 Hey everybody today we are debating whether or not there is sufficient reason to believe in God and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen thrilled to have you here for another epic debate. So what we are going to have today is a tag team debate on whether or not there is sufficient evidence to believe in God. So this is going to be a lot of fun folks. We have two seasoned teams here of debaters and so this is going to be a great time. Want to let you know I've linked all of our speakers in the description box. That way if you're listening and you're like mmm I like that. You can hear plenty more where that came from. And we are very excited to let you know as well just a quick couple of channel announcements. First if it's your first time here consider hitting that subscribe button as we have many more debates to come. So for example we are very excited we have coming later this month Jonathan Sheffield and Richard Carrier will be debating on the resurrection. So that should be a lot of fun and also want to let you know. In addition for today's debate if you have any questions feel free to fire those questions into the old live chat and if you tag me with at modern day debate it will make it easier for me to be sure I get every single question in that question and answer list. Super chat is also an option we would just ask that you be your regular friendly selves during that as we really appreciate all of these speakers being here and so if you'd be willing to give them your kindest respect or at least the minimum level at least. Come on work with me here. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have open conversation immediately after the opening statements which from each side as a team will be about 15 to 20 minutes if they need it. And so roughly eight minutes per person. Also want to let you know in terms of channel announcements very excited. We have a lot of people have asked they've said hey would you be willing to have audio of the debates. We are definitely actually right now as a Patreon reward we are going to start putting every debate in an MP3 format which will be on Patreon for those who are supporting and we really so if you're already signed up those will be posted today. We really appreciate it and all of the debates will still be public like they'll still be free here on YouTube. But if you'd like the audio version so if you want to listen to it while you commute or whatever else that's something that we are going to put out on Patreon and we really appreciate those of you who have already been supporting us. So with that we are going to jump into this really appreciate all of our speakers for being here with us today and we are having the affirmative go first. So Dr. Randall Rouser and Samuel Nassan thanks so much the floor is all yours. Well thanks a lot so on behalf of Sam and myself I am Randall I'd like to thank first of all Tom and Matt for agreeing to this debate and to modern day debate for hosting it. Now the subject of the debate is this question are there sufficient reasons to believe in God. For the purposes of this debate Sam and I will work with the following general definition of God. Belief in the existence of a transcendent perfectly good being who is the cause of nature or creation further. Human flourishing is based at least in part in right relationship with that transcendent being. Thus when we discuss the rationality of belief in God it is to that definition that we refer. Now one can define rational belief both in negative terms and in positive terms. Negatively irrational belief is a belief the holding of which violates no epistemic duties. For Matt and Tom to establish their thesis or the denial of this debate resolution with respect to this standard the negative standard they would have to establish that belief in God is defined above always violates a specific epistemic duty that in turn would require them to explain which duty it violates and why. I'll wait for them to make that case positively irrational belief is any belief that is either properly non basic or properly basic a properly non basic belief is a belief that is rational and justified as the valid conclusion to a reasoning process think by analogy of a mathematical theorem a properly basic belief is a belief that is rational and justified if formed in the right circumstances independent of a reasoning process think by analogy of a mathematical axiom a starting point for reasoning it is not clear that or it is clear that not all beliefs could be properly non basic because of every belief could only be justified as the conclusion of a reasoning process of supportive premises then those premises in turn would have to be supported by prior premises and you would immediately fall into an infinite regress and add infinitum list of justifications for any belief and that would result in skepticism that you could believe nothing at all rationally consequently there must be properly basic beliefs a starting point for reasoning now properly basic beliefs come in many types here is a partial list number one there are no married bachelors that is an analytic belief two seven plus five equals 12 that's a synthetic a priori belief three it is raining outside that is a sense perceptual belief four I had cereal for breakfast that would be a memorial belief five it is wrong to torture a person that would be a morally intuitive belief and finally six the restaurant is six blocks west now number six is an example of a belief I would be formed in this case by way of testimony under the right circumstances when another human being testifies to the truth of a proposition then if you have no reason to distrust that human being as a witness if they seem to be a credible witness if there's no undercutting or rebutting to feeders in other words no reasons to reject their witness then you are justified in accepting it and forming your belief based on it but keep in mind that all sources of belief whether basic or non-basic are fallible but the mere possibility that rational intuition or sense perception or testimony can fail you does not undercut our general warrant for accepting these sources of belief barring any specific reasons to question them in a particular case now let's apply a testimony to our question here imagine two parents amber the atheist and chris the christian amber teaches her child that god does not exist while chris teaches his child that god does exist if there are no defeaters to the testimony of which either child is aware then each child is justified in forming a belief in the proposition in question based simply on the testimony of their parent amber's child could be rational to believe that god does not exist based upon that testimony and chris's child could be rational to believe that god does exist based upon that parent's testimony the christian who wants to argue that atheism can never be rational based upon testimony has an explanatory burden to bear likewise the atheist who wants to argue as matt and tom do that theism presumably cannot be rational based upon testimony has an equally onerous burden to bear keep in mind that belief in god by our definition is held by the vast majority of people on earth educated intellectuals and of lowly farmers or uneducated farmers well educated in the soil perhaps but not in the technicals of philosophy highly educated scientists and housewives or house husbands oxbridge philosophers small children noble laureates refugees heads of state literally billions of people believe in god now many of these people come to believe in god in just this way because of a trusted authority a parent or a philosopher a teacher or a scientist attests to the belief in god and they form that belief based upon that testimony in a basic fashion rather than through a process of discursive reasoning it seems quite clear that such belief can in principle be properly basic and thus the possible vector of knowledge if god does in fact exist it is the burden of matt and tom to argue that this is not possible that all these people are thus irrational to accept belief in god based upon testimony suffice it to say the burden is theirs for we have no basis to think that theism necessarily violates any epistemic duties and i think we have excellent grounds to accept the belief in god can be properly basic and thus rational based upon testimony but theism can also be properly non basic that is held by way of a discursive reasoning process i will now invite my debate partner sam to share some reasons by which one could have properly non basic belief in god by way of arguments thank you randall it's a joy to be able to debate with both matt and tom since the topic of today's debate is not whether the christian god exists but whether there are sufficient reasons for one to believe in god i'll be presenting one argument called the argument from religious experience by religious experience i mean a subjective experience in which a person apprehends themselves to stand in relation to what they may consider to be the divine richard swinburne professor of philosophy at oxford university lists five kinds of religious experiences from the perspective of the one experiencing it the first public ordinary experiences of god this would be akin to seeing a mountain or you know seeing the ocean or even if you've taken a flight before seeing the clouds and just feeling this sense of grandeur that that must be a great creative god who put all these things in place and thus experiencing god from these ordinary objects the second would be public extraordinary experiences of god mediated through unusual and uncommon objects for example seeing a bush on fire that is not consumed by the fire i'm of course referring to the incident for example that moses describes as the burning bush experiences or just miracles in general would qualify as a public extraordinary experience of god the third would be private describable experiences by which of course i mean that experiences mediated through private sensations that can be described in sensory normal language i think for example the famous analogy of paul on the road to Damascus seeing a vision of jesus or just visions or dreams in general qualify as a private describable experience there's also number four private non describable experiences for example experiences that we have people have about god that cannot be described or captured by literal language take for example someone feeling a deep calling to go into full-time ministry or something like that this is something we hear a lot from 80s as well that said well i've experienced that call to ministry but of course they rejected later on so the fifth would be non-specific experience experiences of god that is not mediated by any sensations where the person claims to be intuitively and immediately aware of god's presence so based on these five religious experiences i submit the following argument premise one many people from various times and cultures have claimed religious experiences i don't i i doubt that matt and tom would reject this first premise and a recent a research survey conducted by pure research in 2009 demonstrated that half the u.s public claim to have had religious or mystical experiences these numbers interestingly come from a third of those who actually claim to have no religious affiliations and one-fifth of those who claim to be atheists and agnostics a percentage actually is higher in places like asia where about half the world's population live and places like africa and south america where you have about close to a quarter of the world's population so it's it's it's fair to say that people from every time uh cultures and places have had religious experiences premise two it is reasonable to believe these religious experiences unless we have evidences that they are mistaken now this premise is based on two principles of rationality the first is called a principle of credulity the principle of credulity simply means that we ought to believe things as they seem apparent to us unless we have evidences that they are mistaken in other words the rational person is one who treats their basic cognitive processes as innocent until there's reason to doubt unwarranted skepticism is unhelpful in the pursuit of truth for example the girl that i love appears to love me and it's rational for me in the absence of any evidences to the contrary to believe that she's not a planted assassin sent by some criminal organization to kill me uh is it possible that she's an assassin yeah that possibility is always open but it would be highly irrational of me to continue to withhold belief in her simply because there's no proof that she's not an assassin so the principle of credulity simply allows me to rationally accept things on the way that things seem in the absence of defeaters the second principle of rationality is called the principle of testimony and Randall has just shared a little bit about it by which by testimony i mean that those who do not have religious experiences have not experienced it themselves ought to believe what others who do you know ought to believe the vast majority of people who do in the absence of evidences of deceit or delusion for example you know in this pandemic you i've not seen the coronavirus and i doubt many of you are watching from home have not seen the coronavirus yourself but it's rational to believe that this thing is out there even though we have not observed it with our own eyes and i'm sure that both Matt and Tom would agree that that conspiracy theories and flat urtis for example are not rational in spite of the fact that they withhold judgment and they refuse your skeptical of the claim that we have a spherical earth or that you know their conspiracy theories where they continue to believe things are not as they seem that's not a very rational approach students for example in school can rationally believe whatever their teachers teach them in the absence of evidences that would cause them to cast doubt on what is being taught so i'm just applying the same principle to religious experiences and i i do suspect that Matt and Tom would disagree with me and as would most atheists but if they do as my partner Randall has said they will have to demonstrate that these religious experiences are mistaken and thereby cannot be believed by a rational person and i look forward to hearing the evidences for that and if they fail to do so it would seem to lead to the necessary conclusion that therefore believe in god is rational now in closing let me say that's the argument from religious experience prove that god exists no it doesn't it doesn't it's not designed to and that's clearly not the topic of today's debate is it uh does the argument from religious experience will it convince matt and tom to believe in god will it impress them i doubt so i think for tom and matt to believe in god perhaps they may have to have their own extraordinary religious experience but does the argument from religious experience demonstrate that believers in god can rationally hold on to belief in god in the absence of defeatists absolutely thank you you bet thanks so much appreciate that and we will switch it over to our skeptical guests very excited to have them want to say really quick saw new subscribers chris powell and christian jensen thanks for subscribing glad to have you a part of the community we'll now kick it over to matt and tom thanks so much gentlemen for being with us yeah thanks for having us i really appreciate samuel and uh shoot uh randall for coming on today i really enjoy those guys arguments so i'm happy to hear thanks for matt for also taking the time to be here and thanks for james for hosting it so to jump right in i believe there is no evidence for the existence of god and when we're talking about evidence what we're looking for is some reasons believe god exists in reality and not just in our imagination therefore evidence would need to be something that can differentiate between our imagination and reality and none of the proposed evidence or arguments that theist present can do this so i don't think there's any evidence for god pretty much all apologist arguments are gods of the gaps which i define as a kind of argument from incredulity meaning i cannot imagine x could do y therefore x can't do y or i can imagine x can do y therefore x did y for example i can't imagine how y could be explained naturally therefore god if you break this down to its uh component parts it's i can't imagine how y could be explained naturally i can't imagine how y could be explained by god therefore god did y now obviously the fact that you cannot imagine something is not evidence it cannot occur and the fact that you can imagine something isn't evidence it did occur more sophisticated versions of this fallacious argument do not explicitly state the person presenting the argument can or cannot imagine something instead they present an argument from their imagination explaining why they can or cannot imagine something unlike empirical evidence this method can't differentiate between imagination and reality so instead of explicitly stating i cannot imagine x did y the sophisticated argument from incredulity would be an argument such as x did y as a contradiction or x did y cannot happen or x it's impossible at x did y so for example take the argument y has no possible natural explanation the supernatural can explain why therefore the supernatural exists the problem with this argument is that there is no way to rule out all possible natural explanations so as we don't know everything about the natural