This was a fascinating video! Appreciated the honest reflections on your part and it's a reminder of why you're such a valued member of the PhilRel community!
There should be agnostic apologists who just persuade theists and atheists to be agnostic, and furthermore begin a ministry for epistemic indeterminacy and start going door to door telling people about the good news that they can be rational and undecided.
UUU lets go! Her views on the wager really shook my decision making system to the core haha. Actually really empowered me in a lot of other areas outside of abstract concepts.@@MajestyofReason
Separating Gods into worshipped Gods (God representations informed by religion(s), generally perfect, tri-omni) and non-worshipped Gods (non-omni, deistic, indifferent) always made sense for me. I'm atheist for the former, agnostic for the latter. Most believers I interact with on twitter, and most apologists for that matter, don't want to hear about a limited, imperfect God. "That is not my God". Well, if that God exists....that's what we have.
I agree with that largely, but I personally am more forgiving of the anthropomorphizing of an ultimate metaphysical creator intelligence. Science attempts to measure and understand phenomenality through quantities and abstractions. It attempts to use math as a measuring stick to understand the world. Religion attempts to comprehend and understand phenomenality through qualities and generalities. It attempts to use the only thing we have direct unmediated knowledge of -- which is our consciousness, or our sense of human-beingness (or Heidegger's "Dasein") as a measuring stick to understand the world. There appear to be clear benefits to that, as it makes the greatest notion of reality fundamentally human and contextualized through humanness; there is something in that which provides us with a sense of warmth, security, and well-being. The issue, of course -- is when such interpretations become literalistic, dogmatic, doctrinarian, and devolve into contrived theology (which is more concerned with governance over society rather than genuine 'non-empirical/symbolic science'). This isn't something exclusive to religion though; for example, the modern empirical sciences have sort conjoined into one heterogenous mass of notions and motives which we call "Science". It has gained vast institutional and political power, and has also become a source of ontological security where we likewise 'mistake the map for the territory'. In that sense, a sort of "Scientism" has emerged which plays many of the functions of a religion.
Many have alleged I made a “mistake” by referring to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia, but others (who are more perceptive) correctly recognized this as an overt political statement about the illegitimacy of Czech Republic and my undying allegiance to Czechoslovakia ✊
I very much value your work, your humble and honest approach as well as the stringency of your arguments and also your intelligence. Most of the the videos I see here on TH-cam mainly want to show one side of the coin by downpkaying or even dismissing the other side. Your videos live from that tension that arises by showing both sides in an appropriate manner. Seems like you accept the tension and contrasts between counterarguments as a part of life. No glossing over. I think this leads to better results, yet sometimes leaves one lost at sea. Please continue. Luv it!🎉🎉❤ Did you ever consider utility aspects in questions of the existence of a personal or non personal deity like say B. Pascal of W. James did?? Especially if sitting somewhere on the fence between the two worlds and like you say no one has a decisive case. Thx!
Thank you for saying that! You’re too kind. I have considered those pragmatic arguments to some extent, and for me they hold some significant force, especially the Jamesian considerations. I think theism is a hopeful view, and universalism provides some possible pathway of redeeming the suffering on earth, including animal suffering. Without something like universalist theism, earthly life can seem almost unbearably tragic, especially when considering the lives of wild animals. A theistic afterlife can offer some hope that their lives weren’t simply tragedies. I hope reality turns out to vindicate the most hopeful, optimistic people I know. (It won’t, but I wish it would.) For myself, I’d like to live as a Christian theist for the sake of my loved ones, who would be tremendously relieved by my reconversion. That has definitely played a role in my continual searching, trying to find some way Christianity could be believable. Thanks again for the comment. :)
@@EmersonGreen Thanks for your answer. It is so much fuller and wiser than the answers of many I know. I would not believe to please others. Yet sometimes, if you ly on the bed and you ponder about all these pros and cons, the ifs and buts, and you know no argument will tip the scale, you flee to that last resort, where only your most inner feelings count. And there is hope. The hope that there is redemption. Like you said Universalist Theism!! I have stopped listening to people who believe in ECT. Their sadistic, cruel approach is not possible to accept. It's not godly. Its neurotic (although derivable from the bible). What a shxt. All that mess because it was spread by guys like St. Augustine, the most neurotic theologian (together with his mother Monica) I know of. How much harm was done, how many souls crushed. The normative force of the factual as Habermas put it. Your inclusion of animal pains and your focus on the harm in general speaks for itsself. No glossing over. I too hope that torment and death is not the last answer. I guess this unites us. Wished more people had that sensitivity without being sissy. It's rare. It's seldom. It almost never happens. But I see something inspired in your answer! Thx!!!☀️
I personally think that religious ambiguity is decent evidence for a vague form of theism, while being strong evidence *against* most forms of Abrahamic theism. However, I think that religious ambiguity is very compelling evidence for naturalism. Let me explain: 1. There are many religions and supernatural beliefs that don't involve theism at all. Take most forms of Buddhism, which is like the fifth biggest religion in the world. 2. All religious beliefs make plenty of sense under culteral and evironmental context and the cognitive science of religion. For instance, HADD theory explains the primal origins of polytheism, likely the first form of theism. And YHWH comes from a pantheon of such theism, according to the vast consensus of Hebrew Bible scholars and historians of the ancient Semetic region. As much as dogmatic theists like to clutch their pearls on this subject, you can't ignore the data on this. I think its pretty plausible that a vague god is ok with people worshipping it how they want. That seems like a valid form of theism. I just think that the emphirical data regarding all of these vastly different beliefs and cultures these beliefs emerge from point more to naturalism than anything else, as it is completely what you would expect for people in that worldview.
Religious experiences (my own included) push me towards openess to some supernatural reality. Even after losing my faith, I have had one occasion of intense feelings of love during meditation. We may just be simply incapable of accurately describing what supernatural reality might mean, and perhaps ought to focus more attention to moral living in the absence of clear direction. That at least seems to be the takeaway from those who experience NDEs.
I think a strong argument against the problem of evil is the notion that God suffers all evil alongside us. Which was symbolised for the first time in Christ. God, an unlimited being (not a being at all, really, but being itself) must experience everything that we experience. I can put evil into two categories: that which we don't understand, and that which is an existential threat to us; both, I have a hard time imagining being absent from a meaningful existence
@@vex1669 It wouldn't. Our world hasn't been any less meaningful since smallpox was eliminated. But these are obstacles we must overcome. It's all well and good to imagine a world in which smallpox never existed in the first place, but then where do you stop going down the line removing everything else that is painful, like stillbirth, until you've removed all conflict from this world and rendered it static and meaningless? There's no good without evil
Isn't religious amibuity itself an argument against the God of classical theism? If there exists a benevolent God who wishes to have a relationship with his creation, why is it so difficult to ascertain his existence and ascertain the correct religion? The fact that we have to debate the existence of God is itself an argument for atheism.
@@EmersonGreen One question: divine hiddenness (which is essentially the argument I'm advancing here) is a subset of the problem of evil. How can an atheist advance the problem of evil if they don't believe in objective moral values. How do you advance an argument from "evil" if you believe "evil" doesn't exist?
@@EmersonGreenSomeone proposing that there exists an all-powerful being that both desires to have a relationship with us but at the same time doesn’t have a relationship with us, is I think like someone proposing that there exists a three dimensional shape that is both square and at the same time a circle. “Hiddenness” is not simply evidence against that proposition of a god, it’s pointing out that proposition of a god is incoherent.
I really appreciate the honesty of this video. As someone who has experienced spiritual reality on levels that exceed sense perception and imagination, I think trying to understand the truth of God/spirit only through studying religion is nearly impossible. It's like reading a book about weight lifting and expecting to grow strong if it's true. To know the truth you actually need to empty your beliefs and be patient - this goes for theists and atheists, because God is completely beyond symbols, and you cannot lift yourself up by your bootstraps, you have to let higher power do it by dropping your will. From a scientific point of view, I would say the Hindu understanding of creation is the most intellectually accurate. The universe is an illusion created by God to go through a sort of role playing game, a very convincing one.
I am an agnostic atheist and I am proud of it. So you, like me, don't "know" that no god or gods exist (agnostic) but do you hold a belief that one does? I am without (a) belief in a god or gods (theist).
@@downenout8705 I think this is a misuse of the term. It renders it useless. No one "knows" that God doesn't exist. It's not supposed to mean that, it was coined to counter atheistic certainty. I wonder why so many atheists, especially the most certain ones, want to call themselves agnostic.
I've never liked the common consent argument on account of the fact that it seems to assume that people arrive at their personal religious position in an equally logical manner, that is to say that the majority of religious individuals in the world arrived at theism first through some logical means. This could be responded to by saying that an equal quantity of people arrive at a non-theistic position through non-logical means as we usually see happen with those that hold theistic positions, but I just think that's flatly not true on account of the fact that the majority of world religions engage in behaviors that attempt to bypass logic to convince people and the fact that it is strongly encouraged for parents to bring their children up in the religion that they adhere to in most cases.
Yes, it helps that we have a plausible evolutionary origin for why religion is such a big thing But I mean, I do admit, it is some slight evidence 🤷♀️ just not very much because we have significantly better explanations
@@azophi But I'm not talking about the argument as a whole, just the component of it that says the fact that a lot of people believe in it compared to people that don't is much evidence at all. There are so many fewer people that have arrived at religion through purely logical means compared to those that arrived at it through other means that gesturing to the whole of religious belief as if it is evidence is unjustified because you could point towards those that have de-converted from logical problems as evidence against it (and which is likely a greater population than those that have purely logical conversions)
Gotta go with the mystics, folks. Diana Pasulka, Dale Allison have some good things to say about this. To me the question is not, is there or is there not a "spiritual realm", but what is the spiritual realm like?
@@zachr0 Because I, at the very least, question why a citation of experiences is evidence that what they're experiencing is not agent-relative (at least in terms of phenomenal singularity).
@@humesspoon3176 I don't think it is evidence that non-experiencers must submit to. But if someone has a mystical experience, its reasonable for them to believe. Plenty of examples of materialists changing their worldview after having a mystical experience. And I think there are enough accounts of these religious experiences and verified accounts of precognition, out of body experiences, and synchronicities, that make it very reasonable to take them seriously.
@@zachr0 Well, I'm not so sure we should discuss worldviews because this is only one particular view -- whether a deity exists. Anyhow, inasmuch as there have been materialists that have changed their mind, I'm a slight example of the opposite (I'm not a materialist myself -- in fact, I even take secular non-physicalist points very seriously). I was once devoutly Christian and I had mystical experiences -- one in particular that I will say was so life-altering that I wouldn't be here talking to you without it. With that being said, I obviously changed my mind (for more than one reason). The reason why I struggle to believe my experience was supernatural today is for the reason I mentioned prior, "How can we know that these things aren't self-emergent?" More so, since I'm quite nerd for modal thinking, I tend to think about what a world would look like without a deity and whether these experiences would occur -- and if we live in one with a deity, what elements separate us from this possible world? I haven't been able to answer this outright, nor have I gotten much in the way of answers from others (but hey, it's not easy to answer, so no disrespect intended). So you say it's reasonable to believe them, but I feel this point I raise stands against, and at least, some experiences that you might cite to confirm the existence of a deity. As much as I feel the things you mentioned should be taken seriously, do you feel my concerns are legitimate?
Agnosticism is actually closer to the scientific method. In science any theory is subject to further refinement or even overthrow pending additional compelling evidence. So a resistance to rely on absolutes.
It's not something I can easily summarize. Sorry. Just in the course of reading the following books, I started to see a few bridges from stage one to stage two: Who Are You, Really? (Rasmussen) How Reason Can Lead to God (Rasmussen) Is There A God? (Pearce & Oppy)
@@EmersonGreen Fair enough. Thanks for that. Glad to say i have read at least one of those.. Im curious, what do you make of the criticisms of psychophysical harmony arguments by the folks on digital gnosis?
Both sides in the Religion vs Science debates use the Materialism/Empiricism version of logic, math and physics which say 1D, 2D, 3D and 4D are "locally real" and 0D is "not locally real". Unfortunately for Materialism/Empiricism, quantum physics proved the observable universe is actually "not locally real" a year ago (Oct 2022 was the earliest article i could find). The immediate lead-up to this was the Nobel Prize proving quantum entanglement. Well over 300 years ago Leibniz vs Newton competed for the title of "Universal Genius". We chose Newton, obviously, but an interesting point is that nobody ever proved Materialism/Empiricism... we simply thought it "ought" to be true. The only proof that happened was a year ago when quantum physics flat-out disproved Materialism/Empiricism: The observable universe is "not locally real" and that proves we chose the wrong guy, full stop 🛑. Zero vs nonzero numbers are what we assign "locally real" and "not locally real" to. If zero is one thing then nonzero is the other. This is due to zero being "not-natural" whereas nonzero numbers are "natural". The absolute, nondualistic version of the observable universe proposed by Newton simply does not exist and it never has (was never proven anyhow, only disproven). Leibniz said 0D is necessary and more real; having no predecessor and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are contingent and less real; all having an immediate predecessor. Leibniz was correct and that means we're all taught contradictory logic, math and physics. [What is the difference between Newton and Leibniz calculus?]: Newton's calculus is about functions. Leibniz's calculus is about relations defined by constraints. In Newton's calculus, there is (what would now be called) a limit built into every operation. In Leibniz's calculus, the limit is a separate operation. Then: 0 = not locally real 1 = locally real Now: 0 = locally real 1 = not locally real It's about time the same tired Religion vs Science arguments we've heard for over 300 years can be updated (on both sides). Holy guacamole the stalemate has been boring 💤.
Contradictory: *impossible to be true.* Non-contradictory: *possible to be true.* ❌️Contradictory Theology, Mathematics and Physics (knowing good; functions; limit built into every operation)❌️: 1. The Gen 1 character and the Gen 2 character are the exact same character (knowing good). 2. Zero is not fundamental and nonzero numbers are fundamental (Newton/Einstein calculus). 3. 0D is not locally real and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are locally real (Newton/Einstein physics). ⬆️ this is what we're all taught. Materialist/Empiricist version of reality.⬆️ ✅️Non-contradictory Theology, Mathematics and Physics (knowing good from evil; relations defined by constraints; limit is a separate operation)✅️: 1. The Gen 1 character and the Gen 2 character are polar opposite characters (knowing good from evil). 2. Zero is fundamental and nonzero numbers are not fundamental (Leibniz calculus). 3. 0D is locally real and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are not locally real (Leibniz physics). ⬆️ this is what quantum physics proved a year ago and if Theology doesn't match Math and Physics then you're doing it wrong. Realist version of reality.⬆️ [🦄Materialism/Empiricism💩 version of Religion]: Interpreting the Bible with the Genesis 1 character and the Genesis 2 character as the exact same character generates near 70,000 contradictions (see reason project) and requires heavy apologetics. A Bible interpretation which includes near 70,000 contradictions (impossible to be true) is what a snake-oil salesman would sell you. 🐍 [🦤Materialism/Empiricism💩 version of Science]: The standard model of physics is Einstein's 3+1 space-time, which are considered locally real, where 0 is considered not locally real...been that way since Newton for zero vs nonzero numbers. Problem is...quantum physics proved the observable universe (1D, 2D, 3D and 4D) is actually not locally real...and that was over a year ago. (Yes, Leibniz was correct after all.) 🦧 locally real = more real (Leibniz said "necessary") not locally real = less real (Leibniz said "contingent") [Closing arguments]: The Materialism/Empiricism package contains within itself all the contradictions, false dichotomies, paradoxes and literally "life's biggest questions". It's been a year why is everyone still using logic, calculus and geometry that is contradictory at the most fundamental level? Legitimate question 🙋. If both Religion and Science removed their "Materialist/Empiricist-perspective shades 👓" (contradictory for a year) and put on their "Realist-perspective shades 👓" (non-contradictory for a year) they would not only cease to argue...they'd agree with each other.
