 Hey, everybody. Today we're debating whether or not anti-theism is rational and we are starting right now with Jason and snakes opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours. Okay, great. Thanks, everybody. James, can you see my slides? Yep. Okay. Excellent. Thanks everybody for being here. I'm Jason Torn. I'm going to open up with the first six minutes on the topic of is anti-theism rational? And so I'm going to go just for, again, six minutes and then I'll pass it off to Snake to wrap things up. So just to begin with a little definitions on anti-theism, there are a variety of different definitions for this topic. However, the one that we'd like to primarily go with is the view that the belief in God or gods does more harm than good. Now it's a fairly standard definition. However, from a philosophical perspective, there are other types of definitions, particularly from an axiological question perspective, from a value statement perspective. Philosophically, the definition can also be defined as things are worse under theism than naturalism and this is due to God's existence, nature or activity. And we're going to primarily be focusing on the first one, although we're fine with entertaining alternative views or thoughts around the philosophical discussions around anti-theism. So I wanted to make a quick point about the differences between anti-theism and atheism. Some people think that they're very similar or one in the same or one is a subset of the other, but actually you can, from an atheistic perspective, you can be a pro-theist atheist, so somebody that doesn't believe in any gods, but thinks that such views are beneficial. You also could technically be an anti-theist theist, so you could believe in a God or gods, but think that those views are actually detrimental. So they are not necessarily the same and I've got just a little kind of a rubric below from Klaus Kre, who publishes a lot on anti-theism, to show some of the differences in terms of the axiological positions in relationships to these existential views of atheism, theism and agnosticism. And so that's an interesting facet. We could explore some of those topics, but I just wanted to be clear in terms of that with regards to the definition of anti-theism. So the two aspects of anti-theism that I just wanted to briefly touch upon, one, this generalized aspect of anti-theism, which I think Snake is going to talk about in six minutes after this, that applies more to the actual world historical evidence that might indicate more harm than good in relationships to theism. The piece that I'm just going to briefly touch upon is these axiological questions around pro-theism and anti-theism, which I think are interesting. I don't think we need to make an argument about that, but I think that we're willing to discuss that if our interlocutors want to. Primarily these issues of a loss of freedom, loss of privacy and dignity, loss of knowledge, and I'll just talk briefly about those in a second. So just to kind of wrap up what I'm talking about, I just wanted to touch upon these six areas that I think provide supportive evidence from a philosophical perspective. Religious perspectives on helplessness. Many religions have concepts around it's in God's hands. And if you can extend that to things like health, if we say, oh, I'm just going to give myself from a helpless perspective to God, then I'm less likely to be concerned about more proactive aspects around religion. I may not be interested in going to the doctor, just in that example. So you can see that giving away my ability to make decisions, given the fact that God is in control, could be perceived as more harmful than good. The long-term effects of irrational beliefs. I think that there's an argument to be made that some irrational beliefs could be beneficial initially, but over the long term my position is that irrational viewpoints have a detrimental outcome on our world. And I think that there are multiple facets around that that we can get into in more specific detail. And then just to wrap up my portion, these last four components are philosophical aspects that are associated with some of the citations on the right. Loss of dignity and privacy. If God is all-knowing, then essentially I have no privacy in my world and those who value privacy, that would be a worse world than a world without God. Issues of loss of knowledge and understanding. If in a naturalistic world I can explain everything or most things in a God world, God is mysterious. I can't know the origins of the universe, I can't explore that. So in that world, I have less knowledge about our world than a naturalistic perspective. Also aspects of commonplace morality. The issue, and I won't go into the detail based on the timeframe, but issues of loss of meaning and loss of morality are also two important components that have been argued by many philosophers in terms of support for anti-theism. And I'm not sure where I am on the time, but I'm going to pass this over to Snake now and I'll stop my screen share and let him talk about some of the more historical aspects of anti-theism. And so go ahead, Snake, you're muted. Alright, so jumping in there, every argument for theism is by definition irrational, so it's without reason. And either the argument is fallacious in a structure or it simply has unjustifiable premises. For example, the ontological argument based on the ontological fallacy one cannot simply define a being into existence, teleological argument commits the fallacy of composition just because humans organize things does not mean the universe itself must be organized and finally tuned. Life adapts to the environment. The cosmological argument for God commits the fallacy of circular reasoning assuming God is the cause of the beginning of the universe in order to conclude that God created the universe. I could go on but one cannot reasonably accept a conclusion if the argument structure is fallacious or unfounded. So to oppose irrational argumentation is rational by definition. The moral argument for God also fails because morality itself is stunted under a theistic worldview. Most of the other arguments for God are simply the God of the gaps fallacy look at the trees life is too complex etc etc. On top of that every theistic claim of extraordinary and supernatural events have a lack of evidence and cannot be studied and those who've tried get no meaningful results. So it's by definition rational to oppose conclusions that are not based on good evidence and apologetics is an entire field that exists just to excuse God's conspicuous hiddenness and immorality. I believe religion should be treated with mockery rather than treated as noble or some harmless belief in the vein of to each their own because irrational beliefs are themselves tangibly harmful simply for being irrational. They don't represent reality a society that accepts and respects irrational methods of coming to conclusions is a more dangerous society that cares less about rigorous and justifiable conclusions and will inevitably be a permissive of really bad ideas. Our society tells us respect people's religious beliefs but this makes us turn a blind eye to quoting Sam Harris the mother load of bad ideas like such as found in Islam. If we treat these ideas as valid just because they're religious despite knowing that they're based on faith and not rationality. We're now forced to tolerate genocidal and hateful ideas these ideas should not be respected they should be actively opposed so they're not taken seriously by those in power and those who vote or fight to get others into power. Not only is the foundation of faith irrational and it clearly is or also wouldn't need to be called faith it would be called proof for evidence but religions actually are anti rational stories in the holy books frequently contained claims that are counter to scientifically verified knowledge and these things contribute to the slowing down and suppression of scientific progress claiming the earth orbits the sun was considered heresy by the theocracies of the past and scientists were punished for this idea. Not to mention all the other heresies where people were burned at the stake just for not conforming with their thoughts. Without religion we don't have flat earthers in the 21st century we don't have creationism. Without religion we have more respect for the earth and finite human life. For example what is killing when you believe in internal souls it's not as bad if you as if you actually destroy a person. Without religion we don't have notions of souls which interferes with a lot of government policy decisions as well and people's views on the value of life here on the earth right here and now. And when you accept beliefs just because some books said it is set it inside of it. This is actively interfering with our ability to think rationally as a matter of habit. If you think knowledge can be gained by irrational means this is going to slow gaining knowledge with rational methods and at times even suppressed it if it goes against the word of the holy book. So religion slowed the progress of science but even worse it absolutely devastated the moral progress of our world and that stain is still with us beliefs informed decisions and if you believe people will actually still exist after death via immortal souls there's less respect for human life. Since there's less harm and earthly death Abrahamic religions are not only permissive of violence and genocide but they demand it and excuse slavery sexism homophobia and racism. And it enshrines these by the word of God and encourages people to enshrine these values via theocracies morality via God is literally stunted it simply uses God as a proxy for what is right at best but offers zero understanding of what right and wrong really are. The closest God based morality comes is might makes right God said it so it's true but this ignores the important question of why God said it why is something good or bad. Theism offers us no answers simply commands and we're not allowed to question them upon pain of eternal torture. Do we really have a better society if we teach our children they'll be tortured for eternity if they have the wrong opinion about the name of God. Is our world better off to teach people it doesn't matter what they do only if they believe in the correct God. What about the Hindu caste system is the world better off for this idea for these ideas. The idea that God or God's own us or use us for their purposes allow all the evil in the world they created diseases for innocent children natural disasters. This creates a really bad relationship and outlook with authority blindly accepting it. And God is the most villainous and unpleasant character in all of fiction and represents the most diabolical evil plan of all time. A society that excuses the actions of such a hateful being fictional or otherwise is a sex society and if he does exist we have even more major problems. When we accept these beliefs we are more likely to develop a permanent attitude toward immoral actions since we're on God's side anyway. Atheists are underrepresented in the American prison system according to pupils and public religion research center and violent crimes and conflicts are over represented in less secular societies. Let me skip ahead a little bit. Yeah I don't mean to accuse my opponents of holding these values but it is a problem when you defend the sources of these values. And so it's rational to oppose all this division hatred unsubstantiated claims. And thanks yeah. Want to say thanks so much for your opening statement we're going to kick it over to the other side as well. But want to say folks if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate we're a neutral platform hosting debates on science religion and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. And hey if you haven't yet hit that subscribe button we have many more juicy debates coming up at the bottom right of your screen for example. Vosh and Alec Stein collide for the first time next week and whether or not it's OK for kids to attend drag queen shows. You don't want to miss it hit that subscribe button and with that thanks so much for being with us Stuart in cinematic psychology. We're going to kick it over to you for your opening as well. The floor is all yours. Thank you James would you be able to stop me at the six minute mark because I don't want to take up too much time for sure. Great thank you. So I'm going to go ahead and share my slides one moment please. And while that is loading. Let me know when you can see it. OK. Hello my name is cinematic psychology and I will be arguing an agnostic perspective on this motion that anti-theism is irrational. And my primary stance going into this in my opening statement is that it is founded on the hasty generalization fallacy which is essentially that you can't make a claim and say something is true if you only have one or two samples as evidence. Now to be fair they have quite a bit more samples of then one or two they have historical accounts but they do not have every single minute sample and they are making dramatic generalizations of what the is a means. So and this sort of generalization is absolutely impossible to make because each and every religious person has a very deep personal and unknowable experience that can't be defined not by a text not even by society not by anybody except for their own experience. You can see this variation within religious attitudes within America itself. So what does it mean to be religious an atheist or an anti-theist might try to argue that it's the belief in a God that is omnipotent omnipresent omnipotent. However, this is simply not the truth. Many religions in fact do not argue that this is the position of people within religions themselves have dramatically different interpretations of each text. For example, you can see within this graph that 70% of American college graduates believe that God's love all people despite their flaws. However, only 33% believe that they determine what happens in their lives all in most of the time. Religion is a spectrum and it is not constant rather it is fluid and is adaptive. One of the common criticisms of religion is that people pick and choose verses according to their own whims and I will argue that that is not a bad thing but rather that is one of his attributes. It is sort of a guidance that allows people to interpret it via their own standing. So with that in mind, I would like to say that their general criticisms of theism are basically impossible to pinpoint because they cannot pinpoint what a theist is. Even with people who have strict determined religions, a Christian who is an evangelicalist might internally believe something dramatically different from somebody that they go to church with every single day. And that dramatically will affect them in different ways. Now on to my rebuttals. So one of the key arguments that was presented by the affirmative was that religion leads to a feeling of helplessness. However, according to frontiers of psychology, it has been consistently found that individuals with internal locuses of control is in believing that they have the ability to change their lives. We're not only more likely to believe in a divine power to admit to a divine power help them in the past and to ask for the divine power in the future. So people who are more likely to believe that life is not in their hands that they have no control are less likely to be theist. So