 Everybody, today we are debating Christian versus Secular Ethics, and we are certain right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for this epic debate. Welcome to Modern Day Debate. We are a non-partisan channel hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. And we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from, as well as not only welcome to watch, but that everybody would have their fair shot in being able to make their case on an equal playing field. So with that, we want to let you know we are very excited. If you happen to enjoy debates, consider hitting that subscribe button as we have many more to come. So for example, at the bottom right of your screen, we are excited to have YouTube's favorite daughter, Erika will be back, she'll be taking on Shadow Dancer, and that'll be on Creation Evolution, and in particular Human Evolution this coming Wednesday. So that should be a lot of fun. And also want to let you know. 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And if you tag me with at Modern Day Debate, it'll make it easy for me to get every single question in that Q&A list. Also, Super Chat is an option in which case you can not only ask a question, but if you'd like, you can make a comment toward one of the speakers that they, of course, would get a chance to respond to. And Super Chats will also push your question or comment to the top of the list for the Q&A. So very excited folks. We're going to jump right into this. But before we do, I want to say thanks so much. We really do appreciate Snake and Dr. SJ for being here as the debaters are what make this fun. And so we really appreciate you, Snake and SJ for being here. Thanks just for hanging out with us on this Sunday afternoon. Thank you. Yeah, thanks to everyone for showing up and putting it together. Absolutely. So with that, we will get the ball rolling. SJ, I have the timer set and I'll start it on your first word. Thanks again for being here. Excellent. So let me just first try to share my screen. So let me just bring this up here. So this happens to be one of my favorite topics. I don't know. Can you see this? Almost there. I'm going to move it slightly. And perfect. All set. OK, so the big question today, we're going to talk about what are objective moral values and duties. And then we're going to talk about grounding. And I'm saying that because my opponent here, Snake, apparently also agrees that we have objective moral values and duties. So that makes things a lot easier because a lot of times when we start off on these debates, we have two people with different positions. So he and I are both more realists, not moral relatives. And so we believe that objective morals values exist and they're stance independent, which means that the values of truth, justice, equity, liberty, equality of opportunities are stance independent. They don't vary as a function of anyone's opinion. And that refers to what's good or bad. It's in a descriptive sense. And then we have this idea of objective moral duties. And examples of that include following the golden rule, caring for your fellow humans, and the value of life. And we have values of life, liberty, and justice. And we have these duties to follow these particular values. So we have a moral duty, for example, for care. And people like Jonathan Hyatt and others have found that in a lot of big studies that have determined that they've looked at a number of different humans. And they realize we have these certain foundations upon which or from which we draw when we're making decisions about what to do and what not to do in life. The big question I'm going to look at is more of an ontological perspective today. So I'm going to look at whether or not these exist and what their grounding is. So we also have evidence that they're universal. We've got evidence that these values that I just mentioned and duties from studies of the UN, major world religions, global surveys by authors like Keneer and Schwartz and the Globe Studies and the World Value Surveys have essentially identified these same universal moral values and duties. So the question is, well, are they also objective, meaning we know that they're universal across the globe today? But if they're objective, we should be able to find that they stood stance alone through the centuries. And so we find whether or not we have that. So I would say they are transcendent to cultures, eras, and ethnic groups. We have evidence of that in places like the Declaration of Independence where we said we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equally. We're endowed by our creator. And we come to discover these over time. And so that's the way that our cultures have existed through the centuries. We have been moving closer and closer to God's ideal. And so I'm also saying that they're grounded in God, which means they're not mere abstract conceptualizations. So if we go to the Globe study and we just cite a mention of something that they said, the authors, they said, and this is a study again of thousands, tens of thousands of people across 60 different countries on the planet. And they said because in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is associated with ultimate goodness. Orders from God include specific duties and prohibitions that are associated with goodness and humanitarian behaviors. Some of the laws of God require humane oriented behaviors and doing good to others like almsgiving. So I'm just gonna move on a little bit from that. So the ontological moral argument for God, and I'm borrowing some of this from William Lane Craig who's a pretty famous philosopher and debater. He said, if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Two, objective moral values which are descriptive and duties which are prescriptive do exist. Three, therefore it follows that God exists. So now we're gonna look at the youthy for a dilemma. This is one of the arguments actually that some people have tried to wage against this idea that the grounding of our morality is in God. And so I'm gonna tell a little story and then do an analogy using this dilemma that I think should help people to come to understand what we're getting at here. So Socrates and Plato once discovered what they determined to be a dilemma which some have used to try to crack holes in God as the grounding of our objective morality. They wondered whether something is loved by the gods because he is pious or whether it is because he is pious that he is loved by the gods. This dilemma has been subject to a variety of variations to posits God's relationship to our morality. Philosopher William Lane Craig has suggested that this is a false dilemma and a third option or horn should be present which is that God is the source of the good. In other words, our objective morality is not grounded in what may be perceived as the whims of God made either before or after our actions. His very nature is the standard of goodness against which we judge actions and align ourselves. And so we're gonna do a little football analogy. So I'm gonna do a football analogy to try to explain this. So imagine a football field with two teams and opposing goal posts. At one end of the field is the goal post of the good and right while at the other end is the goal post of the bad and wrong. Now, imagine Plato and Socrates on the field. God instructs both to run certain plays which are aimed to get them closer to the good goal post. When they follow his commands, they believe he will deem their plays good. This determination is similar to divine command theory where the players would voluntarily act in accordance. However, what if Plato ran a few yards following God's instructions and then realized that God had instructed him to use different plays that varied in outcomes at other times? For this reason, this horn of the Youthy Frode Dilemma is often criticized for its potential to be arbitrary. Let's look at the other horn. What if God did not give Plato and Socrates instructions on the play? Instead, they ran the play, they assumed would be the closest to what he would have wanted and a way to judgment. This horn also reflects a less than optimal foundation of our objective morality because we don't know until after the action has been made whether or not God considers it good. The good and the right are not determined before and after our actions. They are not shifting goal posts that could vary in unpredictable ways. Rather, God's nature forms the goal post of the good and right and the standard against which we aim. He is the grounding of our moral foundation. Now, how do we know this? In Summa Theologia, Thomas Aquinas referred to Cinderesis as the law of our mind, which is an awareness or understanding of the principles of human actions. Practical reasoning moves one from awareness of the principles to conclusions on actions or decisions. Conscience then forms a judgment on whether the actions or decisions are in alignment with one's moral nature, whether they are right or wrong. So I go to the points with C.S. Lewis who came from atheism actually to Christianity based on these thoughts. He said, my argument against God was that a universe seemed so cruel and unjust, but how would I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. In other words, where did this idea of how things are supposed to be originate? We witness this at the individual level in our conscience and at the global, societal and historical levels in our collective drive over centuries to goodness. This necessarily cannot be explained at the level of human psychology, which was Richard Carrier's argument in a debate I had with him a couple of years back because humans are prone to evil to the other goalpost, yet our conscience drives us to goodness. As Greg Kukul has said, the problem of evil is only a problem if evil is real. To say something evil though is to make a moral judgment. Moral judgments require a moral standard or a moral law and a moral law requires an author. If the standard is transcendent that the lawgiver must be too. And then Richard Taylor, which Greg Kukul quoted, says a duty is something that is owed, but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation. The concept of moral obligation is intelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone. So to conclude, my opponent and I agree that we both have objective moral values and duties where both moral realists at issue now is the source of the grounding. I have demonstrated that God's very nature grounds our morality. My opponent will have to offer arguments either to refute my position or to offer another explanation. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, S.J. We will kick it over to Snake was right for his opening statement. The floor is all yours, Snake. Whoops, I was muted. Am I sharing my screen yet? Yes. Okay. So I'm here to argue against the assertion that in atheism or I guess any other structure other than Christianity, there is the claim that there is no basis for moral values in anything but Christianity, specifically objective moral values, which are the only ones that matter since subjective moral values are meaningless. Moral subjectivism or relativism saying that raping and not raping are both equally valid. So it's an inherently flawed and self-contradictory concept. So this would be like saying two plus two equals four and also not four. So we know that that's not true. So as in argumentation ethics, if you argue against objective morality, then you have to invoke some kind of objective ethic that says it's wrong to do so. So there has to be some basis of truth in a moral statement because arguing against morals would be saying that it's true that you ought not have them. But the question is, how can we possibly measure this? Christians say that the basis of morality is the character of God, but this is just a way of saying that the opinion of God is what's good, but this is an objective. At best, this is just subjective opinions of God and it's just special pleading for the big man in the sky because he has more might and we know that might does not make right. This kind of reasoning always ends with divine command theory, which is deeply flawed. So I'm here to also stand up against the idea that morality is based in a God. Either God is good because he is good or because he is God, the latter being divine command, but it cannot be the latter because it's begging the question. It doesn't answer what is good or why is God good? More specifically, if a God is good, if his opinions or his nature are good, why? Either God's nature is good because it is good or they are good because they are God's opinions. As we know, merely being God doesn't justify the opinions of God. This would mean any opinion of God could be true, but God cannot make untrue things true. So God's opinions must comport with reality. They aren't just true by virtue of being God. And so if a God agrees that torturing a baby is for fun is bad, why does he believe this? Is this just a random opinion that he holds or does he have reasons why there is some kind of problem with this behavior? If it just happens to offend him because the baby is his divine property via creation, then again, this is just an argument from might makes right. He doesn't like it, so it's bad, is just a subjective argument and thus meaningless. His opinion and preferences do not hold special meaning. This is just a bad subjective argument, just special pleading, so it's a fallacious meaningless statement. And we can show this again through argumentation ethics by the mere fact that my opponent is trying to make arguments here. She has admitted the premise that rational arguments are what justifies claims, which means that God's position on moral statements must be justified and backed by some rationale and not by his power and authority alone. This is to say God's positions must comport with reality like that God didn't invent two plus two equals four, that that statement is true in all possible universes and therefore God could know it, but he is not the source of it. So she has to explain why this particular God is correct in its opinions and stands on moral issues. You cannot do this simply by saying that his nature is good or he is the source of good by a self-referential circular argument of God is good because he's God. Stating God's nature as good is just another way to say God is good because God is his nature. So to go back to the original question, how can we measure for objective morality? Well, the same way that God would do this, but what does morality even mean? It's a word that means good or bad behavior essentially, and the way I would interpret that is that it's a system or ethic of universally applicable behaviors since if we can justify a universally applicable system of behaving, then this would be good behavior. Objective things, well, this would be objectively good behavior because it would have no logical flaws for one thing. Objective things are not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and in representing facts. So if we can find some kind of ethic that is universally applicable and consistent with reality, then we have found a basis for morality that any atheist or any God can use to make moral decisions, which a God would need to use in order to be able to rationally justify any of its positions or come to its positions with some kind of rationality framework. Otherwise, it's just random positions. So what would this look like? Let's start with the definition of good. If we remove subjectivity, what we have is an object is what an object is good for, and this is objectively measurable. What a system is good for, I would call degrees of freedom or what its potential is. So if you lower the degrees of freedom, this is what would be considered immoral. For example, let's start at the very beginning. Existence is objectively good for more than non-existences. And how do we know this? Well, nothing true, nothingness does nothing and has no attributes or qualities whatsoever. Existence has at least some qualities and can do at least one thing and that would be exist. What the qualities of that existence is is perhaps unknown at this moment. So this is what the basis for what good is. So essentially, the more a thing is good for, the higher its usefulness and moral value. The higher a thing is usefulness, the more degrees of freedom a system has. A human life has more moral value than an insect since a human life has more degrees of freedom. A human can do more, a human is good for more than an insect. A system of ethics that is rational and has no special exceptions is internally logical and consistent and is good for more. It preserves more freedom in the system than not having such a system. So I have used no preferences or human opinions to get to this conclusion. So it's objective. And what I'm describing is specifically not utilitarianism since in utilitarianism and action is good if it is useful for the benefit of the majority but that's completely irrelevant in this model. So the majority can still benefit off of unethical things that this model would find unethical such as slavery or genocide. So utility to the majority is not my metric at all. My metric is how much the usefulness of a thing our system contributes to the total amount of degrees of freedom in the system or how much it comports to an ethic that overall improves the total amount of freedom in the system. Value or what a thing is used for, what it does is objective. You don't have to be right, but if you're wrong, you're wrong. If you say or do something that is logically incorrect, you're just wrong. To what degree people are justified in stopping you from doing something basically that's illogical is based on how much good it preserves. So stopping you from, I don't know, cheating on your husband or wife. Yes, that's wrong, but you would be creating a horribly oppressive police state if you actually punish people for it. So that's actually worse alternative. If you propose a thing is good that lowers the freedom of the entire system, then you're saying it's good to lower the level of goodness. So you're contradicting yourself and are thus incorrect. So that's the descriptive model, but what about the prescriptive? Why ought we follow this? How do we get an ought from an is? Well, one, we can groundless an objective truth. If you don't, you're advocating something that is irrational. The second thing is that we know that existence ought to exist. Since if existence did not have an imperative, it wouldn't exist. Then nothing would exist and therefore we ought to be correct in how we approach manipulating the things that do exist in the universe. We ought to be correct in how we change the states of existence in the universe. Good is rational states of existence since existence is good for more than non-existence. Three, you need to invoke universally applicable behavior in order to say that we shouldn't use it. Here's an example, going back, torturing a baby objectively lowers the amount of freedom that is to say it lowers the value of both the baby and the universe. It lowers the total amount that the universe can do which it is good for, and thus this is a bad action to do. We can construct an ethic, something like violating bodily autonomy or aggression is wrong and this is consistent with the objective facts about morality and it is internally consistent ethic that is not self-contradictory. So it is rationally valid. You cannot do this by basing morality on God. God must go through this process that I've described if he wants to be correct or to construct his moral values and thus objective morality is independent of who or what God is or what it thinks. God is dependent on this. So if we have to ask ourselves why torturing a baby for fun of it is bad, can we answer it objectively with this system? Yes, can we answer it with morality as God is its basis? No, saying God is the basis of morality gets us nowhere. First of all, there is no content in that statement by which we can draw conclusions from. We simply have to wait around for God to reveal it to us and we can never get there on our own. And secondly, we don't know whether this is true or not. It's just being told to us and dictated to us. It isn't just the fact that something that claims to be a God is saying something is not a justification for why that God is correct in saying it. I can accept that a being could be right about everything, correct about everything, but then this leaves the question of how do we know it is right about everything? How do we know that this being is the being that is right about everything or not just some other being? We have to be able to check this being for errors or else we're opening ourselves to trusting the devil or any deceiver posing as an omnipotent, omnipotent, omnipotent being. Merely invoking the name of the omnipotent, omnipotent, omnipotent conceptual being doesn't get us anywhere. That would, first of all, that would be a genetic fallacy and then, but the claim must be able to stand on its own merits and not from once it came. We have to be able to test God or whoever is claiming to be God or claiming to have knowledge from God or else we are just blindly trusting a label and that is not rational. So I look forward to discussing this today and I anticipate objections. Hopefully we can point out exactly what premises don't work for SJ and thank you. Thank you very much, Snake. We will jump into the open discussion section. So if you have any questions, folks, as mentioned, feel free to fire those questions into the live chat and with that, Snake and SJ, thanks so much. The floor is all yours. Oh, I think you're on mute, SJ. Yeah. Great. So I want to thank you, Snake. I have had the pleasure of reading or listening to a little bit of your work since we decided to come to this debate. And so I actually saw some of this argument before, which is one of the reasons why I created the analogy that I created with the football field to try to explain why what you're using as this God is good sort of thing is actually equivalent to the youthy fro dilemma. And I showed everyone why the youthy fro dilemma doesn't work, not only because the fact that God is a standard of goodness. And so he's not one of the two horns of the youthy fro dilemma. But also because if you look at what you're looking at there, as you're saying in this idea with my analogy is we're looking at the focus on the actions of a player, either that God commanded him to do in advance or that God looked at after the person did it from behind. And so by taking that approach, you're