There are some ontological theories in philosophy of mind like russelian monism that they can go somewhere in between. Goff covers them in his latest book. Its cool stuff, which can imply a type of pantheism or at least a type of cosmic panpsychism and im personally sympathetic to such positions, although not necessarily commiting (the same goes for physicalism for me). Nevertheless i would be an atheist in relation to all versions of an Abrahamic or Christian God, which is the most dominant form considering the major monotheistic religions.
If the deistic/theistic side of your agnosticism turns out to be true/reality, what in your opinion is the likelihood of there being life after death for us (and what about for other animals)? Thanks
I'm so honest with myself, i simply dont know, i spent my whole life convincing myself that i know that my religion is the way of the truth , but i realized that i was just forcing myself and lying to it because of Fear of the hell , , i found so many contradicions in my religion so i decided to become an Agnostic, i simply dont know the answrs to the big questions , like , why does anything exist?ext.., i'm searching for the Truth with logic and reason and i hope i can find it ,even that i doubt my brain neurons capacities , maybe i'm too stupid for knowing the answer of the big question, but i will try and continue to explore this existence with curiosity ^_^
I think you misspoke. Czechoslovakia stopped existing in 1992. There are two separate countries now: Czech Republic aka Czechia and Slovakia. You were referring to Czechia in your graphic.
What even is the minimum viable god definition to make theism possible? I agree, I think theism is simply impossible for any useful _(impactful in our lives)_ definitions of a god.
@Rogstin I define theism as the view that there is at least one god, and atheism as the view that there are no gods. By gods I mean non-natural causal entities (ie entities that are not part of nature but yet affect nature through causal interactions). I am not saying that atheism entails that no supernatural things exist. But the view that I think is most plausible - naturalism - does entail that no supernatural things exist, and so it entails atheism. I used to think that theism is just improbable given the advantages of naturalism but I have come to believe that theism is actually impossible given naturalism. Basically, the claim that I believe is 'Gods cannot exist', so I am practically certain that there are no gods whatsoever. This view would probably seem quite extreme to many people.
@@Nitroade24 The necessity of the initial state and conditions of the universe. If these most crucial components are necessary, then it's impossible for them to have a supernatural cause. Necessities don't have causes. They are brute.
If the fine tuning is to require a cause, one needs to believe 3 things: 1. PSR - Principle of Sufficient Reason (the "everything needs a cause" version) 2. PC - Principle of Conceivability (conveivable, therefore possible) 3. PI - Principle of Indifference (the prior probability assigned to every possibility should be equal unless you have reason for believing otherwise) But if PSR, then whatever causes fine tuning also needs a cause and, if PC and PI, if I can imagine a bunch of different causes then it's surprising that the cause of fine tuning is also fine tuned to provide the specific fine tuning of the universe we were initially trying to explain. So postulating a cause (a limited designer or moral values with magic powers) just recreates the fine tuning problem at another level. In this video, th-cam.com/video/A8KciwM5N5I/w-d-xo.html , you said that "Whatever range of options is open to the theist to explain the existence of God, exactly the same range of options is open to the naturalist to explain the existence of the universe." I agree, and I also believe that, in a similar fashion, whatever range of option is open to explain the cause of the fine tuning, the same options are available to explain the fine tuning itself. Hence, we don't need a cause for fine tuning. If you find a cause, this cause will be in check against the same 3 principles that made you go after it in first place.
If we are, when it comes to the biggest, deepest questions, what William James said we were, dogs and cats in a library staring at stacks if books, then certainty, not to speak of smug assurance, is not merely an intellectual mistake but also a moral failure. If only smugly assured atheists knew how similar they look to their fundamentalist/evangelical counterparts. I follow Emerson because, from the first time I tuned in, his honesty, integrity, and self-awareness were apparent, indicating that he was on a journey toward truth and might take us with him...as far as dogs and cats can go.
re: the Common Consent Argument-I think it only points towards humans having a cognitive bias towards believing in god(s). All humans can feel love or fear but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have an external “realness” independent of humans.
We also have a cognitive "bias" towards believing in other minds, the external world, dogs, and other things that are real. We have generally truth-tracking cognitive faculties.
@@humesspoon3176 I find this becomes clearer if you lay it out as an argument: 1. Most beliefs held by a significant portion of humanity are true. 2. Therefore, if we encounter any belief, x, that is held by a significant portion of humanity, it is probably true. 3. Theism is a belief held by a significant portion of humanity. 4. Therefore, theism is probably true. As Emerson stated, premise 1 is true because examples of these include a belief in the external world, dogs etc. and also if most of our beliefs were false we'd probably die out as a species. Premise 2 simply follows from premise 1 because it's like if you had a jar full of pieces of paper with a belief written on each of them. We know that the vast majority of these beliefs are true, so if we take one out at random it'll probably be true. The conclusion that theism's probability is increased by common consent follows naturally from 1-3. The only way to respond to this argument is to provide an extra premise that weakens the extent to which the conclusion is made more likely, such as "most people's beliefs about complicated metaphysics are unjustified and false, and theism is a complicated metaphysical thesis" or "x psychological or sociological explanation shows why we'd expect most people to believe theism independent of its truth".
I think HADD theory, MCI, and some other hypotheses from the CSR do a pretty good job of putting the Common Consent argument for theism to bed. Humans having these cognitive biases is entirely expected given the different kinds of data. In fact, I'd be shocked if humans *didn't* have these beliefs.
This reminded me. This is a big issue that rationalist thinking runs into. Just because something is rational or logical doesn't mean it's true. Rationality is more like a good rule of thumb, rather then a surefire method of obtaining truth. If you are solving a murder, and a good amount of evidence points to one person, it would be reasonable to assume they are the murderer. But, it's conceivable that this person is actually innocent, they got unlucky, wrong place, wrong time, they were framed, etc. That being said, I'm sort of a classical theist. That is due to my assessment of the various arguments for God's existence, analysis of where the Atheist worldview logically leads, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, my own experiences. Do I know for certain, no, but I'm pretty confident.
I think you'll eventually come around to gnosticism as it makes the most sense of everything that we experience in this reality. It fills the gap between atheism and theism, as well as the personal experiences that the atheist and theist go through which are opposed to each other. Only for most people, its a very hard pill to swallow, and depending on how ingrained in ones belief of who and what god is, and who and what we are, it may be too reality breaking for them to accept. Especially when it comes to the church which is why there was such a campaign in eradicating it. It might be too foundation shaking which causes one to reject it, or not be taken seriously. But in my opinion gnosticism should be taken very seriously and theres many great academic books on it. This life is far stranger than it appears on the surface. In my opinion its the best explanation for the problem of evil, and the problem of suffering as well.
At 20:00. "If God does not exist, I find it very surprising that nearly everyone believes in God". Most, if not all believers, learn about God from their parents. Also isn't there an explanation from human psychology?
I mean, not really, but you can explain it away, as you can explain away anything, but the much simpler explanation for why people innately believe in god and benefit from belief in god is that there is a god.
@@username-yn5yo the simplest (as in parsimonious) explanation for a psychological prediliction toward the broadest form of an evidently absurd belief which has long unbroken historical lines of propogation, based at least in large part on its cultural and political utility, to the point of universal normalization and constant reference, is NOT that the belief is true. I give it no credence for the same reasons I give none to the monster under every child's bed.
What do you think of Jaynes idea that without introspection, pain does not involve suffering? He called it "consciousness" -- at least related to something that you have already connected with "the good". Also, why would you consider--i.e., what reasons require--theists to be responsible for providing a theodicy for their omni-god when they typically don't feel that responsibility?
I have to say I'm a firm disbeliever in the value selection hypothesis. "Significant value" does some heavy lifting here. What does it describe exactly, if not the subjective values of the reader? I would say that the reader thinks of these things as "having significant value", because they were molded inside a world with things that clearly benefit them. To disprove this, all you have to do is to show me a thing that is valued despite not having any benefits ("any", because things like drugs might not be valued yet have a benefit, things like candies might be valued despite having a detriment). If we value something despite it having no benefits, that would prove me wrong, as it shows that it wasn't a benefit that shaped our values, but something else.
The true demarcation is not between those who believe in a "God" and those who do not. It is between those who believe in a rational approach to belief and those who could take-it or leave-it. The border is between people who believe in magic and people who do not.
El is on the other side of zero. On this side it's "last Elohim standing" and the Church can't tell the difference between Genesis 1 Elohim and Genesis 2 Yahweh Elohim. Kind of a shitshow.
Agnostic is an adjective. Atheist is a noun. One can be agnostic and atheist if one is not convinced of the existence of a god or gods, but does not believe it is possible to know for sure whether one exists. I don't understand why so many people think that atheists and agnostic are mutually exclusive traits. They describe two very different standards of knowledge and belief.
@@Dock284 "agnostic atheist" is incoherent to me...but at best it is ambiguous. I know of no philosopher who uses that terminology, and I have shown using logic that the four-quadrant schema is both epistemically and logically untenable.
Agnostic means to not believe p and not believe ~p. Atheism and agnostic are mutually exclusive as positions on the proposition that God does not exist. Agnostic here has absolutely no relevance to knowledge, but is understood as being undecided.
When I grasp just how horrendous evils really are (which I cannot do of course, only catching glimpses), positive states seem accidental. Indeed, it can seem like there is a reverse value selection effect. If there were no happiness at all, complex creatures (the kinds capable of the most suffering) wouldn't try to survive. So if you want to maximize suffering then you need to motivate complex creatures just enough so they stick around to let you torture them. (The impulse to survive no matter what helps a lot with this.) Arguably the indifference hypothesis predicts either for there to be nothing at all or for there to be exactly this kind of chaotic clash between value and disvalue.
Emerson, I'll have to disagree with you on fine-tuning. I do think that it's just necessary that the values of the physical constants are the way they are.
Surely the fact that the only way out of infinite epistemic possibilities for the physical constants to be is life-permitting would be evidence for value-selection? The hypothesis "the physical constants of the universe are necessarily life-permitting" surely has too low of a prior probability for us to take seriously.
@Nitroade24 I do not think that there is any value selection that is going on. There's no need for a biased outside agency if the way the values are is actually the only way they could ever be.
I don't think that necessity can really save you here. If the stars spelled out "I am the Alpha and the Omega. Jesus Christ is Lord. Repent and be saved", I don't think you'd rescue atheism by adopting necessitarianism. The message in the stars would still be evidence for theism (or the simulation hypothesis, or whatever). You can't defang evidence that is a priori very surprising by invoking necessity, I don't think.
@EmersonGreen But the stars do not line up in such ways as to spell out such messages. That's really not the same thing as the physical constants taking certain values. I agree with you regarding the stars, but that's not what we have in reality. If your objection is that necessity would mean that even obvious evidence for theism should be discarded, it just doesn't apply with the FTA because the analogy just doesn't work as well as you think. I think that the branching theory of modality is quite plausible, where all possible worlds share common history with the actual world, and at some point, there is chance divergence. This means that up to that point, all possible worlds are the same, so whatever is fixed then is necessarily the case because it doesn't vary. If the values of the constants were fixed at the beginning, then they could never vary, so they are just necessarily the way they are. On the other hand, if they were not fixed and go through some transition from not being fixed to being fixed during the chance divergence, then it's all just a matter of chance, and probabilities do not matter once you are committed to chance anyway. The other point is that the multiverse hypothesis paired with a selection effect is still perfectly viable. I am aware of the objections to the mutliverse hypotheses, and unlike Philip Goff and others, I think that they do not work. The fine tuning of the physical constants doesn't favour theism over naturalism at all. Now, I don't think that the same answer is needed when objecting to the argument from psychophysical harmony. First, I don't think that there are such things as psychophysical laws, so I don't need to argue that these laws were fixed from the beginning in the initial state of natural reality. I am an identity theorist, so I think that there are just physical laws. Proponents of this argument say that evolution through natural selection can't be used for an explanation because it can not explain psychophysical laws. But I don't think that such laws need to be explained. What needs to be explained is why there seems to be such harmonious pairing between physical states and mental states that is fortunate for us, ie that allows us to survive and more or less thrive (here I am not going to discuss thriving and the problem of suffering). Well, I don't see why the naturalist, in the spirit of the evolutionary hypothesis, can't just postulate that there probably were species who had 'disharmonious' pairing of mental and physical states, and who were filtered out through natutal selection. This disadvantage (for example, they might have felt pleasure rather than pain from things that damage their bodies severely) resulted in the extinction of these species and only those with advantageous pairing between physical states and mental states survived to pass on their traits to their offspring. Thus, today, we are left with the species that exhibit the greatest degree of psychophysical harmony. Problem solved. Lastly, I would like to discuss something about evidence. I agree that in general evidence is a piece of data that makes a hypothesis more probable than not. I suppose that you argue that psychophysical harmony and the appearance of fine tuning of the physical constants constitute evidence for theism, either because theism is more probable given the data, or because theism makes the data more probable (or both). But should we consider the data and hypotheses in isolation? If the data can also constitute evidence for naturalistic hypotheses, is the data still evidence for any either hypothesis, or is it ultimately no evidence for either of them? Does D constitute E for H iff it makes H more probable than not relative to all alternative H1, H2, H3, etc? Personally, I think that there is no available data whatsoever that favours theism over naturalism. Since naturalism wins in theoretical parsimony, it's just the better theory, and I accept it.
I'm a little confused. You did address tuning in a pretty comprehensive and, I thought, convincing way in the first episode. So it's very strange to me that you've since added "but I can imagine it being even worse so its more plausible on theism" and I don't really follow. I understand that your approach to evidence has become much more tepid and drifted far from empiricism. But have you decided that actually we DO know that the laws could be different and and we DO know no significantly different versions of concious life are possible? What changed there? Are the infinite possible universes where life is exponentially more prevalent and accommodated (and therefore condusive to fine tuning, as you once said) outweighed by the infinite possible universes like ours where intelligent life is evidently a niche chemical incident in a cosmos dominated by empty space, plasma balls, and dust, as opposed to the infinite possible universes where no life can exist at all? How does that even work? Or is this just contingent on your updated views of conciousness?
