Two Baby Philosophers Discuss the Ontological Argument

so hello welcome to capturing christianity today we are talking about the ontological argument with two philosophers in the title of this i call them baby philosophers and there's a reason for that because they're actually both really young but they're both just super intelligent and i'm i want to say i'm definitely friends with joe but alex would you say that you and i are friends i mean i that's what i want to say but of course but of course absolutely he said that so elegantly too all right oh yeah i mean that that's what i said i said i think we're friends but i i don't know if you would consider his friends so cameron what what are we are we gonna have that chat right best friends first of all i mean i think we're best friends that's what i think well let yeah let's get to the topic um so we're talking about the ontological argument we're going to explain what that is and the reason why we're discussing this topic is because uh actually recently joe submitted a paper for review it's currently under review if i understand that correctly joe and so you're unfortunately you guys aren't going to be able to watch or watch you aren't going to be able to read his paper the ideas that are in the paper themselves but we're going to discuss some of those ideas here so in this paper he defends the ontological argument against a really common objection and so that's basically what the plan is today is that alex is going to push back we're just going to have a really good dialogue about the ontological argument but before we jump into the actual dialogue i want to give my two guests joe and alex just a moment to tell you guys who they are if you don't know and then i've got both of their youtube channels linked in the description this video so go check them out for sure but let's start with alex alex for anyone watching this who doesn't know who you are who are you and he's frozen while we're waiting for alex to get joe why don't you start we'll switch what's going on yeah uh okay so yeah like you said um i'm joe i do both popular and scholarly level work in philosophy i have a youtube channel called majesty of reason where i do lecture videos in philosophy particularly philosophy of religion metaphysics i also have philosophers on my channel like josh rasmussen rob coons i'm also getting trenton merrick's on in august so i'm really excited for that uh and on the pop on the scholarly level i have my book and let's see if i can point backwards is it up there no i did it wrong okay so pointing backwards that's my book majesty of reason and then i also um publish various papers in in peer-reviewed journals so yeah yeah and you've uh did you mention youtube channel sorry i was focused on alex getting back in the show did you mention your youtube channel i think i think i did yeah majesty of reading if you all want to just check it out yeah which is one of the coolest youtube names that you could even come up with uh way cooler than cosmic skeptic but alex tell everyone who you are uh welcome back to the show who who are you uh i hope i'm audible because i was just having some problems yes i think i must have disconnected so now i'm just hot spotting on my phone so sorry if i disappear again yeah i'm i'm alex and i'm an atheist youtuber uh although i don't know i mean i recently flirted with the idea that um well i mean i recognize that in the context of academic philosophy where i work mostly is like the the area i like to think that i work in um atheism tends to be defined as the belief that there is no god although colloquially speaking among my friends and colleagues it seems to be a lack of belief in god and so call me whatever you like um i generally to bridge the device myself an agnostic atheist youtuber um so yeah that's what i do i make videos about that and then i nag people uh for eating meat as well more recently is another mantle that i've taken up um that's about it that's all there is to me that's all literally that's that's everything you need to know about alex so let's start i wanna i wanna jump right into the dialogue about the ontological argument so i've titled this i've just got the little thing i'm bad at this too joe is god's existence possible and so yeah let's start with talking just about give an overview of what the ontological argument is one of the let me also mention this one of the reasons why this is the topic that because alex and joe and i we were talking about like what topics could we actually focus on in a dialogue between the two of them and we settled on this one because alex i know that you've mentioned uh several times in your videos and also just personally that like the ontological argument is an argument that you kind of take seriously you like to think about it i mean obviously you don't think that it works but nevertheless you think that it's like an important argument in in some way so i just thought that it was a good topic we all basically agreed that it was a good time do you want to say anything about that just some some thoughts that you've got on the ontological argument i think it's potentially the most fun of the arguments it's just such a it's such a trip to just sit and do nothing but think there's no there's no kind of researching no evidence no looking at statistics or anything like that you just sit there and and talk it through and then you think well how about we define this word this way and see where that leads us and before you know it you get a eureka moment and you know a problem with the previous version no longer exists i just find it absolutely fascinating that you can just sit and do that in your brain um i i just i find it crazy to think that it's at least conceivable and a lot of philosophers seem to think it's conceivable to prove or establish the existence of god through pure reason alone and that if it can be done i'd like to know about it because it seems the most kind of low effort way to come to theism um because i can do it for my armchair so if it's possible i'd like to know about it that's why i'm here cool so then why don't we get into uh and joe feel free to like if you want to say anything else i know that we kind of talked about like how should we structure the beginning of this as we set everything up so let's just get an overview of the ontological argument introduce whatever terms you want whatever whatever you know other important little distinctions whatever you want to make but let's just give an overview of the argument and then we'll turn to uh some of the things that you've said recently in defense of it and keep in mind that let me let me mention this one last thing before we before we start is that alex he's already talked that he's already mentioned that he's an atheist and uh sorry joe again i was oh and now joe's gone well well uh so what i was gonna mention and uh joe doesn't have to be around for for me to say this but i was just gonna say that joe is an agnostic and so that kind of makes this whole dialogue between the two of them interesting because we're talking about the ontological argument it's an argument for theism yet joe is still an agnostic alex is an atheist and then also joe has defended the argument in print uh recently again it's under review so we'll uh we'll see where that goes let me see if i can pull up uh while we're waiting for joe to get back here we go just me and and alex how's it going just the two of us best friends um yeah i it's i'm i'm sure that we're we're i was quite impressed with joe's paper he was kind enough to send it over to me and it's uh it's an interesting argument that i hope we get to discuss but we've talked so far as if there's only one such thing as there's only one ontological argument that exists it's of course worth noting that there are many many quite different versions that work very differently and require different kinds of assumptions and different forms of thinking and i actually i mean recently i've been talking to a friend of mine his name's ryan he has a youtube channel called maximally great philosophy which i really just want to steal for a podcast um and he came practically raving to me recently he's just got on to a phd under eugene now osaka is that how you say his name eugene nagasawa i think uh yeah i don't have him on my show actually fantastic i mean i i'm a big fan of his work and he came to me and he'd been talking about the moa for the longest time and he and he came to me recently and said you know what i've been revisiting anselm and he was right all along we've all just completely misunderstood him um and you know what fair play to him he did actually make me rethink the thing i think that anselm's version has a lot more credit than a lot of people tend to give it credit for um including my former self um i was quite pleased to find that there's kind of a way to respond to parody objections um all this is to say that uh it's we don't have to restrict our discussion to the modal ontological argument although that seems to be the one that everyone thinks is if one's going to work it's going to be that one yeah but i'm not i'm not so sure i don't know i'm actually at this point i think i'm more attracted to anselm's version than i am to the moa interesting i i don't really know all right looks like joe is actually joining us again let me see if i can pull him in the scene joe can you hear everyone yeah okay he's back annoying that's frustrating but okay i came back quickly so you know you did and we've had about a thousand different technical issues so it's totally cool let's do this so alex and i were just talking about uh basically the fact that there are different versions he also said some nice things about anselm's version at least a defensive anselm's version of the argument uh from a friend of his so let's uh turn it over to joe and uh give us an overview of the argument to get us going into uh what you said recently in defense of it all right yeah so an ontological argument roughly is just sort of like an armchair proof or armchair argument for god's existence and what that means is that we're trying to justify a conclusion a prayer i so that's just independently of some kind of experience of the world say and it's an argument for god's existence based on among other things perhaps god's nature or the concept of god or maybe the nature of existence or perfection or perhaps god's possibility okay so that's an ontological argument now the ontological argument that we're gonna be focusing on today is the modal ontological argument and so to talk a little bit about modality the modality concerns the study of possibility necessity contingency impossibility things like that and i just want to make a quick three-fold distinction between different kinds of possibility before we get going because it's really important so the first kind of possibility is logical possibility so logical possibility is just consistency in terms of some things like logical form or structure so so long as it isn't of the form a and not a so like there are dogs and there are no dogs or so long as it doesn't entail something of that form then the proposition in question or the being in question is going to be logically possible and so that's basically just a matter of not involving or entailing a strict contradiction uh the second kind of possibility that i want to talk about is metaphysical possibility so metaphysical possibility it's hard to define but it's roughly what genuinely can be true or can obtain in reality and so it not only must respect logical consistency but it also has to respect the natures of things so for instance maybe there's something in the very nature of causation that nothing can cause itself even though there might be there might not be anything strictly inconsistent of the form a and not a uh that follows from that so that's metaphysical possibility and there are different accounts of what metaphysical possibility consists in but we can think of it as what genuinely could obtain what genuinely could be in reality and then finally epistemic possibility so epistemic possibility is basically just consistency with what we know to be true about the world so for all i know something might be the case you know so for all i know it might be raining in i don't know tanzania right now um and that's possible epistemically speaking and it's also possibly false epistemically speaking and more of a like goldbox conjecture right so these things can come apart presumably gold's box conjecture is going to be necessarily true if true at all that's a conjecture in mathematics and but nevertheless we no one has a proof of it yet so we don't quite know it's like epistemically possible that it's true or false but it's necessarily true or false one way or the other and so there's a kind of you can these can disentangle from one another okay so that's modality and then i guess the final concept before i get into the um the argument itself is