3 Hours of the Argument from Contingency w/ Dr. Josh Rasmussen

so the argument from contingency is hands down my favorite argument for the existence of god and there's one big reason for this at least for me personally the biggest reason is that a couple years ago at this point i went through a period of doubt where i wasn't necessarily like an agnostic or an atheist or anything but i was very very seriously doubting a lot of the arguments for the existence of god there was one argument in particular that i was wrestling with and i just remember hearing like a really good critique of this argument and being like it does kind of seem just like to come down to a clash of intuitions between like the theist side and the atheist side on here and i can see how like any you know a rational person could take this position or this objection and they'd be able to to get out of this argument and i just remember that having a real profound impact on me and being like that's probably the case for a lot of these arguments and then comes the argument from contingency the version of the argument from contingency that i found in the work of dr josh rasmussen now he has in his work he's got a couple different versions of the argument from contingency but one in particular i remember when i first encountered it i was like blown away it this this argument is not the kind in my view that you can just be like okay this is a clash of intuitions like someone could just sort of rationally disagree with this there's objection there's good objections to it and i no longer have that opinion i know that that may sound a bit strong to a lot of you out there watching but that's the view that i eventually came to that's how powerful i think this argument is and that's what i truly believe and i'd be lying if i didn't say that i believe that and maybe i'm wrong it could be it could be that i'm just not seeing something that's always possible but nevertheless what you're about to hear in this video this is just the introduction for a video where i recorded a four-part series which was originally scheduled to be a two-parter but we split it into four parts in the podcast and this originally was only available on the podcast but what i wanted to do was make it available because i think it's so important i wanted to make it available in just like one long video for all everybody on youtube so you could just listen to this interview that i did with dr josh rasmussen on the argument from contingency just the whole thing through so we split it into really two main sections so it was four podcast episodes but it was two main sections we split it into stage one and stage two so i'll explain a little bit about what those two stages are so in the argument from contingency there was a really helpful philosopher back in the day that a guy named william rowe who made this distinction in the argument from contingency between there's like there's basically two parts to this argument and so splitting it up can kind of see uh help us see what part we're we're trying to focus on at the current moment so in stage one stage one is all about establishing excuse me i'm currently drinking my uh cup of joe as as the the kids kids don't definitely don't say that and this is not even coffee i don't know what i'm trying to say uh back to what we were talking about stage one of the argument from contingency is all about establishing that there's some kind of necessary foundation for realities there's a necessary part of reality the reason why that's even like a thing is because contingency the opposite of contingency is a necessity so the argument from contingency gets you to a necessary thing and that's what stage one is all about it gets you to a necessary foundation of all other contingent things so that's stage one and then stage two uh traditionally of these arguments is about making the connection between that stage one thing that you arrived at the necessary being the necessary part of reality the necessary thing making the connection between that and god so like these divine attributes how do we know that this thing is omniscient omnipotent omni-benevolent how do we know that those divine properties sort of fall out of this necessary foundation so that's what stage two arguments are all about and what's interesting is that atheist philosophers like graham oppe and there this seems to be like a trend among academic philosophers at least in the atheist tradition there seems to be a move a shift recently to where they're accepting stage one and they're saying that yeah there is a necessary thing or there's a necessary foundation for reality but what they do now is they get off they jump ship at stage two so they say that that necessary thing is just like part of the universe it's not you know it's not an agent it doesn't have the will or intentions or mind and so that that's to me that's progress but it's just a sort of interesting sociological note um but to get back on point so what you're about to hear is the interview that i did with dr josh rasmussen where we talked about stage one and stage two in this four-part series that's been at this point is up until today has only been available on the podcast in these these four different parts but what i wanted to do is just string them all together into one long video that you can enjoy on the youtube channel so that's what you're about to hear you're about to hear this really really good and powerful version of the argument from contingencies stage one and stage two arguments and you're going to hear the the argument that basically pulled me out of my period of doubt and it's just i think one of the most important things that i've ever done on the channel even though you know obviously i was just interviewing josh and it's it's josh's arguments but i think it's hands down one of the most important things that we've ever produced so yeah that's what you're about to hear i hope you guys enjoy it let me know what you think in the comments below and without further ado here you go here is my long very long interview with dr josh rasmussen on the argument from contingency [Music] you guys i can't tell you how excited i am to do this podcast it's been a long time coming josh we we originally scheduled to to sit down and record this back in the beginning of september and now it's october it's been a long time i've been like i said i've i've been so excited to record this podcast ever since before i did the discussion with alex o'connor cosmic skeptic on unbelievable i wanted to make sure that we did a two-parter series on the contingency argument with you so first of all thanks for coming on to the podcast we've had you on a couple times already on the youtube channel but it's it's great to have you on the podcast thank you it's awesome to be with you great so for for anyone who may not be familiar with you your work tell us a little about your background what you do for a living and then also i wanted to ask a question from you specifically because i've seen your testimonial video i think it's on youtube you guys can go search it i'll even put it in the the podcast show notes but have you always been a christian like how did that come about because i know that you went through a period of doubt and then came back ever since i was an embryo in my mother's womb oh just kidding oh yeah so you know i think as anybody can relate to when they go through a process of transition from their parents worldview or their communities worldview for me my worldview sort of just completely shattered as i began to have my own questions about things and so at that point i would say i didn't really have any beliefs and i was just on a quest to find out more about the world and this quest eventually just led me to become a philosopher so at some point on my journey i just remember feeling a conflict in my soul between what i might hope to be true and what actually just seemed to be true and when i when i felt that conflict i actually gained i would say an awareness of the value and the courage it takes to face reality to follow reason and evidence to speak truth and actually remember making a decision that i was going to just seek truth so who i am is a philosopher and i had to sort of rethink everything um as a philosopher yeah so i don't know if you want to follow up on that i mean there's a lot i could say about my background right yeah yeah i just remember you talking about how you went through this period of doubt yes and it changed your perspective specifically with how you interact with other people who don't believe like you do yeah so let's yeah let's let's talk about that a little bit i think that that's that was one of the things that really stuck out to me and one of the things that i've learned from you and try to emulate is that we don't have to just be so combative and it's like this team versus our team you know and we're trying to beat them and right it doesn't have to be that way yeah there's a sense of community you know that we get from our tribe from people who think like us and but then this can be a problem because we tend to simplify people who are sort of not thinking like us and we imagine why they think what they think and we tend to oversimplify and demonize to some extent and in my case it wasn't so much that i was demonizing people who didn't agree with me but it was that i didn't really understand what it was like to be them and so as you remember specifically when i was in high school senior year there was a friend in my biology class and he was just asking these questions about the existence of god and i had some arguments and and he had some good questions against my arguments and i didn't really fully understood what it was like to be him until i had my own questions and stopped believing god myself and then from that standpoint of just not believing in sort of an ultimate great foundation that would design the world with purpose i realized that my friend he had a lot of courage to ask his questions because i i mean i knew that it took me courage to face reality to ask my questions and that helped to break down this i think oversimplified view of people and it also just gave me a compassion and a love for people like just as people like people are just people and i keep thinking about this even like now it's like a theme for me is i think sometimes arguments get in the way of seeing people because we see their arguments we think of people through the lens of what they believe or what their arguments are maybe they have silly arguments or good arguments so that we think of them as either sort of kind of silly or kind of sophisticated but you know people are more important than their arguments and people can switch arguments they can switch beliefs and so for me it was the shattering of my worldview that that also helped to break down i think these sort of invisible barriers between me and other people and so now it's just all different when i meet people who see the world differently i have more of an exciting feeling inside i want to learn more i see it's an opportunity for sort of mutual conversation and ultimately i keep coming back to this principle which is like that people matter the most the person matters and so i don't know it's sort of ironic when people get to these arguments and i've experienced this where sounds like the arguments start mattering more than the person and it's especially ironic if the argument is about reasons for thinking that people have value such as maybe an argument for um people being made in the image of god or something and then we devalue people in our attempts to try to support those arguments and so i discovered the irony of myself and that i think helped break me out of that the idea as you were talking of how arguments can get in the way of people is mind-blowing i'm just thinking about that as we're as we're going along here well let's let's talk a little bit let's sort of set the context for the argument that we're discussing today which is the argument from contingency and in part one the episode you're listening to now we're discussing stage one of the argument from contingency and the next episode we'll discuss stage two so let's first try to figure out why are we splitting it up into stages why is that helpful i to me i think it's a really helpful distinction i think it was uh william rowe who first made the the distinction between the stage one and stage two and i think there's even a stage three if i'm not mistaken but so what let's talk a little about why we want to break it up into these stages yeah i find it helpful to break the argument the stages because it sort of separates just the different parts of the argument like so for example you know what is this argument about it's about the foundation of things okay the foundation of everything and the two stages together are about a great conclusion about the foundation in particular that the foundation is itself great supremely great then which there is no greater and the first part of the argument focuses not on trying to show that foundation of things is god or is supremely great but it focuses on something much more modest it focuses on rather just that there is an ultimate foundation and that it has in nature that allows it to explain all the contingent things that there are and the reason to separate the stages is because these two conclusions the first being that the conclusion of stage one that there's this foundation that has this nature that allows it to explain the contingent things is something that people could think is true independently of whether they think that god exists independently of whether they think the conclusion of the second stage is true and so i like to think of the argument it's almost like a bridge with many steps and so certain steps take you to stage one and then more steps take you to stage two and so by separating it we can sort of focus and get clear on what we're talking about i want to provide a little bit more clarity on stage one yeah but before that let's talk about some of the terminology that's going on because you've already talked about contingency you've talked about foundation right let's cover some of the basic terms that we're going to need to understand what's going on because these terms are actually pretty technical or at least they require some kind of technical definition so that we know what we mean when we're using these terms in this argument so so what are the basic terms that we need to understand yeah okay so first i think it could be helpful just to even say like what's the purpose of the argument and the way i think of the argument is it's a tool so as i mentioned just briefly we can think of the argument from contingency as a tool for investigating ultimate reality okay what's ultimate reality well ultimate reality would be what you might think of as sort of like the ultimate explanation of things if there is such thing and the argument from contingency as a tool to get insight into ultimate reality and so then some of the key terms obviously one of the terms is contingent so what does that mean right basically a contingent thing is just something that doesn't have necessary existence so what does that mean well for example take a leaf so a leaf doesn't have necessary existence because you could smash the leaf and it could be completely annihilated maybe its part still exists but that particular leaf doesn't still exist so as long as its non-existence is an actual possibility then it doesn't have necessary existence and it counts as contingent we need to distinguish contingency from dependence sometimes these are confused in popular language and i think it's because there is a use of the term contingent that does just be independent or for the purposes of the argument from contingency contingent doesn't mean dependent so dependence example um a leaf will be dependent on the causes that produced it so you know the leaf comes up from the plant and the leaf its existence ultimately depends on whatever ultimately produces it without its underlying causes the leaf wouldn't have existed and so in that sense the leaf is also dependent it's contingent and dependent and you might think that whatever is contingent is dependent but that's a further step that's a further argument to be made just as far as defining terms we have contingent we have dependent and then we have necessary and so something is necessary if just if it isn't contingent uh it exists but it doesn't have contingent existence so then it'll count as having necessary existence those are some of the main terms the key terms for stage one the way that i like to frame contingent is in terms of like this thing can fail to exist and you mention that with the leaf like if you smash the leaf or if you burn it i mean another easy example to think of is like a chair if we threw a chair in a furnace then it would be eaten up destroyed or turn to ash so that chair is contingent it didn't have to be there uh it probably wasn't there for all of eternity if we were talking about a chair that we known our experience chairs are made by humans so it didn't always exist and then it can be snuffed out it can go out of existence so this is a contingent thing it can come into being it can go out of being and then i also like to just say well a necessary thing is like just the opposite of a contingent thing it's like yes that's something that cannot fail to exist so it has to always be there it has to be there for eternity it has to always exist and every and this is more philosophical jargon it has to exist in every possible world but i like how you distinguish between contingent and dependent yeah if we can what was your definition of dependent one more time well actually i don't have a definition because i think it's sort of a basic relation but i was trying to illustrate it with a um example with an example so okay if the leaf is produced by some prior causes that allow that leaf to exist then we can say that the leaf depends on those prior causes maybe if you want to have a definition you could say x depends on y means that x would only exist if y exists there's actually problems with that definition because we can think of necessary things that would only exist if other necessary things exist but they don't actually depend on each other but that sort of technical worry aside that generally x depends on y then you know x wouldn't exist without y sort of the idea maybe i'm trying to think of an illustration that would help so if we're thinking about a movie okay a movie is made by humans so a movie is dependent upon the existence of humans at least the movies in our world right right i think that's an easy way to think about if we take away though the movies wouldn't exist right like if the humans didn't produce them yeah right that's the idea okay all right well let's move on to we're still talking about stage one and why this is important so what you already mentioned the goal of stage one is to talk about the foundation of reality how it's a necessary kind of thing yeah uh so let's also talk about this is something that i i really like to uh emphasize in and i also did this in my discussion with alex was atheists can endorse stage one you don't have to jump off ship right at this point in stage one of the argument you can actually accept stage one and then you can get off at stage two right so so let's talk about that a little bit and and how the the the reach i suppose maybe that's a bad way to put it stage one can appeal to all sorts of people it doesn't have to just appeal to christians to theists it can appeal to anybody yeah right so you know in the exchange i had with graham opie for example he would accept the conclusion of stage one or at least that's his preferred theory of things that there is a initial item foundational item that has a necessary nature it cannot fail to exist its existence is necessary and yet he would decline to think that this foundational thing is supreme in nature so that's something we'll look at when we look at stage two but one could right be an atheist and endorse the conclusion of stage one and i i recommend that i so if you don't believe in god i recommend stage one and i recommend it just because to be very honest with you i think it's uh a sound argument okay well let's let's move on to in your work and what i've noticed because i read a lot of your work you may not know that people may not know that i'm i'm joking of course but what i wanted to say was that i've noticed you use a lot of different routes in establishing your conclusions you like to have a lot of different maybe bridges is the the right term you like to have a lot of routes a lot of roads to the same place so let's talk about some of the different routes that you've discovered or that you've you also mentioned that you like to to be a sort of creator of these new ideas and help to think creatively yeah so let's talk about some of the ways that you've defended stage one and go from there yeah so i mean just right away i want to just address a worry that someone could have so you might worry that maybe i'm sort of starting with the conclusion in mind and then i'm just trying to find routes to that conclusion and you might worry that that's not really a reasonable way of like finding truth right