DEBATE: Does God exist? (with Ben Watkins)

all right at this time i would like to invite up our debaters so trent horn and benjamin blake speed watkins got to make sure i say your whole [Applause] name come on up guys so um you you can have a seat just as we uh i'll just kind of let everyone know what we're gonna do tonight uh it's on your handout so uh 15 minute openings seven minute first rebuttal this is super weird i need to stop i have never been like participated in a live debate so this is really cool for me i'm not i'm moderating it obviously but i don't know this is this is pretty cool this is cool okay weirdness out of the way all right 15 minute opening seven minute first rebuttal i'm gonna be timing this on my phone uh five minute second rebuttal 30 minute moderated dialogue i'll try to keep my talking again to a minimum then we're going to do 30 minutes of q a we're going to set up microphones here and here i'll let you know where to go if you want to ask a question and then five minute closings so that's going to be the format of the debate and we're debating the topic does god exist so in the affirmative is trent horn let's go ahead and just have you come on up here [Applause] get our microphone okay can you hear me now all right and before we get started yes cameron i'm sorry that you have a you have a cough uh i still have shingles in my left eye ben if you want to disclose your medical history you're free to do that in your opening let's see and then let me all right well thank you so much cameron and thank you ben thank you so much for being here as well it's we can all agree at least it's nice to finally do this kind of stuff in person so let me start by saying that uh god is not a being in the universe what i'm arguing for tonight i'm arguing for that god just is unlimited being itself god is not something that we locate with scientific tools because god is not composed of matter and energy neither is god located within time and space that doesn't mean the game's over though because philosophers know lots of things could exist or do exist beyond the reach of science this includes minds numbers propositions free will and objective moral truths in fact i listened to an interview that ben did recently where he defends the existence of objective moral truths or moral realism i felt a common bond in hearing him make this case for example the philosopher dan baras says that moral realism is no better than theism because neither can be proven scientifically the atheistic philosopher j.l mackey in fact said of moral facts they are unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them so i feel for ben that no scientific fact proves moral realism just like no scientific fact proves theism instead you have to guide people's intuitions towards the only conclusion that makes sense of the world around us so let me offer some observations of the world around us based on our strongest intuitions and show you how they point towards god as the ultimate cause of the world first i'll offer what has been called the argument from motion or change that goes like this one change exists two change involves the actualization of a potential this could be intrinsic change like growth or extrinsic change like movement but whatever it is change is the result of a thing's potential being actualized such as liquid water's potential to be solid when it's actualized by cold air three no potential can actualize itself four any change is caused by something actual the point here is that no potential x can become an actual y on its own any more than water could just freeze itself or a train car could propel itself instead something like a freezer or a locomotive must actualize the potential for change in these objects five anything that is changing has its potential for existence actualized by something else and six there can't be an infinite chain of actualizers so the impossibility of such an infinite series is explained by the philosopher gary lagrange who once wrote to do away with a supreme cause is to claim that as someone has said a brush will paint by itself provided it has a very long handle in his discussion of saint thomas aquinas who this argument is based on the atheist j.h sobel writes i am persuaded by it that sustaining causes could not go on to infinity what this means is that causes which are concurrent with each other cannot be infinite because if there were there would be no cause at all this series of causes would be like an infinitely long train of box cars without a locomotive such a train even infinitely long would have no motion to it unless you added a car that gives motion to the train without receiving motion from anything else seven therefore there must be a first actualizer eight this first actualizer could not have any potential and so it must be an unactualized actualizer or that which is pure act since an infinite regress of concurrent causes is impossible the first cause must not rely on anything else to actualize its own potential to exist in that respect it must be pure existence or pure actuality itself moreover this cause could not have any other potentialities because like everything else we observe what the cause does follows from what it is and what it is at its most basic level is existence or actuality itself to say this first actualizer has perfect existence but another part of it doesn't exist or it only exists potentially would be a contradiction nine if something is pure act it would be god ten therefore god exists all right so why should we believe something with pure act has the classical divine attributes for example we know if it's pure act there could only be one purely actual actualizer uh if there was more than one in order to distinguish them each actualizer would lack something the other had but this would cause each of them to have potentials which they can't have if they're purely actual also if there was more than one purely actual being they would have to exist in a common framework that's more fundamental than either of them and so neither could be pure actuality in addition change only happens when potential is reduced to actual but this final cause is just pure actuality so as a result it can't change and because time is how we measure change it follows the cause cannot be subject to time so it must be timeless we also know that matter is always changing at least on the atomic and subatomic levels and so this cause can't be composed of matter the cause must also be unlimited because a limit would entail a potential which the thing in question could never actualize that means the cause is causal power couldn't be limited it couldn't have a potential for action that it couldn't actualize so if the cause is unlimited in power it would be all-powerful this cause also can't go out of existence because going from existing to not existing is a temporal and changeable process and this cause is timeless and changeless in fact in being pure actuality this cause would have no potential for non-existence so it couldn't fail to exist so this argument shows there's one unlimited purely actual cause that exists beyond time and space that's expected on theism but very surprising on atheism also keep in mind there are only two kinds of entities that exist concrete ones like two toy blocks and abstract ones like the number two or the shape of a cube but unlike concrete objects abstract objects like numbers and shapes don't have causal power so the cause of the universe can't be an abstract object like a number that is causally a feat instead it has to be some kind of concrete object but the cause is also an immaterial concrete object and the only immaterial causal realities we know of are the intentions of an agent so the cause must be personal rather than impersonal another clue that points to god is the fact that the universe came into existence in the finite past from a state of nothingness one reason to think the universe began in this manner is because causal chains that terminate in an effect in the present cannot be infinite into the past this can be seen in a thought experiment called hilbert's hotel if the past were infinite then a builder could construct one room of a hotel every year i'll bring up my little builders here note some of them wear masks so the builder could construct one room of a hotel every year in the past that also produces an immortal guest who lives in that room and today by today if the paths were infinite the hotel would have an infinite number of rooms that are fully occupied but while you can have things like infinite set infinite numbers infinite sets and imaginary numbers in the abstract realm of mathematics you can't have these things in the real world the mathematicians edward kasner and james newman write the infinite certainly does not exist in the same sense that we say there are fish in the sea existence in the mathematical sense is wholly different from the existence of objects in the physical world so for example in trans finite arithmetic subtracting infinite quantities is undefined and prohibited in the same way you can't divide by zero but at hilbert's hotel nothing stops every guest from checking out where every guest in the even numbered rooms from checking out or every guest after room number four but if this happened then a different amount of guests would remain in the hotel each time even though an identical amount or infinite would have been subtracted each time which is a mathematical no-no guess checking in would also be a problem even if the hotel were full remember every year a room is built and an immortal guest checks into the room but even if the hotel were full you can always accommodate new guests by shifting all the occupants over to the next room and so this infinitely occupied hotel could accommodate an infinite number of new guests it would have a sign that says no vacancy room's always ready for you and it gets worse back to my cute construction men imagine that as the rooms in hilbert's hotel were constructed each worker received a piece of paper from the worker who built the previous room the previous year if the paper is blank the worker writes the room the number of the room he just constructed on it but if the paper already has a room number on it then he just passes that piece of paper onto the guy building next year's room now here's the question what is the number uh what number is written on the paper given to the worker building this year's room there has to be some number written on the paper because of it were blank then the worker who built last year's room in 2020 would have written that room number on it but the paper couldn't have been blank last year because the guy who built the room in 2019 would have written his room number on it and so on if the process continues forever into the past we have a paradox there is a piece of paper that arrives in the present that must have some room number on it but it can't have any particular room number on it this leads to a simple argument if an infinite past is possible then hilbert's hotel is possible hilbert's hotel is not possible therefore an infinite past is not possible moreover if the past is finite the universe would have begun to exist from a state of nothing however many atheists say they'd believe in god if they saw something like an amputated limb healed through prayer or a limb from nothing this means they would pick a divine explanation for a limb from nothing rather than no explanation at all but if our universe came into being from nothing just as inexplicably as a healed amputated limb then atheists should be consistent and conclude the universe has a divine cause as well finally there are features of morality that don't make sense if morality isn't ultimately grounded in the perfectly good god of classical theism let me review three of those features number one human equality in his debate with dr christopher kaser on abortion ben said that it is not human beings that have equal rights instead only persons have equal rights and according to him personhood does not begin in human beings until several weeks after birth ben and other philosophers like peter singer concede infanticide would be permissible under this view but it might be restricted on prudential grounds however even pro-choice philosophers like jeff mcmahon say grounding our equal worth in unequal cognitive abilities causes human equality to in mcmahon's words rest on distressingly insecure foundations equal possession of a human nature explains equal moral worth however that leads to another question why does having a certain kind of dna make us more valuable than other animals that leads to moral feature number two human exceptionalism in his debate with dr kaser ben expressed concerns about speciesism which is supposed to be an evil like racism under this view saying one species is more valuable than another in virtue of dna would be as bigoted as saying one race of humans is more valuable than another race of humans because of their dna but nearly everyone agrees it would be moral to feed a pig to your starving child and monstrous to do the opposite atheism leads to the conclusion that species membership is morally irrelevant but theism can explain why only human animals have intrinsic value as it has been said before we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights finally there's number three human evils by human evils i mean those acts which aren't just bad like a drought i'm talking about evils that only humans can commit a tiger might be a cunning killer but only humans can be cruel killers who disregard a moral law they ought to follow once again if humans are just another species who act in accord with physical laws then there is no reason to assume they have moral responsibility including the responsibility to not commit certain intrinsic evils that are always wrong no matter what kind of good they might accomplish atheism cannot explain why there are some things we must never do such as actively killing infants who have mild disabilities even if such an act produced net utility it also can't explain why we are morally responsible for our actions if we do perform these evil acts however if god created human beings to freely obey moral laws that reflect our equal intrinsic value then this makes sense of our moral experience and god would just be the ultimate standard of goodness and morality would reflect his perfect nature the atheistic philosopher robin lapoidevan puts it this way unlike humans god is a source of moral value that is god's goodness in part consists of the fact that he is the basis of ethics since it is not trivial that god plays such a role it cannot be trivial that god is good in fact it is highly morally significant because it points to the source of moral obligations that's robin lapoidevan who wrote a great atheist introduction to philosophy of religion finally badness or evil are not positive things they are privations of the good a thing ought to have but if the cause of the universe has no potential and is pure actuality then it must be good by definition that's because it could not lack anything and so it couldn't be bad in any sense of that word in fact when all of these arguments are seen as a whole they form a strong case that there is a changeless timeless immaterial infinite necessarily existing all-powerful all-knowing and all-good cause of the universe or most people refer to as god thank you [Applause] check check ben whenever you're ready check check y'all can hear me right good are you ready yes okay i want to start off tonight by sincerely thanking cameron bertuzzi for inviting me to the first capturing christianity conference and trent horn for agreeing to have this day debate with me on such short notice i'm looking forward to some exciting and gay and engaging exchanges and with any luck we might just be able to resolve some deep disagreements the focus of my case will center around the concepts of evidence and probability i will present at least one argument from experience and two arguments that are a priori against trent's particular classical theist view but much of what i say will also apply to theism more broadly i have a good deal to cover so let's get started before i get to my arguments arguments though i need to characterize some concepts i will be defending naturalism understood as the hypothesis the universe is self-contained or causally closed such that there are no supernatural causes natural reality exhausts causal reality this conception entails the universe is indifferent towards the nature and condition of sentient life what i'll call perfect being theism or sometimes theism for short is the view there is a perfect and personal being who is the omnipotent omniscient and morally perfect creator of the universe trent is also a classical theist so i will understand classical theism as entailing perfect being theism and making at least four additional distinctive claims about the nature of god god is simple immutable timeless and impassable i want to now characterize the concept of evidence that will be the be crucial to my case we can understand evidence as an observation that probabilistically favors the truth of some proposition according to the law of likelihood some observation is evidence for hypothesis h1 rather than hypothesis h2 if and only if the likelihood of the observation given h1 is greater than the likelihood of the observation given h2 my broad strategy in the philosophy of religion is to let evidential chips fall where they may and then proportion our beliefs to the evidence my case tonight i will begin by making an argument from simplicity i will show naturalism is more coherent and modest than theism and is thus the more simple explanation next i'll defend a cumulative argument from imperfection where i show particular facts come together to provide decisive evidence for naturalism over theism finally i will be offering what i call the argument from freedom where i show there is an internal coherence problem within classical theism to help illustrate my arguments we can borrow from paul draper and think of both naturalism and theism as being in a race to the finish line which represents the best explanation on the total evidence the argument from simplicity claims naturalism starts out ahead in the race before we even consider the evidence because of theism's lower prior probability the cumulative argument from imperfection claims naturalism outpaces theism with respect to the total evidence and finally the argument from freedom claims there are some internal tensions within classical theism that threaten its coherency and thus has the possibility of pushing it out of the race before it even begins there is a method in epistemology known as inference to the best explanation perhaps an influence inference to the best explanation is the one that is most probable given some observation there's also a well-known theorem of probability known as bayes theorem that allows us to infer that some set of facts is evidence for our hypothesis on our total evidence rather than another using the ratios of likelihood comparisons known as the bayes factor and the prior probabilities of the hypotheses this evidential method is known as bayesianism however it is going to require me to say something about the prior probabilities of naturalism and theism this brings me to my first argument tonight naturalism has a higher prior probability than theism because naturalism is simpler my premise a claims simpler hypotheses have higher prior probabilities because they have fewer ways of being false premise b claims simplicity is determined by modesty and coherence because the less modest a hypothesis is the more ways it has to be false additionally the less coherent a hypothesis is the more tensions arise so it also has more ways to be false premise c claims naturalism is more modest than theism because naturalism asserts fewer fundamental features of reality it might be objective that theism is more modest because it is supremely simple i explicitly reject this claim because it does not be considered my premise d the coherence of classical theism which is notorious for having problems of coherency for example according to the doctrine of analogy any claim about god we make in personal terms will always be inadequate inadequate because god is only analogously personal these problems of coherency are only made worse when we consider trends other theological beliefs cast in personal terms such as the trinity being three persons in one or the idea that an eternal god came into time to suffer and die i don't really know how trent square is coming into time with timelessness nor the death and suffering of jesus with impassability and immutability i argue these problems of coherency count against theism's prior probability it might be objective these issues of coherency can be resolved by making additional claims but doing so comes at the cost of modesty the classical theist faces a dilemma in being modest the classical theist faces a problem of coherency in being more coherent the classical theist faces problem of modesty either way conclusion f follows classical theism's prior probability is low moving on now from prior probability how do the evidential chips from experience fall for theism that brings me to my next argument and my most important one the argument from imperfection the imperfections we observe are evidence against theism because the probability of observing them given perfect being the perfect being theism is zero we can only confer this probability on this observation if we make assumptions about perfect being theism and perfection more broadly those assumptions are given by my premise g a perfect creator could not create anything less than a perfect universe if it's conceited that h the universe contains imperfection then conclusion i follows there is no perfect creator of the universe we might be tempted to deny g but that premise is entailed by god's omnipotence and moral perfection the actions of a perfect being cannot decrease the degree of perfection of the universe as a whole in any possible world and that claim entails premise g premise g then is necessarily true premise h is the only contingent premise we can deny why think the universe contains imperfections such that the universe is worse than it would be what sort of observation probabilistically counts as evidence against theism it is to these questions that i now turn according to the argument from hiddenness there is an observation that proves there is no perfect being because we can deduce this conclusion from the observation given by premise k there are some non-resistant non-theists these are people like me who no longer believe or maybe never have ever believed there is a perfect being and this lack of belief is not the result of emotional or behavioral opposition towards god god's perfect love implies he would always be open to a relationship such that every finite person believes god exists unless they are somehow resisting such a belief because a belief that god exists is a necessary condition for a meaningful relationship it cannot be the case that we are in a relationship with someone unless we also believe that they exist therefore premise j follows perfect being theism implies there are no non-resistant non-theists consequently conclusion l follows there is no perfect being how might other observations justify the claim the universe contains imperfections that are evidence against theism according to evidential arguments from evil there are observations about evil that show theism is false all things considered these observations include general facts about the kinds amounts and distributions of evils in the world and particular facts about evil like children who suffer from cancer fawns that die in forest fires and holocaust victims who suffer horrendously premise m claims god's perfection rules out unjustified evils as imperfections so why believe premise end that claims there are such imperfections as unjustified evils i will argue we can justify premise in using an inductive method and the moral assumption that the world is on the whole imperfect unless all its wrong-making properties are sufficiently counter-balanced by making properties both known and unknown we'll let n be god's allowance of any seemingly unjustified evil or imperfection are any unknown right making property and w any unknown wrong making property such that there are only four possible outcomes for any particular n in three of these four possibilities n is an unjustified evil all things considered because it has wrong making characteristics that are not counterbalanced by its right making characteristics so it is three times as likely any particular n is an unjustified evil supposing there may be some right-making and wrong-making properties unknown to us the atheist philosopher michael thule shows the probability all these evils are actually morally justified to allow all things considered must be less than one over n plus one because n is a very large number the probability it is morally permissible to allow all these evils is extremely small thus we have inductively justified premise in that there are probably some unjustified evils all things considered therefore my conclusion o follows theism is probably false all things considered how else are evil's evidence for imperfections i claimed at the start i'd be defending naturalism but so far that hypothesis has been relegated to the sidelines it's time to bring that hypothesis into the game to see what it has to say about observed evils recall naturalism entails the universe is indifferent to the nature and conditions of sentient life using likelihood comparisons i argue there are at least three evolutionary observations about evil that are more likely given naturalism than theism first according to what i'll call the evolutionary languishing of sentient beings for hundreds of millions of years biological organisms have experienced mostly profound languishing predation starvation and disease secondly 99 of all species that have ever lived are now extinct and and the state of nature is locked in a savage struggle for survival over limited resources finally according to personal tragedy some lose themselves entirely by coming to believe their lives are on the whole no longer worth living another interesting point about all these observations is that they are straightforward physical implications of the second law of thermodynamics according to this law of nature entropy or the measure of disorder in the universe is always increasing because there are more ways for things to be disordered than to be ordered there are many more ways for animals to suffer than for them to experience pleasure many ways for life to languish than to flourish and many more ways for us to experience tragedy than triumph naturalism predicts this kind of thermodynamic indifference towards sentient life however given trent's classical theism these are neither accidental nor unfortunate byproducts of an intentionally designed process but are rather the very clockwork of the process itself this is the divine means by which god intentionally chose to bring about the goal of finite creatures through his creative act so god actively employed gratuitous pain languishing and tragedy in his provincial production of humanity for hundreds of millions of years this is really surprising using these likelihood functions to formulate the base factor and using the prior probabilities from my first argument we can now formulate a bayesian argument from evil this argument is going to argue on our total evidence and claim that evolutionary evils and the previous evils that i also mentioned are evidence for naturalism rather than theism all things considered in my first argument i had mentioned classical theism faces problems of coherency affecting its prior probability now i want to look at another a priori argument that further challenges its coherency according to the argument from freedom god's immutability is incompatible with perfect freedom premise s claims god is immutable or purely actual and premise t claims whatever is purely actual is devoid of any potentialities therefore conclusion you god is devoid of any potentialities it's also true by definition that v a will devoid of any potentialities is also devoid of any contingencies premise w a will devoid of any contingencies could not have done otherwise premise x a will that could not have done otherwise is not perfectly free therefore conclusion why god is not perfectly free however premise claims perfect being theism implies that by definition god is perfectly free therefore conclusion a a follows the conjunction of perfect being theism and classical theism is impossible it's important to notice this entire argument is analytic meaning that all of its premises are true by definition these pieces of classical theism do not coherently fit well together in conclusion i've made at least three important claims first i argue naturalism has a higher prior probability than theism because it's simpler i argue this is because naturalism is more modest and coherent than theism second i claim the imperfections in the universe are evidence against theism i cashed this evidential claim out in at least four probabilistic ways non-resistant non-theists prove theism is false particular evil facts about evils are evidence theism is probably false all things considered evolutionary evils are more likely given naturalism than theism and facts about evolutionary evils are evidence for naturalism over theism all things considered my last claim was in a priori argument about the coherency of trent's classical theism where i showed god's immutability is incompatible with his perfect freedom i think all of these lines of reasoning taken together give us powerful evidential reasons for thinking trent's classical theism is false and something like my naturalism is closer to the truth thank you [Applause] all right we're gonna turn to rebuttals first rebuttal seven minutes and trent whenever you start talking i will start my timer from there uh just just a quick reminder we're gonna do first rebuttal seven minutes five minutes second rebuttals dialogue after that q a after that and then closings so seven minute first rebuttal whenever you're ready sure well thank you ben for that opening statement here are some thoughts we'll talk about low probability ben's definition of naturalism seemed to only be the negation of the supernatural but any specific explanation is going to have a lower intrinsic probability than the mere negation of an explanation for example the intrinsic probability jones killed smith is lower than the negation that anything else killed smith but it doesn't follow that the most probable explanation therefore is that no specific thing killed smith in the same vein we shouldn't follow this reasoning and think the most intrinsically probable explanation for the universe is no specific explanation at all second paul draper defines naturalism as the physical preceding the mental and supernaturalism as the mental preceding the physical draper then says naturalism and supernaturalism are equally probable intrinsically because they are equally modest and coherent so a theism makes supernaturalism more likely because its added facts provide ultimate explanations and are more coherent than theism's intrinsic probability is not hindered when compared to naturalism third if something obtains in more possible worlds it has a higher intrinsic probability for example the claim there is a cat outside my door is more probable than the claim there is a pink cat outside my door because the former claim which includes black and white cats along with pink ones obtains in more possible worlds now theism holds that god is necessary or god exists in every possible world whereas minimal naturalism makes no such claim about the universe and so this increases theism's intrinsic probability in relation to naturalism also when it comes to the evidence of sentient life languishing well under naturalism we would expect that there would be no sentient life at all when we hear about the research related to the fine-tuning of the universe so the existence of a possible world where there is sentient life at all actually points back towards theism finally if simplicity increases probability then an appeal to the infinite undivided and absolutely simple god of classical theism uh increases theism's intrinsic probability also naturalism is not as simple as ben makes it out to be because it must posit things like brute facts and fundamental particles to explain the existence of the universe if it's going to be more than a mere negation of the supernatural so one could argue naturalism is not simpler than theism ben gave an argument from imperfection that if there was a perfect universe if god is perfect creator there would be a perfect universe to me a perfect universe is as incoherent as a best possible world uh there is no maximum a universe can reach where it becomes perfect or it becomes a best possible world ben and i can both tell you what a perfect creator looks like all knowing all powerful necessarily exists but if a perfect world is possible i would like ben to tell us what it looks like and then finally he gave us an argument an argument from evil because i bet i could think of a more perfect one uh an argument so let's look at the argument from evil uh very few atheists claim that evil logically disproves god's existence uh paul draper who ben has been drawing from in tonight's opening says quote theists face no serious logical problem of evil as a result atheistic philosophers try to zero in on particular evils that make god's existence less likely and not illogical but there are problems with this first by narrowing the evils ben tassly acknowledges there could be reasons for some of them like moral evils are justified by free will but if we can see god has reasons for some evils why shouldn't we presume he has reasons for all of them then second anything god creates will be limited because only god is unlimited so under theism we shouldn't be surprised that anything god creates especially something that is material will have competing goods and shifting limits among creatures so that certain goods and absence or privation of the good might obtain when they're created also this argument isn't really about hundreds of millions of years of evolution it's more about whether god is justified in making sentient beings that are prone to decay and ben kind of assume god has no good reasons for this but i think there's good reasons here's a few one creating animals that don't feel pain seems as unfeasible as making humans that don't have free will god can make human puppets that look free and he can make animal robots that look like they have animal instincts but if they don't feel pain they're not really animals they're not responding in an animal-like way god chose to allow humans to morally develop in a process that creates unique goods and evils so god chose animals to biologically develop so that unique goods and evils would exist too the very existence of animals may justify suffering that they endure for example most people wouldn't think it wrong for humans to terraform a planet in the solar system and create sentient life knowing that it will languish also we would be fine to leave the earth and not destroy it if we wanted to go colonize a new planet but if humans can create or allow animal suffering to continue because it is good that animals exist why can't god do the same three if sentient animals have a sense of self enduring sense they might be compensated in the afterlife if they don't have an enduring sense of self over time this makes the problem of their suffering much less pressing when it comes to the evil of non-belief in god just as god gives us a long leash when it comes to making moral mistakes even grave ones so that we can have certain goods like free will the theists would say it makes sense that god gives us a long leash to make epistemic mistakes so that certain goods could obtain like freely choosing god but if god can bring greater goods from evil then that evil can be justified and in fact i don't think it'd be obvious everyone believes god exists i think consciousness and free will and temporal becoming are obvious but there's many philosophers who don't believe those things exist so if god were as obvious as those things people still might not believe in him finally probabilistic arguments they're misleading because you got to have all the background knowledge not just the things that make things less likely but all the stuff that makes it even more likely a 600 pound person is probably not an athlete but if they're a world-class sumo wrestler oh now you've changed all the background knowledge to reach a different conclusion finally when it comes to free will ben's argument is ambiguous when he says god is devoid of potentialities classical theists agree god has no passive potentiality he can have active potentiality nothing affects god but god can refrain from affecting other things like letting the dinosaurs have another million years premise finally premised w says a will devoid of any contingencies could not have done otherwise this is a fallacy of accident because it compares the divine will to the human will human wills are in time and limited and have to do discursive reasoning god is timeless and all-knowing and does not have to process things in the same way so we would not expect god's will to achieve different results to have any kind of intrinsic contingency so i think i've shown ben's arguments do not prove god doesn't exist and on my next rebuttal i'll show ben's objections to my i will answer ben's objections to my case for god thank you [Applause] thank you trent for that first rebuttal you ready trent makes a cumulative case for classical theism with an argument from motion supported by arguments for er for causal finitism and a moral argument i will respond to these considerations in order i'll start with the argument for motion first trent's argument makes a crucial assumption he assumes the existence of some substance at time t presupposes the concurrent actualization of its potential for its existence let's call this the sustaining causation thesis i believe naturalists have no good reason to accept this first we can follow j.h sobel who trent quoted earlier tonight in pointing out that there is no justification for thinking that something is being moved from potential to actual with respect to its existence change is evident to the senses but a concurrent actualization of something's existence is by no means evident to the senses yet the existence of such a per se chain is precisely what trent's argument needs to succeed the thesis of existential inertia can account for all the data that trent appeals to second trent's argument relies on the distinction between essence and existence trent is assuming existence is not an intrinsic feature of a thing's essence a naturalist can simply reject this assumption on the grounds of metaphysical simplicity we can say that one the universe does not contain non-existent essences and two existence can can be an intrinsic feature of all essences this is a simpler model that offers a rebutting defeater to trent's assumption the second objection i want to mention we can call the quantifier shift fallacy even granting trent's assumptions it does not follow that there is a single unique unactualized actualizer just as it does not follow there's a single unique counselor for all students from the fact that for each such student he or she has a counselor it likewise does not follow there's a first cause of all per se chains from the fact that for each such chain it has a single unactualized actualizer even if things have per se efficient causes there is no obvious reasons why all things must have the same first per se efficient cause let's now turn to trent's second cosmological argument his argument from causal finitude by asking a series of questions trent infers the divine attributes of the god of classical theism for the sake of time let's suppose the universe really is past finite does this get us to classical theism i will argue it does not first trent asks whether the cause of the universe can change or is temporal if god begins to be related to creation then god changes this follows from the doctrine of creation x nihilo if god changes then he is neither immutable nor timeless therefore the doctrine of creation x nihilo implies god is neither immutable nor timeless this is an undercutting defeater to trump's point next trent also asks if the cause of the universe is limited i think this is the best place to mention the bane of all cosmological and even teleological arguments including the prior argument from motion according to what i'll call the gap problem neither of these arguments give us any moral information these arguments cannot undercut even in principle and argument from evil and imperfection so long as that argument is still on the table and we have reasons to think those arguments are sound trent's arguments cannot succeed thirdly trent asks is the cause of the universe necessary i doubt this a necessary cause of the universe leads to modal collapse if x is caused by something necessary then that necessary cause entails x however a necessary cause will entail other necessities this leads to modal fatalism and trent's causal phenotypism can't bridge the gap between contingency and necessity trent also asked if the cause of the universe is personal trent rules out a material cause for the universe but all known mental activity has a physical basis in material brains this provides inductive support for the view there are no mental changes without any material changes that claim is an undercutting defeater for inferring a personal mind that is the cause of the universe also consider my prior arguments from hiddenness and evil here finally trent asks if the cause of the universe is good even if we suppose the universe is finite and has a cause the arguments from evil and imperfection are rebutting defeaters for inferring a good cause of the universe again here we see the gap problem now i want to say something about trent's moral arguments i'm an atheist and a moral realist my view implies basic moral truths are necessary truths meaning they are true in all possible worlds it's impossible pain is in itself good or that persons do not have intrinsic value basic moral truths are true in all possible worlds so they are not evidence for either naturalism or theism this claim is a rebutting defeater for all of all of trent's moral arguments but i want to also say something about my moral view so i believe that some things matter in a moral sense because there are reasons for everyone to care about them some reasons are also moral reasons because they are stronger than any other competing reasons we may have truths about moral reasons do not have any ontologically weighty implications meaning they do not imply the existence of anything other than themselves because basic moral truths are irreducibly normative meaning they cannot be restated in purely non-normative terms this gives me all the conceptual framework i need to affirm things like moral values justice requires us to treat similar cases alike prudence requires we have equal concern for all parts of our lives and benevolence requires us to treat the good of any other as much as their own this also helps me understand moral wrongness or moral responsibilities and act is morally wrong when it would be disallowed by a principle that would make things go impartially best by a principle everyone could rationally will or by a principle no one could reasonably reject this also gives me the conceptual resources to distinguish between moral agents and moral patients moral patients are sentient creatures that can be the uh benefactor of a moral obligation but they do not themselves have moral obligations only moral agents have obligations so this explains the special duty that we have to humans that we don't have to other non-human atoms because those other non-human animals are moral patients rather than moral agents how am i for time i plan that perfect that's what a perfect world looks like [Applause] we're now gonna turn to five minute second rebuttals starting with trip when you're ready i'll start my timer how could it be perfect when more goods are about to be added to it [Applause] well let's look at ben's criticisms for my case for the existence of god uh he took aim at the argument from motion that's saying you don't need an actualizer for a thing's continuing existence because things could just have existential inertia well there's tons of problems with this first existential inertia is not well studied it doesn't tell us if an ultimate theory is true rather our ultimate theories tell us whether existential inertia is true or not paul audi and one of the few recent treatments on existential inertia says it would be most likely to exist if change were simply an illusion but the second law of thermodynamics that things tend towards decay and the fact that you can know a thing's essence apart from its existence count again counts against the view that objects possess a tendency to exist that doesn't need to be actualized and finally using existential inertia against theism argues in a circle by claiming objects merely have a property of continuing existence and that property exists because of the object whose very existence is invoked to explain it there's a circular relationship between the substance and the property of existential inertia and yeah i would say no existence and essence are distinct because i can talk to my son about the essence of horses unicorns and triceratops but telling him the essence of those things will not tell him horses do exist unicorns never exist and triceratops once existed he said my argument committed the quantifier shift fallacy uh by saying you know all chains of a single actualizer so there's just a single actualizer for every chain that's like saying every wife has a husband so one husband has every wife good luck buddy but i didn't say that i said my argument shows an actualizer uh there cannot be an there just cannot be an infinitely long causal chain they're not possible just like you can't have the infinitely long chain of boxcars so if the infinite chain is not possible then only the finite chain is possible and that would include the chain of things like past events uh or the chain of concurrent actualizers that it ends in pure actuality uh let's talk about the argument for the finite pass notice that ben basically conceded the argument can work to show the past is finite it just doesn't give us theism but i don't think his arguments here are successful he says well if god creates something from nothing then god changes no that's an extrinsic change i have a six-year-old son one day he might become taller than me if he does that he will change but when i become shorter than him when that happens i don't change it's an extrinsic change when god creates the world he doesn't have to move his will he doesn't have to exercise power units when god creates the world the only thing that changes is the world when it comes into existence he also said that causal finitism can't show that god is perfectly good i agree with that but i think the argument from motion can because goodness and badness are fundamentally about possessing being and privations of being you know i have a bad eye because it's missing the color it should have in it and the proper fluids in here shouldn't be where they are a bad tree is missing its leaves it doesn't have water a bad person might be missing the virtues of justice and charity and things like that so if goodness and badness are about possessing or lacking being then if there is a being that just possesses all actuality in existence it can't be bad in either the non-moral or the moral sense of the word he said that if god is necessary that he exists that entails modal collapse he's using an operator shift fallacy with the word necessary and i'll show you where that happens try this argument necessary let's imagine the sun necessarily shined just always shined in every possible world necessarily the sun shines sunlight is identical to moonlight necessarily moonlight shines no that doesn't follow because the sun could shine before the moon ever came into existence just because god's existence is necessary it doesn't follow that he cannot will the existence of contingent things also by talking about uh creation of things he made a fallacy of accident all mental activity is physical so we can't have a non-physical creator well as far as we know all mental activity is carbon based but that doesn't mean we couldn't have silicone-based mental activity by other creatures in the universe or maybe artificial intelligence uh when it comes to the moral argument i would say here ben either has to invoke moral platonism and the idea that these moral truths inexplicably exist out there and bind us but also which ones do we pick if they're out there do we pick the truth of the golden rule treat others how you want to be treated or the other golden rule he who has the gold makes the rules what makes one true and the other false what determines that if the statements are just out there finally he he said atlanta i thought was interesting said human equality just exists in every possible world but ben can correct us if his view is that infants do not possess the right to life then i would say it doesn't even exist for him in this world this possible actual world that's my time and we'll keep the discussion going thank you all in my opening space speech i made three important claims first we saw how naturalism has a higher prior probability than theism because naturalism is simpler than theism second we saw how imperfect imperfections are evidence against theism finally we saw how given classical theism god's immutability is incompatible with perfect freedom but what about trent's case in my second rebuttal i laid out several problems for trent's cosmological arguments the most devastating of those objections was the gap problem there is an evidential gap between uncaused cause and perfect being neither of these arguments can in principle undercut my arguments from evil and imperfection trent attempts to fill this gap with his moral reasoning i provided a rebutting defeater for all these moral arguments by laying out my robustly objectivist view of metaethics but trent has also introduced another form of moral reasoning trent tries to avoid my argument from imperfection by appealing to the privation theory of evil i want to argue this view is deeply mistaken first even if we concede evil is a privation of goodness and god does not create evil itself then we must still explain why god allows privation evils to exist we still have a problem of the missing good the problem of evil cannot be so easily defined away second the philosopher david hume famously argued there is a fundamental distinction between how the world is and how the world ought to be according to hume's is ought gap is and ought statements are two ways of characterizing the world that could not be the same because they are in different non-overlapping categories of truth there's a sharp distinction or unbridgeable gap between claims about how things are and how they ought to be ought facts if true cannot state non-ought truths third if goodness and being are identical then claiming something is good only states that this thing exists such claims if true would state trivial facts that could not help us make better decisions nor to act rightly in any substantive moral sense morality given the privation theory would be trivial so let's call this the triviality objection finally this just is not a plausible account of evil because the privation theory is unable to account for certain paradigmatic evils for example we cannot reduce the evil of pain and depression to the privation of pleasure or some other feeling pain is a distinct phenomenological experience that is positively evil rather than merely not good the only thing evil about pain on the privation view is that we are not currently in it because pain insofar as it actually does exist is good for us and god wills it for us it's only evil insofar as it lacks something the evil of pain and depression would be morally indistinguishable from the blank unconsciousness of an oyster these implications i think are very hard to believe and i want to give an argument against them now an argument i'll call the agony argument we all have decisive reasons to want to avoid future pain like depression the privation view of evil implies we have no such reasons therefore the privation view of evil is false how am i for time oh you're good a minute and a half so i want to say something about a perfect world so trent objected to my argument from imperfection by saying that it's not possible that there is a best possible world i didn't claim that god would build a the best possible world i claimed that he would build a best possible world i will concede that we can constantly add good things to a world infinitely so there may not be the case that there is a the best possible world but god would create a best possible world those would is what a perfect world would look like christian theisms theists are already committed to this possibility if they believe in a place called heaven heaven is a place where there is no significant freedom but in which all of the greatest goods are realizable so my argument is that if there were to be a world created by a perfect creator it would look something like heaven this kind of softball is one of trent's favorite uh objections it's called the why not heaven now objection and i'll go ahead and yield any to any remaining time or how much do i have yeah i'll go ahead and i'll yield any more time than i have thank you so much [Applause] so normally i can just look at the live chat and like see how the audience is enjoying it what do you guys think like so what's what's unique about this debate is that and we're going to get to the dialogue soon trust me but what's unique about this is that they exchanged opening statements so i i mean that's why you can probably tell like it's there's a lot going on here there's a lot of content a lot of substance and it's because they were sort of working together so that we could make you know the the ideas king here so let's get into the uh to the dialogue what i was as i was listening to you guys both i'm i feel like there's maybe two way or two big things that we could try to discuss in this 30 minutes the first thing might be uh the gap problem because it seemed like you were kind of like willing to go at least you know a certain way a certain amount but then you've got this gap problem so maybe we could just discuss the gap problem and then turn to the problem of evil for the second half of it sound good so let's start with the gap problem uh why don't you just start yes remind everyone what the gap problem is um arguments like cosmological arguments and teleological arguments don't give us any moral information about the uncaused cause or the intelligent designer of the universe and so even if we were to concede these arguments in their entirety and claim that yes there is an intelligent designer an uncaused cause those could not even in principle undercut something like an argument from evil you their naturalism would still have the hypothesis of indifference now naturalism might be false on that view because there might be this disembodied mind that's incompatible with naturalism but the gap problem says there's no reason to believe that this being is anything other than indifferent to sentient life that's the gap problem summarized yeah well i guess then what's interesting to me is when to the objection that well we haven't discovered all of god's attributes so it's like hey you've got eight out of the ten divine attributes but you haven't made your full case that doesn't seem as compelling to me because then if i compare wait here's eight attributes of a cause we wouldn't expect on naturalism so then it would seem to me that while maybe you haven't gotten all the way to theism you've you've dealt some body blows to naturalism then if there is and especially depending how we define it because i wasn't sold totally by your definition that it's well naturalism is a closed causal system can i can i jump in here the eight that you were talking about what are those eight well i did a certain number oh oh yeah well like list like well just give me like a yeah let's say we get it is uh immutable necessary uh timeless and material but so far ben said well we don't know if it's good and my other thought on that is i do believe that the argument from change does show that this being is good it can't possibly be bad and so ben you said well i don't buy the privation theory of evil and i don't buy your criticisms of the privation theory of people so that that's just going to happen uh because um i'm looking at some of the the objections there like with pain for example uh i would say that uh pain is um you can describe it as an evil but sometimes it's a good some people choose to run marathons i don't get it but but apparently like if someone if i said a runner hey here's a pill if you run this marathon in boston you'll finish and you won't feel any fatigue or soreness whatsoever i think many runners would not choose that because there is there is a good in um what's being endured in the pain now you might say well okay is there going to be pain in heaven because it's good no because i think some goods when god creates the world they exist because they are kind of tied to evils like i agree you won't have certain goods related to pain in heaven just like you won't have certain goods like forgiveness or compassion in heaven because there won't be suffering a moral wrongdoing so i guess those are some thoughts there if you want to throw thoughts back that's fine too um yeah so i'm not so sure that i'm uh dealing blows to naturalism by just supposing that your arguments are successful so i am uh skeptical of a priori arguments against the existence of a past eternal series of events um i don't think that the i think that project of a priori arguments that try to rule that out is kind is just not going to be a successful project project but i think that's largely because of my views about mathematics and cantorian set theory however i don't really have a lot of time to unpack all of those difficult concepts tonight so i just supposed that they so but i don't think that that deals any blows to my naturalism well could you give us the definition of naturalism again because in your slide it was essentially a closed causal system uh and that natural reality um exhausts causal reality so i don't think that this but it's hard for me because the terms in the definition you see like naturalism is a closed causal natural reality so that we can say that of that causal reality only consists of natural causes so naturalism is obviously incompatible with supernaturalism and so this is one way of cashing out that incompatibility and also that would be willing to go with well draper's definition was naturalism is the few the the physical precedes the mental and supernaturalism is the few that the mental precedes the physical would you be i understand yeah yeah certainly i would certainly work with that i think that's a good working definition that can be modified if needed well i think that's helpful as well because it gets us out of the circularity problem but then if i have an argument that establishes the ultimate cause of reality is immaterial for example uh that would seem to make more sense under the supernatural view than the natural view though do you see how it would well sure i think that evidentiary chips could fall in favor of that i certainly concede that point um what i would want to say is that the way the evidential chips fall favors naturalism over theism on the total evidence so that's the purpose of the bayesian yes can i just say that i loved your little racing analogy really that's all i want to say i tried to make it as accessible as possible um so i also had would like to so i take your argument from motion to be a demonstration this is going back to the gap problem sorry for to help everyone follow along um and so i think that it's significant to say that um four cosmological uh arguments how do we solve the gap problem uh you have to appeal to the privation theory of good to help make that demonstration go whatever evil is a privation of good of good i'm sorry yes thank you for the correction um you have to appeal to that view though to complete this demonstration is do i have that right well i think that when we are i don't think i'm appealing to it i think i'm trying to make a basic understanding of what it means for things to exist and what it means for them to be good and i think goodness ultimately has a teleological or end-oriented nature into its definition that would then relate to to being under classical tomism being and goodness are convertible and i think it does explain with the examples i gave i would be curious how you would explain without using privation or being what the terms like good and bad or good and evil refer to absolutely so i think that good and bad are reason implying terms so i mentioned in i believe it was my second rebuttal or might have been my first rebuttal i can't remember but where i characterized my moral view saying that these are reason implying and irreducibly normative so i don't believe that morality is necessarily teleological but i do believe that moral properties like goodness and badness are normative what about the non-moral sense of good and bad absolutely so i think there's a reason implying too so i think that contradicting yourself is bad but maybe not in a moral sense i think that we should ought or must care about evidence or the conclusions of sound arguments this is non-moral rationality so i think one of the advantages of my view is that this reason implying sense of normativity can apply both to moral normativity and non-moral normativity so i have a greater scope of exercise so you're saying something is good if it has reasons for it and just bad if it doesn't have reasons yeah so i think that the nature of what it's like to be burnt or whipped gives everyone decisive reasons to not want to be in such future states if something is good then that means that we have some reason to care about it for its own sake now that doesn't mean that these things can't come in conflict with each other or that certain things can't be used instrumentally but then we would have to find a way to decide if the reasons themselves are good or bad reasons because we might have reasons for example uh to take fetuses that are not persons and genetically engineer them so they have a desire to be slaves and serve us and so it seemed to me that under your view you know if they're not persons we can't be harming them they don't have intentions and we have reasons for doing something like this but i would think under my view that has more of a teleological view of understanding what a nature is ordered towards possessing a certain being would make more sense under that view than just kind of a broad appeal to reasons in general as to why that would be wrong well so i think that the central task of moral philosophy is understanding these reason relations so i think that the fundamental question of moral philosophy is what i do well so that ought implies or i think a reason and so what do i have most reason to do what would make things go in personally imply that there exists a categorical imperative you ought to do good and avoid evil that is a fundamental bedrock of the system yes so i cash it out in terms so i have a view in meta ethics and normative ethics in which a lot of normative theories seem to be in tension with each other i deny that tension i think that all of these moral views are climbing the same mountain from different sides so i think that we can think like consequentialists and say that we have reason to act in ways that would make things go impartially best i think we can think like kantians and say that we have reason to treat people in ways that they could rationally will and i think like a contractualist sometimes and thinking that we should act for reasons in which no one but i would say that there is also there is a categorical imperative not in the sense of a hypothetical imperative which you that's easy to get without theism if you want x do y i'm talking about that people categorize people seem to universally recognize that there is just you must do x and i would say that makes more sense under a view of moral obligation imposed by an authority even what you're saying here i think that description of morality implies the categorical imperative you ought to figure out how to climb the mountain and not be the nihilist who just sits on the beach and watches rick and morty or something like that now i like rick and morty okay but it is a show that defends nihilism uh so i so for me i would find it hard under your your view to get these kind of categorical imperatives these universal arts things like that without making them well just their reasons to have their own imperative force even though they don't have real existence well so again i think that they're necessary truths so i think that they're true in all possible worlds i mentioned that i don't think that pain is good intrinsically good in itself good in any possible world well it but it can be good under circumstances it uh instrumentally it might be instrumental in achieving some higher order good but it is never in itself good what it's like to be burnt or whipped is never intrinsically good okay so so pain apart from anything else the nature of pain so i'm an objectivist so i find the normative value in the object not in a subject so what is it that makes pain bad is it only that we don't want it or that there's something about it that like there's an absence of good and absence if something is in pain normally that's a sign that an organism is lacking something it needs to properly function so it's the nature of pain so the concept of a reason is difficult to characterize because we cannot helpfully define it using other terms it's irreducible so one helpful way equivalent way of thinking about it is something we have a reason to do something if this something counts in favor of us responding to it in some way so pain has a nature the nature of what it's like to be burnt or whipped counts in favor of us responding to it negatively of not wanting to be in such a state right and i agree with you that's why with my moral argument i didn't make some kind of broad argument like you can't have objective moral values with without god i was i was narrowing in on very specific things that i don't think your your morally realism will have to bite the bullet on uh so do you did i characterize your view on on bioethics and personhood and rights i don't think i mischaracterized it that you don't believe in human rights you believe in person rights yes so i think that if we're talking about something that has a right like a like a serious right to continued existence i think that's a right that something like a person is going to have and so i don't think that being a human being is a sufficient condition for being a person so i think that there are many other types of things that might be able to meet the criteria of being a person you mentioned earlier the possibility of a synthetic mind so synthetic minds in the future may may well be persons i agree that not all persons are human but i do believe that all human beings are perfect so that raises the question yeah fair enough fair enough but i will get deep in another topic let me ask you another question though is um could someone hold the view could someone hold naturalism and the view that all human being biological human beings are persons and have intrinsic value yeah and you have that unnatural now i guess well here's the thing you can believe anything on any view can you consistently hold it because i would say what is it that makes the case that under naturalism this particular organism that has certain dna has a property like intrinsic value beyond just all of us agreeing that it does so i very much concede that a naturalist could be pro-life so i want to without getting too deep for too far off topic here um to say that the abortion debate is very controversial it's a very difficult question the reason why it persists in the way it does is because there are arguments on both sides and so i think that there are um naturalists who are pro-life maybe for prudential reasons maybe for purely political reasons um i'm asking for philosophical reasons yeah i know and so i'm with you they would have to defend in which in how the moral commitments that they had how that was consistent with their metaphysical naturalist um beliefs and so it's a difficult ethical question and then a further difficult metaphysical question sorry to answer right and so that's why what i would prefer for people to consider would be one could maybe make an argument like if naturalism is true the human the the biological human equality thesis is false uh but if modus tollens someone believed it was true that biological human beings both have intrinsic value and they equally possess it in virtue of their species membership and other species don't have this uh and if you're very if you think that is more likely to be true than naturalism then then down goes naturalism if if you run that path so that's why one man whose opponents is another man's bonus let's surely can see that can we leave that there and then move to a problem of evil do you feel comfortable with that as long as you are i'm concerned okay yeah let's discuss that we're right at about the 15 minute mark so uh yeah problem of evil and i'll let you start again and just um go ahead and re-characterize for the audience kind of give a brief summary of what it was so i started with the idea of an um argument from imperfection that if we're starting with the concept of a perfect being a perfect being wouldn't create anything less than a perfect world were there any reasons for thinking that there are imperfections in the world such the world is not as good as it could be and so i laid out a cumulative case for that they use four different probabilistic methods so the first one tried to prove that there are these such imperfections i appealed to the argument from divine hiddenness because my observation that i'm a non-resistant non-theist entails that there is no perfect being perfect being so that is one way in which i can probably prove that there is no god the second one was an evidential argument from evil that used an inductive method that focused on particular facts about evil that said these facts are probably unjustified an unjustified evil and an unjustified evil would be an imperfection that's incompatible with a perfect being and then the final two used likelihood judgments about evolutionary evils um to then culminate in a bayesian argument that gave us an argument um for naturalism over theism all things considered so trent would you like to try to tackle all four of those or would you want to we could have a dialogue i don't need to do like separate rebuttals so i have a few questions on some of these uh well ben would a perfect create an imperfect world that becomes perfect why because it may be the case that only certain kinds of if you were to create a perfect world there are certain goods that would not obtain i alluded to this earlier that you would have certain goods you might have moral goods like forgiveness forgiveness which can't exist without wrong betrayal um courage which can't can't exist without danger compassion which can't exist without suffering uh so it may be the case a perfect creator will make a world like i was just watching back to the future on the plane coming over here uh marty you need to clap [Laughter] right yeah that's one of my favorite movies ever uh and you know doc brown always says to marty buddy you gotta think fourth dimensionally and i think sometimes the problem of evil we fail to think fourth dimensionally we think of the world as a snapshot the way it is right now but the world for especially many scientists philosophers is a four-dimensional block and so what if the perfect world is one that you have perfection but part of the block is imperfect and it goes from imperfect to perfect so you have all the goods of perfection and then some goods in the imperfect part you don't have in the perfect part why couldn't a perfect creator do that because wouldn't it be better on the whole if it just didn't have those imperfections to begin with you wouldn't have significant freedom but you would still realize the greatest goods possible in heaven god is an infinitely good being well i'm in heaven when the presence of god that's the greatest realizable good that's a perfect world right but the term perfect world that's my problem is that it doesn't seem to be analogous to perfect creator like the great making properties that god has i can conceive of their upper maximum like god knows all truths can do all logically possible things uh but then if i think of a perfect world that has all goods but then the problem is like i brought up there are certain goods that that you that become competing like goods like forgiveness compassion the good i think animals are good i like animals you know they're i don't want them as pets but like i enjoy seeing them once in a while that's why um i probably hold the thomas view there there are no pets in heaven any children watching if you in heaven you'll be in heaven you will be perfectly happy so if you need your pet there he will be there but you won't need them sounds like a perfect world uh so that would be um my one my response to that that perfect world gets it's harder to find um well on hiddenness your tone seemed to change a bit from saying divine hiddenness makes god unlikely i thought you said it proved he didn't i did that is that's a big one um so it's an observation that entails the so so your your claim is that it is logically impossible for there to be a world with god and people who do not believe correct if i am a non-resistant non-theist it would be logically impossible for those people you're saying god could have no good reasons whatsoever to allow non-belief no he would always be open to relationship he would be perfectly loving so the analogy so a great analogy here's a perfectly loving parent a perfectly loving parent would not do would ensure that nothing he or she did um would put relationship out of reach of their child um god would be for us like a light that always remained on unless we were to close our eyes and i i'm concerned about that analogy there is a uh movie that i saw recently my wife was always like read all these philosophy books where do you have time to watch movies you know we have to watch movies all day um it was called beautiful boy with uh steve carell and i forget the other actor who's based on a memoir about a father and his drug addicted son and actually uh at one point his son like moves back home steals from them keeps his drug habit going he goes and then he says dad can i come home and dad says no you can't because not because you haven't you haven't changed at all and he really shuts him out and that cutting off of the relationship actually forces the son to really take stock of his life and and change things so i'm concerned about the the parent analogy there also for me uh it's just an odd view the logical problem because i think you and i you ran an evidential argument from evil and most philosophers agree that the existence of evil and god are not logically contradictory because god could have good reasons for tolerating evil for me the ignorance of god is just another kind of evil so i don't see why there i don't see how it's logically impossible for god to have good reasons to tolerate that kind of evil and the reason i give is this you know so god moral evils are not largely contradictory because god uh allows us free will to make moral mistakes i don't see why you can't extend the thesis to say god gives us free will to make epistemic mistakes so that we're free to develop as creatures without god holding our neurons the whole way i don't see why you can't just shift the argument argument from evil in that direction right so i dissent from a sort of a popular opinion in the philosophy of religion that i don't think that logical arguments from evil or a logical argument from hiddenness are dead jl mackey defends one j.h sobel defends one michael thule defends one gram opie defends one um they're i think they're still very much alive and kicking and i think that we you appealed to the free will the odyssey perhaps a free will defense so i don't think that that is a sufficient um the odyssey my favorite theodicy is the soul-building theology as cameron knows um but so like when we uh look at non-resistant non-theists something like an isolated non-theist in what way does the free will theodicy help us here in what way is an isolated non-theist using their free will to just never come in to contact with the concept of a perfect being or perhaps someone like a lifelong seeker someone who looks for god their entire life uses their free will but still never finds that but here's what i would say when especially when it comes to evils that humans endure if god exists and he were to love human beings we might ask what should god give human beings to show that he loves them and i might say well how about infinite happiness in you know happiness that is that is infinite in nature so it seems to me if god does do that after we die then any negative experience we have in this life when it is added to the infinite amount of happiness we can be compensated with we will still overall be given that which a loving god would give people now i'm not saying that justifies god doing any willy-nilly thing to us but that helps things to become sensible so that conjoined with that is the idea well does god have good reasons for allowing non-belief and then the other problem i have with the divine hiddenness argument is well it seems like the vast majority of human beings god has not been hidden to them it's more of a relatively recent phenomena that it's that it's it seems like nearly everyone has come to to recognize that there is a god that's an interesting claim because um you know christianity you know human civilization predates perfect being theism by thousands of years right but i think that most people even many neuroscientists and others see that human beings have a a natural religious sense that that i don't think can be purely explained by something like evolutionary violence this is one way so everyone could have a properly functioning census defenitatis so everyone could have that inner awareness of god and god could keep that epistemic distance from us much like a perfectly loving parent could still ensure their child that they are still there and want to love and love them while still giving them just a distance to make and i guess let me just jump in real quick hold your thought justin can we get the microphones down we're about to uh head to q a in about five minutes yeah and so just my thoughts on the divine hiddenness argument is it's another form of the it's just a form of the argument from evil and so one we have to understand our epistemic humility uh you know just because i can't see a good reason doesn't mean that it's it's not there so it's like if i look at the if i look at who's seen the real mona lisa who's ever seen the real one yeah it's like this big yeah yeah okay so you have to get really close to it in the loop in the live if you can when i was there there was like a huge crowd of you know what's news to me i had no idea it's too tiny it's tiny and don't worry if it's crowded you can go to the pompadour and look at a tire that's the museum of modern art in paris it's terrible um but you go if i went up to them like this is a crummy painting but if i'm only looking at a tiny part of it then i'm not able to see um to be able to see the whole picture much like uh so so i think that that's something with the problem of evil uh one would have to look at then when it comes to the problem of divine hiddenness look if there are these reasons i can think of even other reasons like what are some goods god might want to obtain i'm not saying i even have to prove the goods exist i think the fact that we know god can tolerate some goods we can incorporate it here but some goods i can think of might be the good for example of sharing the knowledge of god with other people i think that evangelism itself that that interpersonal dynamic is a particular kind of good the good of being able to approach god and even when you know like oh i could just rationalize it all away because i don't want to believe i'm not saying you're you're doing this but the ability to be able to freely approach so each of these reasons may not explain all of the evils but they give us confidence there are those reasons like for example when i drive down the road uh the highway i drove you here and i kind of we skirted some red lights and we were trying to get here you know it's not as bad as that just he made it sound yeah but if there was a police officer in my rearview mirror i'm not gonna say wait a minute the duty i have to other drivers implores me to obey all of these speed limits uh it would be the the lurking over my shoulder and so if god made himself obvious that might take away the good of following him apart from daddy's looking over your shoulder right now i'm saying that's one possible reason i think people wrap their heads around that so uh we've got about two more minutes uh i just want to let you guys know you can go ahead and start lining up questions over here for ben questions over here for trent wow you said something about ben look at this oh i thought you said we had two minutes yeah you know we have two minutes but i was just showing you the the line like everybody shot over to your mic oh i see what you say i thought you're saying to go up to the podium to answer questions you have 30 you have 30 seconds that was 10 seconds ago now 15 seconds um so you said something about the perfection of god being different from the perfection of the world um and so i wanted to see how you responded to the distinction between quantity and quality so it seems like when we're talking about the perfection of god um we're talking about the quantity of the you know he can do all things he can know all things but when we're talking about the perfection of the world we're talking about the quality of the world aren't we we're talking about the maximum quality that something to have so to use another analogy we could think of of a perfect craftsman creating a perfect craft obviously the perfect craftsman is going to be different from the perfect craft but we would still expect the craft to be maximum and what i would say though is when we talk about god because god does not have an essence god is radically distinct from us all language is going to be analogical i'm not equivocating on perfection or being but we're always going to speak about god in an analogous way like how i say i see you right now and i see what you're saying i'm not that's the use of the word see in a different though related sense and i think perfection will apply to god in in that um in that analogous way second when it comes to like like i understand like a perfect trumpet i used to play a trumpet if i was smart i would pick the guitar but in any case you know so i the perfect trumpet will have the right oiling it'll meet at certain end but world is just too too um too vague of a thing in that regard and also well let's take like i think this is parfait's problem for example like which is a more perfect world uh one that has x number of people at one hundred percent happiness or two x number of people at ninety-nine percent happen yeah the repugnant the repugnant conclusion yeah and so it seems like i you know now of course you could say well god can make infinite x and infinite happiness and i would say there's still some goods left but with world it's just more amorphous of a concept than like a perfect so if we use the conclusion from the republic conclusion that would pretty much refute theism right now because the world isn't infinitely full of oysters oh is that what your philosophy or professor said or that is that what parfit said yeah my professor said that the repugnant conclusion leads to a world of infinite people who eat raw potatoes and listen to muzak and if you take one of those things away they'll kill themselves i think he just described hell right [Laughter] all right so i'm i'm really only standing up because i'm i need to stand up all right the way we're gonna do this is uh we're gonna start with questions over here we're gonna do two minute answer one minute counter response okay and uh it'll we'll just alternate back and forth as long as we can go and yeah that's it for about 30 minutes okay sit back down hang on oh and try to keep it to one sentence oh man i can't do that i'm sorry yeah but i'll be quick i promise um so trenton in the opening you said that the um you you compared the materialization of an arm to the materialization of the universe and you suggested that the weight and the value of witnessing that could be identical to the theoretical transformation of the universe that we haven't witnessed and it's completely theoretical so how do you can you explain that or elaborate on that and tell me why i would use that in my sort of search for god and how that could be something that i put into my equation for that yes so i have tied that in as an argument from you know if the universe came to be from nothing what would that entail and i've asked many atheists what would it take uh to to prove that god exists to you i think it's a question many atheists have a very difficult time answering like what what under what circumstances would you believe that god exists now some philosophically informed atheists i think like ben would say a sound argument that leads to a conclusion which would be nice many others don't have that many of them will say well a miracle and my option is well why a miracle what do you mean and i picked healing of an amputated limb but many other kinds of miracle claims are often um you know whether it's god written in the stars or knowledge i should not normally have if i were to say to the an atheist well why do you believe that god caused that maybe that effect or that knowledge just came from nothing instead of god because any proposed miracle i could say well just it just came from nothing but if they say well no i wouldn't buy that option i would take miracle in this rare case because things don't come from nothing then if we do have a case of something coming from nothing then i just think they should carry that that same uh intuition over essentially i would say if you believe in the lesser miracle you should believe in the greater miracles if that makes sense ben um so i uh defect from a lot of my atheist peers in saying this but i think that there are evidential chips that fall in favor of theism i don't subscribe to the dogmatic claim that there just is no evidence for theism and so i think one of those chips that falls in favor of theism is a religious experience thank you and so atheists often get asked what sort of consideration could change your mind what sort of evidential chip could fall in favor of theism such that you would change your mind and i think my answer to that would be a cogent religious experience if i were to have a cogent religious experience i think that's the evidential chip that would outweigh something like the argument from evil and i think that atheists should be more willing to reflect and think about ways in which their minds could be changed it's good 54 seconds nice thanks all right gordon take it hey this question is for both um hypothetically speaking what would you say to the dyslexic atheist who lies awake at night thinking if dog exists i'll see myself out i would say there's very little cost in believing that dogs exist and that when you're aware of them your life might be more improved either to seek them out or to avoid them so i would give horn's wager well there i i do i generally believe animals don't go to heaven i know there's some evidence uh to the contrary philosophical arguments and some they pray so you can think of them as documentaries about all dogs going to heaven i don't know so i have five cats so i don't know how to answer this question cats don't have souls well it's disputed among theologians ben get out i'm serious [Music] all right over here trent i am worried about the validity of your argument from motion particularly with premise eight you conclude that from this argument from motion that you get unactualized act but then that same premise you go on to say otherwise known as purely actual actualizer i think that is a non-sequitur to go from an unactualized act to pure act there's nothing incoherent about having an unactualized actualizer which still has potencies how would you respond to this yeah so what i would say is that the argument uh entails also that one thing that is actualized in a siri is series is the potential to exist at any moment in that series and so that would lead to a cause that is at least purely actual when it comes to existence itself and so if it actualizes existence and everything else in the chain if its own existence has to be actualized in any way then it's not it cannot explain the entire chain it must at least be purely actual when it comes to its own existence and so in my opening i said that existence is the most deepest metaphysical fact about something and so if it doesn't lack anything in existence it seems contradictory to me that it would have potentials in other kinds of areas maybe other powers or operations or properties i would also say if it had pure existence but potential when it comes to activity or operations that would entail that this cause has distinct parts and so something would be actualizing its unity to keep its parts together and so it really really wouldn't serve to be the the final foundation for all of existence so i i would say that it's being pure existence explains why it has no other potentialities and how it could not have um other parts of it that are not actualized because this being can't have any parts at all if it's the most fundamental explanation of reality that's how i would answer that ben any thoughts yeah so i will um appeal again to kind of how these pieces don't really seem to fit well together that we have a problem of coherency here so my understanding of classical theism which i'll surely concede trent's understanding is much deeper than mine but my understanding of classical theism is that um god has no potentials so distinguishing between active and passive potentials doesn't really help us god doesn't have any properties so appealing to something like um cambridge changes you know we want to say that god doesn't have any properties but he has these cambridge properties where he can change extremes extrinsically oh god is immutable he can't change but he can change extrinsically i think that these cause problems of coherence that these pieces don't fit well together and that i would just want to mention that as a a supporting claim for my claim that the prior probability of classical theism is low thank you both sure 57 seconds ben good job i'm i'm really amazed you're doing good i'm just as surprised as you are tim alrighty perfect all right what's up all right ben so i would love to see or hear your answer to this i've been musing over this for a little bit i want to go to your understanding of naturalism that you presented that the sum total of causal events is simply just natural reality so all of causal reality is natural reality i want to step back and ask you a question about the whole thing about cause in the first place so what about that naturalistic picture actually gives you kind of an epistemic prediction or derivation to think that any natural entity causal entity given that we're operating our powers would actually allow you to epistemically predict that you would that those entities would actually have causal powers because it seems that on theism there's a property or something playing a metaphysical priority here that would allow you to epistemically predict that it does have causal powers but what about on your view allows us to actually have a that benefit that would i guess put itself on par with theism that we go okay yeah these entities do have causal powers how does it seems that though theism would have the uh the leg up on that since you look at perfection on perfect being theism and you can just derive that oh yeah causal powers but i don't see how on any naturalistic foundation we'd have that unless you just add that to the hypothesis but simplicity cost and theism simplicity game what's your responsibility so i'm i'm not sure i understand the question um in what you mean but like by things having causal power so i think that one of the observations that's a datum that we've both conceded tonight there that there is causation that there is something like change in the world and so um how i relate that to naturalism um and when i characterize it is i appealed to a causal closure thesis so the idea that something like the conservation of mass and energy is just what is at bottom there is nothing that comes in that reaches into the world to cause now you said something interesting about theism would give us this kind of causal some reason to think that there's you know causation in the world well theism is plagued by what is uh known as the interaction problem so it's this idea that if god is non-physical and the world is physical how does god reach out and causally affect the world so i think i would push back that theism explains some feature of causation in the natural world better than naturalism awesome thanks yeah and i guess my reply would just be i don't think that the great divider in reality is physical and mental or physical and non-physical i would say the great divider would be being and non-being and how things participate in being or not now when it comes to the existence of causation itself i think i would agree the existence of mere causation could probably go either way between naturalism and theism but the existence of finite causal chains that require ultimate explanation the existence of uh mental causation that affects the physical world that if human agents are able to undergo make physical causation be rooted ultimately in mental causation which was part of my argument for moral responsibility in my opening uh when a lot of these nate or the nature of causal regularity that affects always proceed from causes in regular ways i think causation simplicitor probably equal on either view but various elements of causation uh i think the favorite theism time yeah three seconds over i'm not not as good we lose and the price is right one over bob all right next for trent hey it's great to see both of y'all in person i just had a question regarding um you said that divine hiddenness you you see it's sort of like the problem of evil and that the free will defense applies to both i'm just wondering if you could clarify more on that because it seems that some people it's they're not exactly free to be able to form these beliefs having belief in god it seems like there's a sort of lack of control there comparatively to like a decision of doing evil thanks right so my view is that the problem of divine hiddenness is a subset of a larger problem of evil so i don't think it should be treated as being dramatically different than the problem of evil and the problem of evil is just if god is all good why does he allow certain evils to exist and the classical theist answer for that which by the way i would also say if this is an evidential argument if you run demonstrable proofs then the evidential argument evaporates so if um if god exists unjustifiable evils sorry if unjustifiable evils exist god does not exist unjustifiable evils exist therefore god doesn't exist you can run it backwards and just say well god exists so there are no unjustifiable evils and that'd be running from the other proofs but so with divine hiddenness you might say well okay trent but i agree that free will is not going to explain every kind of evil involved in lack of belief just like free will does not explain every kind of physical evil humans or sentient creatures might undergo there in that case there might be other reasons that divine hiddenness or non-belief occurs but my point is that if god exists and he's all-powerful then we have good reasons to believe that god can always bring a greater good from any evil that exists and so this argument the burden is not on me to show these good reasons exist the argument the burden is on an atheist it's an atheistic argument to show there could not possibly be these good reasons but if we already have good reason to believe god exists i don't think atheists can meet that burden so i would agree that the argument from hiddenness can be understood as a variation of the problem of evil um but instead of dealing with like the practical domain it deals with the epistemic domain so if there's a problem with the way in which people believe in the world in which knowledge obtains in the world but there's also an important way in which the argument from hiddenness is distinct from the argument from evil the argument from hiddenness doesn't make use of any moral claims so it all starts from the conception of perfect love and asks what the entailments are of perfect love and so one of those entailments i want to argue tonight is that god is always open to relationship and that's where i gave the analogy of god being like a light that would always remain on and we must be resisting seeing that light by closing our eyes you're cheating you looked over and so i did i didn't want to you caught me all right next for i was just looking at you i know you were looking at this so i have a counter argument well i have a counter argument that's about as long as tim's question to uh ben watkins imperfection argument so premise one god does not have to create the most perfect world perfect be perfect being theism implies libertarian free will or some compatibilistic free will we can discuss that uh premise two god only has to create a world that is more perfect than the most imperfectical world premise three we are not in the most imperfect imperfect world therefore we are in a world that can be created by perfect being and btw subscribed to wolves doe apologetic since you know around here um so i would start off by asking the question why would a perfect creator create anything less than a perfect world that doesn't seem to follow if we assume that god is omnipotent and morally perfect so if we assume that god is omnipotent he is not constrained by anything other than logical limitations so he can do anything of which the description is coherent and if he's morally perfect then he's going to do what he's going to make the world go impos impartially best he's going to treat everyone in ways they could always rationally consent and he would never act in ways that were unjustifiable to others or in ways that someone could reasonably reject and so when i think you reflect seriously on the moral implications of this um your first premise there seemed to be that god would create less than a perfect world and so i would just want to i would want to press on that and say but why it would be if if such a being existed that didn't do that it would obviously be greater than that being and so if we're starting with the concept of god that is wholly worthy of our worship it's going to be the greatest possible being and it seems like your first premise just denies that god is the greatest possible being because god could create a world in which everyone freely chooses right such a world could look like heaven might allow a counter is it no it's it's uh well we're sorry we gotta get a response from him and then we gotta move on and so i think this is going to go back to the central question of what does it mean for something to be a perfect world you brought about qualitative or quantitative things it seemed like what i glean from your definition of a perfect world is just one that is uh free from pain for example uh because one could argue if god makes simply just makes it's him and an electron orbiting a nucleus of an atom is that a perfect world well it certainly doesn't have pain doesn't have any bad things but it's also lacking a lot of good things too uh so i would say that if god is he's the perfect being when god creates he um you're right uh he doesn't do logical contradictions but i would also say he doesn't do um ontological contradictions so god won't create a world where uh i am safely courageous a world uh where i am uh for i i'm forcibly loving other people uh so just to just to get those kinds of goods without evils uh connected to them so yeah so i i don't think it's um a feasible term just a perfect world job i think god just has an obligation to make a good world time all right uh next jeremy right for trent i'd like to dig into divine hiddenness as well so i think that someone can look at a certain body of evidence and come to the conclusion that god does not exist or perhaps agnostics the agnostic is a tendable position to hold and be reasonable in that efforts so not far on left field so i'm not looking at ben and thinking he's completely crazy necessarily um but uh i was wondering if you agree with that assessment and then what assessment that people can look at evidence and reach different conclusions and reach a conclusion that god did not exist in a reasonable matter and then does that circumstance decrease the probability that god exists well i i don't think i think that people can in general in general be reasonable individuals but if they reach a false conclusion they will have made some error in their reasoning along the way uh i don't think it is not possible to only grasp true premises and perfectly reason and then end up at a false conclusion but just because but just because someone might err in their reasoning and it doesn't mean that they are some kind of an unreasonable person and so once again as i said before that if god allows us moral freedom to develop his beings he might also allow us epistemic freedom he might give us freedom to pursue goods he also gives us freedom to pursue truths because you might say well if god makes his existence obvious maybe he should make other truths obvious to us why should we have to learn any truths maybe god wants us to go through the goodness of learning those learning those truths on our own and then finally i would say that these kinds of arguments once again if you have a a proof like the argument from motion or something or even the argument from from morality uh you would just have to get you would just get to the conclusion well god does exist and then there must be some reason he does not make his existence obvious but if he is fully good he will compensate those who have not come to know his existence in this life and there's more on the parent analogy but i don't want to overstep my time okay yeah i would just say look when we speak of god we cannot speak of him uh universally as being the exact same as a human parent for example uh so there are many things that that i do when i treat um my own children uh for example like adults we treat adult children far differently than infant children so it doesn't mean just because you know a parent of an infant child will treat their child one way doesn't mean they'll treat an adult child the same way so there are going to be differences and ultimately when we apply that to god who has who is all-knowing he is able to achieve goods with his power and knowledge that we're not aware of um so i want to say that i uh agree that we can disagree about what the evidence has um we can have apparent reason to be atheists and we can have apparent reason to be theists and this kind of shows how the problem of divine hiddenness shades in the problem of widespread religious disagreement i mentioned earlier how i thought that religious experiences was an evidential chip that fell in favor of theism but the idea that there's this widespread disagreement there's multiple different kinds of incompatible religious experience is surprising given theism if we're conceiving of a god that cares about us and what we believe and predicate something like our salvation on what we believe i think the widespread disagreement is surprising thank you folks question for ben yes fantastic uh discussion guys it was great you know it's coming for you ben um so if there's a problem of evil for the theist there's also a problem of good for the atheist but it seems like on the problem of evil it is easier to have an ontology or the intrinsic value of being able to ground that goodness for theism but on atheism or naturalism there doesn't seem to be anything at all or any intrinsic probability of anything that we can ground it in unless it's something ambiguous so i would disagree that there is a problem of good on naturalism so i am a moral realist however that is a controversial position within my camp there are many philosophers whose opinions i very much respect who are not objectivists they are anti-realists about morality so the problem of evil is unique because it's a tension that arises because of god's attributes and observations we observe in the world so we can take an argument from evil and um morian shift it the someone man's modus poland is another man's modus tollens and so we can say that the argument from evil in something like a moral argument can kind of play off of each other and so what we're trying to ask really is what's more plausible that there are some unjustified evils in the world or that something like moral realism implies theism these are you know we can use the forms of these arguments to narrow it down to these two theses and i think that the weight of evidence clearly falls on the side of there being unjustified evils and i defended tonight a secular robust objectivist view of morality so i would deny that moral realism implies something like theism yeah and i would just say i disagree with its um robustness and many other atheists that i've cited uh don't see it that moral truths uh having existence beyond just scientific datum doesn't have that explanatory power though i would also say that just because we aren't aware of reasons for things even in very unusual circumstances like well if x is true we'd expect y we don't get y so we don't get x we have to look at all the factors to give an illustration if i go to a decrepit abandoned house that's got moss and weeds and bugs i might think wow i look at all this i would expect that no person would live here and if somebody lived here that wouldn't make sense but suppose i walked in i found a piping hot cup of tea inside of this house even if i might think why would anybody be here the fact that the piping hot cup of tea uh it now outweighs the very strange circumstance of being in the um being in the decrepit house so i think when we look at the evidential argument from evil we have to look at all of the background knowledge and everything that points towards god is is even if you thought it's just so bizarre god would make a world like this yes but it's also bizarre if there's a piping hot cup of tea and nobody around time i kind of lost my train of thought so would you like some tea i need some more i need some more really okay i think we have time for two more questions so one from each side so sorry everyone else including especially you john i still love you john you can talk to you can talk to them at any point literally what who created god is that your question john sit down i think that means i'll win the debate now right i'm pretty sure all right so last question for trent hello trent um so my question has to do specifically with so obviously you presented like a deductive argument for for god um so my question just has broadly to do with like deductive arguments in general so obviously your argument presented a lot of premises in the arguments right but it seems like each a lot of the premises not all of them but a large majority of them seem to depend upon a particular view of metaphysics right in this case domestic views or maybe it doesn't you can help clarify my point is that you have to assume that particular metaphysics right so you have to actually show why we should prefer that view of metaphysics over some alternative naturalistic view and so my question just more broadly is shouldn't we be be comparing tomism with like naturalism and like seeing okay so don't we look at the theoretical virtues of the views rather than just presenting deductive arguments well okay so the question is then if i you know is my case being less probable because i have a very specific kind of explanation in the world based on the thought of thomas aquinas the argument from change versus just naturalism uh i think though that either view will succumb to this problem because ev everyone has to answer these questions the naturalist has to explain change as well uh naturalist has to explain how do we have immaterial properties in a material world things like qualia other things like this so i would say though that in my deductive argument i didn't just merely assert these metaphysical principles i talked about what change is its potential reduced to actual i gave examples of that and i don't think that anyone who denies that metaphysic they might describe change in a different way but they won't explain it in a different way now i agree that you can define the terms more but with any deductive argument when you are pressed like does it mean you know like in the kalam argument that william and craig makes whatever begins to exist as a cause oh yes but what does it mean to begin to exist so you're always going to be you can define the terms more carefully according to your own metaphysic everyone will have to defend their own metaphysic and i think in the argument from change i provided examples where the basic feature of change act and potency are intelligible concepts so i think this is one area where my view is going to have something of an advantage um because there's been what's known as scientific paradigm shifts so during the enlightenment there was a scientific paradigm shift away from the aristotelian way of thinking about the world and towards a clockwork kind of universe and now we have a paradigm shift again in physics that uses um a conservation of momentum the idea that things are in motion until um something comes and acts and stops them from being in motion so you'll notice that in the current paradigm things like actin potency are just aren't concepts that are used so i would say that i supposed trent's paradigm tonight for the for the sake of charity so that we could have these interesting conversations but i would also say that i'm skeptical of the classical theist aristotelian paradigm i think we have shifted away from it 57 if you if you were wondering i was wondering all right last question for ben excuse me sorry um i appreciate both of your guys's talks i think you both presented your case as well and i'm just thankful that i get to be here to learn more about how to defend my faith um so ben my question for you you stated earlier in the discussion that naturalism entails indifference to sentient life yet later when you lay out your moral framework i know there's not enough time to lay out your entire moral framework but um under naturalism why does personhood or persons matter like what is the underlying i guess so in the you know theistic camp maybe more of the abrahamic faith we have the idea of the imago day as you know where people are endowed with certain like trent mentions like um like we're made in the image of god so we have intrinsic worth so where does that i guess intrinsic worth or how would you describe that in naturalism right so the question i take it to be you know what gives human persons their kind of moral status and so one of the distinctions i drew earlier in the debate is between a moral patient and a moral agent and so i think there's at least two features of human persons that make us morally relevant the first is our capacity to feel pain and so this is what we share with other um moral patients we all have the capacity capacity to suffer i have also claimed that the nature of suffering and pain is in itself bad so this is a way in which we have intrinsic value we can suffer the other way in which we're morally relevant is we are rational animals we are the um we are uh capable of appreciating and responding to reasons in the world just like cheetahs were selected for speed and giraffes were selected long necks we were selected for our abilities to respond to reasons in the world and so our rationality is what makes us morally relevant it's what makes us moral agents it's what allows us to recognize and appreciate something like a moral obligation so i think that this challenge can be met by just appealing to one the conscious the capacity to have conscious experiences such as suffering and our rationality the ability to appreciate and respond to reasons and understand duty duties and what we owe to each other and my reply is i don't believe this coherently solves the problem on the one hand we're told under naturalism the universe is indifferent to sentient life yet there are also these necessary moral truths that say we ought to care about sentient life in every possible world which seems like a contradiction to me we're also told human beings have intrinsic value because they can suffer but any sentient being can suffer that doesn't explain why humans unique their unique suffering matters more than other creatures and then it doesn't explain how for example let's take an infant a human infant it is not a moral agent it is a moral patient the same way a dolphin a pig or a pigeon might be and yet we would recognize as a moral patient that has unique rights and i would say not merely by a prudential conventional judgment but in virtue of its nature and i would say i don't see what can explain biological human nature having value apart from some source of value creating it all right let's move into closing statements sound good why don't we just do it from the chairs sure sounds good catholicism we call that ex-cathedra can we i'd rather use the podium you want to use the podium rather use a podium oh do you have it you feeling fancy oh no yeah okay that means mine's infallible all right let me put this thing back all right trent go ahead five minutes why are you going to use the podium i want to create symmetry i guess it takes the pressure off right so um i left my phone i'm not i'm a good internal chronometer like ben has uh i'll say well just to recap uh think of the cases that we both presented tonight i presented um two cosmological arguments that show the universe has a transcendent cause to its existence and that this cause has divine attributes and also a moral argument that shows that this alt whatever this ultimate cause is it would also be a perfect standard of goodness that explains moral facts that naturalism cannot explain so when we look at ben's arguments we could say well did he show that god does not exist i would say no he did not he tried to show contradictions in the case for classical theism you could just be a regular old theist if you want or i showed those contradictions don't obtain because ben is using ambiguous terms to create contradictions that don't really exist there so i think his logical case for there not being a god doesn't work i also don't think his evidential case for god not existing did not work he tried to point out various kinds of evils that exist non-belief suffering things like that but i showed that he did not meet the burden of showing that the god who created the universe which i believe my arguments did show tonight uh is incapable of having reasons to justify that rather i would say ben's naturalism simply cannot explain the things that my case was able to put forward tonight now as to his objections to my arguments he alleged they committed various fallacies like a quantifier shift fallacy or a gap problem i think i showed they did not do that and even if you are not convinced that they describe every single attribute of god i think if you are a naturalist who does not have a circular definition of naturalism but you hold that naturalism just means the physical always precedes the mental and there is no ultimate mental foundation of reality if all my arguments essentially show there is at least an immaterial cause of reality something that is not physical then that's going to put your naturalism on uh on life support and i think the other arguments will um you know will pull the plug on it uh so i i not to be grim about there are hypotheses we can we can abuse positions not people uh i always believe this you should always some people tell me uh trent uh shouldn't you respect everybody's opinion i say no some opinions are stupid or they're evil we should always respect people because people have intrinsic worth and value even if they haven't developed the capacity to have opinions yet so that's why i think i was happy with this debate that we can show no matter what we should go out you don't have to respect people's opinions you might think they're wrong and they need to be refuted you can always respect the person who has that opinion and dialogue with them and i hope that the very least this debate will encourage people to continue this dialogue i mean when i do debates on the existence of god i don't expect that we will end the question my goal is to begin the question for many people who might be watching this for the first time and i believe is the most important question that we can ask as human beings why am i here what ought i to do and what is my ultimate end and i think the case i presented tonight shows that we are created by a perfect god who is unlimited and that ultimately revelation shows us this god loves us and desires eternal life with us so thank you all so much and i hope you have a good evening [Applause] i want to start by giving my sincerest thanks to trent for being such a wonderful interlocutor tonight and i want to thank cameron for not only inviting me but also for being such a wonderful moderator in trent's opening statement we saw at least two cosmological arguments we saw the argument from motion and an argument from causal finitism regarding the argument from motion we saw at least two undercutting defeaters in the form of my existential inertia thesis and the quantifier shift fallacy what about causal finitism we saw that even even if we can see the universe is finite this fact is not sufficient to get us to classical theism we saw how the doctrine of creationx nihilo is incompatible with immutability and timelessness we also saw how a necessary cause of the universe would modally collapse the distinction between necessity and contingency in the universe implying modal fatalism we also saw how the gap problem the physical dependence of minds divine hiddenness and facts about evil are rebutting to feeders for inferring a perfect and personal cause of the universe finally trent gave at least three moral arguments that are supposed to be reasons to believe naturalism is false and that theism is closer to the truth i argue these moral arguments are mistaken because naturalists can accept the robustly objectivist view of morality that i laid out tonight i argue that some things matter in a moral sense because we all have reasons to care about these things for their own sake and that some of these reasons are moral reasons because they are weightier than any other competing reasons we may have this model of meta ethics can account for the intrinsic value of persons the wrong the moral wrongness of our acts and the special moral duties that moral agents have but moral patients lack this gives us rebutting to feeders for all of trent's moral arguments we saw how basic moral truths are necessary truths because facts about intrinsic value moral wrongness and the distinction between moral agents and moral patients are necessary truths it follows these truths are not evidence either for naturalism or for theism in my opening statement i laid out at least three arguments for naturalism the first was that naturalism is simpler than theism because it is more modest and coherent the second argument i gave was undoubtedly the most important the argument from imperfection this argument is a cumulative argument that appeals to at least four probabilistic claims the first is that non-resistant non-theists prove there is no perfect being the second is that particular evils are evidence theism is probably false all things considered the third is that evolutionary evils are more likely given naturalism than theism and the last is that evolutionary evils are evidence for naturalism over theism all things considered my final argument was the argument from freedom we saw how by definition god's immutability is incompatible with perfect freedom so the conjunction of classical theism and perfect being theism is impossible trent also appealed to the privation theory of evil as a rebutting defeater for my arguments from evil and imperfection we saw this view is mistaken for at least four reasons the first was that this move doesn't actually solve the problem of evil because there is still a problem of the missing good second we saw how hume's is ought distinction undermines the claim that goodness and being are identical third we saw how identifying goodness with being implies morality is trivial finally we saw how this just isn't a plausible view of evil because it cannot account for paradigmatic examples of evil like pain and depression taken together i think we have much more reason to prefer my robustly objectivist meta ethics to the privation theory of evil my main contention tonight is that something like metaphysical naturalism is much closer to the truth than trent's classical theism to use the metaphor from earlier naturalism wins the evidential race this conclusion will have some unwelcome implications for many people for starters it implies there is no life after death no eternal salvation and no perfect being to have a meaningful relationship with i recognize that these implications may seem unacceptable to many in the crowd tonight and watching at home so the best advice i can leave you with is to let evidential chips fall where they may and to proportion your beliefs to the evidence as you see it because we all have nothing to lose and everything to gain from an honest pursuit of truth thank you for your attention thank you for this platform for trent and i to raise the level of discourse in these kinds of discussions i am proud to call each and every one of you my friends and in the words of my late grandfather you are all wonderful people please be safe and cheers hey thanks for watching this video if you want to help us produce more great content like this be sure to click subscribe and go to trenthorne trenthornepodcast.com to become a premium subscriber you'll help us create more videos like this and get access to bonus content and sneak peeks of our upcoming projects

Channel: The Counsel of Trent

Views: 7,368

Rating: 4.9615383 out of 5

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Id: CLlZJrSMOo8

Length: 132min 32sec (7952 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021