Within Reason - Atheist Slogans You Should Stop Using - Joe Schmid

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.Get tickets to my UK tour here.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack.Joe Schmid is a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton University and creator of the Majesty of Reason YouTube channel. He graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Purdue University in 2022. He has published articles in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of time, and the author of books including "Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs". Felipe Leon’s 200 arguments for atheism: https://exapologist.blogspot.com/2023/03/200-or-so-arguments-for-atheism.htmlTIMESTAMPS00:00 – Tour00:32 – Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence07:50 – There Is No Evidence for God25:27 – Who Created God?49:44 – Science Flies You to the Moon, Religion Flies You into Buildings01:02:33 – Your Location Determines Your Religion01:28:33 – Claims Are Not Evidence01:32:50 – You Can’t Prove a Negative01:38:35 – What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence01:43:51 – Faith Is Belief Without Evidence01:54:59 – Religion Makes Good People Do Bad Things01:55:32 – Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence01:56:31 – Theism Is Unfalsifiable02:01:03 – Science Books Would Come Back, Religions Would Not02:12:58 – Evolution Disproves God

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conicsontera.ca. Hey, I'm going on a tour. of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes.

The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to to see you there. Joe Schmidt, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. How are you doing, man? We haven't done this in a fair amount of time now, but we were just talking about how popular these episodes seem to be. People like overviews. They like lists. They like comparisons. They like sort of, I don't know. I don't know what it is about these videos, but people seem to really like them. So I'm glad to have you back today. I'm glad to be back. I mean, I think it's just because I'm like overwhelmingly sexy. That's the only explanation. That the woman are just like, Even the guys are swooning. The straight guys are swooning, in fact. That's what happens

every time I'm sure that people in the comments will let us know. And now, since we said this, there will inevitably be TikTok edits of these comments. So, you know, edit away. We're here today to discuss some of the most popular atheist or like counter religion, counterapologetic slogans. And this was your idea, because I wanted to do another episode with you. And you said, hey, how about this? I don't know about you, but all the time on the internet, not just like in comment sections and stuff, but I see like videos. It's either like people making videos on social media or it's like clips of someone like Ricky Jervais and they've got these kinds of like one-liners and you're seeing people say like,

oh, well, I just believe them one God less than you do. Or it's like the Ricky Jervase thing went viral kind of recently, right? Of like, you know, if all the books were burned in the world, the science ones would come back and the religion ones wouldn't come back. And it's sort of, they turn into these like slogans that atheists use all the time. look, I don't believe in God. I think you don't believe in God, at least the last time I checked you didn't. And I think some of these slogans work, some of them don't. So today, let's go through as many as we can do in a reasonable amount of time and see if we should keep using them.

How's it sound? Sounds good to me. Yeah, I mean, these are often used as like thought-terminating cliches, but, or, you know, like mic-drop moments. So we'll see if we have any mic-drop moments in defense of them or maybe in responding to them. We'll see. I'm sure we'll have them. Yes, sir. Okay. Well, let's start with a claim, which is it Carl Sagan who first said this? It was someone like that. I think it might have been Sagan, who said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's claim one. And I think it's because, you know, a lot of the religious claims that people make are pretty sort of out there, you know, people arising from the dead, supernatural interventions into the world. And people like to say, well, we've got evidence for these things. But for a lot of atheists, it's, it's, maybe you can't say, oh, well, you don't have any, like, any evidence at all for this kind of stuff, but it isn't really doing it for me. And this is supposed to capture that kind of feeling, I suppose. Yeah, I think so. I mean, Sagan talks about not only about religion, but also, you know, like alien abductions.

I remember watching a video when I was in my new atheist phase of Carl Sagan talking about aliens. And he's just noting that, like, these claims maybe seem to, like, be antecedently quite improbable. they run very contrary to our ordinary humdrum experience, to the way we generally know the world to operate. And when you have claims like that, it seems like you need some pretty strong evidence in order to believe them. Maybe he would cash out extraordinary

in some way other than pretty strong evidence. But I think that's maybe the most charitable interpretation here. I mean, we actually might not get sparks flying for this one because, like, I think there's a very charitable reading of this slogan, which is just like clearly correct. I don't know what about you. Well, I've heard people say in response to this, like, no, extraordinary claims just require ordinary evidence, right?

Like, if your sort of epistemological standards are such that I require, you know, X amount of evidence to believe in a claim, I guess there's something about like the prior probability of the claim, which makes us want to like heighten the amount of evidence needed. So technically speaking, we might be saying something like, you know, if the prior probability of the thing that you're claiming is much lower, like, at least according to my assessment, then the like amount or strength of evidence goes up. But there is a response to this which sort of says, you know, I don't know, like should we not just say that if there is evidence for something to be the case, then there's evidence for it to be the case.

And if that evidence leads us to something kind of like wacky or extraordinary, you know, so be it. It's the same, you know, amount of evidence that convince us of some other claim, so why should we have to change? Do you think that the strength of a piece of evidence, in other words, actually, like, varies with the, like, weirdness of the claim? After all, the weirdness of the thing that we're trying to prove here is kind of a product of us and our credulity. It's not like a, if it's just true that miracles occur in the universe, then that's just a fact, like any other fact, The only thing that makes it extraordinary is that we as people are a bit more incredulous to that kind of thing. But that doesn't change that it's just a fact in the universe that has evidence in favor of it.

See what I'm saying? I do. Sometimes though you do need more or stronger or better evidence to believe these seemingly extraordinary claims compared to seemingly ordinary ones, right? So like, you know, my mom might testify to me that she got her nails done or something like that. She's just making one claim. This is one person claiming something. But like that seems totally sufficient evidence for me to believe that, you know, my mom got her nails done today or whatever. But like if my mom also testified that, you know, she was at Walmart and she saw the packer of the groceries just start like levitating and flying all around Walmart, I don't think I should just immediately trust her. I'd be like, okay, did you have some kind of like psychedelics before going to Walmart? or something or did you misperceit? Were there like invisible strings or ropes or something like that?

Like I would be much more hesitant at that case. So I don't know. And notice that this is just like the same kind of evidence. It's just testimony from one person. We can specify the cases in such a way that like the person seems equally honest in both cases is equally trustworthy and so on. So like I think most charitably, this is just like an instance

of Bayes theorem, right? So like base theorem for the audience. I mean, it's just a mathematical equation that tells you how confident you should be in a hypothesis in light of certain information or evidence. So, like, I would understand most charitably extraordinary claims as claims with just like a super low prior probability, as you were saying. So that just means like prior to looking at the evidence and maybe in light of our background knowledge, the claims seem really unlikely to be true. And then extraordinary evidence, I guess charitably interpreted would just be, you know, evidence that's powerful enough, that's strong enough to overcome a very low prior probability to, to,

to make the claims reasonable to believe. So if we understand things that way, then extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. But it is a slightly attenuated sense of extraordinary. Like we're sort of just reducing this to probabilities. Yeah, I think it's also, it's just a good rhetorical tool, right? And I think it does make sense. You get what the person who's saying this is getting at. Christopher Hitchens said on a few occasions, you know, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but religion rather daringly fails to provide even ordinary evidence in favor of its extraordinary claims, which I think is a good segue into our second and perhaps more interesting claim, which is this, there is no evidence for God. I'm not taking these in order,

by the way. I've got your Google Doc, but I'm moving them around as I see fit. There is no evidence for God. As Hitchin says, you know, religion provides nothing. People say this all the time. Like, When you ask people online, like, why are you an atheist? What's your evidence for atheism? They say it's not really like that. It's more that there's no evidence for the thing that you're claiming. Do you think that's true? No.

So, like, what is evidence? Evidence, at least as lots of philosophers understand it, is some piece of information that raises the probability of a hypothesis. If your hypothesis gets a boost in light of certain information, then that information is evidence for the hypothesis. Can I ask a question about that definition? Because that's really helpful, right? We need to define what counts as evidence. That seems reasonable. Like, okay, you said something like, say it again, the definition of evidence? Yeah, so in slogan form, which is fitting, evidence is probability raising. So it's just evidence is information that raises the probability of hypothesis.

Okay, so, but I wonder like, is there a counter example to this that would seem a little sort of weird? Like, I mean, if I said, you know, I've got this hypothesis that there have been alien abductions. And if there had been alien abductions, then I don't know, maybe there would be some geopolitical influence, like the government would start focusing on that and things would start going badly elsewhere. And look, like, you know, the government is shutting down or whatever. And therefore, I've got this evidence of alien abductions. In theory, you know, that that evidence is kind of predicted on my hypothesis and that evidence is, you know, forthcoming, but it would seem a little bit too loose to say that that counts as evidence for alien abductions. Why not? I mean, it's just weak evidence, right? And it's evidence that's significantly overcome by countervailing evidence, right?

So I don't know. I don't really feel the intuitive poll of saying that that's no evidence whatsoever, because after all, I mean, the hypothesis is boosted by it. I mean, listen, there are philosophical challenges to this. I recognize that. But I would just want to diffuse those intuitions by saying, I'm not saying it's conclusive evidence. I'm not saying it's evidence sufficient to believe the claim in question or the hypothesis in question. I'm only saying that it is at least some potentially weak evidence in favor of the hypothesis. It's at least some reason to think that the hypothesis is true. Maybe it's an overwhelmingly weak reason. Maybe it only boosts the probability of the hypothesis from one in a trillion to one in a billion.

But I take that to be just some evidence. Because otherwise, you know, the hypothesis was super duper unlikely. And you just made it much more likely. You gave us some more reason to think that it's true than we previously had. I think when we start saying things like, okay, technically this is evidence, it's just really, really, really weak evidence, right? This is kind of a line of defense, actually. If someone says there's no evidence for God, it's like, no, no, no, there is evidence.

It's just not very good. But surely there comes a point when the evidence is like so bad that basically, again, like, rhetorically, you can just say there's no evidence. Because if you pressed somebody in a TikTok comment section who said, there's no evidence for God, and you said, really, there's not like one fact about the world which even like marginally increases your creed, they might go, yeah, okay, but you know what I mean. What I mean is that like, there isn't anything out there which should compel any reasonable person to like significantly increase their, you know, credence in the idea that God exists. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fair? Okay, listen, I think

That's a fair rendering of what many people have in mind. I mean, I suspect you underestimate the depravity of TikTok comment sections. But, like, I really have come across people who are like, no, no, no evidence. And, you know, it's like that video, no, no, they just keep on screaming. No, no, no, I don't want to see it anywhere. So I think some people really are like that. In fact, many people. But the more reasonable people will grant that the, okay, maybe there's like, you know,

slight evidence or weak evidence, but like, yeah, like no sufficient evidence or no evidence to compel a belief or something like that. Of course, you know, theists will disagree with this. And I think that there's like non-trivial evidence. There's like substantive evidence to make theism a live possibility to people. I certainly don't claim that, oh, goodness, wow, where to start. Well, I mean, we could talk about, you know, fine-tuning. We could talk about contingency arguments. we could talk about arguments from consciousness. It just turns out that there's... So you're talking about the typical sort of arguments for God's existence.

Right. You know, count as evidence. And I think it's helpful to point out to people that in saying that, you know, fine-tuning is evidence for God. The instant response from an atheist, I think, reasonably, is to say, no, no, no, like, you know, there are lots of other explanations with this. There could be a multiverse. There could be some necessary reason for the... It's like, yeah, that's true. But to say that this is evidence for God is not to say that this establishes the definite

existence of God. It's just to say that, you know, it gives us reason to increase, your definition of evidence is sort of gives us reason to increase our credence in a hypothesis. But having said that with something like fine-tuning, when we've got like a bit of a stalemate, you know, all of the constants of the universe, the strength of gravity and stuff, they're so finely balanced that it can't be down to chance. Well, one solution is that God did it. One solution is that there's a multiverse, and that means that because there are infinitely many universes, some of them are going to be finely tuned, and we're in one of those. And because you've got a stalemate here, unless you do have some conclusive evidence to show why one is better than the other,

can we really count the, like, fine tuning as evidence of either of these hypotheses if it can also be evidence for both of them? There's so many places I want to go here. This is amazing. Okay, So one thing to say is that some piece of information really can be, you know, like good evidence for multiple and compatible hypotheses. So like suppose we have a fair deck of cards and we have a dealer who we know to be honest and we know the dealer tells the truth. And there are four of us around the table and we each guess the suit of the card that the dealer pulls from the top of the deck and doesn't reveal to us. So I guess that it's a heart. You guess that it's a diamond. And then are two other guests, who are they, you know, Joe Foley and Donald Trump or something?

So Joe says that it's a spade and Donald Trump says that it's a club. Okay. The dealer says, well, I'll tell you this. The suit is red. You know, so it's like it's a red suit. Okay, boom. Instant confirmation of my hypothesis, but also instant confirmation of your hypothesis, which is incompatible with my hypothesis.

My hypothesis went from a 25% chance of being true to now being 50% likely to be true. Likewise, your hypothesis went from 25% chance of being true to 50% chance of being true, and we've essentially completely disconfirmed Donald Trump and Joe Foley's hypotheses. Okay, so boom, some piece of data that we just gained is evidence

and non-trivial evidence from multiple incompatible hypotheses. That's just an example of how that can be the case. So that's one. Because you've actually raised your probability there by 25%. Yeah, you doubled your initial probability. Exactly. And yet that evidence does that for two mutually incompatible views.

So something can be evidence for two views at the same time, even if both of those views are like competing explanations for the phenomena. That's interesting. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, things, you know, similar things happen with like suspects in a crime. Like if you have two suspects and they're like indicators for. why one of them might be the actual suspect, the actual promulgator of the crime,

and there's some indicators that the other one is guilty. You know, that can actually be, I mean, that's going to significantly raise the likelihood that they're guilty compared to just random Joe Schmoe on the internet. So that's one thing to say. A second thing to say is that, you know, the thieves will arguably say that,

no, actually, we don't actually have a tie here, you know? Like, there are various reasons to think that God is much more plausible than a multiverse. Like, even with explaining fine-tuning, it's not actually clear. that the multiverse even raises the probability of our most specific evidence here. Our most specific evidence is that our universe, this very universe, is such that its constants fall within the exceedingly narrow life-permitting range.

But positing a multiverse in which each universe kind of is like a toss of, you know, it's basically like a toss of the die, whether the constants fall within the narrow life-permitting ranges, that doesn't make it any more likely that this universe specifically would be fine-tuned. It just makes it likely that some universe or other would be fine-tuned, but it doesn't predict our specific data here. Now, of course, there are various, you know, this is called this universe objection to the multiverse hypothesis.

There are various philosophical responses to this. I don't want to pretend that this is decisive. My broader point is just that theists do try to wield reasons for thinking that the multiborce hypothesis actually doesn't adequately explain the evidence concerning fine-tuning. And then the third thing and final thing that I wanted to say was that we should also keep in mind that, like, we want to take a holistic approach to the evidence.

So, like, even if, for any particular piece of evidence, you can find some alternative hypothesis, which would explain it, maybe even would explain it slightly better than theism, it may still be the case that Theism offers, like the best, most elegant, most unifying explanation, but broad diversity of data, you know, like fine-tuning, consciousness,

the existence of moral agents, you know, psychophysical harmony, the fact that there's a contingent universe at all, various things like that. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, But first, do you like to keep up with what's going on in the world? Me too. The problem is that in this internet age, it can be difficult to trust the sources of our information. Biased news media in particular is something that will never go away, but by using today's sponsor, Ground News, you can mitigate that bias by objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same story.

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dot news forward slash Alex O.C or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access advantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. I've sometimes said that my favorite argument for the existence of God is the argument for God's existence from the number of arguments for God's existence. Because it's like everywhere you look, you can construct an argument from consciousness, contingency, design, like an argument from beauty, an argument from physics and the reason, language, yeah.

Reason, like, all of that. It is kind of crazy. And I think, yeah, it is rash to dismiss that evidence. But I think a lot of the time when people say there's no evidence, what they mean is there's no compelling evidence that has convinced them that God is a good explanation. But it is worth pointing out, like you say, it should be holistic in the same sense that, like you know, if, I don't know, if, if you were like driving with your wife and you crashed your car and you said, like, I think that like the brakes stopped working and I said, yeah, but you know,

it could, it could also be that your wife is like trying to kill you. You're like, okay, look, in this circumstance, it seems far more likely that the brakes just stopped working. That could be true. But then if like as well as that, you got food poisoning after your wife had cooked you a meal. And again, in that circumstance, it's like, it's way more likely that something went wrong, some of the food was off, then that your wife was trying to kill you. But then, like, later that night, you know, you get locked outside of your house in the freezing cold and nearly freeze to death. And it's sort of like in any individual instance, if it was just the one of them, you would say, this extraordinary hypothesis that your wife is trying to kill you is, is, like,

the worst option. But when you've got all of these different evidences, which at least sort of seem consistent with this more extraordinary, like, idea, when they sort of all get put together, They sort of cumulatively give you better reason to believe that your wife is trying to kill you, or by analogy, that God exists. So, you know, I think we need a sort of better philosophy of evidence and what counts as evidence and how it fits into an overall picture of our views on the universe. But to say that there is no evidence for God, if you mean literally no evidence, like not even bad evidence, I think this is just trivially false. But if what you mean is something like, oh, there's no good evidence, I think maybe. a lot of people just underestimate the strength of this great tradition of natural theology and some of the arguments that it has at its helm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm with you there. I mean,

you know, we see that there are contingent things around us, things that can fail to exist. They don't have to be included within reality. And, you know, everywhere we look, it seems like contingent things, whether individually or collectively have explanations beyond themselves. If you think that there can be contingent things that don't have explanations, it starts to become a mystery why, you know, contingent things don't just exist kind of all willy-nilly, kind of randomly all over the place. We start to get into potential skeptical scenarios and various other things. And, you know, no, it seems like no contingent thing could explain why there are any contingent things at all, because they're kind of just presupposing the very thing in need of explanation. And so it seems

like we might need to appeal to some kind of necessary foundation of reality. Okay, let's look, let's investigate what kind of reality this thing produced. Well, oh my goodness, it has various striking features, striking seemingly massive coincidences that are kind of coordinated to allow for very valuable things to happen like virtue and knowledge and love and relationships and whatnot. You look at the fundamental constants and laws of nature and it turns out that, you know, the basic parameters in the laws of nature have to take on very, very specific values in a very tiny range of the full range of conceivable values that they could have conceivably taken on in order to give rise to anything interesting in the universe.

