Pints With Aquinas #196 | Cameron Bertuzzi

today Matt Fred here welcome to pints with Aquinas today I am joined around the bar table which is this by my friend Cameron Batusi of capturing Christianity you're really gonna love today's show Cameron is a Protestant apologist we get into a lot of things the best argument I think for Catholicism we talked about the contingency argument we talk about proper properly basic beliefs Alvin Plantinga Thomas Aquinas we also talk about our experience of dungeons and dragons crickets if you're into that so that'll be really fun so I hope you'll have a great time and I want to ask you before we get into the show that you do one thing for me maybe two first is please subscribe it would really help the channel out if you like what you're seeing if you want to see more of it click Subscribe then click that Bell button right next to it that way YouTube will be forced to let you know whenever we release a new show also you know please feel free to share leave a comment that that would be really helpful as well that's all I got to say here's the show [Music] Kameron the 2z oh yeah good good how are you this is it oh great I'm doing really well we should mention why we're drinking out of these coffee cups we should also make sure that we're drinking the proper way yes right do it it's lovely yes this is espresso and I didn't have any manly espresso or hipster espresso which would be like just super minimalist so I just had the floral stuff and that's why we're doing it mm-hmm yeah I know that the floral stuff is mine has I guess there are some flowers on it yeah it's beautiful y'all good Neil good so it's so lovely to have you on the show thank you so much for flying in a couple of days earlier and hanging out with my family yeah it's been awesome this has been great because I've just flown in last night say to the hotel and come here this morning we still wouldn't really know each other yeah right but we played D&D together last night we did we did I was turned into a where rat and attacked my best friend yeah it was a lot of fun I was a little skeptical I'm also a big introvert so going there and like hanging out with a bunch of people I know we should show people your cooler your shirt there oh we introverted but willing to discuss the Kalam cosmological argument it's awesome yep I actually got that inspired yeah so I also have a shirt yeah introverted willing to discuss and I stole it from somewhere else so it's just going around that's how creative they create creative work that's how it works yeah creative stuff and then I'm introverted to theirs I get nervous if someone was to take me somewhere or if I if there's no way to get out mm-hmm like I was like if I ghost does it like more like social anxiety ah it might be but maybe I don't think of it that way I just think I don't feel comfortable here I want to be doing my own thing yeah so I remember I can't reverse just introverted I remember being somewhere in British Columbia I went to exactly where in case people are watching and know it's them that I'm talking about and I was driven to a party that was going on right and the guy dropped me off and had to go somewhere and I was just stuck with these people I didn't know and it was like four or five hours and it wasn't fun and was terrifying and the uber didn't exist back then so I couldn't just be like I'm gonna go yeah well no it wasn't like that last night it was we got there and I sort of met everyone and then we had a we had a good time as the game started to get rolling it's it's not that difficult to sort of understand how it all works it was fun it was I had a really good time even Neal the guy Neal's a camera guy who's not on who is it druid who also turned into a bear yeah and destroyed that way we could like jump on his back and ride him too there's a there's a I mean have you in kageura Evangelical Protestant for my listeners who may not be familiar with you and you do fantastic work your channel is called capturing Christianity we'll have links below but in your sphere do you find kind of by the way what do you like evangelical a protestant i want to call you what you don't call yourself i don't care okay to be honest confuse the evangelical is nicer sure i know that the people to have like issues with that word do they equate evangelical with fundamentalists see this is the problem right yeah just call me Cameron no I'm like friend yeah I don't mind you but what isn't a not Protestant is defining you so far what you're not Protestants far well sort of protest you're protesting protested right sure against room okay so my friend Cameron so in your sphere do you have people who would be very would look at day and day like demonic something uh not in my sphere not the people that I hang out with so I yeah I actually posted about it last night on my private Facebook page yeah a lot of people were we're happy about it I guess yeah it was what it maybe there was like me maybe there was like a couple people that were I don't know I think they were just joking around but I didn't get any one that was like oh this is yeah not that I saw I mean maybe people when they saw the post they were like oh my unsubscribe yeah exactly unfriend well while we were all there we were sitting around a table smoking cigars you I don't want to rat you out but us wings go and you look fantastic while we're doing that I thought to myself this is a beautiful thing for this day and age where people are so connected to their screens all the time it's a way to make friends sit around something and be engaged in something and it's way more exciting that a text you may just got so you just gonna put your phone to one so it was yeah I was actually nervous like with it you may not have been able to tell that because my role like the guy the dungeon master his name right yeah he's like in control of everything which I was like okay so he's basically god of this universe and he decides sort of what happens within the parameter there's a lot of like overlap is the parameters of freewill exactly that's like they have freewill to do their little quest or whatever but his will is being accomplished he's giving the situations to the people and then they use their free will too so it's almost like Molin ism in a lot of ways anyways I forgot where I was going with that on being able to sit around you said you feel a bit anxious yeah I felt anxious because the role that I was given I was actually supposed to like I was there was this vampire okay he's in control of everything evil demon he's a vampire and I had been seduced but her slate like I was his slave okay and so I had to basically try to get all of you guys killed but y'all didn't know this and you thought it was a good guy so that's what I was nervous about I was like how am I gonna convince these guys you know how is this character gonna convince these guys it's an awkward position like hey the first thing the outsider who doesn't know this friend group yeah gonna be evil and try and kill all of him welcome well yeah no I was happy that that's why well when I came in a few days earlier I think the rapport that we built yeah sort of helped make it a little bit more put Hades absolutely me too we did a live stream on your channel yeah I'm Saturday night Saturday night it was completely well we planned it like maybe 10 minutes before but it was it was great in the same room I think a lot of people were really happy to see an evangelical and a Catholic get along and like disagree without being disagreeable kind of thing you know yeah yeah I think we need more that absolutely my ministry is sort of geared toward that because there's a lot of there's enough of that there's a not enough of the kind of combativeness and you know angry disagreement so and combative is what sells that's what gets the clicks - that's so how do you divide against that because you're trying to build up an apostolate or a ministry whatever you call it and but you and so you want to be able to appeal so that's appealing so people consume it but you also don't want to kind of just yeah be controversial just for the yeah well the way that I look at it is on YouTube and the way that rhythm works is that if you don't specify like who you're trying to target then you're not going to end up reaching anybody and so on my channel I target the person who does care about being non-combative being someone who's open to dialogue very cordial so I the way that my show works is the people that see it they love it and when I get too combative or if I post a video where I'm a little bit too snarky they'll like tell me it would be like hey you know that's not why I watch your channel i watch your channel because you just look at the issues you're just it's all about the analyzing stuff and philosophy it's not about us versus them tribalistic kind of warfare so I think I've sort of carved out a space for people who appreciate that and so you know obviously I want way more people to be that way and maybe later on down the road it'll start to have a bigger impact but right now I think that just just doing it there's enough people there's enough there's a big enough target market for that right now hmm yeah that's really great and I found to that as my modest YouTube following has grown like in the beginning you post a video you get all sorts of people but eventually you're kind of like curating a particular audience mm-hmm and you can learn to trust them after a while as they're coming to your show for a particular reason we're at the beginning is any random person who might have all sorts of yeah right yeah as you start to develop what you want on your channel you like you said it's like those types of people will start to to come and and want to watch yeah now one of the things you do so well of course is theistic apologetics I'd say that's probably the bulk of your show right mm-hmm yeah we we do and Christian apologetics resurrection stuff yeah so we do have some resurrection stuff and I want to get into doing more that in fact I just released a three-and-a-half-hour sort of what what you do a really really long interview that I did with these two guys out of in in Oxford three and a half hours it was three and a half hours just evidence for the resurrection see I saw that on your channel but I figured it was just a compilation of different talks on the rip it's one it's one interview that we did we filmed it I split it into five parts of my podcast and it had lived on my podcast for I think about maybe six months or so and I decided you know why don't I just post them all together at one extreme string on my youtube-channel and so I did that and actually it's it's sort of blown up I think right now it's at 20,000 views and it's already getting a bunch of responses from atheists because you know we're talking about the evidence whereas if I had just left it on my podcast it probably wouldn't have had this type of engagement or response yeah especially from the atheistic community that's what I found weird because I started pints with acquaintances of podcast and that was going solidly for three years until I started releasing things on YouTube with a podcast you don't have people reacting to it in real time Yeah right which is both positive and negative I mean you want to hear people's opinions but I found that in the beginning I was a little more guarded on videos because people were just very critical and ah man I'm just trying to do my best where's on a podcast people either listened to it or if they don't like it they'll stop but there's no way for them to go and tell you why you're a horrible person yeah ya know on YouTube it is a lot you got to be sort of you're putting yourself out there yeah and there's some there are some Christian youtubers who disabled comments so that just don't have to deal with that yeah and not to throw them under the bus or anything but it's pretty well known reasonable faith they don't allow comments okay their YouTube channel any of their videos that is not to say well this is why because they have a forum on their website or they push people they say hey if you want to engage these issues then go sign up to become a member I Drive you over there yeah they're trying to drive you over there because that way it can be a little bit more moderated you have a lot more yeah it's it's I so I get that but at the same time if you really care about building a YouTube presence and your channel and views and everything I think that you've got to leave that kind of stuff open but on the topic of like how do we respond or deal with these types of comments that we get from people that disagree with us I think this is something that I talk about a lot is that well we get upset when someone says something or like criticizes us and if we get upset at that I think we well first of all we shouldn't like if it's a good criticism then we can grow from that and that's great it's a bad criticism that doesn't apply to you then it shouldn't bother you at all but a lot of times we like we just get upset when someone criticizes oh yeah yeah but and that actually psychologists point this out to is like criticism if it's good criticism you can grow if it's bad criticism you can ignore it but I think that the reason why we respond the way that we do is because of sort of these deep-rooted insecurities that we all have and so when they touch on something that we're insecure about we want to like it you know it's sort of a defense mechanism because we feel threatened and so we want to like you know get up and how have you dealt with that because this is a relatively new endeavor for you how many years have you been doing this YouTube channel so the YouTube channel I would say probably just a couple years so that's too long no not so how have you grown in being able to take criticism know when to block somebody perhaps alright if if I can tell that they're just a troll and they're just trying to you know sort of make waves and just I don't know just mm-hmm make fun of somebody I'll just like hide them from the channel I don't I don't know what happens when you hide someone from a channel actually don't know yeah no no when you hide someone from a channel I think what happens is you just hide their comments so they think they're commenting but no one's seeing them right so you just mute them I think that might be how it is actually I think other people can see that they were hidden but they may not be able to see that they were hidden and so basically all of their comments will just be there for them like they're the only people that can see yeah basically I'm the same as you if someone's trolling or being obnoxious or making fun of something and they're clearly not there for that's when I'll hide them from the channel yeah and part of the reason I want to do that is for what we just talked about I wanna I want a particular audience to be with me along for the journey and if there's someone just like making fun of everybody it's like this is not the spirit that I want the YouTube channel to grow in right but if it's a comment that's like a good comment substantive and it's like a good criticism of something that I said I'll leave it there sometimes I'll respond to it if I have time too but otherwise I'd like I appreciate those comments and it took a while to get to that place where I could just accept that here's this criticism of something at at the some point that I made in this video and I can just like let it sit on my YouTube channel and not let it bother me and I think I think it goes back to that what I had to sort of learn and go through was that well if if it's bothering me there's probably something deeper going on in me and it's not on them it's on me and so that's something that I need to work through instead of like you know putting the blame on them for them causing me to react this way so if I if I see something I'm like yeah I mean that that's a good point there's a really good response to it or maybe I just don't have time to respond to it I'll just let it sit there and it doesn't bother me but if it's a bad criticism or something that's unreal unrelated or irrelevant then I'm just like let you know that people make comments like that all the time like that's basically 90% of YouTube 99% of YouTube sometimes I'll see like a comment that I think that's particularly crazy and I'm happy that it's there and I just let it go and I let everybody respond to that person yeah no exactly yeah that's that's that's one of the strategies is to just let other people respond to the fad or if this was a debate I would yield my time please keep talking yeah but if it's something that's completely disrespectful and they're just being obnoxious then I'll just hide those people but if they give a bad argument I'm not necessarily gonna hide them I'll just yeah let them good argument just be there alright I want to take a pause here and say thanks to our first sponsor hallo this app is going to help you to pray and it'll lead you in prayer I have it on my phone my wife has it on hers you can listen to these beautiful meditations that'll lead you can choose by a bloke or a woman and you can have Gregorian chant playing in the background or synth music it'll help you pray the rosary meditate on Scripture do an examination of conscience at night it's really fantastic hallo h al l o w they offer a permanently free version of their app right which includes content that's updated every day they also offer a paid subscription option with premium content but by using the promo code Matt Fred one word you can try out all of the sessions in the app for a full month check it out totally for free so you got nothing to lose so take advantage of this special offer got a Hallowed app slash Matt Fred that's Hallowed app slash Matt Fred we'll put a link below you can click right through to that create your account online before downloading the app it really is fantastic all right back to my conversation with Cameron so why did you start capturing Christianity tell us about this journey good question so let's go back aways so back in I think 2012 my brother came out as an atheist to my family and that really kind of took me by surprise because I went through my own little period of doubt while I was in Bible School right after high school and basically what I was doubting was Jesus's existence I was like well how do we know that any of this stuff is real how do we know the Bible is real and what was interesting is I went through about a week of really serious doubts and it was like really gripping me a lot of anxiety and stuff and then one of the teachers in my class and that this school is not really known for this type of thing but one of the teachers mentioned that there was a guy named Josephus who was a Roman Jewish historian living during the time of Jesus around that time and he wrote about Jesus he wrote a lot of stuff about Jesus and you can go and read his works and so I was like you know that's really cool if that's if that's true and so I checked into it and yet it is it's a fact Josephus was writing about Jesus and the crucifixion and stuff that happened to him and his people and that was that was it that was all that that I needed in order to sort of get back in line and do my Christian thing and so I didn't really think about those doubts or the the evidence rule side of my belief up until the point that my brother came out as an atheist how did what was that luck because do you come from a Christian family mm-hmm yeah our whole family's Christian it was actually my brother-in-law who told me first and he was he just called me up and he's like hey you know have something serious to talk to you about and he and I like we're we're big jokesters like we we joke about everything he's he's basically like my big brother like I've known him almost longer now than I then I haven't known him well he was introduced to our family when I was really young so he told me he was like hey look you know Trevor's something's going on with him and we need a we need to talk about it so he told me and right after that I set up a meeting with my brother I was like hey let's talk about this and so we had a meeting and it was awful well when we first started there was like there was an elephant in the room and neither of us wanted to talk about it just the two of you it was there was the two of us and his wife she was there I don't know she was in the room or she was in the other room but she was she was in the house so we we got there and I think I think we set a meeting out for like a week after I text him or initially called him and so during that time I was like doing everything I could to try to like find something to defend what I already believed in Christianity so I found William Lane Craig during that time and I found on guard which is a book that he he wrote basically defending or giving sort of an introduction to apologetics I watched some of his video clips and so completely unprepared I mean I like literally just about him watch like a couple of his YouTube videos debates and so I went into this to this discussion with him just prepared to just beat him over the head with this stuff I literally learned like two days ago and so the discussion was was very bad it did not go it did not go well and one of the things that I give it I give a talk on this sort of subject how to share your faith with skeptics and this is one of the things that I talk about is that if you go into a situation like this where you're underprepared and all you want to do is defend what you already believe instead of really searching for the truth is you're gonna have a bad time so that's something that I learned and I've sort of thought about a lot more as the years have gone on and I know that worse we may be getting off track here but no this is great this is exactly what I want to hear it is so helpful to people cuz I've had those conversations as well yes so you're not truth if it's not about truth then you're just gonna end up defending something that you grew up believing right and you're almost just sort of presuming what their response to your argument will be and you're not even listening to the person you're not listening to them you're not taking seriously what they're doing and another thing is that when my brother was going through this period of doubt and that eventually led him to atheism I didn't see any value in that I didn't see any value in the courage that it takes for example to really question something that you've grown up believing it takes a lot of courage yeah you know and I make a decision that you know will be unpopular with your family and those you love right yeah so I didn't take any that kind of stuff into account when we originally met and it I mean it's really only something that I've recently started to reflect on a lot is that like a lot of this stuff is not easy to do yes a lot of them well a lot of them is in atheists a lot of them will have conversations with each other and how difficult it was at first yeah yeah I mean imagine what that would be like for you right now right am an atheist B it would be awful in a lot of ways he started questioning and at some point it just tips and you're like I don't think I believe anymore which would be I think we talked about this last night in the car it's doubly difficult since you're beginning to sort of make somewhat of an income through doing this right yeah so laborer deserves his wages it's a good thing that you're making money hope you make a lot more but we have to be honest about the fact that like we're invested in this in a way that we're not just partial so observers and right I think I think for me because it was only a very recent transition so I was doing this I had no intention of doing this full-time like I was a photographer is that was my profession and so I was completely fine with just doing that basically I don't the rest of my life so I didn't as I got into apologetics into philosophy I that wasn't like one of my goals was to be this apologist and do all of these things like that was not that was not the goal so the way that I went about the sort of methodology that I used in order to discover truth hasn't changed