As Many True Things & As Few Ham Things (feat. Matt Dillahunty) - (Ken) Ham & AiG News

[Music] welcome apologia and another addition of ham and egg news where we react to Ken Ham reacting to things just hit those emoji so they come across the screen when George's the majority can hit that angry ones when I'm speaking hit that nice ones yeah I've got to say ever since can ban me from seeing him some of the magic is gone did somebody say magic Matt Dillahunty that is an impressive entrance how'd you do it well it just takes a lot of practice and being a cartoon helps so it would seem for the record real magic is fake and fake magic is real but let's talk a little Ken Ham not like this please okay one day I was named the OP there was a group of Catholic nuns a group of Muslims from Baghdad a group of Orthodox Jews and then we have also two other people from different countries and Amish and Mennonite I mean that's the sort of people that the arc attraction is not wrong as a former Mennonite I definitely felt at home with the crowd at the Creation Museum but you went to the Ark Encounter with Seth Andrews last September I wonder why Ken didn't list atheists so we were in Kentucky and they said hey we want to take you to the Ark Encounter I know it's raining a bit we drove up and I was thinking about the irony of it you know raining in us we had to get umbrellas and in order to walk up to the Ark and the front facade the the part that everybody sees when they come up was impressive but I think slightly smaller than I would have kind of envisioned and I think that gets to the problems that rational individuals have with the Ark Encounter is that if you just do the math on the measurements you're like wow this is just not possible first of all this thing's not structurally sound it's not gonna float but there's no way you could fit everything on there and everything else but because the story is about fitting all these animals on there I think in my mind the dimensions played out as bigger than they actually are and so when we got up there and you know I saw it I was like you know that is an impressive structure that's a lot of great woodwork as somebody who enjoys woodworking there was a lot of impressive stuff with the structure but it felt smaller and I didn't even notice until Seth showed me afterwards that I just assumed as I'm sure a lot of other people do that it was a full Ark but it's just a big building with an arc facade on you know one side of it they brought in my people the Amish to do a bunch of the work because they can produce without modern screws and bolts they use screws and bolts and concrete and metal they brought in Amish woodworkers to put a facade on it it's beautiful it's a testament to their craftsmanship as far as visibility of the structure both outside and inside but I think once I got inside I was even kind of more shocked at how absolutely barren this place feels now I know it's expensive you get a plot of land you do a lot of building you have to pay for crews there was a lot more involved here than Noah and his sons but when I got in there's a whole bunch of little cubby holes and stuff like that there wasn't a lot of description or explanation for the specifics I mean apart from this is a guess of how the animal on the top shelf would basically poop down you know it would drift down and then as we walked through the Ark there a few exhibits not quite animatronic but model animals and cages and then there were just seemingly vast open spaces where you had large placards and graphic displays that were flat with a lot of reading and I really felt like the vast majority of what I saw in the ark could have been in a coffee table book for almost the same experience they actually do sell that book it's called Ark signs for about 16 dollars all your favorite Ark encounter signs in one place in glossy clarity if you just rip that out and stick it on the wall that's kind of how I felt walking through the Ark Encounter you know will you walk into this little cubby hole and here's five things on the wall and nothing really there for display they noticed the people like me were taking pictures of all the signs so they found a way to monetize it the most crowded place in the Ark Encounter was the Gift Shop on the exit that is just jam-packed with anything and everything you can imagine it was very clear we're expecting bus loads of church kids coming in here and their parents so there's something for everybody to buy after the ridiculous price they already paid to get into the Ark Encounter to basically see no it's kind of like a pop-up book maybe suffice to say you were underwhelmed yeah I was actually about two-thirds of the way through I just kept walking I'd see a placard and I was like you know I'm sure I can read this online it was like I'm not gonna learn anything here and there's not that much there that is interesting you're intriguing because when they talk about the construction of the arc and try to answer the questions that people might have of how do you feed all these animals what do you do with the waste material in all that well of course it's all speculation but I didn't have certainly at the time and definitely not the expertise to go through and figure out oh does this even make sense as a plausible explanation and answer to these questions when every 15 20 steps I was finding something that was a laughably bad attempt at explaining things what didn't surprise me was how there weren't that many people there you know you've got so many different varieties of Christianity there are some that are never going to go to the Ark Encounter they're just gonna look at this as ridiculous because they don't necessarily take the story literally anyway then of those who think that this story actually happened there's going to be a split between those who have some interest in taking their kids and showing them because they're terrified of evolution or whatever else and then there's gonna be others who are like yeah we don't need to do that there's so many cafeteria Christians out there pick and choose and Easter and Christmas Christians I don't think it has near the sort of draw you can go online and see enough about what it is so it didn't surprise me that there weren't very many people there did anyone recognize you were stuff there was a group of us and some people had atheist t-shirts on and they certainly got noticed I'm not convinced that anybody actually recognised me I can usually tell when that happens I mean it didn't happen in airports more frequently than anything else but we stopped by on the way out at the office place next to the gift shop and I said I was wondering if Ken Ham was around my name is matt doheny tell him I was here I'd love to talk to him real quick and they had no idea how they could possibly get ahold of Ken at all so we just kind of left after that I remember one right on the stage when I debated Bill Nighy he said kids in Kentucky are taught about creation they're gonna be behind inside smooth fairly week goes by when Ken doesn't reference his debate with Bill Nye your atheist debates channel is dedicated to the arts of debating and analyzing debates looking back now what are your thoughts on how that to be went typically I only deconstruct my own debates on the atheist debates channel it's not like I'm gonna go pick somebody else's debate and say here's what this person did wrong here's what this person did wrong and here's what this person did right that may be beneficial but I don't necessarily feel that connection and I'm not trying to prop myself up as the world's authority on debating but with the Ken Ham Bill Nye debate I remember it of course because I was opposed to this debate happening in the first place and was concerned because while bill is obviously a great science communicator he might have been one of the best choices for this if it weren't for the fact that this was a win-win scenario for ken by bill agreeing to do this he took a financially struggling Creation Museum and gave them every opportunity to make as much money as they possibly could because if Ken loses the debate in