Oh, my goodness, lo and behold, the constant do indeed fall within those narrow life-briding ranges. You look at the basic laws of nature. strikingly elegant and simple. They actually successfully apply to the contents of the universe when conceivably they could have failed to apply to the contents of the universe and failed to induce temporal evolution from the initial state. That's nomological harmony. That's a recent paper by Brian Cutter and Brad Sodd. And then, you know, the universe of all is in, oh my goodness, we don't have just like zombie creatures who aren't conscious. It's actually consciousness is sprinkled around. There are these conscious beings. That's kind of crazy. And that's like, seems like pretty valuable. And also, you know,

the consciousness is linked up with the physical universe in ways that make rational sense. Our conscious lives are strikingly, orderly, harmonious, and intelligible when conceivably they might have failed to be that. And then low and behold, we have tons of moral knowledge when it seems like if evolution and naturalism are true, if there's no God behind the process, it seems very, very striking and surprising that, you know, our beliefs would be, our basic moral sensibilities and intuitions that beliefs would be like, by and large, truth tracking, because evolution, after all, only cares about survival and reproduction.

It doesn't care about giving us true moral beliefs specifically, and this extends, of course, to other a priori bits of knowledge. You can see what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to actually defend these things. But who created God? Because that's the thing that you're not, that's the thing that you're not taken into consideration that, Joe. That is actually going to be our next claim.

But that's quite extraordinary. I think, like, if I said to you, can you just, as an atheist, speed run, like proving God's existence. I think that's probably the best attempt I've ever heard at such a thing. So congratulations on coming up with that off the cuff. I mean, you did just speed run proving God's existence, which is pretty impressive. And yeah, I mean, like, listen, like to what Joe has just said, everybody, there's a lot in there. And it's interesting and it's powerful.

Now, you might think in any individual case, like, yeah, but that's not going to make me believe in God. Okay, it doesn't have to. But to say that there, to say that if I just took up all of the, all of the, facts about the world which even marginally increased the likelihood that there is some kind of designer. And you said that that just would have zero content, that there would just be nothing, no evidence whatsoever. I think it's probably a result of either confusing what we mean by evidence or just not realizing like how deep some of these arguments go, even if they ultimately fail, which an atheist is, you know, condemned to believe. But

I think having proved the massive evidence, the massive potentially mediocre evidence that's there for God's existence, I do want to move on to that next claim, which is who created God, who designed the designer. It takes up sort of many forms. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion had a chapter called Why God Almost Certainly Doesn't exist. Rare for New Atheists, I think,

is to really make a proactive philosophical case against God's existence. And Dawkins said, well, look, you know, if the universe is really complex and therefore requires some kind of complex designer, because that stuff just doesn't come up out of nowhere, what you're not considering is that the designer themselves would have to be more complex than the complex thing that they've created. You know, it's not like a, it's not like a simple, like chess computer can build a MacBook Pro, you know, but a MacBook Pro could build a chess computer. The complexity of the creator has to be bigger than the thing created. So even if we accept all of these arguments for God's existence,

yeah, contingency first cause, there must be a designer. Who designed the designer, Joe? Wow. You know what? I've just basically convinced me of atheism. I mean, I'm going to, I mean, I literally just, as you were talking, I was ordering my fedora. But anyway, yeah, so who designed the designer. That's, yeah, like, very, very good question. I mean, I do want to say, like, and who created God. Like, I don't want to be little people who, you know, raise these questions. Like, these are good questions. What is the relevant difference between God and non-God things, which explains why non-god things require an explanation, but God doesn't? That's a very good and deep philosophical question. So I don't want to like, and it feels, it feels like special

pleading, right? Like, we're kind of being funny here. And you're right. Like, we've spent, I mean, I've spent like, for what, 10 years with these discussions. And I actually use that as a bit of a joke, like anytime anyone makes any argument related to religion, I just am like, but who created God, you know? Because it's just, it's such a sort of common thing to hear, which sort of throws theists into a frenzy, because they're like, that's not how it works. But it does feel like special pleading. It does feel like someone saying, well, you, Mr. Atheist, you need explanations for contingent objects and you need design, but God, oh, no, no, God, God doesn't need that. God doesn't need a designer. God doesn't need a beginning. God doesn't need a cause. And it does sort of feel like you're just

carving out this space for a thing and having a different standard for your idea than for anybody else's. So like you said, for the theist to use God as an explanation for things like causation and design, but say that God himself is immune from causation and design, you have to show that in principle there is some kind of difference which allows us to do that with God, but not with like the universe or something. And do you think there is such a difference? Yeah, so I mean, it's not like I can pinpoint any particular difference and say that I'm basically like absolutely certain that this particular difference explains why God would be immune from these calls for explanation. But I think that there are just like a sufficiently large range of like reasonably plausible candidates that theist really shouldn't be worried about this sort of question. So that's my like broad take on this.

And I can get into some of those candidates. So like, you know, one thing is that at least traditionally God is conceived of as a necessary being. He exists necessarily. He could not have failed to exist. This is quite different from contingent things, things which really could fail to exist. There's nothing, as it were, about their nature, which demands that they be in reality.

Now, at least to a lot of people, and certainly traditionally, theists have held the following. There does seem to be some kind of relevant difference between contingent things and necessary things in terms of kind of calling out for a deeper explanation. When you think of a contingent thing, its nature is, as it were, indifferent

to whether it falls on the side of existence or non-existence. I'm speaking. What is a contingent thing just for people listening? Yeah. So it's a thing that does not have to exist. It doesn't have to be in reality. So, you know, Alex's dildo that he just purchased. You know, that's a contingent thing.

It didn't have to exist. It didn't need to be in reality. It can be destroyed. It was created at some point. People didn't have to create it. It didn't have to be included within the world. By contrast, consider the claim that one plus one equals two. Well, that's not only true.

That, like, must be true, right? It's not like one plus one could have equaled 17 or something. Like, that's just not even possible. So it's necessarily true. And at least a lot of philosophers and certainly the theists within theistic tradition think that, you know, necessary things like one plus one equals two. It's like, does that really kind of call out for a deeper explanation? It's like, oh, there's such a mystery as to why one plus one equals two, my goodness,

we need to deposit some like exponous. Like, no. It just could not have failed to be the case. there's no deeper demand for there being some kind of explanation for why it's the case. And if God is like that, as opposed to the aforementioned dildo, then it seems like there could be a principal difference between God and the dildo and various other things. Like again, like this water bottle could have been in existence, but also could have failed to exist. So there's like this pressing question. Why does it exist?

What accounts for why it falls on this side of the dichotomy when it genuinely could have been? fallen on that other side of the dichotomy. We also have ample experience with contingent things, and we uniformly see that they have deeper explanations. But, like, we don't have similarly ample experience with necessary things, having or even calling out for deeper explanations. And, in fact, the necessary things that we do tend to have acquaintance with, as I was just mentioning, like, laws of logic and math and whatnot,

like, actually, there's a much less of a call to give some kind of, like, deeper account for why they are the case. So that's just one, that's one candidate relevant difference between God and other things. There are lots of, yeah, so a, so a theist might say, look, my argument is not, you know, stuff exists and stuff always needs a cause or an explanation. And then the atheist can say, but what about God? Like, God is a kind of stuff. Then you're saying he doesn't need an explanation? No, because the theist is being more specific. They're saying contingent things require an explanation. Like, you need, because it could have failed to exist, because that water bottle could have

existed or not existed, the fact that it does, there must be a reason why it does and said it doesn't. Whereas if you construct an argument which proves the existence of a necessary thing, then if you were to ask, well, why does it exist? It's like, what do you mean why? Like, that's just, that's what it means to be necessary, is that it just does exist. Existence is a part of its very essence. You know, you can't separate those to your.

concepts. And that's a bit like asking, why is one plus one, two? Which you can literally ask, and it might be a kind of interesting question, but the only real answer you can get for that is that it's kind of just self-evident. It's just true by definition, you know? And so if a the atheist sort of treats God that way, then, yeah, to ask, well, what caused God is just a category error. However, the next move for the atheist would then be to grant that and say, okay, fine, so God is just a necessary thing that doesn't require a cause. But why can't I just say that there's a necessary thing. Maybe the laws of physics are necessary. Maybe the existence of the universe is just necessary. Yeah, we've got the Big Bang, but maybe the Big Bang was just,

you know, the end of one universe and the start of another. So like, okay, there are some things that don't need a cause, but, you know, why is that, why has that got to be God? Good. Well, that's a very big question. And I mean, so like, I could try to put on, you know, my Theist hat and respond. I mean, I think this is a, a very reasonable rejoinder. That's one thing to say. But, I mean, theists will probably say, like,

listen, not all things are equally good candidates to be, like, the necessary foundation of reality. I mean, you know, like, do we seriously think that, like, for instance, like a Disney princess might be, like,

the fundamental, necessarily existent explanation for everything else? I don't know. That seems kind of implausible. It seems way too kind of, I don't know, arbitrarily limited in various ways,

it could conceivably have been totally different. It has various features that really do seem to cry out for explanation. Like, why is it hand only this shape instead of like a slightly larger shape or a slightly smaller shape? Why is it this size? Why is it only like eight inches tall instead of like 8.1 or 7.9 or something like that? Like there are various features of this thing, which really do kind of seem contingent and seem to call out for deeper explanation. We can conceive of them being radically otherwise. And like, theists will typically say that,

God isn't like that. God does not have various arbitrary limits on his power. It's not like he can do everything except for create like, you know, blueberry pancakes or something. Like, no. God just has unlimited power, a very simply, compactly specifiable property for a being to have.

God is unlimited in perfection. He's unlimited in knowledge. He's unlimited in value. And so God doesn't seem to have all these various, like, very highly precise, seemingly coincidental, arbitrarily limited properties or features

that cry out for deeper explanation. And so it seems like God may be relevantly different from, let's say, the initial state of the universe or like laws of physics or whatever in terms of being a reasonable candidate for the necessary foundation of reality. And again, think of the other things we know to be necessary.

They are almost uniformly, distinctly non-arbitrary. There's nothing like arbitrary or seemingly coincidental or conceivably otherwise about one plus one being two or like you know it is not the case that p and not p as a logical law you know like etc so uh we might think that like god seems to maybe more naturally fit on that side compared to a disney princess or the highly specific and seemingly arbitrary arrangement of the initial conditions and whatnot yeah um and also we we shouldn't allow this uh conversation

to devolve into a conversation about the arguments and the evidence because we'll be here forever But I think it's just worth pointing out that there are reasons to say that there are things in the universe which can be immune from rules which apply to other things in the universe or outside of the universe. Things like causation, design, explanation, all of that kind of stuff. But I mean, I suppose we should give maybe a short hearing to Dawkins' point about complexity in particular. Like it does seem that, you know, complex things beget complex things. And so are we just imagining that we've got a sort of really complex god whose sort of attributes and stuff are just like necessarily that way? Because again, it's sort of once you start imagining a complex god who like has complex ideas and plans and wants to send his son to save people from a foreseen human tragedy, it starts to get a bit sort of complex. And it like you just said, like, you know, could something like a Disney princess or whatever like be.

like necessary, it seems a bit too arbitrary. People could say the same thing about a complex God with a complex plan. Ah, perhaps they could. And perhaps that just means we should accept that God is not complex. God is quite simple. You know, maybe, so, you know, there's this huge tradition within philosophy, like the classical theistic tradition, which conceives of God as, yeah, a very, you know, perfectly simple being. He's not built up out of more fundamental components which make him, it's not like he's got a brain or anything like that. It's not like he's got these like discrete ideas. He has to like,

first he has to represent in his mind and then like deliberate how to create and then create in accordance with like the super complicated plan that he came up with his mind. Like no, God is just a simple, pure,

perfect, infinite, unlimited consciousness. Right? He's just like this unlimited foundational mind with no deeper parts. No, it's not like there are complex interconnecting related things within God's mind.

Like, no, he just very simply, um, wills the good for the good's sake, and he's perfectly sensitive to reasons, and it's not like he has to represent very complex things in his mind before doing them. No, he just kind of exerts a direct,

intentional control over his effects without those kind of intermediaries that very finite and limited creatures like us have to make do with. So, I don't know, it kind of neglects this long-standing classical theistic tradition on which God is just, like, pure perfection. You know, he's just this unlimited, simple being

Yeah, I think there's some sense in that. I mean, the divine simplicity thing is a bit sort of weird to wrap your head around, but it's at least worth pointing out that a lot of theists just believe in a God who is not complex, who's actually the opposite of complex. Because for something to be complex, it kind of implies that it's got like lots of parts that all kind of work together in various ways. But for something to have like parts, seems to imply that it kind of has limits, like limitations. on its parts. And if God is this like unlimited pure act, you know, being, you wouldn't expect him to

sort of be gerrymandered in that kind of way. But given that there are so many different, you know, ideas of what God is like, you know, some people think God is simple, some people think God is complex, some people think that God sent his son to die on a cross, some people think that God's final messenger was a man called Muhammad. Some people believe that God has many manifestations in different sort of, you know, pantheistic deities. The atheist, surely, just looks at all of these gods and says to the Christian, you know, you don't believe in the Muslim God, you don't believe in Thor, you don't believe in any of these other gods. All I do is go one God further. You already know would it's like to be an atheist in respect to 2,99 gods? I just go one more. So there, what do you

think of that? Now streaming on Paramount Plus, it began on the shores of New Jersey. The calls of gym, tan, laundry, reverberated north to Canada where a new type of party animal resides. They move as a herd migrating to their favorite watering holes, asserting dominance by flexing, grinding, and twerking. Coupling is quick, steamy, and sometimes in hot tubs. When morning arrives, they do it all over again. Canada Shore, new original series, now streaming on Paramount Plus. Welcome aboard Via Rail. Please sit and enjoy.

Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that, and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. Brilliant. I mean... That's unexplain, by the way.

It's the Ricky Jaze bit, you know. Yeah. Well, yeah, the... one less God thing. Yeah, this is... So again, I want to emphasize that there's something good and valuable about this slogan.

I don't want us to lose that, right? You know, it's an appeal to consistency, maybe, or like a non-arbitrariness. Like, you shouldn't be carving out arbitrary exceptions for your own views. You know, and it's just in general, an injunction against special pleading.

Right. And that's good. That's a good kind of injunction. But in terms of, like, an argument for atheism or scoring dialectical points, at least against sophisticated theists, I think it'll fall flat. I mean, it may work if all gods had an equal likelihood of existence

so that if some gods, like, very likely don't exist, like Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster or the Disney princess god, then, you know, neither would the monotheistic god of traditional Abrahamic religions, because all gods are equally likely. And so those gods are super duper unlikely, so is the traditional god of Abrahamic religion.

But of course, the traditional theist is going, to say that not all gods are equally likely. Right? We have good grounds, at least according to the traditional theist, to say that there's a single, perfect, necessarily existing unlimited being at the foundation of reality, seems to be much more kind of intrinsically plausible

than these other candidates for the various reasons that we'd be going over. You know, it's not like arbitrarily limited. We have reasons to think that there's some kind of necessary foundation to reality. It's a relatively elegant hypothesis that could be quite compactly described in terms of these very uniform properties like omnipotence, all power, all knowledge, all goodness, and whatnot. It's not carving out any arbitrary exceptions. And moreover, they'll say that in addition to being quite intrinsically plausible and much more

plausible than these other candidates like Zeus or Thor or the flying spaghetti monster, we do indeed have lots of evidence for the existence of such a traditional monotheistic god from in like fine-tuning and consciousness and various other features of reality. and maybe even they'll sprinkle in some miracles for their favorite theistic tradition. But that's, you know, an optional add-on for the connozures. Yes. Well, I want to say one thing in defense of this claim, which is that I think it often comes up in a context where people are like, I know, somebody kind of says, like, how could you be an atheist? Like, psychologically almost.

Like, what is that even like? Like, how can you go around not, like, thinking that this is all, has a lot. creator. And in a way, it's a way of trying to get across like, the very least, you kind of know what it's like to be unconvinced of a certain proposition, right? Like, you know what it's like to be unconvinced that it's raining outside right now, right? And just sort of take that feeling of not being convinced by the evidence. Like, why are you not convinced? Why is sort of one sound you hear outside that could potentially be rained? Why is that not enough to convince you it is raining? I don't know. It's just kind of not in a way that I can't describe.

and the atheist kind of wants to say that's kind of how I feel about arguments to the existence of God. And I think that's fair enough, you know, that this is just what it's like. However, as like an argument, as like a sort of, you know, there are all of these gods, right? And like, what is it, Christopher Hitchens used to say? Like, it's, since they can't all be true, you know, it's far more likely that none of them are true than one of them is, or just something, just nonsense. It was just ridiculous. But he said it was such a charm. as he always did. I think this fails for like so many reasons. Firstly, when we talk about

like these thousands of gods, right, and then we're including things like Thor or Athena, not to mention the fact that like the Greek gods and the Roman gods are like the same gods, right? So if you're double counting, you know, these gods, that shouldn't be allowed, you know. But also, you know, if you've got like Jupiter and you've got Zeus, it's like, no, same, same god, just, you know, different, different words for the same being. But also, like, these are not the same kind of thing as, like, the unlimited foundational creator of the universe. David Bentley Hart writes quite compellingly about this in the experience of God. Like, when people are talking about gods with like a small G, they are not talking about the same thing as the conclusion of the contingency argument, right?

