#137 Debunking Arguments for God - Graham Oppy

27:28Which includes its spatial location. And now it might get a bit more complicated because I might say, well, it's got the properties it has because it's black because of the design or of the Shure SM7B. Its spatial location is because of the microphone stand, all of that kind of stuff. But if we followed one of those threads, we might say, well you know this property at least it has the property of its spatial location because of the stand and that's because of the earth and that's because of so on and so forth well why does the earth have the properties that it does oh because of you know some kind of universal laws of gravity and stuff like that well yeah why and then we get to the universe you know some some kind of big sort of collection of everything and we say well why does the universe have the properties that it does that does seem like a sensible question to me and it seems like if there were an answer for why the universe had the properties that it has, we are now straying into the realm of a cause that sort of exists outside of, at least logically separable from, the universe.

28:28So once you're asking about things, why do they have the properties that they do? There's two kinds of considerations here. One will be some of the reasons why it is the way it is at the moment is because of what other things are doing to it right now. And the other thing will be to do with its history, right? It has the properties that it now, because of the way that it was earlier, the way that other things were earlier. If we're asking this question at the level of the universe, why does the universe have the properties that it does? Once we've got to the universe right now, why is it the way it is?

29:04If you're me, you're going to say, well, to answer that question, we look to the past. So we've given up on horizontal explanations. Is that right? No, we've given up on vertical explanation at this point. We're now going to do it horizontally, right? And we're going to go back. And if there's a first thing that its properties, it has of necessity, right? So it doesn't look like finding these kinds of, I mean, asking these kinds of questions about things in the universe isn't, at least by my way, it's going to take you beyond the universe. mm-hmm i see i guess what i'm trying to get at is is to what extent the impotence of this line of thought is a result of the way that we're wording it and the fact that we're unhelpfully choosing words like holding up and how much for this in principle because like poetically speaking almost i could say well what holds up the earth well that's a silly question but in a way i could say, well, you know, the earth is kind of held up by the sun, like, you know, in a sense.

30:09And as long as you kind of get what I'm saying there, you know, that really, I've maybe made a bit of a mistake with my language, but the point is still there, that the earth is there because of the sun. And I'm wondering, like, is there, do you think there is any sort of perfectly designed version of like the language we're using that could get us to what the theist wants, which is a sort of direct line from the microphone to the god of the universe? So I suspect not. There is a kind of quite good version of this argument that Ed Fieser gives in his Five Proofs book. But the thing that he focuses on from memory is something like unification of essence and existence.

30:56Graham Oppy:It's a very abstract thing, something that you might not think is happening in the world, and that kind of requires some external doing. So what unifies your essence in existence has to be something else, and forcibly that thing's going to be God. So it's a very short, vertical chain, a sort of one-step chain. But that's where he ends up with, because he kind of concedes a point about all of the standard examples, that they just, I'll say it this way, they just peter out. They don't get you outside the universe. Yeah, and I'd recommend that text, as I have done in the past to people, and Ed Fazer has been on this show as well to discuss the argument from change.

31:44I think one thing that's probably worth mentioning here before kind of moving on is that I mentioned this to you over email is that one of my favorite objections to contingency arguments, any kind of argument that relies on contingency and necessity is this wonderful observation that was made by Peter Van Inwagen, which is known as the modal fatalism objection. And I think maybe it's worth trying to touch on. It can get a bit complicated, but I wonder if there's a kind of simple-ish version that we can get at. And it first relies on this controversial assumption. Again, we take the principle of sufficient reason.

32:21We say everything which happens, there is a sufficient reason for why it happens. And you have to sort of be on my team for this to work. You have to say, well, a sufficient reason is the same thing as entailment. If P is a sufficient reason for Q, that means that if P happens, Q must happen. P entails Q. And I suppose the most interesting part of Van Inwagen's line of thought here is that if P is necessarily true, if it just cannot be false, then if P entails Q, seems to imply that Q is also necessary. It would be weird to say that, yeah, P has to be true, and if P is true, then Q is true, but Q could be false.

33:09That doesn't make any sense. So if a necessary thing entails another thing, that other thing is necessary. Yet the first premise of contingency arguments for the existence of God are there exist contingent objects, which could have not existed and they require an explanation for their existence. And ultimately, the theist wants to say that this is all explained by a necessary being. But if your first premise is that there are contingent objects, your conclusion is that everything is caused by a necessary being, or sufficiently explained by a necessary being, that's where this becomes relevant.

33:44Because if a necessary being, or a necessary truth, sufficiently explains everything in the universe, then because it's necessary and it entails everything in the universe, everything in the universe cannot be contingent. Therefore, the first premise doesn't even get off the ground. Now, I know that's far from the entirety of what Van Inwagen says, but it's an interesting thought, you think? So, I think that that is what Van Inwagen says. That is the objection that he's making to this style of argument.

34:16Graham Oppy:And I think that if you really want to hang on to the idea that there's a necessary cause, you better give up the idea that the causal relation is a relation of necessitation. Or you better, so as before, you better just go with Leibniz and say, surprisingly, absolutely everything is necessary. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I say that it's not the totality of Van Inwagen's argument is because he gets quite specific about how this all works with his big conjunctive contingent fact and stuff like this, which I think is probably too complicated to get into verbally here. but I would recommend people go and read the paper.

35:10I think it's one of the most ingenious arguments I came across when I was first getting into contingency arguments years ago at university. But the basic point that I think is worth reflecting on that I think not enough people spend time reflecting on is that if a necessary being is causally adequate to fully explain a contingent thing, there is a potential paradox lurking in there unless you're extremely careful because necessary things cannot entail contingent things or can they i mean that i suppose that's the question to round this off do you think that at least that part is true are we sort of misusing because some people have sort of told me that that's not quite how necessity and contingency works on some theories of logic is it just sort of it seems to me almost um you know like clear and distinct, as Descartes would say, that it seems obviously true that if something is necessary and it entails something, the thing it entails is also necessary.

36:10But is that necessarily true? So I think that that's true. So I'm just trying to think a little bit about modal logic now. So we've got necessarily P then Q and we've got necessarily P, right?

36:29Graham Oppy:So in a normal modal logic, we're going to have necessarily Q. We can make weak modal logics in which you don't have that, but there have been very few people who thought that those weak modal logics are going to work for the explanation relation or something like that. Maybe it'll work for a deontic logic or something like that. Yeah, and I think we're on the same page there as it were. And I'll try to remember to link all the various things I'm talking about in the description below. But, you know, some people will be listening to this and thinking, okay, cool, this contingency stuff is really interesting.