at all so thinking more about the consequences like you were saying yeah yeah there there is that fact of like if I were to change my mind that would have a big impact on the ministry and sort of other things and family and everything but I guess what sort of grounds me is the fact that the methodology that I used is completely the same I like that you know it's mean when you engage people online and and and when you have hosts those debates on your shows and yeah I mean again it goes back to this search for truth and I know a lot of people on both sides of this if you're a Christian you're like oh yeah he was researching for truth and if you're an atheist you're probably thinking he wasn't really searching for the earth but I think that's as I look back that we in tribute pour motives to each other don't we yeah we do just like what you said let me be the oh brother you attributed poor motives to him didn't I couldn't see that yeah the positive yeah you didn't see the kind of virtue I mean obviously we don't want anyone to be an atheist and we pray that he would come back to our to the Lord but that does take a certain amount of courage to yeah stand up and choose to go against something well and also the Bible tells us to sort of test the spirits right and so we want to test whether or not our beliefs are true not we don't just want to believe everything yeah so I think that there's virtue in doing that and one way I find is it's it makes it easier to be a little more kind of balanced in a debate is I sometimes like to ask myself the question if someone's presenting an argument okay what's the most that proves mm-hmm right so if they're taking aim at the contingency argument of the Kalam argument or something like that I could go here what's like let's say they're right what's the most is proof okay the most is proves that this is a bad argument for God's existence that's okay like that doesn't prove that God doesn't exist so I I should be able to talk about this and search for the truth with the other person yeah no I like that I like that I think I've taken the same strategy I know it's important to think about where the argument goes and what are the what are the actual and implication yes a lot of people will argue against something that happened in the old testament yeah and really what that boils down to is an argument over inerrancy it doesn't like that one Aaron C or just the way it's being interpreted oh yeah yeah yeah because there's multiple ways to interpret a passage so obviously your brother Trevor you said his name he doesn't mind you speaking about him um yeah no conversations that we've had he's he's totally open to it yeah so in that initial conversation who was who was better who did that Bell or both of you just blowing up at it yeah it was it was kind of that just blowing up at each other and a lot of things that I did during that conversation that I've thought about a lot more now is another another one of the things that I did instead of searching for truth is that I was giving like I was shooting from the hip a lot so some he would raise some objection oh yeah well let me just respond to that this way and that's and that's something that I hate to see in other people when they do it but for some reason I wasn't thinking about it in this context of like just wing it sometimes I'll do all exactly you know I'm talking about I'll just wing it and hope that it lands well yeah exactly does yeah just throw anything and hope yes yeah that's what I was doing and I mean I'm not saying that he was you know perfectly giving all of these super logically deductive arguments and everything it didn't happen that way at all either side but that from from my point of view I think as I look back that's what I was doing have you had conversations since mm-hmm yeah a lot more productive yeah I think that we've had some productive conversations but but it's not something that sort of rules yeah or all of our conversations that was that was something I had to realize later on as well is that what I what my goal was after that conversation was to just every time I talk to him got to talk to you about apologetics got to talk to you about this new argument that I just learned for God's existence and eventually I learned that that's not the right way to do this because you're not really caring about him you're just using problem to be fixed or not even not even him it wasn't about him at all it was about trying to make myself look better more reasonable and to just sort of win I see and so it wasn't about it wasn't about loving him yeah really caring about what he's going through at that moment and everything so I this is such a great point yep so I switched my focus from that from trying to win to just loving him and that's that's what I focused on now is if when we do have a conversation about it we have it and it sort of happens organically but that's not the focus of everything that I tried to do with him all the times to just try to like win this apologetic yeah I think this would be great advice to people listening because we all have people in our family who might believe things differently to us either politically or religiously I think it's important that we take a holistic interest in the person I mean we've all had people in our lives who we get the sense that we're doing something they disagree with whether that be a Mormon missionary or a friend who thinks we shouldn't be engaging some sort of behavior if all they did was talk to us about how we needed to change we wouldn't want to be their friend but if we believe that they loved us you know and we got to talk to them about what show we're watching and what games were into and what we're looking forward to about this coming summer then you can have a conversation that I think will be a lot more helpful yeah I agree I think it's important this is hard to see in yourself the point in taking a holistic interest in the person is not necessarily to make them convert mm-hmm and that's what's hard because yo that's just another strategy oh yeah I'll pretend to be interested say no just love the person so when I came back from Rome when I was 17 years old came to Christ my sister Emma she wouldn't mind me saying this was a was an atheist she had read Dawkins and she was I think pro-choice and all that sort of stuff and yeah it was the same as you like every time we got into an argument I would lay it down you know and I think because I was older perhaps and maybe had read a little more I was pretty good at like showing where she was wrong yeah but she was it wasn't willing to listen to it and I'm not sure I blame her and she's actually a Christian today thank god she's doing beautiful work and Brisbane Queensland Australia yeah yeah but I think to myself okay so why if let's say I'm right in thinking I had good arguments and they were overwhelming her bad argument if she wasn't can you know changing her mind darn it why is it that we do that do you think what do you we sometimes tend to treat people like computers you put in the right syllogism : and they should just mine so you're asking why don't people just respond to logic and in reasoning I guess I guess that's what I'm asking because let me put myself in the hot seat if an atheist were here and he would debating me and I and I had nothing to say to him and he gave me a great argument yeah I wouldn't convert yeah you're right I would speak to everybody I no smarter than me I would do a lot of research like these are things that we didn't have access to in the early 90s you know when people what you were just in your little town and there's a village atheists or the village Christian they came at you with an argument and made sense to you unless you were gonna go to the library and look up what they said and what people have said about that you were pretty happy to be like okay you maybe you happy it may have taken some time but then you eventually converted and then you weren't encountering objections yeah right whereas today no matter what view you take be a Christianity or Judaism or Islam or atheism there's someone on the internet smarter than you that can prop probably right that can respond to one of your objections in a way that you're not sure how to answer I think that's true for 99% of us yeah how do we how do we deal with that how do we live in that climate hmm yeah I have a lot of thoughts on this and I'm trying to I'm trying to organize them in my mind yes it's a long show so it's okay okay listen all right so one of the thoughts that I have is if we're worried about like this this person who might exist that smarter that could give all that these arguments against us we could do the same thing on the other side there could be some smarter person than that person who is on my side who could then respond to them and so we're not actually gonna get to like a skeptical conclusion with that thinking in my view because we can always imagine some smarter person I mean God ultimately we'd be the smartest person who could just demolish this atheist arguments and so if we're just gonna go to like these these different levels of these imaginary people who are gonna be responding to our arguments I think we're gonna run into like a sort of self defeat problem venosus ISM really not known not even that like it wouldn't it wouldn't give you any reason to be skeptical at all because because the argument would be self-defeating like your reason for thinking that that's a reason for skepticism there could be someone smarter who could come along and say oh no that's not a give reasonably infinite regress of opponents would cause you just to standstill that that's one part of it but the other part of it is that the argument itself would have to lead to a skeptical conclusion so that's that's one part of it is to build this like infinite chain of people who are constantly right conversation aback and forth that's that's one part of it but the other part would be that chain the argument would be this chain therefore gives you reason to be skeptical that would be an additional side argument and so what I'm saying is that of that side argument you could have people on both sides and so basically that's gonna sort of cancel out because the argument is what does that look like what's the result if in this imagined experiment it cancels out doesn't that lead to sort of like well I just can't no no no B I this is difficult to put into words I'm doing this all on the top of my head here mm-hmm and I'm trying to figure out if I should start using some terminology I don't want to but if we're thinking about so you have an objection an atheist is giving you all of these objections to your Christian belief okay and this is an imaginary person you're saying this we can't imagine this person and it may not be imaginary it may be someone that you know of that you know of you know III wouldn't know how to respond to that I okay I hope somebody does find somebody who does do you think yeah but he would probably respond some way right to that and right and I think that you could do that in indefinitely you can yeah you could do that indefinitely so that that might be reason enough to be sort of skeptical that this is doing anything that this imaginary situation is really should should lead to some skeptical conclusion about your own beliefs I think the fact that you can go back and forth is enough but there's another side of this which is to say that even when we think about this you know infinite chain of going back and forth these two different people there's a separate argument where that that says that infinite chain is a reason to doubt your beliefs because these people couldn't go back and forth and defend and argue and go back and forth yeah so the argument would be if there's people who can rationally disagree with what you have to say then you should be skeptical that you have the truth would be that argument but there's people that disagree about that argument mm-hmm and so it would run into like a sort of self defeat type of worry that's very interesting so that's that's one worry with that type of argument another worry with that type of argument is that usually in the in the literature of disagreement epistemic disagreement disagreement about how we come to know things there's something that's called an epistemic peer so in order for this sort of situation to work they've either got to be an epistemic superior they've got to be more knowledgeable more intelligent than you or they've at least got to be on your level of rational if they're dumber than you that's not going to be a reason to be skeptical we don't we don't typically think I think all of this what I'm talking about right now like building out these these sort of assumptions that are going into this argument we don't really think about this it all just sort of happens naturally yeah we think oh if someone can respond to us then it's someone that disagrees with us that's automatically a reason to doubt my beliefs so what I'm doing is I'm drawing out some of the assumptions that are going on with this and so back to the point of epistemic peers you have someone who is equally as intelligent equally as knowledgeable as you and they have access to the same exact evidence and they come to a different conclusion or a different belief what should we do at that situation and so some people will say and these are equal weight theorists I can't avoid using this terminology it's good it seems you're equal weight theorists who say that there's equal weight on both sides and so basically with this situation you've got to be skeptical because this person is your peer they know as much as you they're just as intelligent and they're coming to a different conclusion and so basically both of you ought to become agnostics that you've got to be an agnostic now and so one of the things I pointed out earlier is that people disagree about this theory about saying well we've got to be agnostic because we have this the stalemate so some people say well you know at that level this is argument there's there's people that disagree on both sides and who P is and so there's a there's a kind of self defeat type of worry there that's what interests another thing that you could do and I'm just taking all of this time to explain this this is great physics of the argument is you could deny that this other person is your epistemic peer who you're actually disagreeing with and so that's one thing that you'd have to figure out is well how intelligent is this person how do I know that they you know weren't bias in the way that they came to their beliefs right cuz someone could be equally as intelligent and bias in a way that would right lead them to draw a different conclusion right same evidence and so you would just be skeptical that this person is your peer that you're disagreeing with and how do you really prove that like how what type of evidence would you be able to give somebody to prove to that enough you could yeah you're on a par with this person and so that's that's another another worry with this type of thinking is that we'd have to really question like who who are our peers who are our superiors and is a really nothing bias that's happening in the situation right as a lot of you would this gets back to the public we're not computers we're not mere intellects they aren't influenced by other things yeah this yeah really fascinating thanks for thanks for spelling that out cuz I didn't quite get it when you first explain it but now I see what you mean okay I kind of self-refuting know because you were doing a poor job because I'm your intellectual inferior no I wasn't to be honest I haven't really I have an article on this on my website I think it's called equal weight theory so if people want to learn more about it I'm really glad that I remembered that I did this yeah so you can go out and check it on my website capture in Christianity comm search for equal weight theory and you can get some more info about it but it is a very interesting phenomenon just the fact that we have the world of information at our fingertips in a way that we didn't when I was a teenager so like I'm 36 so and I lived in Australia so the internet really wasn't a thing until about 1999 or 2000 so in my high school if someone disagree with me I would either have a come back which may not have been good but maybe it would have convinced him and nobody else could come back at me and my high school so went cool done that's the truth you know there was nothing really else to maybe I wasn't intellectually curious enough to go read books like I should have been but yeah there was just maybe people felt a sort of stability whether they should or shouldn't have that they may not feel now because there's always always somebody out there who disagrees with you yes so I think the right course of action is to ignore those types of concerns and just a looking at the and trying to judge the best that you can yeah because we all deal with bias and we're all trying to fight against bias and so I think that's all that you've got to do and all you all you really can do is just continue to fight against your own bias and look at the evidence as honestly as you can and if one were to keep God up on the chalkboard so to speak until one feels that they heard you know examine and exhaust of the evidences for and against they're not they haven't actually made a decision right they're just they still haven't they're not living like a Christian like maybe they're living like a Christian externally like they'll still go to church but they doubt but in their heart they really haven't they're not praying they're not obeying Christ that just is willing to kind of get rid of it than to not this is itself a decision like if you don't choose theism or atheism you're going to start living like a mishmash of the two or like one or the other mm-hmm so to not choose is a choice I guess it's what I'm saying well yeah if I have a choice between marrying my wife and marrying some other woman I just can't decide and I'm endlessly weighing the pros and cons I'll get nothing in the end yeah I get either of them it's equal to me how to make a choice yeah it's almost like it's not an option for us not to make a choice yeah we're going to practically speaking make a choice one way or the other I think yeah I think so too and if you're like if you're 50/50 on whether or not God exists or Christianity is true you don't have to force yourself to believe that God exists you can still like you said commit to a Christian way of living so you do still have a decision you have a decision whether to not do anything at all dependent matter how what your belief state or your your mental states are that doesn't matter in terms of making a decision either way so if you if you're completely agnostic if you're a perfect agnostic which I don't think there's actually anybody who's like that no one no one's perfectly reasonable and agnostic when it comes to God's existence just saying but that that's irrelevant because you still are going to make a decision going yes yeah you can make a decision to just live the same way that you've been living the secular life not really paying attention to God or Christianity or or any other religion and so you basically are making a choice by not doing anything you you're choosing to live a secular life okay I want to take a pause and say thank you to our second and final sponsor covenant I covenant eyes is the best filtering and accountability software on the web if you're tired of being exposed to pornographic things if you have children you know that they are going to be exposed to pornographic things do the responsible thing and get covenant eyes put it on all of your devices we here at the Fred household we have it on everything phones laptops desktops we don't let our kids play at friends houses who do not have this it's really important that you get it best filtering app out there also has accountability what that means is you as the parent let's say will get a report of your children's online activity if they go to any websites that they shouldn't you'll be right there to see that and that way you can come in and love on them and teach them how to use the Internet appropriately maybe you're a single guy and girl and you're struggling with pornography find an accountability partner and that way the notifications will go to them and it's your file it's a lot easier to beat temptation when you know someone's gonna get your reports covenant eyes comm covenant eyes comm and here's what's great for my listeners only if you go to cavernous comm and sign up and use the promo code Matt Fred that's my name one word Matt Fred you can try the entire app for a full month for free so you've got absolutely nothing to use lose rather a head to the end of the month you decide you don't want to just delete it you don't get charged a cent and I think that's gonna happen though I think you're gonna install it and think this is the best thing you've done so covenant eyes comm use the promo code Matt Fred at checkout to get them up for free sometimes I'll hear atheists say well if God existed there would be a sort of consensus on this issue but there's not but of course we disagree about all sorts of things like whether we have a soul or what freewill is and whether we have it whether it's and all this is all just an illusion that we live in and so on but it doesn't mean we can't have a rational belief about the external world or my free will or things like that mhm yeah I think that there's there's a really easy explanation to explain this agreement is just that we're humans yeah and so then the question would be would would it be more likely for God to create this type of person or a different type of person that would be less susceptible to Tobias or whatever huh so that that might be that's I think were there where the argument would go there was a time in my life where I'm ashamed to say that I hoped a theism was true I mentioned this to you in passing last night that seems so crazy to me yeah it is crazy and it's because I had a perverted view of God the Father and I had been listening to so many debates and so many talks by atheists and I was reading them and just what they would say about you know the reality of God and I was just like oh my gosh like it wasn't a conscious thing I wasn't saying oh my goodness you know God is like that it was just this sort of doubt that crept in into the goodness of the Father that's what I was like it's kind of like if you knew your father existed but you started to hear lies about him and then began to believe those lies you might rather him be dead than in your house it was kind of like that or you hoped for that yeah you hoped that he would just sort of go away yeah because I was really bad stuff yeah so really I mean my solution was to I had good people in my life I got to read good spiritual books that and it's obviously the Scriptures teach me about the goodness of the Father his tenderness towards us and things like this not really hoped yeah man so when it comes to sort of you said you read on God which has excellent book I think is there was was any of these arguments did that did that help solidify your faith in God cuz it doesn't sound like you ever really had a crisis when it came to believe in God you said it was regarding the historicity of Christ maybe but it was the historicity of yeah Christianity was there any really good historical basis for Christianity that was it that was just a period of doubt that I went to that I went through but I have experienced doubts along the way like there was a time when I didn't really think that any of the arguments for God were any good mm-hmm and I eventually got over that and I think that was driven ultimately by emotional factors and it was driven by this very irrational belief that if you can find a possible way out of an argument before you've got or the argument isn't good or or you shouldn't believe it you know and I think that's a lot of times what happens is we think oh well you know I don't have to believe that Christianity is true or already I don't have to believe that this is a good argument because there's