this is post hoc rationalizing but on the other hand even before i respond to that worry i would like want to acknowledge that word like that's a legitimate worry so i think when we're looking at these pathways we want to you know keep in mind kind of like what's our goal so if our goal is truth then you know we want to find out okay are these pathways actually reasonable like do they actually lead us to truth and one of the reasons that i've explored many different pathways is because well it really was inspired originally i first started this back in college and it was inspired by just this curiosity about whether i had made some mistake in my thinking so you know first i found a kind of simple pathway where we argue from a principle of explanation and perhaps the simplest way to put it would be if we want to try to explain contingent things ultimately we can't appeal to just contingent things to provide the an ultimate explanation of contingent things because that would be circular that's like creating the chickens in terms of chickens like i mean uh even if you have an infinite regress of chickens you don't have sort of an ultimate explanation of why there are any chickens at all just by appealing to chickens right so in a similar way even if there's an infinite regress of contingent things you're not going to explain why there are any contingent things at all you're not going to have an ultimate explanation unless there's something that's not self-contingent and by definition the only thing that isn't contingent would be a necessary thing so this is one pathway to a necessary foundation for contingent things but i remember when i was in college and i was asking people what they thought about this pathway of reason and one of the questions people would ask is like well why i think there is an ultimate explanation maybe some things have an explanation but maybe when it comes to sort of the ultimate explanation of contingent things that's just root right and so i mean one response is to give arguments for thinking that there are that you know that there is an ultimate explanation um so that's one pathway that i explored but a different pathway i explored is instead to take a route from possible explanation so i remember i just asked well do you think that as far as logic goes it's logically possible for there to be an explanation for any contingent state of things and many of the people who are skeptical or who question whether there's an ultimate explanation found it quite plausible that there was at least a logically possible explanation and so then i found a pathway that moves from a logically possible explanation to the possibility of a necessary foundation of things and then using recent developments in the logic of necessity and possibility i was able to show from there a pathway from the possibility of an sre being for necessary foundation to its actual existence so here's two kinds of paths one from actual explanation and then another from possible explanation do you like to comment in any of the of those paths at this point no i'm just listening i'm actually waiting to hear and i don't know if you're actually going to discuss it or if you are planning to but in your work and on your youtube videos and stuff i've seen you actually use another pathway even from dependence and that one i haven't seen anyone else defend and maybe that's just a matter of me being so focused on your work because i love it so much but let's maybe talk about that one a little bit and we can come back and discuss the other one because i do have some things that i want to say yeah sure and i mean and by the way uh there's my website necessarybeing.com where people can sort of explore for themselves a number of pathways because there i just ask questions and then based on your answers i ask more questions and so yes there's many different pathways a more recent pathway i mean this is after finishing graduate school and as i began to just think again about these things from another angle i was struck by oh i'm always looking for like what's the clearest okay this is like a a tool that i use in thinking about things if things are unclear then i try to find okay what's the clearest and one of the things that struck me as being clear is that there can't be a cause that exists outside of all that exists okay because if there were cause that exists outside all that exists then since it's outside all that exists then it doesn't exist but then if it exists and doesn't exist that's a contradiction and it seems like manifestly clear that there can't be this contradiction of something that exists and doesn't exist right so for but now even though it's so clear even though it's clear it's not actually a trivial thing that there's no cause outside all that exists and and same for explanation if there's a difference between cause and explanation we still have the result there's no explanation outside all that exists there's no ground outside all that exists there's nothing right outside all exist and what this implies is that if you think of existence in total there's nothing beyond existence in total that explains it and this is actually pretty puzzling because when we think of examples of things that exist both small things and big things both individuals and wholes both individuals and plurals taken together like the plural of laptops let's say there is a pause outside of them that explains their existence and this is sort of puzzling i mean like let me just use an example so i'm thinking now about my laptop it exists and there's a cause that explains its existence and it's because of the kind of thing that the laptop is it's just the kind of thing that depends on other things it wouldn't exist without other things having produced it but now we can just like imagine in our minds that we subtract out everything outside of the laptop we just subtract out like the rest of the universe so that the laptop is all that exists okay so in this imagination the laptop now occupies the totality of reality the totality of existence but now by subtracting everything out in our mind we realize that that the laptop in this case in this sort of imagine world doesn't depend on anything else because we just subtracted out everything else that it could depend on that seems like a problematic world to imagine because it seems like the laptop is the kind of thing that does depend on other things and so it's dependent nature it would still be dependent in its nature no matter like what other things happen to exist or not it's sort of like the nature of the laptop to require other things and so this takes us back to the puzzle how can there be something that doesn't depend on other things like merely adding up dependent things together uh dependent laptops together into an infinite stack of dependent laptops doesn't seem to yield an independent kind of realities like dependence can't add up to independent maybe a way of thinking about it from dependence only comes more dependent in my recent book that i'm i'm writing i call this a construction error you can't construct uh independent reality or an independent totality of things purely from dependent things but then this brings us back to the puzzle how can the totality of things have an independent nature and the only solution that really makes sense to me is that reality in total has to have within it something that is itself independent in its nature something foundational that then can explain why reality in total doesn't have an outside cause or explanation because the idea is the foundation of reality can't itself because it has an independent nature and so this independent nature is the source of the fact that reality in total has no outside explanation okay so this is sort of an abstract route uh come back to me tell me where you would like me to clarify well let's be honest all of this is going to be really abstract when we're talking about contingent things and like a necessary foundation for all of contingent reality it's like when we start to talk about these terms and especially when we're talking about dependence and adding dependence and you can't get independence from dependent like this this language just starts to get really it boggles the mind espec like you can try to slow it down but ultimately we're gonna lose people and so what we can do is maybe i can just suggest that if you're having trouble following along remember where you are and just go back and listen to it again listen to it again or even go check out some of his his youtube videos like he he does it in a really nice presentation on his youtube channel which i'll have in the show notes and everything so don't worry about that but if we can try to sort of summarize and i'm gonna see what i can do here i'm thinking about because i've actually watched pretty much all of your videos on this and this pathway for stage one is one of the more interesting ones to me because maybe just because i'm more familiar with the other ones those are the ones that i sort of when i was getting into apologetics william lane craig uses the the version of the explanation of everything so the independence the dependence route is really really different intriguing so i think i was i was actually trying to think of an illustration that might help so like if we're imagine we have a swimming pool and we're pouring water in it slowly okay we're not going to like fill up the swimming pool with water and then suddenly get fire that's not going to happen and it sounds like that's the same type of situation that is going on with these dependent objects so you talked about your computer i'm looking on my desk right now i've got a mouse i've got a phone here i've got a glass of water if we start to add these things up we don't just magically get something that exists independently right but the question is how is that possible right is that the the sort of basic idea i mean so i like your swimming pool analogy i mean like so if if all you have is like this water and you're just adding more and more water all you're gonna have in total is just water okay yeah in the same way if you have dependent stuff and you add more and more dependent stuff all you're gonna have is dependent stuff the totality will be dependent but that contradicts the uh the point that the totality can't be dependent because there's nothing for it's depend on nothing beyond it so in order for the totality to even exist at all we need something that isn't dependent sort of at the ground layer to support the dependent things it's sort of like something beyond the water in the pool to support the water in the pool something that isn't water that you know something else right something of another nature because without without something of another nature everything's just dependent through and through and by dependent we mean dependent on something beyond itself so then the totality would be dependent on something beyond itself but that leads us to a contradiction there's nothing beyond the totality so what about if we just had dependent things all the way down right so the infinite regress issue right and here i think it's important to realize that the problem of dependence really has nothing to do with the number of things that exist it's sort of like uh i like either i'll continue with the water analogy it's like imagine you had water all the way down okay would you have fire no you wouldn't have fire you would just have water all the way down and sort of in the same way if you had dependence all the way down would you have an independent reality no you have dependence through and through the whole reality would be dependent every part's dependent the totality would be dependent and i mean at this point somebody might worry like well you know why think that like maybe you have enough dependent things then somehow totality is independent somehow right but one reason to think that it doesn't work this way is just by our experience i mean every example of dependent things added together still just a dependent thing if we have a bunch of iphones added together we still have the totality of iphones has to be invented by something that's not itself already an iphone otherwise you get a circularity and so if we have no counter examples then we could support this as a principle that makes sense of our universal experience as well i think of just basic principle of reason that dependence just doesn't add up to independence we can just sort of see this by the light of reason okay and so the but it's it should just be obvious to everybody that when we're considering all of reality all of reality has to be independent right it can't that all the totality of reality can't be dependent on something else right something beyond it yeah i mean you might think maybe it's dependent sort of on its parts somehow and so but then that's what we have to make sure we're clear when we're defining our terms there's dependent on something beyond yourself and the idea is you can't well this is like this is the notion of dependence we're working with the idea is you can't take things that are dependent on something beyond themselves and derive from that a reality that's um itself not depend on something beyond itself and reason experience seemed to confirm that inference okay so what we have to do in this and this is again we're this is one pathway to affirming stage one you already mentioned two others and we're gonna go come back to those actually in just a moment but so this in this one we're just gonna say that this is a puzzle that we found all of reality is independent but everything that we see in reality everything that we interact with at least is more or less from what we can tell dependent yeah and so how do we get independence from purely dependent things yes computers mouses this microphone that i'm talking into how do we get an independent reality from just purely things that depend on other things and that's a big question how do we how do we fill up a swimming pool with water and get fire exactly can't do it maybe so maybe what we have to do is start with fire and then we can have fire and water side by side maybe you're having a cookout right outside in there in your backyard well anyways okay did you have any other thoughts there just to be clear so in this case fire represents independence something that uh has no outside explanation and then like water represents dependent thing yeah so that's why we need to get fire because we know there's something without an outside explanation namely the totality of thing and we got there using a lot of non-contradiction and this is a really important point that i mean i think this is this is why i became intrigued with this pathway in the first place was because i realized that the other pathways they take a while to get to this conclusion that there's some reality that's uncaused so either there's some principle of explanation or there's maybe an argument against an infinite regress so the first member has to be uncaused and so then people will press against those pathways in various ways and what i notice is that well we can just use a law of non-contradiction and get very quickly to a reality that's uncaused we just apply it to the reality as a whole now we have a reality that's uncaused that's like the fire right it's this reality that's uncaused and so but how can there be this fire this uncaused reality that's puzzling when everything in our experience is dependent cause that's the puzzle okay yeah i'm i'm still thinking through this myself and i'm i can't tell if i'm happy that i use that analogy or not because it's sticking to my mind and now i'm trying to think about swimming pools and fire all right back to these these first two pathways and probably i think this one has to do more with the first one because you wrote a book with alexander prus recently called necessary existence i think it is yes necessary existence and you give a really interesting defense of the principle sufficient reason which is just the principle of explanation as you put it and in my debate with alex o'connor again that's cosmic skeptic i simplified this argument that you give by saying that basically the universe is predictable and so here's a quick illustration i'll make a prediction right now there are no tigers that are going to jump in my room or come into being when i snap my fingers i'm going to snap here on on the into the microphone real quick hey my prediction was correct there's no tigers in my room thank god so the question is though why can i make these types of predictions why isn't the world sort of just unpredictable all the time and a really simple answer is that contingent things just can't do that they must always be accompanied by some kind of reasonable explanation a tiger doesn't just jump into a room it has to come from somewhere and be placed there there's got to be some reasonable explanation and so but in the book you have a much more rigorous defense of this and i wanted to talk briefly about that because it was one of the more powerful arguments i think i've ever seen in defense of the principal sufficient reason so let's let's talk about that just a little yeah i like how you put that uh so yeah we give several different arguments for a principle of explanation and there are different versions of the principle we end up using a modest version although we also defend well anyway there's different versions of the principle but for our purposes just we can stick with the with what you just said which is that contingent things exist because of some explanation some cause that produces them something that leads to their existence and the argument that you gave is similar to the argument from chaos that we develop which is basically if we don't have some principle of explanation then we have this problem of chaos it's the problem of understanding why things don't just randomly pop in and out of existence all the time right what accounts for the sort of uniformity of our experience and at the deepest level i mean we can maybe explain the uniformity by physical laws but then that doesn't give the sort of deepest explanation because why don't those physical laws snap out of existence right like you know there's a strong nuclear force and a weak nuclear force and and the law of gravity right like why don't those laws just cease today at 4 30 right and then be replaced by other laws and so it's the same problem of chaos all over again and i like how you put it yeah the sort of deepest explanation is going to be in terms of this principle of explanation that contingent things don't just exist without some explanation beyond them and that explanation then accounts for the order of things it makes sense of why contingent things aren't coming in and out of existence all the time i mean so there's more we could unpack i mean one of the things we do in the book is we also give a holistic development of that argument maybe this is what you're referring to yeah that part of the argument was something that kind of blew my mind as i was reading through i mean the whole book is mind-blowing you've got to really take your time with it but that that part and especially when you were talking about like well let's imagine this category of things contingent things that have no explanation and let's imagine like how many things are in that set of things how many are in that category yeah that was the probability thing yeah so think about like how many possible contingent things like don't exist maybe these are possible futures right like there's a building that's 4 000 feet tall and a building that's 5 000 feet tall and and plato and just random ghosts or whatever maybe ghosts aren't possible whatever like take all the things that you think are possible there's an infinite set of different such things right so how likely is it that not one of them ever comes into being within your field of view especially if they all could if any one of them could i mean if if you say that they can't they can't come into being well then that's exactly what the principle of explanation predicts so that's that makes sense right but let's say you want to avoid believing in this principle of explanation even just for the sake of argument we want to see is it possible to be um to go without the principle well then you have this problem of accounting for the ex the the enormous improbability that like none of these imaginary things that could exist just like they'd never do but why there's so many so yeah so bruce and i we developed a kind of rigorous probabilistic formulation of this where we um talk about this set and we talk about non-zero probability of arbitrary sections of things just coming into being or going out of being and then it turns out that the probability that none of these things ever come into being if if the principle of explanation is not true approaches zero just given the infinity of things so without an ex so so this is a pressing motivation to have some explanation for why there's this order to things an ultimate sort of deep explanation not just appealing to laws that themselves could go out of existence need an explanation of contingent things all right so we're going to move at this point to discussing some of the objections to the contingency argument at least we're