 Dear Eric Hovendt, I recently viewed your discussion with Thunderfoot at the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. I wanted to take a few minutes to clarify some issues raised and see if I can help to shed a little light on some confusing issues. At the end of this video I'd like to offer some suggestions on how you can better achieve your goal of representing your religious views honestly. The key point on which you and Thunderfoot seemed to disagree was a very important question of whether reality exists independent of the observer. This is something philosophers all the way from Plato to the modern day have been exploring. I'm not a philosopher by training more profession, but I think I can give you a short introduction to a few interesting thought experiments in what is called if an independent reality exists. I'm going to start with some soft examples from movies and TV that you might already be familiar with. 1. The Truman Show Starring Jim Carrey as Truman. This movie came out in 1998. It told the story of a man who was born on the set of a reality TV show. Growing up into the camera's eye, completely unaware that his every choice, his every word was being broadcast to a TV audience. The small island town he lives in is actually a TV set built in a giant dome. All his friends, his family, his coworkers are actors. Truman is aware of how artificial this reality is, except Truman. He believes all the experiences he has to be genuine, never knowing until the movie's climax that he's the star of a TV show. He completely believes the experience of his senses, his genuine interactions with the people around him, but in reality he's been completely fooled. So here's the challenge. How can you be sure that you aren't on the Eric Hovind Show? What if your belief in God is just the result of the director of your particular show trying to incorporate some comedy elements for the audience's amusement? Remember that you can't trust your own senses because they're being actively deceived by people acting behind the scenes. 2. Star Trek Holodecks. I don't know if you like science fiction as much as I do, Eric, but I recall when I first watched Star Trek the next generation that the holodeck was one of the things that most captured my imagination. It creates a realistic holographic representation of anything it's programmed for. The regular rules of physics can be suspended. Cause and effect can be altered. History or fiction created at will. People in the holodeck are unable to tell it from the real world until the door to the other reality is opened, and the worlds can even be populated with holographic beings with apparent thoughts and feelings of their own. Now how do you know that you aren't in a holodeck right now, either as a quote real person who doesn't know it's a hologram, or as in one episode a hologram yourself convinced of the reality of the simulation you exist in? Are there any tests that you could perform from within the simulation that would reveal that it was not truly an ultimate or objective reality? Three, the matrix. This doesn't seem like your kind of movie, Eric, but it's a very strict illustration of the much older thought experiment called the brain and a vat scenario. The entire human race are plugged into a shared virtual reality, feeding sensory data directly to our brains so that we are essentially living in a world that does not exist. Interacting with other quote real humans, but our senses are lying to us all the time about things as fundamental as our name, our age, and whether we are walking or laying down. The matrix is the consensual hallucination that the human race experiences. Eric, the question of whether the universe exists is not as simple as most people think. Your questions presume that we can only have reason and logic if reality exists independently. That's not necessarily true. A matrix-like illusion could be created where 2 plus 2 equals 5 every single time. Your brain looks at two fingers on one hand, two fingers on the other, but when putting them into one view, they suddenly become 5. You wouldn't consider this to be unusual because your brain would be conditioned to accept these altered laws of mathematics. You could just as easily have a universe where 2 plus 2 could be any number from 3 to 9 depending on the time of day or the color of the objects. When you say 2 plus 2 equals 4, you're drawing on deductive and inductive rules that work on your perception of reality. Your perception could be wrong though, and there's no easy solution to this problem of global skepticism. You might also be familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave. In it, two prisoners are imprisoned from birth in such a way that they can't move their arms, legs, or even move their heads to the side. Behind them, people are carrying figures that block light from a fire, producing the shadows that are the only things the prisoners can observe. The prisoners mistake the shadows on the cave wall for the real things themselves, and their limited experience gives them no way to know that outside the cave is an entire world of real things. Yet they become very excited when one of them can predict which shadow will pass on the wall next. Their reason appears to work to be predictive within the constraints of the logic of the shadow world. So in light of these classic and not so classic examples, I hope you'll agree that your belief in an objective independent reality is not based on any true knowledge. Thunderfuss points were mostly about the provisional nature of knowledge, and this is a key concept in the philosophy of science. I can't tell you that the law of conservation of mass is true or false, real or unreal. I accept it provisionally as appearing to be predictive and being useful to my imperfect perception. Most of scientific knowledge about the natural world is considered to be provisional, and we only value it in so far as it provides useful explanations or predictions. If the reality we experience is the result of a mad scientist experiment where we are all brains in a jar hooked up to electrodes, science and reason still has some utility. It's not describing ultimate reality, mind you, but it can explain the simulations we experience and sometimes predict them like our prisoners in the allegory of the cave. Thunderfuss's point was that inserting the assumption of a ghost that never lies, your religious belief, is not much different than inserting the assumption of a universe where the laws of logic are simply a fact of the universe. One assumption or the other has the same effect, giving us permission to trust our senses, whether they are actually correct or not. He called these basal assumptions. Basal meaning that all our claims to knowledge rely on assuming that either there is a ghost that never lies or the universe is actually out there and we can understand it. Neither position is to be preferred so far as I can tell. If you doubt what I'm saying, play along in the matrix scenario. The matrix is programmed to make you believe false sensory feeds and also to feed you a propensity to believe that it all needs a supernatural explanation. What about your argument proves that you aren't a brain in a vat? I think that's enough on the epistemology of global skepticism. Next I'd like to address your tactics. I think you're using what I would call a rhetorical gotcha argument. A classic example of this from politics is the question, have you stopped beating your wife? Where you'll only accept the answer yes or no. Either answer makes your opponent look bad, but it's not a very honest tactic. The generalized principle is the magician's choice, heads I win, tails you lose. It forces your opponent into a position where he is duped into a false dichotomy that results in loss either way. This isn't good argumentation. In fact, it makes you look like your argument is so weak that you must resort to entraping people into gotchas that they can't legitimately escape. The problem with these and the reason you failed to get a planned response from Thunderfoot is that smart people see the manipulation, the dishonesty underneath them and refuse to play along. Thunderfoot did the right thing in not giving a thoughtless yes or no answer to the question. It became obvious that when Thunder pushed back you hadn't really put any thought into the deeper philosophical issues behind your casual questions. I don't think this tactic is in the best tradition of witnessing for your beliefs. If you can't represent your faith with honesty then you make the arguments against you even stronger. Most non-believers in the English-speaking world live, work and spend every day surrounded by Christians. Many of us are former believers. Some of us have read the Bible cover to cover or studied philosophy and theology. A lot of us are pretty good at argumentation and reason. The chances are that your dishonest, clumsy argument does more harm than good to your side. I'll show you exactly how it feels to be on the other end of a rhetorical gotcha and this will be my last question to you Eric. Please answer yes or no. Do you feel any guilt for profiting from the sale of DVDs to the gullible? Thanks for watching.