37:13But when I've heard of the cosmological argument, it's because I've seen these debates with William Lane Craig, and he's talking about Kalam and things beginning to exist. So I think if even if only briefly, we are going to have to give some attention here to this famous Kalam cosmological argument popularized by that Dr. William Lane Craig, who has also been on this show, which is quite simple. Premise one, everything which begins to exist has a cause. Premise two, the universe began to exist. Conclusion, therefore, the universe has a cause. What do you think? so good so good so good spring styles are at nordstrom rack stores now and they're up to 60 off stock up and save on rag and bone made well vince all saints and more of your favorites how did i not know rack has adidas why do we rock for the hottest deal just so many good brands join the nordy club to unlock exclusive discounts shop new arrivals first and more plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free great brands great prices that's why you rack

38:21Okay, so that's one thing. Sometimes the argument goes like this, whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist.

38:31Graham Oppy:So there are actually two versions of the argument. It won't really matter. I don't think we're going to get so precise as to worry about the difference between them. so there are two key things to think about in assessing the syllogism one is what you mean by the universe and the other one is what you mean by begins to exist so if you think that there's an initial state of the universe that's necessary do we think that that kind of initial surface begins to exist. That's a hard question to address. If you compare with the situation facing the theist, the theist says, so, God makes the initial state of the universe.

39:29But what about God? Does God, in a relevant sense, begin to exist?

39:38And is there a kind of difference between these questions,

39:43Graham Oppy:sort of what theists and naturalists could say in answering that question? Is there a relevant difference between the options that they've got? So that's the main thing to think about, I think. Yeah, sometimes it feels like the kind of paradoxes and incomprehensibility that a theist describes to the atheist. Like, well, a universe can't be eternal and infinities don't seem to make much sense and stuff like that. When you start talking about God, some of these concepts seem to kind of crop up again in various ways where they're treated as though they're a bit different. It's like, no, God isn't infinite.

40:28He's just timeless. You know, he hasn't existed for all time. He's kind of existed for no time. And it kind of feels like a similar-ish trick is being pulled, especially when you consider that modern physics tells us that time is a sort of dimension of the fabric of space-time, right? It's just one dimension of the same kind of stuff that the universe is made out of. And so if you sort of go back to the Big Bang, let's say, everything gets sort of condensed and everything sort of begins, it sort of feels like that point itself might be kind of described as timeless, you know, because it's this sort of infinite, almost near infinite sort of density.

41:06And we know that like mass changing in that way can have huge effects on time and time can slow down and speed up and stuff. And yeah, maybe we just sort of get this sort of get this timeless thing at the beginning of the universe. And it seems a little unclear, I think, to a lot of people. and one of the points you make in this book I mentioned earlier that crops up quite consistently is like even if this argument gets you somewhere it doesn't seem to get you to something that you should call God it gets you to yeah there's something weird going on at the beginning there's some necessary existence there's some first cause or bunch of causes but to call it God seems a little bit misplaced perhaps right yeah so that that's the way that I'm inclined to respond.

41:49There is this other thing about whether what exactly you mean by the universe, whether you think that the universe is just all of natural reality, or whether you think of it as our bit, this side of inflation, of our inflation.

42:06Graham Oppy:And there might be a whole lot more stuff, including a kind of background space that maybe goes back infinitely into the past, with lots of inflating going on in different regions at different rates of time. And then our universe maybe turns out to have a cause in that background space because there's a cause for the inflation to happen. That will give you a very different kind of response and you kind of have to make a decision about what you're going to mean by the universe before we can really settle things. Yeah, in my experience, most atheists I speak to, especially just sort of casually, hearing the Kalam, they reject the second premise most readily, that the universe began to exist.

42:54They sort of say, oh, maybe the universe is infinite, or maybe the universe that is the multiverse or stuff that before the Big Bang, maybe there's just more to it. And it seems like a pretty easy sort of thing to say. I'm also interested in the first premise because you said it also you know it depends what you mean by begins to exist because I've made this point quite a lot that things don't really begin to exist ex nihilo in the way that the theist wants the universe to begin to exist ex nihilo you know when God creates it out of nothing when we talk about things beginning to exist in a colloquial sense it seems intuitive at first right like everything which begins to exist has a cause sure but like you know does a car begin to exist there's no new material nothing's like popped into the universe instead you've taken a bunch of pre-existing matter a bunch of metal and some rubber and you know electrical wires and stuff and you just kind of arranged it you just kind of put it in an arrangement and given it a label and so it never really begins to exist in the literal sense in fact given that all of the matter of the universe which we just rearrange to create objects like cars and microphones and lights and stuff.

44:06If that all originated at the Big Bang, then let's say the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe. Let's say the universe did have a beginning and it was called the Big Bang. Well, the first premise of the Kalam is everything which begins to exist, and I kind of want to put in brackets here, to make the argument truly valid, we'd have to say everything which begins to exist ex nihilo, because that's what we're trying to get to. Everything which begins to exist out of nothing has a cause. Premise two, the universe began to exist out of nothing, therefore the universe must have a cause. But if the only thing that's ever begun to exist out of nothing is the universe, because everything within the universe is just a rearrangement of matter, right?

44:45Like there's no new stuff. The only time anything has ever begun to exist in the literal sense is when the universe began to exist, then the argument now reads like this. Premise one, the universe began to exist, because the premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause. And so, oh, sorry, rather, the first premise then becomes, if the first premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause, the only thing that really began to exist was the universe. So the first premise is now just the universe has a cause. Premise two, the universe began to exist. Conclusion, therefore, the universe has a cause.

45:24The first premise becomes identical to the conclusion. I think that the Kalam cosmological argument might actually be circular. Right. So it's quite tricky to give a good account of what circularity in arguments makes for. But I do think that there's a serious question about the first premise of the kind that you're pointing to, that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist, it really does matter what we decide we're going to mean by begins to exist.

46:10Graham Oppy:because if we decided that God begins to exist in the relevant sense of begins to exist,

46:22there's no prior time at which God doesn't exist.