possible worlds so a possible world that's just a complete or total or global way that reality could be we i use it just as a kind of semantic heuristic device not trying to like ontologically commit to the robust existence of these like concrete universes or anything like that and then god as well so god as i define it is just going to be some kind of ultimate independent necessarily existent perfect being and by necessary i mean metaphysically necessary so that's what i mean by god and so then we can get into the modal ontological argument it's pretty simple i'm just going to give the simplest version of it it goes something yeah yeah so before you give the actual version i want to give alex an opportunity to come in because we've talked about what modality and then possible worlds is there anything that you'd like to add clarify anything you'd like to to say alex uh no i mean i i think it's a good description i think it's worth perhaps adding that we can represent um we can represent certain things in so if i wanted to say for instance that something is possible uh the way that that would be represented in modal talk would be to say that it is true in a possible world um to say that it's necessarily true is to say that it's true in all possible worlds um to say that it's impossible um is to say that it's true in no possible worlds uh i think that's worth for anybody who's who for whom this is the first introduction to modal logic it's useful to recognize that they can be used interchangeably so there is a possible world in which my shirt is red um that would be kind of the language that we use it wouldn't be something like oh it's possible that in some world my shirt is red that's kind of the way we're presenting things that there is a possible world again as joe says not not an actual physical world somewhere like a multiverse but rather a maximally consistent logical state of affairs that could obtain in which everything is as it is right now except my shirt is red but there's no possible world in which um there's a married bachelor there's no possible world in which there's a square circle for instance i think it's just worth adding that that's a that's a kind of that's how we're going to use the terms linguistically i think joe yeah no i think that i think that's excellent so that was good and then so yeah the argument would just be oh yeah what are you gonna say i just said cool oh okay so yeah the argument would go something like premise one possibly god as i just described it exists conclusion therefore god exists it sounds it sounds tricky but that follows from a system of motor logic called system s5 and in fact you can actually get that inference with weaker systems as well but that gets really complicated but s5 is just yeah it's a system of modal logic which just dictates what follows from what and how the kind of operators within modality interchange with one another so you know the operator's like possibility so that's like a diamond so possibly p that would be like diamond p necessarily p that would be like box p and so on so these systems of motor logic just basically telling you how you can go from various like combinations of operators to other combinations of operators and so the system s5 the the it has a kind of distinctive axiom and that distinctive axiom is if something is possible well then it's necessarily possible and that actually entails that if something's possibly necessary well then it's actually necessarily the case the entailment there is a little bit complicated but um yeah if people people want to like email me and ask me for the the derivation i think josh rasmussen has a derivation on his website of it and it's it's also online and um encyclopedias and whatnot but anyway so you can get from system s5 that if something is possibly necessarily the case then it you can shave off that possibility operator it simply is necessarily the case and since necessity entails actuality right if something's necessarily true that it's obviously actually true or necessarily existent then it's obviously actually existent you can get the conclusion that god actually exists right because if it's possible that god exists given that god's a necessary being as i defined them it follows that it's possibly necessary that god exists given system s5 you can shave off that possibility operator so it's necessary that god exists in which case it's actual that god exists so that's the basic form of the argument now i could pause here or i could spell out the the symmetry worry uh uh i'll just turn it over to you to see what you want to do there yeah go ahead alex oh yeah all sounds fine to me um a lot of kind of words being thrown around and i i hope that everybody manages to follow there's a lot of term new terminology for anybody that who's new to this um it might be worth thinking of it in terms of i remember way back when i first heard about this argument i basically misunderstood the point right because the the argument is something to the effect of if something is possibly the case then it's true in a possible world as i said before um if it's possibly necessary that is to say because if something's possibly the case it's true in a possible world if it's possibly necessarily the case then there's a possible world in which it's necessary but if something's necessary it's either true in all possible worlds or no possible worlds so if it's possibly true that means it's true and impossible and if it's possibly necessarily true it means it's necessarily true in at least one possible world and so it must be true in all possible worlds a useful analogy for people who think that feels like a bit of a trick or isn't really saying anything is to say it's a it's a lot like and i can't remember who to attribute this to but it's a lot like looking at a house and knowing that there's only one light switch for the whole house as to say either all of the lights are on or all of the lights are off and there's only one window open that is the the bathroom window or something and you can only see that the bathroom window is over that the bathroom light is on but from that you can derive that the whole uh that every single room in the house must be lit up it's a similar kind of thing just by saying that there's any possible world in which something is necessarily true that just means that it must be necessarily that that means it must be true in all possible worlds to say um i just want to spell that out because obviously this is the this is the basis of the discussion so i want to make sure that everybody is with us on that um i'm glad you noticed that okay so we could represent possible worlds like little circles let me see if i can move this up yeah okay so little circles let's say that like okay let me draw an actuality so this little at right here that is the actual world and so if we're saying that something is possibly necessary we're saying hey it's possibly the case so in some other possible world say we're going to move to that it's possibly the case that something is necessary so this is a world where we're locating the thing that's necessary so there's something that's necessary there but wait a second if it's necessarily existent right that means that that thing in there is in all possible worlds right and so then you can actually take you from there to this that thing is actually in all possible worlds so our space of possible worlds is actually filled by it right so we went from in the actual world here we said that it's possibly some it's possibly the case that something is necessary so we went to that possible world where that necessary thing exists and then we focus we're like oh hey wait wait a second it's necessarily existing which means it spans all worlds right so then you can go here and then you get it spans all worlds now that does assume system s5 uh but um yeah a lot of a lot of philosophers think that uh s5 does accurately capture metaphysical possibility and it should be i should emphasize that the argument that we're talking about here is indeed cast in terms of metaphysical possibility we're not saying like oh for all i know god might exist or for all i know god might not exist you know no we're saying premise one is that it's metaphysically possible there is some possible world some way that reality could be such that god exists and then from there you do get the god necessarily exists so yeah yeah i think this is one of the one of the first weaknesses or or rather kind of ways that the rule the the rug gets pulled under people is that when you ask them to accept the first premise it's possible that god exists most people say yeah i can agree with that in the sense of epistemic humility yeah sure it's possible that god exists but that's not we have to be careful to specify that we're talking about metaphysical possibility right so for example if you're somebody who thinks if you think to yourself well yeah i mean i think it's possible that god exists that means god must exist like that doesn't seem right like if you are of the mind if when you say you think god possibly exists you mean it in the sense of saying well possibly god exists possibly god doesn't exist i don't know um that's not the kind of possibility that we need for this argument to work if you if you are talking about metaphysical possibility and you say well it's possible that necessarily god exists it's possible that necessarily he doesn't it's like no you can't have both at the same time it's one or the other so one of the ways that i think one of the first mistakes i think that a lot of people make is they kind of go well yeah i mean the first premise seems reasonable it's possible that god exists but there are different types of possibilities very helpfully spelled out and so if you're just thinking epistemically speaking like yeah it could be true don't worry that doesn't quite commit you to the conclusion but if you think it's metaphysically possible then unfortunately you are committed yeah this this has been super helpful and i i think that joe especially your little scribble right there actually was was really helpful maybe we can refer back to it in just a little bit so yeah let's talk about one of the the main objections and this is one of the objections that led me away from thinking that the ontological argument was a sound argument or not not well so i'm a theist so i believe that the the premise is true that it's possible that god exists but whether an argument is sound is distinct from whether it's a good and sort of persuasive argument to people that don't already accept the premises of the argument so uh and this is one of the objections that led me there it's called the reverse ontological argument so uh joe i'm going to pass it back over to you and inform us on what this objection is yeah so like alex just said right you can't have your possibility claims both ways when we're talking about metaphysical possibility when we're especially when we're talking about well actually only when we're talking about necessary beings right necessary truths you can't say it's possibly true and possibly false under s5 motor logic the one that we're operating in here um a necessary being is going to be either necessary or impossible you can't say that it's both possibly true or possibly existent and also possibly not true or possibly non-existent uh so there's this reverse problem which is what you're pointing to and again the uh this is the biggest problem in the literature and it's that hey we can just run an exactly symmetrical argument with the opposite conclusion here's the argument premise one possibly god doesn't exist and so from that you actually get that god doesn't exist right if it's possibly true that god doesn't exist well that actually means that returning to this right um because we're in the actual world now we can imagine that this like little black dot is the world in which the necessary being is absent right so if we have the actual world here and it's possibly the case that the necessary being is absent well hold on a second if the possib if there were a necessary being it would span all worlds right and so if if the necessary being is absent in one of the worlds it simply can't be in any of the worlds right because if it were to be in any one of the worlds it would be in all of them as we showed right you go from here to here but in that case if there's one absent then you can just shave them all off okay so you can go from the possible non-existence of god to the actual non-existence of god and indeed the impossibility of god and so that is the reverse ontological argument and it's it's symmetrical right this is a problem because those first two premises they seem like epistemically on par right there doesn't like without giving some kind of independent argument no one should just privilege one of those premises over the other uh without some kind of independent reason that would just be arbitrary i mean one of them