 No, it's not, no, it's not, no, it's not, no, it's not, no, it's not, no, it's not, yes, it is, yes, it is, yes, it is, yes, it is, where was the evidence for God that was the that was the entire first part was is there evidence of God and I didn't hear not only any objectively verifiable empirical evidence for God, I didn't even hear any intuitive evidence for God, just a lot about the value of intuition and how evidently as an atheist, I'm all about military power, which I generally despise despite having done eight years in the military. And that's not consistent with my secular humanism, and nothing that I could view as evidence of God. No, the whole point was to question your standards. That's your subject of debate. Hey, I didn't interrupt you when you Correct. Called what I said a diatribe. Let's try to be civil here. I am trying to be civil. Then don't interrupt me. Then don't interrupt. Interruption is. Don't interrupt me. Uncivil. Okay. So as I was saying, the whole point of this opening is to question your standards of evidence. If you want to say that, well, there's no scientific evidence. When we do experiments and open the microscope and look at in the beaker, we don't see God. Then I can concede that. So what's the point of that point that your opening was about? My opening was to take the discussion to a higher level of what are our standards? What is our epistemology? You're assuming a atheistic epistemology that I don't accept. And the most most people in history and even today don't accept that. So that's, that's point number one, as opposed to as for evidence of intuitions that people believe in God. We'll talk about it in the next part of the debate, but there's this is something that's established. There's a natural theology that is established within the cognitive science of religion that people have intuitions about spirit beings. They have intuitions about a purpose to creation. They have intuitions about there being an afterlife. These are all things that are established within the cognitive science of religion. Is that a pause for me? Yes. Cool. So I wanted to do a debate on Islam versus secular humanism and which one's better for the world. But Dandel didn't want that. And then James kept coming back to me with potential topics for a debate. And I pointed out various problems with them and everything else. And then finally I gave up and just the three different topics that he wanted over three hours is what I agreed to. And so I'm given a list of topics and topic one is, is there evidence of God? I rest my case because he just said that the entire purpose of his opening was to question my epistemology. I am irrelevant and my epistemology is irrelevant to whether or not there is evidence of God. And if you demand that the first hour beyond is there evidence for God and you do not address that topic and admit that instead you've decided to go with a different topic, you have defaulted and I rest my case. No, it's the same exact topic. If you have a debate topic. Part of the debate is to analyze the topic and the assumptions that go into one position or another. I'm analyzing the assumptions that go into the first sentence or the second sentence that you had was that this kind of scientific analysis is the best route to truth. I am objecting to that and proposing an alternative. How about you explain to us and justify why it's the best route to truth? Because the subject of the debate is, is there evidence of God? Yeah, how do we determine that? You're asserting that it has to be scientific evidence. The subject of the debate is, is there evidence for God? My answer is no. And I talked about what sort of evidence I would accept or not accept. I didn't say anything at all about shutting down intuition. I didn't say that intuition should be sidelined or less important or that it has no. I thought we were done interrupted. Or that it has no importance. I didn't do any of the things that he asserted. And not only did he not present any evidence of God for us to address, but he fully acknowledged that that was not the purpose of his opening statement. I rest my case. So where's the evidence that the external world exists? That's not the subject of the debate either. You, I want to know like your standards of evidence for God. Do they have any meaning outside of that particular question in the very specific way that you've defined it to, to set the debate up in your favor? Is there anything else that is scientifically verifiable, like the external world? Yes. Like the principle of non-contradiction, please give me the evidence, the objective, objectively verifiable evidence that the law of non-contradiction is true. I'm not the subject of this debate either. And after being accused of setting this up so that it would be easy for me to win, after acknowledging, he chose these topics that I did not want to address. And now it turns out that he also does not want to address. I don't know what to do. James? No, no, there's plenty of evidence. There's plenty of evidence. If you ask people, start for evidence, if you ask people for evidence of God, they will point to their sense that God exists. They will point to their sense that when they look at the world, they see it as being created by a supreme being for a purpose. When you ask people about any number of things that are not scientific, they will have a tendency to answer in specific ways. These are studied within the cognitive science of religion and psychology generally. If you ask people for evidence of the external world or basic arithmetic propositions, there's a tendency to answer