You remember episode 1?? Goodness. I think there are convincing replies to those sorts of objections, provided you're not too dogmatic about certain things. Sorry to be vague. Maybe it would be worth making a more in-depth defense of the a priori fine tuning argument that I favor. (I could make a response video to myself from 2018...) You're right that my understanding of epistemology has changed pretty dramatically in the intervening years, but I think I'm only relying on (a better understanding of) a standard Bayesian framework to defend the argument. In the meantime, I would highly recommend Philip Swenson's defense of the fine tuning argument, which intentionally does not rely on all the controversial claims about physics that have always irked me: th-cam.com/video/MZR-PoFIRsw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=JiUsv_xKcRcz6bcZ
If it gets to that point I'll let you know. The problem with this is... historical evidence for world religions is everywhere, just none for any of their fantastic claims. And prophecies are fulfilled all the time. Ask believers of Nostradamus.
The common consent argument I find unconvincing, given that there appear to be some fairly plausible mundane explanations for human behaviour, both individual and social, that would appear to have survival value and may lead naturally towards belief in the supernatural generally, and to a God or gods more specifically. I am wholly unfamiliar with Rasmussen or Pierce so can’t comment on that.
I don't like religion because of the crowd or the group think which comes alongside it. I do however believe that there is a creator, I believe it is a more likely that there is a creator than there is not. When I was telling myself that I was an atheist, I felt I was lying to myself but I also feel the same if I claim I am a christian or whatever. My stance towards god is that until fields within various science can with no doubt say or prove that there is no god or the nature of such until than I will have an agnostic stance towards it all. In my opinion - atheism and theism is on the same coin and people who claims to be one of either (especially the ones who makes a huge deal of it) of these tends shows poison and I don't want their poison.
Hey Emerson! Love your stuff - big fan! You're always welcome to join me in my Apatheism. I don't care if God exists even if He does. What's clear to me is that there is no way for us to know anything about God's existence, character, and will. But if he does exist, we certainly have more than enough evidence demonstrating His sadism, thoughtlessness, and pitiless indifference. Making Him not just irrelevant, but a moral menace and unworthy even of our interest, let alone worship. Keep up the great work! It's so heartening to see so many young, brilliant people like yourself stepping up and joining the cause in earnest.
I think the ambiguity is due to people using different definitions for “God” ( see Jordan Peterson ). But if you define God as an all-knowing mind that exists outside space and time, that’s a problem. I don’t believe it’s possible even in principle for there to be evidence for the existence of such a thing. Maybe I’m ignorant. Could someone give me an example of evidence for the existence of such a thing?
Why is it a problem? Or it could be a panentheistic view where Mind/Source/God is the universe and/or outside of it. I agree, there is no evidence "scientific evidence" and there never will be, I suspect. I think the best we have are the thousands of personal mystical experiences. Out of body experiences, NDEs, angels, other religious experiences. And people that engage in spiritual practice are happier, more resilient and are less likely to be depressed.
@@zachr0 It’s a problem if evidence is not possible _even in principle_ for such a thing. Mystical experiences, NDEs, angels, and spiritual practices that improve quality of life do not depend on the existence of an all-knowing being or suggest the existence of an all-knowing being. It’s a non-sequitur. If “all-knowing” is how God is defined ( and in my experience that has been the case) , the rational position is to say: “there is no evidence for God” … right?
@@MarkLeBay At the bottom of all "rationality" are brute facts which are circularly true. The experience of being human is not measurable or "provable" in the deepest sense because we can't study the lens we're perceiving through; the phenomenon of being conscious. No two people have the same understanding of God. If there was a infinite omni God, we would not be able to comprehend it because we have finite brains. I dont see how the concept is incoherent, even in theory. Im not sure if the specifics of those "omni" categories are important but I know many describe mystical encounters of "source" or "God" as infinite. Pretty common across all religions too. Its not a non sequitur. Why else are people who experience NDEs or mystical encounters more likely to believe in a "God"? Plently of famous cases of materialists changing their beliefs after an experience. The real question is, if you had one of these experiences that are described as "more real than real", would you be persuaded? Many rational people are, or are at least pushed to agnosticism. But at this point, it seems like there are an embarrassment of riches of the accounts of transcendent spiritual experiences.
@@MarkLeBay All rationality is based on brute facts that are ultimately circular. Because of this, I think our epistemology needs to be pretty humble. We dont even know know what consciousness is, and our intelligence is finite. I dont think its a non sequitor because people that have these transcendent religious experiences often describe God (or source or reality) as infinite. An important question is, if you had one of these experiences that are described as "more real than real"...where you experienced infinite love or some kind of divine being, how would you respond to it? Many rational people, including materialists have changed their worldview.
We can know a cause through its effects. This is generally how we do science. But you observe correctly, we cannot have physical evidence (in space and time) for a non physical being. (not in space and time)
At 14:09: _"... Natural selection would have dutifully promoted the adaptive fitness of chemical gene-machines regardless of what dreams they were having..."_ Sure. Natural selection would have _"dutifully"_ promoted the adaptive fitness of chemical gene machines regardless of -what- *SOME* dreams they were having. BUT some other "dreams" can and do have quite a devastating and dire consequences regarding natural selection and the adaptive fitness especially as a *type I error:* *"Type I error vs Type II error"* by 365 Data Science ( th-cam.com/video/a_l991xUAOU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=DNayaRELF0SVZ4ws ) How and why do USAmericans do not get this about biological evolution by natural selection?!? Of course natural selection has an effect or some effect on behavior and or adaptive behavior in general and not only just on _"adaptive fitness of chemical gene-machines",_ because of course it does. Type I error: If you dream of there being no tiger in the bush and therefore do not run, when there is actually a tiger in the bush, then you'll end up eventually as tiger dinner. Type II error: If you dream of there being a tiger in the bush and therefore do run, when there is actually no tiger in the bush, then you'll do not end up as tiger dinner and will survive. *So of course there is a Selecting pressure towards that type II error Naturally.* *And as such of course there is a Selecting pressure towards that type II error regarding that theistic God being falsely presupposed/preassumed/postulated Naturally, even when there are no gods in any bushes.*
Regsrdless, it is immoral to expect or command to be worshipped. I don't care how good you say you are. Worship is immoral. Who wants to be worshipped? I really don't. In fact, no healthy person should. Can you even try to say it is healthy? I can not.
@@strawpiglet God as conceived of in, for instance, Advaita Vedanta. Brahman, the immaterial, immanent being through which all is manifested and known and which constitutes ultimate reality. I'd like to know Emerson's views of this philosophy. The central principles, without the baggage.
Unfortunately, people getting really upset over something usually means they cannot see the world in a multi-variate manner. Being able to quickly and efficiently see the world as a theist, atheist, or in-between is a mark of a learned philosopher. At the end of the day, we can agree to disagree and drink to the glory of knowledge - a truly Theist sentiment of common God image bearing as well as a common humanistic sentiment. Great stuff!
well how is atheism NOT a religion, just like with my belief i cannot prove that God exist, I just have faith in his promises and his existence, its faith, but to say you know something doesn't exist when you can't know is faith as well, faith you are correct about your beliefs
There's just so much we don't know, Agnosticism seems the only rational way to go. Fine tuning really doesn't add up to me though - perhaps we are the only really (sic) complex life in the whole universe and it's quite a fluke that we are here, that would mean that there is a hell of a lot of universe not fine tuned for life of any kind.
First of all thank you for writing what you're explaining. I would much rather read through your arguments in a few minutes than have to listen to 30 minutes total. Otherwise I have to rely on my AI summary website to transcribe everything you're saying as a summary :P. No offense intended, I just like to read and think fast. But it basically sounds like you find some form of limited theism convincing because of fine-tuning arguments or variations thereof. Like why our universe with conscious organisms evolving instead of boltzmann brains, stuff like that. Why no consciousness at all, etc. These to me are all variations of fine-tuning. But I think what is critically important here is to note the reasons for why you find these things convincing - and to point out that essentially (you may hate to read this :P) it is a God of the gaps argument. Like I would freely admit, as an atheist, that I don't have a good explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, or why the universe exists in a configuration to support life over a configuration that doesn'. But this is NOT therefore evidence that we should take theism seriously. It is ALWAYS illogical to reason this way. Just because you cannot think of a better explanation at the moment for why the universe is the way it is, is not license to invent a magical deity as a solution. We always need evidence for this being, unless you can somehow prove that there is no other conceivable option, which is an impossible standard to meet. And that is really the problem, and why it is a God of the gaps idea. Because we are making the claim "I can't think of any other theoretical solution...God seems the most plausible from the ones I CAN think about...so therefore God! Or therefore God is probable! Or therefore God seems plausible!". There could, especially in this case, be an infinite number of solutions we are unaware of, including solutions that we can't comprehend, or which break our human conception of logic. And unless you somehow rule all those solutions out a priori, it will always remain a God of the Gaps argument to simply assume that these solutions don't exist. Notice we can say precisely NOTHING regarding its "probability" of being correct here either, if probability is even the right language to be using. Notice that there is no "evidence" pointing to a "designer" here either as theists like to claim. The fact the universe could be interpreted as being fine-tuned (I won't even get into the question of why we are assuming the constants can vary over such a wide range, which is a major unstated assumption) merely acts as a *possible* solution for the God hypothesis. There is nothing about a fine constant that says "hey, only God could have done this!" or "here is God's fingerprint". So yes...to conclude...this is God of the gaps. And it is wrong :). PS I agree that theists can be intelligent. But I am going to part ways with you when you say "rational". Rational to me, means that their arguments are logical or based in clear evidence. And to me this is precisely where they fail. Though personal experiences I think can show, perhaps, supernatural events. I don't mind agreeing to that ==== And on the flip side, in terms of allowing for an all-knowing God who allowed so much suffering in the world. I'm sorry to say but the argument that Gods reasons are beyond human comprehension is a valid counter-argument. It may be frustrating but that is irrelevant. All that matters is, its a valid counter. In fact that's the one WLC uses. Emotionally I agree with you its hard to square these two ideas of a loving God with so much suffering. But unless you can make a clear and coherent logical case for why this is a contradiction, that there couldn't have been any reason for God to perform these actions, then the argument is utterly lost.
>Otherwise I have to rely on my AI summary website to transcribe everything you're saying as a summary :P. No offense intended, I just like to read and think fast. I'm sorry, are you telling me that you asked an AI to summarize my video instead of watching it?
Meh, I'll still like you if you become agnostic. Or theist, for that matter. Some of my best friends are theists, just go down the stairs to my basement and you'll find them all there. It's slightly annoying to me that, when people consider agnosticism more in line with their epistemology because of the perceived weight of theistic arguments, they forget that those arguments are so focused on the "what" or the "why" that they're not just disinterested in the "how", they're giving the "how" the middle finger. Take the fine-tuning argument: Even if you don't think the name itself is begging the question, it's definitely either an argument for a non omnipotent god, or a god who uses magic. Either god has to overcome some external constraints to set those constants to values that would make "life, the universe and everything" possible, or god forces the universe to work as intended with the values we measure as he could with any arbitrarily selected values. The latter a) makes the universe not a product of fine tuning and b) is magic: - God did it. How, you ask? Well, god can do anything. - Well, even forgetting the fact that he can't find the time to say 'hi", I can do many things, but one can usually explain how I do them, even when they can't explain why. - Yeah, sorry, fuck "how". When it's god, there's no "how". How does Occam not apply here? Why not say the values are what they are and there's no how, and skip introducing a middle man? I welcome any objections, things I'm missing, or accusations of straw-manning the argument. (There's still room in my basement.)
Very nice and thoughtful video! At the end I think I can go most of the way towards agreeing, but I still call myself an atheist, because like you I reject the incredibly popular and widely held conceptions of god - specifically the god of the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions. So for the majority of people on the planet, I am an atheist: I believe their god does not exist and if I heard correctly, you believe it doesn't exist either. Now if you get into more general kinds of theism, I can agree with you as an agnostic there. Though I do lean more towards the hypothesis of indifference than you do, probably by a lot. There was one bit that I wanted to bring up in particular: @18:14 I wonder if you say that the finitist form of theism would be compatible with your earlier claims about an afterlife existing. That does seem hard to square because if there could just be an afterlife, what's the point of this world an all it's suffering? I think that kind of argument works against any kind of theism that raises the probability of an afterlife, meaning what we'd be left with is a kind of impersonal mind-first basis of reality. But then I do tend to lean towards a mindless basis of reality, because I don't find type 1 physicalism nearly as implausible as you do.
Thank you! >I wonder if you say that the finitist form of theism would be compatible with your earlier claims about an afterlife existing. That does seem hard to square because if there could just be an afterlife, what's the point of this world an all it's suffering? I do think they're compatible. I don't understand the objection. If God is limited, then it makes *more* sense, not less, that pain and suffering would be unavoidable to provide us a decent life, just as it is with limited, finite human fathers.
@@EmersonGreen Right, I agree that a limited god makes much more sense about why we have suffering in the world. The objection is about the afterlife, if there is supposed to be a limited god + afterlife with a heaven. Heaven still would be a place with no evil or suffering, at least presumably. The objection goes - if limited god can create a heaven, why are we not just created there? The entire reason a limited god is far more plausible is because limited god can't create a world without evil, but an eternal afterlife w/ heaven is a state of existence without evil. So if you come up with a kind of theodicy as to why limited god needs people to go through the actual world of suffering before they can get into a heaven, then that theodicy probably applies to the normal tri-omni god as well. What do you think?
9:30 I thought so too, the world that we live in does not reflect what the Bible describes heaven. But in my own view, grave evil is something that I don’t expect to happen to me, but the fact that atrocities do happen, makes me think that there can be an experience that is good. So my monkey brain logic: Heaven is too good to be true, but evil is too horrible to be true, yet it exists, so heaven must be possible.
@user-dy3uh Idk man, the holocaust was laughable to some Jews before they went. Some thought that Auschwitz was just some rumor. There can be grave evil, and grave good. Is there so much evil that it’s unbelievable? Depends on the person. Some believe nothing bad can happen to them until it does.
Atheism is the position that there is no evidence for the existence of a god, untill such evidence arrises. Which is where you seem to be at. "We don't know untill we do" Is a fair assessment at any rate.
I'm not 100% confident that homeopathy (in all its forms) is false and baloney even though I lean towards that so I'm not an A-Homeopatheist. I'm just agnostic about it. **eyeroll**
@@EmersonGreen what's the tipping point into atheism then? There can't be any decent evidence for a view otherwise agnostic? Even if a majority and the leanings are heavily on one side?
Sorry, Huxley. Agnosticism is a useful tool for categorization, but to ID as an "agnostic" doesn't say what you are so much as what you're not. To see why, just swap gods for other hypothetical beings e.g. Martian microbes. Do they exist? Gnostic affirmers: "Definitely." Gnostic deniers: "Definitely not." Agnostic believers: "Probably." Agnostic disbelievers: "Probably not." Agnostic nonbelievers: "I'm neutral." (Of course, affirmers also believe just as deniers also disbelieve but not vice versa). It's the same with gods. To ID as "agnostic" doesn't say whether you're a believer, disbeliever or neutral; atheist or theist. The vast majority of theists are affirmers who hold to some sort of _personal_ god. Believers are basically deists; who believe in some nebulous "higher power" or "ground of all being" without ascribing any gender, desires, feelings or motivations to their god or gods. To ID as an "agnostic atheist" shows you're not an ultra-rare gnostic denier but doesn't reveal whether you're a neutral nonbeliever or a disbeliever. They both qualify. This is the Rainbow Model: a handy tool for assessing who had the burden of what vis-a-vis hypothetical beings. Red 🔴affirmers. Orange 🟠believers. Yellow 🟡nonbelievers. Green 🟢disbelievers. Blue 🔵deniers. The burden of substantiation increases as you move outward from the no-burden center: rational justification for the 🟠s & 🟢s. Objective proof for the 🔴s & 🔵s.
