#162 Two Million Subscriber QnA

23:45There's nothing traditional about this land. On August 7th, the clock starts on the summer's biggest rom-com. I'm Owen. Allie. What about me and me? Monica Barbaro. Callum Turner. I've been told I'm a seven. By who? Your mom? No. She thinks I'm a ten. One Night Only. Rated R. Only in theaters August 7th.

24:04Alex O'Connor:Thanks. Of my public debates, who has been the most fun? I am going to look on my own YouTube channel because I kind of just forget some of the things that I've done. The Jubilee thing was really fun. I debated 25 Christians at once, even though, of course, you can only debate one person at a time. That series has the same syntax as like one UFC fighter versus like 25 opponents. Of course, you can't actually debate 25 people at one time. So really, it's kind of like a series of questions and answers. It's like doing an audience Q &A or something. It's great fun, but it's maybe not as impressive of a feat as it may sound.

24:50And yeah, that series has gone a bit crazy since I was on it. But the one that I did was really fun and the people there were great. We all got on really well and everybody was just really friendly. And we actually all went out for a drink afterwards. I took them all to some bar in LA where it was filmed and we just had some drinks and talked about Christianity and it was just a really good time. So I loved doing that. I enjoyed the debate that I did with Glenn Scrivener on whether Christianity gave us

25:17Alex O'Connor:Western values just because like Glenn's really nice and we get on and I thought it was like a good conversation but also there were just some moments in there which i thought were super interesting and i think kind of deleterious to the western civilization is based on christianity position deleterious yeah okay that is how you pronounce it like the standout moment in that debate for me was probably when we were talking about women's rights women's suffrage the ability of women to vote and stuff like that and glenn was like look you know this is ultimately a christian movement, or if not, it's sort of rooted in Christian values.

25:55And I remember asking him, you know, do you really think that were it not just for women asserting themselves and protesting and throwing themselves under horses and stuff like that? Do you think that Christian men on their own, just reflecting on their Christian principles, would have sat around and thought, you know, I know that we've kind of been oppressing women for thousands of years. And I know that Paul in the New Testament tells us that women should be in submission and that they shouldn't speak over a man or assert their authority over a man and that if they've got a question, they should go home and ask their husband and stuff like that.

26:27But you know what? I think we've been getting this wrong. I think that we should maybe give women the right to vote. Like, do you think that these Christian men would have done that on their own? To which Glenn said, 100%. Do you think that that would have happened, would have gotten off the ground, if women themselves hadn't just tried to assert it for themselves? Do you think, in other words, if they'd have done what the Bible tells them to do and to essentially stay silent and ask their husbands at home instead of coming out and saying, you know, we've got something that we want and we're going to throw ourselves under horses until we get it.

26:57So female suffrage. So female suffrage. Do you think that men on their own, that like Christian men of the Enlightenment era would have just sat around and gone, you know what? You know, it's been hundreds and hundreds of years that we've been Christian. And I think, I think, and there's all these verses that we've been, but I think we've been getting it wrong. And I think we should, we should, we should give women the right to vote. Do you think they would have just done that on their own because of the influence of Christianity? to see listen i mean just just read through read through the without the protests of women and you know credit where credit's due he's biting the bullet on that but that just seems to me and i think to most people that i've shown this to or talked to about this just so unfathomably implausible that it borders on the comical ultimately though my favorite people to debate are my friends because it's private so we're not playing up to a gallery except sometimes the gallery of our other friends at the dinner table.

27:48But also, it's almost guaranteed that it's going to be in good faith. These people know me, and I know them better than any public opponent possibly could, so it's more fun and often more brutal and often just more lighthearted. Would you do a quick fire?

28:03Alex O'Connor:Sure. One country you want to visit in the future? Australia. I've never been there. I've never been to Japan either. Those are two that come to mind. You asked for one, you got two. One country you never want to visit okay um it's tempting to say like some kind of horribly war-torn country or something because it's so dangerous but that would in its way be interesting and probably teach me a lot so where would i not want to go uh maybe like antarctica does that count is that even really a country like yeah okay it's probably kind of cool to know that you're like at the edge of the earth and all that kind of stuff and to check that the flat earthers are not correct.

28:46But I feel like there's kind of nothing going on there, like a lot of wind, a lot of ice. It doesn't really sound like my idea of a good holiday. One person from history you would want to talk to? Jesus of Nazareth, of course. I mean, biblical characters alone is its own category. John the Baptist is, of course, another one. Outside of the Bible, who would I talk to? I feel like I would love to talk to Aristotle, mostly because his philosophy is still so pertinent and so interesting and so applicable that I'd really like to know if the ways in which people have applied his philosophy after his death, so say scholastic metaphysics, people like Thomas Aquinas adapting it into a very Christianized worldview, or in the modern day, his notions of friendship and his notions of the good life and ethics and living virtuously and all of that kind of stuff.

29:39I'd love to know if he kind of broadly agrees with how his philosophy has been applied. But also Aristotle was an exceptional biologist. I think that about a quarter of all of his surviving works are about biology. He was really interested in animals and his metaphysical worldview actually had a lot to do with the way in which he saw animals function as organisms. So I'd love to introduce him to modern biology, to DNA and genetics and evolution, and just kind of see what he would do with it, whether he would go back to the drawing board and have to rethink everything he knows about animals, or whether he would sort of be like, yeah, sure, that makes sense.

30:16Aristotle actually, somewhat amazingly, seems to preempt evolution by natural selection. If you look at the Physics, Book 2, Chapter 8, he discusses an idea that maybe there are these random distributions of particular characteristics, and the ones which are suitable for living survive, and the ones which aren't suitable for living end up dying. He does then dismiss this quite quickly, but it's really cool that there's this embryonic form of evolutionary theory right there in Aristotle thousands of years before Darwin. So in other words, I'd really like to show Aristotle the origin of species and talk him through our understanding of natural selection.

30:54Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't be the person to do that, but I'd read up, I'd prepare for it as if it were a podcast and I would present it to him and say, hey man, what do you think of this? and he would probably say something in Greek and it would be lost on me. Even if I could understand Greek, it would probably still be lost on me because he's just that smart. But yeah, it would be like a real full circle moment for philosophy, this really important father of Western philosophy rubbing up against the fruits of his labor, where philosophy is today. Of course, I'd also love to ask him about the argument from motion and be like, is this true?

31:31Is this an accurate representation of the entailments of your metaphysics, Mr. Aristotle? Because of course, Aristotle had a very different picture of reality to Thomas Aquinas, even though Aquinas relies very heavily on Aristotelian metaphysics. For example, Aristotle believes in this unmoved mover, the kind of unmoved mover that Thomas Aquinas associates with God. But for Aristotle, this unmoved mover is kind of associated with objects in the sky. As well as this, he thinks that this unmoved mover would just be thinking about thinking all the time. It would just be in this abstract mode of thought and have absolutely no interest in or anything to do with us, with humans.

32:10Whereas, of course, for Thomas Aquinas, this unmoved mover is the God of Christianity who comes to earth in the form of Jesus Christ. So quite a discrepancy there. And I would love to ask Aristotle what he makes of the way in which Thomas Aquinas builds on and I suppose ultimately critiques his worldview. Sorry, this was supposed to be quickfire and I've not been very quick.

32:31Alex O'Connor:So what's next? One person you are a fan of. Lots of possible answers to this question, but you know what? I'm going to give a shout out to Tony Lapidus, I think is how you say a second name. He's an impressionist and he does these impressions of like quite hyper-specific people from like the UK political scene. Like he just did an impression of Mehdi Hassan, which I've never seen anyone do before. And it was just like brilliant. So yeah, enjoy his stuff quite a lot. He also does an impression of Peter Hitchens, which is worth watching. Your favorite sport and club? I don't really do sport exactly, but does it count?

33:10Alex O'Connor:I like watching snooker. I think that that can be quite entertaining, more entertaining than a lot of people might think, I suppose. And poker. I like playing poker and it can be fun to again watch poker highlights on youtube and watch people kind of lose their minds at a bad beat but like i said earlier i also watch football highlights but i just don't really have a club um i've kind of got this problem with football clubs anyway like i've talked about this before but i suppose i've got like a philosophical problem with what actually makes a club a club um most football clubs aren't made up of people who are like from the place so So it doesn't really just make sense to support the team of like where you're from because the players aren't from there most of the time.

33:52So what is it that you're supporting?

33:54Alex O'Connor:Well, you're not supporting the players because, you know, if, say, Manchester United and Manchester City had some kind of freak business deal where they just like each bought each other's players and just like swapped over. You've kind of got the identical players, but now they're playing for a different team. So which would you support? Like imagine that this happened halfway through a game, right? Imagine you show up, you're a massive Manchester United fan and they're playing against Manchester City. Those are two different teams. And halfway through the game at halftime, the players on Manchester United just get bought by Man City.

34:29I know that this can't happen because of like the rules, but suppose they change the rules like you can buy players whenever you want. So at halftime, all of the Man U players are bought by Man City and all the Man City players are bought by Man U. And so all the players come back out onto the pitch. It's the same players in the same formation. They just basically swapped shirts. Which team would you support? Well, I think the most sensible answer from a sports fan is to say, look, weird as it seems, you support the club. You don't support the players exactly. You support the club. You support the kit.

35:00You support the community. right and so yeah as weird as it seems you would just be now shouting in support of the exact players you were in the first half shouting obscenities at as they often do at english football games but then like i want to go further with this i want to say that maybe at halftime also the manager from either club like swaps teams so now the man city manager manages man you and vice versa and imagine also at halftime because why not the team is like you know i'm kind of getting a bit tired of this particular football kit. I want to change the design. So Manchester United takes on the kit design of Manchester City and vice versa.

35:38So they also essentially swap football kits. And now imagine finally that for some reason they decide that they're fed up of their name and want to get a new one. So they come to an agreement and they agree to take on each other's names. So Manchester City is now called Manchester United and vice versa. So now it's like a bit of a mess. Like, who do you support? So remember, you're a Manchester United fan. You watch the first half and then in the second half, all of the players you were just supporting come out and they're wearing the same uniform and they're still called Manchester United and they've got the same manager.

36:11Everything about them is exactly the same, except somehow, like technically, they're on the other side of the pitch. Like they are the other team, even though they're the same players with the same kit and the same name. Who do you support then? It doesn't seem quite so easy to say something like, well, I just stick with the team. Because in this case, sticking with the team would mean that you stick with the original team, which technically has now taken on the name Man City and taken on their uniform and taken all of their players and their manager. So you'd then have to be supporting the very thing which in the first half you were hoping and dreaming wouldn't score any goals.

36:45And I think the only possible answer to this conundrum is to say there's only really one thing that has to remain consistent for the football club to make sense as a concept. It's not the players. It's not the kit. It's not the managers. It's not the name of the team. It's the supporters. It's the community. And so I think essentially whatever a football club is, is just made up of whatever a particular collection of people throw their support behind. So whichever one they chose, that would just become their football team. And there's something kind of beautiful about that, I think, that really what a football club is, is not its players or its management or anything like that, but literally the only thing it could possibly be is its supporters.

37:29Legally, though, of course, when it comes to who gets to take the profits from various games, I don't think that the management would see it that way. But still, I don't know. What do you think? What do you think makes a football team a football team? Once you can answer that question for me, then I'll pick one. You know what? Here's how I'm going to pick which football team I support. I'm going to look up, actually the World Cup's on right now, so let's do it by country. Which country competing in the World Cup this year has the highest population? Okay, look, after all, I am a utilitarian. So I think the only fair way to settle this is to look at which team is going to arguably probably have the most supporters and so them winning would bring the most happiness and it looks like it might be the united states can that be right damn yeah i think um at least of the teams that made it through that like qualified for the world cup uh the usa with 340 million people is the team with the highest population So, okay, yeah, USA, USA, why not?

38:39But then I don't know, because the USA doesn't seem to care that much about football. Okay, maybe you think that you guys do care about soccer, as you call it, which by the way, footnote, soccer is apparently originally actually an English word, despite it now being used exclusively by Americans to refer to football. It comes from the phrase association football. Soccer is kind of short for association. And it's like, I guess, the kind of formal way of playing football sometimes some decades ago. So if you were playing association football, you were playing football properly, got shortened to soccer and for some reason got exported across the ocean.

39:15But yeah, an English term. But I'm not sure that Americans care as much, shall we say, about football as, say, like England, definitely, and countries like Brazil and Argentina. So maybe I would have to do a kind of hedonic calculus of the sort of average level of interest and level of care that a particular population has in football and measure that against the population size and whichever comes out on top that's who i'm going to support the greatest good for the greatest number and i just can't wait to watch england hopefully in the final of the world cup playing against some other team and i'm like the only person in the room supporting the other team and there's all these like angry drunk punters who are kind of shouting at me and I'm like, hey, hey, have you not heard of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham?

40:02Do you not know what a hedonic calculus is? Or maybe I'll just watch it from home. Okay, sorry. Sorry. Back to the quickfire questions. Your favorite dish and beverage.

40:12Alex O'Connor:Look, if I could eat any food and it would sustain me and be healthy and I could eat nothing but that food for the rest of my life with no negative impact, it just would be pasta. But unfortunately, it's just not that good for you. so that's probably my favorite but I just don't eat that much of it favorite beverage I think red wine is probably the best like all-rounder you can have it with dinner you can have it at the pub you can have it with lunch I suppose you could have it with breakfast if you wanted to I don't do that I have whiskey I'm just kidding I have gin but like I don't know it depends whether or not that's allowed to be healthy, which it's definitely not to drink lots of red wine.

40:57I guess water would have to come out on top if we're taking health into consideration, because it seems quite important. Maybe like diet Dr. Pepper. I feel like I could probably live off that.

41:08Alex O'Connor:One thing you regret. Recently, I suppose, one thing that I regret is the way that I went about my event with William Lane Craig. So we had this dialogue at the Royal Institution, I was quite looking forward to it. We'd never done anything in person before. And I remember thinking, like, how should I go about this? What should we talk about? At the beginning of the event, William Lane Craig laid out like five or six different arguments for God's existence. He talked about the Kalam cosmological argument, of course. He mentioned the moral argument. He mentioned the evidence for the resurrection, I think, and then kind of threw the ball into my court.

41:45And I was able to kind of pick up wherever I wanted to. And I thought to myself, look, I'm sat across from the man who invented the Kalam cosmological argument. I think it would just be a waste of an opportunity to not talk to him about his life's most famous work. And at the very beginning of the event, William Lane Craig said... Now, with respect to our time this evening, this is not going to be a debate between Alex and me. Rather, this is going to be a conversation where we openly discuss these issues. And I thought, great, that's relaxing and sounds like a good idea to talk about the Kalam, because why not?

42:26That's what he's known for. And we stayed on it for quite some time. And even about halfway through when the moderator suggested moving on, I thought, no, let's let's keep drilling down here. I really sort of want to get to the to the nub of this. But then that did mean that we just ran out of time to talk about other things which I do care about. I wanted to talk about the problem of animal suffering, and we got to do it a little bit, but it felt extremely rushed, and I feel like I didn't really get to get the point across in any detail because we'd run out of time. And that was my fault because I'd left it too late to bring up the topic.

42:57Then I had a bit of a shout-off with an audience member, which probably wasn't my best idea, but he kind of asked a very pointed question, which, you know, fair enough. And then when I said something in response, he started talking back. He didn't have the microphone, but he just started talking again. He was sort of shouting out something. So we gave him the microphone back and then we had a bit of a back and forth. And then he started like, at one point he sort of pointed over there and was like, you know, let's go to the next question kind of thing. I remember getting a bit annoyed and thinking like, hold on, you don't get to shout out a response.

43:26And then when I start responding to your response, start pointing over there for the next question. And like, yeah, I guess it was a little bit animated, you could say. But then after the event, someone sent me a link to William Lane Craig's newsletter, which he had sent out after his trip to the UK, and I found it a little bit strange. So in the newsletter, there's a paragraph on his dialogue with me, where he's sort of telling people how it went. He says, you'll be able to judge for yourselves how this evening went when the video is released, but I'll make a couple of observations here about it.

43:57The topic was basically God's existence, and I opened by summarizing briefly the six theistic arguments I have written on.

44:04Alex O'Connor:In my view, Alex made a strategic mistake by choosing to focus exclusively on the Kalam cosmological argument, which is my area of expertise. This put the whole discussion right in my wheelhouse, and Alex was able to make little progress in refuting it. So for a start, I don't see how it's possible, like even in principle, to make a strategic mistake in a conversation. Like yeah, if this were a debate, that would be a terrible idea, like picking him up on his area of expertise. But I thought this wasn't a debate, Dr. Craig. I thought that this was supposed to be a friendly conversation, a dialogue.

44:41And if that's the case, like, of course, I'm going to talk to you about your most famous contribution to philosophy. Like, imagine that I'd met William Lane Craig at a bar or something, and I just got chatting to him, and we were just having genuinely a conversation about philosophy. And because it's William Lane Craig, I say, hey, can we talk about the Kalam? Because of course, that's what you'd want to talk about. And so I start raising objections and I start asking questions and saying, I'm not convinced by that, or I don't know how you'd respond to this. Would that be a strategic mistake in a conversation at a bar?

45:14I don't think you can make strategic mistakes in genuine conversations. Now, I have no problem with having a debate instead, and you can definitely make strategic errors in debates, but if we were having a debate, then I probably would have chosen to talk about the moral argument instead, because then we'd have been in both of our wheelhouses. And maybe I should have done that anyway, just to make it a more interesting conversation, but it kind of annoyed me that William Lane Craig made such a point out of saying this isn't a debate, and then said that I made a strategic mistake by talking to him about his life's work.

45:46But anyway, William Lane Craig then goes on to say, the second thing that happened that was so remarkable was that during the Q &A, Alex, who was normally so calm and unflappable, really lost his cool and basically got into a shouting match with a member of the audience. Even when the moderator tried to intervene and move things along, Alex continued to argue with the person in the audience. That's true, I did do that. In fact, maybe we should play a little clip here. You don't get to respond. Keep that microphone away from them. You don't get to shout. It's going to be a bloody night. Jesus. You don't get to respond by shouting out.

46:20And then when I respond to you, point over there for the next question. That's not how this works. That's not how this works. This episode is supported by FX's The Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties, and excess. At its centre is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's The Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu. If you want to keep shouting responses, that's fine.

47:02If you want to keep shouting responses, that is absolutely fine. I'm going to do the same thing. Are we done now? I can't remember one shouting. Your question, please. Next question. Thank you. Yes, sir. Maybe I got a bit frustrated and it wasn't my best moment, but William Lane Craig then says this, Alex's conduct in this dialogue really exploded the myth which Alex likes to propagate that he is a non-resistant unbeliever. It was evident, I think, that he is mightily resisting God. I'm sorry, like what? So I've said in the past that I believe I'm what's called a non-resistant non-believer, that I don't believe in God, certainly not the Christian God, but not because I hate the idea of it, or I wouldn't want to worship such a being or anything like that.

47:46I feel like I'm quite open to it. I wish that God existed. I think it'd be great if there were an afterlife. If Christianity were true, that would be a wonderful story. And I feel like I'm sort of open to it. I just don't feel convinced. The supposed evidence just doesn't move me. The arguments just don't convince me that Christianity or theism is true. But I'm open to it. It's not a hardness of heart, so to speak, that makes me not believe God. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I think it just stems from a genuine psychological position of just not being convinced by the arguments for theism or Christianity.

48:21Now, you could dispute what I'm saying here. You could say, you know, Alex, I know you think that you're not resisting God, but secretly you kind of are, even if you don't realize it. Like, I don't know, the way that you live your life and the conversations that you have and stuff, it's sort of resistant in a way that you don't recognize or something like that. That's fine. But the fact that I get a bit annoyed with somebody in the audience for speaking over essentially the next question and then pointing at the next questioner saying, let's go over there when I was trying to respond, getting a bit annoyed about that is enough to, quote, explode the myth that I like to propagate that I'm a non-resistant non-believer.

49:02I might be wrong about being a non-resistant non-believer. I might be resisting God in ways that I can't recognize or imagine. But for you to say that me getting annoyed in that particular moment with a particular person saying a particular thing is enough on its own to explode the myth that I'm a non-resistant non-believer just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, yeah, I'm sure that William Lane Craig has never gotten frustrated at any point during his entire career with an audience member or someone that he's debating with. Because of course, if he had, if there's any moment in his entire career where he gets a bit annoyed with the way that somebody's conducting themselves in the conversation, that just explodes the myth that he's thinking purely rationally about God.

49:40No, no, no. Religion is all just about emotion and the way that you feel, and it stems from a position of anger and frustration with the world, and that's why you invent deities. Clearly, if you can find any evidence that William Lane Craig has ever gotten annoyed, say, with an audience member, that definitely explodes the myth that his Christianity is based upon reason and rationality. Like, what are we talking about here? Am I not allowed to sometimes get frustrated in order to be a non-resistant non-believer, in order to be someone who is genuinely in a position of just not being convinced of arguments for God's existence?

50:11Does that require that I never get annoyed in any conversational context where the subject is about God? Is that what it means to be a non-resistant non-believer? Because if it is, then I think you have trivially defined them out of existence. Everybody gets frustrated every now and again, And that is not a reflection, necessarily at least, on their entire philosophical disposition. And I kind of also just actually don't understand why that particular moment with that audience member would have anything to do with whether or not I'm a non-resistant non-believer. So given that William Lane Craig seemed so sensitive to my tone and also seemed to think that I should have strategized better for this event, maybe I should have just treated it like a debate.

50:52Maybe I should have prepared a debate and done an opening statement where I laid out the case for animal suffering and how it contradicts with Christianity and how William Lane Craig's comments about how the Canaanites deserve their slaughter by the Israelites. So it was actually a tremendous blessing to these children for them to be killed. undermines our moral intuitions that he relies upon to make the moral argument for God's existence, like that kind of stuff. Stuff that would actually be quite difficult, I think, for him to respond to. But no, I thought we were having a friendly conversation, so I wanted to ask him about the thing that he's most expert in.

51:29I guess that was a mistake. Even according to him, it was a mistake, so I guess I shouldn't have done that. But yeah, I found that non-resistant, non-believer thing really weird. I actually don't think it makes sense. If William Lane Craig would like to have a debate where we strategize and talk about things that are definitely very much in my wheelhouse as much as his, then I'm up for it. But I didn't think that that's what that event at the Royal Institution was supposed to be. So I guess that is a recent regret.

51:58Alex O'Connor:I should have just talked about the problem of animal suffering. I should have picked him up on the moral argument instead of the Kalam cosmological argument. And I guess I should have remained perfectly cool and not got at any point even remotely frustrated, lest I give off the impression that I'm in fact, as he put it, mightily resisting God. Anyway, I think, yeah, that'll do.