We'll talk. But folks, thanks for being here. The way this debate is going to work is this going to be longer than usual. It's going to have three different sections. So in particular, we're going to have one hour that focuses on the evidence for God, then one hour on the evidence for Islam, and then one hour on ethics and more in particular on secular humanism versus Islamic ethics. So we are going to start with Matt for each section. There are 10-minute openings for each section, followed by 40 minutes of dialogue, and then there are 30 minutes of Q&A at the end. And then if you can do me a favor and silence your phones for the debate. Thanks very much. And Matt, thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours for your opening statement. Thanks everybody for showing up. My apologies from the start. I'm on medication that may cause me to have like pick-upy burp things that might make me pause. I'm not having a Mitch McConnell moment. I'm just trying not to be rude. And James has already managed to get Daniel and I to agree on microphones. I don't expect us to agree on a lot after that, but that's where we're at. The first of the three topics is, is there evidence of God? And by that, for me, as we saw a little bit in the previous debate, is objective verifiable facts that are consistent with the proposition. I promise I'm not going to go through everything that we went through in the previous debate, but there's a reason why we look for objective verifiable facts. And that's because subjective, unverifiable suspicions just aren't a reliable path to truth. If there's a better way to get to a reliable understanding of reality, somebody would need to demonstrate it. And so this is why I'm seeking objective, verifiable paths. It is the most scientific, reliable path to truth or the most consistently reliable demonstrable path to an accurate model of reality is tied up in empirical objective verifiable facts. That doesn't mean it applies to absolutely everything. If I say, life is generally preferable to death, that doesn't mean that that is an objectively verifiable empirical fact. It may just be my foundation that I use for things. If your God doesn't interact with reality in a detectable way, then you cannot claim to have detected it. You must show a mechanism by which you have detected what appears to be the undetectable. There's a reason that courtrooms, at least in most of the modern world, no longer accept spectral evidence of magic and things like that. Because when we're looking at a claim and we want evidence for that claim, we must demonstrate a connection between our proposed explanation of the facts and the facts that support that. Science doesn't make proclamations of certainty, not absolute certainty. I don't even think that it makes approximations to certainty. Science creates models that are the best representation of a construct that describe the available facts. It's important that people understand a couple of basic things about logical arguments and logical fallacies. The easiest way to look at it is to look at a simple syllogism. It's constructed of two premises and you reach a conclusion. You have a major and minor premise and a connecting term, and that's how you say something like obvious, like Socrates is a man, all men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal, that sort of thing. Fallacies come in a couple of different forms. One of them are structural fallacies that get to the validity of the argument, the structure itself. It's content agnostic. Those are formal fallacies. A lot of them have names. There are informal fallacies too that get to whether or not the premises are structured in such a way that they can reliably be used in a properly constructed. There's a difference between validity and soundness. Go look up validity versus soundness on Wikipedia. It's a decent start. Just every time you go to Wikipedia, make sure you go to the bottom and look to where it links you because you might find yourself on like the Winston philosophy page and in over your head. If you haven't looked into any of this and yet that's one of the best places to go to get information. So you might have some fallacies with names like post hoc or go proctor hoc, which just means after this, therefore, because of this, you can't say, Hey, I had my breakfast and then I had diarrhea. Therefore, my breakfast caused diarrhea and something else. It's not just true that this one thing follows another, that that was the cause. Similarly, you might have something like an argumentum ad populum, which just means you're appealing to the popularity, the idea or what the masses think. And the truth is not impacted in any way by what people think or how strongly they are convinced of it or how long they've done it or how many of them there are. But a fallacy does not mean that the conclusion you've reached is false. That would be the fallacy fallacy to assert that something is false because it's fallacious. All it means is that you cannot reliably you should not be convinced that it's true because it does not follow from the facts or from the premises. And there are a number of different arguments to the existence of God, some of which are ones where they attempt to support it by evidence, others, it's just, hey, it's a philosophical argument, and we're going to look at a couple of premises. What you've heard many times from people are things like, oh, if there's a painting, we know there's a painter or arguments from design and teleological arguments and anthropic principles. And the thing is, it almost doesn't matter in a logical argument if the premises are actually true, as much as whether or not you accept that they're true. Because if you accept that the premises are true and the logic is valid and the arguments valid in structure, and you reject the conclusion, you are irrational, you are unreasonable, you are in conflict with the basics of logical reasoning. So it'd be nice if we had true premises because a valid argument is one where true premises necessarily lead to a true conclusion, but at a minimum, if you accept the premises and reject the conclusion, you're in a position of being irrational or unreasonable. The same thing's true if you're using an invalid form. There's a number of different categories of arguments, but what we're talking about in general is I have a claim about something in reality, and it either matches up with the facts of reality, or it doesn't. And it may match up, and I won't have any way to demonstrate it. But when we're evaluating the evidence for a claim, you have to evaluate the facts that seem to be consistent with your proposition, and you also have to account for the facts that seem to be in conflict with your proposition. Does the evidence support some alternative hypothesis? For example, if there is a God and He created grass, some people might look at the grass and say, every blade of grass is proof of the Creator. No, it's not. Because if there's not a God, or that's not the right God, if pixies created grass or if evolution is the explanation for why we have grass, then the grass is evidence for each of those equally, which means it's evidence for none of them until you can demonstrate why it is connected to one and not the others. If you're accused of a crime and you wind up in a courtroom, quite often they'll ask about, they'll try to demonstrate that you have motive means and opportunity.  Actually, I don't think the district attorney should bring the case anyway, because we haven't established that the case is worth trying, because in order to have a hypothesis, it needs to be testable, which means it also needs to be falsifiable. There needs to be some way to demonstrate that it is wrong, at least hypothetically. You would need to show that God should be considered as a candidate explanation for whatever it is that you're trying to use God as a candidate explanation for. And why are you picking God as a candidate explanation over pixies or over evolution? Once you've demonstrated that God's a candidate explanation, you need to show that it is consistent with all of the available facts and not inconsistent with the facts that would seem to contraven it. You have to show that the preponderance of evidence is consistent with and makes your hypothesis not just more likely than some other, but more likely than not, more probable than not. And then you have an evidence-based conclusion. There are a number of things that people believe, those stories, old wives tales, the farmers almanac, and all sorts of people believe that they have strong evidence for it because they go through a process of prioritizing evidence. If you think that the Bible or the Quran is the ultimate foundation of truth and then what's in there is going to lead you to truth or that it's more likely to be true than not, that will bias your ability to assess the information as to whether or not it's consistent with that. If I'm on trial for murder and they can't produce a body, they might still be able to convict me. If they can't produce a weapon, they might still be able to convict me. They could show that I have means, motive and opportunity and I might still be innocent and they might not be able to convict me because means, motive and opportunity are only part of the evidence for this. When it comes to God, there's no demonstration that I'm aware of. Maybe we'll hear one that God is a candidate explanation for anything. There is an assertion that God has has the means to do whatever he wants by claiming that he's omnipotent or all powerful or at least sufficiently powerful. But where's the demonstration that God exists and is all powerful? So the means is an assertion that's unjustified as far as I can tell. The motive seems to largely be ignored. I don't know why any being any God would create anything, certainly not anything inferior. Why would it create flawed things? And by making God spaceless and timeless, they're going to give him the opportunity. But these are assertions that aren't supported by evidence. You can make philosophical arguments. You can stay, keep things in the in the realm of abstractions. But when we're looking for objectively verifiable facts of reality that are not just consistent with a God, but consistent with a particular God and no others, no other pixies, no other nothing, no evolutionary thing, I'm not aware of any evidence that truly counts for God. I'm aware of many things that people point to and say, this is evidence that is consistent with a God, but correlation with an idea does not demonstrate that there is in fact causation. It doesn't demonstrate that, oh, there's my time. See, I was watching my 10 minutes and I didn't hear James say a thing. In any case, I'll wrap up here with I'm unaware of any objectively verifiable evidence for any God whatsoever. I'm interested to hear both a definition of a God and the objectively verifiable evidence for it. Thank you very much for that opening Matt. And if you're watching at home, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. We have many more debates coming up. And with that, we're going to kick it over to Daniel for his opening as well. Thanks very much, Daniel. The floor is all yours. One thing, James, the light doesn't need to be on, so glad you said that darken the. I'm saying it doesn't need to be on. It does. OK, there it is. And how is my volume? Good. It's bad. Bismillah, Alhamdulillah, wassalaat wassalaam. The debate today is whether Islam is true. We've divided the debate into three sections or three parts. Is there good evidence for God? Is there any religion more compelling than Islam? And which is best for society, secular humanism or Islam? Debating these questions will allow us to answer the overarching question, is Islam true? First, is there good evidence for God? What kind of evidence is compelling evidence when we ask, is there compelling evidence for God? We should also ask compelling for whom? How do we decide what is or isn't compelling? It depends on the audience. If we were to ask 11th century Europeans, if they found the existence of God compelling, virtually all of them would say yes. But if we asked 21st century Europeans, far fewer would say yes. So what's changed? Atheists claim people have just become smarter, more scientific, more in touch with reality. That's the atheist narrative. But I want to propose a competing narrative. Cognitive science says that human beings have natural intuitions, whether they're moral, religious, aesthetic, logical or mathematical intuitions. Intuitions are mostly unconscious and they're based on the feeling of compelling this rather than systematic proof. For example, people have the intuition that harming others for no reason is wrong. This is an intuition because people might not even have articulated this as a concrete belief and they have no logical justification for it, but they still strongly tend to accept it as true. Psychologists have shown that all children naturally develop this moral intuition earlier in life. Beyond moral intuitions, there's also aesthetic intuitions. Humans universally experience disgust at the thought of eating human flesh. There are also logical intuitions. We all intuitively accept the law of non-contradiction that two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time. And we also have mathematical intuitions like five objects is more than one object. There are also intuitions about the world and history. For example, we all intuitively believe that there's an external world that persists even if we're not in it. We also intuitively believe that the past was real and our memories are based on that past reality. We also have natural intuitions about God. Most people in the world and in history believe in spirit beings. According to cognitive science, this belief is biologically rooted. Research shows that children as young as five across diverse cultures all express similar beliefs that the universe was created by the supernatural. This is the case even for children in cultures that don't affirm a creator God like Japanese children. This shows that the intuition to believe that the universe was created by supernatural beings is inbuilt. People also naturally believe that the mind persists after bodily death. Belief in the afterlife is a biologically rooted intuition. Psychologists call this natural theology. So to recap, humans have many natural intuitions about what is true. When we rely on those intuitions, that is called intuitive thinking. A good way to think about intuitive thinking is like a tendency to find something plausible or true. If I tell you the world doesn't go away when you close your eyes, most people will tend to believe me even if I don't present some elaborate argument. The idea just has this inherent plausibility because of our human psychology. Now, there is another mode of thinking, which is called analytic thinking. Analytic thinking is different because it causes us to question our intuitions rather than just accept things because they feel compelling. We demand further evidence and justification. In other words, analytic thinking is about doubt. We doubt our intuitions and then we explore other possibilities. We gather evidence. We make inferences. We might intuitively feel that eating human flesh is disgusting, but is it actually wrong? Well, let's just gather data and evaluate arguments for each side. This is analytic thinking, overcoming intuitive thinking. Both intuitive and analytic thinking are found in human beings, but they're balanced in different ways in different societies. Research shows that intuitive thinking is dominant in some societies and analytic thinking is dominant in others. The other important thing is that when you engage in more analytic thinking, you start doubting more and more of your intuitions. This is studied in dual process theory. People who have maximized their analytic thinking will doubt their religious, moral and aesthetic intuitions. Only their strongest intuitions remain. For example, their intuitions about logic or about the external world, but for everything else, they demand empirical evidence. But there is no empirical evidence for these things. So when you maximize analytic thinking, people become more and more inclined to a reductionist view of the world defined by scientific materialism and anything beyond that is doubted.  