 He's essentially blinded by it, right? Yeah, no, no, no. At this point now, you're just turning into a liar. No, no, at this point now, you're turning into a liar because instead of answering my questions, I'm trying to, I'm getting into this. Instead of answering my questions, you're gonna begin by accusing me of never being willing to believe something. That's a lie. Today's debate is Islam true or not? I have three arguments for the case of Islam. First, being a cumulative argument with Islam being true based on the argument for contingency or the necessary being and how Islam is the most compatible for that. The second argument is gonna be on the evidence of the Quran, the third being the evidence of prophethood from Muhammad, peace be upon him. So I find it hard to convince everyone if they're agnostic or atheist on the concept of God first. So I'm gonna use the contingency argument. Pretty much states, there's three terms, necessary things, dependent things and impossible things. Possible things cannot exist. They're like squared circles or a married bachelor by their necessity. There's a necessary thing. It doesn't need, require, it is independent. There's other attributes I'll go over later. There's a dependent thing. So it depends on something. It's a reliant subject to addition and subtraction, can be rearranged and thought of otherwise an abstraction. So the proposition goes there cannot be a world with only dependent things without a reference to an independent thing. As a dependent thing cannot continue to exist on their own. Existence is only explicable with reference to an independent existence. As an impossible existence do not exist by logical necessity. Furthermore, dependent existences can't self-generate or self-maintain. That'd be a miracle. So there's a case like contingency through fine turnaround. You can say the universe is fine tuned for life by either contingency or necessity. If it is fine tuned by necessity then a necessary existence must account for that necessary fact of fine tuning. If you looked at it through contingency then a necessary existence must account for any series of contingencies. So the universe is fine tuned for life. Therefore the universe is fine tuned for life by a necessary existence. And then it's saying like everything is made up of pieces is dependent. The universe is made up of pieces and this would include the multiverse as well. Even though I don't believe it and I think it's a fringe science theory. Therefore the universe is dependent and you can even see this mathematically like any set with more than one member is dependent on its members. An infinite set has more than one member. Therefore an infinite set is dependent on its members. Okay, so argument for oneness. So we've got like why a necessary existence is more probable. So a necessary existence cannot be any other way. Therefore there cannot be more than one necessary existence. So a necessary existence, this is put pretty much what I said. This would disqualify the trinity and the Christian concept of a God as well as obviously polytheism. So then we get to attributes of the necessary being based off this logic. So we would say that it would be independent doesn't depend on anything. It would be one, which again disqualifies trinity and polytheism does not have a cause. No beginning, no end, no parts. The first cause as it has a will and intelligence and created the universe. No space cannot be seen, no weight or body. And then all powerful. This would also disqualify Judaism as there's like many stories in Judaism where Jewish rabbis debated God God actually submitted to his creation. So do the disbelievers not observe the heavens and the earth were closed? Oh, sorry. I still have a little bit more on this. So there's a Quranic quote on this and there's some other Quranic quotes that essentially reference the contingency argument or a necessary being as well. It's kind of littered through the Quran. So, man I lost it. I'll just go on to the next thing. So evidence from the Quran. Do disbelievers not observe that the heavens and earth were closed? Then we opened them and we created water from every living thing. They would not believe. So this is a, it's explaining to the viewers, literally that the Quran states all living things are made of water and this is true as everything is made up of cells that contain water, obviously. So there's another one. He turned to heaven while it was all smoke. In 1991 there was a New York Times article published about the Big Bang and described it as mostly smoke. There's Oso, a book that goes on about this and then talks about how there was a star forming out of cloud of gas, which is an ebula, which is one of the remnants of smoke from the origin of the universe. In that same article there was Oso of information about David Tran which talked about the expanding universe and this is another Quranic truth. So it says the expanding universe of Allah. Allah says in the Quran, the heavens we constructed with strength and indeed we are its expander. Okay, so there's, again, I think all these are more probable. There's like what we see in reality and this is reflected in the Quran as well as prophecies where I think there's problems with atheism. So we made the sky preserved in protected roof yet they still turn away from our signs. It is now known that the sky serves as