Never having come across you or your videos before, what I hear is a man who is emotionally drawn to the idea of a celestial overseer/"God" and who, desiring to move himself closer to accepting the reality of this notion, has swallowed an awful lot of mumbo-jumbo. It is very simple: Do you believe that a "God" exists? If you do, you are a theist. If you do not, you are an atheist. If you DO believe that a "God" exists, you must have good, credible evidence to support this belief. Philosophical arguments are NOT good, credible evidence. They are narratives; they are products of the fertile, human imagination. As such, they are not very far removed from the imagining of our more primitive ancestors. Agnosticism is best distinguished from atheism these days by putting the emphasis on knowledge. If one is not claiming to KNOW that "God" exists or does not exist, one can be said to be agnostic. I can think of no good reason why one cannot be an agnostic atheist. But the only reason to embrace the term "agnostic" while rejecting "atheism" is because one has begun to BELIEVE that a "God" exists.
value selection hypothesis just seems unfalsifiable - any possible world would be perfectly predicted by a god who wanted that exact world. there's no a priori reason to think a god would care about anything we find valuable, or be any more probable than any of the infinitely possible gods that don't.
@EmersonGreen we definitely do. specific religious claims might be falsifiable but general fine tuning arguments for a god can't be. and a finite god might be even more undetectable/unfalsifiable since we couldn't say whether it wanted to create intelligent life for a brief instant in time on one little blue speck, or if we're just an unintended side effect of it creating some eact number of black holes in the universe.
I think the problem with value selection is the apparent assumption that minds are part of that process. If we believe that black hole cosmology is true, then an infinite series of black holes are forming where the parameters are tuning towards forming black holes, which requires large masses, which form stars and planets and coincidentally form life. Any other theory which also allows for continual universe production with modification means that of course any universe with life would be good for life, even if it's a side effect. Anthropic principle. Ultimately fine-tuning arguments amount to nothing, because our data set is woefully insufficient.
@@Rogstin i mean yeah, that is another problem with it. we don't even know if the laws of nature could be any different in the first place, it's just arm chair probability, like declaring the chance of a penny landing on its edge is 1/3 because it technically has 3 faces
Nice objection to the sophisticated argument from psychophysical harmony: "No. Just no." I'm sure Dr Crummett will realise he was wrong all along and stop defending his argument thanks to your input. It's obviously not science - it's philosophy.
Why is it for so many so hard to understand that gnostic and agnostic is about knowing and not knowing, and theism and atheism about belief and non-belief? One can be an agnostic theist or agnostic atheist, et cetera. It's not one or the other.
9:46 - This world is dominated by Darwinian evolution and the concerns of Darwinian evolution. That destroys the coherence of a being who is all good or all love creating this world *in direct congruence* with it's good or love. It doesn't require an evil being but it does require a being with much different intentions, for example what Donald Hoffman talks about - ie. an Aleph 1, Aleph 2, etc. where it's exploring all existing possibilities indifferent to quality or outcome, almost dutifully since it identifies itself with all existing things, and a cosmos seemingly tuned to generate psychopathy from natural selection, entropy, and second law of thermodynamics is much less of a problem than said overmind not examining and experience said world - even if said world was in a Minkowski block universe where we unconditionally went extinct in the 21st or 22nd century and all of the suffering - from our perspective - was null and void in terms of any real meaning or purpose while trying to survive within the universe. That's the closest thing to a rational answer as to why so many NDE'ers keep coming back with apex experiences of unconditional love, being told what really sounds like very friendly gas-lighting or disinformation, and get sent back in - and that mystery deepens when such people have miraculous medical recoveries or have elements of their NDE that seem to verify that their minds genuinely touched some larger database even if we can't assume that them learning things they couldn't have known at that time (having 360 degree spherical vision be a common feature of NDE's, something we have no wiring for, or blind-from-birth people 'seeing' and being disturbed by it, lots of weird stuff but very little of it is what people want it to be such as Harry Potter magic or The Secret being real). TBH I'm not sure which is more or less unsettling - a universe where you literally come into existence in the womb and cease to exist forever at death or a world where, as John Gray would describe it, you go from one place having no idea where you are or what's happening on to a different environment where you still have no idea what's happening or why, particularly if you were forever the plaything of an impersonal overmind. The people who get a ton of comfort from new age or occult beliefs tend not to think that deeply about it, ie. they're coping like most people and will pull in whatever seems to work well enough in the short term.
How does evolution destroy the idea of God as ultimate good/love? It could be that this world is a challenge/difficult "video game" that God/we incarnate into for the challenge. The same reason why someone might want to climb mount everest. They would climb it is difficult and the suffering involved is the point. The suffering makes the endeavor more glorious.
@@zachr0 it doesn't destroy the idea that God could be ultimate good/love, it's just that IMHO it destroys the notion that this world - as it is - is a demonstration of that love. In the most wildly benevolent spin I could put on that - maybe it's like loving parents sending a kid to football two-a-days through the summer, it's just that... this roughly describes the Masonic Great Work and a lot of other alchemical reincarnational stories that, to me at least for several years, sounded more plausible than Christianity until I see just how base much of the world is and what's required to win - particularly in ages of moral decadence. I also noticed that people who tend to pile into esoteric orders tend to either be elderly (like church returning baby boomers) or they tend to be people with disabilities - meaning life challenges, like culture shredding it's contract with disabled and LGBT and them needing to search for deep meaning and join esoteric fraternities, this all seems to only suggest causal dynamics within this lifetime and in most cases the world is filled with suffering that's not just meaningless at our level but it's wildly redundant as well - such as millions of people suffering from the same illness, same sort of social ostracism, etc. meaning even if reincarnation is true I don't think we're on a self-purifying journey through incarnation - there seems to be no credible display of that in the world. If all of that seemed a bit gobledigook or 'Why is he talking about esoteric orders?' - If there was a central priority that the local universe had for civilizing humans, promoting liberal democracy, and promoting progress of mind - it feels like we're staggering to make any of that happen and most of it goes up in heat with destructive competition, back-stabby politics, etc. and it seems like it can be taken away every few generations or so which is not what the world would look like if we were making a growing number of adepts through reincarnation. So if it's incoherent as even a painful spiritual cultivation system like the old Renaissance alchemical woodcuts seemed to suggest, and if a higher power still finds this place valuable it's goals and aims are probably orthogonal to our programming for survival on this planet which is Darwinian and sexual selection, possibly also group selection, oriented.
@@carbon1479 Reincarnation or not, whether there is progress or not on earth... The human experience of suffering can still be an expression of love. Because all suffering could, in theory, lead to "soul building" or character building. Lots of NDEs have an idea that suffering is preplanned and consensual between God and the soul. And suffering is relative. What appears to be huge amounts of suffering, would seem as insignificant as getting a paper cut in a dream. And suffering may be something that, in the course of a soul journey, is something we are trying to collect, rather than avoid.
@@SteveMcRae No. They’re not. Agnosticism deals in what a person knows (for certain) and atheism deals with what a person believes (to be true). So, an agnostic atheist (like just about every atheist out there) is someone doesn’t KNOW for certain that a god doesn’t exist, but they operate their daily lives on the belief that one doesn’t exist based on the lack of evidence.
@@purv989 Not a single university teaches what you just said. I will stick with ACTUAL academic usages of terms. You're COMPLETELY wrong and would fail out of intro to philosophy of religion. "Nowadays, the term “agnostic” is often used (when the issue is God’s existence) to refer to those who follow the recommendation expressed in the conclusion of Huxley’s argument: an agnostic is a person who has entertained the proposition that there is a God but believes neither that it is true nor that it is false. Not surprisingly, then, the term “agnosticism” is often defined, both in and outside of philosophy, not as a principle or any other sort of proposition but instead as the psychological state of being an agnostic. Call this the “psychological” sense of the term. " - SEP Please don't try to correct me if you have literally no education in the subject and CLEARLY don't know what you're talking about...it is annoying and I don't suffer fools well.
@@SteveMcRae It’s okay to be wrong (which you are). It’s not okay to whinge about it and haughtily act like you’re informed. I explained to you how they’re not mutually exclusive. You’re literally on TH-cam. Take two seconds and search “agnostic atheism.” I swear, people have the breadth of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet will remain willfully ignorant rather than do 2 seconds of research.
The entire universe is finely tuned for us, and that's why we can _only_ survive on a small fraction of the surface of this infinitesimal mote of dust soon to be devoured by the sun as it itself reaches the end of its life. Yep, seems _very_ fine-tuned to me. 😅
@@Nitroade24 ALL of it. The idea that the universe is specially tuned for human life to eventually be able to survive on a tiny part of one planet in the vastness of the cosmos. The idea that the physical constants that determine how matter and energy behave in our universe were chosen from a set of options. The idea that a supreme being outside our universe is twiddling the laws of physics so that we can exist. It's ALL bunkum.
I'd always been the "I'll actually make arguments for my position" kind of atheist as opposed to the "I'll make arguments that I shouldn't have to give you arguments" kind of atheist.
Igtheism first and foremost. Let us all define the god we’re talking about first. Im atheist toward gods known to man, agnostic to some possible entity “out there.” Christian God’s name (in common usage) being “God” really muddies the waters of discourse. EDIT: Okay, I see he deals with these subtleties of theism near the end of the video. :)
@@EmersonGreenNope. I don't need argue my position for not believing in Leprechaun's. Do you? But it seems you feel you need to make a special exception for a god. Well, that's great you feel that way. I just don't care about your feelings and neither does truth.
@@Mr.PeabodyTheSkeptic I assume there are reasons you believe Leprechauns don't exist, no? Or do you genuinely not have any arguments against the existence of leprechauns? Additionally, claims about Leprechauns are not claims about the fundamental nature of reality. Saying that a worldview that doesn't contain leprechauns is probably coherent is pretty uncontroversial because Leprechauns aren't meant to have any influence on things like the beginning of the universe or the existence of consciousness or fine-tuned constants or be the foundation of ethics and beauty and this kind of thing. However, the moment you positively say "an atheistic worldview is coherent", you give yourself the burden of proof in explaining certain phenomena like those generally explained by theists as related to God. Personally, I think there are good atheistic ways to explain all the phenomena in the universe, but we're certainly not going to get anywhere near good explanations if we don't make a positive case. Atheism only doesn't have the burden of proof until you claim that atheism is a coherent worldview, but I highly doubt that most atheists would want to prevent themselves from saying that atheism is a coherent worldview.
Knowledge is a subset of belief that only includes beliefs that are sufficiently rationally justified (or meet an externalist condition). If you believe that God doesn't exist, but you don't think that you know that God exists, then you are admitting that your belief is irrational and unjustified. Thus, atheistic or theistic agnosticism are irrational positions.
For goodness sake, do you believe in a supernatural god or not? It's a yes or no answer. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't know", doesn't inform anyone about what you believe.
@@FaptainCalcon750 Exactly, it baffles me why so many people struggle with this concept. It's not like you can't change your mind the next day if you learn something new.
@@downenout8705 I suppose it's for the same reason they think that "agnostic" and "atheist" are different degrees of the same axis rather than orthogonal axes: knowledge and belief.
@@mikolmisol6258 Exactly, but it's so simple to for anyone to recognise this that I am still baffled by why people struggle with such a simple concept.
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This was a fascinating video! Appreciated the honest reflections on your part and it's a reminder of why you're such a valued member of the PhilRel community!
agnosticism >
Manchester > Arsenal 😜
There should be agnostic apologists who just persuade theists and atheists to be agnostic, and furthermore begin a ministry for epistemic indeterminacy and start going door to door telling people about the good news that they can be rational and undecided.
I gotta say tho... Dr. Liz Jackson's wager theory is pretty compelling from an agnostic perspective. Is it really > ;p
@@rebelresource I’m actually getting Liz on my channel in April to ‘debate’ Alan Hajek on the wager🙂
UUU lets go! Her views on the wager really shook my decision making system to the core haha. Actually really empowered me in a lot of other areas outside of abstract concepts.@@MajestyofReason
Separating Gods into worshipped Gods (God representations informed by religion(s), generally perfect, tri-omni) and non-worshipped Gods (non-omni, deistic, indifferent) always made sense for me. I'm atheist for the former, agnostic for the latter. Most believers I interact with on twitter, and most apologists for that matter, don't want to hear about a limited, imperfect God. "That is not my God". Well, if that God exists....that's what we have.
I agree with that largely, but I personally am more forgiving of the anthropomorphizing of an ultimate metaphysical creator intelligence.
Science attempts to measure and understand phenomenality through quantities and abstractions. It attempts to use math as a measuring stick to understand the world.
Religion attempts to comprehend and understand phenomenality through qualities and generalities. It attempts to use the only thing we have direct unmediated knowledge of -- which is our consciousness, or our sense of human-beingness (or Heidegger's "Dasein") as a measuring stick to understand the world. There appear to be clear benefits to that, as it makes the greatest notion of reality fundamentally human and contextualized through humanness; there is something in that which provides us with a sense of warmth, security, and well-being.
The issue, of course -- is when such interpretations become literalistic, dogmatic, doctrinarian, and devolve into contrived theology (which is more concerned with governance over society rather than genuine 'non-empirical/symbolic science').
This isn't something exclusive to religion though; for example, the modern empirical sciences have sort conjoined into one heterogenous mass of notions and motives which we call "Science". It has gained vast institutional and political power, and has also become a source of ontological security where we likewise 'mistake the map for the territory'. In that sense, a sort of "Scientism" has emerged which plays many of the functions of a religion.
As a Latter-Day Saint, I believe in the option you didn't mention: A limited God, who is perfect within those limitations.
As Czech person I am doing my duty to inform you that Czechoslovakia was divided more than thirty years ago
Many have alleged I made a “mistake” by referring to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia, but others (who are more perceptive) correctly recognized this as an overt political statement about the illegitimacy of Czech Republic and my undying allegiance to Czechoslovakia ✊
I very much value your work, your humble and honest approach as well as the stringency of your arguments and also your intelligence. Most of the the videos I see here on TH-cam mainly want to show one side of the coin by downpkaying or even dismissing the other side. Your videos live from that tension that arises by showing both sides in an appropriate manner. Seems like you accept the tension and contrasts between counterarguments as a part of life. No glossing over. I think this leads to better results, yet sometimes leaves one lost at sea. Please continue. Luv it!🎉🎉❤
Did you ever consider utility aspects in questions of the existence of a personal or non personal deity like say B. Pascal of W. James did?? Especially if sitting somewhere on the fence between the two worlds and like you say no one has a decisive case. Thx!
Thank you for saying that! You’re too kind.