world there could be an infinitely many things about the natural we simply don't know yet so there could always be an unknown natural explanation that we cannot rule out therefore this argument is stating a fact not stating a fact about reality it only tells us about the psychology of the person stating the argument namely that they can't imagine a natural explanation if at some point we later we later discovered that there is a natural explanation for x even though they said it was impossible well then obviously it wasn't impossible after all necessarily meaning their argument wasn't a statement about reality it was a statement about their perception they couldn't believe it was the case this kind of argument has been used many times throughout history one of the most notable examples is the argument used against Einstein's general relativity in which time can bend many philosophers would argue that well time is a philosophical concept so it can't bend yet we discovered empirically at what it actually does meaning that their argument was necessarily an argument from incredulity they were simply stating they couldn't imagine time could bend therefore they assumed that that was true about reality and then reject the Einstein's theory because of that making it an argument from incredulity other common examples would be life cannot come from non-life consciousness cannot come from non-consciousness typically a gaps argument follows the form of nothing we know of can explain x i can make up an explanation of x this is evidence of my explanation the more sophisticated versions go something like given what we currently know it is really improbable x can do y i can imagine g and if g exists why would not be improbable therefore this is evidence of g the most common example of such an argument is the argument from the resurrection of jesus would go something like it is really improbable that a natural explanation can explain the historical counts i can imagine if god existed or if the resurrection did occur this would be a good explanation of historical counts therefore this is evidence of the resurrection in god or miracles the problem with this argument is that imagining that god exists and would do something isn't evidence god does exist or actually did the thing the resurrection is just an imagined explanation with no basis in reality there are infinitely many such imaginary things that we can come up with to explain an unknown for example what knocked over that cup i can imagine there is a cup knocking fairy that exists or leprechauns or pixies or unicorns or magic and that would explain the cup falling over is this evidence for any of those things well obviously enough because none of these things that have been demonstrated to exist independently of just post-hoc explaining the unknown then they're just gaps arguments of i can imagine this thing doing that but it's not actually evidence it did something we currently know about no matter how improbable like delusions hallucinations fabrications birds squirrels any of those things is always a more probable and better explanation than an imagined thing that has no basis in reality like miracles magic gods mythical creatures the paranormal supernatural u of os so until these things that don't have an empirical basis have been demonstrated other than just being post-hoc explanations of the unknown meaning they make novel testable predictions that are confirmed then those things are not reasonable explanations of the unknown you can't use them until they have been independently verified to exist now there's there's an even more sophisticated version of the gaps argument which is the intelligent design argument which goes something like it's really improbable that natural processes could produce insert some complex property of life intelligence or intentionality can produce this same complex property as seen in human design things therefore it's reasonable to include intelligence intentionality produced life the reason this is the more sophisticated version of the gaps argument is that it plays a game of hide the fallacy very in the i can and cannot imagine in the premises to make it look perfectly reasonable in the intelligent design argument the crux of the arguments based on this assertion that there is some complex property in life that is the same property that exists in human design things or design things in general the problem with this argument is that that property is purely fabricated it's purely an imaginary property there is no such real property that has been demonstrated to exist in life and also in design things it's purely a figment of their imagination so the i can and cannot imagine is hidden in this property that they've asserted to exist so most apologists arguments are gaps arguments that follow the form i cannot imagine how x could be explained naturally i can imagine how x can be explained by god therefore god the cosmological argument is i cannot imagine how naturalism can create a universe without spacetime the resurrection i cannot imagine how the historical counts can be explained naturally the fine-tuning argument i cannot imagine how the concept of universe came about naturally the moral argument i cannot imagine how a non-conscious thing can ground morality the ontological argument i can't imagine the greatest possible being literally one of the premises the transcendental argument i cannot imagine how you can account for mathematical god so in conclusion all apologetics arguments are arguments from incodulia god of the gaps meaning they're all just versions of i can imagine cannot imagine how not god could do this or explain this i can imagine how god could explain this therefore god and such arguments do not provide a way to differentiate differentiate imagination morality therefore there is no evidence for god i'll turn it over to matt so hi first of all thanks for everybody for being here it's the first time i've had the chance to interact with randall and samuel and and tom and i only i think met once or twice before this at aca stuff so i'm thrilled to be here thanks for everybody for participating unlike tom i don't tend to say there is no evidence for god and i do that for a very specific reason and that reason is not because tom is wrong i agree with tom with what he's saying when he says there's no evidence for he's talking about and at least in my understanding and he can correct me if i'm wrong a very specific thing and that is evidence for a proposition not merely evidence consistent with a proposition and so when i talk about it i tend to not say there's no evidence for god because then my theistic opponent will come back and say oh but what about anecdotal testimonial evidence that counts as evidence and then you have to have this side discussion which we're probably going to have today anyway there's a couple things i want to clear up and one is that for many years i and many others have pointed out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and while this is true it is often confusing to people and so let me make it more confusing because that's the best thing we could possibly do today all claims require sufficient evidence the only reason that some claims seem or feel more extraordinary to us is because we are sloppy and lazy we use the sum total of human experience as a weighted collection of evidence for something and that's why if you say i have a pet dog it feels very different to us than saying i have a pet dragon or god is real and that's because well everybody knows dogs are real dogs exist people have dogs as pets and we just include all of that sum total of human knowledge in our claim and we and because of that we would say that the claim there is a dog is mundane and that's because it's already consistent with what we know whereas the claim that there's a dragon or god or whatever is not mundane and we view it as extraordinary but the truth is no matter what the claim is it requires sufficient evidence to for belief to be warranted they just feel different for us now if i were to say randall is a murderer sorry man should we just believe it until someone prevents a defeater well i would argue that no the testimony alone is never going to be sufficient the mere fact that we don't currently have a defeater and you know randall's free to try to prove that he's not a murderer i don't know how you would do that i don't know how you would go about proving that you didn't murder anybody ever in the history of the world but if we were going to try to make a case for this producing an eyewitness testimony saying i saw randall murder this person that i would argue is now evidence for the proposition because there's testimonial evidence that specifically ties to this however it's not sufficient on its own to warrant belief i would hope that all of us would recognize that he's you know an incident of someone saying hey i saw this happen and you know that's not enough to deprive some of their freedoms and say sorry you're a murderer producing an eyewitness would be evidence for although very weak evidence for producing a body by the way isn't necessarily evidence for the proposition that randall killed somebody because i can produce a body and maybe randall killed that person maybe randall killed some other person and didn't kill this one maybe this person wasn't even murdered maybe me producing a body we have to also establish that there was a wrongful death and then tie that wrongful death to god this is the way we mess up in our in our intuitions about how we should think about things producing a body isn't sufficient evidence we need to actually produce the entire case and make a strong case for it and so when somebody tells me hey the restaurant six blocks down okay that's a testimony and by and large i'm going to take them at face value for that but only for the extent of me going six blocks down to see if the restaurant is actually there the proof is in that six block walk to the destination that is when we are rationally justified in believing that the restaurant is where that person said it is because we also know that people can be mistaken that people can be biased that people can be wrong that eyewitness testimony is incredibly unreliable and so with somebody says oh just look at the grandeur look at the you know here's this or here's an account of a religious experience an account that identifies itself as a religious experience is not confirmation of a religious experience and to simply suggest that because people report experiences we should take them at their word on what has to be the single biggest and most important question we can ask which is is there some god that exists and knows and cares about us and wants any interaction with us the notion that someone would argue that because people have reported religious experiences or because people have testified to these sorts of things all of a sudden the burden of proof now shifts to the atheist to show that all of these people are in fact wrong that's not the way the burden of proof works and it would be a mistake for a defense attorney to walk into a courtroom and suggest that well you know the prosecution hasn't presented any physical evidence but let me spend all my time trying to prove everybody who might make some claim wrong despite the fact there's no physical evidence tied to this and that's that's a case where in a courtroom all we're looking for is beyond reasonable doubt and we're talking about an individual's life on an issue where whether or not there's a god exists whether or not a god exists this is far more significant than a stolen bicycle and yet the defenders of this god don't seem to be able to produce a body don't be able to show don't seem to be able to show that the body was in fact wrongfully killed and and don't be able to present in don't seem to be able to present any evidence that ties it to that god so if the all we're getting is that it's rational to believe in god because there's a bunch of people who believe in god i i will continue to say that is not sufficient reason you bet and with that we'll jump into open conversation folks so thanks so much another quick reminder that all of our guests i have linked in the description just for you folks so with that thanks gentlemen for being here the floor is all yours okay so let's let me jump in then the way that matt and tom have both approached this is by objecting to arguments for god's existence but of course the first part of our presentation was that arguments need not be required because one can form belief basically upon testimony that was one example and interestingly matt concedes the point so he he says yeah you know you could form belief based upon testimony that the that the restaurant is six blocks away so keeping in mind that the actual burden of proof you've assumed here is to show that every single person who believes in god is irrational can i ask yeah let me just i just want to know if this was free form or if we were going turn by turn i just clarity on order you have an open open style just kind of okay go ahead i'm sorry randall i just wanted to make sure i wasn't interrupting inappropriately yeah no problem feel free to interrupt appropriately at any time so okay so um so that the claim was that every single person that several billion people on earth believe in god under the definition that we provided and the assertion that they're all irrational even though many of them whole belief based upon this properly basic testimonial formation it's a very strong claim you have to defend that in every one of those instances those people do not have sufficient reason based upon the grounds of the testimony they received in order to rationally believe in god so i'm wondering directly how would you show that the argument i presented with respect to proper basic howlity failed yeah let me jump in there if i can um so we're the people in Rome reasonable to believe in Zeus and Thor or Zeus and uh Hercules and Medusa and all those people based on the testimony of their parents and the testimony of the people who lived at the time why not at that time they didn't have any defeaters to that i just said in my opening statement that an atheist erin could teach the child the child could rationally form belief in the non-existence of god based upon their testimony yep so if they're rational to believe all those things and yet now we know today through science that lightning isn't created by Zeus and that all those uh entities don't exist we know for certain that that methodology has been proven to be extremely unreliable you know not just in the case of the Greeks and the Romans that their gods don't exist or false but also the Norse gods and fairies leprechauns unicorns magic miracles lots of things that people have been taught by their parents Santa Claus don't are not real and so we know that that methodology of believing things based off of testimony from parents is an unreliable method like using the broken compass to try and guide which direction you should go and so using that as a basis to ground knowledge is irrational because we know it doesn't work and as far as we know pretty much throughout history in all cases that are related to things outside of just the normal stuff in your life it's false that methodology does not give us any reasonable information like you can tell us there's a store six blocks down the street or that there's a dog over there or that chickens taste good when cooked or whatever but it can't tell us anything about the fundamental nature of reality or god here the problem is that the statement you just made itself defeating okay because okay because the way that from the when we are infants when we are toddlers the way that we form beliefs about the world is in large part through the testimony we learn language through testimony of our parents and caregivers and others and if you're now claiming that the the testimony is sufficiently unreliable to provide a sweeping undercutting defeater for all testimony then you've just undercut all the testimony you've ever received from anyone back to when you were a one two three year old learning your first words right that's why I said there's testimony is reasonable in certain cases like saying there's a house six blocks down or the chicken tastes good in those cases that already have an empirical basis it's reasonable to leave testimony like if they're just mundane claims as Matt pointed out but if you're making claims about the fundamental nature of reality like that Zeus exists and causes lightning those are the ones that we have demonstrated false with science like the the testimony that there's a house six blocks down science is going to confirm that so those kinds of claims are reasonable to believe based off of the testimony of parents teaching their kids but the claims about the fundamental nature of reality that have no empirical basis those are not well for if I can jump in for a second because Randall started this off by claiming that I said that one can form belief based on that testimony and what I would point out is that if somebody tells me the restaurant six blocks down is it possible for me to form a belief that the restaurant is in fact six down six blocks down yes does that mean that it's rational for me to form that belief no I would argue that the belief that may be rational to believe is I am convinced this person is more than likely honestly trying to direct me to where the restaurant is that's what is that is what is the default assumption when I'm engaging with someone who I don't know