most people's eyes which i think is obviously the case then he gets to go back to his financial backers and say you know hey the evolutionists are winning we need more money and if he were to win the debate he gets to go to his backers and say see we're being successful we actually are doing really well and we completely dominated this debate and now we need more money to reach more of these kids that are falling into satan's whiles I watched the debate upstairs in my office because I was rather animated and on a few occasions and was kind of yelling at the screen I know who built kind of trained and prepped with and I was fairly confident that he'd get all the science right so my only concern was when he went anywhere near doctrine or theology or anything else and bill made a number of mistakes fortunately Ken Ham might be the worst debater on the planet because he did any capitalize on any of Bill's mistakes I mean I remember at one point bill was trying to make some point about how he's got a an org chart in his office with him at the top of it and Ken Ham probably has the same thing and I think if I recall Ken just kind of agreed with him when if I was Ken I would have taken that opportunity even though it doesn't everything do it the debate to say no the org chart in my office has Jesus at the top because that gets an applause line from the audience it shows that somebody can actually think on their feet and stay on message and ken can't do either unless the messages I've got a book that seemed to be about the only message that Ken could stick with and there were one or two other times where bill kind of drifted off into the theology and the doctor around and I was like so irritating because there's no reason to do that you get no benefit you're smacking him around with the science and you are coming off as reasonable and measured and overall if we were to just view the debate I think bill did a great job overall I think Ken Ham might be one of the worst debaters I've ever seen he looked wholly unprepared on the science which didn't surprise me but he seemed unprepared when it diverged from the science outside of presidential debates it's probably the most watched debate in history millions of people have seen this and I think that this debate essentially saved the Creation Museum and helped continue the process towards the Ark Encounter which is exactly what some of us predicted it would do and that's a little frustrating the fact that there was someone who did a really good job of explaining biological evolution and the science and evidence behind it with virtually no rebuttal is incredibly important people can watch that debate it's gonna live on forever that's great but the side effect of this debate of giving him a product to sell giving him attention and a source of income there's a reason that Dawkins and others and I don't want scientists debating creationist I want scientists doing science and communicating science there was an accretion versus evolution debate I would have it be more along the lines of get our own raw to do it because the whole creationist argument the Ark Encounter it doesn't deserve anywhere near the level attention it got and if Bill weren't so famous he wouldn't have been as good at it but the money thing was probably my biggest issue very true but I personally have to thank the rise of Ken Ham for leading me out of young Earth Creationism and towards atheism so from a net societal basis maybe not worth it I'm quoting from his blog finds it the kind of people more likely to believe stories that are literally fake news who fall for hopes is if you will are those who believe in delusions are dogmatic in their thinking and are just flat-out religious Fundamentalist and then he goes on to basically defined that as people who believe in biblical creation I believe in the Bible and believe it hold on so so we would be in that category and yet we pulled up his news item you realize that that's a good point wow-wow-wow the article says that religious fundamentalists are more likely to fall for fake news that those people who are more likely to accept and believe fake news are those who have a mindset that has already convinced them of religious stuff and kins response to that is that they would fall into that category and yet they found hem its blog piece and then they all have a good laugh as if the implication is that they've discovered Hemet and Hemet is fake news Eve laughing guys either way the joke is on you this demonstrates first of all why ken ham is such a terrible debater but also it kind of further demonstrates the point because the real fake news in this clip is Ken's fallacious argument his implied argument that if this article was true then that means that us discovering hem it's thing means that him it's things fake news this is a logical syllogism that would be invalid in structure right off the bat it's like saying if it's raining that I'm wet and then ken is going if I'm wet therefore it's raining and those two things aren't the same because I could be wet because I got out of the shower it has nothing to do with rain he's got an inversion here and they're sitting around laughing I'm not one to just go oh my gosh you know religious people are stupid or what cuz I wasn't and most of them aren't you my acute didn't go up I just learned a bit more and gain better access to information but if the article is saying that if you are religiously minded and you are more likely to fall for fake news the structure behind all of that is there is a certain mindset that falls for religion and falls for fake news and ken is trying to take that to say ah we've also found this article which means this article is fake news I'm sitting here staring at two logic books on my desk I'd be willing to pet a paycheck that Ken doesn't have a logic book in his house he really focuses on the religious fundamentalist part of this and then the close-minded idea but in 2017 we commented on this study before found that people particularly atheists are even more closed-minded towards the beliefs of others then re theists were closed-minded other people's beliefs certainly more closed-minded than the people who believe them they seem to be willing to believe almost anything but this notion that there's nobody who's not religious this is a bit of an equivocation fallacy here because what they'd like to suggest is that there is some definition of religion that would apply to almost anybody and in that sense they're right but when we talk about religious people religious fundamentalists things like that we're not talking about it in the broad sense where Harry Potter fans could be religious or where I could go to a sporting event religiously or where I have thoughts in my head that form a model that deal with questions of ultimate concern as the Supreme Court put it you know this is when they were willing to include secular humanism as a religion and I'm fully agreeing that secular humanism could be viewed in a religious sense but that's not the same sense of the word religion that the individuals are talking about so strike two right off the bat because I'm not religious in the sense that they are religious yes there are things that I believe and I have thoughts about issues of ultimate concern but I am not subscribing to any organized religion I am NOT an adherent of any religion I am not subject to any dogma nothing like that this is just a straight-up equivocation fallacy and the funny thing is is that this takes another form as well quite often which is when you start pointing out problems with religions they start engaging in this what about ISM where they say oh yeah well what you do is just as bad as what we do which everyone should immediately say even if that were true you just acknowledged that yours was bad and if you were to say oh you atheists are just as unreasonable in your secular humanism that is an admission that you are holding an unreasonable position it's not necessarily confirmation that I am but by you saying you're just as bad as me you are acknowledging how bad you are if he was not religious you wouldn't be talking about religious topics if it's injured it's like if you weren't a racist you wouldn't be talking about the problem of racism all the time you know Hemet is a good friend of mine so to be fair I'm probably a little biased but what I can say about having myself and others we speak about religion not because we're religious but because we're objecting to its problems it would be like suggesting that someone who's researching to find a cure to cancer is just like someone who's advocating for cancer the group of people who are advocating for religion are pointing to people who are opposed to religion and saying oh you're religious - that's why you spend so much time on religion no the reason I spend so much time talking about religions and your religion in particular is because curiously I find myself living in a world in a world where the most people believe that there's a god and this informs their beliefs and informs how they vote and that informs the legislation that affects the rest of us objecting to something doesn't mean that you are engaged in that something every one of these clips just demonstrate how Ken and the people that are almost seemingly worshiping can as oh he's the fearless leader of the creationist movement they don't understand the basics of a simple logical syllogism they don't understand fallacies I mean it's not that surprising it's just embarrassing ly sad to listen to it play out you know I get accused of being arrogant or whatever else on occasion but I don't think you're gonna find any sort of smug superiority that is more obvious and less well grounded than people who are actively engaged in undermining their own point because they don't understand what a logical fallacy is and why they should avoid it Matt Dillahunty meet Bodhi Hodge straw man fallacy the bifurcation fallacy an equivocation fallacy double-standard fallacy emotive language fallacy and affirm a consequent fallacy king of misunderstanding logical fallacies and failing to avoid them all those who believe in delusions are dogmatic you know he's very dogmatic in this article married up in fact he's dogmatic that those who believe in Genesis it says it three times the lies the lies the lies all right so first of all he doesn't understand what Dogma is the fact that you're making an assertion even if you're making a false assertion doesn't mean that it's Dogma Dogma is an unquestionable claim something that you have to believe without question it is a foundational core thing that cannot be any other way can at every single point just demonstrates the very thing he's trying to object to that it's actually true he said oh well he's dogmatic and they're like yes he claims that Answers in Genesis people literally believe that it's true and then they acknowledged that they do which means what Hemet said wasn't an or inaccurate assertion if I say you're bald and you go yes I'm bald look could you possibly complain about if I said you're bald in you're bald and your reply is oh look how dogmatic you are saying I'm bald it's true that is almost exactly what we just listened to he says well I'll put these Christians like Ken Ham all evidence must be shoved into that idea that God created you know he's an atheist he's already rejected evidence he rejected the Bible which is evidence well the Bible is the claim there is a sense in which you could view it as evidence but in whatever since you could view it as evidence it is in line with anecdotal evidence there's a difference between evidence and good evidence but if the Bible is the thing that's making the claim and the Bible is a collection of 66 books depending on what religion you are by number of different authors simply saying that Hemet has rejected the Bible is an acknowledgement that Hemet has in fact changed his mind in the same way that I have I was a fundamentalist for 30 years and I changed my mind and my thing is I'm not convinced that ken has changed his mind I am sure he's changed it on something but the issue here is what would it take to change your mind and for me when it comes to something like you know the God claims or whatever else the only thing it would take is sufficient evidence to justify belief the problem is Ken thinks that the fact that the Bible says it is sufficient evidence that is demonstrably false and hypocritical because he also rejects other claims from other religions other holy books things that are older he can't do it based on age you can't do it based on this so he's got to be relying on something other than the Bible to verify that the Bible is reasonable and if he could make the case for that then instead of standing there saying I've got a book I've got a book he would have said I've got evidence I have justification for why we should accept this book I have good reasons for this belief instead it was I've got a book I've got a book and even in talking about him it he's basically saying oh well he just rejects the book that I accept well congratulations you've told us nothing we didn't already know Ken's crew is implying that we rejected their evidence because we're atheists when what really happened is we became atheists because we rejected their evidence when it comes to the god thing ken would want to pretend that I am close-minded that I am asserting his God does not exist and that there's nothing that could change my mind he's wrong on every single point there my position is I am not convinced that his God does exist and while I don't necessarily know what specific things would change my mind I know that it falls into the category of evidence and I set up standards of evidence for every claim in such a way this is the foundation of skepticism such that I want to believe as many true things as few false things as possible and so I set up standards of evidence to try to make sure that I don't fall into the realm of gullibility because it's a position of reserving judgment a position of saying I'm not going to be convinced until there is sufficient warrant it often gets portrayed as cynicism especially by the religious they scoff at skepticism by suggesting that you're closed-minded you are cynical you are hyper skeptic like we clearly have enough evidence that would convince any of this any reasonable person of this and that means that you're unreasonable and on those grounds they will make appeals to the popularity oh there's so many people who believe this for so long but they don't have a good understanding of what it should and would take to make something reasonable and this position that they're in of accepting one particular religious doctrine while rejecting others when they don't have any epistemological grounds to draw a distinction between them it's like saying oh unicorns are real but fairies aren't it comes back to the issue of it's a worldview it's an interpretation a sheik he's interpreting a minister his role you weren't ER when you notice there are really only the battle is at the worldview level not at this thing a worldview the problem is is that the worldview foundations the presuppositions that they are viewing the evidence through their beginning with there is a god they're beginning with the conclusion in question which makes this circular if you begin with there is a God all of a sudden all this other stuff becomes plausible and the position that I would take I'm not gonna speak for him it anymore I don't start with there is no God I start with there's no reason to believe that there's a god until such time as that has been demonstrated that the burden of proof is on those who are claiming that a God exists because if you get to start with oh my presupposition my worldview is that there is a God and now I need to go figure out which of these religions got it right well of course you're going to find that the evidence supports your view it's just like the people who are starting with the notion that earth is flat they're only going to find the evidence that supports their view but if you start with as an unbiased position as possible which is the earth may be flat or the Earth may be round and you evaluate all of the available evidence that is not the same as beginning with one of the two conclusions and evaluating the evidence with that bias now we're never going to be completely unbiased but this goes back to what I was saying before the kind of what about autism when they say oh well we're just looking at the evidence through our worldview and you're looking at the evidence through your worldview yeah the difference is one of those worldviews is based on sound epistemology that makes every attempt to not be biased toward a conclusion and the other worldview is beginning with the conclusion this is an attempt to make reason and irrationality seem as if they're roughly the same thing we are open about starting with a on his word to look at any piece of you know what's interesting he's one of these atheist bloggers and I very rarely go to his side I love it there's pornography and blasphemy but 90% of the time he attacks Christians or Christianity and and what he says about us is so twisted and so just outright untrue a use of the word lies yeah so first of all I think it's funny on a number of levels that they just acknowledge that what Hemet said about them literally believing the Bible is factually correct and then they acknowledge that they're beginning with God and then they want to slam him because there's you know pornography or whatever it is website I think we have different definitions of pornography but he's saying that hemant is talking about Christianity a lot and using the word lies now here's a part where I might agree with Ken Ham to some extent I am very cautious about asserting that someone is lying because lying carries with it this implication of an intent to deceive and I'm sure that there are charlatans out there I'm sure that there are preachers out there who are saying things that they don't believe but if someone is honestly representing what they believe and it just so happens that it's irrational or ridiculous or wrong that's not the same as lying so I exercise a bit more caution than some other people do and what ends up happening is when I ask somebody like I've had a number of discussions with Orin and others and they think for example Ray Comfort they think he's a big fat liar and my position is I've met ray I am convinced that he believes what he says he believes I'm convinced that ken believes what he says he believes I'm open to being shown that they don't actually believe that and that they're engaged in some sort of act of deception it's entirely possible but the default position for me is if somebody comes up and tells me something that it's trivial but my name is Paul okay I'm gonna take you at your word cuz it doesn't impact me at all if I find out later you lied about your name well now I know that you were dishonest because you clearly know what your your name is but it may be that you gave me the name that you prefer to be called and so maybe it's not so much a lie as there's a different context I'm not telling you the name that's on my birth certificate I'm telling you what I want you to call me so I try to listen as charitably as possible and I also try to make sure that I don't assert that someone is lying however there's a good case to be made that the individual may not intentionally be lying the claims there's a context in which we can view them as lies as long as we're careful to make sure that we're not asserting that ken is intentionally trying to deceive that he's not engaged in some intentional deception because there's a context for lies when you know and it is common knowledge what the truth is if someone is asserting something to the contrary colloquially that just gets called a lie if people are running around saying the earth is flat that's a lie it doesn't mean that the person who's saying it knows that it's a lie or is intentionally trying to deceive and so there's a little bit extra caution that I throw in a lot of it has to do with strategic things because if you say ken ham's a liar now you have moved on from the actual subject at hand you have shifted a burden of proof he has to demonstrate that his conclusion is correct if you can show that it's wrong you should do that because at the end of the day now you've shown that what he's saying is factually incorrect it's a mistake to start pretending that you can accurately represent someone's motivations or intent unless you are able to present evidence for that I mean there are cases where we can show that someone is in fact lying and I think that some people put together videos showing Oh Ray Comfort has lied about this and this and I think that at least in one occasion I found it really convincing and so on that front I think it's fair to say that Ray was lying about that but the mistake that a lot of people do is to say oh I've caught you in this lie and this other thing you've said is clearly untrue which means you're lying there too or you've had this explained to you this was this was the thing that Arne and I went round around about Ray Comfort has had evolution explained to him so many times that arns view is you have no excuse for not getting it now which means you've been told and explained that what you're saying is factually incorrect and yet you keep saying it which means you're lying when the truth is as far as I can tell he's had this explained to him many times about why he's wrong and he's just still not convinced that he's wrong the question you touched on here is the question I get asked most often does Ken Ham actually believe what he's saying or is he lying my answer simple I have no idea if he's lying but he's wrong he hasn't made his burden of proof for the claims that he has and many of the things that he says have been shown to be demonstrably incorrect and he's been made aware of this that doesn't mean that he's lying he could be it could be that he sees more value in like you were talking bout with the doctor thing to do something to save your life that it might be worth it but I can't read his mind I can't know what it is that he's thinking and all I can do is judge him based on what he says and what he does and so I can't reach the conclusion that he is intentionally trying to deceive but I can certainly reach the conclusion that he has not met his burden of proof and he is repeatedly consistently said things that are demonstrably wrong oh you know that's awful Christian of him because it's the Bible that says not to lie far away from Christian morality to try to argue he's far from Christian morality oh my gosh we could do an hour on morality alone or 50 hours this is common I don't have to borrow anything from Christian morality as a matter of fact the things that are correct about the Christian view of morality are borrowed from things that humans have discovered about having to live in share space with other people the sam harris wrote a book about lying where he basically argued that there's a good case to be made that you should never lie I disagree with them I think that there are in fact some noble lies where the most moral and most ethical thing you could do is to lie and Frank's up in your attic and the Nazis are knocking on the door asking nope haven't seen or that is the most immoral thing you can do this is so weird because they're hung up on this issue of Hemet saying oh these are lies which may be distinct from these people are lying but to suggest that there's no good reason to object to dishonesty and les you first borrow from Christianity is absurd because let's imagine that you and I found ourselves as blank slates sitting on an island we know nothing about any religious doctor and we ain't we know nothing about morality or ethics you and I would discover things about what other people would refer to as morality and ethics on our own if you're like hey I ate this plant here and it made me sick if you're lying because that plant is the best source of food that has consequences and as soon as we find out that there are consequences this that are beneficial or detracting that's all it takes I mean morality includes a component of empathy but you could have an empathy free moral sense that is based entirely on selfishness I want to keep living and I