 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating whether or not Christianity is reasonable and we are starting right now. With Stuart's opening statement, thanks so much for being with us, Stuart. The floor is all yours. Thank you, James, for having me. Appreciate you, Matt, for another one. Always love these. So is Christianity rational? Gotta start out with the leader of the faith, whether he actually was, did he claim to be God? Did he have the character to be God? And I would say the claims were there. You certainly have it throughout the Gospels. You definitely have it in John with the seven IM statements he makes. But then he also receives worship. He doesn't reject worship like the apostles do at times, like Paul did when he tore his clothes, or like when the angels even were rejecting worship. He also claimed to forgive sins. And so throughout he's pretty consistent in the claim to be God. Secondly, the character. That's a big one for me. I think if somebody who comes is just a lunatic or somebody who doesn't connect with us emotionally, psychologically, in a way where we perhaps long for something like relationships and love. If we don't have somebody like that that we can connect with, then I would question whether that was truly God or not. And I think he came right from the get-go saying crazy stuff in a culture that was all power driven and all about violence and oppressing people who are lower down the rung on the socioeconomic or ethnic ladder. And yet he comes in and says, turn the other cheek, forgive 70 times seven, look out for the oppressed, and look out for the poor and marginalized. And when you look deeply into his character, it's incredible how he combines things. He has these virtues within his character that let's just say are incompatible for most of us. He doesn't have these crazy temperaments. We can flare up. I have a temperament of times to tremendously get angry on the basketball court, for example. But you never see this with him. He's always controlled. He always has this type of meekness, which is not weakness, but power constrained. And I mean, think about the combination as well. He's strikingly beautiful because he combines this kind of high majesty claim to be God. And he has tremendous humility. He joins this commitment of justice with astonishing mercy and grace at the same time. He reveals a transcendent self-sufficiency and yet entire trust on God the Father. So he has this type of humility as well, but no uncertainty, really accompanied by a towering type of confidence. And so you get the character. I think he comes at the right time, too. A lot of people oftentimes say, well, he should come today when that makes the most sense. Well, we can see that in every day and age, I think. 2000 years ago, I think it would make a lot of sense because you got the Pax Romana. You got the 200 years of peace. You've got all those wars dying down between all those warring civilizations. So it gave an opportunity for the trade routes to open up as well. You have the spiritual hunger. Larry Hurtado at Marquette University talked about how there was this vast spiritual hunger and a disillusionment with certain types of gods, for example, in the polytheistic culture. And all of a sudden you have Jesus Christ coming. And the reason why Christianity was so attractive that day and age was one, because you could have actually a personal relationship with the God. Two, that God forgave sins and gave you a second, third, and fourth opportunity to actually live a life. And you weren't condemned to something like a shame and guilt, like a shame and honor society. And then spiritually, and then thirdly and finally, after his ascension, so 70 AD, what you have with Christ, and you have to break down the temple. And now what happens, persecution starts, and the total dispersion of Christians. And so that's when they go and take over the world. And so it makes sense for those three reasons that he came when he did. He affirms and convicts every culture. I like that. I think that makes sense with the God. The reliability of the Gospels, I think are pretty obvious. You got the manuscripts and the dates, 5,800 manuscripts. You got the dates within 15 years, probably even closer to the events themselves. You have the church fathers. You take with all the manuscripts themselves. You still have the church fathers counting up for over one million New Testament quotes. I mean, that's pretty impressive. There was never a time when any one man or group of men had control over the text of the New Testament. There was never this Christian utman. All claims that there were changes in theology or doctrine are simply without merit. You had the Christian church was obviously a persecuted minority without power to enforce a uniform, textual transmission like Islam. So that's why it's bogus to think that Constantine 325 or around then would have had some power to change things. He didn't. It was a persecuted minority from the get go. And then you got the resurrection. Evidence, I would take a cumulative case, typically. One, witnesses and how they reported. Two, skeptics that converted. Three, expectation of the gospel, the way it was presented and the way it was received. Four, Jewish background and understanding of what they were expecting. Five, voluntary persecution and suffering. Six, immediate proclamation. Seven, empty tomb. Eight, the use of women as eyewitnesses, which would have been thrown out. And then nine, I would have said just the start of the early church. How's a major paradigm shift overnight, which typically would have taken hundreds of years for that many people to have shifted from something like Judaism to Christianity. Both Christians and atheists cherry pick the Bible, I would say. I think it's important to look at to see if Christianity is truly rational. You have to go from cover to cover. And you have to see, okay, are there beautiful things in the characteristics of God? Is he inconsistent? Is he consistent? How do I go about not just picking on his wrath? Or just taking him as a God of love and grace? But there's obviously a combination of the two. And so cherry picking from Christians and atheists happens all the time. And that's when I start to see a straw man that is frustrating for me to see. Failed Messiah movements. Why in the world did Jesus Christ Messiah movement work? We have at least 10 on record that failed total flop. Chuck Colson. I love how Watergate with Nixon, he talks about how they couldn't keep that conspiracy quiet for longer than two weeks. So if this was simply some kind of crazy hoax and conspiracy that was going on with the resurrection, think about how many years that conspiracy and hoax has been able to stay quiet. It's pretty impressive. Then you got all kinds of external evidence. You know, you talk about Lucian, Zutonius, Tacitus, plenty outside of the Bible. You have the coherency of Scripture. And then you get down to thinking about, how does this thing really work experientially in my life? And this is the one I always focus on. Because I think about how secular humanism so frequently lands on humanity is good. Set up the right social constructions and humanity is innately fine. It's great. It's good. And I'm more of the Sigmund Freud approach, which is, no, we have a semi-good side. We also have an id. And that id I would call connected to original sin. And so that makes sense for me. We got to have some type of name for it or we start to lose ourselves. And then I would say Christianity makes the most sense when it comes to our incredible devotion as a society now to justice and to helping those who are outside of our own social circle or even national circle. What's the reasoning behind it? From an evolutionary perspective, everything is just supposed to be naturally violent. And yet, why do we all of a sudden have just this incredible focus to help those who are different from us in ways that doesn't benefit us at all? And I would say that Judeo-Christian values are the reason why they've come into our culture and they've radically impacted things. And so you see things like sympathy, compassion, agape love, sacrificial love. You see things like hope. We are irredeemably hope-based preachers. And I don't think you can get there without a firm eternal understanding of what hope is. Because so often here, you look at suicide rates now. They're up 700 percent in women. They're supposed to double. And you look at anxiety and depression on college campuses over 50 percent. I see this all the time and I'm thinking, how do you infuse young ones, but old ones too, with a strong sense of hope in what really hope is, not just this type of polyamnetype optimism. Because it has to be deeper than that. Because the number one reason why someone commits suicide is hopelessness and a lack of meaning. And so the Christian hope is both personal and cultural. You look at, for example, Andrew Devonco wrote this book, A Meditation on Hope. Not a Christian, he's an atheist. But he charts how originally our nation focused on God. And self-sacrifice, not self-assertion that we see today, just fulfill my own personal needs in a selfish kind of way. Instead, it was live for God, sacrifice for others. Then turn more so into live for nation. Go be in the military, sacrifice for your country. But now it's live for self and the individual. And we see the radical breakdown sociologically, individually that has taken place. So going back to God, that's the rationality of Christianity. It makes sense. It just fits. Versus what Gary Howler-Wass would talk about. Again, not a Christian, but he talks about how there's an awareness of things that are missing in the secular worldview. And I would leave it with that. How do you explain your experience, your lived out experience when it comes to your worldview? Thank you very much for that opening, Stuart. And want to say thanks so much for your opening, Stuart. Want to say, folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from, Christian, atheist, and all of the strange creatures in between. We're glad that you were here as well as, folks, a quick housekeeping thing. Modern Day Debate has expanded on to TikTok. If you didn't know this, we're thrilled about this. Once we hit a thousand followers over there, we'll be able to livestream our debates there, too, which will be huge. So I want to say, if you haven't yet, want to encourage you to follow our TikTok. I'll pin that at the top of the live chat right now. And it's also in the description box. If you will follow us there, we appreciate that. With that, we're going to kick it over to Matt. Thanks so much, Matt, for being with us. The floor is all yours. Hey, my pleasure. And thanks to Stuart for this. I think we actually got set up. I was joking earlier that somebody came into one of the shows I was doing is like, do you think that Stuart and his dad are rational? And I was like, not when it comes to the religion. And right off the bat, like two days later, it was, hey, you want to do this debate? So here I am. I also, evidently, just minimized the whole zoom thing. Oh, well, we'll just trust that it works. So the question is, is Christianity rational? And the answer is no. And with from a philosophical perspective, I actually have friends who will not debate this subject. They're not going to debate whether or not Christianity is rational because within philosophy, there's this notion of internal consistency and something is rational if it's internally consistent. But internal consistency isn't enough. Fantasy games with a rule setting for their magic system can be internally consistent. Mario is internally consistent. You have a certain jump height maximum, run down maximum, even using the game glitches to do a speedrun is consistent, which is why you can have tool assisted speedruns. Sorry if I'm getting all geeky on everybody, but it would be irrational to claim that Mario can violate the rules of the game. And or if you prefer, Dungeons and Dragons has a magic system and a set of rules that govern that aspect of the game. And as long as an act within the game is consistent with those rules, it's rational. That type of rationality does us no good. Internal consistency isn't relevant to what we're talking about today. In order for something to be rational, it needs to be consistent with the facts of reality. The miraculous, the supernatural are irrational. They do not conform to the order of reason and logic within reality. Now irrational doesn't mean false. That we don't know or understand something or can't rationally defend it doesn't mean it's not true. Christianity could be both irrational and true. There just wouldn't be any reliable way to know whether or not it's true. And you have to have a testable falsifiable proposition or hypothesis. Rational and reasonable, I'm going to use probably as synonyms throughout this debate, but at one point it was reasonable to believe that the sun orbited the earth. It's wrong. It wasn't true, but it was reasonable and it was the rational based on the information available at the time. Interestingly, that changed when new facts were presented, when new facts were discovered. We discovered that the old model was inconsistent with the new information, and that's when the position became irrational, unreasonable to continue to hold. The internally consistent model of geocentricism, which is basically what we're talking about, where the earth is the center of the universe, the earth is the center of the solar system, became unreasonable, became irrational, when the facts of reality proved to be inconsistent with that model. This is where we get to magical thinking. What if the proposition isn't falsifiable? Well, then it's ultimately untestable. And if it's not testable, an untestable, unfalsifiable position cannot result in a rational position. If you can't test it, its consistency with reality isn't accessible at all. Christianity includes a number of specific claims that do not conform to reality in any identifiable, verifiable, testable, falsifiable way. And the foundations of the religion, the very core of the religion, are rooted in the supernatural. In addition to raw supernatural claims that would have to be beyond the universe, we have events that are purported to take place within the universe, things that have supposedly occurred and were observed that are inconsistent with natural law. The sun stood still in the sky supposedly. The whole earth was covered with water. One man and one woman were formed out of dirt and are the origin of all of us. Donkeys and snakes and burning bushes all spoke. People claimed to know or see the future, yet are no more able to prove it than someone on the psychic friends fraudulent network. For entertainment purposes only there, at least they label that. For some reason, we don't label these other things as for entertainment purposes even though they have no more support for the claim. Blood magic, flawed understandings of genetics and sheep breeding and about whether or not you beat them with a stick and they turn out differently or have them stare at a spotted stick, have them turn out differently, has nothing to do with genetics. Beyond the space and time, there's also stuff in space and time. A being that is supposed to be beyond space and time and also in space and time, who created everything and loves everyone, but can only save us from what he's going to do to us by performing a weird blood ritual and the claims that there are three beings as one being, which just violates logic from the get-go. There are other claims that we used to consider magical and are now irrational. This notion that lightning comes from the gods, we eventually learned what lightning was. At no point was it truly rational to believe that gods were hurling lightning bolts, but it was the best explanation that people had at the time. But it wasn't rational and it turns out it wasn't true. The earth spins on its axis. That is counter-intuitive and bizarre and yet it is true and proved to be true. We know that the earth isn't flat and someone could say, how is it that the earth could be spinning on its axis and I don't fly off into space? And it's because of gravity, which is something that we didn't understand as well. None of the supernatural claims of Christianity have been demonstrated to be true. None have ever been demonstrated to be testable, falsifiable. None have ever been demonstrated that they actually occurred. And how can it then be rational to believe an explanation for something that we can't even verify happened? If I have a soul, for example, I would suggest that people spend more time trying to prove that I have a soul than trying to explain whether soul is or how it works or how to save it or if it needs to be saved. That's like skipping past our fairies real and talking about what fairies want, where they're hiding, how to make them happy, etc. Christianity down to its core is wholly incompatible with reality and therefore irrational, which is why there are so many unsubstantiated appeals to miracles and yet no demonstration that these miracles actually occur. I'm not even convinced that Christianity is internally consistent, but it's definitely not consistent with the rationally demonstrated facts of reality. There was never any debate on, is lightning