says possibly god exists one says possibly god doesn't exist um and it would seem arbitrary absent some kind of further considerations to just like foot stomp and privilege one of them over the other so that's the biggest problem essentially it's like yeah the argument doesn't give you any reason to go one way or the other precisely because there's this perfectly symmetrical objection uh argument as well uh and so that that actually spawns the need and i'll pause here that spawns the need for symmetry breakers a symmetry breaker tries to justify one possibility premise at the expense of another one and so it thereby tries to break that symmetry between the modal ontological argument and the reverse modal ontological argument so i'll stop there yeah alex do you have any thoughts on that i think it's just worth adding maybe that um alvin plantinga who is credited with formulating the modal ontological argument himself recognizes this problem and doesn't claim that the modal ontological argument works as an argument to establish the existence of god to an atheist he's only seeking to establish what he refers to as a rational warrant for for christianity that is if you are a christian um he thinks it's rational to accept the premise that possibly god exists and therefore it's rational to accept the conclusion that god does exist but it can also be rational to accept that god possibly doesn't exist and therefore he doesn't exist so for plantage for you know the actual argument's origin it's not strictly supposed to be an argument that establishes god existence it's just a way to say that i'm at least rationally warranted in some sense i think that's a bit of a cop out i think that's a bit of a weak thing to say um but obviously we're not here to discuss panting's views because you know as long as we can find a symmetry breaker um then we can do one better than plantinga and that's kind of seems to me the the holy grail of the ontological argument discussion is to find some kind of functional symmetry breaker um but this is the one thing that the ontological argument is good at doing because i i'm with cameron on this that is to say you basically got two breezes equally pushing against each other but it at least reduces the debate the debate is no longer you know god exists versus god doesn't exist it seems like it's much weaker now it's between god possibly exists and god possibly doesn't exist we recognize these aren't actually compatible um that seems like a much more modest thing to be arguing about you know so i think it's got that strength going for it the conclusion that we now need from a good argument is just that god possibly exists not that god exists because we've got this argument to take us that step further yeah so why don't we at this point because uh we're about at the half hour mark so why don't we turn now to uh to joe your recent paper that again is under review so i apologize you guys can't read it but we can at least talk about the ideas that joe presents in his paper so he presents a symmetry breaker and uh for for those of you that are having trouble following along first of all you're watching a video titled ontological argument so uh there's gonna be stuff like this that we that we've gotta discuss so uh symmetry breaker one last time just to reiterate is basically some type of consideration in favor of one of these possibility premises okay so in the regular modal ontological argument first premise at least the simplified version it's possible that god exists and in the reverse it's possible that god doesn't exist and so we need some reason to uh joe how did you say it we need some reason to privilege one possibility premise over the other one and so what joe has done in this paper even though he's an agnostic and so you can probably tell that he's got some reasons to think that this signature breaker doesn't ultimately work in the end but he's nevertheless defended one in print and uh he's gonna defend it against alex right now and we're just gonna have a really good dialogue about it so yeah so joe tell us what your symmetry breaker is uh you know in in this was one of the first questions i asked you i was like well which way are you going with the symmetry breaker are you going toward atheism are you going toward theism so which way is it going and then yeah just spell it out for us yeah so the symmetry breaker is indeed trying to favor the theistic possibility premise over and above the non-theistic or atheistic possibility premise and one kind of worry that i want to spell out that people should keep in mind when they're thinking about symmetry breakers is a lot of times when someone tries to offer a symmetry breaker for one of the premises they oftentimes don't realize that it kind of bites them back in the butt as it were and it actually supports the other possibility premise as well so you know some people will appeal to like conceivability well i can conceive of god existing um but it's like you know it's also i can surely also conceive of say naturalism being true or you know it's at least conceivable conceptually possible that naturalism is true or that or that there would be like a world filled with gratuitous evil say or you know filled with some kind of thing that would be incompatible with god's existence so i don't think conceivability or things like that are going to work so that's why i want to try to find one that doesn't ultimately you know bite both ways and so mine is what i call an explanatory symmetry breaker for the original modal ontological argument and so i i begin by focusing on what i call existential facts okay now those are just true propositions about the existence of concrete things so concrete things that's like a table and a chair and you and me and and god and cartesian egos or cartesian demons if they exist uh it's just anything with some kind of causal power and we can call these concrete things just like things or objects or beings for sure and so i take so again an existential fact is just a true proposition or some fact about the existence of concrete things so an existential fact an example would be turtles exist or tables exist or my house exists or something like that and so i take existential facts again to have the abstract form the x's exist or x exists and so i begin the paper by looking at a kind of strong explanatory principle and i call it the principle of explanation or p e for short and in rough sketch it says that hey all else being equal existential facts have an explanation okay more precisely i kind of spell out that explanation in different ways now i say that every existential fact according to pe is explained by some other fact which includes the existence of some concrete thing that is not among the concrete things specified in the first existential fact that's abstract i'll take it more concrete now so pick any existential fact you like that there are turtles say okay according to p e p e says that hey that existential fact that there are turtles that's going to be explained by some further fact that includes a concrete thing not among the concrete things in that original fact so it's going to include the explanation that is of there being turtles it's going to include some concrete thing that is not a turtle right and that just seems intuitive right how could you have an explanation of turtles why there are turtles as such why there are any turtles at all in terms of a turtle right you're presupposing the very thing you need to explain so um that that's p e it basically is saying that uh there there's going to be existential facts have some outside explanation and that explanation is going to include something that's not among the things being explained okay that's the basic thrust of p e now i do want to get some quick notes on the pe before going on to my my the main principle that generates my argument which is the principle of possible explanation so some notes on the pe so first pe doesn't like demand or require an existence or an explanation for example sorry joe i i think i'd i'd like to slow down just for a second and uh get it alex would you like to say anything or any any kind of clarification type questions or before we uh it all sounds good to me i mean i've of course read the paper so this is this is familiar um yeah but i mean it is gonna it is gonna be very much because it's quite a i mean you know joe's got a whole paper to to describe so i i don't mind the fact that i'm just kind of sat back not saying much oh yeah i'll be going to the group this won't be too long yeah it's fine i don't mind just letting you spell out the whole the whole thing i'll um i'll raise my hand if i've got any questions okay all right continue joe okay okay yeah so i was just giving some notes on the pe before going to the main principle that drives my symmetry breaker so we're not at my symmetry breaker yet i'm laying the groundwork so the first note that i want to make on pe is that it doesn't like demand or require an explanation for existential facts it just says that an explanation exists all else being equal and what that means is just that there's a kind of defeasible presumption in favor of there being an explanation like we should expect there to be an explanation unless we have some positive reason to think that there is no such explanation we're justified in taking there to be an explanation unless we're given some positive reason to think otherwise so it doesn't demand or require an explanation unlike some causal principles and other cosmological arguments and things like that i know we're not talking about cosmological arguments but p e does not require an explanation it just says that it exists all else being equal okay so that's the first note the second note is that i'm only going to be concerned with these kinds of external or non-circular explanations right and that is explanations that don't presuppose the very thing being explained right recall the example of the turtles that i gave uh a condition on the explanation in pe is that it has to be a non-circular explanation it has to be outside of the very thing being explained right you're not going to be able to explain the fact that there are turtles in terms of turtles right in terms of uh one turtle that gets them all because you're already presupposing that um that there are any turtles at all so that's also another condition on explanation for my pe and then the third and final note before i get into the the juicy stuff from my uh uh uh symmetry breaker is that i'm going to be stipulating that an explanation of an existential fact itself includes a concrete thing so it's going to include the either activity like the grounding activity or the causing activity or the functional realizing activity it's going to include some kind of explanatory activity of a concrete thing so um for instance returning to the turtles right various uh factors in an evolutionary process that were prior to turtles uh including various concrete things and certain selection pressures on them that explains why there are any turtles at all uh and so those are my notes on pe and so i'm just gonna very briefly uh just like why would someone find pe plausible well i mean it does seem kind of intuitive in its own right i mean like yeah i mean things generally just seem to have explanations i mean how could there be you know like there being turtles say that are inexplicable moreover it seems to track philosophical and scientific practice right i mean both philosophers and scientists like even when like we don't have an explanation readily available they nevertheless take it that there is an explanation even though it's as yet undiscovered and moreover this principle enjoys a kind of abundant inductive and experiential support right i mean look around um a lot of these existential facts like that my house exists or that my table exists or that my computer exists they have outside explanations in terms of facts that cite concrete things that that brought them about or that account for them uh so that's and we also might think that like the truth of pe best explains this kind of uniform and widespread inductive and experiential support that we have for it okay so that's that's the pe we're gonna set that aside and that sets the stage for my my symmetry breaker okay so i consider in the paper a logically weaker principle than p e that doesn't mean that it's not as dialectically strong in fact it's less vulnerable to criticism and hence dialectically stronger precisely because it's a weaker a logically weaker principle it doesn't demand as much about reality so the rough sketch of this principle the principle of possible explanation or ppe uh the rough sketch of it is that existential facts possibly have an explanation all else being equal right so remember p it said existential facts have an explanation all else being equal p p e says existential facts possibly have an explanation all else being equal and so a little bit more