Within Reason - #82 Joe Folley - 9 Questions Atheists Cannot Answer

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

oe Folley runs the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice. he graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil in Philosophy, specialising in logic, in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe Foley, welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you very much. Good to be here. You're an atheist? Yes, I'm an atheist. We have asked our respective followers for questions that atheists cannot answer. And today, well, we're going to try and answer them. Well, I notice it's a good follow-up.

I feel like we meet up every couple of months and attempt to destroy our own worldviews. So this is a good follow-on from those conversations. That's right. We should make a regular thing of it. If you follow me on Twitter or I suppose there was a YouTube community post, and I think you posted on YouTube as well, we asked for questions, and these could be from atheists, it could be from atheists, the idea is questions that traditionally, I thought of as questions that atheists in particular struggle to answer. Beginning with what is perhaps the most foundational question, not just of the philosophy of religion, but of all, why is there something rather than nothing? Yes. I mean it's it's you go big or go home for the first question. I think that I think this is a very interesting one in the sense that it almost sneaks in a really cool presupposition that I think that I've seen some atheists disagree on. It's like why is there something rather than nothing is asking if there is a reason why there is something rather than nothing. And it assumes that that's a question with a sensible answer. And I have heard some atheists say, essentially, do the response of, well, what do you mean by that? You know,

what do you mean by why? And, you know, I think that sometimes can be sort of a facetious facetious response. But something that, for instance, like David Hume addresses, which I think is an interesting aspect of the very least worth considering, is that he suggests that questions like, why is there something rather than nothing? The domain in which they're operating is fundamentally unlike the domain through which we've acquired most of our not. knowledge gathering apparatus. So, you know, Hume's an empiricist and he talks about how, well, we're gathering our ideas from the material world around us. Or that's not be, that controversial, just the world around us. And additionally, he thinks that we learn reason, even if he's not, you know, goes not entirely sure what the kind of metaphysical grounding of reason is. He thinks that our reasoning faculties are attuned to this reality that we live in. And so something that he brings up, which I think is very interesting, is the notion that questions like, why is there something rather than nothing, are in principle unanswerable, is his idea at least. And it's not that he thinks it's not that he thinks necessarily just that they are unverifiable.

Like, why is there something rather nothing? Oh, maybe there's a god. Maybe there's like a platonic ordering to the world that dwells in a realm of forms. It's not so much. That's not so much his issue. That becomes an issue for a lot of like 20th century philosophers. But Hume, through his kind of skeptical method, basically raises the idea that it's just unanswerable because the tools that we've got to form beliefs and form opinions and reason aren't suited to the domain in which that question needs to be answered, which is sort of a cop-out answer, I suppose. Well, does it mean that the questioner is right, that this is a question that atheists can't answer?

Hume would say it's a question that no one can answer, which is which I think may end up potentially becoming a bit of a theme. Well, because, you know, and the other presupposition of the wiser something rather than nothing is that it has this kind of like teleological bent to it, which I think is, I find really interesting because I think one of the presuppositional differences in almost temperament between a lot of atheists and a lot of theists is that I think that a lot of people, as in I think that a lot of people, as in I think that a lot of. of theistic answers appeal to this like teleological instinct we have in order to find not just not just mechanistic explanations and not just kind of causal explanatory theories but reasonable ones so you know um you know i if i um were to would to you know drop this like energy drink can then um there's the this new tonic this new tonic way for the camera yeah oh yes we're not sponsored but um but maybe one day but if i were to drop it then there'd be two ways of approaching that. One is of approaching explaining that. One is to say,

well, the force of gravity acted on the can and all of the muscles in my hand unclenched and there was an electoral signal that went from my brain to the hand. And that would be a kind of a mechanistic explanation, right? I can't say the word explanation, quite right. I always missed the L. But that would be a mechanistic explanation. And whereas a teleological one, a one in terms of reasons or purposes, one might say, kind of broadly construed, would. be that I wanted to and then I did. And those two types of explanatory hypothesis often run parallel in everyday life, especially when explaining human behavior. And I think the why is there something rather than nothing? You know, one of the reasons I think that the kind of, oh, well, there was the

big bang or like stuff like that, or well, because, you know, we have this causal story that runs towards this, this whatever point in time the universe began at, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, why I think that a lot of the time that seems unsatisfactory, especially to someone with this kind of teleological predisposition, is that it doesn't have this parallel sort of, well, what's the reason why it is the case? You know, there's an underlying methodological assumption, I think, to basically all inquiry, which is good, because otherwise I don't think inquiry would be possible, that we're going to have intelligible answers to whatever questions we ask.

And I think that, you know, why is there something rather nothing is a perfectly sensible question. And I think that it tugs on this teleological instinct that we have. But, you know, but something that I think that Hume raises as a possibility is just that our mechanisms of knowledge and sense acquisition simply aren't equipped to answer questions like this. So I think, to be honest, I think it's a bit of a cough out. It has to be a cop out. I mean, this question is a sensible question, like you say. Yeah, yeah. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Everybody likes to ask that. Everybody likes to address that question. In a lot of philosophy and theology, I think, there's that sort of bell curve of intelligent questioning, which like begins with, well, why is there something rather than nothing? It's like the most naive, simple, unintelligent question you can ask. It's just super straightforward. And then as the intelligence of the question raises, it's like, why is there a contingent series of cause and effect? But then you get down to the really, again, super smart, super intelligent, very meaningful question, and you're right back around to why I say something rather than nothing.

It's fundamental for a reason. I think that if you really reflect on the possibility of a world in which there's nothing, I mean, like a possible world, a way that things could have been that's just empty. Just, and there seems to be an empty possible world, and we do not occupy that possible world. And why? It seems like nothing is the neutral position, and that there being something is this sort of strange insertion into that space. Though I have spoken to atheists who basically asked questions like, well, is it possible for there to be nothing? I mean, is it not a contradiction to say there is nothing?

If nothing is nothing, you can't say there is nothing. And so it's impossible to have nothing. And if it's impossible to have nothing, then there must be something. This is basically a way I think of putting forward what I think is the atheist's best bet in answering this question in hypothesizing that essentially the universe is necessary. You know, when you speak to a theist and they say, well, things exist because God brought them into existence. And then you naively ask, well, then what brought God into existence? They say, well, God doesn't get brought into existence. God is a special kind of like first cause, which by virtue of being the first cause, the foundational cause, is itself.

not course. That's fine. That's not an illegal chess move. You know, you can do that. But I think a lot of atheists turn around and say, well, like, maybe the Big Bang, maybe the beginning of the universe is super special, which does seem a little bit like, yeah, okay, that's easy enough to say. But if you think about the fact that at the Big Bang, for example, the laws of physics just like break down. They just sort of stop working, right? And it does seem like a very special kind of event in that way, which makes it sort of not seem impossible to me that there's some kind of weird way in which that can be like separated from things that happen within the universe that finally arises such that like, yeah, maybe the universe sort of necessarily came into

existence. Maybe it necessarily exists. I don't believe that that's true, but I think that's basically the best option available for the atheist on this question. I sort of think, I think that raises a really interesting point about, about this idea of like necessity, right? You know, there's And I, you know, I don't want to, you know, there are theological reasons why one might argue that God is necessary. And I think there are decent, first off, reasons to argue why something might be necessary rather than nothing. In the sense that, you know, like, even in set theory, if you want to say nothing, you say the set of things, the empty set, the set of things that contain nothing. It's a, it's still describing a thing. Yes, yeah, yeah.

It was true nothingness, I think Aristotle defined as what rocks dream of. Oh, that's very poetic. It's not just like nothing, you know. It's not, like you speak to Lawrence Krauss, and he says that nothing isn't really nothing, and it's something, and you think, okay, fine, that's right. And that is actually really interesting and, you know, there's some great science there, but we're not talking about the same thing. Or someone says, oh, there's not nothing. There's like, you know, quantum fluctuations. Okay, well, then there never was nothing. I mean, if somebody says something like, if you take the Krausian line and say, well, nothing doesn't exist, you know, nothing isn't really nothing. I think that's just a version of saying. that there can't be nothing. Yeah. That stuff just necessarily exists. Because even when you have nothing, there's still something there.

That's just a way of saying that there isn't really nothing at all. And so there isn't really nothing at all. Yeah. And so, like, if you've got your sort of philosophy cap on, anytime you hear this sort of scientific attempt to redefine nothing to be something, I think we have to recognize that what's really going on there is another kind of like stuff exists necessarily kind of argument. Yes. I mean, it is kind of difficult.

You can really tie yourself and not defining nothing. Because, like, I remember posing this to a classroom of logic students and being like, and asking, you know, how would you define nothing? And they said, well, the set in which every proposition, or the universe in which every proposition is false. And I was like, well, what about there does not exist an X? Or an X such, that F, like, where F is whatever, whatever predicate you like. Well, that would be true then. It's like, oh, God, yes, there's a true proposition in the nothing verse. Yes.

And I thought, you know, it's kind of a fun little formal exercise. Someone in a comment once said to me on YouTube, true nothingness would not contain the constraining axiom that something can't come from nothing. So, like, why not? Why can't something come from nothing? Because if it's truly nothing, then where's the rule that says that something can't come from nothing? The other thing, I mean, I really like that. I feel like that's going to come up a lot later where it's like, where our rules something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do the laws of logic. Yes, yeah, yeah. But, oh, yes, the talking about possibilities about whether there could be something rather than nothing. I think is very interesting because it, again, drawing back to

this methodological point that human like doesn't quite spell out, but I actually think, you know, with kind of modern like ideas about possible worlds, we can, we can think a bit more in a bit more detail about, like reasoning about possible worlds is kind of weird in and of itself. And I think that it's one of those things that aren't, you know, if you wanted to, you could argue that, well, all of our, all of our reasoning about possibility, again, is grounded in this world, right? I can, I can, you know, there's a camera over there and I can imagine a world in which there is no camera. And I know that's possible because of all of my experience of rooms that don't have cameras in. There is an argument to be made that that is really disanalogist

to the situation of, well, could there have been nothing rather than something? Like, there's, it's true that there could have been nothing rather than something in the sense that it doesn't seem to imply a contradiction. Well, unless you ask like some ancient Greek philosophers, but like let's just assume that it doesn't apply a contradiction. Then there is, but there is, there is the further point of, well, does, just because something doesn't imply a contradiction, that may mean that it's logically possible under the rules of classical logic, as in you can form a model of it, but does that mean it's metaphysically possible? Like, the universe could not have existed. What would it take to make that phrase true? Like, how do we, how do we even

go about investigating the possibilities there? Because normally, as I say, we're using our imagination. Can you conceive of a world that's different from ours, at the very least, right? Because let's not, you know, if we're going to abstract from why is there something rather than nothing to why is there, you know, why does our universe hold the particular characteristics that it does. Like you can imagine a universe where, okay, it's not nothing, but it's just empty space. And that seems like it holds the same kind of, the same kind of question for the atheist. It's a sense what we mean by empty space, right? Because when you say like the possible world which contains nothing, and by the way, when we talk about possible worlds here, this is like a way of conceptualized. probability, right? It's like it's a way that the world could have been, uh, or by the

world, I mean like everything which is. I don't mean the earth. I mean like everything which is. And so a possible world is like a conceptual tool to think about what, what was possible. So there is a, the way that people use the language, there is a possible world in which your shirt is blue instead of pink. That's how people talk about it. It's not like, oh, there could be like the language that's uses, you know, there is this possible world where everything is the same except like your shirt is blue and okay so there's a possible world in which there's nothing but then even just like imagining that I'm kind of imagining this like big orb that exists somewhere that's just empty and black but the like the like the

world itself still seems to kind of like exist in order to contain nothing I mean if it truly was nothing like what is that sort of possible world contained in like like even like conceptually, if there's no, if there's no abstract objects, if there are no numbers, if there's like, I mean, do numbers exist in this possible world? Yeah, I suppose the closest you come to us to be like, there's a model such that it only contains the empty set. Yeah, but you're still talking about a model, right? Well, yes, exactly.

And so that's why I think that the best shot the atheist has here is to use this kind of language to say sort of, when you really start imagining the possibility of there being nothing, like, it's sort of not possible to do. Do you not think we still have a problem in that as in whatever, sure, there may necessarily exist something, but we have a lot more than just something. We have a lot more than just there is a thing that is true. And I think that that's, and my response to that particular worry is to throw some gentle skepticism on the idea that our possible world's reasoning stretches to the possible existence or non-existence of our unit. universe as a whole. Partly because I don't really know how to, I don't really know how my imagination is justified to hook on to the different possibilities there. I'm, I'm open to being convinced

because also we're in really dangerous territory with that sort of response, because possible world's reasoning is so useful for the rest of the world. So, so there is, again, I think there's a genuine, like, non-trivial problem for an atheist answer to this question, if they want to go down the route of, well, how reliable is our possible world's reasoning at the level of the whole universe where we have to cut the distinction fine enough that we get around this question or in other ways, you know, express the intuition that I think that a lot of atheists have that this question is in some way dodgy without getting rid of possible reasoning in much of the rest of reasoning. Because that is, it's such a useful tool.

Like, you know, it's in everything from, you know, probability to epistemic logic to just like planning like can you imagine planning without thinking about possibilities yeah so it's it's it's a high stakes game this is why something rather than why is there something rather than nothing question how much sleep do you lose over this particular question because i must admit for myself it's one of those super naive sounding philosophical questions that i think is really worth like reminding oneself of just how uh serious a challenge it is and how how incredible it is to think about stuff like sometimes i'm just like looking at an object it could be like the wood on this chair or something and it's just like there's just like stuff that exists and it seems like that stuff could not have existed and it's such a simple naive thought but it's it's it's really like it's it's incredible and it's so i i think about a lot in other words but i mean does it trouble you yeah i mean i go back and forth on it right because i and i think it's a very natural question to go back and forth on how how how philosophically troubling it is yeah um but partly because like stuff is like water to a fish it's it's it is it is

what would it mean to not have stuff? But you're right, it is remarkable if we are considering the open possibility that there could have not been stuff. Or at the very least that this stuff could have been like totally, totally different. That, you know, the idea that the world could have contained contradictions. That's really interesting. And that's, you know, some like Graham Priest is a logician who has set up this remarkable system of paraconsistent and paracomplete logics, which are logics that where either, well, where basically you get rid of. of the law of non-contradiction, or you get rid of various other laws of, like, completeness and stuff. And, you know, then he'd say, well, you know, in some possible worlds, there'll be,

or in some impossible worlds, which is another fascinating, like, term that comes up in these paraconsistent logics. Yeah, the world is sometimes contradictory. And I think, okay, yeah, that's fine. And that's, that's outside the realms of what we would standardly consider logically possible, but could it have existed? And this is what I, this is why I kind of, this is where my intuitions run out. And I go, well, actually, I don't think I have a firm grasp from what, on the ways in which I think the universe could be. Like, you know, think about the, you know, if I, if we're thinking about possible worlds alongside this kind of probability vein, you know, so, you know, they're not exactly the

same, but like, they're clearly related. If I'm, like, rolling a die, I can, or six-sided die, I can be like, right, there are, there are going to be six possible, six relevant possible worlds open to me. And I know that because of all of the other times I've observed dice. but we haven't we haven't observed universe formation or universe being and so I kind of when I attempt to justify why I think there could have been something rather than nothing or why I think the universe could have been different on this kind of on this kind of not just intra-universe objects could have been different but the universe fundamentally

could have been different I struggle to I struggle to like I have this strong intuition that it could have been and then I really struggle to justify it to myself yeah it does keep me up I mean, thinking about probability, like, I often think about, like, if I roll a five on a die, to think about, like, what the probability of that was, I kind of think, well, if I ran that back and did it again, how many times would it have come out as a five? And if I say, well, every time I ran it, it came out of five, then it's like it had to happen. You know, that's a way of sort of thinking about probability. When I think about the universe existing, so, okay, well, let's run it back. And how many times when we run it back does a universe, well, run what back? Yeah, exactly.