46:30Graham Oppy:Maybe that's enough to make it the case that God begins to exist. No theist is going to say, oh, okay, so God's got a cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? And, you know, when I had William L. Gregg on my show the first time, I presented this to him quite excitedly at the time. I was very young. And I was like, you know, I kind of think this is circular because I don't think that things really do begin to exist in the way you want them to. I think you just sort of rearrange matter. And he says to me, you know, Alex, I don't think you realize how radical the view is that you're proposing.

47:03It's this view called myriological nihilism, which has since become a huge part of so many of the topics I talk about. And my listeners will be hopefully quite familiar with the concept. But it's funny that that's how I was introduced to the concept, because he said, well, you know, Alex, if if if a car if there's no point in which the car began to exist, that means that right now the car doesn't really exist. and I was like huh but I was happy to kind of bite the bullet on that and say yeah you know what I've I've I still don't think that the Kalam works but I now also don't believe in distinct material objects thank you William Lane Craig for giving me that existential crisis although I I find it I don't find it troubling at all to to be a muriological nihilist but I do think as long as you're willing so you in other words you should be aware of that potential implication but I think as long as you're willing to accept that like think about what the argument is saying everything which begins to exist again in what sense well because our conclusion we want to be talking about the universe being created like new stuff then to be consistent we have to be talking about stuff beginning to exist in the same way so when the premise says everything which begins to exist we have to mean new stuff everything which begins to exist as new stuff has a cause and you kind of want to say well how on earth do you know that because when have you ever seen anything pop into existence and verify that it has a cause, you know?

48:25Right. So that's interesting. And this thing about cars, when they begin to exist, is really tricky too because cars

48:34Graham Oppy:are assembled from components that are made in all kinds of different ways. I mean, in all kinds of different locations, typically, and then brought together and put together in a certain way. There's a certain amount of vagueness about exactly when a car begins to exist. I don't know whether that matters, but, I mean, presumably this is part of what feeds into your myelogical nihilism, right? You can't actually... So, I mean, here's another part of the same thing. Suppose I like to take my car apart and sort of sits in the backyard, spread out all over of the lawn. Does my car still exist while it's spread out all over the lawn?

49:24Or does it only exist intermittently when I put it all back together again? And if it does, is there a kind of precise point at which I've put in just enough of the components that it now exists before it didn't? yeah it's it's tricky i mean the the common example that i come across all the time or did when i read about this i suppose is uh somebody taking their their watch or their clock in for repair you know like the and maybe the the watch gets taken apart and the the hands get sent off to one factory and the glass gets sent off to another and the leather strap gets sent off to a different factory and it's like does the watch still exist it seems at some point like if i were to set it on fire and disintegrate it into individual like bits of ash we probably want to say it's it's not there anymore but like you know in theory all the material is still there the ashes there the the stuff that's sort of burnt up and evaporated into the air is somewhere in the atmosphere or something it's still all there the people say no no that the watch doesn't exist and yet if i just remove the strap from my watch we want to say it still exists and there is again this sort of problem of um specificity of resolution of like where but if we can't even say meaningfully when a thing begins to exist or that it begins to exist or in what sense it begins to exist it starts to look more and more dubious that we can have a strong premise like everything which begins to exist has a cause.

50:55It's like, I don't even know if we can sort of agree on what we're talking about here. So some people will hope that we can just, loose talk will do. I mean, in a loose sense, most of the time

51:09Graham Oppy:when we talk about things beginning to exist, we're going to agree sort of roughly about when it began to exist and when it stopped existing. I mean, yeah, there's some vagueness, but the vagueness doesn't extend over centuries. like when I began to exist is slightly indeterminate, but it was sometime around the beginning of the 60s, right? It wasn't in the 1860s. Yeah, and it's easy enough when you zoom out in that way. Although, of course, if you speak to a Buddhist or a Hindu or something, they might have a slightly more complicated answer or perhaps a more simple answer in that, you know well he didn't begin to exist in the 60s or the 80s i guess we sort of all began to exist at the same time but and once again you've sort of got this own only one thing ever begins to exist if anything does um but yeah you know people sort of i think one of the reason one of the motivations for views like that are to sort of try and get a get away from these seeming paradoxes of things beginning to exist or not existing because my i've taken my strap off my watch and so it doesn't exist anymore.

52:17That seems a bit weird to say. And so people kind of want to accept a metaphysical principle that just releases all of that paradoxical stuff into the air. And one way to do that is to say the watch doesn't exist in the first place. You know, that's what the muriological nihilist does. They just say, there is no watch. So it's not a problem for me. You can take as many repairs, you take it for as many repairs as you like, and it's not going to cause me any metaphysical concern. But you know, okay, we might not be able to talk about exactly when things begin to exist. And we're not sure if the universe began to exist in the right metaphysical sense.

52:52But let's use that as a segue to move on here. And we spent a lot of time on cosmological arguments, but I wanted, as promised, to cover a couple more. And maybe we can do them with a little bit more haste, because I think cosmological arguments are probably the most tricky and technical, especially in this format, to get into. But there's this other feature of the universe, whether it began to exist or not, which is that it seems to abide by some perfectly balanced and really finely attuned laws and principles and constants. So famously, this is called the fine-tuning problem or the fine-tuning argument or whatever you want to sort of label it.

53:34Now, we're talking here about things like the strength of gravity. We're talking about the expansion rate of the universe, the curvature of space-time, the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces that hold atoms together. In principle, logically, it seems possible that gravity could be two times as strong. It could be that when you have an object of one kilogram mass, it just exerts twice the bending of space-time than it does in the actual world. That could have been the case. And the scientists have been telling us for years now that If that were the case, if gravity had been a little bit stronger, then the entire universe would have collapsed shortly after the Big Bang, right?

54:20Because the gravitational pull would have been too strong and things would have collapsed in on themselves. If it had been any weaker, then everything would have flown apart so fast that, you know, planets couldn't form. And so this fine-tuning argument, I think, is often misrepresented. I think people think we're talking about like, oh, the Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun, which is pretty nice. But when you realize there are billions and billions of suns and billions of planets, one of them is going to hit. But we're talking here about the fabric of the universe itself, that if these constants had been ever so slightly different, basically nothing could exist short of maybe like some hydrogen atoms or something like that.

55:00So the theist wants to look at this and say, this fine tuning can only be explained in one of three ways. chance, which seems exceedingly unlikely given just how perfectly balanced these constants have to be. Necessity, they just had to be this way, but they certainly don't seem logically necessary and we don't really have any good reason to suspect that they would be necessary. We don't have any sort of scientific law that says they have to be that way or something like that. And third is design. Somebody chose to make them that way so that the universe could come about and no surprises which one they favor so having laid that out what do you think

55:45so there's So, you're suggesting there are three options. Let's part design and talk about the other two.