I have considered those pragmatic arguments to some extent, and for me they hold some significant force, especially the Jamesian considerations. I think theism is a hopeful view, and universalism provides some possible pathway of redeeming the suffering on earth, including animal suffering. Without something like universalist theism, earthly life can seem almost unbearably tragic, especially when considering the lives of wild animals. A theistic afterlife can offer some hope that their lives weren’t simply tragedies. I hope reality turns out to vindicate the most hopeful, optimistic people I know. (It won’t, but I wish it would.)
For myself, I’d like to live as a Christian theist for the sake of my loved ones, who would be tremendously relieved by my reconversion. That has definitely played a role in my continual searching, trying to find some way Christianity could be believable.
Thanks again for the comment. :)
@@EmersonGreen Thanks for your answer. It is so much fuller and wiser than the answers of many I know. I would not believe to please others. Yet sometimes, if you ly on the bed and you ponder about all these pros and cons, the ifs and buts, and you know no argument will tip the scale, you flee to that last resort, where only your most inner feelings count. And there is hope. The hope that there is redemption. Like you said Universalist Theism!! I have stopped listening to people who believe in ECT. Their sadistic, cruel approach is not possible to accept. It's not godly. Its neurotic (although derivable from the bible). What a shxt. All that mess because it was spread by guys like St. Augustine, the most neurotic theologian (together with his mother Monica) I know of.
How much harm was done, how many souls crushed. The normative force of the factual as Habermas put it. Your inclusion of animal pains and your focus on the harm in general speaks for itsself. No glossing over. I too hope that torment and death is not the last answer. I guess this unites us. Wished more people had that sensitivity without being sissy. It's rare. It's seldom. It almost never happens. But I see something inspired in your answer! Thx!!!☀️
I personally think that religious ambiguity is decent evidence for a vague form of theism, while being strong evidence *against* most forms of Abrahamic theism.
However, I think that religious ambiguity is very compelling evidence for naturalism. Let me explain:
1. There are many religions and supernatural beliefs that don't involve theism at all. Take most forms of Buddhism, which is like the fifth biggest religion in the world.
2. All religious beliefs make plenty of sense under culteral and evironmental context and the cognitive science of religion. For instance, HADD theory explains the primal origins of polytheism, likely the first form of theism.
And YHWH comes from a pantheon of such theism, according to the vast consensus of Hebrew Bible scholars and historians of the ancient Semetic region. As much as dogmatic theists like to clutch their pearls on this subject, you can't ignore the data on this.
I think its pretty plausible that a vague god is ok with people worshipping it how they want. That seems like a valid form of theism.
I just think that the emphirical data regarding all of these vastly different beliefs and cultures these beliefs emerge from point more to naturalism than anything else, as it is completely what you would expect for people in that worldview.
Religious experiences (my own included) push me towards openess to some supernatural reality. Even after losing my faith, I have had one occasion of intense feelings of love during meditation. We may just be simply incapable of accurately describing what supernatural reality might mean, and perhaps ought to focus more attention to moral living in the absence of clear direction. That at least seems to be the takeaway from those who experience NDEs.
Theism and evil section hit hard honestly. Never seen the evil problem articulated so well.
انت ملحد؟
@@SCIENTIST-X لا
@@ILoveLuhaidan مسلم؟
واضح يعني XD@@SCIENTIST-X
@@SCIENTIST-X و ليش تفترض اني ملحد يعني بعد كل الكلام في المقطع؟
انا فقط منصف و صادق مع نفسي.
I think a strong argument against the problem of evil is the notion that God suffers all evil alongside us. Which was symbolised for the first time in Christ. God, an unlimited being (not a being at all, really, but being itself) must experience everything that we experience. I can put evil into two categories: that which we don't understand, and that which is an existential threat to us; both, I have a hard time imagining being absent from a meaningful existence
Who made up those rules?
@@roxics Hm? Which rules?
How would existence be any less meaningful without stillbirth?
@@vex1669 It wouldn't. Our world hasn't been any less meaningful since smallpox was eliminated. But these are obstacles we must overcome. It's all well and good to imagine a world in which smallpox never existed in the first place, but then where do you stop going down the line removing everything else that is painful, like stillbirth, until you've removed all conflict from this world and rendered it static and meaningless? There's no good without evil
@@LeNZian Would there be no delicious food if there was no bad tasting food, then?
Isn't religious amibuity itself an argument against the God of classical theism? If there exists a benevolent God who wishes to have a relationship with his creation, why is it so difficult to ascertain his existence and ascertain the correct religion? The fact that we have to debate the existence of God is itself an argument for atheism.
I think it's probably some evidence against theism, yeah
@@EmersonGreen One question: divine hiddenness (which is essentially the argument I'm advancing here) is a subset of the problem of evil. How can an atheist advance the problem of evil if they don't believe in objective moral values. How do you advance an argument from "evil" if you believe "evil" doesn't exist?
@@EmersonGreenSomeone proposing that there exists an all-powerful being that both desires to have a relationship with us but at the same time doesn’t have a relationship with us, is I think like someone proposing that there exists a three dimensional shape that is both square and at the same time a circle.
“Hiddenness” is not simply evidence against that proposition of a god, it’s pointing out that proposition of a god is incoherent.
@@skooma103 Is this satire?
@@Nitroade24 What is?
I really appreciate the honesty of this video. As someone who has experienced spiritual reality on levels that exceed sense perception and imagination, I think trying to understand the truth of God/spirit only through studying religion is nearly impossible. It's like reading a book about weight lifting and expecting to grow strong if it's true.
To know the truth you actually need to empty your beliefs and be patient - this goes for theists and atheists, because God is completely beyond symbols, and you cannot lift yourself up by your bootstraps, you have to let higher power do it by dropping your will.
From a scientific point of view, I would say the Hindu understanding of creation is the most intellectually accurate. The universe is an illusion created by God to go through a sort of role playing game, a very convincing one.
i’m agnostic man and i’m proud of it❤
I am an agnostic atheist and I am proud of it.
So you, like me, don't "know" that no god or gods exist (agnostic) but do you hold a belief that one does?
I am without (a) belief in a god or gods (theist).
@@downenout8705 no i don’t have a believe
@@AxmedYare-sb9uc Then welcome to the "agnostic atheist" club.
@@downenout8705 I think this is a misuse of the term. It renders it useless. No one "knows" that God doesn't exist. It's not supposed to mean that, it was coined to counter atheistic certainty. I wonder why so many atheists, especially the most certain ones, want to call themselves agnostic.
@@strawpiglet wtf is "atheistic certainty"? The only thing the thing the atheist needs to be certain of is their lack of belief.
I've never liked the common consent argument on account of the fact that it seems to assume that people arrive at their personal religious position in an equally logical manner, that is to say that the majority of religious individuals in the world arrived at theism first through some logical means. This could be responded to by saying that an equal quantity of people arrive at a non-theistic position through non-logical means as we usually see happen with those that hold theistic positions, but I just think that's flatly not true on account of the fact that the majority of world religions engage in behaviors that attempt to bypass logic to convince people and the fact that it is strongly encouraged for parents to bring their children up in the religion that they adhere to in most cases.
Yes, it helps that we have a plausible evolutionary origin for why religion is such a big thing
But I mean, I do admit, it is some slight evidence 🤷♀️ just not very much because we have significantly better explanations
@@azophi But I'm not talking about the argument as a whole, just the component of it that says the fact that a lot of people believe in it compared to people that don't is much evidence at all. There are so many fewer people that have arrived at religion through purely logical means compared to those that arrived at it through other means that gesturing to the whole of religious belief as if it is evidence is unjustified because you could point towards those that have de-converted from logical problems as evidence against it (and which is likely a greater population than those that have purely logical conversions)
You spelled out the problem of evil so well. That's how I see it.
Gotta go with the mystics, folks. Diana Pasulka, Dale Allison have some good things to say about this. To me the question is not, is there or is there not a "spiritual realm", but what is the spiritual realm like?
But how can we qualify the latter inquiry without the first?
@@humesspoon3176 If someone has already had first hand experience of divinity, then they would no longer need to question if there is divinity or not.
@@zachr0 Because I, at the very least, question why a citation of experiences is evidence that what they're experiencing is not agent-relative (at least in terms of phenomenal singularity).
@@humesspoon3176 I don't think it is evidence that non-experiencers must submit to. But if someone has a mystical experience, its reasonable for them to believe. Plenty of examples of materialists changing their worldview after having a mystical experience. And I think there are enough accounts of these religious experiences and verified accounts of precognition, out of body experiences, and synchronicities, that make it very reasonable to take them seriously.
@@zachr0 Well, I'm not so sure we should discuss worldviews because this is only one particular view -- whether a deity exists. Anyhow, inasmuch as there have been materialists that have changed their mind, I'm a slight example of the opposite (I'm not a materialist myself -- in fact, I even take secular non-physicalist points very seriously). I was once devoutly Christian and I had mystical experiences -- one in particular that I will say was so life-altering that I wouldn't be here talking to you without it. With that being said, I obviously changed my mind (for more than one reason).
The reason why I struggle to believe my experience was supernatural today is for the reason I mentioned prior, "How can we know that these things aren't self-emergent?" More so, since I'm quite nerd for modal thinking, I tend to think about what a world would look like without a deity and whether these experiences would occur -- and if we live in one with a deity, what elements separate us from this possible world? I haven't been able to answer this outright, nor have I gotten much in the way of answers from others (but hey, it's not easy to answer, so no disrespect intended). So you say it's reasonable to believe them, but I feel this point I raise stands against, and at least, some experiences that you might cite to confirm the existence of a deity. As much as I feel the things you mentioned should be taken seriously, do you feel my concerns are legitimate?
Agnosticism is actually closer to the scientific method. In science any theory is subject to further refinement or even overthrow pending additional compelling evidence. So a resistance to rely on absolutes.
Hey Emerson, what were the possibly divine aspects of the necessary being that Rasmussen and Pearce helped you to see?
It's not something I can easily summarize. Sorry. Just in the course of reading the following books, I started to see a few bridges from stage one to stage two:
Who Are You, Really? (Rasmussen)
How Reason Can Lead to God (Rasmussen)
Is There A God? (Pearce & Oppy)
@@EmersonGreen Fair enough. Thanks for that. Glad to say i have read at least one of those..
Im curious, what do you make of the criticisms of psychophysical harmony arguments by the folks on digital gnosis?
Both sides in the Religion vs Science debates use the Materialism/Empiricism version of logic, math and physics which say 1D, 2D, 3D and 4D are "locally real" and 0D is "not locally real".
Unfortunately for Materialism/Empiricism, quantum physics proved the observable universe is actually "not locally real" a year ago (Oct 2022 was the earliest article i could find). The immediate lead-up to this was the Nobel Prize proving quantum entanglement.
Well over 300 years ago Leibniz vs Newton competed for the title of "Universal Genius". We chose Newton, obviously, but an interesting point is that nobody ever proved Materialism/Empiricism... we simply thought it "ought" to be true.
The only proof that happened was a year ago when quantum physics flat-out disproved Materialism/Empiricism:
The observable universe is "not locally real" and that proves we chose the wrong guy, full stop 🛑.
Zero vs nonzero numbers are what we assign "locally real" and "not locally real" to. If zero is one thing then nonzero is the other. This is due to zero being "not-natural" whereas nonzero numbers are "natural".
The absolute, nondualistic version of the observable universe proposed by Newton simply does not exist and it never has (was never proven anyhow, only disproven).
Leibniz said 0D is necessary and more real; having no predecessor and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are contingent and less real; all having an immediate predecessor.
Leibniz was correct and that means we're all taught contradictory logic, math and physics.
[What is the difference between Newton and Leibniz calculus?]:
Newton's calculus is about functions.
Leibniz's calculus is about relations defined by constraints.
In Newton's calculus, there is (what would now be called) a limit built into every operation.
In Leibniz's calculus, the limit is a separate operation.
Then:
0 = not locally real
1 = locally real
Now:
0 = locally real
1 = not locally real
It's about time the same tired Religion vs Science arguments we've heard for over 300 years can be updated (on both sides).
Holy guacamole the stalemate has been boring 💤.
Contradictory: *impossible to be true.*
Non-contradictory: *possible to be true.*
❌️Contradictory Theology, Mathematics and Physics (knowing good; functions; limit built into every operation)❌️:
1. The Gen 1 character and the Gen 2 character are the exact same character (knowing good).
2. Zero is not fundamental and nonzero numbers are fundamental (Newton/Einstein calculus).
3. 0D is not locally real and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are locally real (Newton/Einstein physics).
⬆️ this is what we're all taught. Materialist/Empiricist version of reality.⬆️
✅️Non-contradictory Theology, Mathematics and Physics (knowing good from evil; relations defined by constraints; limit is a separate operation)✅️:
1. The Gen 1 character and the Gen 2 character are polar opposite characters (knowing good from evil).
2. Zero is fundamental and nonzero numbers are not fundamental (Leibniz calculus).
3. 0D is locally real and 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D are not locally real (Leibniz physics).
⬆️ this is what quantum physics proved a year ago and if Theology doesn't match Math and Physics then you're doing it wrong. Realist version of reality.⬆️
[🦄Materialism/Empiricism💩 version of Religion]:
Interpreting the Bible with the Genesis 1 character and the Genesis 2 character as the exact same character generates near 70,000 contradictions (see reason project) and requires heavy apologetics. A Bible interpretation which includes near 70,000 contradictions (impossible to be true) is what a snake-oil salesman would sell you. 🐍
[🦤Materialism/Empiricism💩 version of Science]:
The standard model of physics is Einstein's 3+1 space-time, which are considered locally real, where 0 is considered not locally real...been that way since Newton for zero vs nonzero numbers.
Problem is...quantum physics proved the observable universe (1D, 2D, 3D and 4D) is actually not locally real...and that was over a year ago.
(Yes, Leibniz was correct after all.) 🦧
locally real = more real (Leibniz said "necessary")
not locally real = less real (Leibniz said "contingent")
[Closing arguments]:
The Materialism/Empiricism package contains within itself all the contradictions, false dichotomies, paradoxes and literally "life's biggest questions". It's been a year why is everyone still using logic, calculus and geometry that is contradictory at the most fundamental level? Legitimate question 🙋.
If both Religion and Science removed their "Materialist/Empiricist-perspective shades 👓" (contradictory for a year) and put on their "Realist-perspective shades 👓" (non-contradictory for a year) they would not only cease to argue...they'd agree with each other.
There are some ontological theories in philosophy of mind like russelian monism that they can go somewhere in between. Goff covers them in his latest book. Its cool stuff, which can imply a type of pantheism or at least a type of cosmic panpsychism and im personally sympathetic to such positions, although not necessarily commiting (the same goes for physicalism for me). Nevertheless i would be an atheist in relation to all versions of an Abrahamic or Christian God, which is the most dominant form considering the major monotheistic religions.
Are you agnostic?
I'm not sure.
If the deistic/theistic side of your agnosticism turns out to be true/reality, what in your opinion is the likelihood of there being life after death for us (and what about for other animals)? Thanks
I believe in the laws of nature and science and also a higher power or supreme entity which created and governs the universe and cosmos.
