Atheist Slogans You Should Stop Using - Joe Schmid

22:06But if what you mean is something like, oh, there's no good evidence, I think maybe a lot of people just underestimate the strength of this great tradition of natural theology and some of the arguments that it has at its helm. Yeah. I mean, I'm with you there. I mean, And, you know, we see that there are contingent things around us, things that can fail to exist.

22:25Joe Schmid:They don't have to be included within reality. And, you know, everywhere we look, it seems like contingent things, whether individually or collectively, have explanations beyond themselves. If you think that there can be contingent things that don't have explanations, it starts to become a mystery why, you know, contingent things don't just exist kind of all willy-nilly, kind of randomly, all over the place. We start to get into potential skeptical scenarios and various other things. and you know no it seems like no contingent thing could explain why there are any contingent things at all because they're kind of just presupposing the very thing in need of explanation and so it seems like we might need to appeal to some kind of necessary foundation of reality okay let's look let's investigate what kind of reality this thing uh produced well oh my goodness it has various striking features striking seemingly massive coincidences that are kind of coordinated to allow for very valuable things to happen like virtue and knowledge and love and relationships and whatnot you look at the you know the fundamental constants and laws of nature and And it turns out that, you know, the basic parameters in the laws of nature have to take on very, very specific values in a very tiny range over the full range of conceivable values that they could have conceivably taken on in order to give rise to anything interesting in the universe.

23:31Joe Schmid:And oh my goodness, lo and behold, the consequences do indeed fall within those narrow life-burning ranges. You look at the basic laws of nature, they're very strikingly elegant and simple. They actually successfully apply to the contents of the universe when conceivably they could have failed to apply to the contents of the universe and failed to induce temporal evolution from the initial state. That's nomological harmony. That's a recent paper by Brian Cutter and Brad Sod. And then, you know, the universe evolves. And oh, my goodness, we don't have just like zombie creatures who aren't conscious.

24:00It's actually consciousness is sprinkled around. There are these conscious beings. That's kind of crazy. And that's like seems like pretty valuable. And also, you know, the consciousness is linked up with the physical universe. in ways that make rational sense. Our conscious lives are strikingly orderly, harmonious, and intelligible when conceivably they might have failed to do that. And then lo and behold, we have tons of moral knowledge when it seems like if evolution and naturalism are true, if there's no God behind the process, it seems very, very striking and surprising that our beliefs would be,

24:29Joe Schmid:our basic moral sensibilities and intuitions that beliefs would be like by and large truth tracking because evolution after all only cares about survival and reproduction. It doesn't care about giving us true moral beliefs specifically and this extends of course to other a priori bits of knowledge it's like you can see what i'm trying to do i'm not trying to like actually defend these things but who created god because that's the thing that you're not that's the thing that you're not taking into consideration that joe that is actually going to be our next our next uh our next claim but that's quite extraordinary i think like if i said to you can you just as an atheist speedrun like proving god's existence i think that's probably the the best attempt i've ever heard at such a thing so congratulations on coming up with that off the cuff i mean you did just speedrun proving god's existence which is pretty impressive um and and yeah i mean like listen like to to what joe has just said everybody there's a lot in there and it's interesting and it's powerful now you might think in any individual case like yeah but that's not going to make me believe in God.

25:31Okay, it doesn't have to. But to say that if I just took up all of the facts about the world, which even marginally increase the likelihood that there is some kind of designer, and you said that that just would have zero content, that there would just be nothing, no evidence whatsoever, I think it's probably a result of either confusing what we mean by evidence, or just not realizing how deep some of these arguments go, even if they ultimately fail, which an atheist is condemned to believe. But I think having proved the massive evidence, the massive potentially mediocre evidence that's there for God's existence, I do want to move on to that next claim, which is who created God?

26:20Who designed the designer? It takes up many forms. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion had a chapter called Why God Almost Certainly Doesn't Exist. Rare for new atheists, I think, is to really make a proactive philosophical case against God's existence. Dawkins said, well, look, if the universe is really complex and therefore requires some kind of complex designer, because that stuff just doesn't come up out of nowhere, what you're not considering is that the designer themselves would have to be more complex complex than the complex thing that they created. It's not like a simple chess computer can build a MacBook Pro, but a MacBook Pro could build a chess computer.

27:07The complexity of the creator has to be bigger than the thing created. So even if we accept all of these arguments for God's existence, yeah, contingency, first cause, there must be a designer. Who designed the designer, joe wow you know what that i've just basically convinced me of vaithiism i mean i'm gonna i

27:26Joe Schmid:mean i literally just as you were talking i was ordering my fedora um uh but anyway yeah so who designed the designer that's yeah like very very good question i mean i do want to say like and who created god like i don't want to be little people who you know raise these questions like these are good questions um what is the relevant difference between god and non-god things which explains why non-God things require an explanation, but God doesn't. That's a very good and deep philosophical question. So I don't want to like, you know, see people - And it feels like special pleading, right? We're kind of being funny here, and you're right.

27:57We've spent, I mean, I've spent like, what, 10 years with these discussions, and I actually use that as a bit of a joke. Anytime anyone makes any argument related to religion, I just am like, but who created God? Because it's such a sort of common thing to hear, which sort of throws theists into a frenzy because they're like, that's not how it works. But it does feel like special pleading. It does feel like someone saying, well, you, Mr. Atheist, you need explanations for contingent objects and you need design. But God, oh, no, no, no, God doesn't need that. God doesn't need a designer. God doesn't need a beginning.

28:28God doesn't need a cause. And it does sort of feel like you're just carving out this space for a thing and having a different standard for your idea than for anybody else's. So like you said, for the theist to use God as an explanation for things like causation and design, but say that God himself is immune from causation and design, you have to show that in principle, there is some kind of difference which allows us to do that with God, but not with the universe or something. Do you think there is such a difference? Yes.

29:02Joe Schmid:It's not like I can pinpoint any particular difference and say that I'm basically absolutely certain that this particular difference explains why God would be immune from these calls for explanation. But I think that there are just like a sufficiently large range of like reasonably plausible candidates that the theist really shouldn't be worried about this sort of question. So that's my like broad take on this. And I can get into some of those candidates. So like, you know, one thing is that at least traditionally God is conceived of as a necessary being. He exists necessarily. He could not have failed to exist.

29:33Joe Schmid:This is quite different from contingent things, things which really could fail to exist. There's nothing, as it were, about their nature which demands that they be in reality. Now, at least to a lot of people, and certainly traditionally, theists have held the following. There does seem to be some kind of relevant difference between contingent things and necessary things in terms of kind of calling out for a deeper explanation. When you think of a contingent thing, its nature is, as it were, indifferent to whether it falls on the side of existence or non-existence. I'm speaking a little bit of that.

30:02What is a contingent thing, just for people listening?

30:05Joe Schmid:Yeah, so it's a thing that does not have to exist. It doesn't have to be in reality. So, you know, Alex's dildo that he just purchased, you know, that's a contingent thing. It didn't have to exist. It didn't need to be in reality. It can be destroyed. It was created at some point. People didn't have to create it. It didn't have to be included within the world. By contrast, consider the claim that 1 plus 1 equals 2. Well, that's not only true. That, like, must be true, right? It's not like 1 plus 1 could have equaled 17 or something. Like, that's just not even possible. So it's necessarily true.

30:37And at least a lot of philosophers and certainly theists within the theistic tradition think that necessary things like one plus one equals two. It's like, does that really kind of call out for a deeper explanation? It's like, oh, there's such a mystery as to why one plus one equals two. My goodness, we need to posit some explanation. Like, no, it just could not have failed to be the case. There's no deeper reason, there's no deeper demand for there being like some kind of explanation for why it's the case. And if God is like that, as opposed to, you know, the aforementioned dildo, then it seems like there could be a principal difference between God and the dildo and various other things.

31:17Like, again, like this water bottle could have been in existence, but also could have failed to exist. So there's like this pressing question. Why does it exist? What accounts for why it falls on this side of the dichotomy when it genuinely could have fallen on that other side of the dichotomy? We also have ample experience with contingent things, and we uniformly see that they have deeper explanations.

31:36Joe Schmid:But like, we don't have similarly ample experience with necessary things, having or even calling out for deeper explanations. And in fact, the necessary things that we do tend to have acquaintance with, as I was just mentioning, like laws of logic and math and whatnot, like actually there's a much less of a call to give some kind of like deeper account for why they are the case. So that's just one that's one candidate relevant difference between God and other things. There are lots of them. Yeah. So a theist might say, look, my argument is not stuff exists and stuff always needs a cause or an explanation.

32:14And then the atheist can say, but what about God? God is a kind of stuff. And you're saying he doesn't need an explanation? No, because the theist is being more specific. They're saying contingent things require an explanation. Because it could have failed to exist, because that water bottle could have existed or not existed, the fact that it does there must be a reason why it does instead it doesn't whereas if you construct an argument which proves the existence of a necessary thing then if you were to ask well why does it exist it's like what do you mean why like that that's just that's what it means to be necessary is that it just does exist existence is a part of its very essence you know you can't separate those two concepts and that's a bit like asking why is one plus one two which you can literally ask and it might be a kind of interesting question but the only real answer you can get for that is that it's kind of just self-evident.

33:02It's just true by definition. And so if a theist sort of treats God that way, then yeah, to ask, well, what caused God is just a category error. However, the next move for the atheist would then be to grant that and say, okay, fine. So God is just a necessary thing that doesn't require a cause. But why can't I just say that there's a necessary thing? Maybe the laws of physics are necessary. Maybe the existence of the universe is just necessary. Yeah, we've got the Big Bang, but maybe the Big Bang was just, you know, the end of one universe and the start of another. So like, okay, there are some things that don't need a cause, but you know, why is that, why has that got to be God?

33:41Good. Well, that's a very big question. And I mean, so like, I could try to put on, you know, my theist hat and respond. I mean, I think this is a very reasonable rejoinder. That's one thing to say.

33:54Joe Schmid:But I mean, Theists will probably say, like, listen, not all things are equally good candidates to be like the necessary foundation of reality. I mean, you know, like, do we do we seriously think that like, for instance, like a Disney princess might be like the the fundamental necessarily existent explanation for everything else? I don't know. That seems kind of implausible. It seems way too kind of, I don't know, arbitrarily limited in various ways. It could conceivably have been totally different. You know, it has various features that really do seem to cry out for explanation. Like, why is its hand only this shape instead of like a slightly larger shape or a slightly smaller shape?

34:34Why is it this size? Why is it only like eight inches tall instead of like 8.1 or 7.9 or something like that? Like there are various features of this thing which really do kind of seem contingent and seem to call out for deeper explanation. We can conceive of them being radically otherwise. And like theists will typically say that But God isn't like that. God does not have various arbitrary limits on his power. It's not like he can do everything except for create, like, you know, blueberry pancakes or something. Like, no. God just has unlimited power. A very simply, compactly specifiable property for a being to have.

35:07God is unlimited in perfection. He's unlimited in knowledge. He's unlimited in value. And so God doesn't seem to have all these various, like, very highly precise, seemingly coincidental things. are arbitrarily limited properties or features that cry out for deeper explanation.

35:25Joe Schmid:And so it seems like God may be relevantly different from, let's say, the initial state of the universe or laws of physics or whatever in terms of being a reasonable candidate for the necessary foundation of reality. And again, think of the other things we know to be necessary. They are almost uniformly distinctly non-arbitrary. There's nothing arbitrary or seemingly coincidental or conceivably otherwise about one plus one being two or like you know it is not the case that p and not p as a logical law you know like etc so uh we might think that like god seems to maybe more naturally fit on that side compared to a disney princess or the highly specific and seemingly arbitrary arrangement of the initial conditions and whatnot yeah um and also we we shouldn't allow this uh conversation to devolve into a conversation about the arguments and the evidence because we'll be here forever but I think it's just worth pointing out that there are reasons to say that there are things in the universe which can be immune from rules which apply to other things in the universe or outside of the universe.

36:30Things like causation, design, explanation, all of that kind of stuff. But I mean, I suppose we should give maybe a short hearing to Dawkins' point about complexity in particular. It does seem that complex things beget complex things. And so, are we just imagining that we've got a sort of really complex god whose sort of attributes and stuff are just like necessarily that way because again it's sort of once you start imagining a complex god who like has complex ideas and plans and wants to send his son to save people from a foreseen human track it starts to get a bit sort of complex and it like you just said like you know Could something like a Disney princess or whatever be necessary?

37:18It seems a bit too arbitrary. People could say the same thing about a complex God with a complex plan. Ah, perhaps they could.

37:25Joe Schmid:And perhaps that just means we should accept that God is not complex. God is quite simple. There's this huge tradition within philosophy, like the classical theistic tradition, which conceives of God as a perfectly simple being. He's not built up out of more fundamental components, which make him, it's not like he's got a brain or anything like that. It's not like he's got these like discrete ideas that he has to like, first he has to represent in his mind and then like deliberate how to create and then create in accordance with like the super complicated plan that he came up with his mind. Like, no, God is just a simple, pure, perfect, infinite, unlimited consciousness, right?

38:04He's just like this unlimited foundational mind with no deeper parts. It's not like there are complex interconnecting related things within God's mind.

38:13Joe Schmid:Like, no, he just very simply, you know, wills the good for the good's sake. And he's perfectly sensitive to reasons. And it's not like he has to represent very complex things in his mind before doing them. No, he just kind of exerts a direct intentional control over his effects without those kind of intermediaries that very finite and limited creatures like us have to make do with. so I don't know it kind of neglects this long-standing classical theistic tradition on which God is just like pure perfection you know he's just this unlimited simple being yeah I think there's some sense in that I mean the divine simplicity thing is a bit sort of weird to wrap your head around but it's at least worth pointing out that a lot of theists just believe in a God who is not complex who's actually the actually the opposite of complex.

39:03Because for something to be complex, it kind of implies that it's got like lots of parts that all kind of work together in various ways. But for something to have like parts seems to imply that it kind of has limits, like limitations on its parts. And if God is this like unlimited, pure act, you know, being, you wouldn't expect him to sort of be gerrymandered in that kind of way. But given that there are so many different, you know, ideas of what God is like. Some people think God is simple. Some people think God is complex. Some people think that God sent his son to die on a cross. Some people think that God's final messenger was a man called Muhammad.

39:45Some people believe that God has many manifestations in different sort of pantheistic deities. The atheist, surely, just looks at all of these gods and says to the Christian, you know, you don't believe in the Muslim God. You don't believe in Thor. You don't believe in any of these other gods. All I do is go one God further. You already know what it's like to be an atheist in respect to 2 ,999 gods. I just go one more. So there, what do you think of that? This is a test of the Reese's broadcast system. If you're currently eating Reese's, this is just a test. Continue living the dream. If you aren't, oh boy, drop what you're doing, go.

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41:05Brilliant. I mean... That's unexplained, by the way. It's the Ricky Gervais bit, you know? Yeah. Well, yeah, the one less God thing. Yeah, this is... So again, I want to emphasize that there's something good and valuable about the slogan. I don't want us to lose that, right? You know, it's an appeal to consistency, maybe, or like a non-arbitrariness, Like you shouldn't be carving out arbitrary exceptions for your own views. You know, and it's just in general an injunction against special pleading. Right. And that's good. That's a good kind of injunction. But in terms of like an argument for atheism or scoring dialectical points, at least against sophisticated theists, I think it'll fall flat.