56:01Graham Oppy:Whether it's chance or not depends upon, I think, when exactly these values are fixed. So one story that you could tell, one way that maybe the physics could play out, is that at some point there's something like a phase transition in the universe and the values get fixed by the phase transition. And it's just like other things that happen in physics. this is going to be an indeterministic process, right? Suppose it goes that way. Well, now it doesn't matter what the numbers are. It doesn't matter what the probabilities are. Once you know that it's indeterministic, that it really was just a matter of chance, there's nothing left to worry about.

57:07It's like suppose we conquer the galaxies.

57:11Graham Oppy:right, humans inhabit. And we build sort of every star has either a planet that we've colonised or a planet, a set of planets that we've artificially constructed. And there are billions and billions and billions of galaxies, right? I've underplayed how many there are. And we have a universal lottery in which every person on every one of the planets had a seat ticket. And it turns out that you have the winning ticket. And the odds are astronomically against you getting the winning ticket. But for reasons that I won't go into, we're quite confident that the lottery was won fair and square. But you shouldn't be worrying about the fact that it was so incredibly unlikely that you would get the winning ticket to think, oh, it must have been rigged in my favour.

58:13Graham Oppy:It must have been that for reasons unknown to me that the organisers of the lottery decided that I was going to be the person that wins the big prize or whatever. So as long as you're confident in the fairness of the process, the size of the number doesn't matter. And I think that analogy is going to carry over to the case of the fine-tuning of the constants. so long as we know that it was just the result of some phase transition in the universe. Okay, so that's the first point. You can't rule out chance as a satisfying explanation until you've ruled out the possibility that there was a phase transition of that kind, perhaps back before inflation.

59:01Graham Oppy:So it's physics that we don't know anything about. Yeah. Can you just clarify what you mean by a phase transition? So I'm just thinking about something that happens that applies to the state of the whole of the universe in which these various parameters get set to particular values. They were not set to these values earlier. Maybe it's because the universe wasn't, at that earlier point, wasn't characterized by those parameters. That's the kind of thing that I've got in mind. The parameters of the universe now, have they always characterized the universe? Yeah, who knows? I think thoughts like that are quite plausible or intuitive.

59:47Yeah, you know, I would think there's no way it's me that I've won the lottery. It's so unlikely, but someone had to win it, right? But it's that someone had to win it that I think is key here because we've only got one universe that we know of and people like to talk about a multiverse that's kind of a version of the chance argument but shelving that for the time being there's just the one universe that we know about and so it's it seems to me less like doing a big lottery with everyone in the universe and the person who wins is is really really surprised it'd be more like sort of i don't know if in the same way that if i don't know how many like hands of poker are played every day probably millions online poker and you know casinos around the world and probably a royal flush occurs every now and again right but i've got to say that if there were only like one game of poker that that occurred or one hand of poker that occurred and it was a royal flush and it was like the one time that it had happened i would feel like less inclined to say like oh well you know like had just as much chance of that hand as any other it would feel a lot less less easy and so in other words the intuitive force that someone had to win the lottery it doesn't feel like some universe had to get the the constants that they did unless there is a multiverse if the idea is just that well something could be unlikely but as long as we know that it was due to chance like it shouldn't be a problem i still think that that would be like a a big a big problem for me you know like i find it very difficult to to swallow that intuition for the universe unless we're just talking about a multiverse in which case it becomes trivially easy to say, yeah, you know, some universe had to have these constants.

1:01:42So in the case of the poker hand, that someone gets a royal flush is actually some evidence that there's some cheating going on in general.

1:01:55Graham Oppy:If I was really, really confident that there couldn't possibly be any cheating going on, then the one deal and it comes up, well, fine.

1:02:07so that's one thing but the point about the analogy is just that it so easily could have happened that the cards came out differently and you didn't get a royal flush

1:02:20Graham Oppy:and in the case of the universe it could easily have happened on this telling of the story where there is a just, I'll say random even if it's not quite the right way a random assignment of the values to the constants. It could easily have turned out that if it is the case it's just one universe, the one universe that there is only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second. It blew apart so rapidly that it never contained anything interesting. And the thing to say would be that's just the way it turned out. But that's it on the assumption that there's this kind of uniform random assignment of the values.

1:03:02well maybe not very likely right that the story about the the random assignment of the variables that depends on physics stuff why not well do do you think it is plausible i just want to be clear what you're saying here do you think it is just like plausibly true that there's only one universe and that it has the constants it has and it could have had different constants and they are like extremely like finely balanced with a with a with an unbelievable degree of unlikelihood do you think it's plausible like a sort of live option to just go yeah but it just just so happened to be that way sure just on analogy with the so i happened to win the intergalactic lottery yeah i just i mean it's just i mean you can make the the numbers in the intergalactic lottery as big as you like you can make them rival the numbers in um fine-tuning argument it doesn't it doesn't change anything as far as i can see i i see the the lottery thing is more like the multiverse because the way the lottery works is that there is a ticket that's going to win right i think it would be more like you run this strange you run this really strange lottery where like you have to you have to pick a series of of of 10 numbers and it's not that like everybody gets a ticket and somebody's going to win it's like there's only one player right because there's only one universe there's only one player and they have to pick you know 500 million numbers in a random order and i've written down 500 million numbers and if you pick the right numbers, you know, you're going to win the lottery.

1:04:53You're going to get a million dollars. And the person just randomly guesses 500 million numbers in a row. And I go, oh, gosh, you know, like after however long it takes me to check them, I go, yeah, congratulations, you've won. Right. That seems to be more like the situation where there's one universe and those constants have to be exactly as tuned as they are in order for basically anything to exist. And it no longer becomes plausible to me for the person who won the lottery to go like, Yeah, well, you know, I guess, you know, it's... So it depends. So what's the explanation for the numbers that they wrote down, right?

1:05:27What matters is the ruling out any other possible explanation. So I mean, I agree that it seems massively implausible, but that's because you're starting to think, well, they must have cheated.