Like, I think from where? Yeah. From where are we going to replay this? You know, like, where does it start? I mean, especially if time itself is like a physical property of the universe, this question of like, you know, running it again and seeing if it works, it's like, I mean, human other contexts talks about the fact that we don't have other universes to compare. Yes.

Yeah. We just don't have any kind of like control group or point of comparison. We have just no idea. And so, like, it's difficult for me to even conceive of what it would mean to imagine there being nothing. And yet at the same time, like you say, it's so obvious. It's so simple. It's like, of course there could have been nothing. Yes. Well, I think, I think part of this is that there's a, there's a, there is vagueness in the concept of could, like just impossibility in general. Because, and we know, you know, you, and often this is, this is solved by a modifier. So you can

say, okay, logically possible, metaphysically possible or physically possible. And I think, you know, I have a broad idea of what's physically possible. And I have a, it's much clear idea of what's logically possible, because that's much neater and kind of, you have fewer rules to worry about. But metaphysically possible is a real grey area. I don't know what's meta physically possible and I'm not sure that I could know. And there are philosophers that try to know and, you know, best of luck to them. But certainly I really struggle to justify my sense of what's metaphysically possible. So why is something rather than nothing? I will admit, I have no answer. But I also would tentatively suggest that no one in principle has an answer.

As in the, you know, the, as in if you want to take, you know, the theist idea of, well, there's something rather nothing because God created it. I mean, you know, there's a kind of, again, to your bell curve thing, the kind of, the kind of silly atheist response, which is, well, why is God necessary? And then the kind of middle, the big hump, which is the sort of, you know, engaging with all of the kind of theological literature around divine necessity, which I think is very interesting in its own rights. And then getting to the other side and being like, yeah, but like, why is God necessary? Because it doesn't seem like it's contradictory to say that there is no God. And if that's the benchmark, because that's the benchmark we used for discussing whether the universe could or could not have existed, then it seems like we are at the same problem. And the sort of ontologically minded theist might want to say, well, God not existing is a contradiction because of the meaning of the word God. I mean, God is the maximally great being, maximal qualities, or God is the greatest conceivable being, and that means you must conceive of him existing.

or whatever, and my regular listeners or viewers will know that I, I give a lot of credit to the ontological argument, more than most people do. I think it's brilliant. I think it's great fun. But in the same way that like, okay, you know, well done clever clogs, like you've sort of got this concept of God, which is kind of difficult to imagine not existing, even like conceivably, I would say that there's a similar sort of thought you can have about nothing as a materialist, right? Can you imagine nothing? Whether you're a materialist or not. It's sort of like, you know, well, okay, if something is possible, then you should be able to conceive of it happening. So now conceive of there being nothing. Oh, look, you can't do it because as soon as

you're conceiving of anything, it's not nothing. Therefore, nothing is not possible. Therefore, to your question, why is there something rather than nothing? It's like, that's like asking, why is God necessary? It's just like, it just has to be that way by the definition of something, you know, like by the definition of even conceiving of possibility. Now, I don't think that would work, I think, because somebody's going to listen to that and they're going to be like, yeah, but like, man, there could have been nothing. They just could have, right? And some people will want to say to the God question, I know you've got this clever ontological argument that sort of defines him as necessary, but like, he could not exist. He just could. Well, there's,

there's, there's, there's, I think there is real vagueness around, around what we're meaning by could. Um, not to be all, I don't know, not to be all the kind of stereotypical philosopher, like, what do you mean by that? But what do you mean by, by, by could? genuinely that, there is, there is, there is ambiguity in the scope of could. Because as I say, you know, you know, classically it seems like could is the possibilities that are left when you have imposed certain constraints on a set of models. So I say classical logic imposes certain constraints on models

and physical laws would impose certain constraints on models if you want to be compatible with the physical laws. But then I say this in this in between realm where it's like, well, you know, the laws of physics could have been different. And it's like, well, could have been within what constraints. Because logic, I think the trouble is that physical, possibility isn't sufficient to show this could have been nothing rather than something proposition because physically within physical laws, it doesn't seem like that's the case.

But logical possibility is almost seems like it is not connected enough with the universe to be all that. Like if you like, because if you if we say logical possibility according to classical logic is just the same as like non-contradiction. And if we say it is not contradictory that there would be. nothing rather than something. That doesn't seem to have the same pull as when someone says there could have been nothing rather than something. So it strikes me that then we must need something slightly stronger than that. At least no first glance. I might be wrong. So it seems like we are grasping for some sense of could, some sense of possibility. That is that does more than logical possibility, but far less than physical possibility. I don't know. Again, I sort of, so this is, it's Again, I think that it was be fair to say that this is almost a cop-out answer because it is saying I am in disagreement with the question. Or at least I think the question requires further clarification.

But I do think it's very interesting. And arguably, it is a genuine question that atheists can't answer. Yeah, I mean, atheists can try to answer it, like with some universal necessity thing, might not be satisfactory. But likewise, you know, theists try to answer it. And it's up to you to decide whether you think that's satisfactory. I mean, they always have an answer to this question, but the question is whether that. satisfies you enough. And for many it does. I mean, even if you are a theists, it's still like pretty amazing that like the universe exists. There's still something to sort of pause and

think about and wonder about the possibility of there having been nothing. I mean, I guess for the theist, there's never nothing in the sense that there's always the something of God. Like the nothing they're imagining everything coming out of is like physical nothing. You know, there's no material things. And yeah, I mean, maybe that's their way out of Say, well, yeah, no, you can't conceive of nothing, but you can conceive there being no material stuff, and it's out of that that the universe sort of is brought into being by this non-material entity. A very interesting thing that I think this also touches upon is the fact that we are so much happier, just intuitively, and I'm not suggesting this is wrong. It's just kind of an observation. We are much happier to accept a metaphysical grounding that ends in the immaterial than the ends in the material.

And I think this might be because we can conceive of material things not existing in a much more straightforward way. But yeah, this idea of, okay, well, what's the beginning of material stuff? And you end up with the immaterial plane, be that kind of platonic or theistic or whatever, what have you? And then even I think the question then, oh, well, why was there immaterial something rather than nothing? For some reason, I don't know if this is just naive intuitions. Like, I am less troubled by that question. It seems so much easier to smuggle in necessary existence in the immaterial than the material. Yeah.

And again, but there is a, there is the possibility that this is just because we don't have direct access to the immaterial. I mean, quite the same way that we do to the material, it is much easier to imagine the necessary existence there, whereas we can disprove necessary existence for intramaterial world objects because we've seen things come in and out of existence. Yeah. I think I know what you mean. We've spoken about this before, I think. this sort of explanation terminating in immaterial

or material things. We were talking about free will and it's sort of like well why does the brain do this why does the hand move why does the neuron fire whatever and you keep wanting to ask well why did that happen

then what determined that what determine that and if you get back to a point where someone says oh it was because of the soul it was the immaterial self that did it people just go like

okay yes exactly and it's like okay we just ends there yeah and that is prima facie really weird that we do find that satisfying and that there is the question

of asking whether we are justified it being satisfied It's almost as if we imagine these non-material things is not having, like, mechanisms which can be asked about in that way. Yes. You know, one thing is that I think that there is potentially, I think, a kind of a tendency towards being satisfied with agential explanations as the end point. Because, like, in everyday life, we often are, right? If, again, take the thing of me dropping the Newtonic. The Newtonic, the, the, me saying, oh, I wanted to drop it, and so I did, tells you basically,

everything you need to know. But it is weird. On the train ride here, there was a really cool example of this where there was this like five-year-old sitting across from it on the train, and she was trying to colour in her unicorn coloring book. And one of the pens had ran out of ink. And she said, she put this in the most fascinating way. She turned to her dad and sent, Daddy, the pen has lied to me. And I was like, that's amazing. That's like, that's a gential bias in explanation, just like in front of me. That was incredible. Yeah, well, because they say that of children, that children sort of have, like, agential preferences in explanation. If you, if you ask children, why do rocks exist? And you give them the option, you know, does it exist because

of, you know, insert physical explanation? Or do rocks exist so that the bears can scratch their backs? You know, kids always prefer the bears scratching their back explanation. So atheists have used this observation as a sort of atheist argument to say that, you know, we have this, like, natural sense to this natural want to improperly attribute agency where it doesn't belong because obviously the real explanation for the rock being there is because of the physical explanation but oh look at the silly children saying that it's because the bear wants to scratch us back that's what religious people are like when they're like why does the world exist oh so that the big man and the sky can have as good people but the thing is like

you can also use the same consideration in the other direction to say that Well, why would humans have this, like, this tendency to believe in agential explanations if they weren't, you know, like somehow more appropriate or more proper? And, in fact, the theists will even say that the analogy is wrong because why does the, why is the rock exist? Is it so the bear can scratches back? Well, no. But is it because, like, of the, you know, the atoms bumping into each other, blah, blah, blah. Well, kind of, but also no. Because for them, ultimately, it was an agential explanation.

It was just another kind of agential explanation. It was God, you know? Yeah, it's also I think that we have to be reasonably careful. Similar to what I was saying about the possible world's thing, we have to be pretty careful

about how much we undermine our own demands for explanatory hypotheses and our own reasoning faculties because another problem that people raise for, well, not so much atheism, but for a monist,

materialist understanding of reality is the idea that we'll end up undermining our own reasoning faculties to the point we can't believe in truth. Yeah. And that is, you know, that's a genuine philosophical. Sorry, right. Which we'll talk about. We'll get to. We're going to get there.

Perhaps we should move on because otherwise we'll be here. How long have we been mattering about? Why is there? God knows. Something rather than nothing. How long? 30 minutes. 30 minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Too many to count. So we'll try and speed things up just a little bit. Okay, question number two, what do you do if you're not getting enough fruit and vegetables? I can take this one, actually.

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why, not the letter why. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's, oh, no, that's fantastic. And again, I actually think that this ties in quite nicely to the intuition we're talking about before, about we do have this kind of crying out for teleology in our why questions. Because there are two, like, why is wonderfully ambiguous as a question. In everyday life, when we ask why, we often have, yeah, we mean it in two ways. What's caused this to be the case and what is the reason this is the case? Or, you know, this is interesting. Richard Broughty kind of offhandedly almost defined this distinction between reasonable and causal explanatory hypotheses. And I think this really touches upon it, right? In, certainly in materialist atheism, and there is non-materialist

atheism, which is, again, its own fascinating topic. But I think it's fair to say that most atheists are coming up, coming at it from a materialist standpoint. Yeah, that they're, you, you eliminate teleology. You don't have, you know, arguably, you don't have purposes or, or reasons in this sense of why is this, yeah, it basically in the sense of purpose, right, in this teleological fashion, at which point, yeah, you actually do lose questions of why. But it is worth noting that that's not necessarily, that's not actually an implication of atheism. It's material. It's not, I was just about to say that. It's not, it's not a problem for atheism because, I mean, the real problem is when you reduce everything to the material, which I suppose are almost all material. all materialists are going to be atheists, but it doesn't mean that all atheists are going to be materialists. You could be an atheist who believes that, you know, consciousness is immaterial or something, but you still don't believe in God. Like, the problem I've always had with the example you gave earlier of their sort of being these two competing styles of explanation, it's something I hear commonly in religious discourse. Like, why did I boil? Like, why did the cattle boil? Well, one answer is because the atoms got excited and, you know, the temperature increased and then the water turned into steam.

Fine. Another explanation is because I was thirsty and wanted a cup of tea. Yeah. And so they say, so there's like an agential answer and there's a material physical answer. And so where we have scientific explanations for how the world works, that doesn't rule out God because God is like the agential answer. The problem for me when I hear that is I'm like, well, just analyze for a second what the like I wanted a cup of tea and was thirsty is. Like for the materialist, that explanation like, well, I was thirsty and I wanted a cup of tea is just a material. like event in the brain. And so it is actually just part of the original chain. So why did the kettle boil? Because the atoms got excited, because the, you know, electric circuit was completed, because the flick was switched, uh, because the, you know, the electro signals in my arm, you know, moved the finger, because the brain did this, because I was thirsty. And the thirstiness is like a material thing in my brain. And so it just sort of becomes part of one long chain. And so you've sort of broken down this. ability to say that there are two different kinds of explanations at all. I mean, certainly that that's an implication of the materialist worldview. I think that this question is presumably getting at the idea that their first premise is that teleological questions are sensible to ask and then saying, well, if you have a materialist worldview, then as you say, all of the teleological explanations collapse into causal ones. Well, the question might actually think that teleological answers aren't sensible to ask and just sort of accept that. Yes, well, that again,

It's similar to, I think a lot of, I think that a lot of atheists responses to these questions that atheists can't answer are, you know, genuinely to put forward a positive argument for dissolving the question. And but, you know, there's, and there is a debate about how, what you lose if you lose teleology. And much of, much of, I think, the questions that, that atheists purportedly cannot answer are to do with this dissolution of teleology. Because teleology, teleology can give you all sorts of things. it can give you morality and it can give you meaning and it all sorts of purpose is such a is such a weighty concept. I think that to use this as question as an opportunity though to expand or to like broaden our kind of metaphysical imaginations, so to speak, is that obviously online like the there is often this dichotomy drawn between atheism as materialism and theism as non-materialism. And that makes sense, right, because I think materialism is a very popular atheist position. But it is not the only one.

If you're going to explore the different possibilities there, you can also have things like a Platonist, atheistic worldview. So, you know, Plato did believe in gods, or at least he gives an indication of believing in gods in his dialogues. But at the same time, much of the explanatory work in his metaphysics is done by the forms, which aren't agential. They're just, they are immaterial and they're metaphysically grounding, but they're not agential. And, you know, that's one atheistic possibility. And it's an, it's a possibility that some atheist philosophers of mathematics use when they're trying to explain, you know, why does maths work? This is really weird. And they say, well, if you want to metaphysically ground maths, we could always turn to Plato.

And there's also this, there was kind of an ancient view and it's kind of crept back in a little bit because Thomas Nagel is like seemingly a fan of this. where you just have a very thick conception of nature. So the kind of inherited, you know, kind of post-enlightenment view of nature is that it consists entirely of is-is. And that's, you know, all that is-is is. And then you have the is-aught gap. And in some ancient philosophies, this is-aught separation doesn't make any sense because they have a much thicker conception of what nature amounts to.

So, like, you know, some Stoic philosophers are outright. theists, but some, at least in their writings, don't reference God, or don't reference gods that heavily. But they will reference this thick conception of nature, whereby nature is in some way both descriptive and normative. And so that's another view that doesn't imply atheism, sorry, doesn't imply theism. And so is in some ways compatible with atheism, but would also give you teleology. The trouble with this, though, I think, is that it tends to conflict with the methodological principles that have drawn many people to atheism. Which I think, again, it's not like I've done like a survey or anything.