therefore how can you necessarily determine that this will be helpless. And additionally, another point that was brought by my opponents was the concepts of religious war, zealotry and all this sort of horrible crimes that happened because of religious societies. And I'm going to argue that you're blaming a simple aspect of human nature for the crimes of human nature itself. These things that are happening, there's a correlation between religion and these crimes because people commit crimes and people believe in religion, but that's not causation. In fact, if you look at the five most brutal dictators and most brutal regimes that were the most oppressive to their people within the 20th century. Four of them were anti theists. One of them Hitler was Catholic, but the Nazi regime was largely influenced by Nietzsche and anti theist. So you cannot say that religion is causing all of this pain when you remove the factor and it still exists. So, Snake mentioned the fact that they believe that religion is rational because of there's no necessary reason to believe in that faith is inherently irrational in itself. However, the definition of a rational is lacking usual or normal mental clarity or coherence the DSM five as accepted by popular society has a stipulation that any beliefs caused by religion cannot be defined as delusions. So at what point do you decide it's a rational that seems more opinion than general consensus of society and your experience, you cannot necessarily doubt that and many people in fact believe that they have a direct experience with God. Should they find themselves irrational because they had that experience simply because you doubt it. No, you're asking us to take a leap of faith. Furthermore, I'd like to mention the fact that anti theists are hypocrites in that the main criticism that they have a religion is tribalism, our tribe versus your tribe Christians killing Muslims vice versa battling for your own thing. But by trying to oppress another group you're shutting yourself off to another person's perspective and therefore imposing your own beliefs and forming an identity around a fixed idea a fixed idea that you don't have proof about. So, like a Christian like a Muslim like a Jew like any other religion you're looking for people who believe the same things that you do and therefore put people down. Now I have lived across the world I have lived in many homes in many different countries I have lived in homes of Buddhist Jews, Muslims Christians and atheists and anti theists. And I have found that they have much more in common than they have different. They have values that they can teach you they have lessons that you can learn from them and most importantly they all have the same smug look on their face that they are better than other groups and that they know us right. You are not the exception you are the rule. Moreover, religiosity is and it has been proved to be natural human tendency so how can you cause a natural human tendency to be irrational. A cognitive study conducted by the University of Oxford involving 57 researchers in $1.9 million and 40 separate studies in 20 countries have confirmed that humans are predisposed to believe in God's in an afterlife by biology. So if somebody is predisposed to believe something via their biology can you necessarily call that irrational James how am I doing on time 30 seconds left. And I will yield my 30 seconds to Stuart. Thank you very much. C.S. you're on fire just finish up. This is great. Preach it. All it's all you Stuart go ahead. You should don't you got 30 seconds you sure. I'm good. Yeah, you gotta save something for the open conversation. So just to add to that I mean my favorite atheist Christopher Hitchens when he used to say you know what can be asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence. And there was a lot of assertions I heard from the non atheistic. However you guys refer to yourselves anti theistic side and I have a lot of issues with those assertions I would have to see studies I would have to see a lot of different pieces of evidence the latest we probably all know that of Harvard that US Post and many other newspapers picked up all the different health benefits when it comes to dealing with suicide depression anxiety when it deals with seven years longer of life expectancy when it comes to dealing with crime. The Harvard study that just it comes out every five years is so impressive for those who go to church on a on a weekly basis compared to those who are atheists. It's not even close when it comes to what can Christianity actually do for the world. That's it. I have a little bit more to add if you don't want any more time. That was 30 seconds though right. Oh no. I talked for five minutes and 50. Oh I thought you were saying okay I thought you went for the full 11 and a half. Okay. All right so here we go. Good to know. So that's my favorite latest study but I think you always have to come back to what are the latest studies saying and a recent book not written by Christian the character gap. How good are we Christian Miller observes that literally hundreds of studies link religious participation with better moral outcomes. And you can pull from the sociologist Christopher Ellison and Kristen Anderson discover that the levels of domestic violence in the US sample were twice as high for men who did not attend church versus those who attended at least once a week. And I was out of the journal of the scientific study of religion. Religious participation has been linked to lower rates and 43 other crimes TD Evans for example talked about how religion and crime reexamined in this essay he did peer reviewed the impact of religion and secular controls. Talked about just the incredible discrepancy when it comes to these crime rates in those who are religious versus non religious in different countries in the US regular service attendees donate 3.5 times the money given. By their non religious counterparts per year and volunteer more than twice as much so religious attenders 3.5 times they give as much per year and volunteer over twice as much than those who are atheists and non churchgoers. So, obviously, you know, another interesting book would be Ronald Osborn Humanism the death of God. Basically, again, I don't think he's at all vouching for the Christian belief but he says there is no way you get human rights from scientific naturalism. If you lived out scientific naturalism it's the strong eating the weak. It's all about oppression. It's all about raised red and tooth and claw. It's all about any means necessary. I live right outside New York City. And so I'm a pastor as well as a therapist and I do apologetics across the country. We're going to be in Louisville soon and especially being outside of New York City, you know, you mingle with a lot of Wall Street guys and women. And you see scientific naturalism, you know, you remove God, you remove church attendance and see what goes on when money becomes God. And basically you see morality completely drop, drop off the map, you know, by any again by any means necessary. You see the selfish knife, for example, going on when it comes to, yeah, okay, social contract theory, you know, there is no God, let's get together, let's try and do good. But then, again, what is it going to ultimately motivate the person who's on the back end saying, well, if I can get away, if I can skim off the top just a little bit, if I can get away with just a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and do that. It's not going to really hurt anybody. And so what's the motive ultimately? Christian Smith out of Notre Dame, one of my favorite more recent sociologists who's really attacking atheism in many different ways just on morality and the question of goodness and defending, although he would never say he's defending Christianity. But his whole point is, sure, the Dostoevsky argument, you know, if there is no God all things are permitted. Obviously, if one doesn't believe in God doesn't mean that they're going to be ethically worse, that they're going to devalue human life more. No, I have many atheist friends who live out good lives. Yeah, that's not it. The problem is, look at ideas, look at the consequence of ideas, look at the consequence of the fumes we are obviously living off of, even though our age here in the US in some ways becoming more secular. The increase of religious nones and at the same time there's a great increase of those who have grown up in the faith. But you remove Judeo-Christian values and how we grew up all on them, whether we want to admit it or not. And do I think we're going to have the great purge within a couple of years? No, not necessarily. Do I think we're going to have something like the great purge if we remove theism completely for the next 100 years, say 100 years from now? Maybe, unless you say, well, no, it's going to be humanism. We'll write a Bible, you know, the humanist manifesto, for example. Okay, well, you're just still stealing from Christianity. I mean, sure, if you want to just remove the Bible, bring in the humanist manifesto. Any honest philosopher or historian will say, no, that's completely stealing from the Bible. Now, it's adapting here and there, but you're just stripping from Scripture. And the latest, Tom Holland and many other historians out of England have talked about that at length. Oh, and by the way, they're agnostics and atheists who are saying this. They're historians. So that's a big piece. I mean, Peter Singer, I'll go here, since he talks a lot about the dangers of Christianity. You know, Peter Singer talked about a guy who's all for the euthanasia. I mean, I would not want my grandma anywhere close to Peter Singer. He talks about how, you know, a baby was one to one to two months old. A baby has less worth than a pig because of the level of self-consciousness, awareness and IQ. Sorry, how many minutes? Thirty seconds left. Thirty seconds, okay. And Peter Singer, he says, you know, I'm just living at my worldview, scientific naturalism, and there's no ultimate value and worth to people. It's basically just self-consciousness, awareness and IQ. And so if the pig has higher than a two month baby, kill the baby, he doesn't say this exactly, kill the baby basically and let the pig live. He's got more worth. And I think a lot of what you get with human rights comes directly from that type of scientific naturalism. If you live it out, if you're honest with it. Thanks James. My pleasure. With that, we're going to jump into open conversation folks. Want to let you know our guests are linked in the description and that includes at the podcast as all of the modern day debate debates are uploaded to the podcast within 24 hours of the debate being live. You can find our guest links in the description box at the podcast as well. With that, thanks so much. The floor is all yours. All right, Snake. I'm coming for it. So you mentioned in your argument that religiosity is negatively correlated to resistance of crime or rather atheists have less crime rates. However, I have the exact opposite statistics from our PDO org that shows that across all sectors, likelihood of adolescent crime has a negative correlation to religiosity from crime's worth of life in prison to petty theft. So what is your evidence that shows that atheists commit less crimes? It's from Pew Research. There is 23% of the population is religiously unaffiliated, atheistic, agnostic and 11 and in prisons that's 11%. So that's literally less than half. And what age group does this comprise of? Anyone in prisons. Anyone in prisons. So my story focuses particularly on adolescent crime in general. Do you think that's significant? Do you have the citation for this? Yes, I do. What is it? Your citation. Can you just give me what the authors the year in the pub is? Yeah, I'm pulling it up right now. Okay, so let's see. And oh, while I'm pulling it up, it also shows that religious populations tend to have fewer homicides and fewer suicides. I mean, it's interesting because there's a wealth of research that secular countries have lower crime rates. Stephen Law has written from, believe Columbia has written considerably on this topic. I mean, and he makes several references to religious countries over time that become less religious improve in terms of their outcomes. So I'd love to see the citation. Actually, you know, I've heard, I'm pulling that up right now, but you know, I've heard that argument before that more well developed countries are less likely to be religious. However, that is correlation and that's not causation from this study that I mentioned previously about how religion is a natural occurrence. Let me pull that up again. And don't worry, I'm going to get your site recognition recognition and theology project. It found that people are more likely to have religious beliefs when under stress or pressure. So this is actually a coping mechanism that is biologically found and it actually has been shown by the exact same study to improve societal cohesion and peace. So therefore, with that in mind, it makes perfect sense that well developed and successful countries would have less religious beliefs. This is not causation. Nobody's claiming that it's it's directly causal. There are interactions and effects that we know that there are multiple variables involved. Nobody's saying that it's a singular causal impact. I think that's the way it is with all analyses in this instance. But I'm sure you would agree that we do see correlations in that respect with countries that have declining religiosity and improvements. Now, there could be other health don't end up in the hospital. But there could be there could be other attributing factors, but certainly it is interesting that we do see decreases in religion increases in overall outcomes in societies. Yeah, you don't go to the doctor when you're not sick. Well, that's anecdotal. No, it's obvious. You're just making a claim. You're just making a statement. I'd rather just stick with like the large breadth of research in that particular. No, you're just making a fallacy. What's the fallacy? The fallacy is that you're saying that because societies are less religious, they're more successful. And I'm saying it's the other way around because they're more successful. I'm just saying that the data shows that countries that are less religious or locations are less religious tend to have better outcomes. There could be other variables that are involved. But that's an interesting outcome. Do we see the opposite? The countries that become more religious? Yes, we did. Which countries are those? All right. Like I said, from the study, the cognition, religious and theology project. I'm just saying just give me a general country that you would think that's the case. Well, have you ever heard of the printing press literacy came about because people desire to read the Bible. The Bible was what brought people to read. So you're reading your research right now. Congratulations is because people wanted to be closer to God. Bam. I'm glad that you're doing a little cheerleader dance. That's nice. That doesn't support the position that you're talking about. And actually, just wait a second. Wait a second. I'm responding. Are you interrupting me? Sorry. I was talking. Let's kick it over to Jason for a bit. Two minutes, Jason. And then we'll kick it back to the one or cinematic. Sure. The one point I wanted to make is that in my presentation, and I actually have several comments about