When we have a debate about good evidence for God, what are our standards? Are we trying to meet the standards of a maximally analytic mode of thinking, the type of extreme analytic thinking of atheists? Why should we? Why should we just accept that standard of evidence as opposed to a more balanced type of cognition that doesn't nuke all our natural human intuitions? What atheists will want to claim here is that we should obviously prefer the maximally analytic mode of thinking. Why? Because that's the mode of thinking that's most likely to give us the truth. But is this true? Does maximizing doubt bring us closer to the truth? Why should we believe that? I would challenge atheists to justify this. Why should we adopt such extreme epistemic standards? In reality, a psychology that balances intuitive and analytic thinking is more suitable for recognizing truth. And this is actually an insight that we find within the history of philosophy and the work of Western philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not all of reality can be reduced to empirical data points to be scrutinized through systematic analysis. The reality is we all experience the reality. We all experience is far richer than that. And insisting on maximum analytic thinking actually takes us further from fully seeing reality, like covering up one half of our binoculars. Furthermore, the insistence on maximal analytic thinking is nothing more than a recent product of cultural evolution. For most of history, human cognition was more balanced. So what changed? Analytic thinking become became dominant, not because it's more attuned to the truth or because it's more beneficial for humanity. Analytic extremism became dominant because of what we can call cognitive colonialism. To understand how this happened, consider Society A that is analytic dominant versus Society B that is intuitive dominant. Over time, both societies experience technological and economic growth, but Society A experiences this faster. This allows Society A to dominate Society B. Society A then imposes analytic thinking on its newly acquired subjects by establishing an analytic focused school system. In this way, analytic thinking spreads and dominates more and more societies until it dominates the entire globe. The societies that the most extreme emphasis on analytic thinking win out. That's modern history in a nutshell. Researchers like Joseph Heinrich have explained this history in books like The Secret of Our Success. Now, the fact that analytic thinking can accelerate technology and growth, that sounds like a great thing. But the big question is just because analytic thinking excels at producing technology, does that mean that maximizing it is better suited to determine truth? I'm not claiming that analytic thinking has no connection to the truth. But again, when you maximize this type of thinking, that means that your analytic capacities start overshadowing intuitions about the world that are also very compelling. Throughout history, all peoples felt intuitively that there were moral aesthetic and religious truths, truths about life and purpose. And many of these truths were based on intuitions that were universally shared by all humanity. Now, if you told all these people that they have to reject their intuitions and adopt analytic extremism, which ultimately will bring into doubt all these other intuitions, most people would not accept that. But unfortunately, people don't have a choice. The analytic mode of cognition has been imposed by cognitive colonialism. Secular humanist powers have implemented all manner of social and educational programs over the course of the past 300 years to champion analytic thinking. Why? Because that's the type of thinking that maximizes economic growth. The more people are thinking analytically, the more they produce science and technology, which will increase GDP. Atheists want to tell the story that the debate between atheism and religion is about two sides making arguments against each other and people decide which is more compelling. But there's another way to look at it. Atheists represent an extremist mode of thinking that results in maximizing GDP and military power. The reason that there are so many atheists today is not because the scientific worldview is inherently compelling, rather maximizing analytic thinking allows you to invent nukes and tanks. Most people historically disagreed with maximal analytic thinking, but they were wiped out. Social technological economic violence has changed the epistemology of people across the world. Prior to this, no one would have taken atheism seriously, but atheists fail to acknowledge this history. They just assume that analytic thinking should be maximized no matter what. This biases any debate on the existence of God. The theist is always at a disadvantage is if he has to mold his arguments to satisfy a mind that's primed to reject anything non-empirical. Humans have strong natural intuitions about reality. We have the intuition that there's an external world that our memories have truth content. There are intuitions that do that don't give us any more power to do science or produce technology, but that doesn't make them unreal. Intuitions about the existence of God are among the strongest intuitions humans have. And this intuition is supported by inferential reasoning and communal traditions. If an atheist says he doesn't find these things compelling, we should ask, where do you get your epistemic standards from? Why shouldn't we believe that those standards are unique to modern Western culture and have only emerged very recently in history primarily because they maximize GDP? Why should we take those standards as arbiters of truth about God or anything else? We'll now jump into the open dialogue. So this is for 40 minutes. We'll have open dialogue. If it gets to be too much in that there's too much speaking over each other, then I'll break it into two or one minute intervals. But let's give it a shot. Gentleman, the floor is all yours. So that's an interesting guy tribe on the problems of analytic reasoning. Where was the evidence for God? That was the that was the entire first part was, is there evidence of God? And I didn't hear not only any objectively verifiable empirical evidence for God. I didn't even hear any intuitive evidence for God. Just a lot about the value of intuition and how evidently as an atheist, I'm all about military power, which I generally despise, despite having done eight years in the military, and that's not consistent with my secular humanism and nothing that I could view as evidence of God. No, the whole point was to question your standards. That's what you're subject to debate. Hey, I didn't interrupt you when you correct what I said, a diatribe. Let's try to be civil here. I am trying to be civil. Then don't interrupt me. Then he's done an interruption is done interuptly and civil. OK. So as I was saying, the whole point of this opening is to question your standards of evidence. If you want to say that, well, there's no scientific evidence. When we do experiments and open the microscope and look in the beaker, we don't see God. Then I can concede that. So what's the point of that point that your opening was about? My opening was to take the discussion to a higher level of what are our standards? What is our epistemology? You're assuming a atheistic epistemology that I don't accept. And the most most people in history and even today don't accept that. So that's that's point number one, as opposed to as for evidence of intuitions that people believe in God. We'll talk about it in the next part of the debate, but there's this is something that's established. There's a natural theology that is established within the cognitive science of religion that people have intuitions about spirit beings. They have intuitions about a purpose to creation. They have intuitions about their being an afterlife. These are all things that are established within the cognitive science of religion. Is that a pause for me? Yes. Cool. So I wanted to do a debate on Islam versus secular humanism and which one's better for the world. But Dandle didn't want that. And then James kept coming back to me with potential topics for a debate. And I pointed out various problems with them and everything else. And then finally I gave up and just the three different topics that he wanted over three hours is what I agreed to. And so I'm given a list of topics. And topic one is is there evidence of God? I rest my case because he just said that the entire purpose of his opening was to question my epistemology. I am irrelevant and my epistemology is irrelevant to whether or not there is evidence of God and if you demand that the first hour beyond is there evidence for God and you do not address that topic and admit that instead you've decided to go with a different topic, you have defaulted and I rest my case. No, it's the same exact topic. If you have a debate topic, part of the debate is to analyze the topic and the assumptions that go into one position or another. I'm analyzing the assumptions that go into the first sentence or the second sentence that you had was that this kind of scientific analysis is the best route to truth. I am objecting to that and proposing an alternative. How about you explain to us and justify why it's the best route to truth? Because the subject of the debate is, is there evidence of God? Yeah, how do we determine that? You're asserting that it has to be scientific evidence. The subject of the debate is is there evidence for God? My answer is no. And I talked about what sort of evidence I would accept or not accept. I didn't say anything at all about shutting down intuition. I didn't say that intuition should be sidelined or less important or that has or that it has no. And I thought we were done interrupted. Or that it has no importance. I didn't do any of the things that he asserted. And not only did he not present any evidence of God for us to address, but he fully acknowledged that that was not the purpose of his opening statement. I rest my case. Is it where is the evidence that the external world exists? That's not the subject of the debate either. I want to know like your standards of evidence for God, do they have any meaning outside of that particular question in the very specific way that you've defined it to to set the debate up in your favor? Is there anything else that is scientifically verifiable, like the external world? Like the principle of non-contradiction, please give me the evidence, the objective objectively verifiable evidence that the law of non-contradiction is true. That's not the subject of this debate either. And after being accused of setting this up so that it would be easy for me to win, after acknowledging he chose these topics that I did not want to address. And now it turns out that he also does not want to address. I don't know what to do. James? No, no, there's plenty of evidence. There's plenty of that. If you ask people, start for evidence. If you ask people for evidence of God, they will point to their sense that God exists. They will point to their sense that when they look at the world, they see it as being created by a supreme being for a purpose. When you ask people about any number of things that are not scientific, they will have a tendency to answer in specific ways. These are studied within the cognitive science of religion and psychology generally. If you ask people for evidence of the external world or basic arithmetic propositions, there's a tendency to answer in consistent ways in a universal fashion. What this tells us is that the human mind has a certain structure. It works in a certain way. And we have to understand the human mind in order to ask questions about morality, religion, aesthetics, logic, mathematics, all of these science, right? Empirical data, all of these things have to be understood with reference to human psychology. So it's not irrelevant to the debate. It's actually a core first step of being able to debate evidence for anything, let alone evidence for God. So what we just heard was that if you ask people, they'll tell you that they believe in a God. Some of them even say they intuit it. I'm still asking and still waiting for a demonstration of evidence for God. That's evidence that people believe in God. And if you just said, hey, I want to debate whether or not people believe in God, I'd say, why would we do that? I clearly agree that people believe in God. I used to believe in God, but I didn't do it necessarily because of intuition, although some people might do it for intuition reasons. Some people might think that they're doing it for good evidence reasons. But when I found out that I didn't have good evidence. And when I found out that intuitions could be wrong. And if you're going to have intuitions about, oh, I don't know whether or not the restaurant's going to be busy, that's probably based on past experience and data that you're just using your gut to assess. And so what you're describing is potentially intuition there isn't actually intuition, but it's based on data. But we don't have any data that I'm aware of for God. We don't have any evidence that I'm aware of for God. You haven't presented any. And that's the subject into the first hours of debate. Intuitions are evidence. Intuitions are evidence just because you don't accept them. That doesn't mean that they're not evidence. There are different types of intuitions. I didn't say all intuitions are equally compelling. There are some intuitions that are so compelling that no one has questioned them for most of human history, like the intuition that there is an external world, for example, or the intuition regarding the law of non-contradiction, certain moral intuitions like it is wrong to harm people. People have universally had this intuition. Why? Because every moral system, every religion that we see has this principle in it, implicitly or explicitly, that it is wrong to harm people without reason. That is evidence of its truth in so far as the human mind is capable of accessing the truth. That's the point. And the belief in God is also one of these very strong intuitions that human beings have that they develop from childhood. So that is evidence. You don't accept it as evidence. That's my point. Boy, have I got some surprises for you. Daniel seems to think that nobody's questioned reality. I don't evidently have never heard of solipsism. And the most of history was are you interrupting me again? What's good for the goose? Solipsism in the study of this within philosophy is something that is robustly argued all over. It's almost argued more than whether or not atheists can be rocks or whether or not tacos or sandwiches. Solipsism is the issue of can we trust? And do we know that the outside world that we think is the outside world that we experience? Is it the real true world? And as far as I'm aware, there is no solution to the problem of hard solipsism. But when you say that people's intuitions about God count as evidence, as I was pointing out, whether you're going to have objectively verifiable facts or objectively verifiable empirical evidence or not, at a minimum, the evidence that you have that you demonstrate someone's intuition. If you want to claim that's evidence, you have to make a demonstration to show how that intuition is consistent with a specific God concept and excludes other God concepts and how we can demonstrate that it is probably correct. And you haven't done any of that you've just asserted that people have intuitions about God, and that we shouldn't dismiss them. I didn't say we should. Sorry, you've asserted from the beginning, in your opening statement that the route, I think you use the word route to understanding reality and truth is through this kind of scientific analytic investigation. What do you want? You asserted that you asserted that. So why can't you justify that? Why can't you tell us why we should accept that standard? Because the first hour of this debate is not is Matt's epistemology sound? Is there? Yes, it is. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Meanwhile, what I said is that scientific inquiry is the most consistently reliable pathway to demonstrably understanding reality. I didn't say that intuition couldn't get you to the right answer. Intuitions need to be demonstrated in their reliability, because the wise person as Hume would teach us proportions their confidence to the evidence. You can have intuitions and they might be right. But the way to be confident and the way for them to count as good evidence is to show that they are probably right. So asserting that people have intuitions doesn't make them evidence. It doesn't make them reliable. And it doesn't mean that people's intuitions about whether the God is a Christian God, a Scientologist God, a Hindu God, a Muslim God, or some other God that nobody has proposed as any demonstration that it's likely to be correct. And this hour of the debate is supposed to be about evidence of God. I still am waiting. So your standard of evidence takes out all moral claims, moral truths, I'll say, actually, because I do believe it is a moral truth that harming others for no reason is wrong. I can't demonstrate that. I can't bring you peer reviewed studies to establish that. I do believe that the law of non contradiction is true. I can't bring you scientific evidence for that. I can't bring you I can't demonstrate that in a proof. I do believe that the external world exists. I cannot demonstrate that through a proof. I can't bring you scientific evidence for that.  That is a truth. And I will stand by that. But there's no scientific result that will say that that that is true. But it is true. That is reality. We all have these universal truths that we abide by an understanding reality. But none of that has to do with scientific evidence. None of that has to do with having this kind of deductive proof. Yet it's still true yet it's still a reality. What the atheist does. And in general, not just Matt, the atheist says that well, none of that is really real. And we don't need to talk about that. Let's just talk about what is scientific. But this is a drastic violent limitation on reality that the vast majority of humanity not only today, but throughout history doesn't share. We don't people don't have this scientific reductionist view of reality. So if you go back to the beginning of my opening statement, not the Mitch McConnell joke, which was really good, by the way. But if you go back to the beginning where I was describing things in addition to talking about the nature of evidence and everything else, I think I specifically pointed out that there are things where we're not going to be able to point to empirical evidence. And I think I used morality as an example for that to suggest that I am tossing those things out is not remotely accurate. And I guess he just missed part of my opening. But my opening was about evidence of God not about competing epistemologies. So I'm still waiting. Well, the difference is when it comes to morality, I'll stand and up and say, this is true. And it's not something that I can doubt. If I doubt it, I doubt my reality. But your position and you can correct me if I'm wrong is that morality is something that we can't have objectively verifiable facts about our positions are not the same on morality. My position is shared by the vast majority of human beings like no one even questions that's people's reality. I doubt reality. I doubt many things that I intuitively feel about reality. And yes, our view on morality is very different with something I'm sure we'll get to in a little while, which everybody's already aware of. When it comes to moral truths, or let's say the law of non contradiction, identity non contradiction in excluded middle, the foundations of logical thinking or presuppositions, we can't demonstrate that they're true because you'd have to assume that they're true to try to prove their false, which means they're not falsifiable. However, what we can do is demonstrate that they consistently seem to be inviolate. That means there doesn't seem to be anything that breaks those rules, but we don't have an exhaustive understanding of the universe. And so beginning as a practical, necessary assumption to say, I would like to reason, these are the foundations of reason that I'm going to begin with identity, non contradiction, excluded middle, and they continually consistently demonstrate to be true and reliable and have never been shown to not be. It is a reasonable intuition or inference or presupposition that we should continue to use them until such time as somebody demonstrates, hey, we found a problem with identity non contradiction excluded middle. And now you have to rethink whether or not you can use them as a foundation. But until then, it's like, you know what, I rolled a dice, and I rolled it over and over again, and I calculated the probabilities and this dice consistently conforms to the reliability, but I there, it might be the case that angels are picking the number that shows up on the dice every single time and they're just doing it consistent with the probabilities that I understand. And any day now that angel could just turn it to something else. So I better not. I don't have any foundation for probability.  We have loads of foundation for probability probabilities. We have loads of reason to think that something is true. What we don't have a way to demonstrate is that it's impossible for it to be otherwise. Yeah. So how would you falsify the principle of noncontradiction? I just asserted it just just literally said you cannot falsify. And how is it false? So it's not up to be falsifiable. Why do you say it seems to work as if there's going to be a future point where it's not going to work and therefore it will be falsified. Am I speaking English? I said these things are unfalsifiable. They are presuppositions that continually demonstrate that they are true. There's no reason to think that they could be violated in the future. But you can't demonstrate that. And so it is a presupposition. I am as convinced as I can be of anything that the foundations of logic are reasonable. But you can't prove it. This is this is the foundational problem of logic. Why do you accept it? Because oh my gosh. If I pick up a pen and I try and write with it and it writes every time I pick it up and write with it. Then I'm going to view that pen is reliable right up until it stops being reliable. That's the same thing for identity non-contradiction excluded middle. Those things have demonstrated continue to demonstrate that they seem to be and it's not a empirical case. And they say it's not an empirical thing. How can you demonstrate something that's non-empirical? I didn't say how can you demonstrate that harming someone is wrong? Like is there going to be a future point where we discover oh actually harming people for no reason is not wrong. It's actually good. It's not an empirical thing like you're making a category mistake. Like these are non-empirical things, but you're applying this empirical standard of falsifiability to everything. This is just a basic category mistake. So everybody pay attention to what's happening. This grandstanding is ludicrous. Are you speaking English? I'm sorry. Rewind it. I literally have to say the same thing. I answer the question. Your principle of falsifiability. You don't get to determine, you don't get to decide what question I answer and what question I don't answer. And what's actually happening here.  What's happening? Yes, you are. You're hurting my feelings. I know. You're breaking my heart. Wait till we get to the other problems. So what's happening here is I explained it and then I explained it again. And when he didn't have an answer, he instead tried to shift the topic to is harming people wrong? Are we going to find out that someday harming people is not wrong? And then he shifted that topic to is harming people for no reason wrong? When that's not the subject of this debate. It is not the subject of this hour debate. And it is not what we were talking about. Are you going to be able to stay on topic and eventually present some evidence of God? Or are you going to keep grandstanding and deflecting and pulling up topics that we weren't talking about? So if you apply the standard of falsifiability, that's exactly what's in question. That's what the whole opening was about questioning that standard of scientific evidence is the arbiter of truth. You haven't addressed that at all. You just grandstand to the audience and then you keep saying that. Well, we don't have evidence for God. Yes, I know that's the question. That is the debate topic, but we're trying to analyze what does evidence actually mean? What are standards of evidence that are required? I say that intuitions that human beings have universally from childhood are evidence for God insofar as we can understand truth insofar as we can understand reality. That is evidence. You don't accept that as evidence. And you say that, well, this is not objectively verifiable. And I ask you, why is it not objectively verifiable? You say, well, this is not something that's empirical or scientific. Why would we ever accept this? And then I say, well, what about all these other things that you accept that you seemingly accept? But they don't have that standard of proof. Yet you accept them. Do you accept that there's an external world? Do you accept that harming someone for no reason is wrong? Do you accept that even though you don't have any empirical proof? So why won't you accept that God exists? So I was just accused of saying, why would we accept it if it's not empirical when I just finished explaining that identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle are not only not falsifiable, but are an example of the thing I highlighted at the beginning of my opening about things that are not based on empirical evidence. I didn't address the question at all about whether or not I think there's an objective world that we're experiencing. So Daniel is arguing against a fictional straw man of me and still presenting no evidence of God. You accept law of non-contradiction? Yes. Why? Where's the where's the empirical evidence? As I've, where's the empirical evidence? As I've explained now four times, it's something that's not empirical. That's my correct. Correct. So then there can't be any empirical evidence for it. Yet you accept what I didn't say there couldn't be any empirical evidence for it. But that's not why I accept it. What could be not where you're going to let me answer? Are you going to talk over me again? I explained why I accepted it because it continually demonstrates its reliability. And I also pointed out that I accepted initially as a pre supposition because there is no way to demonstrate identity non-contradiction excluded middle are always true. But there is a way to show that they are true in every example that we can come up with. You can do this with a simple Venn diagram to show that a not a and everything is either a or not a and everything is both a and not a. This is what a single Venn diagram with a single circle demonstrates. Come up with an example that suggests or shows that identity non-contradiction or excluded middle aren't true. Come up with an example where they're not true. And I'll stop believing them kind of I'll stop believing that they are going to continue to be reliable because now you'll have demonstrated that there's a circumstance where they're not reliable. But much like the pen until there's a demonstration that this is going to not be reliable at some point which for pens we know. But until that time I'm I'm justified in continuing to use logic as a pre supposition that continues to demonstrate its viability and its reliability. I said nothing at all about why should we believe something if it's not empirical. I did not I did not say in at any point that science is the only way to knowledge understanding what I said is the most consistently reliable demonstrable pathway to an accurate model of reality. If you're not going to address what I actually said could you finally present some evidence of God. You're contradicting yourself you keep saying that well this is non-empirical the law of non-contradiction is non-empirical but you're still waiting for a demonstration that can happen later in time meaning an empirical event. This is a contradiction in what you're saying. We can get more specific with the issue of harm. Is harming someone for no reason. Wrong. That is something are you waiting for a future event. Can you explain like something that could happen or. When it could be demonstrated that harming someone for no reason is morally right. So again on the law of non-contradiction when I say. That there it's not empirical proof I'm saying there's no empirical proof that those things will always be true. There's no way to demonstrate that. There's no way to demonstrate currently a circumstance under which those would be false. But I don't have complete knowledge of the universe and wouldn't pretend to. And so my reliance on them. Is contingent on the fact that they continue to demonstrate that they work. And as soon as they stop then my confidence in them will be diminished that's how confidence work right now. Identity non-contradiction excluded middle consistently demonstrate in all circumstances and in all conceivable circumstances this I'm not sitting around waiting for somebody to demonstrate that they're not going to work sometime. I don't have any good reason to think that's likely to ever happen. I can't even imagine. The circumstance and so far nobody else has been able to imagine circumstances under which that's the case. I'm not saying I believe them. But that are on as they are presuppositions. But that doesn't mean that there aren't empirical facts that are consistent with them. See. Then how are they non empirical. See comma. They there is not as I just explain a minute ago. There's not an empirical way to demonstrate that they could be false. But there are empirical ways to demonstrate that they are currently reliable.  All of those pieces of empirical information are evaluated within the realm of logic and they continue to demonstrate that the logic. The foundations of logic lead us to accurate models of reality.  