however for me to conclude that they are in fact right about the restaurant is not based solely on their testimony it is a the proof is in the pudding the proof is in getting to the restaurant if someone were to say the restaurant is six blocks down and I went hey I'm convinced the restaurant is six blocks down I would argue that that is not a rational justification that I have in fact taken the thing that I would be justified in accepting which is this person is as far as I can tell honestly trying to convey me to the right place and I would have then misplaced a secondary belief on it which is almost exactly the same thing that that Samuel did when he talked about in premise one many people claim religious experiences and that claiming a religious experience is separate from having a religious experience and yet he goes on with this equivocation throughout the rest of that argument where the fact that someone claimed a religious experience is somehow equated to them having one and that begs the question I'd love to jump in but Sam do you want to respond yeah I wanted to ask just wanting to see whether you you wanted to jump in yeah so Matt so what I'm what I'm essentially what you're essentially saying just to understand you correctly you're saying that it's equivocating when I say that people claim to have religious experiences and people who actually have religious experiences is that right yeah in the same way that I would say someone claiming they were abducted by aliens is not confirmation that they were in fact abducted by aliens right so uh so do you do you then believe that people who claim religious experiences are lying is that is that it's I mean clearly there's a possibility that I I myself won't deny but I'm just wondering do you believe what what do you what's your belief yeah so what what I've talked about before is that if someone tells me they had a religious experience or that they were abducted by aliens I'm going to use both of them side by side I believe that that person unless I have some evidence to the contrary is honestly telling me about an experience they are convinced they had but that does not mean the conclusions that they've reached about that experience are valid you know somebody says oh I saw a ghost and the truth is they had some experience and the only way that they can describe it is to use the language of I've seen a ghost or they've had some experience and the only thing that they can do is describe it as I was abducted by aliens or God talked to me none of those are indicators on their own that God actually talked to someone or that aliens abducted somebody etc sure I mean I think that you're on the same page so my question would be like for example if someone actually told you that they were abducted by aliens what what are some defeaters do you think to that proposition um so if somebody says I was abducted by aliens uh that's not a proposition that I think that we have any defeater on without actually investigating and asking questions um you'd have to say more about the experience and look into this to see what is plausible and what is not I completely agree with you so what I would say if someone is so I I wouldn't discount the possibility that someone if they claim that they were abducted by aliens actually were abducted by aliens and I completely agree with you that I would ask follow-up questions like did anyone witness it was it an independent thing but now assuming for example hypothetically speaking that the vast majority of the world's population claim that they have been abducted by aliens you would agree that the analogy is not quite the same right because due to the universality of the claimed not the experience but the claimed experience so and I have a follow-up question so yeah I just answer one thing that kind of piggybacks on what Sam said and then you can respond so um so Sam invoked most people on earth being believing in God and so adjusting the alien analogy to that but I would also like to push it on the idea of an individual experience so you've seen the movie contact I'm sure you have at the end of contact Ellie Arroway for those who don't know they seem to they have contact with an alien a civilization and then they send instructions back to earth on how to build this contraption which they do and then she gets into the capsule and she falls through it and then she's only what they tell her afterward does she fell through uh in in this little the space pod and fell down to earth she was only in there for like two seconds but when she was in the pod she felt to her like she was in there for nine hours and she had contact with this alien who came to her in the form of her father and talked to her and she had this interaction with him now it seems to me that even though in that case that isn't like several billion people have had an experience like that she did but nonetheless she is rational to believe under those circumstances that she had that experience even if other people are not privy to the same experience and to them it seems like it was only two seconds yeah so first of all the number of people who are reporting an experience has no impact on whether or not it is true or rational so i like the fact that it's it's strange that samuel went to look at how many people believe in god and randall went to this here's this one example albeit an example from fiction and what what ellie may or may not be justified in rationally expecting is independent from what somebody else should and so if if you've had a damascus road experience i i would not deny that if that experience occurred and you had it that you might be rationally might be there's a little more to this might be rationally justified however nobody else is rationally justified in believing because of your account of your damascus road experience going back and this is me cribbing him with revelation as necessarily first person into everybody else it's hearsay and so that it that is where i'm where i would come down on that um i don't think and granted we're talking about a a fiction in contact i don't think that ellie given the totality of the evidence that we are presented with could rationally could could say that they were reasonably justified in saying they truly experienced nine hours and all this content in any sense more than somebody who reports a death bed an out-of-body experience can truly say that because of what we know about the brain because of what we know about how the brain is deprived of oxygen or in all to say it or whatever else and it comes back and begins to snap back to conscious awareness it has to invent something to describe the time it took place and when those stories are like that now okay i from my point of view and i don't mean just to be glib we basically are propping up a fictional account to try to prop up another fictional account and all i'm saying is that i'm not saying everybody in the world that reports or thinks that they had a religious experience is wrong or irrational i'm saying that there's no demonstration that they are rational and it seems strange to me that that we're getting pointed to all these people who have these god experiences and yet we're ignoring the fact that almost i would describe i would argue that every single god experience is unique that they have similarities and overlaps but they belong to different religions and different doctrines and different structures and even two baptists in the same baptist church can have experiences that are different they just have some commonality and for me the commonality is best explained in the fact that we are human beings with a mind trying to make sense of the world seeking patterns etc so matt just want to just come back directly and what you said there so you stated several times that it's a fictional story that's a little bit of example of what we call poisoning the well what where you're trying to undermine the point with a particular label what it is actually in this context is a thought experiment so the fact that the thought experiment is a hypothetical scenario that has not to our knowledge in fact occurred in the world is quite irrelevant to the informational impact it can have on this discussion now i'm glad that matt conceded that it's possible that people have had for themselves religious experiences analogous to what ellie airway has in that scene in contact which could for them provide justification so that they could rationally believe that and of course there are billions of people who exactly say that i've had a particular experience so i think that uh at most what you would be out at this point is back into the corner of agnosticism do you have to say since i haven't had those experiences speak to it okay first of all agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive they they answer two completely different questions but this this discussion here which by the way in randall's opening statement he declared exactly what tom and i need to do and that is we need to provide a defeater to the resolution well i'm sorry to let you know maybe you're reading from old notes but there's no resolution for this debate it's just listed as sufficient reasons to believe in god question mark it's a discussion about whether or not there's sufficient reasons me pointing out that you cited a fiction to support something else that i think of fiction yes okay whatever but i did in fact address the thought experiment aspect of it and me saying that someone may be rationally justified is noted and expanded on about the fact that even if you randall were rationally justified in your belief about god that would not serve as a rational justification for anybody else and in order for me to be convinced that you were in fact rationally justified you would have to demonstrate that otherwise you're just another person out there going nope i'm rationally justified i can't demonstrate it to you can't show it to anybody can't provide any evidence for it but i'm rationally justified and that from an outsider's perspective it's functionally identical to to someone who's delusional no it's actually not um you know we've taught you accuse me of being a murderer early on so let me come back to that illustration i actually did well i'm you know i i'll play along i'll play along yeah okay so but let's say somebody accused me of being a murderer and there actually was there were some eyewitnesses and there was a motive and there was also my dna was found at the crime scene on the other hand i remember distinctly that at that afternoon i was up at the cabin although nobody saw me at the cabin but i distinctly remember that it's absolutely clear that i could be perfectly rational in believing in my own innocence even if other people could be justified in believing in my guilt and you'd be overreaching to claim i could not rationally believe in my innocence and it's the same thing when we're talking whether you're up at the cabin or whether you have an experience of pride you could be rational yeah but the problem here is that if the issue we're addressing is is there a sufficient reason to believe in god you are in a position of claiming that you have sufficient reason to believe in god correct sure yeah which means you need to demonstrate to the rest of us that you have sufficient reason to believe in god and if your demonstration is you can't prove me wrong well that's just a fallacy that's not a demonstration that's not my demonstration i've actually written a few books about this now if if your assumption is that i have to provide evidence for the belief in god that is going to compel every other single person no argument meets that standard and that would be a completely irrational standard no i'm i'm saying in order for for in order for an outsider to determine that you are in fact rational you would need to present the case for why you think you're rational right sure i can provide arguments and evidence the fact that i don't persuade everybody in the room but you so you started this whole thing by saying arguments aren't necessary and you presented no evidence and it's all about testimonial no i actually present that that is an argument i presented an argument based upon proper basicality okay right if i jump here so my position is is that you like using your example of the contact one where she fell into the thing that would not be reasonable for her to believe that there was aliens that you contacted unless that individual experience gave her something else to work with like if the aliens told her that if you go to this this position somewhere on earth and you dig up a pile of gold at this exact location and then she did that then she may be reasonable to believe that she actually talked with aliens but just having an experience with her father and having things that could purely be done by your own mind would not be reasonable for to believe that she talked with aliens testimony like you mentioned that believing you're not a murderer because you remember yourself being in the cabin would not be the same as believing in a god because there's those are two different categories like the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence if you think that if you remember being at the cabin then maybe that would be reasonable to believe you weren't the murderer but if you remember yourself being abducted by aliens during that time period then it's probably the case that you had a delusion and you may have committed the murder and so it wouldn't be reasonable for you to believe you didn't if you remember yourself being abducted by aliens the testimony is only reasonable if it's testimony of things that already have an empirical basis then you already know exist in the world that are not purely imaginary if you have testimony of other things yeah so i'll make a statement and a question and then i'll let sam get in after that but i i need to respond to that so the statement well so first of all you've been oh yeah so the statement is you're talking about what's what's extraordinary right well in fact i hate to break it to you but to the vast majority of people on earth believe in god such as we've defined it here is not extraordinary so it seems to me that actually that's true so it seems like you're just projecting your plausibility framework and everybody else and say well for me that's extraordinary this is uh not extraordinary so you have to have additional evidence for that well to persuade you yes but that doesn't mean they have to have additional evidence for them to be justified because they have a different background set of beliefs or what we call a plausibility structure than you do now tom you've been talking about this empirical corroboration and it seems like you're appealing to a general epistemic principle here that you have to have empirical corroboration in order to be justified in believing something and if that is the case you actually believe that then i'm wondering what's your empirical corroboration for the principle such that you can be justified in believing uh no the argument is that you need empirical corroboration of something that is has no basis in reality like if you need some way to differentiate imagination from reality that's like if i saw question begging no no so like if i saw a dog that would be reasonable for me to believe just based off of my i see the dog if i saw a unicorn i should really think probably not the case i should need some other way to verify that unicorns exist and shouldn't believe that so to what was the first thing you know you said it was so so the first one was that you're you're you're projecting your plausibility for americans saying right so and that's the demand for everybody right so i'm in that case you said i needed some more evidence and my other evidence for that is the fact that when people base beliefs off of testimony of their parents or whatever or their personal experience we know for a fact that gets things wrong consistently throughout history in every possible case that doesn't already have this common empirical basis like dogs like we know aliens ufo's bigfoot Loch Ness monster Thor Zeus all of those cases which were all based on the same kind of evidence we know that science has shown those are false those are wrong so we know this methodology does not work and that is a defeater for using this methodology to ground your belief in a god because it's the same category of things yeah i think i would respond to that by saying if you follow that principle consistently as an undercutter for all testimony of evidence then you would undercut all your beliefs to basis to believe anything because vast majority of our beliefs are based upon evidence in the early for testimony in the earliest formational stages of our lives so you ultimately back into what i'm accusing you of here which is projecting your plausibility framework onto the entire human population and saying well if they don't match your plausibility framework then they believe extraordinary and then justify things yeah it will be quiet now sorry the problem here isn't that we're trying to impose like our framework on people we're trying to propose a reasonable framework on people so it's not about this wasn't out it's not like tom and i sat here and came up with skepticism in science and how to establish the burden of proof it's a bunch of great thinkers over the years kept saying you know what if we allow this standard of evidence then all sorts of stuff gets in which is conflicting which is why if testimonial evidence is deemed rational enough to to be supportive of a god belief now