Because imagine that you are like living in ancient Greece and you believed in, like, all of the pantheon of gods, except a theme. You're like, no, I don't believe, I don't believe in Athena. You know, that's the only one I don't believe in. That wouldn't be, like, significant. That wouldn't, like, change the ontology of, like, how the universe exists, or, like, it wouldn't remove or, like, add any mystery as to why the universe exists as a whole, any of that. It would kind of be a little bit irrelevant because Athena is a different kind of being to the unlimited creator of the universe, right?

So, really, when we're talking about God with a capital G, the only other gods, which should be comparable here, are those that take up a similar position. And I'm not even just talking about, like, Zeus, who is, like, the top of the pantheon of gods. I mean the thing that gives existence to all of those things. So in the same way, like, in Hinduism, you've got all of these different gods, right, with all these different arms and, like, elephant heads and stuff, except there's only one, like, creative principle behind the universe, which is Brahman, right? And all of these sort of gods, small G gods, are like manifestations of Brahman. But any Hindu will tell you that essentially they are monotheistic. They believe in one unified, like limitless, indescribable, animating principle of the universe, and it's called Brahman. So once again, you've like limited your scope.

There are not thousands and thousands of gods in the way that we need there to be. There's actually only a few. And then you've got to contend with the fact that all of these different gods, so to speak, like the Muslim god and the Hindu Brahman and the Christian, you know, Yahweh, like, are these actually different gods or are they just like different interpretations of the same thing? Like they're all saying there are some kind of like limitless animating principle behind the universe. And the Christians say, yeah, and I think that that thing is a Trinity. And the Muslims say, and I think that thing is like Tarweed. It's like, you know, unified. And, you know, the Hindus might be like, oh, and I think that thing is, is difficult to put into words, but manifests in this way or that way, you know. But maybe they are kind of talking about the same thing. And obviously, I'm not doing the whole, all religions are the same thing. But the thing that's different about them is in their doctrine, their response to this sort of divine, you know, creator of the universe. And so really, there's kind of only one God that you can either believe in or not. And that's the God who is the, you know, uncreated creator of the universe.

It's like you either believe in that or you don't. It doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter if you think it manifests as, you know, Vishnu or whatever. Like, it's basically on or off. It's a binary, right? And even if that weren't the case, this turned into a bit of a rant, even if it really were the case that there were like thousands of different gods to choose from and you only go one God further, there is a big difference between like believing in 10 versus 11 gods

and believing in one versus zero gods, right? Because if there does need to be some explanation for the universe, you might say, oh, well, there must be a god at least. They could be 10, they could be 15, they could be 100, I don't know, but there has to be something, right? To say that there's zero is not just like another trivial, oh, minus one, minus one. Once you get to one and you then do minus one again, you've actually just like deleted an entire like realm of explanation.

So I would compare this to imagine that like I was sat around with my three brothers, right? And we had, our mother had us via a sperm donor and we didn't know who our dad was, right? And I said, you know, I think our dad is American. And, you know, my brother said, well, I think our dad is from Australia. And the third guy goes, I think he's from France. And then the fourth guy goes, guys, you know what? like, I don't think we had a dad. And you're like, what?

Like, hold on. What are you talking? Of course we have a dad. We need to create it. Like, we wouldn't exist with that. And he goes, oh, guys, guys, guys. Like, you know, you don't believe in the Australian dad. You don't believe in the French dad.

I just go one dad further. You'd kind of look at him like he'd lost his mind. And I think that when this argument is used in that kind of argumentative form, that is unfortunately the amount of force that it has. Like, there is a God or there is not. however it sort of manifests is not like the invention of a bunch of new creative principles of the universe. It's just different interpretations of the same thing. Do you agree? Yeah, I mean, I'm over here like, oh, sweet. I'm like, you know, I'm having a religious

experience over here. I also think it's funny that you were able to, you know, unintentionally tie in the like atheists have daddy issues trope into your example, which I quite appreciated. But anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So I think. we can put that one to bed. I mean, people might disagree with us. This is, of course, an invitation for people to comment if you disagree with us because it will hurt our feelings, but it's good for the algorithm. So do let us know if you think we're missing something, but I just think that, again, the annoying thing about these slogans is that they are like good rhetorical points. And they often get like an applause because it kind of sounds sensible. And again, if you're just being like psychologically,

you know what it's like to not believe in, you know, the truth of the Quran. That's how I feel about the Bible. Yeah, that's fair enough. That's totally fair if you're just trying to explain why you're not convinced of a particular tradition. But to say that you have good reason to think that there is this like fundamental, like metaphysical, ontological question, is the universe created? Can be answered in the same way? I think is a mistake. Anyway, it's difficult to even know, like, where to take this. All right, let's go. Let's get a bit more cultural. here's a claim. I can't remember who was the originator.

It might have been someone like Richard Dawkins. Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. Discuss. Yeah. Yeah, this is, ah, man, I should have had the neck beard with this one. This is a good one. I don't know.

So it's like, yeah, science also creates the atomic bomb, right? And also flying you into buildings, I don't know, that seems to just be like a perversion of, religion. I don't really have much to say about this. Like, well, what is exactly, is this supposed to be, like, a rhetorical point? Like, science is better than religion. I guess it just depends on how you, like, use science. Science is a collection of tools to investigate the natural world. Religion is maybe a collection of spiritual tools to investigate the spiritual world or something like that. You can misuse the tools in either case. You can misuse the tools of science by creating an atomic bomb and

then politically weaponizing it and then dropping it on tons of innocent civilians and whatnot. And you can also misuse the tools of religion. You can try to interpret verses that aren't supposed to be interpreted. It's a certain way to dehumanize others to justify racism, sexism, violence, terrorism, and whatnot. But, you know, sophisticated adherence of the relevant religions will just tell you that these are perversions of the relevant religions. And for the religions, for which it's not the case, that these are perversions, then I would just say so much the worse for those particular religions. But I think, again, the more sophisticated versions of the religions don't have these like nasty consequences. But that's just my root take.

I think the issue is, right, so obviously this is a sort of religion is bad thing. And there's this conflict thesis between science and religion that they're somehow in conflict with each other. And I think that that is often the case. There are particular religious claims or doctrinal affairs which run in the face of scientific understandings that we have of the world. but it kind of led to this, I think at the height of new atheism, it had this, like, we're on team science, you're on team religion. And the point is like, science is great. Science does all this cool stuff for us and it takes us to the moon, but religion is evil. And the difference is, like, yeah, people want to point out. But yeah, like, science also gives you the atomic bomb. Sure. But the scientific method doesn't, like, tell you to drop it on people, right?

science is like a key that opens the door to heaven and hell, as I think Richard Feynman had talked about and his, he like learned it from a Buddhist or something, I'm not sure. You know, it's just a tool. And you can use it to sort of do whatever you want. The thing that you need, because reason is the slave of the passions, of course, you need some kind of motivating principle on how to use it. And the point is that for a religious believer who, you know, flies into a building, like, they had to, quite strongly believe that there was going to be an afterlife, that there was an overarching reason to be doing this, otherwise they wouldn't have done. That's not something science can get people to do. You need this belief in the ultimate correctness and the divine authority of your behaviors in order to commit such incredible acts. And that's something that if you're just a scientist who doesn't believe in religion, you know, you're not going to be beholden to that. I know you're doing your hardest, you're doing your darnedest, but you said some false claims there. So I got to step in and save the day, I suppose. Yeah. Well, you don't need religion to, you know, get people to do these heinous things, right? And you don't need to have some kind of like divine purpose and whatnot. Like, you'll find non-religious terrorists. You know, various sociopolitical explanations can be offered for the resortment to terrorism, right? There's nothing, I just think there's like nothing really unique to.

religion here. Yes, religion does have this potential to galvanize people to violence, or at least to provide a post hoc rationalization for violence. But the same happens with politics, political ideologies, right? You know, the Nazis. Nazis, you know, they did some very, very, very, very, very terrible things. And a lot of it was like motivated just by like this political ideology and like this deep tribalism and this festering hatred for other human beings. being spurred by, you know, propaganda and various dehumanization tactics and whatnot. And sure, you know, like, you'll find some religious stuff making its way in there. But, like, a lot of this really is just, like, about, you know, expansionism, where the superior race.

Like, at bottom, it's just, like, racism and hatred and whatnot. And, like, political power. You know, politicians, politicians do lots of really bad things. So politics can get people doing bad things. you don't need religion. It happens with corporations and business owners. Money will get you to do these sorts of really, really, really bad things.

You don't need to feel like you have some kind of like divine institutional purpose or whatever. And hey, even, hold on, even the institutional pressures of science, like publisher perish, right? Like the pressure to get tenure, securing grants and whatnot, can get people to do really bad things,

like fabricate data, plagiarize, mystery, abuse subjects of experiments and whatnot. It also, I think it depends on what you mean by science, right? because like when we say science, I think what somebody wants to mean is like, oh, science is just how we understand truths about the world. And yeah, that sounds great, whereas religion is this set of doctrines that you have to follow that flies you into buildings. Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty bad. But like, you could just as easily say that, like, people use, like during the pandemic, people say follow the science. Or, you know, on debates about gender, people say that someone's not being biologically accurate or whatever.

like science, like the science and science is like a process becomes a prescriptive thing. It's not just, hey, we're trying to understand truths about the world. It's like science is telling us what we should do, right? And I think that happens more often than people in this context give it credit for. And you could say, oh, yeah, okay, but that that's just when people are like misusing science. Or really the core of science is just understanding what's true. And yeah, if people want to then come up with, if political parties want to, to then you yeah okay but then I could say yeah but religion is just a it's just an approach it's just

the soul's response to the divine in the universe right and and then if individual religious groups want to come up with doctrines that allow them to go around you know killing people then fine but they're they're just you know you could do that for both um yeah i think that that science like we had this idea that in the manhattan project when people were like building the atomic bomb as quickly as they could. They were just doing that because they just wanted to like figure out the truth about how atoms were. They just wanted to understand and marvel at the beauty of, like, no, like we know why they

were doing that, right? Like, it's quite clear that in that case, this like scientific method is like created and justified and motivated and enacted upon with a particular intention, which is the development of a bomb, which governments aren't doing that for the first. fun of it. They're doing it so that they can use them at least as a deterrent, right? And, you know, religion is kind of doing the same thing. It's telling you to do a particular thing, but I think it's fair enough to just say that the, especially, like, if it was something like, you know, like molecular, like chemistry helps us develop medicine, whereas Wahhabism, like, as a doctrine,

sometimes flies people into buildings or something like that, right? Maybe. But then it becomes a lot less catchy. If you want to generalize religion to be bad, then I think you have to generalize science in the same way and you run into all kinds of problems. I've often said that saying religion, like, as a thing in its entirety, is bad, is like saying politics is bad.

Like, yeah, you can say that. And that makes sense. Yeah, politics sucks, man. Politics causes wars. Politics drives families apart. Like, can you name me one war that wasn't caused by politics? No, you can't. And yet, if you were to then say, therefore, I think there is no correct political position. And I think we should all just be apolitical. That doesn't like follow from that, right? Like, religion as a whole can have caused wars and been really bad and whatnot. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a correct way to interpret like good religion. In the same way, there can be a way to do good politics, even if you can simultaneously say, I hate politics and politics is bad. That's what politicians say, who are trying to, like, run the country in a new, like, way that they see as more, like, empathetic and true and honorable. They will, they will say, like, oh, I hate politics. That's why I'm trying to fix it, you know? And I think religious people do this all the time. They say, I just, I hate what religion has become in the popular understanding. I just want to, like, meditate.

and like spin around in a circle, drinking lots of caffeine until I like experience unity with the divine. I'm not on with this whole suicide bombing thing. Anyway, which is a relatively recent invention as well. I mean like suicide bombing within Islam only really sort of cropped up in the last hundred years or something and it's it's not exactly the most theologically grounded of doctrines within Islam. So, you know, it is unfortunate the the the way that it's so easy and compelling to generalize. But I think we just need to be careful. And it's not to say that you can't, you can say if you want to, like, I don't like Islam. I don't like Christianity. I think these religions preach evil things and it's no wonder that you can

say that. But I think you just have to be more specific. What are you talking about? Are you talking about particular doctrines? Are you talking about the religion as a whole? Are you talking about the holy text? Are you talking about the way that it's been like culturally received? Just be more specific, which is never good for sloganizing, I suppose. This is true. Yeah, I mean, it just looks like, I guess the general trend that I see here is that a lot of this violence is explained by, maybe not religion per se, but putting people in positions of authority over others, right? That just can significantly raise a likelihood that people do very bad things. And also, you know, giving people the power to exploit others. And also being significantly exploited and trampled on by others. All these sorts of things can galvanize. violence and often you know religion will sometimes be used as a pretext or post hoc rationalization and this is not to say that there aren't any you know truly religiously motivated wars or whatnot but i just think when you when you delve into the evidence with a careful eye more often than not

you will at least find that it's these more sociopolitical explanations of violence than religion but you know i i still you know i still want to be able to say like yeah religion is like bad and In various ways, yes. Yes. And it does sometimes fly you into buildings. It does do that. But, you know, as you say, like, it's complicated. It's not as simple as like, you know, like 9-11 happened because, you know, Muslims wanted to kill the infidels. It's just like just no way that that is like the correct interpretation of why 9-11 happened. And there's there's probably a version of 9-11 which happens without, strictly speaking, religious influence. It's hard to know people would be willing to like send. themselves to know after life, sure, so the specificities, but the idea of, like, you know, attacking America as a terrorist, the idea that that was purely, like, religiously motivated in the strict sense, I think is just a mistake. So I want to still be able to say, yeah, religion does sometimes do these things, but I think sometimes is the operative word there. And, like, if you're able to treat religion, even though it's a relatively inert, descriptive term, as this

thing which motivates and is responsible for the things that religious people do, I think you can kind of do the same thing with science. Like, science is also responsible for all kinds of, you know, death and destruction. Really, it's neither of those things. It's at least not in their totality. You kind of need both. Like, religion without science doesn't get you the airplanes to fly into the building, right? And some people say that science without religion doesn't get science off the ground in the first place,

but that's a whole conversation for another time. At any rate, I think we should move on. And I would like to ask you about a claim. which I've used a lot and it is a bit of a slogan that people throw out as well, which is that, again, we're atheists here, right? And we're speaking to the religious person and we say, okay, so you're like a Christian or you're a Muslim or something. But if you'd have been born somewhere else in the world, you'd have a different religious belief. But yeah, you're a Christian because you grew up in like, you know, Kentucky, right?

But if you'd have been born in Iran, chances are you probably probably. would have been a Muslim. And given, you know, like, if God exists, then given that he probably wants to come to know everybody, why would he allow people's like likelihood of being saved to be dictated by where they happen to grow up? So, if you were born somewhere else, you'd have a different religion. Therefore, that gives me reason to distrust the truth of the religion to which you belong. Thoughts. Everyone needs help with something. If investing is your something, We get it. Co-operators' financial representatives are here to help with genuine advice that puts your needs first.

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disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Yeah, so this one is one that I just think conduces to lots of. of really cool and fun philosophizing. So, like, this is one that I just,

I've got, like, a soft spot for this one, because it's like, it really does get people thinking, and it's a really interesting point. And you kind of, I think we all sense that there's, like, something at the core here, which is, like, interesting and right in some kind of important way. Now, it is kind of hard, though,

to find what exactly that is. Okay, so, like, it can't just be that had I been born elsewhere, I would not have believed that P. is some kind of like defeater for P. So it somehow like undermines my justification or grounds for accepting P. I mean, listen, had I been born elsewhere,

I would not have believed that I was born in Indiana. I mean, like, had I been born in Ohio, I would not have believed I was born in Indiana. That doesn't mean I should just like start questioning like whether I was born in Indiana or something. Yeah. Like, okay, that general principle can't be true. Okay, so maybe we have to modify the general principle.