There's nothing about that that says they're not related to the empirical world. Of course they are categorization. This is what set there is isn't just a letter. It represents a set of things. It could be the set of empirical things. It could be the set of empirical things that are blue, green and come out on Thursday. I don't know what that is but somebody in you go or Pokemons got something like that. The empirical facts demonstrate the reliability of that but it also can be shown as an abstraction which is why I pointed out of Venn diagram. Well can answer and it's still not evidence of God. The moral claim. The moral claim is irrelevant to this hour of the debate. I'm still waiting how is that irrelevant? You just bloviated about the law of non-contradiction. Explain to us this moral principle of harming others for no reason is wrong. Presumably you accept that. Give me the empirical evidence or the objective objectively verifiable fact that that's the case like when you talk about everything in nature demonstrates the law of non-contradiction that sounds like a lot of theist everything in nature demonstrates that God exists. You have a certain intuition a logical intuition about the law of non-contradiction and that's why you use terms like oh it works you know I have confidence in it my confidence is not diminished. You're expressing an intuition which is as I defined a tendency to find something compelling. That's all you're expressing you're just trying to fit it into this mold of empiricism. But you contradict yourself at first you say that is non falsifiable it's non-empirical and then you still have this standard of falsifiability for non-contradiction. But please answer this question will we ever determine in the future that harming others for no reason it can be correct. So this is a demonstration of what happens when you don't listen and when you have a flawed epistemology because I was just told that because I bloviated about the laws of non-contradiction identity in excluded middle that this required me to answer or perhaps bloviate about his other irrelevant question that is also not about the evidence of God and you sure are wrong I don't have that requirement in this particular debate. Yeah you can dodge it dodge it no problem. So at least when I dodge it I'm not constantly dodging the subject of the actual the subject is evidence. The subject is evidence and epistemology is literally in the title. The subject is evidence of God. What is a standard of evidence. If you don't understand the debate if you don't understand the debate you don't understand I don't understand the debate literally evidence epistemology is the core of the debate. Whatever evidence and epistemology is the core of the debate. I rest my case. I rest it. You rested the wrong time ago. You rested a long time ago. Keep telling me I don't understand the debate that you picked. That's what that's what you keep telling me that I don't understand. Yeah so this is the whole debate is about evidence and epistemology. I gave evidence you just don't accept it. So the question becomes why don't you accept it and you're not able to justify why you accept certain things on the basis of not having any kind of scientific evidence behind that. You said you accept the certain laws of logic. You accept certain moral principles. You accept that the external world exists. You accept those things without any kind of empirical evidence. So that says that you're either being inconsistent with your standard of evidence. I mean that's what it shows you're inconsistent with your standard of evidence. Explain how you're consistent when there are things that you do accept without any empirical evidence. But you you're accusing me of claiming God exists without empirical evidence. When I'm saying that that's not relevant to establishing that God exists and that God is a part of reality. So now I've been accused of another thing that's not true which is not explaining why I didn't accept his claim about intuitive evidence for God. And I think I specifically said that it had to do with whether or not that evidence is consistent with facts and whether or not it excludes other potential hypotheses. This is how we tell whether something is evidence for a proposition because right now if somebody has an intuitive notion about a God well that's evidence that maybe that could be evidence that there's a God it could be evidence that they're delusional. And so until you come up with a methodology to distinguish between those two you don't get to declare that their intuition is in fact evidence for or of or from or a God because thoughts about a God don't in any way demonstrate that a God is real. You have to draw. I don't care if it's intuitive. I didn't say you didn't present empirical evidence. I said you haven't presented any evidence even with intuitive evidence in order to show that intuitive evidence for a God exists or is actually evidence for that God. You have to show that it excludes competing hypotheses including this person is wrong or delusional. That is what evidence for a proposition is whether it's empirical, intuitive or magic. But if it's an intuition that there are pink elephants in this room with us and it's just me who has that intuition. Yeah, you have to show that I'm not delusional. But if it's an intuition that everyone is share is sharing on the basis of biology and natural psychology, that's something else entirely. And when we look at cognitive science of religion specifically, it's a massive field with so much peer-reviewed literature and books that have been published. They show that just like people have intuitions about morality, just like people have intuitions about the law of non-contradiction, just like people have intuitions about aesthetics and certain aesthetic principles, they have theological intuitions about an afterlife. That's why we see so many cultures independently have this idea that after we die, our mind persists. That is something biological is part of human psychology. The idea that the universe has been created for a purpose specifically to benefit mankind. This is an idea found in one form or another in the vast majority of all human religions. Did they how if religions are just something that people made up in their villages? How are all of these people across the world at different times and places coming up with the same exact kind of theology? The belief in God, the belief in God as a creator and monotheism, this is something that is shared within so many different religions. They come to the same conclusion independently of each other. What cognitive scientists of religion say is that this is because it's biologically rooted. So they do surveys of different cultures. They do childhood developmental studies and they survey children on what they actually believe prior to becoming socialized within a particular social milieu. And they identified why I refer to in the presentation as a natural theology. There are certain beliefs, the belief that if you are a bad person and you harm others and you take advantage of others, the universe is somehow going to punish you for that.  That is something that is an intuition that's shared universally across all different cultures and religions. So these are things that need to be investigated. They need to be taken into account. It's not a deluge. Someone's just delusionally thinking, oh, there might be, you know, pink elephants in this room. That's straw manning the intuitive position. So it's simply not true that all people across all times have come to the same conclusions or the same intuitions about God's or an afterlife. Not only is there a good example in the people of the Paraha and the Amazon that have no had no God concept until somebody decided to jump in and present them with one. But the various notions about things differ, which is how we ended up with thousands of different religions, with thousands of different denominations. And the bigger problem here, this is one of the reasons why the world shifted to what was the phrase that you use the cultural. Sorry, was that cognitive colonialism? Cognitive colonialism, basically his view of why we've shifted to a focus that is more on empirical evidence and analytic thinking. And the reason the real reason that happened, it wasn't some atheist cabal, because even though I would like to live in a pod and do drugs and play video games, not all atheists share that that goal of mine. But amongst people, there are competing ideas, competing intuitions about a God. There's a reason why religions come in conflict because they have competing intuitions about a God and no way to demonstrate which if any of them are right. And that is why we began to rely more on analytical thinking and assessing data to say, you know what, we can find out what's right on this, on this, we can't really do it on this, we can do it on this and this, but we can't really do it on this. And you guys who want to rely on intuition about something that you think is important, which the rest of us don't think actually impacts our lives, you'd need to make a demonstration. I agree, if there is a God that's one of the most important questions ever, which is why I've spent my life addressing it, both as a Christian and as an atheist. But whether or not there's a God is a big enough question that if you simply relied on intuition, you might end up in the wrong religion. And so if there is in fact some God and he's going to judge you, which some of the religions say, based on whether or not you accept that God versus a competing God, then it is that God's responsibility to provide sufficient evidentiary warrant for accepting its existence. And if that comes in the form of intuition, that's fine, but it has to be demonstrably reliable. That's the problem of God and it's the problem of relying on intuition and it's the reason why in an hour long discussion about evidence of God, I'm the only one that actually talked about and addressed all aspects of that topic. Whether or not it's true that harming people for no reason is wrong, whether that's true or not, that also has a major impact on human life.  Where's the demonstrable proof of that? Where is the science of evidence? Where is, why can't you answer it? You accept it. You picked the debate topic, not me. Who is this clown laughing? You don't need to laugh at everything he says. Look, show me the proof. Show me the demonstrable proof of those kinds of things within morality, law of non-contradiction, logic, all of these other things that you take and you accept without objectively verifiable facts, show me that that is a correct standard to use. If you can't demonstrate that, then why do you have this standard of evidence that you apply just to the question of God? That is inconsistent. Furthermore, the Amazonian group that you mentioned, they do believe in spirit beings. They do believe in an afterlife. So that is shared universally amongst people, even in the depths of the Amazon. Why? Because it is biologically rooted. And if you want to go and disagree with the cognitive scientists of religion, go ahead, write a peer-reviewed paper about it. But this kind of new atheist nonsense is old hat, old news. It's been debunked decades ago, but you're just repeating it. So I want to see demonstration of these other things that you accept as being true, as being correct that you accept. They're also very important for human society, whether morality, whether there's any kind of moral truth, whether there's an external world. Do you think that has something to, that is a big part of our understanding of reality? Of course it is. Of course, morality is a big part of our understanding of reality. What about our memories? How do we know for sure? Can you demonstrate to me that the entire universe wasn't created five minutes ago and all of our memories of the past were implanted in us? How can you demonstrate that scientifically? Is there any objectively verifiable fact that can prove that it wasn't? Our memories are pretty important, right? So show me any kind of consistent standard of proof, standard of evidence that you're applying to God. Show where it applies in these other very critical human domains. Ashton answered. I did it at the beginning. I talked about the standards of evidence and how it applies to a bunch of different claims. This debate is not, hey, Matt, justify everything that I think you believe, which, by the way, everything you think I believe isn't necessarily what I believe. But if you're interested on my personal YouTube account, I just did a video about whether or not the five minute universe hypothesis is true. If you'd pick that as a debate topic, we could have maybe done that. But I've already done it and I've already addressed this first hour's topic. I have nothing further to add on whether or not there's evidence of God when nothing's been presented. Yeah, I mean, that's is unexplained. You accept many things as true or you accept them as just working or it seems to work. But basically, you're saying that you feel that it's compelling. You have that intuition as true. That's not what I'm saying basically or otherwise. That's not an accurate representation. No, it is. No, it's not. I specifically pointed out how to test. We're back to interruption. We're back to interruption. Okay, if you're just gonna not tell the truth about what I literally said, people can rewind. It's fine. No, you said something. I'm interpreting what you said. Well, I'm interpreting what you said. Your interpretation with your flawed epistemology. Yeah.  Is there evidence for God? Not epistemology. There the debate was evidence. Is it epistemology? You can derp all you want. This is your fault. Not mine. Yeah, derp all you want. So again, brings us to the next section of our debate. We're gonna have a five minute intermission. So folks, if you'd like to use the restroom, we're going to have a five minute intervention. Intervention. And then we'll be back in just five minutes. See you then. Thanks so much. First one for subscription. We'll give you a lot of feedback on the email. That's on the description. Who wants to? What? 15 seconds. Hey, folks, if you're watching at home, want to let you know first, if you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button as we have many more debates coming up. You don't want to miss them. So hit that subscribe button right now. As well as if you didn't know that modern day debate, debate con is happening this Saturday or I should say Saturday, November 4th in Dallas, Texas. You don't want to miss it. Pickets are linked in the description box below already. And we'll be back after this five minute intermission. Folks, just want to let you know if you're watching at home, I had mentioned debate con part four by modern day debate will be happening Saturday, November 4th in the Dallas, Texas area. You don't want to miss it. If you're anywhere near, grab your tickets. We expect to sell out. It's going to be a tremendous conference with four to five debates in a single day. As of now, we've already booked David Wood, Christian versus R&R, atheist or an epic debate on whether or not naturalism is true among many others. You can find those on our YouTube homepage. And if you can't make it to Dallas, Texas for November 4th's debate con by modern day debate hit that subscribe button as we'll be live streaming all of those debates for the public for free during that conference. All right, folks, thanks so much. We're back. We're going to jump to the next section of the three sections total. The second section that we're about to start is on whether or not Islam is true. Thanks very much, Matt. The floor is all yours. Welcome back to Matt needs to justify his beliefs on everything, even though that's not the debate topic which Daniel presented as is there any religion more compelling than Islam? And because that was the debate topic that I was presented with, that's what I prepared for. It's a silly topic that is absolutely ridiculous and irrelevant because to say, is there any religion that is more compelling than Islam doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not it's true. It's like saying, is there any racist more awful than Jim Bob or any fable more compelling than the boy who cried wolf or any Tyler Perry Medea movie more enjoyable than, well, none of them. But I had to accept this particular, thanks for interrupting the opening. Good job. I had to accept this debate or this portion of the debate despite the fact that it's pretty silly because all I care about personally is whether or not something is true or whether or not we have a good reason to believe that it's true.  