real? Just what is the explanation for lightning? And like everything else that we've discovered, it wasn't magic, it wasn't supernatural. It would be absurd to debate, is it rational to believe that lightning is a part of reality? Of course it is. It's observationally so. Or to debate, is lightning ism rational? The only debate was on, is it rational to believe that lightning bolts are thrown by the gods and the answer as it is for Christianity and every other appeal to the untestable, unfalsifiable supernatural realm is no. Is it rational to believe that there's a naturalistic explanation for lightning? That question is supported by evidence and understanding and deserves a yes. Christianity, whether it's true or not, isn't testable, isn't falsifiable, makes claims that aren't supported by evidence or verifiable observation and therefore isn't rational. Moreover, as Christianity holds that there's a being, an agent, who is beyond nature and is capable of communicating with us and capable of explaining all of these claims in a way that would result in a justifiable, rational model and yet this hasn't happened. That's one aspect of Christianity that, while not fully falsifiable, certainly would affirm that the default position of this is not true applies and continues to apply until that changes. The burden of proof for truth and for rationality exists and neither has been met for Christianity. Thank you very much for that opening, Matt. And I want to say, folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Aid Debate and you haven't hit subscribe yet, do want to encourage you to hit that subscribe button as we have many more juicy debates coming up. And with that, we're going to jump into the open conversation. Thanks so much, Stuart and Matt. Thrilled to have you with us. Well, we didn't really decide how we were doing this. I have questions. I mean, we're not doing like a rebuttal period, but you said some things that I'm not sure are true if you want to try and clarify those either way. I want to put you on the hot seat because I want to learn. Well, okay. I mean, I'll go first and then you let's do that. Sure. We'll go back and forth. All right, just just one question. Every single time we've talked with the supernatural and you picking apart scripture, you've always gone to the Old Testament examples. So burning bush, talking snake, sun, the sanding still. I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to sound like a liberal progressive Christian, but it's always dealing with the New Testament and historical documents and Jesus Christ himself to find out if Christianity is reliable. Now, yes, everything he really is about, he does take the Old Testament seriously, but that doesn't mean that some of those stories are not going to be metaphorical or so how can you always go to the Old Testament? All right. Well, first of all, I start with the Old Testament because it's the one that has the most obvious glaring errors, the ones that are contradicted by facts of reality. And until somebody says, hey, we're going to chuck out the entirety of the Old Testament, which by the way, chucks out the origin of everything and original sin and the commandments and every prophecy that Jesus supposedly fulfilled. I don't know how you can chuck that out, but in the New Testament, the very notion of Jesus performing miracles that haven't been demonstrated, that can't be confirmed, all of those things are still supernatural as well. It's just that it's easier to talk about the sun standing still in the sky than it is to say that if I spit on the dirt and rub it on somebody's eye, it doesn't heal them. We have no evidence that it's ever been done other than the story, which isn't evidence for a proposition, it's just a claim itself. But there's plenty of things that I mean, the entirety of revelation, almost the entirety of it, I'm sure there are words that aren't, is bizarre. It almost wasn't even included in the doctrine, but the very notion that somebody died and was resurrected, which we have no empirical evidence for. It's just a story in the book. That's a supernatural claim that I would put in that list as well. And so you have revelation, obviously, apocalyptic genre. John was probably schizophrenic when he wrote it. Then you have Josephus and so many others. Obviously, back then it was taken for granted. There were many miracle preachers, rabbis out there who could do both teach and as well as do the miraculous. But then the Old Testament, no, I strongly disagree with what you said about the Old Testament. Just because you would take something like the talking snake and some of those passages, not so literalistically, and just because I'm not a creationist and taking the earth as 6,000 years old, doesn't mean you would turn to Exodus chapter 20 in the Ten Commandments and say, now, let's throw those out too. And those are metaphorical as well, because they're not written in that manner, right? Sure. But I didn't include the Ten Commandments in the list of supernatural things, although the notion that God led people by a pillar of fire by day or pillar of fire by night and a pillar of smoke by day and pillar of fire by night and led them to a place where he wrote commandments onto stone. There's no evidence for that beyond the story. And all of that is supernatural. Are you saying that didn't happen? I am way quicker to accept Hammurabi's code or something like it, like the Ten Commandments, as being passed down through a certain people group and making it successfully to us, at least the trickle-down effect. Then I am to say, absolutely, when Moses, or whoever may have written Genesis, somehow meant, Matt, you better take that as a Python. Attacking Eve, Eve had some fig leaves on. Literally, she was naked and there was all these trees everywhere, but there was this one tree that she could not touch the apple of. I see it. I bifurcate those two pretty strongly, and I don't think that's being inconsistent. Well, so what we would need then is for you personally, what parts of the Old Testament do you think are actually literal? Did God speak from a burning bush? Did he write the commandments onto stone? Was he a pillar of fire? Is all this just metaphoric? Because the foundational parts of Christianity are still supernatural in origin, even if you want to dismiss as metaphor certain things in the Old Testament. Like I said, even when we get to the New Testament, the notion that somebody was resurrected is not verifiable and certainly supernatural, and that's the cornerstone of all of Christianity. If Christ be not raised on our hopes in vain. Exactly. Foolishness to the Greeks and to the Gentiles and the Jews. See, I like that right there. I think that there's obviously a level of embarrassment there when it comes to this is foolish. This is ridiculous. Even the Christians are saying that. If it has been like, oh, this is very normal. We knew God was going to come and send his son and he was going to die and be resurrected. No, they said from the very beginning, this is foolishness. This is lunacy. We can't believe that this is happening. And just because Hume talks about, he really, I thought, you tell me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of that type of thinking comes directly from Hume. But it's still why couldn't just because it's not empirically verifiable, I mean, obviously no miracle can be tested in a science lab. So why can't I'm missing the like, why can't that chasm be bridged in a way where certainly it's not going to be verifiable empirically strong empiricism? I don't buy into. And yet why can't there be a one off supernatural piece to it? Well, because we have no way of testing the supernatural. So what I didn't, I said it may be true, but that doesn't mean it's rational. Rational is something for which we have evidence and is consistent with the world, not just a claim. So here's the here's the bigger question. What evidence is God incapable of providing in order to win everybody to himself? I mean, couldn't God just show up right now in the middle of this debate, demonstrate conclusively to all of us that he is in fact God, and that these stories are true and consistent with reality in a way where it's rational. No, because that would be coercion versus compelling. That's not coercion. That's how we've demonstrated every other claim. When somebody says, Hey, this is the truth, and you provide evidence for it. That's not coercion. That is the demonstration. That is what makes it rational. Why would God, why would it be the case that God providing evidence is somehow coercive? Why can't I just say prove to me you're my friend right now? You can say that you just did. Would you want to prove that to me? Why do I don't know that I am your friend, but we could then we could then decide. Let's say you're a close buddy. Why in the world would I say, Matt, prove to me right now you're my friend? I mean, nothing about like, give me $10 right now, and then I'll know you're my friend. God's not going to play that kind of game, right? God doesn't even show up to entertain. God is like, I've got a girlfriend who goes to another school and you don't know her. That's the level there. This isn't like prove to me that you're friend. I would be happy to have God demonstrate that he even exists, let alone whether he's a friend, to make an analogy like that to say, hey, would you be willing to prove you're my friend? First of all, yes, we can have a conversation about what what friends are and everything else. What I asked was what what what evidence can God not provide? And you said that demonstrating the truth of his claims would be coercive. And I'm like, even if it were coercive, which I don't think it would be, the question was, what evidence can God not provide? So you know exactly where I'm going, I'm guessing. I'm quoting Blaise Pascal when I say that. So I mean, he talks about how God gives us just enough evidence to connect with our heads and our hearts in order for us to make a free decision rather than coercively just showing up and saying you better believe in me. Here it is. I'm right here right now. And secondly, but Matt, secondly, to that point, that's simply going to be a type of mental ascent that you're going to buy into. There's not going to be any type of trusting relationship simply by improving himself to you right now by showing up right next to your chair. Just like in Matthew 28, so many of his disciples actually connected with him physically after he rose from the dead, and yet they stopped believing just a matter of probably weeks later. I mean, how do you know how can you be so certain that if God shows up right here right now, that supposedly just you saying, oh, there you are. Now I can go to heaven, right? No, that's not even in the ballpark of what I said. Nothing I've said has anything to do with whether or not to go to heaven or whether or not there's a trusting relationship. I'm talking about whether or not Christianity is rational. It is saying that God won't provide evidence is just an admission that Christianity isn't rational. Rational versus true. See, those two things aren't the same. They're not the same, but I mean, can we please connect them at least? I don't know why can't God connect them? I'm not the one who believes in something and then makes excuses for why God who can supposedly do anything that is doable can't come down and present evidence for the proposition. For every other claim in the world where we said, hey, is it rational? We go to the evidence and you have a being who you think is real who can provide evidence but won't to suggest that he's got a good reason not to is just an admission that this isn't rational, but God's got a good reason to keep it not rational. So what's your definition of evidence and how much do you want? Evidence are facts which are consistent with the testable hypothesis, not just facts that are consistent with a proposition because pointing to the dead body is consistent with the proposition that the butler did it, but the body is going to exist whether the butler did it or not. If your hypothesis is that the butler did it, you need something that actually connects those two things. At the end of the day, I don't know what would actually be convincing, but God certainly would. And what I've asked is why can't God provide that? I mean, you listed a bunch of things in your cumulative case. I'm sure we'll get to many of them at different times throughout this, but all I'm saying is that in order for something to be rational in the sense of consistent with the facts of the world, there needs to be evidence to support that proposition. Is it impossible for God to present evidence for the proposition that he exists? Yes. And I would say then it's irrational you looking at any worldview. It's going to take a mixture for me. What I would call, I guess our definitions of evidence. See, I would say there's the intellectual side, which I gave some in the reliability of the Gospels and the resurrection and his character and claims, but then I gave the experiential as well, which is love, justice, forgiveness is disappearing in our culture. Why did forgiveness come through Christians and why can't we hold on to something like forgiveness? And it's because there's a growth of secularization in our culture. And what happens there when secularization really grows, and I'm not saying by no means is Matt de la Honte slower at forgiving than Stuart Connectley. You may be way quicker at forgiving, but I'm saying on the whole, it makes a big difference. If atheism is correct, then human practices of ethics will function more effectively if the general public remains in total obfuscated darkness about morality's mere human origins and sheer functional purposes, like because the origins don't connect. And so why are you making that type of leap in your worldview as well when there's no evidence of a connection? Let's be honest. Making what leap in a worldview because you completely misrepresented secular humanism, and now you're suggesting that Christianity is better for society, but that's irrelevant to whether or not it's rational. I don't agree that it is, but that's irrelevant as to whether or not it's irrational. Well, see, I wrestled with that one before prepping that part. I said, oh, is this part of the rationality? And I think it is. And maybe you would say, no, that's more so connected to whether it's true or not. But I always look at if the experiential lines up with the intellectual, that's when you get rationality and reason. But it's not just some brain and a bat. The experiential is poisoned by your biases. So for example, when you began listing stuff, you said that secular humanism lands on humanity is ultimately good. That is not at all what secular humanism lands on. It has nothing to do with it. Secular humanism in all three of the manifestos and in every version of the secular ethics that I've advocated for that other organizations have put out, isn't humans are ultimately good? Although I think that humans are generally better than some people might expect, it is we live here and we have to solve problems and we have no one outside of us to reach to. We have no, we can't appeal to a God that we have no rational reason to think exists. We can't appeal to some sort of external, we are left to our own devices is what secular humanism says. And the things that are positive that you were pointing to are not functions of Christianity at all, forgiveness, cooperation, sympathy, none of those things are necessarily direct products of Christianity exclusively. They are instead the result of properly applied game theory. The recognition of you and I have to cooperate to some extent and figuring out to what extent that is, that is the principle that we've learned through game theory. This notion of who's going to forgive faster, by the way, is irrelevant until you demonstrate that faster forgiveness is better. Maybe forgiveness isn't always the right conclusion and maybe faster forgiveness isn't the right conclusion. So even in talking about something like forgiveness, you've set up a false dichotomy of maybe I'm faster, maybe you're faster without ever demonstrating that faster is relevant to better. No, that's not my point, because I agree with everything you just said, but totally not my point. My point is simply going back to the Roman Empire, what we're talking about when it came to who Jesus was, what his environment was, how he made changes connected to the rationality perhaps of whether this guy was even God or what this movement looked like. My whole point was it was totally natural to have a slave, a mistress, and a wife for a male and do whatever you want in any orifice you want. It was totally natural. It would have been extremely unnatural for us to have said, hey, the races, they're all equal by no means whatsoever. And that's why you have so many philosophers writing about that. And so my whole point is not, yeah, I would agree with you. I think actually one point to Matt de la Honte here, I think the church has done a horrible job with forgiveness at times in the past. Why is that? It's because they haven't called out justice first and penalizing the wrongdoer first. Instead, they just said, oh, grace, forgiveness, you got abused, shut up, just forgive him and come back