1:05:43Graham Oppy:They must be using cameras. There must be somebody with a microphone. and they must have an earpiece and someone's just dictating the numbers to them or something like that. And that will bring a more plausible hypothesis than they just guessed them all. But the thought was, we rule all of that out. And then what's the option? You just accept it. hmm i said i suppose and in fairness in that case like if i just if i just knew that the person genuinely had just randomly chosen and just gotten lucky then yeah i would just have to accept that as a matter of fact but i suppose if somebody said that a live option and for me like when i look at fine tuning like yeah like god designing the universe is a is a live option for me i don't think it's the like true one i don't have enough reason to think that's the case, but yeah, it's possible.

1:06:38Yeah. Maybe God designed the universe. If my only other option, let's say, were chance, because that's the one we're considering right now, I think I would have to choose the God explanation because it would be like if there were two explanations for how that person got that number, either they randomly chose or somebody had secretly like psychologically, you know, designed it. So they'd pick those numbers. And I would, in a heartbeat, I would pick that second explanation and would you do the same yeah yeah well i agree about that i'm just just thinking about that can you rule out chance um absolutely

1:07:20Graham Oppy:and at this stage we haven't compared the other hypotheses and so i just want to see yeah yeah yeah i think i think that's worth worth pointing out and you know i think you're right at the very least that the chance thing just gets like brushed over doesn't it when people are talking about this they go like so it could be chance but we know it's not that so let's talk but yeah let's let's slow down let's take a moment let's think about it okay so what about our other options here we've sort of got necessity in design at least that's the way that it's often painted so are those our only remaining options so so how are we going to classify multiverse right so there's what so yeah of trials here and uh the constants are just assigned randomly to an incredibly vast array of initial states of universes, and a few of them take off, and the rest of them are spectacular failures.

1:08:25Graham Oppy:Is that necessity? I tend to say that that's a version of the chance, because you're saying that we find ourselves in a finely tuned universe just by chance, because this is the lottery thing, where there are trillions and trillions, or maybe an infinite number of universes, And yeah, like, of course, by chance, some of them are going to be finely tuned. But now I'm thinking about it in a way, it's also maybe a version of the necessity argument, because if there's a multiverse of every possibility, you want to say that, like, necessarily, one of those is going to have finely tuned constants. So maybe it kind of sits outside and should be its own option.

1:09:03But yeah, I mean, it's probably the most popularly discussed response to this is the multiverse. So however we classify it, some people posit the existence of a multiverse in response to the fine-tuning problem. Others think they have other reasons to believe in a multiverse anyway, and then conveniently that sort of solves this problem for us. Do you think it is as neat a solution as atheists often claim, that if a multiverse exists, then the fine-tuning problem just disappears?

1:09:34Graham Oppy:So I think that it's an important question whether we have independent reason to believe that there's a multiverse or not. It seems like it's very expensive if you're postulating a multiverse just to explain the fine-tuning of the constants. It's theoretically expensive. But there are certainly physicists working on interesting multiverse models. so this is something that's consistent with physics as we have it now um i don't know because the cosmology of the early universe is seems to be always in a state of incredible flux so i don't know much like the the early state of the universe itself i just did an episode with uh with phil halper a friend of mine and niayesh afshordi they wrote a book called battle of the big bang and it's about all of the competing models and yeah there's a there's a lot going on there and i think it would be fruitless even for a physicist to to try to speak too confidently on what's going on back then let alone us two um but i understand what you're saying it's sort of it gets a bit complicated but the the philosophical point it seemed to me like what you were saying is it shouldn't be it shouldn't be quite enough to say we've got this fine-tuning problem and the multiverse would solve it.

1:10:57So let's believe in the multiverse. Instead, it's only really going to be satisfying if you have other reasons to believe in the multiverse, which you then apply to fine-tuning and see that it offers a solution. Protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha. Try it today at Starbucks.

1:11:26yep so i'm fine with that so so now we've got chance and multiverse as two things that might be satisfactory but on their own neither of them seems particularly appealing i think is the right to describe the situation okay and so we've got this multiverse thing going on we've got this potential for chance what about necessity by which i want to say there's only one universe and there's just some reason why the constants had to be the way that they are by by necessity do you think that's that's a plausible option so i think that that's um a viable option and if forced to choose between the three options that we're

1:12:19Graham Oppy:now discussing is probably the one that I like the most out of the three. But not that I'm enormously confident that it's the best one of the three to pick, or maybe that's not the right way to say it. I'm not enormously confident that it's the correct answer. The A lot here turns on what you think about the metaphysics of modality. What's the story that you want to tell about necessity and contingency? And broadly speaking, there are two competing schools of thought. There's one school of thought that seems to think that basically our powers of conceivability tell us about the range of metaphysical possibility, right?

1:13:13So if we can kind of consistently conceive of something,

1:13:16Graham Oppy:then it's metaphysically possible. And if you're thinking about it that way, it seems very implausible to take the necessity route. There's a quite different approach to the metaphysics of modality, which I take it goes back to Aristotle, but there have been lots of people in the history of philosophy who've gone this way, who think that modality is grounded in the actual world. So somehow or other, the actual world determines what's possible. Now, the particular version of this that I want to go with is that possible worlds share some history with the actual world and diverge from it only as indeterminism, causal indeterminism plays out differently.

1:14:06Now, if you've got, and you think that the constants were fixed,

1:14:13Graham Oppy:always. So the values have always been the same. Then it's a consequence of that view that the values of the constants are necessary. There's no point, history, where they could have taken on a different value. They've always taken on the value that they do, and there's no mechanism for changing them as the universe evolves. So there's no possible world where the values are different from how they are. So it turns out that they're necessary. That's the third position. Yeah, now, okay, so, and some other people will say that they have sort of a trust in this necessity argument in the sense that they're searching for this so-called theory of everything, you know, like if you could sort of solve science.

1:15:04Now, my regular listeners will know that I'm suspicious of the extent to which science can actually explain anything at all. I think it's a purely descriptive enterprise. But for those who, you know, take an explanatory view of this, they say, OK, well, you know, we haven't got there yet, but one day I'm sure we will unlock the key which tells us there's one simple equation or something which predicts or entails all of the constants as we currently have them. I think you still probably have a problem of like why that equation is the way that it is but maybe when we get there we'll see that it's self-justifying or something and so even though we don't have it there's this idea that that there is some necessary reason that we just haven't discovered yet so we've got some broad strategies here and you said of the three that we've been discussing your favorite is the necessity thing not in that scientific way but in the modality sense but the way you you caveated that by saying you know of the options that we've got here like made me think is there a response that you have to the fine-tuning problem that doesn't abide by these categories like typically speaking if somebody presents this argument to you what is your actual view like yourself you don't believe that the universe was finely tuned by a creator deity so how do you sort of suspect we can account for the finely tuned constants so what i'm going to say is there's this range of options and it's kind of we aren't in a position to decide between them.