Is it something like, had you been born elsewhere and used the same, like, method for belief formation that you, in fact, used. So, like, deference to religious authority or something like that, then you would have believed something different. Maybe that's, like, the modified principle, and maybe that's supposed to, like, undermine the belief or something like that. Here's the issue, right, as far as I see it, is that, in theory,

this is a version of the genetic fallacy. Right? So the genetic fallacy is a type of informal logic. fallacy, which says that because the means by which you came to believe something were faulty, the thing you believe must be false. So I might want to say, oh, you only believe in Christianity because you were born in Kentucky, right? Like, okay, but somebody could say, yeah, but I only believe that the earth is a globe because I was taught it in school. That's not a very conclusive reason. That's a bad reason. And so does that mean it's false that the earth is a globe? Because

my reason for believing this true claim were a bit sort of faulty or weird. It's like, yeah, well, if you'd have been born 2,000 years ago, or you would have thought that the earth was flat, I don't even think that's true, by the way, as opposed it were. You know, that's not, depends where, I suppose. But like, you know, you could have been born at a certain point in human history where you would have thought the earth is flat, right? And, you know, so if you'd have been born elsewhere, you would think the earth is flat. Therefore, you know, can we really say the earth is a globe if you only believe that because of where you happen to, to have been born. So it seems fallacious to say that because you've got bad reasons to believe

something, that thing must be false. However, I think that when you're talking about God's existence, this doesn't apply. I was going to write a piece on this called the genetic fallacy, fallacy, right? Because people bring this up all the time. And it's like, yeah, okay, so for just things that just happen to be true about the universe, like where you happen to be born or, you know, whether the earth is a globe or whatever. Like, you could be, it's, it's, you could be, it it would be expected on theism or atheism or whatever that there would be some people who just don't know those facts, you know? Like if you were born in like some rural, like Asian town 3,000 years ago, you wouldn't know what the capital of France in 2025 is. And that's just like,

that's not a problem. Like, yeah, that's just, that's just true. However, if my philosophy was that there was a creator of the universe who intentionally created people so that they could enjoy the knowledge that Paris is the capital city of France in 2025. Then given that he created a universe in which many people were born not knowing that, I would think that would be disconfirming evidence for the existence of God. So it's not the fact, it's not just the fact that, oh, if you'd have been born elsewhere, you know, you wouldn't have believed in God, but also that if there was a God who was like a particular god, like a Christian god, and he wanted everyone to be a Christian, then why would he set up the world in such a way that people could be born elsewhere and not have that knowledge?

So in this way, it's a version of divine hiddenness. It's a way of saying, so you wouldn't just say, like, I can't remember how you formalized it a second ago, like, you know, you've got, you only believe P because you were born in the country that you were, therefore P is false. that obviously doesn't work. But what if we say something like, you know, premise one, there is a God. Premise 2. If there is a God, then God would want everyone to become a Christian, you know, change it to Christian God if you like. And then premise three might be something like, if God wants everyone to become a Christian, he would not set up a circumstance in which many people were precluded by, you know, their cultural condition from becoming a Christian. and then the next premise would be something like

some people are born into countries where they believe other religions and when you put all of that together, you get this contradiction, right? Which is that it couldn't be the case that you're only a Christian because you were born in Kentucky if there is a God who designed the universe to make sure that everyone came to know him, right? I think that's actually quite a powerful observation. Yeah, so I agree with that. I think that's a powerful observation.

I want to say a few things here. Some, in defense of that observation, some maybe attacking it a little bit on behalf of the theists. Well, one thing to say is that, I mean, I think the points about a genetic fallout, you know, the points about the genetic fallacy and whatnot are fair, but I think that the best proponents of this style of argument

are not trying to show that, you know, your belief has false. false because like had you been born elsewhere you wouldn't have believed that P instead they're really just trying to like remove your grounds for believing that P to try to like show that you are not justified in accepting that P. And in fact, like facts about the origin or the provenance or the etiology of our beliefs can indeed undermine them in this way, right? So if I pick up a book on Madagascar birds and it's got like seemingly realistic pictures

about Madagascar birds and it's got all these descriptions about their weight and their diet and like where they're located and whatnot and they're like mating procedures and whatnot. You know, and I formed the various beliefs on the basis of this seeming textbook about Madagascar birds. But then if I learned that the origin of this textbook is like a chat GPT hallucination, right? Like this is not explained by or connected up with in any appropriate way, facts about Madagascar birds. So like even if the facts about Madagascar birds had been different, I still would have been reading the book and it still would have said all the same things. And like the facts about what the book says are not explained by facts about Madagascar birds.

Once I learned that information, once I'm apprised that information, I should suspend all my beliefs. I should stop believing everything that I just formed on the basis of the testimony of the book. So facts about the providence of your beliefs can indeed undermine them. And I think that's really what this objection is trying to get at. It's just trying to like undermine the theists or the Christian or the Muslim or the Buddhists or the Hindu's beliefs. So I just wanted briefly say that about your point about, like, genetic fallacy. I mean, one thing to know, as an aside, before I get to what you said, I just find this topic endlessly fascinating. So I want to say some stuff.

Like, this argument would arguably also apply to the atheist, right? Like, had you been born in, like, 17th century France, you would not have been an atheist. Like, I can guarantee you that. Okay, maybe not 17th century, but like 12th century Italy, okay? You would be Catholic. Like, trust me. Yeah, I agree. Well, I am a Catholic, even though I was born.

when I was because there's no way to officially leave the church except for one 26 year period, I think, between the 80s and 2000s. Weird little history of that. Anyway, I get what you're saying. Yeah, because people say this in response. They're like, yeah, but if you were born elsewhere, you wouldn't be an atheist. Yes, which is expected if there's no God, right? If there's no God, then I would expect that what you believed about the world would just be a product of your cultural conditioning.

atheists think that religions are just like localized mythologies essentially. So yeah, if atheism is true, we would expect that people would believe whatever their local society told them to. So the fact that, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim, is totally in accordance with atheism. But if we assume theism, if we assume that there's a God who created the world intentionally wanting everyone to become a Christian, then you would not expect that everyone's beliefs would just be a product of their cultural environment.

So when I say to a Christian, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim. That's a good reason to distrust Christianity. But when the Christian says to me, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be an atheist. That's not a good reason to distrust atheism. There's an asymmetry there, I believe. Oh, yeah. So I think that's right with an asterisk. I'll get to the asterisk in a second.

I was just, I don't know if people who like put out the slogan have this in mind, like this comparative expectation. of like the distribution of religious belief, conditional on theism and conditional on atheism. I suspect that at least a lot of people who proffer this slogan instead have in mind this kind, they're trying to like undermine, they're trying to say that people aren't justified in believing what they're, what they believe just because, you know,

have they been born elsewhere, they wouldn't have believed it. So I suspect that they're not making this evidential argument that you're giving. And I think what I say, what I said earlier is kind of a response to that more undermining defeater approach. to the slogan. And I think this is a good segue then to talk about the kind of more expectation-based argument.

Okay, so like one thing I want to say, I'm sympathetic to this argument. I think this is some evidence for atheism and against theism. But like, I think the evidence, we shouldn't think that it's like overwhelming or like particularly strong because we can at least see some inklings of a reason for why God might permit there to be such doxastic discord concerning the true religion and whatnot. At least, at least if we have a view of religion on which, like, you're not being burdened alive for eternity for getting the wrong beliefs about God. Right. Okay.

So, like, what are some of those reasons? Well, I don't know. There are lots of, like, really great goods that can come about as a result of interreligious dialogue and as a result of trying to help each other come to learn stuff about the divine. So there's a really interesting paper on this very topic by Dustin Kromit. It's in the journal Faith and Philosophy. It's called, like, we are here to help each other, divine hiddenness and something. You'll find it if you search what I just gave you. And, you know, his basic thesis is that, like, there are various great goods that can only be realized if there is, like, some ignorance about what God is like, about God's nature, and about various things religious.

Like, we can be difference makers in each other's lives. Like, we can make the difference to whether or not they come to have a knowledge of God. and whether or not they, you know, come to have true beliefs about religion and whatnot. And so if there's this, like, great good of us being, you know, responsible for another and helping each other come to learn important truths about religion, and also just to, like, increase our empathy and our understanding of differences, you know, like loving people across deep ideological barriers, serving people across deep ideological barriers. there are just various great goods that are only possible if you have this kind of doxastic discord among relevant religious factions. And so we can at least see an inkling of why God might do this, why he might have some reason to do this, and why he might sort of deputize us in various ways to help others come to the

knowledge of God and come to knowledge of religious matters, which will require a lot of people to have mistaken and false beliefs about God and whatnot. Now, again, things get, as always, in philosophy of religion, your views just get, like, monumentally more difficult to defend if you think that, like, you have to have the right, like, state of mind before you die in order to avoid hell. Because, like, there are just, like, so many isolated people who didn't even have the chance of being evangelized, you know, like, isolated.

It just seems, yeah, the idea that it's like, what you believe at the moment you die is what's important. Because, like, you know, like, I know, for example, that if, if, like, judges in court are hungry, they're, like, more likely to send someone to prison, right? Like, the content of your belief can be so sort of volatile and based on such contingent factors that the idea that that moment is, is what matters is so strange. And also, you kind of have to address, like, how specific does the belief have to be? Because we're sort of quite trivial. saying, like, oh, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you know, you'd be a, you'd be a Muslim. But, like, you know, I could be talking to a Catholic friend and say, well, if you were born in a particular place in America, you would probably be a Protestant. I could say to a Protestant, you know, if you were born in the town over, you'd probably be a Lutheran. I could say, you know, if you were born to the family who lives next door, you would have this one, like, really specific disagreement with your current theology. You know, you would think that, I don't know, whatever, insert the most minor

trivia. You would think that, you know, John chapter 21 is a later edition. It was not in the original gospel. And like, you kind of have to, for this to work, you kind of have to define, like, how different the belief has to be for it to be, like, unexpected that God would allow you to believe that falsehood. You know, would God allow you to go wrong on, like, you know, like, are the birth narratives historical? Or was Corinius the governor of Syria at the same time that Herod was King of Judea? Maybe, yeah. But it seems weird that God would allow you to go wrong in not believing the entire Bible, you know, the entire Bible. I think you have to be a bit more specific about what is like the extent of the wrong belief that you would have if you were born elsewhere.

Yeah. And I just think the force of this argument will, it will just depend on one's soteriology or like, you know, one's views about salvation. Because, again, like, if you have a view on which salvation, either everyone's eventually going to be saved, or even if not everyone is eventually going to be saved, salvation is much more closely tied to your actions and how well you loved others and served others in this life, then we can kind of, I don't know, at least to me,

it's not like super unlikely that God might allow this doxastic discord and ignorance to prevail simply because he's deputizing us and there are various great goods that result from deputizing us to, you know, help each other come to knowledge of God and, you know, and whatnot. But if instead you think that there are these dire eternal consequences for getting the beliefs wrong, then this looks hopelessly implausible that, you know, people would just be almost at the whims of whether or not like a missionary reach them. Yeah.

But also it depends on what you mean by belief, right? Because I think the big thing that often gets unspoken in this particular conversation is that when we say, you know, you would be a Christian or you would be a Muslim, we mean nominally. We mean that that's like what you'd be calling yourself. Like if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, you'd be like, yeah, sure, yeah, I'm a Muslim. Yeah, I believe in God. I believe. But like, can we guarantee that the contents of your belief would actually be like theoretically inaccurate? That is to say like, you know, if I go to a, to some random town in America, that's full of like evangelicals and they say, well, we're all Christians. And then I go like

across the road to a bunch of people who are like Buddhists, so they don't believe in God. But when I observe their behaviors, they're like, you know, helping each other out and they're sort of, they're giving arms to the poor and they're treating everyone as their brother. And the Christian evangelicals across the road are being like fiery, political, like, divisive, that kind of stuff. I'd be like, well, like, are you going to be saved because you call yourself a Christian, because you've got that name, or do you get saved by like doing the will of the father? Because if the way you actually get into heaven, which I think is what Jesus taught, is doing the will of the

father, then you've actually got a lot more of that going on with the Buddhists than you do with the evangelicals over here, right? I don't mean in like actually Buddhists and even, I mean in my particular thought experiment, right? And so you could say like, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be more likely to call yourself a Muslim than, to be a Muslim in the sense that you sort of follow the Quran, but, you know, maybe if you actually added up all of the people who, broadly speaking, like, do the will of the father, or actually do the stuff that gets you into heaven, it might actually be, like, fairly balanced across the globe. And there's kind of no way to test for that, really. Yeah. No, I mean, that, yeah, that seems right

to me. And I just, you know, I think I said this before, and I might have even said this in one of our previous tierless videos, but I just think it's kind of beautiful. And I want people to appreciate this more. I want, I want atheists to see that this argument maybe isn't as forceful against certain views of God. And I also want theists to maybe adopt these views because if they don't, then they just face some pretty serious challenges. So I just want to lay out the beauty of this picture, right? So like even consider the non-theist, right?

Like if God exists, it seems quite plausible to me, at least, that non-theists could be in a kind of implicit relationship with God by loving and deeply pursuing, you know, truth and beauty and goodness and justice. Since if God exists, these things are intimately bound up with him or his nature in certain ways. And so, like, arguably, you'd be getting closer to God, even if you don't recognize it, by doing these various actions. And, you know, you mentioned Jesus in the Gospels.

I think it's in Matthew, right, where the people who fed the hungry and clothed the naked said to Jesus, like, Lord, when do we do these things for you? And Jesus replied, well, whatever you did for one of Easley's brothers of mine, you did for me. And, I mean, it's just pretty beautiful when this comes out in C.S. Lewis's, like, some of his last lines in the last battle. I'll just quote this. Actually, I don't recall

if these are the last lines, but there's some beautiful lines. And I pulled this up because I think it's beautiful. And I want theist to consider this. Okay, so a little bit of background. Emmett is this character. Emmett is actually Hebrew for truth, I believe.

I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly, but who cares. And Emmett was serving Tash, the evil character. And there's Aslan, who is, of course, you know, like the Christ figure in the story. So I'll just quote this.

Then, oh, and Tash, kind of at the end of his life, as it were, is in the Eschaton, meeting up with Aslan for the first time. And by the Eskaton, you mean like the sort of the afterlife. Yeah, the end times. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so here's the quote. Then I fell at his feet and thought, surely this is the hour of death. For the lion, who is worthy of all honor, will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. nevertheless, it is better to see the lion and die than to live and not to have seen him.

But the glorious one bent down his golden head and touched my forehead and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, alas, Lord, I'm no son of thine, but the servant of Tash. He answered, child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the glorious one and said, Lord, is it then true, as the ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The lion growled so that the earth shook, but his wrath was not against me, and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take the services which

thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oaths sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man does a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves, and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also, but I said also for the truth constrained me, yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the glorious one, unless thy desire had been for me,

that wouldst not have sought so long and so truly, for all find what they truly seek. Hmm. I know, it's like, this is what, this is what, yes, I propose this picture to you. If you want to avoid this very serious argument against your view that Alex has articulated, I think this is the picture that you need to go in for. It's worth, yeah, go on. It's worth pointing out that we've talked about how there are people who are sort of not nominal Christians who yet have like, you know, served Christ or insert whatever religion. But also like Jesus says the opposite as well.

He says that there are many people who will come to me essentially in the Eschaton and say, you know, Lord, Lord. And he'll say, depart from, depart from me. I never knew you. famous line from the Gospels as if to say, there'll be people who call themselves Christians, but they don't know me. I don't know them, you know, because they, who cares what you call yourself as about what you do? And you got this flip image of people who, like, are like, what, when did I, when did I do something for you? And he's like, oh, you didn't even realize, but you were, you were, by helping these people, you were helping me. And so it does seem to be, like, not a necessary

requirement, and my reading of Christianity, to, like, really know exactly, like, what your like doctrinal commitments are or whatever. I don't think that's what that's what matters. I mean, it seems crazy to me that you would get to the pearly gates and God would sort of check his notes and go like, you know, like, okay, right, so you're a good person. You gave to charity. Yeah, no, you're Christian. You go to church. Oh, you're a Lutheran. Oh, man. So, so, so, never mind, you know, back, back, it's, it's obviously sort of nonsense, I think. Yeah, yeah. No, you get the theology exam and it's like homo uceus or homooyeusias. You're like, oh my gosh.

Like, oh no. And then you take the wrong one and you just immediately start burning into flames. Like this is just... Yeah, you need like 100% on the test. Yeah, but the thing is right. So I've used this argument and I will continue to use it. It's this sort of geographic location thing. But this isn't so much an argument like...

I kind of regret saying that this is strictly speaking an argument against like God's existence. I think it at the very least shows that the... understanding of Christianity or any religion, but I use it against Christianity in particular, that like your doctrinal commitments are the things by which you're saved, are the things that matter, that you need to, it's not just that, you know, no one comes to the father except through Jesus, but no one comes to the father except through knowledge of Jesus and like precise details about exactly how he was incarnated and stuff. I just don't think that's the message. And so

this argument still works and if someone's willing to turn around and say you know what, fair enough Alex, like that is a bit weird so I guess like what you're saved by is not like being a nominal Christian or believing this or believing that but just sort of being a good dude

and living in accordance with the will of the father then I would probably have to say okay, fair enough then this problem at least shrivels by comparison to what it was but I think there's still some truth in there it still does seem a bit weird but it goes away if you have a

a non-doctrinal approach. Or also if you're some kind of theist who, maybe you're just like a pantheist, where you kind of believe that the universe is made out of consciousness or something. And it's like, yeah, you call yourself a theist, but it's not like, you don't believe in like a God who's going to send you to heaven or hell and wants you to do particular thing. There's just kind of a creative, you know, essence behind everything. Maybe then you just sort of stumble into whatever you stumble into. There are ways out for the theists, but I want to say that it still remains to me like a powerful sort of question mark. I'm like, really? Like, really, there's a God who exists and yet like allows entire nations to just, you know, become beholden to demonic pagan entities? I don't know, man.

It just seems weird to me. It seems unexpected, shall we say, in a Bayesian sense. Yeah, I think we've exhausted what we both want to say on this. Okay, so let's move on. I want to talk about evolution and evolution disproving God because we said that there were going to be some new theologies to explore. But before we do that, because that might be a bit lengthy, let's quickfire some of that. By the way, these are kind of arbitrary. I don't know if you just like came up with these, like from some thought.