of a sudden that has that has to be just that has to be granted to every god believer and so now you have you are claiming that there are a bunch of people who believe in a bunch of different gods and they're all rational and that sets up something that is in conflict with what we what we know to be true which is they cannot all be correct and so we need something we're not talking about correct i mean rational and correct or believe having knowledge are two different things people can rationally disagree that's not a big revelation i get it it's um the thing is if you're going to say that something's rational and you provide the foundation that you're providing does not offer a way to delineate between the the belief that you derive from that supposed rational or non-extraordinary structure if you have no way to delineate the belief that you accept from it and the belief that somebody else accepts from it then i would argue that by definition it cannot be rational if if a methodology can lead to two different mutually exclusive conclusions then that is not a method at all and how dare anyone suggest that they can be rationally justified by appealing to a method that can lead to different conclusions well one of the issues to keep in mind here again is that people actually do have different data sets when they come to data different plausibility frameworks different worldviews and those provide the interpretive grids for the data and so it is possible the data can be undetermined such that it can be interpreted consistently relative to do different worldviews plausibility frameworks or interpretive structure no no no because now what you're all right so what we're talking about when we're talking about whether or not something's rational isn't just on it on an individual basis it's like when you go to to court and they have a different standard you know like what a reasonable person would would accept what the average bystander would accept what the what an expert a recognized expert in a field would accept um yeah if we wanted to we could say that every child who was taught by their parents that god is real is rationally justified therefore it is rationally justified for people to believe in god except that i don't think we're looking at this on the can we find some individual for for whom they are they are rationally justified because they are monumentally ignorant of the world around them i think we are looking at this from from the spectrum of humanity as a whole and the bulk and wealth of human experience and understanding and if that's the case then we're not talking about whether or not an individual can think that they are rationally justified but whether humanity as a whole given the wealth of human knowledge and understanding about best methodologies would think that this individual is rationally justified well most uh people that have access to some degree of the wealth of human knowledge actually disagree with atheism so i think at the least we could grant them prima facie that they very well could be rational to do that yes except none of them have prevented presented rational evidence-based arguments to support their belief they are inculturated into this it is not the fact that science has confirmed the existence of god just because some scientists also believe in a god that that is that is a monumental error in categorizing what's going on the fact that most people believe something is independent from why they believe it and scientists who believe in god don't believe in god for science reasons of course not i mean that would be a category error that's not the kind of believe just like you don't argue for your ethical position based upon scientific principles it's a different field of discourse i just wanted to ask uh just come in if that's all right uh and the reason why i'm asking matt this and not tom is because tom and i have had extensive conversations on this i think i've had at least two hours on his channel just discussing this but matt i just want to follow up and also i want to deal with uh you know i think a possible objection you raise about the conflicting experiences but i just wanted to just follow up on what i said i would follow up and that is uh yeah i mean i think we are actually a lot closer than that i then i've pre-supposed coming into to this right so i just wanted to ask you and in terms of religious experiences uh correctly if i'm wrong but this is something that if i'm not mistaken you have said you have had as well uh when you're younger uh is that fair to say that yes i i was um so short version uh my mom's side of the family was originally catholic my dad's side was southern baptist my uncle's a medical missionary who served in Thailand Taiwan uh one of those two i'm getting confused at the moment i was in church from before i was born i walked down the aisle at the age of five to accept jesus into my heart at a revival i was active in in the baptist church the southern baptist church uh all the way up until i graduated high school and people in my church expected me to go on to become a preacher so much so that when i debated michael conan the resurrection some of them flew down from st louis to ask me during the q and a hey what happened uh so i have i have that background and i've had experiences now i can't say that my experience was the same as somebody else's but when somebody describes like their experience of being in church and feeling the holy spirit i've had an experience which is indistinguishable from that in description i just don't happen to think that the holy spirit is the best explanation for it because i've had similar experiences on drugs from secular music from secular art from really good meals things like that not identical but similar like that so yeah i've had those experiences right so uh when you mentioned for example that people have different kinds of experiences and they're not the same i actually picked that as a an evidence of non corroboration that you're not finding people i would find it really interesting if if people came up with the identical experience and then i mean it's almost like you know when you know people claim that they're speaking in tongues but you find them saying the exact same thing the other guy is saying and you begin to have your doubts you know are you just repeating what the other guy is saying so i think that this different experiences uh actually uh it it's all right but uh i'm very interested to know for example what what would you consider at least for yourself because i'm just interested in understanding what would you consider for yourself to be a you know like a defeated to show that this experience that you had not not what i had not what other people had uh was not real uh no i'm not saying it wasn't real i i had i had an experience i'm not denying that i had an experience i just think it was entirely an experience from me i have no evidence see previously i accepted there were a bunch of people around me who offered their testimony that i was experiencing the holy spirit and i gullibly went along with it because hey they're they know more than i do they're smarter than i am they're having this experience and later on i found that you know what that experience there's nothing to tie that to the holy spirit there's no evidence to tie that specifically to the holy spirit other than that's what people are telling me and what people are telling me cannot be good enough because these people disagree on every manner of everything else where is god to clear this up if god is willing to give me an experience of the holy spirit then god should damn well be able to step up and answer a clear question and not put me in a position where i need to keep debating about whether or not i'm personally rational or whether the world should consider i'm rational or whether there's evidence for it this is absolute i mean we're sitting here talking about and i don't mean to to beat up on everybody else over it but randall's position is essentially if any individual through whether it's because of their lack of knowledge or understanding or whatever in a given instant feels rational therefore it's good for us it's reasonable for us to argue that it is rational rational to believe in god and that's just not the way it works and while he's shaking his head so i guess he agrees it's not the way it works i i apologize i didn't hear that i said i apologize if i misrepresented it but i i'm looking at this is whether or not the belief is rational from you know let's let's go from the expert in the field category or something like that not just the bare minimum of somebody can be rational because once upon a time i think we would all agree that it was reasonable to conclude that the sun went around the earth given the available evidence but would we say in 2020 that it is reasonable to conclude still that the sun goes around the earth and i would say no it's not and yet we have a bunch of people who are flat earthers and other stuff and they are using this same thing of here's my limited set of understanding and i'm reasonable in that framework and i'm saying no that doesn't fly in the grand scheme which is why i'm objecting to no i think i think you're absolutely right matt so i mean i think that if people all the evidences that were available to them is you know to be just sit down and just look up at the sky but funny thing is the greeks actually realized that the geocentric viewers was not a very plausible one very early on even in the bc period but the point i'm trying to make is that i think absolutely right in the absence of defeaters then you can say that that's a very rational belief but clearly i think flat earth flat earth is not rational at all because you have the defeaters you have the photographs you have all these evidences available to you and on the basis of that obviously it's not rational to continue believing in a flat earth but i'm i'm just the reason why i'm asking this is because i when i when when tom asked me when i was on tom's channel tom asked me why why do i believe in god i said tom i'm not going to come here and lie to you and say the reason i believe in god is because i found the kalam cosmological argument convincing or that the fine-tuning argument of the universe at age five you know i realized that this was none of those happened i believe god because primarily my parents told me so my dad was a pastor my great grandfather was a missionary and that's how it started but eventually i began to find that faith in god actually led to me experiencing god in in a multiple of different way multiple different ways and i'm saying that if skepticism is the way to go then i need to i want to know because i don't want to waste my life right living on believing in god if it's not real i want to know what are the rational defeaters out there that i should be aware of and if there is not why aren't why am i not justified in continued believing until you know i get because you see the my the experiences i have continued to confirm my the intuitions that i have that god exists i'm just interested to learn that because this is it's not really a debate for me this is concerning life choices and life decisions yeah what if i jump in here i'm only time jump in i just want to say one thing uh just so it doesn't get overlooked you keep looking for a defeater that that is all based on the notion that you think you should believe until there's a defeater which is something i don't accept in which i already kind of respond to but we can get into it more i want to let tom have time here well let's just grant that for the sake of argument say it is reasonable to believe until there is a defeater i think we do have a defeater like if you imagine children growing up thinking they have a magic eight ball that can tell them things about the universe and they they honestly think that this works and then later we discover scientifically oh the magic eight ball doesn't work now even if the children were reasonable to believe in that magic eight ball now that we've come through the age of science and science showed oh no that's not really a good method we have a defeater the magic eight ball doesn't work that's science and the same thing applies to our testimony and intuitions as human beings is like we have a defeater for that we know those things don't work we've proven scientifically those are really bad methods to try and assess the truth of the universe they work for things like maybe there's a house six blocks down or there's a dog that the neighbor has or whatever but they don't work for things like quantum mechanics or what is the correct medical treatment to cure uh the side pains that we have like our intuitions and testimony do not work for those things and they don't work for the fundamental nature of reality so we have a defeater for those we have demonstrated that our intuition testimony do not work when trying to discover the fundamental nature of reality and so we have reason not to say that we should not base our conclusions based off of those things so uh time you're talking about the fundamental nature of reality but you're actually what you referenced there was nature and so when we talk about god we're not simply talking about nature which is the proper object of scientific investigation we're talking about another sphere of reality the metaphysical sphere that which is ultimate or absolute and so to to say that well science hasn't shown us that god exists actually matt said yeah i agree you know science isn't about that shouldn't be in the business of trying to show that god exists i mean that's a a conflation of concepts here in the same way that you don't judge in ethical theories i said earlier based upon some sort of scientific test you don't judge uh particularly conceptions of god or you can't settle ultimately certainly the question of the rationality of belief in god based upon scientific inquiry right that's not i'm i don't think i said what you accused me of saying by the way so i'm saying that the methodology you're using to try and differentiate is this thing imaginary or real doesn't work so you're claiming that there is this god thing and this god isn't just a part of our imagination exists in reality and when we say we can we use that kind of terminology quite often like we think Zeus exists in reality that's that was a metaphysical claim it wasn't a physical claim it was about the fundamental nature of reality think Zeus and chronos were in voodoo and all those things are metaphysical claims and so whenever someone claims that there is this thing that exists not in our imagination in reality we discover that scientifically oh wait no that was actually false and so so we're using that method of i have this testimony to judge whether this thing exists in reality we know that is an unreliable method to differentiate if this thing whatever it is whether it's physical or metaphysical whether that is real in reality or just a part of our imagination and so unless you have a different methodology you can use to differentiate imagination from reality we know that method of just testimony is unreliable so we have a defeater for that so so let me make illness simplify sort of the conversation here the disagreement perhaps so we're talking about that which is unconditionally non-dependently real the ultimate what's the nature of ultimate reality and there are two sort of basic positions we could think of ultimate reality is a personal reality or it's an impersonal reality it's an agent cause or it's a non-agent cause and the theist is the person who says ultimate reality that which is unconditionally non-dependently real is an agent cause it's a personal reality the atheist is the person who says no i think it's a non personal or a non-agent reality uh so if you want to argue that a person cannot rationally believe either one of those claims i mean fine you can undercut the rationality of atheism if you like and say everybody ought to be global agnostics about the ultimate nature of reality oh my god well i mean tom the one atheism is not the assertion that there is no god atheism is not accepting that there is a god atheism is not a positive statement that there is no god no conventional if you want to be theist in the modern atheist movement and that there are two multiple different usages of the term and if you're only going to go with the strong or hard definite or hard usage you are now engaged in a straw man because you're no it's not interacting with the person who's sitting right here no so if if you're an agnostic by historic definition fair enough and if you want to use the word atheism look you can open up the encyclopedia you can open up Paul Edwards encyclopedia of philosophy the definition of atheism is the one i just gave you can open up the Cambridge companion to philosophy that's the definition that i get so what you're arguing those people it's relevant but not when you're debating me so so you're an agnostic by historic definition but you call it atheism i'm not answering this stop deciding that you're going to label me did i do that for you i am an agnostic atheist or agnostic atheist or agnostic anti-theist depending on different different usages of those terms but if you're just going to go with the straw man hard strong agna strong atheism thing to just say oh we're not agnostic first of all whether or not i'm an atheist is completely irrelevant to this debate this debate is whether or not there's a there's sufficient evidence for god not there's no onus on me to hold that god doesn't exist or to prove