1:16:35Sure. If you insist that I just answer the question and I'm only allowed to pick one, then I'm going to pick necessity. And I've written a couple of books where I try to elaborate the kind

1:16:52Graham Oppy:of worldview that I see as being based on this necessity answer. Yeah. And in those books, I don't say what I'm now saying, which is, okay, so this is where at every choice point I pick the view I like the most, but I'm not necessarily confident in the choices. So the overall worldview isn't one that I'm enormously confident in. It's just that at least it gives you a kind of complete worldview to discuss. You know, I was about to move on and try to wrap up with something on the ontological arguments. But just before doing so, I nearly forgot that every time I ever talk about fine tuning or see it discussed on the internet, somebody comments about the puddle.

1:17:37who i can't remember which which writer it is that talked about the talked about the puddle it's like the person who goes wow i like how wonderfully designed the shape of the hole is for the water that fills it now which is obviously a parody the idea is you've mistaken the way around that this that this goes it's not that the hole was designed for the puddle it's that the puddle just fit the hole that happened to be there and gave the illusion of a perfectly sort of designed hole. And the reason I want to point that out is because I think that's a very clever sort of response to some versions of these design arguments, like the distance of the earth from the sun and stuff like that.

1:18:20But I want to point it out because it kind of frustrates me when I see that, because when faced with the possibility that the universe as a whole could not have formed like molecules, it's not enough to say something like oh but you know it's a bit like seeing a puddle and thinking that the hole was designed for the no there's there's no water there's no hole there's no concrete there's no helium there's there's no anything this strong version of the fine-tuning argument is not applying to you know like oh well you know like it's not like the sort of oh this thing looks designed a bit like a watch or something like that or that you know we're in the habitable zone.

1:19:00It's like the fabric of reality would not exist as you know it if these constants were not finely tuned. And so I just want to say that that puddle analogy only applies to a very limited scope, I think, of so-called fine-tuning arguments. And it does not respond adequately, even closely adequately, to something which is about the existence of anything at all made of physical matter there there would be no water and no hole in the ground for it to fill if the constants weren't finely tuned anyway i just want to say my piece i i unless you i maybe you have something to say on that yeah yeah so i think that that's absolutely right the the kind of cosmic

1:19:42Graham Oppy:fine-tuning argument the part of analogy isn't any help at all i have a suspicion that maybe Dawkins was the person who originated that analogy well. No, it was a fiction. It was a writer of fiction. I'll figure it out while you're speaking. I'm not sure what else to add, really, at this point. Okay, it was Douglas Adams, by the way. It was too, actually. It was. It was Douglas Adams who came up with it. I'm not sure where exactly. But yeah, the puddle analogy, imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, this is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in.

1:20:25Fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made to have me in it. And yeah, it's funny. It's clever. It's a good bit. But it's very limited in its scope.

1:20:41Graham Oppy:uh the the puddle analogy is very good for evolutionary i mean for responding to um evolutionary arguments for design because the the evolutionary story tells you about how your features fit the world as it now is right um yes yeah and that's where it's so genius right is that like somebody who thinks you know wow look look how brilliantly designed the the human eye is to perceive you know color and and the environment and stuff and and the point here is like no no no like your eye evolved for the environment it's not that the environment was designed for your eye or whatever it just evolved to fit the space that it was in and douglas adams here is is giving a wonderful illustration of that by saying the hole wasn't designed for the puddle the puddle just fit the environment in which it was in that's right but for some reason i see this like douglas adams quote quoted more in response to fine tuning than to any evolutionary arguments which is extremely strange because i think it just doesn't apply at all it's just like a bit of a psa to people listening like think about it for a moment that doesn't quite apply although i'm sure some of you have already commented it down below and some of you may even think that despite what we've just said it does still apply and if you think that's the case please do let us know why.

1:22:04Having said that, we are kind of running out of time. And it's also very late for me, because you are on the other side of the globe. But I think we would be remiss not to mention what I think is one of my favorite arguments to the existence of God. And that's the ontological family of arguments, because you can do them from an armchair. It's great. You can sort of sit down, close your eyes, just think about stuff and guarantee the existence of God. There are lots of versions of this. I think too many, of course, to cover here. But I think there are two that are the most famous and widely discussed.

1:22:38The first is Anselm's original argument, in which Anselm essentially asks you to do something quite simple. He says, just conceive in your mind of the greatest conceivable being. And I want to be clear, Anselm does not say God, at least not yet, because he's just asking you to do something which by definition is possible. Conceive of the greatest conceivable being. So that means take all the qualities it could have, power, knowledge, goodness, whatever, and turn them all up to their maximal conceivable quality. Again, not say infinite, just whatever you can conceive. Okay, you got it in your head.

1:23:16And here's the question, does that thing exist in reality? Most people say, no, it only exists in my head. I say, well, then you're not doing what Anselm asked you to. Because if that being existed in reality, it would be greater. It would be a greater conceivable being because it would have more existence. It would have more reality. There seem to be levels of existence. It seems that you know, Hamlet doesn't exist in the way that I do. So Hamlet exists less than I do. But also there are all these characters that Shakespeare never wrote that never existed. They seem to exist even less. And maybe logical contradictions like a four-sided triangle seem to exist maybe even less than that.

1:24:00And Anselm kind of wants to say that these levels of existence, or maybe you only think there are two, existence and non-existence. He says there's like existence in the intellect, that is just your imagination and there's existence in reality and a being which exists in reality as well as the intellect is greater it has more stuff than the one that only exists in the intellect so like i said anselm was asking you to do something which by definition you can do you can imagine the greatest conceivable being but a being that exists in reality rather than just in the mind is greater and therefore as long as you're doing what you're to do, which you can do, you're imagining a being which exists in reality.