want to live a good life and with only that as a foundation you could still reach the conclusion that because there are other people here with different information lying to someone is harmful to them and if I encourage or allow other people to lie to me just so that I can lie to them the level of harm just increases this is like sitting at the poker table and everybody's bluffing there's a lot of people who are gonna get screwed when everybody's bluffing so yeah but we don't believe his fake news oh hey anyway I find it rather telling that Hemet wrote a news article about a study and the study was never really addressed they didn't address the actual findings of the study in a forthright fashion they didn't address the methodology they said nothing about the evidence they just addressed Hammett's blog post and decided to call it fake news now if him its blog post is fake news then essentially they're saying either this study doesn't exist or it's not real and yet curiously that's never addressed this is a complete straw man there's a study which may be horribly flawed which may have a factually incorrect foundation and finding and instead of addressing that they address the individual who referenced it this entire story is an attempt at an ad hominem rebuttal to Hemet in order to deflect from the fact that somewhere out there is a study because these people have no understanding of how one would go about demonstrating that there was actually a problem with the study it won't surprise you to learn that this is actually standard operating procedure on the answers news show rather than talk about scientific research papers they find some non science outlet covering the science paper secondhand and then latch onto any hyperbole that the pay by the click reporter might have made rather than addressing directly any of the actual science claims of researchers yeah so basically an atheist had applied to be a chaplain in the US Navy and if it's inherently Christian although they're not coming right out and saying that but is inherently Christian position and so and maybe listen and they rejected the application they said look the position of a chaplain is a religious position so how can an atheist apply for a religious position right but ideas ideas claim they don't have a really this is weird because certainly in a predominantly Christian society traditionally the chaplaincy has been varieties of Christianity but she's wrong that it's like intrinsically Christian because they have chaplains for Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism and really what ends up happening at least when I was in the military it was certainly predominantly Christian because that's the culture but the reason the chaplaincy exists and I would like for the chaplaincy to go away I think this isn't government endorsement of religion but so long as we have a voluntary military service and they're people who need to serve then they need representation to adequately allow them to exercise their religious rights which may mean that there's some justification for chaplaincy but most of what the chaplaincy does is counseling type of services that's the thing that's important and for that what you need are trained secular counselors they may in fact be religious individuals but their counseling methods are based on sound science and secular processes but this isn't an atheist chaplain this is a humanist chaplain and the Supreme Court has already ruled that humanism counts as a religion for First Amendment reasons so if somebody applied and said I'm gonna be an atheist chaplain even I would have objections to that because if the position is necessarily religious humanism works atheism doesn't you know the whole reason they want to do that that's the whole reason it's all inconsistent but the whole reason is because they want to do their best to impose their religion of atheism on everyone um god this is projection at its finest the individuals who are attempting to legislate the religious beliefs on to others have now come up against people who are saying hey wait a minute what's good for the goose is good for the gander so if you get to do this we should be able to do this - because we're equal citizens and then Ken pretends that he can read minds oh the the motivation is so that they can force their religion onto others no the motivation is to make sure that our armed services which include people who identify as humanists that those military members are not second-class citizens that they have the right and access to the same sort of resources that a Christian does that a Jew does if you're beating something over the head with a stick and I take your stick away I'm not marginalizing your religious rights I'm protecting someone and just because you run around trying to make sure that yours is the only game in town when somebody else comes in to say no no we get to play here too to say oh they're just trying to impose their religious views on everybody it is laughable even an attempt to preach to the choir that the choir would buy this see the article actually made a point here you know really what they're trying to do was to hijack the chaplain Corps I love this this notion that they're trying to hijack the chaplain Corps first of all the very notion that someone could hijack something from you implies that you think you are controlling it and should control it so that's an admission that they're doing the very thing that they were accusing others does I don't know this is a Christian thing bla bla bla but portraying this as if the intent here is to take over the chaplain Corps you have this tiny portion of the population that would identify as humanists and the best argument they could make is that there simply aren't sufficient humanists in the military to warrant a humanist chaplain that would be about the best argument they could make but instead they want to claim that this tiny group of insurgents is trying to overthrow the Christian regime which tells you everything you need to know about how they are thinking about this and how they fundamentally don't understand religious freedom and they don't view non-christians as having equal status in their culture and they don't have respect for individuals who serve in the military voluntarily who don't share their views our actions don't matter in a cosmic sense but that doesn't mean they don't matter and so this is an article by Marko Michael Shermer who's a well-known atheist talking about William Lane Craig who is a theologian who kind of talked about some of these things if you're an atheist ultimately you have no purpose and meaning in life because from your perspective when you die that's the end of you and eventually the whole universe dies so nobody'll know they ever were so ultimately life is meaningless and purposeless this notion about there not being any ultimate purpose so what first of all I'd recommend the people go to the Atheist book calm my friend chris johnson did a coffee table book and a documentary called a better life and it is 100 a theist giving their thoughts on joy meaning a purpose and a life without god but at the end of the day if your claim is oh without a god there is no ultimate purpose there's no intrinsic purpose to the universe I don't have a problem with that because I don't need an intrinsic purpose for life to have purpose I don't need some intrinsic meaning for life to have meaning my life has whatever meaning and purpose I have for it the fact that someday the universe is going to suffer heat death and none of this will continue to matter doesn't mean that it doesn't matter now I can buy a new car tomorrow and in a hundred years it could be a bunch of rusted metal in a junkyard that no longer has any meaning or value or purpose for anybody but it's meaningful valuable and purposeful right now the fact that I have to eat again tomorrow doesn't make the meal that I'm going to eat today any less valuable so this argument of under the Atheist model when everything goes away nothing will matter anymore I agree nothing will matter anymore but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter now you know if you think about this his argument is ok and an ultimate sense there is no purpose but we can say that there's purpose anyway even though we have no purpose yeah and we're just quite illogical yeah it is quite illogical when you say it like that unfortunately there's a disparity there to say that we don't have any ultimate purpose doesn't mean we don't have a purpose that's accurate but what he's doing is removing the ultimate and basically saying purpose twice he's also saying that because we are sentient beings designed by evolution we evolved morality and so evolution bestowed on us a moral and purpose driven life and so therefore we have purpose while we're here at the end of the day we don't have purpose because we were designed by evolution and I find it hilarious that they want to seize on the word design the quote from the article is why does it matter because we are sentient beings designed by evolution to survive and flourish in the teeth of entropy and death he's probably just taunting a little bit because we all acknowledge the appearance of design but the reason we have purpose is not because of how we came to be the reason what we have purpose is because we identify and say that we have purpose I'm not hungry because I was designed by evolution to be hungry it is the fact that I am the product of evolution and this resulted in me being hungry I am hungry because my body needs food I have purpose because I value purpose I have morals because I value living a good life and making sure that my interactions with other people are positive and productive his and I he is saying being kind and helping others well who decides what needs to be part yeah I think female praying mantis is it or not kind I mean they can be big like gosh this is actually a fairly complex subject that I'm not gonna spend a ton time on because we're addressing all kinds of stuff you could take where they're saying being kind and relate that directly to what I've said about well-being what Sam Harris has said about well-being and basically you're saying what is the foundation upon which you would say this is good or this is beneficial and for me the answer is easy we are physical beings in a physical universe the universe dictates what the consequences of our actions will be and if you set a goal of living a productive healthy life that sets up the foundation for well-being chopping off your head does not contribute to your well-being but it's so strange that this guy over here chimes in with I've seen praying mantises who aren't kind I'm not sure these guys could think their way out of a wet paper bag because the structure of the argument here is how can you tell whether or not something is kind and his response is to say I've seen praying mantises do something that isn't kind how is that a response to anything you know what I've seen you guys do things that aren't smart I've seen murderers do things that aren't kind whether or not someone or something has done something that isn't kind is a separate issue from how we would go about determining what would be kind and the kindest thing that I could do right now would be to perhaps sit down and explain this to them if I could figure out a way for them to understand it but they are so mired in and confused and you informed on these topics it's like none of them have ever looked into issues of morality or meaning they just began with God and ran with it and then everything else is clearly bs well I remember once it was a young man came up to me and he said well mr. ham I still believe in the Big Bang and I said you don't believe in God no I said well you don't believe in God what if I said to you I don't like talks like you I'll shoot you well you can't do that why not it's not right why isn't it right it's wrong why is it wrong it's not right yeah so I love the fact that ham like other apologists will cite some on the street conversation they had with somebody else who may not have had a prepared well-thought-out understood answer as if it vindicates their position you know I could walk into a kindergarten and when every debate I do on every subject that's not an argument for my case so presenting an anecdote where you asked someone a question and they didn't come up with a satisfying answer does not in any way mean that there isn't a satisfying answer and it doesn't in any way suggest that your objections to secular moral philosophy are remotely accurate I mean his anecdote there of saying I oh I well it's not wrong it's right it's right it's not wrong openly that would be like me saying you know I keep hearing Bill Craig talk about how there has to be a first cause our first mover but I went out and I talked to this guy on the street and I was like oh yeah well where did God come from then oh and he didn't have an answer oh god always was well how could something always be you know how are you gonna demonstrate that this is why when they sit there and and talk amongst themselves which to be fair we're doing now we get nowhere and this is the reason why I push for actually having the debates and discussions it's just that not every debate or discussion is valuable you're borrowing from biblical Christianity to have a standard for saying what is right and what is wrong that's what they're doing borrowing I'm a Christian someone said here that can make it for morality but that doesn't make it real right but I think Ken means here is that you can say that something's moral but that doesn't mean that it's true that it's moral and that I agree with but that also applies to saying God the Christian God is the foundation of morality saying that's the case doesn't make it true and saying that atheists are borrowing from Christianity from religious worldviews doesn't make it true that said I will fully acknowledge that there are probably plenty of non-believers out there who because they've been raised in a culture that is dominantly Christian a lot of their moral opinions have been informed by the culture that surrounds them that's a separate issue from whether or not one can and whether or not individuals have justified secular moral principles without appealing or beginning with Christian morals because there's a case to be made that the foundational things that we would agree are moral within any particular religion are not in any way derived from a god but are derived from the human condition think about it that whole logical is meaningless in an ultimate sense because from Michael Chalmers perspective he'll die won't even know he wrote it right and eventually everyone else will die and from whose perspective they won't even know they read it so I mean I'm gonna be told meaningless it yeah if you reform what ken just said into an argument it is essentially if there is no God then everything becomes meaningless I don't want everything to become meaningless therefore there is a God this is the fallacious reasoning that he's using he hasn't demonstrated in any way that the notion that everything will ultimately be meaningless is in fact false is not as secular as previously thought when you start to read the article you realize nope they're just as secular as we actually thought here's what says I have 64% still identify as Christians but only 18% said they attend church at least once a month yeah so again it's it's a cultural thing it's not it's not what we would understand as a true Christian yeah so there's a bunch of interesting things going on here first of all this demonstrates that how they can't see anything other than through the lens of not only Christianity but what they identify as true Christian the study is about whether or not Europe is more or less secular than previously thought not about whether Europe is more or less Jewish than previously thought if the study showed that Europe was now ninety percent Muslim it would certainly not be more secular and yet it would be vastly less Christian now to be fair the thing that he cited was that the Pew study surveyed about twenty four thousand some odd people in fifteen countries that still identified as Christians so to be fair the word Christian pops up in this article that they're referencing over and over again although so does Pope Francis so this article is lumping Catholicism in with Christianity which I think and one might I'm not completely sure so this article is mostly about whether or not people identify as Christian this portrays two options Christianity or secular when the truth is its secular or religious and then you break down the religious based on denominations and doctrines but this notion that only eighteen percent said they attend church at least once a month and according to Ken those people aren't true Christians well hang on a minute where is it within Christianity that has some requirement or expectations that you attend church at least once a month what about the people who can't from a Protestant perspective I don't ever need to go to church I was a Southern Baptist I went to church a lot but it was made very clear that whether or not you were in a church is irrelevant that there are countless people who are in a church who are not right with God and there are people who are potentially outside of the church who in fact are right with God and that God is the ultimate arbiter of who is or isn't a true Christian so even in this study I don't know what the value is in this particular study I'm not really worried about it if you're become slightly more Christian or slightly more Muslim or slightly more secular granted I'm not gonna suggest that they're panicked but they pointed out that the study shows they're not as secular but that's not really true because the people that they're citing as showing that it's less secular those aren't Christians anyway practicing Christian is not a course not interested as if there's something about being a practicing Christian that requires you to go to church or to answer questions in a specific way on a survey now they're just openly proclaiming their own no true Scotsman conditions yeah as they said in my circles going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile oh nice when I say 64% of the adults only 18 percent say they attend church once a month in America as of 2010 the research showed 18 percent of Millennials only attend church in America so where Europe is now is where America will be in the future it's heading in that same direction are they essentially acknowledging that they're losing they are can actually as two books on this very subject of how rapidly the youth are abandoning fundamentalist faith it's like the situation with the Bill Nighy debate you were talking about before he's painting a dire picture so that he can raise even more support to combat the impending doom in America when they do similar sorts of surveys and they ask who's a Christian and who believes about we find people who say they're Christian but they don't believe the Bible this is one of those things where I don't know if it's just that they don't understand it or if they are incapable of viewing thing from any sort of perspective other than their own because what we're talking about here is sociological definitions because we can't read minds and because science when it's exploring things can't determine who is or isn't a true Christian this whole doctrine thing that they're trying to dig in on is irrelevant to the study because all the study is doing is saying how many people self-identify as Christian we're not in the business of saying who is or isn't a true Christian and if the number of people who self-identify publicly as a Christian declines that is at least noteworthy if 50 years ago it was twice as high I don't know if that's accurate I'm just using that as an example it doesn't matter to me whether or not somebody is a true Christian from God's perspective or ken ham's perspective or whatever the thing that I'm concerned with is how many people are self identifying as Christian how many people are actively practicing as Christian how many people are actively practicing Muslims etc that is where the delineation between secular and non-secular or secular and theistic come in because what we're concerned is is the world becoming more secular all of the evidence I've seen shows that yes the world is becoming more secular it's gonna vacillate you know some years is gonna climb a little but the general trend is for a more secular world and if at the end of the day Christianity continues declining whether Ken thinks the number of true Christians is increasing and decreasing or double and all of us are relevant that's just sophistry it's not like you have any way to demonstrate this they quoted one French Islam expert as saying the traditional organized Christianity and favor to fade it away in favor of a cultural market which is more and more turning into a neo ethnic marker so it's basically migrant verses right it's nothing to do with Christianity or anything like that if you grew up in a society that's predominantly this particular religion the religious idea is affect and infect the culture that surrounds you and it's ridiculous to suggest that you are immune to being influenced by the culture that is surrounding you even the most Pig anarchist counterculture whatever is still going to be impacted there's something about the culture that they're in some value something that people think is important something that people would view as a proper way to act or whatever that's still going to impact you it to some sense and merely acknowledging that individual they just reference that essentially it's becoming sort of an ethnic marker in the same way that Judaism is Judaism has this notion that your Jew if your mother was a Jew and there are lots of secular Jews and I think the last statistic I saw was like fifty one percent of Jews living in Israel are secular in the sense that they don't adhere to a God and Judaism has the Orthodox and conservative and reform as well and Reform Judaism doesn't even require you to believe in a God and so as an objective observer you can look at all these things and say ah when you say you're a Jew you might mean that you are the descendants of Jews that this is your ethnic cultural identity or you might mean that you are a practicing observant Jew this is like having Hasidic Jews in a panel talking about how all these other Jews aren't really Jews they're not even talking about the same thing that the study is talking about and this is just a way for them to say oh look at what society is doing they're trying to reduce Christianity to a cultural identity well that's not what society is trying to do the research is it's that are recognizing something that is in fact happening which is that Christianity in addition to the traditional religious view in addition to Ken's particular true Christian definition is also a cultural identity yeah I guess it gives him something to object to but I don't know why this is news because when I was a Southern Baptist we were raised to understand that it's written in the Bible not everybody who calls me Lord Lord is a Christian this isn't I'm gonna say depart from me I never knew you this is common doctrinal thing so the only sense in which this is news is that they have a new study that allows them to repeat the same no true Scotsman no true Christian fallacy that they love to do because it puts them in the position of being the ones who are right and look how fallen all the rest of the world has become and whether or not they're doing it to scare people or earn more money is I suppose subject to debate I don't know that is a the prime factor I'm sure it factors into it I strongly suspect that this is more about finding way to be comfortable in a world that is constantly challenging your beliefs in your expectations if the world is saying only you gullible fools will buy into Christianity and all of a sudden your religion is in decline pointing out that all those other people they don't understand it they're not true Christians etc can make you feel very comfortable I mentioned projection earlier that they're projecting upon their detractors the very things that they're doing and this division between true Christian and cultural Christian didn't begin with this study it's always been there you know a lot of this research was done in Western Europe and you know I've always been curious you know what some of the stats might be in Eastern Europe you know because they were held under a communist Peck atheistic worldview for so long once that wall came down we started to see a lot of Christianity explode once again we bring up the atheistic communist SiC regime and we hear this over and over again and it's worth pointing out how bad this argument actually is if the issue is whether or not it is true that there is a god or whether or not it is true that Christianity is the correct model of God pointing out where other models might have failed doesn't accomplish that it doesn't demonstrate the truth of the proposition and it can't and I think that on some level they understand this and what they're really arguing is which model the atheistic communist ik Soviet regime or Christianity has more benefitted society and resulted in a better culture and I think it's funny that on this front they are abandoning their true Christian model and trying to say that oh look what Christianity is done for the world clearly this can only be the case if Christianity is in fact true which is in fact a fallacy that's not necessarily the only case you can convince someone to do good things by lying to them if it's a convincing compelling lie the only thing that needs to happen for someone to take an action is to be convinced that it is the right action and it may in fact be the right action independent of what the motivations are and I'm gonna do one quick story that I've done many times before because I think it illustrates the point pretty good I've spoken to atheists and I've said prayer were now what I mean by that is if you are convinced that prayer works it can work in a certain context if you are trapped in a mine and it caves in and you pray to be rescued your chances of being rescued increase not because there's a God listening to your prayer or at least not necessarily because of that but because believing this to be the case will calm you down which means that you will use oxygen up less quickly which extends the amount of time that you will be alive in that cave in which extends the opportunities for a rescue so convincing people that prayer can save their life can in some situation save their life if you think that it's because of God is answering it you're wrong or at least you can't demonstrate that that is true but if it is the case that the reason it increases your chance of being rescued and the only reason we can demonstrate is that it would calm you down in useless oxygen then one would think that teaching people that would get them to understand that if they're ever in a cave in what they need to do is calm down and understand that remaining calm will extend the opportunities for them to be rescued here's the problem what if that doesn't work what if simply understanding that remaining column increases your chance to be rescued is insufficient it may be that a big lie is required that you need to believe this for a different reason in order for you to actually be calm that may be the case for some individuals it may be the case for all of them but at the end of the day the fact that more people who prayed were rescued than people who didn't pray were rescued isn't a testament to the truth of the religious claims underlying it it just demonstrates that there's something about what they did that seems to be strongly correlated with being rescued if not causally now I'm convinced that if human beings had a good understanding of all the facts surrounding a particular scenario it is possible for them to make the best decision but that doesn't mean that fallible human beings will actually make the best decision where this falls apart is when they're our contingent of atheists who suggest I don't need religion but those little people do that is amazingly arrogant and condescending and my preferred tactic will always be to try to inform and educate and lift up people because I'm not convinced that there is any significant portion of the population that is actually immune to reason and good judgment once they've been given all the tools once they've been taught how to make better decisions so pointing out oh I'd like to see how the Soviet Union's doing now well to the extent that that was an atheistic regime you might also just be talking about whether or not societies do better with leaders with moustaches because that was a religious regime with the government and the leaders at the top of it in the same way that kim jeong-hoon is the supreme godlike leader of this when I talked with Jordan Peterson and called him out on this because he was trying to say communist Russia was a secular humanist regime the words secular humanist regime make no sense but under no circumstances was secular humanism the foundation of what happened in communist Russia or anywhere else we've never had a proper secular humanist society and as long as they're curious about what sort of society results from different worldviews well let's be fair and let's work towards establishing a secular humanist worldview because at a minimum there is no atrocity no harmful dogma that one can even begin to ascribe to the foundations of secular humanism you could have the most wonderful religion in the world that is good and kind but if it still has bad baggage in it it's going to be worse off than one that doesn't have that baggage and with if nobody can point out a flaw in secular humanism that would lead to a worse world then I think anyone who actually honestly tries to go down this line of argument should be actively promoting some secular humanist society so that we can see whether that leads to a better world or not I think it will but at the end of the day what leads to a better society is independent from what is actually true about whether or not there's a God well I can't think of a better way to end it and frankly there's only so much Ken Ham and a person should be exposed to in a day for their own health consideration yeah I've hit my limit thanks Matt since most of my viewers have probably never heard of you before where can they find you rather than trying to give you all my contact information if you go to Matt Dillahunty comm there you should be able to find my Facebook Twitter patreon calendar with dates and events and there's some other exciting announcements it'll be coming I tend to do them announcer mostly on Facebook so you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and you can find all that at mataloni com I caught Matt's magic and skepticism show when it came through Canada if you have a chance to see it I highly recommend that you do thank you a few announcements before we go first ham and egg news shirts and mugs are now a thing check the link in the description to order yours and be the first to proudly wear your love of atheist breakfasts don't forget to send me a photo of you wearing it second there's now apology a discord server link in the description where apologia fans are hanging out together and having a good time but more importantly we also have a channel where those of us who have transitioned out of religion can listen and support each other I have the best fans in the world speaking of best fans a huge thank you as always to my patrons whose financial support makes the work I do in this channel possible I couldn't possibly dedicate the many hours each video takes without them if you're willing to help for as little as a dollar a month visit patreon.com slash pala jia and to everyone watching thank you until next time later

Channel: Paulogia

Views: 100,112

Rating: 4.9068127 out of 5

Keywords: paulogia, matt dillahunty, seth andrews, answers in genesis, ken ham, answers news, creation museum, Dr. Georgia Purdom, Georgia Purdom, Bodie Hodge, ham and aig news, ham and aig, ham and egg, ham and egg news, ken ham bill nye debate, atheist debates, ark encounter, jordan peterson, secular humanism, ken ham vs bill nye

Id: LLUBxFjoT5o

Length: 59min 1sec (3541 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 09 2018