precise way to put that is that every existential fact is possibly explained by another fact which includes the existence of something that's not among the things reported in the first fact that we're trying to explain and all else being equal so uh unlike pe again ppe concerns merely possible explanation and so why might one think that pe is plausible i just have like you know i'm just going to briefly talk about the motivations for p p p e and then i'll spell out why it's a symmetry breaker and then we'll turn it over to alex so maybe just about you know 90 more seconds or something so stick with us so the reasons favoring p e plausibly favor ppe as well right i mean pe for instance entails ppe and there are also seem to be distinctive like modal epistemological tools that support ppe so like you can pick some existential fact an explanation for which we don't have positive reason to think is impossible well an explanation for that fact is surely one consistent and coherent to conceivable i mean even under close inspection and thirdly compatible with like the known natures and essences of things and moreover we know that many facts about like the existence of things we know that many of them are actually explained and hence possibly explained and arguably there's going to be some kind of defeasible presumption in favor of the uniformity of this modal property this modal property of being possibly explained across the class of facts reporting the existence of things josh rasmussen has actually developed this about modal uniformity a lot of you have probably heard josh talking about that on cameron's channel even and so plausibly these various modal epistemological considerations in addition to the various reasons favoring pe give us the feasible reason to think that a given a given existential fact is at least possibly explained in the manner of explanation that i cited earlier all else being equal okay so that's my justification or brief defense of ppe and now we can turn to the the symmetry breaker so how does ppe break symmetry so by ppe right the existential fact that there are imperfect beings and by imperfect beings i mean beings that are not perfect beings that are not god by ppe that existential fact is possibly explained all else being equal and so we can call the fact the existential fact that there are imperfect beings we can call that imperfect fact okay and so now we're going to consider a world in which imperfect fact is explained well by ppe the principle includes a concrete thing we can call that concrete thing t okay by the non-circularity of explanation right t is not going to be among any of the imperfect things in the world that we're considering right because if it were then we'd have a circular explanation we're trying to explain why there are imperfect things in that world but every concrete thing is either imperfect that is not perfect or else it's perfect and so since t is a concrete thing that's not among the perfect things in that world it follows that t is perfect in that world and so there's a possible world in which a perfect being exists and in that case a perfect being possibly exists and by the modal ontological argument it follows that a perfect being exists all else being equal remember that that's the terrorist parabolas clause or keterous paribus clause the all-speaking equal clause that's throughout this and so in other words we have the feasible reason to think that a perfect being exists and that's an explanatory symmetry breaker right because it supports the possibility premise in the modal ontological argument for theism over the possibility premise in the reverse motor ontological argument because when we apply the ppe to imperfect fact that fact earlier that gives us a possible concrete thing that is perfect and so essentially uh ppe is going to give us this kind of uh symmetry breaker it is a defeasible symmetry breaker it doesn't prove god exists it's defeasible you know you could give some kind of positive reason to think that there couldn't be an explanation in this case but it does give us some weight of a reason to think that god is indeed possible and hence actual over and above the possibility premise of the reverse argument all right so that concludes my summary okay so now we're ready for uh fuzzy alex to come in i say fuzzy alex because it looks like his uh internet something's going on we've had a thousand technical issues but i think that we everyone should be able to hear you nevertheless so uh what would you like to say in response that was a lot but uh where would you like to begin well do let me know if there are any problems i suppose audio is the main thing i can try switching back to the other wi-fi i'm currently hot-spotting off my phone um okay so uh yeah there was a lot there but i think you'll agree everybody's listening that it was wonderfully wonderful um it seems to me that this kind of explanatory symmetry breaker is going to fail if either the same kind of considerations could support um the reverse modal ontological argument or if there were like other or better reasons even separate reasons to support the impossibility premise or i should say the possibly not existing god premise than the reasons that this gives to support the the possibility premise i think realistically it's not so much that i have any strict objections but more clarifications that i that i'd like to that i'd like to make um for example i was when i was when i was reading the paper show one thing that kept coming back that i wasn't sure about is how you understand necessary beings some people describe necessary beings as those which explain themselves some would characterize them as those which have no explanation i don't know which you'd favor yeah yeah so in terms of definitions right i would just i'd leave open whether or not they have an explanation i would say that a necessary being is just a being that exists in all possible worlds so it cannot fail to exist it must exist um in terms of the explanation i don't think that anything can explain itself i think something would already have to exist in order to have any explanatory power in the first place in which case it can't explain why it exists it'd be like bootstrapping itself up into existence as it were and so i tend to think that's impossible but i do think that you know some necessary beings could be in principle explained so like a lot of philosophers think that you can generate generate the uh the numbers by set theory right you start with the empty set say and then you can build a set theoretic hierarchy in that case there's a sense in which the the the later elements in the set theoretic hierarchy are like dependent on the earlier elements and they're somehow explained by them and so i leave open whether or not like necessary things could be explained sure okay i i want to just because you you did say quite assertively that nothing can explain itself and i wonder where that would leave us with necessary beings i suppose it would commit you to the view that necessary beings have an explanation outside of themselves or have no explanation one or the other i'd imagine that in this in the instance of god kind of foundation of all things if he does exist it would be strange to say that he has an explanation that exists outside of himself i think that would diminish his perfection in fact um and so i think you you're probably committed to saying that god exists without any explanation yeah so well it depends right so i wouldn't make generalizations about necessary beings as such because i think we would you know like the set theoretic hierarchy those things would be necessary beings but a lot of them would presumably be dependent if sets exist but um in terms of god yeah if i were a theist i would yeah rather emphatically say that god is uniquely the only thing that doesn't have this kind of non-circular explanation precisely because he's the foundation he's the source of everything and we have principled reasons to think you know that he doesn't have an explanation you know you could talk about his perfection and his ultimacy and and his society and so on so um so i mean to be clear you say that god would be from the theater's perspective putting the theater on and i'm probably gonna just treat you like you're a theist i sometimes just forget given the nature of the conversation um you say that god would be the one thing that has no or one of the things i suppose that that uniquely has no non-circular explanation does that mean either that he has a circular explanation or he has no explanation at all or would you remain agnostic on that point yeah so for the purposes of my paper i stipulate that explanation is non-circular if you want my personal view i don't think that i don't think any explanation could be circular in principle um yeah so i mean if i'll be willing to yeah take that view here i think that god is the only thing that in principle couldn't have an explanation and um yeah and he can't be like self-explained again because i think something would already have to exist in order to have any explanatory power in the first place oh i should say for the audience um the kind of explanation we're talking about philosophers distinguish between a kind of epistemic sense of explanation where you're like removing mystery as to why something is the case but there's also more like ontological or metaphysical side of explanation where there's some kind of connection between things in extra mental reality maybe some kind of dependence relation like grounding or causing or something like that um but but yeah so philosophers make that distinction and in this paper i'm mainly concerned with the kind of metaphysical kind sure um so we have we've kind of arrived at this idea that if this symmetry breaker works and we establish the existence of god god would essentially exist as a being with no explanation now it it seems as though i mean and again this is something you discuss in your paper but i think maybe it's worth uh worth addressing is this idea that the very principles that you put forward the pe and ppe seem to lead to an absurdity that is to say if god possibly has an explanation or if god has an explanation or i should say if everything has an explanation then god would have an explanation himself and this is where you stress that your principle is defeasible it's like all other things being equal we have reason to think that there is an explanation with god because of the fact that we see him as the ground of all as this necessary being and what we've discussed so far that he wouldn't have an explanation that kind of gives us reason to say that god is like exempt from this right yeah and would you say i mean it seems to me like i i don't know if i'd be able to come up with a good reason to think this but is it at least plausible that the same kind of thing could apply to the imperfect fact that it could be such a fact that just exists with no explanation or do you think that's like is it just a case that because there's no reason to think because there's no like positive reason to think that the imperfect fact would be exempt we'll assume that it's not exempt or is it rather you have positive reason to think that it's not exempt if you see what i'm saying yeah no that that's good so i think that whether someone has such a positive reason it's going to depend um on their position on the epistemic landscape as we're i mean if someone has what they think is a decisive proof for atheism to say like they think that a perfect being is incoherent well then yeah then they have some positive reason to think that imperfect fact cannot be explained right because then that would entail that that god exists uh but they they have this kind of independent proof as it were um but mice what my symmetry breaker allows is that if someone doesn't have that independent reason to think some positive reason some positive justification for thinking that imperfect fact cannot be explained is inexplicable then my imagebreaker gives them some weight of a reason to move towards to move towards theism um and moreover i mean i think that even if they do have that positive reason even if they do that independent positive reason that might still potentially depending on how strong their reason is that could still move them it could sway their mind because they can recognize that yeah well you're right things do in general have explanations and as a general rule of thumb as a rule of inquiry right as rational inquiry we tend to think that things have outside explanations and so that could at least move them a little bit uh but again it depends on the strength of their of their reasons but but yeah so i would say someone would need some kind of principled independent reason in order to debar imperfect facts from having an outside explanation now in the case of god we do have that independent reason given god's perfection we could just see the nature of perfection