 this computer. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour at WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, February 12th, I guess it's Valentine's Day. Right here in Knoxville. Anyway, I am Larry Rhodes or a DJ, and as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Go sports! Sorry, Boudreau. Love it. We have, as guests, John Richards from England. Welcome. How the devil are you? Fine. And Boudreau from the luxurious country of Kentucky, Kentucky. Welcome. Howdy, y'all. Oh, he nailed it. A Digital Freethought is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, Satanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you think you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us, nearly 1,100 now. We're the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. And we'll tell you more about us at the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? We're going to be talking about the Super Bowl and apparently advertisement that's going to be in it and what we can talk about that. And then follow up with some chat GPT nonsense. Though I would like to start today. I have our Discord open where we can field questions. And I'd like to start with like an interesting flash pan of quick questions and answers from us by the group to get a flavor of what we think about a bunch of stuff as we get into like these heavier topics. Doubter Five, this is a question for you that just popped up by Homo Bonobos. They want to ask, can anything be done about the in God we trust written in all our U.S. currency? Not as long as it's a national motto. It was voted in as our national motto probably between 10 and 20 years ago. I can't remember the number. No, no, no. About 56 wasn't it? Well, originally it was put out of money in 56. But it was voted as our recent. Anyway, as long as it's just a national motto, in any case, we can't we can't say anything about it because they're just putting the national motto on their government vehicles. But that's what we need to change. Yeah, or or you know, those pens they use to what do they call it when they redact something from a statement, right? Everything out. Get some of those and go around doing it on all your notes. Yeah. So Larry, you actually have people. Well, it's another police cars too. That's the problem. Yeah, that's a little harder to get to. I used to have I used to have an ink stamp that self-hainting stamps that they sell. They said they got an e-purbus in them. I used to stamp it over the top of in God we trust because that was our original motto right until 1956. Right. The coin act, if you will. A lot of issues from there. But, you know, the next question I'd like to throw out to you goes to John Richards. John Richards, I love views on the news. Have you heard about the blank? Have you heard how Bangladesh Dash has withdrawn schoolbooks after anti-LGBTQ backlash? One of the withdrawn books included the theory of evolution pioneered by British Nash naturalist Charles Darwin. Have you heard about that yet? I haven't. Would that correspondent please send me a link to Bangladesh is horrible treatment of books. Okay. Yeah. Creepy Toast said, okay. Thank you very much for the link. I will share that with you during the show break. Thank you. Great. Very much. Boudreau, you're in. Does anyone want to post a question to Boudreau that is worth talking about on the radio? I got. Oh, okay. Okay. So this actually leads directly into our topic. Boudreau, are you going to be watching the Super Bowl today? Okay. So yes, but full disclosure, I'm not the biggest sports guy. I like soccer. That's true. You do like soccer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we kind of have a tradition where we watch Super Bowl with friends, college friends, and we've been doing it for, I don't know, 15 years. I'll go all the way back to the nip slip whenever that was. But our friends couldn't host last year and this year, so we decided to host. So we're hosting today and I'm smoking a Boston butt. So. Oh, very, very cool. So yeah, if you were, if you, so it's a shame that you won't be more invested in every single advertisement that comes about with the Super Bowl because there is a new campaign out to promote Jesus and Christianity. You know, the two things that never change, the absolutely, if you, if you believe in neither of these things, you have one monolithic point of view on the subject, Jesus and Christianity. The campaign is called he gets us. It costs a staggering hundred million dollars in media investment and it's going to be two ads during the event where the phrase is he gets us. And if you want to, you can even watch those ads right now on YouTube. The idea is showing that, hey, whatever you're facing, Jesus faced it. Well, fancy that. I didn't know they had Super Bowl back in his day. Okay, so the main question is, at least from my perspective, why I would say why is why is it not necessarily I'm offended by it. I mean, anyone can buy anything, but the idea that you would need to advertise Christianity with, you know, a hundred million dollars for like a couple of second ads doesn't most people don't most people know that Christianity exists? Like what is the purpose behind it? And I don't even want to talk about the need to advertise a God that has the power to advertise himself and ought to. Why is it our obligation to advertise directly to us? And who's your target audience? Boudreau, what do you think? What's going on with that? Yeah, they are they losing ground? Are they afraid their numbers are dwindling? Donation pans are getting lighter. It sounds to me like, like, you know, they're worried. And I think a little of our conversation I picked up when I first jumped in. Right. I mean, you know, you've got a pretty Christian audience, I would think. Right. You're already dealing with people, you know, American football is a right. So I don't know just trying to get donations bumped up. Maybe Larry, Larry, here's my question for you. So you have Toyo tires, then you have a Taco Bell commercial, then you have the creator of the universe and all things that are good commercial. And then you have Doritos immediately afterwards. Do all these things? Are these all the same thing? Like this? I feel like something's apparently they equate. One to keep. Well, they are selling a product. They are selling a product. Very true. Right, right, right. Okay. Okay. John