that that doesn't exist this is about whether or not there's sufficient reason so why do you keep bringing up the strong atheistic position which isn't mine and isn't relevant to the debate i was pointing out that tom took a position the implications of which would be you could not have a rational belief as to whether the ultimate nature of reality is personal or impersonal which would historically be the agnostic position now if you say i'd recognize some people use that term now and they call it soft atheism fine that or whatever they want to call it that's just a secondary issue yeah well can i can i see it so you're what your argument is is that we can't conclude that the fundamental nature of reality is either personal or impersonal it doesn't matter what we label those things so my argument is actually we could actually say that because as far as we can tell the best methodology we do have to discover differentiate imagination from reality is science right now and that does indicate that the most fundamental things we can discover are impersonal vacuum states quantum mechanics particles those things are all impersonal things as far as we can tell so given the best methodology we have to differentiate imagination from reality we can inductively conclude the fundamental nature of reality is probably impersonal yeah i i said matt said i misrepresented him on this so i'm going to say this on the turner back and you can respond so in my view science the domain of science is nature but to extrapolate that science thereby provides us information as to the ultimate nature of reality is i believe a category error science so science isn't co-equal with nature science is discussion is the is the search for knowledge and it will deal with reality right now science is based on methodological naturalism which is not the assumption that the supernatural doesn't exist it is hey as far as we can tell we can only investigate natural as soon as somebody comes up with a way to investigate the supernatural it will become a part of science unfortunately for supernatural believers that hasn't happened and so they don't have any strong epistemologically sound methodological process to confirm the supernatural which is why we spend our time talking about how we should just accept testimony until we can find a defeater for it and that's just wrong yeah i just i just want to go back to to the defeater that tom was talking about there so uh tom essentially you're saying that if uh that the fact that it cannot be demonstrated just correct me because i don't want to misrepresent you the fact that it cannot be demonstrated by nature is itself a defeater is that is that an accurate summary of your position no no so again so i'm not making the claim about nature i'm just saying observation yeah is that what yeah sorry go on well sort of you're claiming that our testimony can give us knowledge it is a reliable source of knowledge and i'm saying that well if we can demonstrate that isn't a reliable source of knowledge and that it fails a lot well then that's a defeater for your justification of using that as a justification for knowledge so if we can say the the methodology you're using that we accept testimony for god as being rational well that same methodology was used to accept voodoo and homeopathy and that vaccines cause autism and the world is six thousand years old like all of those methodologies or all of those conclusions were came to from the same methodology and so we know now today from science that all those are wrong so we know that that methodology did not work it was not a good method to differentiate imagination from reality in the general sense for any case as far as we could tell right and so using that in a different case thing well we're going to apply this methodology even though we know it fails in these cases we're going to apply it to this other kind of methodology and say what's reasonable here for that to be rational you would need to demonstrate why this methodology is somehow going to work in this case when it doesn't work in all of these other cases right so the first one is the like what man brought up which i said i was going to deal with which is the idea of this you know this competing uh oh inconsistent revelations that is that is there on the basis of testimony and i think there are two ways in which you can approach this the first way of course is that you approach this by saying uh well we are going to accept all of them which again it's it's not logically possible because they fundamentally contradict one another or you can say let's accept the points of agreement that they all have in common in which case i would submit is the view that there is a transcendent ground of reality what we call god so it doesn't matter whether they believe in god or gods the fact is they believe in a transcendent ground of all reality so except that that's not the that's not the shared trait the shared trait of those is that human beings have experiences that they label in certain ways the you you've you've jumped past the common feature is that human beings have experiences and human beings look for answers and you jump past that to say to saying that no no the common feature is this transcendent experience or that that there is something outside of there the common experience is that human beings experience things and another common experience is that human beings who experience things they don't understand propose all sorts of explanations for it and the way to determine which explanations are more reasonable or not is based on evidence and argument not on personal testimony right yeah so just just uh to correct what i was saying when i said experiences i was referring to i i mean i don't deny the fact that human beings have experiences i was speaking in the context of religious experiences which i define in my opening statement uh and i'm basically saying that on the basis of these religious experiences in the category of those things the five categories that i laid out the things that they have in common is belief in god i think this is something that you have experienced that i think tom shared with me when uh on our channel as well right uh tom uh yeah i've had religious experiences too but i think but there are cases like buddhism and jainism that don't have a god kind of experience they have experience just kind of like a karma thing sure sure so i think that if you go deeper into the study of religious experiences there's actually a distinction between mystical experiences and religious experiences and i think that buddhism an example would fall into the mystical ones and not the religious ones now there is a tendency to the pure research for example combine the two as both religious and mystical but that's a that's a separate topic the topic that i'm trying to deal with is that we're looking at this this different experiences that exist and and we're saying that uh sorry matt you said something that i really wanted to respond to and just completely slipped my mind what's that what what what did you say the last so oh oh yeah sorry yeah i i remembered yeah uh yeah just just you're looking let's remember what you were saying okay so uh uh what what i was trying to get at is that the question we've got to answer is is the belief form in a reliable way now you shared earlier that uh you know that for example when you were intoxicated these things appeared real but the defeater then is that the intoxication is leading to that and we know that when we experience things in an intoxicated state it's not reality directed but i'm wondering that i know richard docens has raised this up and and and i've looked i've spent a lot of time in fact when i was being my mth in malaysia i was actually working on the census divinity artist and looking at the cognitive science of religion research by the likes of debra keleman uh and uh and and and so forth where they they talk about how the children are intuitive t is they they have a predisposition that they are hardwired in the words of paul bloom from Yale university all of these two are eighties claimed that there's a hard wiring uh for towards religious tendencies and i know that daniel denadis has done a bit of work on this as well uh so it would seem to me that we're not doing what tom said which is just filling the gaps uh and saying that since we cannot explain it we therefore attribute it to the divine rather what we are saying is that uh the the what we find is that we are predisposed towards disbelief the eighties is saying that uh you know they have the same beliefs as well they're just saying that it is not reality directed that these things don't prove that there is a god but i'm just wondering that uh you know the fact that it shows that this is what humanity at whole is hardwired towards itself would lend credibility to the fact that it could be reality directed and it's rational to believe in them so first of all um i i think you and i would agree because i get people calling me all the time saying you know oh have you tried DMT dude because on DMT you will finally experience god and my question to them is always you know what makes you think that a brain altered biochemical is somehow more accurate in its understanding of the totality of reality rather than less you need to make a case for that so i would agree however it would be wrong to say that you know like if a bunch of people said hey we took a drug and we all had this experience and it was the same and a point of this it would be wrong to say that what they experienced wasn't true i i don't know how despite what some people in chatter saying i don't know how many times i can repeat the fact that i'm not you know in any way asserting that a god doesn't exist and that's not relevant to this debate but what human beings are hardwired for is pattern recognition human beings are hardwired to try to figure out the world and in some cases there's there's different categories of errors there's thinking x is the case when it's not and thinking x is not the case when it is and one of those two scenarios is far more dangerous like if there's a rustle in the bush and you think ah that's not a tiger and you just go sticking your head in the bush that's going to be more dangerous and the person who thinks it's a tiger even when it's just wind is more likely to survive and pass on so we are we we have been designed unintentionally unguided through evolution to be the offspring of people who leapt you know who in many cases ran away when there was no good reason for it or who reached a wrong conclusion because reaching a wrong conclusion is not what we're actually selected for as long as you're as long as it doesn't cause you to die it's not a bad enough wrong conclusion and so to say it suggests that human beings are hardwired towards the religious i would argue is really you might as well say human beings are hardwired towards not being comfortable with saying i don't know what the right answer is and therefore accepting whatever feels like the right answer at a given time which is why we rely on people's testimony is is it rational for me to believe there's a god just because my mom wrote me a letter my mom and this is true story my mom wrote me a letter that said honey your mom would not lie to you there is a god that's like opening lines from my letter now i know i don't believe my mom is is a liar i don't think she's making this up so therefore my rational to believe in a god based on that letter no absolutely not okay and so we need something more than than testimonial stuff because my mom could tell me that jesus is real and somebody else moms could tell me that Allah is the only prophet of god etc so we need something that actually gets down to hey this is evidence for a proposition not merely as i noted at the beginning evidence consistent with a proposition testimony is consistent with everything faith is not a path to truth absolutely i think you guys are equivocating on testimony because in some cases you want to admit that testimony you can walk six blocks in order to get to the restaurant i explained this yeah so testimony all knowledge as i said and rational belief is fallible it can it can mislead you it doesn't mean that we have a excuse me now basic the grounds to be skeptical of testimony or of others now you both said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence it seems to me that really what you're saying is things that are extraordinary to me require extraordinary evidence now fine relative to your data set your background set of beliefs you might require more evidence than another person but again the vast majority of people don't find these claims to be extraordinary and you haven't shown anything to show that all people are irrational and tom has been just has been defending scientism so this idea that science is somehow the key to unlock all of reality rather than simply reality that pertains to its domain of inquiry and of course scientism is self-defeating i actually did do the thing maybe that you accuse me of not doing so when i spoke earlier i pointed out that it that the claim extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is us smuggling stuff in and the truth is every claim requires however much is evidence is sufficient it's just that some claims are more consistent with the facts of the world the claim that there is a god is not consistent with the facts of the world and it's not made consistent with the facts of the world merely because a lot of people happen to have believed it that's not the way epistemology works because when i say for example you're like oh you you must demonstrate that all of these people are irrational no all i need to do is show that the individual reasons that they're giving are not sufficient to warrant a reasonable conclusion on that to others that's it and the fact of the matter is if you have an experience and somebody else has an experience and you say that this is evidence for your god and they say it's evidence for their god i have zero work to do in the entire history of atheism agnosticism non-theism free thinking whatever we've had to do no work because all we had to do to find out what was wrong with what religion is to one religion is to let another religion tell us what was wrong with it because there is no consensus agreement you want to know what's wrong the first baptist church go to the second one then go to the catholic church then go to the jewish church all atheists are doing is agreeing with all that and the fact that somebody somebody does not think that their their belief is extraordinary that is irrelevant because they can be wrong about that they need to show that their belief isn't extraordinary and if in fact they're appealing to the supernatural which has no supporting evidence it cannot be confirmed and leads to multiple different views how can you say that's not extraordinary okay well i find your beliefs extraordinary so i guess you need to demonstrate that they're not extraordinary to me sure now you want to talk about you want to talk about just what belief do you find what belief of mind do you find extraordinary well the belief that you're defending that people can't be rational to believe in god for example i i didn't say that rational people couldn't believe in god the the subject of this debate for like the third time i don't know if you're whatever is sufficient reason to believe in god not whether i've argued not whether not argument no not whether or not you can be rational and believe but whether or not there is sufficient reason to believe in god yeah and i've been providing that so the fact that you don't are persuaded by my testimony or by my argument does not mean you win what you have to do is show what it does mean is you need to show why testimony should be considered reliably sufficient to warrant reasonable belief and you haven't done that and we have done things to show that testimony is it possible for testimony to lead to true and false beliefs like everything is fallible i already pointed that out but everything isn't equally fallible a coin toss is not as fallible as a die roll which is not as fallible as a yardstick at measuring something and so it depends who's given a testimony you're pretending that because everything isn't nothing is infallible that all of a sudden we should rely on testimony well a coin toss isn't infallible either but i don't think we should rely on it i don't think it's a path to reason so demonstrate that testimony is more reliable than a coin toss so the three-year-old shouldn't rely on their parents when their parents testified to them that eight-year-old shouldn't rely on her teacher the first year physics student shouldn't rely on his professor i mean are you saying that all testimony we should be skeptical or only that which you've deemed extraordinary no i'm a testimony that how we should consider testimony is this is a guide where's the evidence supporting it if a parent tells a child that left is right and right is left that that doesn't make it true and it doesn't mean that they're reasonable to support it that i can't believe i just asked you to demonstrate that testimony is more reliable than coin toss and what i got was shouldn't parents listen to their kids that's not even go ahead tom yeah so randall you accuse me of scientism and i wanted to to address that really quick so i'm definitely not arguing for scientism i'm not saying that empirical verification is the only way to knowledge i'm specifically using science as a way to demonstrate that testimony is not reliable