entails ultimacy i think but uh yeah anyway for a neutral agnostic they might not have any principled reason to think that um imperfect fact has an outside explanation yeah so one one thing that might lead us to think this that is to say something that might lead us to support the rmoa because i'll refer to the reverse modal ontological argument for everybody listening because i know using a lot of um initialisms and i've seen i've sometimes briefly look over at the chat and people are just like what is pe what is ppe um so i'll try to specify as we as we go along um do you think there's any do you think there's any plausibility in these kinds of arguments that try to show some kind of incoherence in the concept of god i think i mean obviously the most common that you hear is this so-called paradox of omnipotence which i think can be dismissed fairly easily by the idea you know can god create a rock so heavy he can't lift it well look we're talking about a maximally powerful being here we could either say that god can do all things and logical contradictions aren't things they don't refer to anything or we could say that god is omnipotence just means the ability to do all logically possible things but i mean for instance i i'm just thinking now of of a of a version that might be applied to something like omniscience because the god that you define is a perfect being possessing all perfections including that of omniscience it seems to me that there's a bit of a problem that can't be solved in the same way with omnipotence it's very easy to do but if god no if god is omniscient i think we can find that as god knowing all true propositions that is if there is a true proposition then god knows that true proposition this to me seems like it leads to a potential problem potentially a paradox potentially a problem with infinity that is to say if god knows that p oh let's say p is true then it follows that god knows p god is omniscient god knows p then becomes a true proposition right which means that god must also know that proposition and that is to say that we are we're kind of creating new propositions right every single every single time we make this step and that's because it's a true proposition it's one that god must know this kind of problem comes up in human knowledge as well right can you know something without knowing that you know it but human beings aren't omniscient so we can just say and i think we have to say that you can know things without knowing that you know them so for instance you might have something you know when there's something in the in on the tip of your tongue or something you didn't remember somebody jogs your memory and it's it's there it's in there somewhere you didn't know it you just didn't know that you knew it right but with an omniscient being we run into this problem that as soon as god knows anything and this this could just be one proposition that you know this microphone exists god knows that this microphone exists which creates a new proposition that proposition is god knows the microphone exists so we can say god knows that god knows the microphone exists that itself is a true proposition and so god must know that god must know that god must know yada yada and so on and so forth and this is the case we create this infinite regress for a singular proposition this microphone exists so for every other proposition that that is true as well you end up with this infinite chain and it seems to me that if god it exists in a state he's not like i mean we there's some discussion to be had between a potential and an actual infinity but god isn't kind of like going through this one by one kind of thinking about these propositions and thinking about the next one and thinking about the next one he knows them all at once and it seems to me that we have here a problem with infinity potentially but i don't know what you think of that kind of line of thought because if that's if that's true if we think there's something paradoxical or contradictory contradictory might be too strong a term um but something at least troubling that gives us reason to think that this concept of omniscience and therefore the concept of a perfect being that encapsulate it is incoherent in a way that would make it impossible yeah so that's i i like it's interesting so the first thing that i want to say so i have roughly three remarks that i want to say so first we should note that my symmetry breaker precisely in virtue of being defeasible right that's the kind of ketterous paribus clause the all else being clause that does allow for the the symmetry breaker still to give some support to theism but yet you still have these overriding defeaters like if you think that this argument shows that god is impossible so i think that this argument is compatible with my symmetry breaker it's just that you would have some positive reason to think that imperfect fact can't be explained so it would block the inference ultimately to god's existence but i don't think it would block the success of the symmetry breaker insofar as by symmetra breaker we just mean some consideration that does indeed favor the modal ontological argument vis-a-vis the reverse modal ontological argument or in relation to it so that's my first response the second response is that i think god could or i think in principle one might hold that god's knowledge is non-propositional so this has like this has historical precedent aquinas held it for instance um a number of other authors have held it more recently william lane craig bill alston and others have held that god's knowledge is non-propositional and god just has this kind of single intuitive grasp of all of reality as it were and so you're not kind of building these infinite hierarchies of propositions and whatnot but instead god just has this simple intuitive gaze as it were of reality and you can spell that out variously you can get more precise and rigorous and so on but that's the second thing that i want to note is that there's an up there's an avenue out for the theist and then the third thing that i want to say and this is the final thing is that i'm not sure that the regress you're describing this kind of you know this there's this further proposition that god knows that he knows that p and he knows that he knows that he knows that p and so on i don't quite see that as a vicious regress so there's this distinction and philosophy between vicious regresses and non-vicious regressors sometimes they're called virtuous regressors but we could just call them non-vicious and a non-vicious regress well there are different ways to cast this distinction but typically philosophers think that a vicious regress some requires some kind of dependence uh and like one thing in order to be settled or in order to be the case this other thing itself would have to be settled or be the case first and but yet that thing would have to be settled by some other further thing and then so on ad infinitum and so it's almost like you never get the original fact settled or accounted for as it were so that would be a vicious regress it involves some kind of dependence but the request that you're specifying doesn't seem to involve this kind of like problematic dependence on infinitely many elements i mean we can just consider the proposition p and then the the proposition it is true that p and then the proposition it is true that it is true that p and then so on ad infinitum right this is a typical example in the literature of a non-vicious regress because it's not as though it's not as though you have one thing depending on infinitely many other things needing to be satisfied first rather all the infinitely many depend on that first more fundamental p but similarly god is knowing that he knows that p like those are going to be dependent on that more fundamental fact um and so you don't have this kind of like dependence in the infinite direction rather they all bottom out in this more fundamental fact so it seems non-vicious and so it seems non-problematic to me yeah that's that that's the way that i would try to get out of it too i think there's potentially a way of um reframing the the the consideration we could say something like because we've been working on this principle that if you know p is true then god knows p but we could also say that like um p can only be true if god knows p as say like it's it's a requirement of p being true that god knows p and then we've reframed it so it kind of works in the opposite direction if p is true well that can only be the case if god knows that p right and that can only be true if god knows that god knows that p because as a principle of omniscient if god is omniscient something can only be true if god knows that it's true um so it seems it's just by almost like redefining it seems to me redefining in a way that's logically equivalent um but it would reframe it such that it would work in the other direction because if we say that a a proposition is true if and only if god knows that it's true then we seem to have the problem resurrected and working in the opposite direction potentially i don't know i mean i'm just thinking of this now but i mean we would then be able to say something like p being true relies on uh the truth of the proposition god knows p and that itself relies on the truth of the proposition god knows that god knows p and so on and so forth and then we do have a vicious regress yeah so yeah i know cameron yeah yeah you can kind of tell i wanna so i just wanna let people know that we're gonna transition to some q a we're right at about the hour mark and we planned on doing some q a we'll see how the conversation goes we even talked about like if the conversation gets too interesting we may just not do any questions uh but i'll just let you guys know that we may transition to q a so if you have questions for either alex or joe leave it in the live chat i'll be keeping an eye on it as we uh progress here so yeah i'll pass it back over to you joe yeah no so that's good and i like how you pointed out like yeah hey uh p is true only if god indeed knows that because god's omniscient but that does still leave open the question of which way the direction of explanation goes right uh you know we still have the yeah here and so we still have the direction of explanation so which way is it dependent which way is the direction of explanation and i would say you know knowledge is surely dependent on there being the fact there to be known right it's not as though um something is true because uh someone knows about it no their their belief state gets to count as knowledge in addition to them having justification say precisely because the fact is out there right it's a fact that p and that is what accounts for or explains in part that's what part of what explains why the entity in question has knowledge and so in that case we actually do have the er element the bottom element being the fact that p and then we have uh a non-vicious dependence of god not just by that condition a needs to be satisfied but oh wait some further condition needs to be satisfied first and so on add infinitum you don't have that structure here joe sorry you uh you cut in in and out a little bit just repeat that last that last bit okay yeah so um i would just say precisely because knowledge is dependent on the facts themselves we actually have the er element the fact out there and then god's knowledge is knowing that p and then his knowing is knowing that p and so on that's a non-vicious regress dependent on that single foundational element which is in contradistinction to a case wherein you have say some condition and that condition needs to have satisfied before it explaining it infinitely many things so um yeah i think you've um expertly seen through my sophisms there um i wanted to make sure because i i think i think i think i think you're about right like that that i would agree with you that the dependence must go that way um at least it steems to in our ordinary understanding of knowledge you know something because it's true it's not true because you know it maybe there's some room to discuss whether that's true in the case of of an omniscient and omnipotent creator of the universe it's some room i think there for discussion at least um but i think it's perhaps a less interesting point because we've kind of we're not exactly talking strictly about your symmetry breaker here we're just kind of talking about a way of concluding the opposite so i want to i want to uh probe a little bit here about this this concept of a perfect being um because this is this is kind of the crux of the thing the distinction between imperfect and perfect and therefore if there are imperfect things there must be a perfect thing to explain them or you know ultimately must be because there might be uh so i want to know exactly like can can we kind of could we reframe this argument it seems to me that the the operative part of this perfect being is