I don't know if you asked chat, GPT or whatever, but whatever the case, we've probably like missed a few important slogans. But there are a couple left which I think deserve a mention. Okay. So relatively quickfire, right. Claims are not evidence. What does that mean? Where does it come from? Why is it on this list?

What does it mean? That's a good question. It's slightly unclear what it means. I think it comes from Matt Dillahunty. Matt Dillahunty, right? I think so. I think that's like his biggest motto, like claims aren't evidence.

And then, you know, he like hangs up on the call or something. Yeah. You know, that's a nice way to end, your calls. Yeah. So I think maybe a claim that approximates what people are trying to express with this slogan is the following. The mere fact that somebody claims that P does not provide evidence for P's truth. I think that's what they're getting at. Am I wrong? And this comes up in the context of the resurrection, right? Because Matt will be

debating a Christian and they'll say, look, there are all of these people who claim to see Jesus after he died. And Matt will say claims are not evidence. I need evidence that Jesus wrote from the dead. Yeah. So in my view, this is just clearly false. I mean, like, very often the fact that someone claims that P is evidence for the truth of P. This is just called testimonial evidence, namely, you know, evidence you get for the truth of a proposition from the fact that someone testified to its truth. That is that they told you that it's true. So, for instance, you know, my friend claimed that he bought a new soccer ball, this provides pretty strong evidence that he did, in fact, by a soccer ball. It doesn't prove it.

He could be lying, right? Or he could have, like, misperceived a soccer ball, and he thought that, You know, you thought that it was a soccer ball, but it was actually like a cleverly disguised basketball or something. But still, it provides strong evidence that he did, in fact, buy a soccer ball. Or, you know, again, return to Alex's new dildo, you know. He testifies that he bought a new one to add to his mounting collection. And that's, I don't know, that's a pretty good evidence that he did, in fact, buy such a thing, right? And like, listen, science, science crucially hinges on testimonial evidence. If you throw testimonial evidence out the window, we are all screwed.

right? Like science relies on saying like, hey, listen, I performed this experiment. Like, here is the picture of the experimental results. I didn't fabricate this, right? I'm testifying to you. I'm claiming that this is a real picture that I took of my stuff. You know, I'm testifying to you that I have 67 participants in my study and that I measured these things, right? Science is a big game of testimony. And, you know, of course, there are ways to like try to independently corroborate that by having other people, produce studies, but again, that's just adding more testimonial evidence to our body, big body of testimonial evidence. Of course, very like systematically and carefully curated testimony and whatnot. I'm not saying that there are no differences between this and the resurrection. But like, at bottom, this is ultimately just testimony. It's just people saying things, right? It's just claims. They're just claiming that they did these things. And we have to have a kind of basic trust in testimony in order to get any of this inquiry up and running. So listen, testimony is evidence. Testimony is claims. Claims are evidence.

deal with it. Testimony is claims. Yeah, deal with it, Matt. I think the problem here is it seems to be kind of making a category claim. It's like, look, yeah, they made a claim, but they didn't sort of make evidence. Like, you might want to say, I don't think that for the resurrection, the claims of the disciples are strong enough evidence, right? But like we discussed earlier, they might still be bad evidence. But, like, they're evidence.

Like, it might be bad evidence, but it's still evidence. And also, it's this idea, it's like a category thing. It's not just, well, in this instance, I don't think these claims count as evidence. It's like claims are not evidence. When, like you say, sometimes, at least, like, yeah, they are. They might be bad evidence. They might not be enough evidence, but they're evidence, you know? So that's that.

We can wipe our hands of that particular slogan. So next, because we're going to try and take this relatively quickly, oh, you can't prove a negative. Right. So like, because the the atheist will say, will say, oh, can you prove like that there's no God? And the atheist says, well, you can't prove a negative. You can't prove that something is not the case.

You have to prove that it is the case. It's not possible to prove a negative, right? Oh, boy. Yeah, so this is one of the ones where I do just experience unparalleled amounts of pain thinking about it. Okay, so yeah, this claim, I think, is firstly self-undermining. It is itself a negative claim, right? You can't do something. You can't prove a negative.

no. There's no proof of a negative. So, like, it's self-underbite. It's like, if it were true, like, he couldn't prove it. Now, maybe they're saying, oh, you know, I'm not talking about proving it. I just mean, like, giving justification. Well, then, you know, then you just can't give justification for this claim. Anyway, I think it's self-undermining. I think there's literally an entire method of proof in logic called reductio ad absurdum, expressly dedicated to proving negatives. Okay. So, yes, you can prove it. What are you talking about? You can suppose a hypothesis is true and derive a contradiction from it, and thereby negate the hypothesis.

So, yes, you can prove a negative. We can also disconfirm the existence of entities, even if we can't decisively disprove them on certain occasions. So, for instance, I think we just have, like, excellent evidence, excellent reason to think that Yeties and unicorns do not exist on Earth. Okay, why is that? Listen, if they did, we would very strongly expect to see traces of them,

which we don't. Okay? And that just is strong evidence that they don't exist. These are very particular kinds of things that would have to exist. already we should be kind of suspicious that they would be around, right? That's a very specific way for reality to be. And we would expect if they were to exist that they would leave traces of various kinds. We'd expect to find them.

We don't. That means that's evidence against their existence. And that's some kind of disconfirmation. We have reason to believe that they don't exist. And I should also, again, I know I'm on my high horse, but just like, this is exactly what non-theists do, sophisticated non-theists, I should say. this is what sophisticated non-theists do in the case of God, right? They say that, hey, if God did exist, well, we'd expect the world to be different in various ways,

like maybe containing much less evil or something. So, I don't know. This is never strict. I'm remotely plausible. Well, I want to sort of clear something up because when you say, well, we've got good evidence that, like, yes, these don't exist on earth, somebody will probably want to say, ah, yeah, but you don't know that there isn't one, like, hiding out somewhere, like, in a forest. and so you can't actually prove that this is what they're getting at.

It's like, yeah, you can say it's unlikely or whatever, but you can never like prove that something isn't the case. In a way that if you saw a Yeti, you could go, yes, there is a Yeti. I can prove there is a Yeti. But what do we mean by prove? Because if by prove, you mean prove with 100% certainty, then actually even seeing a Yeti would not be enough. Because I can say, yeah, but how do you know that your sense data is accurate

and that you're not sort of hooked up to a simulation, right? Like clearly when we say proof, typically we're talking about like really good evidence or a sufficient level of evidence. So, so fine. But like at the very least, you have to accept that you can have really good evidence for a negative. You know, there's really good evidence that there are no. And even if you sort of go like, well, technically you can't prove that there's no yet, it's like how does that make you live your life? When you, when you go out and sort of, you know, camp in the forest, do you bring like Yeti, like anti-Yety like weaponry just in case? like, no, the level of disconfirmation you've got is high enough, like, for all intents and purposes, you don't think it's true. I know you don't think it's true. And so, yeah, like the same thing's happening here. And also, very helpful to point out reduct you add absurdums, the reduction

to absurdity, where, as you said, you take a claim, like the way that you test a claim, it's a little bit complicated, I guess, to think about without like an example, but you just, you just, if you want to prove that something is false, you assume that it's true, you show what that like true claim entails. And if it entails something which is false, then the claim must be false in the first place. You sort of assume it's true as a way to prove that it's false. You know, like, well, I don't think it's raining right now. I'm going to prove it's not raining. I'm going to say, if it were raining, I would, you know, be wet right now. Premise 2, I am not wet right now. There's another one for the TikTok edits. Conclusion, therefore, it's not raining outside.

I've sort of proven that something is not the case by assuming that it is and showing that at least is something false. So, yes. Anyway, you know, why are we even spending any more time on this? I'm just repeating what you're saying. I don't know. It's just no, I mean, you know, here's a negative claim. There is no adult elephant in this room right now. Yeah, I thought of that. Bro, like, come on. I obviously, I know that that's the case. And I can show that that's the case. Okay, can I prove with like absolute decisive certainty? Well, like, no. And I can't prove that I have hands with absolute decisive certainty. Like, come on. Like, I can know and justify we believe that there is no elephant in this room right now. Because if there were, I would certainly be aware of it. And I'm not.

Yeah. So. There has, there has been no female president of the United States of America, you know? Like, it's just. You can just multiply this. There are no positively charged electrons. Yeah. It's just true, man.

It's just true. Like, there are no, there are no, like, instances in which three individual objects total four, you know. Like, it's just, you know, we can, we can do this. all day. And I would love to. I'd love to spend a day. Right. Just doing that. Just doing, coming up with negative, like, trivially proven negative claims. But yes, turns out you can prove negative. Okay, how about this? So-called Hitchens Razor, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence? That's another popular claim. And the idea is that, you know, that certain, like, religious claims or whatever are kind of asserted

without evidence. Oh, I just trust the Bible. I just think it's true. Well, if you can assert it without evidence, you can dismiss it without evidence. It won't take long to tell you neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Yeah, so there's... There's something to this. I mean, like, Generally speaking, it seems like we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence. So that, you know, if someone is just like blithely asserting something, at least if it's not obvious, and they're not providing any evidence for it, I'm under no pressure to accept it. And in that sense, it seems totally fine for me to dismiss it in the sense of like not accept it and, you know, not give it any more weight than I previously gave it. Okay.

So, like, in some sense, I think this is fine. I mean, there are, you know, the philosopher in me likes to nitpick everything, right? So I see this as like a universal generalization. Like, for literally anything that can be asserted without evidence, it's fine to just dismiss it without evidence. I don't think maybe, that's probably not right. Like, we have various non-inferentially justified beliefs. So that is beliefs which are justified. So, you know, we have, we're within our rights to hold them.

Like we have good grounds to hold them, as it were. But they're not justified inferentially. So we don't infer them from other beliefs that were justified and accepting. So like here's the belief right now as opposed I stub my toe. I form the belief that I'm in pain. But I don't like infer that from other beliefs. I'm just like directly aware of my pain. And so I might I might then like assert without providing any other beliefs from which I infer it,

like without providing evidence in the traditional sense, I could just assert that I'm in pain. but like you know you that should not be dismissed like so I can assert it without evidence. You could even assert it to yourself. You could like assert it just in your own head. You could just go like, oh, I'm in pain right now. But then I guess the evidence for the for the claim that you've just made is that you're feeling pain. But if you think of it as the belief is not the propositional content, oh, I feel it's true that I feel pain and the justification for that is the pain in my foot. The thing that you're cognizing is just the existence of the pain in your. your foot. Like, there's no further evidence for it. It's just there. And yet, it would be great, wouldn't it, if you could go, ah, but remember Hitchens' razor? Because I just feel pain and there's

no, like, reason or evidence that I do. I just do. And so great news. I can just dismiss that. And I can just not feel pain anymore. That would be great, but we can't do that. Right. And I mean, oftentimes I feel like this slogan is misused, right? So it kind of goes back to, like, the claims aren't evidence thing. So like sometimes an assertion can itself be evidence. Whoa, isn't that kind of cool? It's very ordinary. It's called testimony, right? Like where you assert something to the case. Like, hey, I, um, you know, I was mowing my lawn earlier today. That's an assertion. And I didn't provide you any evidence. I didn't provide you any, like, other independent evidence for that assertion. But that's not something that you could just like

dismiss comfortably. I actually just provided you evidence by my very assertion that I mowed my law. Right. So, like, the assertion itself can be evidence and doesn't need to be, like, I don't need to provide oftentimes evidence for my assertion. My assertion itself carries enough evidential force or weight to legitimate you believing the content of my assertion. So, actually, it's not true that what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And there are also cases in which we seem to believe things without evidence like the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, that other people exist, right? These are things which, strictly speaking, I can't justify. I can't know that I'm not a brain in a vat somewhere.

I can't prove that the external world exists. And maybe, you know, you can still hold to the slogan and say, well, you know, like whatever. But I think most people want to say, but if you claim that these things are false, if you say, no, you are living in a simulation or something like it or, you know, the external world isn't real or other people don't exist, you don't want to say, well, what's your evidence for that? And this person could say, well, look, I mean, what can be asserted with evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

And maybe they're kind of right, but it would be a sort of unhelpful philosophical move. For what it's worth, I think that this is, again, like a rhetorical tool that isn't actually trying to establish a philosophical principle. All it's really doing is just like complaining that evidence hasn't been provided. You know, it's like a quip. But the true bit of the quip is not actually this principle that, oh, well, without evidence, we can. That the true part of the quip, which makes it worth using is just as a clever way to point out, you haven't provided any evidence. You know, that's really, I think, just what's being said here.

If Hitchens were trying to establish, you know, universal philosophical principles, I think most of his philosophical principles didn't even apply in the unique cases that he was using them, let alone universally. So I think we'd be a bit stuck in the mud there. Yeah. Yeah. I think we have a good agreement here. Yeah.

It's like technically, again. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. Nice. Awesome. Okay.

So next. I think we've got, I think we'll probably do, like, we'll see how we do. What about faith is belief without evidence or faith is like pretending to know something that you don't? This idea that faith is like contra, like justified belief. What do you think? Do you think that's true? Well, as a generic statement, well, Kevin, actually, the Kallam cosmological argument starts with the premise that whatever be. weekends to exist has a cause. Space less, timeless, immaterial, enormously powerful.

Okay. Man, we should have done principle of credulacy last time so we could add the swimburn. Never mind. Never mind. Okay. Anyway, I got a little bit too excited there. Where was I going? I was going to say, listen, I don't think this applies to, like, generically to faith as such. No doubt. many people who have faith don't have evidence. Maybe they indeed are pretending to know what they don't know. No doubt, like this applies to many people. And no doubt many people will just,

many people have a mistaken conception of faith on with faith just is kind of like blind trust or something like that. But I don't think that this is like essential to the notion of faith. So I at least view faith as the following. It's roughly speaking something like a trusting commitment to someone or something.

Okay. And what will that trusting commitment involve? Well, plausibly, it'll involve at least two components. So firstly, I think it involves a cognitive component. So that could simply be a belief, but it might be something weaker, but still belief-like. So, for example, maybe at least some level of confidence that the object of faith is true or exists or will occur. Right, so for example, like, if you have faith that your friend will win their upcoming basketball game, well, then at the very least, you'll think that there's, like, a not absurdly low chance that they'll win. It doesn't make sense to say that you have faith that your friend's team will win if, like, you're absolutely convinced that they're definitely going to get crushed. But you arguably don't need full-blown belief that they will, in fact, win in order to have faith that they'll win.

You might, and likewise, you know, you might actually just think it's like somewhat impromptuant. that you make it through a marriage or like finish a project on time, but you might still have faith in those things, right? So maybe faith doesn't actually require belief. So that's something that I want to know. But like I do think one component of faith is going to be a cognitive component. It's going to be something having to do with judging something to maybe be a live option or like sufficiently probable or maybe like belief worthy or something like that.

So that's the first component, a cognitive component. And then I think there's a second component of this trusting commitment, which is faith. which is something like a conative or desire-like component. Okay, so it's going to involve something like a desire for or, you know, like a positive evaluation of or maybe a hope for the object of faith. So if we return to the case that I gave of like the basketball game, if you have faith that your friend will win their game, well then, yeah, you like, you want them to win.

You regard that as a good thing. You hope that they win. you've got some kind of like positive positively valence attitude towards it, right? In addition to the more belief-like component of it. Yeah, it would be weird to say like, yeah, like, oh man, I really, I really don't want that, that team to win, but I've just got faith that they will. It, like, you can kind of make sense of that. It could be like, oh, I don't think they're going to win. I really don't want them to win, but I, maybe they would.

But to say something like, but I've got faith that they will. It sort of seems to necessarily imply a, like, a, a. a positive evaluation of the thing. Right, exactly. And so given that faith is a trusting commitment with these two components, I think it's quite plausible that faith is compatible with believing

on the basis of evidence and indeed with believing on the basis of evidence sufficient to render the belief rational. So like, here's an example that I oftentimes like to give. Somewhat recently, well, this actually wasn't recent. This is when I was back at home.

But, you know, it is what it is. Some of recently, my dad told me that he would get home with the car by noon, because I didn't have a car. He would told me that he'd get home with the car by noon so that I could, you know, get to my appointment. I need to leave at noon to get to my 1230 appointment. Now, I had ample evidence that he would fulfill his promise. Like suppose that, you know, my dad has made these promises many times of the past. He's very dependable. He's very reliable.

He almost always comes through with it. So I had ample evidence to think that he would come through on this occasion. And enough to make it rational to believe that he'd get home by noon. but I think I still had to have faith that he would pull through. And, you know, as I sat there anxiously waiting at like 1159 and he's not yet there, I do indeed have to have some faith there, even though I have good evidence that he's going to get here by noon. And then lo and behold, I see him come in and, you know, he's there basically right at noon. I'm pulling up into the driveway.

So I think I had to exhibit faith in that circumstance. I had to have a kind of trusting commitment. I had a positive avalan attitude towards it. I had the relevant cognitive component of faith. And also I had enough evidence, I think, to legitimate belief in this case. So I just don't think faith requires belief without evidence or in spite of evidence or faith just must be blind. That's my take. Yeah, I tend to think faith, the way that I see people using it, because people always say like,

oh, well, you have faith that the chair you're sitting on is going to hold you up. and you have faith that your wife loves you and stuff. And I'm like, I know what you're getting at, which is that I can't prove that this share isn't going to collapse, but for some reason I believe it anyway. And I've come to realize that I think a way that people tend to use faith is like belief in something without evidence of that particular thing, but with good like background evidence to sort of trust in that thing.