So I can't speak to this. But when I speak to a lot of atheists, including myself, when I'm pacing around my room, talking to myself like a madman, is that it tends to be something like you begin from like an empiricist standpoint. And then you kind of build outwards from there. And you go, well, what do you see? I can see the natural world. I see, at least in my estimation, the natural world doesn't imply a creator. There's not a kind of conditional there.

And as a result, a creator isn't in my theory of reality. It's not a statement implied by the things I believe and I don't have independent reason to believe it. And so it tends to fall out of that kind of thing. And materialism also tends to fall out of that. And unless you encounter a worry that you're or something that you're very, very stressed about and you're like, okay, I just can't do without this. And then, you know, there are reasons to reintroduce teleology. People tend to want to stick with this materialist standpoint. Because also, it's lovely to have like that structure.

where you begin with an epistemological principle, it spits out a mess physical principle for you, and you can make that work consistently. It's just so, like, wonderfully satisfying from a kind of, it really tickles the kind of philosophical structure, itch, I think, in people's brains, or certainly in my brain. So, and to a certain extent, saying,

oh, well, we can't answer this question, so we're going to introduce teleology at the metaphysical level. It just seems a bit like, oh, you ruined that lovely, neat flow structure that took you from epistemology down to, down to your beliefs about garden stuff. So I think there's a there is a worry there that there's a certain amount of ad hociness going on. If then, you know, we start saying, oh, well, actually, no, we've got this thick conception of nature. On the other hand, there is, you know, certain philosophers, I think Thomas Legglauch has argued this, where he says, well, actually, no, our intuitions about purpose are empirical data that imply that there is teleology out there.

And I don't think I agree. But it is, I'm not, I'm just wanted to raise it to say it's not entirely inconsistent with empiricism to try and have a thicker conception of nature. Okay, you mentioned it. Let's do it. Atheists cannot get an aught from an is. Well, to a certain extent, there's a strong argument that's just that no one can get an aught from an is. This is a fairly common theme in this genre of response video I find when somebody says, you know, why does the universe exist? the smarmy atheist says, I don't know, and neither do you. And the point is like, you're asking a legitimate question, but it's a legitimate question that your answer to is either, like you

say, a bit sort of ad hoc, or a bit unsatisfactory, or a bit silly, or, you know, subject to its own, you know, analysis and questions. So can an atheist get an aught from an is? No, but like you say, can a theist do it either? I had this debate with Ben Shapiro, and I think I didn't expressed this particular point well enough on basically everything he was saying, you know, well, if you're an atheist, free will can't exist. If you're an atheist, you know, there's, there's no way to get aught. If you're in it, and I was just sort of like, yeah, like totally, you're right, but where the hell are you getting it from? What, what difference does it make if, if there's a god? And I think with the ought question, even if, just to be clear,

like there are sort of two questions here. I mean, the question I actually have written down is, or rather the subject, the statement, the question of why we ought to do anything aside from arbitrary preference, right? And so there are sort of two questions hovering here. There's, can atheists have a concept of ought? And I think it's legitimate to maybe say that, you know, the concept of ought can only come from God. But if the question specifically is, can you get an aught from an is? Even God doesn't help you there. All God does is just gives you the ought to derive more aught from. Yes. I mean, I think, well, yeah, and that makes sense, right, because it's, it's the problem of the is-aught problem, at least this is kind of controversial of me to say, but I think it's a logical problem, right? You're attempting to deduce an ought from an is because of, because of the idea that, you know, basically anything within the logical closure of the statements you begin with must in some way be contained within those original statements. Otherwise, we would be doing, otherwise we wouldn't be doing logic. We'd be doing something else. We wouldn't be doing deduction. We'd be doing something else. would suggest that it is, it is primarily, it just is an intractable problem, right?

You cannot get an aught from an is, because if you could via, if you could get deductively go from is to a ought, then the ought must have been there originally. Well, here's a question that I spoke about on a recent Q&A. Can you get an is from an ought? Because if you have an ought statement, like, you know, you ought, you know, like tidy the garden, then it does seem to contain within that the is statement that there is a garden even though it's like not really there explicitly because the statement is just you ought to you know tidy the garden it seems like you can say therefore there is a garden yes i think that um

and if it were a logical problem if it were like these are just two totally separate logical categories then it would seem like you wouldn't be able to go either way well so as in the there it would be, if you were saying you ought to tidy the garden, uh, someone might respond by saying, well, the reason that you can get a there is a garden from there is because within the, you ought to tidy the garden, there is the sub idea that the garden exists, right? And it's, it's sort of a, it's just sort of within the, within the constraints of deductive logic that, that, that, but maybe because like, I mean, it could be like, it could be incorrect that there exists a garden. Somebody could, could think you ought to tidy the garden.

and be wrong, but still derive from that. I guess, like, okay, so fine, it, like, subcontains the, like, assertion that a garden exists. But is there any way for somebody to say that some is statements sort of subcontain automatic aughts? Well, I think that is kind of what the theist's, that is kind of a theist position, right? Because if, as in, well, it's, it is a position that, um, if you're using God to solve morality, then that is part of your position, right? Because you're saying that, well, God's will is good. You know, that's as in, as in, as in, it's not that I think that you can't have mixed is-a-aught statements.

It's that I think that if you just have is statements, getting an a ought, it seems like it's a, it seems like a problem that strikes me as likely to be intractable. I'm not saying it definitely is, that could just be wrong. So maybe what theism does here is, in part, certain is statements with, like, automatic shoulds. Because if you say something like, it is the case that God wills it, then you've just automatically said that you, should do it. Yeah, because cashing out the definition of good as God's will, yeah. But then it still sounds like if you were being like really pedantic

about it, you're not getting an aught from an is, you're just getting an aught from an or. You're getting an aught from an or. I think it's still not like bridging that divide, right? Yeah, but okay, but we spoke about like the is aught problem, but I think the more interesting question really is just like this concept of ought entirely. Like, so the question here wrote, the question of why we

ought do anything aside from arbitrary preference. I mean, people will look at an atheist and they'll say, I know you have feelings about the world. I know that you don't like, you know, theft or whatever, but that's just like your opinion, man. I'm very seen when you just looked at me and said, look, atheist, I know you have feelings. Yeah. Well, I, oddly therapeutic. I don't know. I think you must have feelings, because I think that's all you have, being a controversial emotivist. But when, I think I, I would agree with this that there is no question of why we ought to do anything aside from arbitrary

preference. To some degree, I'd quibble with some of the, I'd quibble with some of the wording. Yeah. But, but yeah, I'm kind of, I'm more or less an ethical emotivist. So, like, okay, yeah, that's, that's fine. I'm happy to say that maybe an atheist can't answer this. I'm not sure if a theist can too, but I don't actually know what your moral worldview is, like, I sort of, I go back and forth on this. So I have, I have pretty emotivist or pragmatist intuitions about ethics. But I think that, I think that the, you know, to, but that's kind of esoteric of me. So, like, to take up the view of someone with significant, because I think it's fair to say that most people have moral, realist intuitions, right? Yeah. It's like most, most people want to say

that murder is wrong is thicker in a, in really significant ways from just boo murder or, you know, just any of the more sophisticated emotivist theories. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I want to say it's true. And moreover, there's a, there's a governing scope there, right? So I think that we can, I think that this question about... You don't talk yourself into moral intuitions. You talk yourself out of them. Yeah. And I think this question about God-growing morality has...

I think the reason that it strikes people as worthwhile as a challenge to atheisms, because, you know, people are very fond of their moral intuitions. And I think that that's fair, right? We kind of want to say that murder is bad because we want to justify stopping people from committing murder. And I think that one thing that the theist does really have going for them, with the God's grounding morality thing is that it gives very good pragmatic reasons for following morality

because when the stakes are eternal punishment or eternal salvation, you have a really good motivation to do to follow his commands. And I think that also it also gives you a standpoint from which to look at things that is beyond

merely intersubjective kind of oh well let's look at right and wrong like language and say okay well they're relative to communities or purely subjective, which is, you know, everyone has their own morals, Matt. And both of those kind of don't quite do what we want morality to do intuitively, which is, which I think is slightly separate from the question of can atheists come up with explanations of moral language and moral behaviour, which I think, broadly speaking, I think we can. We've got like non-cognitivist theories

of moral language. We also just could be error theorists and say all moral languages or all moral statements are false. And on the standpoint of moral behavior, we can talk about you know, evolutionary bases for moral behavior, cooperation within communities, that sort of thing. So I think it's the former kind of pragmatic concern that theists are worrying about. Because I think oftentimes I think this is pitched as theism grounds objective morality. And I sort of don't know if that's true because standardly,

I think about subjective and objective as agent relative and not agent relative. And by definition, divine command theory is agent relative. It's just relative to one agent. But pragmatically, that one agent does a, you. It's special in a way that allows you to do all of the pragmatic stuff. Having said that, I do think that all religious language is analogical, including probably words like agent. God is not an agent in the same way that God is not powerful, God is not loving, God is not, you know, like, God is not any of these things. We've got to be really careful here, though, right?

Because if we understand God too much by analogy, then it becomes very difficult to articulate what a theist. That's the fundamental ethical problem is that there is no really sufficient way to capture what God is. He is ineffable. He can't be contained into language. And basically the only reason, the only real authority that a Christian can have, for example, to use particular analogies, like words like powerful and loving, is because they've gotten through revelation. Because Jesus used those words, for example. And so you know they must be accurate to some degree, right? But like, it's just, if it's truly impossible to sort of comprehend what we're really talking about, then we're going to use analogy.

And so when you say, you know, subjective means agent related or however you phrase it, yes, I understand what you mean. And I sort of wanted to raise this point as well that like, okay, like it's objective because it's grounded in God's agency. Well, what makes God's agency special? Well, maybe because it's not actually agency in the same sense. Maybe that's just a word we're using to capture that God is not just some like amorphous blob, but something like a person. I suppose, again, I think that there's a kind of steering between a rock and a hard place type thing going on here generally with kind of definitions of God. Because let's say, let's just think about belief in terms of the possibilities that you're excluding. It's like this is, again, this is how belief is to find epistemic logic.

It's kind of, it's nice. It's a lovely kind of relatively neat system whereby, okay, so if I, if I know that if I believe, that you are sitting in front of me right now. What that means is in all of the possible worlds that I am considering when I'm making decisions, you sitting in that chair in front of me is in everyone. And we could contrast this to say, if I knew that you were in Glasgow or London, but I didn't know which, then one of the possible worlds I would consider would have you in Glasgow and the other would have you in London. And I think the trouble, there is a danger in making God too ineffable. I think this is like a kind of a nice epistemological internal tension in some theistic definitions

of God. Whereas if you make God too so, if you make God too ineffable because of all of his greatness, then the possible gods that, the open possibilities for what God is start to broaden and broaden and broaden. And on the far end of this, you've got kind of something that looks almost like atheism. If you were to say that God is totally ineffable, you're basically saying, well, there's something out there, but I don't know what it is. And that is almost it, that is like a hair's breadth from atheism. That is, because you're basically saying, saying, oh, there's a placeholder. There's a variable to answer these questions, but I don't know anything about it. But interestingly, this is in tension with God's greatness, right?

Because if God is so much greater than us, then also it makes sense that we wouldn't be able to find out everything about him. So there's a kind of, so again, there's steering between a rock and a half place. I quite like this. It's one of the kind of, it's a nice, it's a fun internal tension within theistic conceptions of God that I think is under explored. Like, I don't really hear people talk about this. Like the idea that if you make God too, great and too ineffable and to find too many things by analogy, then it becomes very hard to believe in him in any sense where you've narrowed down the possibilities, right? Because if you make him too ineffable, then you're like, well, it could be God one or God two or

God three or God four, all the way to like God N. And it's like, well, if you've left open an infinite number of possible gods that your description of God could latch onto, there's an awful lot of bet hedging going on. Yeah, it's sort of like God is the, is the truest thing I've ever known. He's more real to me than real as he's touched my life and he's like, oh, what's he like? I have absolutely no idea. What kind of being is it? I don't know. Like, what are some of his properties?

I cannot put them into words. I have literally no idea. It does begin to sound a little bit like, okay, like, is this really the sort of the truer than true thing for you? But then I understand why people would then use language like that. They would say, like, you know, this person is so real to me in a way that I just can't. quite like put my finger on it would be as if you were the only person in the world who's in love or who has like a really good friend even and everybody else are just like people who interact

as we do but like they don't care about each other really they just sort of get on with their own lives and do their own thing purely like rationally and you say like I've just experienced this thing this connection to this person they say what kind of connection like I don't know and they're like oh is it like a reciprocal thing is it like you do it to because they do it for you. It's like, well, like, actually kind of in a way, but, but no, because it's not motivated by that. It's kind of like, yeah, and you'd be trying to explain it, and you'd end up having to sort of use analogies to the way that they live. You'd have to talk in terms of reciprocal function and, like, you know, hedonism and how it makes you feel good

and that kind of stuff, but it's not quite the same, you know? But just because you couldn't explain it wouldn't mean that, like, you know, it's a hair's breadth away from not being in love at all, right? I suppose the only difference there is that, is that in the love example, direct access to the reference of your sentence, right? You can say, at the very least, you can gesticulate to your own feeling, so to speak. Well, Viconstinium worries aside, yeah, but if somebody is gesticulating their own feelings about God, right? Then that's fine, but then the reference they have direct access to is their feeling, not God, right? It's as in at the very least, as in within some conceptions of theism, their referent would be God.

But at the very least, without assuming that at the outset, they would be talking about you know, the thing they have direct access to is their feeling of the divine. But if they're trying to pick something out in the world in the same way that, like, I might pick something out in the world by, or I might pick Shakespeare out by describing him as the writer of Hamlet or something like that, then it seems like there might be a narrowing down issue going on there, which I'm not suggesting it's insoluble. You could take, and you could, for instance, take a different theory of reference and say,

well, I'm having direct contact with God, so I'm picking out that or something like that. So I'm not, again, I'm not suggesting it's insoluble. just think it's an under explored internal tension. Sure. Before we move on, I suppose, briefly, do you give any credence to atheist, moral, realist positions? By moral realism, I mean the idea that morality is a real thing, that moral claims can be true or false. I suppose I don't. I mean, people will say, what about utilitarianism? What about Kantianism? What about, you know, or like a kind of atheistic cantyism

what about like what about like a sort of atheist virtue ethics maybe good kind of work what do you think about these ideas well they're not they're not contradictory so it's not like it's not an implication of atheism that you can't have moral realism

it is more that are you sure about that I'm reasonably sure as in I don't think you could derive a contradiction from saying there are there are some things that are good and there is no god i mean again i think plato's like a good example of this in the sense that you know i think plato broadly is theistic but um the form of the good is doing so much of the heavy lifting in his um philosophy in his like ethical philosophy uh that you kind of god is kind of a you know it's a bit of a loose cog

there right in the republic he says that gods are fully good um but like the form of the good does a lot of the philosophical legwork there and that would be an atheistic position it wouldn't be a materialist position but it would be an atheistic position whereby you have moral realism I think that I think that we run into

again I think we run into more difficulties when we look at the kind of methodological constraints that tend to lead people to atheism which I think also tend to lead people to moral anti-reel or not moral

anti-well not to moral realism like Jail Mackey in inventing right and wrong raises this he has the the argument from queerness, where he basically says, well, moral properties, if they exist, are really queer. They're very, very odd. They, we can't seem to see them directly in the same way

we can see loads of other properties. We feel them in a way that we feel them, but their reference is outside of our feelings. You know, I, I, I learn things by feeling all the time. I might learn that I'm angry or learn that I'm happy or learn that I'm sad, but I'm learning that something is right from the way that I'm feeling about something. And Mackey basically, says this is so disanalogous with the other ways that we learn things

that if we're going to stick by broadly empiricist principles we ought not to be moral realists and I think that's the line of argument that where

the where a lot of then atheist worldviews would struggle to come up with moral realism and it's broadly my

argument for not being a moral realist right it's so it convinced me so so I think that's where the tension comes in. It's not that I think

that atheism implies moral anti-realism. It's that I think that the same steps that get you to atheism often get you to not believing in moral realism. Cool. Next question. How can you explain census divinitatus? Which I believe

is a term coined by John Calvin to describe the sense of the divine that sort of seems to exist within people. Muslims have the concept of fitra. this sort of this pulling towards God that even if you don't personally feel it, maybe you've talked yourself out of it or something.

It does seem anthropologically that wherever we look, people tend to have some kind of sense of the sacred and the profane and the numinous and the religious. If that does not actually latch on something real, why do we have it? So again, I feel like there's, yeah, the theorist has a very good answer to this question, which is that we have it because it's accurate. And I, and, you know, that, but remember, this is not, this is not a series of questions that theists have a more ready and obvious answer to you than atheists.

It's a question that atheists cannot answer. I think it's rather presumptuous to say that, or to imply that atheists simply cannot explain why we may have developed a sense that does not latch onto something real. Oh, yeah, I mean, you could, there are all sorts, as in you could come up to the sorts of explanations, you could talk about how it might have some sort of evolutionary advantage. One of my friends is a biologist sent me an article the other day that was talking about the use of religion and sort of like social cohesion. And also that the idea that I can't remember the exact wording of this, but he'll kill me because I'll just butcher this.

But talking about how the sense of a religious, a theistic god would be, is very useful for things like having a sense of fulfillment and love in your life. It's like a kind of stand in person that is always there and can be supportive and sort of present and can fulfill that psychological need. And I sort of think that this is a point where, of course, the theist would say, this is exactly what the theist would predict. It's just also not what the atheist would not predict the sense of divinitatus, if I'm saying that correctly.

it is sure it's not implied by atheism in the same way it's implied by theism but atheism would it would not be an expected observation of a world without god that we wouldn't have a belief about god in the same way that it wouldn't be an expected observation of a world without like chairs that we would never have a belief about chair but it does seem well this is more or less a version of the argument from desire that c s lewis advanced thing Is this a mere Christianity? I think so, yes. Yeah, I'm almost certain it's from mere Christianity where Lewis points out that we have this desire. I mean, he's not speaking on like an anthropological sense, you know, analyzing humans. He just sort of says, you know, any person who really pays attention to their own desires will find within themselves and find very like strongly a desire for something that's not of this world. And if I find myself with a desire for something that cannot be satisfied by this world, The only or best explanation is that I was not made for this world, that it's satisfied by something else.

And an expanded version of this is to say, look, from an evolutionary perspective, people want to say, oh, yeah, but it's just a sense that we've evolved. Like, why did we evolve hunger to help us get food? Why did we evolve tiredness so that we could sleep? You know, why thirst? You know, like, it'd be strange indeed if we had all developed this, like, perpetual hunger, even though there was no such thing as food. food. I think that the... If there was nothing that you'd actually satisfy it, in other words. Well, I think that the atheist response to that would be, well, there is something

that satisfies our desire for a belief in God, and it's a belief in God. And nobody disputes the idea that theists exist, right? I mean, that would truly be... I know some theorists have argued that atheists don't exist. But I've never heard an atheist argue that theists don't exist. But that would be, I mean, that would be radical. Somebody should do a paper on that, you know. I feel like that we don't have enough...

that are published just to kind of say something batch it and then leave. Well, you know, like, I've often thought about the fact that, you know how, like, Jordan Peterson says, like, you're not really an atheist, man. Like, he once actually said, oh, you think of secular. Are you in a museum? Are you looking at art? Well, what makes you think of secular then? He sort of has this vision. And, again, I've tried to, I've did a whole video trying to understand his religious philosophy where something like that begins to make sense.

But I've often thought, like, people do the same thing in the other direction. Like, people don't act religiously. And the example I always give is when they mourn people's death. Yes, yeah. Does that make sense if somebody's... I mean, I remember really annoying. I went to Sunday school as a kid. I remember really annoying the very, very friendly young man running it when I was like six or seven because they were talking about like sin and the idea of well, well, when you're christened, you're free of sin and then like you get to go to heaven if you're free of sin.

And I remember being like, mate, why did you let me live past my christening? You could have... Hell sounds like it... Hell sounds like it is enough worth avoiding. You should have killed me after you christened. Yeah, it could have done your favor. I mean, yeah, like, it is strange the way people treat death and react to death if they truly believe in an afterlife.

In 12th night, Olivia's mourning her brother's death and the fool comes up to her and says, I'm going to prove that you're a fool. She says, go on then. And he says, like, you know, why are you crying? Why are you upset? And it's because my brother's dead. And she says that he's in heaven and he says, I think he's, he's probably gone to hell. And she goes, no, no, no, he's in heaven.

And he goes, well, more fool you for mourning someone who's in heaven. And it jumped out at me because it was a sort of Shakespearean way of putting the point that I'd been making for a while, which is that like, what are you mourning for? Okay, like, Alex, you're being totally naive and you're not considering that people are just upset that they're going to be separated. from the person they love. But that's not right either, because if I found out that I was never going to be able to speak to you again, Joe, I'd be pretty upset about that. Like, if you were going on like an expedition to Mars or something

and for some reason there was no communication and I literally would never see you again, I'd be pretty upset about that. But if I found out, especially if you were the one on the ship, you know, like, if I found out after you take off and I'm never going to speak to you again anyway,

that the ship just, like, exploded and you're now dead, I think I'd be upset in a different way it would like change the sadness that I feel right and so intuitively to me it can't just be the separation there has to be something stronger about the death itself and you know when I made a reel about this

you know people in the comments were sort of saying tell me you don't understand emotions without telling me you don't understand emotions or so you know this kind of just sort of as if like I'm being really stupid oh he just doesn't get it but it's like the point is I do get it I do get like of course

you're going to be emotional. Of course you're going to be upset. But why would you feel that way if you truly believed in the way that you think you believe that, you know, this person has gone to heaven? Yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I once met at a pub, a Christian anti-natalist, which is a fascinating, like to say, I think he was he had to kind of, and I'm sure that this is just like heresy. But he was a reformed Christian, as in like, you know, following reform theology and believed in predestination, he said, well, if I think that that God has only chosen a few people. I don't want to have kids because chances are they're going to go to hell and I would love my kids. And I remember thinking, oh, wow, that's because just as a, you know, a worldview that's

familiar to me. And I remember, actually, yeah, that that kind of is in the logical extension of, of both loving your children and the idea of that. I mean, Christians are certainly encouraged when no, but then conflicts would go forth a multiple. Yeah, but then I don't know if that's like a commandment. I mean, like Paul was celibate, at least ostensibly, you know, says he was. And And, like, seemed to think that celibacy was a good thing. He says at one point that, you know, it's best to be as I am. But if you really can't keep your hands off each other, then at least go and get married, you know. Like, Jesus himself is probably celibate, probably, doesn't have a wife, depending on which sort of esoteric Gnostics and people that you speak to.

And so, like, it doesn't seem like, it can't be, in other words, a Christian necessity that you must have children because otherwise, you know, Paul would be this grave sinner. Jesus would be this great sinner. And so, you know, maybe there could be some track to that. Yeah. I don't know. I've never considered it before. No, I do think there's something a little bit sort of too game theoretical about it that sort of misses what's important. Oh, what is it?

Well, I suppose I think that that's the child that anti-naturedism generally gap, isn't it? Maybe. But, you know, I'm sure that they'd say, that's not an argument. That's just you saying, I want kids. Yeah. It's interesting that. Yeah, I suppose you might be doing them a favor by sort of saving them the, the trial all together

I suppose the Christian would say that communion with God is such an infinite good that it's worth running the rest but then I don't even know if that is true well yeah that it would that it would be worth it even then that's an interesting point but okay

yeah what was the question we were talking about census of vinaatas and yeah we were talking about senses of vinosartes and and how you know you were saying about there being people who uh let me actually think oh yes the atheist

the atheist answer to, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis's challenge of like, well, why would we evolve hunger if we don't have food is to say, well, we don't hunger after God. We hunger after a belief in God. If the belief is doing the explanatory work, rather than God doing the explanatory work. But then why would we have a desire for a belief in something which doesn't exist? I mean, it's on, I mean, I'm going to, there are, it does seem like there are examples where we potentially have this. I mean, I'm going to butcher. some psychological literature here. So, be, you know, I'm probably getting this wrong. I'm going to preface that. But I remember reading a couple of papers about, about self-judgments and the idea that humans, on average, overestimate themselves in a whole host of ways. And the only, and, you know, they asked people questions about themselves and then tested those attributes.

And basically, they found that people would overestimate themselves in a whole host of ways. I can't remember the exact properties, but I think, like, one of them was, like, how attractive they are, not the nonsense. and like um and the and when they tested them they found that they were of estimating themselves but the only people that didn't were people who were like depressed and that they had a fairly accurate view of themselves this was this explained to me by it by a professor when I was in third yet I remember thinking god I wonder which way around that was for them is it like because they were depressed they were more accurate or because they had a more accurate view

of themselves they just get depressed but but one thing but one thing that this does demonstrate um potentially if this finding still halt it could be really out of date now is that it is possible that there would be beliefs that are suited for surviving and thriving that nonetheless are not true. This is actually the exact example that Richard Dawkins gave to me in response to the same challenge was precisely that consideration about people who think they're more attractive than they are. But like attractiveness is still a thing. It's still, it's still a metric which you can place yourself on legitimately or illegitimately, right? But like if God just doesn't exist, then the desire for him, it's not like you desire

him like to be slightly bigger than he actually is or the, you know what I mean? Like it's just like this thing that doesn't exist at all and yet you develop this desire for it. I mean, Richard Dawkins also then said, you know, well, you can desire all sorts of things. I mean, you know, like a person might desire to, you know, mate with an attractive, famous supermodel, but, you know, it's never going to happen. And I was like, yeah, but the supermodel exists, right? You know, and it does seem like it's actually quite difficult to come up with an analogy for something that we would claim with that we wouldn't dispute people almost universally desire in some sense.

And yet maybe doesn't exist. Yes, I suppose depends. Because if you cast it in terms of propositions, the proposition that you are more attractive than you are is just as, it's just as false. It's just as false as the idea that God exists. So like that it, but if you're, but if you're cashing out in terms of objects, I can see why that might. I mean, one thing, I suppose you could say in response that I'm not entirely convinced by the response I'm about to give, but, um, would be the idea that well, if God is the maximal point of things like intelligence and, and, uh, goodness and X, Y and Z, uh, then, um, a desire after that, um, a desire after a lot, loads of things we already, we already desire in an everyday sense. And that, that might be potential. I mean, that's kind of an ill formulated response, but that's also something that Dawkins and I sort of discuss this idea that we're there. things that we desire in the world that we've just sort of turned up to 11 or sort of abstracted or, you know, formed into this one great big archetype. I mean, it must say, it does seem

mysterious to me. It would be as if I said, I'm saying, like, you know, I think that, like, food is an illusion. I don't think it exists. And you're like, well, hold on, like, I mean, I feel like I can see it. And I'm like, yeah, that's just because it's an evolutionary adaptation that you'd like get this illusory sense that food exists. And you'd be like, well, like, why would that, like what possible reason would they be for that? And I'm like, well, you know, by believing, there's obviously good reasons that we can have. Like, if we believe that there's food there, then we can, like, come together to eat it together. And so we develop this, this universal sense of hunger that, yeah, like everybody everywhere has the sense of hunger. But

it's totally just an evolutionary adaptation, man. And it's because, you know, by evolutionarily inventing this, this illusion of food, we get to, like, eat meals together and we get to spend time together and we get to go hunting and we get to do all this kind of stuff, you know. like it just seem really strange that we've all just got this desire for this thing which we also think is actually fulfilled in many cases but it's just completely illusory yes no i think that's fair but i suppose with the with the food thing you directly experience food and so you're arguing you're arguing that's direct experience god right actually no that's actually another is the fact point but you just say that it's an illusion and i i'm saying like

you you you experience the food in front of you but it's just an illusion your brain is just tricking all of your sense data into thinking that there's something there. I suppose there are differences of degrees rather than differences of kind here. It's a bit stupid analogy. No, no, no, no. You get what I'm saying. I do get what you're saying. As in like with the food thing, because I can verify it with other, but also it's with other people's like as in I think that if everyone, if people could publicize their religious experiences in the sense if I could if one of my very good friends is a is a very, very committed Catholic. And he often, explains when he takes Eucharist, sometimes this feeling overcomes him. And I was like, yeah,

if you could make that feeling public in a qualitative sense, you could beam that into everyone else's head, I'm sure I would believe in God. Also, in fairness, like, if people actually died as a result of not believing in God, in the same way that they die by not eating food, that would probably this also do something. This also tugs at the question of utility of belief. Like, are there legitimate reasons to believe in, like, say that belief in God is useful and fulfilling. Is that a legitimate reason to believe in it, even if it's not true. Yes. Well, here's another question.

Provide me with a single civilization that has ever succeeded under an atheistic paradigm. Also, name me a civilization that has come into being without a preceding binding myth. So this practical question, like, how does the atheist respond to the fact, like implied in this question that there's never been a successful atheistic paradigm and that there's never been a successful civilization that hasn't had some kind of like mythological founding. I suppose that, I mean, one, I mean, obviously I'm not an anthropologist, so all of these answers are going to be terribly unreliable and you shouldn't listen to me. But thanks for watching, everybody.