its metaphysical necessity that's the part that makes this argument work right it's not the omnipotence it's not the omniscience it's none of that the thing that makes this argument work is the fact that you have things which are not metaphysically necessary that is to say they're metaphysically contingent and that if they have an explanation that explanation must be metaphysically necessary and therefore if these this group of imperfect things which i think operatively can be switched out to just say this this group of contingent things has an explanation possibly then there's a possible world in which contingent things are explained and therefore there's a possible world in which there would be a necessary thing and we're essentially in the realm of of cosmological arguments we we're kind of that's that's the discussion we'd end up having but like would it be fair to essentially not not use them interchangeably but to say that that's kind of the that's the crux of the of the perfect imperfect distinction that's relevant to the to the argument you're making is that a perfect being is metaphysically necessary whereas imperfect things are metaphysically contingent um sort of sort of so i would say yes and no so i agree that we can substitute things in for that you know whatever fact that we're trying to explain like that there are turtles right then we wouldn't be able to infer a perfect being we just have to infer that there's a non-turtle or at least one non-turtle that explains why there are turtles um so the point is is that yeah we can we can inter-substitute things for the relevant existential fact um but i think the the explanatory symmetry breaker will work whether or not we do we substitute only metaphysically contingent and then yeah you'd be able to defeasibly infer the existence of a metaphysically necessary thing but um given the generality of the principle of possible explanation or ppe you can likewise substitute in imperfect you know imperfect beings there and that might include unnecessary imperfect beings and also some contingent imperfect beings so long as they're all uniformly imperfect right um we can apply ppe to it to the case and defeasibly infer that there is indeed a perfect being so i mean i understand like your point right we could just swap in and place that like contingent beings there and then we'd be able to get unnecessary being but you know as a rule of thumb right things are explained as far as we can and so if this necessary thing is not perfect if it's not unlimited if it's if it has these various uh arbitrary limits to use josh rasmussen's phrase if it has these various limits well then we could still call out for some further explanation we can still ask hey could even if we have a necessary imperfect or limited thing as well we can ask uh why are there those um uh imperfect limited things simplicitor and we can get the explanatory symmetry breaker uh just by applying the ppe to that so it's possibly the case that these things are um non-circularly explained and then we get to the perfect being so it's similar to a cosmological argument i recognize that um because it has to do with explanation but it still does differentially support the modal ontological argument rather than the reverse and so i i still think it's usefully characterized as a symmetry breaker in the modal ontological argument debate i mean and it does it does proceed from some apri considerations right like i do think that people can just see that yeah things in general have an explanation right there's a kind of intellectual repugnance at inexplicability and unintelligibility right that's what the majesty of recent points do well that's what i wanted to um perhaps i should tell you the reason that i'm that i was asking this um i think if it is if we can interchangeably or if it's kind of reducible to this discussion of um imperfect that is metaphysically contingent things requiring an explanation or possibly having an explanation that's necessary i wonder if we'd have to discuss objections of modal fatalism um that is to say we might have a feasible reason to think that or i should say we might have a reason to think um that actually imperfect things don't have an explanation because if they did we'd run into modal fatalism that is to say i should explain this i'm sure you're familiar with modal fatalism joe but um how can i best explain this well let's take is it um okay if it is the case that but well i should i should specify for a start when we're talking about explanation here presumably we're talking about like full explanation complete explanation sufficient explanation reason being for example if we said what's the explanation for why we're having this conversation today i could say well look you know i was i was talking to cameron on facebook a little while ago about this whole atheism definition and i mentioned in passing that i'd seen you two discuss the topic and therefore you know um we're here now having this discussion like that doesn't seem sufficient like yeah that kind of that's part of the explanation but that i could then say well the reason the thing that explains why we're here today is because i said so because somebody posted a clip of me on twitter discussing the definition of atheism i mean clearly that doesn't that doesn't do it right we want to we want a sufficient explanation we need an explanation that leaves no room um leaves no mystery that leaves no nothing explained right that leaves left to be explained it leaves no ambiguity about why p instead of not p right so if we're looking for a full explanation or a sufficient explanation the problem is that if you have a set of metaphysically contingent things that is things that could have failed to exist or be as they are and you're supposing that these are explained by a necessary being well it seems to me that full explanation is the same thing as entailment that is to say if something fully explains something else then it entails it and the reason i think that is because let's let's assume that this were false let's say that p fully explains q but it doesn't entail q this would mean that we that we know that p is the explanation for q but because it doesn't entail q we still need an explanation as to why q rather than not q um it seems to actually i mean you might just agree with me on this point i i think that you might might quarrel but like what do you think of this claim that's uh embedded in modal fatalism arguments from modal fatalism that full explanation is the same thing as entailment and the reason that this comes up um just to complete the argument for everyone listening and i haven't explained it very well i think if the butcher you'll probably do a better job than i will um is because if something if full explanation is the same thing as entailment then if contingent things are explained by a necessary thing then they're entailed by a necessary thing but if they're entailed by a necessary thing then they are necessary so they're not contingent so a contingent thing in other words can't be explained by a necessary being so the only thing that could possibly explain contingent things would be other contingent things but that breaks the non-circularity condition so we're left with the conclusion that contingent things the existence of contingent things can't be explained by something contingent can't be explained by something necessary and so can't be explained at all and so the argument goes um we have reason to think that the the set of contingent things that exists cannot have an explanation because it can't be necessary and it can't be contingent yeah no i was smiling when you mentioned at the beginning when you mentioned uh like modal fatalism because i actually just published a paper on modal collapse arguments um in certain philosophy of religion debates uh and it just came out online yesterday so if anyone wants to check that out it's called the fruitful death of motor collapse arguments um yeah if anyone wants to check that out you can check that out but uh that is a slight that's slightly oh anyway that's in a slightly other domain of philosophy of religion than this one but yes uh i think that this is a really interesting worry um and what i would say is that i don't think explanation requires contrastive explanation so i don't think explanation requires entailment and if if we want to just say that a full explanation um is going to need to be this kind of entailing explanation then what i'll say is that um we very rarely provide full explanations and moreover uh my principal possible explanation can be run in terms of non-full explanations so there's gonna be at least some kind of explanation for existential facts all of us being equal and we get all the same modal epistemological support for that we get all the same experiential and abductive and inductive support for it and so on so i think that my argument could go through just by saying um they have a non-contrastive so it could be contrastive but all we're demanding is that they have a non-contrastive explanation so contrastive explanation for for those who are uh in the audience wondering what is he saying so we're contrasting some fact p with why did p happen rather than not p happenings like why did i go to the store rather than you know a boxing match with alex or something or like why did uh the kangaroo jump right now instead of jumping one second later or something like that so we're trying to explain one thing rather than another we're contrasting two facts uh and oftentimes we do think we give perfectly legitimate explanations that don't entail their explananda uh so the thing being explained so like why did i um get a drink uh well because i was thirsty and the means to actualizing my desire there were like within my power and readily available so like that that doesn't strictly entail that uh i get a drink i mean you know some some factor some random factor could have perhaps happened in my brain or you know something like that but it still it still explains it at least in part that we're still citing factors that influence and that um that still remove mystery as to why i went up and got the drink so we we oftentimes rarely cite explanations that strictly entail the ex one end up and moreover i would just say again my argument can be run in terms of non-contrasting explanation and all the same arguments will apply so yeah i'd have two two points here um how about alex why don't you why don't you respond and then look at the final wording yeah yeah why not um although you know if i i don't want to kind of have the last one and get off scot-free so if perhaps there's some room for some it depends uh totally fine because he also had like the first word i guess he so yeah i suppose i mean have it's your show you know i'm just doing what i'm told um the the first quarrel i would have what you said is that you're correct that in everyday usage and in in most areas of life when we give an explanation of something or say we give an explanation for something we don't give a full explanation but if pressed right if i asked you for an explanation that is i really didn't understand why this thing obtained why it was that you've got yourself a drink or whatever and i really wanted a full explanation like a sufficient explanation that removed the mystery of the matter when you said i was thirsty i could say well well that doesn't explain it i mean you know like just because you're thirsty what the drink just appeared or what it's like one no okay so i was thirsty and i had access to a kettle and i turned the kettle on and the molecules did this and all this kind of stuff obviously in general usage like this would be ridiculously pedantic there'd be there'd be no reason to expect somebody to provide this kind of explanation but remember that with this argument we're talking about explanation in principle right like we're saying we're saying that there exists an explanation for um existential facts or there possibly exists an explanation for existential facts i think that if we don't mean by that a full explanation i'm not quite sure what we're talking about now that's not to say that like we'd have epistemic access to that reason or to that explanation and it might be that an imperfect explanation or an incomplete explanation would generally suffice to make people happy enough to kind of you know practically get on with their lives but as a philosophical point if we're asserting that there exists this this thing this explanation it seems very strange to say to demand with with a principle that every fact p has an explanation um but not a full one you know like it explains part of why p is true but not all of it seems it seems really strange to me to say that we can have this principle that demands an explanation or demands that we at least assume that there's an explanation without reason to the contrary but only partly i why would it be that we require some explanation but