if we were better at believing perhaps there'd be a lot less disagreement about things than there is right I mean there's a kind of I mean one one thing that you could try to say here is well you know we've got quite different evidence. We're all kind of pretty good at believing. It's just that we believe according to the evidence that we've got and we've all got different evidence. A different way of going will be to say just we're not very good at responding to the evidence that we've got. That's also true. Just not that good of believing. Yeah. Okay, shifting gears once again,

you wrote a book called Atheism, The Basics, and there's a quote or a list of quotes at the beginning of one of the chapters of that book, including the following quote from Richard Dawkins. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. You have a relatively negative assessment of this quote in the book, and I wondered if you could rehearse to us the reasons why that's the case. This is quite a popular way of framing what atheism is in sort of social media circles, for example. They say, look, everyone knows what it's like to be an atheist. You don't believe in a whole pantheon of gods. And with respect to, the way that you're an atheist with respect to those gods, I'm an atheist with respect to yours.

So, I can't remember what I said about this quote in the book. It's, there's very, there's various things to say. One would be that it's quite common. And so in my debate book with Kenny Pierce, he runs this line. It's quite common for Theists to say, well, actually, what's going on when people claim to be worshipping a different God from the one that I worship is that they're actually worshipping the same God. They've just got some mistaken beliefs about that God. Right. Now, That would be one way of responding to Dawkins because it's not that you're thinking that you're an atheist about their gods.

They believe in the same God that you do. They've just got mistaken beliefs about it. And so if Pierce was right, then the Dawkins thing just wouldn't get off the ground. Yeah, it would be like saying that you don't believe, I don't know, you're talking about like the White House in Washington, D.C. And, you know, you think it's got an oval office in it, but you're not sure. And somebody else says, no, there's not an oval office. There's a rectangular office.

And you say that they don't believe in the same White House as you. They believe in a different White House. You believe in the same White House. You just have different ideas about, you know, its properties or the way that it presents itself in it. Yeah. In its most sort of, perhaps in one of its most culturally important aspect, perhaps. That is, you know, the famous oval office. but it's the same White House that we're talking about here.

Right. So that's why at least some theorists are going to be quite unmoved by the thing that, in fact, annoyed by the thing that Dawkins says, right? On the other hand, if you think about ancient pantheons, like the Greek pantheon or whatever, where any polytheistic pantheon will do, Now you can't say, well, maybe you can still say actually they're worshipping the same God, but it's just that they've gone very wildly wrong in their believing because they think

that there's all these different gods, which are actually, I suppose we have to think of them as different manifestations of the one God just misperceived. But theists, I think, will often take a different line, which is to say that They're, what people are talking about, they call them gods, but they've got nothing to do with God with a capital G, right? I mean, they've got these mistaken beliefs, but they're not misperceptions of God with a capital G. There's something else. They're kind of, I don't know, names for natural powers, for example. So, you know, gods of thunder and so on, right?

that's not really got anything to do with Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or whatever. So that would be a different line. And again, if you take that view, your reasons for thinking that there aren't really nature gods sort of has no bearing on the question whether your god with a capital G exists. It's just a kind of different kind of consideration. So that's something else that some theorists are going to say. I hear, I think. I can quote what you said at the end of that chapter that I mentioned, seeing as you can't

remember what you wrote, and that's fair enough. I think it was some five years ago now that that book was published. This was the closing sentence of that chapter. You said, I do not join with Dawkins in saying that we are all atheists relative to most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. I would no sooner say that we are all vegans relative to those meals to which, you know, we sit down that contain no animal products, atheists believe that there are no God's end of story. Very, um, sort of dramatically put at the end there, I think. Yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm,

that seems to be a slightly different approach to the one that you just took. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have an idea of sort of what you were getting at with a sentence like that? So, so, so What's, so how's the analogy with veganism supposed to work, right? It doesn't, there's, there's no sense in which you're a vegan just because you occasionally have a meal in which there's no meat and dairy products. That just doesn't make you a vegan because to be a vegan is to be in a sort of continuing state where you don't have meat and animal products. No, sorry, you don't have animal products of any kind.