I'm so honest with myself, i simply dont know, i spent my whole life convincing myself that i know that my religion is the way of the truth , but i realized that i was just forcing myself and lying to it because of Fear of the hell , , i found so many contradicions in my religion so i decided to become an Agnostic, i simply dont know the answrs to the big questions , like , why does anything exist?ext.., i'm searching for the Truth with logic and reason and i hope i can find it ,even that i doubt my brain neurons capacities , maybe i'm too stupid for knowing the answer of the big question, but i will try and continue to explore this existence with curiosity ^_^
Good luck, friend! You cannot find it with logic itself, but learning to be honest with yourself will help you find the truth.
I think you misspoke. Czechoslovakia stopped existing in 1992. There are two separate countries now: Czech Republic aka Czechia and Slovakia. You were referring to Czechia in your graphic.
I do not recognize the Czech Republic. Long live Czechoslovakia ✊
@@EmersonGreenI wonder if those 2 countries have any desire to reunite? I doubt it.
@@Overonator we dont. We have very friendly relationship with each other but there is no way we are reuniting in a single country again
@@EmersonGreen Nah, I think they're fine being separate 😋
@@petrhorak5951Yeah that's why I said I doubt it.
My credence in atheism (in the sense that the proposition 'no gods exist') has recently become 1. I have come to believe that theism is impossible.
What even is the minimum viable god definition to make theism possible?
I agree, I think theism is simply impossible for any useful _(impactful in our lives)_ definitions of a god.
@Rogstin I define theism as the view that there is at least one god, and atheism as the view that there are no gods. By gods I mean non-natural causal entities (ie entities that are not part of nature but yet affect nature through causal interactions). I am not saying that atheism entails that no supernatural things exist. But the view that I think is most plausible - naturalism - does entail that no supernatural things exist, and so it entails atheism. I used to think that theism is just improbable given the advantages of naturalism but I have come to believe that theism is actually impossible given naturalism. Basically, the claim that I believe is 'Gods cannot exist', so I am practically certain that there are no gods whatsoever. This view would probably seem quite extreme to many people.
@@Nexus-jg7ev What has made you 100% certain that theism is epistemically impossible for you?
@@Nitroade24 The necessity of the initial state and conditions of the universe. If these most crucial components are necessary, then it's impossible for them to have a supernatural cause. Necessities don't have causes. They are brute.
If the fine tuning is to require a cause, one needs to believe 3 things:
1. PSR - Principle of Sufficient Reason (the "everything needs a cause" version)
2. PC - Principle of Conceivability (conveivable, therefore possible)
3. PI - Principle of Indifference (the prior probability assigned to every possibility should be equal unless you have reason for believing otherwise)
But if PSR, then whatever causes fine tuning also needs a cause and, if PC and PI, if I can imagine a bunch of different causes then it's surprising that the cause of fine tuning is also fine tuned to provide the specific fine tuning of the universe we were initially trying to explain. So postulating a cause (a limited designer or moral values with magic powers) just recreates the fine tuning problem at another level.
In this video, th-cam.com/video/A8KciwM5N5I/w-d-xo.html , you said that "Whatever range of options is open to the theist to explain the existence of God, exactly the same range of options is open to the naturalist to explain the existence of the universe."
I agree, and I also believe that, in a similar fashion, whatever range of option is open to explain the cause of the fine tuning, the same options are available to explain the fine tuning itself.
Hence, we don't need a cause for fine tuning. If you find a cause, this cause will be in check against the same 3 principles that made you go after it in first place.
Are you agnostic toward Lord Indra?
If we are, when it comes to the biggest, deepest questions, what William James said we were, dogs and cats in a library staring at stacks if books, then certainty, not to speak of smug assurance, is not merely an intellectual mistake but also a moral failure. If only smugly assured atheists knew how similar they look to their fundamentalist/evangelical counterparts. I follow Emerson because, from the first time I tuned in, his honesty, integrity, and self-awareness were apparent, indicating that he was on a journey toward truth and might take us with him...as far as dogs and cats can go.
Hmm. I didn't find any evidence that he had a method for finding truth at all. How does he propose to resolve any of these questions?
10:08 I don't understand how he went from only believing vague theistic claims to believing these very specific and controversial ones.
re: the Common Consent Argument-I think it only points towards humans having a cognitive bias towards believing in god(s). All humans can feel love or fear but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have an external “realness” independent of humans.
We also have a cognitive "bias" towards believing in other minds, the external world, dogs, and other things that are real. We have generally truth-tracking cognitive faculties.
@@EmersonGreen Yeah, but for what reason do we hold a belief of a deity in tandem with that of other minds, the external world, and dogs?
@@humesspoon3176 I find this becomes clearer if you lay it out as an argument:
1. Most beliefs held by a significant portion of humanity are true.
2. Therefore, if we encounter any belief, x, that is held by a significant portion of humanity, it is probably true.
3. Theism is a belief held by a significant portion of humanity.
4. Therefore, theism is probably true.
As Emerson stated, premise 1 is true because examples of these include a belief in the external world, dogs etc. and also if most of our beliefs were false we'd probably die out as a species.
Premise 2 simply follows from premise 1 because it's like if you had a jar full of pieces of paper with a belief written on each of them. We know that the vast majority of these beliefs are true, so if we take one out at random it'll probably be true.
The conclusion that theism's probability is increased by common consent follows naturally from 1-3. The only way to respond to this argument is to provide an extra premise that weakens the extent to which the conclusion is made more likely, such as "most people's beliefs about complicated metaphysics are unjustified and false, and theism is a complicated metaphysical thesis" or "x psychological or sociological explanation shows why we'd expect most people to believe theism independent of its truth".
I think HADD theory, MCI, and some other hypotheses from the CSR do a pretty good job of putting the Common Consent argument for theism to bed.
Humans having these cognitive biases is entirely expected given the different kinds of data.
In fact, I'd be shocked if humans *didn't* have these beliefs.
@@EmersonGreen That's whataboutism and you shouldn't need to be told that.
This reminded me. This is a big issue that rationalist thinking runs into. Just because something is rational or logical doesn't mean it's true. Rationality is more like a good rule of thumb, rather then a surefire method of obtaining truth. If you are solving a murder, and a good amount of evidence points to one person, it would be reasonable to assume they are the murderer. But, it's conceivable that this person is actually innocent, they got unlucky, wrong place, wrong time, they were framed, etc.
That being said, I'm sort of a classical theist. That is due to my assessment of the various arguments for God's existence, analysis of where the Atheist worldview logically leads, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, my own experiences. Do I know for certain, no, but I'm pretty confident.
I think you'll eventually come around to gnosticism as it makes the most sense of everything that we experience in this reality. It fills the gap between atheism and theism, as well as the personal experiences that the atheist and theist go through which are opposed to each other. Only for most people, its a very hard pill to swallow, and depending on how ingrained in ones belief of who and what god is, and who and what we are, it may be too reality breaking for them to accept. Especially when it comes to the church which is why there was such a campaign in eradicating it. It might be too foundation shaking which causes one to reject it, or not be taken seriously. But in my opinion gnosticism should be taken very seriously and theres many great academic books on it. This life is far stranger than it appears on the surface. In my opinion its the best explanation for the problem of evil, and the problem of suffering as well.
At 20:00. "If God does not exist, I find it very surprising that nearly everyone believes in God".
Most, if not all believers, learn about God from their parents. Also isn't there an explanation from human psychology?
There's pareidolia.
I mean, not really, but you can explain it away, as you can explain away anything, but the much simpler explanation for why people innately believe in god and benefit from belief in god is that there is a god.
And that just raises the question why everyones parents know about God
@@username-yn5yo the simplest (as in parsimonious) explanation for a psychological prediliction toward the broadest form of an evidently absurd belief which has long unbroken historical lines of propogation, based at least in large part on its cultural and political utility, to the point of universal normalization and constant reference, is NOT that the belief is true. I give it no credence for the same reasons I give none to the monster under every child's bed.
What do you think of Jaynes idea that without introspection, pain does not involve suffering? He called it "consciousness" -- at least related to something that you have already connected with "the good". Also, why would you consider--i.e., what reasons require--theists to be responsible for providing a theodicy for their omni-god when they typically don't feel that responsibility?
I have to say I'm a firm disbeliever in the value selection hypothesis. "Significant value" does some heavy lifting here. What does it describe exactly, if not the subjective values of the reader? I would say that the reader thinks of these things as "having significant value", because they were molded inside a world with things that clearly benefit them. To disprove this, all you have to do is to show me a thing that is valued despite not having any benefits ("any", because things like drugs might not be valued yet have a benefit, things like candies might be valued despite having a detriment). If we value something despite it having no benefits, that would prove me wrong, as it shows that it wasn't a benefit that shaped our values, but something else.
The true demarcation is not between those who believe in a "God" and those who do not. It is between those who believe in a rational approach to belief and those who could take-it or leave-it. The border is between people who believe in magic and people who do not.
I think God exists. Makes more sense.
El is on the other side of zero.
On this side it's "last Elohim standing" and the Church can't tell the difference between Genesis 1 Elohim and Genesis 2 Yahweh Elohim.
Kind of a shitshow.
Why do you think so?
Agnostic is an adjective. Atheist is a noun. One can be agnostic and atheist if one is not convinced of the existence of a god or gods, but does not believe it is possible to know for sure whether one exists. I don't understand why so many people think that atheists and agnostic are mutually exclusive traits. They describe two very different standards of knowledge and belief.
Exactly. I’ve been a self professed agnostic atheist for almost 2 years now.
@@Dock284 "agnostic atheist" is incoherent to me...but at best it is ambiguous. I know of no philosopher who uses that terminology, and I have shown using logic that the four-quadrant schema is both epistemically and logically untenable.
Agnostic means to not believe p and not believe ~p. Atheism and agnostic are mutually exclusive as positions on the proposition that God does not exist. Agnostic here has absolutely no relevance to knowledge, but is understood as being undecided.
When I grasp just how horrendous evils really are (which I cannot do of course, only catching glimpses), positive states seem accidental. Indeed, it can seem like there is a reverse value selection effect. If there were no happiness at all, complex creatures (the kinds capable of the most suffering) wouldn't try to survive. So if you want to maximize suffering then you need to motivate complex creatures just enough so they stick around to let you torture them. (The impulse to survive no matter what helps a lot with this.) Arguably the indifference hypothesis predicts either for there to be nothing at all or for there to be exactly this kind of chaotic clash between value and disvalue.
why not being theological noncognitivist? I take religious ambiguity as one of my reasons to keep igtheist
because there are some versions of theism that aren't unintelligible to me.
@@EmersonGreen gotcha
@@EmersonGreenzoroastrianism? That religion seems kinda legit, ngl
Emerson, I'll have to disagree with you on fine-tuning. I do think that it's just necessary that the values of the physical constants are the way they are.
Surely the fact that the only way out of infinite epistemic possibilities for the physical constants to be is life-permitting would be evidence for value-selection? The hypothesis "the physical constants of the universe are necessarily life-permitting" surely has too low of a prior probability for us to take seriously.
@@Nitroade24 It all depends on your view of modality.
@Nitroade24 I do not think that there is any value selection that is going on. There's no need for a biased outside agency if the way the values are is actually the only way they could ever be.
I don't think that necessity can really save you here. If the stars spelled out "I am the Alpha and the Omega. Jesus Christ is Lord. Repent and be saved", I don't think you'd rescue atheism by adopting necessitarianism. The message in the stars would still be evidence for theism (or the simulation hypothesis, or whatever). You can't defang evidence that is a priori very surprising by invoking necessity, I don't think.
@EmersonGreen But the stars do not line up in such ways as to spell out such messages. That's really not the same thing as the physical constants taking certain values. I agree with you regarding the stars, but that's not what we have in reality. If your objection is that necessity would mean that even obvious evidence for theism should be discarded, it just doesn't apply with the FTA because the analogy just doesn't work as well as you think. I think that the branching theory of modality is quite plausible, where all possible worlds share common history with the actual world, and at some point, there is chance divergence. This means that up to that point, all possible worlds are the same, so whatever is fixed then is necessarily the case because it doesn't vary. If the values of the constants were fixed at the beginning, then they could never vary, so they are just necessarily the way they are. On the other hand, if they were not fixed and go through some transition from not being fixed to being fixed during the chance divergence, then it's all just a matter of chance, and probabilities do not matter once you are committed to chance anyway. The other point is that the multiverse hypothesis paired with a selection effect is still perfectly viable. I am aware of the objections to the mutliverse hypotheses, and unlike Philip Goff and others, I think that they do not work. The fine tuning of the physical constants doesn't favour theism over naturalism at all.
Now, I don't think that the same answer is needed when objecting to the argument from psychophysical harmony. First, I don't think that there are such things as psychophysical laws, so I don't need to argue that these laws were fixed from the beginning in the initial state of natural reality. I am an identity theorist, so I think that there are just physical laws. Proponents of this argument say that evolution through natural selection can't be used for an explanation because it can not explain psychophysical laws. But I don't think that such laws need to be explained. What needs to be explained is why there seems to be such harmonious pairing between physical states and mental states that is fortunate for us, ie that allows us to survive and more or less thrive (here I am not going to discuss thriving and the problem of suffering). Well, I don't see why the naturalist, in the spirit of the evolutionary hypothesis, can't just postulate that there probably were species who had 'disharmonious' pairing of mental and physical states, and who were filtered out through natutal selection. This disadvantage (for example, they might have felt pleasure rather than pain from things that damage their bodies severely) resulted in the extinction of these species and only those with advantageous pairing between physical states and mental states survived to pass on their traits to their offspring. Thus, today, we are left with the species that exhibit the greatest degree of psychophysical harmony. Problem solved.
Lastly, I would like to discuss something about evidence. I agree that in general evidence is a piece of data that makes a hypothesis more probable than not. I suppose that you argue that psychophysical harmony and the appearance of fine tuning of the physical constants constitute evidence for theism, either because theism is more probable given the data, or because theism makes the data more probable (or both). But should we consider the data and hypotheses in isolation? If the data can also constitute evidence for naturalistic hypotheses, is the data still evidence for any either hypothesis, or is it ultimately no evidence for either of them? Does D constitute E for H iff it makes H more probable than not relative to all alternative H1, H2, H3, etc? Personally, I think that there is no available data whatsoever that favours theism over naturalism. Since naturalism wins in theoretical parsimony, it's just the better theory, and I accept it.
I'm a little confused. You did address tuning in a pretty comprehensive and, I thought, convincing way in the first episode. So it's very strange to me that you've since added "but I can imagine it being even worse so its more plausible on theism" and I don't really follow.
I understand that your approach to evidence has become much more tepid and drifted far from empiricism. But have you decided that actually we DO know that the laws could be different and and we DO know no significantly different versions of concious life are possible? What changed there?
Are the infinite possible universes where life is exponentially more prevalent and accommodated (and therefore condusive to fine tuning, as you once said) outweighed by the infinite possible universes like ours where intelligent life is evidently a niche chemical incident in a cosmos dominated by empty space, plasma balls, and dust, as opposed to the infinite possible universes where no life can exist at all? How does that even work? Or is this just contingent on your updated views of conciousness?
You remember episode 1?? Goodness.