in certain cases so i agree that testimony is good in some cases it's totally fine like having the kid believe their parents that the house is six blocks down that's fine it's not fine if the parent says that they should believe based on testimony that the universe is made of flying pixies like that's not reasonable or the vaccines causautism so that's why i'm not gonna back to vaccinate you yeah exactly so so there are some cases where testimony is good and some cases where testimony is bad and the way we can differentiate between these two is by using a different method the method of science we can say well we can scientifically test well is the house six blocks down yes it is okay so that's reasonable to believe based on testimony we can test do vaccines cause autism no they don't that's not reasonable to believe based on testimony and so we can categorize the two different things and give a specific definition of extraordinary of saying that the ones that can be verified by science the things that have an empirical basis are reasonable to believe based on testimony the ones that cannot are not reasonable to believe based on testimony so and then that's not just my criteria that's the criteria of historians who the vast majority of historians agree that history can't evaluate miracles magical creatures etc and the topic is not miracles magic pixies or anything else the topic is whether whether god is defined exists and whether it's rational to believe that and how does science provide overriding evidence to make it irrational to believe in god want to mention that we're going to go we're going to go into the q and a pretty quick here so want to let you guys know if if one side is willing to defer to the other to let them have the last word uh we will go into q and a within the next five minutes well i on the on the wealth i've had more than enough words i just find it strange that when tom talks about um supernatural stuff and everything else randall wants to say that's not what this debate is about well the supernatural has more to do with god than parents telling kids to to look both ways before crosses the street has to do with the general reliability of testimonial evidence you got it and does everybody feel like i don't get me wrong i i hate interrupting but i i think at the same time it's i know you've got probably a round in the chamber ready to fire but at some point we should probably jump in and so uh i did i just want to clarify it still not scientism like my argument i'm not arguing that empirical verification is the only way to knowledge i'm just using empirical verification to delineate which kinds of testimony are good and which kinds are bad if there's another method in addition to that that is not in conflict with anything i said there could be a different way to assess the truth of the claims now would be good evidence but the testimony isn't it i like the fact that all all of us were nodding along with tom right then so maybe we found the one thing that we can tie to for una for agreement gotcha and who knows maybe around to maybe in person someday once uh things kind of settle down and travel gets going again this has been a really fun time so we're going to try to read through as many questions as we can want to want to say thanks so much appreciate all of your questions super chats and comments and first one from Matthew Anderson appreciate it said tj a hunty thanks james appreciate that kind of like brad gelina i like that there's that's these i thought these were great teams and i i was so glad in the chat a lot of people were saying like this is a really cool uh debate i couldn't agree more dave dally fjord thanks for your super chat said james congrats on the success of the channel well i have to say all credit to the speakers they are what makes it fun here so we're excited about today's debate this is a really good one and apple pie thanks for your super chat said question for tom who do you think has the best facial hair and hi james that's a i don't they mean best facial here in the in the debate or do they mean ever tom it's it's clearly james james has the best facial hair thank you thomas i've never heard that i appreciate that josh killian thanks for your super chat said uh just gave a super chat no comment let me know if you you want to add one andrew handlesman thanks for your super chat said hope all is well everyone well you too andrew you hope you're healthy and well josh you're white thanks for your super chat said oh this is an interesting one okay so he said for each side is it a problem that philosophical argumentation seems to address the probability of a generic god will commonly argued by believers of a specific god i think they mean i'm not sure if they mean like is it a logical coherence problem or something maybe an ethical problem but what do you guys think about that we can hear from everybody on this if you have an opinion yeah i i would sorry i'll just be quick so i i think from my perspective many arguments for god's existence are arguments that are for god not surprisingly under a particular definition often the perfect being theology definition or classical theism and those kinds of definitions would identify properties that are that undetermined a particular religious view so for example they may be consistent with judaism islam christianity but they be inconsistent with non-theistic views of the world and like pantheistic views etc so i don't see any problem with arguments like that being part of a cumulative case for a religious perspective that they provide some ground to understand a particular definition of god while undetermining the exact religious nature of that view i think i think the major argument is that one thing atheists like to bring up against theists is well why are you arguing for this just general kind of a god and not your specific kind of a god and depending on what the goal of the debate is then that can be an underheaded tactic like you're trying to shift the burden like a moat and bailey fallacy where you're trying to address the more common easier thing rather than addressing the actual point but if the goal of the debate is just a general god as the topic then there's not actually an issue there got you any thoughts from anybody else you got it thanks so much appreciate your super chat from joshua let's see oh we got that justin mower phd in pine creek studies thanks to your super chat says i was raised this is kind of a similar to an objection that came up and but more in the kind of common time so i think the objection that came up was about if people let's say believed in the like the greek pantheon in the past were they justified in believing it or were they rational and believe it this person says i was raised to believe in a supreme transcendent spaghetti-ness spaghetti monster i'm guessing maybe one in the same and have never seen a defeater am i rational in my continued belief today no absolutely not because again i don't think we are talking about claims necessarily even though i think matt and i spend a lot of time discussing claims we're talking about experiences that are held not just by a select group of people we're talking about religious experience that i held by tom and matt myself and basically the vast majority of the people in the world not just in a known world but you know we've we've realized that religion is everywhere you go to the jungles of africa or the jungles of south america you find religious tendencies and that's why i've taken a keen interest in the work of debra kelemann and paul bloom from yale on the cognitive science of religion and to treat religion as a cognitive phenomenon why is it that we seem hard-wired towards religion and belief in god agency and so forth and not for example spaghetti monsters and stuff like that so what i'm saying essentially is this that when you when you see that the belief is formed in a reliable way for example the same traits that tell us you know that the rustling and to use matt's analogy the rustling in the in the bushes indicate there's a genuine threat of a predator and that it's rational to run whether or not there is an actual predator it's it's it's it's it's rational to run when you when you see things like that i think in the same way in the same sense it is rational to trust our sense of divinity which we have and to basically believe there is a god out there again i mentioned in my opening statement this is not a proof that there is a god and i think both matt and i in agreement in this but whether it is reliable whether it is a rational position to believe on the basis of the sense that we have i think it is and i don't think that with all due respect to tom i don't think that the defeated that he brought out actually challenges that at all i'm sure that we'll make the difference so the thing that that you overlook in addressing that particular analogy is that if i'm standing in front of a bush and the bush rustles i have to make a decision right now it's now life or death and so in that situation that is a factor where it may be the most rational thing for me to do is to move away from that bush rather than going into that bush that's not directly analogous to what we have to do with respect to whether or not there's a god first of all there's nothing prohibiting us from trying to investigate it's not like going to see where the evidence is for god is going to result in my immediate demise right if i go in the bush to try and find out and i'm not equipped with like body armor weapons or whatever else i'm putting myself at risk i'm not putting myself at any risk to try to find a god and a god doesn't put itself at risk at all by stepping out of the bushes and saying hey it's okay it's me the analogy falls apart there and and it is the the notion that we don't have to make and a decision immediately based on insufficient information that is not rational that's why that that analogy doesn't line up with the realities about god claims right is it all right for me to follow up or do you want to go to the next i'd like to hear randall's answer because i is it rational under properly basic beliefs to believe in the spaghetti monster if you're brought up being taught it yeah so first of all of course the historical origin of the flank spaghetti monster was a letter to the editor and then a book written by a fellow named bobby henderson back in 2005 and it was a parody it was intended initially as a parody of intelligent design theory and then later on morphed into a parody of religion generally and actually the book is is quite fun the gospel according to the flank spaghetti monster but rhetorically the function of the flank spaghetti monster is of course there is no such belief community a formal belief community of people who actually believe this there are people who call themselves pacifarians and they will wear culviners on their head but as far as i can see what's intended as is a parody of religion so is it possible that there could be various different religious movements that develop over time and develop a reflective equilibrium of how to interpret the world that includes doctrines that relative to my way of looking at the world appear extraordinary sure naturalism appears extraordinary to me and some versions of naturalism even more so than others reductive naturalism appears very extraordinary but i don't think that anything significant follows from that fact it just means again that we all can have a particular way of interpreting the world and to some degree plausibility or expa which is extraordinary is relative to that context in that person so so just to clarify if the pacifarianism was a real religion that people genuinely believed and they brought up their kids believing in pacifarianism then it would be rational for the children to believe in this point spaghetti monster based on it could be it could be until they had defeaters for it yeah just like it could be reasonable for a child to be raised to believe something as extraordinary as naturalism until there are some given some good defeaters for it now there's kind of a smile tom has here and again i think that smile belies the sense that you are projecting your particular plausibility framework upon everybody else and thinking well if people who don't believe as i do or interpret the world as i do are just kind of silly and i think that's a little bit of a provincial perspective to be honest we do have to keep moving dave gar thanks for your super chat said the restaurant is closed due to covid-19 sorry to hear about the dave gar tioga thanks for your super chat said do christians this is kind of like the question we just covered do christians care about other religious experiences and i'm unless you guys interpret it as different we can keep moving if you'd like if you feel like we've said enough but if you want you can keep okay uh nico blast i'll just kind of just say one thing i do have a chapter on that in a book my next book kind of coming out i do think that christians shouldn't ignore a religious experience that doesn't fit into their plausibility framework because they could be guilty of a confirmation bias right of just looking at evidence that supports their views and ignoring evidence that doesn't so we do have to take it seriously you got it thanks for that and also thanks to nico blast appreciate your super chat said paul had painful sight head pain the bill uh did bill it should for several days that matches a seizure okay it might also match it all it might also match an actual experience with god now now you gotta figure out which one it's more reasonable to conclude a seizure i would say so since we have evidence for seizures but this is this is a bad argument that i suggest atheists stop using because it unnecessarily adopts a burden of proof that you can't meet just showing that an experience is consistent with something is exactly what the opposition is trying to do so why do it gotcha and martin b thanks for your super chat said sitting with my notebook waiting for one single good reason to believe in god is it coming soon got a critic out there for theist friends uh let's see you don't have to respond to all these lucky movie dweinberg thanks for your super chat said if you want to disprove jesus as god all you have to do is disprove the supernatural the prophecies the unknown knowledge and bible codes good luck atheists wait i what bible code i don't i'm not sure there's a there's a theory that if you know i i'm aware of it it's it's pretty funny where if you analyze certain books with theories you can find complete sentences that are just hidden in code i think there were a couple books written in the 90s one was called the bible code by michael drawson and another was the signature of god by robert jeffrey's but i think this person's being facetious and yeah i certainly wouldn't take that seriously bible codes i think you just it's kind of like back masking when you listen to sleds up when backwards and you can hear satan talking it's very highly subjective it wouldn't surprise me to find that some of these like there's there's pose law about you know there's nothing you can say that couldn't have been said by somebody who holds a i think some of these people may be dissing to hear what's in their question but or at least i hope so i i'm always trying to be optimistic that that it's not as bad as it seems next i have appreciate oh by the way uh new subscribers thanks guy uh let me know if i mispronounce guide guide oh giante thanks for your super uh subscribing today thank you nico dig thanks for subbing and uh jelly roll michael jackson and jt hunley we hope you feel welcome we're a neutral platform so we really do whether you come from christian atheist whether you be gay straight you name it no matter what walk of life you come from we do hope you feel welcome here and with that jumping into the next question appreciate your super chat from bothel guy who says i saw god die i have no more evidence for this claim than you have for your god is it rational to believe me just because i claimed it you see that that to me uh would be a really good example of something we have a defeater for namely if you if it again it goes back to how you define god right if you define god as this uncaused uh you know timeless uh eternal being then you have a natural defeater within that that uh you know an eternal being cannot possibly die so i think that that that itself is a natural defeater already so and that's what that's what i was looking for can can god die if he wants to uh it would depend if in his eternal nature i don't think he can't right i mean otherwise you'd have to redefine what eternal eternal eternality means i was having a bit of fun samu i i'm always just having fun there uh with with the burrito thing gotcha hand thanks for your super chat from appreciate it tioga who said thank you for the content uh for continuing to have these conversations we'll thank the debaters uh the pleasure is all ours to have them it's always fun and they are linked in the description as i mentioned let's see f t thanks for your super chat said thank you tom randall matt and sam for having these discussions can you this is an interesting question too they said can you give some advice on the epistemic crisis in america regarding politics and fake news within politics how different the random for the christian side well uh i think that i've been horrified to to see the evangelical support for donald trump i i would argue that he's a proto fascist and i i don't say that as uh just an insult and i think you can go down the kind of behaviors he's in going he's in joining such as demonizing the media and and the use of the military most recently all sorts of things and i think that's very concerning i don't think christians should ever get behind any particular political part of your platform because that never ends well i'd like to say that i agree with randall and i'm encouraged that there's something that we vehemently agree on and that is that our current president of the united states is garbage and in my position into my opinion uh absolutely misused his power and turned his own troops on peaceful protesting americans using uh all he put air quotes around tear gas since he wants to claim it wasn't tear gas in order to disperse them so that he could march down and have a photo op holding up a bible uh because he thinks americans are stupid enough to buy that and i genuinely hope we're not but i'm betting that we are and that you'll see another four years of trouble tom any words nope all right thanks i'd i'd get i'd tip to 20 bucks if you just said maga right let's see thanks for your super chat from roi stigall appreciate it said does the theist word salad come in blue cheese wedge i'm not sure they even listen to tom and matt randall and sam can you steel man their position you have a challenge there go ahead uh a randall and sam i can try and steel man a part of it and that is in the absence of actual supporting physical evidence and in the absence of something uh a similar evidence that would show that this belief is false it is rational for someone to accept the direct experience and testimonial experience of others with respect to the the notion that a god exists that is is how i would sum up what they've did they were asking us to to steel man the theist position no vice versa i believe i think it was vice versa but yeah they were saying that that we uh the commenter was saying that we straw man your position did not actually listen to your respond to it and was asking us now to steal only i didn't listen to the question and then straw man the question and answered it on my own so i'm guilty in your innocent you did not what you actually did is exhibit a commitment to steel manning you ennobled yourself even as i continued to look like a straw man in the eyes of that audience member so can you steal matters position randall i think that that you've done a good job of presenting your position and i think i've offered relevant criticisms to the position gotcha and i don't think i i don't think i foisted a fake a false view on you well i mean i know that matt didn't like me using the term atheist in a particular context i i think people disagree that's an essentially contestant term people disagree about how it is randall he was specifically asking like can you steal man our position like try to rephrase our position in the most accurate possible yeah well so for example you took a position that you believe that science is the provided the best explanation for uh and such you you said that religious beliefs are imaginary and science provides the best tool to understand them and i don't agree with that but i understand how people can find science compelling um i think that both of you you are rightly suspicious of testimony to the degree that it can mislead but of course i did say that testimony is fallible so i think that there actually is a fair amount of agreement on various parts even if there's overall disagreement gotcha and thanks for your super chat from nc sorvisto appreciate it asked where is the verification for this reality plus and is there a way to discern between make believe and this expansion of existence so one way to think about the to respond is to is to point out some classic epistemological observations that for example our experience of the world under determines whether what is called realism is true namely whether there is a world external to the mind or whether idealism is true but the fact that you cannot ultimately settle the question of whether idealism or realism is true does not mean you can't have good grounds to believe or accept realism or that a person could have good grounds to accept idealism gotcha and thanks for your super chat from sigafredo sarabia good to see you again said you uh atheist are designed unintelligibly and they attribute that quote if i understand right they are attributing that quote to matt uh let's see yeah so earlier when i was talking about that we have been designed by the unguided process of evolution i'm sorry that they don't pick up on you know hey i'm using a word in a colloquial humorous sense because i specifically pointed out when i said the sentence that it is an unguided process so i use this specifically because people will point to things and say look it's designed and i will say no the appearance of design is not actually design and we we i actually did this dance day and and sent the thing to tom before we started because somebody posted like uh two pictures of like a beach ball and a globe and a car engine and a heart and the ones on this side were were like oh not designed according to atheists and the ones on this were designed according to atheists and i'm like that's because for the ones on this side all of the available evidence points to them actually being designed and having designers and no evidence points to them occurring naturally and the the reverse is true for the other side these things occur naturally and there's no evidence explicitly for design and so you know if you want to make that case cool but it's not like we're holding up some standard that's what we do to to confirm design is to contrast it with that which is naturally occurring i don't know how else you could do it because if you want to say that that which naturally occurs is also designed then you might as well just be saying everything's designed and how do you prove that there's no there's no reason to have any argument then because it's just an assertion that everything's designed gotcha and sigifredo sarabia thanks for your other super chat said tom let's see i think if this is relevant enough to the topic it will let you guys clarify if there's actually discrepancy so they said matt agrees there's no answer to solipsism so i ask you can science prove the world was not created five minutes ago or that your brain is actually in a vat it takes experience to answer or if it takes experience to answer wouldn't it be irrational if arbitrary it can't prove with absolute certainty but it can provide evidence we have justifiable reasons to conclude we're not just a brain in a vat does it give us absolute certainty no but it doesn't need to gotcha and luminiferous thanks for your super chat said randall and sam i get sleep paralysis every few months i wake up and paralyzed and see shadowy figures poking about my apartment and whispering then they vanish is it rational to believe that they're real is experience enough this has actually already come up earlier with the discussion of the apostle paul and whether we should interpret the apostle paul as having had a seizure um i would say first of all i would say is this that if somebody experiences sleep paralysis of that kind um and one of the first factors to keep in mind is what is their background set of beliefs about the world if they believe there is a supernatural realm it may be consistent and rational for them to believe that there could be demonic agencies that are acting through the mechanism of sleep paralysis if they are an atheist or a naturalist and they believe there are no such beings i would think based upon that evidence that would be insufficient for them to believe that there were demons but of course it would also depend to some degree on the nature of the vividness of the experience uh kind of like again back to ellie arrowway and her experience in the film contact gotcha and thanks so much for your super chat from stupid whore energy strikes again and says god or gods and things like that are objectively extraordinary if i told you i flew like superman to get to work yesterday you would find that harder to swallow than me saying i took the bus to work i think that's a false analogy i agree that uh because we do know aspects about what human beings are and how we propel ourselves through space that is an extraordinary claim i deny that relative to theists in the perspective of most people but frankly in planet earth the belief in god is an extraordinary claim in the relevantly analogous sense gotcha and thanks so much from sigiofredo sarabia for your super chat said samuel doesn't the argument of religious experience follow if you presuppose god and must be quote religious unquote why does it have to be a quote religious unquote experience because we're talking in the context of god i i'm basically we we all have i mean i completely agree with matt that we all like have experiences all the time in fact you're watching this debate you're experiencing this debate as well right through your cognitive faculties but the the question of whether we can go ahead and trust god's existence is not really a presupposition i didn't employ a presuppositionalist view neither did i make the claim that therefore god exists on the basis of these religious experiences what i'm saying is that in the presence of these religious experiences uh and couple of course and in throughout the discussion we had with matt i brought up for example the research in the cognitive science of religion that shows that human beings are hard-wired towards belief in god i'm just basically arguing there's a rational grounds to basically saying that since this is not something that you know someone is just basically intoxicated believing in it this is something we are doing in a steady state of mind we have reason to trust that in the absence of defeaters remember the two principles i raised principle of credulity and the principle of testimony which was also raised by uh randall and i'm saying on the basis of that we have good reasons to believe rationally that god exists right so uh yeah that i think that that's that's pretty much what we were trying to make the the claims we were making gotcha and thanks for your super chat from uh just many many a's in a row i'm not sure how to pronounce it next they said uh so they have a string of super chats here i'll read a number of them in a row said matt and t jump ultimate tag team combo glad you enjoyed their teaming up and then i'm waiting for my call from vince mcman then he said matt i've learned a ton from you on uh i've learned a ton from you thank you they also said matt you changed my life for reals you the bomb and also said uh james there is another ghost behind you be careful i think they're referring to my the cat echo uh but yes so you have a fan there matt and cool appreciate it not relevant to the debate but i appreciate roya roya lindsay thanks for your super chat who said cool debate i couldn't agree more roya this has been a really fun one and michelle eggleston thanks for your super chat said if a physics student doesn't believe their professor they can run experiments to validate the claim what can an atheist do to validate theism do you want to tackle that rendle or shall i so that was that's directed to us yeah well i mean not a physicist a physics student may not be able to corroborate the teacher whatever the teacher's talking about they may for example for example you may have to go to the stern laboratory or you may lack the cognitive abilities to fully be able to develop an experience that can teach it so you actually do have to trust your teachers there's actually at my church there's a fellow named axel halloween who was on the uh Nobel prize committee for particle physics and believe me i talked now i haven't studied much physics but i talked to him for two minutes and he's lost me but in terms of of testing well i would suggest this person read philosophy of religion because there's an extensive literature between theists and atheists each one providing arguments and evidence for their particular interpretation of the world gotcha and michael w roble thanks for your superchats and question for randall you are talking about ultimates and absolutes and appear to be taking a hard line on definitions are you a follower of darth dockins no i i do think that's important to have clear definitions i don't know what hard definition is i mean we can see if we have clear definitions then we recognize where people are using terms of slightly different ways as for example matt and i did and then you can avoid talking past one another and leading to confusion so i'd like clear definitions gotcha in this time frustrated atheists thanks for your super chat for samuel said so are you saying that a belief in a general concept of a deity is reasonable if so sure but why i think we've presented reasons why namely for example i think randall has presented the argument from properly basic beliefs and i've presented the argument that it's reasonable to trust uh our experiences i think this is not something that is uh it's not a debatable or disputable i mean it's not something that i think is really that contentious we trust our experience all the time and in response to the previous questions sure when it comes to physical things that you know a class features you can go out and test it but how do you do that with history how do you do that with consciousness how do you do that with there are lots of things that are not there that you can believe that are not tied to the natural world and clearly when we talk about god when we none of us believe that god is a natural entity so i think it's a categorical error to try and say use the same method or at least it's not analogous to testing out a physical experience because a physical experiment because god is not a physical being right now you can use that and say well that's a dodge you know you're dodging because you've made god in that way but that's always been the way we've defined god right god is that that's the fact that this is always the way we define god it's like the people who try to want to fault science because god has been defined in such a way that science can't investigate it therefore it's a problem with science i mean rand Randall was asked how these atheists how tom and i can actually uh confirm the existence of god and instead he just says well maybe if you don't have access to the to the physics experiment stuff you should just have to trust your teacher and i'm saying no that's still not how it works just because you have a physics professor who's relaying information to you and you don't have access to cern doesn't mean you merely have to take your teacher's word for it because it's not the teacher's word that's relevant it's the data that they're presenting how reliable it is how independently reproducible it is that's the way science works and we still didn't get an answer for what tom and i should need to do to confirm a god that's not what i said what i said was in the example the person gave where the student your first-year physics student could just go ahead and test whatever their professor who's a world-class Nobel prize-winning physicist says in the classroom that's silly there are the vast majority of things where that first year student has to accept what their teacher says the next thing i pointed out was that if you actually want to look at arguments for god's existence there's a vast literature in the philosophy of religion uh that are debating both atheists theists and various other perspectives and they're all providing arguments and you can go ahead and look at those arguments and see whether you find them compelling cool still got it wrong and still no answer right uh just i just want to respond to matt if that's all right uh i think sometimes the way we the way in which the question is phrased uh and i think that matt would completely agree with me on this you know for example if i asked you matt you know what was what who was the creator of the universe if you claim there is no creator who is the creator of the universe you would rightly say uh that question is a convoluted one right it's it's not a helpful question the question itself is quite poisoning the world because it assumes there needs to be a creator for the world i mean you would agree with me so i see i think that when someone basically comes and says you know how do you test god that's not a very helpful question because god is not repeatable and testable like the other things of why would anybody why should anybody believe something that isn't testable because it's immediate and intuitive to us that's what i mean i think that if you no matter whether you're in the jungles of africa matt or whether you are in uh you know uh you're a scientist or no matter what you are belief of god believe in god is something that is immediate natural and intuitive it's tell that to the paraha let me let me finish matt so it's something that you and i can experience and it's something that you you and tom both have claimed your experience both of you have said that you know uh that uh well you know we don't trust what we have experienced that's fine but for those of us who do we have rational grounds for doing so you have not presented any defeaters for those so in the absence of any i'm not saying they aren't please hear me carefully i'm saying that in the absence of those defeaters we are absolutely rational in going ahead and believing in in that god that's all we're saying we do have some comedic relief for me too thanks for your super chat from