not all and how much of an explanation would suffice to to fulfill that principle if we if we accepted the pe for instance the strong version um the principle of explanation that for those listening again uh the principle that all existential facts have an explanation if i gave you like the most minimal most most absolutely fundamental explanation that just basically gave you no information just marginally increase your understanding you'd probably say well that's not the kind of explanation i was talking about when i said that an explanation exists so you run into this question of how sufficient would the explanation have to be before we say okay that's fine that's that's the level of explanation that we that the principle requires of everything it seems to me that if we're talking about explanation in principle it needs to be a full explanation um because otherwise you run into this problem of saying if we think that p explains q but it doesn't entail q if then it's the case that like it could be that p and not q and it could be the case that p and q right now it happens to be the case that p and q but if p doesn't entail q then we're still left with this question why is it that p and q rather than p and not q it seems to me that that not being explained just means that the fact that q is true isn't explained there's something lacking still um are you right like you can just say that something that the principle uh is only that something be partly explained but then you're going to have to define like how much you know like like what are you talking about like a 20 explanation of 15 30 40 like where do you place it it seems to be completely arbitrary and it seems to me that if you gave me a 40 explanation of why something's the case i would just be like well you haven't finished explaining it you haven't finished explaining why that's true you know if i was telling off my children uh for coming home late i said why you know why are you home late and they and they just said like oh you know um my shoelace was untied or something i'd be like i feel like there's a lot more to that story that you're not telling me like there's got to be more there and they're like well technically that is part of the explanation because there's some story involving how their shoelace got untied and when they bent over they got hit by a car and had to go to the hospital and stuff like that but you know you don't you don't need all that but you only need a partial explanation like how much of an explanation would you need you see what i'm saying it seems arbitrary it seems to me that it's much easier to just say well if we're talking about an explanation we're talking about a full explanation and if we're talking about a full explanation we're talking about entailment and if we're talking about entailment from a necessary being if necessary being fully explained something um then it entails it and if anything's entailed by necessary being it is itself necessary um undermining the idea that contingent things can be explained at all and if we have a reason to think that contingent things existing the existence of all contingent things um doesn't have an explanation or is immune from the pe or ppe then like we have in the same way that when you say that god is exempt from the from the ppe because we have good reason good separate reason to think that god should be exempt i have good reason to think that the imperfect fact should be exempt and therefore be able to exist without an explanation therefore not requiring or allowing even for the possibility in this case making impossible the existence of that perfect being i hope that makes sense people listening and of course to you guys i was gonna i was gonna say that the longer you go on the longer joe's follow-up post on his blog is gonna be so right now you're at like twenty thousand word response and the longer you talk it's gonna go up and up and up so probably time that we move on to some q a uh okay so we actually do have a lot of questions queued up here and uh i'm sure that we could talk more about this forever but uh let's let's just change things up a little bit and go into some questions so this one is from oba king i don't know oba killa king there you go uh modal ontological argument but actus puris first you probably know how to pronounce this joe instead of maximal being so basically says a being in which essence equals existence intuitively seems like a symmetry breaker to the reverse ontological argument what are your thoughts joe i i picked this one first not only because of a super chat and i wanted to thank you for sending this in as a super chat uh but also because i knew it would trigger you yeah no so actually in my video on um arguments for classical theism part two out of two i go through different um ontological arguments that try to distinctively favor classical theism in relation to non-classical theism so that they focus on um god's being identical to his act of existence or god's being purely actual so if this person is curious they can see that video in there i do raise a number of criticisms thereof but but one thing that i would say is that well firstly i would argue that there are a number of um positive considerations that count against such views uh and i've published on those in fact my recent paper i outlined two different problems in there at the bottom of the paper in the last section for that view but i would also say that i don't think that it functions as a symmetry breaker because you could just say possibly there is such a purely actual being but also possibly there is no such purely actual being and so you're right back at the symmetry right so you need some kind of positive reason to think one of them is possible rather than the other uh so i i don't think it solves the symmetry problem alex do you have any thoughts on this uh i don't i don't think i have much to add to what joe said i'm actually interested um as to why joe being an agnostic thinks his own symmetry breaker fails um that that's something that didn't even really cross my mind uh until we until we came on air but i but at the same time i i i feel like that might take a while to explain and which perhaps yeah no so um well i i don't think it oh there's some sense in which i think it doesn't work there's another sense in which i think it works so i do think this does provide some evidence for the possibility premise and the modal ontological argument so this is some consideration that counts in favor of theism in my mind but the reason why i remain agnostic is just because i have lots and lots of other considerations uh that favor um uh naturalism say as well as the reverse ontological argument so like there might be some considerations about the possibility of gratuitous evil or the possibility of certain horrendous evils and so on um but but anyway uh my point is i do think that the the symmetry breaker my symmetry breaker succeeds it's just that that defeasible aspect comes in so i have kind of counter balancing evidence yeah that makes sense yeah and he he does that with a lot of things that's why he's agnostic i know joe so well trust me guys okay so from uh maverick christian he just sent this in as a super chat thanks thanks wade he says uh question could indeterministic causation be a complete explanation on alex's view um well again like i i'd want an example of indeterminate interseministic causation i mean i know uh for instance alexander prus discusses um this the exactly the question that we're talking about and tries to give some examples of things which are you know causally adequate um but don't entail but his examples include things like probabilistic explanations which i think are troublesome for certain reasons but also the existence of free will for instance he thinks that like um you know something can be caused we're like there's an explanation for why we commit certain actions but clearly there can't be an entailment there because otherwise it wouldn't be free i don't believe in free will so that doesn't work for me either i indeterministic causation i mean what kind of examples are we talking about like like can we what do you mean by indeterministic causation like well i'll see if he can yeah yeah i'll see if he can follow up in the live chat so wade yeah unless i could i could probably well so by indeterministic causation i just think that he means that the total set of causal conditions relevant don't strictly entail the effect coming about so it's consistent that the cause c obtain and yet the effect e not obtained so possibly it is the case that c and not e so that's what i take it to mean indeterminacy causation that the cause doesn't necessitate or determine or strictly entail its effect um now i myself do think that that could potentially serve as inadequate um well i don't think it could satisfy alex's complete explanation or full explanation because that's going to be a contrastive explanation and in indeterministic explanation in indeterminacy causation you're not going to be able to have a contrastive explanation precisely because there's there's no entailment link there there is no explanation um that fully removes mystery as to why one of the probabilistic outcomes obtains rather than the other because there's nothing in that cause across worlds that you can point to to differentially account for that but um i still think that um you could at least give you don't have to say like oh it's a 20 explanation or a 15 explanation you can still give a reasonably adequate explanation that helps illuminate why the effect comes about i mean if i say that uh god freely created the universe for a given reason because it was really good and since he's perfect he desires to bring about good things that although it doesn't strictly entail that this universe comes about because god could have created another universe say that's good it does still seem to at least remove some mystery as to why that's the case and so i still think it could account it amount to some kind of adequate explanation and when alex when you were giving your example right you were um you were talking about how uh you know what if your daughter just said oh well i mean my shoe was untied that's that's why i'm late i mean yeah it's it's part of an explanation but like imagine that she told you oh there's no explanation at all it was utterly inexplicable i think you'd be even more like mystified at that you'd be like no that's even more absurd than if you at least cited some kind of explanatory factor and i think that calls again to the plausibility of my ppe because it's at least more plausible that there's some explanation than that there's utterly inexplicable unless of course um but bear in mind that this kind of your argument relies on the fact that such facts as her shoelace being untied is an imperfect fact or a metaphysically contingent fact um if my daughter was sufficiently philosophically inclined i might say well look if you actually were to give me a full explanation i'm not uh you know i there is a full explanation out there and if there is then it would actually be a deterministic um explanation and therefore isn't this interesting that ah i actually can't blame you for being late because it turns out that um it was necessarily the case that you'd be late because ultimately um anything explained by a necessary being must itself be necessary or something like this like i mean i i don't think i yeah i i really i don't think i'm trying to think about the precise wording with the question and whether i would just have to deny that there are such things as indeterministic causes and i think i'd probably be on board with that at least as it seems to me i need to think about it more it seems to me the case that if you have something which causes something else but doesn't entail it or doesn't um determine it to be the case um then you've basically just got a partial explanation of partial cause you don't have a fully sufficient cause because if you had a fully sufficient cause it'd be sufficient to bring it about i think i would just deny the existence of indeterminacy causation i'm sure there are existence out that examples out there but i just really i just really can't i mean i would use like determination and causation essentially interchangeably um but that's a product of of my i guess my broader metaphysics um which might be wrong but i think i'd be committed to that view with the views i currently hold so do you guys mind if we uh move on to another question yeah let's go to one of the questions cool okay so uh before we do that i would be remiss i think that's the right way to say this i'd be remiss if i didn't mention the fact that alex is going to be with us in person live at our ccv on our first conference and let me go ahead and just put the little thing the graphic on the screen so it's august 26 to the 28th in person conference and these are the lists of speakers if you're interested in attending josh rasmussen luke barnes cygart lee strobel liz jackson trent horn alex o'connor and braxton hunter there's been a slight change in the uh the program so instead of braxton hunting uh instead of braxton hunting alex instead of uh braxton debating alex it's going to be uh a debate between alex and trent and so uh that's just the the only change there but i would love to to see you guys there in person and as i mentioned alex will be there with us he'll also be on the panel at the very end of the conference answering uh questions and everything so it's gonna be an awesome conference hope to see you guys there just visit the website if you're interested in attending so uh with that here's the next question this one is from daniel barrios and he asked us earlier he also sent in a super chat uh so thanks for that daniel he says question for alex would you find yourself believing the infinite regress idea to be more plausible or the idea of a necessary unmoved mover honestly and genuinely which do you find more plausible uh if you're talking about the infinite regress we were talking about earlier as pertains to knowledge then i definitely think let me make sure i'm understanding this correctly i think the question is asking if i find it more plausible to accept the existence of an infinite regress then the existence of a necessary unmoved move which says to me that you're not talking about the infinite regress of knowledge that we're talking about earlier but rather just an infinite request of causes um i actually i i don't know like this is the thing i i remain in a kind of passive agnostic atheism in that i it seems i mean it seems to me intuitively implausible that there can be such thing as an infinite regress of causes um but i think like the idea of a necessary unmoved mover has problems too um i think like you know we generally there are certain rules that we apply like non-circularity um that it may be the case that contingent things are explained by other contingent things or something like this it seems very unintuitive to me um but like i i don't if if you push me on it i think it's probably more intuitive it seems definitely more intuitive to me that there is some kind of terminus to an infinite regress rather than there can exist some kind of infinite causal regress like i would admit that that seems more intuitive but i think that most of philosophy consists in reevaluating such intuitions uh to see if they're actually rationally warranted um but yeah like i think at a base level the idea that without an unmoved movie you've essentially got an infinite regress of causes and that can't exist for uh reasons of paradox and um but for the paradoxes that it raises i i think that's potentially more plausible um but my i should i should stress that the agnosticism the agnostic atheism that i currently possess is quite unlike the one that i had maybe four years ago beforehand it was very much the case that i essentially would have said like there aren't really any good reasons to think that god exists or at least those reasons that have been put forward i think don't work now and that is to say i was sat on the fence um because there was just there was just no breeze there was just no breeze to push me onto one side one side i was just sat there um now i'm still sad on the fence i'm still an agnostic atheist of some description but now it's more like there are equally uh beautiful pushing in opposite directions right so i do think that uh the contingency argument for the existence of god is a strong one i do think that certain ontological arguments you know if there are certain quarrels like the one we're having now can be resolved like is is a good argument is at least a good attempt to prove the existence of god um i think that the idea of an infinite regress probably does lead to unacceptable paradoxes and so i would say that on its own yes like it's a it's a i think there's good reason to think that there is a necessary unmoved mover however now the agnosticism is that that's the breeze pushing in one direction uh but there's also now i've been more um i've thought a lot more and a lot more deeply about the breezes that would go in the opposite direction involving the problem of evil or divine hiddenness or animal suffering in particular and these kinds of things the potential paradox is involved in a necessary being arguments about modal fatalism for instance that we were just talking about that now pushed me in the other direction so on its own yeah i do i do i do find more plausible on a surface level um the idea of a necessary unmoved mover than the idea of an infinite regress of courses if you asked about it in isolation i would say so joe don't say anything in response to that because i think we've actually got to close it out i want to respect alex's time but then also uh here's the last question that i want to get to and then we'll uh we'll close it out from al uh fukron and i think actually i'm not sure exactly how to pronounce this and i feel like i see that every time i actually put up anything so anyways his question is what kind of bear is best not everyone i i wish i could i wish i could remember this is i've just been re-watching the us office and i'm sure do you yeah i was gonna say do neither of you know what this is from joe probably doesn't because he doesn't watch tv at all yeah no i was gonna say gummy bear oh my gosh no it's not it's an office that's how it goes dwight from me i can't quote that show so jim is impersonating dwight on the show in this quote and he goes uh he says to dwight he goes which bear is best and then dwight responds and says something like well that depends there's basically two schools of thought and then jim says false black bear something like that anyways my wife and i love that show we watch it just on repeat all the time so i had to ask it so uh thanks thanks for sending that in okay well uh why don't we just take i know alex you've got to go but why don't we take just a couple minutes close this thing out and uh and wrap it up so i know alex just got done talking but i'm gonna pass it back over to you alex share some of your you know thoughts about the the dialogue today and then uh we'll close it out with joe yeah i mean i think um once the paper is available in print people should read it because joe kind of anticipates and uh responds to a lot of objections including some that we've spoken about today but also ones that we didn't um worth reading i i you know i think it's a i think it's an admirable attempt to break the symmetry um i feel as though like yeah it was a bit because it took quite a long time to lay it out we spent a lot of time talking about the moa generally it takes quite a while to explain the whole paper and i i feel as though we spent i spent more time kind of offering reasons to think that the possibly god doesn't exist premise is plausible rather than specifically addressing your reason to think that the possibly god does exist premises is reasonable so i i feel like i may have kind of derailed things a little bit there from what was expected but i hope it's still been somewhat fruitful and you're also right to say that like the the considerations about uh modal fatalism really more applied to that like arguments from contingency that rely on the psr rather than um the the symmetry breaker that you put forward strictly speaking i think it might be kind of embedded into it but i mean it's it's been fun we've talked about a lot of different things um but yeah i mean i i feel as though i could have spent a little bit more time um discussing some of the objections that you raised in your paper um it's a shame that i didn't get around to it but um yeah no i mean i had fun it's been good it is what it is i mean yeah conversations like this that's what that's kind of why i was like joe joe sent me like a list of how we should like start this and i was like bro if you do all that and we're not even gonna like start to have the conversation until like an hour in just because there's like so much to talk about but yeah joe go ahead and think i mean you could have done a whole episode just just laying out the yes in the first place i think which there's i mean there's there's stuff already out that joe have you done a video on that were you just kind of like uh no talk about this once it's published what yeah no once it's published i'm gonna do a full blown video on it like one of my lecture videos so super nice yeah cool but yeah okay so i really enjoyed this conversation i thought it was really fruitful and uh i really liked uh the various avenues that we explored like the knowledge one the infinite regress the uh the modal fatalism trying to break the symmetry in the other direction i thought this was super duper fun and yeah i hope just people um benefit from it and i hope that it serves them so uh yeah i like that it was super duper fun so one last question if you guys could both recommend one resource on the ontological argument what would it be i know that i just kind of threw that out there i think it depends on who you're who you're like targeting here i think i think that the best place to start with the ontological argument might genuinely be the scp entry by graham oppi um like that i mean that's obviously grammar has an entire book on ontological arguments by scp we've had about 50 different acronyms today yeah the scp is the stanford encyclopedia encyclopedia philosophy it's a it's an amazing website it's just fantastic i mean it's it's wonderful for anybody studying philosophy even if you are like i was that is at an actual university with access to a real library i spent more time on the sap than anywhere else um it's a fantastic resource and as i say it's graham oppe who authored the author the entry um and i think i think it's a good place to start so if that's what you mean like for somebody who's kind of the general interested reader who wants to learn about the ontological argument i definitely recommend saying that especially because the scp can also be used as a directory if you look at the footnotes if one of the arguments one of the considerations takes your fancy you can just go right down to the bottom and find out where you can find further reading so it's a good kind of landing page in many ways as well so that's where i'd point people to in the first instance so what about you joe yeah so that was actually going to be one of my i know you said only one but one that was going to be one of my recommendations that is a little bit technical so um there there's it's still a somewhat technical book but it's much more understandable than um lots of other ones it's tyron goldschmidt's um you might have had him on your channel i don't know if you have uh yeah but i've also had him on my channel he's been on other channels but yeah um his book ontological arguments it's in the cambridge elements series and so it's really small you can read it in like an afternoon at the beach it is so good i love it so much it's so clear it's such a good book it's cheap because it's super like super short and it's like an intro to like the whole debate um yeah i recommend everyone get that and i mean i had them on my channel to discuss the book as well it's something like ontological arguments with tyron goldschmidt so if you want to look at a video on it as well you could check out that but yeah there you go that's actually a good uh segue into just letting you guys know one more time go check out their channels if you don't know or if you're you're not already subscribed to alex cosmic skeptic or to joe majesty of reason uh yeah go check out their channels linked for your convenience in the description of this video and we will see you in the next video actually happening in just a couple days so i hope to see you there live but until next time hey it's me again uh actually don't leave yet i've got something super super important to tell you so first of all you're awesome like you you just watched a really really long video just now and you're still watching it that is actually pretty amazing secondly we have hundreds literally hundreds of other apologetics related videos for you to watch on our channel go check them out i've interviewed exorcist hosted debates between christians and atheists i've even made response videos to atheists all of that is available on our channel go check it out third i rely on people that see value in my work people like you that watch videos to the very end to keep the lights on around here literally this is how i feed my family so if you see value in the work that i do please consider supporting this ministry and becoming a patron links to that are in the description oh and uh have i mentioned that christianity is true

Channel: Capturing Christianity

Views: 83,800

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

Id: czPBS4FVi2Q

Length: 95min 41sec (5741 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021