this possible way out maybe the universe is eternal for the Kalam cosmological argument and that's enough for some people to really get them to really doubt that an argument goes through but on a rat from like a rational standpoint possibility is not the same thing as probability just because you have a possible way out doesn't mean that it's probable that the universe didn't exist and so you still sort of got to follow the evidence and decide what's most probable not what's just possible so I have gone through periods of doubt myself and through this journey they don't last very long and yeah I tried it I try to do my best to analyze like what from the rational point of view like what is it that I'm really doubting yes and how what are all these connections that I'm making I've one another thing that I've noticed about my own psychology is that I put a lot of emphasis on authorities figures it's like this person I judge is really smart really knowledgeable and so if they have a good objection to my belief I just sort of find myself putting a lot of weight on that but that's not necessarily like a real good solid argument that Christianity is false or that God doesn't exist it's really just sort of an emotional thing that I'm leaning to just because I find them to be reasonable person yeah but that but there's a lot of missing steps between this person is like really reasonable and that could even be you know we could be skeptical about that because people can appear reasonable but can be driven by all sorts of emotion and bias and and everything but what what I try to do is I tried to analyze like what why am I actually doubting like what is going on mm-hmm and so when I start to actually look at the reasons why they usually are just not very good it's I agree I'd do the same thing when I experience doubt it's more like a sea of feelings yeah that made me feel a certain way and that feeling is towards doubt and skepticism and I'll stop and I almost like shake myself out okay what is the argument yeah exactly thing that I've heard recently ever counted and I'll kind of think it out like that's terrible I said yeah horrible yeah or I'll just start to like doubt one premise of one argument and the doubt is not based on any reasonable anything it's just like oh well now I'm starting to experience doubt about this like okay why yeah what reason led to that and it's usually from what I've tried to do an ant and an analysis on it's usually not any it's not based on anything but like a feeling CS Lewis in the Screwtape Letters says you know one way to tempt this Christian who's at church is to keep everything sort of vague this vague sense that the people around me should be in togas and sandals and but never to have it be explicit that he thinks that because then he would recognize it as ridiculous but just this vague sense that things are a bit ridiculous mmm that's sort of like that yeah I think so I think - we often Ruby up very often don't take into account the fact that if Christianity is true we live in a world at war mm-hmm and that the demons exist and Satan exists and wants our damnation and so well I mean that's another good great CS Louis quote is that one other thing I think it's in the Screwtape Letters it's like one of the things I don't have the quote oh sure on to up top my head but it's basically are the things that Satan was so brilliant about was convincing everyone that he didn't even hmm so that's my point is we assess these things if you've got Christianity and atheism well if Christianity is true then there is a whole kind of invisible demonic realm that doesn't want us to come to belief in Christianity and it's something good wrestle with it's not just like a neutral weighing of the of the premises mm-hmm but then of course if you're an atheist you say well that's just ridiculous you're just this is just kind of fear tactics to make you side yeah yeah well I think what you're pointing out is that there's these sorts of leaps in reasoning that happens we start to have these feelings of doubt and then we leap to a conclusion that doesn't follow at all and we need to be aware of that and we need to sort of put it into it but on the flip side to be charitable I think that on the Christian side of things when we're trying to build arguments for our own faith or whatever I think sometimes we can just have a feeling that this is a good argument instead of having a real good solid reason for thinking that it goes through and that it's you know it leads to God's existence and everything else so I think that there's it happens on both sides it's not just on the skeptical side of things I think that sometimes again I noticed this in my own initial walk or if you want to call it a walk and you need to apologize I mean yeah my initial journey into apologize as I found myself really wanting to believe these certain arguments like the Kalam cosmological argument was was one of the arguments that I was just like yeah this is a really great argument and then after a while I was like you know what after I started to look in some of the objections and everything I was like you know what I'm not I'm not super convinced but as I look back on to initial part it was just this desire to really think that there's a an argument to make myself appear more reasonable and so I think that again it can happen on both sides now to sort of preface that gonna make a disclaimer on the kalam I'm now completely convinced that the Kalam is a good argument so and I like to think that that's because of arguments and evidence and reason and stuff but obviously I acknowledge that there could be other delighting to hear to atheists talk about their belief system in the way we're talking about ours I don't see a lot of that I'm not saying there aren't humble atheists atheists who recognize seeing that we're just like the most humble I think we've been pretty high yeah I think we've been very transparent about our doubts and and the fact that belief is difficult now psychology is that you can't get away from it yeah I may be an easy objection right now to throw it on youtube is yeah the reason you're finding it easy to doubt is what you believe is crap that's why yeah it's clearly not it though I mean they're brilliant people who believe these things I would just like to see some atheists who like wrestle with the kind of psychological aspect behind their own I know they wouldn't call it a belief it called a lack of belief but I I think it looked pretty close to a belief well this is this is something related and interesting is that's that's one of the Atheist tactics is to point out while hey look the Christian just believes for these this you know psychological reason they want to believe in an afterlife and so therefore that's that's why they're really trying so hard to be a Christian or to be an atheist and when enough people tell you something you might start to be come open to it and start to really entertain it and so I did that like I was really entertaining the thought maybe I don't really it's not all about reason and evidence and arguments and so I started to really question that aspect of my psychology and it actually took like talking with my friends about it for them to point out no it does actually seem like you're looking for the truth here in a took someone else to look at it from from the outside to convince me that know what these people are saying is not true and so that's something that I had to eventually come to but it's interesting how the psychology of it all works and so I mean and I think that's one of the reasons why a theists are so some some atheists not all atheists are like this but a lot of them will just speculate forever about why theists believe what they believe they ignore their own psychology in the process and their own psychological reasons projects oh yeah unless if you're not human like if you're maybe you're the one robot who doesn't have psychological factors that plays a part plays a significant role in why you believe what you believe maybe you mr. atheist you're the person who doesn't have to deal with bias but if you are a human there's going to be some explanation some very good scientific psychological explanation for why you believe what you believe and so it's not I guess I'm kind of rambling at this point but I'm enjoying it yeah no but this is something that I think about a lot yeah hmm and then you asked me a great question last night in the cardoon what if I bring it up yeah go ahead yeah he was very kind of you you said do you mind if I psychoanalyze you for a second is that okay and I was kind of weird and I don't mean to be a jerk or tubercular and you said yeah I've been like debating this for for a couple nights I was like do I even want to talk to him about this why don't you bring it up so you can state it the way you wanted to rather than okay okay so because we disagree you're Catholic I'm a Protestant we talked about that the beginning what would labeled do I need anyways so I got the impression but be a reasonable be it unreasonable be it you know because I'm a jerk or whatever I got the impression that you are a Catholic because you sort of fell into Catholicism and that's sort of just where you've been since that point and that's what you've defended and that's why you believe what you believe because you just happen to fall into Catholicism and my answer is that's partly true yeah that doesn't really surprise me that you were just so willing to think that's how most of us come to our beliefs right like my answer to you is if I was converted at like a Bible Baptist Bible Camp then I would probably adopt the interpret of those around me and then I would say hey I'm encountering this Catholic who's challenging my belief in Sola scriptura or something and they would give me answers and I would respond to them and and who knows now I think Catholicism is true like I do think that I'm not just saying well I fell into it and therefore I don't have to be critical of my beliefs and basically the arguments are the same but I'm just gonna stick over here cuz it's easier like I do actually think Catholicism is true but I think I think that's the this is just a reality we have to face our we are all kind of bias and how all of us are and so we obviously have to see if how biases line up with the truth but yeah yeah and we have we have what made you think that because I thought it was really you asked in such a gentle way and I thought it was cool that you did it but I mean was there something that I did that you're like oh that's not cool why is he acting like that I don't know I I think what what sort of spawned it was when I was hearing you tell your journey because you started out as an atheist and well agnostic I would open a theist yep okay so you fell into Catholicism you said you had some experience yeah and so that's and it just seemed to be like that that's what just happened yeah is that you went to this this meeting where there was like what three million people to do a half million a half a million people in Rome and you became a Catholic like on the spot like that's well and I was baptized right as a Catholic and so it was the easiest thing to be brought into right but another thing we talked about was like if I had been in that situation that would have been true of me right so he it's not something that's just so he is the difficult question how do I know I'm right how do you know you're right you know like that that's a difficult question but what's the me it's not it's not it's not that difficult it's just maybe it's not maybe it's very difficult to assess the arguments and decide which is superior but it's a difficult emotional choice to see your own bias if that's even possible yeah and then just in to really try to work against yeah yeah cuz I was saying to you early and I chatted with Trent Horne about this yeah a theist will say well you just have this preconceived belief and then you become an apologist for what you already believe right but we do that about so many things I went when I was a child believed the external world was real when I was about 16 I started to doubt it and I had never heard of the word solipsism and then I started to find reasons to leave what I had believed in the beginning or someone might write a dissertation on why a certain action is intrinsically evil and they may have always believed that but now they have evidence for it right and you wouldn't say well therefore they're wrong because they were just trying to justify something they held previously right right so ultimately it is just gonna come down to the arguments into the evidence so I mean that that's sort of what I was getting at before is that it's it's ultimately just gonna come down to that so we can talk about bias and try to prevent that as much as we can you know prevent us from being swayed by all of the things that that make us want to believe what we want to believe what we might in order to combat it we just try our best to look at the arguments and the evidences as catholocism ever been a live option for you I would say right now it's a live option yeah to just be completely transparent I think right now it's a live option because I haven't done the study yet that I would like to before I get it and so right now you've probably got friends on both sides right like friends who think Catholicism an absolute perversion of the gospel and other friends feel like this guy's also really intelligent so I have it depends on what you mean by perversion I think that I have friends who would say that the Catholicism does not teach what the you know that's sort of biblical I guess that's what profession I understand that almost all evangelicals would agree that Catholics believe good things yeah but then they would also say Catholicism teaches things of that they sort of add unnecessary unnecessary things or just believe erroneous things about God and salvation yes yeah yeah so then what do you do with that like oh yeah honest question like what would happen if you go home from pints with Aquinas yeah that's right I'm gonna be a Catholic and suppose you would now I tell you you get a big following wouldn't he follow us no you'd pick up some follows but you would lose a lot same thing with me you and I have a chat and I'm like you know what this whole papacy thing is bunk I don't know what to do or gonna become Orthodox or you know like that's a terrifying thing yeah to me I guess it's not that terrifying because again I guess this this goes back to the fact that I really do care about truth I really care about it and so if Catholicism is true I want to know that I'd like the consequences Nate man the consequences that's good that's important yeah but ultimately like I I prefer I'm a more interested in that man that's beautiful because I I think two years ago I would have said that but I'm not sure I would have meant it hmm because it's easy right atheist Christian we all say all our wants the truth and you engage with enough people who say that you're like no you really don't and so that's maybe why I'm a little reluctant to say that say what I would hope that I could say what you just said and do say what you said right yeah like ultimately if this isn't true and I can know something that is true I want that regardless of the consequences I do think that intellectually but because I encounter people who seem so bias and are totally unaware of their own bias it makes me question my own bias and whether I'm capable of just deluding myself I guess yeah what is the number one obstacle to Catholicism for you like what's something you like okay this is the thing that I'm I can't yet take it seriously because of this isn't this we don't have to debate it or anything unless you want to chat about yeah yeah let's not debate it because I can I haven't done like a study or anything but initially one other thing that's on the top of my list is the papacy yeah how all of that works and I know that a lot of my Catholic friends are sort of upset and there's just a lot of like gray area and like how do we really navigate this and the I mean the scandals don't really bother me that much because it's just this these group I mean it it bothers me in the sense of like it's a terrible evil and this is really bad and no one should have to endure this and no one should have to go through this but from a logical standpoint from the truth of whether or not this is true that it's completely unrelated to me so I guess one of the things that sort of sticks out of my mind and I see Catholics among themselves talked about a lot is how do you know Pope Francis he does some really weird stuff in the history of the the papacy there's just a lot of weird stuff going on yeah and so it's it that that seems to me to be something that I would have to really work out and understand yeah that'd be the biggest the biggest maybe one of the bigger things yeah like I talked with the Catholic friend of mine about the Eucharist and he basically convinced me that it's not that big of a problem really I'm thinking that you know it still might taste like wine it might still taste like bread but that's yeah that's a completely different thing than what it I think these III think the infighting within the Catholic Church is a big deterrent to people considering on cuz i'm not i don't think i wouldn't call Pope Francis a good Pope hmm I wouldn't say he's a good Pope I don't think I'd say he's a bad Pope see when he first came into power office what is it what do you call it when he assumed the papal throne the throne but even callable in when I first saw him become Pope becomes Darth Vader yep a Sith Lord the I actually thought that you know this guy's cool Yeah right because he he didn't wear all that like extra Julia yeah yes he's on the pool always yeah he was the people's Pope yeah and so I was really drawn in to him because of that but now like some of the stuff that he's saying is really fusing that's why that's why I wouldn't say yeah but France is a good Pope because he's incredibly confusing in a day and age where we would need we'd like some clarity and some guidance and we're not really seeing it so what initially I think people were excited about now it's starting to well he could do both right I mean you could be you could be concerned about the poor live simply and teach clear doctrine yeah and not completely know yeah I also think like there was a day and age and for the majority of church history we didn't live with Twitter and news feeds and so the Pope could be like having mistresses or charging off into battle all of these things have happened stealing the papal cutlery like Oh crazy crap is heaven right there was one Pope it denied our Lord three times Peter so like this is all going on but you know weren't necessarily seeing it constantly yeah so I can see how that would be a deterrent and I know like even like sometimes my response to Catholics though is I'm like okay but what what's what's what are you gonna do because if you were looking at the Jews in the Old Testament and you litmus test for true religion is morally perfect or almost morally perfect religion you would have missed the true religion when you see what you have King David sleeping with Bathsheba killing her husband like you see some of the shenanigans that are going on amongst the Jewish hierarchy right okay this is no this is not God's people that's not one of the things that bothers me let's go about Catholicism and you know I imagine I wonder is true of Christianity exactly because you hear atheists who say well why there's so many hypocritical person to me and you recognize something can be true and people can still be sucky yeah right right yeah yeah they would just not be living up to the standards that the Bible sort of sets out right how do you deal with the the variation within Protestantism I know it feels like all the old labels are sort of fading away now and people are sort of wanting to refer to themselves as evangelical or they'll say I'm more this or I'm more that how do you navigate that does that make sense well what do you mean by navigate what what's like how do you choose like am I going to be more of a Calvinist or are gonna think this way about freewill and what am I gonna think about what baptism does it can I lose my salvation does hell exist like I feel like as a Catholic what's great is basically I'd say like the basic answer to the papacy is just like we think that Christ established a church and that church can can help us know what God has revealed God has revealed himself and we can know what that revelation is so I don't need to wander around Christian blog sites deciding who has the best argument for you know hell or not hell or this or not this that God wants me to know and and accept the truth and I don't have to be terribly worried about it and whereas I think if I were now we have our own stuff as well like there would be like fractions amidst smaller things like different liturgies and people with different emphases on different prayers and things like that but I think if I were a Protestant I'd like oh now I got to figure out like what I believe mm-hmm because there's a lot that Protestants believe right there's it yes Protestantism isn't a thing it's Protestantism mm-hmm I mean sir do you find that like a freeing sort of thing that you can there's this freedom you might be able to accept hell as a Protestant maybe you don't have to that kind of does that make sense yeah I know I mean it doesn't bother me okay that there's a bunch of different views that you could take as a Bible believing Christian so Moulton Utley I think it's really just about what the Bible teaches and that can be difficult but it doesn't really strike me as like a real serious problem so isn't it weird that you've got all these Christians who say they go by the Bible alone and they come up with contradictory views on many many things it depends it depends on what kind of problem you mean like what what what would be the problem how do you become a Christian how do you be saved can you lose your salvation of things that would bother me okay yeah what I would go back to and maybe this is gonna fit more in line with Catholicism is the sort of bedrock of Christian belief in my opinion is to look at the early church Creed's mmm like the Apostolic Creed or the Nicene Creed and start there yes I would sort of start there if something contradicts that you know something contradicts that then yeah there'd have to be cool some kind of split or something but these are questions where we're like kind of on the periphery of my yeah totally we die down there I wanna ask you what is your favorite argument for God's existence right now if Neil is an atheist and I've secretly hired him so that you can proselytize him but you can pretend you're talking to me he's not really a theistic but what what would you say what's a good argument a contingency argument okay I'm stand this is Aquinas this third way of course you might be referring to something slightly different yes it's gonna be similar but since his plans with Aquinas I feel like we should at least mention him tell us what gonna be a lot of overlap for sure yeah what what is contingency main and what is the contingency argument so I have a version of the argument that I like the best and this is the argument one version of the argument that kind of pulled me out of out of one of my sort of dark periods of doubt I don't know why I even use that language right now but I went through a period of doubt and this is the argument that that pulled me out of it one of one of the arguments and it was because again what I was focusing on was oh well there's this possible way out of this argument so therefore I should be skeptical and so what I found what this argument is that there's really not a way out of it there's not and so even basically God like worked with my irrational doubts and brought me sort of back into the fold almost so to speak I wasn't I wouldn't consider myself a non-christian or agnostic or anything it was just a short period of doubt and this is what pulled me out of it this argument in particular and there's a there's a couple different