But this one he called, is there any religion more compelling than Islam? Now to be fair, I still do my homework. And so I went out and did some research both on a number of different definitions of compelling so that I could potentially address other things. I may not have got them all but dictionary definitions of compelling. And by the way, I'm not citing dictionaries as authority on anything other than describing usage but evoking interest, attention or admiration in a powerful, irresistible way is one definition for compelling. Not able to be refuted inspiring conviction is another one. Now, on the front of evoking interest, attention, Islam's done a really good job of evoking interest and attention in a number of different ways. Some not as good as others. Some definitely bad press, Christianity has also inspired quite a bit of interest and attention, atheism, secular humanism to some extent as it's starting to inspire a little more than it used to. But that's really kind of, as he mentioned in the last hour, this issue of compellingness is ultimately subjective. I'm glad he said that because I was getting ready to say it. And it's one of the reasons why this hour of the debate is kind of like your refreshing gap because ultimately a good chunk of it's gonna come down to subjective opinions. There are though some facts that we can look at that cry to figure out if there's any religion more compelling than Islam. Well, if we just look at statistics on practitioners, Christianity is the most popular religion on the planet currently based on a 2010 Pew study that could change any minute at about 2.3 billion or 31% of the population. Islam is second with about 25%, 24.9% in the last day but we'll give it, it's probably increasing a little bit at 1.97 billion. And then secular, non-religious, agnostic atheists is in third, I'm sorry, Hindus, Buddhist, Chinese traditional religion, ethnic religions, African traditional religion, Sikhism, spiritism, Judaism, Baha, Jainism, Shinto, Badais or Asterianism, Tanrikkyo, I didn't know what that is, animism, neo-paganism, unitarian universalism, Rastafarianism, they're the only ones that were listed but secularism comes in third. Now by the way, I wanna make sure I'm honest about this, that third category of the nuns, the N-O-N-E nuns, not the N-U-N nuns, is about number of adherents not to an idea but to that label. It doesn't mean they're all secular humanists, it doesn't mean they're all atheists, it doesn't mean they're all agnostics or free thinkers. And so if we were to judge compellingness by whether or not, or by the number of adherents, then no, there's at least one religion that is more compelling than Islam on that front and that's Christianity, it has more adherents. That could change and it could change tomorrow. It could change when the 2020 Pew study for the same thing hasn't been released yet and it's 2023, it takes them years to assess this data. When it comes out, Islam could be number one which doesn't tell us anything at all about whether or not it's true or how compelling it is, it just tells us how many people have become convinced as a percentage of the population. It could also be the case that the nuns take the number one spot, but let's be honest, that's probably not gonna happen right away. What it does mean though is that if Islam represents 25% of the population, at least 75% found some other religion or some other view about religion more compelling than Islam. So you don't have to just compare number one to number two, you have to compare where you are to everything else. And so it's not that there's any necessary, it's not like Baha'i is more compelling than Islam but it's more compelling to some people than Islam and there's a lot more people who are compelled by something else than are compelled by Islam. What about another definition of compelling? Like controlling, like I'm gonna compel you to pray five times a day or wear a particular outfit or not to leave the house without somebody else in your company or not to do this or do that or not to have sex with someone of the same gender or not to seek equality on those fronts. Well, I don't know if Islam is the most compelling on that front. I don't think that's what Daniel had in mind but I don't know because he hasn't, he'll get to give his presentation in just a minute. We don't know if that's what he was thinking about but I had to go through the various definitions of compelling, but just so that I'm not here to throw shade at every other religion, secular humanism was originally founded as a religion. The first humanist manifesto presented the case for secular humanism as a religion. And while it is definitely not more compelling on the two grounds that I just presented, I find it more personally compelling and so do other people and my personal view is that it should be more compelling to everyone. And my reasons for that, some of which we'll get into in the third part when I give a more robust defense of secular humanism as a good for the world is that secular humanism adheres to a few very basic principles, individual autonomy, the right to steer your own ship, that sort of freedom, liberty, that's key. But also it holds that whether or not there is a God or whether or not some other religion is right about something that we seem to be stuck here on this planet and we have problems and conflicts and we need to find ways to resolve them. And since I can't point to my God and say, this solves the problem unless you also happen to accept my God, by the way, I don't have a God I'm using. This is an example, somebody's going to cut that out and put it up on YouTube. Matt's talking about his God again. You can't do that because we don't have an objective way to determine whether Daniel's version of Allah is correct or Issa, the guy I debated a week or so ago whether his version of Allah is correct. And that's just within Islam. When we also take a look outside at Christianity, there's no ready solution to those. And so what secular humanism does is it doesn't say, those are wrong, it says we can't appeal to those. We're gonna have to fix our problems on our own. But secular humanism has at its foundation the betterment of human existence. That's the goal, find, not to declare what are, but to find the best, most reliable methods of understanding the nature of reality and coming up with solutions to our problems. We don't get to say, well, my God said, we're doing this, so we're doing this because that just doesn't work. We know from the empirical evidence over history and conflicts between people asserting their religious authority over others that that's not a good method of solving problems. Religions solved their problems by conquest, by conversion. And secular humanism seeks to solve our conflicts by data, debate, and discussion. That's the foundation of humanism. If the goal within humanism is to come up with a world that is better for human beings, then any idea from any religion that can demonstrate that it is in fact better for human beings, that idea gets rolled into secular humanism. If it turns, well, it gets rolled into humanism because if it turns out that somebody can actually demonstrate that following a particular God is better for human beings, then it would be a part of humanism and just no longer be secular because you're gonna be adhering to a God. That's the foundation and the focus. Humanism focuses on humans. Islam focuses on God. And while God may have the best interests of humans in mind, that would need to be demonstrated in order to declare that it's better for humans. Otherwise, it could just be that God has God's best interests in mind or that what we have is a situation where we don't have a God, but we have a lot of people making declarations about what that God thinks and what that God wants for the world. And so if secular humanism says, let's work together to find the best information and the best ways to address that information so that we can share the best world possible even if we never get there. I'm not saying we're gonna get to utopia. Oh, if secular humanism just takes over, we'll all be in utopia. No, it's ridiculous. The problem is we don't have good data to compare fully, which we'll get to in the third part because there's not a secular humanist nation and never has been. And so we don't know for sure how a nation would be like that, but that's for the third part. With regard to compelling, I think if you genuinely care about human beings, then a religion sounded on human beings and the betterment of human beings as its focus and goal. That is willing to accept ideas wherever they come from that are demonstrably good for humans should be pretty damn compelling. Thanks for that opening, Matt. We're gonna kick it over to Daniel for his opening for this section in particular on Islam, whether or not there's more evidence for Islam compared to other religions. Daniel, the floor is yours for 10 minutes as well. Thanks for being with us. When we evaluate a complex belief system, whether it be humanism, communism, Islam, Christianity, it's never a simple proof that can be provided to show that it's true. We usually look at compelling points in favor of that belief system and then look at any potential deal breakers. We weigh all the compelling points against the deal breakers in order to come to an overall conclusion about its validity. In this part of the debate, atheists have to pretend that they're open to accepting a religion. So rich religion is most compelling. Atheists commonly argue that all religions are equally compelling but what they mean by this is that all religions are equally false. This is because religions make claims that cannot be proven scientifically and it's assumed that claims which cannot be proven scientifically are not compelling. For example, the Islamic claim that one God exists is no more compelling than the claim that Zeus or Hercules exist. But this is not true. Humans naturally find certain theologies more compelling than others and this is because of natural intuitions that all humans have. There are three natural intuitions to consider. First is what psychologists call intuitions about spirit beings. Every society in history believed in some form of spirit beings like angels, ghosts or gods. Brain scans reveal that such belief is associated with a prefrontal cortex. Spirit beings are conceptualized as possessing minds but lack ordinary bodies made of matter. Because spirit beings lack material bodies they're considered invisible or exist in a hidden realm. Because people have an intuition that spirit beings exist they're inclined to believe in things like angels, demons and ghosts. By contrast, people are not inclined to believe in a flying spaghetti monster. This is because a spaghetti monster has a material body. Atheists know that humans have trouble believing in such a creature and this is why they misrepresent religious beliefs as equivalent to belief in the flying spaghetti monster. This is a strawman. Second, there are intuitions that psychologists call teleological intuitions. Studies reveal that young children believe that certain things like cars and spoons are made by human beings but natural things like animals, plants and the sun are not made by human beings. The interesting thing is that children believe that these natural entities were made with a purpose by non-human agents like God. In other words, human intuition support the idea that spirits or gods create natural entities like animals, rivers and humans themselves. This idea is found in religions across the world. Third, humans have intuitions about causation. Humans find simpler causal explanations more compelling than complex causal explanations. This is Occam's razor. The ideal is causal explanations that assume only one cause. Now, when you combine these three intuitions, the result is people believe that spirit beings exist. Spirit beings have created natural entities for a purpose and ultimately there is one spirit being who has caused all things to come into existence for a purpose. This is the natural intuitive basis for belief in one supreme spirit being or creator God. In other words, monotheism. Since it's supported by so many natural intuitions, monotheism is very compelling for human beings. Surveys prove this, 80 to 90% of people endorse the belief in a singular, all-powerful creator God. What's surprising is that even 60% or more of Buddhists in the world believe in a creator God despite the fact that Buddhism does not have this idea in its theology. The natural intuition is so strong it even overcomes Buddhist theology. Most of the 10 to 20% of people who don't believe in a creator are actually atheists or agnostics. So the idea of an all-powerful creator is the dominant idea across all these independent religions and cultures around the world. This is due to biologically rooted human psychology. In Islamic terms, we call this the fitrah. Islam is more compelling than other religions because it centers on pure monotheism. This differentiates it from other religions, many of which also endorse the idea of a creator God but blend it with polytheism. For example, the Christian notion of the Trinity mixes monotheism with polytheism. Another example is Judaism. Certain passages in the Hebrew Bible are strictly monotheistic. Others are polytheistic. Also, Hinduism has a monotheistic strand which holds that there is one ultimate God who reveals himself in the form of many deities like Vishnu and Shiva. Hindu texts also contain many polytheistic passages. Now moving beyond theology, religions usually claim to have founders who lived in the distant past and had access to supernatural knowledge. For example, Zoroaster had access to supernatural knowledge and founded Zoroastrianism. Similarly, Moses founded Judaism, Buddha founded Buddhism, Muhammad sallallahu alaihi sallam founded Islam and so on. Religions further claim that they've preserved the teachings of their founders without fundamental alteration into the present. Given this claim, a religious tradition would be discredited if it's discovered that its present day teachings cannot be traced back to its founders. This creates a problem. History shows that religions usually change significantly over time due to social, technological and political change. This means that in most cases, a religion's core scriptures and doctrines have changed over time and cannot be traced to its founders, at least not in any historically verifiable way. For example, historical investigation demonstrates that basic Christian doctrines like the Trinity cannot be traced back to Jesus. Similarly, when it comes to figures like Zoroaster, Moses and perhaps even Buddha, it cannot be independently verified that these figures have ever even existed. As a result, basic Zoroastrian, Jewish and Buddhist texts or doctrines cannot be traced to these founders. But Islam is unique in that its basic scripture and doctrines can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi sallam. This is something acknowledged even by non-Muslim academics. Rock inscriptions and seven century non-Muslim sources confirm that the Prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam actually existed. Furthermore, radiocarbon dating has demonstrated that the Quran we read today can be traced back to his lifetime. There is also no doubt that basic Islamic practices and doctrine can be traced back to the Prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam because they're mentioned in the Quran or in inscriptions or in seventh century non-Muslim sources, practices like ritual prayer, fasting, zakat, pilgrimage or beliefs like belief in one God, his prophets, his angels, heaven, hell, a final day of judgment. All these core practices and doctrines can be objectively