still talking about stage one but before we do that in your work you make a distinction between objections and barriers and i think this is also really important here's my attempt at the distinction that you make here so objections help us sort of test a view or a hypothesis but barriers keep us from taking a view seriously i want to get your thoughts on that attempt at explaining this distinction yeah no that's good um yeah i've been thinking a lot about this lately i've been thinking about even just the role of arguments and even maybe the problem with arguments um so like i mean one of the good things about arguments is it can help people to organize their thinking so they can see new things but one of the problems with arguments is that it can be used arguments can be used as weapons in ways that kind of like put people down or make people feel judged like for example there could be a situation where somebody says you shouldn't believe that because you have no argument for believing that then the person who does believe that maybe feels defensive and so they say well here's why i believe that and they give the argument but then a skeptic who doesn't believe it now feels like they need to defend their reasonableness by showing there's a problem with the argument and then there what happens is an infinite battle happens because of the argument and this is connected to the beginning of our conversation where you brought up something that i'm concerned about which is a kind of problem with with polarization and with people fighting for different tribes and they sort of lose sight of of the value of people in the conversations it's like people are battling against people instead of seeking to use arguments to serve people so going back to this distinction between objections as tests versus barriers as obstacles i like to think of objections to an argument as a way of investigating that argument sort of testing whether it's a good argument testing its premises right but sometimes there's something else which isn't really an objection but more like a barrier to even taking the argument seriously because let's say the argument's been weaponized let's say that i've had this experience even recently somebody was endorsing an argument that i myself think is sound but they didn't know who i was and they were treating me like i was somebody that they needed to like prove was wrong they didn't even know who i was and i instantly found myself wanting to be skeptical of an argument that i already think is sound just because i felt like they were bullying me with the argument and so this is an example of where barriers can arise because of the association with arguments with those arguments being used as weapons or even just with the conclusion of the arguments maybe there's reasons to doubt that conclusion and so then those reasons become barriers to even taking seriously the argument especially an argument for something like the existence of god for example yeah as you're talking about this i'm thinking barriers seem more like psychological in their their sort of nature whereas objections i mean objections can be psychological depending on like what type of person you're talking about and whether or not they're thinking about primarily objections or if they're trying to accept of you yes but i i think that's that's helpful to make this distinction barriers are more in terms of like a psychological block or a barrier sure because in your response in how we can remove bearers i think that's going to be important yes yes that's a good way of characterizing the difference so how can we help people to kind of remove some of these barriers or and even not not to help other people but how can we present arguments maybe that as we're presenting them we can begin to remove barriers along the way yeah i've been thinking a lot about this i mean in some ways i almost feel like even more important than developing sound arguments is understanding just like how to present arguments in ways that are are winsome i think intellectual virtues are key right like so are we actually humble are we careful um are we presenting the argument with an attitude of service towards somebody or is it to more justify ourselves uh or to pr prove to people that we're reasonable uh i mean and i feel this temptation like if somebody says like i'm i'm a silly person i shouldn't believe x y or z i'm not reasonable in my thinking then i find myself almost like tempted to try to justify my own reasonableness to them right but then you know i mean how how helpful is that going to be for them especially if now they're feeling defensive because i'm trying to prove them wrong right so intellectual humility um seeking rapport seeking to serve to add value i think these really go a long way to removing barriers to inquiry i often think of like truth flows like a river but then these barriers block that river and before we come up with stronger arguments or whatever we almost just need to unblock the river by seeking intellectual virtues being humble being careful seeking truth having the courage to follow reason these sorts of things being willing to be wrong you know sometimes i'll just ask somebody like help me see what i'm missing you know and sincerely like not as a way of having power over them in the conversation but like you're just sincerely wanting to to learn right from them and and and i can even be sure of my argument but oftentimes even though i'm sure i i won't really see ways in which things are unclear or maybe my sureness is is actually unfounded and by just asking a question like help me see what i'm missing i'm much more likely to see what i'm missing and then also at the same time remove the barriers and i can give you lots of stories of conversations i've had with people where it was a productive conversation where on both sides we gained a deeper insight on this particular argument from contingency weaknesses and potential strengths just through intellectual seeking to be virtuous in our in our way of thinking about the argument i think something that can happen especially with apologists because you you go through and you learn about an argument you read about it you look at the objections and you're like oh yeah all the objections are so bad because you're as an apologist you know that's that's your viewpoint you're coming from this view of and a lot of us well i don't want to say how many because i i honestly don't know but if you're coming from a position of like you were already a christian or you were already a theist and you're looking at these arguments sometimes what you want to do is you want to go into a conversation and you want to just kind of beat somebody up with this argument and say well look how rational christianity is look how rational i am well especially if you feel defensive if you feel like they're saying you're not rational and you want to like prove them no no like but i am rational right that's right yeah that's that's true and what i'm thinking about is actually i was listening to a ted talk on how to have good conversations with people and i was listening to this in my preparation for my debate with alex actually because i wanted to figure out like how how i think this was actually along the same lines without even knowing about it but basically one of the things that she mentioned she listed like 10 different things i can't remember the actual figure but one of the things that she mentioned that really really stuck out to me and an area that i often fail at is in going into a conversation you already talked about this but going into a conversation and thinking that you already have all of the answers and they have nothing to give you they have no deeper insights they have no genuine objections that's i think one of the biggest pitfalls of apologetics and in talking with other people is that we don't consider the basic idea that this other person you're talking to is not an idiot they they may have insights and they may actually have a really good objection that you didn't know about and so what we need to do is when we go into these conversations is to assume that you can learn something from this person and i think when we have that attitude when we go in thinking that hey i might learn something really key or really interesting that i haven't thought about before and i need to think about if we go into a conversation with that attitude i think that we can make a lot of progress in terms of removing these barriers and you mentioned the other intellectual virtues and whatnot but i think if we start there yeah i think everything else is going to kind of flow out of that yeah and i just want to add you know really seeing the person you're talking with as the treasurer in the conversation like they are the most important thing like not the argument not even what truth is revealed or whatever and this is something i mean i feel that this i'm constantly trying to figure out how to be better at just having that rapport i've had conversations where i could tell that the problem that there was like a problem in a conversation is that um they viewed me as and sort of an enemy they didn't have trust and one of their worries was that um it's like i have to remember that when they're talking with me they're actually kind of sometimes talking to a type it's like they don't know me personally so they're actually talking they're thinking about like the 10 people of the same type that they talked with before me and then if it looks like i'm trying to give an argument for a conclusion one of the common worries is that i'm starting with the conclusion and i'm not sincerely interested in the truth like i'm more just trying to just convince them and that's i think in my experience that's a turn off like people want to feel like they're valued and that there's a kind of cooperation in the conversation it's not like i'm superior i have the truth it's just what you said you know like coming in the conversation willing to learn and and i just want to add this other element and and see really seeing and even feeling that the other person is valuable and like and they're the treasure because other otherwise it's almost like it's pointless and they can kind of pick up on on that like they'll feel used like you're using them to i don't know like win your argument or make a point or something and we don't like to i know what it's like to feel used we don't like that so in a way this is all common sense but but it's like not like it's not common it's just so not common cameron it's just not confident and i feel like we could really just kind of change the world if if enough people there's like a critical mass of people who really get this who understand like we can unblock the truth from flowing we can unblock the truth flow i think of like just flowing from place to place like as people unlock insights as we really figure out how to have these conversations in a way that doesn't turn people off and people don't feel polarized by them like if we can figure that out then everything else becomes a lot easier and more fun and more productive well let's swing back to stage one and let's talk about some of the most common objections you hear when discussing the contingency argument with students yeah sure probably first the argument from the infinite regress people bring this up you know why couldn't each contingent thing just be caused by another contingent thing ad infinitum and there's no first contingent thing and so that's just it uh that's probably the most common objection one of them well actually yes yeah as you're as you're listing it why don't you just list them because we actually are planning on discussing some of those so just sort of list some of the more common ones that you that you hear and then if we don't if we don't have it sort of in our outline here then then we can cover it if we need to right so then there's the fallacy of composition that it's a mistake to infer that the totality of contingent things has some feature like is caused or is explained from uh the fact that just parts of that totality have that feature like is quasar is explained so the fallacy of composition there is also this argument from quantum mechanics that we can actually get uncaused things because we have these particles that just appear from nowhere like virtual particles and there's no sort of determining cause of them that's one that comes up i mean in my classes to be honest a lot of it is just clarifying questions like okay tell me what this term means well i actually wanted to add a clarification that does come up from students which is um understanding that a contingent thing when we say it can fail to exist if we say necessary thing as necessary existence that doesn't mean to say that has necessary existence isn't to mean that it's necessary for something so students will sometimes get confused about this they'll say like a chair is necessary for sitting on so it has necessary existence and i had a hard time explaining to them like i used the term could fail to exist i tried to find different ways finally i just asked the students like okay how would you define contingent because some of them got it but then some of them just didn't and there was this one girl and she offered definition that this other students understood so i just want to like throw this out too which is a contingent thing is something that could be gone that's how she put it it could be gone okay so that's an example of like an objection that comes up it's just a clarifying objection okay what do you what do you mean by contingent and i wasn't sure actually in your exchange with alex if some of his objections were actually more rooted in still trying to clarify the concepts because you know these are deep concepts on that note one of the objections that he raised was he wasn't convinced that there were any contingent things and he seemed to adopt determinism in defending this and if you guys want to listen to that episode i've got it in the show notes it's really easy to to go back and listen to if you want to but determinism is basically the idea and i was trying to think about the best way to put this quickly is that there are no genuine choices so like a tree when it grows a branch the branch doesn't have a choice whether or not it was going to grow so all events including our choices are sort of caused to happen by prior events that's the basic idea behind determinism and so what he was saying is that determined if the world is determined then there are no contingent things and my initial reaction was to say that there's a difference between something that is determined and something that is necessary and i gave an illustration of a gumball machine which came up actually a lot in the in the conversation but i'm curious to see how you would have responded would you have just tried to clarify what the terms meant how would you have responded yeah i mean i thought your clarification was good i mean at one point i was kind of wondering whether he was thinking that the foundation of things is sort of automatically necessary so the idea is that if everything is determined then everything would be necessary because everything would be well either there is a foundation or just an infinite regress but in either case from everything being determined it just automatically follows that everything is necessary and then i was thinking it might be helpful just to clarify that we could distinguish between different possible worlds where maybe in one world everything is determined maybe in another world there's just a single chunk of cheese and then there's another possible world where maybe things are indetermined and i wasn't sure if he would allow for alternative possible worlds if he was really thinking that there was only one possible world but probably the response i would have given would just be just to go ahead and just grant like okay let's say everything is necessary well then that completes the first stage of the argument right because the whole point of stage one was to try to show that there's some necessary part of reality some necessary thing and so then we can move on to stage two and investigate what's the nature of the necessary if everything's necessary and then we can look at stage two and unpack some of the features of a necessary thing if it turns out that well some of the features revealed by stage two are incompatible with some of the things we find in our universe okay well we can discover that later when we get to stage two but it but as far as stage one goes it's not really a good objection to stage one to say well everything's necessary because that's the conclusion of stage one yeah we actually talked about this right after the podcast and uh or the the discussion that i had with him and i really really wish i would have thought of that at the time because it is sort of obvious it's like if you want to deny that there are contingent things well then you're already saying that there's a necessary thing in reality or that there's nothing right like that nothing exists right but but that wasn't on the table i don't think so well let's let's talk about another objection this is called the fallacy composition you already mentioned it earlier and basically the idea is that just because some contingent things have explanations or causal explanations my computer has an explanation from a factory a bunch of people worked on it developed it and everything that doesn't mean that all contingent things have causal explanations that's inferring from parts to holes and sometimes those inferences are bad for example every part of an elephant is light in weight but that doesn't mean that the whole elephant is light and weight so how do we know that we aren't making a similar flaw in our reasoning when we're thinking about and again this is this actually only affects pathways one and i think it's actually only pathway one here it doesn't even affect pathway two or three but let's talk about the fallacy of composition yeah so i like how you how you put that and i also really appreciated uh alex's discussion of this when he brought it up i thought he made a very insightful point which was that he made the point that uh even though sometimes you can make an inference from parts to holes you can do that sometimes like if the parts have mass then the hole has mass still that's not enough to sort of vindicate the argument from contingency if it's relying on this general inference from parts to holes because as long as you have one counter example like the one you gave that's enough to show that that inference is not a reliable inference the shaky inference so the person giving the argument they have the burden to justify the inferences and all we need to to do to undermine the the argument um is to point out that the inference is just not reliable in general so i i thought that was a nice way that alex was was addressing i thought that he identified one kind of response to the argument from contingency which is just to give exam uh sorry one response to this fallacy of composition which is just to give examples where it's not fallacious to make that inference um but then that's just leaves open the question like well why isn't it fallacious in the particular case that's relevant to the argument from contingencies so the burden now is the proponent of the argument from contingency more okay so then now what more might we say and so you you know are right that um not all versions of the argument and contingency even move from parts to holes and in fact some of the arguments that i ever give move from parts to holes like that no version that i ever give uses as inference from parts to holes but it might seem like it does because you remember i talked about how from dependent things you can't compose an independent thing and you might think okay well that's making use of that inference from parts to holes but no but it's not because there's another inference in at play so this is where you have to like distinguish the inferences that are that are in play so here's an inference inference there's multiple inferences in play but one of them is inference from extrapolation so for example we can extrapolate from many cases where we see an event have a cause we can extrapolate here's an explanation for why all those cases have a cause because all events have a cause that's extrapolation that's not an inference from parts to holes similarly we can extrapolate when we consider many holes that have a cause so for example take the hole of all of the dirt uh on earth all that dirt together uh has a cause okay so the parts have a cause and the hole has a cause so by extrapolation then we could explain why all dependent wholes have causes by a basic principle that in general from dependence you can't get to independence that all dependent totalities are themselves dependent so here the inference isn't really from part to whole it's rather from extrapolation and so that that's one thing that you could say i don't know if you wanted to follow up on that i do because extrapolation i'm curious what is meant by that term it sounds to me like you're basically just giving an inductive argument which is sort of what i did with alex as i talked about gravity and how yes we experience gravity everywhere