41:46Joe Schmid:I mean, it may work if all gods had an equal likelihood of existence. so that if some gods very likely don't exist, like Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster or the Disney princess god, then neither would the monotheistic god of traditional Abrahamic religions because all gods are equally likely. And so those gods are super-duper unlikely, so is the traditional god of Abrahamic religion. But of course, the traditional theist is going to say that not all gods are equally likely. We have good grounds, at least according to the traditional theist, to say that there's a single perfect, necessarily existing unlimited being at the foundation of reality seems to be much more kind of intrinsically plausible than these other candidates for the various reasons that we'd be going over.

42:29Joe Schmid:You know, it's not like arbitrarily limited. We have reasons to think that there's some kind of necessary foundation to reality. It's a relatively elegant hypothesis that could be quite compactly described in terms of these very uniform properties like omnipotence, all power, all knowledge, all goodness, and whatnot. It's not carving out any arbitrary exceptions. and moreover they'll say that in addition to being quite intrinsically plausible and much more plausible than these other candidates like Zeus or Thor or the flying spaghetti monster, we do indeed have lots of evidence for the existence of such a traditional monotheistic god from fine-tuning and consciousness and various other features of reality.

43:07And maybe even they'll sprinkle in some miracles for their favorite theistic tradition.

43:11Joe Schmid:um but that's you know an optional add-on for the uh connoisseurs yes well i want to say one thing in defense of this claim which is that i think it often comes up in the context where people are like um i don't know somebody kind of says like how could you be an atheist like how like psychologically almost like what what is that even like like how can you go around not like thinking that this is like all has a creator and in a way it's a way of trying to get across like, at the very least, you kind of know what it's like to be unconvinced of a certain proposition, right? Like, you know what it's like to be unconvinced that it's raining outside right now, right?

43:51And just sort of take that feeling of not being convinced by the evidence, like, why are you not convinced? Why is sort of one sound you hear outside that could potentially be rain? Why is that not enough to convince you it is raining? I don't know. It's just kind of not, in a way that I can't describe. And the atheist kind of wants to say, that's kind of how I feel about arguments to the existence of God. And I think that's fair enough, you know, that this is just what it's like. However, as like an argument, as like a sort of, you know, there are all of these gods, right? And like, what is it Christopher Hitchens used to say?

44:24Like, it's since they can't all be true, you know, it's far more likely that none of them are true than one of them is, or just something nonsense. It was just ridiculous. But he said it with such charm, as he always did. um i think this fails for like so many reasons firstly when we talk about like these thousands of gods right and we're including things like thor or athena not to mention the fact that like the greek gods and the roman gods are like the same gods right so if you're double counting you know these these gods that that that shouldn't be allowed you know um but also you know if you've got like jupiter and you've got zeus it's like no same same god just you know different different words for the same being.

45:07But also, these are not the same kind of thing as the unlimited foundational creator of the universe. David Bentley Hart writes quite compellingly about this in The Experience of God. When people are talking about gods with a small g, they are not talking about the same thing as the conclusion of the contingency argument. Because imagine that you were living in ancient Greece and you believed in all of the pantheon of gods, except Athena. You're like, no, I don't believe in Athena. That's the only one I don't believe in. That wouldn't be significant. That wouldn't change the ontology of how the universe exists, or it wouldn't remove or add any mystery as to why the universe exists as a whole, any of that.

45:57it would kind of be a little bit irrelevant because athena is a different kind of being to the unlimited creator of the universe right so really when we're talking about god with a capital g the only other gods which should be comparable here are those that take up a similar position and i'm not even just talking about like zeus who is like the top of the pantheon of gods i mean the thing that gives existence to all of those things so in the same way like in uh in hinduism you've got all of these different gods, right? With all these different arms and like elephant heads and stuff, except there's only one like creative principle behind the universe, which is Brahman, right?

46:38And all of these sort of gods, small g gods are like manifestations of Brahman. But any Hindu will tell you that essentially they are monotheistic. They believe in one unified, like limitless, indescribable, animating principle of the universe. And it's called Brahman. so once again you've like limited your scope there are not thousands and thousands of gods in the way that we need there to be there's actually only a few and then you've got to contend with the fact that all of these different gods so to speak like the muslim god and the hindu brahmin and the christian you know yahweh like are these actually different gods or are they just like different interpretations of the same thing like they're all saying there are some kind of like limitless animating principle behind the universe.

47:25And the Christians say, yeah, and I think that that thing is a trinity. And the Muslims say, and I think that thing is like tarweed, it's like unified. And, you know, the Hindus might be like, oh, and I think that thing is difficult to put into words, but manifests in this way or that way, you know. But maybe they are kind of talking about the same thing. And obviously, I'm not doing the whole, all religions are the same thing. But the thing that's different about them is in their doctrine, their response to this sort of divine creator of the universe. And so really, there's kind of only one God that you can either believe in or not.

47:58And that's the God who is the uncreated creator of the universe. It's like you either believe in that or you don't. It doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter if you think it manifests as Vishnu or whatever. It's basically on or off. It's a binary, right? And even if that weren't the case, this turned into a bit of a rant, even if it really were the case that there were like thousands of different gods to choose from, and you only go one god further, there is a big difference between like believing in 10 versus 11 gods and believing in one versus zero gods, right? Because if there does need to be some explanation for the universe, you might say, oh, well, there must be a god at least.

48:38There could be 10, there could be 15, there could be 100, I don't know, but there has to be something, right? To say that there's zero is not just another trivial, oh, minus one, minus one. Once you get to one and you then do minus one again, you've actually just deleted an entire realm of explanation. So I would compare this to imagine that I was sat around with my three brothers and our mother had had us via a sperm donor and we didn't know who our dad was. right? And I said, you know, I think our dad is American. And, you know, my brother said, well, I think our dad is from Australia. And the third guy goes, I think he's from France.

49:21And then the fourth guy goes, guys, you know what? Like, I don't think we had a dad. And you're like, what? Like, hold on. What are you talking? Of course we have a dad. We need to create it. Like, we wouldn't exist without a dad. And he goes, oh, guys, guys, guys. Like, you know you don't believe in the australian dad you don't believe in the french dad i just go one dad further you'd kind of look at him like he'd lost his mind and i think that when this argument is used in that kind of argumentative form that is unfortunately the amount of force that it has like there is a god or there is not and however it sort of manifests is not like the invention of a bunch of new creative principles of the universe it's just different interpretations with the same thing.

50:01Do you agree?

50:03Joe Schmid:Yeah. I mean, I'm over here like, I'm like, you know, I'm having a religious experience over here. I also think it's funny that you were able to unintentionally tie in the like atheists have daddy issues trope into your example, which I quite appreciated. But anyway. Yeah. So I think we can put that one to bed. I mean, people might disagree with us. This is, of course, an invitation for people to comment if you disagree with us, because it will hurt our feelings, but it's good for the algorithm. So do let us know if you think we're missing something. But I just think that, again, the annoying thing about these slogans is that they are like good rhetorical points.

50:40And they often get like an applause because it kind of sounds sensible. And again, if you just mean like psychologically, you know what it's like to not believe in, you know, the truth of the Quran. That's how I feel about the Bible. Yeah, that's fair enough. That's totally fair if you're just trying to explain why you're not convinced of a particular tradition. But to say that you have good reason to think that there is this fundamental, metaphysical, ontological question, is the universe created, can be answered in the same way, I think is a mistake. Anyway, it's difficult to even know where to take this.

51:17All right, let's get a bit more cultural. Here's a claim. I can't remember who was the originator it might have been someone like richard dawkins uh science flies you to the moon religion flies you into buildings discuss yeah yeah this is uh man i should have had the neck beard with this one this is a this is a good one i don't know so it's like yeah science also creates the atomic bomb right um and also flying you into buildings i don't know that seems to just be like a perversion of religion. I don't really have much to say about this. Like, well, what is exactly, is this supposed to be like a rhetorical point?

51:58Like science is better than religion.

52:00Joe Schmid:I guess it just depends on how you like use science. Science is a collection of tools to investigate the natural world. Religion is maybe a collection of spiritual tools to investigate the spiritual world or something like that. You can misuse the tools in either case. You can misuse the tools of science by creating an atomic bomb and then politically weaponizing it and then dropping it on tons of innocent civilians and whatnot. And you can also misuse the tools of religion. You can try to interpret verses that aren't supposed to be interpreted a certain way to dehumanize others, to justify racism, sexism, violence, terrorism, and whatnot.

52:35Joe Schmid:But sophisticated adherence of the relevant religions will just tell you that these are perversions of the relevant religions. And for the religions for which it's not the case that these are perversions, then I would just say so much the worse for those particular religions. Um, but I think, uh, again, the, the more sophisticated versions of the religions don't have these like nasty consequences. Um, but that's just my, I think the issue, the issue is right. So obviously this is a sort of religion is bad thing. And there's this conflict thesis between science and religion that they're somehow in conflict with each other.

53:07And I think that that is often the case. There are particular religious claims or doctrinal affairs, which run in the face of scientific understandings that we have of the world. but it kind of led to this, I think at the height of new atheism, it had this, like, we're on team science, you're on team religion. And the point is, like, science is great. Science does all this cool stuff for us, and it takes us to the moon, but religion is evil. And the difference is, like, yeah, people want to point out, but yeah, like, science also gives you the atomic bomb, sure, but the scientific method doesn't, like, tell you to drop it on people, right?

53:42Science is like a key that opens the door to heaven and hell, as I think Richard Feynman had talked about and he learned it from a Buddhist or something, I'm not sure. It's a tool and you can use it to do whatever you want. The thing that you need, because reason is the slave of the passions, of course, you need some kind of motivating principle on how to use it. And the point is that for a religious believer who flies into a building, they had to quite strongly believe that there was going to be an afterlife, that there was an overarching reason to be doing this. otherwise they wouldn't have done.

54:17That's not something science can get people to do. You need this belief in the ultimate correctness and the divine authority of your behaviors in order to commit such incredible acts. And that's something that if you're just a scientist who doesn't believe in religion, you're not going to be beholden to that. I know you're doing your hardest, you're doing your darndest, but you said some false claims

54:43Joe Schmid:there so uh i gotta i gotta step in and save like what i suppose yeah um well you don't need religion to you know get people to do these heinous things right you don't need to have some kind of like divine purpose and whatnot like you'll find uh non-religious terrorists you know various socio-political explanations can be offered for the resortment to terrorism right uh there's nothing i just think there's like nothing really unique to religion here yes religion does have this potential to galvanize people to violence, or at least to provide a post hoc rationalization for violence. But the same happens with politics, political ideologies, right?

55:21You know, the Nazis, Nazis, you know, they did some very, very, very, very, very, very terrible things. And a lot of it was like motivated just by like this political ideology, and like this deep tribalism, and this

55:36Joe Schmid:festering hatred for other human beings spurred by, you know, propaganda and various dehumanization tactics and whatnot. And sure, you know, like you'll find some religious stuff making its way in there. But like a lot of this really is just like about, you know, expansionism, we're the superior race, like at bottom, it's just like racism and hatred and whatnot. And, and like political power. You know, politicians, politicians do lots of really bad things. So politics can get people doing bad things. You don't need religion. It happens with corporations and business owners. Money will get you to do these sorts of really, really, really bad things.

56:13Joe Schmid:You don't need to feel like you have some kind of like divine institutional purpose or whatever. And hey, even, hold on, even the institutional pressures of science, like publish or perish, right? Like the pressure to get tenure, securing grants and whatnot, can get people to do really bad things like fabricate data, plagiarize, mistreat, abuse subjects of experiments and whatnot. It also, I think, it Depends on what you mean by science, right? Because when we say science, I think what somebody wants to mean is like, oh, science is just how we understand truths about the world. And yeah, that sounds great.

56:48Whereas religion is this set of doctrines that you have to follow that flies you into buildings. Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty bad. But you could just as easily say that during the pandemic, people say follow the science. or, you know, on debates about gender, people say that someone's not being biologically accurate or whatever, like science, like the science and science is like a process becomes a prescriptive thing. It's not just, hey, we're trying to understand truths about the world. It's like science is telling us what we should do. Right. And I think that happens more often than people in this context give it credit for.

57:23And you could say, oh, yeah, OK, but that that's just when people are like misusing science or or really the core of science is just understanding what's true and yeah if people want to then come up with if political parties want to then you yeah okay but then i could say yeah but religion is just a it's just an approach it's just the soul's response to the divine in the universe right and and then if individual religious groups want to come up with doctrines that allow them to go around you know killing people then fine but they're they're just you know you could do that for both um yeah i think that that science like we had this idea that in the manhattan project when people were like building the atomic bomb as quickly as they could that what they were just doing that because they just wanted to like figure out the truth about how atoms work they just wanted to understand and marvel at the beauty of like no like we know why they were doing that right like it's quite clear that in that case this scientific method is created and justified and motivated and enacted upon with a particular intention, which is the development of a bomb.

58:34Governments aren't doing that for the fun of it, they're doing it so that they can use them at least as a deterrent. Religion is doing the same thing. It's telling you to do a particular thing, but I think it's fair enough to just say that especially if it was something like molecular chemistry helps us develop medicine whereas Wahhabism as a doctrine sometimes flies people into buildings or something like that maybe but then it becomes a lot less catchy if you want to generalise religion to be bad then I think you have to generalize science in the same way and you run into all kinds of problems I've often said that saying religion like as a thing in its entirety is bad is like saying politics is bad like yeah you can say that and that makes sense yeah politics sucks man politics causes wars politics drives families apart but like can you name me one war that wasn't caused by politics.

59:43No, you can't. And yet, if you were to then say, therefore, I think there is no correct political position, and I think we should all just be apolitical, that doesn't follow from that. Religion as a whole can have caused wars and been really bad and whatnot. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a correct way to interpret good religion. In the same way, there can be a way to do good politics, even if you can simultaneously say, I hate politics and politics is bad. That's what politicians say who are trying to run the country in a new way that they see as more empathetic and true and honorable.

1:00:19They will say, oh, I hate politics. That's why I'm trying to fix it. And I think religious people do this all the time. They say, I hate what religion has become in the popular understanding. I just want to meditate and spin around in a circle drinking lots of caffeine until I experience unity with the divine. I'm not on with this whole suicide bombing thing. anyway, which is a relatively recent invention as well. I mean, like suicide bombing within Islam only really sort of cropped up in the last hundred years or something. And it's, it's, it's not exactly the most theologically grounded of doctrines within Islam.

1:00:56So, you know, it is an unfortunate, the, the, the way that it's, it's so easy and compelling to generalize, but I think we just need to be careful. And that's not to say that you can't, you can say if you want to, like, I don't like Islam. I don't like Christianity. I think these religions preach evil things and it's no wonder that you can say that, but I think you just have to be more specific. What are you talking about? Are you talking about particular doctrines? Are you talking about the religion as a whole? Are you talking about the holy text? Are you talking about the way that it's been like culturally received?