traced to the seventh century. Now to be clear, the fact that a religion's teachings have been preserved does not in and of itself prove the truth of that religion. Nonetheless, if a religion's teachings have constantly changed over time, this destroys the credibility of that religion. For example, it's hard to be a Jew or Christian once you realize that basic Jewish and Christian doctrines and rituals cannot be objectively traced back to Moses and Jesus. Of all the major religions, Islam has preserved its teachings best and this contributes to its unique compellingness. Another critical factor, every religion ascribes amazing and miraculous acts to its founding figures. And this is because the miracles of a founder make his message more compelling. Amazing acts are evidence of support from God or supernatural forces. Now consider the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi sallam. Muhammad claimed that he was God's messenger to all of mankind, that his task was to turn mankind to monotheism and to bring them God's final message. Suppose that after Muhammad sallallahu alaihi sallam claimed all this, he only won two or three followers and then died virtually unknown in the desert. Were this the case, his message would be far, far less compelling. But in reality, he proceeded to perform many amazing acts that can be historically verified whether one is a Muslim or not. For example, Muhammad sallallahu alaihi sallam is widely considered the most influential man in history even among non-Muslims During his life, he established the foundations of a major new world religion, a world civilization and launched wars that would overthrow two of the three greatest world empires of his age. No person in history has turned more people to the monotheistic worship of God than he has. His religion is the strongest and most robust in human history and will soon have the greatest number of followers. While other religions, including Christianity collapsed before our eyes, Islam stands alone offering the only religious alternative to atheism and secularism. Due to these amazing achievements, it's natural that people take Muhammad s message more seriously than they would otherwise. When it comes to founding figures associated with other religions, it usually cannot be established that they did anything amazing. For example, many amazing acts are attributed to Zoroaster and Moses, but these cannot be verified because their existence cannot be verified. The same is arguably true of Buddha. Jesus preached for a few years before being crucified according to Christians, Christianity then spread across the Roman Empire, which is quite impressive, but the understanding of Christianity that spread had little to do with what can be traced to the purported teachings of Jesus, rather what spread were teachings of Paul, which mutated over time through a series of church councils. Finally, statistical studies show that Muslim societies across the world have the highest levels of religious belief and the strongest system of marriage and family. This is due to the Sharia, a concrete coherent, time-tested system of rules for how to live. Other religions lack such a system. For example, Christianity and Buddhism currently do not have a concrete system of rules to guide people with the result that Christians and Buddhist populations simply take on whichever values and norms of the dominant political system. In the Roman Empire, every Christian accepts Roman imperialism and feudal Europe. Every Christian accepts European feudalism. In a liberal communist country, every Christian accepts liberalism or communism. Judaism and Hinduism do have systems of rules, but anyone who closely examined these rules sees that they're full of contradictions and have constantly changed over time. As a result, no one, including Jews and Hindus, take them seriously or apply them consistently. The Sharia is different because it does provide individuals and societies with a concrete blueprint for living a life which values religion, marriage, family, and community. All these factors make Islam the most compelling religion. Thank you very much for those openings, gentlemen. I'm gonna trust you guys. We're gonna jump into the open dialogue to discuss the evidence for Islam. The floor is all yours. I think this one's mostly pretty easy. I'm happy to know that Islam is the only thing standing in the way of secularism because I can stop, find all those Christians, I can stop debating them now. So I'm wondering what the criteria that you're using to, I mean, you talked about it, but you gave a couple of, you implied a couple of different criteria, like that Islam centers on monotheism and that this makes it superior or more compelling than Christianity, which relies on theism or on the Trinity, except that Christianity is more popular than Islam. So what makes Islam more compelling other than the number of adherents? And then it seemed like you suggested that those other ones change, which I agree, that's a problem when you think you've got the truth and then it changes as the world which has been impacted by cognitive colonialism changes around you and your religion changes, that's a problem for your credibility. But that would make Scientology more credible. So what criteria do we have to determine that Islam is the most compelling? Which one are you using? Well, it's a confluence of factors. So there's not gonna be one clear cut, oh, this is it, this is what makes it most compelling. It's a confluence of multiple factors and that's natural, like when we evaluate any kind of belief system. It's a complex belief system. You want to know if, should I accept capitalism or communism or socialism or anarchism? I'll evaluate those complex systems and find multiple things that are compelling about each one. Some will have deal breakers, some will be less compelling in other aspects. You have to take a confluence of factors and these are just four that I mentioned, they're not the only four. But these are things where I think we can get a grasp on what do we mean by compelling? Like what do we mean something is compelling or oh, okay, this is an interesting idea. We should explore it, maybe we should accept it. That's why these are the four that I focused on. So for example, I could ask you just very honestly to understand your perspective. So would you concede, for example, or would you agree that it undermines religious belief when texts and doctrines change over time and that Islam is more, assuming that it hasn't changed, Islam is more compelling than religions that have changed over time. Like Christianity or Judaism or Zoroastrianism? Perhaps, I think I'm glad you mentioned it's complicated. Perhaps the thing is, for me, is if the actual scripture changes, maybe that could be because it's like correcting something. So I can't say for sure that that should make it less compelling. I will say that it does impact its credibility as it changes. What I find to impact its credibility even more is when the religion as practiced begins to deviate from the traditional religion without the text changing, that that impacts its credibility more. I think we agree, we're on the same page. So if you start deviating from what the text says, like for example, many of the Hindu texts advocate the caste system and many Hindus today find the caste system absolutely abhorrent. So that would be an example of the practitioners deviating from what the texts actually advocate. So I think we're agreed on that. If there's a deviation with what people are practicing compared to what the text says, because the text is purportedly from a supernatural source and a supernatural source is going to have certain features like being infallible or having knowledge that an average human doesn't have. And they also purport to be these timeless truths. So if the text changes or it gets updated or there are mistakes found, then that would destroy the credibility of that religion. Now, if a religion has been preserved that people are practicing according to its texts, that's not proof that the religion is true, but that's a compelling factor. It adds to the credibility. And I think Islam is really unique as a religion in that regard. So, would it be fair to say that what you're looking at because it's complex is almost like a ranked choice of voting where you give Islam a score two out of 50 on popularity and a one out of 50 on or two out of 50 on consistency with the original text and an X out of whatever.  Yeah, that's a simple way to put it. I think it's a simple guy. But I think that's the way that the human mind works. Like people who convert to Islam or another religion, like that's how they evaluate. They look at different factors. It's a complex thing that can take years or it can take minutes, but that's the way that naturally organically we come to accept certain worldviews or belief systems. So, when it comes to the Christianity being having the most adherence currently, I would say that the core theology of Islam is belief in one creator God and that monotheism. And I think that actually is held by the vast majority of Christians. And when Christians are surveyed, they about 30 to 40%, I forgot the exact number, won't even accept the Trinity as true. So I consider even those Christians or a large portion of Christians agree with monotheism. Hindus the same thing, Buddhists the same thing, like this idea of one creator God, one all powerful creator, that is the dominant theology. And what's interesting is if you survey people across the world about what is your strongest belief? Like belief in the afterlife, belief in karma, belief in reincarnation, belief in the Buddha or belief in God as a creator, the number one most compelling religious belief that people will vote on is belief in one God. And that's why I focused on monotheism as really a top choice because it's supported by many different natural intuitions that people have that they develop from childhood. And the fact that Islam puts that at the top of its theology with Tauheed, that is a big point in favor, like if we have a scorecard, that's a big point in favor of Islam. I don't know how much of a point in favor it is, but in the interest of finding at least one more thing to agree on, the Trinity is garbage and Judaism is not just potentially polytheistic, but also potentially henotheistic. But this gets down to what, from the pool of people who are likely to accept supernatural claims about a God, there seems to certainly be a trend towards more monotheistic things, but this is about what people find is popular. What do we do with, for example, the argument that Islam, while it has remained unchanged a little bit since the seventh century, what about the argument that this is just a re-spin on Judaism, just like Christianity's a re-spin on Judaism and therefore Christianity and Islam have both departed from the actual origins and therefore they've both changed and neither of them are compelling? That's a good question. Islam doesn't claim to be like a spin-off of Judaism. Islam has its doctrines and teachings, what Islam says is that there have been prophets sent throughout the course of human history to bring the revelation of God. And there's different revelations that are sent progressively to prophets and the Quran is the final revelation with the final prophet, Muhammad SAW. So Judaism makes claims about, okay, these are the teachings of Moses and we have the Torah, we have the oral Torah and we have these kinds of doctrines and practices and they will not be able to historically verify that the Torah is actually traced to the time of Moses as a historical figure. There's actually no archeological evidence or radiocarbon evidence, manuscript evidence that Moses even existed. As Muslims, we believe that Moses existed as a prophet and he's one of the most frequently mentioned prophets in the Quran, but we believe in the existence of Moses because of the Quran, because we believe in the Quran, we accept revelation. But with Muhammad, it's a different category because he is verified independently as a historical figure, SAW, and in the Quran itself also has been historically verified to the seventh century and there are non-Muslim accounts that through manuscripts from the seventh century that would describe what Muslims do. Like Muslims pray, Muslims face Mecca for prayers, Muslims have this pilgrimage. Like all the things that Muslims are doing today, it's been independently historically verified that they're doing it 1400 years ago. This adds to the compellingness. Is it like a knockdown of this is the proof? No, I'm not claiming that, but it's adding to the compellingness in a unique way that's not found in these other major religions. So you said that atheists claim that all religions are equally compelling. I'm an atheist, I don't claim that. Never have. But which religion do you think is more compelling other than secular humanism? You're defining that as a... Other than the one I already talked about. I would say, I don't know if you saw the debate that I did with Issa the other day who is an advocate for a particular strange Sufism version of Islam, but I find that one more compelling than yours. Personally, but what I'm personally thinking... On one basis, if you can just flesh that out a little bit. His version agrees with me on a number of social issues that you and I definitely don't agree on. And so your version of Islam is fundamentally, for me, worse than his. Well, putting the morality question aside, like is there anything else like theologically or about doctrine and that makes it more compelling or is it just social issues and morality? Well, no, no, no, the actual, to be fair, I don't fully understand his doctrines and I think he's not here. This isn't fair. I probably shouldn't have mentioned him, et cetera. I don't know what you would think of them. I could easily imagine you and any other Muslim I've engaged with saying that guy's not a Muslim. I could absolutely imagine that because he's pretty much an atheistic Muslim that loves secular humanism, but wants to reform Islam. And so how that ties into this, or I think he wants, I don't want to put words in his mouth. Well, that ties into this is, I asked about dealing with the notion that Islam is at least a departure or change from a foundation Judaism, but we also have the issue of Islam is younger than Christianity or Islam. And so maybe we need to wait 700 years to see how much more it might change because in addition to that, we have a good history of change that led to, I'm not a history guy. I'm not a Muslim, but I'm gonna get some of this wrong, but like the 79 in Iran where we had basically countries that were primarily Muslim, but they had gotten so far from the foundations that it sparked basically a revolution and the return of people. And eventually after the 79 thing you get into al-Qaeda in the 80s, I believe, I don't fully know, but there are changes and there are people who are trying to get it back to what it was. And so if the compellingness of it is about whether or not it changes, I don't think it's accurate to say that Islam has changed less because not only we had less time to look at it, but there have been changes and attempts to bring it back. And so there's a credibility issue, not necessarily from the people who are saying, no, no, we need to stick with the text, but just a credibility issue across Islam. The text, that's something that's objectively been preserved. I put some references on the screen. I cite them in a lot of my debates about the preservation of the Quran and non-Muslims claiming this on the basis of manuscripts that they've discovered. I would agree, like if 700 years, like it's shown that a religion has changed, that would decrease from its compellingness. That would change the way I rank its compellingness if that were the case. But we're talking about now, like our time now, what is more compelling? But I would, if you indulge me, I'd like to know, like how do you rank the religions in terms of compellingness? So if you, the major religions. Sure, I have a list of their popularity so I could look at them and try. Let me, I don't wanna lose my follow-up. Nevermind, I lost my follow-up. Let's see.   What I suspect is that I might think that for many other religions, if I had access to them at their origin and what was going on then, there are some of these religions I prefer. So for example, I tend to prefer Judaism to Christianity in part because they don't have a big interest in proselytizing and you have to actually do some work to become a Jew. If you wanna be a Christian, you need it. Here, let's just pray the Lord's prayer, which I did every week for a while when I was a teenager, because you gotta rededicate your life to Christ and all that crap. But I find Judaism, I think as a foundation, the more things you add to it, whether you're adding in the direction of Christianity or adding in the direction of Islam, not to say that that's exactly what happened, I find that the more untestable, unverifiable things you add to it, the less credible it is to me. So I put Judaism ahead of those. I don't know enough about African traditional religions. Some things like animism and spiritism, they don't make proclamations so much about how we should live our life. It's mostly about here's our spirit answers or these, I like to think that my ancestors, I'm not saying I this, I don't think there's anything after death, but I can understand people and see the appeal of, I'd like to think my ancestors live. There's nothing about that that's gonna say, oh, because of that, two dudes can't get married. That sort of thing doesn't happen. And not just that, but it's not, while Islam, maybe one of the big obstacles in the way of a secular world, right now in the United States, Islam is not relevant on that front. What we're facing in the United States is Christian dominionism and extreme literalist, fundamentalist Christian dominionism, which is why I've spent so much time actually debating that. I don't know which ones I find necessarily a more repugnant Hinduism. I might put ahead of it just because, and this is really glib and silly, but I don't believe any of these. They got closer to the age of the universe than the Bible did. And the Bible, if you did a literal thing, it'd be six to 10,000 years old and Hindus at least think it's 13 billion in a cycle. It's not that, but if you're throwing a dart at a dartboard, they're at least somewhere on the dartboard and Christianity is in the other room, as is any literalist view that dates it back to Genesis.  So, and maybe this is probably, and maybe it fits here, but it may be better for, which is better for the world's secular humanism or Islam, but a world full of Jains, I think it's silly, but the insects are gonna be really happy that the Jains have covered their face so that they don't even inhale an insect to kill it. That's the level of their pacifism. And I much prefer that to anybody in any religion who says, let's go out and kill people, which by the way is wholly inconsistent with secular humanism. Yeah, so I mean, thank you for indulging me and giving your reasons, but they're very personal, what strikes you in one case or another. This is why this is a difficult thing to debate and establish. And I tried to get my mind around this epistemology, how do we come to accept belief systems? And I put these four things here on this slide that you have four criteria for compelling this. I think they're good criteria. They can be disputed. It seems like we agree on some of them or we have shades of agreement, like on preservation, it seems that we have shades of agreement. Sharia number four, we're gonna have a lot of disagreement, but we're gonna really hash it out in the next part of the debate. Monotheism, when it comes to that, I guess I can ask you something like, do you find it, would it be more compelling, the idea that there's one God who has caused the entire universe and controls the universe, as opposed to 377 gods? Like if you had those two choices, is it one, like without any other information, one God controlling the universe or 377? Well, to be consistent, I'm gonna say that I can't make a decision, but to be generous, one. Yeah, so, I mean, that's the tendency that human beings have. And there's this really good book called Big Gods by Aaron Norensian. And it falls in this genre of psychology, of religion. But he describes how when monotheism is introduced into polytheistic societies, even when it's not militarily, but the idea is introduced, it tends to win out over polytheism. And the way that he explains it as well as other cognitive scientists of religion is that there's something more compelling about the idea of a big God or one God that is in control or is giving blessings or controlling destiny, et cetera. The idea of monotheism has this kind of intuitive basis. And that's also why 80 to 90% of people today believe in the idea of an all-powerful creator. What was shocking is that even Buddhists, because in Buddhism, Buddha mocked the idea of gods. Buddha mocked, you know, according to Buddhist texts, mocked the idea of a Brahma or a creator God. Yet, when we look at Buddhist societies today, the majority will have this kind of belief in monotheism. So that adds to the compellingness. That is just an intuitive, compelling idea. And so that's the basis for point number one, preservation point number two. And then your thoughts on amazing acts, because every religion claims that its founder performed miracles including Islam, but that doesn't help us because we're not witnessing those miracles. But there are amazing acts. So for example, if I sat here and said that, I have supernatural powers and I will conquer the world, and I will establish this ideology as the one true ideology that everyone accepts, you all would justifiably laugh at me if that's, it was just claims that I made. But if next year you see that, oh, Daniel is now taken over certain countries and he's established his ideology and it's fast spreading across the world, all else being equal, you'd start to wonder like, oh, that's interesting. And after two years, after three years, that would add to the credibility or the compellingness of my initial claim. Would you agree? I don't, I'm not completely sure. It might be compelling. But now we're at the point, or we're back at the point that I started with, which is this particular topic is silly. And I don't mean that in an overly dismissive or simple sense, but when you talk about all of these religions have competing amazing acts or miracles. So if you took a list of all the religions that include miracles and listed their beliefs, we know that they cannot all be true because they have competing views and claims about who and what a God is. And yet they all have reports about amazing events that cannot and have not been demonstrated empirically. And if they were all to be true, that would create a conflict. And so at the beginning of this segment, Daniel's opening when he talked about Occam's razor and kind of mildly misrepresented it as a simplest explanation prefers to be the best. That's the common version. It's actually don't multiply entities unnecessarily, which is too complicated. So I'll just go with the simplest explanation seems to be preferred.  The simplest explanation is that humans get stuff wrong. The simplest explanation is that all of these people from competing religions that have competing and mutually exclusive concepts of God that are making claims about what their prophets and people do on behalf of those God are lying or misinformed or exaggerating hyperbole is what we're prone to. Claiming that we know something, we've all heard about fish stories. We've all heard about the old wives tales that I mentioned at the beginning. There's a reason why we don't just rely on intuition. As a matter of fact, minimizing intuition is I think something that would be preferable. But that's not the same thing as elimination because what epistemology is doing, what skepticism is doing, what critical thinking is doing is training your intuition. It is something that you can be trained so that you can more reliably intuit what's gonna be the correct answer because it's not just an intuition. It is your brain's ability to assess all the data you have. So when you mentioned, for example, children looking and seeing, oh, this appears designed and this doesn't. Well, children see things that are designed and they're not completely silly. Granted, I'm not the biggest fan of relying on children for our epistemology, but it shows that children show that we rely on top-down authoritative thinking. And I think that the best explanation for the fact that one religion is more compelling to another is that it appeals to people on a psychological level and not on an epistemic level, not on some level where there's some warrant. People tend to go along with the religion they were raised in. Then the religion, whether they were raised in it or they convert to one, that most appeals to their own personal ideals.   We are all directionless at some point. And so I think the religions that are most compelling, and I judge that primarily by which ones have the most adherence, are compelling specifically because they appeal to things about us and not to things that are true, which is what I'm concerned with. Because if I just picked the religion that I found most compelling, I'd wind up believing something that may not be true, that I don't have good reason to think is true. And that would prevent me from finding out whatever is true because the second you stop exercising your skepticism and critical thinking and accept an explanation for something, you stop looking for the right one because if you think you've got the right explanation, why would you keep looking? And this is why, and I'll stop here because I don't want to give 20 things for Daniel to reply to, but this is why in the competition between religion, David Wood and I can team up on Kenny. David and Kenny can team up on me. Me and Kenny can team up on David. And at no point is there a demonstration of the truth of any of the positions other than me saying, you guys haven't met your burden of proof. And while that doesn't say that we shouldn't use intuition or that we shouldn't look at religions that are compelling, whether or not a religion is true isn't impacted by the number of people who are compelled to accept it because one truth is that the overwhelming majority of people accept some God over no God. That's just the way it is currently. Will it always be that way? I don't know. If we're going to complain about pushing analytical thinking, I don't think we've done enough because the fact that more people still prefer some God to no God means that we haven't been pushing analytical analysis enough and a lot of people are still relying on their intuition because, yeah, it's a long list. Yes, it's a ton. That's not what I meant to do, but I think they rely on it because quite often it's un-falsifiable and if there's no way to prove you wrong, why change your mind? So I just want to clarify that my argument in the first part of the debate or now has never been that we just rely on intuitions. Intuitions are starting points, but then you have inferential reasoning that theists have given across many different cultures, the cosmological argument, the contingency argument, the teleological design argument. Those are also evidences for God. You also have communal traditions that our natural human epistemology does take into account what other people think and what our community thinks. And we're a part of a society, a part of a community. That affects our understanding of reality and the world. So the evidence for God is multi-dimensional, but intuition, that is like a basis, but you can have different epistemic channels that support the existence of God and religion more generally. What you're saying is that what is compelling is really, what is compelling to us personally and individually. I think that that is a great point for us to, as a point of departure for our conversation because I agree, like what is compelling on a personal level, the fact of the matter is, because of this field called psychology, that human beings share a mental framework and what is appealing or compelling to one person does have a connection to what is found appealing to someone else on the other side of the world. We do have a shared structure of our minds because we're human beings. The brain structure is similar universally across all human beings. So that is why certain things can be compelling to people universally. That's why math is so compelling, regardless of your culture. That's why logic is so compelling. That's why the idea of there being an external world. Yeah, there's plenty of diversity in religions and cultures and ideologies, but we also find universals and those universals are due to a shared human biology. Whether you wanna attribute that to evolution or you want to attribute that to God, the creator, there is that universality amongst human beings. So we need to, in having a debate on these complex topics involving ethics and epistemology and comparative religion, we have to appeal to what is shared, what is universal because that's the only way we can get a conversation or a debate going. If off the bat, you don't accept logic and I don't accept math and you don't accept whatever, we don't have any shared ground in order to debate. But my attempt with this part of the debate and this presentation is to appeal to things that are universal. I've asked you some questions about what you find compelling. I think we do have some common ground here at least, much more than the first part of the debate on things that, yeah, certain religions would be more compelling. You acknowledge that when you said that the idea of one God being in charge of the universe is more compelling than 377 gods. That means that religion that acknowledges one God as opposed to 377 is a more compelling religion and that's not just you, your personal preference. You are appealing to this sense of Occam's razor in a predictable way that cognitive psychologists have studied, they have done experiments on, they've literally put diodes on people's skulls in order to see what part of the brain that intuition is associated with. That's the study of psychology. So that's what I'm appealing to in this part of the debate and the first part of the debate. I think when we have this more accurate understanding of human epistemology and the human brain and human psychology, that shows that why so many theists actually find religion compelling and specifically monotheism compelling and why Islam has been so compelling and has had so many adherents throughout the centuries. That's really the crux of my argument. So just for quick clarification because I know we're at the time, I don't find math compelling as a result of intuition. I don't view math in the realm of intuition. Mathematics is a language that we've come up to describe things and it's just, it is deductively reached from logic. Now logic is, we can't demonstrate the foundations of that but back to this portion of the debate. Yes, I agree, some religions are more compelling than others and yes, I agree that some of them are more compelling for psychological reasons about who we are as people. I don't agree that any religion is more compelling on the grounds of evidence that it is true and that is the part that I care about. Now, if we're in agreement that religions can't demonstrate their truth and all we're gonna do is look at whether or not we people find them compelling, then we might as well just have like American idol voting and determine a national religion that way. It wouldn't be consistent with secular humanism though because under secular humanism, you could still be a Muslim. Under some versions of Islam, I would be killed for being a secular humanist and saying and doing some of the things I do which is why atheist bloggers in Bangladesh were killed. I'm not saying that you or anybody hashtag not all Muslims, that'll be coming up in the next round. But the notion that a world which is, I guess we're doing part three right after this, a world under Islam versus a world under secular humanism, which one's better? I guess we'll sort that out in the next hour. Yeah, we can agree that the scientific method is not going to decide between religions. So we're agreed on that. But again, like going back to the entire basis of my presentation is that there are psychological tendencies that affect our understanding of reality. There is intuitions and psychological tendencies that affect how we understand the world and what we accept as true. And that reality extends far beyond what can be strictly proven scientifically. And certain religious truths, not all religious claims also fall under that. And that's why I'm focusing on the ones that are most intuitively supported according to the cognitive science of religion. The creator God view or intuition that is something that is very strongly intuitively felt for some people as strong as moral truths like harming others for no reason is wrong or the law of non-contradiction or the idea that the external world exists. Our memories are true. All of these things are part of our reality or what we understand to be real. So that's why we have to go to this. We have to go beyond the scientific method. We can't just rely on what is strictly scientifically verifiable. Otherwise we agree, there would be no debate. I agree that if we just have this standard of scientific verifiability or falsifiability, no religion is going to be more compelling on that basis. Even if you said that, oh, well, there's a flying spaghetti monster and that's my religion, that's just as un-falsifiable as these, empirically un-falsifiable as these other theologies. But that's not my point of departure. I think this would be a great opportunity to jump into the next section, the final section where we'll have 10 minute opening statements from each speaker. This is on the topic, specifically secular humanism versus Islam, which is best for society. As I mentioned, there will be 10 minute openings. We'll start with Matt, and then we'll have 40 minutes of discussion followed by 30 minutes of Q and A. With that, thank you very much. Matt, the floor is all yours.  I thought you were doing another five minute break. I don't have to pee, so it's okay. My bladder's not quite that small. So, secular humanism or Islam, which one's better for the world? Well, as I already kind of worked in some of the stuff, I did this debate on this subject last week and some of the steel things from that opening, but I also mentioned that secular humanism has as its foundation, the betterment of a world for humans. And so any idea within a religion would at least be worked into it under humanism.  Sorry, not sorry. This stuff's important. And so I'll start off by talking a little bit about secular humanism and that it has as its focus, the betterment of humanity, while Islam has as its focus adherence to God, which may or may not be in the interest of the betterment of humanity. It depends on which version of Islam and how different people view what Allah wants and what we're expected to do. And we also have this problem that I mentioned the other day, which is the temptation to look at data comparing Islam and secular humanism fails because we don't have a secular humanist state. And it may in fact be a bad thing that I might be opposed to, to have a secular humanist state, a secular state, yes. But I don't think that it's the purview of the government to be telling people what their religious values should be and what religion they're going to support. And with humanism in some models, being a religion, I think there may be a problem. There's certainly values that are consistent with any number of religions that I have no problem at all incorporating into a government.   I won't tell the story in detail, but you guys can go look up why in the West we use Arabic numerals and have algebra and all kinds of things that come from a wonderful Arabic culture and how at least in the instance of one Muslim cleric wiped a good chunk of that out and the progress that was being made along there. So the next temptation, if we don't have data to compare two cultures right now is to look at the lives of secular humanists and compare them. You're gonna find some secular humanists who are awful people. They're probably paying lip service to secular humanism, but it's very difficult to get into a no true Scotsman fallacy.  Just have the worst ideas. But yeah, you're welcome. I forgive you. But in a nutshell, whether or God exists or not, we have problems to solve. And Daniel and I, well actually Daniel and I don't have to find a way to work together after this, but in the broader sense of humanity, Daniel and I would have to find a way to work together if we were working towards a similar goal. And if we're trying to do that, I don't get to appeal to a God and he doesn't get to appeal to God. Now there was get to appeal to any values that we don't necessarily share. And so that puts the onus on each of us to try to convince the other to share those values. Now there's a bunch of studies on religiosity and societal health that have been cited in the past, but we simply don't have the data set to really address this. So for me it starts with what's the focus? In secular humanism, the focus is on autonomy, freedom, consent, a view that a number of Muslims, including Daniel, don't seem to understand. The consent of an individual to any imposition on their body is paramount. You don't get to do something to somebody else without their consent. And it needs to be informed enthusiastic consent four-year-olds can't consent to sex or marriage whether they've had cautious puberty or not. And it's repugnant to suggest otherwise. When we look at the comparison of lives, Muslims in the United States live a completely different life than Muslims in other countries. Not every Muslim-run nation is the same. We look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was signed in 1948, Saudi Arabia abstained and later Iran, Iran voted for it. But then after their revolution, Iran came back and basically said, no, that's not right. And instead the organization of Islamic cooperation supported the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights because it was consistent with Sharia law or at least some version of that and squelched their objections with the United Nations version. But one thing we can say about secular humanism is that there is no sect denomination of secular humanism that has ever required someone to believe something that is not empirically verifiable. For the record, I'm talking about facts about reality. Secular humanism doesn't require that you believe ex-moral claim, by the way. It states what its views are, but that's not a requirement to believe. So secular humanists do have beliefs that are not empirical, but there's no requirement that people believe something that's not empirical. No sect or denomination of secular humanism has ever ordered the death of another person, ordered or acted to attack or destroy property of any other person or government, never overthrown a democracy to impose a secular humanist regime, never been connected with terrorist cells or activities, never advocated for treating people differently over their gender with regard to what rights and freedoms they have, never advocated for treating people with different rights and freedoms based on their sexuality, never denied freedom of speech or expression, never called for the deaths of people for drawing any person or anything, never called for the deaths of people for criticizing secular humanism or any other religious view, never advocated for inspired suicide bombers or terrorist attacks.  But if we're gonna put a hashtag not all Muslims, we should also have hashtag virtually no secular humanists because these various problems that arise primarily through theocracies and through religion's attempt to control governments and control the world and shoot down anybody who disagrees with them, that's what happens when religions take over a world. Now, the claim is, well, it would just be nice if everybody was Muslim, then there wouldn't be any conflict. And if everybody was Christian, there wouldn't be any conflict but that's not only unrealistic. It's exactly the same thing that abusers say, I only beat you because I love you. If you just do what I say, you wouldn't make me do this to you. That's the exact same justification. Christian extremists, Christian dominionists, slightly different groups. Christian dominionists want a Christian country and a Christian world. Christian extremists are awful and want worse.  People on behalf of their religious beliefs, not secular humanism have caused great harm on behalf of their religion. And many will say, oh, well, that's not the true version of our religion, true. We're only a few days out from the anniversary of 9-11. The radical Islamist flu planes into buildings. We're only a few years away from the Charlie Hebdo attacks where people went in with guns and killed satirists for mocking Prophet Muhammad. Never in my life would I, I'm not an artist. I had no inclination to draw Muhammad or anyone else. As soon as you tell me that I can't, I will. And I did and I posted it. Not an offensive, nothing. It was just a normal tracing of an individual that was represented as Muhammad and I drew it. Was that wrong of me? Was it wrong of me to draw an image of someone that doesn't make any sort of quality or quantitative assessment about them at all? I just did something because a religious group said I couldn't and they killed some other people for doing it. Between 1979 and 2019, Islamists, hashtag not all Muslims, have been followed by terrorist watch groups and committed 35,000 attacks with 160,000 deaths. That doesn't exist for secular humanism. Not only does it not exist, I'm not aware of any secular humanist organization that has ever been on any terrorist watch list or hate group watch list. And yet that can't be said for Islam and it can't be said for Christianity. Plenty of groups attached to both religions are in there. Which one's worse? Flip a coin. Primarily it depends on which one's in power or which one is struggling to gain power. None of that stuff exists within secular humanism and it doesn't exist primarily because of foundational principles of autonomy, freedom and consent. And that is, I permit all of you to believe as your conscience dictates and to act in accordance with what your conscience dictates right up to the point where your rights and freedoms come in conflict with someone else. And that is the point which a government is justified in stepping in. The founders of the United States created a constitution that was a living document and they had a notion of separation of religion and government, sometimes called separation to church and state. They didn't write it in there expressly but it was included in the letter to Dan Bray Baptist. The Constitution of the United States was unanimously or the Treaty of Tripoli was unanimously ratified saying the United States is in no way founded on Christianity. And yet Christianity is the dominant religion here and is the cornerstone of many ideas of the broken parts of the United States of America. And when we throw out consent, when we say in order for you to be a good person, you are not allowed to leave the house without somebody else with you. You're not allowed to leave the house without wearing some garment covering you. You are not allowed to engage in the sort of love that you would like to engage with another person even though it doesn't harm anybody else. You don't get to consent to whether or not you're gonna be married. You are a property of a God, no matter which God. You diminish humanity. You sacrifice everything that we value as humans about our liberty and freedom, the right to be here and govern our own lives to the best we can. You sacrifice everything on the altar of an idea that you cannot prove and that objectively, demonstrably, results in harm for people. Thank you very much. Thanks for that opening, Matt. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his 10-minute opening as well. Daniel, thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine there was a company called Pleasure Inc. And they invent the Pleasure Machine. You strap a person in, pull down the virtual reality helmet, plug in a few diodes into the skull that tap into the pleasure centers of the brain. You pull the switch and then pure unadulterated bliss. The brain implants and the VR are so powerful that any pleasurable experience you want to have, you can have it. You can satisfy basic bodily pleasures, but the tech is so advanced that you can simulate any desire. You want a vacation on the beach with supermodels? No problem. You want to travel the world and sample cuisine from every region? No problem. Every form of pleasure and entertainment is now at your fingertips. The Pleasure Machine comes on market and is heavily advertised. People start using it for recreation on the weekends, but the machine works too well. People can't get themselves off of it. Eventually Pleasure Machine users are strapped in for 10, 15, even 20 hours a day. They can't stop using it. The constant supply of dopamine is too much to resist. Before the Pleasure Machine, people had time for their extended families. People would get together with aunts, uncles, cousins. If you had elderly parents, you would take care of them. If you had grandparents, you could spend time with them. But as more people get hooked on the Pleasure Machine, there's no time for extended family. And let's be honest, what's more fun? Fulfilling any fantasy or sitting and talking with grandma? As the Pleasure Machine continues to spread, the whole concept of extended family dies off. People only have time for their spouse and their kids, but even this nuclear family gradually becomes too much of a burden. The only thing that people want to do is to plug themselves in. Over time, Pleasure Machines get a bad reputation for disrupting families and sales start to drop. Pleasure Inc realizes it needs a new strategy. First of all, let's improve the machine so that people don't have to worry about unplugging themselves to eat. Anything the body needs biologically can now be supplied by the machine so that hypothetically you can stay plugged in nonstop. Second, let's get the government to subsidize the machines. We want to make sure that anyone who wants a Pleasure Machine can afford to get one, even if it takes government assistance. Third, more aggressive marketing techniques are needed. People who oppose the Pleasure Machine say that it destroys marriage, destroys families. Now they're even saying it destroys cultures and religions because maintaining culture or religious traditions requires people to make an effort, to work hard, to make personal sacrifices, not to mention maintain bonds with others. How can you do any of that if you're strapped into a Pleasure Machine for most of the hours of the day? In the beginning, religious people use the machines and then sometimes they'd miss prayers, sometimes they'd miss going to church. Then they start missing major holidays like fasting and Ramadan and other important cultural communal rituals. So the