versions of the argument the one that is really easy to understand and again shows that it's impossible to get out of is you paint this paradox or these two different options between dependent things in independent things and I'll use some examples so contingency let's start there actually with that word real quick and then because there's there's two different senses in the way that that word is you in these discussions the the argument from contingency there's two different usages so one use would be this is this cup is contingent because it can go out of existence doesn't always have to exist it's contingent so in other words this contingent be dependent using seasons that's the second usage so the first usage is it can fail to exist okay so it exists in if we want to use some philosophical language it can exist in some possible worlds and it doesn't exist in other possible worlds or it just doesn't have to exist the whole time in a possible world so this cup hasn't always been here there was a time when it wasn't arranged in this shape even if even if you don't think that like macro objects exist the arrangement of it itself didn't exist so this cup is a contingent thing I could smash it and it would go out of existence so something that is non contingent or necessary just has to exist all the time everywhere and so that's what a contingent thing is is something that can fail to exist in some sense so a dependent thing is something that depends on another thing for its existence right now or in the party I guess either way and this is that's actually a good distinction because I think you're talking about the the causal series the different types of calls I mean to get to that sorry know it no worries it it doesn't necessarily have to do with time so we could we could take more of like a hierarchical like a split moment of time and talk about dependency that way but I think it works on either either way that we look at it I hope we're not going to too quickly know if my face looks bad it's just that's how my face looks no well I'm knowing no I feel like you're you're good at following but it's nobody incidental love it ok ok cool sorry I just this is what they came for ok good all right so we're talking about these two different kinds of contingency and so dependence and we talked about this a little bit earlier well maybe I don't want to go into that yeah cuz let me just give that one when Jean helpful it's just contingent depend yeah well ok so I am dependent on my parents if my parents hadn't existed then I wouldn't exist so that's one way to look at it is if something else didn't exist then this thing wouldn't exist okay so like the moon if something else if this asteroid hadn't crashed into the earth then the moon wouldn't exist so the moon is dependent on an asteroid or whatever whatever it was that happened with the moon that's what dependence sort of means such a had I think that's actually like what people think about when they hear contingency yeah you think about that type of contingency dependence yeah but contingent in the philosophical literature at least in the contemporary scene is more thinking about the first kind that something can fail to exist and so but the argument that I'm about to give is on the second time the more is the second type the more down-to-earth usage of the word and so I'll just use the word of the language of dependence so this Cup going back to an example this is a dependent thing and it depends on something else for its existence and everything that we experience in our everyday lives is a dependent thing your car out there the blinds this table the microphone everything that we interact with on a daily basis is a dependent thing I think most people would agree okay man-made things dependent got it but why don't it's probably a little more difficult the atheist might say if you start talking about natural things so like a you mean like an animal or a rock or something Joe so a rock would still be dependent a rock would be that formulation of Iraq even if you don't think that rocks are rocks exist you would still think that that arrangement is that is dependent on something else like maybe there was these tectonic plates that hit and the core of the earth and that's what created these mountains and these rocks fell down off of the mountains and so it would be dependent on something else for its existence these rocks would still be dependent in some sense there's something that it depends on if that mountain didn't exist then this rock wouldn't exist so it'd be dependent in that sense so what I'm doing now is I'm building this first initial plank of the argument that everything that we experience is a dependent thing depends on something else for its existence you could also say something like a rock depends on the earth for its existence if we want to go more broadened I I don't want to cut you off because I don't know it but I also would love to be able to interject throughout but I don't want to yeah iced you know like step too far ahead and you're like I was about to explain that yeah you know no worries but I think that I think very often I suppose if I were an atheist I would say there is just so much we do not know about reality and the more we understand about it the weirder it looks and so yeah we can look at things like plants and dogs and rocks and cups and realize that they're dependent but then that's problem you can't you don't necessarily interact with reality as reality you're not necessarily in touch with reality you're in touch with what you perceive like space and stars but to just flat out say this everything we interact with is contingent feels like a step too far because you don't yeah you don't know what's at the heart okay bedrock that's helpful let me make a clarification so I'm not saying that everything is dependent I'm saying that everything that I've interacted with or enough you and me interact with on a daily basis is a pendant yep and so here's here's maybe an example to see how we could sort of generalize from opens from a principle like this so take gravity so in our experience gravity works uniformly everywhere that we go mm-hmm right and so what scientists do is they can make what's called a general an inductive generalization so based on your experience your inductive experience of the world you can use that and sort of generalize to the universe as a whole or just something outside of your immediate awareness so with gravity there's very little reason for example to think that gravity doesn't work the same on the Andromeda galaxy as it does in the Milky Way galaxy and part of the reason why we think that is because based on our own experience of the world and what we interact with it's very uniform yeah its gravity works the same everywhere and so the simplest explanation of why gravity works in our area of the universe our little pocket of the universe is that it just works like that everywhere in the universe so we could use a kind of inductive generalization when it comes to dependence so most of everything that we experience is dependent but in and here's the interesting thing about this argument is actually I'm going to get to the conclusion that not everything is dependent that that there is something that is independent and so even if you raise that objection or that skeptical worry you'd actually be pointing in all Russia where I wanted to go yeah okay but there's a problem with induction right in that it's it's not certain yeah yeah right I mean we thought if you'd lived in Europe that all swans were white and then we visited Australia and realized some swans were black so that could just that just shows that that induction is is fallible right so we can't be wrong this isn't a proof of anything it's something that is it is true based on our evidence is the best just on a basic level like if I encountered something that was necessary that would freak me out mmm I think that goes to your point like everything we interact with on a daily basis is contingent is dependent yeah if we found something bumped into something or encountered something in some way that we realized wasn't we would freak out right so that that just goes to a point that you're right everything we encounter is dependent okay right and so what we go from the second step of the argument is to think about all of reality let's let's suppose that in for the audience let's suppose that we could put all of reality I'm getting away a little bit too away from the mic here suppose that we can fit all reality into this cell phone mm-hmm you trying to look for something that's trying it yeah like maybe a cup and this look at this where this about this one okay sure what is this that's just old Catholic manual yeah yeah yeah well anyway so let's let's suppose that this book is all of reality okay okay everything that exists everything that exists yes everything everything everything all of reality if gods exist they're included in this this is all of reality now there can't be and this is impossible this is this is one of the reasons why I don't see an option out of this argument there's nothing that can exist outside of everything right it's impossible right so all of reality has to exist independently the totality everything has to live in a dependently right because it's everything the totality of reality has to exist independent right that makes sense yeah so here's there was something else out of it wouldn't be independent and yeah yep they'd have to be in there it had something can explain all of reality you have to be in the but then we're not talking about something that's outside of the group of everything that exists okay so there can't be an outside explanation of everything that exists that is literally impossible hmm it's impossible but the puzzle here's here's the problem I want you to interject so be thinking here's the problem well you can't get up pointing at the camera I'm putting it Neal everybody you can't get out of it so keep that in mind it's impossible to object to this wow I love how on one level you come across and are super humble and you're like this is impossible and you think this is wrong you're wrong good no I mean I am kind of joking yes say no okay so if you have a good objection then then maybe you know I would love to entertain it so the puzzle is is this we've already looked at everything in our experience is dependent okay so we have this dependent reality that sort of built and that's that's what we're most familiar with but as we look at reality in total it exists independently the problem you can't build an independent reality out of purely dependent things right so if I I'm a photographer or at least I was a photographer I'm a full-time I'm full in full-time ministry at the moment but I know a lot about cameras I know a lot about photography and I still AM photographer anyways so one camera is dependent okay it's dependent on something else for its existence and just imagine in your mind a camera but let's now think of a group of ten cameras okay so just adding on more dependent things we don't suddenly have an independent group mm-hmm so you can't build you got to have the right building blocks basically mm-hmm so the what Joshua asked to be seen called he calls this a construction problem so you've in order to build the right kind of structure you've got to have the right building materials and so to get an independent reality you can't only use dependent stuff it'd be like trying to build a fire out of water you've got to have the right building materials at least one of those things has to be independent and so the theory what this is we're still just on the side of the puzzle like we're just trying to understand there's there's a puzzle here so how do we have it say it one more time because I'm struggling because it's early and then people must be struggling too so let's just do that again okay yep so everything in our experience is dependent yep and you can't build it and I guess this is another step that we can we can add to it you can't build an independent reality out of purely dependent things that's impossible because of this type of construction problem and you can general I mean you can just by the light of Reason you can see this very clearly if I take one camera and I just add on more stuff to it a whole bag I don't suddenly have an independent existing thing just because I'm adding on more substantive things yeah sure yeah so size is irrelevant that makes sense number of atoms is irrelevant to the distinction between something that is dependent and independent era but and this is because it's like again this this argument you can't get out of it you can't get out of it when we were thinking about this is a necessary truth all of reality think about this book again all all of reality everything that exists every thing there can't be an outside explanation of all of reality and so all of reality has to exist independently mm-hmm but how is that possible so I love this it helps right to have something visual when you're not as brilliant to some people so familiar right okay yeah this is all of reality all of reality exists you want to say independently there can't be an outside explanation of all reality yeah so have a an all of reality how do you explain the independence that we see and the the combination of everything that exists and so that's well that we're still just at the level of the puzzle okay how do we get there what's the explanation you how do we square this and so what Josh does in his work as he proposal and the proposal is that we just sort of posit a necessary foundation the foundation of reality that has its nature it's a it just has existence it's independent as the part of its nature its foundational okay sort of just like a house has a foundation all of reality has a foundation that everything else all the dependent thing is built on there is an explanation outside of which there is no other its bedrock exactly and at this point like I mentioned the atheist does not have to jump off at this point the atheist can accept and you should point out that some very intelligent atheists are willing to bite the black grama p ya grandma he's been on my show and he's had a discussion with josh and they agreed with this stage of the argument they agreed that there's got to be some foundational layer of reality other things are necessary that's necessary that has to exist that has its nature its existence independently doesn't rely on anything else but what atheists will say like grandma P is just well this is a you know it's the universe or it's what he calls simples it's not any it's not God the necessary foundation is not God and that would take us until we say there's no good reason to think that it's good what would he say the necessary foundation is fundamentally at odds with what theists mean by God I don't know that he would say it's at odds okay see would you say there's no good reason to think that that is I think he'd just say it hasn't yeah there there hasn't been good reason to oppose to to get to that level Wow but in more my discussions with Josh I'm now convinced that that I don't know if I would say that it's impossible but I think there's really good reasons on this side of the argument so on stage one I think everybody has to accept that any rational person has to accept it but on the stage too when we're arguing about the divine features of this award is that thing yeah yeah what's the nature of this thing I think there's a little bit more gray area on that side and that maybe maybe I won't be convinced to that maybe I'll be convinced just as strongly of the second part of that as I am the first part excellent but so when you say you can't get out of this you're not necessarily saying this absolutely in your mind proves existence of God right you're saying you're convinced that there is something necessary right and that we have good and then that leads at least try that would think stronger support for theism well I mean there are some arguments that and I'm still working through them myself that the foundation of reality has to be God basically there are deductive arguments that say you can't you you've got to posit a divine being in order to sort of explain why there's a foundation at all why do you have to do that so that would take us into stage two I'm gonna go ahead and do that early you want to get any more clarity on the part that makes a lot of sense to me and I think a lot of people are willing to accept that there has to be something necessary that underlies all unnecessary things there has to be an explanation outside of which there is no other explanation that just is the bedrock of explaining or explanation there's something necessary upon which contingent things are able to exist yeah yeah yeah so one of the things today at this point the Atheist gets really nervous because he sees where you're going he's like oh my gosh you're going to see you're gonna tell me you're gonna tell me this necessary thing cares about my sex life and I'm really not into that you know yeah and it's difficult when you ask you with people right because that's the thing like they're jumping ahead and you know just wait wait because at this point you say maybe theism isn't true but there's a necessary being yeah right and even if you get to theism you still haven't shown Christianity is true so everyone can just relax yeah yeah yeah and I think going back to talk a little more about psychology when people feel threatened they're gonna immediately shut down and so it's important to really feel out how the conversation is going when you're talking with someone about this and that's why I like to give caveats like this is just stage one we're not getting all the way to God's existence right now I think you have to accept stage one but this doesn't mean you have to be a theist at this point so I give caveats like that because I realized that people will automatically will put up doing the other day too you remember I'm like you can say Mary's the mother of God and not believe all the other stuff I believe like that would be okay at least bite that much off yeah yeah so I'd like to make those those types of yeah yes I think it's important to do that so the stage one of the argument is if you can really get that and understand it I think it's very difficult to get out of because the initially I think what people want to do is just say well there can just be dependent things all the way down like everything can depend on something else can depend on something else just all the way down but what's so fascinating about it is when you think about totality the totality of reality imagine the book again that's impossible you can't have an outside explanation all total of realities right exactly turtles all the way down would still exist in that exact it can't be all the way down yeah exactly so that's not an option like it's not an option and so but that creates the puzzle how do we have this independent reality when everything in our experience is dependent and so ultimately we have deposited sort of something necessary at the foundation that's sort of holding all the dependent things up where's the ground of it all mm-hm and then the second stage of the argument is to really look into that foundation and ask questions like what is the nature of this thing what can it do what are its properties is it just the universe is it God does it have knowledge does it have any value and once we start to ask those types of questions we can start to probe deeper and start to really pull out some really interesting things that come out of this so in my research into this argument there's really two broad strategies in building like a stage to case for the contingency argument from a necessary thing to God's existence and actually in literature this is called the gap problem like atheist philosophers have noted you've got a gap here you even if I accept that there's a necessary thing there's a big gap between that and God's existence and this is called the gap problem Alexander Proust and his work he calls it the same thing it's it's a well known problem even the Kalam cosmological argument has this gap problem where we're going from beginning of the universe or a cause of the universe to God that's a big gap big leap so it's important that we recognize that is like yeah that is that there's there's we've got to do some extra stuff in order to get there so there's two broad category or categories of argument that close the gap one of them is to just put this argument aside for a second and let's look at some additional evidence some additional arguments let's look at something like the fine-tuning of the universe for life are you familiar with that that argument yep so the fine-tuning argument we could look at that a little bit and if so you're saying you need to bring in other arguments to get to go to close the gap that's dangerous the argument alone won't do it I'm not saying you need to okay I'm saying this is one one broad ratted strategy one strategy is to look at more arguments look at more evidence and even Josh Rasmussen does this there's no reason not to do this it's just one strategy so and I think ultimately you'd have to do that if you're looking at what is all of the evidence that we have suggests about reality does God exist as God not exist we don't just want to look at one thing we want to look at all of the evidence we want to also include evidence like that points the other way that might point against God's existence we want to we want to look at all of it not just the part that we think confirms our own belief but the point is that we want to look at everything eventually so this is not some like trick or some you know it also doesn't mean that the argument isn't good it's just one of the strategies and I think we have to do it ultimately anyways so we can look at additional evidence different arguments and get to a divine being that way I think that's totally plausible we could we could do that I think - fine-tuning argument is a great argument that's one strategy the next strategy is to just look at the foundation itself and just say well what what are the properties what are give me some arguments for thinking that the foundation of reality has to be a person or has to be a perfect being or God and so we can do that now if you want we can go for it look at the second stage yep alright so with this part of the argument stage two we're looking at the the foundation analyzing it I want to do this a little bit differently than what I normally do so I want to think through with it with you mm-hmm let's it let's analyze it together what could the foundation be like okay well let's that's it let's ask actually another question what can be a distinguishing factor between something that is dependent and something that is independent what would be a good demarcation but it doesn't have pots there's no change it cannot change presumably if something changes its dependent on something else possibly or if it has parts has to subsist in a hole which would be a talk of cause that's interesting is that is that Aquinas well I guess is just me trying to think it's rude okay what would you say all right so one second water yeah so and this is something I'm still thinking through and I'm analyzing myself that's kind of what I want to do it with you here one of the things that Josh points out in his book he wrote a book recently called how reason can lead to God and he lays out this whole argument and does a couple a state a couple of the same moves that I'm making here and in getting you to think about stage 1 and stage 2 and analyzing the foundation and what he points out is that when it comes to dependent things to think about like a mountain range say that this mountain range has three peaks okay what he says is the reason why something is dependent is at least in part because there's some kind of limit that it has mm so a mountain range say the mountain range with three peaks has a limit of three and that limit is what needs an explanation of why it's dependent on something else for those three things that are features of that thing so limits is what he's saying limits are the thing