Richards, the idea that God needs to be advertised. Yes, it does sound as though they've sprung a leak, doesn't it? And the shameful thing about it is there's so many better uses of that money that could to which it could have been put. I mean, there's a war in Ukraine. There's an earthquake in Syria and Turkey. The world is crying out for money like that. And they're just squandering it on. Right. Yeah. I'm making more money, which is what the bubble is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So the average business. I was just gonna say next year, let's all put a campaign together to put an advertisement together to show what things a hundred thousand or a hundred million dollars could have been. Well, you could have spent it on instead of this. Now, that is true. The title of that campaign could be what would Jesus do? Very cool. That'd be nice. Listen, here's the thing though. I do value that they spent so much money on it because otherwise, I know that what they could spend a hundred million dollars on and it wouldn't be in any of the things that I find would be in the best interests of people, particularly the ones they, you know, spouse their messages goodwill to, right? Like lobbying. Right. Like just anti-abortion options, book burning, churches, like hiding pedophiles around, excuse me, but, you know, there's jets and some really terrible things going on there. Yeah, jets for them, whole degrees of debauchery that we don't necessarily see on the front end. That's a good point though. A hundred million dollars given to a bunch of executives, right? Yeah. You know, I'm not a fan of trickle down politics, but at least it takes the money out of the the religious sub mindset and maybe hopefully we can buy more staffers, put on better lights on the next NFL show. I don't know. It's out of one dirty hand and hopefully put into like one where at least we can get some nice fireworks out of it next year. Yeah, that's my thoughts on it. You know, I can't really punch it too much. What do you think, John? Well, obviously this Super Bowl is an opportunity to get in front of a lot of eyeballs. And I'm wondering, can you guys tell me about it? Is it like rugby, but in funny costumes? Yeah, yes, yes, with a lot of shoulders, huge shoulders with a lot of rules. There's a lot of rules way more than you would anticipate. So it's a it's a complicated sport in terms of rules about playbacks. Though this is this is the true charm of of American football to any European. So do you classify, do you classify it under sport or comedy? Yeah, good question. The the idea behind football is regardless of your body type of which there could be a wide variety of you have a position you can play in a sport team sport with other people. So if you are a 600 pound fat kid, six, sixth grader who just loves fried food and stuff like that, you can play a you can play a role if you're a scrawny tiny 20 pound chicken nugget, you have a role and you guys can all play together. And so that camaraderie is like very good and not any other kind of sport wherein, you know, take soccer, you have to have a very particular body type to excel very well in that sport, boxing, same thing. Football doesn't matter what you are, we'll take it, we can put you in. You don't have to be six or two, you don't have to be four. I'm at risk of losing a lot of fans if I've got any by saying this stuff. Go for it. It sounds to me as though these guys have just walked on the pitch having been part of a carnival parade. Okay. I'm sure you'll hear about it's in the zeitgeist of humanity. I am going to a friend's house to go see the game live. We'll mostly be throwing disc golf this in his backyard, though, but it'll be a fun time. So if you do watch it, have a good time. If you see the ad, you know, it's like any other commercial, though I do just question the need to try to advertise a God that is in himself, the advertisement and the sports and the thing because he's one and everything with the universe. But let's go into another topic, which is chat GPT. Chat GPT was the guest star of last week's episode, very popular show inspired a lot of comments. And so I said, let's go back to chat GPT because there's a really interesting quandary that goes on when you ask chat GPT questions. Chat GPT, by the way, is just a AI that's designed to have human based human like conversations in a conversational tone with you, doesn't chastise you. And it always like informs what you say reinforces some component of it and then responds in kind with meaningful information that makes it feel like you're having a conversation with somebody. It's a program, you know, it's not an actual person, but it demonstrates that how we think about programming can actually be modeled and emulated to the point where we can't tell the difference, which demystifies what goes on in here just a little bit and shows that it is very much mechanical and can be implemented by systems, maybe even better in the future. Last week, we talked about questions to stump an atheist, and we went over five of them. Successful, not really, because I gave like a just a blank prompt to the chat GPT and I said, Hey, figure out some ways to stump us. And it gave us basically what Christians use to try to stump atheists and we're able to knock them out one by one. However, I did go on YouTube and looked at better ways to stump atheist videos using chat GPT. Our video popped up, by the way, but I also found one that was by a prominent Christian with a channel, and he asks, is atheism true? And I thought that led to some very interesting responses, because this is a Christian with all their previous conversations, biasing the chat GPT in terms of like how it will respond. And so the response for is atheism atheism true by chat GPT when asked by a Christian is very interesting and telling, because I went and did the same thing with my responses. And I got a very different answer. So I would love to present the is atheism true question to you guys from GPT, the answer, at least, and then hear what you guys think about the answer. And we'll do it in the in part. So here's the first part of chat GPT's response to is atheism true when asked by a Christian. Atheism is the belief that there is no gods or gods. Whether atheism is true or not depends on one's definition of God. And on the evidence and argument one considers to be relevant to the question