into the church. No, that's horrible. That's awful. But my point is, where was this all traced from, historically speaking? And it came from the Judeo-Christian worldview. No, the Judeo-Christian worldview. It supports, as we've addressed in other debates, it supports slavery. It's not about equality. But even if all of that were true, even if Christianity was this wonderful package of do this, do that, that led us all to a better world, that doesn't make the belief rational with respect to the supernatural claims. And the supernatural claims are at the core of it. If the purpose of life is to, and don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about works in the slightest, but if the purpose of life is to worship, and if you are among one of the elect, move on to a better afterlife, then now it's making a claim that is supernatural in origin that has nothing to do with how we treat each other here, except with the notion that someone is going to potentially judge that. The part, the most important part, that someone is going to judge what you've done, and really not, you know, under most, under normative Christianity, it's not about how you behaved or what you did, it's about whether or not you're forgiven. As long as that's the case, well, I forgot where I was going at the start of that sentence, which is going to happen, probably going to happen more as I get older. But none of that deals with whether or not it's rational. Something could be good and not rational. Something could be true and not rational. But at the end of the day, if you're going to talk about the ultimate goal being salvation, then talking about how we live this life and what better way there is to live this life is kind of secondary. But it still doesn't get to rationality. I agree with most of that. But so would you say that all human knowing is built on believing? Well, knowledge is a subset of belief. I don't know how someone can know something that they don't believe. And so generally, I mean, you've got like justified true belief is one of the definitions or one of the clarifications of knowledge. And so that makes knowledge a subset of belief. Is that what you're asking? I don't know if that's what you're asking. Yeah, it's what I was getting at just a second ago with my point on, I could ask you something like do you believe that all of humanity at all times in all places are worthy of provision and protection? And so you might just know that. Okay, but what's the belief structure underneath it? Why? Why do you know that? Why are you so certain of that? You shouldn't be so certain of it. Maybe I shouldn't be so certain of it. I'm not absolutely certain of anything. So that's good to hear. We're similar to nothing. Well, I mean, I think that's an undeniable truth is that absolute certainty is entertainable because you can't have a conclusion that is more accurate than the method you use to reach it. And since we cannot absolutely affirm the foundations of reason, we just pragmatically assume them and they continue to demonstrate reliability. This is why I talk about maximal certainty as opposed to absolute certainty because it kind of gets in the way. But when you're asking what beliefs is it based or is this knowledge based on? If someone makes a claim where we go through a heuristic, most of us to say, do I already believe this? Is this consistent with my understanding of the world? This is where all of our biases come into play. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to make sure that we train our gut so that we don't have to sit down and have, I don't know, an introspective jam session and accumulate a truckload of evidence for anything and everything because we'd never get anything done. And so instead, we say today is pretty much the same as yesterday. Tomorrow is probably going to be pretty much the same as today. We don't think that the moon is going to disappear tomorrow or that it's going to stand still in the sky or that the sun will do that or any of these things. We don't assume that those things are going to happen. But if they did, what we would then need is specific evidence that provides some sort of edifying understanding of how and why that happened. And I will always struggle with, so I respect a lot of your thoughts right there and most of your thinking. But I will never, I might go to my grave scratching my head on what in the world Matt DeLante means when he talks about so many of the nuances. I wonder if he's making the majority of them up in his mind of evidence. And when he frequently says, I don't know what evidence I want. There's not enough evidence. I don't know how it'll scratch my head over that. I mean, you so frequently talk about the inconsistency, whether it's in scripture, maybe it's the gospels, the inconsistency of God's character you talk a lot about. But I mean, like, okay, what level of consistency do you want? Like, do you want the level of consistency to the point of collusion? Clearly these authors like knew each other perfectly and everything was consistent. But wait, now they obviously were playing off each other and we don't know that's how reality works. And with God, the consistency matter is he's loving and wrathful. And I know Matt DeLante does not like the wrathful side of God. But in order to love somebody, oftentimes you do need to have a type of wrath in order to go after something that's perhaps is harming them. And that's what we see over and over again with God. See, if you just take a God of love, then he can easily become apathetic in the face of true wrong doing. And so that's why you have a nuanced understanding of God with many different attributes that looks inconsistent, but couldn't be any more consistent. Yeah, so I'm not, it doesn't, I don't know what you mean, it bothers me that God is inconsistent. I don't think there is a God. I'm pointing out the inconsistencies within Christianity and it's a portrayal of this God character. When I go through, for example, the list of things that you said in your opening, I don't know that any of them address whether or not Christianity is rational. What would be something? Evidence. What would be evidence? Well, God could come down here and present that evidence, but I asked you what evidence could happen. So we shouldn't be having this discussion or debate then, because I can't get God down here. Yeah, that's not my fault. It's not my problem that you are advocating that something is rational when it's not rational. But then why are you having this discussion debate right now? I'm doing it to expose the fact that you think something is rational when it is not in order to teach people. You're the one who's saying Christianity is rational, and yet everything that would demonstrate its rationality you don't allow for. It's not necessary. No, I cannot get on board with that type of strong empiricism and that type of, for me, playing God, rum to twist God's arm. If there is a God of the universe, I honestly think you keep defining God as this little pygmy creature who literally I can go out and just bully around myself. But if you define God as the creator of the entire cosmos, I mean, isn't that a little bit strong in your own standards, perhaps? That God's a coward. Why isn't he showing up? Exactly. So here's the emotional bias right there. No, it's not an emotional bias. The emotional here does not exist. The emotional here is the frustration of saying, you are holding a position that those of us who don't believe in this fairy tale are irrational. But the fairy tale is irrational because it isn't considered consistent with reality and it isn't supported by evidence. And then you're like, okay, what evidence would you like? Well, if you make a specific testable claim, then we can tell what sort of evidence we would like. I would like, for God, to demonstrate that he actually exists. That wouldn't, by the way, be coercive. It wouldn't require me to worship or adhere. There are plenty of people who exist, who have power over me, whose character I don't respect at all. And the character, most of the character that is presented in the Bible, is somebody that I wouldn't respect or worship. As a matter of fact, I'm already on record as saying I wouldn't worship anyone ever because I think that those that would expect or demand worship are already undeserving of it. I have no problem at all respecting people or a God, provided that it demonstrates that it's deserving of respect. But to say, this God existed, created you and isn't going to provide you any evidence, automatically puts him in the category where he doesn't deserve respect. Because he's not making a claim, or the claim that's being made around him, he could demonstrate it instantly to be rational and reasonable, and he doesn't. Well, and so here's the problem. Dovetailing that, we clearly get that human beings are naturally religious in some kind of way. Like culture always comes with religion. Not the paraha? Religion is leading. Not the paraha? What's that? Not the paraha? Okay, I'll grant you the paraha, maybe. I need you to explain that a little bit more later. But, I mean, it's so endemic to the human condition, even though individual humans, obviously, like yourself, reject religious beliefs all the time. And some societies have been known, like Sweden, to reject kind of the religiosity. But it's still humans naturally ask the questions over 87% of the world, over and over again, and they harbor these desires that religious beliefs fulfill. So what I was trying to get at is things like ultimate meaning, final hope, ecstasy, stable identity, stable sense of self, strong reason for justice, rights and wrongs. And I think those all connect beautifully and show which minutes level of rationality with Christianity. And you could be like, well, that could be the case with other religions, too. What is your point? My point simply is, there appears, like the strong atheist philosopher Stanley Howard, whose gloss talks about, there's appears to be something incredibly missing from the secular worldview, type of imminent frame that you live in, that in no way, it's like the buffered self, philosophically speaking, where you don't allow everything that's closing and pushing in on Matt De La Honte to say, hey, look, love is immaterial. Hey, look, sacrifice, all these, hey. Where have I said any of this? When you are dying. Why on earth are you trying to put words in my mouth and positions that I've never advocated for? And the name isn't De La Honte, it's, but. My bad, my bad. I was calling Aaron Rae Aaron for about a year and a half. He didn't correct me once. I felt really bad. I attended correct people on that. Here's the thing. The notion that human beings have desires for things that are tied up in religion, in no way demonstrates that those desires are tied to something real and true that, at least for all of the religions other than the one you've adopted, somebody invented that and got it wrong. But the fact that human beings tend to try to explain the unknown and can get it wrong and can be irrational is all anyone needs to explain everything about every religion, especially when we have zero supportive evidence for we don't have a testable hypothesis. So Christianity isn't, doesn't come with a testable falsifiable hypothesis, which by definition means it cannot have evidence for it. It can have facts that are consistent with it. But that's not surprising because the whole purpose is to try to explain facts that are unknown. But to have evidence for means that there is a link between the proposed explanation for a fact and the fact itself. This is how when we find out anything else. Oh, what's lightning? Well, we don't know. We don't know anything. How come I don't fly off when the earth spins? I don't know. I don't know because we didn't know about gravity. The evidence ultimately builds a case for, ah, here it is. It operates according to, you know, the inverse square law with of masses. This is about what people do doesn't in any way mean that people are being rational or that what they ultimately decide or believe in is rational. That's determined by the supportive evidence for it. Okay, you keep going back to the lightning. Scientifically speaking, I mean, those who created science, at least modern day science, I won't go back to the Egyptians, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, they all see as Lewis later on, obviously not a scientist, but he references them frequently in talking about how they knew there was a law giver. They knew there was a creative mind, creator. And so they could get in touch with this law giver and that there was a creative mind behind the universe. And so that they could find out what these laws really were, whether it's gravity or for others, it was moral, it was moral argument, moral absolutes. And so you keep defining kind of this God of the gaps, which is in no, in no, in no way, what I espouse. But again, I mean, I used to think that you were early on, when you first debated my dad, I thought you were a professor at Texas State. And I was there a couple months ago. And this is one that I brought up in my intro at the end. I know you don't like the experiential side of my rationality of Christianity, but value, 10 students approached me after I was done one day speaking and they started talking about the value in human life. And I said, okay, well, here's, here's I'm a rational Christian, I believe, and here's where I believe I get my values of human being. And after I went, they talked about theirs. And I pushed them on. I said, okay, so you've believed you're valuable because you give yourself value. And they said, yeah. And I said, well, what if you're depressed? What if you're manically depressed? And you want to kill yourself? Well, I still have value. No, you don't. You said you give yourself value. And then another guy said, yeah, it's kind of right. I don't really like that. I was like, yeah, okay, well, where do you get your value from? So I don't have any value yet. I was like, well, why do you have a smirk on your face? You have no value. You should be over in a ditch somewhere. And he said, well, I'm gonna get value after I make my first solid paycheck after college. That's my value right there. And so the rationality of Christianity, yet again, you have from the very beginning that what changed the Roman Empire, which Jesus Christ comes, points to Genesis and says, this is what's going to change the world right now. Knowing that the God of the universe says that Matt Stewart has value no matter what they think of themselves, no matter whether they knock it out of the park or not financially, no matter what they look like, no matter what if they're handicapped or or what, you have value no matter what. And that obviously changed slaves view of themselves. It changed the caste system. It changed everything dramatically. And so the value that we experience another immaterial that's connected directly to the Christian faith, which I believe is part of the reasonableness, the rationality of Christianity. I mean, another big one is, you know, you keep attacking the supernatural and miracles. I mean, if you were teaching at Texas State, and you had a couple Africans come over here, wouldn't it be, let's just say, it would be the secular person, Professor, who would be very militant and ostracizing them if you sat them down and said, we don't believe in the miraculous or the supernatural here. And the Christian, I'm sitting there and I'm saying, no, we believe in the miraculous and the supernatural. And here's actually how you as Africans can even grow if you want to fit this on precise in understanding the gospel when it comes to where does your value come from and these other things, but we're not going to suppress the supernatural miraculous when it comes to you. And so the piece of the supernatural as well as value yet again, it's pushing in on you. It's pushing in on you in a way where you have to start asking the questions of, okay, does this make, is this part of my sense experience? And don't tell me it's not an important question because the majority of strong atheists who I respect the most, when they were passing away, this is what led them to faith in Christ. It was these issues, it wasn't, oh, wow, that last point by Richard Bach, I'm on the resurrection, that was fantastic. I believe Christianity is rational now. No, it was the immaterial, it was these things that were pressing in on them that they could not explain from an atheistic perspective. Okay, so I'll try to do this as kindly as possible. First of all, telling someone that I don't believe in the supernatural is not being a secular militant. It's embarrassingly bad that you decided to pull in Africans out of the blue and then suggest that I would be a militant and somehow problematic by telling them that I don't believe in the supernatural, even if I was a professor at Texas State. I could be a professor anywhere or not anywhere, and what my point would remain the same, which is there's no good reason to believe that supernatural is real. There isn't evidence supporting the proposition that it's real, what people believe has no impact on what's true or rational, and this thing that you keep wanting to dismiss is value. You try to put words into my mouth. I value many of the things