that basically demarcate between something that is dependent and independent so something that is unlimited can be independent whereas something that is limited in some way is dependent on something else to explain those limits so here give another example so my phone is a dependent thing we've already dostala' shhhhht that but it also has certain limits my phone is only a certain size it can only do so much it can only hold so much information it's limited in certain ways and it's those limits that really cry out for an explanation mm-hmm and so the basic argument is that when it comes to the this foundation this foundation theory there's got to be some necessary independent foundation there can't be an outside explanation of this foundation right we've already talked about it all of reality there can't be an outside explanation so there can't be an outside explanation of the foundation imagine suppose that my phone is the foundation mm-hmm there can't be an outside explanation of this that we've already hit that's better yeah that's bedrock so there can't be an outside explanation of it but if the foundation suppose it did have limits suppose it was limited in how much it can know or there was limits and how much power it has suppose it has the power to create 20 universes for example that's a limit that is a feature of dependent things and that would need an explanation but we can't have an explanation of the foundation and so basically it's impossible this is another one of those impossibility arguments where it's almost impossible to get out of have you familiar with Aquinas is distinction between essence and existence I've heard it because it sounds like you're getting very close to this right you and I are something we also have something existence unicorns have neither essence nor existence Tyrannosaurus Rex has neither but did once have existence and it has an essence I'm beg your pardon unicorns do have essence but don't have existence right they're a thing that we can think about it has a it has an essence but not existence and so whenever we define something it comes from the word like D finite right we're limited by what we are we don't share in all of existence we ask something and so when Aquinas says that God's essence is existence his sound is saying something that sounds like you're getting to when you say he's not limited he's not limited to an essence he is existence and is undivided you know you can't in any way divide him are you open to that kind of way of thinking is I guess I'd have to get a whole lot lower clarity yeah I'm not sure if I'm the guy to help you what happens I'm just spitballing maybe I'll just read some Aquinas yeah but it's interesting to me that it sounds like you kind of it sounded is going in that direction which is awesome yeah I mean I'm sure that there's overlap yes ways that these arguments can sort of work together so it doesn't necessarily have to conflict you can still be a proponent of the five ways proponent of this argument totally they don't have to necessarily conflict with each other but what we're thinking about and I want the audience to really think about this - what is the best theory of the foundation of reality so some people will say well hey it's just the universe it's some part of the universe what is the foundation that's what a lot of atheists will want to say huh and what we run into when we starts are really okay so it's one thing to say oh well it's just part of the universe that's that's what it is that's one thing but now actually do the hard work of explaining what you mean by that okay what can it do what are its properties and when you start to do that what you're gonna run into inevitably unless you want to call this thing God and Nevitt Allah you're going to start to put on what Rasmussen calls arbitrary limits in what it can do and its power against oppose it can only create ten to the five hundred universes or it can only create you know twenty universes that's a limit in what it can do and that's interesting I'd need to hear more from Josh about why a limit is a sign of dependence okay yeah it's a difficult thing for me to grasp right now okay I think he would say that it's a feature of every dependent thing is that it has some kind of limit yeah in it and so this is a way of helping us see the difference between a dependent and an independent thing was it everything that we know of in a dependent thing has some kind of limit and its size its geometry its shape and so it in to add to that any limit is gonna need some explanation of why it has that limit why does it have that shape why is this mirror over here only have four corners mm-hmm it's a it's a rectangular mirror why does it have that shape why does it have some some other shape and it's presumably Josh and you don't want to say that this thing's of course physical so you're not gonna be talking about shape or size because that wouldn't apply to this thing presumably - OH - this thing yeah right yeah so what you would do is that itself would be a limit that would be a limit yes number of vertices the shape of it yeah how many points it has so like a triangle has three and three corners and so that would be a kind of limit and would need an explanation and I mean it's it's really interesting thing about this is why I'm saying like I want the listeners to really think about this if you're an atheist if you're a theist if you think that this isn't a good argument feel free to jump off but don't just reject it just because you know you don't like it really think about it think about what is the best account of the foundation of reality and if you're a naturalist it seems from my point of view that you are going to have to build in certain arbitrary limits what do you say then it looks like a dependent thing like it needs some outside explanation but it can't have an outside explanation because it's the foundation of all reality and so you're gonna run into this contradiction if you start to limit what this thing knows or what it can do and so ultimately I think we do sort of have to just go back to the the classical conception of of God unlimited unlimited in value unlimited in power unlimited knowledge eliminating goodness and we're gonna run into like the the divine conception of God another thing to tag on to this is that an arbitrary cutoff or a limit is going to needlessly add to the things complexity so when you add in this this idea that oh well the foundational theory of everything can only create twenty universes that's making the the theory more complex yeah because you ovulate it you're stipulating something that can do it requires more concepts in essence so what Josh does is he builds a theory that is the simplest theory that you can even imagine it says there's the simplest theory it explains everything it doesn't run into this problem we're dependent things part of the reason why we know they're dependent thing is because they have these limits this theory avoids all of these problems in the theory is just that the foundation is perfect mm-hmm and it avoids everything and it's the simplest because you don't have any arbitrary cut offs in value or in power or in knowledge it's perfect it has unlimited of all of these things yeah it'd be like going back to a scientific example it would be more complex to say oh well gravity works everywhere in the universe but in the Andromeda galaxy mm-hmm like that's a needlessly complex hypothesis why would you do that you would just say gravity works everywhere that's that's simpler it's easier to understand the concept is gravity works everywhere there's not some random cutoff in where gravity works but I want I want the audience to really think about this it's not just me giving this argument I want them to think about it first ourselves here's a question someone will say okay well if this thing is unlimited it would have the power to be you presumably - I wouldn't say that that's a power to be to be to be someone else it also depends on what you mean because it says some people will say that this sounds like it's getting dangerously close to pantheism right there there's this thing that runs throughout all of existence that may very well be existence that is sustaining everything and that maybe this is just a good argument for pantheism that there is this necessary being where's the universe you me yeah maybe maybe this is what I mean that it's by the universe is God sorry okay so by that's where terminology can sometimes be helpful because you can call it natural you can call it supernatural you can call this thing the universe if you want to you can call it a perfect being whatever you want to call it I think we're still gonna run into these issues right you're still gonna run into the fact that we need of an independent foundation of all reality that was stage one and then you're gonna run into the fact of if you start to give this thing limits in what it can do what it can know these are going to be arbitrary first of all they seem to require some deeper explanation but there can't be a deeper explanation so you're gonna run into these issues no matter what you want to call it or so that I guess that's that's ultimately where it's gonna come back to okay whatever you want to call this thing well that's an interesting way I mean if that works and I look for to getting this book it sounds like yeah and even Josh says that like some people will say oh well a supernatural thing is over and above it's unnecessary it's needlessly complex and so he says is well let's just call it natural yeah let's just call God a natural thing yeah it's really just about terminology it's like we're talking about the same thing you want to call it you know supernatural or natural or you can call it whatever you want but we're still ultimately going to have like that but this is supernatural for many is a pejorative term anyway yeah and so you don't even need to bring that back I hate that distinction I think it's so so unhelpful basically what people do is they take things that we no longer believe and call those supernatural so it is pejorative it's like purely pejorative interesting but no I don't believe in ghosts and fairies and so those are supernatural and so we don't believe in those and so what you're doing is you're doing the same thing with good yeah but I want to read this book because as you say that could be a way to close the gap I just need to read it a bit more about why yeah that's point to kid something thinkin yeah it is very abstract and I'm not done trying to even if you're if your goal is try convinced me of it now it'll be a very long episode where I might yeah think but don't do it no I think you've done a good job of explaining it okay I just need to think about it more I need time alone to think about that yeah so here's here's another thing that we could do at this point so I talked earlier about a construction problem where you can't get an independent reality out of purely dependent things because you don't have the right building blocks in the same way you can't build a fire out of water okay and what he what he argues is that there are certain features of reality like consciousness where you can't do the same you basically run into a construction error and so what he wants to do is build consciousness into the foundation of reality mm-hmm so you can basically do the same kind of strategy see that well actually you can't get a conscious being out of purely non conscious materials just because we know that that's like that's a construction error be like trying to build a fire out of water you don't have the right building building blocks suppose that you were looking around here and the dust in the air had took the same shape as all of your neurons that were firing in your brain like that the dust wouldn't suddenly be become conscious because you you even if you have the right shape of the right structure you don't have the right building blocks you need something that is sort of already conscious mhm and so he takes those types of arguments and it introduces them in the book that's really good the other thing I like about this argument is that avoids a lot of the sort of Aristotelian jog and that Aquinas uses hmm so that's one and I'm not saying that's a detriment to Aquinas his arguments except that when you're trying to present them to a modern person you have to explain accidents and substance and essence and all that and it also doesn't have the stigma that the Kalam argument has when people like you have already heard this ridiculous bender a few a thousand times yeah well has it but okay yeah yeah yeah and and just for the audience sake we are very barely just barely scratching the surface fantast of us are so tell us more about this Josh bloke what's he's nominate when she says just Josh Rasmussen I'm never gonna forget it again it's locked in the vault rasmussen really Josh Reston you know your brain worked like that I don't know if a does a that we'll see in five minutes you can ask again but no I mean I keep saying Josh Rati Matata Josh wrasse mutant cool that's awesome you send you already forgot it doctor said it Rasmussen yeah you said wrasse mutant did I you did so my brain does not work like that Emily I am not perfect in knowledge or memory you have limits I have limits I must be dependent you are dependent that's cuz in my interview with dr. Glynn mine Craig he mentioned him didn't he he did were you surprised that he did that no I wasn't surprised dis Josh is Joshua we're very flattering he is he's aware of it but he also has met Craig a bunch and this is an interesting story from Josh is that the first time that he met dr. Craig he was he I think he may have been an agnostic or a deist at the time Josh yeah Wow yeah he was he was agnostic for a while atheist he may have even been an atheist and this argument is the thing that brought him back to to the fold so jolly yeah it's worked on me too if you want to call I mean I didn't go away I'm but it's really good this level of confidence that I have now this is great I mean obviously not all Christians need to be apologists not all Christians need to be wrestling with these deep philosophical questions it's important that some do so they can help us explain it to others I think but I think if nothing is it kind of because people often point to and say what's the point of it there's no reason but yeah it kind of bit boys you up when you have those sort of irrational doubts right it sure is you up exactly yeah I can work it can work to sort of put your irrational doubts - yeah so this is the I was gonna tell a story about Josh and dr. Craig he was as he was an agnostic or an atheist he went up to dr. Craig and he had all of these objections to the Kalam and he is very very intelligent and Craig said that on his on his podcast he's like or on your podcast scary smart was that just ope cool I figure I think he called Alec spruce scary smart idea yeah but but I think Josh falls into the same category he's just Josh's a little bit more docile he's just very super super friendly so he doesn't cross that way yeah anyways Josh if you're watching this some of you so he says uh he went up to dr. Craig and he was gonna give him all of these like knock down arguments along yeah and I wanted to point out that Josh is super smart so he has like his objections were not gonna be terrible and he had a discussion with Craig and he came away and Craig responded to all of his arguments against the kalam and that really built like rapport with with Josh he was like there's a lot more going on with dr. Craig didn't meets the eye because all you see with dr. Craig is like his debates and his public frame to premises conclusions yeah you don't realize how much is going on beneath the surface he's very unassuming you might say like a iceberg that's amazing yeah but no josh is josh is great he and I have become friends over the past couple years and I would love to get him on this show he also has a YouTube channel called worldview design okay so if people want to check him out he's on YouTube I think he's at about a little over a thousand subscribers so he needs a lot of help okay yeah we'll remind me if we don't but would be good to put a link in the show notes to Josh tell me about so much I'm sure he'd love to come on in I'd be honored let's talk a little bit about proper basic allottee okay reformed epistemology which is interesting because in plantinga's work on christian warrant what's that called that but warrant a Christian birth warranted Christian belief he calls it you know this two mystic Calvin model mm-hmm and that really surprised me because Aquinas states emphatically that one can come to know God exists apart from divine revelation this is something you can know so you don't need faith to know God exists though you can have faith if you not smart enough like me and don't have the time perhaps to investigate these things to your liking but I was surprised that he mentioned Aquinas and so I actually went in and and tried to find where Aquinas talked about this I found a few places so I'd like to kind of bring some of that up in a minute go for it yeah because sure that kind of introduced maybe and tell us what it is yes so reformed epistemology is a view that sort of came out of this time when everyone was thinking you've got to have arguments for your belief in God otherwise you're not rational and so what planning it did and this was revolutionary back when it happened back in the 70s is said actually we can we can be skeptical about that that premise and so the the argument basically runs like this if you have a rational belief in God then you need arguments mm-hmm premise two there are no good arguments for theism and then in conclusion sorry not rational basically and so most people most theists most Christians have been responding to that second premise that the second premise says there are no good arguments for God's existence or for Christianity so most theists have been looking at that second premise saying oh no there are good arguments there is good evidence for Christianity and so at planning a dad is he looked at that first premise he said well hey it's not actually true that if you need if you have a rational belief in God than you need arguments what he says that's that's not true and the reason why is because on his view depends on what you we we would have to probably get a little bit more clear on what we're looking at here because in epistemology there's different kinds of properties that we could be talking about and one of them is called justification so someone is justified in their belief they're actually in philosophy there's like a bunch of different views on justification - and tell me if I'm giving too many caveats as we're like lowering the sea a little to me okay we're giving too many caveats as we're starting this yeah but the point is that the basic overall picture is that we don't need arguments in order to have a rationally justified belief right in God and so the way that he does that we can get into in a little bit how about that yeah yeah sounds good but that's the basic overall picture why don't we talk about some other things that are sort of properly basic what is what is probably basic main and most some examples of properly basic beliefs okay so proper basic properly basic belief we probably need to split that term into two so so let's put aside the proper part of it for a second and just think about what a basic belief is a basic belief is a belief that is not based on other beliefs that you have so here's here's one example so suppose that I go to the casino and I just find myself believing my next role or my next play I'm gonna become a millionaire suppose I just have that okay that belief wouldn't be based on anything deeper said be it be a basic belief it wouldn't be based on some deeper belief but that wouldn't be a rational belief so it wouldn't be properly basic so a properly basic belief is a basic belief that is just rational to hold thank you for that distinction yeah I wasn't aware of that so the proper the proper part of it I can give another example of that suppose that you're experiencing pain someone punched you in the arm you just hit you just saw hurt your leg right doom what was it cuz I was chasing the friend at the Botanical Gardens super man manly yeah so you hurt your leg and you find yourself believing I'm in a lot of pain yep that is not based on some deeper belief or some deeper argument but in that context since you're experiencing pain completely rational completely yeah perfectly you're justified in that belief and so that would be a properly basic belief but then you hear of these people who are amputees and have these sort of phantoms right right that would be a basic belief that isn't proper so on that one you would say that it's not proper because you'd have a defeater for that belief so this this would introduce like you can have a properly basic belief is something that is justified in case you don't have some kind of defeat or that could potentially come and defeat it so defeater is just some other reason that you have to think that belief is false so looking down and seeing that you're an amputee and you don't have the rest of your arm what count is a defeater of your belief and so it would no longer be properly basic it still be a basic belief but it would no longer be properly basic because you have a defeater if and this is different I guess is it's not that you are not rational to have this experience there's this of neurological reasons people have this experience but if you were to conclude I must have fingers exist where I feel the itch and it wouldn't be properly basic it would be you could still have that as a basic belief not based on any deeper belief okay but it wouldn't be rational for you to continue believing that mm-hmm you gonna be just now I already mentioned this earlier and we haven't talked about this I assume you're the kind of guy who would find this interesting when I was about 15 years old I went through this terrifying period where I was sceptical that other people existed I've never met anyone but like that but yeah and that it's not to say I came to hold that belief so I wasn't a solipsist I certainly didn't claim I didn't know what that word was hmm I remember I was like 15 years old and I would shut mrs. exactly the same but I was shut the door to my bedroom and then wonder if everything outside of my bedroom disappeared like maybe it all fell into the void and was nothing I quickly open it to see if I could catch it yeah whole dream 15 you know and I remember once like how do I know my friend Gareth and Rowan who I would hang out with at school how do I know they exist right now like I I guess you could tell me they were doing something maybe I could call them but maybe they came into existence when I called them or maybe they don't exist but this experience is leading me to think that and I thought maybe they don't exist like maybe it's some sort of an illusion and I hadn't thought it through I didn't try to make it rational or give a good explanation for why it was the case because again it's not that I thought it was the case I was just afraid that it was yeah I remember sitting with my friend Gareth in the library and actually saying to him like sometimes like I'm afraid of you'll don't exist like I'm afraid you don't exist and he said to me he must have been afraid for me because he's like okay but I like I promise I do and I'm like but that's what you would say so there you go you've now met somebody who actually struggled with with that belief it's fair dinkum trial yeah but this gets to the point because we look around and we see other human beings but we don't see their minds mm-hmm if we were to not that we would crack their head open we might see their brain we're still not seeing their minds that might be very sophisticated robots that look like humans and I can't know that directly but I assume it to be true is this an example of a properly basic belief the existence of other Minds I would say yes it would be an example of a properly basic belief you can I I think that very few of our beliefs are actually