1:01:27Just be more specific, which is never good for sloganizing, I suppose. This is true. Yeah. I mean, it just looks like, I guess the general trend that I see here is that A lot of this violence is explained by maybe not religion per se, but putting people in positions of authority over others, right? That just can significantly raise the likelihood that people do very bad things.

1:01:52Joe Schmid:And also, you know, giving people the power to exploit others. And also being significantly exploited and trampled on by others. All these sorts of things can galvanize violence. And often, you know, religion will sometimes be used as a pretext or postdoc rationalization. and this is not to say that there aren't any you know truly religiously motivated wars or whatnot but i just think when you when you delve into the evidence with a careful eye more often than not you will at least find that it's these more socio-political explanations of violence than religion but you know i i still you know i still want to be able to say like yeah religion is like bad and does in various ways yes yes and it does sometimes fly you into buildings like it it does do that but you know as you say like it's complicated it's not as simple as like you know like 9-11 happened because you know muslims wanted to kill the infidels it's just like just no way that that is like the correct interpretation of why 9-11 happened um and there is a there's there's probably a version of 9-11 which happens without strictly speaking religious influence it's hard to know people would be willing to like send themselves to no afterlife, sure.

1:03:05So the specificities, but the idea of attacking America as a terrorist, the idea that that was purely religiously motivated in the strict sense, I think is just a mistake. So I want to still be able to say, yeah, religion does sometimes do these things, but I think sometimes is the operative word there. And if you're able to treat religion, even though it's a relatively inert descriptive term, as this thing which motivates and is responsible for the things that religious people do, I think you can kind of do the same thing with science. Science is also responsible for all kinds of death and destruction.

1:03:39Really, it's neither of those things. It's at least not in their totality. You kind of need both. Religion without science doesn't get you the airplanes to fly into the building. And some people say that science without religion doesn't get science off the ground in the first place, but that's a whole conversation for another time. At any rate, I think we should move on. and I would like to ask you about a claim which I've used a lot and it is a bit of a slogan that people throw out as well which is that again we're atheists here right and we're speaking to the religious person and we say okay so you're like a Christian or you're a Muslim or something but if you'd have been born somewhere else in the world you'd have a different religious belief like yeah you're a Christian because you grew up in like you know Kentucky right but if you'd have been born in Iran, chances are you probably would have been a Muslim.

1:04:33And given, you know, like if God exists, then given that he probably wants to come to know everybody, why would he allow people's likelihood of being saved to be dictated by where they happen to grow up? So if you were born somewhere else, you'd have a different religion. Therefore, that gives me reason to distrust the truth of the religion to which you belong. Thoughts?

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1:05:58Yeah, so this one is one that I just think conduces to lots of really cool and fun philosophizing. So like this is one that I just, I've got like a soft spot for this one. Because it's like, it really does get people thinking.

1:06:11Joe Schmid:And it's a really interesting point. And you kind of, I think we all sense that there's like something at the core here, which is like, interesting and right in some kind of important way. Now, it is kind of hard, though, to find what exactly that is. Okay, so like, it can't just be that had I been born elsewhere, I would not have believed that P is some kind of like, defeater for P. So it kind of somehow like undermines my justification or grounds for accepting P. I mean, listen, had I been born elsewhere, I would not have believed that I was born in Indiana. I mean, like, had I been born in Ohio, I would not have believed I was born in Indiana.

1:06:49That doesn't mean I should just like start questioning like whether I was born in Indiana or something. Like, okay, that general principle can't be true. Okay, so maybe we have to modify the general principle. Is it something like, had you been born elsewhere and used the same like method for belief formation that you in fact used? So like deference to religious authority or something like that, then you would have believed something different. Maybe that's the modified principle, and maybe that's supposed to undermine the belief or something like that. Here's the issue, as far as I see it, is that in theory, this is a version of the genetic fallacy.

1:07:28The genetic fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, which says that because the means by which you came to believe something were faulty, the thing you believe must be false. So I might want to say, oh, you only believe in Christianity because you were born in Kentucky, right? Like, okay. But somebody could say, yeah, but I only believe that the earth is a globe because I was taught it in school. That's not a very conclusive reason. That's a bad reason. And so does that mean it's false that the earth is a globe because my reason for believing this true claim were a bit sort of faulty or weird.

1:08:04It's like, yeah, well, if you'd have been born 2 ,000 years ago, you would have thought that the Earth was flat. I don't even think that's true, by the way. I suppose it were. It depends where, I suppose. But you could have been born at a certain point in human history where you would have thought the Earth is flat. So if you'd have been born elsewhere, you would think the Earth is flat. Therefore, can we really say the Earth is a globe if you only believe that because of where you happen to have been born? so it seems fallacious to say that because you've got bad reasons to believe something that thing must be false however i think that when you're talking about god's existence this doesn't apply i i was going to write a piece on this called the genetic fallacy fallacy right because people bring this up all the time and it's like yeah okay so for just things that just happen to be true about the universe like where you happen to be born or you know whether the earth is a globe or whatever like you you could be it would be expected on theism or atheism or whatever that there would be some people who just don't know those facts you know like if you were born in like some rural like asian town 3 000 years ago you wouldn't know what the capital of france in 2025 is right and that's just like that's not a problem like yeah that's just that's true.

1:09:23However, if my philosophy was that there was a creator of the universe who intentionally created people so that they could enjoy the knowledge that Paris is the capital city of France in 2025, then given that he created a universe in which many people were born not knowing that, I would think that would be disconfirming evidence for the existence of God. So it's not just the fact that, oh, if you'd have been born elsewhere, you wouldn't have believed in God, but also that if there was a God who was like a particular God, like a Christian God, and he wanted everyone to be a Christian, then why would he set up the world in such a way that people could be born elsewhere and not have that knowledge?

1:10:05So in this way, it's a version of divine hiddenness. It's a way of saying, so you wouldn't just say, like, I can't remember how you formalized it a second ago, like, you know, you only believe P because you were born in the country that you were, therefore P is false. That obviously doesn't work. But what if we say something like, you know, premise one, there is a God. Premise two, if there is a God, then God would want everyone to become a Christian, you know, change it to Christian God, if you like. And then premise three might be something like, if God wants everyone to become a Christian, he would not set up a circumstance in which many people were precluded by their cultural condition from becoming a Christian.

1:10:51And then the next premise would be something like, some people are born into countries where they believe other religions. And when you put all of that together, you get this contradiction, right? Which is that it couldn't be the case that you're only a Christian because you were born in Kentucky if there is a God who designed the universe to make sure that everyone came to know him. I think that's actually quite a powerful observation. Yeah, so I agree with that. I think that's a powerful observation. I want to say a few things here. Some in defense of that observation, some maybe attacking a little bit on behalf of the theists.

1:11:36Well, one thing to say is that, I mean, I think the points about the genetic fallacy and whatnot are fair,

1:11:43Joe Schmid:But I think that the best proponents of this style of argument are not trying to show that, you know, your belief is false because, like, had you been born elsewhere, you wouldn't have believed that P. Instead, they're really just trying to, like, remove your grounds for believing that P to try to, like, show that you are not justified in accepting that P. And in fact, like facts about the origin or the provenance or the etiology of our beliefs can indeed undermine them in this way. Right. So if I pick up a book on Madagascar birds and it's got like seemingly realistic pictures about Madagascar birds and it's got all these descriptions about, you know, their weight and their diet and like where they're located and whatnot.

1:12:24And they're like mating procedures and whatnot.

1:12:26Joe Schmid:you know and I formed the various beliefs on the basis of this seeming textbook about Madagascar birds but then if I learned that the origin of this textbook is like a chat GPT hallucination right like this is not explained by or connected up with in any appropriate way facts about Madagascar birds so like even if the facts about Madagascar birds had been different I still would have been reading the book and it still would have said all the same things and like the facts about what the book says are not explained by facts about Madagascar birds once I learned that information once i'm apprised that information i should suspend all my beliefs i should stop believing everything that i just formed uh on the basis of the testimony of the book um so facts about the provenance of your beliefs can indeed undermine them and i think that's really what this um objection is trying to get at is just trying to like undermine the the theists or the christian or the muslim or the buddhist or the hindus beliefs um so that i just want to briefly say that about your point about like genetic fallacy um i mean one thing to note as a as an aside before i get to what you said i just find this topic endlessly fascinating so i want to say some stuff like this argument would arguably also apply to the atheist right like had you been born in like 17th century france you would not have been an atheist like i can guarantee you that okay maybe not 17th century but like 12th century italy okay like you would be catholic like trust me yeah i I agree.

1:13:48Well, I am a Catholic, even though I was born when I was, because there's no way to officially leave the church except for one 26-year period, I think, between the 80s and 2000s. Weird little history, that. Anyway, I get what you're saying. Yeah, because people say this in response. They're like, yeah, but if you were born elsewhere, you wouldn't be an atheist. Yes, which is expected if there's no God, right? If there's no God, then I would expect that what you believed about the world would just be a product of your cultural conditioning. Atheists think that religions are just like localized mythologies, essentially.

1:14:22So yeah, if atheism is true, we would expect that people would believe whatever their local society told them to. So the fact that if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim is totally in accordance with atheism. But if we assume theism, if we assume that there's a God who created the world intentionally wanting everyone to become a Christian, then you would not expect that everyone's beliefs would just be a product of their cultural environment. So when I say to a Christian, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim, that's a good reason to distrust Christianity. But when the Christian says to me, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be an atheist, that's not a good reason to distrust atheism.

1:14:59There's an asymmetry there, I believe. Oh, yeah. So I think that's right with an asterisk. I'll get to the asterisk

1:15:07Joe Schmid:in a second i was just i i don't know if people who like put out the slogan have this in mind like this comparative expectation of like the distribution of religious belief conditional on theism and conditional on atheism i suspect that at least a lot of people who proffer this uh slogan instead have in mind this kind they're trying to like under they're trying to say that people aren't justified in believing what they're what they believe just because you know have they been born elsewhere they wouldn't have believed it um so i suspect that they're not making this evidential argument that you're giving and i think what i say what i said earlier is kind of a response to that more undermining defeater approach to the slogan and i i think uh this is a good segue then to talk about the kind of more expectation-based argument okay so like one thing i want to say i'm sympathetic this argument i think this is some evidence for atheism and against theism um but like i think the evidence we shouldn't think that it's like overwhelming or like particularly strong because we can at least see some inklings of a reason for why god might permit there to be such doxastic discord concerning the true religion and whatnot at least at least if we have a view of religion on which like you're not being burdened alive for eternity for getting the wrong beliefs about god um right okay so like what are some of those reasons well i don't know there are lots of like really great goods that can come about as a result of um interreligious dialogue and as a result of trying to help each other come to learn stuff about the divine.

1:16:36Joe Schmid:So there's a really interesting paper on this very topic by Dustin Cromit. It's in the Journal of Faith and Philosophy. It's called, like, We Are Here to Help Each Other, Divine Hiddenness and Something. You'll find it if you search what I just gave you. And, you know, his basic thesis is that, like, there are various great goods that can only be realized if there is, like some ignorance about what God is like, about God's nature, and about various things religious. Like we can be difference makers in each other's lives. Like we can make the difference to whether or not they come to have a knowledge of God and whether or not they, you know, come to have true beliefs about religion and whatnot.

1:17:16Joe Schmid:And so if there's this like great good of us being, you know, responsible for another and helping each other come to learn important truths about religion, and also just to increase our empathy and our understanding of differences, like loving people across deep ideological barriers, serving people across deep ideological barriers. There are just various great goods that are only possible if you have this kind of doxastic discord among relevant religious factions. And so we can at least see an inkling of why God might do this, why he might have some reason to do this, and why he might sort of deputize us in various ways to help others come to the knowledge of God and come to knowledge of religious matters, which will require a lot of people to have mistaken and false beliefs about God and whatnot.

1:18:09Joe Schmid:Now, again, things get, as always in philosophy of religion, your views just get monumentally more difficult to defend if you think that you have to have the right like state of mind before you die in order to avoid hell because like they're just like so many isolated people who didn't even have the chance of being evangelized uh you know like isolated like it just it just seems yeah the idea that it's like what you believe at the moment you die is what's important because like you know like i i know for example that if if like judges in court are hungry, they're like more likely to send someone to prison, right?

1:18:48Like the content of your belief can be, can be so sort of volatile and based on such contingent factors that the idea that that moment is, is what, is what matters is, is so strange. And also you kind of have to address like how specific does the belief have to be? Because we're, we're sort of quite trivially saying like, oh, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you know, you'd be a, you'd be a Muslim, But I could be talking to a Catholic friend and say, well, if you were born in a particular place in America, you would probably be a Protestant. I could say to a Protestant, if you were born in the town over, you'd probably be a Lutheran.

1:19:24I could say, if you were born to the family who lives next door, you would have this one really specific disagreement with your current theology. You would think that, I don't know, whatever, insert the most minor trivia. You would think that John chapter 21 is a later edition. It was not in the original gospel. For this to work, you have to define how different the belief has to be for it to be unexpected that God would allow you to believe that falsehood. Would God allow you to go wrong on are the birth narratives historical? Or was Quirinius the governor of Syria at the same time that Herod was king of Judea.

1:20:10Maybe, yeah. But it seems weird that God would allow you to go wrong in not believing the entire Bible. I think you have to be a bit more specific about what is the extent of the wrong belief that you would have if you were born elsewhere. Yeah. And I just think the force of this argument will just depend on one's soteriology or one's

1:20:34Joe Schmid:views about salvation. Because again, like if you have a view on which salvation, either everyone's eventually going to be saved, or even if not everyone is eventually going to be saved, salvation is much more closely tied to your actions and how well you loved others and served others in this life. Then we can kind of, I don't know, at least to me, it's not like super unlikely that God might allow this doxastic discord and ignorance to prevail simply because he's deputizing us and there are various great goods that result from deputizing us to help each other come to knowledge of God and whatnot.

1:21:08Joe Schmid:But if instead you think that there are these dire eternal consequences for getting the beliefs wrong, then this looks hopelessly implausible that people would just be almost at the whims of whether or not a missionary reached them. Yeah. But also it depends on what you mean by belief, right? Because I think the big thing that often gets unspoken in this particular conversation is that when we say you would be a Christian or you would be a Muslim. We mean nominally. We mean that that's what you'd be calling yourself. If you grew up in Saudi Arabia, you'd be like, yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm a Muslim.

1:21:40Yeah, I believe in God. But can we guarantee that the contents of your belief would actually be theologically inaccurate? That is to say, if I go to some random town in America that's full of evangelicals and they say, well, we're all Christians. And then I go across the road to a bunch of people who are like Buddhists, so they don't believe in God. But when I observe their behaviors, they're like, you know, helping each other out and they're sort of, they're giving arms to the poor and they're treating everyone as their brother. And the Christian evangelicals across the road are being like fiery, political, like divisive, that kind of stuff.