I mean, the first thing I would point out here is that this, this, this at least implies that like, I mean, the way the question is says, also name me a civilization that has come into being without a proceeding binding myth, grants that it might not be true. Also, proceeding is interesting that, right? Because I suppose there's a, there might be a sort of chicken egg problem. something interesting that one of Nietzsche's interesting observations is he thought that we often got causes and effects really confused. So like, you know, again, come on to existential issues in a sec, but like the, he thought that it wasn't that nihilistic people, he said,

thought it wasn't the belief in God led, sorry, disbelieving, it wasn't necessarily that a disbelief in values led to nihilism. It was that people became nihilistic emotionally because of the disorganization of their wills. And then it didn't make sense for them to value things. And he was like, you know, that, he had a kind of, and he would talk about the active, list who was, you know, simplifying somewhat, but was broadly someone who just thought, well, my will inherently has value. Like, what do you mean my will doesn't have value? I want something. What maud can you ask of me? And so, and to bring it back to this question, one potential atheist answer is to say, well, yeah, if you get a group of people together in a room of really

any significant size, they'll come up with all sorts of, like, awesome ideas. And it could be that civilization begets a founding myth rather than a founding. myth begets a civilization. Like proceeding is an interesting word there because I think clearly these two things are going to be interrelated. If I get a hundred people together on a desert island, I'm sure they're going to form religion as a as a thing. And I think that is like the interesting problem for the atheist is like, well, why does this happen so much? But regarding whether there's a preceding myth, I think that's probably, it's probably kind of a mutually interdependent thing there. Can a civilization survive without a shared?

myth, I think, is an interesting question. It's one that I don't have the answer to. Yeah, I mean, I doubt it. I'm totally pessimistic about the idea of a, of a nation in any meaningful sense, or certainly a civilization being able to be sort of cohesive and survive and thrive without having something that bonds them together more than like the immediacy of their like day-to-day sense experience, right? And in fact, I think for a lot of atheists, they hypothesize that this is why religion is invented by the mind, by, you know, the collective psychology of mankind and womankind. Because, of course, like, we sort of need things to tie us together. That's like the whole reason it's invented. And so where the questioner says, I keep calling them questioners, but a lot of these are just

statements, provide me with a single civilization that has ever succeeded upon an atheist, under an atheistic paradigm. Like, maybe I can't. I mean, an atheistic paradigm, no. As people often conflate the idea of secularism in politics with atheism in politics, right? Like an atheistic government might be like the USSR, which, like, people bring that up as a point against atheism all the time. It was not a secular government. A lot of people describe it as secular, even though it was like actively, like proactively persecuting religious people as if that in any way fits into a definition of secular. But it was certainly atheist. Yeah, I can't think of one.

And maybe that is because I'll just grant. It's because like it doesn't work. Yeah. Let's just say, fine, let's just agree with the implication of the question. No civilization can function under atheism. That is as well answered by saying that's because atheism is false as saying, and that's why, although there is no God, people have to invent one. Yes. I mean, the other thing is that it doesn't strike me as actually a necessary implication of God exists that no civilization could survive without a belief in God. Yeah, sure. But it is an implication of the atheist explanation there. So in some ways, yeah, there's actually a strength of the atheist explanation. Yeah, I think you might be right there. because God could exist, but if God existed, it would seem like even if people didn't believe in him, he could still, in theory, like, design it so that civilization can still be stable. At the very least, it doesn't fall out of theism as a kind of obvious implication that no civilization survive without God.

But I think this is an interesting question for atheists. Yes. Are we being terribly irresponsible, Alex, by spreading our horrific corrosive doctrine? It's true. It's true, at least to the extent that, I mean, there are studies to suggest that, like, religious people are, like, happier, that they have better sex lives. There's all kinds of things And so like There is this case to be made

That like even if you don't think it's true Like why would you talk people out of it Like to what end And you can say oh because you know I value truth and stuff like Really like more than you value people's well being Well I mean like maybe But then I don't know

Like it is a question that does have to be addressed I mean I know you say it bit tongue in cheek But it's really true It's worth thinking about One one interesting implication of basically Potentially of an atheist worldview But also just generally Pretty much any worldview that

doesn't have a very, very good metaphysical mirror between human mind and the structure of reality is that there can be, is that there could be things that are true that are just unbearable. It could be that you discover truths that the send you mad. And arguably, theism does have a way around that. Like, theism could really neatly sync up truth and utility with the idea of a loving God. It's like, well, things are, things are, truths are useful because the world has been designed benevolently. And that's like, that, that is a, an explanatory framework that helps square that circle. I think the very interesting question when you remove that is, well, there could be things that are true that are really

not beneficial to believe. But there are also atheistic theories like there's kind of global pragmatist theories that attempt to tie truth back to utility. It's a kind of truth is like abstracted away from things that are useful, even if there are individually things that are true that are not useful. So there's there's some extra work. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there could be things which are false, but are beneficial for a society to believe in. And so, again, considering that we're asking here for questions that atheists cannot answer, like, okay, you know, it's a confronting question. Well, why hasn't atheism ever worked on a civilizational level?

Like, I don't know. Let's talk about that. But is it a question that atheists can't answer? I don't think so. I mean, think about the fact that, for example, you know, I don't think that civilizations can survive without all other kinds of myths. Like, for example, you know, like belief in the rule of law. Like, believe in your constitution.

belief in your nation's ethic, right? It's very difficult for a nation to survive. If there isn't, like, general, like, agreement on that, like, when, if we were still living in, like, a real monarchy, well, like, the monarchy was really, like, the absolute monarch with proper power, yeah, the kind of monarchy that I would like to see. Not the kind of the kind of limp monarchy we have at the moment. Exactly. Then, like, okay, like, you'd probably need most of the population to sort of believe in the

concept of monarchy in order for it to work. Now, I could be sad in that society and be like, well, obviously monarchy is, like, ridiculous and it's not true that this person is ordained by God. The chrism oil being rubbed on the chest does not transform this person into some sort of like demi-god with like, you know, right to read. None of that's true, right? And people would probably say, okay, well, how are those, you know, Republican societies working out? How's France going, you know? That was what people wrote around the turn of the 18th century, right? And so, but it wouldn't, all that would tell us is that what we're dealing with here is something like a noble lie, you know, it's like, it's, it's, that's, that's an idea from Plato, you know, that the idea that there are certain things which are not true, but must be believed by a society for it to function. This is not an old idea. And religion just may be one of those things. Yeah. I suppose it's, there is, there is obviously the argument that, or at least that, I think people's response to that sort of thing tends to be, well, that's horribly condescending. And I don't think, I don't think that's, and I don't think it necessarily has to. And I don't think it necessarily has.

to be horribly connoisselling. Because I think you can make it work by saying, well, it's not that people are, it's not that people are too limited to not have a God or something like that. You could just say, well, you know, it's just a good organizing principle. It's not that any individual person, you know, is limited in some way. It's just that when you have people at scale, there are all sorts of things that you need to. Like most people don't need a spreadsheet to organize their lives. But if you have 2,000 people, you probably will need a spreadsheet. Yeah. And yeah, and it's a bit like the monarchy thing where if I said

I don't think the monarchy comports its reality in the sense that the claims that people make about divine right of kings and stuff aren't true, okay, so then we abolish the monarchy and society just fools apart at best I would have to say

okay maybe we should have kept it anyway it wouldn't prove to me that actually it was all true yes, this isn't a question atheist can't answer it might be a question that atheist shouldn't answer that's another good video idea actually. Questions atheists should not answer. Let's change gears. Totally different kind of question here. I'm not sure if there's no answer, but I'd be curious to hear an argument for why we are able to trust human intellect and rationality as a reliable guide to truth. Oh, this is a

fascinating one. I've been thinking about this. This has been actually really playing on my mind recently. How can we trust human intellect to get us to truth? If there's no God, there's no divining divine guiding principle, just to sort of lay this out, for the materialist, like, the brain is just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, right? It's just like, it's kind of like a rock or a piece of word or something that happens to have developed this weird thing called consciousness, but like, it seems no necessary reason why it would have to be formed in relation to truth. Like, we were just talking a moment ago about how it makes sense to believe certain things that are false, because it's like beneficial for us, right? Now, if,

if it happened to be true, that that actually applied writ large to things like the laws of logic and mathematical truths, we'd literally be incapable of knowing because it might be the case that it's not that 2 plus 2 equals 4, it's that believing 2 plus 2 equals 4 is beneficial for my survival, and that's why my rationality evolved to believe that kind of thing. And somebody will come along and say, yeah, but hold on, like, you know, it just can't, like, my brain just can't, conceive of the opposite. Like, we can know it to be true a priori. And I'm like, that's because that's how your brain evolved, right? There were people who believed that two plus two is five. It's just that believing that was not beneficial to their survival, and so they died out leaving only us. Now, people will want to say, like, this is stupid. What do you mean? The reason they died out. And the reason why believing two plus two equals five was not beneficial to their survival was because it's not true, right? And do you think that that's a good response to this? I think this is one instance of what, of a huge, just a general problem of circular justification in philosophy.

And just like sort of, so here you've got two claims. You've got one about epistemology and one about ontology. And effectively the question is how we're going to get them to play nice together. And the trouble is, I mean, on the classic Aristotelian model of philosophy, you have a bunch of branches of like the outer branch of the tree and you get to the middle and it's metaphysics or ontology. It's like the stuff that is. This is why Descartes' Meditations on Metaphysics is called Meditations on philosophy. first philosophy is because metaphysics is the first philosophy. And I think the trouble is that in practice, there's an interplay. There is mutual dependence between your epistemology and your

ontology, because your ontology will justify your epistemology, but your epistemology has to justify why you believe in your ontology. What is ontology and epistemology? So epistemology, like the study of how you can come to know things and ontology, the study of what is. So my epistemology, that's a really good example of where somebody has put forward the argument that that ontology has undermined epistemology. The idea that we are simply evolved creatures, atoms bumping together and that's all our brains are and that's what our rationality is,

has undermined or positively undermined the epistemology. And then the, and this is kind of fascinating, right? But then you have to assume the reliability of epistemology in order to come to any sort of ontology. So when the the theist, so it's not just that the atheist argument is circular when they would say, oh, well, God would ground that. well, how do you, prior to God grounding it, how do you know that, what's the, what's the

pre-considered reliability of your epistemology that has allowed you to know that your reasoning chain from God existing to the reliability of your epistemology works. But, but this is sometimes posited as a problem for the theists, but it's a far, it's a problem for everyone. But it's a problem for everyone, right? It's because, it's because, it's because, um, what we know is predicated on what we think is, and what is, what we believe is the case. predicated on what we think we can know. Yeah, so, so, we'll break this down, even if just for your sake, Alex, I could see you looking sort of panicked over there, because there's a lot of words.

And I think, no, don't apologize. That's what we're here for. But I think I want to make sure that I'm understanding what you're saying. There's like a circularity potentially in the God justification in saying, well, I can trust my rationality because God grounds it. That's what Descartes does. Yeah. And one of the most famous criticisms of Descartes' work is known as the Cartesian circle.

It's this circle of like, well, if you need God to justify your reasoning ability, how do you reason that God exists in order to justify that reasoning ability? And it sort of goes around in a circle, right? And so think about like the atheist version of this, or the atheist problem here, is really put together best, I think, by Alvin Plantinga, his evolutionary argument against naturalism. So he specifically makes the case that if you believe in evolution, I've talked about this a lot, right? If you believe in evolution and you're a materialist, assume you're a materialist, you believe in evolution by natural selection.

Natural selection selects for survivability. It doesn't select for truth, which means that if you believe in evolution, you believe that your reasoning faculty has not evolved to be sensitive to truth, but to survivability. Why do you believe in evolution? because you've reasoned your way into it but the thing you've just reasoned your way into evolution has undermined your ability to trust the reasoning process that you've used to reason into it so he sort of points out that like you can't be a materialist and believe in evolution

because believing in evolution undercuts the reasons you have for believing evolution the thing is right one of these is a vicious circle and one of them is a virtuous circle because for the atheist you've got this horrible problem where like you've got this weird circle of like, like, yeah, okay, like I believe that it's just atoms bumping into each other that has no connection to truth and that's produced this belief, but it's that belief which has caused this, this reasoning. And you're getting all messed up. You know, the theist goes around in a circle, but they say, okay, sure, it's circular,

but we all have to start somewhere and everyone's circular in some degree. But my circle is one that says, well, God justifies reason because he's an agent who, who, is, you know, the foundation of truth and gives us access to truth. And, yeah, sure, I've used my reasoning faculty as you get there. But that circle is, like, consistent and self-contained and gives you this access to truth. Even though it's still circular, it's one that sort of gives you trust in truth. I mean, I think that the, yeah, I think that is essentially the core difference for the two. It's right.

Self-undermining versus self-reinforcing. Yeah. There's the, but yeah, I don't want to point out the epistemological, ontological thing. Because I think oftentimes we sort of pretend that we can ground. things more than we can. I mean, you know, you've got Wittgenstein's uncertainty on your shelf. And he comes to, he has this idea of a hinge statement, which is where a statement you eventually come to where you can neither justify it nor challenge it, because you can only justify propositions with more strongly held propositions. And you can only challenge propositions with more strongly held propositions. So you eventually get something that you can't justify

your challenge. But yeah, again, and I think that that is sort of, that could form a kind of the atheist way out of this Cartesian circle where they just say, well, I say, you've got to start somewhere. I think that the, there are, I suppose, there are two, there are a couple of potential responses that an atheist could have. First of all, I should say, I genuinely think this is a cracking problem. This is like, this is, this is the, this is the stuff good philosophy is made of. Me too, by the way. Like, I really, like, in fact, often, depending on who I'm talking to you, right, because sometimes when I present this argument to people, especially, it's a bit complicated, but it's also a little bit, like there are so many

little ways that, that it can be, I guess, like misunderstood or objections that seem like they should work but kind of don't. And so it's a little bit tricky, but like if I'm, if I'm talking with somebody who, who like gets it, this is like my go-to challenge. If someone's like, what do you think is the best argument for like believing in God or something? I'll be like, just check this out. Like, try this on and see what you think. Yeah. I mean, this, this idea that our epistemology can become self-undermining. And that, that does keep me up at night. This keeps me up at night more than why is there something rather than nothing. Yeah. I think that there are, again, to toy with roots out, because there are, I think that there are potential roots out.

but at the same time, each of them is so incredibly controversial. I mean, I suppose, actually, before I did that, initial observation is that you, it's not that, it's not that an atheistic view implies this, it's a materialistic view implies this, or potentially implies this, if there's no kind of break in the reasoning. So, again, if you, for instance, you know, if you, if you like Kant, to incredibly, probably butcher Kant, to say that the world is in some way synthetically a priori aligned with, with the particular fact. faculties of your reasoning, then you don't have to worry about this. But again, that's like, and that's what I mean we say, all the solutions, this is so controversial. It's like, yeah, but do you want to, do you want to swallow the synthetic a priori whole? That's a lot to, it's a lot to take, man.

So each of these solutions will have massive controversies with them. One is to adopt some form of global pragmatist view. So this is what Hugh Price does, who is a brilliant Australian philosopher, who goes from object naturalism, which is essentially we need to start, we're studying the world as a natural object, and then he comes to subject naturalism, which is studying the human as natural object. And then he says, well, if you're studying the human as a natural object, we use all kinds of weird non-natural terminology like truth and the whole of maths and like loads of stuff that at first glance is a bit non-natural. And so he says, well, if we're going to be consistent naturalists, we need to study the human as a subject naturalist project. And so he comes up with an idea of truth, which is the same boat principle, which again, it's been a while since I read Price, so you know, don't quote me on this. But this idea, he takes truth and abstracts it from the

stuff that is useful. So he gets around it by, in a way that I won't attempt to recall the details of because I know that I misquote him, takes the things that are useful to humans and then abstracts truth away from that as the thing that is generally, the principles of how we come to have truth is the principles of, as the principle of the stuff that will be useful as a general rule. And sure, it will sometimes break with utility, but it's kind of the best fit we've got. And and that's kind of how he gets at it. Of course, the difficulty with that is it's a fundamentally anti-realist conception of truth. Yeah. This is like, this is, like, it's, it is almost idealist in it's, in the way that it sets up the human investigative project. But it does, it's a definition

of truth that means that we can be sure that, we can be pretty sure that our reasoning is true, because we've defined truth relative to the human. And this is kind of, this, this, this touches upon an interesting point regarding generally a pattern that I noticed between atheist and theistic reasoning. again, you know, to generalise, is that oftentimes you will have the theist want to have something human grounded in metaphysics. And the atheist will often take something that is purportedly metaphysical and attempt to ground it back in the humans. So like the classic, you know, classic one is quite a lot of metaphysically minded people will say, well, how does maths work? And they want to say something like, well, maths works because it's grounded in these platonic eternal truths. That's why maths works.

and lots of less metaphysically minded people want to say something like well maths works because we've designed it to work it's a tool and if the world was different maths would be different and maybe truth

kind of works in the same way yes so that's so that will be again to just illustrate like general explanatory differences between competing philosophical tendencies or philosophical predispositions I think that that really cuts at something

and I think that you know those that are very very sympathetic to explaining the metaphysical in terms of the human will love something like Price's idea of truth because it connects something weird and a bit fuzzy and seemingly immaterial, like the truth relation. That's odd on the face of it, right? I can say a statement, it latches on something in the world and that becomes true. On the face of it, that's kind of really weird and sort of non-naturalistic. And Price linking it back to naturalism, I think would be very satisfying for some people. But on the other hand, you've lost like hardcore realism about truth.