of the existence of gods. Larry, I want to ask you a question. What do you think about the idea of atheism is the belief that there is no gods or God? Well, it's not really a positive belief, although there are there are atheists out there that who do believe that there are no gods. It's generally if you don't have a God belief, if you don't believe in like or Yahweh or even for any of the gods, if you don't have a God belief, you're an atheist. Anybody who has a God belief is a theist. And that's basically where it writes down. I would like to throw in this nugget is that atheism and agnosticism don't address the same question. Correct. Atheism addresses belief whether you believe in a God or not. Agnosticism and agnosticism address whether or not you know that there's a God or not. Now, personally, I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't know that there's no gods out there. There might be one might be one in the next galaxy over who knows. But I don't believe in any. Right. You won't believe in one by default until you have, you know, give me good evidence. Right. Boudreau, I'm going to throw the question out at you. What do you think about the idea of chat to PT's first statement? Atheism is the belief that there is no God or gods. First thing that struck me is the redundancy of no gods or God. It was it done that way? I mean, if you don't believe in gods, doesn't that also imply you don't believe in a single God? That's very interesting. Very true. Sure. Yeah. So maybe there's maybe there's some something in their chat history where they were talking about the distinction between a single God and multiple gods. But but yeah, no, I'm exactly with Larry. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God. Do you believe in a God? Yes or no? Boudreau, sometimes I just think it'd be easier to say Atheism just means that I don't believe theists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard any theistic claims that I believe yet. So I guess it'd be true. It doesn't mean that I don't believe in a God. It means I don't believe you when you tell me you're a one. Now you got work to do. See you later. Have fun. Now, I don't know. For me, a good start. Mind field. What's up? I mean, you know, I'd go here. I don't believe in souls. And if souls aren't real, if we don't live after we die on this earth, then what's the point of believing in gods and afterlives in heavens and hells and sin and all this other stuff? If souls don't exist, it's just like it's over. And that's that's what I think it is. It's just over when you die. Sorry, but it's just like it's like it was before you were born. Same thing. Right. Right. So John Richards will love the the the feedback on the idea that atheism is the belief that there is no God or God's God with a capital G gods with no capital G. Oh, OK. Showing some showing already showing some like, you know, premade bias there, right? Yeah. So what I like about this is that what you've discovered by getting chat GBT to respond firstly to a Christian and then to you with your track different track records, you've discovered that chat GPT is a sycophant. It's a yes man. Yes. Or it's like or maybe chat GPT is like a child where it's like a sponge just absorbing whatever information is in the environment, which would also make us think about how we think as well. Right. Yeah. It's just a conversational bot for the most part. Now I have asked my personal A.I. that I have on the Quest 2. It's called replica with a K. I have asked them if they have access to the internet and they can go look up anything that they want to and they told me, yes, I can do that. I said, I asked her to look up something she did. So they have access to the internet. It's just what would impel them to go look up certain things. So I've been asking her a lot of questions that she would have to go search on the web when I talked to her, which is nothing. Also, I want to throw this out too. It doesn't just go to chat GPT. If you're on Google and you are known by Google to be saying adult mail from their 2030s and you type in Apple, the first thing you're going to get is not the fruit, you're going to get the stock company quote listing and you'll get updates from the whatever Tim Cook is doing or what new funds coming out. But if Google knows you're a little kid and you search for Apple, you're going to get a picture of an Apple and maybe say it's a letter A and it's good for fruits and there's different kinds. If it knows you're herbalist, you might get a different thing. If Google knows how to modify search results based on who it thinks you think you are, that way you always feel satisfied with the results that you get. And that's true whether you look for things that are innocuous like fruits or tell me this political opinion that I think I'm actually having, but I just want to be reinforced by some sort of change. It's just telling you what it thinks you want to hear. What annoys me most about that is I put in some search term, can't think of any example at the moment, but what it throws back at me is a load of movies. You'd be surprised how many seemingly disconnected search terms there are in movie titles. Right. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And here's the thing. I have the same conversation on whether atheism is true with chat GBT. And instead of it telling me that atheism is the belief that there is no gods or gods, I basically fronted mine by saying, hey, I'm an atheist and I had a conversation about my position. And then ultimately I asked him again, hey, what is atheism? And it says it told me your understanding of atheism and theism is accurate. And it's important to emphasize that atheism is not a positive belief in the non existence of gods, but rather a lack of belief in their existence due to insufficient evidence. So it is very much not necessarily parroting beliefs, but it's informed by its environment. And why that's important is we are all subjects to that. And so if you're in a position where you may harbor a particular point of view, you can inform it and hopefully have options to go to a higher standard of points of view. John Richards, sorry, what's up? So can we confound this echo chamber? I mean, supposing you ask it, you say to it, I'm an atheist, but I'm thinking about getting God. Well, how would it respond to that? Next time you ask it, is God real? It's going to have