So like I don't have evidence. If I walk into a new restaurant, I don't have any like direct evidence that, I sit down on the chair, it won't just collapse under me. But I've got good evidence. It's not like I've got zero evidence like that's relevant at all, because I've got evidence that every other restaurant I've been into has chairs that haven't fallen over. And maybe I sort of know that roughly there's probably some kind of like law in place where they'll get sued if I'm going to be, yeah. But still, I still don't like, no, I can't prove if someone asks for evidence of that of that chair not falling over. They're like, no, but like, you don't know. You don't even know what it's made out of. You don't. don't know, like, if it's attached, you don't know who put it there. It's like, that is actually true, but I still believe that it will hold me up in a way that, technically speaking, yeah, it's not really justified in this instance, but it is also kind of justified by all the background stuff. And I feel like faith is used in that way. Like, when someone says, well, I've just got faith

that, you know, God has good reason to allow suffering, that sounds really weird because you're like, well, you've got no justification to explain why suffering exists. But they go, but yeah, but look, I've got all of these reasons to think that God exists. I've got all this other evidence that there's this God who's good. And so in this particular instance, yeah, I know I have no idea why he allows suffering, but because I've got all this background stuff that tells me that, yeah, there is some answer that God has. I just believe that he does have an answer. I think that's actually quite like a reasonable position to take, but I wouldn't want to call that like reasonable belief because you're admitting that you don't have good reason to believe this particular thing. And so we have a word

for this, and that word is faith. Yeah, interesting. See, I sort of even see that trusting commitment as compatible with, you know, reasonable belief. I don't know. I think I am totally reasonable when I go into the restaurant and I, you know, sit down and even believing that I'm not going to just like fall through the chair. Like, I mean, like, come on.

I can see all the other people in, you know, this restaurant seems to be evidently well kept, right? I mean, the other people in the restaurant, they're sitting there, you know, like, restaurants would get sued if they had really bad chairs. Like, you know, I know I have a lot of information about other restaurants and chairs and whatnot. And I, like you said, I do think I have to exercise a degree or modicum of faith in this case, but it's reasonable.

Like, I don't know. And I have a reasonable belief here. Like, it's, I have a trusting commitment. I don't have decisive evidence. So maybe that's a requirement. Like, that's maybe what we're getting at. Like, you don't have decisive, conclusive proof in the thing. in question or like something they're about.

But I think that is compatible with reasonable belief. Yeah. But you're right that what I'm describing might just be best described as a form of just reasonable belief. But I do think that when people use the word faith, especially in the context of like, well, I've got faith in God, but you're an atheist. You have faith in all kinds of things. You've got faith in this.

You've got faith in that. If that's what you mean by the word faith, then maybe faith just kind of is a form of weak, rational belief. It's just like one of the things. the weakest forms of rational beliefs that you can have. But I think that that's not exhaustive because I'd never considered this before, but I think you're right that faith has to come along with like the desire to have faith in something implies you want it to happen. So maybe what faith is, is what I'm describing, which is like belief in the absence of direct evidence

for that thing, but with good background evidence at the same time as wanting it to be true. Maybe if you have all of those components but together, you get something which is sort of best described as faith. Like, I don't think anybody has faith just, like, right off the bat. It's like, somebody just says, like, oh, I believe that the universe was created by a sort of cosmic spider. I say, like, oh, why do you believe that? I've just got faith. I'm like, okay, fair enough, but like, like, why a spider? Don't you know what faith is? Faith isn't, like, reasonable evidence. It's disconnected. I'm like, but there's got to be, there's got to be, like, some, reason why, even if you don't know this for sure, there's something about this spider,

there's got to be some reason. Like, faith can't just be, like, belief in something without evidence, like, on its own. There has to be some kind of background reason or evidence or something that, like, provides the basis on which somebody can stand before taking that venerable leap into faith. So, you know, I don't know. But I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to say faith is belief without evidence, like as a strong point because usually there is like I say just then like some kind of evidence involved

it just might mean that faith is belief without direct compelling evidence of the particular thing that you're having faith in maybe we can agree on that yeah I think I would at least for for the moment lean towards something like that okay well look I promise we're we're nearly done I'm looking at your list here no have one more the Ricky Jervais this yeah we're gonna we're going to do that because I was going to say we've got we've got good people do good things bad people do bad things oh you've already covered that one with well this I was going to say to this is what I mean I just want to like because people might be like where are these claims right like to get good people to do bad things that takes religion it's the Steve Weinberg quote but because we've kind of

already covered that with you know religion flying you into planes flying you into planes so I want there's also this other claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence which have we kind of have we covered that?

Like you know the fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence that there is no God. I mean I don't know like maybe quick quick words on that

what do you think? Yeah I mean so I mean typically this will be combined with the claim that there is indeed an absence of evidence for God's existence, have we addressed that earlier on? Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking was called it.

I guess it's a slightly more specific claim in that it's not just there's no evidence for God, but the fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence against God's existence, which I think if that evidence were to be expected and you didn't find it, that would be true. So, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah. In that particular circumstance. But anyway, like, like I say, I'm trying to get through these quickly. There's only one other one on the list apart than Ricky Jervais one, which is,

Theism is unfalsifiable. So sometimes atheists will get frustrated because they'll say, well, I don't believe God would allow suffering. And they go, ah, yeah, but God's got this super secret special reason to allow suffering. Or, okay, but then, you know, why would he allow that if he was a loving God? And theists might go, well, you know, I'm a theist, but maybe God doesn't have to be loving. You know, God could be, you know, amoral. So it's like, okay, well, then, you know, how does God sort of fit into, you know, this or that? And they're like, oh, well, you know, God's...

It's like they've always sort of got this alley to run down. It's like, there's nothing in principle that could be true that would make the theist go, yeah, fair enough, that's incompatible with God. Because instead, what they'll do is they'll just adapt their conception of God to make the evidence fit, right? And so, therefore, this hypothesis of theism is unfalsifiable. There's nothing I could say that would prove it false. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fair?

Not quite. I mean, in some sense, like, given what you were just saying, like, it sounds like we take a theistic hypothesis, but then we modify it to a different hypothesis, given that it has kind of been falsified, right? So, like, we take these hypotheses, which do indeed make some predictions about how we'd expect the world to go, right? And then we find that the world doesn't go in those directions. And then the theist, as you were depicting it in this hypothetical scenario, switches to a different theistic hypothesis. And like, okay, in some sense, it's still theism. But like we've switched hypotheses. And the original hypothesis was indeed falsifiable, or at least it was liable to confirmation and disconformation based on the predictions that we can tease out from the hypothesis. So like in my view, like generic, perfect being theism or like traditional monotheism does indeed make predictions

about how we'd expect the world to go or not go. And that just means that it's liable to confirmation and disconfirmation. So it's not on falsifiable in that sense. But I think this just applies to basically, any theory, right? It applies to atheism. It applies to standard scientific theories. You can always, in the face of disconfirming evidence, retreat to a different version of your theory or append onto your theory, various implausible auxiliary hypotheses. You know, like with the atheist, you know, they come across fine-tuning and maybe they'll just pause it like a multiverse. They come across

potentially well-evidence miracle claims and they'll just say, oh, you know, like, some kind of misperception or misidentification or hallucination or something like that. And like, oh, they'll come across a contingency. They'll be like, okay, maybe there's some like atheistic necessary foundation of reality. Like, maybe it's the universe or something. And then they come across consciousness and they're like, oh, well, maybe, you know, consciousness doesn't exist after all. Maybe we're eliminativists or illusionists about consciousness.

Or, you know, they'll posit something else. Like, oh, maybe they're just these like brute emergent powers of brains or something. Like, the atheists will also be able to just make all these. posits to save their theory. So I don't know. I don't really see anything distinct of theism. Yeah, I think this is a criticism that shouldn't be levied against theism, but against particular theists.

So I can understand when someone's having an argument and they go like, there's nothing I can say that won't just make you retreat. Your position is unfalsifiable. It's actually maybe just that person is like not granting like falsifying criteria that they just keep retreating. But it's not unique to the position of theism, as you say. I mean, there might be some versions of it. Like, you know, if you have like an ontological argument, which says that God just exists by definition, that God just has existence as part of his essence. And it's like, well, well, what could I do to prove that false? What would have to be true for that to be false? And the theist just goes, there's nothing. Because God just is existence. That's just what God is. You're asking me, how could you falsify that two plus two is four? Right. And in that circumstance, that version of theism would be unfalsifiable. But to the theist, that would be justifiably so. It would be like saying, oh, yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're,

maths, your two plus two is four, it's just unfalsifiable, isn't it? And you're kind of like, yeah, like, kind of, yeah, because it's almost just like a point of definition. It just follows from, and some theists see you got in that way. So I think that form of theism would probably be unfalsifiable, but not in like a necessarily unfair kind of way. If you accept the ontological argument, that is, of course you're going to think it's unfalsifiable. So worth flagging, but it depends on the theist. It depends on their behaviors and which arguments they're employed. right? I think so.

So, before evolutionary considerations against God, there's one more here from that great theologian, Ricky Jervais, which seemed to have gone like viral again recently on the internet, even though it was from some time ago, where Ricky sort of, he's talking to like Stephen Colbert or someone like that, and they're kind of debating religion. And Ricky goes, look, here's the thing, man, here's what you've got to understand, right? If you were to just burn every single, like, book, every book, every bit of information is just, like, erased from human society. And we all had to start again. You know, we go back to being cavemen, like, on day one. Then in a couple of thousand years or so, all of the science would come back.

All of our scientific understanding would come back exactly as it is. But none of the religious texts would come back, like, exactly as they are. And I think even Colbert was like, yeah, fair point. And he gets an applause. And it's an interesting thought. Yeah, like, science would come back. but religion wouldn't because religion is full of hyper-specific stories that had to be made up in a particular way, whereas science is like, you know, gravity. Things would still fall to the ground, and we'd still mathematically describe that eventually. So that kind of gives us reason to think that the science stuff is trustworthy, whereas the religious stuff that you find in the scripture is not, because it's like arbitrary and, you know, contingent on sort of historical circumstance, right?

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Hey, Jamal, you've been promoted to pack leader. Save the everyday with deals from Amazon. Yeah, so I've got three responses to this one. So first, how does Ricky know that none of the religious texts would come back basically with the same contours? I mean, after all, if God exists and is behind one of the religions, presumably if we completely lost his crucial revelation to us, I don't know, maybe he'd touch base again or something. So how does Ricky know this? And in fact, this almost starts to sound question begging against. Moses smashed the Ten Commandments, right?

Moses smashed the Ten Commandments on the original tablet, and then God just sort of like wrote them down for him again, because you kind of needed them. So, you know, why not? Yeah, you're right. It's question begging. It's like you have to assume this is on the assumption that there is no God who would like replenish the religious stories.

On that assumption, yeah, of course the religious story wouldn't come up in the, but then you don't need that argument because you just assume that God doesn't exist in the first place. Right, right. So that's the first response. The second response is that like, if this were some like devastating objection to religion, it would also be a devastating objection to what, like the entire field of history and also like literature

and like various other things. I mean like, come on, if you destroyed all the history textbooks and like our evidence of what happened in the past, a lot of the information is just lost to the past, right? Like, we would lose tons of letters, descriptions of battles. Like there's like no way that we could reconstruct

like what the precise details of certain battles and the years in which they occurred from like certain archaeological findings and whatnot. So I don't, know. Do you, does Ricky really want to, like, think that the whole field of history is untrustworthy from this kind of test about this destruction test, as we could put it? I don't know, it doesn't seem plausible. So that's the second response. And then the third and final response is, it's not actually clear to me that science would come back again exactly in the same

way. I don't know, dude. Science seems kind of institutionally and theoretically contingent in various ways. There are, there have been in the history of science. predictively very successful and practically very useful false theories. So, I mean, how is he sort of ruling out that we might land on some kind of very predictively successful theory, but which just nevertheless happens to be false and different from the ones that we have currently landed on? And also, like, bear in mind that, like, scientists often adopt different values or standards for judging competing theories, right?

So scientists in general have a kind of balance or trade-off, a theoretical trade-off between simplicity and explanatory power, right? So, like, oftentimes we'll posit new entities to explain various phenomena. And we posit new features of entities to explain various phenomena. But, like, I don't know, we can imagine future scientists or scientists in an alien civilization having different views about which theoretical virtues are more important or how to balance these theoretical virtues. Maybe future scientists will actually be much more reluctant to posit new entities in order to explain phenomena.

Like, they just are much more attached to parsimony than, we are. And like, these are extra scientific considerations, because these are like considerations about how we weigh and compare scientific theories, right? So it's not like science itself could kind of solve these issues about how to best weigh up the theoretical virtues that scientists deploy. So I don't know, like maybe future scientists would have different theoretical weightings. And yeah, so there are a number of things, many things wrong with what he says. So I want to disagree with some of that and agree with the bulk of it. I want to disagree with, I mean, you said about like, I do think it would, to the extent that religious scriptures like cover religious history, you know, the story of the Jews or whatever, like, yeah, the fact that we lose that and couldn't get it back is not like evidence that it didn't happen or like reason to think that that didn't occur because we wouldn't be able to rediscover it.

However, I think what Ricky's getting at is like the sort of the eternal truth claim stuff, like the stuff. like the stuff that's good, the stuff that's bad, it's, it's immoral to do this, it's, it's, but even then it's like, but then if you make it sort of so, sort of generalize, if you're talking about that stuff, then maybe that kind of just would come back. Like people kind of probably managed to work out, yeah, you should like love your neighbor and like, oh, even though that person is like from, from the tribe over, you should still be nice to them. I mean, maybe not, right, because some people think that, you know, if you, if you listen to like Tom Holland and his sort of Christian followership you think. No, no, no, like Christianity uniquely, like without Christianity,

you know, like the treatment of women and slavery and this kind of stuff, like you needed this particular Christian story to come along. Like, maybe there is something unique about that, but it's not like out of the question for me that, you know, love your neighbor and treat people equally could not arise within the next few thousand years somewhere. And then if it works, it works and if it's successful it it sort of takes off. But if you are talking about the more specific stuff, like the historical claims about like the resurrection of Jesus or something, like you say, like, okay, suppose it actually happened and they wrote it down and then

we destroyed all of the records and we couldn't find them. Yeah, like, but I just want to, but then you said like, you know, it would also undo like literature. I don't think that's true because literature, the utility of literature is not connected to the truth of the things that it's saying. Whereas in history it is. Like the thing that's useful about history is that. it tells you what happened, right?

So, and you just sort of mentioned that in passing. I don't know if you actually believe that or if it came out. I meant like Shakespeare studies. That's what I was talking about. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Okay, cool. Yeah, so, yeah, then fair enough. I think that's definitely true.

But also, I really want to, like, think about this, this fact that, like, oh, yeah, science would just come back. Okay. Like, no, like, no, I just don't, I just don't believe it for a number of reasons. First is that, like, we know that throughout the history of our species, as you say, we've had like false, false theories, or theories that we've improved upon. So famously, like, Newton has his Newtonian mechanics. And then Einstein comes along and says, you're kind of actually thinking about it all wrong. And instead, there's like, you know, this space time thing,

right? Which of these would come back? Would they both come back in the same order? And also, given that we know that Einstein corrected Newton, surely within the next thousand years or so, somebody's going to correct Einstein. So when you say that science will come back, there's going to be a lot we're wrong about right now. And it's unlikely that the stuff we're wrong about would like come back again because it's like it's like wrong, right? And if it did come back again, then you're saying that like stuff that's wrong could come back again, in which case if the implication of your argument is that like, oh, the true stuff would come back would just be false. Not to mention the fact that the most important kind of science that we're doing it, like the cutting edge of science right now is of course quantum

mechanics. And nobody even can agree, like, what's going on down there. Like, you know, we've got all these different interpretations. You've got, like, many worlds and Copenhagen interpretations that rely on a particular, like, language of mathematics that was, like, invented by particular individuals, you know, like Newton and, you know, independently, we've got some evidence that, like, calculus might have come up because Newton and Leibniz, and I think somebody else had, like, independently come up with it. But, like, even that, like, relies on a particular kind of mathematical notation. Like, surely the ideas of like calculus, the kind of the stuff at the core of it would be like rediscovered. But what do we count as the science? Because, you know, would

a future society that erased all of its knowledge and then had to start again, would they come up with atomic physics, for example? Like, maybe not, because like now we're kind of doubtful that atoms really exist in the way that we traditionally thought with the little proton and the electrons going around. It might be that they just have no conception of atoms. And you kind of got two options here. You either say, yeah, but atoms are an integral part of science, and that wouldn't come back, in which case, Ricky's wrong. Well, you say, well, yeah, the atoms wouldn't come back, because the atoms are something that, although as part of our scientific lexicon, it's just incorrect, in which case, Ricky is saying that, oh, incorrect things will, will reoccur. Like, you know, who

guess. You know what I mean? I just, I just, I really struggle to believe that if we actually started again, then a thousand years from now, people would, like, with certainty, be debating whether the wave function collapses when the observer looks at it or whether there is a multi, maybe one of those is correct and that will be rediscovered, but the idea that the, and maybe you want to say, oh, that's because we haven't worked it out yet. But once we work out what the truth is, that's what any society would do in the future. But like, there's no like end point of science. There's no point where we're like, okay, we're done now. Like we understand fully and coherently.