Yeah, I've, I guess in part because of this consideration, just sort of been committed, I think, recently to this kind of view of truth, that becomes like a sort of anti-realist view of truth. The truth is not as traditionally thought of that there is just this reality that our minds latch onto. I mean, maybe, at least maybe that's the case. It's just that you can't know that that's the case. And so the way that you're in practice using words like true and using, and sort of, sort of granting a sense to propositions and saying, I believe this is true. Recognizing as a materialist what my brain is, how it evolved, how it functions. Like, I don't think I so much have to, like, abandon truth as rethink, like, what truth mean.

Yes. But then you hear a theist saying something like, you know, those who don't believe in God, they've abandoned truth. And you're sort of like, maybe, maybe I mean, it's also worth noting this type of anti-realism about truth doesn't have the same implications as somebody saying truth is relative, because here truth is not relative, and here truth is not subjective. It's not, you know, it has it's as anti-realist theories of truth go, this is not a bad one. But it's still an anti-realist theory of truth. And that is such a massive pill to swallow. I mean, the, yeah, this is the, for instance, this is not saying all statements are false, which, you know, classically is self-contradictory. But yeah, but you're right. Anti-realism about truth is a is a really tough pill to swallow. I mean, depending on. how good your grounding of truth is in naturalistic principles, it can be that you can get truth to do still lots of the same things that you'd want it to do anyway. But again, it kind of, again, this is what I mean about, I think some of these questions are an issue of philosophical

predisposition. Because like if I was more metaphysically minded, I would just reject that out of hand. I'd say, what do you mean? Like, how does this anti-realist, how is this anti-realist definition of truth useful if not because it's true? You're saying truth, it's abstracted utility, why is it useful? What's what's what is ontologically grounding that? And I think that is that philosophical instinct to ground something human in something metaphysical. And again, I feel like it is those competing intuitions clashing in this in this debate around the grounding of truth. Next question, moving on. Where do the laws of logic come from? Oh, yeah, no, this is a fascinating one. Um, one thing is that I, you know, because I, when I was at uni, my, my specialty was

mathematical logic. It's like, well, it's what I focused on during my, like, final year and then during my master. So, like, it's, it's a very interesting question. There's a lot of, um, dispute, understandably. Some argue that, that, that, um, logic is, uh, fundamentally empiric system founding. So some people argue that the laws of logic are abstracted from observations. We don't see contradictions. So, uh, we have the law of non-contradiction. And there, there are various arguments used to support that. So like, um, there was a, uh, an attempted research program called quantum logic in like the 80s by Hillary Putnam, I think. And he attempted, he modified the classical laws of logic in line with observations from quantum theory about, about, you know,

uncertainty, principles and stuff. I don't understand quantum physics in the slightest. So I'm going to tread very lightly here. And he was basically saying, well, actually, you know, imagine that, his general argument was right. Imagine that you couldn't know position and velocity in, in like general life. Well, we would modify the laws of logic to reflect that, right? You wouldn't be able to, if you knew the, you wouldn't be able to distribute certain properties, for instance, and stuff like that. So he's saying, okay, well, we would modify the laws of logic in accordance with that. So whether or not, you know, you want to modify logic because of observations and quantum mechanics, he's suggesting, well, what this does show is that the laws of logic would be alterable if we encountered certain things in the world. Thus, there is some empirical component to the laws of logic. But that's, that's the, that's the epistemological answer for Putnam. For other people, it's intuition. and for others, but there's also the metaphysical problem, which is why do the laws of logic work? And again, you have this kind of human, human metaphysical directions of explanation where some people say, like Putnam will say, well, the laws of logic work because they are designed to fit the world. We have designed them to fit the world. And then for a lot of people, that's deeply unsatisfactory because they say, well, you know, why does the world correspond with the laws of logic? How have we been able to do that?

Why is the world not chaos and darkness and lots of other nasty, unpredictable things that make logicians nervous? And yeah, and that's a broadly, and that strikes me as a sensible question, right? And often, you know, kind of the only answer that somebody who suggests that who's doing the human direction, the metaphysical human direction explanation there, is to say something like, well, if the world had been different, then the laws of logic would have been different. and we would have made different laws of logic. And like, I can kind of get, I sort of some, again, I go back and forth in this intuitively where sometimes I find this like incredibly unsatisfying. And sometimes I'm like, okay, maybe there's something in this. Because we do do things like reason with uncertainty because we have probability for reasoning with uncertainty. If the world, if we were never uncertain about anything, we wouldn't have had probability.

There would be no need for it. Likewise, if deduction was always uncertain for whatever reason, like that was just empirically true in the world. world, as weird as that is to say, then our deductions would have uncertainty attached them and stuff like that. So there's, there's an argument that you can say there. But then we're also, at this point, bumping up against something we talked about at the beginning of the episode, which is what is the limits of possibility? Is it, is it in some sense impossible for the laws of logic to have been different? By the laws of logic, what are we talking about? Actually, that's a good point as well, because the laws of logic are themselves kind of controversial. So classically,

you know, things like the, you know, a few uncontroversial laws, well, as uncontroversial as anything ever is in philosophy, but uncontroversial laws of logic would be if A implies B, then you can infer from A to B, stuff like that. One of the less controversial ones is the law of non-contradictions. So you not A and not A. So if you have A, you can infer not not A. So something can't be true and false at the same time? Yeah, basically. I mean, it's very intuitive, right?

But there are people that. You say not as in, it's true that not, brackets, A and not A. So, I mean, I don't know if you can make like a little icon pop up on the screen. We're getting a, getting a hard no from our video. So, not A and not A. And, close bracket. And there's, but there's also more controversial logical laws, like the law of the excluded middle, which is, oh, God, I always get this. Actually, no.

Let's just say, something can only be true or false. So, there are two really similar laws here. So one is the law of the extruder middle and one is bivalence And to some reason I always get them the wrong around And I got like completely roasted by supervisor What's the difference? Well, so the law of the law of excluded middle is something is either A or not a The law of byvalence is any statement is either true or false

And they're clearly connected but they are different in the way Well, they're distinct in the way that Yeah, I may have been misusing that too I'm not I'm not sure I mean I'd misuse it all the time and I'm meant to know about this It's like I always say Whatever man Yeah, exactly

So here are some examples of the kinds of laws that we're talking about, right? These kinds of like fundamental, seemingly self-justifying intuitive, like, bases. Yeah, like, where do you go if you don't have this? I mean, yeah, like, if A implies B, that is like, if A then B, A, therefore, B. Well, how do you, how do you know that? It just seems like you're kind of saying the same thing twice. Yeah, it just has to be true. Yes, like what, if you don't have this, what do you have?

So one of the quirks of classical logic is that you can, and a contradiction implies anything. And my logic tutor in first year used to say that a good way to get your head around this intuitively is, well, if this is true, then anything can be true. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. I've been planning on doing a video about this concept, you know, from the law of explosion. X-Falso quad-ed. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

It's great, it's great fun. I remember I talked about it in my. interview for Oxford, where I was sort of given the definition of a valid argument and then provided with a valid argument. So for those listening, a valid argument is, at least in, you know, some schools of logic, not defined as if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. That's not what a valid argument is. A valid argument is one where there's no interpretation under which the premises are true and yet the conclusion false. Yes, yeah.

That's not quite saying the same thing, right? So the definition of valid argument is there's no interpretation in which both of the premises can be true and yet the conclusion be false, right? And so then my tutor, or my would be tutor provided this argument that was like, premise one, it's raining outside, premise two, it's not raining outside. conclusion you know Batman has a black cape yeah is that valid

and I was like no she's like think about it I was like no no so I thought she was trying to trick me I was like no and then suddenly the penny drops I was like yes it's valid because there's no way which the premises can both be true and the conclusion be false because there's no way that both the premises can be true because they contradict each other

I used to love doing this I taught so it's a valid argument and what that means is that it follows from it's raining outside and it's not raining outside From that, in logic, it follows that Batman has a black gape. And so ex-foso-quadli-bet, I think, means from the false anything. Like, from a contradiction, you can derive anything.

Yeah, so the, yeah, and this is classically, because in, like, when you're defining classical logic, you have a mark for contradiction. And it's normally like an upside-down T. And, yeah, the ex-foso-quadlet bet is, yeah, from contradiction what you please. and it's just contradiction implies anything. And yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting. I mean, so I taught logic to first years during my master's, and I used to love doing this. This is like my favorite little pullback and reveal over the course of the lessons.

And but yes, yeah, so that's, yeah, that's another law of logic. I mean, one thing to bear in mind here is that the laws of logic aren't nearly as uncontroversial as people think they are. So there are paraconsistent logics, as we're talking about earlier with Graham Priest. I think the trouble, partly this is, and paraconsistent logic's get rid of any contradiction implies anything. It places limits on what you can infer from contradictions because it allows for contradictions in non-trivial models of it. So, yeah, that's like a, that's, that's, yeah, so the laws of logic aren't nearly as controversial as people think. But at the same time, for all intents and purposes, most of the time, classical logic works perfectly well.

And we want certain things to really work. Like, if A implies B, then if you've got A, you've got B. We really want that to work because otherwise, what do we do? I don't know. We just kind of sit in a corner and cry, or at least I'll sit in a corner and cry, even if no one else will. Everyone else will get on with their lives because they don't need everything in the worldview to be grounded in classical logic. But I do. And, but yeah, so that would be, yeah, so this is a real worry, right?

And, yeah, and our, you know, theists can make a pretty cool move, which is say, well, because God has ordered the world according to the laws of logic. But there are, I mean, there are further, there are a couple of things that I want to potentially talk about here as potential problems for that response, which is that one is that if God is going to be explanatory there, it sort of implies that God could have given the world a different logic. And I think that's really cool. But that, in turn, raises tensions for classic theistic responses to things like, can God make a stone so heavy he can't

lift it. Because the classic theistic response which I think is perfect and brilliant. That's why I don't really think it's, you know, well, can God make a stone so heavy you can't lift it's a problem. It's just to say, well, a stone so heavy God can't lift it doesn't make any sense. It's a self-contradictory property. But of course, if God crafts the laws of logic and God grounds the laws of logic, then in order of that to be explanatory, it kind of seems like God could have made it differently. Because otherwise, it's like, well, if God couldn't have made it differently, then in what sense is he grounding it in a way that, I know, Platonism wouldn't, or just then becomes a bare fact about immaterial reality, rather than material reality.

So there's a potential tension there with other potential, like, theistic responses to alternative problems. And yes, so, and the, yes, and the second is just to stress that it's probably a bit too extreme, so the atheist cannot explain the laws of logic. But it is probably fair to say that there are genuine difficulties in grounding the laws of logic metaphysically. A lot of the time philosophers will turn to Platonism for mathematical and logical laws to give them their grounding there. So you say something, you say that, you know, there's a, the laws of logic exist in the immaterial plane and are instantiated in the material plane. So the law of non-contradiction is out there in the platonic realm. and in this world it is instantiated in the fact that nothing contradicts, there are no contradictory

properties. And I think that's fine. I mean, it strikes me as at least as good an explanation as the theistic one. For the reason I gave before is that it seems like the agency of God must be pretty limited in explaining this particular thing because otherwise theological reasoning, why God did one thing rather than another thing and stuff like that becomes very, very difficult because if God isn't bound by the laws of logic and they're kind of downstream of his will, then that becomes, you know,

then it's kind of you make God really, really inscrutable. Yeah, maybe God does exist and also doesn't exist. It's just that the one that did exist created this law of logic which blinds everything else. Exactly. If God isn't bound by the laws of logic and instead they are downstream of him, then there's loads of theological reasoning becomes potentially really, really tricky.

Yeah, and that would mean that the atheist has, as much of a question as to sort of where this comes from if it binds God and comes from God. And I think this is really nice, right? Because there is a difference between God grounding the laws of logic and God grounding the laws of like morality.

Because logic is plausibly prior to God. Even in a theistic worldview, it is one of the few things that is plausibly prior to God. It seems prior to thought. Yeah, exactly. It's like it's the trouble with any kind of grounding of the laws of logic, atheistic or theistic,

is that, I mean, first of all, you're going to use logic to get there, because what else are you going to use? If you don't have that, you know, you're either going to shout or just take a wild stab in the dark and then not be able to evaluate it. So there's that there's that aspect to it. And also, yeah, just that whatever you pick to ground logic, if you're trying to ground logic in something prior to logic, then the thing that you're grounding logic in becomes really difficult to examine because it sort of seems like it wouldn't be itself bound. by the laws of logic. Because if it was, then, well, it's bound by the laws of logic. Well, where's its binding coming from? So a difficult question to answer all round. Yeah. I mean, amazingly difficult. I mean, any question that goes, that attempts to take a step before you get to logic is going to be horribly difficult to answer. But I do think genuinely,

this is this is a, this is not just a problem for atheists, it's a problem with theists, it's a problem for anyone who wants to use logic. Yeah. Again, why does it work? Relevant here is the Cartesian circle. I mean, Descartes tries to say that God exists, and so our trust in even our logical laws, our mathematical truths can be grounded in the fact that we know that God exists, but if he's using reason to prove the existence of God and using God to justify the existence of reason, there seems to be a circle. Pascal once wrote that he could never forgive Descartes because he sort of uses God. He, like, constructs God to be this basis of his worldview, so he can justify, like, reason and logic and stuff, and then just has no more use for him ever again. He's just this sort of, like, he's just this, like, stepping stone that he uses to sort of, you know, to, to start walking.

And then he just leaves him in the dust. And Pascal was really annoyed at that day. That's, that guy, I'd never thought of that. But that's so true. He absolutely does. But he arguably is working in a circle just as the atheist, the atheist would have to do. as well. So again, it's one of those questions that maybe atheists can't answer it, but if they can't, reasons

to think the theorist can't either. But there's also, it's also worth noting that the atheist, whereas before we had a, the atheist was in a potential vicious circle. Here, the atheist seems to be in, if anything, a kind of neutral circle. Yes. Like, it's like kind of again, because partly, partly this is just because we're so, we're so, we are now so deep into

not being able to use reasoning apparatus if we're going prior to logic that, again, it's like said at the beginning, my intuition's kind of run out a little bit. Yeah. But I mean, I'd be interested to know what people's intuitions are with something like this. Oh, yeah. I'm sure that they're already letting us know in the comments. I have a quite simple, straightforward one next. Yeah, yeah. What is consciousness? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I reckon we could probably rattle off a few answers. Rats us up in 30 seconds. This is like the mystery.