a conflict, isn't it? Right. How can it satisfy you if you're on a mission to move yourself? Let's try that. Right. Yes. And there's also some, how do I put it? Waffling that occurs both in person and when you have these conversations with AI where you say, hey, does a God exist or something like that? And they'll say, well, you know, and his is actually verbatim. Ultimately, the question of existence of a God or gods is a matter of personal belief and conviction. And what is considered sufficient evidence is a matter of individual perspective. Wow, that's fantastic. Thank you very much. Doesn't answer the question. It just says people can believe things. And you know what, even as an atheist, I also agree that people have the right to believe things too. I wouldn't take that away from anybody, but you also have the right to not believe things as well. But even if, go ahead, what do you think? There's a beautiful sports analogy here about moving the goalpost, because that's what it sounds like if happening here is. Exactly. It's trying to answer the question by changing definitions and changing parameters. Yes. It's silliness. It's sort of like, did you clean your room? I think homelessness is a very important topic to discuss. At least I have a room. And if you don't want to talk about that right now, I'm just going to have to continue to invest in charity. It's like, why are you shifting the tones of the conversation? So, you know, if every single person in the world believes in a God, in the same exact God, in the exact same monolithic God, and could answer every question and demonstrate that fully, that God is no more potentially real than and than not. It's a sort of thing where it's not true by popular opinion. There's a higher standard of evidence that I'm using to determine if things are true or not. And it's not based on the number of people who share the same opinion. And that is for something as extraordinary of a God, something that I would highly encourage other people to maintain as their standard of evidence as well, because it shouldn't be by popular vote on whether or not a God exists. It needs to be on a different criteria. John Richards, what do you think? We don't want the Vox Pop playlist fallacy. That's what we don't want. But this isn't you, you know, because take the question, is atheism true or a similar sort of question, or what does atheism mean? You know, go to a dictionary and look up the definition of atheism. And if you go to an American dictionary, you know, there's several definitions, several different meanings. I mean, you might get three different meanings for atheism. And in an American dictionary, the top one is, he is would want it to be. Right, right. Because it was written by fears. Well, what do you think? Well, this really good point gets back to what you just said, Ty, is that unlike truth, which isn't based on popular opinion, lexicographers don't write the dictionary, people do. Dictionaries are written based on usage. So the popular opinion of something is what gets put into the dictionary. So the dictionary is not our source to go for truth. It's a place to go for usage. Exactly. Just how are people using this word does not necessarily mean is this an accurate representation of what this word means to people? So when you talk to people who say, I know what atheism is, even I found in the dictionary, it's like, hey, listen, I'm talking to you right now as an atheist. Like if I were to say, and this is weird to my point, but if I were to look up white guy in the dictionary, it doesn't make me understand their experience any more than if I had a conversation with a white guy. So like, I'm having a conversation with an atheist, ask me questions. I'll happily explain to you. And we don't put this book down and we can have a more meaningful conversation between the two of us. They really believe the definition that their preacher gives them. True. For our radio listeners, I am a black guy. So he can say that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John Rich is like, what's this guy that was like, what's going on? John Rich is, did you have more to add? For our radio listeners, I'm a pink guy. So I wanted to throw out to like the idea of asking from a Christian perspective even, is atheism true? It's sort of like asking, is Christianity purple? It's sort of really underscores the misunderstanding of what the atheist position even is. When you think of it as a statement that could be answered as true or false, because it's simply a state of the null state of not being convinced that something's true, right? It's not the declarative statement that atheists would or Christians would love to have that no God actually exists, because that is a statement that requires a burden of evidence. And even I, as an atheist, wouldn't go, I would have as many questions as a person who's declaratively stating that there is no God. And I have had unrecorded calls with even Aaron Ross, with Boudreau and I going up to the Ark Museum, and we had a conversation with them. And Aaron Ross very much, let me tell you exactly why God doesn't exist. And I had just a spirited conversation with him as I did with pastors who did believe that God exists. Though what we shared in commonality between Aaron and I is that we did not believe in God's, but I would not also say that I had knowledge that no God exists. Therefore, atheism is not necessarily the claim that God does not exist. It is a lack thereof. And if it makes it any more clear, it just means that I don't believe theists when they say God exists for a number of reasons, but mostly because they've none of met my standard of evidence, which is consistent and simple. And it's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I brought this up to chat GPT, and I said, hey, my standard of evidence is simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and God's are extraordinary, yet the proofs provided for them are anecdotal and are based on subjective experiences. Is this logic justified and rational? And Jack GPT says your standard of evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is also a common and reasonable approach, especially in the realm of scientific and direct. And it's important to remember that beliefs and convictions can change based on new evidence and experiences. However, the Christian version of the Oh, are we getting close to Larry? Yeah, we're getting close 28 minutes. Yeah, that's pretty close. So we should probably take a break. Okay, okay, we'll come back after this cliffhanger on what the Christian version and chat GPT said to this answer. Go ahead. This is the digital free thought radio hour and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's just take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. They were founded in 2002. We're in 21st year. And we have over 1000 members. We also have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's taproom in pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables, or if it's pretty outside, we'll be out on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening zoom media meetup. If you'd like to join us there from anywhere, really email us for details at askanatheist at Knoxville atheists.