So equally, it's not right to say that you're kind of an atheist with respect to these other gods. That's to misunderstand the way that the word atheist writes. I mean, it's the way that the word atheist works. It's true maybe that you don't believe in those gods, and it may be true. that theists don't believe in those gods either, right, taking the second of the roots that I argued for. But that doesn't mean that there's some sense in which the atheists, atheists with respect to those gods, any more than someone who's an omnivore is vegan with respect to certain meals. That's just to misunderstand how the words vegan and atheists are used. That was

what I was thinking. Yeah. Now, I understand. what you're saying, I think. However, I do think that there is a way in which this can be made sense of, right? It would be strange for somebody to say, I'm a vegan with respect to this meal, but it's not an incoherent concept. I mean, if I were to say something like, well, you know, I was, I was vegan at lunch today, you'd know what I meant. And maybe if I were trying to convince you that it was really easy to go vegan, what I might say to you is something like, well, consider the fact that, you know, what did you have for breakfast this morning? And you say, oh, I had some oats with oat milk.

And I say, well, you see, that was a vegan meal. So, you know, the way that you were vegan at breakfast this morning, I just do that with every single one of my meals, and that's all it is. And you go, oh, yeah, fair enough. Now, that makes sense. It was easy enough at breakfast this morning, so maybe I could just do that every meal. Now, as an explanatory tool, somebody could be doing the same thing when they say, look, okay, you're like, ah, what does this atheism thing mean?

And I say, well, you don't believe that Islam is true, do you? And they say, no. And I say, well, that's just how I feel about Christianity. It's sort of an explanatory tool. And there is a sense in which I can say I'm vegan with regards to this particular meal in a way that I think I maybe can say that I'm an atheist with regard to these particular gods. So you could certainly say, look, you've had meals where animal products were not involved. You've had meals that were exclusively plant-based. You can certainly say that.

that what whether um so it depends what you were trying to explain or trying to get this person to think right because for most people the stumbling block for being a vegan isn't that occasionally you sit down to an entirely plant-based meal is that you're going to be doing that for every meal right and so it's not clear um why pointing to the fact that you occasionally have a meal that's entirely plant-based, what work that's going to do in trying to persuade someone that they could be a vegan. Yeah, and the stumbling block for the the atheist, talking to the atheist, is not that there are going to be some conceptions of God that don't exist,

but having to believe that there is no God to ground the nature of reality. So it would be a slightly more powerful claim. But I think, I guess, I interpret it. a little bit more poetically what Richard Dawkins is saying. And perhaps this is part of the problem with analytic philosophy is that we don't have room for a bit of sort of beauty in our turns of phrase and that if somebody says, I'm an atheist with regards to thousands of gods, they probably don't mean in the academic sense of the term atheism

that they think there are no gods in relation to Zeus and Thor. they're sort of saying you know how it feels to not believe in something and that's how I feel about your god it felt a sort of like a bit more of a poetic statement than an analytical one so I think that's fine but I don't think that theists kind of misunderstand the atheistic position in this way they know perfectly well that what the atheist thinks is that there aren't any gods and in particular that means they don't think that there's a god that whoever the particular the atheist is believe sin. Now, you just talked about sort of a mistake that you don't think theists make.

I'm interested, broadly speaking, being an atheist and having spent some time thinking about this kind of stuff, what do you think is the biggest mistake that theists generally make, given the falsity, as you see it, of their worldview? I doubt that there's a biggest mistake. It's not clear to me that it's even right to talk about mistake here. It seems to me that it's kind of reasonably, rationally permissible to be a theorist for all kinds of reasons. One thing that really shouldn't be underestimated in any discussion of this kind is the extent to which our beliefs are based in the testimony of other people that we trust.

And if you've got lots of, I mean, so imagine someone living in a relatively isolated community with a very influential church is probably perfectly, and no encouragement to think that things are different elsewhere, and perfectly reasonable for them to be fierce, members of the church. That's what I think. So I'm not inclined to think that there's got to be mistakes. I do think that, and so this is part of what animates my philosophical way, that it's a mistake to think that there are compelling reasons that should compel everybody to be a theorist, right?

So when people start talking about proofs, I just think, no, that's, there's no proofs here, right? Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification that you've just made, and it motivates me to slightly rephrase my question. I think you know what I'm getting at, but you're right that it should maybe be phrased as something like, what is the most common error you think people make

when considering arguments for and against the existence of God, assuming they're in a position to hear lots of arguments, they're in a library and they have a motivation to seek out arguments for and against, and they're a theist at the end of their investigations. do you think that what's the most sort of common misfiring of reason that happens so I guess if I think that there's a misfiring

it's it happens on both sides it's not just um atheists um atheists will make a similar kind of mistake it's to think that an argument shows you know that an argument's a proof that will be the mistake or that the argument's stronger than it is

than it actually is, that the kind of rational persuasive powers of the arguments are always lesser than their proponents, suppose. And I know that they come up. That would be a way of describing it. So that was kind of the burden of the book I wrote arguing about gods

was to argue for essentially that position. Yeah. I know that sort of actually committing to theism will tend to be based on a cumulative case from lots of different arguments put together, but within that pool of arguments that people tend to cite as part of their reasons for being a theist, what do you find is the most common one that persuades people? That's not to say the best. I know I've heard you ask before. People are interested in, what do you think is the best argument for God's existence? I'm interested in what you think is the best, not in terms of its philosophical consistency or philosophical plausibility, but rather the practical success that it has in actually changing people's minds. What do you think most commonly achieves that? So I would think that telling people about your religious experiences is going to be most likely to persuade them that your position is right, that I expect, right? So, I mean, because you're asking me really about what's the most effective way to proselytize for religion.

And I'm going to guess that it's going to be by talking about your experiences and the experiences of other people who you've been in conversation with and the kind of benefits of living a life where you have these kinds of experiences. Let's say that we were restricting our scope here only to philosophical arguments that bear on the truth or falsity of theism. What do you think comes up most commonly and has the most persuasive force within a sort of academic discussion about the existence of God? So I think it's probably true historically that there's been some variation over time which argument or style of argument or form of argument plays this role I think that there have been periods

And maybe we're currently in a period where cosmological arguments have been viewed as kind of pretty strong. There have been other periods where design arguments, again, we might be in such a period where design arguments have been viewed by many theists is pretty compelling. And there've also been periods where moral arguments of one kind or another have been thought to be the kind of the best arguments. And I'm thinking that probably amongst those three categories, you, to the extent that there are theists who think that there are compelling arguments, they're going to think they're in one of those three categories. Hardly anybody thinks that ontological arguments are compelling, and arguments from miracles, scripture, and religious experience and things like that,

considered as arguments, tend not to be viewed as particularly compelling either, I think. So that would be my assessment. leaves a lot of different kinds of arguments because there's very different ways of very different kinds of design arguments and there's very different kinds of cosmological arguments as well. So, I mean, just to, within the field of cosmological arguments, there are tomists who think that a certain style of causal argument that that adverts to per se causation is very strong, whereas if you're William Lane Craig, you probably don't believe in that kind of causation, but you think that there's a kind

of past causal chain argument, column, cosmological argument, that's pretty strong, and so on. So in other words, it depends. Yeah, so obviously it depends. Yes. So asking you about your own perception of the plausibility of arguments, because that's the only thing you can sort of confidently speak on in this regard, a slightly, I guess, more trivial question, but one that I'm interested in, is what you think are the most, or is the most overrated and also the most underrated argument for the existence of God? That is arguments that are popularly put forward and cited as good reasons, but you think are terrible, and ones that don't get enough attention, but you think are actually quite powerful, perhaps.

So do you mean four or either for or against? I'm interested in both, but let's say four, let's say four theism. What do you think is an overrated and an underrated? It's unfair to press you to think of the most off the top of your head, but just something that you think is overrated or underrated. Well, I mean, I guess you can probably anticipate what I'm going to say, right? Because I don't think that there are any successful arguments on either side. So it's not like...