that we go and so we can extrapolate give an inductive argument for the fact that gravity works everywhere in the universe that seems like a really really reasonable inference to make right everywhere that we go gravity works exactly the same and we don't expect it to be different anywhere in the universe even though we have i mean everybody knows pretty much at this point how big the universe is it's massive okay it's ridiculously huge but it's so easy to see that this is a good inference that from our experience we walk around and i mean we don't even think about it because of how ubiquitous it is it's everywhere but it's a very very reasonable inference to think that gravity works everywhere where we go so therefore pretty reasonable gravity works everywhere in the universe is that what so i'm take i take it that's what you meant is that it's sort of it's a sort of inductive argument for this that's exactly what i'm saying and i use extrapolation instead of induction only because induction is the philosopher's word and i'm i'm trying to learn how to speak more colloquially myself you know why do we have to call it induction i mean the ordinary way of calling it you know is extrapolation but yes it's exactly what you're saying um it's just you're basically trying to figure out another way of putting it is you're trying to figure out okay what's a hypothesis that best explains our observations and so you consider competing hypotheses you figure okay which hypothesis best explains them well presumably it's going to be the simplest hypothesis that accounts for all the data so what's the simplest hypothesis that accounts for the data that we have with contingent things having explan an explanation well here's one uh in general whatever is contingent exists only because of something else uh some principle of explanation would account for the data and it's a simple hypothesis so yes and and notice that we're not relying on any general inference from parts to holes here i mean it maybe implies that whole whole contingent things like coal contingent solar systems for example have a cause as well right just like gravity works on parts that works on holes so too this principle of explanation works on parts and holes but the way that we justify the principle is not by this fallacy of composition but rather by this principle of induction or extrapolation here's here's one thing that i i've noticed you mentioned also in response to the fallacy composition is that when it comes to explanation individuals are not different from pluralities there's no difference and that's going back to the example that you gave which what what actually was so you talked about masses right so if a thing has mass then the group of whatever it is has mass so when it comes to mass there's no difference if it's a small thing if it's a large thing it everything has mass if part of it has mass so in the same sense when it comes to explanations there's no difference between individuals and pluralities of things and you can give examples of this yes it makes just as much sense to ask why one camera exists as it does to ask why 10 cameras exist yes it's not like less mysterious like imagine a camera appears in front of you you're like oh that's mysterious i should have had an explanation but no instead it was 10 cameras that appeared in front of you and then you say oh that's mysterious that should have an explanation and then somebody says no no that's a fallacy of composition there it's like no no no it's not a fellowship composition because it has nothing to do with it it's just the principle explanation applies to any number of things number is irrelevant yeah here's a here's maybe another way to think about it is when we're talking about i talked about elephants before it's like every part of an elephant is light and weight that doesn't mean the whole elephant is light and weight however if part of the elephant is gray and the whole elephant each part is gray then the whole elephant is going to be gray so when it comes to color there's no difference between the parts and the holes so that maybe that's another way to look at it it's the same thing so like color there's no difference between parts and holes and when it comes to explanation there's obviously no difference between parts and holes there maybe that's not as clear to see in terms of an explanation yeah well and you can one might wonder okay why are you saying that and then one way you can answer it is through a principle of induction another way you could answer it is well just sort of on reflection it's just like once you consider the cases it just seems true like just like it seems true that gray applies to the parts out of the hole so does explanation yeah you're walking down times square okay and you see one one cab drive by and you're like oh that that cab must have come from somewhere there's some kind of explanation for it and then 10 cabs drive by you're not suddenly thinking oh well they're just they just all popped into being from the from around the corner right so it makes no difference between individuals yeah and pluralities of things i think that's a really good way of rebutting that well yeah i always want to say i mean there's even another path here that sidesteps the entire thing this is less well-known but i just want to mention it because the issue of parts and holes can get kind of confusing but we can sort of sidestep entirely by talking about types and asking why certain types are instantiated like so for example there's a type being an iphone and then you can ask okay why is that type um why are there any iphones like why does anything instantiate that type why is there anything of that type and here parts and holes have nothing to do with it it just has to do with why a certain type has any members at all and so it makes sense when we think of examples that there's going to be an explanation like the type iphone you know there's an explanation for why there are some iphones there are some types that don't exist yet like let's say smurfs okay that's a type right that type may never be instantiated like they'll never be smurfs okay and why not well they'll only be smurfs if something explains why there are some smurfs maybe by creating a smurf and so when we think in terms of types we can then think about the general type being contingent and just as we need an explanation for why there are any iphones or whether any smurfs or whether any protons or why there are any cameras or why there are any people in the same way we need an explanation of you know for why there are any any contingent things and just as you can't say well here's why there are iphones because an iphone made it the case there are iphones that's circular and in the same way we can't say that well here's why there are contingent things because some contingent thing made it the case that there are contingent things because in the same way that's circular so if we want to avoid a circular explanation now we're back to a non-contingent necessary foundation for contingent things so that's that's another path that moves from types and it has nothing to do with parts and holes at all so we're really close to discussing the infinite regress problem and there i want to press you on the circular explanation why that's unsatisfying or maybe maybe not unreasonable but why it's not a good explanation a circular explanation so i'm gonna shelf that for now because i think that's an important discussion to have but here's a here's an objection that i saw actually from a professional philosopher and this guy i don't want to reveal his name but he is probably one of the most brilliant christian philosophers out there okay he i don't know that he accepts this argument but this is sort of and i'm gonna paraphrase so he's gonna have to forgive me if i don't get this entirely correct but basically he said that the psr is something that your worldview determines for you so if you're an atheist for example you won't be convinced that every contingent thing has an explanation and if you're a theist you will and it seems like so so what he's saying is that you're only going to accept this conclusion or this this premise if you're already ex if you already accept it so you're only going to accept it if you already accept it and so basically the question i have is can we only hope to convince people that already accept these premises or do we have any hope of convincing people that might not view things the way that we do yeah well i mean it's interesting because i you know i mentioned necessarybing.com and there i investigated this very question by asking people questions and one of the questions i ask is whether they accept the conclusion of well stage one of the argument that there's a necessary thing so theism takes us to stage two but it's interesting because i think it was roughly half of the people who took the quiz during the trial period uh said they didn't think that there was a necessary thing they rejected that first stage its conclusion but they did accept premises that logically entail that are that there's a necessary being and several people roll wrote me and said that it convinced them and it changed their mind uh i mean i'll tell you you know i didn't believe in god and then the argument from contingency led me to think first that there's a necessary foundation and then by a stage two that the foundation is supreme in its nature i have friends who have a similar story who were moved by the argument they didn't first believe the conclusion now i mean as far as psr psr is not even necessary for every pathway so there are atheists who believe in psr but who reject theism and there are i remember when i rejected psr i rejected the principle sufficient reason and this was after i was moved by a two-stage argument from contingency yeah i didn't accept psr i was stuck on some of the puzzles against it and it was only later that i became less skeptical and then worked myself through those puzzles but but it had nothing to do with theism so i mean i guess i would say it's just more complicated i mean that i do think that that yeah i mean probably if you're a theist you're more likely to think that something like psr is true i mean especially because psr is a handy tool in arguments for theism right and so if you know it can actually lead you to be a theist but i wouldn't say it's because of the theism it wasn't because of the theism in my case so this is really more a question about psychology what people would do yeah and that kind of thing which is these are all very interesting questions we've actually had a discussion twice here on this podcast about that but ultimately when it comes to the argument like that is not an objection to any premise of the argument to any argument other in defense of one of the premises so i think that while that's an interesting thing to think about ultimately if we do want to figure out whether or not this argument is true going back to objections as tests yeah then we need to actually look at the objections to the arguments that we're giving in defense of it and ultimately that that can be our way to help us determine whether or not we think that this argument is good and sound yeah so i think that we'd have to turn back to that and on that note let's turn to another objection we have two left and then we'll we're going to end this episode and uh and shift over to stage two so this one comes from quantum mechanics you already mentioned this earlier these are some of the objections that you hear from students every now and then yes you don't just hear it from students but basically some people argue and i don't know what all this stuff means virtual particles can come into being from nothing or at least there's no cause or reason that they come into being they just kind of pop into existence randomly and this is a scientific example it's a sort of counter example of a contingent thing that has no explanation and i think the one of the reasons why this is so powerful or it's seen as so powerful is because we have this scientific counter example and when science starts to get introduced and stuff it has i don't know it has this psychological effect i think on on people it's like you have you know it's philosophy versus science and science is obviously going to win it's it's more powerful so i think this is maybe it's not the most strongest objection maybe it's not the strongest objection to the to the argument from contingency but maybe it's one of the more moving ones yeah and so that's what that's the reason why we should we should spend some time on it yeah well it's very interesting i was actually at a philosophy conference and i was talking with somebody um just sort of on the side we were just talking and and i was talking about an argument from contingency and they brought up this objection to me philosopher i think he said that he taught logic and this was sort of his stumbling block to the argument and it was very interesting because i just asked him you know what do you think about thinking of causes as probabilistic so instead of causes having to determine the outcome you know as you said determinism where there's sort of only one path without any choices that instead causes just to make probable their effect and he he objected to that he said that like sort of by definition the word cause um just means it determines its effect and so the idea here is that while these small particles virtual particles nothing really determines them from the prior states and so therefore they they count as uncaused on his definition of cause but then it was interesting because you know we were in rapport i mean this is an example of a productive conversation where we were just having fun and we were seeking to learn from each other so instead of me sort of digging in to the ground and saying well you know your definition of cause is wrong or whatever i just granted that and i said okay well if that's how you use the term cause that's fine what do you think instead of using the word condition and then i just gave the whole argument again in terms of conditions and i said i mean look when things exist and i use the problem of chaos that we talked about earlier um that there isn't this chaos and what explains that well what explains it is that at least when things happen there's some prior conditions that allow them to happen it was very interesting because that helped i mean he said okay that that seems plausible you know and so let's see you know where the argument goes from there and that's how we got past that objection and so ever since then i've found it very helpful to just make this distinction between a cause that determines its effect without any other possibility versus a cause that makes that that doesn't determine of necessity it's effect but that acts as a prior condition for its effect that makes its effect possible and whether you call that cause or not that's just a verbal issue the point is that we need some condition there that allows the effect to happen so that's what i would say i like how you used verbal instead of semantic i don't know if you were itching to use the term semantic there i'm trying to stay away from the philosopher's jargon yeah no it's good uh one of the things that i wanted to mention on this on this one was this actually was what sparked me to use the gumball machine analogy because you use this you sent me so graciously one of the one of the pre-drafts the initial drafts are your book that you're working on which i want to make sure that we we talk about at the end one of the things that you mentioned in response to this objection was to talk about a gumball machine analogy and i'm actually i want to hear how you explain that because it was it was really helpful and insightful and i think it will help put some some meat on the on the bones of the because we're thinking really abstractly here causes versus conditions but if we get an illustration with some gumballs i think it'll i think it'll help us solidify it yeah i'm trying to get the remember it clearly you you might have okay better understanding of this now better clear memory let's see it's basically imagine you have a gumball machine and it's got some red balls and blue balls inside okay let's say you put a quarter in and it's sort of indeterminate whether you're going to get a red ball or a blue ball if you go either way um so the quarter is like the cause and then the effect is let's say you just happen to get a blue gumball so the blue gumball didn't come from nothing okay like it came from a prior state and that prior state of it sort of coming into your hand we could say was initiated by you putting the coin into the gumball machine so there's still a cause and there's still an effect even though the effect was you might say indeterministic that you get that color whereas in another case you can imagine the gumball machine has only blue gumballs so when you put the coin in there's only one outcome namely you get a blue gumball at least there's one outcome in terms of what color you get i guess it would be still perhaps indeterminate like which gumball you get so this is a way of illustrating the difference between deterministic effects versus indeterministic effects in both cases there's a cause like the coin goes in but in one case it's sort of indeterministic which color you get but in the other case it's deterministic and the way that relates to the virtual particles is that you might think that what's going on there is that the virtual particles are not deterministic effects they're indeterministic effects from prior conditions but they don't come from nothing they still require prior states yeah i think that for this objection to work the quantum mechanics objection to work we'd have to imagine that instead of a gumball machine a blue gumball or a red gumball would just sort of magically pop in our hands that's the only way that this objection goes through if there's there'd have to be no gumball machine at all a gumball would just have to pop in your hand and that's obviously we're talking about this like replace the gumball with a virtual particle that's the difference is that the virtual particle yes would just have to pop into being for no reason without any explanation but that's not what's really going on when we're talking about quantum mechanics yeah we have some kind of quantum vacuum that a virtual particle is coming into being from so there are these prior conditions you talked about that before we have these prior conditions that are sort of setting the scene for what's about to happen and going back to the gumball machine we have this gumball filled with red and blue balls and when you turn the lever you're going to get one of those and that's the explanation even though it might be indeterminate and it might not be 100 certain that you're gonna get either one you're still you still have this whole scheme this whole situation where you've got the gumball machine you turn the lever you get something out so it's not the fact it's not a matter of like holding your hand open and a blue ball just popping in your hand right that's not what's going on when we when we're talking about quantum mechanics there's a whole situation there's a whole reality beyond the virtual particle itself that's involved in in the explanation even though we might not have a determined causal relation here i don't know i i think i hope people are able to track on this because it does start to get well and that's that's the credible scientific account but let me also just add there's we have good reason to think that virtual particles don't literally come from nothing without any prior conditions apart from the science we have good reason because the difference in size is not relevant to the ability to be uncaused i mean it's not like if you take a like a pink ball and you just like make it bigger or something then it's more likely like i i guess imagine a pink ball that doesn't exist and like make it bigger in your own mind it's not like its size is going to make it like easier to come into being if it's bigger or smaller and then there's a probability problem because there's literally infinitely many different kinds of small things and if any one of them could just come to me from nothing uncaused then this is spanishly vanishingly unlikely that this just never happens so so yeah so there's there's the irrelevance of size which um together with the problem of chaos again that that gives us a positive reason this isn't just like a defensive move that oh well for all we know virtual particles could still be caused indeterministically no no like we have good reason to think that they don't just come from nothing like everything else so let's talk about the infinite regress problem a little bit more and we'll talk about why circular explanations are bad explanations so why can't groups of things explain themselves this is the objection take a stack of portable hard drives because i'm a photographer if we have an explanation for each hard drive then why do we need some kind of additional explanation for the group of hard drives if each individual thing is explained isn't the group of hard drives explained simply by listing the manufacturer of each hard drive and this sort of shows that