essentially putting God onto the football field rather than putting God into the standard as the goalpost. And that's the standard against which we're all aligned and what we're seeking. And so that's the basic premise of this youthy fro argument is that there's a third idea, but I have a question for you. I wanna ask about your grounding and because I wanna try to understand what you're coming at here. I understood, I picked up a few words here, like you said, things that are useful are valuable, things that are rational, we can certainly agree to that are valuable, things that allow more freedom. And so you said, it seems to me that you're making the position and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you're grounding our objective morality rather than saying we have a goalpost is in the human idea of we wanna maximize freedom and the freedom as you define it as a person who has more degrees of freedom, meaning the one who is capable of making more decisions and capable of doing more than other beings. And I'm assuming that you're using human exceptionalism as a reason for our capabilities, considering things like mind and other sort of factors that distinguish humans from other animal beings on this planet. And so I'm wondering where you get this grounding of freedom, number one, and number two, how you've decided that everyone is gonna come to an agreement with your decision that it should be grounded in this idea of freedom. Well, I'm wondering if we can address the youth of fro argument. One second, forgive me for cutting in. I'll give you a chance to respond, Snake. I think that your audio, I'm trying to balance each of your audios and I think yours is maybe dipped a bit. If you're able to either turn up your gain or maybe just speak even just a little closer to the mic, I think you guys might be evened out. How's that? That's better, definitely. Okay. Okay, so I wanted to address the youth for a dilemma first because that I really disagree with. I don't see how you can have a third horn to that because if you're saying that God is the source of good, that's exactly the same as saying God is good because he's God. If his nature is the goodness, that means that he's good because he's God. So I'm saying that the standard of goodness against which we judge everything is in God's nature. So yes, I am making that statement. And so I'm saying that as humans sitting here on the planet, on the football field running back and forth and saying, okay, God commanded me to do this or I'm going to make this action and see how God acted. This is a false dilemma or what you'd call a false dichotomy. Instead what we must look at is the fact that God is at the third level or there's a level beyond us on the football field and that is the goalpost to which we're all aspiring. And so you can look at a football field as having two goalposts. One side has the good, the other side has the bad. And we're wondering why humanity over the past at least 2,000 years has been steering towards the good. And so if you read Tom Holland's book, you can see something that Jesus basically came into the earth and informed people of how we should act, how we should be. And he created in himself a moral exemplar. So we can see what the standard of goodness is in Jesus standing there as the goalpost essentially to whom we're all aspiring and to bearing our own crosses on our way. And so that is my claim. The other thing is if we didn't know that we have innate within us this nature that we're trying to align ourselves up with, we wouldn't have the conscience that we have that gives us shame and gives us doubt and gives us this idea of guilt when we do the wrong thing. If we were aligned to a source that was in accordance with evil, we would actually feel good about committing evil actions and we wouldn't feel that sense of shame and that sense of guilt that we feel when we do things that aren't right to our fellow humans. And so one of the reasons why we have that little scratching in the back of our ear or that bug in our ear when we do the wrong thing is because God has planted in us a conscience as he noted in Romans 2.15. So I would I guess agree that goodness is in God's nature but the goodness also lies outside of God's nature. God's nature is derived from what the goodness is. So there must be some reason that God's nature is in the particular form that it is in that it has to make sense. God needs to be drawing from these rules that it has to make sense. He can't contradict himself. He can't do things that are wrong. So there must be some kind of rules and he's not just making these rules randomly. There has to be some sort of form that he's deriving what makes sense from. And to say that if we have a guilty conscience that that proves that there's some kind of objective standard but we all feel guilty about different things. We have a different conscience and all feeling guilty is is that we don't like what we did. So that's it's not a very objective metric at all. Let me go back. So what I'm saying is God is the source of the rules. God is the one who's created the rules. And what you're saying is there's rules out there and God has to adhere to them. So you're taking God and separating him from the rules. Am I correct to see that? It has to be or else God's rules are just completely arbitrary and there's no logic or reason to it. So what is the source of the rules? If they can't be from humans because obviously if God's transcendent to people's space and time then the rules had to also be transcendent. They had to be something that were in place before. And so where did the rules come from if there's no moral lawgiver or rulegiver? They don't necessarily have to exist before they can just coexist with God. But it's just the fact that they're unchanging that two plus two equals four cannot ever change. God didn't invent that in the sense that it's just going to be true no matter what God does or no matter if God exists or not two plus two will equal four and contradictions are incorrect. So God can't change that. He's not the author of it. How do you get to the point where God is not the author of the codes under which we live? Because they're unchanging. And if you understand God the way I understand God, God is also unchanging. And so how does that, how do you get to, because the laws are unchanging that God can't have any impact on the law? I'm not saying he wants to change the laws. I'm saying he created the laws initially. He set up the game about 14 billion years ago at the great, at the Big Bang. And so 14 billion years ago we have in the beginning we go back and we can say that time, space and matter as we know them today had a different form if they even existed prior to the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. So we say, what existed prior? Well, it had to be timeless, spaceless and immaterial. And so any qualities that were brought into the universe had to come from somebody who had those same qualities. So we also know that the person would have to be transcendent to the universe and would have to be personal essentially and intentional because God set the rules in place essentially. So two plus two equals four has no meaning prior to the Big Bang necessarily because we can't understand that. But what we do know is that whatever existed prior to that had to have these qualities and also have to be omnipotent to be able to start the universe and power it in a way that it's today as it revealed to us today. Well, I'm saying that they're not causally dependent on God because it's just true no matter what and they could have come into existence at the same time or both just be eternally existing at the same time but God needs to have some sort of reason or rationale behind his moral system. Otherwise it's just random, right? So God needs to have a rationale behind his system. Let me just ask a little bit about that. So why does God need to have a rationale behind the rules that were governed by? Because he needs to, there's must be some reason he doesn't like torturing babies. So what would you say that reason is? Well, he would need to come up with some idea of what good is and as far as I can tell good is essentially rational states of existence. And so that would mean maximizing the potential of anything that exists and maximizing existence itself. I completely agree with you. I think you and I are in the exact same page. I think that God feels that's good and God has established that same thing. He wants to maximize our human potential and he wants to make sure that we come to this planet do the job that he's intended for us and he has morally sufficient reasons for our experiences on this planet which sometimes aren't the best. We all go through and have to bear our own crosses for example, but he has morally sufficient reasons that this existence which we consider temporary will help us get to the next. And so actually you and I are on the same page on a lot of this. So I'm just trying to get at what are those reasons and what is God using to come to those reasons? Why does he feel that way? If he's correct. Why does he feel? Well, I think that if we can, if we look at, for example, if we look at the example of Jesus Christ and we say, why did Jesus have to come down to the planet? Why have all the world religions is there only one religion where people don't have an ax-based religion? Essentially, we're a religion based on faith in Jesus Christ as he did the work for us. And he say, well, why did he have to do this? Why did he have to go through the bloodshed and all of this kind of stuff? And why did he have to sacrifice? And this is the whole reason behind our human experience. That's the great thing about Christianity is it helps explain our purpose, our meaning, our destiny, how we have this objective morality, the moral exemplar to which we are trying to be more like. He explains everything. And he explains through his own sacrifice that he gave his life for the benefit of us. And so that what we do on this planet is geared to get us towards heaven. He opened the gates of heaven for us by sacrificing himself for our sins. He actually unified and rectified God's perfect justice, which means he needs to condemn us for our sins and God's perfect mercy, which means he's also gonna forgive us. So you can't do those both together unless someone's gonna pay the price for the sins. And so the one who did that is the sinless lamb, the Passover lamb, and he was the only one capable of actually paying the price for our sins. So that whole thing on there on Calvary helps to explain our human existence and why we have such a hard time down here and why we all have to bear our own crosses and why Jesus promised us we're all gonna pretty much go through some sense of hell while we're down here. There's gonna be suffering. No one gets off this planet without suffering. And so to put that all together, Christianity is the greatest package there is because it explains all of that for us. I don't think it explains how God got to those conclusions, though. Why do we have to know how God got to the conclusions? Well, it would be the same way that we get to the conclusions. It would just be rationality. Like, why does God care about any of it? Why is it valuable to God? Why did he make, why is he