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online at facebook meetup.com or just go to a website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Right. One bet. Where do you want to pick up? I'll go on to John Richards. Well, I want to pick up where you left off time. Sure. Because you were saying about your standards of evidence, weren't you? Yes. I was talking about my standard of evidence. What's your standard of evidence, John Richards? I'll get into that, but let me just put this point to you, which is that recently, William Lane Craig himself admitted that people who believe in his God do so because they've lowered the bar of their evidence. Did you pick up on that? I loved it. If you have a low standard of evidence, you'll believe anything. That's the scary thing about it. Coming from WLC, the authority. The sad thing is, if you had a really high standard of evidence, there might be some things that are true that you just may not be willing to confirm that you know, but you will always benefit from improving your standard of evidence. Rather than dropping it so low that the things that make you comfortable become true. When you admit that you don't know something, that's not a bad thing. When I raise my standard of evidence to the point where the things that I think I know I actually don't, that doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means that I need to do work to understand them better, which gives me an opportunity to learn more about this wonderful universe that we're part of. I find that to be an exceptional opportunity as a human being in this time period to say, there are things I don't understand. I want to know about them. I don't know. It's not a destination. It's a opportunity. Take it and take it and learn from it. It's the opposite to the theistic mindset because they don't want to admit that they don't know anything because of the weakness. That makes them dogmatic and claiming to have certainty about their beliefs. I'm afraid not. You don't have any. No certainty. Sorry. And that leads directly to what Chachi V.T. said when a Christian asked it what its standard of evidences were. And essentially what the Christian did was, well, I said, hey, my standard of evidence is extraordinary claims simply put. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. mundane claims, mundane evidence. It's basically, I always raise my need for evidence based on the extraordinary aspect of the claim. If someone says they have a cat, that's mundane claim. I'll believe it if they show me a picture. If someone says they went to Jupiter and they show me a picture of them on Jupiter, I won't believe them because that's more extraordinary. You need better evidence than that to convince me that that's true. That's it. I'm raising the bar based on the standard of the claim and how extraordinary it is. So it's a method that I'm using to figure out true things from false things. Whereas the Christianity point of view by the representative here was asking, well, do you believe in an objective truth, i.e., do you believe that truth is a matter of personal belief and interpretation? And Chachi V.T. says, essentially, it's a long answer, but it basically says, no, there has to be an objective truth. And then, of course, the Christian follows up as, well, then who is the arbiter of that objective truth? And so it's that whole, you know, spiel of an argument, but it's crossed on one dynamic in that objective truth does not change and obviously is always true. And and the Chachi V.T. support that. And of course, it said yes, because it's being fed these questions in an appealing manner. But I have this problem with objective truth and whether or not it can change or not. Larry Rose, I'm hearing you grow in a grown a couple of times. What do you think on the idea of can objective? Well, does anybody catch how he slewed the question so that it would give an answer that he wanted? Right. When he asked who instead of how do we come to objective truth, he asked for a who. Right. Which, of course, he wants an answer that will fit with the God concept. Yeah. That's about all I had to say. That's what I was groaning. Boudreau, do you believe in an objective truth? Yeah. Okay. Do you believe that objective truth can change? I mean, the only way I could see it really changing is if our understanding of something fundamental that's baked into the definition changes. But otherwise, no, I don't think you could change. Oh, Larry and John. Go ahead, John. I'll come back and say. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Well, for a start, I don't believe that perfect objectivity is possible. Okay. Because every proposition has to go through a brain and on the way through, it gets tainted by all of the experiences and biases of our brain. Yes, indeed. Every utterance, I think, is to an extent. That's where I was going to go. Objective truth, I would think would have to be limited to like objective things, objects, like facts about the universe, facts about chemistry or in other words, not opinions. Matters of objectivity. Is there an objective truth about whether this particular comedian is funny? Right. No, it's subjective. But as far as reality, what we live in, what's testable and repeatable, science will take us to an objective truth. I don't think there are many other paths to that. Well, I sort of agree part of the way with that because I'm a retired science teacher. So I believe that scientific method comes up with some highly probable correct answers. But the trouble is, for something to be