we don't need a necessary being to explain the plurality of all contingent things because each contingent thing is explained by some other contingent thing and this just goes on forever all the way down yeah so i think what we need to do is separate some cases so on one level i want to say yes like we can explain the group by explaining each of the parts in fact you can say that the explanations of the parts add up to a total explanation of the group but notice that in the example that you gave where you had the manufacturer the total explanation exists outside of the total exponent dumb which is the thing things to be explained so the manufacturer is not itself among the hard drives right it transcends the hard drive as you could say so all the individual explanations could add up to a complete explanation as long as the individual explanations transcend the effect that avoids circularity but think now about a different case so imagine uh well let's just take the case of the infinite stack of turtles okay turtles all the way down so you want to know okay so why is there this top turtle and that's because there's a turtle underneath it that caused it and that exists because of a turtle underneath that that caused it and then it goes all the way down and then you say okay well can't the explanations of the parts add up to an explanation of the whole well here the problem is the explanation of the parts is included in the hole i mean it's part of the very effect because this is sort of the nature of infinity here is that because there's nothing outside the chain now if there is something outside the chain explaining each part and that's a different case that would be like maybe each of the infinitely many turtles is produced by something else right something in the turtle then the cause would transcend the effect but if it's just the turtles explaining the turtles then we have a circular explanation and that's a problematic kind of explanation it doesn't really answer why there are those turtles in the first place does that help i mean there's so much more we could say i mean sometimes people they respond by pressing that well no i mean in this case the totality of the turtles is explained by the parts of that totality and sometimes we the parts do explain the whole and then my response to that is well let's make a distinction between the totality and the plurality you know this is getting technical but maybe the totality is a whole and maybe it is explained by its parts the turtles so let's let the plurality now refer to the just the turtles so the plurality of the turtles explains the totality of the turtles but now we can ask okay but what explains the plurality of the turtles and now if you just say the answer is those same turtles well that's a plurality explaining the plurality and that's flatly circular i think if we go back to what you said earlier about types maybe that would be helpful too yes i was just thinking that that i think it is useful at this point if somebody's still stuck and saying well you know what is this distinction between totality and plurality haven't we explained everything there is to be explained each turtle is explained right this is sort of the humian idea each one is explained what else is there to explain you say the turtles maybe there just is no explanation of the turtles it's not that it's explained by itself that's circular there just is no explanation and there shouldn't even need to be one because everything in the series is explained and i think yes talking about types is perhaps just a helpful way of pressing like why there would still need to be an explanation here's a way of thinking about it imagine that in front of your eyes right now a blue box appeared okay and suppose it just happens to be that the top half of this blue box is caused by the bottom half of the blue box it's a weird situation okay and then the bottom half of the blue box what's it divides into its own top half and bottom half and as you might guess its top half is caused by its bottom half and then its bottom half further divides in the top half and bottom half and we continue this division add infinitum there's an actual infinite series of clauses that has appeared in front of you like from nothing okay that would still be puzzling just the fact just because there's an infinite series of causes does nothing to explain why there is that theory and we could perhaps express this puzzle in terms of the general type being a box in this room let's say so we specify the type to this room we haven't explained why that type is instantiated by anything in the first place you can't appeal to its parts to explain why that general type is instantiated in the first place that's still left unexplained and i think that's pretty intuitive i mean it would be puzzling if a box appeared and merely dividing the box into an infinite regress there's nothing to answer why that box exists at all and similarly for any given type we have an explanation for why that type has members we don't have counter examples for that and i would say the simplest and best explanation of this observation is that in general all contingent types are going to be explained in fact i would even just say all types are going to have an explanation either in terms of some prior causes or in terms of the necessity of its substantiation well we're already going on we've gone on an hour and a half on stage one and we could we could even break down we were actually talking about this before we went on air that we could break down each one of these objections and talk about it for a couple hours probably each one so unfortunately we don't have time to do all that and we don't even have time really to defend the various pathways that we set out at the beginning but what's really nice is that josh has actually created videos pretty much on every single one of these objections and even in defense of the pathways that he's outlined so what i'll do is i'll provide links to all of those if you want to look deeper into these objections and then from here why don't we just go ahead and close out stage one of the argument again i just want to remind people stage one is not where atheists or people who are not already christians not already theist this is not necessarily where you have to jump off the argument because really where the the hardest work in my opinion is stage two we're arguing that there is a necessary part of reality that is god that is not just the universe but has these sort of divine properties and i think that's really where atheists need to be suspect about obviously because you can't be an atheist and endorse that the necessary part of reality has omniscience and is omni-benevolent all that stuff so i i think that's where atheists should be more concerned about is is stage two so just to remind people stage one is not necessarily where you've got to be more skeptical in in that sense did you have any any last things to add about stage one before we close this this episode out yeah probably just just a very quick summary picture so imagine a castle which represents the totality of everything casa represents reality and then what stage one is is really doing is it's it's trying to identify a floor of the castle as providing an ultimate account of how there could even be a castle so the floor is like the ground layer it's what we might call the foundation and the foundation exists in a way that's different from the dependent parts of the castle the dependent parts of things the foundation exists independently and necessarily and if you're an atheist you could think of this as the sort of fundamental energy maybe or just the universe itself right but there the idea is there needs to be this special category of thing a necessary thing an independent thing that provides the ground layer for everything else so i think that's a good summary uh statement to give you a picture of what what this stage accomplishes well thanks josh for laying that out given the summary and then also everything that we've already discussed in episode uh in this part one of the the this two episode series so thanks again for coming on and hey guys just stay tuned we're about to to jump into the next episode where we'll be discussing stage two of the argument which just to remind you very quickly is that we have this necessary part of reality and that necessary part of reality is god and that is what you're gonna be looking out for in stage two so stay tuned and we'll see you guys soon welcome back to stage two of the argument from contingency i'm here with my very good friend josh rasmussen we're finishing off this episode or this series on the contingency argument which is as many of you guys know my favorite argument for god's existence maybe let's talk about that for a second is this one of your favorites josh yeah i find it very intriguing and i think because more than even just as an argument for theism it invites me to just think about the ultimate questions i mean from any perspective it it takes us to the foundation of everything foundation of all existence of all inquiries uh in my recent book as i was unpacking the relationship between the foundation and everything else i was just struck by its connection literally to everything like math logic consciousness reasoning it all this argument sort of brings it all together so i would say yes it's it's probably just my favorite arguments my most most intriguing argument for me this is a species of argument the cosmological arguments and to compare it to just briefly the kalam cosmological argument that one is talking about the beginning of the universe and usually with that argument we've got to get into physics and we've got to get into cosmology and those i think take a lot of study and there's actually well i don't even want to speak on it i know that a lot of cosmologists are thinking that yeah it's probably the case that the universe began to exist but even at that you've got to get into a lot of literature and you've got to figure out what really is going on there and with the argument from contingency you don't necessarily have to go down that route you can actually at some point if you wanted to talk about why the universe can't be a necessary being because it began to exist but i don't know i i think that you don't necessarily have to go there and so it might just in one sense be be better at that be better that way but another thing that it has going for it and this is actually a perfect segue into stage two is that we can actually start to discuss how we can get at the existence of god full-fledged classical theistic picture of god all-powerful all-knowing all good we can get to this classical picture of god through i think the contingency argument alone and with the kalam we're going to be pretty limited and what we can infer based on that argument alone so i think that this has a lot of application it's really interesting and so just to remind people folks that are listening what is the difference between stage one and stage two of this argument right so in the first stage we're focused on seeing why there would be an ultimate foundation for contingent things this foundation would have a necessary nature and provide a kind of ultimate explanation for why there are things that themselves don't have a necessary nature these are things that are contingent they can fail to be that would be stage one and then stage two seeks to identify the nature of this necessary foundation and unpack the theistic attributes such as having supreme power supreme knowledge and supreme goodness so you talked about some of those terms already but let's discuss what other terms we need to know for stage two in stage one we talked about contingency necessity we even talked about dependence what are some of the terms that we need for stage two yeah so i mean in a way i guess just as there are different versions of stage one there are different versions of stage two and so the terminology is going it's going to depend on sort of the particular line that you're going to take my favorite line requires that i define the term supreme or perfect and i've thought about whether i could sort of sidestep that by talking instead about maximal power and that's deriving from maximal power other theistic attributes but although there are these other lines to explore in the end my favorite route takes us to a supreme foundation so i would say the key term for me would be to define what do i mean by supreme and to be honest i heard you give a definition of perfect which is what i'm thinking of now in terms of supreme in your exchange with alex you said it's that which cannot be improved upon and i thought that was a nice 50 way of putting it another way that i like to characterize this is just through an example where i'm praising my wife rachel and i'm just telling her the things i like about her i'm saying you're so great you are powerful you have knowledge you have virtue uh and and all these things i'm saying sort of intuitively make sense of what i would say if i'm praising her but if i said something like you are virtuous you are uh weak it's like well that thing calling her weak that's sort of incompatible with praising her and we understand intuitively it's not like a great making feature and so power knowledge wisdom kindness these things are all pointing toward a more co a more fundamental attribute of greatness and if you take greatness to its limits then you get supreme greatness or perfection so you talked about a couple different methods that people use in stage two and in my research i've discovered two primary methods or ways that stage two is defended the first one is to introduce additional evidence this is something i saw in alexander prusa's argument that he has in the blackwell companion to natural theology so in addition to contingent things we'd add evidence from fine-tuning moral knowledge and so on and this is also richard swinburn's approach he likes the cumulative case so once we add all the evidence together it's clear that this necessary part of reality must be god we're talking about fine tuning that's a design argument so basically whoever created the universe whoever put it together had to be a designer and so that would imply therefore that the necessary part of reality is also a designer and only being or only agents personal beings can can design things basically so this is what i'll call the cumulative approach and the second method i've found is to analyze the necessary foundation i think this is the approach that you favor actually so the question there would be does this being have any power and if so how much obviously it has to if it's the explanation of contingent things it's got to have some kind of power right can it create five universes maybe 20 does it have any knowledge that's another question does it understand right and wrong and so i'll call this approach the analytic approach and so let's get some of your comments on these these two methods yeah i like the way that you put that one way we could distinguish them is by arguments from effect versus argument from the nature of the cause and actually find both to be quite valuable in fact in my recent book that i'm polishing off now i take both approaches so i talk about the kinds of effects that we see in the world such as consciousness morality reasoning and then i work my way from those effects to the kind of cause that could be the ultimate cause of them and that actually can illuminate the nature of the foundation in significant ways but yes then there's also the argument from just the nature of the cause and we just take an analytic approach we apply reason and we just think about okay what kind of a foundation could have this necessary existence what kind of a foundation would be ultimate and then we can begin to unpack some of its features through that analytic approach did you want me to go into a little bit of you know how how we could do that how we could actually proceed or you or would you rather address something else first yeah before we get into the different approaches and everything i want to go back to something we discussed in part one of this series which were barriers to belief we made a distinction between objections and barriers and just as a reminder objections are a way to test a hypothesis whereas barriers are obstacles that keep someone from taking an argument seriously and it seems to me that part two of the arguments or stage two of the argument sorry is where we're gonna see a lot of barriers or potentially we're gonna see a lot of barriers and so just remind us what those are what the the types of barriers that we're going to see here are and how we can all learn to remove them start to remove these i would say the most significant barrier that i see here is just the association of the conclusion theism with other things like religion in particular and in fact i noticed this it was very interesting in your exchange with alex you made this argument from simplicity and his quick response was to he seemed surprised that you could think that theism provided a simpler account of the foundation and so he mentioned a bunch of things from religion about the nature of god that adds complexity and i think what might be going on there is that if we think about this argument through the lens of religion then we're gonna end up associating a lot of complexity particulars and objections that we might have to religion i mean including even objections to maybe uh intellectual vices that we associate with religion a kind of dogmatism a lack of genuine truth seeking and so it's going to put a barrier in the way of really taking seriously this argument from the standpoint not of religion but just through reason and i think one way to remove that barrier is just to make this distinction really to flag the problem that this conclusion is often associated with various religions but we're we don't have to think about this at all from a religious lens we can just look at this as people as philosophers as truth seekers who want to understand the nature of the foundation and we can ask okay well what is the best account of the nature of the foundation let's get out our instruments get out our tools of reasoning and evidence and let's just have a look um and i think that goes a long way to removing the barrier just to separate kind of what we're doing and then also one more thing is to just emphasize that the goal is a greater understanding it's clarity and i think oftentimes people will resist an argument if they feel like the argument's being used not to help bring clarity but rather to write like to win an argument or to prove something that one antecedently already believes not through reason or evidence but through some other means and so then it's like hard to trust uh right like the person who's maybe defending the argument we it's not really it's like what you said before about psychology it's not about psychology a battle of psychology it's about really trying to find out what's true through the instruments of reason and evidence so before we get into the supreme being hypothesis which is your preferred method i i wanted to discuss just briefly some of the different attributes so in your work you have two different papers on the contingency argument one of them is from states of affairs to a necessary being and then the second one is from a necessary being to god i believe that's the those are the titles of those two papers am i wrong i have those papers i also have a new argument for a necessary being so i have a couple on the the stage one and then yes there's one on stage two from an assertive being to god that's right so yeah from a necessary being to god in that one what you do is you sort of go through and you first establish infinite power that the necessary being has to have infinite power and then from there you move on and you sort of establish the other divine attributes so before we get to your preferred hypothesis or your preferred approach i wanted to discuss some of these properties because this is actually what i do on my website i have a an article that most of my listeners will be aware of it's called an updated contingency argument which is largely based on your work josh and one of the first things that i do as well is to establish infinite power that the necessary part of reality has to have infinite power and at this point this is also something that i think people may not understand is that it before we get to stage two i mean we could have a plurality of necessary beings that are the explanation of everything so before we even get to unity that there's only one being then we can talk about infinite power like this group of things if it's if it is a group or if it's an individual necessary being let's talk about some of the arguments that you have or i can i i mean i can even give one off on my website for for infinite power and then maybe a couple of the other attributes uh well if you wanted to mention your argument and then i can add to that okay uh let me actually mention two here so the first one is basically that when we're thinking about possible worlds what this necessary being could create it has to have some kind of power if it's going to be an explanation of contingent things and think about