what CP was saying previously in her rebuttal, but that in my presentation, I made a very specific statement about the long term effects, the long term relationships of irrational beliefs. So you can have an irrational belief like the printing press or as an example, you can have short term benefits based on religiosity. Nobody is denying that. Over the long term, irrational beliefs, beliefs that are not based in fact over the long run result in negative consequences. So you're right. You can have beneficial outcomes initially, but over the long run, I don't think that that's the case. And I think that the research supports that. Yeah. Why do you want people being happy based off of delusions? Okay. Once again, the way that you're defining a delusion is completely arbitrary because a personal experience is a personal experience. Can I say that I'm having a delusion because I'm drinking water? Yes or no? No. So if I feel like I'm having a delusion experience, it just seems to be arbitrary that you're calling it a delusion. If you're walking around saying that you're having a relationship with someone, maybe, I don't know, you have this baby daddy or you're telling your friends, oh, I'm engaged. No one can find any evidence of this person. They go through your phone. There are no phone records. You tell them their name. The name doesn't exist. The address doesn't exist. This is a delusional belief. Except there are thousands and thousands and thousands of accounts of people experiencing God. There's thousands and thousands of accounts of schizophrenia. That is absolutely ridiculous. Wait a minute. Because that's a fallacy of populism. No, no, no, no. Snake defining a delusion using snakes and logic of something that no one else can account for and no one else can therefore assert it's happening. But the massive groups of people are asserting it's happening. That doesn't mean that it's actually happening just because a bunch of people believe something. Basically, yeah, sure, it doesn't necessarily mean that's happening. But your logic is that it's a delusion because no one else can confirm it. But when we're talking about thousands of years of holy text and thousands of people with similar experience in confirming it. Can you really call it a delusion by the same definition? It's not objective. Where's the evidence? Oh, that's nice little dance there. I don't want to see you dance. I bet you'd be really cute at it. I can, but I prefer to stick to the content. We haven't really given you the floor. How about we give you a chance? I just want to say one thing in response to that is that typically we like to point to factual evidence, scientific evidence, empirical evidence that indicates if something exists or not. So if a bunch of people say that the Easter Bunny exists, that's not evidence that the Easter Bunny exists. We know that humans draw wrong inferences even based on things that they see. People think they see ghosts. People think they see aliens. People think they see all kinds of stuff that we don't have any evidence for. So just because a bunch of people see something is not evidence that something like that exists. And I would say that that can be delusional. I think it fits with the DSM-4 or DSM-5, whatever it's on. Oh, no, it doesn't. And you cannot rewrite the DSM-5, which has a particular stipulation that religion believes are not delusions. It is literally written right in there. So I believe a faith that the DSM-5 says what it wants to say, but it doesn't. That's just to not offend people because so many people hold that delusion. You could never get away with that. Yeah, but Jason literally just said that he believes that that's in the DSM-5. That's just ridiculous. I'll look up what the specific verbiage for delusion is in DSM-5. Well, you guys, do you not agree? If you haven't said a lot yet, Stuart, if you had anything, I want to give you a chance. James, you could speak to this one. You're going to be the psychologist here. So I'm a therapist. My wife's a therapist. One of my closest friends is the head of family services at the top psych unit down the road. He would say the Bible is the best psychology book in the world. And I don't even think he's a Christian. In terms of comprehensively diagnosing the human situation, the complexity of the human being, you have physical, you have emotional, you have social, you have intellectual, you have conscience-based reasons for why people struggle with mental illness. I was just at a funeral today. And the atheists and theists were both agreeing that we all have a God-shaped hole. And if you put anything in there other than a God called the untethered soul by different celebrities, the incredible national bestseller when it comes to dealing with suffering and substance abuse, you give somebody spirituality. You give somebody a God and it will help them emotionally, psychologically and even relationally. So if we're going to go down this whole path, I mean, checkmate, I'll go here. And I'll just keep going. And it's an easy one, really. But if you want to get more serious and Snake is talking about the irrationality, where do we get the term progressive from? Even the term progressive is a Christian term. It defined Christians early on. It pushed away from much secularism, but especially Islam, which was cyclical in nature and how it studied different types of the atmosphere and what they saw in the environment. Christianity was known as Christianity. Christianity was known as a progressive faith because it said, here's where history started. Here's where history will end. And so you go out Galileo, Copernicus, you go out Kepler, Newton, all of these Christians who you can read in their autobiographies about their faith. It wasn't just the type of water that they were swimming in about how incredible their faith was and how that directed their inventions, their ideas, their progressive ideologies. And so the irrationality of faith and supposedly the spaghetti monster and my close, close imaginable friend. I mean, Snake, you talking about this stuff? I debate tons of atheists. I know for you this is all emotional smoke screens because you're not even coming close to entering into the debate by saying these very simplistic things like, oh, the milk carton could be my God and somehow close enough by giving me my nutrients and being close to me. I mean, enter into the debate because I could easily come at you with, okay, I believe in say the virgin birth of my God, what you believe in the virgin birth of the universe. I mean, I could even hit you with a statistic of almost 80% of atheists or white males. Both of you are white males. There's a good chance that has a lot to do with it. There is so many statistics on rationality and thinking through, okay, why are we actually believing in what we believe in? This whole idea that it's totally irrational to believe. I mean, how much literature do you truly need? How about the book that made our world by a Hindu? Read that book and see what T.S. was saying in so many different ways. What all came from the Christian faith and the Bible specifically? So a lot there. It's ironic that you talk about just one religion. So it's not about theism versus atheism. It's about your specific regional God and you believe everyone else is of the devil and going hell. And if you want to talk about, oh, I only believe something because I've been determined to do so by my birth. Circumstances of birth. Well, there's no more better correlation, predictive feature of what God you believe in than where you were raised. So you just believe in that because that's what you were raised with. But what I really wanted to get to was why isn't the Bible, why isn't the Bible? I didn't hear that. Genetic fallacy. That's so easy. I'm pointing that out because that's what you just committed. No, that's not. I'm not saying you're definitely atheists because you're white males. I'm simply, I stated a very interesting statistic. And I stated it right back to you. You said definitely. You got a hundred percent chance. No, I did not. I said it's the greatest predictor. So why isn't the Bible the standard for psychology? Why isn't demon possession, which is in the Bible, the cause apparently of mental illness in the Bible? Why isn't demon possession in the DSM five? If it's such a great book. Why? So Greek terminology in the Bible is kissed by the moon. So Jesus was casting as well as dealing with mental health issues, which is the Greek kissed by the moon, because mania is connected with the full moon. We know all these things. So you're discounting. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight. M. Scott Peck, one of the most notorious, incredibly gifted M.D. psychiatrist. Even possession. Genetic fallacy. That's a stretch. I mean, you're saying you're saying discounted simply because demon possession is not in the DSM. I don't understand. You're saying discounted simply because it's delusional to believe that casting out of demons and dipping a living bird in a dead bird's blood to cast out leprosy. That is delusional medical advice. All right. So, you know, that's in your Bible. discounting the DSM five because it said that religion cannot include religious beliefs. But now you're saying that the DSM five discounts the Bible because it doesn't include it. So do you worship the DSM five or do you not worship the DSM? We're not just the matter is there are many different ways to interpret our reality. The DSM five being one of them. And there are delusional ways. You're making the exact same ways of testing. There's something called the ABCs. The ABCs in psychology. Anything but Christianity. So thank heaven, Snake. You got this one right. Absolutely. There's a militancy against Christianity and that's because of something called action fusion. The action fusion is basically the following. It's taking scripture. It's understanding that Jesus said you lusted with your eye, gouge it out. It's basically equating the thought with the actual action. Obviously a misinterpretation was Jesus literally telling all his disciples physically gouge out your eye. So basically, you're just ripping scripture out of context. And that's how you're trying to get to this position. That's why right there. Psychiatry and psychology has been a big part of this. That's why right there. Psychiatry and psychology has moved away from Christianity specifically because of misinterpretation of scripture. And yet how interesting in the last five years, the first question you're supposed to ask as a psychologist when somebody comes into your room is, are you a spiritual person? That's a terrible question because it explains. Mental health, holistic. Better than any mental health should not be based on allegory and metaphor. I have a question for Jason or Snake or whoever wants to take this. Okay. And just answer me this honestly. I want you to answer, if we were to eliminate religion from the world, do you think that people will become more independent thinkers as a whole? Depends on the mechanism of getting rid of it. If I just pressed a button and brainwashed everyone. Do I think people would become more independent thinkers? Sure. I'll say yes. How's that? Well, the psychological studies of Milgram's authority test. Are you guys familiar with this? No. Snake, are you familiar with this? I don't think so. So when Milgram did this test, basically it was to see if people would take destructive orders from authority figures if given. Yeah. And are you familiar with the results in terms of religiosity? I don't remember. So basically what happened was people who took this test from Milgram, if they were going to obey orders from an authority figure or not, and basically zap somebody who didn't deserve it, the most compelling evidence or indicator of if somebody would actually fall through with this test was not religiosity, but rather their inherent levels of suspiciousness. So somebody who is predetermined to be more suspicious is already more likely to be resistant to authority figures. And you could argue that this is cause birth or this is caused from environment, whatever. But this was considered the strongest indicator, far more than religiosity. And in the meantime, in the spectrum of religiosity, extremely religious people were more likely to resist the authority figures compared to moderately religious people and anti-theist people who identified it as anti-theistic were more likely to resist both positive and negative authority instructions. Sorry about that. Because they have a different authority, they'd kill someone if their God told them to do so. More religious people were shown to be less accepting of authority than moderately religious people. So their authority is God. It doesn't matter. So that actually puts them at a higher authority compared to a person on Earth, which might, for example, hint at why the most destructive dictatorships in the 20th century have all been anti-theist ones. They put themselves as a God. Once they try to eradicate an outside figure that gives you an internal locus of control and tries to control you directly. But that's your religion too. You're just citing the 20th century. How about if we go back 2,000 or 3,000 years, we have extensive numbers of societies where they're theistically dominated societies that have killed millions and millions of people. Once again, you could also say the same thing about people who drink water. I'm making a direct analogy to what you're talking about. You're the one that made the argument that most of the dictators and those in control of societies were anti-theist, but you're only choosing, this is kind of a cherry picked aspect, just like cherry picking one study. If we had multiple studies that assessed what were the likelihood of people who were religious that were not religious, whether they would become more independent thinkers. I don't think one study alone, I'm not sure if the Milgram study actually validates what you're saying, but if we looked at the vast set of literature on that topic, do you think that people who are not religious are not independent thinkers? Would be less independent thinkers than religious people? Is that correct? I think that no one's an independent thinker. That's not an answer to the question. I'm so sorry. That's not an answer to the question though. I was just trying to say between those two positions, do you think that individuals who are less religious or not religious would be, or individuals who are religious that became non-religious, they would become more independent in their thinking or they would not? If you believe in a particular philosophy to the point where you're shutting out everything and thinking in black and white terms, it doesn't matter if you're anti-theistic, Christian, Muslim, anything, you're the same. I agree. If you can't keep an open mind, you can't keep an open mind. Anti-theism in general, the advocacy for a particular elimination of religion, this is dogmatic. No, no, no, no, no. Well, that's not my position. My position essentially that the religion does more harm than good. I'm not suggesting that we take militant action against religion. I'm not saying that we tell people that they can't do what they should be able to do if they want to practice their religion. I'm fully in favor of that. I just think from an epistemological perspective that people who practice religion, that aspect ends up causing more harm than good. And there are ways to mitigate that, but I'm not in favor