But in a way, maybe we can because, of course, it's a bit of a cop-out, but it is worth saying that you can be an atheist whilst not being a material. Yes, I mean, this is almost like we've, the kind of runs like that would apply to the logic one. Indeed, loads of ones we've looked back. You can believe that consciousness is this strange immaterial. You can believe in the existence of the soul. You can believe in all of that kind of stuff and just not believe in like an agential god overseeing it all. It would be quite weird. Yeah. It would still be like weirder that there wasn't some like creator non material thing. But like it's, it's possible to be of that persuasion. So it's worth noting that. But I think really the question here put in the context of atheists not being able to answer it is like, it's like, it's Like, consciousness seems like a very strange thing to expect if there is no intention behind the universe, and if there is no immaterial element to the universe. Because consciousness seems like it's immaterial. It seems, I mean, we can answer this as if we were looking for questions that materialists can't answer. Consciousness is very strange. I've talked about it a lot recently.

People who've been listening to my recent material will know that I'm just bemused by consciousness. Well, it's one of the weirdest things. You know, as in it's, well, it's actually, it's a bit like the laws of logic in the same. it's one of the weirdest things and one of the most obvious things. What are you going to do to, like, I think Paul Churchill is a limited materialist, so he thinks that that consciousness doesn't exist. And he thinks about it, his point is more nuanced than that. But like, I remember reading one of his papers and being like, what do you mean?

How do I even go about disbelieving in consciousness? This seems like a, yeah, it's like, well, how do you expect me to not believe in conscience? It seems like one of the only things that is really self-evidently there. Again, on par with something like the laws of logic. It's arguably, it's the filter through which I view everything else. else in the world. If I'm not conscious, like, where, where do I begin? And, and, you know, again, you're right. I think, I think that the, the difference here, though, I think, with consciousness compared to something like morality and why I think that the atheist has a more sensible

anti-materialist position here. Like, I don't think it kind of gets him, gets, I don't think it gets us in as many epistemological binds is that we have direct empirical evidence of consciousness. So, if something is going to be the exception to the materialist rule, it's going to be consciousness because if the materialist rule is broadly downstream of this kind of broad naturalist empiricist approach, then if there's going to be an exception, consciousness is going to be the least controversial one. I'm not, I don't think, and people might expect me to have some the thing is, I'm not a neuroscientist. No, no, me neither. And I think that this is a, this is a relevant field, right? Like, there may be these wonderful explanations for what consciousness is

on a purely materialistic framework. I've tried to sort of discover them. I've tried to interview people who might be able to give me some ideas and I've been left sort of wanting and I'm just perfectly happy to say that I'm like agnostic on the question of materialism because of conscience.

Yeah, I mean I'm kind of approaching the same sort of place. I mean, Francesco Varela is a neuroscientist who's been looking at like correlations between like certain mental states and certain physical brain states and stuff like that. But again, we're so far away from a kind of reductive materialist program of consciousness. And, you know, I'm not suggesting that it definitely can't happen. I don't quite

buy into the like Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, oh, nothing physical in principle could explain consciousness. You know, it strikes me that it could. If we're just like blue sky thinking, then there could be a kind of future scientific paradigm that is as dissimilar from our current way of thinking about consciousness as like the the mechanistic view of the world was from the teleological Aristotelian view of the world. I was just thinking that, you know, just like this kind of in, and that's sort, but to a extent, that's like idle, right? Because what I'm, like, scientific revolutions almost by definition are pretty unpredictable. As in you can't predict what they're going

to be in advance. You might be able to predict when they're going to be. But, but, but, so that, that, that, that, that would be like my first point is that I wouldn't, I think that it's probably, I'm not convinced that materialism, that materialism is. like completely blown to pieces there. But I'm also, I also think that it will be unwise to say that it's survived it because it hasn't yet. Yes. There are some cracking responses to this sort of worldview, though. There's a guy called Galen Strausson.

Yeah. You know, I get him mixed up with Peter Strausson, one of the son of the other. Oh, are they related? I think, I think that's so cool. I mean, and Peter's the son of. Yeah, then I must have met Galen. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, Peter Strawson's awesome.

And Galen Strausson, I think, is also. very cool, though I only really know him for this, this idea that he suggests that he is an atheist and he is a naturalist and he just thinks that consciousness is part of the natural building blocks of the world. He just thinks that consciousness is, he thinks that consciousness is some sort of, so, I'm sorry, I'll start from the beginning of what I take to be part of his reasoning chain. So he starts, the first thing I suppose to note is that is that a consciousness is at least potentially gradable, right? You can get more or less of it. both on the kind of drifting in and out of consciousness

I went from being unconscious to conscious this morning and from the kind of if you were to gradually remove bits of my brain in like a horrifyingly sadistic manner then in theory it seems intuitive that I would become less and less of a conscious being until I was dead and was no longer a conscious being. It seems strange if there was just like a point where you just, everything just switches off all at once.

So that's one kind of faucet of his argument. The other is basically saying well there's nothing there is nothing as obvious as the existence of consciousness, which, you know, that's reasonably well, you know, I think therefore I am is, you know, you might have your issues with the argument, but as a whole, you know, there's very little self-evidence as consciousness. And then he basically says, well, then if the consciousness either by structure or by just matter, the preconditions for consciousness must already be out there. And we can kind of, think about consciousness along this kind of gradation scale. And so he's sort of a panpsychist, but not in the sense that he thinks that rocks can think. It's very few panpsychists actually think that. Panpsychists don't think that rocks can.

No, exactly. As in there's a piece, you know, someone somewhere does think that. I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure someone somewhere will. I have a podcast with Philip Goff on panpsychism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People are interested, panpsychism, the view that sort of everything is conscious, but kind of more like, I mean, his, his view is more like the fundamental building blocks

of the universe is consciousness. and it, like, is everywhere. Yeah, so Strausson's position is reasonably similar to that. It's sort of saying, well, well, the, the potential for consciousness must already be there in matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's sort of how it's right. It makes sense, man. Like, it makes sense to suggest that, like, yeah, like, there is just something about, I mean, it seems like really weird.

Well, why would, like, why would the fundamental, like, material of the universe, like, you know, be consciousness or have consciousness or provide for consciousness? Like, why would the fundamental matter of the universe, like, have energy and vibration and, you know, velocity and mass. All of these properties are completely mysterious. There's no reason not to ascribe consciousness or consciousness permitting, you know, fundamental properties to the sort of subatomic particles. And if you are a materialist, then you're unlikely to conceive of consciousness

and in this kind of Cartesian dualist way, where it's like it's one thing, right? You have consciousness and it is a single object. You're more likely to view it along the lines of gradation, along the lines of, well, it's composed out of something else, and, and, and, uh, Strausson's point is, well, if it's composed out of something else, um, then the preconditions must be in the thing that was there. And then, you know, and I think we, I think we are broadly more comfortable talking about gradations of consciousness. And this also, this kind of comes up a little bit in an integrated, it's integrated information theory, which is another, a theory of consciousness where, you know, the integrated

information is everywhere. It's not just in, in human subjects. Uh, and, you know, and I, I'm not suggesting that this is like necessarily a knockdown way of viewing consciousness, but I'd see real potential here for a philosophical framework for analyzing consciousness that is non-theistic and like not even that's different from materialism. Like if you think that, you know, because materialism, most of the attractive qualities of materialism just comes about from the fact that it's monist. It's just one type of stuff. And like the physicalist stroke materialist side of it is, you know, great in some ways. But, but, you know, there's, there's, if you could have one type of stuff that is, that has preconditioned properties of consciousness and non-conscious

properties, it doesn't strike me as like absurd that that, that would also have, that also has loads of philosoph, loads of the philosophical strengths of materialism, um, without this potential consciousness weakness. Of course, the, the reply to that is, isn't this all a bit ad hoc? Isn't this all like, you've got a problem and you're just being like, well, there must have been consciousness before then? How explanatory is that? and I don't think I have very good response to that if God is being sort of filled in here

purely because of considerations of consciousness and God's sort of doing the same thing and so to the question what is consciousness is this a question that atheists can't answer well I think that it's a I think that it's a question that on the face of it materialist would struggle to answer and to the extent to which a theist doesn't have materialist constraints

then theists could answer it and the atheist would struggle But yeah, but I think this kind of panpsychist idea has potential, as does integrated information theory. I think that, yeah, and I do think that the Straussonite, I suppose, panpsychist, or Straussonian, panpsychist theory at the very least, does, it does strike me as not explanaturally totally inert because it, you know, it predicts certain things. predict gradations of consciousness depending on the structure, and we can, I think, broadly have a pretty good argument for gradations of consciousness based on structure. Eric Fitzsgable is really, really keen on this at the moment. He's a professor at UCLA, and he's really hammering this point home at the moment. So I think that I don't think that this sort of modest panpsychism is as explanatorily inert as people give it credit for, as people kind of criticize it for.

People who've been listening to me recently will know that, as I say, consciousness has like baffled me, especially as of late. It started with this podcast, right? I'm speaking with people like Anil Seth and Philip Goff and Josh Rasmussen and I'm just, my mind is, is blown or my brain is blown or both, maybe. I don't know. But like, like people will know it's kind of become a bit of a meme in many ways. I'm just like asking people like, where is the triangle in my head? Like, where is it, man? Like, show me the triangle. I saw someone made a, made a meme of this, me with like a gun being like, I'm no longer asking, where is the triangle, you know? Because it does, you know, it freaks me out.

I lose sleep over it. There's another question sort of on our list, which I sort of think functions here or fits in here. Somebody said, on consciousness, this is one of your subscribers. Why could my body have not accomplished all the same evolutionarily favorable tasks, simulated all the emotions and motivations of firing neurons in complex, possibly deterministic sequences of pattern response without me being there to experience it. I mean, a bit of a complicated phrasing it. Maybe I'm slightly sort of going in a different direction to the question, but I'm imagining like, why could not have things just evolved essentially as they did without first person conscious experience?

They could still be human beings interacting, like eating things and whatnot, but sort of in the way that like a flower attracts the sun. There wouldn't need to be this first person's center of consciousness. I mean, it does seem like a mystery. I will say that, like, if it is some evolutionary adaptation, it does seem to serve some pretty useful purposes. It does seem like it probably makes it easier for people to interact, for them to chase out food, for them to work out that they need to go and, like, hunt that animal and put it on the fire and all this kind of stuff. But it doesn't seem like necessary. And given how, like, weird it is, it does seem like a grand mystery that the universe could have evolved such that, I mean, I mean, even to get biological. biological evolution off the ground is like, you know, a grand mystery. Like, how does life get started?

Like, the universe could have just been rocks and, like, grass and water. But there's just this thing, this, this first person conscious experience, this, like, potentially infinite number of imaginary triangles that can just be sort of conjured up out of nowhere and still in nowhere. It's a grand mystery. If you are a theist and you think that this is all created by a sort of immaterial mind with intention to bring about immaterial minds, then, yeah, of course, that's why. So I do think that, like, consciousness is going to be more expected on a theistic worldview than an atheistic one. Like, a lot of these questions, I don't know if it's like atheists cannot answer this or cannot

account for it, but I think that we have to admit in a lot of these cases, at the very least, even if an atheist can answer this question, they're going to do it with a bit more squirming than the atheists going. Yes, I think there's, yeah, there's certainly it's a, it is, yeah, it's a difficulty see for the atheists in as much as they might be able to come up with an answer. And we won't be able to come up with an answer. But like, it's clearly going to be like, well, the fact that we haven't so far shows it's probably going to be a little bit more convoluted than the atheist answer, right?

And yeah, I think, I think that's a fair point, right? It's, you know, what do we judge theories on, if not the things they can explain and things they can predict and the things that they, you know, the observations that they make and stuff. So, so, so there is, I think it's generally something there. I think that, yeah, I suppose, I think one of the reason. I think one of the reasons why consciousness becomes so difficult is because we see it from both within and without. Like, I see consciousness from without with you and I see it from within with me. And so, you know, one response I've seen people give to this is that, well, consciousness probably is necessary for complex behavior.

Because whenever we see complex behavior, we see consciousness. I think, well, it's probably more accurate to say that whenever we see complex behavior, we infer consciousness because we're pretty complex and we behave in certain ways. And then we go, well, you know, if a bird is behaving in ways that are a bit less complicated than humans, then it's probably conscious in a different way, a way that facilitates that less complex behavior. And, you know, intuitively, if you ask people whether an ant is conscious, they'll probably say yes, but they'll probably be like, well, yeah, but in a really, really minor way.

You know, and that's sort of, you know, and that makes sense given the correlates of neuroscience and stuff like that. But also I think that, so I think that that response potentially also encounters difficulties when we say, well, because, you know, consciousness is necessary for complex behavior. And we say, well, I know we've only got really one example of that direct matching up and that's with us, as in not us as humans, as in us as individual agents. Yeah. And then we're kind of extrapolating that out further. So I think AI is going to have a significant contribution to make on this question, too, because. Because, I mean, the sort of everybody and their dog is debating whether AI is conscious, and everybody and their AI chatbot is debating whether AI is conscious. Well, as you'll know.

As I well know. And look, we're not even, like, close to convincing me that these things are or can be conscious. But, like, say in, like, you know, 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, like, we still have a thing which just, like, is not claiming to be conscious, it's not appear to be conscious. Because it does seem that the fact that we just can't simulate it with material things, we can't simulate it with electricity and by sort of replacing the biological matter with digital matter or sort of, you know, cables instead of neurons or whatever, it does maybe seem to give us a clue that consciousness is something more than material. And likewise, obviously, if the reverse is true and we just develop a convincingly conscious agent out of, you know, out of computer material. I think that the materialists would have much more of a leg to stand on in saying that we're just material beings as well, you know?

Also, yeah, there's a question about what makes something convincingly conscious. Because the problem we have about talking about AI consciousness is not that different from the problem we have talking about other human consciousness or animal consciousness, right? Like, we're still doing the behavior to whatever

is hidden from the behavior inference. Well, famously, there's the Turing test. Yes, yeah, yeah. The Turing test is a test that you can put, a computer through as to whether you can tell that it's a computer or not. And so if it passes the test, then you can't tell that it's not a real person on the other side, right? That's how a computer can pass the Turing test. And somebody recently on my chat GPT video where I tried to convince it that it's conscious, and chat TBT is like, I'm not conscious, Alex, I'm not

conscious, you know, and I was like, you're having me on. They said something that I thought was kind of eerie. They said like, you know, everybody's wondering about whether a computer can pass the Turing test, but are we ready for one which fails it on purpose? I also, I mean, my controversial take on AI is that we, at the very least, we ought to have a theory of when we're going to consider it conscious, if we're going to consider it conscious. Yeah, sure. Because, well, partly, I mean, partly because of, you know, the whole AI apocalypse worry, but also, like, in this point was made, again, by X. Fitzgabler recently was that, like,

they'll need rights and protections, right? Like, if we're going to create life, we can't just, like, abandon it. So if we decide that that's possible and we decide that there's going to be a point at which we consider it conscious, whatever that's going to be, then we need to do some hard thinking about when that's going to be in order to not create like, I don't know, what could be an enormous civil rights disaster. Yeah. I mean, I think there's, well, there are two sort of competing fears here. There's fear of like evil robot aliens trying to kill us all and like really good, you know, happy, personable robot aliens who need rights and protection because. We're the cruel aliens who are sort of abusing them and saving them. But like there is some kind of like interesting sci-fi concept here of when you think of the robot takeover movies, it's always these big robots coming in and destroying everyone with their big guns.