it like this so i have a stapler here i have to have some kind of power if i'm going to be able to create this stapler right but let's think about this so it takes a certain amount of power to create one stapler and it takes more power to create two staplers but then let's imagine well how many staplers actually could exist and it seems like we could always add more staplers to the mix we could always think of more possible worlds where we have more and more and more and more staplers and so basically what we'd have to say at that point is that there this necessary being that explains all the contingent staplers that could possibly exist this necessary thing has to be unlimited in power because there's always one more stapler that you could add and so this is one way that we could see that this necessary part of reality has to be unlimited in power because there's always one more thing that could be created that that's one way another thing another way that richard swinburne prefers or at least he mentions in his work is that a finite limitation of power if we're thinking that well maybe the necessary foundation has some kind of finite limit in what it can create maybe it can only create 20 universes for example there's a question here about why 20 universes why can it only create that number that that finite number and so for instance if the necessary thing exhibited say 1 000 units of power one might wonder why it doesn't have 1001 units of power or why not one unit of power and so this is another one of those things that sort of cries out for explanation just like a contingent thing cries out for an explanation some sometimes properties of a thing specific properties of a thing cryo for explanation so there's a well this stapler on my desk going back to the stapler this is black the stapler i'm looking at so this is this is a question that that we want to know why is it black instead of red or green or blue and that's a question that's a very very legitimate question that we can ask and so in the same way we'd want to ask well this is a finite limit so why that limit instead of some other limit and there's got to be some explanation for that so these two combined i think are really good arguments for thinking that the necessary foundation has infinite power what are your thoughts there and then maybe if you want to expand on those yeah that's a good summary and i think all i would add is just you know the the arguments you gave are related by a problem with thinking that there's some arbitrary cut off either to like the number of staplers that could be produced or just to the power that it has it's like you know why we're talking about logical possibility here this is the foundation of all contingent things it has necessary existence and so whatever is possible it's the ultimate foundation of that right so why would there be some cut off any for any finite number we say well you know once you get up to a universe with i don't know 10 to the 99 staplers that's it you can't make one more like there's no other possible universe in which there's even one more stapler that seems like an arbitrary cut off and the simplest account of the nature of the power is that it's just infinite well or zero it has to have at least some power to produce the right to be the foundation of the effect but if instead you say it has a finite amount of power then you do have this problem of an arbitrary cut off that seems problematic from here i i want to turn turn it back over to you where do you go after you establish infinite power do you go to volition do you try to establish that this is a personal being yeah you know it's interesting because in the article that you mentioned so i i wrote that actually quite a few years ago i was in graduate school and i was teasing these properties out one by one so i had this argument for infinite power and then i had an argument for volition and it had to do with the connection between the necessary thing and the contingent effects or one version of it is that it could to produce the effects just by its necessary nature or else the effects would be necessary and it also couldn't just fix a probability of its effects because the probability for any probability would be arbitrary why it was that probability rather than a slightly different one and so if it's not by its nature and it's not by some probability then the only other account seemed to be that it would be by volition at least the only plausible alternative and so this is how i then argued for its volition and then from there i argued that well in order for it to have volition and power the kind of thing that would be personal because only persons have volition and in order for it to be personal and be able to produce the universe it would have to have at least some knowledge and then i argue from arbitrary limits again that in order for it to have knowledge it's not going to have some arbitrary limited limit in its knowledge it's either going to be zero but that contradicts the fact that it's personal so it's able to produce this world with beings that have knowledge it's got to be infinite or maximal and then i turned toward goodness and i had sort of a similar argument so i argue i argued property by property but i just want to say i've i've shifted into my approach i think i have a more powerful way of proceeding now one that gets underneath all the properties but i don't know if you want to comment at all at my summary of those arguments i'm i'm sort of thinking it through because i i think that it is important to to look at these two ways because there are these two methods right the first method was to add additional evidence the second one is to analyze the necessary foundation and i think there are two there are two different ways that you could analyze it yes and the first the first way would be to and so we're talking about method two here which is the analytic approach i mentioned yeah and there's really two ways that you could do the analytic approach one of them is to use sort of deduction give some arguments for the individual properties but another way is to use the way that you use or your preferred approach now which is to and it's actually the one that i used in my debate with alex and i used that because i figured that if you were if you were favoring that one now there's got to be some good reason behind it and so actually that's that's sort of the reason that i preferred that one i think it's actually easier to sort of comprehend in a debate type situation so actually i want to make clarification so there's another approach here so the preferred approach that i have there's a deductive form of it so what you're talking about is um using a kind of a probabilistic approach where you're making an appeal to the best explanation and so you're going to appeal to simplicity and that's the approach that i took with ram and that's also the approach you took with alex and i think that's a very helpful approach especially in a conversation because we can just be looking at hypotheses and then considering pluses and minuses of the different hypotheses but even before we look at that approach i want to suggest another deductive approach that doesn't go properly by property but rather moves from the necessary foundation to its most fundamental property and then derives all the other properties from there would you like me to unpack that because i would say my favorite approach is deductive and approach from which you can actually see with crystal clarity every step and you can actually know that the foundation is supreme and has the theistic attributes you can know that in principle yes let's let's uh go ahead and turn to that yeah okay so i mean disclaimer you know speaking of barriers you know what one of the ways we can create a barrier is by sort of being overly confident and claiming that you can know things that you know like people say well i can't see how you can know that so i don't really trust you okay so having said that i would be intellectually dishonest if i told you that i don't think that we can actually know that the foundation is supreme through this kind of an argument and the reason that i would be dishonest is because i think that i've come to know the foundation of supreme and that's just how it seems to me so having said that just because i think i see a path but let me put this away whatever you can know it's possible for somebody to be blocked from seeing that and there's nothing wrong with that there can be a rational obstacle to that like for example there was a time when i had a different view about the nature of consciousness than i have now i don't think i was irrational it's just i didn't see the things that i see now okay so okay so those disclaimers out of the way here's the outline of the path basically we move from a necessary foundation to sort of the ultimate explanation for its necessity okay so like what makes the foundation necessary now it's very interesting actually there's a recent article came out in 2018 june it's called from a necessary being to a perfect being and this is from ryan this is by ryan byerly and he makes an argument that the best explanation of a necessary being is going to be in terms of perfection a perfect nature and the reason that he he says this is because if you think about it like what kind of a being would be perfect just think about this conceptually like imagine you know you're attributing worth to a being it's a being that cannot be improved upon so you think about what kind of a being would it be would it be the kind of being that could fall apart kind of being that could fail to exist well no it seems like a truly maximally great being a perfect mean that cannot be improved upon have the greatest kind of existence and that would be the kind of existence that cannot fail to be it would have necessary existed so here now this isn't the deductive argument this is just setting the stage for why you might think that a perfect foundation or supreme foundation provides the best account of a of a necessary foundation the deductive version of this proceeds like this suppose that the foundation is less than perfect suppose it has some degree of of greatness that's that's between zero and right the limit case of perfection well then we have the problem of arbitrary limits this is the same problem that led us to think that it had to have maximal power it's just instead of arguing for maximum power and then arguing for maximal knowledge let's just argue straight away for its maximal value for its supreme nature if it had less than a supreme nature then it would have some cutoff some limit and it has some limit then there has to be some deeper explanation to account for why it has that limit and we can argue for this based on the principle of explanation we used even in the first stage of well one version of the principle which would apply to things that are contingent contingent things have an explanation well any limit is going to be contingent it's going to call for deeper explanation that accounts for why it has that limit right there but the problem is the foundation of everything there's no deeper explanation behind the foundation of everything it's the ultimate explanation so by definition of its foundational ness of its ultimacy uh there can't be an explanation of its degree of perfection so therefore if its degree of affection or greatness is limited then that leads to a contradiction because that implies that there's a deeper explanation but there can't be a deeper explanation so therefore it can't be limited it can only be perfect okay questions clarifications yes lots okay so we have this perfect being and we're saying that i'm trying to think about how the the best way to word this so we have this necessary being and we're imagining well let's let's assume that this being is less than perfect and so it has some kind of limit in maybe what it can do maybe what it knows maybe how good it is but what about this so let's assume that it's infinite in power but then it has zero knowledge yes does that cry out for an explanation because that's not a finite limit that's just to say that it has zero does that do you think that that's the same kind of situation of the arbitrary limits yeah so it wouldn't so in that case i don't think we would need to have an explanation for it's having knowledge because we could just say just has zero knowledge and that sounds pretty much as good as saying it's just simply infinite or maximal knowledge but the problem there though is that it wouldn't be supreme in its in its nature so it wouldn't have a limit to knowledge but it would still have a limit to its we might say its value or its degree of supremacy or its degree of greatness these are all different ways of getting at the same concept that i'm trying to point to i think value is is a good term for it it has some value by virtue of its valuable properties such as property of having the ability to like withstand all forces right like it can't fall apart it can't cease to be as necessary existence it has supreme knowledge let's say by the argument that we gave that the couple arguments that you gave and so it's got some value but then how much value does it have and if we say has zero knowledge well then it's value there's some arbitrary cutoff why does it have value the amount of value that allows it to have supreme power and necessary existence but it's just cut off there that's still a limit and i think then that limit would call out for further explanation especially because we can think of something that has more value than that yeah i'm definitely catching where you're where you're going with this so at this point i'm i'm doing my best to play devil's advocate here let's let's think about why we have to have an explanation for arbitrary limits right so i mean there's a few different approaches i mean we could appeal if you know if we're in a kind of modest mode we can appeal to just this inference to the best explanation so in general limited things have an explanation and the simplest best explanation of our observations of limited things having an explanation is that that they all do right another argument more from reason is just that limits just by their very nature mark a cutoff between the actual and the potential so for example if there's a limited amount of i don't know water then that marks a boundary between so the actual water and some conceivable potential water and if that's right well then one reason then another reason to think that limits would have to have a further explanation is to explain why things are actual to the degree that they are it's about actualizing possibilities because there could always be more well why isn't the more actual why is this actual rather than the more and it seems like we need a deeper explanation for that so we're appealing again to sort of this general principle that contingent things contingent states don't just exist and even if people are skeptical about the general principle they think maybe there are exceptions i know there are some puzzles against the general principle still there's the presumption that contingent things have an explanation other things being equal so unless we have an independent reason to think that the contingent limit in question doesn't have an explanation the presumption would be to think that it does have an explanation and again anything less than perfect is going to be limited and there can be no no explanation of its limit and so it seems like that would be a problem other things being equal we should prefer to think that there's an explanation okay i'm still thinking through this argument because it's it's fascinating to me right now could we use a kind of modal principle of sufficient reason in order to defend this so we're asking well like why does this thing assuming that it has like zero knowledge it's less than perfectly valuable and so we want to ask well it has a finite limit in how valuable it is so what best explains this or what's the what's the explanation and according to if we if we adopt some kind of principle explanation then we'd have to have some kind of explanation for for why this finite limit is being exemplified as opposed to infinite value or or what what have you so could we use a kind of modal principle of explanation that again introduces this modal operator possibly possibly there's an explanation for this possibility could we use that is that enough like could we can we because that's a more modest version we talked about that in in part one yeah so that shows up in the article you mentioned from nestor remain to god it also shows up in a co-author with chris weaver in the book the two dozen or so arguments for god uh we develop a modal version as well where yeah all we need is the possibility of a deeper explanation again because there can't be it's impossible for there to be an explanation that goes deeper than the ultimate explanation so if we're talking about what are the features of the foundation of everything the foundational explanation of everything what are its features those features can't be further explained and so all we need then is the principle that there's possibly an explanation for any limit well there can't possibly be an explanation for the limits of the foundation therefore the foundation can't have limit that's the idea okay so let's turn to a really common objection that you hear and and i'm curious to hear how this version the deductive version of the supreme being hypothesis would sort of deal with this objection which is basically why is this better than the universe like why can't the universe be the necessary being that we're talking about and maybe it's even a necessary multiverse i think this is the view that grand mafi defended in your discussion with him on our youtube channel why can't it just be the universe like why does it have to be well i mean at first i want to say maybe it could be right so like maybe this is the universe but then is the universe a perfect being right so well you know if you just say it's the multiverse here's a problem the multiverse isn't a perfect being because like so first of all it has arbitrary limits so like if you think about you know even if it's infinite sort of in the number of universes it's not infinite in its density right like there's space between us for example like i can move my limbs and stuff it's not like infinitely dense so like so why does it have the geometry that it has i mean take the whole multi multiverse and think of the entire multiverse as one giant scattered geometry well that's kind of an arbitrary i mean there's limits in there right i mean it's it's not itself perfected i mean if it were perfect then hey we're at the conclusion there's a perfect being but i mean i wouldn't think that people would think of the universe as right like having the perfections maximal knowledge power and goodness but if they did well i mean then god exists and it it is the universe a personal knowledgeable supreme being right yeah i mean we already talked about the the fact that if we if we assume that the necessary being or whatever the necessary foundation necessary part of reality has no knowledge then it's not as valuable perhaps as it could be right and so maybe that's that's another way that you would look at it and as i'm saying this i'm thinking now maybe we need to give some kind of defense as to why knowledge is supremely valuable or valuable at all and so how do we know and that's another video like i'm telling you i've watched everything that you've produced another video that you talk about is why the supreme being would have these properties or why a perfect being how do we know what a great making property is how do we recognize it yeah that's a good question so so in this deductive form of the argument the basic structure is the foundation of things can't be limited in its value it's got some value because it's got supreme necessary i mean it's got the supreme ability to exist without being able to follow parts because some value it can't be limited it's got to have supreme value and the question is what do you what do you do with that like what does supreme value imply well then i think it actually is a conceptual consequence of supreme value that it's going to have just the kind of rate making properties that we associate with value knowledge power goodness if i can if i compare two beings in my mind and one has supreme power supreme knowledge moral perfection has a sort of classic theistic and then i compare that with another being that has let's say infinite power but it's a multiverse without knowledge it maybe has some goodness right scattered throughout the multiverse like which of these two beings or these two realities has the greater worth you know which is like more worth being praised if you want to praise these things right it seems like it's the one that includes the additional great making attributes right like has the knowledge it's got the virtues has everything else and i mean it's in a way it's hard to argue for these things because i think that we sort of see them intuitively by example if i'm praising my wife and i say you are so kind and so gentle and so beautiful and so ignorant of everything like she intuitively knows that that last thing that