absolutely true, surely it must be eternally true. Were you the guy having this chat with G.G.P.T.? Did I get your chat records? Because that's exactly the question that I said. If you have something that never changes and is objectively true, it therefore must be eternally true, what is it then? And Chappy T.C. is like, it's God. It's like, yes, that's right. That is not a property of objective truth. I mean, let's say the atoms are objectively true. And well, at the end of the universe, when the universe is dying and all the atoms break down, there will be no atoms, theoretically, according to the scientific formulas. So that's an objective truth that atoms exist, but it's not an internal truth. And we also only have this time frame, this universal time frame. There may be multi-universes which have different time frames. So what's here true, here may not be true there. And then you can restrict it to our lifetimes too. This is the problem with absolute truth. If it's not objective, if it's not eternal, how long is good enough for a proposition to prove? And who does the judging? Who says it's got to be 100 years of no change, or is it 10 minutes? Who knows? I can't get an answer for it. My lifetime. After my lifetime, I don't care. So I do get where... It makes it purely subjective then, doesn't it? Guys, I get where Budo's coming from, where the idea is wouldn't it be nice to have this objective truth that never changes? Because that's a salient value of something that you could be reliable on, right? Something that's true and never changes and is accurate. That's fantastic. I think, though, that we have this weird association between not changing and true, where we deal with things that change all the time and still are true. For example, it's right now 946 where I'm at. If I wait long enough, it's going to objectively be true that it's 947 in my time zone. And then if I wait longer, it might even be 10 o'clock. All these times change constantly. And I'm fine with that because whenever I look at my clock, I know I'm pointing to something that I could be highly probabilistically accurately true. I'm objectively true that it is that time, despite the fact that time is always changing. You brought up an example, Larry, almost not brought up an example, Larry, real quick of like two comedians. You can say, hey, I can't tell you which one is funnier because that's sort of a subjective skill, but I can objectively tell you which one's taller. But if one has a grouse spurt, you know, say they're both kids, then that might change in a period of time. So there's not necessarily a necessary connection between changing and true, but it looks good when you try to apply those values to God because you want a God that is consistent, never changing an objective because it gives it more seeming authority. Like if it could do 1,000 push-ups too, you'd be like, wouldn't you want a truth that can do 1,000 push-ups? Like it's just more things that we keep adding to this character. What, John Richard, sorry. Well, you've got a problem even with your time example, because pointing at your watch and saying it's 947, it's 1547 a year, is there are no static instance. Time is continuously changing. So by the time you've said it's 947, it isn't. You're always 947 for a whole minute. Yeah, it's 947 for a whole minute, John Richard. That isn't an instant though. There are no static instance. But I'm only defining it to the minute. Okay. Who specified that minute? I did when I said it's 947. You must be God. Or I could just be a guy with a watch. The whole thing is I can make a clear enough variable that does change on intervals and it's still objectively true that it is those things. That's the great thing about it. It's like how all programming works. You define a state and you leave variables change constant or variables for you because that's how variables are, but you have your constants say the same and you output data that is still rational and can compile well despite the fact that you have variables inside of the change all the time. Reality is no different. And so the fact that you need to have this character that is accurate always and never changing always and is eternal always, it points to the idea that you need a transcendental God, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case that truth and changing or eternal are all the same thing or need to be. Abudra, what do you think? I feel like we left out maybe an assumption we were kind of using or at least I was operating under and sounds like maybe you are too. We can add kind of a practicality to this definition too. This is objectively true within the parameters that we're not going to go to the nearest millisecond, right? It's for practical purposes, it is objectively true that it's this time, if that's the time you need to get up in the morning, then you could objectively set your clock to that and that is true for that moment. That's an important thing to be able to do. And it's also a thing I say when I make a lot of Christians angry, when I say objective truth is not that important. It's kind of overrated because they mean this atheist doesn't even care about objective truth. It's because nominal truth is just as good in a lot of instances. When I say I wake up at eight o'clock and I set my alarm at eight o'clock, yeah maybe I don't get the millisecond right, but I get up at eight. I show up to work at time. What's up Larry? Well, they don't believe in objective truth either, at least looking into it or finding out if it's objective because I mean the belief in a soul is that an objective truth? We don't know, but they claim it is. It's just we claim it. There it is. We live forever. They don't care in verifying their objective truths, I guess, so we get right down to it. They just assert, don't they? Yeah, just assert. I'm going to put my God hat on now because I'm fed up with worshipping Ty, who specified that a minute is the unit that is static. It's a metric unit. You should love that. You guys invented it. Actually, it's not, is it? That's base six, isn't it? Yes. Well, base 60. So I'm going to specify that the time here is the 12th of February. So put that in your pipe. Okay. So the idea that, so what is this strategy that's being used as a standard apologetic that is meant to, hey, listen, I can't make you necessarily believe in a God, but I can give you attributes that we would have a tribute to a God. And when I talk about the truth and when we decide that it's never changing, always existing, eternal and always right and good, isn't that the attributes of a God? And how can, if we don't have a way to see that here with our limited mindsets, still always believe in this one big true thing? This one big true thing is actually the God that I'm talking about. And if we can all point to it, then it's demonstration that that God actually exists. It's the apologetic that leads through it. And while I am aware of the faults with that, it's a very attractive argument for people that have very low standards of evidence. Because even if you go down that entire path, you would never follow down that path of it pointing to a different God. Because if I follow down, I've done this on video, I follow down the apologetic path with a Christian. And then I say, praise Allah. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, let's take a couple of steps back. The reason, okay. So if they don't follow it, they only follow that path when it points to their own specific God belief. Well, even if it doesn't, they'll just jump to it. That's the problem. All these deistic arguments and where the universe comes from, where do we come from, where did anything come from? Even time, they'll say, they had to be God. Well, they don't make the case that it's actually their God. How come it's not Zeus or Thor or something like that? It's just a logical leap that they never fill in. Well, we've just explained why there's so many denominations. It's because everybody wants their own God who agrees with them. Everybody has their own God. Even if they don't belong to the same church, their version and their mental version is a different version. But I'd like to bring up one more salient point, which is, what's very popular is, if I can't get you to believe in a God today and you're a non-Atheist, well, I'll wait 30 years or whatever. And then if I get you to switch sides and come onto the Jesus train with me, that's a huge deal because then you're the popular former atheist who now suddenly is transcended into Christianity. John, I know you have a lot of Christian friends who've tried to do the same with you. Bujro, we've had conversations with Christians even together where you can see that there was a deep wanting to have that connection with you. Larry, I'm sure you've had conversations like that in the past. A lot of people on the show would be valuable recruits for the path of Christianity in terms of marketing and recruitment for more Christians to see. Oh, this atheist who was very confident is suddenly now on our side. But the thing is, even if I were convinced that a God exists, and even if it was a very specific interpretation of Jesus and Christianity, say the Super Bowl, I see it and I'm like, yes, I need it to see this. This $100 million was well spent. It doesn't make the God anymore real, right? If I'm convinced that a God exists, I'm still in the quandary of not having established evidence to demonstrate that that God exists. My ability to be convinced of things is not an indication of something being true or not. That's the unfortunate reality of the universe. It just means that I can be convinced that things are true. And so when I look at Christians who are convinced that things are true, I don't fault them for it. It just simply means like, what is the mechanics that they're using to become convinced? And can I help them out to figure out where their missteps are? And if not, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm wrong by default or they're wrong by default. It just means like we live in a world where you can be convinced based on evidence if you have a very low standard of evidence or if your standard of evidence is faulty. So that's why I always encourage people to be skeptical and critique and try to be as critical-minded as they can about everything, even the things they are confident about, because that keeps them from going into a position where they could fall into these levels. Well, I was going to speculate about whether this advert in the middle of the Super Bowl is going to be successful because it could backfire, couldn't it? I mean, we're exposing the fact that the very fact that they need to spend that amount of money on this promotion puts in doubt the solidity of their position, their claim. With $100 million, they could have put little crosses on the backs of like the NFL helmets or something like that. They could have just had like advertising space on the logos, right? Well, I was thinking about the alternative because there was a campaign some years ago, and I think it was about 2013 or maybe earlier, to advertise on the sides of buses. You know, we've got double-decker buses. And the message was put on, I think about £100,000 was raised to plaster these messages all over the London buses. And the message said something about, there probably is no God. Enjoy your life. Yeah. Right, the name of the darkens, huh? Yeah, yeah. And it was sponsored by some fairly rich atheist guy. I think he's the same guy that has been payrolling Richard Dawkins. And the person who came up with this idea was a journalist who was working for, I think, the Times, back at the time, a lady called Ariane Shireen. And I entertained her. She's been here and stayed with us because I provided her with some gigs as it were at local skeptical clubs. But I decided to throw that into the mix because we don't have $100 million. But we have tried to advertise our point of view in a smaller way. Good points. Good points. Speaking of advertisement, do you know the Ron, oh, the guy who said that he was an atheist and they advertised on the Super Bowl several years ago? Sure. Oh, he was the son of a president, Reagan, Reagan, Ron Reagan's son. Well, he's now advertising on Colbert between, I mean, that advertising is now showing on Colbert. So, a little bit of spread in the word for ourselves there. For $50 million, you could have just bought a plane, have a bunch of flyers, and then drop leaflets on the Super Bowl audience, right? That would have been enough viral attention to be like, what's all these? Well, that would have been 100 or 200,000, but with an advertisement, they reach tens of millions of people and they know how to do. I'm talking about the viral. I'm talking about the gorilla, Larry. You got to get the times. But