the result of some like argument or some process that you would Li yeah and then my parents are right exactly where you were where you were born the fact that I am in Georgia right now totally that is not based on an argument I just I believe that or it's or if you woulda formulated an argument it would be based on premises you can't prove well this is one thing to point out is that a basic belief can turn into a non basic belief if you just sort of focus your attention on it and be like well late wait a second I probably need to have some argument for why this belief is true oh I see so you can turn a basic belief into a non-basic please gotcha but in our everyday lives in our everyday experience most of our beliefs are the basic kind we're not lucky what about this like I it's possible you tell me what this belief this is just fun it's possible that Neil is a Russian spy that has been sent here from Russia to assure the next election or something that's possible um I have no good reason to think that it's true if I was to say that to you and you were trying to convince me that he was a Russian spy you would say well wouldn't you think that would be the case like of course you wouldn't think that if he's the legit Russian spy oh maybe my wife is a Russian spy and she's just pretending to love me yeah I would just say that that's not a properly basic belief so it'd be it'd be basic but there would be that I'd be my point is I'm justified at taking him at his word I'm just afraid I told you that know if I'm justified thinking he's not a Russian spy okay I'm justified in thinking you're Cameron Batusi and that you have a brother called Trevor even though I have no other way of knowing that right even though all you have is my testimony that's just telling you so would testimony be an example basic belief if you say something and I accept it so the way the way that I think about it the way that it works in my mind is you can have something like testimony but you're not building an argument in your mind of like oh yeah but the best explanation of why this person told me this is is that it's true yeah all that's happening is they're telling you something and you and you immediately find yourself this is really helpful to me thank you for showing me that a properly basic or basic belief can be common on basic belief by reflecting upon it I'd never made the connection before that really helps yeah well planning a point set out to basically that you have can turn into a non basic give us the example of the reality of the past I find this fascinating - okay so the reality the past imagine that and this is actually kind of difficult for some people to think about but it's possible mm-hmm that the past is illusory that it's all an illusion that sort of came up in your brain or even began to exist five minutes ago it began to exist with the appearance of age five minutes ago that's our stomachs we haven't yet digested rusting cause crumbling mountains the whole thing's baked it started like that and it appears real yes eat all of your memories everything it just appears that it's older than it is that's interesting some young earth creationists actually bleeping now yeah but anyways so let's take that theory what's your best argument against that theory that's great look there's my best argument I haven't even thought about that I guess if if you were just to kind of pull me off the street and say that my best argument would be it doesn't seem that way and you don't have a positive reason for it yeah so you'd say you you would basically fall back on how things seem to ya yeah and so you're gonna with this and I will sleep in particular you'd have to fall back on something like this is this is just a basic leaf that I have it just seems obvious seems obvious to me to me that the past is ríos I trusted you and you're like no dude really listen to me I'd be like okay well then you're gonna have to give me more like give me a reason to think you're right yeah and if you couldn't I would say well you you're not this I can't go with you there yeah there's no good reason to think that the past is illusory therefore I'm gonna go on believing what seems apparent to me yeah right right and so the there's a whole lot of things that are at play in this when we actually look at some of the details but there's an example that I really like to think about a lot and this is another one from album planning yeah he says well suppose that you the night before were up late reading some book on Aquinas say and the next day you're accused of murder and they say that you murdered somebody the night before yeah but you know that you didn't commit the murder you know that you were sitting at home reading Thomas Aquinas but then suppose that they start to give you some some good evidence like maybe they say that your fingerprint was found at the crime scene and maybe there's some like blood on your pants or something and that they found in your home and what he says is that you would still completely be within your rights to believe that you were not the murderer because you remember what you did last night and you were reading your book and so even in the face of potential counter evidence the rational proper thing to do not in every circumstance but in some circumstances is to go on believing what seems to you to be the case and we also know that like you know evidence can be fabricated you can fabricate DNA I know that's good because my first thought was I guess if enough evidence was compiled and shown to me I would begin to question my own sanity right yeah no it's yes so it is but is but then I would have to say well do I have any good reason to think I'm mentally unsound because if I don't have any good reason to think that then that would be another point so this is where the feeders can come in so he's really open to the fact that you can have a defeater come in and sort of defeat your basic belief as being no longer properly basic but it depends on the situation how much evidence that would require how sure you are that you were really there the night before reading Thomas Aquinas so we'd have to look at the particular zuv the case sure so he can't just say in every circumstance it would be rational for you to continue believing what what seems to you to be the case but in some circumstances I think it is and yes you can have a lot of counter evidence and it just bro that's not enough like I can have a lot of evidence that we're in the matrix or someone could could give me a lot of evidence that we were in the matrix and I'd be like bro you're crazy like I don't care if you think you have evidence that dix the external world is fake but I'm not gonna believe that like it really seems to me to be the case that the external world is real it really seems to me to be a case that the past is not an illusion that it was that it was real you know that I was born in 1987 and I've been around for that length of time like it really seems like that's so in some cases that that's what's really interesting about this view and to sort of bring out some of them some of the thoughts that you don't necessarily have to have an argument for all of your beliefs and sometimes you're seeming your basic belief can defeat arguments or potential evidence to your belief and to be rational there's a whole process that needs to happen you gotta weigh both sides and so it's not just like this thing that's you're not always going to be rational in saying well you know that counter evidence is not enough but in some circumstances it will be okay so then bring this to theism it what about God and our experience of God what's plantinga's argument to you so planning is planning as view is that just like we do with other Minds typically like when I'm thinking they were looking at my wife or interacting with her I believe that my wife she has her own mind she has her own thoughts and intentions and desires and I've never never based my belief that my wife has a mind on some argument like I've never done that all right and so is support like let's think about the objection that we had earlier the argument if belief in Brittany's mind is rational then you need arguments there are no good arguments that Brittany has a mind and the conclusion therefore you shouldn't believe that that Brittany has a mind so I actually agree with number two there are no good arguments that other people have Minds and this is one thing that Alvin plant he's got a whole book on it where he basically shows that the arguments that people have offered over the centuries for belief and not for yeah for the conclusion that people have minds really and it's not just like philosophical zombies running around everywhere yeah those arguments are actually not very good arguments and so you can agree with that second premise but then you would just reject the first one that if I'm rational and believing that Brittany has a mind that I have to have arguments you don't have to have arguments who says you have to have arguments and so using that analogy he says well we can basically do the same thing with God so we don't necessarily have to have arguments for this belief just like I don't need arguments to believe that my wife has a mind it's obvious to me and that seems perfectly rational in the absence of a defeater like I don't have a defeater I'm not in possession of a reason to think that my wife doesn't have a mind and so I should believe that my my wife has a mind I'm not in possession of a defeater of my belief in Christianity or in God's existence and so therefore I have no reason to to reject it I'm perfectly justify it and rational and warranted and maintaining this belief I could see why the atheist would think this might be something of a cheeky move because it it it seems to kind of allow you to believe what you want to believe without an argument and then you are in the position of saying to the Atheist well give me a reason to think God does not exist now we should make some things clear if somebody says I have a properly I think I have a properly basic belief in God's existence this isn't an argument for God's existence right and so if it were then you would have to offer evidences or something for an argument so if I want to convince you of God's existence then I do need an argument I can't just appeal to my properly basic belief right right but this is actually a really important thing to raise here so it this goes back to planning his whole project his whole idea was not to give an argument for Christianity or even an argument that Christians are justified or are rational or are warranted that was never the goal the goal is to show that de facto and I'll explain what these terms mean de facto objections against Christianity well let me let me back up there are no de jure a objections against Christianity that don't sort of reduce to de facto objections so a de facto objection against Christianity would be an argument that Christianity is false de facto I guess that's Latin the argument there would be that Christianity is false what he says is that there's no well let me back up and explain what does your I means de jure is an argument that this person is not irrational in their belief and so what he says is that if you want to argue that the Christian is irrational or unjustified or unwarranted in their belief in God's existence you can't stay on the level of rationality or justification you've got to move to the level of fact you've got to argue that Christianity is false and the way that he does this is you show he gives basically two conditional statements the first conditional is if God this then Christian belief can be warranted if God exists then Christianity can be warranted and the second counter fact not counterfactual conditional is if God does not exist then probably belief in God is not warranted mm-hmm so so the whole strategy is to sort of think I'd quibble with both of those to understand them a little more okay yeah so it's it's sort of based on his his outworking uh and this is I was giving these I was trying to give some of these clarifying words and use a lot more epistemology jargon at the beginning because it does it is eventually going to come into play yeah and maybe maybe we'll get into it me we won't don't be afraid to use it yeah but uh so the idea I would say if cursed if the Christian God exists yeah then we have then we can have belief in God can be properly basic yeah right right right the Christian God might not exist but God might still exist in which case you might be able to say the belief in some sort of mind outside of us that created the world and sustains it you might be able to say that is properly basic but not that Christ rose from the dead if it lives in my heart and all that stuff so the Christian in this circumstance is not saying that Christian belief is warranted or is justified or is rational they're saying it can be it can be and that's where this sort of conditional statement comes in and it's really just about showing that the Atheist has a lot more work to do if they want to say that the Christian is in fact irrational or unjustified in her belief then they've got to argue that Christianity is false because if Christianity is true then yeah Christians can have warrant they can have justification if you accept that that conditional state my like I do it makes which-which planning it defends in his book you know another thing to point out is many of us have have gotten into this where we've begun binging dr. William Lane Craig debates and maybe after this they're gonna go listen to Josh Rasmussen and they're gonna start reading his books and seeing his exchanges it is possible try to become so hung up on debates and weighing the evidences for and against that it gets in the way of your relationship with God in the same way that if I were to start doing a deep dive into solipsism this would get in the way of my relationship with my wife and kids yep I think this is what is the best argument that your wife has a mind and love yes my son is doing that I wouldn't be like I wouldn't take her out it might take her on a date night but it would just be to see if she was actually real had a mind and stuff do you see like it could potentially ruin my relationships with those I hold most dear likewise I think someone become can become so obsessed with arguments and evidences for God's existence and Christianity that it it could you know maybe ruin or at least hamper one's relationship with Christ I agree yeah I totally agree I've noticed that in my own life my own walk to have yeah can I read a bit about what Thomas Aquinas says mm-hmm so this he says something in the Summa theologia about it that's his main work with resting out Mike's on two of the versions there and then he has another work called the Summa contra Gentiles or a summary of the faith against the Gentiles which is more apologetic in nature so it's really fun but his lip why don't I start reading it and then we could kind of pause and see what we think he says there is a certain and general and vague knowledge of God in the minds of practically all men whether it be by the fact of God's existence being a self-evident truth as some think he doesn't or as seems more likely because natural reasoning leads a man promptly to some sort of knowledge of God for men seeing that natural things follow a certain course and order and further considering that order cannot be without an ordained ax they perceive generally that there is some or dana of the things which we see but who or what manner of being the or dana of nature is and whether he be one or many cannot be gathered offhand from this slight study he says more but I don't want to bore everybody by reading directly from Aquinas yeah so that seems perfectly in line with what planning argues the I think what he's he's tar general theists believe yeah that's right not specifically that's what I wouldn't dive into so planning a planning it has a whole chapter where he basically looks at the Aquinas calvin model is what he calls it we have this sort of generic belief about God and that can be perfectly rational warranted justified without arguments it can be properly basic it can be and again the emphasis is on can be it's possible that they can have this kind of warrant and yeah but then he has another chapter where he extends the model to include beliefs about the the the great truths of the Christian faith and the way he does that is he introduces the witness of the holy spirit and this is I think more Calvin at this point that's my understand Calvin I'm actually not sure on the history of what what Calvin argued in terms of the in terms of whether or not Christian belief in particular can be justified apart from arguments but either way he planning extends the model to include the witness of the holy spirit which would work the same way that testimony works more generally we use an example earlier what was the what was the example that we used of testimony if you told me something yeah you would accept it I would just accept it it is so basically I told you you I grew up in Australia but I was born in Russia you'd be like oh cool yeah exactly yeah if I had good reason to think that you weren't lying and you're trustworthy person and I didn't think you were joking then that's what I would find myself believing and it would be perfectly within you know it would be perfectly rational for me to believe that so the same thing could be true of Christianity so the witness the Holy Spirit could confirm in our hearts and seal it on our heart so to speak that the great truths of the gospel are in fact true as we're reading through the word or as it's being preached to us and so that's the way to sort of extend them all his version yeah of the model yeah the great Christian truth and you don't necessarily have to go with him on this extended model right you could just stick with that questionnaire just modest I mean there might be a lot that I'm not reading and Aquinas but what I'm seeing seems to be more of a general and vague sense of God that we have yeah and it's interesting because he actually uses the existence of other people as an AA he kind of connects it to listen to this thus seeing a man move and do other acts we perceive that there is him a cause of these activities which is not in other things makeup and this cause we call the soul and still we do not yet know what the soul is whether it is anything corporeal or not or how it performs the aforesaid acts now such knowledge as this cannot possibly suffice for happiness and he goes on for happiness must be an activity without defect and maybe I'll stop there but that's that's a really interesting thing like I see you they kind of infer a mind even if I don't really know what a mind is I infer it if you asked me to explain it where there is physical or not I'm I don't know how to do that likewise I look around the world and I see you know that things seem to act for an end that's good they seem ordered orderly and I just sort of come to this belief in a some sort of or Dana yeah yeah yeah so I think that I think planning acknowledges that in the book he realizes that Aquinas is not trying to go all the way yeah to all of these specific Christian beliefs and saying that those can be properly basic because I could see another thing Christians would run into a problem they would run into if they wanted to push that too far you would say well if that were the case then Christians ought to be a whole lot more unified in what they believe than they are if they want to say that the reason they believe Christ rose from the dead and that he'll exists whatever doctrine you want to slip in there you know you can be as modest or as liberal as you want but if you wanted to push it the whole way you run to a problem I would think you would just have to look around and say well all these Christians who disagree with me aren't being influenced by the Holy Spirit properly yeah I would I would just the thing that initially comes to my mind would be that sin actually plays a part in the whole the planning is strategy and so sin could explain some disagreement on some level so and maybe you could explain disagreement some other way maybe you wouldn't have to appeal to send some just like some innate thing that we all have that the bias and whatever else now what in your experience what does being the atheist objection to this one one popular I mean you raised it earlier was just that this seems like you're just trying to defend something that you grew up believing and you can you can basically use the same strategy I mean well actually the best let me start over I'm just Joe yeah the most common objection that I see from atheists about this is it was why can't the Mormon or someone else use this same strategy in order to justify their beliefs about Mormonism or Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever and so one of the things that I like to point out with this is again we're not arguing that Christians are actually justified or actually warranted in their beliefs we're just saying that this is a possibility and so if you want to argue that the Christian is is actually irrational is actually unjustified then you've got to argue that Christianity is false that's literally the whole goal of this argument gotcha so if you're trying to make it do something that it was never intended to do then you're trying to go further than the argument ever intended to go so that's one point the second point is that I think that people can have justified false beliefs and I think that's perfectly fine yeah so the rushar example would that be an example like if I told you I was born in Russia and grew up I believed you based on your testimony yeah be it'd be a justified false bleep yeah one example that I like to give a lot is belief that the earth was flat before we had evidence that the earth is round ever pretty much everybody thought the earth was flat and based on their experience of the world it was a completely justified belief for them to have even though it was false but people are very averse to that they don't want to accept that people can have justified false beliefs but I think that's wrong I think that we've got to acknowledge that even though this it's absolutely false to us they could have some level of justification and so at that point all that we would do is just talk to them about the truth well it's the same thing with my kids I mean we talk about the Sun setting in the Sun rising and you ask a child what's happening they would say I guess the Sun goes up and down and they would probably come to the conclusion that the Sun goes around the earth which would be it justified false belief right and so at that point what we would do is present them with a defeater for their belief and so that if we wanted to progress the conversation we'd acknowledge yes they can't have justified it they can't have a justified belief in this that's fine but then we don't offer them a defeater and we talk to them and say well this is why your belief is false so it's not that difficult of an objection to get around in my view very good what else going to talk about I don't know what do you want to talk about I feel like we've done pretty good D in D contingency proper basic allottee we haven't talked about anxiety oh let's do that you were able to talk about yeah we haven't talked about anxiety a whole lot yeah how do we get into that I mean you said you wanted to talk about anxiety but and I'm glad that you want to because you said we don't talk about it enough in Christian circles so yeah take the lead why do you want yeah well well like you said I don't think it's talked about enough and I don't have anything prepared yes I just want to talk about it oh and this could be therapeutic for me I don't I might be helpful for me too yeah maybe does everyone's talking about anxiety today and it makes me wonder if it's kind of the same way everyone talked about being allergic to peanuts five minutes ago and whether I want to believe them or not you know I mean like we're all allergic to gluten although or or is it something yeah what do we mean by anxiety so what's who you struggle with anxieties that apparently I do yeah and what was your experience like that how do you know you do what does anxiety really mean I actually don't really not terribly sure what people mean by that that is a good question and I'm like I don't worry I'm not trying to do this to a philosophical discussion I mean is it just a sort of like a fear is it a is that what it is is it yeah it could be a fear but it's I think what it does is it activates your your fight-or-flight mechanism and so yeah if you get super anxious or super nervous about something your body basically that's what panic attacks are is your body is like automatically wanting to like run away from the situation and your heart rate starts to increase because like you think that there's some kind of threat nearby or whatever like there's a lot of evolutionary stuff going on urology wise whether or not you believe in evolution doesn't doesn't matter I'm just saying that there's there's biological stuff happening mm-hmm that can contribute to everything and that's that's actually some something that's really important is that a lot of times we think that doubts are just based on reason and rationality but what I've learned through this process is that sometimes our doubts can be driven by something else by some by anxiety and so we think that we're having this rational doubt about Christianity but really what's going on is some it could even be like a chemical imbalance in your brain that's causing you to doubt and causing you not to think rationally about something there's a thing in the anxiety literature called catastrophizing and that's that's what I do that's Cameron he's talking about anxiety I'm pretty sure us sit around is probably describing me catastrophizing what's that catastrophizing is when you all you can think about is one remote possibility and that's all you can be you're just obsessing about it yeah I have that it's me what if my problem is yeah you have people say you can't see the true the trees from the forest or something my problem is I can't see the forest from the trees so I'll find like if I'm gonna find a good mood things are going well this tree if this tree is wellness then I am really happy but if my wife and I get into an argument everything is going up in flames I cannot see so I kind of micro yeah that doesn't sound like catastrophe okay so weak necessarily yeah yeah so could test some other issue what says well so catastrophizing would be that you're just thinking like you're thinking about all these bad consequences of what could happen like if something else could be true if christianity is false then oh my god that's like the worst thing in the world and it's just super super super bad and that that would cause all of this anxiety for you and it causes like this loop of anxiety yeah but what I've come to realize is that sometimes your doubts or you're like what ifs are driven they can be driven by your own chemistry your body chemistry they can be driven by your your own bad behaviors that you sort of built up over the years and the reason why I've come to that conclusion is because when people are treated with medication they somehow they like their doubts start start to stop controlling them anymore there was a philosopher friend of mine who dealt really bad with OCD and it like any what if it didn't matter like it didn't have anything to do with God's existence or anything it was just like what if I leave my house and like a meteor comes and strikes me down and like that whole know that enough can like him to like not go outside and just like lock himself in his room and not do anything and so he started taking medication and found that helpful exactly so he wasn't crippled by these doubts these what-ifs anymore how is this part of your story then is it so it's part of my story because I went down the the medication route and I it helped a little bit but now I'm doing something else that's now helping and it's it's called cognitive behavioral therapy and it's not I'm not doing my cherry cherry Tudor talked to you about that last night no he didn't okay I think it is but I'm not doing it officially I'm sort of doing my own things that I've discovered that are helping so none this is not medicinal stuff no it's not medicinal right now right but the point is is that I've found that if you've built up in some sometimes it's just chemistry sometimes it's just brain chemistry that's causing all of these things and that sometimes need to be needs to be treated by medication but other times it's just bad behavior it's like you're just focused you're letting your brain focus on this this one what if this one catastrophe that could happen and you get in the cycle of like oh all of this anxiety just continues to build and build and build and so a cognitive behavioral therapy does is it stops that cycle cuz it says Wendy's not allowed for the track you're not allowed to continue thinking about that you got to change your behavior like one of the things that I deal with is health anxiety and this this all happened very recently for me health health stuff I was I was never conscious of my health when I was growing up but it all happened fairly recently back in September when I had my first panic attack on my way to work tell me what that was like if you don't mind because I've never had it it will explain him to me I'm like gosh that says oh I never had one so I didn't know what it was so what was what was happening what is it so I was on my way to work and one of my co-workers text me and and said I just said hey are you on your way or something about the day and that was enough to like trigger it because at the time I was dealing with a lot of stress at work didn't want to be there they didn't want me there and they eventually let me go like a month later after it happened so it was it was a really bad situation it was causing me a ton of stress ton tons of anxiety so on my way to work I get this text and I just feel like anxiety like normal anxiety but like a tightening in the body that sort of thing just like my hands start to get clammy my heart my heart rate kind of picks up a little bit everybody experiences something different yeah but as I was going on my way to work I felt like this rush of blood through my feet and through my hands and then my heart started like pounding in my chest and I thought I was having a heart attack I was like I have no idea what's happening and it was like a cycle like I would have that I would have the rushing feeling that my heart would start pounding and it would go away and then maybe a minute later it started again and the whole cycle started to repeat and that was a panic attack I learned later I like immediately turn around and went to the hospital and they checked me out and put EKGs all over me and everything and they said no you're fine your heart looks good everything looks fine so it was just a panic attack but that was the first time I ever experienced anything like that wow wow so and since then I've had more panic attacks apparently once you've had one there's a lot easier to have more man that's unfortunate yeah it's unfair and I never like I said before that that happened I never had what am I trying to say I didn't deal with health anxiety before it happened but after it happened I really started to think oh my gosh you know I have kids now what would happen if I did just die on my way to work and so that started this catastrophizing health anxiety all this stuff what I realized is eventually over time after reading some books and starting to go through some of the literature on anxiety was that some of the behaviors that I was doing was completely just like making everything worse and so what I was doing was I would get on Google and anytime I had a new symptom of something I'll get on Google and be like okay what is this new symptom and that I learned later on that's my that's one of my triggers yes so I got so I eventually stopped doing that even though like I don't know what this new thing is like I have this new pain in my back or my new pic this new pain in my chest or my arm or whatever I'm like this has got to be something like I have cancer now in this area of my body and that's what the anxiety driven brain does which again can apply to belief about God that's why I think it's so important that we talk about this that maybe your doubt maybe your anxiety or doubts about God's existence are not rational they're just based on these bad behaviors that you've built up or there's this chemistry that is going on in your mind that if you got that sorted out see you would no longer be driven by these doubts I don't doubt that what you bring up is a good point I just want to play the devil's advocate here because we as Christians know how insulting it is when an atheist looks at us and says like you're just deluded like you're actually like there's something you're sick in the brain and like belief is a disease and you just need to be treated it should it should be legitimately in the DSM so that you can be treated and it kind of sounds like you're saying maybe the opposite is true like well if you don't believe then maybe there's just something mentally wrong with you and that could be insulting - yeah they were genuinely seeking God and can't find him that's a good point that we could clarify here so I'm not saying that everybody is experiencing this and all doubt is irrational I'm saying that some doubt can be irrational and can be driven by these factors and I think it actually happens in more cases and we'd like to admit that's one of the things that's super interesting to me is that a lot of people have said you know it's really weird that you are so open about your anxiety and to me like I don't understand why people are so like they don't want to talk about it mm-hmm I just never understood that I think I'm really hoping that you are like that I'm totally open to talking about it because I like if it's an irrational part of me that's causing all of these things like again I think it goes back to the insecurities if it's a legit criticism then it shouldn't bother me but if it's not a legit criticism still shouldn't bother me so then it yes so anyways I'm not saying that all doubts is irrational I think that some doubt can be completely rational and is not driven by anxiety but I think that the fact of the matter is that so many people deal with anxiety and so for some people this is going to be very relevant and I know people like in my my own experience who have been dealing like they've struggled with some of these doubts that are caused by brain chemistry that the only way that they got it sorted out was to get on medication and it's not just about God's existence it was it was this kind of catastrophizing about other areas about just anything going to work you can't get in your car to go to work because what if I get in a crash and I die you know what if this happens is bad consequence so it's not just about existence I think anxiety afflicts a lot of people and it's it's a potential pitfall that could be cured in a sense if you either get on the right medication or you take the right steps and you stop these bad behaviors from leading to all of these potential bad things like I mentioned about this philosopher friend of mine who struggle with OCD he he told me that after he got on the right medication he was no longer like experiencing these crippling doubts and like it for him it was obviously just like a brain chemistry thing and once you can get rid of those those crippling doubts that are just like overriding your mental capacities then you can really start to think rationally about something instead of just being driven to all of these skeptical conclusions because of these underlying biological or things that are going on beneath the surface that you're just not recognizing you think and that's that's because we'd like to think that we're just rational creatures like we're I'm just a rational person just really looking at the ssme theta yeah from an unbiased perspective when in reality you know there's stuff going on beneath the surface and this could be caused this could be a big cause of that could you could you maybe give me an example of how you use this sort of what did you call a cognitive behavioral therapy in a non-religious sense so what is it something when use your thoughts start to go off the track maybe it has to with family or friendships or career and you realize that could you would you mind leading us down there what are you doing how does that work yeah so this is unorthodox and I don't recommend therapists we're not giving therapy advice right but this is what I started doing and it's helped me and again what I deal with his health anxiety that's like the number one source of my anxiety right now it's not talking with atheists online like I still get nervous and I get anxiety when I'm about to go on and speak with somebody and even sometimes when I interact with people that I disagree with online but it's not it's never been at the level where it's caused a panic attack or anything like that it's really just health anxiety is my that's my my main source of exact that like the serious anxiety so what I've started to do when I start to I notice that like I get a pain somewhere in my body and I'm like oh my gosh what is this what's happening what you know what's the cause of this is this something really serious is gonna lead to this thing so just all the typical signs of catastrophizing what I what I do is all like wake myself out of that by like punching myself in the leg or like you're saying causing causing pain somewhere on my body yeah and that immediately pulls me out and like brings me back to the real world and this is a strategy I actually learn from it kind of takes you out of your head doesn't it oh yeah ayan brings you out of yourself yeah nothing brings you back to reality like pain like just just like intense pain somewhere else on your body and I'm like I've had experiences where like I'll have a pain that's like right here in my chest and anxiety can cause that anxiety can cause pain in your chest and it feels like man this is just like a real pain that I'm experiencing like what is this and I'll like I'll do something like I'll punch myself in the arm or like cause pain somewhere again this sounds really weird no I do the same thing can I be honest with you yeah yeah this is a bit embarrassing but I had a bad night's sleep last night and there's times that you're talking to me I'm following you but I start glazing over you know how when you close over you don't go do that yeah that'll look good on camera so what I've been doing occasionally this is not cuz you're uninteresting everything's fascinating I'm pinching myself I've heard done like two times two or three times in this interview we're chatting and I'll start to glaze over and I'll pinch myself a CD whoa hey DeeDee what is that oh I definitely am a Z David that's not the problem the problem is I'm exhausted and so but that's interesting because it's like it's something similar what you're saying is just sort of like it brings you out of yourself did you hear what he's saying about like pain and so and I've noticed that like when I want to have this pain in my chest I'll like punch myself in the leg really hard yeah I'm not hurting myself not bruising I'm not bruising myself I'm just like causing enough to pain to bring my might like snap my mind out of it just to stop that bad behavior yeah I wonder if people I think I've had people talk about having a rubber band around there on oh and just slapping it and that's not of it I've heard that I can't vouch for it of course but yeah it's weird how effective it is it's really weird yeah like you know you'll have a thought like what is that you're like no no I'm not going there hmm and in the past I would just I would get on Google immediately and start searching like you know sharp pain and chest Cantonment ah yeah and what's interesting is that on Google like all the links that are on the front page are meant like they're they're all designed to give you the worst case scenario because that's what everyone's worried about and so you immediately are gonna go click on that link we yeah so it's it's completely terrible like the whole setup is basically against you when you do with health anxiety or yeah interesting thanks for that yeah how much of this anxiety is caused by the modern world in which we live because in some ways we've never had it cushier yeah I work for myself this is happening at home you know like you know I think that's good we're not bad we're not running into battle you know we're not we're not dealing with these significant stresses I'm defending my family from potential attack yep I'm not on the streets anymore for my family so part of me feels guilty for feeling anxiety because I think we'll gosh quite a cushy life and yet if you walk around with this stupid thing which I hate then people are I mean the two examples you just gave me began with technology like the one was the guy texting you about work and you saw it on your way to work the second was you typing things into Google yes I just thought about I haven't given that a lot of thought but I'm totally open to that I mean anxiety is definitely increasing cash nowadays and I think it's virtually in this state of response this people text each other today as if they're in the same room as each other talking to them and if you and I are in the same room I was like hey Cameron and you didn't respond I take either you didn't hear me or you were ignoring me for some reason in which case I might be offended yeah right people text like that hey Cameron if you don't text back like soon like they make all these assumptions about I just want to have to reply to people like texting each other hey I have a wife and kids and a family I want to lay out the back and smoke a cigar I want to write and read I don't have to be on beck and call but this is what's happened when I was 16 years old if you wanted to contact me you had three options and only three options you could write a letter to my house and post it you could call the phone that was bolted to my kitchen wall or you could come to my house and if I there go to the shops and find me there's I don't think of it there's no real other way so how much Tecna is technology increasing or is my point I think that's saying people weren't anxious back then yeah today you can get in touch with me now thank God I don't run my own social media but people are writing to me over there on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook I let my voicemail fill up so I don't have to reply to people people text me dude just so you know your voicemails full I'm like I know I don't want to hear from you I don't want to respond to you I don't want to be bothered by these million voices demanding my attention I want to live a more purposeful life and if that means offending you I'm really ok with that go no I think that technology can definitely be contributing and there's probably studies that have been done to prove this it seems like that's a pretty logical yes thing that's happened yeah so I would I would I would be on board with that and it's gonna make me start to think more about ways to disconnect from technology am i my wife and I have already been talking about that like we want to be disconnected from technology when we're with our kids and this has been a good quality time with them instead of always like you said always being on like beck and call forget about everyone who wants to talk to us and text us you know what I did recently I jumped emails so somehow Matt Fred at gmail.com which is pretty you know secretive I'm not sure how you'd guess that was my email but that that's the sarcasm that got out on one and people started like writing me a lot like bombard people I've never heard of a writing to me I'm I don't have time for this so I created a new email and then I set a vacation responding indefinitely that says don't use it anymore go to my website I don't even give my assistants email I just don't want to deal with you and I jump over here and I am so proud of myself and I think I'm making the right decision I think people should be more like that and it's surprising to me that people find that almost a little like whoa that's a bit much I think you should probably do something like that why do I have any right to respond to some random person who writes me even if you obligated the Geisha thank you even if they're in a crisis if I I mean I I received so many emails from people who are struggling with pornography that if I were to reply to each of them substantively I have no time to do anything else yeah which is why I wrote a book on the topic and so actually as I say that I'm thinking to myself okay then I should incorporate that into my reply if you're trying to looking for help for this so I will do that right to be more secure because I do want to help people I don't want people to be in pain and I want to help however I can I really do but at the same time you have to be very vigilant about guarding that I think speaking of people who are like reaching out for help and one stuff as I've become more vocal about anxiety I've had people reach out to me and ask me like you know I'm dealing with anxiety in this moment what can I do and what I don't like one guy actually was telling me that his main source of doubt for his main source of anxiety is thinking about God's existence and objections to God's existence and he had basically the same exact experience that I did where was like this panic attack and they would continue and what I told him was bro get away from apologetics right yes leave it alone get on top of your anxiety and then revisit the arguments when your brain is right in the right mindset and you're not going to start catastrophizing get a hold of your anxiety before you start to really assess the arguments in the evidence because I think that you're really susceptible right now to irrationality so that's that's I think that's what going back to what you said earlier is like I'm not trying to say that everyone is irrational show but for people who are struggling with anxiety I think you need to get on top of that first because it can be the source it can be it can be one major source of what's driving you to doubt God's existence and it does again it doesn't just have to do with God it can do with exactly I mean my my main source of anxieties about Hell shoes yeah so I think you've got to get that on top of that first before you want to start just happier words for the rational like combat fatigue or argument fatigue it's like you can get whoo and we just can't get burnt out but I also wonder if you can kind of get addicted to it now I might be using that word and a loose sense of the word but people speak um a kind of Idol well people seem to get addicted I'm trying to think of an analogy to things like political commentary mm-hmm CNN Fox News they love it they're always watching it and they feeling outraged and their catastrophizing what will happen if Trump is reelected and what will happen if he isn't and that seems like if you want to like help with your anxiety just don't don't don't watch it because it's not like you watching it is leading you to do something that's going to help fix the country you're just getting angry but it's always like people are getting addicted to out people obviously are not addicted my I mean then they lose sense but it's like it's we become accustomed to it like an afternoon coffee that you need to have to get you through we turn on Ben Shapiro or CNN to get that fix and that isn't to say that I have valuable things to say CNN lesser it that isn't to say that right but it is to say I wonder if there's something like that with with the obsessing with apologetics or things that lead us to anxiety like here's an example I'm sorry I feel like I'm talking all over the place here so this is the cause of my anxiety or it is one cause of my anxiety but it's also the solution to it so it's a loop so if I'm bored I pick up my phone mm-hm and then I see that I have emails and texts which cause me anxiety so it's this like it causes anxiety it's soothers anxiety this and this so this is why I'm just I'm not because I'm better than most people but most people are constantly looking at their phone it's like this constant loop of anxiety and soothing what do you think about that what's the what what are you here what's the question oh my gosh I don't know if there's a question except to say do you agree with that that we yeah because I throw out a bunch there we tends it to be the source of anxiety but then also the solution so outrage political outrage is like that like you like yeah just are and you get it a hit of outrage there's a sense in which it's soothing but it aggravates you same thing with the phone and so to say what I've been about is just like find the source of your anxiety and nip that in the bud is like best you can but what's so difficult about it is what I'm saying is it's also the source of soothe who's going to apologetics and burning out on it is probably going there to regulate a little because he feels God doesn't exist everything's terrible so I need to I need to get this sorted so there's a sense in which is soothing himself but he's becoming agitated so when you say to some will just nip out he's like you're telling me to take away the thing that's sad like pacifying me in a way yeah I guess I would I would include that in the everything that's leading to anxiety so if the fact that you think that you have to have this in order to be happy in order to reach some state of well-being I would say that's a form of catastrophizing that's good yeah so it's so instead instead of feeding into that in making things worse what you think you're doing yourself a good favor or whatever yeah instead of doing that try something else like that's not obviously not working for you try something else put that away for a little while get your mind right and just you know see how you feel when you when you are in your right mind then pick it back up and just see how things are but until you get to that point I think that we ought to stop and really figure out what's what's really going on so sometimes sometimes I think the right thing to do is to to just put your your stuff away that's causing you to go down this path so put your phone down for a while you know you can there's a lot of stuff that you can do on your phone to limit what you can do on it what's it we don't take advantage of that like you can limit how much time you can spend on your apps you can limit who can send you messages and notifications you can limit you can turn off all notifications if you want so you never have to look at any so there's stuff that you can do in order to still use technology and not be bombarded with it you just have to be super vigilant you almost have to have the level of social control that most of us don't have but it just depends on how serious you are about getting better oh yeah that was that was my thing but my plan is I think I think for many people if you're serious are being better it's gonna mean more than adjusting apps it might mean just getting rid of your phone it could be like yeah maybe maybe you need to give it to your spouse and say put this in a closet for these little lock boxes if you've seen that you could do something like that just like get this away from me but what does that say about us that we need to lock things away from us because we don't have the self-control to reach honestly who cares what it says about you right exactly you're in pain you need to do it yeah yeah yeah like what yeah that strikes me as another insecurity it's like who cares yeah it's awesome dude well thanks very much tell people how they can learn more about capturing Christianity about your fantastic debates I mean hopefully we'll have a lot of our evangelical brothers and sisters watching but we'll also have a lot of Catholics may not have heard about you before so tell them maybe if there was one debate you would tell them to go turn to on your YouTube channel to watch to learn about you and your ministry what would it be before I talk about my ministry let me just mention that there's a really great book on anxiety by JP Moreland called finding peace really JP Moreland wrote a book on JP Moreland is like the anxiety captain he like he's dealt with that's a terrible name I love it he's he's dealt with anxiety his whole life he was thrown to it he had some of the same experiences that I did so he has a book on it and he does talks on it too it's cool so yeah finding PC I'm planning to my soother by JP Moreland there you go JP Morgan great book he gives a lot of strategies that he's used as well in the book and a lot of them did help me when I was first going through anxiety and I'm a lot I'm doing a lot better now and I'm off medication so it's doing great but if you guys want a resource on that check out finding peace by JP Moreland such a great book but to talk a little about my ministry capturing Christianity calm yeah is my website but the main source of my ministry what I do is on YouTube so I do a few different types of content I'm actually like a variety Channel I think is the the term for it so I don't create just one type of content which on YouTube is actually kind of bad like you only want to do one type of content per channel but some some channels do variety and it's it's okay it works for them so sometimes it's good sometimes it's not anyways I'm a variety Channel so what I do is I have videos that I posted just me talking about a subject for maybe five minutes maybe thirty minutes I'll respond to atheists objections or I'll respond to an atheist I have a bunch of videos like that the second type of content that I do or interviews so I interview professional Christian philosophers they don't have to be Protestant they can be Catholic I've interviewed some some really brilliant Catholics and that's the second type of content third type of content is I host discussions between people and so one of the ones that I did most recently was between IDI fazer and Grandma P and whether there are any good arguments for God's existence and so that was don't they say no so Oppie is I don't know what good means not necessarily successful but the first hour and 20 minutes of that discussion like if you're not interested in really analytic philosophy really breaking stuff down because what he does Graham is in the first part of the discussion he breaks down what it means what it was the criteria of a good argument and made a lot of people for a lot of people's gonna be super more ideas yeah so if you want to get past that if you're not super interested one of your comments on that video is this is what you came for I penned it yeah yeah and so it gives you the link to the direct time of when they start going back and forth on some of phasors arguments because they've had back and forth in the literature like Graham responded to Ed's book I think maybe a couple different papers and so they had a back and forth about some of the points that Graham raised in his papers and so it was a great discussion I mean I enjoyed the whole thing if you want to get into the argument side of it like the actual arguments gentlemen yeah then look at the pin comment and the first the first comment and in the description below the description of the video so that's what I do on my channel because I do this those two kind of things so I have some videos where I'm in person but most the majority of my interviews are like Skype interviews where I have somebody in their life their live stream so I love doing it you just such a great job it feels like the Lord has really prepared you for this in giving you your talents and studies to be a great photographer and I I've said it before I'm not just saying it to flatter you I can't think of another this might just because I don't use YouTube as much as other people but when I look at your stuff I'm like this is better than anything I've ever seen whether it be secular or Christian well there are no I'm not trying to toot my own horn here but I think that what sets my ministry apart is is that that my background is in photography and so I try to make things look really nice and really pretty and use 4k stuff to make it extra you know high resolution and everything so that's just part of who I am in my story but I don't recommend that for everybody like if you people that are watching YouTube are usually really what's the term forgiving forgiving they don't really care about quality necessarily as long as they can hear it well as long as they can sort of see what's happening and it's not like a but you know it's not tedious to try to figure out what this person is saying because the microphone quality is so awful as long as they can see it and hear it okay mystic Institute as long as they can see it okay there's mud Cusco the two mystic Institute has fantastic content which you check out I think I have it it's really good it's a big cast right yeah these Dominicans they well they they facilitate it but they basically record these lectures on campus I'm gonna look it up I think I have it it's fantastic content I think they're right now in the process of boosting their audio content really yeah phases given a bunch of lectures there the thomas against the toot there - there you go Oh have you subscribed good yeah I told you yeah well there's another one good god splaining where to Dominican sit around and chat Oh interesting yeah father Gregory Pines on my show he's part of it okay continue um what was I saying Oh for everybody it's not forever yeah I would say right like if someone feels like that gonna meet your quality oh yeah you might have spent all your time trying to do that and you're not actually using the gifts that you have and that's going nowhere if it's not going to assist you in getting you know more views or if it doesn't make sense with your branding there's no need for it like if you look at the top guys like even like PewDiePie you know PewDiePie is like the biggest youtuber ever I think someone's actually gonna pass him up pretty soon here but he has like the biggest YouTube channel and the quality is videos or sex it's not that great yeah and the doesn't matter also not that great the content people love the content why but i'm paris to call myself human i'm just talking about the quality of videos right now we're not gonna trash on PewDiePie lighting and camera angles and stuff yeah like the setup that you have here is perfect like it's exactly like it's it's actually way more than what people sort of need and there's a consume content on YouTube thanks man so if that makes you feel good no it's it's great and yes so that's that's what I would say is that that's that's one thing that I embrace the quality aspect of it that's something that I embraced as part of who I am mm-hmm you had a factor on coming in right and it's not totally tedious to you to set up this camera it's just second nature yeah yeah and I like me I don't know I wouldn't even know how to turn one of this cameras on what I think like I just enjoy doing that kind of stuff thinking about lighting and different camera angles and cool stuff that I can do like eventually I want to have a studio like this how you have your your in-person interviews like I want to do that good man good yeah cuz it would be sad if the only YouTube channels are exploding we're like atheistic propaganda channels and there's a lot of those and we should say thank you to my patrons and you would say thank you to yours because you know it's funny I mean some of these atheist channels you go to their patreon page they have a lot of patrons and yeah it would be sad if we as Christians weren't investing in things that we consider to be good content that could you know spread the word right then they were and we're not yeah that we've said yet would be but it's been beautiful it's been beautiful to see that there are a lot of people who are stepping up and making sure these independent forms of media are growing right yeah I mean on your patreon it's it's really really healthy and I think we need we need we need more ministries like this that are doing this on YouTube and being very strategic about it don't just like pump out videos just because you want to have this thing it's really about bringing people to a knowledge of saving knowledge of of God mmm that's really what it's about and representing it in the right way and there's a lot that that's you've got to think about in order to do that it's like it should not be taken lightly I think about the connection that that dr. Craig well dr. Craig going back to him who you interviewed just a couple weeks ago about a month ago at this point yeah he talks about the fact that not everyone should be a debater like you shouldn't just go shouldn't you most people shouldn't be debating atheists and the reason for that is because that's not what everyone is called to do and that would be that would that would apply to me like I think I've done a debate on pornography on unbelievable did you know that with Justin early I debated like a sex worker and someone else and a libertarian who thought porn was good you should listen to it oh my goodness was fun I did really well oh really yeah I destroyed them but I could not do a debate with an atheist I'm just not quick on my feet when it comes to these sorts of things like and I don't want to pretend to be it's like this is not my gift yes so if you're looking for advice on starting YouTube channel don't do it no no really think about it really pray about it it's not something that you should take lightly mm-hmm basically it's my my whole point do you like that I destroyed them isn't that you how you said I guess it's very controversial you got to do that Matt destroys pornographers you should you should put that on don't worry I did really well that was hopeless they were absolutely hopeless so it wasn't so much my genius it was more understanding the science of what was coming out and them having no clue about it wow that was fun so you have to go to Frank Turek who actually heard it and I saw that he posted about it so this is a great episode and then it was Sean McDowell who heard it and got in touch with me to be interviewed on his podcast because of that unbelievable click there you go Wow but for some reason I feel competent to talk on that issue maybe cuz I wrote a book on it whereas I haven't really written much on atheism a little bit here and there but yeah cool but your knowing your gifts and praying and asking the Lord to direct you mm-hmm because we can fall into the trap of thinking unless I'm on YouTube I'm not doing anything good unless I've got a significant good is like know like if you're like a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad like you're potentially doing far more for the kingdom in fact you are doing far more for the kingdom if that's what the Lord's calling you than if you were to go get a hundred thousand subscribers yeah and that's not what you're supposed to be doing and that's a tough thing like speaking of biases right is biases the plural of bias bias I'm not sure but speaking of not being able to see that part in us like it's being aware of that like in ministry it's like my wife and my kids have to come first if I save the world or if I bring people to Christ you know through these these endeavors and I fail to love my wife like I think I risk going to hell like if I if I abandon the family same thing you pointed out was like the reason I think why we don't really take that part as seriously is because like no one stands up and applauds us I change a diaper yeah that's an honest thing it's like I'm embarrassed to admit it because it's so honest but I admit it because I know it's a lot of people's experience when I go out on the road and I give a talk like I'm going to Missouri and I'm gonna give it to up to these high school students that all-boys school it'll do terrific I will crush them it'll be awesome and they'll probably love it and I feel really good about that I just spoke to like a thousand young men about breaking free from pornography I feel good but if I come home and the house is messy and my kid is being Moody and then I snap at them I didn't intend to and I feel like a failure and I feel like agitated what am I gonna want to go towards not the messy moody agitated house I want to be out there and we don't see that yeah we justify it well no no I'm doing the work work at the Lord no you're not you're gonna love your wife and love your kids and if they don't come first which is really great why I have a very strong wife cuz she'll tell me she'll oh yeah mine too me in my place mine too she's really cool he's done it several times already that's cool because your parents were in ministry under her parents are in ministry in Parden so she's probably seen how that plays out what's good what might not be so good and so she might be able to see that in you more like new yeah right right so she's noticed it times when in the evenings I'll still be like posting stuff on social media and interacting with people and it's like my kid is sitting here right next to you and I'm sitting here just on my phone yeah you're not paying attention and she'll she'll point that out you know regularly is something I've definitely not mastered yeah and I often feel guilty about but I'm really you know thankful to have a wife that's constantly trying to make me better that's what I love about her yeah she's always making me better that's awesome yeah and then once you get a office outside the home if you do if yeah I think I think eventually it will happen if you do that because I do that it's really great cuz I'll go to the office and it's a cheap little office for me but I'll just lock the door leave my phone leave I'll just text kami driving home done at my phone I'll leave my phone leave my computer and just drive home for the weekend it's it's great that's what I have to do I understand that it runs like that people got better regulating their behaviors on technology for me even if I put it up it's still this like I could get it oh I shouldn't yeah I'm still doing that hard work of resisting when if it's not an option I'm just a lot freer right yeah can I ask you a question yeah what is your favorite argument for God's existence starting I think yours that was really fascinating again I have to think about it more I like Aquinas is 5th way the idea is that when we look at the world we see that things act for towards ends and it's not by chance because it doesn't happen haphazardly it happens with regularity and things is in what like people or natural things you know like you could say like this seed turns into this flower you know electrons and protons join together to form atoms and things like that and this happens regularly and you could say well it's either by chance or by some sort of in baked baked it baked in intention hmm and if it's not sure it sounds like a design argument yeah it is a design argument but it's it's not it doesn't it it's it can't be thwarted by any appeal to evolution or something because like the design argument it's it's before that but it's not necessarily based on the you know first constants and quantities or whatever Craig talks about it's just saying you look around you see that things act towards an end that's good and you like what explains that why does things happen with regularity if it's not chance has to be something else and if it's if that if there's some sort of baked in intention well it would seem that that intention has to be given here's something that you might find super interesting in his book how reason can lead to God Josh was I get this book he was a computer scientist analysts and something to do with computers so he was building models and I think he got a grant one time and I could be getting the details could be fuzzy here but he got he was working on this project where he was trying to create complex creatures through a process like evolution on a computer program wow what a mess he a brilliant did he he's pretty smart anyways he started to put in the parameters and like let's get let's start out with these number of of complex creatures and then let's just see what happens like let's just say that you know they mutate and then like let's throw in natural selection and then just see what happens and you know however many generations and just see what kind of things creatures we wind up with and every time he ran it if it was just randomized like there were no end goal that he specified in the system then it would always go to two more simple organisms or on the other hand if he specified like really long creatures like he wanted every creature to be really this just the longest possible then the creatures would would end up doing that like they would mutate natural selection would go toward that that direction but if he didn't specify anything then they would just go in and basically evolve down to their simplest parts and so the only way to get complexity in this programs to have a was to have that as the end goal and was to put that in there so this reminds me of this argument yes of that but then if you even on something like evolution seems like you might need an end goal and that would be completely compatible with like these naturalistic mechanisms but you have this in right big old ways from the beginner even the word evolution assumes that we're evolving instead of devolving whereas these creatures Josh created when they would go to their simplest paths or something we would say though devolving they weren't actually becoming more they weren't incorporating more being they were being reduced yeah yeah they were becoming less and less complex yeah and then I would say I don't know I would just say it seems like God exists my life works a lot better when I act like God exists like fundamentally better not just it's not like a superficial better but like everything just seems to be like infused better and so I go with that I also had an experience of God's love when I was 17 and that was transformative in my own life and it wasn't a sort of experience that just faded like every other experience I had as a teen and so I'd say like these these are kind of reasons I believe in God I would also say I'm with Craig and others who say when I look at the arguments for God and against God I find these more compelling mm-hmm but I don't walk around thinking holding arguments in my head and and therefore in siding with that continually I just yeah yeah for me I think apologetics has played a real central role in making it the case that I'm still a Christian so I started out as a Christian but the reason why I'm Christiaan after I was introduced to philosophy and apologetics is because of apologetics and the arguments in the evidence so I think that's a lot of people say oh well you're just a Christian because you grew up that way well I'll say in part but the reason why I'm still a Christian is because the arguments in the evidence ultimately like there were plenty of opportunities for me to fall away if I thought that there were good reasons and good arguments on the other side of it mm-hmm all right so thank you very much Cameron we are gonna take a pause here on youtube if you want to watch the post-show wrap-up clip become a patron at patreon.com slash matt fred in this post show wrap-up clip i'm going to share with cameron one good reason i think he should be a catholic now he'll likely disagree with it but if you're a patron you'll get to watch that by going to patreon.com slash Matt Fred you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 24,101

Rating: 4.9347553 out of 5

Keywords: God, atheism, agnosticism, cosmic skeptic, skepticism, alvin plantinga, Josh Rasmussen, William lane craig, Christopher hitchens, Richard dawkins, skeptic, religion, plantinga, aquinas, calvin, protestant, catholic, apologetics, apologist, fradd, capturing christianity, graham oppy, coffee, philosophy, theology, history, jesus, resurrection, contingency argument, contingency, Thomas aquinas, catholicism, pope, bible, scripture, does god exist, unbelievable?

Id: n1kkchTX2R8

Length: 179min 52sec (10792 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020