that you talked about, and I could make a list of them, including love and freedom and cooperation and equality and all of these things. And it doesn't matter why right now, let me finish my thought, because irrespective of whether or not I have a good reason for believing those things, that has no bearing on whether or not Christianity is rational, which is the point of the debate tonight. If you wanted to debate, does Matt have a foundation for his values? That would be a different debate, but whether I do or not is completely irrelevant to whether or not Christianity is rational. Sure. I mean, again, these things in my mind are connected in the sense of like you skirted around my question of do you believe that all people at all times are worthy of preservation? No, I answered it immediately. And as soon as you said do you believe all people at all times, I said no, because I don't think that there are universals that apply to all people at all times. When you finished your thought, which is do you believe all people at all times deserve, I don't know, protection or value or whatever else, we didn't continue that discussion because you went off in a different direction. But let's go back. No, because I don't want to go in areas that are too off topic. Go back to where you wanted to go, because we don't have to stay here on this one. Let's move. Well, there were a number of things that you said when you were like assessing. You started with the claims and the character. Did Jesus craft a scourge and go chasing the money lenders out of the temple? That scourge was definitely not metal rods that so many people think it was. I didn't say anything about what it was. I said, did he do it? Yes, absolutely. So when you said that he wasn't angry, there's an exception to that, where he was angry that way. And potentially it went on. Handcrafted a scourge of whips to chase them out of the temple. He also, when he was in the Old Testament, sorry that the Old Testament is convenient to you, but flooded the whole world and didn't he kill the firstborn baby of everyone that didn't mark their door? Didn't he destroy the Tower of Babel, where people were just trying to get together and cooperate? And he said, no, no, no, this won't do. And then frustrated their languages. Doesn't he sentence everyone to hell by default? You missed a key verse right there in Genesis 11. Everyone was trying to make a name to themselves. They weren't just hanging around trying to cooperate. They're making a name. If they said they were just hanging around being good people trying to cooperate, then it says, let us build ourselves a city in a tower with its top in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves unless we disperse over the face of the earth. What is wrong with people working together and building a name for themselves as, look at this wonderful city that we put together? What's wrong with that? The definition when it comes to in Hebrew, building a name for yourself was meant to be self idolatry. It was not, here, let's put Matt's plaque up on a nice school that he donated to. I'm still wondering what's wrong with it. What's wrong? Because all that comes with it. Everything about me, just think about it, solipsism. The more I grow in my own personal ego and self-focus, I guarantee you a lot of wickedness comes with that. It's solipsism, not solipsism, and it has nothing to do with ego and focus. Solipsism is about whether or not you are the only individual in the world, whether or not you can demonstrate that the external world is real. How dare you correct my pronunciation of your last name? I waited a long time to do it with the name, but it wasn't just the pronunciation that I corrected. It's what it actually means. Solipsism has nothing to do with ego. What's the definition? Philosophically, solipsism is the question of the issue of the study of whether or not we have a reason to warrant believing in an external world. Can we demonstrate that the external world is real? Are you being fed a reality? The quality of being very self-centered or selfish. Sorry, Professor. Yes. I was going with philosophy and not the colloquial usage. Philosophy is the viewer theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. Colloquially, people will use solipsism from their misunderstanding of the philosophical to talk about selfishness. I never do secondary definitions. I go with the primary one. The quality of being very self-centered or selfish. They describe usage and I was going with the philosophical usage and when you Google solipsism, it literally says philosophy right there to point out that this isn't a secondary definition. It is an alternate usage. I thought we were speaking in terms of philosophy, but fine. Go with it. It just teaches you not to question me in the area of vocabulary, which is the one area I did well in the SAT. Just never again. I will bank that away to not do. I don't know where we are. I think the money changers again. I think in John chapter two, it's a crucial one and I would say it happened probably twice to try and get out from underneath the contradiction. I would say that it shows his incredible devotion to his father and his love for his father and that's connected to humanity as well. Otherwise, he wouldn't have come down here and then connected to his wrath and holiness and desiring his people and his father to be set apart from those who are making idols within the temple. Again, it's exactly what you want. Do you agree with me? Just as a cultural study. I don't want to name any specific organizations, but in our culture today, people talk about justice, but it's vengeance, really, that they want. I would agree with you that I think more people have a flawed concept of justice and their concept is more about vengeance. Exactly. That's part of the reason why I think Jesus there and in so many other areas, he doesn't just let injustice just go and say, hey, it's great. Let's just forgive each other. He's saying you've got to forgive. You've got to forgive before seeking justice. You have to forgive before seeking justice or it's vengeance. Yeah. So is hell justice or vengeance? Luke chapter 12, things 46 through 48 talks about those who will be met with many blows and those who will be met with few blows. And then you got Luke 16 with Father Abraham there and the rich man, then Lazarus. And I think so clearly, it's not Jesus casting us into the lake of fire. So clearly there, the rich man does not have a name, his identity, back to idol is money. It's the whole idea of born a man, died a doctor. He wants to live in hell, despite being so miserable. And I think that's brilliant, by the way. That's poetic. And then I think in Luke chapter 12, the many blows, very few blows would be those who actually have more evidence, more evidence would be met with more blows if they reject Christ. But if they accept and they have barely any evidence, that's few blows. And it's not talking about you as a punching bag. It's talking about the Judgment Day. And again, that gets connected exactly to our conversation right now, but the rationality of Christianity. I bet you desperately, you may not want there to be eternal life. Maybe you're set after live long, Matt, hopefully, and prosper to 85, 90, 95. Maybe you're good after that. I want to keep living in loving relationships. I think we were created for love. I think, again, Christian rationality, I think it makes sense. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, loving each other throughout time, we were created for love. What worldview makes the most sense in terms of what human beings were really created for? And I think it's Christian rationality from something like the Trinity. Yeah, but what I asked was, is hell justice or vengeance? It's justice. Okay. So, and that's why I gave the answer I gave. Well, I asked a question because I had follow-up stuff addressing things that you had, and I wasn't necessarily expecting a sermon. So I didn't want you to get through those follow-ups. Yeah, I suspect. But if a child dies and goes to hell for original sin, is original sin just? He's not going to hell. When David talks about in Psalms, how he in Bathsheba's child dies, based off of God's punishment, that seems pretty brutal, but he says, I will go to him and he will not come to me. They're going to be in heaven. Yeah. If you want to get into the age of accountability, we can. In any case, I don't want to let you off the hook. You would ask me a question. I don't mean to give you a sermon, but you would ask me a question. Let me just finish this one final point, and then you go. Oh boy. You may not want eternity, relationships forever, physical. I want reality. But I want to know as many true things and as few false things as possible. What I desire, what fantasy you desire, is irrelevant to what is true and it is irrelevant to what is rational. Yeah. Well, your reality, though, is a tough reality, not only reality is the same as yours. It makes me nervous. No, no, it's not. Our realities are very different because I believe I'm a magenta. I mean, I believe in magical thinking. So there's no way our realities are the same. Our realities are the same. You desire reality and your delusions about reality aren't the same. But the person who's locked up in an asylum in a rubber room shares the same reality with me. That's just their perception of reality is flawed. Sure. Okay. Sure. Totally agree. I was just going to say in finishing on the Justice and Wrath, I think you desperately want there to be a judgment day, even if you think it's a ridiculous idea. But there are so many people who are going to be ripped off. I counsel women all the time who are going through five, six, seven corrective surgeries from what their husbands have done to them. And then their husbands just take off and sleep with other women and get off totally scot-free. That sort of thing, if you don't at least want and look at hopefully the evidence floor, something like a judgment day, that's where talk about justice and vengeance when it comes to hell, that is justice. And you and I desperately want that. And our culture is all about justice supposedly. And yet how funny it is that they think we need to get justice here and now, and how that leads to vengeance. And all studies show that that just breeds more violence as opposed to the Yale theologian who lived in the Balkans, for example, Miroslav Volk, who talked about the most peaceful countries are those that believe in eternal judgment day, where they don't have to get retribution here themselves on somebody else's dad who killed my dad. Yeah. I came here to debate whether or not Christianity was rational. I don't care what you suspect my inner thoughts and inner demons and inner desires are because all of those, first of all, you're wrong and all you're doing is projecting your suspicion and your misunderstandings about my view on rationality. But all of that is irrelevant to whether or not Christianity is rational. I could be batshit crazy and desire X, Y, and Z. And it wouldn't have any impact on the topic of the debate, which is why I'm concerned that in every time I start asking a question that's supposed to lead to some recognition about whether or not Christianity is rational, I get a sermon, a pronouncement about what you suspect that I want, all of which is irrelevant. So when you asked me that question, I asked you a question that could have had a one word answer because I was leading to other questions. I love hell. I wanted to talk about it more. Proceed. So you said that when you were assessing Jesus' character, one of the things is that he forgave sins. Yes. Prove it. Prove what? Prove that Jesus forgave sins. Prove that there's sin and that there's forgiveness and that Jesus achieved it. So there's two different questions there then. Is he himself taking sin on himself? Are you talking about like a deep theological Christocentricity on the cross? Or are you talking about just like a germane, like I forgive you and how he was forgiving people of their sins? You said Jesus forgave sins. I'm aware that that is a claim. I'm asking you to demonstrate with evidence that the claim Jesus forgave sins is true. So nowhere in my notes did I say Jesus forgave sins. In my notes, I have what I said is Jesus taught his disciples to turn the other cheek and to forgive 70 times seven. I think that if you go back and rewind, you will find that you uttered the words which I typed in immediately and put this question in my notes as soon as it was said. When you said when you were talking about the uniqueness of Jesus' character and among the very many things that he supposedly did, you said received worship forgave sins and you said them in that order. Oh, yes. In that context. Absolutely. Totally right. So when he's on the cross and he says, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. That would be an example. Of what? How is that an example of forgiving a sin? He and the Father are one and so he's forgiving the wrongdoers who put him on the cross and he's actually reserved fully his power to call down 12 legions of angels to kill his wrongdoers. And Harry Potter cast spells. That's a non sequitur. Yes. As is, you don't get to just assume that he and the Father are one and that he forgave sins merely because there's a report that it happened. You have to actually provide evidence to show that this happened and it resulted in the forgiveness of a sin. Yeah. And the evidence is the historical reliability of the Gospels and the footnotes that we did. The historical reliability of the Anonymous books. Within those Gospels. For which you have no originals. Potter asked me that same question and a handful of you atheists have. Why are you guys so focused on that question? On what question? The one you just asked. Did he prove that he forgave sins? Yeah. I only asked it because you claimed it. And my thinking here is, if you're going to make claims, I would like you to demonstrate that they're true. I have a bunch of, I have loads of notes. That was just, after Jesus claimed to be God, okay, that's a claim. I have no objection to that. He could claim to be God. Hell, I could claim to be God. And then you said, received worship. I don't have any objection to that because clearly people worshiped him. But then you got to forgave sins. That is now a positive claim of something that is both foundational to the doctrine and which you were asserting is true when from my perspective, the only thing that has happened is that there's a claim that someone forgave sins. Not actually a demonstration that someone forgave sins. What you, and I'm not saying this to pick on you, but you and believers, including myself, when I believed, often do, is because you believe it, you start taking the claims that are in the book and presenting them as if they are real and true. But you don't have evidence that they are real and true. Yeah. So your dichotomy between claims and evidence, you're going to have to walk me through that because you brought that up last time and that's very ambiguous for me. But demonstrate, how do you, how would you like me to demonstrate that Jesus forgave sins? I don't know how you would demonstrate it, but don't just raise your eyebrows and think that you've got to gotcha. I don't have to know what you do to demonstrate the truth of it until you present the claim. And the claim has to be testable and falsifiable. And then we can construct, okay, what would prove it? But what's funny is you and many other Christians, and some of the people in the chat, I'm sure, are doing it, are like, ah, Matt won't tell us what evidence he needs. I'm not the one making a claim. The sort of evidence, the quality and quantity of evidence that is needed is based entirely on the nature of the claim. And if you have an untestable, unfalsifiable claim, a non-specific claim, I can't give you the evidence. But the issue here is you believe it happened, which means you have somehow reached the conclusion that it happened. And all we're really asking for is what evidence convinced you and do you think that evidence should convince others? Because that's how we go about determining whether or not your beliefs are rational. What is the evidence? It's, when I say demonstrate the truth of this and you're like, well, what would convince you? I've tried answering that question. What convinced you? Because if what convinced you is a report in the Bible, that will never convince me it is insufficient to the claim. So I almost ditched my faith, my sophomore year of college. And it was largely because a lot of my friends said they were picking on my Mormon friends, saying that they're all brainwashed. And so naturally I said, hey, there's a chance I'm brainwashed. I mean, my dad's cliff connectly. I'm a pastor's kid. I grew up in the church. And so I think I got pretty far away. I think I got a healthy enough distance from the faith to be able to separate myself and be as unbiased as possible. And so for me, coming back to the faith and ultimately deciding against hedonism and the bankruptcy behind it was what I've given you in terms of all of a sudden I saw all this evidence for the reliability actually of, you know, you look at something I didn't bring up, for example, six sources now for the resurrection having occurred. I mean, what did Matthew actually lean on? Six sources. And we take two sources for ancient history and say that that's paid dirt of something absolutely happening. Now if you take away, obviously, if you remove that type of standard, then we're all of a sudden back to the Middle Ages, but it's six sources for the Christian faith. And so, you know, it started there. It's multifaceted. It has to be. I don't think I could ever take just one. And so I started looking into this evidence. I started having a more vibrant, devotional life. I had to, I can't just have a mental ascent. My faith involves mental heart emotions through devotional life. And actually, if this God really exists, you're going to have to be able to have some ability to connect with Him, like via prayer or something. And then I've noticed it for me was by doing social justice work and how all three of those connected perfectly and said, wow, just this makes sense. And no, I never bought into, I never went to the prayer groups where legs supposedly were growing back and amputees were now fully mobile. No, no, I didn't get there. But going back to the hard empiricists, I couldn't buy into that either. I mean, how can you test in a lab for a miracle? You can't. Yes, you can. It's outside of. So if I grow a finger back in a lab, if I grow a finger back in a lab, you're going to tell, you're going to say that there's a possibility to call it a miracle? No, no, no, no, this isn't about verifying whether or not the label miracle is justified. This is about verifying whether or not the event occurred. If we cut your finger off in a lab and we sit there and observe it and it grows back, we don't know how it grew back. We don't know if you have the same sort of genes that, let's say, a starfish have. We don't know any of those things. We don't get to call it a miracle in the sense of we have verified that something supernatural has occurred. We don't get to do that. But what we do is we get to say, hey, we have an example where someone's finger was cut off and it grew back in front of us. And now we begin exploring to try to find what the best explanation is. It may be that God did it. But until somebody demonstrates the link, the evidence that links the regrowth of your finger with a God, you don't get to say that that is the cause. This is all about connecting observed facts with proposed explanations. And you have, as the observed facts here, you have a proposed explanation that there's a God. But you don't have the linking evidence that shows that that is, in fact, the cause. And what's worse is that you can't even show the effect. You can't show a resurrection. You can't show any of these supernatural things that you, you can't cut off your finger and show that you can't show someone getting crucified, being stuck in the ground for a day and a half, and then walking back out of it. None of those things have been demonstrated at all. So Christianity is in a position where it can't demonstrate an effect for actual observable effects and is proposing a cause for those. And you want to talk about the experiential evidence of what it's like to live as a Christian and how it impacts your life. That's fine. But you can do that with all of those things would be true about how it impacts your life, even if the foundations of Christianity aren't true, because it's the belief portion that is relevant to changing your life. If you believe that there's a God that wants you to act in a certain way, and you do, it's your belief that is driving that act, not the truth of your belief. Sure. Sure. I'm not saying it proves Christianity by no means. But if you look at your worldview and you trace it back to its roots, unless you're not, there's many different types of atheism, whether it's the new atheists, scientism, secular humanism, different types of atheistic Buddhism, different forms of political fear. I think there's many different types, but if you all trace it all back, especially scientism back to evolution, then obviously, no, the belief is tremendously important, because the strong eat the weak. And I'm sorry, if you're back to the handicapped person, you're a total drain on society. So no, the belief is not true. And like you said, Stephen Hawking was not a total drain on society. That's right. It's true. Stephen Hawking was not a total drain on society. That's a one on evolution is not survival of the fittest in the way that you want to define the fittest. Fundamentally, you want understanding my on six feet right now. But what's weird is you went to this and you're like, you started talking about my worldview. My worldview is irrelevant to whether or not Christianity is rational. Why can't you defend whether or not Christianity is rational without trying to attack what you suspect or want to pretend my worldview is? No, no, I don't know what's your worldview. You kept saying secular humanism. And so I was I corrected you on humanism because you're the one that brought it up. I happened. I didn't bring it up. I responded to you misrepresenting it. And on multiple occasions here, you've talked about what you think I want. My worldview, not all atheists are the same. All this, all of that is irrelevant to whether or not Christianity is rational. Anytime you raise anything other than here's what Christianity is, and here's the evidence that shows that it's rational. You are deflecting and avoiding the topic of the debate. My worldview is irrelevant. Atheism is irrelevant. Secular humanism is irrelevant. Hinduism is irrelevant. Scientology is irrelevant. None of them are relevant to whether or not Christianity is rational. It's a big con. Couple things here. So you don't even think it's worthwhile to attack all the points I gave on the reliability of the Gospels or the supposed evidence for the resurrection because it's irrational. It's not evidence to this link you kept making between God and what was going on in the scientific lack. I'm guessing yet again, you're going to say, I don't know what that link would be at all. I don't know what to look for. So yet again, seriously, I want to be with you. And I don't mean to come off as sounding mean because I legitimately want to be with you when you say this, when you talk about this link and you talk about this evidence and you're doing a little bit of the goalpost moving, but I'm going to, I'm going to grant you a good guy. I'm a grant. I'm granting you a good guy. When you talk about evidence, it seems like you, to me, you move it almost every single time. No, back to the can you simultaneously just so interesting to me and then sign and also simultaneously say that I don't have a standard of evidence. That's not goalpost moving. You're the one moving the goalpost here by suggesting that I have two minds about evolution. I will believe any claim that is supported by evidence. I defined rationality at the beginning of my opening with pointing out the philosophical construct of internal consistency and how it's insufficient. And then in order for us to say it's rational, it needs to be consistent with the facts of reality. Show me the facts of reality that confirm Christianity. That's, that's it. That's what I've said forever. I want to say, we'll give you a chance to respond to it, but just in a few minutes, we'll be going to the Q and A. What I find so interesting, because I just learned today, 20th century, the most, three most famous atheists of the 20th century, arguably, A. N. Wilson, Sart and Camus all became Christians before they died. Didn't know that Sart was buddied up with a pastor who gave him all these reasons, all this evidence. Camus, it was a meaning thing. It was like, okay, there's ultimate meaning out there in purpose. And then A. N. Wilson, it was a moral argument. And I just bring that up because I find it to be so interesting that we can talk about our own definitions of evidence, our own definitions of what standards could look like in terms of what would convince me. We could talk about what is compelling versus coercive. We could talk about all these little things. And yet, I think I saw a little boy, Matt came out and little boy Stuart too, about five minutes ago, where all of a sudden the conversation just got stuck like starking. It's a full effect right now. It got stuck. It got starkingly simple where all of a sudden you just said to me, you're just like, just get him to just jump out of the grave right now. I just want to, I just, that's all I want right here right now. A quick handshake and we don't have to have any type of debate, discussion. We don't talk. I'm the only one here debating. We don't talk about anything like that. It's just game over. That simple. So why don't we just leave it at that? I'm not the one who's here making a case that I can't make and then saying that someone's being a little boy, grow up Stuart. If you don't find any, anything, any of what I gave attractive, I never heard you say one thing in all of our debates, anything attractive about the Christian faith, not one. And we spend hours together, not one. If you're not going to grant a single thing attractive about the Christian worldview, Stuart, you will never be convinced. Correct. But Stuart, this debate isn't, is there something attractive within Christianity? If that was the debate proposed, I would have just said yes and ended it. The debate was, is Christianity rational? And once again, you have avoided that subject and deflected to something else, a personal attack on me and what I have or haven't done. And then an irrelevant thing about, do you find anything in Christianity appealing? Yes, I do, but that's not the debate. It's not relevant to the debate. And you are incapable, it seems, of actually staying with what's relevant to the debate. You talked about these, don't tell me this because the atheists that I respect all had deathbed conversions. Well, no, no, no, no, no, you missed my point on that. You missed my point on that. I said we could quote all these guys all day long and change the definitions of evidence. And yet it's the little boy Matt and the little boy Stuart that are going to ultimately come back to squabbling over this little issue. And it's going to be a very simple thing. And that's just Jesus, get up out of the grave, prove yourself to me right now, the handshake, and we'll call it a game. And that's it. And that's what it all boils down to. And I don't look, I don't blame you for that. I don't, I don't think that's a bad thing. My Jewish friend, who I used to spend summers with, said the exact same thing. He said, look, sir, it's just, it's literally that simple. Just isn't about, I don't know how many other ways to say it. I'm so sorry. But what I believe isn't relevant to whether or not you can demonstrate that Christianity is rational, and you haven't, and you haven't come close and you haven't attempted to. And instead, now you're devolving into, oh, little boy Matt came out and demanded Jesus get up. No, what I said is, present the evidence that supports your hypothesis, except you don't have a hypothesis, because hypotheses need to be testable. So present the evidence that supports your proposition that there is in fact a God at the root of this. And I gave you my four points. You didn't like them. And so you took me on this merry-go-round of different issues. I took you on a merry-go-round. I think if we rewind, you'll find that I said you're quietly and patiently while you delivered servants and deflected. I didn't take anybody on a merry-go-round. I still have tons of notes that I didn't even get to, because every even a simple question of is it justice or vengeance led you into a three or four minute sermon so that I didn't get to get to the other points. This may be an opportunity to jump into the Q&A. Let's go to questions. Do want to remind you folks, yeah, as I mentioned earlier in the stream, our TikTok is linked at the top of the chat or at the top of the description box. We are about 60% of the way toward our goal of 1000 followers on TikTok, which will unlock being able to live stream these debates. Debates just like this with Stuart and Matt tonight on TikTok as well. We're pumped about that. So please do follow us over at TikTok, so we can get over that threshold of 1000 to unlock that feature. And with that, we're going to jump into the Q&A. So thanks so much for your question. Darkbinks83 says, love these debates. Keep them up. Thanks for your support. Ozzie in talks says, empathy and moral intuition is biological. This existed prior to Jesus. There were many philosophies that taught this prior to Jesus, Stuart. Yes, that's very true. Many of the teachings that set apart Christianity had to do with turn the other cheek, love your enemies, forgive in perpetuity. You got this one coming in from to appreciate your question as well. Melavia says, James, you'll always be my favorite soy boy. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Here are fishy fishy says, modern day debate. Thank you for all the content, James. This is my new favorite channel. Thanks for your support. Seriously. That means a ton says, and by the way, want to give you, want to give all the credit toward or to the guests as they are the lifeblood of the channel. So I want to say, folks, if you haven't yet, check out Stuart and Matt are both linked in the description box right now. That includes if you're listening via the podcast as all of the modern day debate debates end up on the podcast and you can find both Stuart and Matt's links in the description box there too. So what are you waiting for? They also said, also Alex Stein is the most one of my favorite debaters. Appreciate it. Okay, good. Atheist Allosaurus says, if we are all made in God's image, then why aren't we all invisible? Thanks for that. I don't know if that was serious. This one from Ryan Seas says, how does Matt know what rationality is? What is the empirical evidence for rationality? I'm certain he has never seen the number one, but nonetheless believes it exists. The number one is an abstract concept that we've defined. One isn't in and of itself rational. As I pointed out in the opening, what is rational is defined by that, which is consistent with the facts of reality. You got it. This coming coming in from do appreciate it. Noah's Ark Kansas says, what Christian society effectively transitioned or turned away from God, excluding physical conquest, and then ended up better in the long term? If so, better for who? I think they're saying, is there a society, Matt, that left Christianity as a generally speaking and was better off and then said, well, if it is better off for who? Well, I don't know that I could name a society, but one of the problems is that we don't have a, for example, secular humanistic society at all. There are certainly atheistic societies, but none of that's relevant to the subject of debate because whether or not Christianity has done things that are good for society wasn't the subject of the debate. If your point is, hey, there's nobody who left Christianity and got better for it, that's not relevant to the topic of the debate of whether or not it's rational at all. You got it. To whatever extent that may or may not be true, well, I'll just leave it there. You got it. This one coming in from do appreciate your question. H.G. says, Stuart, who determines what the canon of scripture is, i.e. the 66 books in the Bible. Different church councils, and it was decided by how old it was, whether it was orthodox, and whether it was written by eyewitnesses. You got it. Thank you very much for your question. This one from Samur. Thanks so much, says, let's say God exists and created us. How do you cross from there to the quote, he is therefore worthy of worship, unquote, says, I love my parents, but I don't worship them, though they created me. Thanks, Stuart, Matt and James. That was a question for me. Yep. I can read it again if you like. Just read the end again. Is it just the question of why does God need worship? Yeah, I think they're saying like, hey, I love my parents. They created me, but I still don't worship them. Yeah. Well, so if you're a child and you have a stepmother and she works her fingers to the bone for 40 years, puts you through college, and you decide, I'm not going to thank her whatsoever. Well, that would be pretty messed up. No, she's absolutely worthy of your thankfulness as well as worship. And if it's the God of the universe, then how much more so? Yeah, the problem is, is that I can demonstrate what my mom has or hasn't done. Nobody's demonstrated that God exists or has done anything at all. It's just an assertion that they want me to worship and revere their model of what did or created this. Until you demonstrate that God did this, you're just asking me to agree with your concept. You got it. This one coming in from, do appreciate your questions. Shasta X says, how is it possible that we have not moved to 2023? You got to update your clock, Shasta, HG. Thanks so much to Stuart. Let's see, we got that one. Will Stuart says 365 or Matt, by the definition you gave, if God chose to sufficiently prove to man A that he exists and chose to not sufficiently prove to man B, would it both be rational for man A and also irrational for man B at the same time? Yes. By definition, evidentiary warrant, in the same way that, if I know something that Stuart doesn't know, I know what Arden said to me right before we went live from direct experience. Actually, in response to one of his things about the rapid, nobody, he didn't do it quite this way, but nobody's, people frequently bring up that no paradigm shift has ever taken place that even begins to rival how rapidly and broadly Christianity spread. And I would say that that's not true because QAnon and the notion that the election was fraudulent spread much wider, much quicker and had a broader impact in a shorter period of time. But that was what Arden said. Now, I know that that's what Arden said to me, but Stuart doesn't. So my evidentiary warrant for accepting that this is what Arden said is different from whether or not Stuart's is. Does Stuart have a rational justification in believing that Arden actually said that? He may well because he may find me generally trustworthy based on the other things that I haven't lied to him about what other people have said, even if we disagree on stuff. But irrespective of whether or not he is warranted and is rational in believing it, our foundation of what is rational is based on what evidence we actually have. So it is possible for a god to exist and choose to reveal himself to Stuart in a way that Stuart can have evidentiary warrant and not reveal himself to me so that I don't have evidentiary warrant. But if I were to believe in that circumstance, I would be behaving irrationally. My belief would be irrational. You got it. This one coming from Atheist philosopher Raptor says for Stuart, why do you think less than 15% of academic philosophers lean toward theism while the majority are atheists? And then said this is from Philpapers Survey of 2021. It was under 5% 30 years ago. Now, it's not 15%. It's like 25%. So it's religious professors, actually, they're decreasing. But how much was it 500? 