But imagine like a tyrannical AI robot that is so successfully tyrannical because it's convinced people that it is not that. That's why I find that that comment so so so so iry. It's sort of like, you know, what if it's like purposefully trying not to pass the Turing test? What it's purposely trying to convince us that it's not conscious. It's just a little bit sort of kind of scary to think about. But, yeah. Well, I hope that maybe it would be best if the theists or the anti-materialists are right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we can't do consciousness with bare materials. Well, I've always just thought that the question of what consciousness is and the question of whether it's material is the answer. is the answer to the question of, for instance, the simulation hypothesis. Everybody just assumes that we can simulate things into this sort of infinite regress of simulations, but it only works if it's possible to be in a simulation where we have consciousness simulated. And so, like, if it turns out that consciousness is more than material, it's not something that we can create with an AI or something, then, like, the simulation hypothesis for me just completely collapses. So this question of consciousness and whether it's material or not, I think it has some interesting implications for

things like AI, but also for these fun little tidbits like the simulation hypothesis, that lives or dies on your theory of consciousness, essentially. Yeah, I mean, theories of consciousness are probably one of the greatest examples of a philosophical question that is truly practical in like a really, a really visceral everyday sense. Like our theory, whether we decide that consciousness can be simulated or not could change the course of history. Yeah. Finally.

Okay. One more question. And then we're done, because God knows how. long we've been, how long we've been going now? Two hours, 35. It's been a long time. I bet you'll see, like, my answer's degrading quality as time goes on. We'll see if people agree with that. It's, it's been a long time, but a good time, I think. We need to get this mentioned.

Fine-tuning. Somebody says, fine-tuning never heard a good rebuttal to the issue. Christopher Hitchens was in the back of a car once, I think it was like Doug Wilson or someone, and he was asked, you know, are there any good religious arguments? And he says, you know, the fine tuning, the sort of hair's breadth balance, it's sort of, you know, it does sort of, yeah, yeah. And he sort of said it was something that really did actually trouble him. And a lot of atheists possibly influenced by that clip, I don't know, seem to say that the most powerful religious argument is the fine tuning argument. And so, what's the question that atheists can't answer?

Why are the constants of the universe so finely tuned? There are constants which govern the physical universe, things like the strength of gravity, the strength, the strength, the strength, the strong and weak nuclear force, this kind of stuff. Like, if these had different values, by, you know, whatever it is, one part in one time to 10 to the minus billion or whatever, the universe couldn't exist. It's just like balance on a knife edge. If gravity was slightly stronger, then the universe would have collapsed in on itself. If it was slightly weaker, then everything would have flown apart so fast that even atoms

couldn't form. So there are three options here. The constants of the universe are so finely tuned. because of chance, because of necessity, or because design, chance seems ludicrous, because the odds are just so unfathomably small. Necessity seems maybe possible, but it doesn't seem to be any logical reason why the strength of gravity would have to be what it is, and the only thing left there is design, which requires something like God. So, by ruling out design as an atheist, how do you answer this question? Well, I mean, first of all, I say that I kind of,

I share the intuition that this is thorny. Really? Like, yeah, yeah. And this is this, it quite often gives me pause for thought. You know, this is, I think that, um, I think that the, the primary way that I, I think an atheist could respond to this is, is to, again, draw on these, draw on, draw on questioning the justification of the notion of possibility when stretched to ways the universe could be. So the, you know, this is kind of broadly an argument from analogy, right? It's, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,

with the entire universe. You know, the universe is so finely tuned if it was off by a, you know, a fraction of a tiny number, then, then,

then everything would collapse and we'd all be doomed. And, you know, if we were to find a similarly intricate object in the world, we would say, well, of course that was designed.

And again, it's interesting. To, again, to bring this full circle from the beginning of the podcast, this is very similar to a point that Hume touches upon where he,

again, the justification that we have for, A, saying things could have been different, because it's like, well, what do we mean could there? As in, sure, it's non-contradictory to say things could have been different, but, like, what do we genuinely mean? Like, it seems like we need a meatier sense of could than that. And also, he just, he throws together, like, almost like, off the top of his head, like a load of other hypotheses, because they're kind of equally, you know, so he says, well, it could be that God is not. intelligent but just really prolific um so you know just if you do something an infinite number of

times then you'll you'll eventually have this uh which is kind of simple which is basically chance but saying well yes some people do some people do take the chance yeah and they just say that we live in a multiverse which i've i've spoken to people who believe in the multiverse um not the kind of multiverse that i think would actually work here but there are people who just say yeah there's a multiverse, we have no, it seems like we couldn't even possibly have evidence to sort of indicate that in the case. But it does, like, explain it. Okay. There's one hypothesis. And the other one he says, he says, is that we don't really know what he's, well, he sees talking about order generally. He says, we don't really know how ordered or disordered universes could be.

Yes. Is one of, you know, that's the kind of skepticism about the notion of possibility. And that's more taking the necessity line. Yes, yeah, exactly. To say, you know, had the law of gravity been different by one part in whatever it is, the universe couldn't exist, is not the same thing as saying there's a one in, like, there's a one part and 10 to the whatever chance that it does exist because the sort of the room to maneuver in terms of, you know, what would have been different, had it been different. It's not the same thing as the chance that it could have been different. Yes, exactly. So, so basically the problem there is how do you define a probability space on the way the, on the ways the universe could have been? Because we don't have any,

sort of observations there. And Hume's point is not necessarily that either of these are, well, so the dialogue kind of runs where he, Philo, the character in Hume's dialogue says this, and then the response that he gets is, yeah, but like, isn't the idea of intelligent God just so much more plausible? And then his response is to say something like, well, our idea of what is plausible is solely intra-un universal. It doesn't step outside the universe. It's just form within it. Outside the universe, he's like, well, it's not necessarily that all bets are necessarily off, but that we don't know what bets are on, is his point. So he's more of an agnostic point than atheist point. He says, you know, he says he doesn't know the answer, but he also

thinks that we are ill-equipped to know the answer. But I don't know, I guess, I don't know, it's just, doesn't it, on the other hand, doesn't it just seem like the universe definitely could have been tuned differently and it definitely isn't? Maybe. But there is a question that's sometimes asked as to, if this is by design, God designs everything, including presumably the parameters by which universes can and can't exist. And so there is this mystery of like, well, why would it be so difficult? Like, if the universe is what everything exists for, like, you know, the universe exists for the creation of humankind. That's like the purpose of it all. Then why would the parameters be set such that their balance on such a knife edge?

You know, why wouldn't it be, why wouldn't it be that like the sort of meta laws of the universe was such that, you know, it could exist in all kinds of different conditions? Now, like, I've never found that a very convincing response, but I must say that I spoke recently to my friend Phil Halper, who I've mentioned on this show before, he's got some, some wonderful ideas. And we were talking about Gnosticism, the tradition in Christianity. And I've been talking, I've been banging on about Gnosticism and everybody. seems to hate me for it online at the moment. At least the Christian community are taking umbrage with how much I mention it. But like, in some Gnostic traditions, there's this idea that the material world is created by this like evil demiurge, that the true God is this immaterial, spiritual being, and that the material world is created by an evil or malevolent

sort of figure. And so the Christian Gnostic position is many times that Jesus is sent by the father to enter the material world and sort of help people to throw off their material conditions and, you know, regain sort of their spiritual truth, whatever. And Phil pointed out that the fine-tuning argument seems to work better for a Gnostic cosmology than a sort of traditional monotheistic one, because you've got these metaconditions which seem to have been designed such that it's like near on impossible to create a material universe. Because the true God, the true sort of creator of everything didn't want it to happen

because the material world is evil and bad and incompetent and all this kind of stuff and so that the true God sort of sets the parameters so that it's nearly impossible like it's as impossible as it can be for a material world to come into existence but the evil Demiurge

balances everything just right to bring into existence that was quite a novel point yeah I know that's fantastic I hadn't thought of that I'd be surprised if anyone had thought of that yeah that's art I can't remember where he got it from.

He probably got it from somewhere I wish I could credit it, but it's a, it was a really interesting thought, which, I mean, it's a bit silly. I'm being a bit silly here, but it does point out that, like, it kind of just depends where your intuition's like. I mean, why, like, well, why is everything balanced on a knife edge? That question can be asked, can be asked in both directions. The theorist can say, look, you know, if atheism is true, then why is everything just balanced on an eye fedge? And I could say, if, if, like, theism is true, why is everything balanced? on a non-fetch, you know, it's the same question. Yeah, I mean, there's, again, it trades on this idea of like, well, once you're at the, once you're at the, the, the level of meta laws, how likely is it that the laws of the universe were a certain way?

Yeah. We're just so outside the realm of anything that we normally reason about that I find it hard to come to any conclusion whatsoever, apart from just throwing my intuition at it and kind of grasping at something. And it's like, oh, yeah, it kind of seems like it would be unlikely. Yeah. But when I think about all of the other times that I infer something is unlikely, I'm taking a set of, previous experiences or other people's previous experiences or what I know about the laws that govern this universe and coming up with a hypothesis about how likely it is that a given set of possibilities will emerge. But I don't have any of the prior data once I step outside to

the meta laws of the universe. It seems to me like if the fine-tuning argument is correct that it is exceedingly unlikely for the constants of the universe to be as they are and that they needed to be in order to create the universe, that either God really didn't want the universe to exist. He created things so that he really did not want this to happen. And maybe somewhere in the sort of infinite realm in which he exists, it just had to happen at some point. Or he really did want it to happen because he balanced these laws so perfectly, but he's somehow constrained by these, like, imagine like the immaterial creator God before the existence of the universe is constrained by the strength of gravity

and the strong nuclear force. Like what? What can that even mean? How can Cod be constrained by the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces in creating the universe? That just sort of seems unthinkable to me. Well, I think this is,

this draws upon a wider point we've touched upon a number of times, which is that there's an open question about if God does a lot of grounding for theistic philosophy, and quite right too. Right? This is like, you know, right back to like Aquinasum, long before then, God does a lot of grounding. And it's a good philosophical job if you can get it. So it makes sense why he would. But then the meta question of what, what grounds the things that seem to constrain God is like things like the laws of logic, which classically constrain God. It's like, well, God can't ground something that seems metaphysically prior to him and is constraining what he can do. So, yeah, and the meta laws of the universe is another one. It's like, well, if God made the meta laws of the universe, then in what sense does, you know, then, yeah, if God is constrained by the metal laws of the universe and had to do this fine tuning thing, then it seems like what's grounding those metal laws.

So he's either constrained by these metallors, which is like really weird because it means God is constrained by things like the force of gravity or the strength of gravity. And if he's not constrained by them, then it seems really weird that he designed things so that they seem so constrained. Yes. And I mean, this comes up with lots of other things. Like, like, you know, the laws of morality. I mean, classically, this comes up and it's like really nascent form in the youth of fraud dilemma, but has been developed a lot since then if God is the thing that grounds the laws of morality, then from God's perspective, the laws of morality are morally arbitrary, which is amazing. Right? That's, that's, you know, then there is just a kind of, well, he must have some other reason. You know, it's, I don't know what it is. But, you know, that, you know, there, there, there is this, um, What God grounds can't ground God and what God is constrained by, he can't ground. And sometimes it's very helpful for him to be constrained by things. And sometimes it's very helpful for him to ground things. But each of those has philosophical trade-offs. Because once they're in one position, it seems very unintuitive that it would be in the other position.

So yet another question which gives us pause is difficult. I can't say that we've solved the problem. And like you say it gives you a lot of trouble. I mean, I wouldn't say it's like easy. It's just not my favorite argument. I mean, a lot of people say this is like their best religious argument is the one that they struggle with the most. I mean, I find something like the existence of consciousness more compelling for theism than something like fine-tuning. Maybe.

I don't know. Maybe I just haven't thought about it. I think for me, the most troubling one we've looked at today is the self-undermining one. Yeah. That's the one that genuinely does keep. Yeah, like the argument from reason. Yes, yeah. Yeah.

I certainly find that the most interesting and maybe also actually the most, like, difficult to respond to. but maybe the not quite as like just moving as the consciousness that I am like constantly yeah like like in and aware of um although you're not always aware of your consciousness even though even though you are conscious all the time you're awake you're not always aware of it I think John transparent quite a lot Josh Rasmussen said he talked something about the difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree yeah I mean and it's sort of the second one that you need to really be thinking about consciousness as opposed to just being conscious. Yeah, I can't remember sort of the exact phrase you used, but it was something like

that. At any rate, these are all questions which, you know, I can't say like we've answered them, but to say that the questions that atheists can't answer, I know, it's a good click-bady video title, but I hope people have found some interest in listening to us, give it an attempt and found us to be relatively fair on our treatment. I mean, I think a lot of this can be summed up in a question or a response that I got on Twitter that somebody said, when I put out a tweet asking for questions, what's the question that atheists can't answer? Somebody said, most questions.

That's what makes us different to everyone else. Oh, okay. Admitting that like, oh, we can't answer questions, but it's the fact that we admit that we don't know that makes us atheists. I don't know if that's a bit too self-congratulatory to say or to end on maybe, But I wouldn't just describe that to atheists, but I do think that this sort of basic response

that seems underneath almost all of our responses here that clarify, we don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't know what consciousness is. I don't know how to justify reason, but it's not clear to me that theism necessarily helps, and it's not clear to me that the certainty that theism gives people is legitimate. The best that I can say is that I don't know the answer to a lot of these. questions, but I certainly would be a far cry from saying that it's impossible for atheists to one day answer them at least. Yes, I think another thing that I kind of general takeaway from

discussion is that almost any, almost any ambitious philosophical view will have trade-offs to it. You know, it is almost any philosopher view has questions that it cannot answer, and I think that that's very, very interesting. It's one of the things that allows philosophy to continue, is hopefully one day will converge upon a perfect total philosophy. And I think it'd be interesting to maybe sit down with the theists and do a series of questions that theists can't answer. Why does the mind map onto the brain so perfectly, if it's not just the same thing as the brain? Why is there suffering in the world if God is good? The Uthifro dilemma, these kinds of things, like there are perennial questions that people have been raising for thousands of years to theists in the same way they've been doing to atheists.

and I'm kind of glad in a way that no one really has an answer because not only would I be out of a job but also out of a hobby. Yes, that's what I. Well, Joe, thanks for what might be the longest episode. Have we gone over the three hour mark?

Sam Harris might have still... Two hours 51. I think Sam Harris still just about takes the biscuit, but it's been fun nonetheless and I hope people, especially if they're still listening, you know, good on you. I'd say like... You're in for the long haul.

I'd say like, you know, if you're watching this, then don't forget to subscribe, but if you've made it this far and you're not a subscriber to the channel, then I've already taken far too much from you, so do as you please. But Joe, honestly, thanks for taking so much time, especially to sit down and answer some of these questions. Thank you so much for having me.