rational? Why is that good? So, well, that's a good question. So why is rationality good? Because it's not incorrect. Okay, so how do you label if something's correct or incorrect? Like how can you make a case to an animal, for example, that acting rational is a good motive? Well, you can't, they're not moral actors. And that's why they don't have, we can't hold them accountable for moral systems. They have to, we can only hold rational beings accountable, but it doesn't mean that an animal dying is good. It's, I would say that it's bad, but we can't hold a lion accountable for what it does because it doesn't understand what it's doing. I actually, I agree with you on that too. We're coming to some agreements. But it's like, I don't see how we can use God as a basis for morality, because we just have to wait around for God to tell us what it is. But I think if God's morality is rational, we can come to the same conclusions using the same reasoning that God did. And actually that's essentially true. God has thankfully given us the ability and the desire to be rational, consistent human beings. He's given us the desire to be reasonable. These are things that go outside the animal planet. He's given us desire to be truthful and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And even going beyond just basic intuitions and moral reasoning, he's given this conscience to us. So we know when we don't act in correctly. And we know, for example, here's the example of, if we go back to moral intuitions theory and we look at some of the work from people like Jonathan Haidt, there's this idea that humans have reasoning and intuitions to guide us towards where we need to be. And if we look at those two foundations, you say, okay, well, is that all there is? Well, what would explain the fact that if I'm standing at the end of a pond and I see an alligator in the pond about to attack a little boy, my intuition says to run away. My reasoning says, should I run away? Should I not run away? My conscience jumps in and says you go rescue that little boy even though you're gonna risk your life. That's something that God has given us. And that's one of the beauties and the ways that we can point ourselves and align ourselves in our nature with God's nature. He's given us this conscience to have a direct communication between us and him. Well, people have all kinds of different moral intuitions. Some people would not feel guilty at all. They'd just be saying, well, it was basically already in the jaws of the crocodile and I had to save myself. And some people wouldn't feel guilty at all. Some people might even take pleasure in it and laugh that the crocodile was eating someone. So I don't see how that's a metric. So well, when we originally were talking about that, you're talking a little bit about a moral epistemological stance. And so that's this idea of some people will act this way, some people will act that way. It's how we come to the beliefs that we come to or how we come to value the values and the duties that we have. However, I'm talking about the moral ontological stance which is basically saying these values and duties exist. And so you would have to agree that in the declaration since we're both in the United States we're both from the United States that we have our Declaration of Independence that basically says we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equally, that we desire things like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We could also say we desire justice, we desire equity. We could go back to moral foundations theory and add in things like authority and to some extent loyalty and purity and sanctity. So we could add some other foundations in there. But we say to ourselves, where did this come from in the universe where there's no moral law giver? If somebody like under the epistemological view if somebody says, well, I don't want to follow those laws even though I know the laws are there. That's the interesting thing. All humans have this sense of consciousness. They've even done studies of psychopaths and they found out in the study of psychopaths that I've seen is that even the psychopath knows what's right and wrong, they just don't care. And so there's 1% of the population considered psychopathy. Another say 3% are considered sociopaths which are kind of related to that. And this idea that they don't care but the vast majority understand what's right and wrong. Everybody understands what's right and wrong. It's a matter of the vast majority know that they care about it. Their conscious is going to bug them. The psychopath, not so much. And so, but we're not operating on what they call operating at the margins. We're not operating it based on exceptionalism or exceptions, I should say. But so what I'm trying to say is that we have these guidelines that exist to life, liberty, justice and we have a sense of conscience that lets us know if we've met those guidelines and I'd say this is guided by God's nature. Well, I think things like that are self-evident. I think we can figure it out without a God because it's just true regardless of what any religion or any God has to say on it. It's basically just math. There are reasons why killing is wrong. At least, if we're excluding self-defense, although you could argue killing is wrong, it's just that the defense justifies it. So I don't think we can ground things in God because we have to know what good is before we can even say that God is good or else we're just blindly trusting it. So especially like is it possible that a deceiver could claim that it's a God? So yeah, absolutely. And deceivers have claimed that they're gods. We have a great example of the biggest deceiver claiming that he thinks he's equivalent to God. And so yes, we definitely have that. If you read Psalm 82 and you look at some of the work of Heiser, Michael Heiser, you're gonna find some really interesting stuff as far as the sons of God reference there. And you can connect that actually with Deuteronomy 32 and Genesis 10, Genesis 6, Genesis 11, these different verses and also with some other things. And you're gonna find that there definitely is a spiritual presence on this world aside from what we've mentioned with God. There are essentially other beings, spiritual beings in the world that a lot of people don't realize that it's actually in the Bible, in their Bible. And so one of the things I wanna say is yes, can somebody else come and say that they're God's sure? What we think is we have the highest power is God and we're aspiring to him. He had been planted a conscious within us to be more like him. And some people choose to live up to it. Some people don't. There are definitely differences. But one of the things that unifies us and this unifies you and me and everybody else are a lot of these different studies that have been out there have identified this too is we have these things that we can't say. You said before, what can you say is good? Well, we would say things like fairness is good. In fact, Jonathan Haidt found that everybody pretty much values care and fairness. And so we can say caring for other people, caring for the environment, caring for animals, care itself is a good quality. And it's just something that's sort of innately hardwired within us. And so the question is if people choose to go against that, they choose to go against their very nature and they don't obey it, by what metric are you gonna be able to judge them if you don't have a divine moral lawgiver who gave us the rules in the first place? Well, I mean, so we would have to have some kind of standard by which to be able to say that this lawgiver is good or not, by which to judge whether it's true and what is good. And God would have these same realizations if he's correct. So it's not the fact that it's coming from God, it's the fact that it's true and logical and God can't really affect that. And then for as far as the intuitions, I mean, people obviously have different intuitions about abortion, but I guess a better example might be taxation. Like some people have the intuition that taxation is necessary for civilization. Some people have the intuition that it's just theft. And then, so how do we decide that? It has to be decided by logic. And if a God comes down and says, okay, well, this or this is actually true, we can't just take its word for it. We have to be able to say, okay, well, if this answer is somehow self-contradictory, it's wrong. And if this answer is not self-contradictory and comports with the truths of reality, then that's correct. And thus we don't need a God at that point. A God might help us get there if he was more of a interventionist. And then for example, like Hitler, when he conducted his genocide, he thought what he was doing was the right thing. And we can argue whether he was suffering from psychopathy or something like that. But it wouldn't matter because he legitimately thought that killing off the Jews was the right thing. And but this is a self-contradictory statement for a lot of reasons. A genocide is not an internally consistent ethic to hold. So that's why he's wrong and not because God doesn't like it. Right. So you're still kind of stuck in the youthy for I see a little bit there just with God doesn't like it or that sort of thing. I see you still kind of fitting on those horns right there of the youthy fro. But I wanna go back to what I think we can come to an agreement on is that's my third point is that God is the standard and the goalpost to which we're aspiring. And I wanna build that off of what you said. You said the truths of reality, we should comport with the truths of reality. Why and what? What are the truths of reality? And why should we comport to that? That your statement that we should comport to the truths of reality. So what are those and why should we comport to those? Well, I don't know how I could list all of the truths of reality. There's some related to our morality. Any, not like a car is driving down the road something related to our morality. Well, we can objectively measure what something does, right? And the fact that we can measure whether it's some kind of proposition is self-contradictory. And so to be incorrect is to be wrong and you don't have to be right. But if you're incorrect, you're just wrong and that's the way it is. So, okay, so I wanna go back though. If we said, if I say, I'll go back to the standards. I'll go back to a couple of the examples that we both talked about. You've mentioned genocide a few times. You've mentioned the Nazis. I completely agree with you. In fact, that's one of the greatest ways to try to refute the idea of moral relativism. Is saying that if we only are bound by relativistic views, no one is in the right position to be able to judge what the Nazis did if the Nazis felt what they were doing was correct within the context of their culture. And so I would say that you and I are in complete agreement on that. And this idea that what did the Nazis do was wrong. Well, number one, they violated Jewish people's lives. So they took a life unfairly and unjustly. Okay, so they were not fair, they were not just and they basically murdered people, which is completely egregious what they did to the Jewish people in World War II. You and I and the whole world, I think, hopefully is pretty much on page of that except for a few fringe lunatics out there. So if we look at the idea of life, justice and liberty, we'll just mention those three because we took the Jewish people's freedom, life, justice, oh, I'm sorry, I'll mention four, life, justice, freedom and equity. So we've got four different areas that we could go from. How, if you say the truths of reality, and I'm saying that among those values, are those values right there? How do we establish whether that, I mean, number one, how did those come about, those truths of reality under your moral framework? And then number two, how do we make people follow those if we don't have any sort of lawgiver outside of that within our own culture because our culture could steer us wrong as we saw in the Nazis? Well, the lawgiver kind of seems to imply that whatever law is proposed is correct. But that's not true because God can't propose laws that are self-contradictory and still be correct. So it's like God doesn't like certain things or does like certain things for a reason. And you can say that it's because it comports with his nature, but then that's just kicking the can down the road is like, okay, so why is God's nature like that? What, why wouldn't God approve of genocide and what reason could that possibly be? Why does God value justice and freedom? That's a great question. And a lot of it has to do with Genesis. Actually, it has to do with the fact that he made his first statement when he brought humans onto this planet. And he said, he distinguished us from the animal world. He distinguished us from all other living forms of life. Basically said, we're at the top of the totem pole or the top of the food chain. And he also made us in his own image. And I think through that idea of being made in the image of God, that's given us a sense of value and importance. And he's imbued that in us through our conscience. And so I would say the reason why we know that we have these certain truths that are self-evident and this idea that we value life, liberty, equity and justice. And I didn't even go into equality because that's kind of a weird one. And it's weird because humans actually aren't equal, but yet we value equality of opportunities. And that's pretty amazing. And that's also, I would say, based on Tom Holland's book, a pretty nice outcome of Christianity. His book, if you haven't read it yet, it's called Dominion. But my whole idea though with you is now, if we say, you say, yes, these are truths, these are within us, we're gonna question God on how he came to these truths. I think that you're getting a little ahead of yourself and saying instead of questioning God how he came to the truths, why don't you question how you came to those truths without thinking that there's any sort of force behind them? What is the force behind these truths that's compelling you to act in accordance? Well, that's the whole point of the model is I'm saying, how would a God do it? Because if a God is perfectly moral and perfectly good, then he must have some kind of perfect reasoning behind it. And so why would being made in his image be good? It can't be just, because he's the most powerful. It has to be, there has to be some inherent value in whatever his nature and the creations that are modeled after him is. And it's just self-referential to say that, well, he's good, therefore his traits are good. There has to be some kind of thing outside of that where, okay, he's good because he's not making any mistakes or something like that. Yeah, you know, I think that's one of the, going back a little bit to Jesus and talking about what happened when he came about is we had these confusions. We had Aristotle and Plato and, no, it's Plato and Socrates basically going back and forth on the Euthypho, trying to figure out exactly if God's good, God's this, God's that. Everyone's trying to figure out what the gods are doing. And at that time it was the gods. They were trying to figure out exactly what that meant. And so you enter Jesus and he's saying, okay, here's what's going on. I'm the standard. I am the bread of life. I am the one who's basically going to guide you into heaven and act like him, act in accordance. And so we saw the example of what we need to be like through him. And ever since then, this whole idea that we used to, prior to that women were given barely any value in society. This idea of life was sort of a joke. They left women to die on the streets. They were in the Roman Empire. Women were treated pretty horribly. Babies, a lot of times, especially female babies were left just to rot or they were exposed because they weren't valued like they are today. The poor and weak were considered cursed by God. And so what was really neat was that suddenly Jesus comes about and the Christians turn around over the first few hundred years during a time of heavy persecution, sporadic heavy persecution over these first few hundred years, the Christians turned around and said, wait a second, we should really value everybody. Let's get these people out of the Coliseums and away from these gladiatorial battles and being fed to the lions and those sorts of things. The Christians stopped that. And the Christians said, you know what? Right now only the soldiers are giving hospital care and definitely not with the poor people or anybody like that. The Christians started taking people in and adopting these little babies out in the streets. And the Christians, if you read a lot of this on Tom Holland's book, there's some other books by other people like Alvin Schmidt that talk a lot a bit about our history and what happened. And you get to the time where suddenly the Christians are the ones creating all of these great universities, medical facilities, and that's carried us up till today. And if you look at the United States, we're founded really on a Christian heritage in this idea of equality, despite the fact that we have differing inputs. We've got smarter people. We have people with more athletic ability. We have people with more physical capabilities. We've got men and women are on differing strengths, all that kind of stuff. But yet somehow we value this idea of equality of opportunity, which is a complete anomaly from anything that was in existence prior to Jesus. And so I would make a pretty big argument that the source of our Christian morality and the source of morality altogether, especially the one that steeped in Western values and Western civilization, and from which all of the other civilizations around the planet have been benefiting and starting to benefit. We're seeing right now with Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago, allowing women finally to drive a car. And so we can see that some of the values that we hold to be self-evident, we hold to be true, have gone into the other parts of the planet. And the plan is that it's gonna spread all throughout the planet. And when we finally get to that point, we'll get to where the end of the world comes and we'll be called up. And so that's my bottom line. Well, so, but like, it's kind of like who cares if we just prefer it that way. That's not an objective reason to base things on, it's just preference. And we might intuit that equality is better, but we can't really, we can't just base things on because we like it or prefer it that way. It's, there's gotta be some reason why this ethic of equality is more consistent with reality than inequality. And for example, I don't think biblical values do that very well because they say that slavery is okay. And that's self-contradictory in itself. And it says that female genital mutilation is morally unacceptable, but male genital mutilation is morally acceptable. So I'm seeing contradictions in the biblical values. So that means that either there's some kind of deceiver claiming to be God or that there's some problem with just taking edicts from above because these edicts seem to contradict themselves. So that's fair. So I wanna, a little bit about slavery in the Old Testament, of course, just so everybody knows, slavery was a foundation of just about every country's economic, in fact, I don't know any country's economic system that wasn't founded, had an economic foundation steeped in slavery. One of the things is- That's subjective, isn't it? Well, no, I'm just talking about something that was going on back then. This is an historical point. And so you go back into the thousands of years ago and you had these different economies operating on the backs of other people. That's something that we saw all throughout the world, not just in the ancient Near East. But going beyond that idea is we go to who put the slave, you know, when we had, by the time we have Paul and Onesimus, Paul basically told Onesimus, he was calling him a brother. Onesimus was a slave who had escaped and he basically sent him back to Philemon and he called him a brother and he treated him well and he told Philemon, treat him like a brother because neither slave, nor person, nor free, you know, whether or not you were a master, all that kind of stuff, everybody was made free under Christianity and made, and so the Christians were the ones who realized they had to get rid of this slave trade and they were the ones who did it. And very sadly and really egregiously, the Atlantic slave trade came about in the early 1600s and suddenly we have this whole idea come back to the United States and throughout, you know, in Western Europe, we've got this, you know, another slave trade. Well, who put that out? Well, who are the Christian abolitionists who actually looked at the Bible and looked at the passages and realized, wait a second, this isn't what Jesus wanted. Jesus said everybody's supposed to be free and the Atlantic slave trade that we had over here, the antebellum slavery, that was pretty egregious and it wasn't even at all consistent with this idea that you're supposed to, if slave escapes, you're supposed to care for them according to the Bible. Another idea that came about that we were in violation of in North America was the idea that you could go, people were kidnapping slaves in Africa and bringing them over here and kidnapping is explicitly outlawed in the Bible. And so God did set some rules to be able to steer people through that, you know, pretty much a pretty terrible time back there in ancient times, but I'm coming back to today under Jesus's new covenant. We have come to realize and appreciate the law that God has set for us. And I think you and I are on the same page because you've said, yes, we should have a reason for why we value equality. And so under your secular humanism, I'm assuming, or maybe just secular morality, what is your reason that we should value equality and what sort of moral force are you gonna use to enforce it if people don't agree with you? What would you say, hey, I need you to value other people's lives. You go over to Nazi Germany and you talk to people or even better, go into say the USSR and confront Stalin, okay? And say to Stalin, who was an atheist operating in the USSR, directly responsible for the slaughter of millions of people, especially the farmers who were living on these farms who weren't even able to keep their own produce. They had to give every single bit of it back to the cities under Marxism and communism. So if you say to him, well, what you're doing is wrong. You're not treating other people right. And you say, this doesn't go in alignment with my secular humanist values. What would he say? How are you gonna get him to agree with you? Well, a lot of times people like that Hitler and Stalin, they weren't given to arguments. And you can point out how fallacious their arguments are and how their self-contradictory, but people can decide not to listen to reason. At that point, force is justified because it's basically a self-defense. And it's justified to stop people from breaking the ethic in order to preserve the ethic because otherwise everyone's just going to just run rough shot of each other and it's just moral relativism. And the problem with basing that in a God is none of that reasoning is actually done. You don't have to weigh whether what you're doing is rational or not. You just say, okay, well God said so, so it's okay. And the only thing to go back to slavery a little bit that God has to say on slavery is that you can have slaves. He doesn't say anything else. And in Ephesians, I'm not sure if it's still Paul speaking, but it says slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear. And so these things we can point out have logical flaws in it. So the idea that it comes from God isn't helping us at all. We have to use logic and rationality to evaluate these claims anyway. And so if a God was correct, it would have to adhere to these laws of rationality. So okay, so under my system, I'll just say what I could do. If under a system like my system, if I'm trying to appeal to somebody say like Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao Tse Dung of China, Pol Pot was in Cambodia. If I were trying to appeal to them in the 20th century and try to bring a reason why I can go, as you said, let's bring force on them. They're doing the wrong thing. They're acting in an unjust manner. If I wanna try to enforce that, I have to have a metric that stands above the level of government. Okay, so I can use the United Nations as maybe a global effort, but what if they don't accept the values of the United Nations? It's just like they don't accept the values of God, but I should be able to appeal as an American or as somebody who does understand the force of God. And there's many people in the world who do believe in a moral lawgiver and a moral authority. We have that appeal. I mean, that's one of the reasons why Frederick Nietzsche said it'd be so scary if we had a world without any sort of an external appeal beyond the level of the government leader. And he predicted, or portended, if you will, portended what would happen in the last century with a slaughter of 120 million people. And so the idea is under a system like mine, number one, our consciousness is in alignment with God's very nature, because our nature is in alignment with him. We're made in his image. Number two, we have an authority against which we can judge our actions. We know what the standard of goodness in life and value is because we were seen it by Jesus Christ. And number three, we're able to actually appeal to people around the globe, at least if they hold similar values to ours, whether or not they're Christians, even if they're someone who holds similar values, even the secular humanists, they value life too. So we can appeal to their sense of values if we want to get them to collectively act. We have a stronger metric than the secular humanists, though, because they can certainly just say, well, I don't agree with what you're saying. They can just say that. And you say, well, here's, you know, from the Christian's perspective, we have a place we can go if somebody doesn't just agree with us and we can show them in our Bible, in our text, this is exactly how Jesus would have acted under this circumstance and this is how he expects you to act. And people can pray and question themselves and wonder if they're acting properly and God will give them the news basically, feeds, gives them help perspectives by giving different aspects of himself and his nature. So I'm just wondering what, so under your system, and you said there, you're gonna, you said that you're gonna have a source of force going into Russia, so you're going into Russia. Say Putin right now decided that he wants to invade the United States. Well, actually, listen, that's not a good example. Let's go back to Stalin again and you're confronting Stalin. Maybe you- Or just World War II. Just World War II. I mean, we invaded Germany. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no, that's true though. But we were, the reason why we can say that what Germany is a country and a society was wrong was because we're appealing to these external values. So my basic question for you is you've already said that the values comport with the truths of reality. We identified some of these truths of reality as things like life, liberty, equity, and justice. And so my question is, what's the metric of enforcement under your moral system? The metric of enforcement, do you mean like at what point are we justified in basically making people obey the ethic? How can you convince somebody under a system like yours that your system is correct when it's just, when it's something that you're telling them, hey, we've got these truths of reality. And they say, well, those aren't my truths of reality. How do you convince them that your moral ontological position, that these truths exist, they're self-evident, they're axiomatic? How would you convince somebody of that under a system such as yours? Well, the same way a God should. Like a God shouldn't be saying, well, it's true because otherwise I'll punish you. That's not a good enough reason. A God should be saying, it's true because X and X and X, because these premises are sound and therefore this conclusion that I've come to is correct. And so rationality is this external value that we base things on. And you don't have to accept God's authority. You don't have to accept rationality. You don't even have to accept an army coming at you over the hill. You can choose to fight back and maybe you'll even win, but that doesn't justify your actions. And so rationality is above governments. And I would argue even above, if not just beside God, governments have been reformed because of rational movements like abolishing monarchy and freedom of choice, freedom of property and anti-slavery. And I think similarly, God has this external authority by which he can justify his actions. And I don't think it's good enough that he says that we can justify it simply by declaring himself good. There has to be some kind of reasoning behind it. God always has to be rational in whatever commandment he's making or whatever. Actually, I completely agree with you. So God is rational. He's a source of a rationality. He doesn't have to justify exactly some of the things he's done. He's got morally sufficient reasons we would have to assume as a source of all moral sufficiency here on the planet and all morality. And the reason why our planet's been directed towards goodness and not in adherence with what our human sometimes sinful desires might call us to do is because God is calling us essentially towards him as his children. Well, I think you could say kind of as a shorthand, like, well, God is calling us and God is good, but ultimately you're gonna have to ask yourself, okay, well, I mean, first of all, is this really God, is this particular God good? And if God is good, then there must be some reason to it. If we already know that God is good, then we know that whatever he says is good, but there's still this reason of why is God good? Why are his decisions, everything that he's saying, there must be some reasoning. He must have a reason why killing a baby is wrong. Like, it's not just arbitrary is what I'm saying. He has something backing up what his framework is. And I think that it should be the same thing that any rational human can figure out because it should be just based on rationality. I agree with you. So you basically pointed out the deficiencies in the first horn of the youth ifro dilemma, which is this idea of focusing on something that could be considered arbitrary and saying that there could be alternatives to people's decisions. And we're trying to align ourselves with rationality in God is the ultimate source of rationality. Humans a lot of times are predictably irrational, by the way, there's a great behavior like an economist called Dan Ariely who's written a book called predictably irrational. And it would make you laugh to read that and find out the ways that humans don't do always rational things. We don't align ourselves properly with our source of rationality. So it might give you, you get a good quick kick out of that. If you don't read that one, read the Y axis, W-H-Y or read Nudge. Great books out there by people talking about some of the irrational moves that humans do. And so it's just interesting reading. But I'm actually in quite a lot of agreement with you. I would ask you if you were to say, if we were to figure out a model where we could see, well, what would be, how would humans know what God is doing is good? Is it possible that if he somehow manifested on the planet to show us what is good, that that would be enough for us to say, okay, I get it now. That's what's good. Well, sure, as long as it was backed by rational reason. So what if he manifested 2000 years ago? I mean, it would be hard to know that, but if whatever this supposed event is saying has any logical errors, I think we can throw out that it's a perfect being. Right. So, well, if we have, so I'm just trying to say, if you had to figure out what would be the source of goodness, and you looked at the example of Jesus, I don't know if you were raised as a Christian, were you raised in a Christian family by chance? Like my parents, it's kind of unclear what they actually believe. They didn't raise me with any particular beliefs and they kind of told me to, like leave people with their own beliefs. And I did go to a Christian high school to kind of immerse myself in that. And I was, because I was looking for God. But ultimately, that's kind of like the turning point where I was like, okay, well, I don't think that there is a God because I read the Bible. And I found a lot of logical inconsistencies. And so I thought if there actually is a omnipotent and or omnipotent and God, it wouldn't behave as the God in the Bible does. And then maybe there is, maybe like there is a Jesus or something, but it would seem to me that at the very least the Bible has been corrupted by some other entity. Heads up that we are near the point where you would normally go into Q and A. So I just want to let you know, whenever one of you is ready to give the last word to the other, that helps. Otherwise in about five minutes, I will cut us off and bring us into the Q and A. I'll just say that my one last thing I'll say is what we're getting at in a lot of ways. If you look at the God of the Bible, when he manifested himself in the New Testament in the Gospels, we saw a God that you would expect, I mean, some people would expect the gods that they worshiped in a lot of the pagan cultures were very petty and they were capricious and they would act in pretty immoral ways. If you look at Baal, for example, in the Canaanite culture, he was a pretty awful God who was basically having incestuous relationships with his siblings and also with his mother and also with beasts. So he was also committing bestiality. So those are the kind of gods that they were worshiping. Suddenly you get somebody like Jesus who comes on the planet. Rather than rub elbows with the kings, he's hanging out there with prostitutes and tax collectors and fishermen and just people who weren't that high level, high walkers in society. And so he exemplified what God wants us to be. He wants us to reach out to the poor and the meek and the humble and that's why Christianity helped to change the world from being a world where people thought you were scourged if you were poor and God hated you to a world that we realized, wait a second, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, all that kind of stuff. And so he's the manifestation of God and what we're siring to be like. That's my last word. Yeah, and I think that there are some good things in the Bible, but I also think there are some pretty important things in the Bible. And so while I would take those good things, I would say that it's kind of incomplete and has some problems with it. Gotcha, and with that, wanna let you know folks, thanks for your questions. We will jump into that Q and A mode. So first up, appreciate it. This one comes in from our dearest friend, Dwayne Burke, nasty guy says, snakes roll on snakes on a plane was disappointing. Ooh, you've got a critic out there, Snake. Thanks for your super- Always the villain. Thanks for your questions. Second best Bob said, live for me again in the UK, thank you, James. Well, it's our pleasure. Thank you, we appreciate your support. And Merlin72001 said, Craig, as in William Lane Craig, is an apologist, not a philosopher. But I'm sure SJ was just confused since she, like Craig, relies so heavily on fallacious reasoning and arguments. Oh my God, he happens to have two PhDs. I mean, I don't know, does that count? He's got PhDs in philosophy, not in apologetics. Gotcha, and thanks for your question. From Brandon Ardeline says, William Lane Craig's answer to the youth of Frode Dilemma is literally the same as using quote, unquote, gun during rock, paper, scissors, pathetic and dishonest. Oh my gosh. Well, I disagree, but. Gotcha, and thank you for your support. Wernhery Atheist didn't see a question attached, but let me know if you have one. And Brandon Ardeline thinks or your question said, how can anyone honestly claim that God is the source of all good when he can't even go two seconds without resorting to violence and intimidation? I don't know, did you see that with Jesus? I don't recall seeing Jesus violently acting and intimidating people. I mean, look at what happened to him. He was beaten up and put up on a cross. Gotcha, and thanks for your question. This one comes in from Spart. Spart, did I see one, Wernhery? I don't think I did. But thanks for your question from Zacuse says the ontological argument is a fallacy. It only explains what we could call something if we could ever find it. It can't prove something to be real just because we have a term for that idea. Yeah, the greatest possible good. I actually think the ontological argument isn't one of the strongest ones. And that's probably why you haven't heard me use it very often. So it's a tough one to argue. Gotcha. It's kind of beyond what you can cognitively catch, so. And Jay, shy, thanks for your question said. Taylor, explain rationality. Taylor, AKA a snake, explain rationality, altruism, categorical imperatives, all naturally. Why we do something because it's right even if it risks our own lives and freedoms. How did we get this reasoning by nature alone? Well, if the brain is capable of making connections that are rational, then we're capable of performing reason. Why would we have a categorical imperative by nature alone is because, well, it's kind of the same reason how we can do math. It's just we can figure out what statements are true and what statements are not true. And we don't necessarily have to do them. We probably should do them. But we can choose to be incorrect that doesn't change the fact that the category on imperative would be true. So basically, I mean, under my model, the basically freedom would be the categorical imperative and everything else would be like a hypothetical imperative. Like we need in order to have freedom, we should have ethics. And the freedom is its own categorical good in its own definition. And I don't know, did he ask in the beginning, how do I explain rationality? Let's see, yes, rationality, altruism and categorical imperatives. Rationality, I guess it's just the ability to logically check for errors. Altruism, you can explain that with just evolution. It doesn't mean that altruism is good necessarily, but the idea that we would evolve to want to preserve our own genes is kind of self-explanatory. And the idea that, but you could also derive it from logic and basically, like if you want to be treated well, you should treat others well. And if basically that's also the only way that you can have an ethic is to treat people equally, so. Gotcha, and thanks for your question. This one comes in from Bruce Wayne, says SJ, if Jesus died and then resurrected a few days later, where is the sacrifice? A bad weekend saves us all? Yeah, I don't see it that way because he took on our sins and the sacrifice was for him taking on our sins. And I think people sometimes don't realize what dying on the cross entailed. It entailed you're going to be beaten with a number of different tools that were like whips that had these metal clumpy things on the end of them that were, you know, you're beaten up with that for a while. You're belted, you're hit, you're blindfolded, you're kicked, you're punched. All this sort of stuff happened before after you're covered in blood, you're marched naked in front of everybody along the streets and people pelting, spitting at you, doing all sorts of different things. Finally, you're hung up on a cross naked again so that the birds, all these other kind of animals can pick at your eyes and everything else. You're sweating, you're covered in blood. It's probably the most abhorrent form of death and that's one of the reasons why the word crucifixion is equivalent to excruciating because of an amount of pain. It was the worst death that the Romans figured out and it originally came from the Persians, but it was the worst death they figured out that they could inflict on people because it was such a terrible death and so it wasn't merely a bad weekend at Bernie's or something like that. This is a truly egregious thing that he did. And the other thing is you have to remember, it was painful for Jesus when he was on the cross, looking at his children and looking across the lands and seeing the pain in their eyes and seeing even the people who had done these things to him, he looked with mercy on them and one of his last words were, Father, please forgive them for they know not what they do. And so that sort of thing is a pretty amazing action that he did for us and he did it for everybody here. Everybody who's listening right now, you're all welcome into that kingdom. All I gotta do is just say, I'm in. Gotcha. And thanks for your question. Comes in from H.E.L. 900 says, Bible condones slavery in several passages, including Exodus 21, 22, verses two through three and Ephesians six, verses five through eight. I assume S.J. isn't in favor of slavery. How did S.J. come to this belief? Why is this standard better than the one set by God? God didn't set the slavery standard. Basically humans were the ones who were enslaving each other and a lot of humans during those times were very poor people and they would sell their services. They sold themselves into indentured servitude, essentially where they'd move in with their, the person that they decided they would, they had a debt to pay. So they'd move in with them and they do work for them until they paid off their debt. And in a lot of cases it was limited to say seven years. If they were Israelite slaves, for example, they were limited to seven years before the slaves were being freed. And so it was a completely different model. But beyond that, let's not forget that Paul equated the slaves with everybody else. Jews, Greeks, slaves were all on an equal plane with Jesus. And then Christians, again, as I mentioned earlier, Christians were the first ones who made this end. Christians made it end during the Roman Empire and Christians later on in the abolitionist period in the 1800s in the United States and in England, like Wilberforce, they were the ones who were a major force in the Puritans behind making slavery end. And it's because we realized that's how Jesus wants us. Jesus came down here to show us, this is how we wanted you to be. We didn't seem to be getting it in the Israelite times, how they wanted us to be. And so we go to the year of Christianity, the time when Christians came about, suddenly we understand, okay, this is how God wants us to be. Didn't Paul, sorry, didn't Paul actually say that slaves should obey their masters as we would obey Christ? So I don't- It's kind of similar to saying we should obey. It's kind of like when Jesus also said we should obey the government. And so when they talked about, when he looked at their face- He says we're slaves of Christ. and the corner was Caesar. But we're all slaves of Christ, yeah. So it's just a word, in fact, the word that they use, E-B-E-D, I forget how you pronounce it, EBIT or EBIT, but the word that they use basically also could be employee, it could be worker, it could be servant. There's a lot of different uses of that particular word when you speak to the slaves, the word that was used in the Bible to refer to slavery. And actually there's a guy called Peter. What's his last name? Peter, he's out of England, Williams. And he's talked about, they changed the word in the Bible. If you go back a few hundred years, the translations of the Bible that talked about the word EBIT, initially the first translation would come back is that means servant. And so then you go back to the translations that are coming in later and suddenly they flip that and slavery is the first translation and then number two is the servant. So kind of it's interesting thing to think about with slavery, but the idea with Paul is he equalized all of us. And so I would say that that's why Christianity views individuals as all of value. Well, I think it's translated as slave because it says slaves are your property. Got to give SJ the last word on this just because the Super Chat was originally a challenge to her and then we got to move to the next one. Yeah, actually, and I'm just realizing EBIT, I would have been used in the, that's the Old Testament, that was the Hebrew word. I actually am not, I shouldn't have mentioned that word but the translations coming in from the Old Testament talking about slavery back then initially were coming from the word EBIT. And then in the New Testament obviously it was written in Greek and so it was whatever the Greek word was. Gotcha. And thanks for your question. This one comes in from Cosmic QQ says, question for SJ, how can a God that committed a worldwide genocide with the flood be a standard for morality? We have to remember something that's really important is God basically is the creator of all life on the planet. And so it goes back to something that Aquinas said. Aquinas basically said that as the creator of the planet he's the one who sets a start date and the end dates for everybody here and he does it with his morally sufficient reasoning that's gonna ensure and maximize people's better existence in the next life. And so he decided that the planet was corrupt and he saved a few people, Noah and his group and he realized the rest of the planet would be better off not living in this corrupt earth and instead going into the afterlife and waiting until the time of judgment. He realized the corruption was just too much and it was worse probably to be here on the earth than it would be to be in the afterlife. Gotcha. And thanks for your question. This one comes in from, Oh, ordinary atheists didn't see one but let me know if you have one you want attached. And Merlin72001 says, the transatlantic slave trade created, propagated and justified by Bible believing Christians using the Bible to show this was what God said. So more of a statement I think in response. I can comment on that though. You bet. I agree that there are some bad actors in our history. We definitely had Christians doing the wrong thing and there were certainly Christians who were a part of that transatlantic slave trade especially because Christians were primarily populating the United States and England during the time when this was propagated. However, and they even created their own Bible. They actually pulled a bunch of verses out of the Bible and created a slave Bible because they didn't want to see the slaves say things like you're not supposed to kidnap a slave. You're supposed to free, when a slave runs away you're supposed to take the slave in. They pulled all those kind of verses out. So yeah, there were some bad actors back then but we can't judge whether or not Christianity is true based on the fact there's some people who've interpreted it in horrible ways. Gotcha. And Ninth Hill's Cosmic Fox. Thanks for your super chat said, actually I think morals stem from a collective desire to avoid the inherent brutality of natural selection. How is this not a better explanation? Moral values to certain extent do come from our social development and our evolution. I mean, that's absolutely true. The value of empathy for example, it's got a certain level of heritability from our parents' levels of empathy. And so we inherit a certain amount of this trait. However, that can only explain what's descriptive. So that can explain a portion of us. That can explain part of our nature. It doesn't explain our environment or nurture but it also doesn't explain what's prescriptive and what we know as far as moral prescriptions of what we ought to do. Like for example, we ought to treat our fellow humans fairly. We ought to be loving, we ought to be caring and those sorts of things go beyond that and can't be explained through social development or evolution. That can only be explained with a moral lawgiver and that brings us back to God. Gotcha, Anne, thanks for your question. This one comes in from Brandon Ardeline, says, how does punishing children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the crimes of one person count as a just moral system? A lot of this stems from this idea of punishment. A lot of times the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, that reflects this idea of sin and how when we sin, our kids are gonna feel that. Their kids are gonna feel it. It's like a ripple effect that goes down and the human condition is a sinful condition and so it just keeps rippling and so people are gonna feel the punishments in future generations for our own actions and that's unfortunate but that's what happens. They do it for example, if you've got parents who are abusive or alcoholics or something like that, that's gonna probably get passed down. Generation after generation after generation they're gonna feel these punishments coming in from your sinful nature. Gotcha, and spider 10x30, thanks for your super sticker. Appreciate the support. Cosmic QQ, thanks for your question, said for SJ, would you stone your disobedient children as God commanded? Is this moral? In the ancient Near Eastern context, apparently that was a mode of punishment that was used all throughout the area and so God as the theological leader of Israel during that time had made those kind of commandments. However, that's Mosaic law, Jesus fulfilled that and we're under the new covenant and so you don't see any aspects where stoning is condoned or ordered in the New Testament. Gotcha. It seems subjective. Sorry, that seems subjective to me, depending on time and culture. No, I'm saying that that's part of the rules of the system but they're still under this idea of valuing life. It was a means of punishment. Right now our means of punishment could be execution, that could be sitting on the electric chair. We have different means of punishment. Back then the means of punishment that's our equivalent of the electric chair was stoning essentially. Gotcha and Woody, thanks for your like or thumbs up sticker. Appreciate that support. And Jay shy ways in saying, God is the necessary rational source snake. He has necessary existence itself. We have contingent humans. Morals are a rational enterprise and moral progression and disagreements show it can't be grounded in human rationality. Yeah, it has nothing to do with humans. It's just whether a statement is true or not and so God would have to basically derive any of his opinions or statements from that and his opinions and statements are not causally related to him being God. It's just related to them being true. Gotcha and thanks for your super chat from everyone needs a smile. Appreciate it said for both speakers. How should we persuade the current Chinese government to stop committing genocide given they don't accept a God or a humanistic foundation either? Yeah, I think that's a tremendous challenge. You've got 1.4 billion people on a planet under a system that's guided by atheist communists who have been making egregious acts over the past centuries. Now I would say one of the ways we could do that is by imposing some sort of sanctions on them when we notice that there's human rights atrocities get people involved in human rights organizations to go out there and try to speak to their inner sense of what's right. Yeah, and I don't think genocide is really unique to communists. And while I completely disagree with communism there are plenty of genocides commanded directly by God in the Bible and he allows the evil slave owners to kind of do what they want but and then allows Israel to slaughter and go on genocides and then but because I'm not sure why the world was flooded it seems like maybe people were just having the kinds of sex God didn't want. So he killed all of their children including them. So buddy allows things like evil slavery to happen. So I don't see any consistency there. You would have to appeal to rationality and of course, like the people in Hong Kong are standing up based on rational principles and I think they should be supported. And yeah, I think that's all you can do short of war which would be the last line of defense. Gotcha, and let's see here. We do have several more questions. One, that L that Jimman handed every, I don't even see the rest of your name but they said just came to say James has a great smile. That's very kind of you, appreciate that. And also we have a question from Vesper. This one is for SJ saying what moral principle God, asking what moral principle God uses in God's judgments. God is the, again, he's the standard of morality. And so he doesn't use one of our human moral principles to make judgments. Those are the principles that we use like for example, deontology or utilitarianism or those sorts of things. Those are created by us to be able to figure out life under our own existence. God doesn't take our, you know, borrow something that some low level humans created where he's our standard. Gotcha, and also wanna let you know folks, I think that's the end for the questions that I had seen and do wanna say as someone had asked me, sometimes I've been told, they said when I, they said even when they're subscribed, they don't always get notifications for, in fact, some of them, it sounds like they don't almost ever get notifications when we go live or have new debates that come out. So wanna let you know, I had looked into it. I think it's, you don't see this on mobile but on desktop, when you hit subscribe, you should have that bell option whether or not you wanna hit the bell. And then when you do click the bell though, it gives you like sub options. So you can say that you want like all notifications, like every single one, and then you can say you want like just some, and I think you can even click for some reason, like you can click like none. I think that's a sub option under the bell. So in other words, that's basically just specifying how many alerts you'd want. And so just wanna let you know in case anyone's had confusion. I don't think it's that super, I don't think YouTube is trying to censor us. So I think that's probably just what it was if people have not been getting notifications. YouTube is so far, we've been under their good graces. We haven't had any strikes yet. So despite our best efforts, but no, I'm kidding. We do enjoy hosting these types of debates though. They're controversial. If you're sick like us and you like these controversial topics, encourage you to subscribe if you haven't already. We've got a lot more. Wanna give you a reminder as well. Both of our speakers I've linked in the description. So that way if you're listening, you're like, hmm, I wanna hear more of that. Well, you can hear more of that by clicking on those links in the description. So one last thank you to Snake and Dr. S.J. We really appreciate you guys coming on, hanging out with us on this happy, depending on where you are in the world, Sunday afternoon or night or maybe even Monday morning if you're in Tokyo. So thanks so much Snake and S.J. Thank you, really appreciate it. I really can't thank you guys enough for the platform and opportunity for the discussion. So thanks. Absolutely. So with that folks, we hope you have a great rest of your day or night no matter where you are. And as we had said, if you enjoy podcasts, hey, we are on podcast now. So hope you find that useful or valuable. And so thanks so much for hanging out with us folks. I can't express enough just how much I'm thankful for everybody's help as this channel truly is a community effort. It's kind of a community owned channel. And so thanks to everybody, the debaters, the mods for always kind of keeping an eye out for that and any of the potentially nasty stuff that once in a while comes in. And I just have just so many people to say, thanks so much, we really do need you. And it means a lot that you guys help even just with like things like likes or just watching really does kind of help make this a lot more fun, you know, the more the merrier. So thanks so much folks. And with that, keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable everybody. We hope you have a great rest of your day.