We don't even understand anything about like site. We don't know what an electron is, right? Like, we literally have no idea what an electron actually is. We only describe what it does. I talk about that all of the time. Like, so what is it that would actually come back? Like, if you, like, if the theory of gravity is just a mathematical description of the fact that objects fall to the ground, like, yeah, like, we start again. And, oh, look, we notice that objects fall to the ground.

Do we really think that we're going to take the exact same course to describing why that happens? I mean, I don't even think we have that explanation now. We don't know why things fall to the ground. You know, it's a big passion of mine. We don't have, like, things don't fall to the ground because of the law of gravity. We have a law of gravity because things fall to the ground. And people forget, like, oh, yeah, like, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. Like, no, he didn't.

Like, people knew that objects fell to the ground before that. The only thing he did was, like, mathematically describe it and really, it's the same thing that keeps the planet in orbit. Like, yeah, maybe somebody else would realize that and realize that it's true, but I don't know, like, I just feel like the extent to which, okay, maybe we wouldn't invent the same mathematical notation and we wouldn't use the same conceptual tools, but the core of what's like going on in physics, we'd probably rediscover. You can just say the same thing about religion.

Okay, yeah, maybe you wouldn't get like a particular, like, named set of dea deities or like, you know, particular angels doing particular things or the particular story of Jesus or whatever. But the core of what that religion is about, yeah, that would, that would reemerge. I just think it's like, you know, I just, I just don't, I'm just not confident that it's, that it's true. Anyway, I'm ranting again. I'm ranting again. And I think we're probably in agreement here. I think we're largely in agreement, yes. But, quick segue, brutal segue, like, almost, I was trying to find a way to make it work, but it's just, there's no other way. I'm just going to have to sort of brute force it here.

Evolution disproves God, doesn't it? Well, let's start with Young Earth Creationism, because it might disprove Young Earth Creationism. I mean, but even there, so this is not one of the odysse. I told Alex beforehand for the audience that I wanted to maybe talk about two potential theodyses

for evolutionary animal suffering. This is not one of them. Okay, this is not one of them. I want to emphasize, but there's actually a potential way to make Young Earth Creationism compatible with evolution. And it's really, very metaphysically spooky and kind of crazy.

But philosopher HUD-Hudson speculates that, oh, I should say, it's not like he claims to believe this. This is like a speculative model that he proposes on behalf of others who want to hold to Young Earth-Earth Christians. Okay. So philosopher Hudson speculates that perhaps there's such a thing as hypertime, which is basically an extra temporal dimension at some point in which our timeline is located, but over which our timeline can itself change.

So basically, it's like an additional timeline within which our timeline is located. So basically then, like the contents of history, if we have hypertime, the contents of history can themselves change over the course of hypertime. And so maybe at an earlier hypertime, so earlier on in the hyper timeline, our first order timeline like our history in our universe actually includes an earth and a garden of Eden created immediately by God 6,000 years before 2025. And then maybe there was like a fall from our primordial parents. And then as punishment for the fall, God changes the course of our actual history, our timeline. So that at a later hyper time, our first order timeline includes a brutal evolutionary

process occurring over billions of years. I see your face. I'm a little, okay, I know you're not quite finished here, but, but I mean, I'm a little confused by this, this hypertime concept and what it means, I don't really know how to, how to, how to, how to picture this. Like, what, what you're talking? What are you talking about? Help me, help me out here. Like, what is this hypertime thing? Yeah, it's just, um, listen, it's, so, you know, think of the three-spy, spatial dimensions. They, as it were, travel through time, right?

Imagine that. You know, like, things in space change over time. Well, hypertime is basically like the temporal dimension along which the timeline itself can change. So, like, the past can genuinely itself change. New events can be added into the past that didn't happen at a previous hypertime. So, like, just as if, like, the universe and physical stuff in three-dimensional space, changes over time, our universe's time can itself change over the course of hyper time.

So at one hyper moment, yeah, I know, at one hyper moment, the course of our history, our timeline might look a certain way. And then at a later hyper moment in this broader temporal dimension, the course of history looks different. Like it might include additional times or might have different times and whatnot. This is very crazy. But like, hey, you know, particles are supposed to be like somehow waves and the same time and like you know like things don't have like a definite position and momentum and it's the same time or whatnot

I've got time for it I think yeah you know this is interesting yeah if you like but I think it's it's like okay this is an exercise in trying to like make consistent like young earth creationism which yeah maybe this does but like with other sort of like with something like a multiverse

or something I think if this idea of hypertime only exists as a response to this particular problem, then like, cool, very clever, like, great job, but probably not going to take it on board. If there's some, like, other reason to believe in this thing called hypertime, and we can then apply that to this and have it works at the odyssey, then great. But that is, that is interesting. Like, the punishment for the fool is not just, like, you know, animals, sort of suffering and humans becoming, you know, more prone to sin or whatever, but literally a rewriting of human history to be, like, or like animal history to be like billions of years old with profound suffering. I guess why not? Like, why couldn't

God just, I mean, that would be horrible. Like, imagine if like, you know, you really wanted to punish someone. Like, if I wanted to punish you, but I had this power to do basically anything I want, yeah, sure, I could just make your life a misery now. Or I could say, you've wronged me so badly that I'm literally going to rewrite time so that for the past thousand years, you've been being like, you know, lashed, that would be pretty, pretty metal, you know? I mean, that's, that's quite the punishment. It is quite the punishment. I mean, so there actually are some, so, uh, let's see, Tyron Goldschmidt and Sam Liebens, two very good Jewish philosophers have, um, written on hypertime and its ability to, like, help with the problem of evil. They don't even take, like,

this fall stuff. They go in for various other sorts of proposals where like, God can literally, like, rewrite the past and make it. that like we never actually sinned and like bad things never actually occurred at a later hyper time so okay at an earlier hyper time okay bad things occur but at a later hyper time literally the timeline is perfect so he kind of like splices in like the good things that we do and the various other things and he kind of there's there's like a movie director who does this right like he has people just like act out some people in the audience will put this in the description right now there's a movie director that has people um has the actors just naturally

do stuff. And he'll just like maybe give them slight guidance, but like he'll just have them act out various different scenes and whatnot. And he will just literally splice in stuff that he liked from what they did. He'll maybe have them redo certain scenes and whatnot. And at the end, you basically have just like a composite product of literally like natural acting. They weren't given scripts or anything like that. And he just kind of like splices it. So like God can actually work like that in this kind of picture. Sam Liebens and Tyron Goldschman, I think have a paper on this called The Promise of a New Past. I think it's an ergo that's a journal. But anyway, so like this stuff can be used, wielded by the

theist to do lots of theoretical work. And so like, okay, I know it's a bit crazy. I know this is out there. And I'm not saying I believe, I don't believe this, okay. But I just thought it was kind of funny because, you know, people are like, yeah, I know people like evolution disproves young you know young earth creation is like well disprove is a little strong like how are you ruling out this hyper time proposal okay um okay but now it's clever i think it's i think it's fun you know like why not why not right i mean it's very metal as you said uh that should be like one of the classic divine you know perfections like the degree of metalness you know yeah metallity metallicness uh you know god's maximal with respect to these perfections so

Matality. Yeah, I guess God would have to be maximally metallic under the ontological argument. I mean, but yeah, I mean, that is, that is, that is brutal and sort of horrifying. Because it also, it opens up other possibilities to me. Like, you know, when we sort of think about eternal punishment in hell, what if it's not just like you go to hell and then every day, if the rest of your life is suffering? But like, when you go to hell, like your entire past history is also now suffering.

That would suck, man. It would suck. But also, like, listen, this would provide people who are proponents of eternal conscious torment, like a way to make their view less unpalatable. I mean, their view is already very unpalatable. But, you know, you could say, listen, yeah, at this one hyper moment where our whole timeline is here, yeah, you've got an eternity of suffering ahead of you. But hey, there are hyper future moments in the hypertime where, you know, your future is

perfectly fine. And in fact, you're in heaven. And maybe, actually, there's like a hyper-endless. series where at each hyper time, the local timeline includes you just like in an infinite state of bliss. But, you know, that's in the hyper future. Unfortunately, in the hyper present, you're stuck, you know, you're in this timeline where you're going to be tortured forever. But, you know, it's only hyper temporary. It's eternal, but it's hyper temporary. That should be like, that should be my motto. Like, listen, the suffering is eternal, but it's only hyper temporary. Like, that's going to help.

Yeah. You've got to be very careful when you're talking about hypertime with like the various I don't remember this bit, I don't remember this bit of the Bible, if I'm going to be, if I'm going to be honest with you, mate. I don't remember. Was this Mark or was this Luke? I can't, I can't remember. What was it you were saying about predicates? I think it was an axe or something. That's where it is.

Yeah, okay. So where we're really getting with evolution disproves God is, of course, you know, an argument from evolutionary animal suffering. So as your audience already knows at this point, because you talk about this all the time. All the time. Natural history took a very. grotesque course. Animals have been praying on one another, parasitizing one another, ripping each other to shreds. Natural disasters have wiped out what, like, 99.99% of all species. Basically, the course of natural history is a bloodbath. And I don't know, that seems like extremely surprising under

theism. Like, this is the very means of the mechanism by which God creates biological diversity in general, and humans in particular. The very engine of creation is the suffering and death and discarding of the least of these, of the innocent fons and baby elephants and whatnot. Like, this is disgusting. I mean, like, what do you do it? Like, God could have, he could have created in so many other ways. He could have made the universe a young Earth creationist universe. He could have created 6,000 years ago, done away with this massively brutal process.

He could have made photosynthesizing animals. He could have made chemo-synthesizing animals. He could have made, like, anesthetic in the claws and teeth of predators so that, you know, the prey aren't living, like, like agonizingly brutalized to death. Like he could have altered animals as mental states when they face the moments of death and whatnot when they're being burned alive

so that they don't experience excruciating agony. Like he could have done a ton of stuff that seemingly he did not do. And this seems very, very, very surprising under theism and much better predicted on a picture on which, you know, listen, dude, the natural world is all there is. It's not being benevolently guided. And, you know, as a result,

the course of evolutionary history is going to just look indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient creatures. So it does seem to be pretty powerful evidence against theism. Yeah, I mean, as you say, I've used this argument before. It just seems unexpected, right?

Like, it seems kind of unlikely. I mean, strictly speaking, it's only really unlikely if there's, like, a God who cares about suffering, who, you know, especially, I think it's this picture of a God who is good and doesn't want innocent creatures to suffer, but also kind of created the universe

for the sake of human beings, as many major religious traditions sort of assume that it's all about humans, that it kind of took us a really long time to show up. And the pre-drinks for the human party was this like billion year bloodbath. It just seems like, you know, God sort of suffers from a lack of economy, if you like. But, you know, technically it doesn't sort of exclude the existence of an unactualized actualizer who is the necessary foundation of contingent things, right? But like, it definitely does something powerful against traditional conceptions of God. So, given this, given how unexpected it is, that God would have chosen this mechanism and that there's so much suffering, and suffering which like, it seems like, you know, people have theodices,

right? You've used that word, attempts to reconcile suffering with a good God. And people say, oh, well, you know, evil exists or suffering exists because of human free will or because it allows people souls to develop or because there are higher order goods you can attain like bravery, which can only come about if you allow things like fear. The thing is none of that seems to apply to animals. That doesn't apply to the fawn, does it? It seems like that's totally random. It's like it's definitely not down to human free will before humans ever existed. It also seems like, you know, these animals don't really have souls that develop in the same way. Maybe they do. Maybe they get to go to sort of doggy heaven. That's one option for people, you know.

But it's particularly this like arbitrary animal suffering that seems incoherent with the nation of God. But you promised me that you have some new theodices that might change my mind on this. Yeah, that was definitely the content of the promise. No, I mean, like the audience knows that this is by my light's probably the most forceful argument for atheism. So, you know, and I think that, you know, it's got a deal of force. So understand this as like an exercise in like trying to give the theists their best shot in response to this. And that should be how I've interpreted going forward. Okay.

I'm going to put on my Theist hat. I'm going to try my hardest. Don't automatically assume that I believe what I'm about to say, but I will proceed. So there may be two Theodyses that I want to try out, but I at least want to try out the first one because it's kind of fun. So this is called the omission theodicy. This is proposed in a recent paper, proposed and defended in a recent paper by theistic philosophers, Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson.

Just a heads up, I might not do full justice to their paper, so I recommend the audience to check out the paper for themselves. It actually won the Mark Sanders Prize in philosophy of religion, and that's kind of a big deal, so it's a pretty good paper. So the key idea is that apparent cases of natural evil can be traced to the omissions of free agents who had the power to prevent them, but culpably failed to do so.

Okay? So it's an example of what philosophers call a subsumption theodicy, where we're subsuming natural evil into moral evil. So natural evil is evil that doesn't seem to be the result of the free actions of moral, the free actions are omissions of moral agents, whereas moral evil is evil, which is the result of the free actions or omissions of moral agents. Of free moral agents.

So there are a few different ways that, that we could run the omission theodicy, and I'll just mention two. So one of them is called like, these are just different like stories or different ways that the theists might take theodicy and flush it out a little bit. So one is called alien abandonment, sorry,

angel abandonment, okay, that's one of them. And the other one is called alien isolationism, okay? So hear me out, okay? This is going to get crazy, but hear me out. So let's start with angelic abandonment. They actually call it Arcon abandonment. It's actually I'll go with that. It's the Arcan Abandonment Theodicy.

cons, that's the word for like, I think the powers in the powers and principalities in, you know, the Bible verse that we, we battle not against flesh and blood, but the powers and principalities of this world. So it's supposed to be like fallen angels of sorts. Okay, so here's the thought. Sure me out. It isn't particularly surprising under theism that God would create beings like much higher than us on the chain of being. Where like there's a lot of value in there being like creatures with an intellect and a will. And I don't know, it's just, it just wouldn't be terribly surprising if, you know, in addition to us and all the various lower beings, you know, with lesser capacities, non-rational beings like the animals, it wouldn't be terribly surprising that God might create,

in addition to us, let's say purely spiritual beings who are also, you know, intellectual, rational beings capable of free choice. There's just lots of value in beings like that. They can have relationships with one another. They can have relationships with us. They can have relationships with the rest of creation, they can have relationships with God, and in general, it just seems good to create good beings. Okay. It also doesn't seem particularly surprising that conditional on God creating beings like that, that God might appoint them to be caretakers of lesser beings. After all, like, you know, God, at least according to Genesis, God has appointed us to be caretakers of the rest of the earth in our kind of earthly reign. We're to be earthly stewards. We're to be stewards. We're to be

stewards of this place, not let it get polluted and take care of the animals. And I don't know, like, there are just lots of goods that come about as a result of delegating the task of being a caretaker of other beings to certain higher beings. Okay, so that doesn't seem like super duper unlikely conditional on theism. And so the thought is that God delegated to some of these angelic beings, the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and predationation. and parasitism and natural disasters. But unfortunately, they freely abdicated their divinely appointed role. They said, nope, I will not serve.

I will not perform this plan that you've given me. I renounce my role here. And as a result, they freely omitted to benevolently steer evolution. And so evolution took a course that, you know, seems to be indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient beings, much like how negligence on the part of governments leads to a seemingly indifferent distribution of goods and ills befalling citizens. It's not like there are active agents, active government agents targeting people.

It's just like an act of omission. It's negligence. So like the course of evolutionary history would indeed, under this view, we'd expect it to take a kind of indifferent looking, we'd expect it to have an indifferent looking character. So like, why might God do this? Like, doesn't this seem to be like an irresponsible policy on God's part? Like, doesn't that seem to be kind of implausible? Well, I don't know.

There are some important goods that can be achieved by the, this divine modus operandi. So, like, by delegating the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process to these archons, he allows them to be creaturely co-creators with God. He allows them to kind of cooperate with God in bringing about, in freely bringing about a good universe. It's arguably good for the archons themselves to be caretakers of less beings, to have that kind of responsibility for others.

That's good for them. It might help them develop various character. traits. Maybe it's arguably good for other creatures to be cared for by higher beings, even if they don't know about it. It's like think of the squirrel, right? It might be kind of pretty cool and valuable, but like, I don't know, there's like an angel looking out for the squirrel or something like that. That could be valuable for the squirrel, even if the squirrel doesn't know it. And maybe most importantly, there does seem to be something pretty good and valuable about there being creatures with this kind of difference-making responsibility for how well other beings

as lives go. And in fact, this might actually have, God delegating this task to these creatures might actually have infinite value in expectation. And why is that? Because if these archons had exercised their freedom to make a positive difference in our lives and the lives of the evolutionary,

you know, the creatures in the evolutionary process, arguably, that has a decent chance of improving our relationship with these archons for all of eternity, right? Like in an afterlife, say. So like, we would basically be more closely aligned with that. You know, like, it's as if someone saved you from a very significant disaster. Like, that could very much improve your relationship with them.

And so, like, if the archons are given this task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process, there's at least a decent chance that that might improve our relationship with them and the animals' relationship with them for the rest of eternity. So basically, at each moment, you get additional value if the archons had successfully implemented their policy, right, if they had freely chosen to make the difference to our lives for the better, at each moment of the afterlife, we could have had a better relationship with them. And that's going to aggregate, arguably, to a kind of infinite value in expectation. So, like, at least if it has infinite value in expectation, arguably that can justify the finite

risks of finite suffering that the archons would be, that God would be risking by placing the archons in this decision situation where there's, like, some chance that they're, they freely omit to perform their divinely appointed task. But the thought is, it may very well arguably be worth it because of these various great goods. The goods of difference making responsibility, creaturely co-creatorship, etc. Okay, so that's the Arkon abandonment version. There's also an alien. Yeah, come on.

Do you want to lay them both out or are they different enough? Yeah, yeah. Because I've got like obviously a billion questions. But yeah, I want to hear the alien thing. Okay, so like if people don't like arcons, you know, like maybe. long before life evolved on earth, there were intelligent aliens who developed in a process

devoid of predation and parasitism and without pain being the kind of motivator, being their motivator, right? So like instead of, you know, stubbing their toe and being motivated by pain, maybe they're motivated by varying amounts of pleasure or, you know, they just, they just, almost like their pain is kind of like an

unconscious reflex to them. So like maybe their evolutionary process was much more benevolent. And God basically created the universe in such a way that beings who evolved like that are given the responsibility for

ensuring that other creatures elsewhere in the galaxy say don't develop through a horrific evolutionary process. So maybe like these alien scientists are poking around in the lab and they like discover pain, right? So like they stimulate themselves in some way and they're like, oh my goodness, that was really intrinsically bad state to be in. And they start to wonder like, well,

my goodness, could this state have evolved? Could this have been the motivational, like what motivated creatures on other planets in our galaxy? Oh my goodness. So like there's this do-gooder faction that like that pops up. And so, you know, this do-goter faction among these aliens are like, hey, we should go through the galaxy and like steer planets away from pain and suffering. Like this is very serious.

They're basically like the EA techno bros of like the alien civilization. I'm like, guys, this is like a really serious moral thing. And we need to go through the galaxy and steer planets away from pain. and suffering. But alas, there's also a large isolationist faction among the alien civilization. And the civilization as a whole and various individuals within the civilization just culpably omit to go out and steer evolutionary processes in the right direction. The isolationists went out culpably and they culpably committed this wrongdoing. And that was what is responsible for the suffering and death on our planet. Okay.

So, listen, we're just going for a Theodicy, which is not supposed to be, like, hopelessly unlikely conditional on Theism and which, together with Theism, renders the data not super surprising. So, like, the thought is, like, this story, these stories, the disjunction of them, is not, like, conditional on Theism, right? Conditional on Theism, these are not totally out there. And they predict the data, you know, they render the data not terribly surprising. Okay, so what do you think?

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Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. But who created God? That's what I want to know. No, I'm kidding. Look, I can't say, I can't say I'm convinced, exactly. And I also like the sort of, the almost sort of desperate, um, apologetic there. It's like, I'm not saying that this is like true. You've got to already assume the isn't like, I get it. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think that in order to I mean, the big problem with the problem of evil is probably the existence of natural evil as opposed to moral evil, right? So people kind of want to easily say that evils that people commit are just down to free will. But why would there be the natural evil? But why would there be the

stuff like hurricanes and whatnot that we can't control, right? And as you say, one sort of strategy here is to say that actually what we think are completely disconnected from, you know, free choices of conscious beings are actually a result of their choices. So some people say that, you know, hurricanes exist because of the fool, for example. We live in a broken world and that includes all kinds of like horrible natural disasters. This is, of course, a little bit different, but it's kind of doing the same thing. But I think it suffers for similar reasons, which is like, firstly, you said, you know, these archons or whatever

just didn't sort of fulfill their duty. They freely chose not to guide evolution on planet Earth to be painless. But this was worth it. But my question is, if God could foresee that that was going to happen,

would that actually be worth it? And then you're sort of back to the same kind of conversation that you have around like moral evil in general. You know, if God could foresee that Adam and Eve were going to sin, would it be a good thing to allow them into existence? Well, yeah, because he can also plan for Jesus to come and save us as well. But I think that that question of like,

why would it be worth it if God just knew that these creatures would freely choose to not fulfill their ethical obligation and cause untold amounts of suffering? Maybe you kind of have to be. a Christian here and say, oh, because he's got some sort of plan to make up for it with Jesus somehow. But it just seems to me so extraordinarily unlikely that God would know what was going to happen and go, because if these angels made a different choice that I know, in fact, they are

not going to make, there would be these good things that could happen. I'm going to allow it to happen. I mean, maybe there's like good stuff that we still get, like you're talking about, I can't remember the exact examples you gave of the good stuff that we get by allowing these angels. But why were these angels given this particular prerogative over this particular sort of earthly realm when God knew that they were not going to fulfill that ethical obligation? Like what is it that's supposed to be like worth it about bringing that situation into existence? Okay. Yeah. So the just not worth it objection is I think the most serious objection to any free will theodicy. So right. And like listen, that's that's that's one of my biggest reservations. But, uh, so I'll just say that at the outset, right?

Like, I, I think I'm convinced by this, you know, response. Uh, but I mean, to put, again, to keep my theist hat on, um, I probably would say a few things. So one of them is, like, I think you might be bringing in background assumptions about how divine providence works and how it relates to freedom of creatures that the theist need not accept. So, you know, Many theists think that kind of explanatorily prior to, so like earlier in the explanatory chain, before, as it were, God places free creatures in certain situations, in that explanatory moment, he doesn't know what they're going to do

because they're free, right? Like they could either go one way or the other, and nothing is determining them to go one way or the other. God doesn't know what they're going to do in that explanatorily prior moment. So it's not like he created. creates these beings kind of like knowing explanatorily prior to putting them in the situations that they're going to screw up, right? That would be, that seems to be terrible, right? But like, that's not the picture, at least that's not the picture that theists need to

take. They could be, I hate to get too technical for the audience, but they could either be an open theist or they don't even need to be an open theist. So open theists think that God does not have exhaustive for knowledge of the future. He, and in particular, he doesn't know certain contingent things that will occur or that might occur in the future. But they don't even also have to go in for open theism. They could go in for a kind of simple foreknowledge of you where God does exhaustively know what happens in the future,

but his knowledge of future contingents kind of depends on those future contingents playing out as they in fact do. So before he puts the free creatures in a given situation, explanatorily prior to that, he doesn't know what they're going to do. He doesn't know if they're going to screw up or not. And so God just kind of has to, as it were, take a bit of a risk. He sees the value, the immense value, maybe even the infinite value, as I mentioned,

of implementing this policy, of giving archons difference-making responsibility for how well the lives go of lower creatures. And again, the reason why it's supposed to have infinite values is because, like, it would enable us and various other animals throughout an endless afterlife to have a better relationship at each moment with these archons. because, you know, they made such a great difference to our lives earlier on. And so he sees that infinite value and judges that I know that there's a risk that these guys are going to screw up. But I judge it worth it because, well, that's only risking finite suffering. And there's infinite, like, there's really infinite goods on the line. And, you know, God knows that he can create us in such a way that we can have an afterlife.

And in fact, maybe God has, like, a background policy. Like, maybe God has obligations to particular creatures, not to let them live lives that are bad on the whole. And so maybe, like, for the animals, as it were, that seem to be thrown under the bus under this picture, maybe God does give them some kind of afterlife, you know, where the lion lays down with the lamb, and their evils are defeated.

So they come to see kind of their role in God's providential plan. Maybe he boosts their intellectual capabilities a little bit so that they can kind of endorse their role and endorse their kind of, they wouldn't wish away their suffering, and they see their suffering fitting into a kind of integrated unity or integrated whole, which is on the whole,

kind of very good. So anyway, there are various things that the theists can say. I know that this is looking kind of desperate, but... Well, you know, it's... What was it we were talking about earlier that was similar? Like, or you were talking about like the hypertime thing, and it's like, I think these are clever and they're interesting, but it does fit. You can imagine why somebody listening to this.

I think there's basically two types of listener. There's a listener that goes, huh, that's kind of fun and interesting and what a fun, like, thought experiment. And there are people who go, like, you know, this is nonsense, who the hell cares. I don't think there's a camp of people who listen to this and go, yeah, yeah,

oh gosh, yeah, fair enough, actually. Yeah, that explains it. Do you know what I mean? I think there's a small camp who might be like that. If that's you, let us know. Let us know. I don't know.

It just feel, I mean, I guess if you've already got enough prior like assumptions. Obviously, you know, if you're speaking to an atheist, all of this is going to sound like absolute nonsense. It's like nonsense on stilts, as it were. I just want to say this is what people misunderstand about theodices because the argument from evil in its best versions is Bayesian. It's looking at, it's comparing different hypotheses and seeing how well they predict the data, how much they probabilify it. So when you're running this argument, you have to say, under theism, holding theism fixed, how probable is the data?

So you have to put on your theistic goggles and think about the probability of these various hypotheses given that theism is true. You can't then say, like, oh, but I'm an atheist and this all seems really ridiculous to me. Like, no, you're supposing that theism is true for the sake of this argument and then trying to tease out.

How likely is it that we would see a seemingly indifferent evolutionary process? And the thought of this argument is that, listen, conditional on theism, it doesn't seem like prohibitively unlikely that God might create beings that are higher than us and give them certain divinely appointed tasks of governance over the rest of creation

or portions of creation. And given the relevant goods involved, especially if we've already conditioned on the fact that God has created us and given us certain responsibilities, which doesn't seem terribly unlikely, I don't know. Like, it does this seem hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism holding that fixed

and putting aside your kind of atheistic, naturalistic, skeptical assumption? Yeah, fair enough. I don't know. And so long as you can at least make it so that it's not hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, then while we arguably will have evidence

against theism here from evolutionary animal suffering, I don't want us to lose that. We will have evidence. The point from the theist's perspective is to put dense in that, to say that this is not overwhelming evidence, because I can tell a story that is not prohibitively unlikely,

conditional on theism, which would render the data, you know, somewhat expected. And that means that, yeah, you're going to get some up state in favor of atheism here. But it's not going to be overwhelming and this shouldn't basically be like a silver bullet for you guys. You guys are also going to have to take into account all this fine tuning stuff and contingency and various other things. So, you know,

you can't just cling to the problem of evil and say like, it's the end of the day. This is decisive. It's just to put dense in the problem of evil to say like this is not as decisive as you guys might have initially thought. Yeah. And also, it's not like you are just creating these entities out of nowhere. Like if, like, in other words, religions believe in the existence of angels. And it's a little unclear exactly what they are, but they seem to be a sort of higher level than humans. It seems to kind of goes animal, human, like, angel, Jesus, God, if you ask me.

And, yeah, like, that makes it a little easier to say, like, well, let's investigate what the nature of these angelic beings might be, where they fit into this sort of story of humanity and evolution. And, yeah, like, maybe that's what happened. Like, it would be a lot less strong, I think, still, if there were no such thing as angels in religious scriptures. And you kind of had to invent these hypothetical creatures in the way that you do with the aliens, where you're like, well, maybe there's this alien thing. That will land better for an atheist.

But as a religious person who already believes in the existence of aliens, the question of angels, the question now is just like, well, where do those angels fit into this story? And it's, yeah, it's plausible. Maybe they had some kind of dominion over the calling featherless, iPads. Right, right, exactly. And I mean, this is something that Cutter and Swenson point out. Like, actually, there are, this is not like some like totally ludicrously ad hoc postulation just to save theism, just to save a theory. Like, you know, when someone's saying that, when someone, when someone is saying about their own argument, you know, just so you know,

this isn't a totally ludicrous ad hoc. It seems a bit ropey. Listen, they don't say quite that. This is me putting words in it around. Their point is like, listen, this is not an ad hoc posit. It's totally foreign to. you know, independent theorizing and relevant religious traditions. And they point out that in the Bible, like, you know, Satan is described as the ruler of this world. And, you know, like, we are battling against these powers and principalities and whatnot. And, like, this is like an age of darkness and various other things. You can even look like Aquinas argued way back in the 13th century that, you know, the role of angels in creation,

like God actually did just give them certain roles. like some of them are appointed to be the angels on top of, let's say, or like assigned to do certain things. So like there are various precedents within church history, within the Bible, within various things. And like, you know, now we're really getting into the week. You know, we're really getting kind of crazy here. But like, I think a lot of Christians will say like, hey, dude,

like we just have like lots of independent evidence from like direct eyewitness testimony across cultures and across times for the existence of like a demonic type phenomena, you know, like seemingly honest witnesses testified. Just like, you know, seeing people, you know, levitate speak languages that they don't know, you know, like objects just like randomly flying across the room and broad daylight and perfectly conducive perceptual circumstances in front of tons of different witnesses. So they'll say like, okay, listen, like, this doesn't prove anything. But like, we have some independent evidence from like direct first, first hand eyewitness testimony

that these things may very well exist. I don't know. I'm maybe just digging myself deeper and deeper into holes. As I said, I have my Theist hat on. It's worth a hearing, you know, and I'm stranger things have been said by, you know, by your guests. People who actually believe. Yeah, on occasion, on occasion, especially, you know, the last time we spoke.

Yeah, I don't know. Like, obviously this does not have any, like, like, this is not compelling to me. That's what I mean to say. But like, it's an interesting. I'm so surprised. It might do something for someone out there, and I'd be interested if it does. Like, has this paper, like, quite niche? Like, is this one you said won the prize?

It's a very good paper. That's the thing. Like, it's pointing out the various different goods that come about as a result of this. Is this the one that won the prize you were talking about, or was that the hypertime? Yeah, Marxianner's Prize in Philosophy of Religion. It's published in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, or rather it's forthcoming. It's called, yeah, the omission the odyssey, I think, by Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson. Let it not be said that cutting-edge research is not being done in the theology department of the University of Oxford.

Right, right, right, exactly. So, I mean, listen, this is not the only approach that theists are forced into. I mean, again, as you said, like Trent already has this approach on which animals may very well be able to have an afterlife, where the evils that they suffer in this life are defeated. There are various other considerations that people raise. You know, Michael Murray has this book Nature, read in tooth and claw, where he tries to give, like, a number of different theodices. Various things can be said in response to these things.

But I just want to point out that, like, hey, the the theme is totally silent here. But then let's take a look at the claim under discussion here, which is evolution disproves God as like a claim. People typically, they might be talking about evolutionary animal suffering. They might be talking about, like, the uniqueness of humans. They might be talking about particular doctrines like young earth creationism, that evolution just flies in the face of like all of these things. I think it flies in the face of the uniqueness of humans because if we're just the result of this like gradual sort of evolution from some kind of common ancestor, then if you were to like resurrect all of the missing links between a human being and a chimpanzee say, they'll sort of on a graph, they'll sort of converge like this until we find our common ancestor, how many millions of years ago that was. You could take all of those creatures and you could bring them back from the dead and you could stand them all like in a line and you'd sort of go, right, chimpanze, chimpanze, chimpanze, and you go all across these like millions and millions of creatures.

And by the time you got to the end, you'd be like human being. But there's no point at which you go, chimpanzee, now you're a human. Because it's gradual, although those sort of missing links are all dead now, they're like real creatures who like walked the earth. And it would have to either be that God like arbitrarily just like chooses a point and goes, now you're humans. and now I'm going to give you the breath of life or whatever. Maybe that's what it means to breathe life into Adam's nostrils or whatever,

but it seems a little bit unfair that now one creature who has exactly the same, like genetic makeup as his mother, it's the same species. You put them together, they're the same kind of animal. But this one, because he was born today, gets to inherit eternal life and benefit from the salvation of Jesus. But his mother, who's exactly the same genetic creature. No, no, no, no, because, you know, she didn't have the breath of life breathed into or whatever.

It just seemed like a really, again, like unexpected thing. So, anyway, we know this, right? There are lots of reasons why evolution sort of seems to rub up against religion in a negative way, but the claim that it disproves God, what do you think? Okay, I mean, that's surely false. I mean, like, these are at least consistent, like theism and evolution seems consistent. God could have created by way of evolution. I don't see any like incoherence in positing conjunction.

Yeah, but then we don't want to be like too trivial here. We don't want to say like, well, technically they're consistent. And so you're right to say that. You know, if you didn't interrupt you. Yeah. Sorry. I mean. You're quite right.

Yeah, they're like strictly consistent. But my own view is that evolution provides serious, non-trivial, substantive. evidence against God's existence that must be reckoned with and must be balanced against those various other reasons and considerations that I mentioned earlier that arguably favor God's existence. Yeah. And as with all of these claims, I think that oftentimes, if we just analyze them on like face value, we can always kind of go, well, you know, technically that doesn't apply or technically.

But like people are like getting at something, right? Slogans are supposed to be like representative of a broader view. The slogan itself is never supposed to be the entire extent of the position. And so, yeah, like evolution doesn't disapprove God. But you know what? Someone's getting at when they say that. They mean that evolution poses a big challenge to some of the assumptions that a traditional theist might have. And when someone says that, like, oh, well, I just believe in one less God than you do,

that's like a bonkers reason to think that God doesn't exist. But maybe they're just trying to get across like a psychological condition. You know, I think with all of these things, it's worth, as I say, they are represented. of broader positions, and I'm glad that we've, I suppose, taken the time today to just try to analyze what those broader positions actually are, so that the next time you hear one of these things, you don't dismiss it out of hand. And instead you dismiss it with, you know, sort of thoughtful critique. Or maybe you think that some of them are true. I don't know. I can't remember. We didn't do like an official like, so this one's good and this one's bad, but there's

probably a relatively clear up and down. I think most of them have been like, knows, right? Like there have been a couple that we've endorsed, like the geographical distribution thing, but whatever, you know, who cares? Joe, Joe Schmidt. Your channel, majesty of reason

will of course be linked in the description and extraordinary in-depth diets. I always have fun talking to you. You seem to, you're just like a, you're a brain and you're an encyclopedia, but you're not just that because you know how to convey the ideas and how to pull them together.

And we're all very grateful for the time you spent sat. in a little box on a screen in front of me for this podcast. So thanks again, man. Yeah, thank you.