Oh, on either side of what, do you mean? For God or against God. You don't think there are any successful arguments against God? No. So such as ought to compel any rational person to be persuaded of the conclusion. Sure. No, I mean, that was the burden of arguing about God, again, was to just go through all the arguments on each side.

It's like, well, you know, they don't. They're not successful by that kind of standard. I guess I'm asking about your own view in that you may think that there's no argument either way that should compel any rational person to be a atheist or an atheist, but there must be something that compels you to be an atheist. So, but it's not, it's, okay, so then we could end up at cross purposes because of the elasticity of use of the word argument. So I'm thinking of an argument as a set of premises and a conclusion.

I'm thinking of a case as something like, here's a bunch of reasons that you have to weigh. And so in my book, the best argument against God, I suggest here's a way of weighing the reasons that bear on the existence of God that might make you come down on the side of thinking that there's no God. But note that it's enormously complicated and highly contentious whether you have to settle on that particular judgment or not. And what you don't get in that book is a list of, okay, here's the set of premises that either entail or support the claim that God exists. It's using that more elastic everyday sense of argument

where it's just making a case, setting up, weighing a bunch of reasons and settling on something. Well, for the listener who's unfamiliar with your position and indeed your work, could you give us like a thumbnail sketch of the considerations that lead you to propose that there are no gods, despite the fact that you don't think these reasons are enough to compel, you know, any rational person to agree with you. Okay, so I think that pick my favorite naturalistic worldview and compare it with any theistic worldview, it doesn't matter where we go. It will turn out that the naturalistic worldview is simpler and it will turn out that if so long as

we think about sort of partitioning the relevant data in a non-Gerrymanded way, there's no data that more strongly favours the theistic view than the naturalistic view. So because there's, because it's at least break even on the data, the simplicity, the relative simplicity of the naturalistic view means that's the view that you should opt for. Now, there's lots of things that are contestable in this. You might actually think that the judgment about relative. if simplicity is wrong, or you might think that there's some bits of the data that actually strongly favour theism over naturalism.

And we can argue about all this stuff, and I have at length with various people, including in the debate book with Kenny Pierce. I don't think that the judgment's compulsory, but I do think that you can see that there's that you can see that there's quite a lot going for it, right? What does it mean for a position or an explanation or a worldview to be simpler than another one? Right. So the way that I think about this, I'm thinking about, I mean, technically I'm thinking of the worldviews as theories in the kind of a way that's familiar from philosophy of science. So you've got a set of sentences and they're closed under logical consequence.

That's what a theory is. What does that mean? A set of sentences that are closed under logical consequence. So it means that you start with your set of sentences and anything that follows logically from them. So you might say my theory is the following and you list a few sentences. Your theory commits you to anything

that follows logically from all of those sentences. And so I'm thinking that the theory itself is closed. It's not just the things you said, but anything that follows logically from them. So we've got these, now, in order to do the kind of compare the two theories, so an atheistic theory, a naturalistic theory and a atheistic theory for simplicity, imagine that we can axiomatize the theory. So we can find kind of the most compact set of sentences such that the closer on them is

what you got from closing on the sentences that you started with. because it's not necessarily going to be the case that the set of sentences that you started with is the kind of nicest way of presenting your theory. Then we'll focus on the axioms. One thing about theoretical simplicity is just the axioms, which has the simpler axiomatization where the simplicity depends on the complexity of the principles involved, basically the complexity of the sentences involved. Another thing is going to be how many primitive terms you need to frame the theory.

And a third thing is going to be what are you committed to, what kinds of things, how many different kinds of things are you committed to by your theory? So we've got three different dimensions of simplicity. And on all of these dimensions, according to me, that naturalist is going to do better than the theorist, because the theist has to have what's in the naturalistic theory to have an adequate account because I'm just as supposing that the naturalistic theory says there's a natural world and all this stuff in it and that's it.

Whereas the theist has to say, yeah, there's the natural world and all this stuff in it. But there's also God and angels and whatever else, after life and lots of other stuff that the naturalist doesn't believe in. And that's going to make the theory more complicated on all of the three dimensions. Is that always the case? Sorry.

Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off there. I was just going to ask if that's always the case in that I'm thinking about a conversation where somebody thinks that God is the necessary grounding of, you know, all contingent things or the hierarchical causal chain. And the naturalist says, well, I believe that there's a necessary thing as well. I just think that that's the universe or it's a fundamental law of physics or something like this. In that situation, it doesn't seem like they're positing more things. It just seems like they're positing different things. So I'm supposing that your theory has to be complete. So you have to get every truth about everything that's true about causal reality.

You have to follow from your premises. So saying that it's a ground, like you say to me, here's my theory. God's the ground of everything. And I say, what's the value with the fine-tuning constant, derive it? You say, I can't do that. I've got to put that in as an extra postulate in my theory, right? So I'm assuming you've done that. You've put in everything that you need.

Then it will turn out that naturalism is simpler, right? Because compress the scientific theory as much as you can, and then you're going to have to have claims in your theory that said, God wants this to be the case, God wants that to be the case. There's no way of compressing science further by postulating God. But if you could, then science would be committed to God, right? Because it clearly isn't. Is that true of like if somebody's reason for saying that God exists is because they think something necessary has to exist and they say that that's God?

Yeah. And somebody else says, well, I think there's something necessary, but it's not God, it's the universe. Yeah. Why is that a simpler view? Or what does it sort of contain less assumptions? Because unless the theist is saying there's only God, there's got to be more in their theory. They've got to get out the universe as well, right? But presumably not a necessary or maybe like not a necessarily existing universe.

No, so they won't think that there's a necessarily existing universe. But in point of commitments, right, we will have a universe and the theist will have God and the naturalist won't. And then there'll be this property of necessity that on the one hand is attributed to the universe and on the other hand is attributed to God. So you've still got additional complexity on the Theos side, right? I see. Yeah. Because my ejection was going to be balancing up.

It seemed like you've sort of got God and the universe. And on the other hand, you just have the universe. And I wanted to say, look, but balancing up the necessary universe with the non-necessary universe, maybe these shouldn't be given equal measure, but I guess the necessity is moved from the universe to the God, right? So you're going to be polluting more things. So, yeah, so according to me, you've still got more stuff in your theory, if you're the theist and if you're the natural. So that's the, on the one side, that's the simplicity side. On the other side, is there evidence that favours one rather than the other?

But that's just a long story. You have to consider every piece of alleged evidence and consider how it falls. So, for example, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, both theories are going to say because there had to be this, this necessary thing, right? And so it's a draw for that alleged bit of evidence. And we could go on. And so on and so forth. I think that's a that's a that's kind of a discussion for another time. I've I've enjoyed speaking to you. We sort of spoken for over an hour now about atheism and about reasons for atheism and burden. Without really talking about any of the actual arguments involved, which I think has been, which I think has been fascinated. One fascinating, one final question that I did have for you in regards to what we were just talking about that I think is necessary to round it off is to say, why is it that if a theory is,

is simpler than another, than all other things being equal, that's the one we should choose to go with? Right. So this is a good question, right? It's a very widespread idea in science that when you're choosing between theories, you choose the one that does best at balancing two considerations, minimizing your commitments and maximizing explanation.

You can think of this as a kind of more accurate statement of essentially what you said was a, kind of popular statement of Occam's razor. This is just a more accurate statement of it, I think. If somebody said, wants to object to this, we can break it into two bits. If you've got two theories, they both fit the data equally well, but one of them, it postulates less.

The point is going to be you've got no reason given the data to postulate the extra things, right? So why do it, right? The reasonable thing is to go with what suffices. And maybe that's, if you don't get that, then I'm not sure what else to say. That just seems to me to be a kind of rock bottom. I think that that makes sense to me as well. You said that there were two considerations?

So I was going to say something about the, try to say something on the other side about the data. So if you've got two theories that are equal in simplicity, so we just agree that they're equal in simplicity. But one of them explains a whole lot more of the data than the other. Then clearly you should go with the one that explains more of the data. Right. So that was the other part of motivating the principle.

That's what I was going to say. Seems plausible enough to me. Graham Moppy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure.