Deconstructing Ben Shapiro on Religion

picture me if you will at my desk scripting the very video that you're about to watch when i see that my friend and colleague genetically modified skeptic has just uploaded a response to the same video as me i promise i'm not just copying you at least not this time anyway i have checked to make sure that i'm not stepping on your toes with this video but of course a link to gm skeptic's video is in the description and i would recommend that you will go and watch it ben shapiro perhaps at least once the de facto commander in chief on the conservative front lines of the culture wars is a man that you may recognize from such classics as encouraging people who own homes about to be flooded by rising sea levels to simply sell them let's say for the sake of argument that all of the water levels around the world rise by say 10 feet by the next 100 years and it puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater you think that people aren't going to just sell their homes and move to fish presumably who once accused the chairman of the spectator of being a quote lefty before leaving the interview early in protest of this well-known conservative journalist's left-wing bias why don't you just say that you're on the left is this so hard for you why can't you just be honest and of course his shall we say confusion over what cardi b was trying to get across by rapping about her wet ass p word there's something that is going on here that is not biologically normal and by the way the song is so unsexy that it frankly sounds like somebody describing what amounts to a serious condition that requires the care of a doctor indeed for people like ben the only person that you should ever be getting on your knees for is a more supernatural kind of daddy and in fact he appears to believe that anybody who fails to recognize the existence of some supernatural creator of the universe is suffering from a moral and intellectual shortcoming ben recently released as part of his debunked series a video called the atheist delusion an ironic reference of course to richard dawkins famous book of 2006 how original so let's take a look at why ben thinks that if you as i don't believe in god you've got some intellectual work ahead of you listen there's no way to blame people who don't believe in god because they've experienced enormous amounts of personal pain god is apart from human beings and if we understood the mind of god then we would be like god in his totality which we are not that does not mean that you're not feeling the pain that you are feeling it doesn't mean you don't have a right to feel angry at god but understand that the struggle with god is a part of religion itself being a religious believer is the consistent struggle with the logic of the universe and that seems to me a deeper and more fulfilling struggle than simply pretending the universe has no meaning at all being a religious believer is the consistent struggle with the logic of the universe and that seems to bend quote a more fulfilling struggle than simply pretending that the universe has no meaning at all why would being a religious believer be a quote struggle with the logic of the universe as if the logic of the universe doesn't naturally point to god and this is instead something we have to effort to make consistent with our observations of the universe how much suffering it contains how absent god constantly appears to be from it ben has already done some of the work for the atheist in pointing out that being religious is a struggle and not just because of the social implications or whatever but because of the very quote logic of the universe the struggle against which ben says is integral to religious belief but also consider that ben said he finds this a quote deeper and more fulfilling struggle than simply pretending the universe has no meaning at all it may well be deeper and more meaningful or fulfilling to you ben but that of course works in favor of the atheist too it implies that at least part of the reason why you choose theism over atheism is not because of reason or argument but simply because you find it more meaningful and deeper of course this is exactly what the atheist thinks accounts for religious belief in the first place man's desperate effort to invent purpose and meaning where it doesn't exist to make themselves feel better about being stuck in the human condition thanks for admitting it i guess ben then assumes that atheism and nihilism are the same thing by saying that the opposite of being a religious believer is asserting that the universe has no meaning at all now it may well be a defensible position that atheism should entail nihilism but ben's sort of smuggled in the meaninglessness there by conflating the two as if they're the same thing but don't worry because bizarrely ben also implies that nihilists are only pretending to be nihilists for him struggling with the logic of the universe whatever that even means is better than quote pretending that the universe has no meaning simply pretending the universe has no meaning at all this suggests of course that a person who doesn't adopt theism is merely pretending to be an atheist or a nihilist and it smacks of a patronizing i know that deep down you do actually believe in god while suggesting that atheists like myself are somehow pretending or at least engaging in self-denial think about it how offensive would it be if i said atheism is just the result of struggling with the logic of the universe which is far more deep and meaningful than simply pretending that god exists not only would that misrepresent your position ben but it would also suggest that you're lying at least to yourself and potentially to others by only pretending to believe what you claim to believe is that what you're trying to accuse atheists of doing god according to atheists is an unnecessary hypothesis the universe just is we just are there's no reason to search for a creator of course there's reason to search for a creator i mean ben i'm essentially a professional atheist at this point and my entire career has been an exercise in searching for a creator of the universe an atheist is simply a person who is yet to find such a being not someone who thinks that it's not worth searching indeed many atheists are atheists precisely because they started searching for the god that they'd been told penetrates the entire universe and found absolute radio silence in response to their prayers and hardly any persuasive force in the arguments used to support his existence there's no reason to search for a creator deposit that he cares about us to suggest that there is some higher power that bridges the gap from what is to how things ought to be trying to ground ethics in descriptive scientific facts about the universe or getting an ought from an is is famously one of the greatest challenges of philosophy ben's correct that this is an extremely difficult thing to do on atheism perhaps even impossible but why would believing in god make the problem any easier david hume is famously credited as a popularizer of the is ought problem he points out that to say something like it is the case that racism causes suffering therefore we ought not be racists is an invalid inference it doesn't follow you can't derive an ought from an is alone you need an extra premise something like we ought not cause suffering now the argument is valid but as you can see we're not getting an ought from an is anymore but just an or from another ought so no matter how many facts we have about the way the universe is we'll never be able to derive how we ought to behave now ben is suggesting that god can somehow solve this problem and allow us to derive an ought from an is but why suppose we say something like it is the case that god forbids murder therefore we ought not murder this too is invalid we can't derive an ought from an is so we need to inject an extra premise like we ought not do what god forbids now the argument's valid but again we're just getting an ought from an ought still not an ought from an is you'll never be able to justify these extra ought premises by using is premises alone even if there is premises are about god you always have to assume an ought from the outset now if i'm not allowed to do that with something like avoiding suffering then why should you be allowed to do it with something like following god's commands atheism often claims that religion corrupts mankind if you want to make good people do wicked things you'll need religion but the notion of a god blinds men to the truths around them that science is directly opposed to the idea of a creator you give them an a at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason i don't think they're reconcilable none of these things are true that was a little bit unfair you used that clip of neil degrasse tyson to make it seem like he was saying that quote science is directly opposed to the idea of a creator but science is directly opposed to the idea of a creator but if you watch the full interview neil is clearly saying that science is opposed specifically to biblical fundamentalism things like believing that the earth was created in six days not that it's opposed to belief in god generally in fact he specifically says that it's perfectly possible to be a religious believer whilst accepting the findings of modern science and that it's the fundamentalists with whom science has a problem and so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that it's the fundamentalists who want to say that the bible is the literally literal truth of god that and want to see the bible as a science textbook who are knocking on the science doors of the schools trying to put that content in the sciences uh enlightened religious people are not behaving that way they're saying yes science is cool we're good with that now listen again to what ben implied neil was trying to argue that science is directly opposed to the idea of a creator which i hope you can see is not what neil was saying at all let's begin with the idea that god is an unnecessary hypothesis it's difficult to imagine an argument in which god is utterly unnecessary that is because all human logic is rooted in certain basic assumptions about the nature of the world and about reason that are completely unmoored from the dictates of evolutionary biology first we make claims of objective truth truth that exists independent of human minds how does such truth exist based on the dictates of evolutionary biology our ability to comprehend a truth should really be no more than our ability to think whatever is most evolutionarily beneficial for us and our genetic descendants but we don't believe that we think two plus two equals four because it's evolutionarily beneficial we believe two plus two equals four always and everywhere because it's true and that be speaks the truth beyond the merely material benz just presented an argument attributed to alvin plantinga called the evolutionary argument against naturalism if there is no god and human beings simply evolved blindly by natural selection then how can we trust our very ability to reason to add two and two and get four think about it what does natural selection select for well it selects for survivability it doesn't select for truth now of course it could just coincidentally be the case that whatever's beneficial for our survival to believe also just happens to be true but this seems incredibly unlikely at least considering how many true things we claim to know and how much room there is for such a process of reasoning to go wrong now if we are entirely evolved creatures then our reasoning faculty is evolved too which means that our reasoning faculty evolved not to tell us what's true but to tell us things that make us more likely to survive so when my reasoning tells me two plus two is four how can i know that this is true and not simply beneficial to believe for my survival well if we're atheists who believe that we evolved by natural selection we can't know this at all but of course if there's some kind of intelligent creator overseeing our evolution then he can design the process such that it does result in our reasoning faculties being accurate to truth meaning that we can trust our reason so the argument goes the only way that we can trust our very ability to reason is to assume that our minds were purposefully designed by a creator for what it's worth i think this is a wonderful argument characteristic of planting as genius truly it deserves a video of its own and it may well get one but what i'll say here is this what kind of video are we watching right now we're watching ben shapiro provide a number of reasonable arguments that god exists and that atheism is false he's about to go on to provide a number of other reasonable arguments throughout the video but he begins by saying that our very ability to trust reason in the first place must assume god's existence without god we can't trust our reasoning faculty as sensitive to truth at all but can't you see how this completely undermines the rest of the entire video and condemns it to be circular indeed saying that we have to assume god's existence to trust reason makes all philosophy of religion completely circular why do i say this well suppose we want to make an argument for god's existence these arguments are supposed to show us that we can use reason to establish god's existence and this is what the rest of ben's video is dedicated to trying to do the problem is that if we're going to use reason to establish god's existence then we of course need to trust our reasoning faculties in order to make the arguments work but ben's just told us that in order to trust reason we need to assume god's existence so before we can even use reason to argue for god's existence we need to assume that god exists but as you can see this makes any attempt to prove god's existence using reason entirely circular because we need to begin with the very conclusion that we're seeking to establish but the rest of ben's video consists in him using reason to argue for god's existence so by saying that we need to assume god in order to use reason in the first place ben is seemingly unknowingly begging the question making literally any other of his arguments entirely circular second we make claims with regard to morality but what is morality without a baseline assumption that human beings have inherent worth even utilitarian philosophies the attempt to ignore moral right and wrong in favor of consequentialist outcomes the greatest good for the greatest number for example has to assume something about what makes an outcome good or bad the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few you can't determine the greatest good for the greatest number without determining the greatest good and that has moral premises that have to be assumed the belief in any moral oughts require us to believe unprovable truths that must descend from outside ourselves so we already just covered the is or problem a moment ago but here we have a more detailed moral argument for god's existence ben says that most of us assume that certain things are right and wrong and that morality exists but he asks what is morality without a baseline assumption that human beings have inherent worth though i do wish that he'd included non-human animals as having worth two ben's right in order to have morality we need to have at least one basic moral assumption remember if all we have is non-moral facts about the universe just a bunch of is statements we'll never be able to get an ought so ben correctly states that morality has to assume some moral premise such as that we ought respect the worth of human beings as long as we assume this we can start deriving moral facts but the problem is grounding that moral assumption why is it that human beings have inherent worth notice that ben didn't provide an answer to this at all let alone proving that it can only be grounded in god opting instead to rather mystically say the belief in any moral oughts require us to believe unprovable truths that must descend from outside ourselves if the moral truths are unprovable ben then how can you know that they must be grounded in god you're suggesting on the one hand that our basic moral assumptions can't be proven but on the other that they can be vindicated by god's existence why if god commanding something proves that it's moral then these aren't unprovable truths at all but you say that they are unprovable and that they must quote descend from outside of ourselves once again providing absolutely no proof of this and in fact stating that such a statement can't be proven if not then how the hell do you know that this is the case i recently recorded a podcast with joe schmidt in which we went into some more detail on the moral argument and whether introducing god into the picture actually helps us ground ethics at all so if you're interested in some more detail on this you can watch that and i'll put a link in the description third we live as though we believe in choice as though we are capable of making decisions in some way based on our own will what in materialism would allow for such choice how would such choice come about if we're just balls of meat wandering around in space how exactly do we make choices god is necessary for these thoughts or at least the possibility of god trash god altogether and you can't explain why you would believe in objective truth or morality or even your own ability to choose ah i'm beginning to see a trend here once again ben has detailed one of the great problems of philosophy and correctly pointed out that it's very difficult to solve if you're an atheist but fail to see that the problem is equally difficult to solve if you're a theist if you've watched my videos before you'll know that i don't believe that free will exists precisely for at least some of the reasons that ben has just pointed out but ben just simply says that's why we need god to solve the problem how exactly do we make choices god is necessary for these thoughts without providing a single reason why the existence of god would make the existence of free will any more plausible if god existed we'd still be big bags of meat wandering around in a universe that's either determined or contained some randomness both of which by definition we have no control over you might say that if god exists then we could have a soul and maybe free will somehow exists in there but you can believe in a soul and still be an atheist and even if we have a soul and the soul determines our actions we run into the exact same problems as saying that the brain determines our actions as long as we can't ultimately control what it is that our soul desires we can't be free and for more information on why you can watch my video on free will i recognize that a lot of you will remain unconvinced but it's something that requires a little bit more attention so you can watch my video on free will and that will explain why i don't believe that it does exist nor do i believe that it can so notice the sleight of hand that's going on here ben points out an impossible task such as justifying the existence of free will or getting an ought from an is he then says quite correctly that on atheism the task is impossible but it's impossible on theism too it's as if he said something like if god doesn't exist then two plus two can never equal five like sure yeah that's true but if you're going to imply that god existing would somehow make us able to do this you have to demonstrate it and what arguments did ben give in favor of free will if god exists none as it turns out there are a bevy of logically consistent arguments offered on behalf of god take for example the first cause proof advanced by aristotle as refined by thomas aquinas edward fazer lays out the argument in his book five proofs of the existence of god the argument goes something like this first change exists in the world but all change is the actualization of a potential for that change so if something is changing it's because there is a potential for that change in the thing no potential can be actualized unless something already actual actualizes it so that means that all change is caused by something already actual this means either there is an infinite regress of actualizers or there is a purely actual actualizer this is sort of like the old joke about the philosopher and the turtle the philosopher is asked what supports the earth and he says a turtle and somebody says well what supports the turtle and he says another turtle so what about that one it's turtles all the way down the infinite regress argument is just not convincing there has to be something underlying the final turtle there has to be one prime cause that cause can't have any potential because if it had potential something else could activate it into changing so there's one unchanging cause that is purely actual that is the thing that we call god and it actualizes all of the other changes now we're talking the argument from change is a fascinating argument that i think doesn't get nearly enough attention in modern apologetics ben serves his view as well by pointing them to ed fazer's book which spends a marvelous 51 pages on this aristotelian argument ben went over it quite quickly so let me try to give you a bit more detail the first premise is usually accepted as common sense change exists things change a hot coffee becomes a cold coffee a parked car becomes a moving car the most subscribed atheist skeptic youtube channel becomes the second most subscribed but change as a concept is a bit more paradoxical than it may seem at first think about it what is change well according to parmenides a pre-socratic greek philosopher change is actually impossible when things appear to change it can only be that an appearance an illusion in reality nothing ever actually changes at all okay why on earth would he think this well for change to occur says parmenides there needs to be something that at one point doesn't exist and then comes into existence fazer imagines a hot cup of coffee the cold coffee which it will eventually become doesn't exist yet it's not there it's not anywhere and if something doesn't exist it's nothing so for the coffee to become cold something that is the cold coffee must come from what is currently nothing but parmenides draws our attention to one of philosophy's most famous observations ex-niello neil fit nothing comes from nothing or to put it in more familiar terms you can't get something from nothing from nothing nothing can come and so if change involves something coming from nothing then change can't actually exist and must be some kind of illusion or take an example from the philosopher a wonderful channel by the way my skin is white but if i sit out in the sun it will become red this change in my skin color requires that redness which currently doesn't exist comes into existence what is nothing must become something but if something coming from nothing is impossible then change must therefore be impossible too pretty weird right well not according to a small time thinker from steigler you may have heard of called aristotle who argues contrary to parmenides that change doesn't involve something coming from nothing but rather something coming from potential which is not quite the same thing as nothing ed fazer imagines once again the hot coffee now the future coldness of the coffee is not actually present right now but it is potentially present in that the hot coffee currently has right now the potential to become cold the parked car has the potential to move forward my channel has the potential to overtake druze once more or so i like to think now you may say that this is just word play sure the coffee has the potential to become cold but the coldness still doesn't exist well sure but consider something else that doesn't exist like a chicken this coffee is not cold and it's also not a chicken but these seem importantly different since the coffee seems to have the potential to become cold but it doesn't have the potential to become a chicken the coldness and the chicken both don't exist but the coldness seems to not exist in a different kind of way a more substantial kind of way because although it's not actually present it is potentially present in a way that the chicken is not so sure if this hot coffee were to turn into a chicken that would seem to be like something coming from nothing but if the hot coffee turns into a cold coffee it seems to be something coming from potential which is not quite nothing at least not in the same way as the chicken is so for aristotle change is not something coming from nothing but rather the actualization of potential actualization here just means something potential becoming actual the potentially cold coffee becoming an actually cold coffee so the reason why this coffee can't change into a chicken is because change is the actualization of potential and this coffee doesn't have the potential to become a chicken so potential is a real thing that exists of objects like my coffee that's distinct from nothing at all at least that's what aristotle would have us believe so the first premise of the argument that ben's presenting is that change exists and we might have thought from parmenides as paradox that change can't actually exist but maybe this paradox fails because change doesn't actually require something to come from nothing as parmenide's thought because potential isn't nothing it's a real property of my coffee which just needs to be actualized and that actualization of the real potential that my coffee has to become cold is what we call change so the argument continues change requires a changer potential doesn't just spontaneously actualize it has to be actualized by something else the potential coldness of the coffee is actualized by the coldness of the room the potential million subscribers on this youtube channel is actualized by you smashing that subscribe button and don't forget the notification bell i also have a patreon but crucially only something that's already actual can actualize something else the potential coldness of my coffee can't be actualized by say a really hot room that has the potential to be cold the room has to be actually cold in order to actualize the coldness of the coffee but this is the beginning of a regress why well because the coldness of the coffee is actualized by the coldness of the room but the hot room becoming a cold room is itself the actualization of potential as is the existence of the room in the first place since at one point this room never existed it only potentially existed and so the room itself required an actualizer and whatever actualized the room requires its own actualizer and so on and so forth now if this chain goes on infinitely we seem to have a problem as ben argues this is sort of like the old joke about the philosopher and the turtle the philosopher has asked what supports the earth and he says a turtle and somebody says well what supports the turtle he says another turtle so what about that one it's turtles all the way down the infinite regress argument is just not convincing there has to be something underlying the final turtle there has to be one prime cause that cause can't have any potential because if it had potential something else could activate it into changing so there's one unchanging cause that is purely actual that is the thing that we call god and it actualizes all of the other changes so as you can see this is a kind of first cause argument that doesn't establish much beyond the existence of some fundamental purely actual cause at the basis of all other actual things now this might not sound like god yet to you but a purely actual cause that sustains and actualizes everything that exists is pretty difficult to believe in and call yourself an atheist okay that was maybe a bit long but i hope you're still with me i think it was worth really spelling out this argument if any of the previous doesn't make sense or you're confused about it you can read ed phase's book or simply google the argument from change for more information now i want to tell you some issues that i have with it the first problem that i have with this is treating potential as if it's a real quality of an object to avoid thinking of change as something coming from nothing we imagine that this hot coffee really has this thing this potential to become cold potential is thought of as a real property of my coffee so something is changing it's because there was a potential for that change in the thing but consider this my coffee has the potential to be lots of things in fact it seems to have the potential to be an infinite number of things for example my coffee is currently around 70 degrees celsius and it has the potential to cool down to 60 degrees celsius it also has the potential to be exactly 60.1 degrees it has the potential to be 60.11 degrees it has the potential to be 60.111 degrees and so on add infinitum now a great deal of religious philosophers and non-religious philosophers believe that actual infinites can't exist for example this is the basis of william lane craig's version of the kalam cosmological argument if an infinite number of things really exists it leads to all kinds of paradoxes perhaps most famously the paradox of hilbert's hotel the way in which hazali shows the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things is by imagining what it would be like if such a collection could exist and then drawing out the absurd consequences from it more information is in the description i'll link my podcast episode with william lane craig one of my favorites to date in which we talk about this in some detail now it's important to distinguish between actual infinites and potential infinites actual infinites would be some kind of actually infinite number of things that exists all at once whereas potential infinites are things which tend towards infinity without ever actually getting there for example i can half the space between my hands and i can half it again and i can half it again and i can half it again and i can keep going on ad infinitum but because this is a process that tends towards infinity but never actually gets there there's no paradoxes involved now if i keep on adding decimal points to the temperature of my coffee as i did a moment ago it may seem like we're dealing with a potential infinite that continually tends towards infinity but never actually gets there but remember in order to avoid parmenides objections we needed to say that all of the potential properties of this coffee are potential properties that are real that it actually has right now it actually has these properties these potential properties because otherwise if they didn't exist if they weren't real they'd be nothing and then we'd run into parmenide's objection that means all of these potential temperatures that my coffee could be are potentially present in the coffee all at once right now this isn't something tending towards infinity as i count it out these things are thought of as actually existing as potential properties of my coffee right now so if we have to think of a potential property as a real thing in order to avoid something coming from nothing then we would be positing that this coffee has an actually infinite number of properties which really exist which seems to be impossible a second problem is one that was raised by the atheist philosopher graham oppe while he was discussing this very argument with ed phaser himself something that you can watch on the capturing christianity youtube channel oppy simply grants that change is the actualization of potential but he points out that the reverse is not true not all actualization of potential is change he provides the example of a chair like the chair that i'm selling right now now this chair is yellow this chair has the potential to become blue say if somebody were to re-upholster it but it also seems to have the potential to remain yellow that is things that are actual seem to have the potential to simply remain as they are if they don't have this potential then they wouldn't be able to remain as they are and so they would stop existing and therefore actual things will always have at least one kind of potential which is the potential to remain as they are but now listen to what ben correctly says about the first cause established by the argument from change there has to be one prime cause that cause can't have any potential because if it had potential something else could activate it into changing so there's one unchanging cause that is purely actual the god that ben is talking about has to be something that has no potential whatsoever but as i've just argued unless god is about to stop existing he must have at least one kind of potential which is the potential to remain as he is to remain in existence so the purely actual god with no potential that ben thinks he's proven may not actually be able to exist at all finally my third objection is that the argument from change may only work on an a theory of time the a theory of time posits that the present is all that exists the past and the future in other words don't exist there's just the present the b theory of time on the other hand posits that the past and the future both exist just like the present does and that they all exist in one big time block it can be a little bit weird to get your head around but on the b theory of time it's often suggested that objects as well as having three spatial dimensions also have a fourth temporal dimension that stretches across this time block of course we're only able to see one point of this dimension but the past cup and the future cup both exist just like the present one does the only thing that makes this part of the cup the present cup is that the person calling it the present cup occupies the same place on the time block as this particular part of the cup so on this view you are right now looking at a different part of the cup than you were a moment ago because the cup has a real unobservable but real dimension that stretches through time and what you think of as the present cup and the future cup are actually just different parts of this same cup along that temporal dimension thus the potential cup the cold cup and the actual cup the hot cup are actually just the same cup and these words merely describe different points along this temporal dimension but all of these points exist all in the same way and if you were able to step outside of the time block you'd see them all at once if this is the case then calling something potential simply because it exists at a different point on the time block to me and actual when it exists at the same point would be like me calling the coffee potential because it was in a different room in the house where i can't see it and actual when it happens to be in front of me this is a misleading description of what's actually going on so if the potential coffee and the actual coffee are actually both just different parts of the same coffee that you could see as one big block if you were outside of time then the distinction between potential and actual is no longer a property of the coffee but a property of the observer and which point of the coffee's temporal dimension they happen to be looking at now if this is the case if this is an accurate description of reality then if we were to look from outside of time we'd see that there's no such thing as real change because the past the present and the future cup would all simply exist all at once in front of us on this time block for what it's worth ed fazer actually discusses this very objection and specifically the view that einstein's relativity theory points to a b theory rather than an a theory of time so there are three objections to ben's argument to consider first the problem of an actually infinite number of potential properties if potential properties are real things that are predicated of an object secondly the problem of the purely actual actualizer in fact at least having one kind of potential the potential to remain as it is and thirdly the problems raised for the argument by adopting a b theory of time making change itself something of an illusion it is also worth briefly noting that so far i've basically just agreed to ben's earlier claim that there just can't be an infinite regress of potential things being actualized the infinite regress argument is just not convincing there has to be something underlying the final turtle i'm inclined to think that it would be really weird if there were such an infinite regress but aristotle himself actually took this view of course to believe as he did in an infinite temporal regress requires belief in an infinite past which has its problems and paradoxes and phases discussion of an a-temporal hierarchical chain of causation seem like they can't actually be infinite for compelling reasons that he discusses in the book but of course if there is an infinite regress of actualization of potential this would count as a fourth objection to the argument it's just not one that i would want to defend now as i've already said i think that the argument from change is brilliant and fascinating and compelling sure i have objections that i've just spoken about but these might be easily answered for all i know by a philosopher of someone like ed phase's caliber but even if my objections can be answered it seems to me that ben's suggestion that atheism is a delusion because of the argument from change among other things is shall we say hyperbolic at best now ben's video gets a bit more scientific which isn't exactly my area i really wanted to just talk about the argument from change here as the main part of the video but i don't want to seem like i'm ignoring anything so let's briefly watch through the rest of the video and i'll offer some passing comments but best refer to a scientist for something more substantial on the following points now atheists frequently suggest that science has killed god but as we've seen science itself requires certain presuppositions outside of science as mathematician kurt gerdell stated any internally consistent system of mathematical axioms cannot be completely comprehensive there must be assumptions made outside the system i'm pretty sure that girdle's incompleteness theorem just tells us that any axiomatic system a mathematical system can never prove every true statement that can be made in that axiomatic language in other words it tells us that there might be true statements that despite being true are impossible to prove as marcus de saltoy puts it at its heart it says there might be conjectures out there about numbers for example something like goldbach's conjecture which might actually be true so it might be true that every even number is the sum of two primes but maybe within the axiomatic system we have for mathematics there isn't a proof of that the real worry is what if there's a true statement that i'm working away on which actually doesn't have a proof so godel's theorem shows us that there will be things described by our system that our system can't prove and so epistemically we need to make assumptions outside of the system but that just tells us about what we can prove not about the actual nature of the things being proven as de saltoy says the girdle showed that actually there's a gap between truth and proof but again this really isn't my area nor is it ben's go and ask a mathematician atheists claim that the evolutionary process relieved the need for god after all if god wasn't directing the process of the creation of human beings in the literalistic interpretation of the biblical creation story who needed god the problem of course is that evolution is an extraordinarily complex process that does not forestall the possibility of a directing hand well no evolution itself doesn't disprove god or preclude his existence but i think it's misleading to suggest that it was ever supposed to sure evolution causes problems for belief in god's existence but only in specific ways for example it invalidates the argument for god's existence from biological complexity it also raises questions about why a process involving so much suffering was the one used by god and what could make human beings special if we're all connected on one evolutionary tree these are interesting problems for theism caused by evolution by natural selection but of course they don't disprove god's existence altogether they're just important considerations against it stephen meyer an intelligent design advocate points out that the transmission of information via cellular processes looks an awful lot like an intelligent creator transmitting information our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as information invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent persons what then should we make of the presence of information in living organisms of course one of the great beauties of evolutionary biology is its ability to explain exactly why certain natural phenomena have the appearance of design its genius is in showing how ordered complexity can emerge from random fundamental processes but on this point of information transmission specifically i can certainly do no better than deferring to genetically modified skeptics video since he enlisted the help of john perry from stated clearly and i will simply never be able to speak more confidently than him on biology links in the description the biggest scientific problem for atheists lies in the nature of the universe itself the big bang is the theory that holds that the universe began with the explosion outward of a high density pinpoint of matter which sounds an awful lot like the creation story at the beginning of the bible how does an entire universe full of energy simply appear out of nothing the original skepticism of the big bang theory was driven in large measure by objections to that similarity the very specific conditions under which our universe was created that allowed for the development of intelligent human life are often used by believers as proof of god's hand the so-called fine-tuning of the universe for life is extraordinary if for example the strength of the big bang had differed by one part in 10 to the 60th power the universe just would not exist the way that it does right now if the deistic god thought all that through and set up the laws of physics then he would have to be damn clever atheists claim that just because you won the lottery doesn't mean that you won because somebody intended for you to win the lottery somebody had to win but that doesn't answer the question if you kept winning the lottery over and over and over and over again billions of times at some point you might suppose that somebody was cheating okay i've discussed and debated the fine-tuning argument before but ben seems to have chosen the most dubious response to it and said that this is what atheists claim specifically the idea that the fine tuning of the constants is actually random and we just got lucky the only time that this kind of response is really taken seriously is when it's presented in the context of a multiverse of course if there's only one universe and the constants of gravity expansion rate strong and weak nuclear forces etc could have actually been anything and just happened by chance to be perfect for a life permitting universe this chance would be so infinitesimally small that i couldn't even take it seriously but two problems first it may be that if the constants differed even slightly then the universe as we know it couldn't exist but it's a different claim to say that they could have differed even slightly so one line of argument suggests that the constants had to be of the values that they have perhaps because of some undiscovered underlying law or perhaps because they're all in fact expressions of the same law and we may need to still explain that law of course but at least there would only be one thing to explain not a multitude of constants but more commonly it's suggested that if there's more than one universe then if they all have a random assortment of constant values chances are at least one of them will get lucky as it were ben says that it's more like getting lucky over and over and over again which is true i mean the chances are tiny but if the number of universes is infinite or near infinite then we can guarantee that such an outcome would happen at least once of course i want to resist invoking a multiverse as a kind of disposal problem for the fine-tuning argument i think we should only seriously consider it as an option if we have independent reason to think that such a multiverse exists and not just consider it as an ad-hoc means of getting out of the fine-tuning argument there's a lot more to say about this argument but i've discussed it before and doubtless will do again i'll put links in the description that might be relevant but look it's a good argument i won't deny that there are lots of good arguments for god's existence and i hope you don't expect me to treat every single argument presented as if it's complete trash just because i'm an atheist and i'm trying to make a video but again i would hardly consider the matter settled at least as settled as ben seems to think that it is then there's the question of human consciousness why are we conscious right now nobody knows the answers scientists have presented many theories about it but none has been sufficient to explain how consciousness arises out of the physical processes of the brain physicist roger penrose explains quote we need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness even richard dawkins admits that the development of consciousness is quote to me the most profound mystery facing modern biology ben quotes penrose and dawkins here both non-believers by the way as saying that consciousness is a great mystery that science is yet to explain but just like earlier where ben would bring up a problem of science or philosophy and say that atheism fails to account for it he himself simply fails to show why god would help us to do so and maybe god's existence can help us explain the mystery of consciousness but ben's provided no argument nor even hinted at an argument that this is the case and perhaps worse still by using these quotes ben seems to be suggesting that because we have a phenomenon which science has at least as of yet failed to comprehensively explain we ought to resort to theism which is the definition of a god of the gaps argument so i'm not so sure about that one either now in the rest of this video ben makes just two more points first that the problem of evil doesn't disprove god's existence entirely and second that religious people doing bad things shouldn't make us think that god doesn't exist i agree with both of these claims more or less but i'm just not going to get into the problem of evil here i just released an hour-long podcast on the topic and have debated it frankly ad nauseam so you can get my thoughts from those past videos and discussions if you're interested and so that ladies and gentlemen brings us to the end of our sweeping journey through reason free will morality change parmenides in aristotle ed phaser and graham oppe theories of time and the limits of mathematics who'd have thought all of this could come from a ben shapiro video i've had a great time making this one and if you do enjoy my content please consider becoming a financial supporter at patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic and a special thanks as always to my top tier patrons for keeping this channel afloat i've been alex o'connor don't forget to subscribe thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 1,158,444

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, vegan, veganism

Id: 2nvwpVoBgLQ

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022