i said was sort of out of step with the first things that i said right i don't have to make an argument for that or if you call like a skeptic of the argument we're giving uh an ignorant fool like they're not gonna take that as a compliment right because intuitively they understand that we're not attributing worth um there's something greater about having knowledge not having knowledge yeah so by example right i think we we intuitively understand these things by example and um i mean i think there is this kind of emphasis in our culture on the five senses start seeing things and touching things hearing things but like we have these other senses like we have the sense of our own thoughts and we have the sense that allows us to distinguish good emotions from bad emotions right i mean and that's a real sense and the way to elicit that sense i think is just through example the way that we would elicit any of our senses so you know one way that one might respond to this kind of argument is to say well we can't trust this sense of value at all but my response to that is that well if we can't trust that sense then how can we trust any of our other senses i mean part of what we need to do is just like recognize the senses that we have and we need to do that through examples if i insult someone i say well you're just so silly and dumb it's like well there's a sense about what i'm doing there right like and so that plays into the argument and we can appeal to that sense all right so as you were talking i'm thinking more about how how to best simplify this and how to yeah to really see what what's really going on here so i'm thinking now about people versus objects okay so people we we generally most most people understand intuitively that people are valuable other people people that we love especially our family members and our close friends we can see that these people are valuable but objects on the other hand are not as valuable they're valuable to some extent but they're not as valuable think about when you see a news story and a home has been destroyed and the family through some miraculous intervention has survived and they're all hugging each other and they're thinking you know at least we're still here like everything else can be replaced but we can't be replaced i think that shows you that everybody pretty much understands that physical material things that are not people are not as valuable as people and then we can start to question well why is that the case why do we why do we value people why why do we automatically assume that people are the things that are most valuable in the universe and then we can see well they have thoughts they have feelings they're conscious and you know you can also see that you're talking about ignorance we tend to value people i think and maybe this is wrong of us to do so but we tend to value people that have more knowledge in a certain area depending on the situation that you find yourself in i'm going to value a doctor with a phd in medicine over some random person that just walks into a doctor's office i'm going to value the doctor over the other person in that situation that context i don't know i'm thinking about out loud at this point you know that's good and we can distinguish between intrinsic value and extrinsic value right so you might think that as you gain more knowledge you you gain more extrinsic value but that your intrinsic value doesn't change even as you increase in knowledge but right so but the point that you're making the central point is that people seem to be the locus of value right and it doesn't seem i mean we not only have the sense that people are have value but we have an additional sense which is the sense that a person would have value even if they were not valued like even if nobody knew about some four-year-old who was just lost in the woods and let's imagine the four-year-old herself has become unconscious or something so she doesn't even have a value for herself there's no sense of herself but we have the sense that even if no one valued someone that that person would still have value just by being a person and i think that does say something about people being the locus of value that we have a sense that senses are evidence so that they're pointers and so here i think our sense of value is a pointer to the reality of value and so the the universe if it's impersonal at its foundational layer then would be missing something of great value namely the kind of value that belongs to persons and i think just one one more point of clarification here is that humans are not necessarily a thing that are valuable it's persons being a person because if yeah you know we can imagine any other race and i mean all you got to do is think about star trek or star wars there are other races that we can imagine maybe even in our universe there are other aliens or whatever that that exists in their persons in the sense that everyone i think understands what a person is we would we would then see them as valuable or at least we'd have no reason to think that they were less than valuable if they exhibited personhood so i i don't think it's human that necessarily is the thing that distinguishes value here it's being a person yeah so when we apply that to the universe or we apply this in the in the broader context of what we're we're talking about the necessary foundation as long as it's a person not that doesn't have to be a human is what i'm saying yeah it can just as long as it sort of exhibits these these attributes that we typically associate with persons yeah so let me just add a note here so here we're talking about a pathway through value the the basic argument is that the foundation has some value how much well the simplest answer the answer that's the least arbitrary the least ad hoc is that it has supreme value and then from supreme value we uncover other attributes like personhood knowledge even even power you can go from value to power a different route that doesn't go through value first is to go to supreme power and then unpack from supreme power the power to know everything because the power to know everything is a power and if something had maximal conceivable power but was missing in the power to know everything then it would be missing and it conceivable power and so then its power would have a cutoff and we could say it's an arbitrary cutoff because it has less than maximal conceivable and so then it brings back that question well why that much rather than more but there's there's a path through value but there's also just a path through power and that's different from the path that i took in the in the article you cited from necessary b to god where i looked at each attribute individually i took a path to power and a different path to knowledge a different path to goodness here we're talking about paths through value and then a path through power and so here we see there's different lines to explore does that make sense that is really really helpful yeah very very helpful and they're all deductive lines these are all the deductive lines for exploration and in the the article that i have it's it's the same kind of thing that you were saying where it's everything is sort of built on top of each other yeah i go from infinite power to volition to unity to infinite knowledge and then finally to perfect goodness and everything is sort of built on top of each other yeah so i don't argue for them independently i argue that they're all sort of connected in a way let's let's turn to uh another objection and this is going to be more the the layman is going to raise this type of objection layman just the ordinary person who might be hearing this for the first time and it's something that actually bothers me in one sense it's like we know that the universe exists so isn't it safer to posit things that we know exist like the universe isn't that way more modest why do we need to invoke something so far removed from our experience like a supreme perfect being right because we don't have any experience with perfect beings yeah i was thinking about this again recently it's actually kind of ironic because this theory the supreme foundation theory or the i call it the perfect theory or whatever is what you might think of as the least arbitrary account of the foundation conceivable because i mean every other account of the foundation has by definition some arbitrary limit or boundary i mean the least arbitrary theory of the foundation is the one in which it is simply perfect it has its value without limit and so there's a certain irony in a way in thinking that a more arbitrary account of the foundation one that posits arbitrary boundaries cut cutoffs or limitations would be more probable but you know it's interesting because i was thinking again about my exchange with ram and he has read about something so it's always safer like not to believe something like no matter what it is so like for example just just to make this point very clear imagine there's a proposition p and imagine p is the most probable theory it's more probable than it's negation and it's more probable than any um competitor um let's say it's i don't know from your perspective given all your data let's say it's 85 likely to be true still here's a theory that's even more probable than p p or not p so like if if i just kind of take the more modest position and don't almost like quote take the risk of accepting p to sort of leave it open i have a more probable theory just p or not p and i was thinking about that actually with respect to my conversation with graham because it struck me that my account or this supreme theory account of the foundation is fully compatible with his account it wasn't like he was giving an alternative theory he wasn't he his theory was that the foundation is a necessarily existing thing and it has power he left open whether it's power was maximal he just left that open he declined to write like to actually have a view on that and so his but his view wasn't incompatible with mine it's almost like his view this is maybe a crude way of putting it is a version his view of the foundation would be a version of p or not p like either the foundation has maximal power or it has less than maximal power and i want to leave that open but still that's consistent okay the fact that his view then would be more modest and then more probable than my view is consistent with my view being more probable than its negation that is to say just to make sure this is clear the the theory that the foundation is supreme that could be more probable than any other theory including just its negation the most probable of the theories even if it's even more probable to say that either it's supreme or not does that make sense so i mean it's like you're taking a little bit of a risk if you accept something that's even the most probable theory but it's still going to be the most reasonable of all the alternatives but i mean i don't think it's it's going to be less probable to think the foundation is the least arbitrary and that is the simplest conceivable that is its nature is just perfect rather than something else more complicated like a multiverse or something else yeah i'm just going to bring it back to reality for a second i think what what you were what you were explaining there was was really good it was it was a great way to put it in the sense that i understood it and i'm sure that people who are listening and might be familiar with like more formal logic and stuff might might be able to grasp that but i think another way of putting it that's a more common way and a way that i'm gonna refer to jay warner wallace i don't know if you're familiar with his work but one of the things that he does and he's so great at and explain and i wish i had this superpower he has i mean he has the the superpower of being able to explain complex ideas even philosophically rigorously in a way that anybody can understand and i'm not trying to put you down josh i'm just saying that this is maybe another way to think about this i i need help here this is good i appreciate it these aren't easy concepts no they're not but one of the things that he does he uses the language of reasonable versus possible and it blew my mind it was such a simple distinction that he makes here instead of what i would typically do is talk about probable versus possible but those two combined together really put this idea as like well wait a second now i've got to really think philosophically about probable versus possible and it's like too much to go too much going on so instead we can make this distinction between what's reasonable and what's possible and i think that gets more at the heart of what you're saying it's like you have either p or not p or p or q or whatever whatever you're saying and that's basically another way a more complex way of just saying well this is it's still possible that some other explanation is is correct and so therefore we should just sort of be in doubt about it and so that's a thing that he talks about is that well anything is really possible but what we what we should care about is what's most reasonable i mean it's possible that during the course of our entire discussion right now recording these two episodes it's possible that both of us have been influenced by aliens and we're not actually here we've actually been killed and we're just having these uh these experiences post-mortem or something i don't know anything is possible but really what we should care about is what is most reasonable so i think i think maybe that's another way of framing it that's gonna hit the nail on the head there yeah i like that yeah if we're taking the the probabilistic route there are alternative possibilities but the question is you know what's the most reasonable account of the foundation and i mean it seems to me that like how could it not be the most reasonable to think of the foundation as the least arbitrary the least limited the simplest how could that not be the most reasonable how could that especially when it has high predictive power it explains the effects you know we didn't get into this but i mean if you have a foundation that's the least limited and so it's got value to perfection and so therefore has the valuable attributes of knowledge power and goodness well that also gives it the resources to produce other beings that have knowledge power value goodness things like us right so it then becomes much less surprising that our universe you know just happens to be finely tuned for conscious beings like us um so it's yeah it's intrinsically probable it explains the effects and i like the way you put it that's a helpful way of of sorting this you know the reasonable versus the possible there are other possible theories well i mean if if we take the probabilistic approach we can grant that there are other possible theories for sake of argument i mean in the end i think no it's actually not possible for the foundation to be limited because i think necessarily any limit is gonna have a further explanation so i mean i think in fact it's just not even possible for their for the foundation to be anything but perfect i do think that but i can grant for sake of argument okay well maybe maybe there are other possible theories and then we can look at okay what's the most reasonable what's the most probable yeah i'm thinking about a million different things right now as you're talking this is this is opening up a lot of different areas for me to think about which is which is so great and i hope that listeners are also really benefiting from this because it's it's it's really fascinating okay so jay warner wallace thanks i don't know if he's ever gonna listen to this but thanks for that that help for both of us and let's turn to a an objection to the perfect being hypothesis which is a very big objection and it is basically just the problem of evil if a perfect being exists then why is there so much suffering in the world and pain and evil and why are there tsunamis why are there tornadoes why is there cancer in children there's these are questions i think that a lot of people will say disconfirm or even strongly disconfirms the perfect being hypothesis because this a perfect being why would a perfect being allow all this stuff it seems to to really provide some counter evidence here so and again i've i've already mentioned your other videos you have a four part series on this question too so let's let's get into it yeah although this is one of the deepest questions and i mean to make it even harder you know think about like what perfection implies it seems like perfection implies like nothing but perfection right so so i mean if there's this perfect foundation you might even wonder like how could he even create anything because it's already perfect it's complete enjoys all the value that it could possibly enjoy and so at the most fundamental level it's maybe puzzling like how it could even produce anything that's limited or finite or less than perfect itself and and it can't create something else that's perfect because well part of what it is to be perfect is to be the supreme foundation of everything else so it's it's the foundation of everything so there can't be another foundation of everything yeah and i think that just to address this most fundamental problem like how could a perfect foundation produce anything i think it's important to make a distinction between maximal value and all possible value so the supreme foundation conceptually has as much value as anything could have okay but it doesn't follow that it thereby has within itself like all possible value so for example there's the value of your existence cameron your existence has value and so you know that value would be missing if nothing was created right so we want to make that distinction i think one of the worries that people have is that well look if foundation has supreme value then it has all value but that's a mistake that does not follow doesn't have all value has maximal value and so then that leaves out other possible values including the value of an interesting adventure with different kinds of beings in itself if it were just by itself in a world without anything else then there would be value missing in the world they would still have as much value as a being could have but there would be value that's missing in the world and so this is not to solve all the problems of course but it's just to solve this one fundamental problem how it could create anything at all i want to try to interject here and instead of instead of like give a layman distinction i'm actually going to give a sort of philosophical distinction and maybe you can expand on this and and i don't know if you actually discussed this in your videos okay let me just get to it so maybe we could distinguish between a ray value and dedicto value so the array value in the sense we're talking about the kind of value that a being has so this perfect this maximally great being is a being and that being has a certain level of value and in terms of a maximally great being or perfect being it has maximal value okay and that's the property of that being but it's another question of whether the world has maximal value or whether the world itself it has every kind or every type of value that it could possibly have and i think what you're saying is that it doesn't follow from the fact that this being this one being has maximal value that the entire world or all of reality has all the different types of value maybe maybe that's another way of of helping us right see the the the difference there that's good and that is a philosophical distinction that i'm hoping that you can help put put a little bit more on well i thought that was a good explanation yeah the one being of the the one idea de rey being of the being versus de dicto of the proposition you spelled it out in terms of the being versus the world but the the idea is the same is basically what you're trying to say is is good that doesn't follow from a being having maximal value that therefore the world has all the values that there could be it just doesn't follow and so that's a good distinction to make because it would be a mistake to say well god can't exist because if god did exist then god couldn't create anything well why couldn't god create something of course that still leaves open other more specific questions about okay well why did god create this particular world with the particular kinds of evil and suffering we find and so we can move on to that but as far as the general fundamental question it's not clear why a perfect being couldn't create less lesser beings in fact i would argue from its perfection that it would create lesser beings the argument being that because it's perfect it would have awareness of all these other values that are possible that could be instantiated in the world and so that awareness would give a good reason to create at least some of those things i mean it's actually consistent with theism that it even creates uh infinitely many universes that so can instantiate all these different values in different worlds and in terms of additional things that are valuable or additional values you mentioned my existence but i think that one in in this is sort of more specific to christianity one of the things one of the