aah many many ayes in a row said in a number of superchats they're in a great mood today said should i order pizza yes or no need advice yes you definitely should i hope it doesn't sound arrogant when i say i am the greatest man in the world love bibliotheca thank you for all of those superchats tioga said bring bring the kitten back appreciate that she's sweet frustrated atheists thanks for your super chat said for randall why does the experience have to be religious a religious one why does the experience have to be a religious one from a religion that is well established that just seems like you are making things up i haven't restricted we haven't disfigured our discussion at all to a particular religion we've looked at starting with the postifarian one where he said we said postifarianism was a not a real religion yeah and everything he said about it was based on a fact-finding mission to the origins of it as if as if that somehow acts as any sort of response at all if if we didn't have that information if somebody just been presented with these flying spaghetti monster how do you know the fact that i can't demonstrate that christianity was an invented fiction in the fourth century by the pope and the masons which is what some i will admit that shit crazy conspiracies theorists think but the fact that i can't show that doesn't change it so the fact that you know what the origin of this is uh isn't relevant to whether or not it's rational to somebody because you yourself have already uh made it clear that the determining factor of whether or not it something is rational is based entirely on what you personally believe as i so i think it is relevant as i pointed out that the rhetorical function when people invoke the flying spaghetti monster is as a parody religion as intended to parody and then i made the point which is an important legitimate point that yes you could be as i said an atheist you could be a naturalist and teach your child as let's say Richard Dawkins famously talked about in one of his essays all sorts of things that i believe to be extraordinary and yet uh that child could be justified in believing them until they have some reason some good defeaters to test them on the other parent don't have too many questions left so we'll try to speed through these last ones and then uh let our speakers go as we really appreciate their time they are linked in the description as i've mentioned in case you have not seen that yet and thanks for your super chat from someone let's see uh they corrected me they said it's not pronounced ah you're supposed to say all the a's in a row it's a lot of them they said uh for you james you're the real mvp setting this up i'm out thanks for your kind words and again all credit to the speakers this has been a blast space cat thanks for your super chat said randall do you think it's rational to believe the bible over the evidence for evolution and what about flat earth should you believe in the and then they uh they said where do you draw the line for irrational beliefs and why i think i believe i accept neo darwinian evolution i don't think that it's inconsistent with genesis one to three genesis one to three are ancient cosmogonic creation narratives written in the accommodated understanding of people in the ancient nearestan world i don't think that they're intended to reveal to us 20th or 21st century science let alone who knows where science will be in the 25th century so i accept the consensus of evolutionary accounts of human origins until it's been shown to be false gotcha and thanks for your super chat ft said can you explain to mr auto pants that you can use facts about the world to get moral judgments is there's an is odd gap uh gotcha thanks for that adam kennedy i think auto pants is a person in the chat they were debating with adam kennedy thanks for your super chats that theas have you seriously looked at the arguments for the catholic church having the correct interpretations of the bible what is unconvincing to you yeah i've actually had debates with a good friend of mine trend horn who's a well-known catholic apologist but that's a little bit beyond the purview as to why i'm not a catholic gotcha and frustrated atheist thanks for your super chat said for matt playing devil's advocate if i'm holding to a deity without saying you have to believe can i be reasonable to hold that position it's interesting that we picked the word reasonable there i will answer your question briefly and the rest of it's tied up in in the closing remark that i'm gonna make um whether or not you are reasonable is determined by whether or not your belief and the justification for it are consistent with the facts of the world not just what's in your head and it doesn't matter whether you're trying to can whether you're trying to say i need to believe as well the only thing that matters is are you asking me if you're reasonable which you just did and so then i must use the criteria that i have to determine whether or not your reason gotcha and thanks for your super chat ronald bentonka said superhero cast and moderator appreciate that this has been a one of my favorites i've just honestly loved it shane pierce thanks for your super chat we have only two left including this one said ellie's camera recorded nine hours of footage during those two seconds in the movie contact interesting but it's still it didn't show anything as i recall there was just kind of a garbled but the fact that there were nine hours of it in that tiny space is the point that somebody is making yeah but uh yeah it's a good point but whether or not there is nine hours sort of under determines the issue that the vividness of her experience could have been something that could allow her to believe it even if others were not justified in doing so gotcha and jl warren thanks for your super chat said matt your lack of nicotine has made you powerful let the precision and snark flow through you appreciate that you've got another fan out there let's see i think that is it for today let me just oh we had one last one come in said thanks for your super chat j pp 3030 said good show thank you james and to all the speakers well thank you for hanging out with us gentlemen want to say thanks so much wait matt did you say you want to do a closing oh were we not we can do that i i just had a couple comments for like a minute or so i didn't know gotcha we do a final thoughts yeah go ahead i'll go first and that'll give everybody else time to do this and then they can say whatever they want that's fair and then i won't have the last word i have a friend who refuses to debate a version of this topic a he won't debate is belief in god rational that's not what this topic was today despite the fact that we heard that many many times talking about rational talking about reasonable the subject of this debate was is there sufficient reason to believe in god and that that presumes reasonableness and that we are going to be presented with specific reasons so can you be rational and believe in god sure does that mean that your belief in god is rational yeah maybe the reason my friend avoids debating this topic is because it is entirely possible for someone to argue that as long as the model is internally consistent it's rational and so then if you have somebody who knows nothing other than they've been told this and they've been told that and the and and this is true they might as well believe that too that that becomes rational this is what we've seen throughout this in the sense that randall was essentially advocating that the rational is based on what you already believe and i would argue that the reasonable is based on the best understanding it's about what we understand the bulk of humanity it's not like it's reasonable to believe that the earth is flat but it may be rational to believe that the earth is flat if you're saying i only have these three pieces of evidence and i haven't looked at anything else all of a sudden it's rational but it's never reasonable and you don't have good reasons to believe the earth is flat the defeaters for simon's belief until defeated are a people can be wrong in the in their description and understanding is of their experience in what they're attributing it to that method of direct experience and people reporting has no demonstrable no demonstrably reliable efficacy the experience leads to conflicting beliefs and the method has no reliability and demonstrated unreliability those are the defeaters for it it doesn't mean that it's false it means that as a method your method is garbage for reliably getting to the truth it is no better than a coin toss which is why i asked for someone to demonstrate that it would be if testimony can lead you here and there please demonstrate that it's more reliable than a coin toss otherwise your method is no reliable more reliable than a coin toss and that doesn't mean it's a path that should be used to truth are we going to flip a coin on whether or not i'm guilty of murder whether or not randall's guilty of murder i i make no bones about the fact that i'm a huge fan of humor and i will end with the two two two of the things from him one is to proportion your confidence to the evidence that the strength of your conviction for proposition should be proportional to the evidence in support of it and the second one the greatest thing that i whom ever taught any of us is to reject the greater miracle and the important thing here is if you're presented with two things hey i experienced a god or hey i experienced something that i am wrongly attributing to god reject the greater miracle and hume does not say except the lesser miracle because hume knew better than that but we should at least reject the greater miracle and between some people got it wrong about god or god is actually real and is confusing a bunch of people that's the greater miracle and so i will continue to consistently reject it and i will not accept the lesser miracle until it has sufficient evidence to warrant belief and currently it does not gotcha any final words from anyone else uh um yeah i'd like to say that i think it's perfectly possible for there to be evidence of a god or the supernatural all you need is testable predictions just like science if you can give some way to differentiate your imagination from reality like saying if supernatural being x exists and i pray to supernatural being a gold brick will appear in front of me every time and that occurs i'm happy to grant that as evidence of the supernatural all you need is testable predictions just like anything else in science or any other belief but i think that theism hasn't presented any so i don't think there's any reason to believe in theism any more so than any other belief that has no predictions gotcha and only if you want to say something then i'll go last sure so at the very beginning his comments matt said belief in dog is mundane belief in god is not mundane and that's a nice sort of capsule summary of what i'd want to say in response to matt so as i've argued actually for the vast majority of people on earth god is not extraordinary it is in that sense mundane and by the same token a dog could relative to a particular group be an extraordinary claim if a person or a community had no experience of four-legged animals they only knew about snakes and lizards uh then maybe to talk about something like a dog would sound pretty extraordinary and that gets us back to the topic of debate which was is there sufficient reason now matt i think the way that matt is interpreting this maybe is different than the way i'm interpreting it so sufficient reason can be both sufficient grounds such as a properly basic experience and also a discursive process of reasoning so i argued the first and sam argued the the second point now tom i accused him of scientism he pushed back on that but i think again in his final comments he kind of comes back to it so he says well what would you need to believe in god you'd need testable predictions just like anything else in science and i think right there what he's doing is imposing a particular epistemic standard as the requirement testable predictions for belief in god and that is something that comes from science i think that's an example of scientism and again uh the question would be what's his epistemic basis for accepting the principle itself as an absolute principle because how do you develop testable predictions the support principle uh my last word is to say i really enjoyed talking with you guys it got heated but in the best possible way and it was a lot of fun so thanks a lot for participating in this you betcha and yeah uh i i just want to close by saying that i'm really grateful to be able to uh you know team up at randall and discuss with tom someone who has discussed many many times and especially to to discuss with matt and i look forward to continue discussing with him hopefully uh somewhere closer to home matt yeah maybe even yeah sorry you say maybe even in malaysia i appreciate it thank you yeah so uh yeah hopefully that that turns out that i really enjoyed this let me say in closing that i i don't want this this closing statement to to be a rebuttal to anything that matt or tom have said but uh essentially when uh what uh when the topic of debate was sent out by email uh that is uh is there sufficient reasons to believe in god randall sent out a email to uh james confirming and saying that's we doesn't mean that you know it's rational belief in god is rational uh and i and i believe that james replied in all caps yes you are right i think that that was uh so that randall was writing the assumption and we worked we framed the debate based on that and based on what james said uh i have we i've i've tried i've realized that we hold to very different frameworks i'm not a naturalist i don't believe we should be confined to naturalistic framework i don't believe that we god should be testable uh in the same way that you know physical objects or things and phenomenon are i think that god is something that is can be very near and very intuitive even children as i mentioned debra kelemann and paul bloom have demonstrated both of them are even treated that it's something that we are hard wired to work so it doesn't take a lot of intellectual effort to believe in god and developmental psychologists are demonstrating that is it rational to to basically on the basis of our experiences and the intuitive nearness of god to conclude that god exists i would think so in the absence of any defeaters what would be interesting is i mean i think that matt brought out three or four defeaters at the end of it i'm not going to respond to him because he will not get a chance to respond back uh but uh what i would say is that uh but then again i have with regards to conflicting revelation i've mentioned we can take what all these religious experiences have in common but uh in conclusion i just want to say that uh it's something that is near you can basically suppress that and say it's not there because ultimately what we believe is that god is a person it's someone you can relate to that implies personhood in some way uh so uh i mean this would lead this is not a conclusive discussion but i've really enjoyed my time discussing with all of you thanks for that gotcha thanks for that and appreciate we have just a couple of last super chats things luminiferous ethan thanks for your super chat this came in late they said thanks to all participants stay healthy and safe we had brian stevens who said tons of children believe in santa is the claim of santa no longer an extraordinary claim i think this is just regarding the uh idea that tons of people believe in god or find it intuitive if you have anything on that uh yeah i do uh show me one person i mean i'm talking about show me one person that someone who is mature especially who actually believes and says i believe that santa claus actually exists i mean i'm not saying they said show me someone show me a claim is there a literature out there it's there i believe say the cause exists okay and and i think i think since you have never told me this term there's i i suspect you have deceived on that one okay so uh but yeah in the absence of any evidence of defeat we should trust it that's all yeah i mean that's that that's the obvious point is well the first point is that there's a clear disanalogy there that the vast majority of adults on earth do not believe in santa claus and actually relative to children yes children are rational to believe in santa claus they're not irrational even though it's a false belief you can have all sorts of rational false beliefs gotcha and thanks so much adam albillia appreciate your super chat they said dr randall you are a reasonable reasonable person i repeat you are totally reasonable it's just that your position on god is ridiculously detached from reality you've got a critic out there uh if you want to respond you can if you don't want to add no problem and uh do want to say i think we had one more from adam thanks for your super chat from adam said for tom jump and matt delahunty they said their combined appearance is as close as we would ever get to jesus's second coming so you apparently have a huge a super fan out there so do want to say we really appreciate everybody being here we hope you have a great rest of your weekend thanks to so much for the speakers for spending their time with us and as mentioned one last time they are linked to the description if you'd like to hear more from them so keep sifting out reasonable from the unreasonable everybody take care