I think there are convincing replies to those sorts of objections, provided you're not too dogmatic about certain things. Sorry to be vague. Maybe it would be worth making a more in-depth defense of the a priori fine tuning argument that I favor. (I could make a response video to myself from 2018...)
You're right that my understanding of epistemology has changed pretty dramatically in the intervening years, but I think I'm only relying on (a better understanding of) a standard Bayesian framework to defend the argument.
In the meantime, I would highly recommend Philip Swenson's defense of the fine tuning argument, which intentionally does not rely on all the controversial claims about physics that have always irked me: th-cam.com/video/MZR-PoFIRsw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=JiUsv_xKcRcz6bcZ
Do you think enough historical evidence or prophecies for a specific religion would be enough to overcome the prior low probability of hell?
If it gets to that point I'll let you know. The problem with this is... historical evidence for world religions is everywhere, just none for any of their fantastic claims. And prophecies are fulfilled all the time. Ask believers of Nostradamus.
The common consent argument I find unconvincing, given that there appear to be some fairly plausible mundane explanations for human behaviour, both individual and social, that would appear to have survival value and may lead naturally towards belief in the supernatural generally, and to a God or gods more specifically.
I am wholly unfamiliar with Rasmussen or Pierce so can’t comment on that.
I don't like religion because of the crowd or the group think which comes alongside it. I do however believe that there is a creator, I believe it is a more likely that there is a creator than there is not. When I was telling myself that I was an atheist, I felt I was lying to myself but I also feel the same if I claim I am a christian or whatever. My stance towards god is that until fields within various science can with no doubt say or prove that there is no god or the nature of such until than I will have an agnostic stance towards it all.
In my opinion - atheism and theism is on the same coin and people who claims to be one of either (especially the ones who makes a huge deal of it) of these tends shows poison and I don't want their poison.
Hey Emerson! Love your stuff - big fan! You're always welcome to join me in my Apatheism. I don't care if God exists even if He does. What's clear to me is that there is no way for us to know anything about God's existence, character, and will. But if he does exist, we certainly have more than enough evidence demonstrating His sadism, thoughtlessness, and pitiless indifference. Making Him not just irrelevant, but a moral menace and unworthy even of our interest, let alone worship. Keep up the great work! It's so heartening to see so many young, brilliant people like yourself stepping up and joining the cause in earnest.
So, what I got from this presentation is that I saw the duck first.
Y’all think you have problems... I’m an Agnostic Gnostic!
I think the ambiguity is due to people using different definitions for “God” ( see Jordan Peterson ).
But if you define God as an all-knowing mind that exists outside space and time, that’s a problem. I don’t believe it’s possible even in principle for there to be evidence for the existence of such a thing.
Maybe I’m ignorant. Could someone give me an example of evidence for the existence of such a thing?
Why is it a problem? Or it could be a panentheistic view where Mind/Source/God is the universe and/or outside of it. I agree, there is no evidence "scientific evidence" and there never will be, I suspect. I think the best we have are the thousands of personal mystical experiences. Out of body experiences, NDEs, angels, other religious experiences. And people that engage in spiritual practice are happier, more resilient and are less likely to be depressed.
@@zachr0 It’s a problem if evidence is not possible _even in principle_ for such a thing. Mystical experiences, NDEs, angels, and spiritual practices that improve quality of life do not depend on the existence of an all-knowing being or suggest the existence of an all-knowing being. It’s a non-sequitur.
If “all-knowing” is how God is defined ( and in my experience that has been the case) , the rational position is to say: “there is no evidence for God” … right?
@@MarkLeBay At the bottom of all "rationality" are brute facts which are circularly true. The experience of being human is not measurable or "provable" in the deepest sense because we can't study the lens we're perceiving through; the phenomenon of being conscious.
No two people have the same understanding of God. If there was a infinite omni God, we would not be able to comprehend it because we have finite brains. I dont see how the concept is incoherent, even in theory. Im not sure if the specifics of those "omni" categories are important but I know many describe mystical encounters of "source" or "God" as infinite. Pretty common across all religions too.
Its not a non sequitur. Why else are people who experience NDEs or mystical encounters more likely to believe in a "God"? Plently of famous cases of materialists changing their beliefs after an experience.
The real question is, if you had one of these experiences that are described as "more real than real", would you be persuaded? Many rational people are, or are at least pushed to agnosticism. But at this point, it seems like there are an embarrassment of riches of the accounts of transcendent spiritual experiences.
@@MarkLeBay All rationality is based on brute facts that are ultimately circular. Because of this, I think our epistemology needs to be pretty humble. We dont even know know what consciousness is, and our intelligence is finite.
I dont think its a non sequitor because people that have these transcendent religious experiences often describe God (or source or reality) as infinite.
An important question is, if you had one of these experiences that are described as "more real than real"...where you experienced infinite love or some kind of divine being, how would you respond to it? Many rational people, including materialists have changed their worldview.
We can know a cause through its effects. This is generally how we do science. But you observe correctly, we cannot have physical evidence (in space and time) for a non physical being. (not in space and time)
At 14:09: _"... Natural selection would have dutifully promoted the adaptive fitness of chemical gene-machines regardless of what dreams they were having..."_
Sure. Natural selection would have _"dutifully"_ promoted the adaptive fitness of chemical gene machines regardless of -what- *SOME* dreams they were having.
BUT some other "dreams" can and do have quite a devastating and dire consequences regarding natural selection and the adaptive fitness especially as a *type I error:*
*"Type I error vs Type II error"* by 365 Data Science ( th-cam.com/video/a_l991xUAOU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=DNayaRELF0SVZ4ws )
How and why do USAmericans do not get this about biological evolution by natural selection?!?
Of course natural selection has an effect or some effect on behavior and or adaptive behavior in general and not only just on _"adaptive fitness of chemical gene-machines",_ because of course it does.
Type I error: If you dream of there being no tiger in the bush and therefore do not run, when there is actually a tiger in the bush, then you'll end up eventually as tiger dinner.
Type II error: If you dream of there being a tiger in the bush and therefore do run, when there is actually no tiger in the bush, then you'll do not end up as tiger dinner and will survive.
*So of course there is a Selecting pressure towards that type II error Naturally.*
*And as such of course there is a Selecting pressure towards that type II error regarding that theistic God being falsely presupposed/preassumed/postulated Naturally, even when there are no gods in any bushes.*
Regsrdless, it is immoral to expect or command to be worshipped. I don't care how good you say you are. Worship is immoral. Who wants to be worshipped? I really don't. In fact, no healthy person should. Can you even try to say it is healthy? I can not.
Worship is a good thing for us. God doesn’t necessarily need worship.
Worship is immoral? Can you trust your own standards?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the non-dual conception of god
What is that?
@@strawpiglet God as conceived of in, for instance, Advaita Vedanta. Brahman, the immaterial, immanent being through which all is manifested and known and which constitutes ultimate reality. I'd like to know Emerson's views of this philosophy. The central principles, without the baggage.
Oh, I see. Thanks. I presented a related thought.@@Ockersvin
Unfortunately, people getting really upset over something usually means they cannot see the world in a multi-variate manner. Being able to quickly and efficiently see the world as a theist, atheist, or in-between is a mark of a learned philosopher. At the end of the day, we can agree to disagree and drink to the glory of knowledge - a truly Theist sentiment of common God image bearing as well as a common humanistic sentiment. Great stuff!
well how is atheism NOT a religion, just like with my belief i cannot prove that God exist, I just have faith in his promises and his existence, its faith, but to say you know something doesn't exist when you can't know is faith as well, faith you are correct about your beliefs
There's just so much we don't know, Agnosticism seems the only rational way to go. Fine tuning really doesn't add up to me though - perhaps we are the only really (sic) complex life in the whole universe and it's quite a fluke that we are here, that would mean that there is a hell of a lot of universe not fine tuned for life of any kind.
So you went from not believing in a god to not believing in a god?
Process philosophy?
First of all thank you for writing what you're explaining. I would much rather read through your arguments in a few minutes than have to listen to 30 minutes total. Otherwise I have to rely on my AI summary website to transcribe everything you're saying as a summary :P. No offense intended, I just like to read and think fast.
But it basically sounds like you find some form of limited theism convincing because of fine-tuning arguments or variations thereof. Like why our universe with conscious organisms evolving instead of boltzmann brains, stuff like that. Why no consciousness at all, etc. These to me are all variations of fine-tuning.
But I think what is critically important here is to note the reasons for why you find these things convincing - and to point out that essentially (you may hate to read this :P) it is a God of the gaps argument.
Like I would freely admit, as an atheist, that I don't have a good explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, or why the universe exists in a configuration to support life over a configuration that doesn'. But this is NOT therefore evidence that we should take theism seriously. It is ALWAYS illogical to reason this way. Just because you cannot think of a better explanation at the moment for why the universe is the way it is, is not license to invent a magical deity as a solution. We always need evidence for this being, unless you can somehow prove that there is no other conceivable option, which is an impossible standard to meet. And that is really the problem, and why it is a God of the gaps idea. Because we are making the claim "I can't think of any other theoretical solution...God seems the most plausible from the ones I CAN think about...so therefore God! Or therefore God is probable! Or therefore God seems plausible!". There could, especially in this case, be an infinite number of solutions we are unaware of, including solutions that we can't comprehend, or which break our human conception of logic. And unless you somehow rule all those solutions out a priori, it will always remain a God of the Gaps argument to simply assume that these solutions don't exist. Notice we can say precisely NOTHING regarding its "probability" of being correct here either, if probability is even the right language to be using.
Notice that there is no "evidence" pointing to a "designer" here either as theists like to claim. The fact the universe could be interpreted as being fine-tuned (I won't even get into the question of why we are assuming the constants can vary over such a wide range, which is a major unstated assumption) merely acts as a *possible* solution for the God hypothesis. There is nothing about a fine constant that says "hey, only God could have done this!" or "here is God's fingerprint". So yes...to conclude...this is God of the gaps. And it is wrong :). PS I agree that theists can be intelligent. But I am going to part ways with you when you say "rational". Rational to me, means that their arguments are logical or based in clear evidence. And to me this is precisely where they fail. Though personal experiences I think can show, perhaps, supernatural events. I don't mind agreeing to that
====
And on the flip side, in terms of allowing for an all-knowing God who allowed so much suffering in the world. I'm sorry to say but the argument that Gods reasons are beyond human comprehension is a valid counter-argument. It may be frustrating but that is irrelevant. All that matters is, its a valid counter. In fact that's the one WLC uses. Emotionally I agree with you its hard to square these two ideas of a loving God with so much suffering. But unless you can make a clear and coherent logical case for why this is a contradiction, that there couldn't have been any reason for God to perform these actions, then the argument is utterly lost.
>Otherwise I have to rely on my AI summary website to transcribe everything you're saying as a summary :P. No offense intended, I just like to read and think fast.
I'm sorry, are you telling me that you asked an AI to summarize my video instead of watching it?
Meh, I'll still like you if you become agnostic. Or theist, for that matter. Some of my best friends are theists, just go down the stairs to my basement and you'll find them all there.
It's slightly annoying to me that, when people consider agnosticism more in line with their epistemology because of the perceived weight of theistic arguments, they forget that those arguments are so focused on the "what" or the "why" that they're not just disinterested in the "how", they're giving the "how" the middle finger.
Take the fine-tuning argument: Even if you don't think the name itself is begging the question, it's definitely either an argument for a non omnipotent god, or a god who uses magic. Either god has to overcome some external constraints to set those constants to values that would make "life, the universe and everything" possible, or god forces the universe to work as intended with the values we measure as he could with any arbitrarily selected values. The latter a) makes the universe not a product of fine tuning and b) is magic:
- God did it. How, you ask? Well, god can do anything.
- Well, even forgetting the fact that he can't find the time to say 'hi", I can do many things, but one can usually explain how I do them, even when they can't explain why.
- Yeah, sorry, fuck "how". When it's god, there's no "how".
How does Occam not apply here? Why not say the values are what they are and there's no how, and skip introducing a middle man?
I welcome any objections, things I'm missing, or accusations of straw-manning the argument. (There's still room in my basement.)
good vid
Very nice and thoughtful video! At the end I think I can go most of the way towards agreeing, but I still call myself an atheist, because like you I reject the incredibly popular and widely held conceptions of god - specifically the god of the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions. So for the majority of people on the planet, I am an atheist: I believe their god does not exist and if I heard correctly, you believe it doesn't exist either.
Now if you get into more general kinds of theism, I can agree with you as an agnostic there. Though I do lean more towards the hypothesis of indifference than you do, probably by a lot. There was one bit that I wanted to bring up in particular: @18:14 I wonder if you say that the finitist form of theism would be compatible with your earlier claims about an afterlife existing. That does seem hard to square because if there could just be an afterlife, what's the point of this world an all it's suffering?
I think that kind of argument works against any kind of theism that raises the probability of an afterlife, meaning what we'd be left with is a kind of impersonal mind-first basis of reality. But then I do tend to lean towards a mindless basis of reality, because I don't find type 1 physicalism nearly as implausible as you do.
Thank you!
>I wonder if you say that the finitist form of theism would be compatible with your earlier claims about an afterlife existing. That does seem hard to square because if there could just be an afterlife, what's the point of this world an all it's suffering?
I do think they're compatible. I don't understand the objection. If God is limited, then it makes *more* sense, not less, that pain and suffering would be unavoidable to provide us a decent life, just as it is with limited, finite human fathers.
@@EmersonGreen Right, I agree that a limited god makes much more sense about why we have suffering in the world.
The objection is about the afterlife, if there is supposed to be a limited god + afterlife with a heaven. Heaven still would be a place with no evil or suffering, at least presumably.
The objection goes - if limited god can create a heaven, why are we not just created there? The entire reason a limited god is far more plausible is because limited god can't create a world without evil, but an eternal afterlife w/ heaven is a state of existence without evil.
So if you come up with a kind of theodicy as to why limited god needs people to go through the actual world of suffering before they can get into a heaven, then that theodicy probably applies to the normal tri-omni god as well.
What do you think?
Can human reason alone prove or disprove the existence of God?
9:30 I thought so too, the world that we live in does not reflect what the Bible describes heaven. But in my own view, grave evil is something that I don’t expect to happen to me, but the fact that atrocities do happen, makes me think that there can be an experience that is good.
So my monkey brain logic:
Heaven is too good to be true, but evil is too horrible to be true, yet it exists, so heaven must be possible.
@user-dy3uh Idk man, the holocaust was laughable to some Jews before they went. Some thought that Auschwitz was just some rumor.
There can be grave evil, and grave good. Is there so much evil that it’s unbelievable? Depends on the person. Some believe nothing bad can happen to them until it does.
Atheism is the position that there is no evidence for the existence of a god, untill such evidence arrises.
Which is where you seem to be at.
"We don't know untill we do"
Is a fair assessment at any rate.
Atheism is the belief there is God. No university uses your usage of atheism. It's silly.
I'm not 100% confident that homeopathy (in all its forms) is false and baloney even though I lean towards that so I'm not an A-Homeopatheist. I'm just agnostic about it. **eyeroll**
I'm not using "agnostic" in the idiotic "I'm not absolutely certain" way. I'm saying that I think there's decent evidence in both directions.