500. They're decreasing greatly. You think it was more than 5% or 15% 300 years ago? 300? Well, somebody asked a completely irrelevant question, which is an argument to Mad Populum, which you've already tried to use several times tonight. And then you argued that it's basically, oh, it's increasing. But what was it 300 years ago? Because if your argument is that there's a trend towards more and more philosophers accepting theism, that still is irrelevant to whether or not it's rational. And it's irrelevant, even more so, because if it turns out that it was 50%, dropped the five and went back to 15, the overall trend is still downwards. Who said it's supposed to be rational, though? The whole debate is whether or not it's rational. No, but these questions, these questions can be totally off topic, and they typically are. Okay. This one coming in from, do you appreciate your question? Samir Farsane says, I'm not Christian, but Christianity is rational because it doesn't claim this beautiful universe came from nothing. Atheism does, and that's irrational. Yeah, atheism doesn't make any claim about the origin of the universe. It says, I don't know how the universe started. There's nothing within atheism. Atheism is simply not accepting the theistic proposition. So you're wrong about whether or not atheism is rational or not, but that doesn't make Christianity rational. You're beginning assertion that Christianity is rational because it doesn't declare that the universe came from nothing, does not in fact make Christianity rational. That is a fallacious line of reasoning. So you're wrong at every conceivable point. So you're in good company though, because Frank Turrick is fractally wrong about pretty much everything he's ever posted. So you're right there in good company. This one coming in from, do you appreciate your question? Azean Talks says, Stuart, if God thought I had value, then why would he ever reject me for not believing he exists? Just like with your silly analogy with some kids. In no way does he reject you. If he tells a thief on a cross that you're going to be with me today in paradise who was probably a murderer. I mean, that's pretty accepting, is it not? And he leaves it up to your free decision. That's the ultimate celebration of one's free will to allow you to make your decision. He's not going to coerce you and pull you in ahead of them. So that's totally wrong. You got it. That's called a post hoc rationalization based on a story that you can't prove, but cool. Matt, I'm going to stop though. I had the sermon tonight. You get to go now on the Q&A. This one from, do you appreciate it? Endo says, Stuart, does Corinthians 13 verse 4 conflict with your definition of love needing wrath? If love needs wrath, where is God today with his wrath? Thank you for the debate. First Trent, what verse did she quote? 13-4, love is patient and kind. Correct. Oh, where is God today with his wrath? I think his wrath changed from the Old to the New Testament. It doesn't mean Jesus was any less if he got a wrath. I think it's more of an eternal approach. Now Jesus fulfilled the law. The law had a lot to do with blessings and curses and God's wrath being made it out if the Israelites disobeyed him. But now it's much more focused on an eternal kind of way in judgment day and thank God. So much of the Psalms are praising God for judgment day because it's what Matt and I want desperately for those who have been ripped off so badly in this life. I want them to get justice. I don't want so many of these people to get away with. There is no justice in your system. A mass murderer gets forgiven and goes to spend eternity in heaven. While his victims go to hell, there is no guarantee of justice in your system that is grossly immoral in the New Testament is grossly worse than the Old Testament because at least then you died and slept with your fathers. But now you're going to be punished forever. The notion that there's justice within Christianity is one of the most bizarre lies that people have bought. It's embarrassing. It's right up there with pretending that it doesn't allow for slavery. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Somer says, Matt won the pronunciation debate. Thanks, Somer. He long nights YouTube and says, if I wrote a book that 40 authors added to, it's then declared mostly false and easy to pick apart by the masses, even by kids. Would you question it? I think that's for you, Stuart. I miss. Yes. Yes, I would question it. This one came in from Samir. Thank you very much. Says we found a log cabin in newly discovered island. Would you say we discovered a wild house that grew by accident? No, because nothing comes from nothing is the burden of proving it was built contingent on finding out who built it. Yeah. See, here's the problem, Samir. You called it a log cabin. A log cabin has a particular definition. We already know that log cabins are constructed and don't occur naturally. The recognition of design is not about complexity. It's about recognizing a contrast between that which occurs naturally and that which doesn't. If you come across a log cabin on an island, what you've had to do is first verify that what you're looking at is a log cabin and not something that merely looks like a log cabin. And by the time you verify that it is in fact a log cabin as you assert, then you will know that it was in fact built by someone because that is where all of the available evidence points. You don't get to then look at all of reality and pretend that it is an obvious verifiable creation by an agent because you have nothing to compare it to. You got it. Thank you very much for your question as well. Mark Reed says, Stewart, why would anyone be happy for a judgment day? Why do you seem so keen on the world ending? How is that rational? How is it rational for me to be keen on the world ending? No, I'm not saying I want judgment day to happen tomorrow. I just want it to happen at some point in the future. You got it. That's my basic point. Tim Zimlic, thank you very much, says regarding biblical criticism, the way atheists conceive of the God of love is faulty out of pleasure and comfort, not of love. I think that's for you, Matt. Is it? Can you do it again? Because I don't understand that. No problem. They said regarding Bible criticism, the way atheists conceive of the God of love is faulty. They require God to be a God of pleasure and comfort, not of love. That's a lie. I don't require any God to be a God of pleasure and comfort. I would say that for me, love is a label that we put on a wide collection of psychological states within human beings. There's a friendship love, romantic love, all of these things. But in any case, all you're saying is that you care strongly for someone, that you value them, and that you are willing to do certain things for this individual that you wouldn't for another. I don't have any expectation about if there's a God and he's a monster who doesn't love anybody, I'll still believe that he exists. I won't respect him and I won't share values with him. But whether or not a God exists is independent from whether or not it is a loving worship. So it's just absolutely dishonest to pretend that I am only willing to believe that God X exists if God X has loved the way I prefer. I'm happy to believe that God X exists if God X is a terrible monster who doesn't love anyone provided there's actual evidence for it. Instead of trying to do what Stuart has done and psychoanalyze me in order to dismiss the fact that you don't have evidence to demonstrate that your beliefs are rational, why not sit back and reflect a little bit on what it would take because I'm not denying the existence of a God because it doesn't love the way I think it should love. I'm addressing the claims of Christianity and pointing out the problems with them both with regard to epistemic warrant and with regard to emotional and psychological evaluation. You got it. Thank you very much for your question. This one from Ozzie and Tox says, Stuart, is Matt's perception of reality more rational than a Hindu's? Why or why not? His is less rational because at least a Hindu would believe in transcendent objective morality and at least, well I would say in the face of suffering they're equally as rational because Matt would not have an answer towards a dying cancer patient. He would just bring, hey look this death is just stripping you of all meaning because there's no eternal life. While the Hindu would go to the dying cancer patient and say that you did something wrong and that's why you have cancer right now. So the rationality piece in the face of evil and suffering I think for atheism and Hinduism is equally difficult. Every time Stuart tells you what I would think or what I would say he's probably wrong as he was just then. You got it. This one coming in from, do you appreciate your question? Happy Dome says the truth about the rationality of atheism is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. This is an assumption, agnosticism is more rational from a place of ignorance on the mystery of God. Yeah so first of all agnosticism isn't some middle ground between theism and atheism. It addresses a different question. Theism and atheism address a question of belief. Gnosticism and agnosticism address a question of knowledge. The tired old axiom of absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence is wrong. It's correct in what it means when for example Carl Sagan used it that the mere fact that you don't have evidence for something does not mean that that thing is false. But absence of evidence where you would expect there to be evidence is in fact evidence of absence. It's not confirmation of absence. It is not you can't falsify the unfalsifiable but if you say that you just killed somebody and stuffed their body in your trunk when we go out and open your trunk and we find no evidence to be consistent with that it doesn't mean that you are wrong but it is evidence against your claim and so evidence of absence of evidence is evidence for absence but not confirmation of absence. You got it man thank you very much for your question this one coming in from Hates Stairs says describe the biblically accurate angel stewart. I'm not sure what they mean by that. Huh there's the fallen angel satan there's the angel Gabriel who is gives tough messages. I would read the book angels by angels and demons by Heisler but no I don't I can't give you too much on that. I suspect that they and I'm just guessing I'm suspect that they were looking for like physical attributes of you know how many eyes and wings and you know one of their capabilities sort of things just this is this is kind of common it's one of the reasons why I don't go to this stuff because I don't I could have I'm on my list of things um that aren't consistent with reality I could have gone to angels um but you know it's like you can keep listing stuff from the bible it's problematic and but whether or not stewart I don't know has a description of an angel isn't really relevant you got it this one coming in from do appreciate it franco true hello says face it matt stewart knows everything about you helpless like a fish out of water you've been out matching hail our debate king stewart that's completely true that that is absolutely certain that that stewart knows me better than I know myself it must be that god gave him this information um and that would then convince me that there is a god you want to you want to demonstrate that there is a god ask your god what number I'm thinking of I'm actually a psychotherapist that's why I know you so well you should refund your money because you do not know me as well as you suspect and what I'd like to pretend too easy this one coming in from do appreciate it some of your first scene says matt you seem to forget that religion is about belief not knowledge why would you be rewarded for knowing you have to seek god first not the other way around why and and I'm asking this and not I realize you're not going to be able to respond but this is this is another um dodge um if if religion is about belief about knowledge then I have zero interest in it because what I want is knowledge I'm happy to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible but knowledge should be the goal which is knowledge is in many different definitions but the one that I tend to use is that knowledge is a belief held to such a high degree of confidence and warrant that would be worldview altering to discover that it was wrong but your claim is that it shouldn't be about knowledge it shouldn't be about you evidentially warranted it should be that you you should believe it because there's some virtue in faith that's not true faith is the excuse people give when they believe things when they don't have a good reason face is faith is not a virtue it is a vice because there's not a single position in the in the universe that one could not accept merely on faith as a foundation I'm going to take it on faith that white people are better than black people I'm going to take it on faith that you know this is this is more important than that all of those are justified by faith I want things that are justified by evidence because that is where the rational world is faith is irrationality but you do have beliefs right I have loads of beliefs okay so yeah I'm just making sure I'm catching your difference me and the definitions of yeah I have belief is merely accepting a proposition is true or likely true knowledge is belief held to an incredible degree of certainty with warrant whether it's just five true belief or whatever I believe many many many many many things because knowledge isn't always attainable even though it should be desirable what I'm not willing to do is believe things for which there isn't evidentiary warrant that demonstrates rationality and consistency with the facts of reality you got it this one coming in from Noah's Ark Kansas says do you have an example of the big bang or evolution is that for me I think so okay I have an example of the big bang and that's the universe that you're sitting in and the the microwave cosmic microwave background radiation which is one of many evidentiary factors that demonstrate big bang cosmology not as true but as the current best supported scientific model science doesn't make proclamations about truth what it does is it presents a model a theory that is robust and testable and consistent with all the facts of reality this is why rationality is so important big bang cosmology could be wrong as a matter of fact I had a friend who up until his death was working on an alternate cosmology that if true would be would replace big bang cosmology and so my worldview isn't contingent on whether or not the big bang is true or whether or not evolution is true even though evolution is in fact true evolution being the observation of the diversity of life the theory of evolution by means of natural selection is merely the single most robust consistent demonstration of a model that explains the observable fact but at the end of the day if big bang cosmology is wrong and evolution is wrong that won't prove christianity in the slightest and most christians recognize that their view of christianity isn't necessarily in conflict with either big bang cosmology or evolution although some are in a position where they are really really opposed to this and it's because of a fundamental misunderstanding of both and evolution and science but