 Okay. So here's a question. Do you have, according to Clifford, according to these conditions for sufficient evidence? Maybe not necessarily according to Clifford, right? But given these two conditions for sufficient evidence, do we have sufficient evidence for these propositions? Okay. So the earth is more or less spherical. Now, you might think you need a lot of evidence, but you actually don't, right? The belief that the earth is more or less spherical is rather ancient. It was over 2,000 years. In fact, you know, one of the earliest measurements of the circumference of the earth is from antiquity. It's really darn close. It's only up by a few thousand miles. Okay. So as far as the earth is more or less spherical, yeah, of course you have sufficient evidence for this, right? We have the experts that are telling us that the earth is more or less spherical, giving us a lot of information about the nature of the earth. You don't even know what's at its core. It's moving around the solar system. You know, we can see other planets, right? It's not hard to see. We can see the moon, right? The moon is spherical. We've got lots and lots of evidence. There's even evidence that you can see for yourself. So, you know, a really couple of really simple ones. So you probably need to be on a beach for this, because it's a large surface. You know, what's good here is to have a large surface that's not interrupted by hills or mountains or something like that. So a beach is a great place to conduct some of these experiments. So go to the beach, right? And lay down on the sand just before sunset. And, you know, kind of keep an eye on the sun as it's setting. And when the sun sets, when the sun sets, when you're laying down, stand up. And when you stand up, you'll have more sunset. And that's because the earth is curved, right? Where your head is, is actually the elevation where your head is, right? That's going to be blocked sooner, you know, down lower than if you're standing up, right? If the earth were flat, right? When the sun sets, that's it, right? You won't be able to stand up and see more sunset, right? It would, you know, be gone. So that's one very simple experiment that you could conduct for yourself. Another one, you know, again, on the beach, see the ships come in. And when the ships come in, what does it look like? Well, it looks like the ships are coming up out of the water. They're not coming up out of the water. They're not, you know, submersibles. So the only reason why it appears that they're coming up out of the water is because the earth's surface is curved. It's a sphere. And again, these were everyday experiments that people, everyday observations that people conducted. And yes, there were some that believed the earth was flat, yeah, but they were actually in the minority, right? And I know history paints a picture that everybody was kind of an idiot and, you know, had these really bizarre beliefs. Well, no, it was actually kind of the minority. So, you know, the earth, you're seeing the, you know, the ships coming up out of the ocean. That's another really simple experiment you could conduct to show that the earth is more less spherical. Again, if the earth were flat, you'd see the ship, you know, it'd be just really hazy off in the distance and be a tiny little dot, right? I don't know, maybe do something comparable, take a, what, a remote controlled car and put it 300 yards away, right? It's really really tiny. And that's close enough to where, you know, it's close enough to where it won't be, you know, you won't, the curvature of the earth won't interfere with the, being able to see the car. But when you have something like that, it's really, really tiny far away. And I guess it gets closer, well, then you can see the details. So the same thing with the ship. If the earth were flat, it would appear to be tiny little dot off in the distance and then gradually grow bigger. And to where you can finally see, but that's not what happens. And that's not what happens. The earth, the ship appears to come up out of the water. That's because the earth is, is cerebral. Okay, so pure water, here's another one. Pure water is composed of dihydrogen monoxide. Okay, do you have sufficient evidence? Well, yes. Yeah. I mean, you have a conducted the experiments, but chemists have. And, you know, they're trying to tell the truth. They, this has been, this experiment has been conducted by chemist after chemist after chemist to prove that pure water is composed of dihydrogen monoxide. So you haven't conducted the experiments, but the experts had and you could trust the experts on this question. Here's another proposition. A square root of four is two. Do you have sufficient evidence? Well, yes. I mean, first of all, you have what the experts tell us, right? When you ask a mathematician, say, what are, you know, what's the square root or a square root of four? They'll say two. Do you know what the other one is? Negative two, right? Negative two is the other square root. So, and again, you can see this too, right? When you understand the meanings of square or square root to four equals a square root is a is a square root of a number is the number times itself to get that number, right? So two times two equals four. Four, two is a square root of four minus negative two times negative two is also four. So two and negative two are square roots of four. Square root of 16 is four, right? Four times four is 16. Square root of 64 is eight or a negative eight, right? So when you understand the meaning of square root, well, yeah, you have sufficient evidence for this too. There is no rational square root of negative four. Now, rational square root you know, a square root is a number times itself, right? Well, two is not the same number as negative two. And multiplying a positive number times a negative number is the only way you get a negative number. When you multiply positive times a positive, will you get a positive? When you multiply a negative times a negative, will you get a positive? The only way to get a negative number is to multiply positive times a negative. So we have, if you have a square root of a negative number, right? Well, that means it's a number times this negative counterpart. Right? So, yeah, there is no rational square root of negative four. Now, there's our irrational ones and many, you know, but, you know, that's a whole other topic, right? So again, yes, you have sufficient evidence for this, but you're relying upon the experts. And you, to some extent, you understand what's going on too when you understand the meanings of the terms. So yeah, so up to this point, we have a sufficient evidence for all these beliefs. The circumference of the earth is approximately 24,900 miles. Do you have sufficient evidence for this? Yes, you do. Again, the experts have told us this, but there's, again, there's still an experiment. It's not exactly simple, but you don't need to, you know, travel to space to measure the other. In fact, you know, we don't measure the earth that way, right? We don't measure the earth by traveling to space and then getting out a big measuring tape. It doesn't work that way. And some of the first measurements of the circumference of the earth are from antiquity. And so it's, it's not, you don't need complicated instruments to get the circumference of the earth. So how did they do it? Well, okay, so a little bit of geometry first, right? We'll just get a little bit of geometry. Suppose you have a pair of parallel lines, right? Parallel lines. And then you have a line that intersects both, right? And it only intersects both. Well, you know, look here at our diagram, the, since they're parallel lines, right, the angles, the bisection, where they intersect both, not the bisection, where they intersect both, they'll be equal, right? So you'll have, you know, if it intersects perpendicular, then they'll all be 90 degree angles. But if it intersects something other than a perpendicular, well, the, the small angle on one end will be the same angle, same angle is the small angle on the other, right? And the large one is the same as the large one. They'll be, they'll be equivalent. Okay. So that, that tells us the angle of that intersection. Well, suppose we have a circle here, right? If we have a circle, and you know, this center of the circle is at one of those intersections. Well, the angle, right, from the center will be that, that arc will be the degree of measurement for that arc on the surface. And that will be the same degree as the angle that's, you know, outside of the circles, right? So it'll have that. And if, you know, if you know the degree, the angle of the, of the one that's further out, you will have the arc, right? That, that's right there. Well, suppose what? Suppose that degree measurement is 10 degrees, right? Well, then that arc there, every circle is 360 degrees, that arc there, it is, is going to be 136th of the whole thing. And it, you know, suppose you know, right, the distance, the length of that arc. Then you multiply that, right, times 36. And you'd have the circumference of that circle. Well, that's how it works on, with measuring the surface of the arc. You know, to do this, you need two structures. And you wait till something like, you wait till the, it's the solar solstice in that, in that area. And that would be the point where the, the sun is the most perpendicular to the surface. So then the sun's rays would be the parallel lines, right? And suppose you have, you know, tower A, right, tower A, and at the solar, at the exact moment that solar solstice, that will have effectively no shadow around it. But then another tower, let's say it's 100 yards of yarn, 100, you know, a good distance away, you know, 10 miles away, something like whatever. It would not be parallel, right, with that tower, right? It would be off to the side. And thus it would cast a shadow. So then what you do is you measure the degree, right, measure the degree of that shadow, right, at that time. So then, so then you take that measurement, and that's the same as the arc, right, starting over the surface. And then you divide that by 360, and that gives you units, right, for that distance between those two towers. I'm not explaining this very well, you should look it up to see for yourself. The other page will describe it better. And so then you know the distance between the two towers, and you multiply that by however, you know, many divisions are within the circle, and then bam, you have a measurement of the circumference of the earth. And again, like I said, this was conducted thousands, a couple thousand years ago, and they can't, I forget the name of the the geometry that actually did this. But his calculation is really close, I guess, it's only off for a couple thousand miles. Okay, so yes, you have sufficient evidence for this, not only can you rely on the extras, but you can conduct the experiments yourself. Okay. It is always wrong, or only wrong to kill infants. Do we have sufficient evidence for this? No, we don't. This is not part of the common human experience. It's not to say that, you know, we've just, common human experience has enjoyed killing infants. No, no, that's not what I'm saying. But there are a variety of different cultures across, variety of different cultures that have at some time or another endorsed the killing of infants, be it usually for survival reasons for the communities as a whole. By the way, ours is becoming one of those, right? We, there are many people who argue very vehemently that is sometimes wrong, sometimes permissible to commit infant, to euthanize infants usually for, you know, because the developmental disabilities in the infant. So yeah, then we don't have sufficient evidence for this. It is always wrong to kill. Again, no. It's not to say that ours is, you know, our society is, ah, you kill people. No, but there are times when it's permissible to kill, according to our society. War, self-defense, home invasion, right? These are instances where, you know, one person is threatened in the life of another, say, well, no, you're allowed to defend yourself. And if you have to use lethal means, well, then you have to use lethal means. So we do not have sufficient evidence for this that it's always wrong to kill. But life forms exist on other planets. Now, this one's getting a little weird today. This discussion is getting weird. If you had asked me five years ago, whether we have sufficient evidence for this, I said, well, no, we don't. We don't have sufficient evidence for this. But the experts are beginning to disagree on this. There's a big movement amongst the experts to say, well, yeah, the, you know, given the number of planets in the universe and the chance of life, well, then yes, there's lots and lots of life forms out there. We haven't seen them. This is all based upon statistical inference. But yeah, we are there. Okay. Now, at least for my money, I'm not sure we have sufficient evidence for this. I mean, there's a whole paradox surrounding this, this very, this very idea within the physical sciences called the Fermi paradox. And the idea is like, well, look, look at there's some paradoxes. If there's so much life out in the universe, why haven't we seen any? Now there's various approaches to try to answer the paradox. I kind of look sideways at the whole reasoning to reach the conclusion to begin with. I might have to investigate it myself one these days and write a paper on it. Again, like I said, if you asked me five years ago, whether we had sufficient evidence for this, I would have said no. These days, there's enough astronomers that they say, well, yeah, sure. Now, again, you go back five, 10, 20 years ago, in the 1980s, 1990s, it was considered silly to think that there was life on other planets. And if you investigated this in nearing serious scientific fashion, usually you're kind of laughed at. And there's a whole movie illustrating this. It's called Contact by the Moon. It's a good movie. And, you know, most, at least what I remember when I was taught in school, most people did seriously consider the possibility. But, you know, times are changing, right? The experts are changing their minds. So this one's kind of at a maybe at this point, I think, which raises some interesting questions like, well, hold on a second. If we didn't have sufficient evidence before, I mean, now we have sufficient, what's changed and all that. And, you know, Clifford might say, I don't know about this uniform in nature, you know, happening here. But, you know, this one's getting more and more puzzling. Okay, extraterrestrials have visited Earth. Okay. No, no consensus on this. In fact, most of the consensus is in the other direction that we have not had any extraterrestrials visit us. There's no evidence. And any evidence that has been provided has been, you know, discredited. Now, there's, you know, there are things that we say, well, I don't know what's going on there, but it doesn't look like it's an alien life that's visited us, right? But no, we don't have consensus on this. And we don't have consensus on this. And it kind of looks deeply improbable. I mean, a lot of things would have to change about the laws of physics in order for an alien species to visit us using something like rocker propulsion, because the distances are just too far apart. So this probably doesn't stand to the uniform in nature. And if you were going to suggest some of the means of transportation besides something like rocker propulsion, well, you probably have to know a little bit more than we can know at this point, which, again, doesn't really help, right? So we don't have consensus there either. So no, we don't have consensus on this. There's some sort of divine. Clifford would say we don't have sufficient evidence for this. I mean, you could tell from the reading, he was not fond of religions in any way, shape or form. However, as part of the common human experience, most people on the planet and across history have believed in some sort of divinity. Now, there's no consensus on what the divinity is or how many of them are the nature of the divinity or what that divinity's relationship is to us. There's no consensus of that. But they'll all say, yeah, there's some sort of divinity and some sort of God. Now, this is a strange result. I don't think Clifford foresaw it. I don't think he'd like it. As a matter of fact, I know he wouldn't like it. And most people who endorse Clifford's view really wouldn't like it. However, it meets the two conditions. It's part of the uniformity nature. It's not saying that sometimes there's divinity, sometimes there's not. That's not what they're saying. And as part of the common human experience, most people across history have looked at them to the world and said, yeah, there's a divinity doing something out there. Now, this is, like I said, Clifford would not like this. But given his conditions for sufficient evidence, I don't see how he can escape the implication. I don't see how he can escape the inference that there is sufficient evidence for this belief. So that's a strange one, given what he's been doing. Okay. So there's one thing to keep in mind here regarding his conditions for sufficient evidence. His conditions work really, really well for mathematics and science. These are pretty much the hallmarks of a good theory, what counts as a good theory in the physical sciences that counts as good theory in mathematics. And I'm not knocking them, right? These are great conditions for our mathematics and science. But as you see, it's, you know, doesn't work really well with morality and theology. With morality and theology, these two conditions, well, they say we don't really have right to believe much at all, if anything. So, you know, maybe again, like, you know, Clifford kind of, I don't think he realizes he does this, but he loses this, right? Pretty much everybody across history has thought that there's some there's some difference between right and wrong. But it's not as if we'd agreed on what that right and wrong is, right? So you don't have sufficient evidence for any particular belief, for any particular moral belief, I should say, for any particular moral. And you don't have sufficient evidence for any particular theological belief, either, be it that there is a divinity or there isn't one or the nature of the divinity won't have you. So, and frankly, given these conditions, pretty much all philosophical beliefs go out the window too. Our theories and metaphysics and epistemology and ethics, we don't have consensus on this, right? We don't have consensus on these beliefs. So they don't fit the common human experience. Frankly, you know, common sense, the so-called common sense that people appealed to well, if common sense was internally coherent, if it was consistent, right? If our common sense beliefs didn't disagree with each other, I wouldn't have a job as a philosopher. Philosophy is born out of the inconsistency within common sense. And so in that regard, common sense of these common sense beliefs, they fail the uniformity of nature as well, because they disagree with each other. There's no consistency. Now, you know, this is a consequence of Clifford's view. I don't think he has many problems with that. I don't think he would be particularly bothered by this. You know, it's like, well, yeah, okay, so, you lose all the rest. Well, at least we got these justified beliefs in mathematics and science, and that's all that really counts. Now, you might wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing, whether anything else that you believe outside the mathematics of science is justified. And if you say that it's not, well, that's interesting.