1:22:18I'd be like, well, like, are you going to be saved because you call yourself a Christian because you've got that name? Or do you get saved by doing the will of the Father? Because if the way you actually get into heaven, which I think is what Jesus taught, is doing the will of the Father, then you've actually got a lot more of that going on with the Buddhists than you do with the evangelicals over here. I don't mean actually Buddhists and evangelicals, I mean in my particular thought experiment. And so you could say, well, if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be more likely to call yourself a Muslim, to be a Muslim in the sense that you sort of follow the Quran.

1:22:52But you know, maybe if you actually added up all of the people who broadly speaking, like do the will of the father or actually do the stuff that gets you into heaven, it might actually be like fairly balanced across the globe. And there's kind of no way to test for that really. Yeah, no, I mean,

1:23:08Joe Schmid:that, that, yeah, that seems, that seems right to me. And I just, you know, I think I've said this before and I might've even said this in one of our previous tier list videos, but I just think it's kind of beautiful and I want people to appreciate this more. I want, I want atheists to see that this argument maybe isn't as forceful against certain views of God. And I also want theists to maybe like adopt these views because if they don't, then they just face some pretty serious challenges. So I just want to like lay out the beauty of this picture, right? So like, even consider the non-theist, right?

1:23:36Like if God exists, it seems quite plausible to me at least that like non-theists could be in a kind of implicit relationship with God by loving and deeply pursuing, you know, truth and beauty and goodness and justice. Since if God exists, These things are intimately bound up with him or his nature in certain ways. And so, like, arguably, you'd be getting closer to God, even if you don't recognize it, by doing these various actions.

1:23:57Joe Schmid:And, you know, you mentioned Jesus in the Gospels. I think it's in Matthew, right, where the people who fed the hungry and clothed the naked said to Jesus, like, Lord, when do we do these things for you? And Jesus replied, well, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me. and I mean this is pretty beautiful and this comes out in C.S. Lewis's like some of his last lines in the last battle I'll just quote this actually I don't recall if these are the last lines but there's some beautiful lines and I brought that I pulled this up because I think it's beautiful and it's I want theists to consider this okay so a little bit of background Emmett is this character Emmett is actually Hebrew for truth I believe I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly but who cares and Emmett was serving Tash, the evil character.

1:24:42Joe Schmid:And there's Aslan, who is, of course, the Christ figure in the story. So I'll just quote this. Then, oh, and Tash kind of at the end of his life, as it were, is in the Eschaton meeting up with Aslan for the first time. And by the Eschaton, you mean like the sort of the afterlife? Yeah, the end times. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here's the quote. Then I fell at his feet and thought, surely this is the hour of death For the lion, who is worthy of all honor, will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the lion and die than to live and not to have seen him.

1:25:23Joe Schmid:But the glorious one bent down his golden head and touched my forehead and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I'm no son of thine, but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then, by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the glorious one and said, Lord, is it then true, as the ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The lion growled so that the earth shook, but his wrath was not against me, and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites.

1:26:03I take the services which thou hast done to him.

1:26:06Joe Schmid:For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not. And it is I who reward him. And if any man does a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves. And by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also, for the truth constrained me, yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.

1:26:45Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me, thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly, for all find what they truly seek. Hmm. I know, it's like, this is what, I propose this picture to you. if you want to avoid this very serious argument against your view that Alex has articulated, I think this is the picture that you need to go in for. It's worth pointing out that we've talked about how there are people who are sort of not nominal Christians who yet have like, you know, served Christ or insert whatever religion. But also like Jesus says the opposite as well. He says that there are many people who will come to me, essentially in the eschaton and say you know lord lord and he'll say depart from depart from me i never knew you that's quite a famous line from the gospels as if to say there'll be people who call themselves christians but they don't know me i don't know them you know because they who cares what you call yourself it's about what you do and you got this flip image of people who like are like wait what when did i when did i do something for you and he's like oh you didn't even realize but you were you were by helping these people you were helping me and so it does seem to be like not a necessary requirement in my reading of christianity to like really know exactly like what your like doctrinal commitments are or whatever i i don't think that's what that's what matters i mean it seems crazy to me that you would get to the pearly gates and god would sort of check his notes and go like you know like okay right so you're a good person you gave to charity and oh you're christian you go to oh you're you're a lutheran oh oh man so so never mind back you know back back it just it's it's obviously sort of nonsense i think yeah yeah no

1:28:36Joe Schmid:you get the theology exam and it's like homo usius or homo way usius you're like oh my gosh like oh no and then you take the wrong one and you just immediately start burning into flames like this is just yeah you need like 100 on the test yeah but the thing is right so i've used this argument and i will continue to use it it's this sort of geographic location thing but this isn't so much an argument like, I kind of regret saying that this is, strictly speaking, an argument against God's existence. I think it at the very least shows that the understanding of Christianity, or any religion, but I use it against Christianity in particular, that your doctrinal commitments are the things by which you're saved, are the things that matter.

1:29:20It's not just that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, but no one comes to the Father except through knowledge of Jesus and like precise details about exactly how he was incarnated and stuff. I just don't think that's the message. And so this argument still works. And if someone's willing to turn around and say, you know what, fair enough, Alex, like that is a bit weird. So I guess like what you're saved by is not like being a nominal Christian or believing this or believing that, but just sort of, you know, being a, being a good dude and living in accordance with the will of the father, then I would probably have to say, okay, fair enough.

1:29:51Then this problem at least shrivels you know by comparison to what it was but i think there's still some some truth in there it still just does seem a bit a bit weird um but it goes away if you have a a non-doctrinal approach or also if you're if you're some kind of theist who maybe you're just like a pantheist where you kind of believe that the universe is made out of consciousness or something and it's like yeah you call yourself a theist but it's not like you don't believe in like a god who's going to send you to heaven or hell and wants you to do particular thing there's just kind of a a creative you know essence behind everything yeah maybe then you just sort of stumble into whatever you stumble into like there are there are ways out for the theist but i i want to say that it still remains to me like a powerful sort of question mark i'm like really like really there's a god who exists and yet like allows entire nations to just you know become beholden to demonic pagan entities i don't know man it just seems weird to me seems unexpected, shall we say, in a Bayesian sense.

1:30:52Joe Schmid:Yeah, I think we've exhausted what we both want to say on this. Okay, so let's move on. I want to talk about evolution and evolution disproving God, because we said that there were going to be some new theologies to explore. But before we do that, because that might be a bit lengthy, let's quickfire some of that. And by the way, these are kind of arbitrary. I don't know if you just came up with these from some thought. I don't know if you ask chat GPT or whatever, but whatever the case, we've probably missed a few important slogans. But there are a couple left, which I think deserve a mention.

1:31:23Okay. So relatively quickfire, right? Claims are not evidence. What does that mean? Where does it come from? Why is it on this list?

1:31:34Joe Schmid:What does it mean? That's a good question. It's slightly unclear what it means. I think it comes from Matt Dillahunty. Matt Dillahunty, right? I think so. I think that's like his biggest motto, like claims aren't evidence. And then, you know, he like hangs up on the call or something. Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a, that's a nice way to end your calls. Yeah. So I think maybe a claim that approximates what people are trying to express with this slogan is the following. The mere fact that somebody claims that P does not provide evidence for P's truth. I think that's what they're getting at. Am I wrong?

1:32:09And this comes up in the context of the resurrection, right? Because Matt will be debating a Christian and they'll say, look, there are all of these people who claimed to see Jesus after he died. And Matt will say, claims are not evidence. I need evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Yeah. So in my view, this is just clearly false. I mean, very often the fact that someone claims that P is evidence for the truth of P. This is just called testimonial evidence, namely, evidence you get for the truth of a proposition from the fact that someone testified to its truth. That is, that they told you that it's true.

1:32:42So, for instance, you know, my friend claimed that he bought a new soccer ball. This provides pretty strong evidence that he did, in fact, buy a soccer ball. It doesn't prove it. He could be lying. Right? Or he could have, like, misperceived a soccer ball and he thought that, you know, he thought that it was a soccer ball, but it was actually, like, a cleverly disguised basketball or something. But still, it provides strong evidence that he did, in fact, buy a soccer ball. Or, you know, again, return to Alex's new dildo, you know, he testifies that he bought a new one to add to his mounting collection.

1:33:08And that's, I don't know, that's a pretty good evidence that he did, in fact, by such a thing, right? And like, listen, science, science crucially hinges on testimonial evidence.

1:33:20Joe Schmid:If you throw testimonial evidence out the window, we are all screwed, right? Like science relies on saying like, hey, listen, I performed this experiment. Like here is the picture of the experimental results. I didn't fabricate this, right? I am testifying to you. I'm claiming that this is a real picture that I took of my stuff. You know, I'm testifying to you that I have 67 participants in my study and that I measured these things. Right. Science is a big game of testimony. And, you know, of course, there are ways to like try to independently corroborate that by having other people produce studies.

1:33:55Joe Schmid:But again, that's just adding more testimonial evidence to our body, a big body of testimonial evidence. Of course, very like systematically and carefully curated testimony and whatnot. I'm not saying that there are no differences between this and the resurrection. But like, at bottom, this is ultimately just testimony. It's just people saying things, right? It's just claims. They're just claiming that they did these things. And we have to have a kind of basic trust in testimony in order to get any of this inquiry up and running. So listen, testimony is evidence. Testimony is claims. Claims are evidence.

1:34:24Joe Schmid:Deal with it. testimony is claims yeah deal with it matt i think um the problem here is it seems to be kind of making a category claim it's like look yeah they made a claim but they didn't sort of make evidence like you might want to say i don't think that for the resurrection the claims of the disciples are strong enough evidence right but like we discussed earlier they might still be bad evidence but like their evidence like it might be bad evidence but it's still evidence um and also it's this idea it's like a category thing it's not just well in this instance i don't think these claims count as evidence it's like claims are not evidence when like you say sometimes at least like yeah they are they might be bad evidence they might not be enough evidence but they're evidence you know so that's that we can we can we can wipe our hands of of that particular slogan so next because we're gonna try and take this relatively quickly um oh you can't prove a negative.

1:35:21Right. So the theist will say, oh, can you prove that there's no God? And the atheist says, well, you can't prove a negative. You can't prove that something is not the case. You have to prove that it is the case. It's not possible to prove a negative. Right? Oh, boy. Yeah.

1:35:40Joe Schmid:So this is one of the ones where I do just experience unparalleled amounts of pain thinking about it. Okay, so yeah, this claim, I think, is firstly self-undermining. It is itself a negative claim, right? You can't do something. You can't prove a negative. There's no proof of a negative. It's like, if it were true, he couldn't prove it. Now, maybe they're saying, oh, you know, I'm not talking about proving it. I just mean, like, giving justification. Well, then you just can't give justification for this claim. Anyway, I think it's self-undermining. I think there's literally an entire method of proof in logic called reductio ad absurdum, expressly dedicated to proving negatives.

1:36:16Okay, so yes, you can prove it. What are you talking about? You can suppose a hypothesis is true and derive a contradiction from it and thereby negate the hypothesis. So yes, you can prove a negative. We can also disconfirm the existence of entities, even if we can't like decisively disprove them on certain occasions. So for instance, I think we just have like excellent evidence, excellent reason to think that yetis and unicorns do not exist on earth. Okay, why is that? Listen, if they did, we would very strongly expect to see traces of them. which we don't. Okay. And that just is strong evidence that they don't exist.

1:36:48These are very particular kinds of things that would have to exist. So already we should be kind of suspicious that they would be around. Right. That's a very specific way for reality to be.

1:36:58Joe Schmid:And we would expect if they were to exist, that they would leave traces of various kinds. We'd expect to find them. We don't. That means that's evidence against their existence. And that's some kind of disconfirmation. We have reason to believe that they don't exist. And I should also, again, I know I'm on my high horse, But just like, this is exactly what non-theists do, sophisticated non-theists, I should say. This is what sophisticated non-theists do in the case of God, right? They say that, hey, if God did exist, well, we'd expect the world to be different in various ways, like maybe containing much less evil or something.

1:37:30So, I don't know. This is never strictly, I can't be as remotely plausible. Well, I want to sort of clear something up because when you say, well, we've got good evidence that like yeses don't exist on Earth. somebody will probably want to say ah yeah but you you don't know that there isn't one like hiding out somewhere like in a forest and so you can't actually prove that this is what they're getting at it's like yeah you could you can say it's unlikely or whatever but you can never like prove that something isn't the case in a way that if you saw a yeti you could go yes there is a yeti i can prove there is a yeti but what do we mean by prove because if by prove you mean prove with 100 % certainty, then actually even seeing a yeti would not be enough.

1:38:11Because I can say, yeah, but how do you know that your sense data is accurate and that you're not sort of hooked up to a simulation, right? Like clearly when we say proof, typically we're talking about like really good evidence or a sufficient level of evidence. So fine. But like at the very least, you have to accept that you can have really good evidence for a negative. You know, there's really good evidence that there are no... And even if you sort of go like, well, technically you can't prove that there's no yet it's like how does that make you live your life when you when you go out and sort of you know camp in the forest do you bring like yeti like anti-yeti like weaponry just in case like no the the level of disconfirmation you've got is high enough like for all intents and purposes you don't think it's true i know you don't think it's true and so yeah like the same thing's happening here and also very helpful to point out reductio ad absurdums um the reduction to absurdity where as you said you take a claim like the way that you test the claim it's a little bit complicated i guess to think about without like an example but you just you just if you want to prove that something is false you assume that it's true you show what that like true claim entails and if it entails something which is false then the claim must be false in the first place you sort of assume it's true as a as a way to prove that it's false you know like well i'm i don't think it's raining right now.

1:39:30I'm going to prove it's not raining. I'm going to say, if it were raining, I would, you know, be wet right now. Premise two, I am not wet right now. There's another one for the TikTok edits. Conclusion, therefore, it's not raining outside. I've sort of proven that something is not the case by assuming that it is and showing that at least it's something false. So yes. Yeah. Anyway, you know, why are we even spending any more time on this? I'm just repeating. I don't know. I mean, it's just, I mean, you know, here's a, here's a negative claim there there is no adult elephant in this room right now yeah i thought of that bro like come on i obviously i know that that's the case and i can show that that's the case okay can i prove it with like absolute decisive certainty well like no and i can't prove that i have hands with absolute decisive certainty i mean like come on like i i can know and justifiably

1:40:17Joe Schmid:believe that there is no elephant in this room right now because if there were i would certainly be aware of it and i'm not yeah so there has there has been no female president of the united States of America. You know, like, it's just, you can just multiply this. There are no positively charged electrons. Yeah, it's just true, man. It's just true. Like that. There are no, there are no like instances in which three individual objects total four, you know, like, like, it's just, you know, we can, we can do this all day. I'd love to spend a day. Right. Just, just doing that, just doing, coming up with negative, like trivially proven negative claims.

1:40:54But yes, turns out you can prove negative um okay how about this so-called hitchens razor what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence that's another popular claim and the idea is that you know that certain like religious claims or whatever are kind of asserted without evidence oh i just trust the bible i just think it's true well if you can assert it without evidence you can dismiss it without evidence walmart business saves you time money and hassle which means you can focus on what really matters like putting the money you save back into what you do spending more time training your team filling orders and finding new clients anything and everything right down to oh that's one choosing the best hold music walmart business it's the walmart you love now for your business learn more at business.walmart.com Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+.

1:41:51Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time! New friends. Gary the Snake. And your last name? The Snake. Dream Team. New habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months plan auto renews and$12.99 a month, terms apply. Yeah, so there's something to this. I mean, like, generally speaking, it seems like we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence.

1:42:29So that, you know, if someone is just, like, blithely asserting something, at least if it's not obvious, and they're not providing any evidence for it, I'm under no pressure to accept it. and in that sense it seems totally fine for me to dismiss it in in the sense of like

1:42:47Joe Schmid:not accept it and you know not give it any more weight than i previously gave it okay so like in some sense i think this is fine i mean there are you know the the philosopher in me likes to nitpick everything right so i see this as like a universal generalization like for literally anything that can be asserted without evidence it's fine to just dismiss it without evidence i don't think that's probably not right. We have various non-inferentially justified beliefs. So that is beliefs which are justified. So we're within our rights to hold them. We have good grounds to hold them, as it were. But they're not justified inferentially.

1:43:26Joe Schmid:So we don't infer them from other beliefs that we're justified in accepting. So here's a belief right now. Suppose I stub my toe. I form the belief that I'm in pain. But I don't infer that from other beliefs. I'm just like directly aware of my pain and so I might I might then like assert without providing any other beliefs from which I infer it like without providing evidence in the traditional sense I could just assert that I'm in pain um but like you know you that should not be dismissed like so I can assert it without evidence you could like assert it just in your own head you could just go like oh I'm in pain right now and so but then I guess the evidence for the claim that you've just made is that you're feeling pain.

1:44:07But if you think of it as the belief is not the propositional content, oh, it's true that I feel pain and the justification for that is the pain in my foot. The thing that you're cognizing is just the existence of the pain in your foot. There's no further evidence for it. It's just there. And yet it would be great, wouldn't it, if you could go, ah, but remember Hitchens razor because I just feel pain and there's no like reason or evidence that I do. I just do. And so great news. I can just dismiss that and I can just not feel pain anymore. That would be great, but we can't do that. Right. And I mean, oftentimes I feel like this slogan is misused, right?

1:44:45So it kind of goes back to like the claims aren't evidence thing. So like sometimes an assertion can itself be evidence.

1:44:51Joe Schmid:Whoa, isn't that kind of cool? It's very ordinary. It's called testimony, right? Like where you assert something to the case. Like, hey, I was mowing my lawn earlier today. that's an assertion and I didn't provide you any evidence I didn't provide you any like other independent evidence for that assertion but that's not something that you could just like dismiss comfortably I actually just provided you evidence by my very assertion that I mowed my lawn right so like the assertion itself can be evidence and doesn't need to be like I don't need to provide oftentimes evidence for my assertion my assertion itself carries enough evidential force or weight to legitimate you believing the content of my assertion.

1:45:30Joe Schmid:So actually, it's not true that what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And there are also cases in which we seem to believe things without evidence, like the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, that other people exist, right? These are things which, strictly speaking, I can't justify. I can't know that I'm not a brain in a vat somewhere. I can't prove that the the external world exists. And yeah, and maybe, you know, you can still hold to the slogan and say, well, you know, like whatever. But I think most people want to say, but if you claim that these things are false, if you say, no, you are living in a simulation or something like it, or you, you know, the external world isn't real or other people don't exist.

1:46:09You want to say, well, what's your evidence for that? And this person could say, well, look, I mean, what can be assertive with evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And maybe they're kind of right, but it would be a sort of unhelpful philosophical move. For what it's worth, I think, that this is, again, like a rhetorical tool that isn't actually trying to establish a philosophical principle. All it's really doing is just like complaining that evidence hasn't been provided. You know, it's like a quip, but the true bit of the quip is not actually this principle that, oh, well, without evidence, we can...

1:46:40The true part of the quip, which makes it worth using, is just as a clever way to point out, you haven't provided any evidence. You know, that's really, I think, just what's being said here. If Hitchens were trying to establish, you know uh universal philosophical principles um i think most of his philosophical principles didn't even apply in the unique cases that he was using them let alone universally so i think we'd be a bit stuck in the mud there um yeah i think yeah it's like yeah technically again yeah sweet yeah nice awesome okay so next um i think we've got i think we'll probably do like, well, we'll see how we do.

1:47:23What about faith is belief without evidence or faith is like pretending to know something that you don't. This idea that faith is like contra, like justified belief. What do you think? Do you think that's true? Well, as a generic statement, well, Kevin, actually the Kalam cosmological argument starts with the premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Space last. Time last. Immaterial. Enormously powerful. Man, we should have done principle of credulity last time so we could have had the swim, but never mind, never mind. Okay, anyway, I got a little bit too excited there. Where was I going?

1:48:07I was going to say, listen, I don't think this applies to, like, generically to faith as such. No doubt, many people who have faith don't have evidence. Maybe they indeed are pretending to know what they don't know. No doubt, like, this applies to many people. And no doubt many people will just... Many people have a mistaken conception of faith on which faith just is kind of like blind trust or something like that. But I don't think that this is like, essential to the notion of faith. So I at least view faith as the following. It's roughly speaking something like a trusting

1:48:42Joe Schmid:commitment to someone or something. Okay. And what will that trusting commitment involve? Well, plausibly it'll involve at least two components. So firstly, I think it involves a cognitive component. So that could simply be a belief, but it might be something weaker, but still belief-like. So, for example, maybe at least some level of confidence that the object of faith is true or exists or will occur. So, for example, if you have faith that your friend will win their upcoming basketball game, well then, at the very least, you'll think that there's a not absurdly low chance that they'll win. It doesn't make sense to say that you have faith that your friend's team will win if you're absolutely convinced that they're definitely going to get crushed.

1:49:23but you arguably don't need full-blown belief that they will in fact win in order to have faith that they'll win um you might and likewise you know you might actually just think it's like somewhat improbable that you make it through a marriage or like finish a project on time but you might still have faith in those things right uh so maybe faith doesn't actually require

1:49:46Joe Schmid:belief so that's something that i want to know but like i do think one component of faith is going to be a cognitive component. It's going to be something having to do with judging something to maybe be a live option or like sufficiently probable or maybe like belief worthy or something like that. So that's the first component, a cognitive component. And then I think there's a second component of this trusting commitment, which is faith, which is something like a conative or desire-like component. Okay. So it's going to involve something like a desire for, or, you know, like a positive evaluation of or maybe a hope for the object of faith so if we return to the case that i gave of like the basketball game um if you have faith that your friend will win their game well then yeah you like you want them to win you regard that as a good thing you hope that they win you've got some kind of like positive positively valenced attitude towards it right um in addition to the more belief-like component of it yeah it would be weird to say like yeah yeah like oh man i really i really don't want that that team to win but i've just got i've just got faith that they will it like right you can kind of make sense of that it could be like oh i don't think they're going to win i really don't want them to win but i uh maybe they would but to say something like but i've got faith that they will it sort of seems to necessarily imply a like a a positive evaluation of the thing right exactly and so given that faith is a trusting commitment with these two components, I think it's quite plausible that faith is compatible with believing on the basis of evidence and indeed with believing on the basis of evidence sufficient to render the belief rational, right?

1:51:21So like, here's an example that I oftentimes like to give. Somewhat recently, well, this actually wasn't recent.

1:51:27Joe Schmid:This is when I was back at home. But you know, it is what it is. Somewhat recently, I was, my dad told me that he would get home with the car by noon because I didn't have a car. He told me that he'd get home with the car by noon so that I could, you know, get to my appointment. I need to leave at noon to get to my 1230 appointment. Now, I had ample evidence that he would fulfill his promise. Like suppose that, you know, my dad has made these promises many times in the past. He's very dependable. He's very reliable. He almost always comes through with it. So I had ample evidence to think that he would come through on this occasion and enough to make it rational to believe that he'd get home by noon.

1:52:02But I think I still had to have faith that he would pull through. And, you know, as I sat there anxiously waiting at like 1159 and he's not yet there, I do indeed have to have some faith there, even though I have good evidence he's going to get here by noon. And then lo and behold, I see him come in and, you know, he's there basically right at noon. I'm pulling up into the driveway. So I think I had to exhibit faith in that circumstance. I had to have a kind of trusting commitment. I had a positive surveillance attitude towards it. I had the relevant cognitive component of faith. and also I had enough evidence I think to legitimate belief in this case so I just don't think faith requires belief without evidence or in spite of evidence or you know faith just must be blind uh that's my take yeah I tend to think faith the way that I see people using it because people people always say like oh well you have faith that the chair you're sitting on is going to hold you up and you have faith that your your wife loves you and stuff and I'm like I know what getting at, which is that I can't prove that this chair isn't going to collapse, but for some reason I believe it anyway.

1:53:06And I've come to realize that I think a way that people tend to use faith is like belief in something without evidence of that particular thing, but with good background evidence to sort of trust in that thing. So I don't have evidence. If I walk into a new restaurant, I don't have any direct evidence that when I sit down on the chair, it won't just collapse under me but i've got good evidence i do it's not like i've got zero evidence like that's relevant at all because i've got evidence that every other restaurant i've been into has chairs that haven't fallen over and maybe i sort of know that roughly there's probably some kind of like law in place where they'll get sued if i'm going to be yeah but still i i still don't like know i can't prove if someone asks for evidence of that of that chair not falling over they're like no no but like you don't know you don't even know what it's made out of you don't know like if it's attached You don't know who put it there.

1:54:00It's like, that is actually true. But I still believe that it will hold me up in a way that, technically speaking, yeah, it's not really justified in this instance. But it is also kind of justified by all the background stuff. And I feel like faith is used in that way. Like, when someone says, well, I've just got faith that, you know, God has good reason to allow suffering. That sounds really weird, because you're like, well, you've got no justification to explain why suffering exists. but they go but yeah but look i've got all of these reasons to think that god exists i've got all this other evidence that there's this god who's good and so in this particular instance yeah i know i have no idea why he allows suffering but because i've got all this background stuff that tells me that yeah there is some answer that god has i just believe that he does have an answer i think that's actually quite like a reasonable position to take but i wouldn't want to call that like reasonable belief because you're admitting that you don't have good reason to believe this particular thing.

1:54:54And so we have a word for this, and that word is faith. Yeah, interesting. See, I sort of even see that trusting commitment as compatible with, you know, reasonable belief. I don't know.

1:55:09Joe Schmid:I think I'm totally reasonable when I go into the restaurant and I, you know, sit down and even believing that I'm not going to just like fall through the chair. I mean, like, come on. I can see all the other people. You know, this restaurant seems to be evidently well, well kept, right? I mean, the other people in the restaurant, they're sitting there, you know, like restaurants would get sued if they had really bad chairs, like, you know, I know I have a lot of information about other restaurants and chairs and whatnot. And I think, like you said, I do think I have to exercise a degree or modicum of faith in this case.

1:55:39But it's reasonable, like, I don't know, and I have a reasonable belief here. Like, it's I have a trust and commitment. I don't have decisive evidence. So maybe that's a requirement. Like that's maybe what we're getting at. Like you don't have decisive, conclusive proof in the thing in question or like something thereabout. But I think that is compatible with reasonable belief. Yeah. You're right that what I'm describing might just be best described as a form of just reasonable belief. But I do think that when people use the word faith, especially in the context of like, well, I've got faith in God, but you're an atheist and you have faith in all kinds of things.

1:56:17You've got faith in this, you've got faith in that. If that's what you mean by the word faith and maybe faith just kind of is a form of like weak rational belief it's just like one of the weakest forms of rational beliefs that you can have but i think that that's not exhaustive because i'd never considered this before but i think you're right that faith has to come along with like the desire to have faith in something implies you want it to happen so maybe what faith is is what i'm describing which is like belief in the absence of direct evidence for that thing but with good background evidence at the same time as wanting it to be true maybe if you have all of those components put together you get something which is sort of best described as faith like i don't think anybody has faith just like right off the bat it's like somebody just says like oh i i believe that the universe was created by a sort of cosmic spider i say like oh why do you believe that i've just got faith i'm like okay fair enough but like like why why a spider don't you know what faith is faith isn't like reasonable evidence it's disconnect but i'm like but there's got to be there's got to be like some reason why even if you don't know this for sure there's something about this spider there's got to be some reason like faith can't just be like belief in something without evidence like on its own there has to be some kind of background reason or evidence or something that like provides the basis on which somebody can stand before taking that venerable leap into faith.

1:57:45So, I don't know. But I don't think it's fair to say faith is belief without evidence, as a strong point. Because usually there is, like I say just then, some kind of evidence involved. It just might mean that faith is belief without direct compelling evidence of the particular thing that you're having faith in. Maybe we can agree on that?

1:58:06Joe Schmid:Yeah, I think I would, at least for the moment, lean towards something like that. Okay, well, look, I promise we're nearly done. I'm looking at your list here. You know, have one more, Ricky Gervais. Yeah, we're going to do that because I was going to say we've got good people do good things, bad people do bad things. Oh, you already covered that one. Well, this is what I was going to say. This is what I mean. I just want to like, because people might be like, where are these claims, right? To get good people to do bad things, that takes religion. It's the Steve Weinberg quote. But because we've kind of already covered that with religion flying you into planes.

1:58:44There's also this other claim, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Have we covered that? The fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence that there is no God. I mean, I don't know, like maybe quick words on that. What do you think?

1:59:08Joe Schmid:Yeah, I mean, so I mean, typically this will be combined with the claim that there is indeed an absence of evidence for God's existence. Have we addressed that earlier on? Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. I guess it's a slightly more specific claim in that it's not just there's no evidence for God, but the fact that there's no evidence for God is evidence against God's existence, which i think if that evidence were to be expected and you didn't find it that would be true um so yeah yeah fair enough um yeah in that particular circumstance but anyway like uh like i say i'm trying to get through these quickly there's only one other one on the list apart from the ricky gervais one which is theism is unfalsifiable right so sometimes atheists will get frustrated because they'll say well i i don't believe i don't believe god would allow suffering and they go ah yeah but God's got this super secret special reason to allow suffering.

1:59:58Okay, but then why would he allow that if he was a loving God? And theists might go, oh, well, I'm a theist, but maybe God doesn't have to be loving. God could be amoral. Okay, well then, how does God sort of fit into this or that? And they're like, oh, well, you know, it's like they've always sort of got this alley to run down. It's like there's nothing in principle that could be true that would make the theist go, yeah, fair enough, that's incompatible with God. Because instead what they'll do is they'll just adapt their conception of God to make the evidence fit, right? And so therefore, this hypothesis of theism is unfalsifiable.

2:00:32There's nothing I could say that would prove it false. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fair? Not quite.

2:00:41Joe Schmid:I mean, in some sense, like given what you were just saying, like it sounds like we take a theistic hypothesis, but then we modify it to a different hypothesis, given that it has kind of been falsified, right? So like we take these hypotheses, which do indeed make some predictions about how we'd expect the world to go, right? And then we find that the world doesn't go in those directions. And then the theist, as you were depicting it in this hypothetical scenario, switches to a different theistic hypothesis. And like, okay, in some sense, it's still theism. But like we've switched hypotheses and the original hypothesis was indeed falsifiable or at least it was liable to confirmation and disconfirmation based on the predictions that we can tease out from the hypothesis.

2:01:22Joe Schmid:so like in my view like generic perfect being theism or like traditional monotheism does indeed make predictions about how we'd expect the world to go or not go and that just means that it's liable to confirmation and disconfirmation so it's not unfalsifiable in that sense but i think this just applies to basically any theory right it applies to atheism it applies to standard scientific theories, you can always, in the face of disconfirming evidence, retreat to a different version of your theory or append onto your theory various implausible auxiliary hypotheses. You know, like with the atheist, you know, they come across fine-tuning and maybe they'll just posit like a multiverse.

2:02:06Joe Schmid:They come across potentially well-evidenced miracle claims and they'll just say, oh, you know, like it's some kind of misperception or misidentification or hallucination or something like that. And like, oh, they'll come across a contingency. They'll be like, okay, maybe there's some like atheistic necessary foundation of reality. Like maybe it's the universe or something. And then they come across consciousness and they're like, oh, well, maybe, you know, consciousness doesn't exist after all. Maybe we're eliminativists or illusionists about consciousness. Or, you know, they'll posit something else.

2:02:34Joe Schmid:Like, oh, maybe they're just these like brute emergent powers of brains or something. Like the atheists will also be able to just make all these additional pauses to save their theory. so I don't know I don't really see anything distinctive yeah I think this is a criticism that shouldn't be levied against theism but against particular theists so I can understand when someone's having an argument and they go like there's nothing I can say that won't just make you retreat your position is unfalsifiable it's actually maybe just that person is like not granting like falsifying you know criteria that they just keep retreating but it's not unique to the position of theism as you say I mean there might be some versions of it If you have an ontological argument which says that God just exists by definition, that God just has existence as part of his essence, and it's like, well, what could I do to prove that false?

2:03:22What would have to be true for that to be false? And the theist just goes, there's nothing, because God just is existence. That's just what God is. You're asking me, how could you falsify that two plus two is four? right and in that circumstance that version of theism would be unfalsifiable but to the theist that would be justifiably so it would be like saying oh yeah your maths your two plus two is four it's just unfalsifiable isn't it and you're kind of like yeah like kind of yeah because it's almost like a point of definition it just follows from and some theists see God in that way so I think that form of theism would probably be unfalsifiable but not in like a necessarily unfair kind of way.

2:04:02If you accept the ontological argument, that is, of course you're going to think it's unfalsifiable. So worth flagging, but it depends on the theist. It depends on their behaviors and which arguments they're employing, right? I think so. So before evolutionary considerations against God, there's one more here from that great theologian Ricky Gervais, which seemed to have gone viral again recently on the internet, even though it was from some time ago, where Ricky sort of, he's talking to like Stephen Colbert or someone like that. And they're kind of debating religion. And Ricky goes, look, here's the thing, man, here's what you got to understand, right?

2:04:41If you were to just burn every single book, every book, every bit of information is just erased from human society. And we all have to start again. We go back to being cavemen on day one. Then in a couple of thousand years or so, all of the science would come back. All of our scientific understanding would come back exactly as it is, but none of the religious texts would come back exactly as they are. And I think even Colbert was like, yeah, fair point. And he gets an applause and it's an interesting thought. Yeah, science would come back, but religion wouldn't because religion is full of hyper-specific stories that had to be made up in a particular way.

2:05:15Whereas science is like gravity. Things would still fall to the ground and we'd still mathematically describe that eventually. So that kind of gives us reason to think that the science stuff is trustworthy, whereas the religious stuff that you find in the scripture is not, because it's like arbitrary and, you know, contingent on sort of historical circumstance. Right? Everything feels a bit uncertain right now. A few months ago, you never would have expected eggs being factored into your monthly budget. New sources of stress equal more opportunities for breakouts to strike. Luckily, Mighty Patch Original shrinks the look of pimples in just one use.

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2:06:31Yeah, so I've got three responses to this one. So first, how does Ricky know that none of the religious texts would come back basically with the same contours? I mean, after all, if God exists and is behind one of the religions, presumably if we completely lost his crucial revelation to us, I don't know, maybe he'd touch base again or something. So how does Ricky know this? And in fact, it almost starts to sound question begging. Moses smashed the Ten Commandments, right? Moses smashed the Ten Commandments on the original tablet, and then God just sort of like wrote them down for him again because he kind of needed them.

2:07:09So, you know, why not? Yeah, you're right. It's question begging. It's like you have to assume this is on the assumption that there is no God who would like replenish the religious stories on that assumption. Yeah, of course, the religious story wouldn't come up. But then you don't need that argument because you just assume that God doesn't exist in the first place. Right. Right.

2:07:26Joe Schmid:So that's the first response. The second response is that like if this were some like devastating objection to religion, it would also be a devastating objection to what? Like the entire field of history and also like literature and like various other things. I mean, like, come on, if you destroyed all the history textbooks and like our evidence of what happened in the past. A lot of the information is just lost in the past, right? Like we would lose tons of letters, descriptions of battles. Like there's like no way that we could reconstruct like what the precise details of certain battles and the years in which they occurred from like certain archaeological findings and whatnot.

2:08:00Joe Schmid:so I don't know does Ricky really want to like think that the whole field of history is untrustworthy from this kind of test about this destruction test as we could put it I don't know it doesn't seem plausible so that's the second response and then the third and final response is it's not actually clear to me that science would come back again exactly in the same way I don't know dude science seems kind of institutionally and theoretically contingent in various ways is there are, there have been in the history of science, predictably very successful and practically very useful false theories.

2:08:35So, I mean, how is he sort of ruling out that we

2:08:39Joe Schmid:might land on some kind of very predictably successful theory, but which just nevertheless happens to be false and different from the ones that we have currently landed on? And also like, bear in mind that like scientists often adopt different values or standards for judging competing theories, right? So scientists in general have a kind of balance or trade-off, a theoretical trade-off between simplicity and explanatory power, right? So like oftentimes we'll posit new entities to explain various phenomena and we posit new features of entities to explain various phenomena. But like, I don't know, we can imagine future scientists or scientists in an alien civilization having different views about which theoretical virtues are more important or how to balance these theoretical virtues.

2:09:22Maybe future scientists will actually be much more reluctant to posit new entities in order to explain phenomena. Like, they just are much more attached to parsimony than we are. And, like, these are extra scientific considerations because these are, like, considerations about how we weigh and compare scientific theories, right?

2:09:38Joe Schmid:So it's not like science itself could kind of solve these issues about how to best weigh up the theoretical virtues that scientists deploy. So I don't know. Like, maybe future scientists would have different theoretical weightings. um and yeah so there there are a number of things many things wrong with what he says so i want to i want to disagree with some of that and agree with the bulk of it i want to disagree with i mean you said about like i do think it would to the extent that religious scriptures like cover religious history you know the story of the jews or whatever like yeah the fact that we lose that and couldn't get it back is not like evidence that it didn't happen or like reason to think that that didn't occur because we wouldn't be able to rediscover it however i think what ricky's getting at is like the sort of the eternal truth claim stuff like the stuff that's good the stuff that's bad it's it's immoral to do this it's it's but even then it's like but then if you make it sort of so sort of generalized if you're talking about that stuff then maybe that kind of just would come back like people kind of probably managed to work out yeah you should like love your neighbor and like, oh, even though that person is like from the tribe over, you should still be nice to them.

2:10:50I mean, maybe not, right? Because some people think that, you know, if you listen to like Tom Holland and his sort of Christian followership, you think, no, no, no, like Christianity uniquely, like without Christianity, you know, like the treatment of women and slavery and this kind of stuff, like you needed this particular Christian story to come along. Like maybe there is something unique about that, but it's not like out of the question for me that, you know, love your neighbor and treat people equally could not arise within the next few thousand years somewhere. And then if it works, it works.

2:11:23And if it's successful, it sort of takes off. But if you are talking about the more specific stuff, like the historical claims about the resurrection of Jesus or something, like you say, like, okay, suppose it actually happened and they wrote it down and then we destroyed all of the records and we couldn't find them. Yeah. But then you said, like, you know, it would also undo, like, literature. I don't think that's true because literature, the utility of literature is not connected to the truth of the things that it's saying. Whereas in history, it is. Like the thing that's useful about history is that it tells you what happened, right?

2:11:54So, and you just sort of mentioned that in passing. I don't know if you actually believe that or if it just came out. I meant like Shakespeare studies.

2:12:00Joe Schmid:That's what I was talking about. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, yeah, then fair enough. I think that's definitely true. But also, I really want to think about this fact that like, oh, yeah, science would just come back. Okay. like no like no i just don't i just don't believe it for a number of reasons first is that like we know that throughout the history of our species as you say we've had like false false theories or theories that we've improved upon so famously like newton has his newtonian mechanics and then einstein comes along and says you're kind of actually thinking about it all wrong and instead there's like you know this space-time thing right which of these would come back would they both come back in the same order?

2:12:41And also, given that we know that Einstein corrected Newton, surely within the next thousand years or so, somebody's going to correct Einstein. So when you say that science will come back, there's going to be a lot that we're wrong about right now. And it's unlikely that the stuff we're wrong about would come back again, because it's wrong, right? And if it did come back again, then you're saying that stuff that's wrong could come back again. In which case, if the implication of your argument is that like, oh, the true stuff would come back, it would just be false. Not to mention the fact that the most important kind of science that we're doing, like the cutting edge of science right now is of course quantum mechanics.

2:13:21And nobody even can agree like what's going on down there. Like, you know, we've got all these different interpretations. You've got like many worlds and Copenhagen interpretations that rely on a particular like language of mathematics that was like invented by particular individuals, you know, like Newton and independently, we've got some evidence that like, you know, calculus might've come up because Newton and Leibniz and I think somebody else had like independently come up with it. But like, even that like relies on a particular kind of mathematical notation. Like surely the ideas of like calculus, the kind of the stuff at the core of it would be like rediscovered.

2:14:00But what do we count as the science? Because, you know, would a future society that erased all of its knowledge and then had to start again, would they come up with atomic physics, for example? Like, maybe not, because like now we're kind of doubtful that atoms really exist in the way that we've traditionally thought with the little proton and the electrons going around. It might be that they just have no conception of atoms. And you kind of got two options here. You either say, yeah, but atoms are an integral part of science and that wouldn't come back, in which case Ricky's wrong. Well, you say, well, yeah, the atoms wouldn't come back because the atoms are something that, although it's part of our scientific lexicon, it's just incorrect.

2:14:37In which case, Ricky is saying that, oh, incorrect things will reoccur. Who cares? You know what I mean? I really struggle to believe that if we actually started again, then a thousand years from now, people would, with certainty, be debating whether the wave function collapses when the observer looks at it or whether there is a multi yeah maybe one of those is correct and that will be rediscovered but the idea that the and maybe you want to say oh that's because we haven't worked it out yet but once we work out what the truth is that's what any society would do in the future but like there's no like end point of science there's no like point where we're like okay we're done now like we understand fully and coherently we don't even understand anything about like so we don't know what an electron is right like we literally have no idea what an electron like actually is we only describe what it does.

2:15:23I talk about that all the time. So what is it that would actually come back? If the theory of gravity is just a mathematical description of the fact that objects fall to the ground, we start again and, oh, look, we notice that objects fall to the ground. Do we really think that we're going to take the exact same course to describing why that happens? I don't even think we have that explanation now. We don't know why things fall to the ground. This is a big passion of mine we don't have like things don't fall to the ground because of the law of gravity we have a law of gravity because things fall to the ground and people forget like oh yeah like isaac newton discovered gravity like no he didn't like people knew that objects fell to the ground before that the only thing he did was like mathematically describe it and realize it's the same thing that keeps the planets in orbit like yeah maybe somebody else would realize that and realize that it's true.

2:16:17But I don't know. I just feel like the extent to which, okay, maybe we wouldn't invent the same mathematical notation and we wouldn't use the same conceptual tools, but the core of what's going on in physics, we'd probably rediscover. You can just say the same thing about religion. Okay, yeah, maybe you wouldn't get a particular named set of deities or particular angels doing particular things or the particular story of jesus or whatever but the core of what that religion is about yeah that would that would re-emerge i just think it's like you know i just i just don't i'm just not confident that it's that it's true anyway i'm ranting again i'm ranting again and i think we're probably in agreement here i think we're largely in agreement yes but quick segue brutal segue like almost i was trying to find a way to make it work but it's just there's no other way i'm just gonna have to sort of brute force it here.

2:17:13Evolution disproves God, doesn't it?

2:17:19Well, let's start with young earth creationism, because it might disprove young earth creationism.

2:17:23Joe Schmid:I mean, but even there, so this is not one of the theodicies. I told Alex beforehand for the audience that I wanted to maybe talk about two potential theodicies for evolutionary animal suffering. This is not one of them. Okay, this is not one of them, I want to emphasize. But there's actually a potential way to make young earth creationism compatible with evolution and it's really very metaphysically spooky and kind of crazy but philosopher hud hudson speculates that uh oh and i should say it's not like he claims to believe this this is like a speculative model that he proposes on behalf of others who want to hold the young earth creationism okay um so philosopher hud hudson speculates that perhaps there's such a thing as hyper time which is basically an extra a temporal dimension at some point in which our timeline is located, but over which our timeline can itself change.

2:18:16So basically, it's like an additional timeline within which our timeline is located. So basically then, the contents of history, if we have hypertime, the contents of history can themselves change over the course of hypertime. And so, maybe at an earlier hypertime, So earlier on in the hyper timeline, our first order timeline, like our history in our universe, actually includes an earth and a garden of Eden created immediately by God 6 ,000 years before 2025. And then maybe there was like a fall from our primordial parents. And then as punishment for the fall, God changes the course of our actual history, our timeline, so that at a later hyper time.

2:19:06our first order timeline includes a brutal evolutionary process occurring over billions of years i see your face so like i'm i'm a little okay i i know you're not quite finished here but but i mean i'm a little confused by this this hypertime concept and what it means i i don't really know how to how to how to picture this like what what what you're talking what you're talking about help me help me out here like that what is this hypertime thing yeah it's just um listen it's so you know think of the three spatial dimensions they as it were travel through time right imagine that you know like things in space change over time well hypertime is basically like the temporal dimension along which the timeline itself can change so like the past can genuinely itself change like new the new events can be added into the past that didn't happen at a previous hyper time so like just as if like the universe and physical stuff in three-dimensional space changes over time our universe's time can itself change over the course of hyper time so at one hyper moment yeah i know at one hyper moment the the course of our history our timeline might look a certain way and then at a later hyper moment in this broader temporal dimension the course of history looks different like it might include additional times or might have different times and whatnot this is very crazy but like hey you know particles are supposed to be like somehow waves and yeah right at the same time and like you know like things don't have like a definite position and momentum and it's the same time and whatnot so things i've got time for it i i think yeah you know this is interesting yeah if you like but I think it's it's like okay this is an exercise in trying to like make consistent like young earth creationism which yeah maybe this does but like with other sort of like with something like a multiverse or something I think if this idea of hyper time only exists as a response to this particular problem then like cool very clever like great job but probably not going to take it on board if there's some like other reason to believe in this thing called hyper time and we can then apply that to this and have it work as the theodicy, then great.

2:21:24But that is interesting. The punishment for the fool is not just animals suffering and humans becoming more prone to sin or whatever, but literally a rewriting of human history to be like, or like animal history to be like billions of years old with profound suffering. I guess why not? Why couldn't God just... I mean, that would be horrible. Imagine if you really wanted to punish someone. If I wanted to punish you, but I had this power to do basically anything I wanted, yeah, sure, I could just make your life a misery now. Or I could say, you've wronged me so badly that I'm literally going to rewrite time so that for the past thousand years, you've been being lashed.

2:22:07That would be pretty metal. I mean, that's quite the punishment. It is quite the punishment. So there actually are some... Let's see, Tyron Goldschmidt,

2:22:19Joe Schmid:And Sam Liebens, two very good Jewish philosophers, have written on hypertime and its ability to help with the problem of evil. They don't even take this fall stuff. They go in for various other sorts of proposals where God can literally rewrite the past and make it so that we never actually sinned. And bad things never actually occurred at a later hypertime. So, okay, at an earlier hypertime, okay, bad things occur. But at a later hypertime, literally, the timeline is perfect. So he kind of like splices in like the good things that we do and the various other things. And he kind of there's there's like a movie director who does this.

2:22:56Right. Like he has people just like act out. Some people in the audience will put this in the description right now. There's a movie director that has people has the actors just naturally do stuff. And he'll just like maybe give them slight guidance. But like he'll just have them act out various different scenes and whatnot.

2:23:13Joe Schmid:and he will just literally splice in stuff that he liked from what they did he'll maybe have them redo certain scenes and whatnot and at the end you basically have just like a composite product of literally like natural acting they weren't given scripts or anything like that um and he just kind of like splices it so like god can actually work like that in this kind of picture sam lebens and um tyron goldschmidt i think have a paper on this called the promise of a new past I think it's an ergo that's a journal. But anyway, so like this stuff can be used, wielded by the theist to do lots of theoretical work.

2:23:53Joe Schmid:And so like, okay, I know it's a bit crazy. I know this is out there. And I'm not saying I believe, I don't believe this. Okay. But I just thought it was kind of funny because, you know, people are like, yeah, I know people like evolution disproves young, you know, young earth creation is like, well, disprove is a little strong. Like, how are you ruling out this hyper time proposal? Okay. Okay. I think it's clever. I think it's fun. You know, like, why not? Why not? Right. I mean, it's very metal, as you said. That should be like one of the classic divine, you know, perfections. Like the degree of metalness, you know?

2:24:27Joe Schmid:Yeah. Metallity, metallicness. And you know, God's maximal with respect to these perfections. Metallity. Yeah, I guess God would have to be maximally metallic under the ontological argument. um i mean but yeah i mean that is that is that is brutal and sort of horrifying because it also it opens up other possibilities to me like you know when we sort of think about eternal punishment in hell what if it's not just like you go to hell and then every day for the rest of your life is suffering but like when you go to hell like your entire past history is also now suffering that would suck man it would suck but also like listen this this would provide people who are proponents of eternal conscious torment like a way to make their view less less unpalatable i mean their view is already very unpalatable but you know you could say listen yeah at this at this one hyper moment where our whole timeline is here yeah you've got an eternity of suffering ahead of you um but hey there are hyper future moments in in the hyper time where uh you know your future is perfectly fine and in fact you're in heaven and maybe actually there's like a hyper endless series where at each hyper time the local timeline includes you just like in an infinite state of bliss but you know that's in the hyper future unfortunately in the hyper present you're stuck you know you're in this timeline where you're going to be tortured forever but you know it's only hyper temporary um it's eternal but it's hyper temporary uh that should be like that should be my motto like listen the suffering is eternal but it's only hyper temporary like that's gonna help um yeah you gotta be very careful when you're talking about hyper time with like the various I don't remember this bit of the Bible, if I'm going to be honest with you, mate.

2:26:06I don't remember. Was this Mark or was this Luke? I can't remember. What was it you were saying about predicates?

2:26:12Joe Schmid:I think it was Acts or something. That's where it is. Yeah, okay. So where we're really getting with evolution disproves God is, of course, an argument from evolutionary animal suffering. So as your audience already knows at this point, because you talk about this all the time. All the time. natural history took a very grotesque course animals have been preying on one another parasitizing one another ripping each other to shreds natural disasters have wiped out what like 99.99 % of all species basically the course of natural history is a bloodbath um and i don't know that seems like extremely surprising under theism like this is the very means of the mechanism by which god creates It's biological diversity in general and humans in particular.

2:26:56The very engine of creation is the suffering and death and discarding of the least of these, of the innocent fawns and baby elephants and whatnot. Like, this is disgusting. I mean, like, what are you doing? Like, God could have created it in so many other ways. He could have made the universe a young earth creationist universe. He could have created 6 ,000 years ago, done away with this massively brutal process. He could have made photosynthesizing animals. He could have made chemosynthesizing animals. He could have made, like, anesthetic and the claws and teeth of predators so that the prey aren't being, like, agonizingly brutalized to death.

2:27:34Joe Schmid:Like, he could have altered animals' mental states when they face the moments of death and whatnot, when they're being burned alive, so that they don't experience excruciating agony. Like, he could have done a ton of stuff that seemingly he did not do. And this seems very, very, very surprising under theism and much better predicted on a picture on which you know listen dude the natural world is all there is it's not being benevolently guided and uh you know as a result the course of evolutionary history is going to just look indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient creatures um so it does seem to be pretty powerful evidence against theism um yeah i mean like as you say i've used this argument before it just seems unexpected right like it seems kind of unlikely i mean strictly speaking it's only really unlikely if there's like a god who cares about suffering who yeah especially i think it's this picture of a god who is good and doesn't want innocent creatures to suffer but also kind of created the universe for the sake of human beings as many major religious traditions sort of uh assume that it's all about humans that it kind of took us a really long time to show up and the sort of the the pre-drinks for the human party was this like billion year blood bath it It just seems like God suffers from a lack of economy, if you like.

2:28:56But technically, it doesn't exclude the existence of an unactualized actualizer who is the necessary foundation of contingent things. But it definitely does something powerful against traditional conceptions of God. So given this, given how unexpected it is that God would have chosen this mechanism and that there's so much suffering. and suffering which like it seems like you know people have theodicies right you've used that word attempts to reconcile suffering with a good god and people say oh well you know evil exists or suffering exists because of human free will or because it allows people's souls to develop or because there are higher order goods you can attain like bravery which can only come about if you allow things like fear the thing is none of that seems to apply to animals that doesn't apply to the fawn does it it seems like that's totally random it's like it's definitely not down to human free will before humans ever existed um it also seems like you know these animals don't really have souls that develop in the same way maybe they do maybe they get to go to sort of doggy heaven um that's one option for people you know uh but it's particularly this like arbitrary animal suffering that seems incoherent with the nation of god but you promised me that you have some some new theodicies that that might change my mind on this uh yeah that was definitely the content of the promise.

2:30:16No, I mean, like, the audience knows that this is, by my lights, probably the most forceful argument for atheism. So, you know, and I think that, you know, it's got a deal of force. So, understand this as, like, an exercise in, like, trying to give the theist their best shot

2:30:35Joe Schmid:in response to this. And that should be how I've interpreted going forward, okay? I'm going to put on my theist hat, I'm going to try my hardest. Don't automatically assume that I believe what I'm about to say, but I will proceed. So there may be two theodicies that I want to try out, but I at least want to try out the first one because it's kind of fun. So this is called the Omission Theodicy. This is proposed and defended in a recent paper by theistic philosophers Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson. Just a heads up, I might not do full justice to their paper, so I recommend the audience to check out the paper for themselves.

2:31:13Joe Schmid:It actually won the Mark Sanders Prize in philosophy of religion, and that's kind of a big deal, so it's a pretty good paper. So the key idea is that apparent cases of natural evil can be traced to the omissions of free agents who had the power to prevent them, but culpably failed to do so. So it's an example of what philosophers call a subsumption theodicy, where we're subsuming natural evil into moral evil. So natural evil is evil that doesn't seem to be the result of the free actions or omissions of moral agents, whereas moral evil is evil, which is the result of the free actions or omissions of free moral agents.

2:31:54Joe Schmid:So there are a few different ways that we could run the omission theodicy, and I'll just mention two. So one of them is called like, these are just different stories or different ways that the theist might take the theodicy and flesh it out a little bit. so one is called alien abandon sorry and angel abandonment okay that's one of them and the other one is called alien isolationism okay so hear me out okay this is gonna get crazy but hear me out okay so let's start with angelic abandonment they actually call it archon abandonment it's actually i'll go with that it's the archon abandonment theodicy archons that's the word for like i think the powers in the powers and principalities in uh you know the bible verse that we we battle not against flesh and blood but the powers and principalities of this world So it's supposed to be like fallen angels of sorts.

2:32:39Okay, so here's the thought. Cheer me out. It isn't particularly surprising under theism that God would create beings like much higher than us on the chain of being, where like there's a lot of value in there being like

2:32:53Joe Schmid:creatures with an intellect and a will. And I don't know, it just wouldn't be terribly surprising if, you know, in addition to us and all the various lower beings, you know, with lesser capacities, non-rational beings like the animals, it wouldn't be terribly surprising that God might create in addition to us let's say purely spiritual beings who are also intellectual, rational beings capable of free choice. There's just lots of value in beings like that. They can have relationships with one another. They can have relationships with us. They can have relationships with the rest of creation. They can have relationships with God.

2:33:25Joe Schmid:And in general, it just seems good to create good beings. Okay. It also doesn't seem particularly surprising that conditional on God creating beings like that that God might appoint them to be caretakers of lesser beings. After all, like, you know, God, at least according to Genesis, God has appointed us to be caretakers of the rest of the earth in our kind of earthly reign, right? We're to be earthly stewards. We're to be stewards of this place, not let it get polluted and take care of the animals. And I don't know, like, there are just lots of goods that come about as a result of delegating the task of being a caretaker of other beings to certain higher beings.

2:34:07Okay, so that doesn't seem like super duper unlikely, conditional on theism. And so the thought is that God delegated to some of these angelic beings the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and predation and parasitism and natural disasters. But unfortunately, they freely abdicated their divinely appointed role. They said, nope, I will not serve. I will not perform this plan that you've given me. I renounce my role here. And as a result, they freely omitted to benevolently steer evolution. And so evolution took a course that, you know, seems to be indifferent to the flourishing and

2:34:45Joe Schmid:languishing of sentient beings, much like how negligence on the part of governments leads to a seemingly indifferent distribution of goods and ills befalling citizens. It's not like there are active agents, active government agents targeting people. It's just like an act of omission. It's negligence. So like the course of evolutionary history would indeed, under this view, we'd expect it to take a kind of indifferent looking, we'd expect it to have an indifferent looking character. So like, why might God do this? Like, doesn't this seem to be like an irresponsible policy on God's part? Like, doesn't that seem to be kind of implausible?

2:35:16Well, I don't know. There are some important goods that can be achieved by this divine modus operandi. So like, by delegating the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process to these archons, he allows them to be creaturely co-creators with God. He allows them to kind of cooperate with god in bringing about um in freely bringing about a good universe uh it's arguably good for the

2:35:40Joe Schmid:archons themselves to be caretakers of less beings um to have that kind of responsibility for others that's good for them uh it might help them develop various character uh traits um and maybe it's arguably good for other creatures to be cared for by higher beings even if they don't know about it so like think of the squirrel right it might be kind of pretty cool and valuable but like i don't know there's like an angel looking out for the squirrel or something like that that could be valuable for the squirrel, even if the squirrel doesn't know it. And maybe most importantly, there does seem to be something pretty good and valuable about there being creatures with this kind of difference-making responsibility for how well other beings' lives go.

2:36:20And in fact, this might actually have, God delegating this task to these creatures might actually have infinite value in expectation. And why is that? Because if these archons had exercised their freedom to make a positive difference in our lives and the lives of the evolutionary you know the creatures in the evolutionary process arguably that has a decent chance of improving our relationship with these archons for all of eternity right like in in an afterlife say so like uh we would basically be more closely aligned with that you know like

2:36:52Joe Schmid:it's as if someone saved you from a very significant disaster like that could very much improve your relationship with them. And so like if the archons are given this task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process, there's at least a decent chance that that might improve our relationship with them and the animals' relationship with them for the rest of eternity. So basically at each moment you get additional value if the archons had successfully implemented their policy, right? If they had freely chosen to make the difference to our lives for the better. At each moment of the afterlife, we could have had a better relationship with them.

2:37:25And that's going to aggregate, arguably, to a kind of infinite value in expectation.

2:37:30Joe Schmid:So, like, at least if it has infinite value in expectation, arguably that can justify the finite risks of finite suffering that the archons would be, that God would be risking by placing the archons in this decision situation where there's, like, some chance that they freely omit to perform their divinely appointed task. but the thought is it may very well arguably be worth it um because of these various great goods the goods of difference making responsibility creaturely co-creatorship um etc okay so that's the archon abandonment version there's also an alien yeah come on do you what do you want to lay them both out or are they different enough because i've got like obviously a billion questions but yeah i want to hear the alien thing okay so like if people don't like archons you know like Like, you know, maybe long before life evolved on Earth, there were intelligent aliens who developed in a process devoid of predation and parasitism and without pain being the kind of motivator, being their motivator, right?

2:38:30Joe Schmid:So, like, instead of, you know, stubbing their toe and being motivated by pain, maybe they're motivated by varying amounts of pleasure or, you know, they just almost like their pain is kind of like an unconscious reflex to them. So, like, maybe their evolutionary process was much more benevolent. and God basically created the universe in such a way that beings who evolved like that are given the responsibility for you know ensuring that other creatures elsewhere in the galaxy say don't develop through a horrific evolutionary process so maybe like these scientists you know these alien scientists are poking around in the lab and they like discover pain right so like they stimulate themselves in some way and they're like oh my goodness that was really intrinsically bad state to be in and they start to wonder like oh my goodness could this state have evolved could this have been the motivational like what motivated creatures on other planets in our galaxy oh my goodness so like there's this do-gooder faction that like that pops up and so you know this do-gooder faction among these aliens are like hey we should go through the galaxy and like steer planets away from pain and suffering like this is very serious they're basically like the ea techno bros of like the alien civilization.

2:39:40I'm like, guys, this is like a really serious moral thing, and we need to go through the galaxy and steer planets away from pain and suffering. But alas, there's also a large isolationist faction

2:39:50Joe Schmid:among the alien civilization. And the civilization as a whole and various individuals within the civilization just culpably omit to go out and steer evolutionary processes in the right direction. The isolationists went out culpably, and they culpably committed this wrongdoing. and that was what is responsible for the suffering and death on our planet. Listen, we're just going for a theodicy which is not supposed to be hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, and which together with theism renders the data not super surprising. The thought is this story, these stories, the disjunction of them is not conditional on theism.

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2:42:17But who created God? That's what I want to know. No, I'm kidding. Look, I can't say I'm convinced exactly. And I also like the sort of the almost sort of desperate, like apologetic there. It's like, I'm not saying that this is like true. I'm not an audience. You've got to already assume theism. I get it. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think that in order to explain, I mean, the big problem with the problem of evil is probably the existence of natural evil as opposed to moral evil, right? So people kind of want to easily say that evils that people commit are just down to free will, but why would there be the natural stuff like hurricanes and whatnot that we can't control, right?

2:43:05And as you say, one sort of strategy here is to say that actually what we think are completely disconnected from you know free choices of conscious beings are actually a result of their choices so some people say that you know hurricanes exist because of the fall for example we live in a broken world and that includes all kinds of like horrible natural disasters this is of course a little bit different but it's kind of doing the same thing but i think it suffers for similar reasons which is like firstly you said you know these archons or whatever um just just just didn't sort of fulfill their duty they freely chose not to guide evolution on planet earth to be you know painless uh but this was this was worth it but my question is if god could foresee that that was going to happen would that actually be worth it like and then you you're sort of back to the same kind of conversation that you have around moral evil in general.

2:44:03If God could foresee that Adam and Eve were going to sin, would it be a good thing to allow them into existence? Well, yeah, because he can also plan for Jesus to come and save us as well. But I think that that question of why would it be worth it if God just knew that these creatures would freely choose to not fulfill their ethical obligation and cause untold amounts of suffering. Maybe you kind of have to be a Christian here and say, oh, because he's got some sort of plan to make up for it with Jesus somehow. But it just seems to me so extraordinarily unlikely that God would know what was going to happen and go, because if these angels made a different choice that I know, in fact, they are not going to make, there would be these good things that could happen.

2:44:51I'm going to allow it to happen. I mean, maybe there's like good stuff that we still get, like you're talking about, I can't remember the exact examples you gave of the good stuff that we get by allowing these angels. But why were these angels given this particular prerogative over this particular sort of earthly realm when God knew that they were not going to fulfill that ethical obligation? Like, what is it that's supposed to be like worth it about bringing that situation

2:45:16Joe Schmid:into existence okay yeah so listen the just not worth it objection is i think the most serious objection to any free will theodicy so right and like listen that's that's one of my biggest reservations but uh so i'll just say that at the outset right like i i think i'm convinced by this you know response uh but i mean to put again to keep my theist hat on um i probably would say a few things so one of them is like i think you might be bringing in background assumptions about how divine providence works and how it relates to freedom of creatures that the theists need not accept. So, you know, many theists think that kind of explanatorily prior to, so like earlier in the explanatory chain, before, as it were, God places free creatures in certain situations, in that explanatory moment, he doesn't know what they're going to do because they're free, right?

2:46:17Like they could either go one way or the other and nothing is determining them to go one way or the other. God doesn't know what they're going to do in that explanatorily prior moment. So it's not like he creates these beings kind of like knowing explanatorily prior to putting them in the situations that they're going to screw up, right? That would be, that seems to be terrible, right? But like, that's not the picture. At least that's not the picture that theists need to take. They could be, I hate to get too technical for the audience,

2:46:44Joe Schmid:But they could either be an open theist or they don't even need to be an open theist. So open theists think that God does not have exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. And in particular, he doesn't know certain contingent things that will occur or that might occur in the future. But they don't even also have to go in for open theism. They could go in for a kind of simple foreknowledge view where God does exhaustively know what happens in the future. But his knowledge of future contingents kind of depends on those future contingents playing out as they in fact do. So before he puts the free creatures in a given situation, explanatorily prior to that, he doesn't know what they're going to do.

2:47:19He doesn't know if they're going to screw up or not. And so God just kind of has to, as it were, take a bit of a risk. He sees the value, the immense value, maybe even the infinite value, as I mentioned, of implementing this policy of giving archons difference-making responsibility for how well the lives go of lower creatures.

2:47:41Joe Schmid:and again the reason why it's supposed to have infinite value is because it would enable us and various other animals throughout an endless afterlife to have a better relationship at each moment with these archons because they made such a great difference to our lives earlier on and so he sees that infinite value and judges that I know that there's a risk that these guys are going to screw up but I judge it worth it because well that's only risking finite suffering and there's infinite like there's really infinite goods on the line. And God knows that he can create us in such a way that we can have an afterlife.

2:48:14Joe Schmid:And in fact, maybe God has like a background policy. Like maybe God has obligations to particular creatures not to let them live lives that are bad on the whole. And so maybe like for the animals, as it were, that seem to be thrown under the bus under this picture, maybe God does give them some kind of afterlife, you know, where the lion lays down with the lamb and their evils are defeated. So they come to see kind of their role in God's providential plan. maybe he boosts their intellectual capabilities a little bit so that they can kind of endorse their role and endorse their kind of they wouldn't wish away their suffering and they see their suffering fitting into a kind of integrated unity or integrated whole which is on the whole kind of very good um so anyway uh there are various things that the theist can say i know that this is looking kind of desperate but well you know i it's what was it we were talking about earlier that was similar like oh you were talking about like the hyper time thing and it's it's it's like i think these are these are these are clever and they're interesting but it does fit you can imagine why somebody listening to this i i think there's basically two types of listener there's a listener that goes huh that's kind of fun and interesting and what what a fun like thought experiment and there are people who go like you know this is nonsense who the hell cares i don't think there's a camp of people who listen to this and go yeah yeah oh gosh yeah fair enough actually yeah that explains it you know what i mean like i think there's a small camp who might be like that if that's you let it let us let us know let us know because i i don't know it just feel i mean i guess if you've already got enough prior like assumptions obviously you know if you're speaking to an atheist all of this is going to sound like absolute nonsense as it were i just want to say this is what people misunderstand about theodicies because the argument from evil in its best versions is Bayesian.

2:50:07It's looking at, it's comparing different hypotheses and seeing how well they predict the data, how much they probabilify it. So when you're running this argument, you have to say under theism, holding theism fixed, how probable is the data? So you have to put on your theistic goggles and think about the probability of these various hypotheses, given that theism is true. You can't then say like, oh, but I'm an atheist and this all seems really ridiculous to me. Like, no, you're supposing that theism is true for the sake of this argument and then trying to tease out. How likely is it that we would see a seemingly different evolutionary process?

2:50:38And the thought of this argument is that, listen, conditional on theism, it doesn't seem like prohibitively unlikely that God might create beings that are higher than us and give them certain divinely appointed tasks of governance over the rest of creation or portions of creation. And given the relevant goods involved, especially if we've already conditioned on the fact that God has created us and given us certain responsibilities, which doesn't seem terribly unlikely. I don't know. Like, does this seem hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, holding that fixed and putting aside your kind of atheistic, naturalistic, skeptical assumption?

2:51:10Fair enough. I don't know. And so long as you can at least make it so that it's not hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism, then while we arguably will have evidence against theism here from evolutionary animal suffering, I don't want us to lose that. We will have evidence. the point from the theist's perspective is to put dense in that, to say that this is not overwhelming evidence, because I can tell a story that is not prohibitively unlikely, conditional on theism, which would render the data somewhat expected. And that means that, yeah, you're going to get some update in favor of atheism here, but it's not going to be overwhelming

2:51:47Joe Schmid:and this shouldn't basically be like a silver bullet for you guys. You guys are also going to have to take into account all this fine-tuning stuff and contingency and various other things. so you know you can't just cling to the problem of evil and say like it's the end of the day this is decisive it's just to put dense in the problem of evil to say like this is not as decisive as you guys might have initially thought yeah and also it's not like you are just creating these entities out of nowhere like if like in other words religions believe in the existence of angels it's a little unclear exactly what they are but they seem to be a sort of higher level than than humans it seems to kind of go animal human like angel jesus god if you ask me um and yeah like like that that makes it a little easier to say like well let's investigate what the nature of these angelic beings might be where they fit into this sort of story of humanity and evolution and and yeah like maybe that's that's what happened like it would be a lot less strong i think still if there were no such thing as angels in religious scriptures and you kind of had to invent these hypothetical creatures in the way that you do with the aliens where you're like well maybe there's this like alien thing that that will land better for a for a for an atheist but as a religious person who already believes in the existence of aliens the question of of uh angels the question now is just like well where do those angels like fit into this story and it's yeah it's plausible maybe they had some kind of dominion over the yeah and i mean you know featherless bipeds right right exactly and i mean this is uh this is something that cutter and swenson point out like actually there are this is not like some like totally ludicrously ad hoc postulation just to save theism just to save a theory like yeah but you know when someone's saying that when when someone when someone is saying about their own argument you know just so you know this isn't a totally ludicrous ad hoc it's it's listen i've seems a bit ropey listen they don't say quite that i see this is me putting words in their mouth their point is like listen this is not an ad hoc composite that's totally foreign to, you know, independent theorizing and relevant religious traditions.

2:53:47Joe Schmid:They point out that in the Bible, like, you know, Satan is described as the ruler of this world. And, you know, like we are battling against these powers and principalities and whatnot. And like, this is like an age of darkness and various other things. You can even look like Aquinas are, you know, argued way back in the 13th century that, you know, the role of angels in creation, like God actually did just give them certain roles. Like some of them are appointed to be the angels on top of, let's say, or like assigned to do certain things. So like there are various precedents within church history, within the Bible, within various things.

2:54:25Joe Schmid:And like, you know, now we're really getting into the, you know, we're really getting kind of crazy here. But like, I think a lot of Christians will say like, hey, dude, Like we just have like lots of independent evidence from like direct eyewitness testimony across cultures and across times for the existence of like a demonic type phenomena, you know, like seemingly honest witnesses testified. Just like, you know, seeing people, you know, levitate, speak languages that they don't know, you know, like objects just like randomly flying across the room in broad daylight and perfectly conducive perceptual circumstances in front of tons of different witnesses.

2:54:56Joe Schmid:So they'll say like, okay, listen, like this doesn't prove anything, but like we have some independent evidence from like direct first firsthand eyewitness testimony that these things may very well exist. I don't know. You know, I'm maybe just digging myself deeper and deeper into holes. As I said, I have my theist hat on. It's worth a hearing, you know, and stranger things have been said by, you know. By your guests. People who actually believe. Yeah, on occasion, on occasion, especially, you know, the last time we spoke. yeah i don't know like it obviously this does not have any like like uh this is not compelling to me that's what i mean to say but like it's an interesting story it might do something for someone out there and i'd be interested if it does like has this paper is this paper like quite niche like is this one you said won the prize it's a very good paper that's the thing like it's pointing out the like various different goods that come about as a result of this is this the one that So, won the prize you were talking about, or was that the hyper-time thing?

2:55:57Joe Schmid:Yeah, Mark Sanders' Prize in Philosophy of Religion. It's published in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, or rather, it's forthcoming. It's called, yeah, The Omission Theodicy, I think, by Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson. Let it not be said that cutting-edge research is not being done in the theology department at the University of Oxford. Right, right, right, exactly. So, I mean, listen, this is not the only approach that theists are forced into. I mean, again, as you said, Trent already has this approach on which animals may very well be able to have an afterlife where the evils that they suffer in this life are defeated.

2:56:26Joe Schmid:There are various other considerations that people raise. You know, Michael Murray has this book, Nature Red and Tooth and Claw, where he tries to give a number of different theodicies. Various things can be said in response to these things. But I just want to point out that, hey, the theists aren't totally silent here. But then let's take a look at the claim under discussion here, which is evolution disproves God as a claim. People typically they might be talking about evolutionary animal suffering they might be talking about like the uniqueness of humans they might be talking about particular doctrines like young earth creationism that evolution just flies in the face of like all of these things i think it flies in the face of the uniqueness of humans because if we're just the result of this like gradual sort of evolution from some kind of common ancestor then if you were to like resurrect all of the missing links between a human being and a chimpanzee say because they'll sort of on a graph they'll sort of converge like this until we we find our common ancestor however many millions of years ago that was uh you could take all of those creatures and you could bring them back from the dead and you could stand them all like in a line and you'd sort of go right chimpanzee chimpanzee chimpanzee chimpanzee and you go all across these like millions and millions of creatures and by the time you got to the end you'd be like human being but there's no point at which you go, chimpanzee, now you're a human.

2:57:47Because it's gradual, although those sort of missing links are all dead now, they're like real creatures who like walked the earth. And it would have to either be that God like arbitrarily just like chooses a point and goes, now you're humans. And now I'm going to give you the breath of life or whatever. Maybe that's what it means to breathe life into Adam's nostrils or whatever. But it seems a little bit unfair that now one creature who has exactly the same like genetic makeup as his mother it's the same species you put them together they're the same kind of animal but this one because he was born you know today gets to inherit eternal life and benefit from the salvation of jesus but his mother who's exactly the same genetic creature no no no because you know she didn't have the the breath of life breathed into or whatever it just seemed like a really again like unexpected thing so anyway we know this right there are lots of reasons why evolution sort of seems to rub up against religion in in a negative way but the claim that it disproves god what do you think okay i mean that's surely that's surely false i mean like these are at least consistent like theism and evolution seems consistent god could have created by way of evolution uh i don't see any any like

2:59:07Joe Schmid:incoherence in positing the conjunction yeah but then we don't want to be like too trivial here we don't want to say like well technically they're consistent and so you're right to say that you know if you didn't interrupt yeah yeah sorry i mean you're quite right yeah they're like strictly consistent but my own view is that uh evolution provides serious non-trivial substantive evidence against god's existence um that must be reckoned with and must be balanced against those various other reasons and considerations that i mentioned earlier that arguably favor god's existence yeah and as with all of these claims i think that oftentimes if we just analyze them on like face value we can always kind of go well you know technically that doesn't apply or technically but like people are like getting at something right slogans are supposed to be like representative of a broader view the slogan itself is never supposed to be the like entire extent of the position and so yeah like evolution doesn't disapprove god but you know what someone's getting at when they say that they mean that evolution poses a big challenge to some of the assumptions that a traditional theist might have and when someone says that like oh well you i just believe in one less God than you do.

3:00:20That's like a bonkers reason to think that God doesn't exist, but maybe they're just trying to get across like a psychological condition. You know, I think with all of these things, it's worth, as I say, that they are representative of broader positions. And I'm glad that we've, I suppose, taken the time today to just try to analyze what those broader positions actually are. So that the next time you hear one of these things, you don't dismiss it out of hand. And instead you dismiss it with, you know, sort of thoughtful critique or maybe you think that some of them are true i i don't know i can't remember we we didn't do like an official like so this one's good and this one's bad but there's probably a relatively clear up and down i think most of them have been like no's right like there have been a couple that we've endorsed like the um geographical distribution thing but whatever you know who cares um joe joe schmidt your your channel majesty of reason will of course be linked in the description and uh yeah extraordinary in-depth dives i always have fun talking to you you seem to you're just like a you're a brain and you're you're you're an encyclopedia but you're not just that because you know how to convey the ideas and how to pull them together and we're all very grateful for the time you spent sat in a little box on a screen in front of me for this podcast so thanks again man this episode is brought to you by athletic brewing company No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in.

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