none of that has anything to do with whether or not christianity is rational because i can be wrong about the big bang and evolution and that still doesn't tell you whether or not christianity is rushed you bet thanks for your question no is our kansas also asked can you be rational by comparison i don't know what they mean by comparison i think the closest i could get to that would be like relatively rational like somebody's closer to being rational um that makes sense i think it's probably a discrete thing where you can certainly be further away from like the barrier but it's like you know if you got 50 point x percent consistent with the facts then you're rational and at 49 you're not and at 12 you're like a republican and at two you're like a maga republican you've got it this one from oliver catwell thanks so much says if the bible were read as epistolary fiction does the reduction of divine smiting in the new testament offer evidence of the forgiveness of sin in that context i'm looking at what epistolum define epis testimony is the method by which we determine what's reasonable it's it's the only thing is it might have been a misspelling but it it's uh they put epistolary epistolary epistolary let me it's a brand new word i've never seen this in my life they it says uh relating to the writing of letters so maybe like the epistles like prosthetians roman history they say if the bible right as a epistolary fiction does the reduction of divine smiting in the new testament so they're saying like maybe a progression in the sense of or at least it's got less smiting say does that offer evidence of the forgiveness of sin in that context i don't know the epistolary i don't i don't know that i understand it but i'm i'm not sure that so let let let me put my here my jesus hat back on keep it handy um i don't think that the reduction of direct smiting in the new testament is necessarily evidence of of of forgiveness itself but it seems to be evidence of some sort of shift in portrayal of the character of god from from smiting to caring which is why so many people have have pointed out that there seems to be two separate characters um that are identified as god not not necessarily actually but like god softened or something but i don't know i think it was probably for stewart anyway stewart any thoughts god softening i like that i have a question i was distracted by the jesus hat i have a question this is kind of just for fun and that is somebody sent me this holy spirit board where i can communicate directly with jesus christ it's basically like a little christian weegee board with a cross-plan shed will it work and is it sinful what do you think stewart you're so entertained it's good to be with you boys and without the kids for a night you know getting out on the town here that's why i don't have kids actually that's not why i don't have kids i don't have kids because i couldn't have kids this one coming oh actually oliver had another question too oliver also asked for both if god is omnipotent can he exist for some and not for others would he hit the like button how many times thanks thanks both of you for a great discussion things oliver uh that's an interesting question i've never heard that one before so if god's omnipotent could he exist for some and yet not for others is that like logically possible that if there were a god that's omnipotent he could do that god's existence is a discrete god either exists or doesn't it would be a violation of logic to suggest that he both exists and doesn't exist uh based on who who we're talking about what do you think stewart they also asked they said for both it's yeah it it definitely seemed to me like it was in a logical point i didn't think in any kind of way the discreteness is a obviously a big attribute that the the read it one more time though he said if god is truly omnipotent could he exist for some but not exist for others oh well he could show himself to some and not others so in that sense you could say oh he doesn't exist for some and for others so he could live in his power in that kind of way but no it no he can't in that sort of way that that's illogical it's a fallacy you got it thanks michelle maria for becoming a channel member just saw that in the chat we appreciate your support and this one from happy dome says matt christianity and western culture are historically co linked the apostasy in christianity coincides with falling birth rates and disintegration of western culture cool you got it joe field says want to let you know james is the real life giga chat i appreciate that joe franco true hello it says face it matt oh we got that one samir farsane says claims beautiful got that one just let me load these up in the meantime i want to remind you our guests are linked in the description box just loading up these other questions by the way folks we've got we're going to probably wrap up pretty soon so i want to say please don't send any more questions in though we appreciate all the questions you sent so far and want to say as well i mentioned before our guests are linked in the description if you haven't checked them out please do and thunderstorm thanks for your question says no organization is 100 rational and has done harm is none are without failure including science i think they're saying like science scientists is not they're not always rational either or maybe and that they also have had ethical failings i think everybody would agree on that the muslim apologist says explain what is the trinity oh stewart you got muslims coming after you now in the live chat with the questions explain what is the trinity excuse me intro i brought some muslims up my intro um so father son holy spirit you can go the dimensions of the room i wouldn't go with the egg illustration there's a lot of bad illustrations out there um it's just as problematic as your toe weed i think and yet like love it's one of the biggest mysteries but um so it's one essence asusia and yet different persons and so i would say i would i would go the strain of theology that talks about that jesus absolutely you know fighting is arianism in the early first century obviously jesus wasn't fully just man when he was here on earth he still had access and that's he restrained his power at many different times and yet he had his own personhood as well so same substance different persons you got it and endo thanks so much as both is a belief a choice can god force me to believe well i don't think belief's ever a choice i think you can choose to act as if you believe but belief is the state of being convinced and you can be convinced for good reasons or bad reasons but i don't think that that becoming convinced is ever simply a matter of deciding i am now convinced in the sense of sort of like a conscious decision absent other information can god make you believe well the god character in the bible definitely could in the same way that he hardened feiro's heart or gave people over to reprobate minds and and can control what people do feiro wanted to let people go and god's like nope nope i'm not done showing off yet so i'm going to force you to act in a certain way um whether or not he actually changed somebody's belief directly um i suppose that could be argued i would suspect that that character the way it's portrayed could do that but i don't know what steward thinks steward what's the question again and god forced you to believe something oh yes god could force you to believe something but again that's that's the beauty of him giving us free will he doesn't force us but like matt said i believe a god could exist who would have created us to be his own slaves force labor slaves and um i mean fortunately doesn't do that and so we have free will and so we have the options to to think through consciousness abstract thinking meaning purpose all these rationality questions that matt and i've talked about in relation to christianity tonight if we didn't have these types this type of free will that we wouldn't be able to have a discussion we don't have free will not in that sense but we can have that discussion another time this one from hillary d says steward do you know of the origin story of the talking snake that predates the bible as well as other versions in other places why is yours real when others predate it well so the enuma elish and all those other ones i i mean i a lot of those um actually the germans due to their racism a lot of that came out of germany when was that late 1800s i want to say mid 1800s in in just trying to say that the the jews were totally wrong and look at all these different mythical cults that clearly were the right cults so a lot of it came out of that others know are true and and closer to what um what exactly looked like happened in the garden of eden but i mean look at the world trade center and 45 minutes from it a plane on the exact same day a very similar spot to a hit struck the world trade center and then planes you know number of years later hit it as well there's there's so many different ways of understanding that things can be similar obviously and yet just because that happened first obviously didn't make the second one wrong when excuse me like it didn't happen when it occurred on 9 11 so that's actually surprising to me because i'm not going to put my jesus hat back on again because i'm not trying to make anybody laugh but that maga hat on you got matt i see it back there i don't i have i have a i have a red hat that looks like a maga hat but it says i made you look black lives matter um i also have a darwin you had me for a second i i would have that exact hat downstairs i have darwin had other hits um i'm surprised at the answer though legitimately because when i was a christian if somebody said ah these other things predated i would have had to say the surviving texts that tell that story may predate the surviving texts that went to made at the bible but because the bible starts at the very beginning in the beginning god created there's nothing that can predate that this this aspect of this story um has been there since the beginning because it's true and it's spread a different way i that that would have been close to my answer back then i'm surprised that yours is different and don't forget the creation stories even though there might be similarities there with that talking snake or the ennemy elish it's not even close the biblical creation story is all about it all it was created good as mentioned but called times everything was good versus work came out of two different gods fighting it out and then the one that lost was it was just demolished and all his different parts of his body became soil in a way where you know we fight in the soil and it's all violence all those different types of stories were based out of violence rather than goodness you got this one coming in from do appreciate it tim zimlich says faith slash participation are prerequisites to miracles is that matt i think it was for matt all right i apologize then do it again because it was kind of fast no problem they said faith slash participation are prerequisites to miracles so if they're i don't even know what that means um i i don't know why there would i would think if there was a prerequisite to a miracle it would be the existence of some being capable of producing a miracle faith can't be a prerequisite to that because the whether or not something happens um is independent of your belief of it or your faith so i don't understand that here you go stewart get him out at berkeley that's pretty good this one from james w says after show matt dillahunty victory celebration at emie newman's channel starts after debate this debate ends open mic all welcome good job to the debaters and modern day debate thanks for your support james w thanks emie as well hope it goes well for trying to moderate earlier appreciate it read hundred percent charles lennar says matt what is your definition of historical evidence what is my definition of historical evidence i think i probably need the context in which to use but basically it is uh evidence from the past that is the best that we have currently well in i i guess suppose it wouldn't necessarily be the best so historical evidence is evidence that isn't necessarily empirically verifiable but is reported from the past and we can uh for historical claims we can look at um for example who's making the claim how many different sources is coming from is it coming from competing sources and the stronger the uh the evidence is stronger when you have for example the losing side saying here's what happened and the winning side saying here's what happened and those are consistent um because we don't have a time machine you got it this one from jashy t says to matt in correct context what about jesus's teaching isn't rational in many people's opinion the world would be a better place what about jesus's teaching isn't rational well if he's teaching that you should take no thought for the morrow and that you should focus on an afterlife that hasn't been demonstrated i would say that's grossly irrational and harmful because until such time as there's a good reason to think that there is an afterlife that you're going to go to this is the one and only life that i know i'm going to get and so telling me uh that i should my primary focus of this life should be an afterlife that you haven't demonstrated um or the salvation of my soul which you haven't demonstrated um i would say those are irrational you got it this one coming in from do appreciate your question nick says matt have you ever thought about what proof of god or the supernatural would look like we definitely had that covered in the debate what would that be for you so this one from noise go ahead so um i mean i've thought about a lot which is why i give the answer that annoys the crap out of a bunch of the people who debate me i'm not arrogant enough to presume that i would be able to on my own identify what evidence is sufficient to warrant believing in the supernatural it's one of those things like where the supreme court as somewhat of a dodge would say oh we we're not going to find pornography but we know when we see it um i i understand why they they get to that point and it's because if someone claims that something is supernatural in origin the first thing that needs to demonstrate that we need to demonstrate is that there's actually an effect the james randy educational foundation for years had the million dollar challenge for anyone who made any claim that they could do anything that was supposedly supernatural if you you know grab your dowsing rods i've i've got my dowsing rods right here um believe it or not and you take your dowsing rods and you walk around and you're looking for whatever you're going to walk around and when they cross uh supposedly that's the spot and when they part or go other ways it's that now you can point out all day long how i can make these rods do whatever the hell i want whenever i want but there's a way to set up a test to demonstrate that these rods can be used to find things whether it's water gold oil whatever and to date no one has ever passed a preliminary test to demonstrate that these things actually do anything once you demonstrate that they do something now the question becomes how are they doing it and until someone shows how we can investigate the supernatural demonstrate that there is anything beyond the natural world and that that that this thing that's beyond the natural world can in fact interact with reality in a detectable way then we're stuck and that means that everybody who is asserting supernatural causation is being irrational because they're claiming to verify a cause that is currently non-verifiable you've got it this one from do appreciate it austin king says matt love you on the hang-up show thanks for your positivity austin thanks this one from no as ark kansas says if something alleviates your suffering or gives you purpose would it be rational to believe in it if they're getting at william james's argument that sometimes it's practical then the argument that it's practical being a good reason to believe it there are plenty of things that that are pragmatic beliefs that you may not have strong evidentiary warrant for like i don't have a solution to the problem of hard solipsism and yet i believe that stewart and i share a reality i have reasons for that like if in fact we don't then i have written every great song and every bad song i've made every wonderful painting and every crap painting i've been every i've been every person who's taught me something that i didn't know at the same time as i didn't know it and on those grounds i find it even though i can't demonstrate the truth of it i find it more pragmatic to just accept that i share a reality with other people than to buck that direct experience and say nope i'm in a reality all to myself this one coming in from we got that one i think let's this come from nathan ducklow says matt how do you deal with someone who is incapable or so biased to the point that you find it hard to persuade them so i think they're saying the people that seem to be unpersuadable what's your strategy to try to persuade i don't i mean so here this is not going to be a surprise to anybody i don't think i'm happy to convince stewart that he's wrong but i didn't come