in consistent ways in a universal fashion. What this tells us is that the human mind has a certain structure. It works in a certain way. And we have to understand the human mind in order to ask questions about morality, religion, aesthetics, logic, mathematics, all of these science, right? Empirical data, all of these things have to be understood with reference to human psychology. So it's not irrelevant to the debate. It's actually a core first step of being able to debate evidence for anything, let alone evidence for God. So what we just heard was that if you ask people, they'll tell you that they believe in a God. Some of them even say they intuit it. I'm still asking and still waiting for a demonstration of evidence for God. That's evidence that people believe in God. And if you just said, hey, I want to debate whether or not people believe in God, I'd say, why would we do that? I clearly agree that people believe in God. I used to believe in God, but I didn't do it necessarily because of intuition. Although some people might do it for intuitional reasons. Some people might think that they're doing it for good evidence reasons. But when I found out that I didn't have good evidence and when I found out that intuitions could be wrong. And if you're going to have intuitions about, oh, I don't know whether or not the restaurant's going to be busy. That's probably based on past experience and data that you're just using your gut to assess. And so what you're describing as potentially intuition there isn't actually intuition, but it's based on data. But we don't have any data that I'm aware of for God. We don't have any evidence that I'm aware of for God. You haven't presented any and that's the subject to the first hours of debate. Intuitions are evidence. Intuitions are evidence just because you don't accept them. That doesn't mean that they're not evidence. There are different types of intuitions. I didn't say all intuitions are equally compelling. There are some intuitions that are so compelling that no one has questioned them for most of human history. Like the intuition that there is an external world, for example, or the intuition regarding the law of non-contradiction. Certain moral intuitions like it is wrong to harm people. People have universally had this intuition. Why? Because every moral system, every religion that we see has this principle in it implicitly or explicitly that it is wrong to harm people without reason. That is evidence of its truth in so far as the human mind is capable of accessing the truth. That's the point. And the belief in God is also one of these very strong intuitions that human beings have that they developed from childhood. So that is evidence. You don't accept it as evidence. That's my point. Boy, have I got some surprises for you. Daniel seems to think that nobody's questioned reality. I don't evidently have never heard of solipsism. For most of history, are you interrupting me again? What's good for the goose? Solipsism in the study of this within philosophy is something that is robustly argued all over. It's almost argued more than whether or not atheists can be rocks or whether or not tacos or sandwiches. Solipsism is the issue of can we trust and do we know that the outside world that we think is the outside world that we experience? Is it the real true world? And as far as I'm aware, there is no solution to the problem of hard solipsism. But when you say that people's intuitions about God count as evidence, as I was pointing out, whether you're going to have objectively verifiable facts or objectively verifiable empirical evidence or not, at a minimum, the evidence that you demonstrate someone's intuition, if you want to claim that's evidence, you have to make a demonstration to show how that intuition is consistent with a specific God concept and excludes other God concepts and how we can demonstrate that it is probably correct. And you haven't done any of that. You've just asserted that people have intuitions about God and that we shouldn't dismiss them. I didn't say we should. You've asserted from the beginning in your opening statement that the route. I think you use the word route to understanding reality and truth is through this kind of scientific analytic investigation. What do you want you asserted that you asserted that so why can't you just justify that? Why can't you tell us why we should accept that standard? Because the first hour of this debate is not is Matt's epistemology sound is is there. Yes, it is. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Meanwhile, what I said is that scientific inquiry is the most consistently reliable pathway to demonstrably understanding reality. I didn't say that intuition couldn't get you to the right answer. Intuitions need to be demonstrated in their reliability because the wise person is human teaches proportions their confidence to the evidence. You can have intuitions and they might be right, but the way to be confident and the way for them to count as good evidence is to show that they are probably right. So asserting that people have intuitions doesn't make them evidence. It doesn't make them reliable. And it doesn't mean that people's intuitions about whether the God is a Christian God, a Scientologist God, a Hindu God, a Muslim God, or some other God that nobody's proposed as any demonstration that it's likely to be correct. And this hour of the debate is supposed to be about evidence of God. I still am waiting. So your standard of evidence takes out all moral claims. Moral truths, I'll say, actually, because I do believe it is a moral truth that harming others for no reason is wrong. I can't demonstrate that. I can't bring you peer reviewed studies to establish that. I do believe that the law of non-contradiction is true. I can't bring you scientific evidence for that. I can't bring you. I can't demonstrate that in a proof. I do believe that the external world exists. I cannot demonstrate that through a proof. I can't bring you scientific evidence for that. All of those things and much more basic mathematical truths, basic aesthetic truths like eating human flesh is disgusting. That is a truth and I will stand by that. But there's no scientific result that will say that that is true, but it is true. That is reality. We all have these universal truths that we abide by an understanding reality, but none of that has to do with scientific evidence. None of that has to do with having this kind of deductive proof, yet it's still true, yet it's still reality. What the atheist does, and in general, not just Matt, the atheist says that none of that is really real. And we don't need to talk about that. Let's just talk about what is scientific. But this is a drastic, violent limitation on reality that the vast majority of humanity, not only today, but throughout history, doesn't share. People don't have this scientific reductionist view of reality. So if you go back to the beginning of my opening statement, not the Mitch McConnell joke, which was really good, by the way. But if you go back to the beginning where I was describing things in addition to talking about the nature of evidence and everything else, I think I specifically pointed out that there are things where we're not going to be able to point to empirical evidence. And I think I used morality as an example for that, to suggest that I am tossing those things out is not remotely accurate. And I guess he just missed part of my opening. But my opening was about evidence of God, not about competing epistemologies, so I'm still waiting. Well, the difference is when it comes to morality, I'll stand up and say, this is true. And it's not something that I can doubt. If I doubt it, I doubt my reality. But your position, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that morality is something that we can't have objectively verifiable facts about. Our positions are not the same on morality. My position is shared by the vast majority of human beings and no one even questions that's people's reality. I doubt reality. I doubt many things that I intuitively feel about reality. And yes, our view on morality is very different with something I'm sure we'll get to in a little while, which everybody's already aware of. When it comes to moral truths or let's say the law of non-contradiction, identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, the foundations of logical thinking are presuppositions. We can't demonstrate that they're true because you'd have to assume that they're true to try to prove they're false, which means they're not falsifiable. However, what we can do is demonstrate that they consistently seem to be inviolate. That means that there doesn't seem to be anything that breaks those rules, but we don't have an exhaustive understanding of the universe. And so beginning as a practical necessary assumption to say I would like to reason, these are the foundations of reason that I'm going to begin with, identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and they continually consistently demonstrate to be true and reliable and have never been shown to not be. It is a reasonable intuition or inference or presupposition that we should continue to use them until such time as somebody demonstrates, hey, we found a problem with identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle. And now you have to rethink whether or not you can use them as a foundation, but until then it's like, you know what, I rolled a dice and I rolled it over and over again and I calculated the probabilities and this dice consistently conforms to the probabilities, but it might be the case that angels are ticking the number that shows up on the dice every single time and they're just doing it consistent with the probabilities that I understand. And any day now that angel could just turn it to something else. So I better not, I don't have any foundation for probability. We have loads of foundation for probabilities. We have loads of reason to think that something is true. What we don't have a way to demonstrate is that it's impossible for it to be otherwise. Yeah, so how would you falsify the principle of non-contradiction? I just asserted, I just literally said you cannot falsify non-contradiction. So it's not up to be falsifiable. So why do you say it seems to work as if there's going to be a future point where it's not going to work and therefore it will be falsified? Am I speaking English? I said these things are unfalsifiable. They are presuppositions that continually demonstrate that they are true. There's no reason to think that they could be violated in the future, but you can't demonstrate that. And so it is a presupposition. I am as convinced as I can be of anything that the foundations of logic are reasonable, but you can't prove it. This is the foundational problem of logic. Why do you accept it? Oh my gosh. If I pick up a pen and I try and write with it and it writes every time I pick it up and write with it, then I'm going to view that pen is reliable right up until it stops being reliable. That's the same thing for identity non-contradiction excluded middle. Those things have continued to demonstrate that they seem to be. It's not an empirical thing. It's not an empirical thing. How can you demonstrate something that's non-empirical? How can you demonstrate that harming someone is wrong? Is there going to be a future point where we discover, oh actually harming people for no reason is not wrong. It's actually good. It's not an empirical thing. Like you're making a category mistake. Like these are non-empirical things, but you're applying this empirical standard of falsifiability to everything. This is just a basic category mistake. So everybody pay attention to what's happening. This grandstanding is ludicrous. Are you speaking English? I'm sorry. People understand me. Rewind it. I literally have to say the same thing. You don't get grandstand. Just answer the question. Your principle of falsifiability. You don't get to determine. You don't get to decide what question I answer and what question I don't answer. What's actually happening here right now. You can, but you're an ass. What's happening right now. Yes, you are. You're hurting my feelings. I know. You're breaking my heart. Wait till we get to the other problems. So what's happening here is I explained it and then I explained it again. And when he didn't have an answer, he instead tried to shift the topic to is harming people wrong? Are we going to find out that someday harming people is not wrong? And then he shifted that topic to is harming people for no reason wrong? When that's not the subject of this debate. It is not the subject of this hour debate. And it is not what we were talking about. Are you going to be able to stay on topic and eventually present some evidence of God? Or are you going to keep grandstanding and deflecting and pulling up topics that we weren't talking about? So if you apply the standard of falsifiability, that's exactly what's in question. That's what the whole opening was about questioning that standard of scientific evidence is the arbiter of truth. You haven't addressed that at all. You just grandstand to the audience and then you keep saying that. Well, we don't have evidence for God. Yes, I know that's the question. That is the debate topic, but we're trying to analyze what does evidence actually mean? What are standards of evidence that are required? I say that intuitions that human beings have universally from childhood are evidence. For God, insofar as we can understand truth, insofar as we can understand reality, that is evidence. You don't accept that as evidence. And you say that, well, this is not objectively verifiable. And I ask you, why is it not objectively verifiable? You say, well, this is not something that's empirical or scientific. Why would we ever accept this? And then I say, well, what about all these other things that you accept that you seemingly accept? But they don't have that standard of proof, yet you accept them. Do you accept that there's an external world? Do you accept that harming someone for no reason is wrong? Do you accept that even though you don't have any empirical proof? So why won't you accept that God exists? So I was just accused of saying, why would we accept it if it's not empirical? When I just finished explaining that identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle are not only not falsifiable, but are an example of the thing I highlighted at the beginning of my opening about things that are not based on empirical evidence. I didn't address the question at all about whether or not I think there's an objective world that we're experiencing. So Daniel is arguing against a fictional strawman of me and still presenting no evidence of God. You accept law of non-contradiction? Yes. Why? Where's the empirical evidence? Where's the empirical evidence? As I've explained now four times. That's something that's not empirical. That's my point. Correct. Correct. So then there can't be any empirical evidence for it. Yet you accepted it. I didn't say there couldn't be any empirical evidence for it, but that's not why I accepted it. What could be? Are you going to let me answer or are you going to talk over me again? I explained why I accepted it because it continually demonstrates its reliability. And I also pointed out that I accepted it initially as a free supposition because there is no way to demonstrate identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle are always true, but there is a way to show that they are true in every example that we can come up with. You can do this with a simple Venn diagram to show that A, not A, and everything is either A or not A, and nothing is both A and not A. This is what a single Venn diagram with a single circle demonstrates. I'll come up with an example that suggests or shows that identity, non-contradiction, or excluded middle aren't true. I'll come up with an example where they're not true, and I'll stop believing them. Kind of. I'll stop believing that they are going to continue to be reliable because now you'll have demonstrated that there's a circumstance where they're not reliable. But much like the pen, until there's a demonstration that this is going to not be reliable at some point, which for pens we know. And until that time I'm justified in continuing to use logic as a presupposition that continues to demonstrate its viability and its reliability. I said nothing at all about why should we believe something if it's not empirical. I did not say at any point that science is the only way to knowledge understanding. What I said is the most consistently reliable, demonstrable pathway to an accurate model of reality. If you're not going to address what I actually said, could you finally present some evidence of God?