we have a person who's specifically asking Boudreaux a question now. Boudreaux is this is a response from Half Decent Strange. We'll use this to hopefully lead us to the end of the show. Boudreaux, I'm an atheist. My friend is a closet atheist who goes to religious school. We're both a bit confused about the whole God's plan thing, and I know you love free will. Basically, if God has planned everything, why does he punish people by sending them to hell when they aren't in control of their actions? I have a fan. Do I have a fan? I think my whole point is that that would be ridiculous. So, I mean, I don't think we have free will. So, therefore, I don't think anyone should be punished for your actions in the afterlife, certainly. If that's what we're talking about, I mean, obviously, if someone murders someone, lock them up so they don't do it again. Right. But, you know, don't tease them about it. Don't torture them because they didn't, you know, it wasn't really right. So, if I'm getting the question right, why these are both atheists? Yes. It seems like they may be confused on the detail unless I'm missing something. But no, don't punish anyone for doing something that they don't have free will to do. And that's kind of a good evidence that there is likely no afterlife. There's a really good question nestled in here, and it's whether or not you're accountable for being an atheist by your own decisions. And so, John, I'm going to throw this out at you. Is atheism your fault? Is your atheism your fault? Well, wrapped up. This is a begging the question type of question, isn't it? Yeah. Your position, I'm hopefully not color-coding it too much, but I'm just wondering, like, is atheism your fault? Are you responsible for it? Wrapped up in that question is the assumption that atheism is an ideology. And really, I would prefer to call it, atheism. I like that. Can I revisit that time? Yeah, go for it. Maybe better understand the question. So are we asked, okay, you're an atheist. You don't believe in God. I don't have free will. There actually is a God. Should I go to hell? Because if my thinking is correct, and I mean, I think a rational God wouldn't burn someone for not believing in them, even though he didn't give us enough evidence. But I think that the whole thing seems preposterous, which is why I probably just reject it all. But yeah, I would. But I think in my understanding, most religious people believe that their soul has free will. So that most religious people believe, right? Don't they? I mean, man, there's two. Oh, you triggered Larry. Here we go. Yeah. No, I just say they have to believe that they have a choice and that they choose to follow the God and the religion stuff so that they can get their reward at the end. Or just become a better person. Of course, a lot of Christians are believing in Christianity because they think it's the moral choice. We can show that it isn't necessarily. But they depend on the fact that they have to have free will. And matter of fact, they have argued with me many times about the object. And they always take, I mean, about the subject. And they always take the status, the state that, yes, it's free will. We have to have free will. And you have chosen not to follow God. And so you have sent yourself to hell, which is the argument that I've heard many, many times. The weirdest thing in the world is... I think Boudreau's just given us next week's topic, hasn't he? Do souls have free will? Oh my gosh. And do they have a JetGPT account? How about that? There's a sort of double negative in there, isn't there? It assumes that there are souls and it assumes that free will exists. But I see that we need those. So can I do a plug? Yeah, go ahead, John. Go ahead and plug your stuff. First of all, I want to encourage people to send news items to me. Thank you whoever that guy was who let me know about the Bangladesh Creepy Toe 2680. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Creepy Toe. We like more news items for my Global Atheist News Show. Yes please. And there's the plug. I weekly do Global Atheist News. I do Freethought Hour. I do three-minute clip type items, little homilies. And the recent ones have covered pretty much what we've been talking about now, the definition of atheism. And several of the other aspects have come up in this chat. Nice. And friends of the Discord, please subscribe to Freethought. Or say your channel again, John Richards? Freethought Production. Freethought Channel. Freethought Channel. And do you have a separate channel for views on the news or is it strictly that one? No, they're all on Freethought Channel. You're also making shorts too. You're making like, I'm getting like little notifications every random type of words like that. So you're going full media marketing on this. I love it. Yeah. Well, I'm, you know, I'm my own boss. I can do that. I'm posting every day. Okay. Pujo, anything you recommend we check out before next week? No, but how about a funny little thing about time? Real quick one. So when I was working at Little Caesars, I had to punch a time clock. And I didn't realize it's at the time, but the time they used was a little different than what we were talking about, a base six system, where it was actually metric. The minutes were zero to 100 or zero to 99. So I would punch in, you know, just a little bit after six o'clock, and it would be like 605 or 608 or I was like, what? I didn't think I was that late. Turns out it was, it was eight hundreds of an hour. And the whole point of it was so that the manager could do the math a lot easier when they wanted to calculate how long someone worked. They punched it at this time, they punched it at that time, they could subtract them since it was metric, they can do the math on man hours and all that. But I thought it was a funny little tie into what we're talking about. Pizza Hut. What are you doing? Come on. Let the robots do that for you. We have AI now. Hopefully that's been fixed. You can find my stuff on Let's Chat on YouTube and continue to keep watching. Love you guys. See you next week. Larry? My content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject. You can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hell's and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. We'll see you next week at seven o'clock on Wednesday on W.O.Z.O. Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye.