Good evening everybody. Tonight we're going to be debating the case for atheism and to start us out we have Mark Reed. Thank you everybody for being here. The floor is all yours Mark. Oh thank you very much and I do have a scrunch share if you could be so kind Brian. I want to thank Brian for moderating my points for being here and of course my partner Leo and thank you for joining us today. Am I up and running? You are up and running. Beautiful okay so today we're going through the case for atheism and I'll sort of begin by sort of defining atheism in general. It's polysemsor has multiple definitions depending on the context. The context of general speech may be put as a disbeliever lack of belief in gods. That's a very broad definition though. While that general definition of atheism is sort of used to now tonight we're going to be arguing for the atheism defined in the philosophy of religion. It's also known generally as hard atheism or strong atheism. So while atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods the strong atheism position is one that not only lacks a belief but it says that no God exists. It's a subtle distinction but it is an important one because this comes with a positive claim even that provisional belief some justification should be profit as to why the belief is held which is what I'll be going into tonight. So this definition we'll find is very vague and it's meant to encompass any God. It needs a little explanation to break down what I'm talking about. Non-material and atemporal means that it does not necessarily exist in space time or at least is not hindered by the more transcend space time. Something that is necessary is the cause or origin for things but is not caused itself making it behold no other entity or thing. An agent is something that can think make decisions and take actions, something that has agency. This assumes that a mind is involved in some way and that can choose what action to take or not to take. If this definition is a problem for my opponents we can narrow it down to a more local level but this should encompass any God that I could possibly think of. So there's a few reasons to sort of establish why God as a proposition should not only be disbelieved it should be believed that no God in fact exists. When we look at how to evaluate a claim, unfalsifiable claims are not worth considering for a truth status. If there's no way that can be falsified. For instance Carl Sagan may have an invisible immaterial all-powerful dragon in their garage but if there's no way to falsify or investigate the truth of the claim then it should be considered false until the time exists that some sort of criteria for falsification can be established. Because the claim that God comes with the assertion that it accounts for all possible things then by its nature it's unfalsifiable as no set of circumstances would ever falsify the God or the immaterial dragon. For this debate I'll be asking our opponents what standard of falsification that they would use. So verificationism is the doctrine that states that a truth statement is only true if it can be verified either with empirical senses or by pure logic and a God seems to fail on either category. The important part is that we only have confidence in things because they continue to show themselves to be true. However we can't observe all cases everywhere. For instance you could say I had the object release will fall down but the question can be asked have you observed all instances of falling things falling down at all times in all locations. We do not need to observe all things at all times to know that this is not possible. Enough repeated instances can allow us to say I know something heavy will fall when I release it. This claim is easily falsifiable a single instance of being on the earth and something floating up will falsify it. But until that time we're justified in saying that heavy things when dropped on the earth will drop and not float upwards. So any God that interacts with the world as the claim comes from Theists should be detectable on some physical level as long as it interacts with the physical world. If a God is the cause of the universe it should be detectable on some level. There's lots of claims God's responsible again without falsification and appeal to design hiddenness or some other excuse must be made for lack of evidence but again the intangible dragon could also use hiddenness for the same criteria. I would demand that we have some sort of criteria for falsibility for the God to even be meaningfully considered.  The main reason I believe no gods exist because we are beginning to understand the mind and it seems a mind cannot exist without the brain. We have trillions of minds and the complexity of mind is directly linked to the complexity of the brain. Indeed if a brain is damaged the mind is too if a brain is split then the mind is split too. Now notice I'm not saying that a mind without a brain is impossible however I do have a reasonable provisional belief based upon what humans have learned about minds that a mind without the neurons and neurochemical reactors of the brain seems antithetical to the process we understand. Again I have not scoured the entire universe for brainless minds obviously but again the same is true of dropping something heavy unjustified to say that minds require brains until such a time zone presented with a mind without a brain that is a justified belief. So again I want to make clear I'm not saying it's logically impossible for a mind without a brain to exist and I'm not just basing my argument on the existence of minds with brains. Consider if I say all human children are delivered via childbirth and not stork a theist may say have you observed every childbirth ever performed by humans of course not but we understand the process of how children come about if someone suggests that a magical intangible invisible stork delivered the babies but cannot be falsified am I then justified in saying that not all children are born via a natural process of course not the unfalsifiability of the magic stork claim rules it out as a candidate explanation as it cannot be investigated like what's all mind minds all requiring the structure of the brain to process and the entire process depends on synapses chemicals neurotransmitters they can confidently reject the idea that mind is there somewhere without a brain until this is shown to be plausible much less possible if one of my stand opponents wishes to disabuse me of this claim then all they have to do is show the mind without a brain and I will certainly soften my stance as it stands I'm confident that minds require brains as I am the children are born through natural processes and not through magic storks I don't know how this can be achieved show this and that is not my problem it's up to my opponents to show a brainless mind and thank you oh I'll wrap it up there all right well thank you so much for your opening statement there mark read just want to remind everybody here at modern day debate we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science politics religion we hope you feel welcome here and also debate con four is coming up it's going to be in dallas texas so check out the crowdfund check get your tickets in the link below leo we're going to hand it over to you for your up to six minute introductory statement thanks for being here leo thank you um so the the subject of tonight's debate discussion is the case for atheism so first let's start with definitions uh I take atheism to be the belief that gods do not exist and that is the claim that I intend to defend here I will be presenting a logical argument from evil against god and for that I needed to find what I mean by god I take the classically theistic definition that most people who believe in god are probably going to hold though there are people who don't non classical theists exist and god defined by classical theism at least broadly there are some specific details debated amongst theologians but that's not relevant for tonight's discussion god under classical theism is a singular being that is omnipotent omniscient or all-knowing and morally perfect and by morally perfect I just mean that god always seeks to do the best thing he can do god always seeks to maximize goodness and by goodness and when I say goodness I'm talking about the good that comes the one standard of good that comes from god's nature because the logical argument from evil is an internal critique and I take good the good to be the action guiding norm that is good what is good is that which ought to be done all things considered so if god is morally perfect then god and god always seeks to maximize the good then god always seeks what's best which would logically entail that given god's omnipotence anything that he desires just comes about god never fails to actualize his desires which means that if god truly seeks the best then we live in the best of all possible worlds except the theist either has to bite the seriously large and very fast moving bullet and claim that the murder of six million jews is good or it seems that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds a world which everything which occurs is what ought to occur all things considered and no things which ought not to occur ever do that is how I define the best of all possible worlds the best world the one that god would make if this isn't it then it seems that this specific notion of god does not exist there are a lot of nuances to this discussion there's objections like free will skeptical theism there's other theodities that people have developed I'm willing to talk about those but for the sake of brevity I want to keep this simple and to the point and just outline broadly what the contradiction is between the idea of an all powerful morally perfect god and things that immediately intuitively seem very very evil to us in the world existing these both cannot obtain at the same time and so if we go with our immediate intuition that very very evil things have in continue to happen in the world like the murder of six million jews then it seems that god as according to classical theism does not exist and I'll end there all right thank you for that leo and thank you everybody for being here we're going to hand the floor over to arden and jordan for the first time ever I think on modern day debate we have a christian a muslim teaming up against the heart atheists so arden jordan who would like to go first we should have established this beforehand he can he can go if it's fine excellent arden the floor is all yours thanks for being here it's aiden by the way just to clarify oh aiden so much sorry sorry yeah it's in my nature to apologize excessively as a canadian but uh your six minute intro and the floor is all yours all righty so i wanted to say um thank you very much to modern day debate for hosting this debate um i'm pretty excited for it because we get to see a positive case made for atheism which is uh pretty rare and i have a immense respect for my interlocutors today for taking up such a challenge and i'm also pretty excited because i get to try out an argument for god's existence of my own design which as it turns out from marx opening it's actually going to end up being pretty relevant um first i'd like to um give a little critique of the kind of atheism presented in this debate so marx argument was that we need to provide an example of a non-physical sort of mind without a brain essentially we would need to prove metaphysical dualism uh i'm perfectly uh happy to contend that um metaphysical dualism is absolutely true um but again i would prefer to first take it from the perspective of uh critiquing a sort of physicalist approach to the mind body problem uh physicalism as a sort of uh metaphysical sort of claim is the idea that um well it could be two things one it could mean that absolutely everything in the universe is made of physical stuff or it could just mean that minds it could just apply specifically to the mind body problem that mind uh is is purely physical there are several problems with uh the very with the physicalism as a theory of mind one of those being that one it's very reductionistic and as a reductionistic framework it tends to limit its scope for what it's looking for and its ability to explain phenomenon that we do observe in the mind uh what that ends up happening because of that is that occasionally we will observe phenomenon that seems to point to perhaps dualism or some sort of non-physicalist explanation for the mind body problem but because physicalism is reductionistic it will simply say well that's a mystery we just don't know and never make an attempt to solve that mystery essentially it would sort of leave us hanging um an example of such a phenomenon which i will talk about later in the opening discussion would be something called terminal lucidity terminal lucidity is a phenomenon where essentially the physical structure of the brain is completely damaged and it can be damaged for whatever reason you're like from dementia to even huntington's classic brain damage drug use you name it anything that can damage the mind um terminal lucidity could still apply and what would happen in the case of terminal lucidity is that despite the damaged structure of the brain let's say that this damage structure causes memory loss or inability to speak or any sort of impaired brain function whatsoever we have observed phenomenon where the structure of the brain is still damaged or at least we seem to believe it's still damaged we have every all evidence points to the fact that it's still damaged and yet their functionality seems to return moments before death so for example dementia patients all of a sudden all of a sudden start remembering um their children's names when they had previously forgotten them or maybe they went able to walk up my mother's a palliative care nurse for example she's actually observed this herself where there was a man who had dementia and he couldn't walk for years and then moments before he died he got up cleaned his whole house and then died and that's just it now of course when it comes to physicalism um many physicalist theories have been put forward to explain such a phenomenon and each and every single one of them fails the like outside of the brain essentially healing rapidly like Deadpool um there doesn't seem to be any physical explanation for how the memories can remain and still be accessible when the physical structure doesn't remain that seems to point to the idea that there is some sort of immaterial mind at play here um again that's something I'd like to go further into detail with later I'm gonna so we get through it and as for the problem of evil that's um the affiliates put forward um the problem with the problem of evil I guess is that we're going to in order to even have that discussion we're going to have to come to an agreement on the metaphysical nature of what good and evil actually means and that's going to be a very difficult thing because I would argue for example that what morality actually is is that I would argue metaphysically it's dimensional in the same way that you might have a dimension of space and time you would also have a dimension of morality and in the same way like so it would be like a sort of continuum of like um good and bad sort of thing in the same way you'd have a continuum of left and right on a spatial dimension now of course in the same way that with space it doesn't metaphysically make sense to have a right without a left or an up without down it doesn't make sense for there to be a good without at the very least the potential for evil to exist it doesn't actually make sense you actually need one for the other kind of thing now you might disagree with that and that's fine you know this isn't a metaphysical necessity I could be wrong on my view on morality but that's the point in order for the problem of evil to hold it has to be a sort of internal critique of the conflict between our metaphysical claims about morality as well as you know the evil that should not exist according to those metaphysical claims but I'm just establishing that you know first of all morality has to be objective most atheists I'm not saying this is all atheists but most atheists would argue that morality is not objective but obviously within the theistic worldview it is so inevitably you're gonna have to accept some sort of like a lot of my metaphysical arguments for what morality is and what what the nature of its necessary nature is um in which case um you know because you obviously can't bring an outside morality system that doesn't apply to theism to critique theism to grant problem of evil that would just be a sort of useless sort of argument now I'm gonna quickly try to give a brief overview of my argument for God's existence and I called the argument from a priori knowledge I've never seen this argument done before it's probably done before I'm not that creative or anything but I've never seen it done before so here it is it's not the presuppositional argument but it is an argument of aims to establish three main points one that we have a priori knowledge and a priori knowledge just means knowledge gained without your experience or without empirical experience so anything that you've learned without the five senses and also for the purposes of this argument without instincts so genetic instinct is not a priori knowledge for the paper purposes of this argument the point number two is that if we have a priori knowledge it requires a causal explanations for how we've got that um and the final point is that that causal explanation is identified as God I'd like to go into more detail that's all the time I go all right thank you Aiden for your opening statement there and also sorry about the typo we're going to get that fixed right away now thank you also here Jordan it's also your debut here at modern day debate up to six minutes to present your case from the muslim perspective thank you for being here Jordan yeah um good to be here um so the case that um the first point that I want to make is that um it's not even just uh it's not really um a muslim thing it's just a a general point that I think um the framing of these debates um I think they sometimes go a little bit off the rails I guess I want to say that we end up talking past each other and I think it's it could be fixed very easily I think there's a misunderstanding on both sides that it's not really about empiricism or or factuality that's not what we're talking about at least theists you know um it's more about um it's called belief for a reason we believe it it may not be um 100 empirical or factual but you know belief is more um what's at play here um and um so it is true that um that you know I can 100 prove that I'm right I could be wrong I'm open to that possibility I'm not so arrogant to the point where I'd say I'm I'm certain that I'm right and everybody else is wrong um but again it's not a question of of facts or um uh or empiricism it's more about um faith it's more about we call it faith we call it belief for a reason you know that was never it was never his story even when you look back at old uh very old religions that was never the point the point was oh I'm gonna uh one up a person who disagrees with me by presenting facts and evidence for my beliefs it's like that's not the point again belief is the point you know and it's not like the people who believe those things were stupid I mean the people like for instance uh in my religion of Islam there was a golden age where you had brilliant people who invented things like there was the first steps toward the scientific method you know the the the camera was invented by a muslim an early version of it at least um uh there were strides being made in medicine you know by Islamic scientists Hindu scientists same thing with astrology and plastic surgery and things like that so these are not these were not stupid people they balanced faith and science at the same time so we we especially um in what I would broadly call the west even though I don't like terms like that necessarily these people were able to balance faith with um science and empiricism and logic and um they did it um in a way that was very practical very balanced and I think that they deserve credit for that and I think that it's only in the last few hundred years where we've gotten this notion that science is one thing and religion is another it's like you know that that was not historically the case and I don't think it's historically the case um or I think I don't think it's the case today so that's what I wanted to clarify is I think we're having a we're talking past each other and I think it's you know the framing is wrong I think what we're talking about at least from the theistic side is a question of belief and as as Aidan said more about metaphysics than actual material uh than actual um materialism uh I kind of lost my train of thought here but but I think we're talking about metaphysics rather than physics and material uh material things so that's pretty much all I have to say all right thank you for your introductory statement there Jordan and Arden for being or Aidan sorry for being here I just fixed the thing so I'm not going to do that again there we go all right and I'm going to keep cropping that everybody so we're going to kick it into our open discussion thanks for being here everybody in the live chat hit the like button share this out in the spaces where you like to have these discussions and I just want to remind you that all of our guests are going to be linked in our description wherever you can find them we're going to get those links up and those are also going to be included in our podcast so we'll kick it back to the other side to get us into our open discussion thanks again everybody for being here you want to go first Mark since you went first in the delivery um yeah yeah that'd be great thank you um I would like to focus on sort of the a prior knowledge that you're sort of saying that we have that's not instinct and not sort of intuitive things but what a prior knowledge do humans have that is not taught to them or a product of instinct what is that so that's a good question so I would argue that the concept of I would guess I would call it the concept of it's a bit abstract the concept of therefore basically or the ability to interpret in in a sense um what I mean by that is let's let's say for example inductive and deductive thinking I think that's what you mean when you say therefore like a form of reasoning kind of um it's more the ability to learn like the example I was about to give is like how is it that a person comes to learn induction like because most even kids have a sort of intuitive sense of induction by the time that they're born and that could very easily be impressed upon them on an early age let's say but to provide that as an example that's not necessarily true babies don't even have object permanence so it means that once an object leaves a baby's sight they basically think it ceases to exist they don't even have the idea that like not let no not induction and not even the idea that something will exist past their their immediate sensory perception of it yeah I agree so that's what I meant like um so like induction would be an example of something that's learned at a very early age um and like so if we would to provide an example maybe when babies start to observe the uniformity of nature let's say they say like oh you know I see the sun come up it happens every day therefore there must be some sort of consistency to nature right that's probably wouldn't that wouldn't that be empirical knowledge because that's learned through repeated experience I don't think that would be so like an example of a priori knowledge would be something like that all squares are polygons that's an example of you don't need to go out into the world or do any sort of empirical investigating to know that squares are polygons that all squares are polygons I suppose something like maybe that all all bachelors are unmarried men could be considered a form of like a priori knowledge but our priori knowledge is the things that we know largely just through reasoning and not through any form of experience or empirical investigation but but I'm getting the feeling that that's not what Aidan's talking about when when he's talking about a priori knowledge so I think he's sort of are you sort of suggesting that a mind comes equipped with some sort of knowledge that isn't learned through the material world around them and isn't a product of instinct um well whether or not this um it comes equipped at say birth isn't really the important part it's um it could be and it might not it doesn't have to be it's possible that it could have um happened by some other means that's kind of what the argument sort of explores so to sort of return it back to induction I don't believe induction would be an a priori thing but our ability to learn induction is so if we if we take it back to that example of the like seeing the sun come up that's laid out in the civilism right premise one I see the sun come up that's an empirical proposition premise two I see it come up every day also empirical proposition but then you have the conclusion that follows from that therefore there must be a consistency to nature that therefore in the sentence and that's why I mentioned that therefore before that therefore in the sentence isn't empirical nowhere in the above empirical propositions do you actually have that therefore contained in the empirical experience it's entirely possible that we could have just evolved to be um purely empirical preachers that only had those two propositions I see the sun come up I see it happen every day there's no need to add that third thing uniformity of nature that's something we bring to the table that's something we do through our capacity for interpretation it doesn't seem to be included in the empirical experience yeah and I'm saying that that's learned I'm saying that's learned because you have like a baby when it's a very very young one it's newborn um it doesn't have that object permanent so the the mother walks away it's vanished um the mother comes back therefore the mother didn't vanish no what happens is the mother walks away again and the baby thinks that they vanished again right so this is something that they learn the uniformity of nature as they go along and one of those things is um even being self-aware like we know from scientific studies that the baby for the first um I think week or so of its life it doesn't have any sense of self it thinks or so it doesn't have an identity it thinks that it and the mother it he or she or the mother are the same thing I don't mean to refer to a baby as it like I don't hate kids that much like um you know um you know so so these things are things that are learned and yeah I get that that the mind is very um it adapts and it learns these things sort of outwards but it's very hard for us to wrap around our heads around the idea that that a baby won't have this idea of self it thinks that it's the mother and it won't have this idea that things remain after they leave it thinks they vanish um these are things that the mind has to learn as it goes along but it is aided by those instinctual things um that repeated actions cause the the synapses to develop these connections which then connect um the the events to one another I will grant you that that's amazing but I have no reason to think it's anything other than physical fornation of synapses through repeated observations of empirical data so there's also a couple other things here the first thing is that um the word therefore is just part of a rule of inference and logic I mean I don't find anything particularly impressive about that word I don't I guess I'm failing to see also the the the argument that you gave the premise premise conclusion the syllogism could just be simplified to I observe the sun to rise every day therefore the sun will rise every day but then you're just immediately going to run into problems of induction because from that statement alone you can't actually conclude that least not through any valid rule of inference that I know that the sun will rise every day in the future I mean not that like Hume's problem of induction or other problems of induction like make it so we can't use induction in its bunk it just means that it's an unjustified way of inferring things it works we can obviously see that it works but it is unjustified but I think I'm confident in saying that that brains minds need brains as I am confident in saying the sun will rise tomorrow I think that that's more than reasonable um um inference given that the amount of and and sort of so you've suggested dualism but I don't like your your your the thing that you pointed to for for dualism that a prior knowledge it doesn't seem like um that you know I'm sort of asking for one example of this knowledge but it doesn't seem like that is in fact an example of some sort of knowledge that isn't gained as we go along well see when it comes to like because like you mentioned that like babies don't have object permanence right and I did mention that induction is learned so I agree with you there but how is it possible to learn that without that therefore and Leo Philly has actually made a good point that that idea of induction isn't necessarily properly justified that's true in fact the the a prior knowledge I'm talking about could very well be wrong or right for all okay I'm talking about where it causally comes from not whether or not it's has any reference to the truth or anything like that um so for all I know God could have put it there to deceive us as far as the argument could I mean I don't think he did obviously but um in terms of like whether or not it establishes dualism or the existence of God or not causally speaking um first of all you have I don't I don't believe you've actually sort of addressed the point where it's like the therefore itself is not actually causally contained like there's no empirical impression that can give you that therefore you use the therefore to interpret the the empirical impressions as to come to the conclusion of induction but in order to use therefore to interpret the empirical impressions it has to already be there in your head and let's say oh well maybe you just learn what it means maybe through school or something you know your teachers probably tell you the definitions of words all the time but how are you supposed to look at a like let's say somebody's pointing to a chalkboard and saying therefore this is what it means if you don't have that concept already in your head if you don't have that ability to make those therefore statements the only way you could learn those therefore statements is if you have the ability to interpret so like um how do you interpret the ability to interpret into your head basically it can't really be done no no I mean I answered that like well I answered that like you're just thinking of the word therefore what I'm I'm sort of alluding to is the concept of therefore that when you have synapse patterns that are repeated and they become that's where the therefore comes from that the the synapse being strengthened to say hey every time this happens this is the result and making that connection in the brain is the therefore I want to get synaptic connection I want to get Jordan here fellas and get some of his thoughts I just want to remind our live chat that we will be having a Q&A at the end of this so get your super chats in for your questions on our debate which is the case for heart atheism essentially is what we're doing so Jordan the floor is yours um yeah I don't really know where to start but um I mean you know I I don't necessarily agree with with priori arguments but um but I I understand what they're saying I get it but I also you know uh I agree with some of uh the points uh that our opponents are making it's it's a fair question um I think um the what I would ask is why um is it not conceivable like I guess what I'm trying to understand is why does it have to be either or um um like either god did something or he didn't like why can't it be a mixture of both where um where well because that would be just impossible that would just be a contradiction to say that any agent both does something and does not do the same thing in the same sense at the same time would be just an explicit contradiction and really if we're talking atheism we're talking about does a god exist so in order for it to be true and not true you would have to say a god both exists and doesn't exist so that's a sort of whether god exists or does not exist is a true dichotomy it either is true or it's not true it can't really be a mixture of both well I think I apologize what I meant was um you were talking something about um you were you you mentioned something mad about the uh like some sort of synapse process or something like that um uh yeah yeah so so basically what's under discussion is I think that the mind is entirely dependent on the brain I think it's all physical it's all neurosynapses and chemicals and things like that um what Aiden is is proffering is the idea of mind body dualism that the mind exists in somehow independently of the brain and has some sort of um um while it relies on the brain to maybe express itself and I don't want to put words into your mouth Aiden but I do want to explain the difference um that that maybe the mind needs to be expressed through the brain but it sort of has its own um identity in some way that is not dependent on a physical structure is that what you're saying yeah okay yeah okay um because I guess you know I just don't see um how it's mutually exclusive that um a god could have created beings that are capable of the process you're talking about and that process going on you know I just don't see why those things are mutually exclusive you know I like it you know I know you don't believe it I'm just saying that from my point of view I don't see a logical contradiction I I just I think that's a false dichotomy is what I'm saying well um in my presentation as I said I don't think it's impossible that there's a god but what the claim to me being presented is that um there is an unfalsifiable deity that um basically has a mind but does not have a physical brain and what I'm saying is that that entailment from what I understand of how minds work and their dependence on a brain um I don't see how that is possible I'm not saying it's impossible I would just um I would need it really rules out the idea of a god for me because as far as I know and this is my belief and and a justified belief so I claim as far as I know minds need brains that's it right sorry Jordan you go first yeah um I don't really think god um has a mind in the way that living creatures like physical features do I don't think god necessarily has I think of desires does god desire things um I mean there's things god wants isn't there possible I would imagine there's things god wants like it doesn't god want everybody to be saved whatever that means and whatever a particular religion and does god make choices can can god choose between one option another option yeah that's another good question um god make choices yes um can god act with intention yes um but again so then what what do you mean when you say he's not a mind that seems exactly like a mind he's he's got desires he acts with intention I would presume god has emotions he probably behaves normatively that means that like he does what he thinks he should based on the evaluation of his standards um I would presume god does all those things that's what a mind is right I I get but what I'm saying is not I guess what I should have said is I don't think he has a brain you know I think that that may tell you yeah yeah um so I guess we agree on that then well but that's the argument is that mark is saying if he doesn't have a brain given that the only minds he's seen that we've ever observed ever have brains it's very very unlikely that there are minds that don't have brains and so therefore if god is a mind without a brain if he's an immaterial mind then it is very very um likely that god does not exist but I'm saying you're thinking of it in material terms if god is immaterial then you can't ascribe material properties to him that he desires aren't material properties desires can bring our intention and normativity are sometimes considered non-natural properties as well go ahead I just got a bit of a question for the atheist so if you're approaching this from the perspective of physicalism in terms of a theory of mind then ultimately on a metaphysical level you can't actually tell the difference between a physical process just an ordinary physical process and a a living thing fundamentally speaking living things are just physical processes they're basically the same thing there might be different types and different levels of complexity but ultimately they're just they're pretty much the same thing so then you have a living thing that's not a physical process well it doesn't matter even if I didn't but I'm trying to what I'm trying to say here mark is that when you talked about falsifiability at the beginning of your speech you'll kind of bite yourself in the tail here because it sort of becomes un-falsifiable as to whether or not the beginning of the universe is a separate thing from the outset because it's like if the beginning of the universe was a mind like or like a consciousness let's say even if it's physical like you and me then well mark what about air you can't see air but it exists well we can physically detect it yeah so so when we're talking about empirical observations and and sort of unfalsifiability we can we can make like yeah I agree whether there's air somewhere yeah sure so but what you're talking about an immaterial invisible undetectable mind which isn't falsifiable at the moment and and my challenge to you would be to come up with some way too falsified just like we have these physical processes and you might say and and my example was that if you have I don't think you have to falsify beliefs that's my point I don't think you have to falsify beliefs you know you know that's why I would disagree with you Jordan I do think I actually agree with mark that a certain level of falsifiability on both sides is kind of needed um uh again like this debate is the you know hard case of atheism so I think I think you know I get what you're saying that beliefs you know like you're not making a knowledge claim it's just a belief and that that that's fine right no but at some point you have to acknowledge that you have a belief with no justification behind it and I did want to go on at some point too how like if we have two contradictory beliefs like I believe there is no god and you believe there is a god how do we tell who's right and how do we tell you know and and I've asked you agreed with you at some parts of this of this debate ever agree with you I mean most people will agree on some things like most people in this world will agree on commonalities that's not a surprise um it's just like when we're talking about epistemology we're talking about how do you know that what your beliefs are is is actually true ontologically like so in reality right right true or metaphysically true and so if if I have a sort of what I want to do is have a good reasonable justification for why what I believe is true or likely true is the best way to go through life um and for that you need you need a process to show that what you believe can in fact be falsified because while due to what Leo was saying the problem induction we can't always rely on induction to show that something is true we can definitely falsify things by finding the exception right so so it was like if um somebody sort of says hey I I know that childbirth is a natural process that that is you know done all this and someone says hey there's a magical stalk that delivers it well it's unfalsifiable because it's an immaterial invisible magical stalk that and and you've never checked every single time someone's birthed a child so how can you say that the stalk doesn't exist well it's because of the understanding the process and the billions of times that we've had birth we've never observed a stalk um I think you know to say hey then I have a higher level of confidence that that's a natural process um if you do have an example of a mind without a brain I would certainly soften my position to agnostic or you know sort of soft atheism depending on how you're using the terms but I think that you know with with understanding the process of how well if you have a material example jellyfish okay jellyfish don't have brains but they have minds no they don't have brains and they don't have so much you mean by brain because they do have sets of neurons so I mean it it it just comes down to what we mean by brain what what humans generally mean by brain no uh jellyfish don't have them but they do have neurons so mark how would you how would you define brain then let's let's go from yeah so so the complexity of the mind seems to be dependent on the complexity of the brain so something like a jellyfish which has neural receptors and and neural pathways generally they will just be able to react instinctively just like plants react instinctively based upon a set of parameters they will always react in the same way what I'm talking about with the mind is being an agent an ability to make conscious decisions of the actions being performed because while a jellyfish doesn't have a brain it can't seem to consciously decide to do things it will always respond to the same stimuli in exactly the same way um so I wouldn't define a a something that is just reacting to the stimuli like a bacteria or something like that as having a mind I think that would be a higher level of consciousness yeah that's another good example yeah that's another they probably should have gone with that one the bacteria example with with the sort of going back to the immaterial mind you mentioned that the capacity to make decisions right um wouldn't under physicalism that not necessarily come through or is I guess I guess I would have to ask the question is free will a sort of emergent property or do you guys not believe in free will because that's I'm a compatibilist so what I would say is that you can have free will what the word I would prefer to use is volition which is the ability to make choices despite things being deterministic in fact I don't know what it would mean to engage in decision making from literally zero prior information or prior factors or anything like that any with literally zero antecedent causes antecedent factors or considerations I don't know what decision making is and this is one of the problems with libertarian free will is the idea that libertarian free will that people often say well the reasons are reasons are the the source of our choices but why that reason versus another reason you can just ask the why question and it either goes back at infinitum or it stops some place at which point all decisions you ever make just become arbitrary so the whole concept of decision making I would say needs something physical you need something like time a past an ability to record that past the ability to understand what's going on around you you need some sort of um um what's the term um few not like some sort of predictive capability the ability to like plan ahead of a forward thing consequences all of these things to make decisions and I don't know how one has that without like physical systems and processes and functions taking place nor have I ever seen an example of it I don't know how you have that with physical systems I don't want to get too much into a discussion of free will but in terms of whether or not um uh you know purely physical processes can give you those predictive things this is I don't see that necessarily um emerging from physical processes um well I I choose vanilla ice cream because I like it better than chocolate because of my my ability to taste which is a physical thing you cut out your tongue you will not taste things because it's physical um I I that's the reason why and so I base on based on the fact that I like vanilla ice cream that's what I will choose over chocolate at least most of the time because I do still like chocolate ice cream I just like vanilla more so that's an interesting fact but I I have you might have like green tea ice cream you might have green tea ice cream cross union never had it before and decide to go with that one based upon the fact that you haven't had it before but that decision may be based upon what you think the taste will be not those are two different decisions but two different decisions both with antecedent factors all right let's wait I have to admit um but I have to admit um I'm a compatible as two absolutely yeah I agree with that perspective yeah just wanted to say that okay right on there's actually a lot of theists I know particularly in the new age uh that are that are compatibilists and I even know yeah decent amount that are physicalists as well I think that I think that the hard determinists do just just to sort of you know sort of um address what you're saying Aiden I think that the hard determinists do have points that there are a number of leading factors that may go into what that decision is but I'm not entirely convinced of that I do see what they're getting at but um I don't know how we could falsify free will or determinism at all that that's the problem like anything that you decide to choose to disprove determinism you could say it's determined so it seems again to fit into that category of unfalsifiability to me which means that it's not really even a meaningful question to ask um it seems like even if we do not have free will we have the illusion of free will and it seems entirely we entirely dependent on this illusion of free will to function so um you know it may be they may may be correct um that that you know everything is determined by priors but I don't believe that and I don't know how you could prove that yeah obviously I don't want to get too much into the free will side of things but I it's sort of paying back to um uh something you mentioned before Mark where you mentioned that this belief like let's use the ice cream example I believe that because I've eaten ice cream before next time I taste it I'm going to enjoy it that's obviously like once again something that's built upon induction um you made the argument that um that that's just a sort of habit of like the synapses being reinforced over and over again but I would argue that unless that induction is contained causally within the empirical propositions you don't have that causality reinforcing those um uh you know those um uh those synapses to have those kinds of thoughts that the habits that you would form would just be for example I've eaten ice cream and so in the next time you eat ice cream you'll be like yep that's ice cream that's what I've eaten before you'll have the memory but you'll never have that predictive inductive ability to predict in the future of like oh that's just the way the brain works that's that's what it is I it is a well just just let me finish it is a prediction machine that's what it does it it fires the the neurons and it strengthens the synapses based upon how often that synapse is used so it will let others wither that's not used that's why addiction is so particularly difficult to beat it's because that synapse is strengthened and strengthened and strengthened until it's the normal response of that person because the whatever they're they're feeling can be overcome by whatever it is that they're doing um sort of so so you're sort of just saying well nothing says that that synapse has to be strength correct but that's how that that is that is literally how the brain works it sounds it sounds that's the thing you're just sort of saying now it's like well that's just how it works no further questions to be asked uh that's you're basically invoking a root factor you don't you haven't actually given the cause of explanation right yeah I agree if you're saying that well yeah because it's not a root fact I mean I'm sure a neurologist can explain to you how the actual neurons are fired and how that strengthens the synapses but I'm not a neurologist you know but they have an explanation as to why the brain works as it works and don't get me wrong there are a lot of unknowns and a lot of questions there right there's a definitely a lot of unknowns but you know we understand why these these um this this um physical process of developing these connections occurs and why if the connection occurs um and the more it occurs the more it is likely to be repeated that's not sort of something we don't understand it I'm not saying the question group facts well because if you're saying we understand how the processes are purely physical because the synapses behave in a certain way and yet you can't explain certain phenomenon that is going on and it seems to require something that's a little bit more non-physical just saying we understand that the synapses do the physical thing it's purely physical pay no attention to anything in material going on behind the curtain but then you'll no yeah well you haven't you haven't demonstrated that to be non-physical you've just said hey because you don't understand it I'm going to insert into this gap something non-physical because in the past we didn't even understand how synapses work in fact most of the I believe in the past some people thought that the thinking was done in the heart because that's where you feel it so that's to say that back in the past when we didn't understand this then the synapses and the neural connections must have been non-physical no we just didn't understand it you're doing a sort of god of the gaps fallacy where you're sort of saying hey because we don't understand it I get to insert that it's something material no you've got to show that no I actually think you're doing that actual god of the gaps fallacy because what you're doing here you can only make that argument you're making from assuming that physicalism is the default worldview I was going to say you're doing the reverse yeah so I don't know how you're saying that physicalism well yeah let me explain it you're saying that physicalism explains the mind and then there's we have something that physicalism can't explain and you'll say well yeah of course physicalism explains it it explains everything we're just you know it anyway can I ask a question that takes us on a different track it's the same just just before you do that Leo can I just address that for one second just told your question there Leo okay so so we both agreed the physical world exists and we both agree that brains exist and they do these things to learn you're suggesting something above and beyond that physical world I'm not I'm just saying hey we're aware of these physical things and it could well be the case that it's nothing physical I'm not saying it can't be non-physical what I'm saying is for me to believe it's non-physical past what we already understand you've got to show this non-physical thing and I don't know how you do that but that's not my problem I'm not the one claiming that there's something non-physical that's why I'm not going to go out of the gaps you're doing this planning that it's only physical yeah I don't want to do because again Leo wanted to say what he once said but you're doing this from the first of all empiricist perspective that takes this almost axiomatically the thing is that I'm gonna argue like I said it's not about empiricism this is not what what religious faith and belief is supposed to be about it's not well I'm not saying it's faith either I would argue that from a rationalist perspective there are certain image I think in order to have this discussion we actually have to have maybe a bit more of a talk about how we define physical and how we define immaterial because when I say immaterial I get the sense that maybe you think I'm talking about wispy sort of ghosts or something like that when I say physical I simply mean that which is verifiable through the five senses so like oh the reason why I know this water bottle for example is physical is because I can touch it and I can see it I can taste it or whatever and all that sort of stuff is it physical I would say no okay and this is I wonder why I wonder why it's a number in like almost every important physical equation if it's not I would I would argue numbers up physically though well no I'm not talking about the numbers I'm talking about what the numbers represent is mass yeah I would uh mass yeah would be physical mass is something yeah but you can't detect it with the five senses correct you can measure it and yeah but not with the five senses not with the five same with momentum you can't like hold momentum in your hand exactly you can't hold momentum is a black hole physical what what I was doing was challenging the way that you define physical is what we like with our senses it's not really what most metaphysicians that I know would mean by physical now physical is there there isn't like one univocal definition of it metaphysicians have debated for a long time over what physical means that being said two things number one I think that physical can be defined in number two I still think everybody kind of has an idea of what we mean by physical and then non-physical even if we don't have a rigorous definition now for me personally I would I would I don't think we do I don't know many philosophers to think that we do um but I personally would define something physical I take physical and natural to just be synonymous myself I know there's people that don't agree with that it's just on them to give an argument for why but I take those terms to be synonymous something is physical if it's natural it's natural it's physical that's just an equal sign between those and so what I mean by those terms I would say is something that is characterizable by objectively definable degrees of freedom degrees of freedom are going to be parameters that um can characterize a system or a state so if you can use numbers to characterize a system or a state in ways where everybody that characterizes it gets the same thing you're dealing with something that is physical or natural or if you can observe the effects and then sort of you know observe the effects of it are physical then the cause is physical as well that we can establish that black holes we cannot sense with any of our five senses but we can observe the effects of a black hole can I ask the question I wanted to no go ahead go ahead yeah I just wanted to say that in terms of the the idea that we don't need a rigorous definition of physical in order to have this discussion if you're going to say that everything is physical and then on the basis of that deny mind-body dualism deny you know the existence of God etc etc I think we probably do need a bit of a like a rigorous definition in terms of like you know I don't want to go on to this because I want to be able to ask this question but I think that's um yeah in terms of um like because if we just assume that for example momentum is just physical because it causes the effects that we can accept like it can cause physical effects that we can detect and therefore that means the thing is physical itself that does not follow and it means that you take it axiomatically almost that immaterial things can't cause material effects when how would they do that argument what's the connection between the immaterial and this is actually goes to my the question I was going to ask you guys is why cannot my mind affect your body causally I mean if it's immaterial it's not then that means that it's not rooted in me why can't I raise your hand why can I only have why can we only ever raise our own hands well again this comes down to our definitions of what immaterial means because I would argue once again numbers are immaterial if I have two marbles in my hand that is only contained to those two marbles that number two isn't affecting something else that's a that's a pile of three marbles let's say right um that's like the the but it sounds like you're talking about something abstract yeah it's not affecting the marbles at all like the two yeah it sounds like you're talking about an abstract concept I'm merely giving I'm merely giving an example it's yeah but the thing is is that your examples like numbers are abstract and the thing with the difference between abstract and concrete is abstract uh do not stand in causal relations so if the mind is abstract then it doesn't cause anything in the physical body I would strongly disagree with that I would actually um but that's actually how it's defined in analytic philosophy like I'm not making it abstract or things that do not stand in causal relations concrete and this is why theists will argue that God is immaterial but concrete like William Lane Craig because he believes that God caused the universe to come into existence abstract or do not stand in causal relations that's what I would ask you to be abstract well then I disagree with the formal logic whatever its definition of abstract because think about it for example if you have thoughts in your head like for example the idea of the number two and it has no causal connections that means that we are aware of the existence of things which disobey the laws of causality which I don't believe is true but let's take the idea of the number two in your head as whether or not physicalism or immaterialism is true doesn't matter it is still true in either sense that the number two in your head like when you think of it when you picture it in your head the number two you know in an abstract sense that obeys causal factors your brain is burning calories for you to have that thought your mind you know probably you know because I wouldn't call it a pure a priori concept you probably learned it at some point and there's a causal connection there you can't have a purely abstract thing which obeys no causal reality because then that means our minds able to create things out of nothing which violates the most basic laws of concept but if the mind is abstract hang on you're kind of mistaking the the map for the place kind of thing right so when we're talking about concepts they don't exist now the thought may exist as sort of electrical signals in your brain or sort of synapses firing in your brain that is true but that's not the concept of the number two it's like if you say hey that video game character doesn't exist it's just an abstraction kind of thing right it doesn't actually exist but the the data on somewhere is actually electrical signals which does exist so you're confusing the thing itself for the concept and and the concept of two isn't abstract it doesn't exist even though the thought may exist so I would argue that in terms of a causal so like obviously the idea of the video game character didn't come out of nothing um it was you know maybe they would have had to have thought about it there would have been some causal process going on there I would argue you're making an arbitrary distinction between the idea of the concept and the thought itself thoughts and concepts are the same that the same thing I don't know what distinction you're making I'm not saying that brains can't cause abstractor I'm certainly saying that brains can give rise to abstractor what I'm saying is the abstractor themselves don't stand like if I imagine me pushing a boulder as an abstract thought the boulder doesn't move it has no causal relation it can't affect anything but you are imagining that in your head is having a causal effect in in terms of the whatever processes are going on your head so for example with the video game character okay so your thoughts are able to just act uncausally I thought you said that you don't can I ask a quick question that might help clear some of this up well as I say Jordan had a question Jordan if you can hold your question for one second we'll let Leo ask you I didn't have a question oh I thought you said you had a question sorry Leo go ahead um can blue cause anything and I don't mean an object that or any sort of object that is blue can blue cause anything and if so what well if we're taking blue to mean the um the movement of like a light particle no writing a certain frequency no that's a photon moving I'm talking about the blue on no the the movement itself is the blue the photon what he's talking about no no that's concept the concept blue like blueness can blueness cause anything can heaviness cause anything can the number 154 cause anything these things don't cause stuff to happen they might be like two physical things like blue is a particular frequency of electromagnetic radiation that we interpret in a particular phenomenal way but the concept that we attach to it blueness doesn't cause anything it's a concept your question is still ironically enough begging the question because you keep saying yeah what question am I begging you're saying well what what is the difference between the concept that we attach to blue and the thing blue itself right the the photon that's moving I'm saying there's no difference between well the difference is the concept includes all shades of blue but any one shade of blue does not include all shades of blue so the concept of blueness could apply to the blue on my mouse which is different than the blue of my lighter which is different than the blue of the bud light which is different than the blue of this pen and there's a variety of other blue objects I could grab and none of them have the same shade of blue so yeah the blue they all possess the same blueness though the concept of blue what is that I'm a little bit more nominalist I'm a bit I'm a little bit I am a nominalist as well I'm not nominalist in the sense that there's well I guess I suppose I would say there's no abstracts depending on how you're defining abstracts but I'm saying that this blueness that you're talking about is merely a sort of language game that you're playing and so there's no extra that means yes but then that means no there's no extra concept you're just there's no extra concept there is only the thought you have of blueness well depending on how you're defining concepts I think thoughts exist but not concepts if that's how you're defining concepts I would say that I think concepts are a mental construct made of what well they're not made of anything they emerge out of a variety of neuro physiological processes I'm saying that there's kind of like my picture on the screen oh we're going around in circle not really physical but it's you've got photons and electrons and wires and the computer like the the processes of all of the physical stuff give rise to my image on the screen but my image on the screen doesn't weigh anything you can't hold it in your hand it's not really physical but it emerges out of a bunch of physical things doing some processes like concepts are the same yeah yeah well first of all that seems to concede my definition of physicalism because you said you can't weigh the picture so that I don't know if that's sort of seated there but also you can't weigh gravity but that's physical you can measure gravity you can measure weight well technically I if gravity is a wave I would argue that's probably not physical then depending on gravity form as waves but but you seem to be arguing that sort of abstract concepts are in some way real so if I come up with an abstract concept of a you know this this magical baby delivering store that in some way that is real or has a real presence in our reality rather than just being an abstract concept in my mind a construction if you will of the mind that's not exactly what I'm arguing so I want to sort of unpack that a little bit let's take the example of the store um so I would argue that the the stock itself you've never had any experience of the stock so no empirical experience gave you the idea of that stock however what your brain has done is remixed ideas in your head and it combined them together to make what is appears new but ultimately it's building blocks are ultimately stuff you've already experienced so you've already experienced the stock for example maybe you've seen one in real life or you've seen a picture or you've heard someone describe it to you um so that you've got the store and you've you're aware of the concept of babies you're aware that maybe stalks carry things you're you're bringing these concepts together and mix mashing them but you're not inventing a new thing completely out of nothing you're taking what you already know and mashing it together that's what I'm saying that our brains do we can't actually invent entirely spontaneous thoughts that have absolutely no reference to substance only less reference to substance so let's let's let's let's say a unicorn for example I don't think unicorns exist I've never experienced it I don't believe that there is any substance of unicorn out there but the question is not really whether the unicorn exists it's whether it exists as a thought in my head or if there's any reference to substance out there so if there's an actual like something that I can touch and grab and etc etc that means it possesses substances right yeah of like you know extension and reality and all that sort of stuff yeah so you're doing is not a reality I would say between an abstract and a concrete so you're just basically saying the unicorn is not concrete but I could I could leverage the same thing against to God and say hey you've seen beings before you've seen more powerful beings than other ones some person is stronger than another that is not a logical chain to go hey if you imagine the most powerful being that could ever exist that is not an original thought either well I would agree I wouldn't make that argument for God in fact I would say that it's possible that it could just be personality or you know a person we've had experience of people experience of weather put them together and yeah you could probably get a God but let's try to apply that exact same kind of building block sort of theory like I said to the concept of therefore what building blocks do you make in order to get that concept I'm not sure what you're asking so so if you're talking about sort of the way that that brains do induction as I've explained before repeated circumstance induction not induction it's the ability to interpret so whether it leads you to a conclusion of induction or deduction or any other conclusion where does that therefore come in well you seem to be well you seem to just be pointing to basic sort of very very simplistic cause and effect things like that if I'm you know if a dog has a Pavlovian response if every time it rings a bell it gets a treat um then it will start ringing the bell um because it hopes to get a treat it seems like you're sort of asking about the very basic psychology and and sort of neurology of human humans and other animals for that matter it's not quite like that because the idea that maybe therefore my I'm about to explain it the idea that therefore might arise out of causality is to ascribe it a different kind of therefore like it's it's a pain in the ass that we have um you know two different ideas for the same thing but um same sort of word but I'm talking about different kind of therefore if I have one billiard ball bump into another and therefore the billiard ball moves that's causality but that's a different kind of therefore because there's no interpretive the billiard ball is not interpreting and and coming to a conclusion that it therefore must roll it just does not because of some sort of interpretive framework or a conclusion that it's that's just a billiard ball following laws like just conservation of momentum and things like that and you've got friction heat transfer all sorts of things but you can make a trickshot by being very experienced with you know repeated time and time again of hitting a ball and seeing how it behaves and so when you say billiard balls you might well ask well I'm not saying the billiard ball does that I'm saying you do that you pay attention and the more you pay attention to how it reacts the better you will be at predicting where that ball will go through repeated actions so you may as well ask how does a dog know that when it rings a bell it's going to get a pablovian treat it's because of repeated experiences of doing that and getting it and that is literally how the mind works you keep asking where this therefore comes from but you might as well ask where where does the therefore come from an adult what's that question even mean I don't know therefore just indicates the consequence following from some set of premises under a rule of inference like it's just an abstraction that we came up with one day when we started to develop formal and axiomatized logical systems of thought I'm just very very confused let's say that we came up with it again I agree yeah it's weird because I don't think he's talking about therefore like like in logic I think he's talking about where does the idea in a causal relations come from no it's it's okay well then I don't understand well let's let's all right let's let's move on from this topic I might come back around yeah I think Jordan Jordan was trying to inject there at one point Jordan bring us back to our atheist theism debate here right I was gonna say there's this is not the point of what we're here to discuss you know um you know we weren't we're not here to debate physics and gravity and all that stuff and and you know uh and the um you know abstraction versus concreteness of numbers and stuff like that that's not what we're here to debate we're you know my case my personal case and I've obviously um Aiden and I have slightly different opinions on there are slightly different goals I guess but my case is that I don't see why a belief if I'm not if I'm not making a positive assertion and I know you are I'm just saying if I'm not making a positive assertion that I know God exists why is the burden of proof on me to prove I don't think it has been that that God exists when you know or why is the burden on me to make a falsifiable claim when I'm just stating what I believe you know I just don't see why a belief has to be necessarily falsifiable that's but my interpret they don't have to be of what you're saying yeah you can you can believe anything for any reason that that's fine um what we're doing is sort of saying well if we have two conflicting beliefs what is the most reliable way to find out which of them an actuality is true and you sort of mentioned faith as as a reason kind of thing and and that's fine you know like I'm not saying you can't believe or disbelieve anything um but what I am saying is that um I don't think faith or at least the faith that I'm aware of I really should ask your definition of faith actually Jordan because that can be for depending on who you talk to but I don't think that's a very good way to reason to believe things and I'd like to know why you think faith is more likely to get you to the truth than say evidence and empiricism um well well just to just to remind we are going to have a Q and A we got about 15 well 10 to 15 more minutes of conversation so Mark Reed has asked the question let me just answer his question because I haven't gotten as much time to speak because any better than the others yeah for sure I was going to say I definitely want to pass it back to you the the question that he asked first was for your definition of faith and then right the application of that in your life so we'll answer that definition first um so for me I guess this is going this is going to sound kind of corny I guess but like I guess I separate factual truth from spiritual truth I think those are two different things you know um so I think that um you can have uh I think spiritual truth is more about what is that uh what is spiritual truth how does it differ from empirical truth both factual truth it's more about um but that's a tautology the truth is factual so saying factual truth let's let me answer the truthiest truth let's let me answer the first question there before we move on okay so um what I meant is empiricism that's what I meant so I should have clarified that you're right um uh so spiritual truth is more about um the contemplating the nature of existence or creation if there is a creator you know like I said I'm perfectly um I'm not gonna lie to you or be dishonest like you mentioned William Lane Craig earlier you know I'm not gonna make disingenuous arguments which I think he does you know to you know they don't try to try to one up you know the other side I'm perfectly open to the possibility that I'm wrong you know but I believe it I have my beliefs and my convictions um uh because it's what I choose um to believe and I don't really see the harm on that because I don't enforce my beliefs on other people it's a very personal um thing for me um and uh it does I would admit it does provide some some comfort to me that I do use it for those reasons but also um to try and explain some sort of um metaphysical concepts you know um there is that as well um so spiritual truth is more about the essence of existence and you know getting at the heart of hey why are we here what are we doing here you know um I don't you know I I apply many schools of thought when uh when searching for those answers um um and then you know the particular school of thought uh within Islam that I identify with the most is Sufism which which is very very um focused on um uh employing different schools of thought and various religions various um uh philosophies um incorporating that into their faith um so that's what appealed to me about it so um so that's what spiritual truth means now empiricism is what you guys are talking about is more focused on material things and uh sort of okay I can concretely prove a b c d you know um so but I think that we can I think that there is a way to believe some there's a sorry um and Mike's a little bit there I think there's a concrete there's a way to prove um there's a way to believe in proven concrete things while also leaving room for the possibility of non-material um metaphysical things so I just I don't see it as too too contradictory I guess that's my the best way I can answer your question okay um well I mean I get I get what you're sort of saying about spiritual truth being um different than empiricism um so what you seem to be and what I'm sort of hearing is a part of it is pragmatic that it that it helps you in your life kind of thing um um really I guess where where I would would come from is that um truth for me is what comports with reality or you know to quote Matt Delahunty is is basically what aligns with reality so I want to have the beliefs in my mind um reflect what is actually real um in reality that that which actually exists so um when you're sort of saying that spiritual truth is different than pragmatism you're sort of saying well these things are spiritually real but you're you're sort of the reasons why you believe don't seem to be because you can demonstrate them to be so um and so I want a reliable way to know whether your spiritual belief is correct or somebody else's spiritual belief is correct because you will have a spiritual belief based upon something or a spiritual truth based upon something somebody else will have a spiritual truth based upon something else and those two things cannot both reflect reality because they are different mutually exclusive from well from a um sufi perspective and from I think certain sects of hinduism teach this as well no all religions are technically correct because they were created by god and god and god can't really you know be god basically doesn't make mistakes is the belief there I'm not saying you have to agree with it I'm just saying that's the belief that that that god doesn't make mistakes so why would he allow for the creation of something that you know like it's not a mistake that you know some people believe in hinduism some people believe in judeism some believe in christianity and whatever that they are all since they all aim for the same thing there's truth in each one of them yes but but the claims the individual claims that most of them are mutually exclusive like for instance if you're taking hinduism versus islam for instance is there one god or is there not one god right is there multiple gods so those two things are mutually exclusive both of them cannot be true I think they're two different interpretations of the same thing you know I think I look at that as as two different manifestations of the same thing but that makes no sense that's like saying that some proposition is true and that same proposition is false in the same sense and then that's just two different interpretations no it's a logical contradiction it is either true that there is one god or it is not true then there is one god like those things you cannot have both that it is true and not true that there is one god that's not possible that's logically contradictory but again I'm not claiming that it's true I you know I but the question we have is how do we tell which of these claims if any of them are reflective of reality like okay just say for instance let's say as a hypothetical there is only one god right how do we tell that the hindus are wrong that there are multiple ones right how do we investigate well actually according to hindu theology um the one creator god brahman is one god but there's uh but brahman has several manifestations uh so like there's um pantheism is actually what uh their system is so they believe that technically there is one god um but uh they but brahman manifests himself in various ways and that is pantheism that is not pantheism pantheism is the idea that the universe is god that everything no pan and theism is the idea that the universe is contained within god well pantheism is idea that the universe there's two different i i did want to ask they are pantheists though what sure i had a quick question for ryan yep how much time do we have left in the open discussion exactly we are actually we can move into the q and a now uh this would might be a good time to move into the q and a it's up to you guys if you want to flesh out any more thoughts well what's up leah well i was just gonna kind of segue us into a different topic and just ask adan and jordan why why did god permit the murder of six million jews well before we move into that question there leo let's just get a time confirmation let's just get a time confirmation from everybody and i'll let you repeat your question if everybody's good uh jordan and adan are you guys still good for time if we go a little yeah i got all yeah i'm still in fellas and mark how are you hanging out over there yeah i'm good i'm good nice all right if any of you guys have uh you know any uh bladder interruptions don't uh don't feel shy leo back to you you can ask your question we'll try to do this for like another let's say maybe another like 10 to 15 minutes if that's fine by you guys before we hit q and a and i'll let everybody know let get your super chats in there they'll be read first um and sometimes i read them with interesting voices that's always fun uh back to you leo so why why why did god permain he's supposed to be morally perfect and all powerful why did he permit the murder of six million jews uh well if we're talking about why god permits evil at all which i think is a bit more of a you know broad thing because any particular example of evil that he would allow would have to come from the reasoning of why evil must exist or does exist in in general again this comes from certain metaphysical claims i would make about morality um i would argue that morality or what is neg like essentially on a metaphysical level that it is necessary for the bad to exist in order for the good to exist because otherwise it doesn't really make sense if you don't have that kind of contrast so you're saying evil is necessary only the potential for it um and also in yeah but you can house the potential without the actuality so it could be necessary that the potential for evil exists and still not actually have any evil in the world which i would argue is a better world than this and god always seeks the best so why didn't he just create that world well because i would argue he did but also he created that same world you just mentioned but also free will this is where free will would come into it in that world where the potential for evil exists and the potential for good and we also have free will means we have potential to choose the evil and choose the good now is it possible that we would always choose the good um possibly i suppose we'd have to learn how to do that so you do think it's possible i just think it's possible but i think you think god it's all powerful uh yes do you understand that in the logic yes yes so you would understand god's omnipotence to entail that god can actualize any logically consistent state of affairs uh yes without violating uh and it seems that you admitted a world where there exists free will but all agents freely choose to never do evil is possible so then why didn't god just make that world you don't think it would be better than this one how would he do that without violating the free will by because we're still freely choosing to never do evil but not if he's forcing us to choose never to do but he's not forcing us we're freely choosing to do evil he's creating the world in which we freely choose to to never do evil okay there's no contradiction there okay but you'll well okay well then if in this world you've created right or i guess we're both creating it a little bit in thin this world it is possible to do evil but also to not and god creates it so that um we're freely choosing not to do evil what mechanism is stopping us from just choosing to do evil our free will we're freely choosing not to do evil it's possible that there could be a world god can actualize any logically possible world so then he could have made that world why did he not well because i think i've pointed out a logical contradiction in your point there that if we do have free will it means we have one of the contradictory premises you're saying that we have free will but you're saying that god should be able to make it so that court he's supposed to enact some he's making the world he's not making our decisions yeah the decisions of the agents are to freely never do evil and all god does is just create that world he doesn't affect our free will by creating that world and only creating that world because why are we not doing let me let me see if i can clear it up so god's created a world where i can't freely choose to fly right he's created the boundaries of that world so that is not a possibility so what leo was asking is why can't he create a world where you have free will it can choose to do whatever you can but the physical properties of the world mean that you know you can't gas juice for instance well that is an argument but i'm actually granting libertarian free will that were that all all agents libertarian leaf freely choose to never do evil so it doesn't have to be like sort of imposed on us through like say physical laws or something like that um i would consider those impositions i don't know if theists would say that those violate our free will i would suspect they probably wouldn't so i'm granting libertarian leaf free decisions here and that all humans libertare or all moral agents libertarian leaf freely choose to never do evil aiden's already admitted that is a logically possible world and god can make any logically possible world so why did we make that one it's only logically possible if we ourselves the moral agents are the ones doing the choosing once you start having god being we are doing the choosing we are the ones libertarian leaf choosing to never do evil okay but if that's the choice on us then it's up to us to create that world then isn't it god no because it's a logically possible world and god can create any logically possible world now i presume a world where we never do evil is better than this one so why god always seeks what's best why did he not make that world it seems to be you're sort of avoiding the question here i just don't see i mean maybe you could explain to me a little bit better how it is possible i can put in premise conclusion form if you'd like and then you can tell me which premise you disagree with it's more the the specific it's not so much the logically possible world thing it's the part where you're saying god can give us free will but we just by some reason i want by our own reason by our own reason we we never we probably choose to never do evil that's libertarian free will so here let me put this let me put this in a syllogism because it makes it easier premise one a large a world in which all rational moral agents libertarianly freely choose to never do evil is a logically possible world premise two god can actualize any logically possible world premise three god always seeks the best premise four the world as outlined in premise one is better than the world we currently observe conclusion therefore god creates that world i think that included in i believe it was the first premise the idea that it's possible for that you know for the world where libertarian free agents to choose that world it kind of necessitates the possibility of the opposite existing at the exact same time in terms of the possibility things about what is potential like if i flip a coin for example it is logically possible that that that um that that it will land heads but that doesn't necessarily mean that because it's logically possible that the alternative to the possibility right so if the possibility if that coin happens to have free will and i can't force it in any way to choose to land heads without violating its free will it seems like it's not up to me or it's not my fault if that tail that that coin lands tails i i don't see how you're as great but if you're all powerful and that coin had free will you could pick the world where it chooses freely heads now that's a contradiction you're using your so what's the contradiction you're using your will to impose um a sort of causal effect onto the coin in this how well so what's the cause i'm just gonna interject here because that's exactly what i was going to say let's get you fellas back in here uh i want to answer leo's question about uh the holocaust i would like to answer that um so there is um i like the way this was framed there is a uh a shake by the name of musty menk he's uh you know i have some issues with some things he says but he basically said that life is nothing more than a series of tests from god or a law i mean we like aiden and i believe in the same god you know it's just you know even uh arab christians call god a lot because it's just the arabic name no i get it the i for having god yes yeah but anyway the point is um i believe that the nazis failed that test and um do i believe that god is always benevolent no i don't um otherwise why would he allow six million jews and disabled people including my you know like myself um so you reject god's moral perfection you would say god is not a morally perfect being god doesn't always see what's best that is correct and that's fine yeah probably doesn't apply to you then yeah he'd be a non classical theist at that point so correct yes um yes i still believe that god doesn't necessarily god mostly good though i can't say um i um i i cannot say i'm i'm different on that question honestly um i can't really i can't say i don't know god's motives i i don't know um what i i i can't get um inside uh what he i i i just i don't know but the point is that i i don't think that although i still believe that he doesn't necessarily make mistakes per se i do believe that he puts certain people through tests and i believe the nazis failed that test and i and i do believe that unfortunately those people that were put to death i think they were just i guess you know i i don't want to say like their lives didn't mean anything to god but they were i guess used as collateral damage maybe i don't know but yeah they were just fodder you know fodder for the test i have a different objection to the free will raised by adan i i do have a different objection that that doesn't involve free will and that's the sort of natural events occur that i would classify as um wrong or causing suffering which you know sort of under definition i'm using would be evil so you know you can sort of appeal to free will in the case of say the nazis but you know in the case of a volcano blowing up in somebody's face and killing a ton of people um you can't claim free will for that because that volcano has no free will you would have to say that god caused that suffering and that death and destruction so um what what is the the reason for that if god is all good natural evils why does god permit natural evils yeah so again this is where i wouldn't invoke the free will argument there but i would point out like i said that the potential for evil must sort of exist you know for the good to what is he let it actualize is that better than it's not actually a second layer that means that sort of the way that he gets that to happen in the end it will be a good thing through revealing this evil to people correct not necessarily could just be a bad event that just sucks you don't have to call it secretly good behind the scenes or anything um but that's why we call it bad then why do it it just why let it happen i'm i'm arguing that if the potential for good and evil exists then like well first of all in the christian worldview because i'm a christian we do believe god you know person the garden of Eden type of thing right and that's in that world it's always a fun discussion i'm just saying that in this particular example god did create the uh space for where obviously there were no volcanoes in the earthquakes kind of thing right that that kind of natural evil just didn't exist um the evil that was actualized like why did the evil um actualized the original um you know the fall of man where you know adam did the first sin blah blah blah that's when like because of free will um the uh evil was introduced in actuality so it's not it's no longer merely a potential and that's where we have um you know the fall of man etc etc but why why did god let man fall he didn't want that to happen did he did god want man to fall and if not then why did he want to have free will because they have free will again but they couldn't have had free will and not fallen um it's possible but that just simply didn't happen so then why didn't god make that world if it's possible he can actualize any possible state again you keep trying to smuggle in this assumption that you can what assumption but also i'm explaining it you keep trying to say that you can have free will but also god can create a world where he you know where you make exactly these decisions that's yeah but you're making them you're but you're making them freely nothing about what you said defeats the ideas that decisions are made freely because because they freely chose to not disobey god muslims do not believe in original sin so yeah that's fine putting that out there i'm talking about original sin the original sin's a different concept but still free will being the cause to the falls a separate thing from original sin go ahead mark are you saying that god has no control over volcanoes like are you saying that because man chose to sin then it must follow that there are volcanoes why is that the case why could god not have created a world without volcanoes killing everyone and instead give everybody say a light a light burn that that has no real ramifications okay so let's let's actually entertain that hypothetical for a moment let's say that we were living in that world would the argument actually change like because it seems to be that you can only understand what is evil in contrast with what is good kind of thing like otherwise i don't think so i can contrast with the evil that people this you already made the free will argument that people do evil things so we know that that is evil right we know we can get an understanding of evil through what what you know the Nazis didn't what what Stalin did and all these people did so we don't need natural events in order to contrast good and evil anymore because we have people choosing evil out of free will so why is god adding additional evil that is not controlled by free will in order to punish for the for the fall of man i don't understand it's not a punishment so to speak i'm i would argue that the concept of entropy right with things sort of falling apart getting chaotic and changing their state um uh which introduces a sort of um sort of chaotic nature to the universe kind of thing that that would be introduced into the fall um because of the way that again you're shaking your head and god has no control over entropy no i'm not saying that i'm saying that i'm saying that it all started when the original sin happened let's let him say why i was trying to focus on the original why god let that happen sorry leo and mike let's let adan say what he's thinking there and again this is just gonna sort of go round and around it's a certain metaphysical claims about good and evil that aren't necessarily going to uh no um report with your world view of what is necessary what is not i find what i meant by good needle i said what i meant by those words yeah in european that please sorry adan in fairness i'll just address your issue it's because um i want to get to this because leo's entire argument hinged on the problem of even that was really what his his sort of objection um to saying a god does not exist was was based around correct leo yes yeah i i just wanted to say uh real quick um my views and this is not you know certainly not representing like the islamic perspective or whatever this is my personal belief in terms of like creation and stuff like that i don't necessarily believe that god creates all things like all human beings and whatever um and all living things and whatever um i believe in actually believe it or not more of a deistic um notion of god set the set the processes in motion you know um uh like i believe in evolution i believe in um all those processes um i don't know why he did it i don't i don't have you know i can't say why he did it but um i do believe in sort of the i think it's called the domino theory um i don't know why he chose to flip that domino but you know i do that is the theory that um i subscribe to that um okay maybe he doesn't directly influence the creation of living creatures or even non-living creatures but he set up the processes by which those things are created so i just wanted to throw that out there real quick well let's go ahead yeah so my objection over over a sort of um immaterial mind would still exist um for even a deistic god but it also brings up the problem of how you distinguish between a deistic god one that has no current effect in the universe and no um physical impact or or or sort of no impact in the universe at all he just doesn't interact with the universe and one that doesn't exist to me there seems to be no possible way to distinguish between a non-existent god and a deistic god um so to me i said i said deistic conception of of creation like that's that that is that is one aspect i'm not you know does god actually sort of participate in his creation after the creation is is i guess what i would ask i believe so yes you know because like i said i believe i believe that um do i believe in every instance no um right but i do i believe in what i call limited interventionism you know i i don't i don't well that's fine that's just not a deistic god that's all i just want to sort of clarify that that a deistic god is one that is removed i just mean like what i meant is like um it's deists that technically believe in the domino theory tend to believe in the domino theory um so so just wanted to yeah put that on there sorry how much how much time are we doing left on the i was gonna say we can move into q and a anytime you guys want to move into the q and a so if you guys want to keep so we each before we hit q and a could we each get like a minute or two just to give some final thoughts on on the discussion uh well i usually do that after the q and a just because the q and a can generate a lot i do mine before since mine is like really really difficult come on man i don't want to wait like a whole nother hour to make the statement that i that i it's just because then it becomes pointless we're so far removed that's that's kind of why all right well i mean you know if you have something i don't mind if you have something to say right now before we go into q and a and then if we if we develop some new thoughts by the end and you have something else to say that's fine too i'm not going to be picky i'm like you mr leo develop some new thoughts i guarantee you yeah but i all right mr um mr leo filius give us your thoughts so with respect to what adin was saying saying it seemed it seemed like what he was saying was that original sin in the fall of man is like where all the evil in the world came from it wasn't until then that volcanoes began to erupt in tornadoes and hurricanes and lions and tigers and bears oh my and that's fine but all that does is push the question back further did god want eve to eat apple did he want original sin to happen and if not then why did it so i mean did eve just like rationally fail when did was she deceived into eating the apple if so why did god allow her to be deceived why didn't he create her with cognitive faculties where she wouldn't be tricked into something or did she just like cognitively malfunction and just behave irrationally and if so why would god create an agent like that so i just that just pushes the question back to why why did the original sin happened to begin with i have to let them respond to that leo of course you stirred the pot a little too much there so go ahead i would just add something i just add something really really quick sorry and then we'll let really quick um plus it becomes worse when you in the story eve did have not did not have knowledge of good and evil so how was she supposed to tell whether obeying god was good or just opposed to obey god so first of all so first of all when it comes to the knowledge of good and evil it's meant to be full knowledge of good and evil not just like limited knowledge of good and evil um again because if you look at the if you want to go to buy the biblical thing it says you will um you will become as god knowing good at in this knowing good and evil so you would know good and evil in the same way god knows good and evil um so maybe that's not fully omniscience necessarily but omniscience on that topic and so it wouldn't necessarily because obviously they were told do not eat the tree and they knew that it was wrong to eat the tree so they had some limited knowledge of good anyway as for um the question that leo filius asked where it was um why did god just not force adam and eve to be cognitive that wasn't my question i said nothing about forcing all right let's let you clarify your question 15 seconds leo let's take the word i don't need anything i already did okay cool let's take the word forced and just swap it out for why didn't god make eve oh i'm not saying that either why did god allow why did god permit it to occur especially you just said they knew it was wrong she knew it was wrong so why did she do it was she deceived or did she just behavior rational and in either instance why would god create an agent that can either be deceived or be or cognitively malfunction why would he do that i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's just like cognitive malfunction but if you're a being who's only capable of making rational decisions that doesn't seem like you have free will again i just don't see how i think it is allowed us to freely choose you say that you say the words freely choose but you're not allowing actual free will into the system i don't i think it comes from the fact that you don't actually maybe i don't think you are i think you're granting the phonetics well this is an internal critique so i'm granting a libertarian free will for this and if it's an internal critique then i can say that it is a cognitive necessity that she needs the ability to both choose wrong decisions and right decisions she chose the wrong i agree here you go i agree but why did she choose the wrong she knew it was wrong she knew she wanted to do it but she did it anyway why we're getting close to the q and a so let's let mark get his thoughts in here as well sorry um the question is like um did god know ahead of time that she would eat the apple well that's a bit of a difficult question in terms of omniscience i don't i don't want to get into that topic because that's going to be like a whole half hour thing i've got what hurt into the day well i i guess my point is that if god's and why did she if god just hold on to eat the apple there is no possible world where she did not eat that apple like if god knew ahead of time it's assuming well not necessarily because you can oh there was a possible world all right let's let's let's let adian speak guys we're cutting them off every couple seconds here i don't know you're right you're right no no no you're right anyway um i don't even so wait are we talking about the possible world the omniscience thing or is it possible to be omniscient and still make free will like it what what which thing we're talking about the world why eve ate the apple when god did not want her to and she knew she oughtnt all things considered so then why did she eat it again if we so if you want me to provide a causal account of free will i could possibly say no that's not what i'm asking you is a completely arbitrary i'm asking why she ate the apple shoes why exactly why but she knew it was wrong right yeah so why did she do it that's what i'm trying to say i'm trying to give you an answer to that or a possible answer to that why why do we make decisions out of free will that's what you're asking me right no i'm asking why did she make the wrong decision when she knew it was wrong well isn't the story that that satan tempted her that's that's the story right right but why would god allow her to be deceived it wouldn't matter because she still had the free will to either go along with it or not it's so yeah but she was deceived she was tricked god's punishing her for being tricked he let her get tricked and then punished her for it if god tells you don't do this and somebody says do this and then you choose to do this that's a decision you still made this free will is still it didn't rob her of a free will she still made the decision wait but if your daughter like sent pictures to somebody this is hypothetical i don't know if you have a daughter sent pictures of somebody online because they got tricked and groomed by an older man but you told her not to she shouldn't be punished for that or is it that she was deceived i would say that there would be natural consequences which would punish her for a decision i wouldn't go out of my way to punish her or anything but was she deceived in that situation and should she be punished for what she did well let me let me take that example that you gave do you think that the daughter in that hypothetical made a good decision no i don't but i also think that she was deceived into making the bad decision she made the decision because she was tricked into thinking that it was the right decision to make but you already granted that eve knew it was wrong so then why did she do it again because people sometimes choose to make wrong decisions again if she just she just said i shouldn't do this i know that i shouldn't do this and i have the ability not to do it but i'm just gonna do it anyway for literally no reason i've that's cognitively malfunctioning that's called behaving irrationally again just assuming that her free will must be strictly determined by the rationality there and that's assuming the rationality follows from free will we do the things we think we ought to do right that's you know that this idea of what is good is an action guiding norm it's what we ought to do we do the things we feel that we ought to all things considered like if you were in a park and you passed by the pond and you saw a child drowning you know the child is drowning you have the ability to save the child and if you think i should save the child then you're probably gonna make an attempt to save the child you're gonna do what you think you ought to do so i'm asking eve knew what she ought to do but then didn't do it knowing that she shouldn't do it with no external factors influencing her decision then she just cognitively malfunctioned and at that point the question is why did god create an agent that can cognitively malfunction is that what he wanted you're still assuming a deterministic process i don't know how i'm assuming determinism let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's go back to the pond example all right you see a child drowning you think to yourself i should save that child but then you don't is what i just described metaphysically possible at all oh of course it's just irrational okay does irrational mean that you have a brain aneurysm or some sort of mental defense that's not what that's not what a cognitive as in like your cognitive thought process is your rationality your intentionality your normativity that that's what a cognitive like doing something so the thing is in most of those instances where you you know you want to save the child all things considered but then you don't is going to be of as a result of extenuating circumstances that are changing the kinds of evaluations that you're making such that you don't save the child because in reality you actually think that you want not save the child and then that's why you don't in virtue of those extenuating circumstances so if there were extenuating circumstances that made eve think that she actually ought to eat the apple then she didn't have the full suite of knowledge necessary to know that it was wrong and then that claim you made is also wrong or she cognitively malfunctioned there was literally no reason for her to do what she knew she ought not do in which case the question is why did God create an agent to cognitively malfunction is that what he wanted I think he was sort of creating the sort of yeah the only way that you could make a cognitively wrong decision is that if you know there's some sort of malfunction which you've not really described the mechanisms of that malfunction right so we were just talking about how brains were purely physical right I would assume then that under that worldview that's a you know of a malfunction is caused by something misfiring in the physical process if you're saying that there's a constant answering the question well I would like to go that's like I have to sorry Leo and the only answer I've got is well because she made the wrong decision okay that's not really an answer that's why I keep interrupting you're trying to answer this question in the short of the time we have left because you're trying to get me sorry fellas I'm just gonna put you both on the mute for just one second I do have to try to get the other fellas in here Jordan says he feels we're going in circles I want Jordan to elaborate a little bit on what about the conversation is kind of causing him to feel that way pass it back to Mark and then like I said maybe get into the Q&A unless there's another avenue we'd like to explore but let's get you guys off off the mute so over to you Jordan well it just seems like we're just fixating on one point that Aidan says and then Leo will say something and then it just goes back and forth and back and forth and then and it just doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere that's kind of what I mean it's just like and then they'll repeat the same points over and over again just in slightly different ways and then that's the perception I'm having you know I mean some people could interpret it differently but the perception I'm getting is that what we have here is I mean you know Mark and I occasionally interact and then these two are just talking past each other and it just I don't know all right without the meta analysis of the debate let's kick it over to Mark there yeah so I just my personal opinion is that God would have known ahead of time that Eve would eat the apple he would have known that it created a flawed agent that is not faithful about obeying him and he would have known that ahead of time there is no reason why he could not have fixed that error so that that did not happen but he didn't so the only conclusion that I can make is that God wanted that to happen all right everybody we're going to kick it into the Q&A I just want to remind everybody that we're going to have a live in-person debate and we do have our Indiegogo link in our description where you can get all kinds of amazing perks so I'll tell you about them right now before we go into the Q&A get your super chats in while I let you know what you guys can do so any as you say what we do is we let me just get this opened up everybody this thing's being slow trying to vamp off here by the way everybody hit the like button if you haven't already now behave yourself computer while I scroll through these so if you want your name in the post debate credits it's $10 USD and we will put your name in the credits for the live debate that we are going to be hosting in Houston not Houston Texas sorry in Dallas Texas that was the last one I gotta get my fax straight everybody see I've I've got my fax all backwards here so if you want an embossed thank you postcard 25 USD you can get that from donating to our crowd fund there scroll down you silly computer it's being so difficult for me guys see I have Canadian dollars and I have to make sure that I tell you what it is an American all right you know what you guys can click on click on the Indiegogo link because my computer is not behaving itself for some odd reason and also remind you that we have tickets for the live in person event there so get your super chats in everybody and we'll keep the conversation rolling we only have a few super chats in right now so if you get them in there I'm sure we'll get to them shortly pointless poppy thank you for being here says for $4.99 when damages are made to the brain changes happen in the mind and when the brain has changed enough all functions stop as far as we know thoughts on that panel well it's even worse when you consider split brain patients that's patients that have had a cut made through the corpus callosium the two hemispheres are actually split off and what you'll see is that the patient will literally have two minds that can disagree with one another over things one side can be a theist one side can be an atheist so it's sort of this ideal of dualism where the mind isn't reliant on the brain doesn't explain this phenomenon and it you know and most mostly when I bring it up they make no effort to but I'd love to hear about them well I guess as the group's resident dualist it's often thought when we talk about dualism that we're only talking about the immaterial mind but it's called dualism for a reason the physical part is still like involved there's obviously an interaction that's going on there and so I don't see why it should be a surprise where if the physical part affects the immaterial and vice versa I don't see why that should surprise us at all I don't see how you know because like let's take a script by an example all right there's two brains to disagree with each other I mean I suppose it's even possible under dualism that the immaterial mind might disagree with the physical brain there's no necessary issue or contradiction there it's the the question of do we observe any interactions from the immaterial mind onto the physical that the physical brain itself just can't seem to explain on its own and I would argue to have no vicinity would be an example of that boss Jordan um I don't really have a lot to add to that honestly all right Leo over to you what do you think about our question from pointless poppy and what we've heard it's interesting it's a lot like an internal combustion engine where if you turn it on it runs and you've got the exhaust and the camshafts move and the valves open and close and the pistons go up and down and crankshaft turns and all that fun stuff happens and you know you can change the amount of air and fuel going into the engine and change certain features of the engine you can even make it run poorly um kind of like the brain you can change aspects of the brain and make it run poorly but when you turn an engine off the engine stops running that there's not some other stuff there that will keep going after the engine has stopped um when you put a flame out on a candle there isn't light still someplace else related to that flame when you shut a computer off there isn't still some processing going on in some happy place forever these just these processes have simply ceased and I don't know why we should expect the brain to be any different from that when that's well you know kind of what we observe in every instance like every instance or at least most instances where somebody has been shot in the head where the brain is by the way any other thoughts on that panel before we move on I would just uh I I wanted to say with the first I actually did like that some example gave like computers and for example um but if we are like in uh the material mind to be in like a radio wave and the physical part of our brain to be in like a television right and we smash the television and assume well oh we're not getting a signal so then the signal must have been coming from inside the tv rather than outside I think that would be a uh an incorrect assumption to make that just because the tv is not working that the you know signal must have been coming inside the tv I just see that how does this brain how does the brain receive this signal well and also we know how tv's receive signals how does the brain it was a example that you can't necessarily say that everything that's going on is internal I'm just saying you can't know that like oh I actually agree with that I think a lot of external factors like external environmental factors our perceptual senses all that stuff's external in fact I would argue that a lot of our consciousness is largely built by the external world and our ability to interact with it well could I chip in for a second the the the um the idea of a receiver is sort of it's really portrayed by the split brain patients because if you split a tv in half it doesn't receive two different signals right it doesn't receive channel on one and a channel that isn't what's happening right like so so the idea that it's just a receiver um and it's just receiving this signal doesn't explain why the signal is broken in half as well it's inadequate to just explain that yeah it's interesting um because uh it's funny that you mentioned the uh corpus callosan thing because um uh not to get too too personal here but um that's actually how um my brain is it was a birth defect and I part of my corpus callosan is missing so I technically have two brains in a way so um so I understand how that that that stuff works is my point you know so I kind of get what you're saying um I can kind of understand that all right there may be something you could oh sorry I was just gonna say that sounds like super interesting Jordan does there anything that like um having gone through that that um what would you be then your views on how that kind of feels and what like what's your experience of that I guess all of us oh it's been pretty hard um especially when um it's funny we've been talking about visible versus invisible things and stuff like that and immaterial and whatever it's hard to um this is a totally different topic but it's hard to live in a world where they'll acknowledge overtly obvious physical disabilities but when you're living in a world where they don't seem to be as willing to accept disabilities that are somewhat invisible and it's like uh so it's really hard to prove to people that's why um it's funny um we talked earlier about I think Ryan you were saying about the uh like Canadians being like serial apologizers I'm a serial apologizer because I feel like I have to explain myself all the time to everybody you know um why are you guys out here apologizing to serial what I'm sorry that was just well we can move on to the next chat but uh yeah we'll uh we'll try to keep everything rolling and make sure that everybody uh is treated fairly that went over everybody's head didn't it uh I think serial apologizer and I was saying why are you apologizing to serial I got it yeah no I got it eventually thank you I thought it was funny that is the term darn dad jokes well I see two ninety of you watching and uh we've only got what 116 likes smash that like button uh everybody what else are you smashing seriously like a Nazi face my goodness Leo yes mute yourself after that anyways like well you're on you it says on the thing I said it was so bad I should smash it like a Nazi's face that's I thought I thought that would be an agreeable thing to say I got well today in America maybe not you know just get get us get us triggered by the old youtube algorithm my friend that's what we want anyways so I'm yeah I was gonna say and I was gonna say we got different rules here in Canada too that sometimes makes it so that uh content isn't available to us based on different types of censorship I don't necessarily agree with that but you know I do want to be able to watch these debates on my own time guys I think I think Leo sort of you know that that ship has already sailed you know Leo brought it up way before now so yeah exactly I was I was gonna say it is a couple of references are gonna make it any worse it's fine he's just he's just trying to pick on me directly and that's fine because you know I love you buddy all right Sal coming in for 499 would the atheist agree if God exists outside the physical universe our knowledge of his existence is dependent on how he chose to reveal himself I'm not sure what quote unquote outside of spacetime is supposed to mean that's like telling me well Santa Claus exists but he's just north of the North Pole what does that mean that means nothing to me what are you talking about outside of spacetime I'm lost I'm lost um yeah so yeah I do agree with Leo sort of summation is outside you know referencing a place outside of spacetime I'm not saying that it can't exist it just seems like you would have to sort of at least at least show that this place could exist outside of spacetime which would be problematic but if they did exist in some way outside of spacetime they don't exist outside of reality and if they do interfere physically with the universe in any way we should be able to at least verify that physical interaction in some way the effects of it if we can't observe the god at this this hypothetically god itself if you say that that it's using divine hiddenness to sort of say well you can't detect it well then there's no difference between a god that's making itself undetectable and a god that doesn't exist I think it's far more likely that people made up these stories about a god than this god exists wants us to know that it exists and yet hides from us when we try and find it this is it's funny that this is a book called um flat land um it's you can search it up on youtube on it's like an audio book it's a kind of deals with a very um similar sort of thing where it's like um if you're saying outside of spacetime you mean like some sort of maybe higher dimension maybe that's something I could conceptualize of what you're talking about because um our ability to understand like because we're able to interact in sort of lower dimensions in a certain sense um it's a bit higher to conceptualize how exactly that works it's to um but like for example if a fourth dimensional being in some way wanted to step into the three-dimensional world um you know we would see a three-dimensional object maybe um uh uh sort of popping it out it's like uh it wouldn't uh anyways the whole thing well that's Sagan that you're referencing Carl Sagan was the one that sort of was demonstrating flatland on a two-dimensional plane kind of thing and you you would be unable to see it but it would still have a presence in that two-dimensional space you would see this um if it was a cube for instance the the two-dimensional being would see a a square kind of thing so this is as I said this should still be detectable um and and I'm not sure that I would agree that a god would only appear in the way that it would choose I think that it should be detectable um physically in our unit three-dimensional universe even if it was a fourth dimensional being or something like that well let's use the example of that story how did the character react when he saw the square all he said was all I see is a square there's no reason to assume any higher dimensions that you're some higher dimensional being um so maybe we do observe right that's not how the story goes no no he's taken aback and and amazed at this square appearing from nowhere because the flatland at two dimensions well the sphere or whatever you know he's amazed at the circle appearing from nowhere because the sphere isn't present in the two dimensions it hasn't like sort of dropped down into it yet but all he sees is a circle but he's completely amazed because this circle came out of nowhere kind of thing that's the whole point that we still should be able to see or observe the effects of this fourth dimensional creature in the third dimensional world and that's my point we don't see the effects of it but my point to anyway I don't know yeah sorry yeah short sorry I just wanted to say clear from my answer a little bit I would I would agree with mark if we're talking about some sort of higher dimension or some sort of meta space it's either going to be somehow metaphysically or ontologically connected to ours or it's not and if it's not then I don't think you can have any ontological effect on our reality and if it is ontologically connected to ours then I would assume its effect is going to be causal to some degree and well we should be able to detect that that hyperspace that other dimension is going to act as a causal medium through which it can interact with and behave with our universe all right I don't see why that wouldn't be detectable any other thoughts there on the other side before we move on I was going to ask about what oh sorry I'll let George go yeah let's let Jordan go here guys I haven't heard from you in a while Jordan yeah so I guess um my whole my question is what's the harm in believing something that is non falsifiable or or believing in something that isn't you know um entirely empirical I guess you know what's the harm in just believing in something I guess not I guess not everybody shares my philosophy that that it's more of a personal thing rather than you know you know there are some people that want to you know impose their beliefs on others of course even though in Islam for instance you cannot do that it is forbidden by the Quran to do that so it's funny how some people at least in the west scapegoat Islam is being a problem because you know they cite al qaeda and stuff like that as examples of of Islam it's like those people did not care about Islam they were a political organization not you know not really a religious one it's like there is no compulsion in religion that is a direct quote from the Quran you know there shall be no compulsion in religion so what is the harm of just believing in something if you're not you know if you're not bothering anybody you're not you know but I guess I just don't see the harm in that well you've kind of hit the nail on the head there if you're not bothering anybody right so so a lot of it is dependent on the actions you take based on your beliefs beliefs never did anything to anybody you know whether I believe there's a there's a teapot around Jupiter or whether I believe there's a magic unicorn in my room it never affected anybody but it's the actions you take based upon the beliefs and the actions you take upon beliefs that are not in accordance with reality are usually ones that have a negative effect in reality so for instance if you believe that the world's going to end because of what you believe you may say well I'm not hurting anybody but you're also less likely to say address problems like climate change or ecological disaster or things like that because of your beliefs there are people who see the I do believe in climate change I do well I'm not talking about you right I'm talking about all right if if your beliefs are that but you probably don't believe that this is the the end of days kind of thing and the world's going to end right um not necessarily I mean I don't believe that we're in apocalyptic times no right right so so that's an example where your beliefs aren't affecting the world in a detrimental way because your beliefs are different than someone who is absolutely sure that the world is ending in the next few years and would not address things like that because of their beliefs and this sort of flows over to a lot of things and while you can sort of say how al-qaeda was political you can definitely say that islamic state or isis was a attempt to create a theocracy and I'm not saying you agree with that and most most theists don't they they don't agree with that kind of thing most christians don't you know sort of act as if the world's going to end very soon they're just you know people get along fine it's fine it's the fact that those beliefs can cause you to take actions um that either um disadvantage others or um um don't address certain things that have a profound effect in this world so I think it is important to have the construct of what you believe to try and fit to what is actually real as as much as possible because we can't be you know we are the way mario everything yeah uh the rapture is actually tomorrow according to american evangelicals apparently a really i didn't know i i didn't get my rsvp did you like what the what is this i i i don't know i i wouldn't expect one quite frankly