1:24:41Therefore, the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality. And this, Anselm says, all men call God. What do you think? So what I want to say in response to that is kind of what Cornelio said in response

1:24:58Graham Oppy:to Anselm, sort of within a year of Anselm's producing this argument. The way that you just described it, I can certainly conceive in my mind of, I don't know, let's be very specific. There's a multiple choice test that I've just done with a hundred questions on it. And sort of my greatest conceivable performance on that test, I can certainly conceive of that. And clearly, the greatest conceivable performance for me on that test is going to be real rather than just in my mind. And now it responds with the reasoning. And so that greatest performance on that test exists in reality, which is great because I didn't study and I just guessed 100 times.

1:26:01but I'm guaranteed to get 100 on the test. That cannot be right. There's something wrong with the reasoning going on here that's not specific to stuff about the attributes of the sort of greatness of the being. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It wasn't quite a bit of that.

1:26:22Graham Oppy:I mean, Gornillo's only example was the greatest conceivable island. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the greatest conceivable island, the greatest conceivable pizza the greatest conceivable you know horse unicorn whatever you like it's a sort of a scheme of response it's it's a it's a parody it's a it's a way of saying well if that logic holds then the greatest possible island exists as anselm had it too and i think it'll be easier to i've got i've got a response to this that you know actually a good friend of mine ryan if you're watching we used to spend ages talking about this and i think i ended up coming around to thinking he might have been right about this, which is that it would be easier to see this with something like a pizza or an island, I think, than the test score, although I think it does apply.

1:27:08So let's say, okay, I can imagine the greatest conceivable pizza, just like the maximal desirability of cheesiness and whatever toppings you like and all that kind of stuff. But clearly a pizza that exists in reality is greater than a pizza that only exists in my imagination. therefore as long as i can conceive of it it must exist right but that doesn't work why not well here's one response anselm has asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable thing like across all categories he's not asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable like car or the greatest conceivable god even or the greatest conceivable you know conscious agent Just the greatest conceivable thing as all the qualities get turned up.

1:27:54Now, if I think about that greatest conceivable pizza, a pizza that only exists in my mind versus a pizza that exists in reality, you know, the pizza that exists in reality is greater in the sense that it has more stuff. It's got more existence. But is it a better pizza? Because we've restricted our scope now. We've said, you know, we're talking about the greatest conceivable pizza, right? And is a pizza that exists in reality actually a better pizza? It's unclear to me whether that's the case, because like all of the great making properties of pizza, cheesiness, you know, fluffiness, temperature, all of that kind of stuff, those exist of the pizza in my mind.

1:28:39And so it doesn't seem to me that making that thing exist in reality makes it a better pizza. And I know I said I wouldn't do this, but I'm going to have to use a latin word here which is the word qua which means sort of you know in regards to or something like that so is the pizza a better pizza qua pizza when it exists in reality some people want to say not really but people listening like what are you talking about of course the pizza is better if it exists in reality well yeah it's better qua thing if you then expand your scope and say a pizza that exists in reality is a better thing or sorry a greater thing than a pizza that only exists in the mind because it's got more stuff it's got more existence yeah that's fine but if you're if you've expanded your scope now to be talking about things again you know you're talking about the pizza that exists in reality being a greater conceivable like thing well i can take that pizza and i can make it an even greater thing by giving it i don't know omnipotence it's an omnipotent pizza it's an even greater thing now and now it's an omniscient pizza and it's existed for eternity and suddenly i would just be describing god again so the only way that i can parody the argument is to not talk about things like as a general sort of broad category which is i think crucial to anselm's argument i've restricted my scope and now i'm talking about things where their existence in reality doesn't make them better qua that category of thing.

1:30:08And it's a hard intuition to get across because when you first hear that, you're like, of course, a pizza that exists in reality is a better pizza. But I'm not convinced that it is because when we say the pizza that exists in the head, it will have all of the qualities like temperature and cheesiness and tastiness just in the imagination. Okay. So what I want to ask you is, do you kind of see where I'm coming from here? And then like, maybe you might, you might it's nonsense but if you don't can you at least like back me up for the audience that are not completely talking nonsense and then tell me why you think that that line of argumentation fails or maybe you do think it's nonsense yeah so i can see where where you're coming from but there is an intuition here that you might simply not share right um the pizza that only exists in your head is not much of a pizza in my opinion okay certainly it's not going to satisfy me if i'm hungry and it's it's not that i was thinking um it's fine as pizza it's just falls down on being a thing right so i don't so i'm inclined to push back against intuition but i can see where i can see why if you wanted to defend ansel this would be a way to go well you know what i might say to that is that i i agree with with this intuition here like you want to say but but if we drill down into it, it might not be quite so simple because you say like, well, if a pizza only exists in my head, it's no good to me because I can't eat it.

1:31:41You know, like in order to be a good pizza, I have to be able to eat it. Right. And I could say, all right, so now imagine that there's a pizza that exists in reality, but it's like, you know, it's behind a locked door. It belongs to somebody else and they're not going to let you eat it. Right. And I've got a different pizza which I'm able to eat. And I might say I prefer the pizza that I'm able to eat versus the one that I'm not able to eat that's behind the locked door. But is it a better pizza? It seems to be like better for my circumstance or it seems to like suit me more. It seems to be that when I expand my scope to include just like the world that I'm living in and my preferences, is like, yeah, this is a better sort of situation for me.

1:32:26But to say that it's a better pizza qua pizza, just because I can access it rather than it being behind a door would seem like a very weird thing to say, right? It's not a better pizza because I can touch it. And I kind of want to say the same thing about the imaginary pizza and the one in the real world. Yeah, the one in the real world is one that I can actually physically eat and touch and see with my eyes. and that's all cool. But it's not a better pizza for that reason. It's just a kind of pizza that I would prefer to have because, you know, I'm feeling pretty hungry. Now, again, I also want to say that to the audience who are still with us listening, saying, Alex, you've lost your damn mind.

1:33:06What are you talking about? Look, I'm trying my best here. Anselm's argument is a notoriously difficult one to defend. I do actually think there's a lot of truth in this line of thought, but it's a bit too complicated to fully explain why right now. But that's one little pushback, you know? The pizza being behind the door is a bit like the pizza being in the imagination. It doesn't make it a worse pizza. So, I mean, I guess to cut to where I would really want to go in pushing back against Anselm, Anselm's assuming that there's this distinction between, I'll say, things and beings, something like that.

1:33:45There are different grades of existence. And that I don't accept, right? When he talks about the pizza in his head, that's no kind of pizza at all, according to me.

1:33:56Graham Oppy:That kind of Minongian way of thinking about there being non-existent things is something that I just want to repudiate altogether. um yes um probably i should have started there rather than on saying things like oh the the pizza in your head is no use to me i should have just said the pizza in your head's no pizza whatsoever yeah i mean it's a really interesting uh sort of area of philosophy like things which don't exist and the way in which they do exist i mean to say that because for anselm there are like Like I said, there are these levels of existence, which I think is an intuition that maybe isn't shared as much today, which is that something can exist in the intellect.

1:34:45Like Hamlet, Shakespeare's character Hamlet, that exists in the intellect, but not in reality, versus the characters that don't exist even in the intellect. It kind of seems like there are levels to it. Anselm is treating those things that exist in the head almost as like actual objects or like real things that are just real in the intellectual realm. And I think probably as a result of our materialistic, reductionistic sort of popular views now where we think, you know, there aren't really little characters running around in the intellectual realm. It's just like neurons firing that we've kind of abandoned that way of looking at the world.

1:35:21And I think without that, this argument does kind of struggle to to get off the ground um but having tried my my best to defend poor anselm um again i don't know yeah i almost don't want to do this because we're so short on time but i feel like i said that there were two the other is the modal ontological argument right and just for brevity i'd usually spend some time explaining this i've talked about it before if you don't know what the modal ontological argument is, then you need to listen to more of my podcasts, but also go and look it up. But more or less, you can talk about possibility in terms of possible worlds.

1:36:01I could have worn a blue shirt today, but I didn't. It's black. But the fact that it's possible I could be in a blue shirt, I can just represent that by saying there is a possible world in which I'm wearing a blue shirt. If something is necessarily true, then it's true in all possible worlds. 2 plus 2 equals 4 is true in all possible worlds. If something is contingent, that means it could be true, it could be false, it's true in some possible worlds. There are a bunch of possible worlds in which I'm in a blue shirt, a bunch of possible worlds in which I'm in a red shirt, a bunch of possible worlds where I don't exist at all, all of that kind of stuff.

1:36:35Okay, if God exists, then God is a necessarily existing being. That's what we were talking about earlier with the contingency argument and stuff, this necessary foundation of everything that exists. Necessary beings exist in all possible worlds, right? And then the argument is quite simple. Premise one, if it's possible that God exists, then God exists. Premise two, it is possible that God exists. Conclusion, therefore God exists. So why should we accept that first premise? If it's possible that God exists, then he exists. Well, because if it's possible that there is a necessary being, that means that there is a possible world in which there is a necessary being.

1:37:16But if a necessary being exists, he exists or it exists in all possible worlds. And so as long as we just accept the premise that it's possible that God exists, then we know that a necessary being exists in at least one possible world. But that being being necessary would therefore have to exist in all possible worlds, including the actual world. therefore God exists in the actual world. A relatively shambolic and lazy attempt to summarize as quickly as I can the argument. Perhaps we can have a less lazy and less shambolic attempt but equally brief response from you. So if we hold fixed the idea that God either exists in no worlds or in all of them then the kind of standard response is going to be, look, you thought it's possible that God exists, but surely it's possible that God exists.

1:38:17Surely there's a world where God doesn't exist. But if God doesn't exist in one world, then it follows that God doesn't exist in any of them. So actually what we should be concluding here is it's necessary that God doesn't exist.

1:38:31Graham Oppy:That's the immediate response to the argument. And there's a parallel here between two arguments, one of which gives you God necessarily exists or God exists. The other one gives you necessarily God doesn't exist. God doesn't exist. And there's a symmetry. And as things stand, there's nothing that breaks the symmetry between these two arguments. So we haven't gotten anywhere. Yes, because a necessary, if you want to say that something is necessary, you don't even really need to say that it's necessarily true or false. You just need to say that if it's true, it's necessarily true. And if it's false, it's necessarily false.

1:39:10So the language you used, it's either in all possible worlds or it's in no possible worlds. It can't be in only some. So my argument was to say, well, it's possible that God exists. so there's one possible world in which he exists but it's either all or none so he must also exist in all of them including ours but like you say there is this reverse modal ontological argument which says well premise one it's possible that god doesn't exist you want to go yeah sure why not that seems to make sense well that means that there's a possible world in which god doesn't exist but he either exists in all of them or none of them and if he doesn't exist in that one he can't exist in any of them therefore god doesn't exist in the actual world and like you say philosophers are working up a great sweat trying to come up with a symmetry breaker.

1:39:58Some people think that they've got them. I've spoken to a few people who do, but I agree with you that that's kind of where we land with the modal ontological argument. But still a very fun exercise in thinking, right? Whatever you think of the ontological arguments in general and the modal one in particular, I think they're great. They're great fun, aren't they? You can just sort of sit around and think God into existence somehow. It's kind of interesting. So I also like Gödel's argument, but we should not even approach that topic. Yeah. And in fact, you have an entire book dedicated to ontological arguments, don't you?

1:40:32Yeah. Which? Though it's old.

1:40:36Graham Oppy:So I wrote it in the early 90s. It appeared, I think it appeared at the end of 1995. it doesn't really cover girdle's argument because he was only just starting to see the light of day in journals in the early 90s um so where could people go for uh if they're interested in a i guess slightly more more mathsy approach to this where could people go for an overview of girdle's um ontological is there anything you've written or would you just point them to like the scp or something so i don't think anybody's written a book about the girl arguments uh alex preuss has written a bunch of good papers um something kind of techy um everything right pretty techy uh that will be a good place to start yeah sweet well i already mentioned arguing about gods is another book you wrote which covers more of these arguments it talks about the stuff that we've been discussing today, but a bunch more too.

1:41:43And it's, I guess, more of an overview. And I think, you know, extremely readable given the subject matter. And so I'll make sure that's linked in the description. And well, I say I'll make sure. My editor will hopefully remind me, Alex, I'm looking at you, to put those links in the description and we'll get them down there eventually. But having said that, Graham Oppie, thank you for this whistle-stop tour of, I think, three of the most popular reasons that people give for believing in God. We, of course, have only scratched the surface as people always like to say at the end of podcasts but i suppose that's mostly what we're here to do so thank you for your time and uh yeah it's it's been fun monster energy everybody knows white monster zero ultra that's the og it kicked off this zero sugar energy drink thing but ultra is a whole line i'm now you've got strawberry dreams blue hawaiian sunrise and vice guava and they all bring the monster energy punch so if you've been living in the white can.

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