actions i think that is most valuable that a person can do is to exemplify radical forgiveness so there's a story of a of an homeless fan of an amish family whose child was killed in a it was a mass shooting or a school shooting and what happened afterwards just i it blew pretty much everyone away it was all in the news stories and everything and basically what happened was the family of the student that was slain went to the funeral of the shooter the person who killed their their child and this is an example of radical forgiveness that i i mean think about whether or not god in a world where only god exists is that value is that action is that exemplified in that world and it isn't so i think what you're saying here this is just another example of something that is valuable that wouldn't exist in a world where it's just this perfect being and so there are different types of values yeah and you're not claiming that this value justifies all the evil in the world you're just pointing to another value that would be missing so where do we go from here well the problem of evil has layers and layers and so in my videos i try to give tools it's it's not something that i can solve for people but i can give people tools that they can use sort of on their own journeys as they're thinking about it for themselves and i think i i think that's kind of the most empowering way to proceed so the tools that i offer are just these general principles that people can use as they think about these things some of these are just distinctions to be made such as the distinction we just made here between all the values that are possible versus the maximal value that a being could have that's a helpful distinction right another distinction maybe i'll just give one more distinction as a tool and then see what you think about that but one more distinction is between a evil that happens and it's it's mysterious in the sense that you don't see why it would happen versus it could be mysterious in another way and that it's not just that you don't see why it would happen you see that it wouldn't happen you see that a perfect being would prevent it so for example let's say you see a cat hit by a car and it's just suffering so one idea is that you see that suffering and you don't see why that would happen why would a perfect being create a world in which something like that would happen or why would the perfect being not intervene stop that or what could be happening there is that you see that that wouldn't happen you see that a perfect being would stop that from happening and this is an important distinction and and it helps us to think more carefully about really what's going on because we have to ask ourselves whether we are in a good position when we see a particular evil to see that a perfect being would stop that now maybe we are like in principle but we have to ask that question because maybe we're not i mean here's a reason to be cautious if a perfect being exists this being would have a maximal knowledge which would include knowledge of all possible value which would then give it knowledge of all possible reasons for allowing various things to happen and this will include reasons that we probably wouldn't see all the time i mean maybe some of them we could see but it's unclear that we would see all of them and so you know we want to separate the clear from the unclear did we clearly see that it wouldn't happen or do we even probably see that it wouldn't happen or are we a more modest position where we don't really see what the reason would be i would argue that we should expect there to be events that are mysterious if god exists we should expect that that would be just the thing to expect because god would have a kind of knowledge that would surpass ours and we wouldn't expect to know everything now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect to know anything or any of god's reasons but in any case this is just the beginning but we have to distinguish between the seeing that god would prevent it from the failure to see that god would prevent it and that distinction can help us sort through the cases yeah i think that's helpful and i don't really have a way of of making that easier to see i think that you've actually put it pretty easily pretty well i mean this can be taken to extremes some people will say well look if you can't see what god's reasons would be if you're always just in the dark then like how can you know anything like maybe god's deceiving you right now for reasons like maybe he created you five minutes ago with all your memories and he's deceiving you and you say well god wouldn't do that well maybe he would but he's he would do it for reasons you can't see right so they'd be like skeptical of everything and i think that's going too far so i think this can be pressed too far so my goal isn't just to press this as an answer to every possible question about evil it's not but it does invite a kind of intellectual humility i think it cautions us from a kind of dogmatism that that says well i see that god couldn't have a good reason for that therefore god can't exist i think that that's also a mistake so we have to have the wisdom to go between the extremes here so let me i'll just add two things because the problem of evil is something that i have actually done some some study on so you you're talking about really the the position of skeptical theism and there's a recent relatively recent paper out by a guy named john depoe he's a he's a christian philosopher he's a what he's trying to do is reconcile natural theology with skeptical theism i'll be using a lot of philosophical terms in this little spiel that i'm about to give but what he does is he he basically says that there are these certain goods and i don't i don't have these in mind actually because i haven't read i haven't read the paper closely enough but he basically says that there are goods that god can achieve through something like skeptical theism through something like where we're in the dark maybe not completely in the dark but we may not know the reasons that god has for allowing certain evils in the world and that there would be goods that would come about by that happening by us being limited in what we know and so that's that's one way i think that that's sort of the way that you're you're getting at it's uh he calls it a positive skeptical theism and he also uses a meteorologist analogy where basically if you have a meteorologist who's like well i don't know what is going to happen with the weather it's just going to be sort of random and we have these these things that pop up uh a random weather event that pops up and you're like well i don't know i mean for all i know this weather event could happen or not based on my model but instead you have a model that predicts sort of these random chaotic events then you'd want to prefer the other model that has these that makes these predictions and i'm i'm sure that i'm botching his argument but that's the the basic ideas that he he endorses a kind of positive skeptical theism where we where god would have reasons for keeping us in the dark about his reasons for allowing and permitting certain evils in the world because we can see some reason like you said we have some light about the the possible explanations for evil one of them is the the famous free will defense by alvin planinga he talks about how valuable it is that we humans have moral freedom we can choose between right and wrong and that is an incredible value to to have it means that we're not robots basically that we have the ability to choose between right and wrong and we can also choose to sort of develop our character in good ways and bad ways and so that's something that's added to the world through this kind of moral freedom yeah yeah there's there's a variety of theodicies that go beyond skeptical theism and i think it's important to to think about those as well i don't think skeptical theism really can do all the work by itself it's limited in its ability to explain the problems i think yeah one of one of the things that i was talking about with radical forgiveness i was basically giving a version of the soul building theodicy where these we have these virtues that are most valuable when they're exemplified so it's not enough to have a disposition toward radical forgiveness you've actually got to exemplify it you've got to do the action in the in the world in order for that value to be instantiated so that's that's one way of of answering it is with that theodicy i also wanted to mention that there are some christian philosophers like peter van andwagen and even mike almeida mike almedia has has an approach to the problem of evil that we actually posted on our website recently about how god couldn't create a world where there were no gratuitous evils in gratuitous here i mean a pointless evil so what he says is that typically people think that god's existence is incompatible with pointless evil that there's always got to be some kind of reason some kind of loving ultimately loving explanation for all the evil and suffering that's permitted in the world but what he says is that that premise is actually false that god can't prevent all gratuitous evil that's impossible that's that's his argument and the only reason why i even point that out is because there are different ways to look at the argument some people say like mike almeida does and peter vandenwagen that god's existence is compatible with pointless evil so we may not see a reason because there is no reason but then the question is well what challenge does that pose to god's existence some people say well god's existence is only compatible with evils that are explained or have some greater good some reason why they are exemplified in the world but that premise can be challenged just like with pretty much any philosophical argument or position but anyways those are the two things that i wanted to talk about were positive skeptical theism with john depoe he has a great paper on it which i can actually link and then the second one was that some philosophers and some of the most brilliant christian thinkers out there deny that premise that god's existence entails that all evils are are explained or have some greater good that that is brought about by them yeah and if i could just add one more thought here one of the theodicies that i develop in my book on the two-stage cosmological argument from contingency i talk about the problem of evil towards the end and i talk about i give a story theodicy where um it may be you could think of this as weaving together many other theodicies like free will and soul making but it puts it all into the context of stories within stories so like your life is a story you are the hero of your life story and you're on an adventure of growth of connection of relationship of learning of discovery and when we think about like the greatest stories the stories with the most value we think of stories where there's heroism there's displays of virtue the greatest being in the story displays a sacrifice there's love there's reward there's transitions you know there's episodes there's stories within stories and maybe we could even make sense a little bit of what you mentioned in terms of gratuitous evils because there could be some amount of surprise and randomness built into the environment here we could maybe appeal to sort of a meta reason a reason for having a world in which there could be evils with no reasons so in a certain way the evils do have a reason but in a meta sort of way it's it's a reason to have the kind of realm in which there are events that happen sort of unpredictably by accident and it's all part of the story within stories and in the end everything sort of is working out for good or at least there's that possibility for each person so that there's no tragedy that's unredeemable like everything gets used and so even if you have an intense suffering as long as it's finite and it can reap something of value in a soul in a person whose story goes on forever then the sort of eternality of that story can make sense like the bigger picture can make sense of the things that we don't see at every moment so the story theodicy is another way of it's another tool i would say for thinking about the connection between the perfect foundation and then our observations i like that a lot i i'm thinking about you you had you put in my mind thinking about what are the greatest stories that are told yeah and and the greatest story seems to me i mean and i guess what my mind immediately goes to are movies you know i'm thinking about like uh my my favorite movies and they all involve a great deal of suffering right and the the protagonist has overcome the suffering confusion he's done something to questions doubts the struggle yes ignorance oh okay so i i i was thinking about this too have you ever thought cause you mentioned earlier briefly that you said you don't even think it's possible that the foundation could be anything but perfect so right my question is well from that could we then just infer that there has to be some explanation for all the suffering in the world or at least that a perfect being must be compatible with suffering yes i think so i mean part of what happens when you consider arguments is you you have to weigh them they have different strengths and i mean and technically even deductive arguments could strike you with less uncertainty because it's a deductive argument but you're not 100 certain of the inference for example but having said that as i've studied the connections between the foundation and then its supremacy yeah i mean i would say that that some those connections are things that are seeable and knowable and that if you know them if you can see them then then you're going to think about evil through the lens of a perfect foundation you i mean i guess i guess there would be a problem if somehow you could show for sure that there couldn't be a good reason for some particular instance of suffering but i mean i don't see how that's possible i mean i i don't see that i mean i have no ability to see that there could not be a reason for particular evils and suffering what happens is maybe i just don't see what the reason is and i have no idea what it could be but i don't thereby see that there couldn't be a reason so i think you're right yeah one could argue from the perfection of the foundation to the conclusion that there has to be some reason all right well what we're again coming up i think on an hour and a half in this uh the second episode which is crazy and there's so much more we could talk about especially just getting into the problem of evil but let me just ask you do you have like another summary that you want to give of stage two do you have any other closing thoughts here before we sort of close out this this uh two-part series well maybe i could summarize with that picture of a castle so if you think of reality as a as a castle stage one gives us a foundation of the castle and stage two tells us that this is a very special castle indeed because its foundation is supreme it's perfect and i guess that's it i just wanted to close with that picture the the perfect foundation provides a even a foundation for understanding the elements within the castle because whatever those elements are they have to be consistent with its ultimate explanation they have to be consistent with the perfection of the foundation and so that can be then a guiding light for your life and also for further uh inquiry about things if you're of course persuaded by the argument of from contingency right then that can help you on other uh another question throughout these two episodes you've mentioned a book that you're working on and i even mentioned reading parts of it can you tell us anything about it yeah so i've got this book coming out um it's called how reason can lead to god and i begin by sharing my story of losing my own belief in god and what that was like and then the pathway of reason that i discovered and i unpacked that in a lot of detail step by step and so the purpose of the book is to help people to see a pathway to a treasure where and this is for people who really want the truth this isn't for people who are just looking for i don't know like a way of supporting something that they already believe i mean it you know it's a resource for that but it's for people who really want the truth and um i i put my heart into soul heart and soul into this book and i'm very excited about it but yeah that should be coming out next summer awesome and so where can listeners go to find out more of your work you already mentioned your website but i still want to talk about your youtube channel what do you have coming up there so i am upgrading it we have a new studio i'm uh just beginning to make some new videos and i almost hesitate to talk about it because i want to create these new and improved videos and then begin to release them week by week so if people were following that i was releasing them week by week and then i've taken a break to upgrade it but yeah it's called world view design and the whole purpose of it is to empower people to equip people to develop their own worldview and i think that i've i'll just tell you this i think that i've made a little bit of a shift so in the beginning when i was creating the videos it was just experimental i just started making videos and i went by the philosophy of let's just produce and learn as we go and so that was good and i'm proud of the videos that i made but i i feel like as i was producing those videos i concentrated a lot on on giving these particular arguments and that's fine but i really want to emphasize the empowerment piece that that the worldview design is for empowering people who maybe they feel a little bit lost in the world maybe they they it's hard to see clearly and it's to give them tools to help them to build up their own worldview like each person has to take responsibility for building their own worldview in their own terms it's not about me trying to give my worldview but it's about empowering people to build their worldview so i want to give people tools and principles and strategies for doing that successfully so that's what that's about and then tell us about your website as well so joshualrasmussen.com people can go there for additional resources i have some of my published articles there and links to things that i've created that they can find at that website cool yeah and then and then in addition to that i mean you and i i plan or i uh for cs working a lot together in the future and so if you're listening you're probably going to see josh again we may have them on for a discussion we may have them on for more podcasts i don't know the sky is the limit so well josh thanks for coming on thanks for spending so much time with us thank you these two episodes it's been uh it's been a pleasure likewise it's been fun thank you yeah and so if you're listening and you want to learn more about us go to capturingchristianity.com that's the easiest way to do it don't forget to check out the shop we have a bunch of different t-shirts and stuff there's actually one that says by the way christianity is true that's our slogan so you can go there you can buy t-shirts and we also have some pdfs there we're starting to put those up on the on the shop there and then if you haven't subscribed make sure to do that too so when you when you go to the website you'll see a button down at the bottom and what you can do actually is get a free pdf copy of our book it's a ebook called the rationality of christian theism that's free to you if you just sign up and subscribe there put in your email but before we get too too long here i'll just say thanks guys for joining us and i hope that you enjoyed enjoyed these two episodes the contingency argument is something that i really have a big passion for and you can see that josh does too so if you have any questions comments feel free to leave them in the comments feel free to go to the website and leave them there go to the facebook page whatever you want to do but anyways we'll see you guys later all right peace hey it's me again uh actually don't leave yet i've got something super super important to tell you so first of all you're awesome like you you just watched a really really long video just now and you're still watching it that is actually pretty amazing secondly we have hundreds literally hundreds of other apologetics related videos for you to watch on our channel go check them out i've interviewed exorcist hosted debates between christians and atheists i've even made response videos to atheists all of that is available on our channel go check it out third i rely on people that see value in my work people like you that watch videos to the very end to keep the lights on around here literally this is how i feed my family so if you see value in the work that i do please consider supporting this ministry and becoming a patron links to that are in the description oh and uh have i mentioned that christianity is true

Channel: Capturing Christianity

Views: 18,611

Keywords: capturing christianity, cameron bertuzzi, apologetics, god, atheism

Id: PqOaHlYmoS0

Length: 179min 11sec (10751 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021