of the experience and actions of every single religious person and quantify it. Well, but this goes back to your statement about not being able to pinpoint what a theist is. I thought that was a little bit of a hedge there because we're generally just saying that the concept of theism is belief in a God. There are derivations around that, obviously. We're talking about belief in a supernatural being that is considered God. That's a very generalistic statement. You can have all kinds of positions around that, but that's generally what we're talking about with a theist. And you could distinguish between theism and theism, but in this instance, a God that intervenes in the world. I'm sure Stuart would. That's part of his belief that God intervenes in our world. Yeah. I'm just as much defending Allah as any other Abrahamic faith. Is that what your point is? Obviously, I'm coming at it from more the Christian understanding of things. But they're mutually independent of the Christian understanding of things. But they're mutually exclusive. You can't do that. They both believe the other is damned to hell, and that's the irony of why secular nations are more successful because it's less religious control. Once again, correlation, not causation. That is causation. That's not even true, either. But even if it wasn't causation, it doesn't matter. It does matter. You can show that theocracies are the cause of religious suppression. So that is causation. That is the cause of oppression. Whether or not a country is religious is not going to protect them in one way and it's not going to put them more predisposed in one way. Secular nations are just as likely to exploit people. People exploit people. It just so happens that if we look at all the nations of the world, the ones that are the most oppressive tend to be the ones that are ultra religious. Why don't you look at the Chinese hate crimes? Okay, but fair enough. But guess what? All of the countries, if we took a mass amount we would determine that most of them were theocratic. You would agree. There are situations where countries have dictatorial authoritarian regimes. That's true. But many of them are theocratic. We're not saying that people are theocratic across the world. We're not saying atheism will get rid of all violence. We're saying that there is an extra layer of violence from religious ideas that demand violence. Plus, on top of that, the religious idea that God demands it or God wills it makes it harder to push off of those ideas and harder to progress past them because it's written in stone. It is the word of God. It makes it harder to discuss. Religious fundamentalists, typically we think, oh, that sounds really bad, and they're all bad. No, it depends on what the fundamental is. If it's ISIS beheading Christians, it's not too good. If it's in 2006, when that angry milkman, because of his daughter, lack of child that he did have, went into the Amish school and shot up all the kids. And what did the Amish parents do? Not only did they forgive him, they invited him over. They welcomed him in with open arms and forgave him in this crazy kind of way. The fundamental was the cross. You sacrifice and forgive no matter what. So it depends on what the fundamental is and that is that. That's the definition of fundamental. Yeah, I still haven't gotten an answer for whether it's good to have happiness based on delusion. Whether or not religion is a delusion. I want an answer. Assertions without evidence, I will give you answers that have no evidence either. I'm not going to get an answer to this. You're just saying delusions. What do you mean by delusions? The definition of delusion. I'm saying you can cut religion out of this. That's the definition of delusion. A delusion is a false belief. A false belief. If you keep saying it, I want to hear what is the definition of a delusion and how do you know the Christian God is a delusion? A false belief held without changing one's mind despite evidence to the contrary. I've changed my mind multiple times. On the existence of God. First time was in college. So you did believe. Total strong man and a ridiculous claim. So you're not going to answer the question. I've asked you five times. A way to answer this is to say, Stuart, could you change your mind about God? Yes. So in the future, you could not believe in God? Yes. Correct. Well, most people don't take that position. Totally false. That is a hasty generalization. You're taking it out of key proof. You're taking out of it. You're changing. Who are you to say that most people take a certain position and then argue? Strong man. Stuart, you're 100% right. He's making a straw man. You're saying that to a pastor who's passed her different churches and been to seminaries. I'm impressed that you actually said that. Check out Hebrews chapter nine. You're absolutely right. Some denominations and sects believe that once saved, always saved. But for you to actually say 100% No, what I'm saying is that the engagement in religion has dogmatic aspects to it. That people who become religious are much more inclined to stay religious and to say, there is no way that I could ever see not believing in God. There are fringe outliers. I would agree with that. But the majority, if I were to say, is it ever possible that I would say that God, that you would ever say God doesn't exist? I know in my heart that God exists. Jason, do you have any evidence that atheists are more likely to convert into religiosity compared to religious people converting to another religion? If so, I'd like to see it. Do I have any evidence? It's faster growing. Actually, saying you just contradicted everything that Jason said. What's your question? If you're trying to prove that atheism is faster growing, that shows that religious people often do switch. Well, look, just because there is, that's from a statistically, statistically not true because you could have an increase in people who are becoming atheists and that could be increasing because we have a very small number of atheists but we have a huge number of people that are religious. So ultimately that could be very small numbers of people who are religious that are actually switching and still have a large growth of atheism. Atheism is like very small percentage in like at least the United States. I don't know why that is, by the way. As we get more technological and more brilliant, why is atheism decreasing? Because Islam is increasing. I know why. Because Islam is increasing. I know why it is. I just think it's extremely bizarre that Jason and Snake are trying to talk about an experience of religiosity that they've never actually gone through. I can tell from being within religious communities that it ebbs and flows. I agree with that. We're constantly dogmatic. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying you're constantly dogmatic. I'm not saying that. I will say this, GT. I will struggle with faith. Because it's very hard to believe. You straw man, ECP. You're implying that I didn't have any sense of religiosity, like changes in religion. I was religious at one point. I was born and raised Lutheran, baptized, was a Catholic, a member of my church. My daughter was baptized when I was younger. I have had a change of heart in that respect. I feel like I have a good comparison between the two. I'm agreeing with you guys. I'm a scientist. I think that it's unreasonable to believe in God. How do you get human rights from science? How do I get human rights from science? It's purely logical. You don't have human rights with theism. Again, like God has saved to God who doesn't give you any reasons. OK. That is a huge stereotype and a huge generalization. Sure. It literally says that in the Bible. Other religions might equate relationship to be more of a father. Some might say you don't even have a relationship to God whatsoever. In the world of ideas, we have an unlimited shopping cart that we can choose from and we can personalize and pick according to our own wishes. and straw manning them. And Thiesin puts a block in choosing that because it puts people's minds in a stuck position of this is the word of God. How can you say it's a stuck position if it's constantly changing internally? You don't know everyone's internal experience. Allow me to clarify because I'm agreeing with you guys that people change their religious positions. Doubt is a huge part of religion because it's really hard to believe because there's no evidence. But what I was actually saying is it just makes it harder to change your mind. It's just another layer. So if you have, I'm not saying religious people don't change their minds. I'm saying it's an extra layer of reason not to change your mind. And we know for a fact that the aspects of deconversion, the issues of us against them, like religions who are like, it's us against the world. The heathens creates the separation aspects and the deconversion process can certainly be harmful as well because people get separated from their families. I don't have a good relationship with my family because they're extremely religious. They see me as a heathen. They don't want to have anything to do with me. Those things cause stress to people and can cause harm. I'm really sorry that you've experienced that, but that's not universal. Down here, he goes to an Ivy League college and he said to me, hey, look, the Christian faith has a lot of evidence, but I cannot ultimately accept it. He said this after we went through about 10 different arguments. He said, I cannot accept it because both of my parents are atheists and I cannot look them in the eye when I go home tonight and honestly say, hey, I'm actually even considering the Christian faith. So that cuts both ways. Absolutely. That's sociology of knowledge. That's the pressure that we all get no matter what the position from the outside, from our social groups. The one thing that I wanted to bring up is that we're kind of all over the board here, but from a philosophical perspective, there are specific arguments around anti-theism. Like one I didn't hear an answer to was the issue of privacy, that in a world where God exists, God knows everything about you. There is no aspect of privacy. If I value privacy, that's a bad thing. Once again, all of these beliefs are totally optional. Going back to my core introduction in the first place, I can't really believe that every human being is God, a piece of God within them. So that's basically saying that I don't have any privacy for myself. You have no idea what people believe and that changes constantly. So with God comes an understanding that there is also you have worth no matter what. So you look at something like 13 reasons. As a therapist, there was a cult following there and literally suicide was glorified. There absolutely was no place for God. There was no place for understanding of this life may actually not be your own. You're actually perhaps created for something more by a God where you have an eternal existence. Basically, kids were getting stuck in contagion and clusters in such a way where it was valorized to commit suicide because it was you determined your worth. You determined, hey, if I get this depressed and think this way about myself, ultimate freedom, you guys talked about a lot about freedom, then ultimately I can do whatever I want and I can kill myself and that's fine. So he did not want this position of self destructive behavior, which is it's part of freedom. And when God comes in here as this cosmic policeman who's your best friend, supposedly who you can't even see, at least that God says, this life is not your own. Ultimately, I do give you self worth. I even died for you. I love you that much. For example, the show was not makes all the difference rather than, hey, you're just a bag of chemicals. You're just a fizzing can. And ultimately you do whatever you want with your life because you created yourself. Nice. Nice. The show is not. Most of the characters are depicted as religious and the show also depicted suicide as an extremely bad thing. That was the entire point of the show. Oh, really? Really? Why did you didn't watch it? The people leave Netflix because of it. What show? Because they thought it was glorifying suicide. Bro, don't don't tell me I'm the whole thing is about how the suicide harms people. The whole thing is about how the suicide was a harmful act. Wait, why are we even talking about this trash TV drama? Because he's talking about stuff he knows nothing about. He's just. Like Atheist, theist, whatever. We should all just agree to take that show and throw it in the bin. We're going with Jason's point on privacy and I'm connecting it with worth and value. And you fail. So if you're the God, obviously invading your privacy who created you, then it also gives you a level of worth of dignity that says, hey, in the Roman Empire, slaves were actually equivalent to their masters. Hey, women and children were equivalent to men. Hey, men, you couldn't have, for example, a mistress. You couldn't have two wives. No, all of a sudden. Oh, hey, you couldn't dump actually infanticide. You couldn't dump babies on trash heaps. All of a sudden, no, this supposed decrease in privacy gave us an opportunity where a God came into the fold and said, everybody has equal worth and dignity. Now the oppressors cannot oppress the oppressed. But this belief, then you just do your history for all you just totally refuse aspects of everything steward is saying is actually 100 percent correct. And I'd like to actually your common argument that it couldn't be further from the truth. Religion, which is that it oppresses women. Actually, if you look through the course of history on how women's rights have evolved before the chivalry movement, women were basically just simply treated as objects to be battered and bartered for. However, the codified in the Bible and the Quran, the church utilized chivalry and incorporated it with into our culture, building our current understanding of romanticism. Women also received a giant increase in rights through the church within the Victorian era in the 1800s, when the church incorporated women as a vessel of godlyhood to teach their family about God, giving them intrinsic value. Women who are actually one of the helpless people of society were protected because of these dogmatic beliefs that you caught claim caused more harm than good. And this is not the only case of oppressed groups receiving leverage because of the value that texts have put on. No, the texts say the opposite. The cultural values went against the religious texts. Well, the culture was incorporating the church to promote them. That's a good point. But I just want to make one point. Galatians 328. I could go down the list of about 20 different texts. I just want to make one point and elevated women to the place of men and and three quarters of the early Christian church was female. Yeah, Jason. I didn't want to interrupt you. I'm sorry. And by the way, I think we're having a good discussion on this. I appreciate it. The only point I wanted to make is that we're kind of hitting on all these topics. But I just I just want to make a point that for those who are watching, who may have a more philosophical perspective that have an understanding of like the issues of value statements of axiological questions, value statements around anti-theism. The concept of anti-theism has some very specific arguments of like the ones that I was mentioning, the loss of privacy, loss of freedom, loss of autonomy, divine foreign knowledge. These are philosophical arguments that need to be provided like philosophical responses. So while I'm cool with like us talking about these other issues, I just want to make a point that I haven't I've yet to hear a refutation of these some of these issues of like a loss of privacy. I didn't really hear that, Stuart. I gave you a perfect one and you ignored it. Well, you're one. If I'm correct, yours was you essentially said, we don't know how to nail down people's views and beliefs. So therefore, that is hard to determine what privacy is to individuals. The question is, if God exists, there is no privacy. What if God is us? Like I said, so if you want to I think that's an incoherent definition. I think it's a cop out. Think your mom's an incoherent definition. You're just defining God in a manner that supports your argument. That's what you're doing. That's exactly what theism is, is defining it personally according to yourself. You don't think so completely subjective. Then I exactly are within. I don't even understand then what we're arguing about because you're just saying theism is just some subjective thing that I've come up with in my mind that everybody comes up within their own minds. And that's why you can't know it's not real. So it's just thought it's just thought forms. It's not really it's not about any actual entity. It's just about people thinking something. Correct? Well, you're valid. Your opinions are just as arbitrary and just as made up. If we have if we have a other not just as arbitrary, if they are absolutely we have a society made up of people that according to your definition of a delusion, they were all deluded. They were seeing pink bunnies. They thought that they were the king of France, that they were running around with you know, whatever that that society would not be harmful society that would not be negative consequences to that society based on their irrational viewpoints. See Stephen Evans, one of the top 100 philosophers in the U.S. out of Baylor with laugh at the statement you just made. You could say Lockhart's monster out of Scotland as well is the exact same thing as looking at and testing God. No, God has created a whole character for the universe. It's not just this bunny supposedly this pink bunny. It's a character outside of the universe that punched a hole in the space and time that came into this world. Listen to what you're saying. There's no basis for that. Lockness monster. Philosophers agree with this across the board. Jason, you got to catch up on this one, bro. There's no evidence. There's no evidence for that. Jason, I've said before about a society where they think a bunch of pink bunnies are running around and all that stuff and everybody believes it. We got no reason to believe that we're not living in that society right now. That's just a hard solipsism question. That's just like, oh, we could be in the matrix. Exactly. So all we can do is go off of the information that we have and experience with God, so be it. We can only go off the information that we have. You're correct. We can only use our reasons. We don't have in a way of saying, where does our reason come from? We don't, we can't do that. All we can do is use our intelligibility and reason to evaluate the world that we're in. And guess what? When we do that, we don't see any evidence of a God. We don't see any evidence. We have our own perception, sure. But according to that state that I brought up in the very beginning, 33% of Americans say that God talks to them directly. That's one out of three people that you would meet on the street. So you're telling one out of three people to not trust their own perceptions simply because you yourself doubt it? No, no, no. It's because he says different things to different people that we can prove that at least most of them are delusions. Yeah, I say different things to different people too. That doesn't mean I don't talk to them, but mutually exclusive contradictory things. This is complete. I can't even believe you're saying that. How can you say they're mutually exclusive and contradictory when we have entire theists once again? Do you know anything about the history of Mormonism? Mormonism teaches that every member of the church can communicate directly with God, and they kept splintering over and over and over because they kept, because God kept telling different people that they were now the only prophet of all of Mormonism. Yeah, people disagree with each other. Wow. That's such strong evidence that God doesn't exist. It's evidence that these voices are delusions or lies. First of all, we're not trying to prove that God doesn't exist. I mean, this debate is anti-theism rational. So we're talking about the potential harm or good of theism, belief in a God. And so you're making the argument that a third of Americans walk around and think that God is talking to them, and your position is that viewpoint is not dangerous. It's beneficial. Well, actually, when you're talking about the concept of beneficials, it has been proven that out of all religious groups within America, can you guess which one is the least happy and suffers from the most oppression? I'm sure you can. I'm sure you can. What do you think it is? Religious group? Or are you talking about atheists? I'm talking about atheists and how did you know that? Because there's statistics that show atheists have an overall happiness for other things as well, such as hobbies or economic activity. And it shows that atheists are more likely, this is according to Pew Research, more likely than Christians to say they feel a sense of wonder from the universe. So there are statistics for some things that atheists feel more happy about. And you know what? And it doesn't mean that if the truth makes you sad, is it better to believe the truth or a delusion? Is it good or bad to believe a delusion? Is it not the concept of beneficial when I slide to it? As a scientist, I'm not really keen on cherry picking one study to support your views. Okay. If there's a body of literature that supports something, I'm certainly willing to look at that. Okay. So what is the position that you're taking that there is? I'm taking the exact sentence that you said, which is would these beliefs be beneficial? And I'm showing that they are. So your position is that as an example, a third of the people in the United States think that God talks to them, that that is beneficial and that the science supports that. Yeah. I don't believe it. 20%, look this one up. 20% of atheists say that prayer helps them when they suffer praying to God, not just Buddhist meditation. This is exactly what I was saying. This is exactly what I was saying. This is exactly what I was saying about before about irrational beliefs can have beneficial outcomes on the show. This is the same thing that I said, maybe you didn't catch the beginning of my opening. I know I understand. Maybe you were doing some dancing and you weren't listening. What I actually said was that the long-term implications of irrational beliefs have negative consequences and that short-term, you can have beneficial outcomes of irrational beliefs. I guess you're trying to say that irrational beliefs can be beneficial in the long-term if that's the case. Sweetheart, you've never proved that completely inappropriate. Look, if I called you sweetheart, that would be inappropriate. So don't call me sweetheart. I'm sorry I offended you. Well, I'm just saying if I called you that, then you would be offended. I'm sure. So I'm just saying don't do that. My only point is that again, long-term benefits of irrational beliefs have negative consequences and this is just purely from the basis of we want to know as many true things as possible, as many as few false things as possible, that having true knowledge about our world in the long-term is beneficial for us. And if we have incorrect views of our world, that leads to a ripple effect of negative consequences. And I mean, I can't see how you can't see that outcome. It lowers our standards for what reality is. So if you're saying that the standard for religion is okay, then that opens up to us, opens us up to the standard to believe literally anything and that's bad. We should have a filter. There is a filter. It's called the evolution of culture, which I've discussed directly with you, Snake, in our own personal debate, which shows that religions change over time to adapt to the culture at hand and to bring the most benefit. Beliefs that do not benefit, cultures do not survive. Yeah, that proves my point because religions bend to culture begrudgingly, not the other way around. So then how can you say that it is apparently a bad thing when it's adaptable? Because it slows that progress. And I'm not saying that there are many, many instances where religion in fact has hastened, has fastened progress. No, because I was going to use that example, because that was not the result of any scripture or any tradition within. But it was the utilization of religion to affect a culture more quickly, which could have been done through the library system. It was a theocracy. They use the government and the church. Oh, well. The actual scriptures said something else. So all that did was delay those cultural changes that could have been done anyway. I think I've effectively proven that religion is one of the greatest motivators and has been one of the greatest motivators of all time in order to bring people into more positive actions or negative. So what do you do with that? Because not all Muslims support terrorism, but the Quran says terrorize the infidel. So how are you going to sit there and say that they're blameless and say that? Yeah, they're defending. YouTube stars also say that we should kill women because they don't give people like, you know, sexual gratification. You know, there are incels on YouTube as well. Should we ban YouTube because we say it causes more harm than good? I would say an incel religion is harmful. I don't know what your point with that would be. The point is that you can find things within certain media and certain elements of our culture and that are going to be harmful, but that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bath water. But all of the beneficial aspects you're talking about with religion can be done without religion and can be done more efficiently without religion. All the bad stuff that you said can be done without religion has been done more effectively without religion. But it's the greatest motivator for both these good and bad ideas, but they uniquely do bad ideas better than anything else. I'm going to make a completely different name and I think that the greatest motivator for evil is tribalism. Does religion cause people to be tribalistic? Absolutely. It inflames it. Is it going to matter if people are not religious in terms of tribalism? No, people will still find in and out groups no matter what this is. But adding religion adds more. There's more religious division. Get rid of religion, you'll still have tribals. Yeah, but less. You'll have less. I agree that tribalism is a core component and they're not mutually or they are mutually, they're not fully mutually exclusive. But like you can have, certainly have tribalism in areas that are not religious. But the insidious aspect of religion is that it is a belief system that involves your immortal soul. It involves like what happens after you die. It's one of the most pervasive brainwashing techniques possible. And as such, that belief system, that tribalism is even more extensive. Like religious tribalism is much more pervasive than like political tribalism. Somebody is much more likely, I think, to say, you know what, maybe the Republicans actually have a right view on that, or maybe the Democrats actually might have a good point, as opposed to Christians saying, you know what, maybe I should become a Muslim or maybe the Muslims have a good position on this. I think that the separation, that tribalistic nature, or even, and that may be even a bad example, it's more like Christianity versus a heathen, somebody who doesn't believe in God whatsoever. Like I think that that is much more insidious. But I would agree with UCP that tribalism, that component, they overlap in a Venn diagram, but they don't completely overlap with religion. Yeah, there's a reason we can't allow religions to be in power, in government power, because they'll start oppressing the other religions. Hold on, hold on. So first of all, the identity politics and getting your ultimate identity from a political position. I deal with thousands of folks here. I'm going to tell you right now, that one has leapfrogged religion easily in terms of 6% of Twitter ultimately monopolizes 95% of Twitter content. And that is not religiously based. It's a politically based tribalism. And what would Jonathan Haidt say? He would say that every single person, no matter atheist, Christian, Republican, Democrat, are all self-righteously motivated. And so everybody's going after their own tribe. Now, my whole point, and I'm different from CS on this, is I would actually agree in the last 10 minutes with Snake and Jason, a ton of what you said. I mean, I dated a woman from upstate New York who was part of, let's just say, a tribe of fundamentalist Christianity. And I saw all the things that you guys just mentioned. But I've also been exposed to tremendous, not liberal Christianity, but more central Christianity that comes to you. It really focuses just on the main tenants and main core, what 34% of the world is actually acknowledged for, which understands these things like freedom, identity, hope, in a way where it's not ultimately oppressive. It's not ultimately a matter of tribalism. No, you see, the most welcoming foundations of Christianity were forged on forgiveness, on grace, on love, on egalitarianism. And you see that when Christianity is done right through someone like Jesus on the cross. Now, if you don't have that, then all this breaks down. And religiosity, yes, that's also in the DSM, causes all different types of issues. So that's where CS and I might disagree some, and I would agree more so perhaps with you guys. But it's important to clarify that issue. But people get along anyway. You don't need religion. Yes, and they do not get along. Religion for Atheists. Read it by Alayne de Patan, one of the top atheist scholars right now. Read Religion for Atheists and how far he says atheists are behind religious in terms of how to forge communities, how to deal with things like envy, how to deal with things like strife, how to deal with things like breakdown in the family. Trust me, atheism is a long way behind. Read your own atheistic profits. I actually agree with that, but we're going to jump into the Q&A. Okay, I actually agree with that. But that doesn't mean that there aren't secular ways to do that. The atheist community has just neglected those ways because they've freed themselves from religion and then kind of just stopped there. And I think that's a mistake. I don't know what that means. Freeze yourself from religion. I just like delusion. So many of these things are thrown out there. Again, it goes back to my to my hitch point. It's just such a clear way, you know, assertions without evidence. Hitchens. Hitchens. Hitchens is a major anti-theist, though, just so you know. Yes. Yes. That's why I'm quoting him for you guys. All right, good. I'm trying to help you guys out. All right, good. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We're going to jump into the Q&A, folks. So thanks so much for all of your questions. And one is saying, folks, if you have not yet shared a modern day debate, we encourage you. It's a great way if you have a friend where you're like, oh, yeah, we love talking about these things all the time. They'd probably enjoy this debate. That share button is down below. I use it all the time. You can just grab the link. You can send it through Facebook Messenger text message. You name it and you can enjoy it with somebody else, get their thoughts on it. Or maybe you thought your side was most persuasive tonight and you just want someone to hear two sides represented in a debate and for them to hear your side being more persuasive. Well, you can share it for that reason too. Thanks for your question. This one coming in from Made by Jim Bob says, Snake, is scientific progress a good thing and can that claim be verified scientifically? Yes. Depends on your definition of good, which I can go into. But I don't. And then they said, I don't want to take up that much time. The idea that it's a science or namely that the idea that scientific progress is a good thing. They're saying, can that claim be verified scientifically? Namely, that it's a good thing. Yeah, you can look at quality of life improved by scientific progress, etc. etc. This one coming in from Conturion for 20 says, as basic consciousness may be God in parentheses as some ancient faiths assert, how is it rational to deny that possibility as it is still unknown to science? I think that might have been for you, Snake and Jason, but I'm not sure. I mean, the this concept of like, have not knowing something isn't necessarily proof or suggest evidence for a God. I mean, certainly, like we don't know everything about consciousness if people want to make an argument that consciousness has some supernatural or external association. I mean, we don't have any evidence that would suggest that's the case. We have a lot of evidence that consciousness is associated with your brain chemistry that consciousness goes away when you die. So until such a time as we have confined evidence that would suggest that's even possible. I think it's reasonable to conclude that any aspects of like consciousness existing somewhere else are unreasonable. As a scientist, I'm not unwilling to consider that. But I would have to first we'll see a methodology of evaluating that and see the evidence for it. No, we just lack data. So it seems like a leap of faith. It's not a leap of faith. Yeah, I'm looking at the evidence and making some conclusions on that. But as a scientist, I'm fully willing to provisionally say, we don't fully understand that. And it can be an unknown at this point. It's not reasonable to believe something unless you have justifications such as scientific data. The fact is, when there's something that is unknown, an unknown factor, you're bound to have a belief one way or the other. Whether or not you believe it's in a higher power or not, you have to believe something. Either way is a belief. You could be unsure. This one coming in from contrarian. Now this one stupid horror energy said, isn't it the case that highly secularized countries tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates like homicide? The highest rates are seen in very religious countries like Brazil and Mexico. Stupid horror energy. I love that screen name. She's always in debate cafe. Is that that's probably directed to me and Stuart, right? Yes. Okay. I'll kind of reiterate the point that I was making during the debate and then hand it over to Stuart, which is that once again, correlation is not causation. I have proven effectively that people are more religious in times of strife and in times of confusion. Therefore, they're more likely to be less religious when their society is going well. You got it. This one coming in from, do appreciate. Unless Stuart, if you had anything to add. No, no, go ahead, James. Yeah. Made by Jim Bob says, if our behaviors, thoughts are just consequences of natural material processes, wouldn't theism and anti-theism be mere responses to the environment? If so, anti-theism has no teleological upper hand. Yeah, they would be responses to the environment, but that doesn't make it good. That was one of the naturalistic fallacies that you said, cinematic psychology. Just because it's part of our psychology naturally doesn't mean that it's good. It doesn't mean that it's irrational, though. Like I might, for example, have a biological tendency to see the color red or see the color white or see whatever that doesn't necessarily mean that those colors are inherently even there. That's a psychology. Does that mean my perceptions are irrational? No, but something like a phobia is defined as an irrational thing, even though it's part of your nature. But if you were to take actions based on your sense perceptions that can be flawed and you're like, I can't possibly be wrong, I think that I'm seeing the color fuzzuzile and that's my perception of it. And the doctors are like, wait a second, you've got an issue. You're like, well, I'm justified in making decisions based on my sense perceptions. It's therefore I'm rational. I don't think that that's, I don't think that is rational. I'm 100% in agreeance with you. And so is the DSM five, when these beliefs cause destructive tendencies, like if you have a religious belief, like you think God is telling you to shoot people, then it is in fact a delusion. But the question, according to the DSM five, that we are referencing here in terms of what is irrational, does not contend that religious beliefs are inherently irrational in and of themselves, we have to look at the effects that they cause. Okay, that religious belief that tells me to jump off a plane. Yeah, that's a rational. Okay, that was that was asking that question. The whole issue that he's getting at is scientific naturalism comes down to things like survival, the fittest, but ultimately it's after survival. His point is, just from a scientific naturalistic perspective, somebody like the head of the human genome, Francis Collins, for example, would say nothing about scientific naturalism gets after truth and reason. He said it makes more sense if you had a creative rational God behind it all, that then we would seek after things like reason and truth rather than from a scientific naturalistic perspective where it's just a total leap in the dark that takes a lot of faith. Whatever God is reasoning with exists, whether there's a God or not, and we also have access to that reason. So how do you get your from scientific naturalism? How do you get seeking after reason and truth? You can describe it with mathematics, with plain language. Where do you get reason and seeking after truth? When from a scientific naturalistic perspective, it's all after survival. It's that's not naturalistic perspective. What do you mean? I don't know what you're asking. What do you ask? I don't know. Well, why are you assuming that naturalism is getting at in terms of why are we reasoning creatures? Why are we even seeking after truth and having this debate? When from a scientific naturalistic perspective, you just go on and on and there's no ultimate understanding of why do we take this leap to actually even have this discussion when, if we're just simply neurons bouncing back and forth, we have no ultimate creativity that is actually directed from a scientific naturalistic perspective. Then why even have this discussion? Obviously, it's a Christian who's asking that question. Reasoning helps with survival. That's the evolutionary reason. Okay, but again, that's completely broken off because there's no connection. Evolutionary psychologists have not found the connection yet between truth seeking and survival from through the evolutionary process. They have not found that yet. So that is a naturalism of the gaps many philosophers like Alvin Planninger would say. Even bacteria have. Naturalism of the gaps is totally fallacious. We have huge amounts of his scientists. We don't really know exactly the answer here. So let's just make up a scientific one. What do you mean? It's funny to let me I think you're mean defensive. Because ultimately, you're just galloping. You're just galloping. You're just nervous. You're filibustering. You're filibustering. Yes, I understand what you're saying. Jason, do you have a response? I want to give you a chance. Yeah, my only here's my response. My response is that to compare it to say naturalism of the gap implies that the gap that we're seeing that when we say we fill it in with naturalism that we have no evidence to suggest that unknown outcomes actually end up having naturalistic responses. But guess what? In the entire course of human history of what us using naturalistic processes, what has happened? We have an unknown outcome that we don't understand. And guess what? Over time, that unknown outcome we deduce through naturalistic processes. We never say guess what that unknown outcome? It was God. We don't have it. We have zero a priori evidence for God. That's why whether it's called God of the gaps, naturalism of the gaps. We have infinitesimal amounts of I just think you're making a false dilemma. You can either believe in science or you can have faith. That's not good. No, I'm just saying that science is the best method, methodological naturalism is the best method, best method that we have to understand our world. And they're not mutually exclusive. Well, okay, if you have another methodology to evaluate our world in that respect, you're not listening to me. You didn't hear a word I just said. What did you say? I said that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Well, one's more reliable. Yeah, but once again, they're not mutually exclusive. So you're saying that in science, we just have faith in some instances? No, I'm saying you can believe in science and have your own personal faith. Well, that is true. That is true. Yeah, sure. Okay. So basically all this stuff you're saying about, you know, believing the scientific method, faith doesn't inherently interfere with that. Well, you can look you can be you can have faith in something if you want to. I just don't think it's reasonable to conclude that I just believe in something without evidence. I don't think that's reasonable. It is a contrary method, though. We believe in stuff without evidence all the time. We believe our parents love us. We believe that the that we are intelligent. We believe that we're looking. We believe things all the time. But yeah, without evidence is stalking. This one coming in from Dupri. That relationship is just two people stalking each other all the time, then. Yeah, elusive. That's kind of hot. With regards to delusions, millions of people. Did anybody have anything? Were you about to say something, Jason? Okay, said with regards to delusions, millions of people are colorblind. Who is delusional, the people who can see color or the people who can't? Neither. It's lacking a certain sense is not a delusion. But we can certainly test for different wavelengths. And as far as survival and truth goes, that goes back to the other thing, senses are truth-seeking mechanisms. So what if we sense God, then? Well, we need to be able to independently test that. We can do that with colors. And we know our senses can produce erroneous results. Like, we know that for a fact. And in particular, the human mind is well known that the mind looks for patterns when there are no patterns. And we'll find them when there are no patterns. And it's part of our evolutionary makeup for survival. So while we do use sense perceptions as part of like empirical, empirically evaluated evidence, we have to take that. We have to look at that very carefully, because we know that we can be wrong. And so this is the process of science of replication and the process of falsification. All of those aspects help to eliminate those incorrect sense perceptions. I'm really glad that you mentioned evolution and that these recognition of patterns is a result of evolutions of survival. If something is inherently helping us survive, then why are you asserting that it's wrong? But not everything in evolution is helping you survive. There are traits that piggyback off of other traits. So you can't always say that. Religiosity probably promotes community building in smaller tribal settings. But I mean, it may be that your brain is finding patterns and we're like, look, this is based on our evolutionary upbringing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that can be beneficial. It can have a negative consequence. And this is what we're talking about, the negative consequences of having false beliefs, of having irrational viewpoints that can result in negative outcomes. Are you trying to assert that the human course of history would have been more progressive if religion never existed whatsoever? No, no, no, I'm not. Religion might also be a no, I'm not making that argument. Religion might also be a glitch. I would like to say that it was outdated. I don't know, but I can tell you that at that certain points in history that the out the productions of or the outcomes of religion had negative consequences. We can look at like in the beginning, it may have been that religion helped to bring individuals together in societies and that had a beneficial outcome. It generated, you know, the ability to feed yourself and to protect yourself and it increased the populations. But at a certain point, with organized religions and with the onset of, you know, manipulation by people in power, utilizing religion in a brainwashing aspect, we can we've seen negative consequences. Tell me pinpoint, pinpoint the exact point in history where the negative consequences outweighed the good and that the good became irrelevant? I don't know. I don't know. I would say that right now it's has negative consequences, yes. That outweighed the good. Correct. All right, tell me why. That's what we've been talking about this whole time. And religion might also be a glitch instead of a feature because our reasoning really is not very good. We have a lot of reasoning flaws that are inherent in our biology. So that might be one of them. If something has been shown through multiple, multiple studies and throughout the course of history to be beneficial on a societal and an individual level, why are you asserting that as a glitch? Well, first of all, I disagree with your conclusion that the mass of literature would say that religion has overall been beneficial in all these areas. I don't think that's the case, but I do think that it's not just a simple chronological assessment of saying at time point X, it has become beneficial. And before time point X, it was or it was beneficial. And after it was detrimental. I think it's a lot that the interactions are a lot more complex and dynamic. Exactly. So I agree. But overall, I think that we total up this. My view is that overall religion has detrimental outcomes. And I think that it's reasonable to conclude that based on what we've been looking at. Now, obviously you don't feel that way, but I would say that there are negative consequences to religion. And I also say that there are positive consequences to religion. And I think that there's theology without religion. Isn't it reasonable to be worried about these negative consequences? I think that human beings can make everything suck. This one coming in from do appreciate your question. Fernandez T says there cannot be physical evidence of God, or else it's not faith. No, then says I believe there is proof, but I cannot prove it. Spiritual proof is all over the place. But we can't prove that either in my humble opinion. Thoughts? Yeah, I think that's there is a distinction between faith and something you can demonstrate. And I if you can't demonstrate it, it's not reasonable. So this one coming in from bitter truth says to believers, can you prove me the God exists that God exists? And what about God is doing scientific mistakes in Bible? Yeah, so no, we can't prove that God exists. Some apologists like Lee Strobel say, yeah, you can prove. No, you can't prove on either end. You definitely can't prove through a scientific test tube that God ultimately exists. Now, it gets back to the second half of this question that I think was getting at in terms of the misinterpretation and Snake brought it up early on in terms of the young earth. Well, Augustine and many of the church fathers would take science and then they would take the Bible and they would say, let's interpret scripture as honestly as we possibly can, while also looking at things like Aristotelian logic and how do we have to ultimately up earth that in areas that it's wrong? And we'll look at scripture at the same time. It also took science for Augustine and other church fathers who said, you know what, wait a second, these scientific experiments make sense. Perhaps the Bible is trying to say something else. For example, 6000 years, that's why the majority of Christians do not take the earth. It's just 6000 years. No, we believe Yom Dei, these other Hebrew terms are not pointing to the 24 hour scale of things or looking at the Toledo saying we can actually count up all the years back to supposedly 6000. No, you have to take science. You have to take scripture. You have to interpret honestly. But then you also look at things like science in order to understand, okay, how did God prepare this place in such a way where we can get ultimate answers to the hardest questions? Okay, I'm glad you said that. That was good. I appreciate you mentioning that you're not a young earth creationist, that you acknowledge science in respects. You like me more now, Jason? I do. I love you, Stuart. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Joe Schwartz says for both, what would it take to change your mind? I don't have a mind. I have no opinion whatsoever. Actually, that's actually a good question. I'm taking the anti-theist as rational position, but I certainly can see a reasonable position of being a pro-theist atheist. I think that this is again, we have a position that we're arguing. I know CPS don't admit to your interlocutors that their position is valid, but this is a difficult question. And I think that we're debating nuances and that these two things are like this. So I think that the other side has brought us some good positions. So, that's from last time. That feedback that I gave for Debate Cafe, we were scoring debate as a sport. It was not an open discussion, so I wanted to clarify why I said that. Okay, cool. Yeah. You got it. And want to mention, folks, Snake and Cinematic Psychology have a debate channel of their own. That is linked in the description. We always want you, folks, to have the freedom to choose where you want to listen to debate. So, if you enjoy debates, they're at Debate Cafe, which is linked in the description. More power to you. That is, like I said, we want to give you the options to listen to debates at every place that we can, even if they're not a modern-day debate. This one coming in from Big Thang, Bruce Wayne, says anti-theism exists because there's no verifiable evidence for any God. If there were no God claims, there'd be no such thing as anti-theism. It exists because theists lack evidence for their own claims. Yeah, sure. So, I would encourage him to look at what Richard Dawkins is being shaken to his very bottom of his feet by right now. And that's the teleological argument. 10 by 10 to almost a 17th power now are the chances that somehow there is life permitting elements here on the surface. When you look at constants, you look at those types of variables, you look at things like gravity, how everything just so clearly was set up. The monkeys messed with the dials, as some say, in such a way that somehow humans can live on this planet. So, to the 17th power now is actually officially beyond even human comprehension that we can even, beyond our wildest imaginations, that we could actually exist on this planet. I don't know any honest, great-minded atheist. I don't know, it's a relative claim who has not said to me, hey, yeah, actually the teleological, from an atheistic perspective, actually is very difficult with all the evidence that's still coming out now. In terms of how in the world did this place seem so clearly adapted in such a way where we could exist? You got it there. But good luck answering that one because it is hard if there is no God. It's not hard. Yeah. It's not hard. It's not hard to answer. Exactly. I need to say it, but what's the probability that life occurred here? I'll tell you what it is. It's one because we see- It's very small. No, we see life. We have life. So what you're saying is that there's this infinitesimal probability, but we exist, but that's because of God. Nope. I'm saying there's a way better chance that something, call it a God, call it whatever you want, immaterial, physical, something exists outside of space and time in a way that created this place for us in a way that's obviously tremendously adaptable in a way where we can actually exist and survive rather than this just came about by chance. But that's just kicking the can down to God. How do I know all the cosmological constants had to align right for God to produce himself? But there are several cosmological constants that could be tweaked to make better conditions for life. There's no counterfactual probability for what the constants are. We don't know whether they even could be different. So God is outside of space and time, and you need something or someone outside of space and time in order to eventually start space and time. And that's, I would posit God. If you would try and go from the multiverse explanation of things or that God is infinite, or excuse me, the material is infinite in some kind of way, well then you could have an argument. Why wouldn't you just say you just don't know? Whether it's a God or something like it, or the Easter Bunny? No, that we just don't know. I mean, it seems like the most realistic outcome has naturalistic explanations because everything that we know has a naturalistic explanation. But once again, you're saying, well, you have an unknown, and because it's so improbable, it must be God. Everything we know has a naturalistic explanation? Yeah. How about love? Yeah, biochemical processes. You're going to tell your wife that? That she's just a biochemical, this is biochemical feeling? My wife's a psychologist in his study of neuroscience extensively. So you guys just talk about it, it's just that if you remove oxytocin and jack with different chemicals, then ultimately you can't love. And so love is just this clearly tangible thing. Yeah, it feels the same either way. Whether it's a spiritual mumbo jumbo, or whether it's called biochemicals. You can't just settle on a naturalistic explanation of the universe, because that's what's tested here in a science lab, here on this planet. But that's all we know about. We're in America. Zoom out. We're on a rock flying through outer space. And who knows how fast? I mean, you keep talking to the scientific mindset that no other culture around the entire world buys into, like you buy into. It's this kind of elitist type of thinking where, you know, we got the scientific method all figured out guys, don't you worry. No, that's exactly what we're not saying that. And there's a type of humility around science and saying that we have, no, we do not have naturalistic explanations to every single question. Give us a study that can test the way that the soul feels love. And we can talk about that, but we can't because we don't have any data. Exactly. You want to talk about it in terms of testing. You don't know exactly. You want me on your ground. Again, you want me on your ground. If I grow back a finger in the lab, how are you? Let's call it a miracle. Let's call it a miracle, right? How are you going to test for it? You would never call it a miraculous event because you cannot test for miraculous events. That's scientifically. That's true. You're basically asking to make it tangible according to your own logic, basically asking him to conform into your own worldview. What I'm saying is that if you don't have a methodology of evaluating your worldview in the sense of supernaturalism, etc. then I don't know why you would believe that. You're just believing it because you think that the other thing is so not possible that it must be this thing. It has a methodology. You just reject it. Well, what's his methodology? Religious. Philosophical historical question. It's not an actual. Christianity is based primarily off of philosophy and history, whether the resurrection occurred or not. Not based off of science. There's science within it, but it's not primarily based off of science. Outside of process. We talk about origin when it comes to God. Philosophical question. We talk about history when it comes to the resurrection. If the resurrection didn't occur, there's no Christianity. Nobody has to worry about it. When is your methodology just keep talking about testing scientifically? We're not saying we're not studying outside of science. We are not saying you have to use reasoning. You just have to do it to be rational. Again, there's historical evidence outside of just your own type of scientific reasoning. But then it's not rational. Testing. Because it doesn't conform to your own certain methodology. It's not. Testing is rational, but you're complaining about being asked to test your claims. Last time I checked, there's not a supernatural methodology. So Bill Gates talked about removing this part of your brain. He said we can remove a part of the brain and religion would be gone forever. The point is that there is historical evidence outside of that part of your brain. Whether Bill's right or not, hey, maybe he is right. I mean, we talk about love like this. He could be right about religion. There could be just a certain neuron in there or a full lobotomy might take away this type of religious understanding of things in our minds. Sure. But again, you would still have to deal with, is there historical evidence outside of that or not? That's why I'm not just talking about religion as a philosophy in terms of some type of Hindu ritual. No, I'm talking about historical event here of the resurrection. You keep referring to historical evidence, but that's a very controversial thing to involve. Historical evidence from a scientific perspective. I mean, historians aren't scientists. I'm not talking about science. Okay, but first of all, I know James got another question, but the only last thing I'll say is that, again, I don't see any methodology of evaluating supernatural outcomes. That's fine. We talk mainly philosophy and then history. You've got to branch out. Get outside of just science. Science is important. It's very important. But don't lose the humanity and everything else. This one from Mitchell thinks so much says, Taylor slash snake quote unquote believes in ghost slash supernatural. Nuff said. I do believe in them in the sense that believe means I don't. Gotcha. Nice. Thanks, Malivia says no question. Love your channel, James. Thanks so much for your support and all credit to the guests. The debaters as I mentioned, folks, are the lifeblood of the channel. So they're linked down in the description box. Highly encouraging. You can learn more about their views. Jamie Russell thinks you're super sticker and Dwight thinks you're super question says it would be nice if any God actually showed up for one of these debates and defended itself and not have theists of all sorts. Let's see. It's become let's see. So I guess they're saying why isn't it in short? Why isn't it that there's not a God showing up here of these debates, Stuart? Or how do you not know that one of us is not God? Maybe one of us is. Maybe so. Good point. Any thoughts, Stuart? Otherwise having to move to the next one. It'd be nice if Jesus showed up every year. Yes, it would be. I agree with that statement. Bitter truth says super bean and don't know universe anatomy super bean like Mr. Bean. I don't know Eric Nelson. Thanks for your question says cinematic psychology. Is it okay to be gay? Great. Highly recommend. Do it. This one from stupid horror energy. She strikes again. Now she says Stuart or you know Stuart the brain can take. She doesn't really sound like that. Exorative inputs. Your argument is like saying quote don't sit on that chair. Science has proven it's mostly empty space. No. Okay, the best day. That national best seller when breath becomes air, you guys have probably seen it or read it. Paul Keithani, Ironclad Atheist, I believe from Harvard. He talked about how you could explain love from a naturalistic point of view. But then later on in his life, he actually ended up passing me of cancer at a young age. I think Redford wrote the book. He explained the intangible draw of things like sacrifice, forgiveness, human rights, love, so much of what comprised of the Christian worldview that he said I cannot deny that anymore. There's some type of intangible nature to love that we all long for that makes sense rather than what he was saying in the lab his entire life, which was oh yeah, love is just a few pieces of oxytocin bouncing around the cuddle chemical. And that's it. He said that just doesn't square with my reality. So that's where I grew up. I will say that's unique to Christianity. I'm just saying it fits into Christianity. Sure, it could be part of. Okay, this is atheism. This is anecdotal. I'm not making any broad scientific claims on this, but I have noticed that there are a number of scientists that in their old age who sense death coming on start to have irrational viewpoints. I've seen this. Again, I don't have any evidence to suggest it. Wish fulfillment. It comes later. That's why you're going to become a Christian, Jason. Don't you worry. Maybe I will. It's the ultimate crutch. I know you got something, something in the closet other than God. Yeah, yeah. I don't have skeletons in my closet. I got a graveyard in my closet. All right. This run from bitter truth says, God made earth in six days and made plants on the third day. Made sun on the fourth day. Without sun, plants can't survive. Interpretation can't satisfy. Stuart. Yeah, Genesis one verse two. I read one as poetry and two as more so historical. And so if you take one as historical, then you're going to have all different types of contradictions and questions. Number two, chapter two, makes a lot more sense from a historical perspective. So again, that gets at with this whole conversation around biblical interpretation, apocalyptic literature, historical narrative, Psalm, poetry. The list is endless. And that's why you got to read in such a way where you're being honest with the text. Gotcha. Anne, thanks very much for this question. Coming in from Richard Taylor says, name a benefit religion provides that is unique to religion. That is a really interesting question. So there have actually been studies. Let me find the one I believe it was from cognition, religion and theology that found through the monitoring of the human brain that when humans engage specifically in prayer, and this was not matched by meditation or any other psychological sort of self soothing behavior to the same degree that they experienced less stress and more well being. And the parts of their brain that lit up to express stress were dramatically reduced. And this was lasting over a long period of time. And this was significantly greater than meditation or any other self soothing practices. You got it. Thank you very much for your question. Coming in from bitter truth says if your God is powerful, why patients still need to see a physician? Why can't you pray and no need bypass to believers? Why do people keep assuming that faith and science are mutually exclusive? They're not, but they do have contradictory aspects in the sense that faith is believing something without evidence and science is based on evidence. So while you can be a scientist and have faith in God or faith in something, that there are contradictory aspects to those concepts. You're right. But the Christian asked the philosophical questions related to faith and God, but then they go into the lab and also do science. I don't understand why we keep trying to just put this into a melting pot. Like this is what Francis Collins talks about all the time and dealing with the human genome. It's not like all of a sudden he comes in and brings in his Christian faith in such a way where it's like, oh man, I got to make these leaps of faith now that I'm in the sun, you know, obviously dealing with experiments. No, it's a worldview. So I don't know why we just keep adding these just in a mishmash. Well, it's different methodologies. So if you try and use the same method, if you try and use the faith method for some biological question, if you're sequencing some gene, you're not going to get anywhere. No, no, you're not. I don't know one Christian who does that. But wait a minute, you didn't do it first. I worked in a Christian school for a while, and they were extremely pro-science because they believed that discovering more about science would actually reveal the secrets of the Lord. It doesn't detract from it, but you can direct that Christianity to try to discover through learning more about science, more about your faith. I think we're trying to draw the difference between the method of assessing a truth claim, faith versus science. Once again, if I was the parent, that was the international big case about what, six years ago up in Pennsylvania, who would not take my child to get ultimately healed from their pneumonia at a doctor's office dealing with things like science and medicine, because I said I don't believe in it, and I believe that this is going to be cured with prayer within 24 hours, and the child ends up dying. And my faith was based off of this prayer of miraculous healing. Now, Snake, we have the question of methodology in terms of how are you dealing with this? That makes sense? I agree with that, but that is a very slippery slope. You're absolutely correct that somebody, like I said, somebody could be a scientist and have faith in something, and those two issues narrow across each other. But the fact that science deals with evaluating our world and using an evidentiary approach to determine what is true and what is not true, and faith and religion are like, this is true without any evidence. It's just I have a faith belief lens to the potentiality of that faith belief swaying into decisions that we know are contradictory to science. Somebody says, I believe that the earth is 6,000 years old. I just believe it. Science says it's not, and the evidence we have suggests it's not the case. And somebody says, well, but I don't agree with that. And I may be maybe making decisions based off the fact I think that the earth is 6,000 years old. You just framed your entire statement in the very beginning with exactly what it was, slippery slope. You can't spell slippery slope fallacy without slippery slope. Look, I'm just saying that it is a slippery slope with regards to that. That's fine. And that's the fallacy. It's a very reasonable thing to say that the issue of those two items that are separate are very close together and do bleed over with each other in some respects. No. Why would you ever suspend your standard of evidence for any question? If you have a scientific standard of evidence, why would you suspend that standard when there are other areas of study, like the humanities, like philosophy, like history, so you're not going to bring your little toolkit in dealing with the book of Leviticus. No, you're going to look at history, and then you're going to judge laws like moral, ceremonial, cleansing laws. You're not going to say, OK, how am I going to somehow fit the letters here into my little test tube to ultimately prove it, what I'm interpreting, whether it's right or wrong. There absolutely is a scientific way. How long does this thing go on? I don't want to get tangent. Would you have a number of questions that I think we can probably go through faster if you guys are needing to get out of here, because I know that a lot of these I've let go into longer discussion. But this one coming in, so in other words, like, do you have a? I really need to pee. So is it OK if I just let you guys hang out and call it a day on my end, because I need to go to the bathroom. That works. As long as you turn the camera on. I'm going to get it out, CS. All right. Thanks. Bye. Take care. This one coming in from Vector says for the atheist is morality, just opinion, given your view of its subjective nature. If so, how do you justify anti-theism, which imposes itself on people who don't wish it's imposition? Should I do the same for any opinion? I don't think anti-theism imposes itself. Anti-theism is just a position that we think that religion causes more harm than good. So we're not imposing our views of anti-theism on other individuals. And my perspective is I'm a moral anti-realist. I'm not. I do not think that morals are objective. I think we get morals from our societal outcomes and also they're a part of an evolutionary process. So I don't think that morals come from God, but I still think that there are moral concepts that we function under as part of society. So anyways, I don't know if that answers the question. I am a moral realist. So I think morality is a purely logical pursuit. And if there's a God that is correct about morality, it's because he's correct on his logic about morality and his justifications for his moral statements. You got it. And thank you very much for your question. Bitter truth says religion people do interpretation since they can't explain in real translation like God made this universe in six days. I think they're saying that like Stuart, you're doing origami with the scripture in order to make it work. Like you're trying to make the interpretation work to your own partisan way. No, no, no, this was this scans back to what was the Scopes Monkey Trial was at 1923 or 29 and we foolishly Christians put a nice young earth or on the stand. And there was this whole debate between science and honestly all of a sudden set up this dichotomy between science and young earth. And no, I know out of our entire congregation and the university's camps as we go to, I apologize if anybody's watching right now, a friend of mine perhaps is a young earth or but I only know of like two young earthers. And that's out of thousands of Christians that I'm close with. So so to say to say that there is this that I'm playing around with the scripture by not being a young earther. No, I would look at John Lennox's book. What is it the earth being in six days yet? Check out out of Oxford. He's reliable mathematician. Check out his book on the push against the 6000 years. It makes a lot of sense when you look at the Hebrew. You got it this coming in from do appreciate your question. But the truth says God made scientific errors. Don't know universe anatomy even didn't explain human anatomy. But bunch of errors isn't this man made religion to believers and atheists. Both sides please reply. For his ears gentlemen. What was the question again? Could you repeat it? You got it. I think that they let's see. They said God made scientific errors. Such as not I think that what they mean is such as not knowing the universe is anatomy or human anatomy. But bunch of errors isn't but nonetheless bunch of errors. Isn't this man made religion to believers? I don't understand the question. And then they say isn't this man made religion? And then they say please both sides answer. I mean my thoughts on that is the most important document of all time. The holy word of God should be a little bit more scientifically precise shouldn't be left up to interpretation like that. You don't even leave the operation manual for your hair dryer up to interpretation. The holy word of God should be absolutely clear. That's that's my that's my thoughts on that. Gotcha anybody else? No that's what the Quran that's what Muslims believe right along with snake. They believe all science came out of the Quran that the Quran is perfect. Don't question it on any grounds. And that makes sense. You know I could get on board there. I mean God of the universe giving us the ultimate guide and manual to life and beyond life. So perfection but I would say no he entered in to obviously a type of relationship with us in such a way where he used human beings. That's why there's 400,000 variants in the Bible which are mistakes. Now those mistakes are small commas here and there or extra spaces or mixed up with small letters so that it doesn't make any kind of ultimately big difference. But but no I so I believe it's the combination. I actually like that there's mistakes because of the combination of humans and God where he's working with humans to give us his word. There's actually a quote by I believe I think it's Galileo that's I I don't believe in a God that gave us rational thought and intelligence and intended us to forgo their use. So if you believe that God gave us rational thought and intelligibility you know it makes sense that like doesn't he want us to use those? And if we are using those appropriately it seems that that just making these like using that approach to evaluate our world and not coming to a conclusion that God is the outcome of an unknown event seems to be a reasonable thing if God gave us rationality and intelligent thought. No that was an interesting point sorry say the quote again. That God I don't believe in a God that gave us intelligence and rational thought and intended us to forgo their use. Right and that's why he he wanted science that's why he pushed back against the Catholic Church and their indoctrination and that's why he so he was a strong Christian pushing back he became more Protestant saying no no no if you guys are going to be fixed in how you interpret scripture that is in total disagreement with science I'm going to look at scripture and I'm going to honestly try and figure out okay with the scripture actually saying this about the earth and the sun and the planets and I don't think it's specifically saying that I think that's a very wooden interpretation that's wrong and so God has given us minds to say hey science says this maybe we should go back and check our interpretation on that. But it leaves so much room for error for such an important message. Yes but just follow what Jason said right there because I love that he brought up Galileo's quote because that's exactly that type of pursuit and it's the whole CS Lewis took that line of thinking too if there's moral laws out there you're gonna obviously expect a moral law giver so get up and get after it and try to figure out okay how do these laws ultimately lead to a law giver or is it better to think that these mathematical laws that are out there, pathogram theorem and all the others are somehow just out there and we've created them ourselves. No they're out there to be discovered and so there's most likely an ultimate mathematician law giver. This one coming in from do appreciate your question. Fernandez T says this is for Jason saying there's a chance we will take that rather all it takes is a mustard seed of faith. All right. This one coming in from bitter truth says now to Jason I've seen a lot of time when you bring up scientific error the religion scholars just use interpretation tool are the weak in their actual text are I think they're saying are they weak in their actual textbooks or helpless. I think I saw this question I think I understand what they're asking. I think it varies based on Christian there are a lot of Christians out there that are very sophisticated in their understandings and that may be very dogmatic in their beliefs and they're just unwilling to consider those scientific outcomes and I think that there are others that are just weak in their understandings of how to form an appropriate hypothesis and what is falsification and rejecting a null hypothesis mean and how do we evaluate outcomes and the fact that it's very reasonable for a scientist to say I don't know that I don't understand something and that that's a much more reasonable outcome to take than to suggest that it is some supernatural being so I think it's a I think it's a hodgepodge of issues. You got it and with the last question they just shot it in they also said sun orbiting earth and earth is flat how will you explain that both sides please let us know your thoughts on whether or not the sun is going around the earth aka heliocentrism and talk to us about whether or not the earth is flat are you a flat earth or steward I happen to not be you get a lot of those on here James yes we do the one argument I would propose and I'm not just very great basically is that we have a number of models that like atmospheric models oceanic models physics models geochemical models biological models all these models all point to a globe earth going around the sun and that if those all those models did not intersect and corroborate one another then you would be like wow that's really weird why does that not the case and on this other side the flat earth flat earthers like may have maybe able to get one model to fit but when they put it together with all these models then they can't get that system to work and this is an example of wise you know science works in this respect we have cross validating models of out of separate disciplines that confirm um particular positions again I guess you could say is science with a hundred percent certainty that that's the case science typically doesn't you go with a hundred percent certainty but you know very very very likely the earth is actually a hollow sphere and the sun is inside it so both are wrong okay shut my mistake thank you very much and want to want to let you know folks our guests are linked to the description we appreciate our guests immensely and also want to share hey this is exciting a lot of people have been asking for a debate with Dan Barker Dan Barker will be here as you can see on the bottom right of your screen against Randall Rouser next week on whether or not Christianity is rational you don't want to miss it hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it there's going to be a big one next week but want 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