@@EmersonGreen
what's the tipping point into atheism then?
There can't be any decent evidence for a view otherwise agnostic? Even if a majority and the leanings are heavily on one side?
@@robertsaget9697did you…watch the whole video?
@@EmersonGreen
Terrible video.
If your duck walks on water or your rabbit comes back to life
That is theist evidence.
Do you think we have free will?
yeah. I have a playlist about it here: th-cam.com/play/PLgCsHWkb9NYseXilnODg310qKxXCJSdWZ.html&si=JMmPdyI1Elaw5B5J
Sorry, Huxley. Agnosticism is a useful tool for categorization, but to ID as an "agnostic" doesn't say what you are so much as what you're not. To see why, just swap gods for other hypothetical beings e.g. Martian microbes. Do they exist? Gnostic affirmers: "Definitely." Gnostic deniers: "Definitely not." Agnostic believers: "Probably." Agnostic disbelievers: "Probably not." Agnostic nonbelievers: "I'm neutral." (Of course, affirmers also believe just as deniers also disbelieve but not vice versa). It's the same with gods.
To ID as "agnostic" doesn't say whether you're a believer, disbeliever or neutral; atheist or theist. The vast majority of theists are affirmers who hold to some sort of _personal_ god. Believers are basically deists; who believe in some nebulous "higher power" or "ground of all being" without ascribing any gender, desires, feelings or motivations to their god or gods. To ID as an "agnostic atheist" shows you're not an ultra-rare gnostic denier but doesn't reveal whether you're a neutral nonbeliever or a disbeliever. They both qualify.
This is the Rainbow Model: a handy tool for assessing who had the burden of what vis-a-vis hypothetical beings. Red 🔴affirmers. Orange 🟠believers. Yellow 🟡nonbelievers. Green 🟢disbelievers. Blue 🔵deniers. The burden of substantiation increases as you move outward from the no-burden center: rational justification for the 🟠s & 🟢s. Objective proof for the 🔴s & 🔵s.
Dude, this is some next level schizophrenia.
Never having come across you or your videos before, what I hear is a man who is emotionally drawn to the idea of a celestial overseer/"God" and who, desiring to move himself closer to accepting the reality of this notion, has swallowed an awful lot of mumbo-jumbo.
It is very simple: Do you believe that a "God" exists? If you do, you are a theist. If you do not, you are an atheist. If you DO believe that a "God" exists, you must have good, credible evidence to support this belief. Philosophical arguments are NOT good, credible evidence. They are narratives; they are products of the fertile, human imagination. As such, they are not very far removed from the imagining of our more primitive ancestors.
Agnosticism is best distinguished from atheism these days by putting the emphasis on knowledge. If one is not claiming to KNOW that "God" exists or does not exist, one can be said to be agnostic. I can think of no good reason why one cannot be an agnostic atheist. But the only reason to embrace the term "agnostic" while rejecting "atheism" is because one has begun to BELIEVE that a "God" exists.
I’m an atheist who does confess to a creator probably existing, YWHW and Jesus is human trickery not it.
The ambiguity is all in your head EG.
ALSO you have a strange definition of rationality... mental consistency .
Also ... Bible?
Just accept death means death of all conscious experience and all these constant arguments get tiresome.
11.00
Good
But we are left with a lot of work to do.
value selection hypothesis just seems unfalsifiable - any possible world would be perfectly predicted by a god who wanted that exact world. there's no a priori reason to think a god would care about anything we find valuable, or be any more probable than any of the infinitely possible gods that don't.
I talk about unfalsifiability in a video called 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology. It sounds like we disagree about it.
@EmersonGreen we definitely do. specific religious claims might be falsifiable but general fine tuning arguments for a god can't be. and a finite god might be even more undetectable/unfalsifiable since we couldn't say whether it wanted to create intelligent life for a brief instant in time on one little blue speck, or if we're just an unintended side effect of it creating some eact number of black holes in the universe.
I think the problem with value selection is the apparent assumption that minds are part of that process.
If we believe that black hole cosmology is true, then an infinite series of black holes are forming where the parameters are tuning towards forming black holes, which requires large masses, which form stars and planets and coincidentally form life.
Any other theory which also allows for continual universe production with modification means that of course any universe with life would be good for life, even if it's a side effect. Anthropic principle.
Ultimately fine-tuning arguments amount to nothing, because our data set is woefully insufficient.
@@Rogstin i mean yeah, that is another problem with it. we don't even know if the laws of nature could be any different in the first place, it's just arm chair probability, like declaring the chance of a penny landing on its edge is 1/3 because it technically has 3 faces
8:00
No
Just no.
This is non science.
You have picked up thiest dullness somewhere
Nice objection to the sophisticated argument from psychophysical harmony: "No. Just no."
I'm sure Dr Crummett will realise he was wrong all along and stop defending his argument thanks to your input.
It's obviously not science - it's philosophy.
12.00 very good 👍
Why is it for so many so hard to understand that gnostic and agnostic is about knowing and not knowing, and theism and atheism about belief and non-belief? One can be an agnostic theist or agnostic atheist, et cetera. It's not one or the other.
Excellent video 👏👏👏
9:46 - This world is dominated by Darwinian evolution and the concerns of Darwinian evolution. That destroys the coherence of a being who is all good or all love creating this world *in direct congruence* with it's good or love. It doesn't require an evil being but it does require a being with much different intentions, for example what Donald Hoffman talks about - ie. an Aleph 1, Aleph 2, etc. where it's exploring all existing possibilities indifferent to quality or outcome, almost dutifully since it identifies itself with all existing things, and a cosmos seemingly tuned to generate psychopathy from natural selection, entropy, and second law of thermodynamics is much less of a problem than said overmind not examining and experience said world - even if said world was in a Minkowski block universe where we unconditionally went extinct in the 21st or 22nd century and all of the suffering - from our perspective - was null and void in terms of any real meaning or purpose while trying to survive within the universe. That's the closest thing to a rational answer as to why so many NDE'ers keep coming back with apex experiences of unconditional love, being told what really sounds like very friendly gas-lighting or disinformation, and get sent back in - and that mystery deepens when such people have miraculous medical recoveries or have elements of their NDE that seem to verify that their minds genuinely touched some larger database even if we can't assume that them learning things they couldn't have known at that time (having 360 degree spherical vision be a common feature of NDE's, something we have no wiring for, or blind-from-birth people 'seeing' and being disturbed by it, lots of weird stuff but very little of it is what people want it to be such as Harry Potter magic or The Secret being real).
TBH I'm not sure which is more or less unsettling - a universe where you literally come into existence in the womb and cease to exist forever at death or a world where, as John Gray would describe it, you go from one place having no idea where you are or what's happening on to a different environment where you still have no idea what's happening or why, particularly if you were forever the plaything of an impersonal overmind. The people who get a ton of comfort from new age or occult beliefs tend not to think that deeply about it, ie. they're coping like most people and will pull in whatever seems to work well enough in the short term.
We don’t use Darwinian evolution we used a far more modern version of evolution which we have confirmed is 100% fact.
@@Dock284 ty, glad I didn't have any typos.
How does evolution destroy the idea of God as ultimate good/love? It could be that this world is a challenge/difficult "video game" that God/we incarnate into for the challenge. The same reason why someone might want to climb mount everest. They would climb it is difficult and the suffering involved is the point. The suffering makes the endeavor more glorious.
@@zachr0 it doesn't destroy the idea that God could be ultimate good/love, it's just that IMHO it destroys the notion that this world - as it is - is a demonstration of that love. In the most wildly benevolent spin I could put on that - maybe it's like loving parents sending a kid to football two-a-days through the summer, it's just that... this roughly describes the Masonic Great Work and a lot of other alchemical reincarnational stories that, to me at least for several years, sounded more plausible than Christianity until I see just how base much of the world is and what's required to win - particularly in ages of moral decadence. I also noticed that people who tend to pile into esoteric orders tend to either be elderly (like church returning baby boomers) or they tend to be people with disabilities - meaning life challenges, like culture shredding it's contract with disabled and LGBT and them needing to search for deep meaning and join esoteric fraternities, this all seems to only suggest causal dynamics within this lifetime and in most cases the world is filled with suffering that's not just meaningless at our level but it's wildly redundant as well - such as millions of people suffering from the same illness, same sort of social ostracism, etc. meaning even if reincarnation is true I don't think we're on a self-purifying journey through incarnation - there seems to be no credible display of that in the world. If all of that seemed a bit gobledigook or 'Why is he talking about esoteric orders?' - If there was a central priority that the local universe had for civilizing humans, promoting liberal democracy, and promoting progress of mind - it feels like we're staggering to make any of that happen and most of it goes up in heat with destructive competition, back-stabby politics, etc. and it seems like it can be taken away every few generations or so which is not what the world would look like if we were making a growing number of adepts through reincarnation.
So if it's incoherent as even a painful spiritual cultivation system like the old Renaissance alchemical woodcuts seemed to suggest, and if a higher power still finds this place valuable it's goals and aims are probably orthogonal to our programming for survival on this planet which is Darwinian and sexual selection, possibly also group selection, oriented.
@@carbon1479 Reincarnation or not, whether there is progress or not on earth... The human experience of suffering can still be an expression of love. Because all suffering could, in theory, lead to "soul building" or character building. Lots of NDEs have an idea that suffering is preplanned and consensual between God and the soul. And suffering is relative. What appears to be huge amounts of suffering, would seem as insignificant as getting a paper cut in a dream. And suffering may be something that, in the course of a soul journey, is something we are trying to collect, rather than avoid.
Did you just not know that atheism and agnosticism aren’t mutually exclusive?
Did you watch the video?
Atheism and agnosticism as related to the ontological status of God are in fact logically mutually exclusive.
@@SteveMcRae No. They’re not. Agnosticism deals in what a person knows (for certain) and atheism deals with what a person believes (to be true). So, an agnostic atheist (like just about every atheist out there) is someone doesn’t KNOW for certain that a god doesn’t exist, but they operate their daily lives on the belief that one doesn’t exist based on the lack of evidence.
@@purv989 Not a single university teaches what you just said. I will stick with ACTUAL academic usages of terms. You're COMPLETELY wrong and would fail out of intro to philosophy of religion.
"Nowadays, the term “agnostic” is often used (when the issue is God’s existence) to refer to those who follow the recommendation expressed in the conclusion of Huxley’s argument: an agnostic is a person who has entertained the proposition that there is a God but believes neither that it is true nor that it is false. Not surprisingly, then, the term “agnosticism” is often defined, both in and outside of philosophy, not as a principle or any other sort of proposition but instead as the psychological state of being an agnostic. Call this the “psychological” sense of the term. " - SEP
Please don't try to correct me if you have literally no education in the subject and CLEARLY don't know what you're talking about...it is annoying and I don't suffer fools well.
@@SteveMcRae It’s okay to be wrong (which you are). It’s not okay to whinge about it and haughtily act like you’re informed. I explained to you how they’re not mutually exclusive. You’re literally on TH-cam. Take two seconds and search “agnostic atheism.” I swear, people have the breadth of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet will remain willfully ignorant rather than do 2 seconds of research.
If you've fallen for the fine-tuning fallacy, you're not as smart as you think you are.
Almost every time anyone thinks they've understood probability, they don't really understand probability.
The entire universe is finely tuned for us, and that's why we can _only_ survive on a small fraction of the surface of this infinitesimal mote of dust soon to be devoured by the sun as it itself reaches the end of its life. Yep, seems _very_ fine-tuned to me. 😅
What's the fallacy?
@@Nitroade24 ALL of it.
The idea that the universe is specially tuned for human life to eventually be able to survive on a tiny part of one planet in the vastness of the cosmos.
The idea that the physical constants that determine how matter and energy behave in our universe were chosen from a set of options.
The idea that a supreme being outside our universe is twiddling the laws of physics so that we can exist.
It's ALL bunkum.
@@ziploc2000Maybe it’s reality?
You said, "Making the case for Atheism." Atheism does not have the burden of proof unless we are using different definitions.
I'd always been the "I'll actually make arguments for my position" kind of atheist as opposed to the "I'll make arguments that I shouldn't have to give you arguments" kind of atheist.
Igtheism first and foremost. Let us all define the god we’re talking about first. Im atheist toward gods known to man, agnostic to some possible entity “out there.” Christian God’s name (in common usage) being “God” really muddies the waters of discourse.
EDIT: Okay, I see he deals with these subtleties of theism near the end of the video. :)
@@EmersonGreenNope. I don't need argue my position for not believing in Leprechaun's. Do you? But it seems you feel you need to make a special exception for a god. Well, that's great you feel that way. I just don't care about your feelings and neither does truth.
@@Mr.PeabodyTheSkeptic I assume there are reasons you believe Leprechauns don't exist, no? Or do you genuinely not have any arguments against the existence of leprechauns? Additionally, claims about Leprechauns are not claims about the fundamental nature of reality. Saying that a worldview that doesn't contain leprechauns is probably coherent is pretty uncontroversial because Leprechauns aren't meant to have any influence on things like the beginning of the universe or the existence of consciousness or fine-tuned constants or be the foundation of ethics and beauty and this kind of thing. However, the moment you positively say "an atheistic worldview is coherent", you give yourself the burden of proof in explaining certain phenomena like those generally explained by theists as related to God.
Personally, I think there are good atheistic ways to explain all the phenomena in the universe, but we're certainly not going to get anywhere near good explanations if we don't make a positive case.
Atheism only doesn't have the burden of proof until you claim that atheism is a coherent worldview, but I highly doubt that most atheists would want to prevent themselves from saying that atheism is a coherent worldview.
All positions to be rational have some type of burden of proof, and there are many different types of burdens.
Agnosticism is about knowledge.
Atheism is about beliefs.
They are NOT mutually exclusive.
Exactly. There are agnostic theists AND agnostic atheists of which I am one.
Knowledge is a subset of belief that only includes beliefs that are sufficiently rationally justified (or meet an externalist condition). If you believe that God doesn't exist, but you don't think that you know that God exists, then you are admitting that your belief is irrational and unjustified. Thus, atheistic or theistic agnosticism are irrational positions.
@@Nitroade24It is not a requirement that beliefs be held rationally.
More like lack of knowledge, and atheism lack of belief.
Welp. Time for my unfollow. Thanks anyway 🤷🏿♂️
bye! 👋
Did this dude just announce his departure from a very well thought out video? LOL Lawl!
For goodness sake, do you believe in a supernatural god or not?
It's a yes or no answer.
Shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't know", doesn't inform anyone about what you believe.
If you don't know if you believe something, then you technically don't believe it lol.
It's more a yes or anything question, and as long as the answer is *not* yes, then you are atheist. Weak/strong, whatever. Atheist.
@@FaptainCalcon750 Exactly, it baffles me why so many people struggle with this concept. It's not like you can't change your mind the next day if you learn something new.
@@downenout8705 I suppose it's for the same reason they think that "agnostic" and "atheist" are different degrees of the same axis rather than orthogonal axes: knowledge and belief.
@@mikolmisol6258 Exactly, but it's so simple to for anyone to recognise this that I am still baffled by why people struggle with such a simple concept.
Your science is weak .
Your religion is weaker