here to do that and i didn't come here with the expectation that it was going to happen it was likely i have atheist friends you were like oh stewart's this close to becoming an atheist i have no idea if that's true i'd be fine with it either way because i'd rather watch stewart think and try to come up with a rational justification for what he believes and realize the importance of it then wind up with another atheist i'm happy also if he became an atheist my goal is to come here today's debate was is christianity rational i'm sure there were people in chat who were like oh matt didn't talk about his worldview correct my old view is not on trial today um christianity is well why didn't you do this well because it wasn't relevant i didn't want to distract all i'm here to do is to present skepticism secular humanism and atheism from my perspective as to what my take is on the issue and that the issue is is christianity rational what i like what i want what i prefer what i believe what i suspect what my biases are are completely irrelevant to whether or not christianity can or has demonstrated rationality and i'm talking about rationality as a demonstration that the claims of christianity are consistent with the facts of reality anything that is not consistent with the facts of reality for example is it rational to believe that ghosts are real well ghosts are inconsistent with the facts of reality yes we have reports of people who claim they've experienced ghosts how did they identify that what they experienced was actually a ghost they didn't they can't they don't have any mechanism to demonstrate the conclusion that they've reached and that's my point that's why i'm here you got this one coming in from do appreciate it noob noob says can god microwave a burrito so hot that not even he can eat it that's an old one but nonetheless thank you very much this one from polarity says matt says god exists and we know it but not which religion was right would the amount of people in a specific religion then give more credence to the claim since god would or could or might influence people to come to one particular rigid religion in greater numbers i don't understand what that's saying i think they're saying let's say granting that god exists would numbers possibly be evidence namely the numbers of adherence for a particular religion because possibly god would be expected to draw people to the correct now the truth the truth is an impact that anyway by the number of people who believe something or how sincerely or how strong their convictions are would it be the case that a lot of people believing something is consistent is is correlated with that thing existing yes but it's not causal and so the plural of anecdote isn't data the more people who believe something or believe something strongly does not tell you in any way whether or not it's true and this is something that steward brought up many many times talking about you know how rapidly it's spread or uh literally almost everything i even i even noted it down here in the notes after i went through the list of things that he said all of these are about how people found it convincing the spread of christianity is because people found it convincing but that isn't confirmation that those people were rational or that their beliefs were true the popularity that's an argumentum ad populum and it is a fallacy cultural flexibility though would be one cultural flexibility how does that sit on that we'll come back to it how does that demonstrate the ration oh well we got questions so this one coming in from do appreciate it otangelo grass hole i think this is a parody account of otangelo i don't know they say matt dill hunty have you has not debunked the shroud of turn the shroud destroys atheists and proves that jesus proves jesus is not possible to prove shroud not real atheism lose bad cool two quick things first of all cultural flexibility we are culture and that's still a result of what we find convincing and it isn't a demonstration of rationality but to answer this question steward is the shroud of turn real or fraud i'm 30 on it you're 30 on it being a fraud or 30 percent of being real real okay so even steward isn't to the 50 percent point but uh joe nickle and others have already demonstrated pretty conclusively from the availability of being able to examine it um that the shroud of turn isn't real but here's the thing that you can ask yourself let's assume that the shroud of turn were real and so you have a god who did all these things and then there's a shroud which is evidence of that and yet it isn't available to be examined it hasn't been conclusively demonstrated to be true and if it were it would be undeniable and it would be the sort of evidence that steward says god won't provide because that sort of conclusive proof would be too coercive and so on every single grounds the the shroud of turns of fraud this one's coming in from austin king says matt what games are you playing currently none i'm in a debate but i'm taking your question in face value uh i streamed on twitch and i've been playing uh majored in gathering in valorant primarily um and some miscellaneous board games i've been busy with a lot of projects i mean we're just doing this exotic pet business as well so that's right i heard about that last time arwin was on that's pretty cool i think i did this one coming in from aw we got that no as our kansas says i like the big words matt uses don't understand them though because i am slow all right i think they're being sarcastic no ken hope i try not to use them i mean my ex-wife used to be guys debunk them what's that i said you do debunk them though yeah except for solipsism i didn't debunk that we were going with two different usages yes i like that ken tovans ken tovans cpa i don't think this is his actual accountant says patrick mahomes will beat the bangles with one leg thank you for that ryan c says so if one isn't consistent with the facts of reality how can mathematics be so consistent with the facts of reality if you want someone one is consistent with the facts of reality the fact that it's an abstract concept doesn't mean it's inconsistent with the facts of reality there's a quantity right here and the quantity of wallets in my hand is what we call one it doesn't matter that it's an abstract concept the label the quantity of wallets in my hand is one you got it this one from also ryan c email me at moderndatabate at gmail.com because they also issued a challenge to a debate matt and no as our kansas says is forgiveness injustice would you define the core principle what would you define the core principles as i think they mean core principles of injustice but i'm not sure i don't think forgiveness is injustice you got it this one from nick says matt if you knew that you were going to die would you pray would you think that would you think about praying or would you make the decision to avoid it all together yeah you see this mark here a year ago in december so a year and a month ago i had open heart surgery for a triple bypass i didn't pray it's very likely that i could have died on the table it's very likely that i would have never regained consciousness i didn't pray i have no interest in praying hey folks sorry about that during the q&a we actually had the internet connection here where i am dropped and then we lost touch with the speakers so this is a post announcement after the debate to say unfortunately the q&a was cut short and so we are sorry that we lost communication with both of the speakers and so that is it for the debate that's the reason for the sudden ending but want to say thanks so much for your support we really do appreciate it here at modern day debate as well as want to say as mentioned earlier if you are able to follow us at tick tock it means more than you know as you can see at the bottom right of your screen once we hit a thousand followers on tick tock we unlock the feature of being able to live stream there which is a huge deal as we're going to be live streaming our debates there as we want to expand this neutral platform so the debates just like this can be seen our link to our tick tock is pinned at the top of the chat it's also at the very top of the description box so you can conveniently click on there and follow us as you really do appreciate that support as we continue our march to 1000 followers there as we just got on tick tock and we had like about a six month one year hiatus and then started getting active on it again once we found out we'd be able to live stream there so thanks so much for your support for following us there want to say if you happen to be in terms of want to say as well so thanks for all of your support and thank you very much in the live chat I have to warn you guys folks I'm sorry I don't want to lead you along and mislead you I don't think that we're going to have a steward come back I'm going to wait a little bit but let me just double check in case I missed him yeah I have a feeling that we might not hear back from Stuart and I don't blame him because it's freaking late it's 11 there so that guy's already it's already been three hours that's just too long so I don't think we're going to see him Ozzy Gold thanks for your support says thanks for your time debaters and modern day debate for your work putting them together thanks for that that seriously means more than you know buddy seriously we do appreciate it thanks for all of your support as it's been a juicy one it's been a fun one we do appreciate both of our guests Matt and Stuart and want to say thanks for all of you in the the old live chat there thanks for all of your support is this especially at technology wise we had some bumps along the way as you know both in terms of obs first and then also in terms of my connection here but want to say hi to you in the old live chat and man thanks for coming by I see you there in the old live chat jack has Paul Amir let me know if I'm saying that right thanks for coming by I see you there in the live chat Nathanius thanks for coming by I see you there what good to see you again and Joe are dim am I saying it right let me know thanks for coming by troll glad to have you here as well as HM I think trolls like trying to like trigger people in the live chat so like look out folks like oh okay so this one into the break thanks for coming by as well as poker man good to see you there crystal rock happy to have you here and gross patat glad to have you with us Dylan moats good to see you Michael Stein thanks for being here DJ Batman good to see you again says keep up the great debates thanks DJ Batman and I was told to make you a moderator I guess you went through the gauntlet to become one so I just made you a mod in the YouTube live chat want to say thanks for your support now for those of you who don't know I want to mention as mentioned Amy is doing an aftershow that's one thing that's going to be going on shortly and in addition to that you could open up more than one tab because maybe you're like oh yeah I want to do more than one thing of course you do who wouldn't blame you to want to both see the aftershow as well as I'm going to put the debate wait what is going on man is my internet cracking out again I'm going to look up the debate between Stewart and Matt in the past as that was a popular debate if you haven't seen it Stewart and Matt already debated on it was a broader different question it was one of the whether or not uh a debate on whether or not god exists whether or not there's good evidence for god that was a great debate the past so I have to encourage you if you haven't checked that out that's a really popular one that's one of our more popular ones want to encourage you to check that out so let me pull that up and I'm going to put that link to last debate years ago between Matt and Stewart if you want to watch that you can so I highly encourage you to check that out but yes this debate is going to be this is going to be we're going to put this on private shortly because this debate was a technological what's the word I'm looking for let me use a poised word we had some technical challenges but no problem we're going to get over it so want to say thanks to Amy for all of your support and trying to make it work earlier as well as Gigi in the chat says thanks for the show modern day debate sad evidence let's see thanks for your support ember good to see you there I see there in the old live chat glad to have you as well as let's see troll I can't tell trolls a robot like a bot or a real person I don't know no offense troll but I just can't tell but what is a thanks for your support you guys you make this fun I want to give you our quick pitch before we go because it's getting late in particular modern day debate if you haven't yet hit that subscribe button as well folks thanks for all of your support modern day debate is a neutral platform our vision our goal what we're determined to do is provide a neutral platform so that everybody has their chance to make their case on a level playing field that's what we're determined to do that's what we're doing here on YouTube and what we're doing at the podcast if you haven't checked us out you can search for us on your 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to modern day debate and then that's two dollars and fifty cents that goes to modern day debate each month that you decide to subscribe to us because you have to go keep going back every month to do it so it doesn't automatically renew on its own and like i said that's complimentary so you have that subscription to use on twitch whether you use it or not like you don't it makes no difference to what what you pay for your prime membership the prime membership is the same no matter what it's just a complimentary or extra membership you can use if you want but want to say if you didn't know this if you want to come on to modern day debate that is a little thing that we have in the description box there's a link to a google page that talks about like what kind of the process is for that potentially happening well we we don't take every topic some topics we just don't feel like they really engage the audience and so we're kind of like meh it's not really gonna work and we also of course it takes time like for me to moderate a debate it takes like usually an hour and a half at minimum and in this case tonight it's been about three and a half or about three hours so thanks for all of your support though you guys i love you guys want to say thanks for being here thanks for making this channel awesome if you haven't already here's another thing lastly if you haven't yet consider sharing this debate for real that really does help a ton if you love these debates this link to this debate is going to disappear so because this video is going to go on private so if you want to share them the channel the youtube channel that can help us grow our neutral platform is we want to give everybody a fair shot whether they be atheist christian muslim all of the other groups you name it we hope everybody gets a fair shot we want to say thanks so much for all of your support you guys keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable i'm going to let you go now because unfortunately i can't blame them stewart probably fell asleep because it's so late there now and then matt said he had to go so want to say thanks for your support though you guys i love you thanks for making this fun i love getting to say hi to you in the chat like this ozzy gold says you could host standing for truth versus based theory juicy that sounds fun if they want to do it on moderated debate i'm open to it psychological shackle breakers thanks for coming by i see you there on the old live chat as well as kata jabril good to see you ember glad to have you with us michael stein happy you're here brandon johnson thanks for dropping in jeremy nolan thanks for being a channel member seriously that means a lot we appreciate your support good to see on the old live chat samir far saying good to see you there i see there in the live chat thanks for your super chats brother means a lot andrace castanos thanks for coming by and everybody else as well thanks amy for your support uh with that tiktok link and base theory says i'm down for it all right well base theory if you email me i mean has standing for truth already said that he would debate you i'm at modern day debate at gmail.com uh write that down based theory because my we're gonna end the stream in a second so write that down uh but yeah base theory did modern did a standing for truth already agree i don't know because i don't know if he's going to he's he turns down a lot of debates he doesn't really he's hasn't come on here for a long time to debate he usually just does it on his own channel dp thanks for your kind words man seriously i see there in the live chat that means a lot thanks for your encouragement non-existent good to see you thanks for dropping in destiny's crack dealer good to see you again glad you're back but yeah thanks you guys you make this fun i appreciate you guys i love you guys we'll see you the next one keeps lifting up the reasonable from the unreasonable and we'll see you the next debate we have many coming up so if you haven't yet hit this hit that subscribe button and thanks for your support