a protective layer just as the Quran stated years ago and there's multiple ways we can see this actually. So Jupiter's shepherds is an asteroid belt that prevents asteroids from falling into the sun or accelerating into the earth which would make it so we can have life. The Earth's magnetosphere has the strongest one of all rocky planets. They state the following, our magnetosphere is a vast common shaped bubble and it displayed a crucible role in our planet's habits for habitility and they go on to say that life on earth initially developed and continues to be sustained under the protection of this magnetic environment. Excuse me, I should say that it was from like Earth's magnetosphere. So evidence from the Quran, there's also iron and so we sent out iron in which there lies great force and which has many uses for mankind. So the word azalana translated as sent down is used for iron in this verse and they cannot be thought of metaphorically and there's context blues within all of these literary devices the Quran uses. So it's being physically, the only way the word has been interpreted and can be interpreted is that it's been physically sent down from the sky as the word juices just been employed and then now we've now discovered and found out that iron is indeed was sent down from giant stars and outer space. Then there's embryology describing it in stages. We made him as a drop in place of sediment fairly fixed. We made the drop into an alakka which is a leech suspended thing and then a blood clot and then we made the lock into a magda which is a chewed substance. So something like is what I've seen. So science has only proved this with the help of latest technology a professor and emeritus Keith Elmore is one of the world's most well-known scientists in the fields of anatomy and embryology. He is not a Muslim and he even said it's clear to me that these statements must have come from Mohammed from God because almost all of this knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later. So there's also pain receptors. This was a recently discovered thing. So skin surely we shall cast those who reject our signs into the fire and as often as their skins are burnt out we shall give them other skins in exchange that they be fully taste the chastisement. So obviously this is being put in a way that implies that skin is where we receive the pain. In Surah Haman it states he released two C's meeting side by side between them is a barrier neither of them transgressions. So science has discovered that in places where two C's meet there's a barrier that divides them which helps those C's maintain their temperatures, salinity and as well as density. And then this can keep going by the way. So in Surah Nama it states that he who created the night and the day, the sun and the moon all heavenly bodies in orbit are swimming. It's a widespread belief now that the sun, the moon and all other bodies in the universe are moving in orbit and constantly moving not stationary as commonly thought before to reference a prior debate with Matt. And some atheists claim that Islam promotes geocentrism but they are just moving in this quote. Okay, mountains as stakes and plank tectonics. Again, this is a recent discovery. In Surah Nama all estates have we not made the earth a resting place and mountains as stakes. So geologists have now discovered that mountains are like stakes and buried deep within the earth's surface. There's long roots and then these also act as stabilizers and you can look into Isotesi to see this. There's also the lying frontal lobe quote. So in this story a man named Abu Jal who is a cruel oppressive tribal leader in the times of Prophet Muhammad, B.B.U.H. Allah revered a verse to him to warn him saying that no indeed if he does not stop you will see him by his forehead his lying and sinful forehead. So according to a book titled Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology it is clearly stated that the forehead and the frontal area of the brain is responsible for motivation and foresight to plan initiate movements as well as the prefrontal area of the brain is responsible for movement, planning, yada yada and it's responsible for lying. So, okay, so proof of prophethood, right? So say I got you to accept the necessary being. You can even see some of these scientific evidence as facts for the Quran. Is Muhammad worthy of being a prophet to you all? So, some people have said that he's just a violent warlord who is only using prophethood or claims of prophethood for power. This is actually based off historical evidence and hadith incorrect at all. It's a mischaracterization and obviously, honestly slander. So he was, before he was a prophet he was held in high esteem as one of the most honest people within the community. He would dissettle disputes and known as a wise person. He embodied qualities of a prophet. He rejected worldly desires, merciful, brave, honest and humble, so on and on. Muhammad rejected many offers to stop preaching and was offered women, money, leadership positions and he denied them all. He even showed mercy to his enemies and even assassins and there's tons of stories on this. The prophet was a, this is from a hadith. So the prophet was a person who honesty was common knowledge to those around him and in fact his clanmen had officially titled him the trustworthy. Even when they were persecuting Muslims and they fled the city, they still trusted him with their most precious possessions. So Aisha said that he instructed prophet Muhammad, instructed Ali to stay behind in Mecca and to return all property. So essentially he's being told that he has to flee, right, and he's gonna flee and he still, even among his enemies gave back their personal property. So if this was merely for personal gain and goods and you're fleeing and you can't know the future, you would take all the money because it's resources that you can use to build your army but he still gave back everything. There's a quote about the simple and a steered lifestyle of the prophet and it's a major indication of his mission was not self-serving, especially when you contrast it with a lot of false prophets who lived extravagant lifestyles and you can see these throughout world history. So even within Arabia, there was thousands of luxuries he could have been afforded but he still lived in a simple living quarter that was actually quite tight and small. So when Aisha, when Muhammad went to pray he would tap Aisha to bend her legs to make room for him to prostrate, to drink her bath, he would reach for a small leather water skin that hung in his room. For months on end, no fire would be kindled for cooking in the home. His family was content with only eating dates and water unless someone gifted them some milk. All right, so we get to prophecies. So you will see the Bedouin Arabs competing in buildings of the tallest buildings. Today the largest building is Burjah Khalifa. In Dubai, he said 1,400 years ago, 60 years. He said this 1,400 years ago, excuse me and 60 years ago Dubai was still in desert. So why did this change? So he also said the reason it would happen. So the earth would keep treasures and money would become abundant with you. So there's no way to know that oil would be worthwhile back then, essentially until today and oil was also a recent discovery. So he correctly predicted it. So the prophets said in the future women will be taken and her belly will be cut open and the baby will be discarded out of fear of having pregnancy, predicting abortion as well as the modern reasons for them. So 1,400 years ago in the past, if you cut a woman, she would be dead. So how would he have known this? Arabia will become green again. This applies not only that the harsh desert was once green but it will become green again. There are now studies confirming this from Michael Protragala, which Arabia was once a lush green landscape and then NASA confirms now that Arabia is becoming green again. So he also foretold Reba, which is one of the most unethical and exploitable transactions and it would be in Islam as well as other traditional religions and that it would be inescapable. So the time will come over the people when they consume Reba and they had asked him all of them and he said whoever does not consume it will still be reached by its dust. Essentially explaining the modern interconnectedness of the modern economy and obviously interest and its wide-ranging effects. Okay, so the Byzantines will rebound. Despite being isolated by endless deserts and largely unaffected by the power struggles of the world, the Quran foretold the almost unexpected events would transpire between Persia and Byzantine. The Byzantines had just been defeated in the nearest land but after their defeat they will be triumphant within three to nine years. The Byzantines were decimated by the Persian Empire losing the territories of Anayat, Damascus, and Armenia and their most cherished Jerusalem, Egypt, and collected on. In the book, The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbons says, at the time this prediction happened, no prophecy could have been more distant from its accomplishment. Since the first 12 years of Hercules announced the approaching dissolution of the empire, everyone saw Byzantinium as an on its deathbed. Thus the opponent of the prophet mocked him as a preposterous foretelling of the Quran. However, not long after Hercules led the Herculeses, led the Byzantine crusade like a dagger into the heart of the Persian Empire fulfilling the amazing prophecy 68 years after it was uttered. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening, Hussain. We're gonna kick it over to Matt for his opening as well. And then Matt, did you have a PowerPoint or were you good without PowerPoint? PowerPoints are terrible. You got it. There should never be PowerPoints. Thank you very much. The floor is yours, man. I just laid that out hot. So thank you everybody for showing up. Thanks for the invite. Thanks to Hussain for agreeing to do this. I've been debating more and more Muslims not because I've targeted them but because they've targeted me. So these requests keep coming. To understand, I'm gonna do a mix of what I wrote down ahead of time and also tailoring it a little bit because when you say that you're gonna talk about how God is a necessary being, that involves an understanding of the distinction between necessary and consistent. And that could come down to, is it a logical necessity or is it an epistemic necessity? Is it a necessary thing versus a necessary truth? Going with his definitions of necessary and dependent, I might slip the word contingent in just because I'm more comfortable with it, but yes, there may be things that are contingent, which means they're dependent on something else. But I don't know exactly how you would go about demonstrating that. And the reason I say that is because how do you tell whether or not something is contingent if you don't know everything about it? I would agree most philosophers tend to view things in the world and say, hey, there are contingent things. This bottle of water was contingent on a manufacturing process and a manufacturer, but there are also people who disagree because when you try to drill down to what is contingent and what is necessary, it's not easy to make the distinction because we don't have exhaustive knowledge. I will though, go ahead and say that like everybody else on the planet, I'm convinced, whether I'm right or wrong, that some things are probably contingent. As a matter of fact, most things that we interact with are contingent. How do we go about demonstrating that it's the case? How do we go about demonstrating that it's reasonable to think something is contingent? Well, one of the ways we do it is by pointing to causal links, to show a chain of causality or chain of connections to say that my existence is contingent on my parents' existence and meeting and copulating, which is something I'd never like to think about, or that we know that something was manufactured, something once didn't exist and now it does and something must have brought it into existence. That's one way. But the biggest truth that a lot of people don't like to address is that the largest determining factor in how we go about figuring out whether or not we think something is contingent is intuition. If it feels like it's something that's contingent on something else, it is. And I would agree that if there's any contingent thing, there must be at least one necessary thing because by definition, a contingent thing is dependent on something else. And so since you can't have a forever chain of dependent things, supposedly, we can go ahead and say that there must be at least one necessary thing. But what is that necessary thing? Is reality and the fundamental particles of reality, are they contingent or are they necessary? I don't know how to tell. I don't see any reason to think that they aren't actually necessary. And yet the apologists or anybody who's going down this road of saying, what they're saying is that reality is contingent in order to set up a scenario where they can say, ah, but we've found the necessary thing that explains this. Could the universe that we experience, could it be all that there is, all that there was? Is the universe essentially another word for cosmos? Carl Sagan famously made the distinction between universe and cosmos because we started to recognize that maybe our universe isn't the only one, maybe there were universes before, maybe there were a series of universes and that there's some fundamental layer of reality that is in fact necessary and each of the universes is contingent on that. And so he drew a distinction between the local universe that we experience with spacetime, et cetera, and the cosmos, which is under his definition, everything that is or was or ever will be. And so the questions we have to ask when we're looking at something like the universe is or reality, I'll probably use that one instead of universe, is our reality necessary or contingent? I don't know. And I don't know that anybody's established and met the burden of proof to show that reality is necessarily contingent. Is our universe alone? Is there a multiverse? Is the multiverse contingent? Is the multiverse necessary? I don't know. I don't know how you can determine from something that you have not exhaustively explored and may not have access to at all, like we can't rewind time and say, ah, this thing is in fact contingent rather than what we tend to do, which is it's my intuition that this thing is contingent because it's the type of thing that we would normally associate with being contingent. It was one way at one point, it's different at another point. But the fact that something changes doesn't necessarily show that it is contingent on something else for it to change. It might be. How can you tell whether or not there's something beyond reality? And I mean that both with regard to space and time. If our current cosmology, with Big Bang cosmology, which may or may not be accurate, holds that time began with Big Bang, then there was no time absent that, which means that no time, there was no time at which the universe didn't exist. And that's all about our local presentation of time. But there may be something we might refer to as meta-time or super-time that applies to, from a multiverse perspective, that each individual universe has its own time and the multiverse has an explanation. Or that there is some other necessary external thing that has its own type of time. And whether that thing is a God or not is part of the question. Because it may be that the universe is necessary, it may be that the universe is contingent. And if it's contingent, we gotta figure out or we would like to figure out what the necessary explanation for that thing is. The contingency apologists basically want to say reality must be contingent. And they, to my knowledge, haven't actually done anything to demonstrate that it must be contingent. Just that we suspect it is and sometimes people feel it is, but how would you show that it actually is? There's another aspect of necessity and that's logical necessity, which I'm just gonna mostly skip because I don't see, given what he's mentioned, I don't see any reason to go down yet another convoluted path to say, ah, there must be some grounding for logic and reason. If that wasn't presented, there's no reason to dig into it. But what could be the necessary foundation if in fact anything is contingent? Well, why not mathematics? There's a physicist, Max Teckmark, who's famous for the mathematical universe hypothesis. Now I don't know if I accept this, I'm not in any way arguing in favor of this particular hypothesis. What I'm pointing out is that this is an unresolved issue even amongst philosophers. To pretend that, yep, we've sorted it out, the universe is necessarily contingent. Ooh, there's a tricky phrase. The universe is contingent and the necessary thing must be some being. I don't know how you concluded that it's contingent. I don't know how you concluded that the necessary thing is in fact a being or that has agency or that can act or that it needs to be that. But I think there's a good case to be made for mathematics being necessary. And the worst case, since I view mathematics as being directly derived from the foundations of logic, logic would be the thing that is necessary. And we don't have any way of demonstrating that logic is inviolable or inviolate. Wow, inviolable, inviolate. And one kind of side distinction I wanna make before I dig in on the other aspects of this opening is there's a difference between synthetic truths and analytic truths. Synthetic truths are truths that have to do with how we describe things and what those things are in reality. Analytic truths are true by virtue of the definition that they're just true. There are no married bachelors who would be an analytic truth. I'm wearing a blue shirt is a synthetic truth because it points to something that is in fact tied to reality. It could have been otherwise. And when we're evaluating contingency versus necessity, one of the things we can do is evaluate it with respect to possible worlds. I can envision a world where I don't exist. So I don't think I'm necessary. I can envision a world where today instead of a blue shirt, I actually wear a blue shirt with a jacket because that's the one I planned for but I left the jacket at home before the four hour drive. I can envision worlds where I'm sitting here doing something else. So it seems that my clothing choice for today would be contingent. And that's a synthetic truth that we can't rewind time so I can't show that it's true. If you ever get confused, by the way, between a synthetic truth and an analytic truth, here's how I remember it. And I have to be a little bit careful here. Synthetic truths being tied to reality, analytic truths being about definitions. Well, definitions are just things we made up. They're pointing to actual concepts that are real. So definitions aren't useless. But we made them up. And since analytics starts with anal, you can think that those are the truths that we just pulled out of our ass. Now, that does not mean in any way that they aren't still useful or true or anything else. It's just for remembering the distinction between those two. So if we have determined that there must be some necessary foundation for reality and we go ahead and grant that it must therefore be a being, how do we then know that a law is in fact that being? Well, at best, the necessary being or the existence of a necessary being is an analytic truth, because we don't have things to point to within reality to make it a synthetic truth. And that's not a cheap way of saying we just pulled God out of our ass, but we might have. To then claim that you've found which of the many proposed gods is the actual necessary one is another step that's adding another claim that is analytic in there. So what's the reason that a proposed and unproven God is actually the necessary one? How can you get to a necessary being when everything is stacked on top of analytic statements and analytic truths? But until we have good reason to believe that the necessary being exists, we don't have to waste any time at all on which of the proposed necessary beings might be the right one. Now, I'm not just, by the way, for the philosophy folks out there who are losing their minds, I'm not just advocating for logical positivism, although there are aspects of it that I'm fine with, but pointing out that we seem to be stuck is not in any way a demonstration that Hussein is wrong. You could come to the right answer purely accidentally or from the entirely wrong path. I don't have a, it may be the case that what he stated about Islam and about Allah is ultimately unfalsifiable, in which case I can't sit up here and prove that the unfalsifiable is false because that would make me the irrational one. So the other aspects of what he was pointing to are said there to bolster this. The intro is about, there must be some necessary explanation. I'm gonna say that that necessary explanation is a being. I'm gonna say Allah is that being and here's why I'm convinced and then we proceed to rattle off a number of things that are attributed to Allah, which are never demonstrated to actually be from Allah. So everything about science and the Quran, you're trying to infer that because the Quran makes a statement about something supposedly in reality that science then later discovers that the only way this could be accurate is because there is the God Allah has revealed this information to someone. Now, I made a list recently, if I can close this window here, of a number of supposed scientific facts from the Quran. Some of them, who's saying it actually mentioned, the notion that life comes from water, no it doesn't. The fact that cells have water doesn't mean that it came from water. And if we're going to look at what verses say, then we should look at what they actually say. By the way, that's sort of 2130. The very next verse is the one where, as you mentioned, where mountains are here as stakes to keep the earth from shaking, which isn't true. The fact that mountains have roots or have things that are described as roots doesn't make them stakes and doesn't make them exist to kind of hold the earth down and keep it from shaking. As a matter of fact, in a great irony, the production and process by which many mountains come to exist is through that shaking of tectonic plates shifting and smashing up against each other and creating ridges or going up and over each other to creating rises. It's not in any way a stake to keep the earth stable. The earth isn't stable. That's just true. Iron was supposedly sent down. Wanzalna is the actual word there. And that word is used many times to talk about what Allah supposedly sent down. Now, iron existed on the earth prior to that, but iron does arrive on meteors. And so there's this big claim that, oh, science has discovered that iron comes from the heavens. Therefore, the Quran was right all along. Well, it's not clear that sent down means anything more than I gave it to you because the other things that Allah supposedly sent down were commands, angels, verses, books, water, clothing. I don't remember clothing arriving on any meteors or cattle. In Sir 3960, he sent down cattle. There's this notion that the sky is a protective ceiling, but the actual verse says a protected ceiling is the most accurate interpretation of that. What's it protect us from? Sun rays, all you're doing is saying there's an atmosphere there. But then you get to sit there and ignore the fact that it talks about seven strong heavens above you, that Allah holds the sky back from falling on us, which isn't gonna happen. He erected the sky, and he'll fold the sky up like a scroll that the sky has no cracks that stars are placed in the sky or in the heavens. And the stars, by the way, are the things that angels throw at devils. In 5147, it talks about expanding the universe, but in the very next verse, which often gets ignored, it talks about expanding the earth. Is the earth expanding as well? How come it's so convenient that science has discovered that the universe is expanding, but we just ignore what it says about the earth. It holds that the sun orbits the galaxy supposedly, except that that's not what the verse says. The verse talks about night, day, sun, moon, swimming in an orbit, which is intuitively obvious from watching the sun and the moon appear to go around the earth, even though that's wrong. Well, one minute left. Soon as, I don't know who's talking, but one minute, thank you. I just thought I was getting interrupted, James. It talks about the sun having a stopping point, a setting place, a muddy spring that it goes to. This issue of the lying forelock, it's originally forelock, and so it's talking about hair. I'm gonna grab you by that hair thing, but now, all of a sudden, it's forehead because that is one step closer from the forelock to the forehead, to the frontal lobe, and wow, somehow or another, it knew about that. Oh, and your skin feels pain. That took a revelation from Allah. We wouldn't have known that skins feel pain at all. The moon was split in two, that you can't pass through the heavens despite the fact that we've been to the moon, that there are barriers between seas, even though that doesn't actually exist. What you see is a visual illusion. Water and things are still passing between those as well. All animals live in communities, all animals, everything is in pairs, but that's not true. And so in order to do this, the Quran revealed nothing that led anyone to a scientific conclusion. What happened is science, quite often infidel science, discovered something, and upon that discovery, when it became accepted as part of reality, people went back to the Quran, and by the way, to the Bible as well, and to other holy books, to say, hmm, what's the Bible say about this? And then interpret it in a way that matches up with it, just as they do for the quatrains of Nostradamus or the prophecies of Edward Casey. And I don't have time to dig into the prophecy stuff right now, but I do have notes on it for when we get to it, so. Thank you very much. We'll jump right into the open conversations, so not a minute is wasted. Floor is yours, gentlemen. Okay. Yeah, so prior debates as well, like a lot of these problems. So some of them are like mistranslations. So for example, like the pair, it's not saying everything of pairs, it's saying from or of everything, so it's complimenting groups. So for example, it will mention day or night, you can think of it as spouses, good and evil, things that compliment each other, like the sky in the air. But it's just not all living things of pairs. Well, I'm not just talking about 5149, it holds that fruits come in pairs and plants come in pairs in 1333 and 3636, and neither of those are true. Plants and fruits don't necessarily come in pair, fungi reproduce asexually, dandelions produce seeds without other plants. But we have animals that reproduce asexually, so it's just true that not everything is in pairs. Yeah, but you're essentially taking like a literal, the irony is like there's like a religious zealots and like Islam who like they take everything as literal, but there's an is specifically that talks about, you know, things within the chron are figuratively and things in the chron are literal. There's specific scholars, that's why we would refer to scholars, not just like. So if a scholar says something's literal, how do you know if they're right? Well, they have debates on this. You have what? They have debates on this. Like scholars have debates. So scholars have debates on it, you and I have a debate, how do we tell which one of us is right? Well, we'll have the audience decide, I guess, right? Well, every individual's going to decide for themselves, but to say that I'm making a mistake because I'm telling you what the Quran actually says, and there's scholars who have found a way to massage it so that it seems to say something else. Why would any God reveal information in a way that requires other people to tell you what it means? So there's a, when they're doing things, when God's revealing things, right? He's revealing it for that time as well. So for example, there's a prophecy, right? And it's, atheists will often use it, right? So Dijal is like the Antichrist, and he's going to come in and they say he's going to travel the earth, right? On a donkey, flying donkey, right? Okay, but they're explaining to the people at the time a concept that would be totally alien to them, okay? But this donkey has a wingspan of an airplane, essentially, right? So Muhammad doesn't have full revelation of that, right? So he's explaining it to people who they have no concept of an airplane, but he's essentially describing an airplane. It's the same thing for almost all these prophecies, like you have to put it at the time of the people. So I don't think that discounts it if the prophecy is true. Why can't God reveal information in a way that people can properly understanding it right away? And by the way, if they misunderstood it previously, and we understand it more correctly now, how do we know that we're not misunderstanding it now and we'll understand it more correctly in the future? So I mean, that would be up for everyone to decide, right? They have to like look into religion. I understand. It's the same thing as the day being exists. I understand everybody's going to have to decide for themselves. But it seems like it was probable, right? What you're saying is like, well, how can I know? Are you saying your methodology for truth is go figure it out yourself? No, it's not necessarily that. There's people who are- That's the answer you've given twice now. There's people who are scholars of these things. There's people who- Are scholars right? How do we tell? We got to figure it out for ourselves, right? They got to debate it and they have- There's things that are more likely. I understand that some things are more likely. And you even admitted- Is it more likely that someone- That's a necessary beating. Is it more likely that someone wrote something down and that later on someone reads something into it that wasn't intently intended? Yeah, but people do all the time. Like people- I was asking, is it more likely that that happened or that a God revealed information to someone in a way that people misunderstood for a long time and then figured it out? Which of those is more likely? And how do you tell? Say that one more time. So is it more likely that someone wrote something down? I don't want to misrepresent what I just asked. Is it more likely that someone wrote something down and later on people interpreted it to be consistent with new facts or that someone revealed information to someone that they didn't understand at the time and then gained understanding of later? Which of those two scenarios is more likely and how do you tell? I mean, we'd have to investigate that. Okay, I agree. We'd have to investigate that. Sounds like we agree. I'm looking- Yes, we agree. Congratulations, we should investigate that. And I would say that we have to the extent of our ability because I don't know how to investigate whether or not something comes from God or not. Yeah, so you as an atheist, right? You don't even believe in the concept of a God or a necessary being possibly, right? So- That's not what I said. Okay, earlier you said you may or it appears, right? But- I didn't say that I don't. Well, first of all, I may not be convinced of the possibility, but that doesn't mean that I'm holding that it's impossible either. Okay. Okay, so if we get to that, you are granting, right? Like, say you are granting that there's a necessary being, right? Okay, and he has a will, right? He could reasonably send down his will to the people and that's what their prophecy, right? The next question would be, are these prophets true? Or what they said is true? And if you investigate that, right? Even Jewish people, they have this in the Torah, I think, and Moses says like, how to investigate if a prophet's real? Like, because they need to know who the Messiah is gonna be. Religions talk about this all the time. I mean, I would need to investigate your claims too. Sure. The difference is that mine are, have been investigated. Well, I'm not making a claim about anything that we don't have the ability to investigate other than I'm not convinced of certain things. You talked about the reasons why Mohammed should be considered a prophet or how you would determine prophethood. And most of what you put up there was that he was held in high esteem. He was honest. He rejected desires and was offered to stop preaching and offered women and he showed mercy on his victims and, sorry, his assailants. Wow, that was not an intentional slip. And that he had small living quarters. How does this show prophethood? Is any honest, poor person in a small house a prophet? Are they making religious and miracle claims? Sure, let's imagine that someone who's generally viewed as honest lives in a tiny apartment here in Dallas and is making religious statements. Does that mean they're a prophet? Did you and I see these miracle claims? Because how many bombs did you do miracles? And people testified to that? Well, see, you didn't, I don't recall you listing specific miracles that people testified to. Well, there's a splitting of the moon, for example. So you think the moon's been split? What's the evidence for that other than somebody said the moon was split? Is it claim? People saw it and witnessed it and claimed it happened. Okay, I'm talking about what evidence? So you're saying claims are not evidence. Claims are not evidence. Claims are not evidence, as I've demonstrated over and over again, but a claim can point to evidence and can be consistent with evidence and can include evidence, but the utterance itself is not evidence. Now, if somebody says, hey, I just got a pet puppy, I'm willing to take them at their word because that's entirely consistent with reality. But if somebody says the moon has been split in two, their word is not sufficient and they are claiming that the moon is split in two, that's the thing we then have to test and seek evidence for. So apart from, hang on, even if we say that the claim, the moon has been split in two counts as evidence, it's clearly not sufficient evidence to justify believing the claim, right? Why wouldn't it be? Okay, I'm going to claim the moon was split into eighths. Is my claim sufficient for you to believe that the moon has split into eighths? But I didn't witness it. You didn't witness the moon splitting in two either. Yeah, but this is like a massive end. So if everyone witnesses this, it's more likely that it happened. No, if I'm saying I witnessed the moon splitting in eighths, is that enough for you to believe that the moon split into eighths? Not for me, because you're not a prophet. See, every single time we go down this road, it's the same thing. It's either not a context, it's either misunderstood, misinterpreted, you're not a prophet, it is 100% special pleading, start to finish. Well Matt, I have a question on your claims on evidence. So that seems really interesting and we're gonna have interesting implications. So if a woman came forward and had no physical evidence but accused someone of sexual assault, you're saying that that's not a piece of evidence. So that claim is consistent with facts of reality and I'm not in any way saying that testimony doesn't get to count as evidence. It's just that testimony in and of itself may not be sufficient depending on the nature of the claim. So if someone comes forward and says I was sexually assaulted, then we should begin an investigation to find out if there's facts that are specific to support that claim. But because we already know that people are in fact sexually assaulted and that people report this and we know things about how that impacts people's lives and other things, we can then accept the testimony as consistent with the facts here. If somebody says that they were sexually assaulted by aliens from regular five, now that's no longer consistent with the facts of reality and we would need more than just that, even though we should still investigate it, we would need more than that before we would be really justified in saying this is probable. So what if there's a, when more claims happen, right? Does it strengthen that? No, it can. Why not? I said, wow, I get like one. So no, it doesn't necessarily strengthen that, but it can. If everybody in this room went to the police and said that I lit that screen on fire, the evidence that everybody was here testified towards that would suggest that they're less likely to be lying. Okay, so if an entire population viewed that and then wrote it down, would that be evidence that something may have happened? So it's, yes, those testimonies, as I've already said, would be evidence because they are consistent with facts of reality. If they said I lifted up my eyelids and laser beams shot out of my eyes and lit that on stage, it doesn't matter if everybody in this room claims to have seen the same thing and I'm not saying they're lying, we can take it as they think they've witnessed something, but that is it's sufficient evidence to include that I can shoot laser beams out of my eyes. The nature of the claim determines what sort of evidence should be sufficient to warrant believing it. Not all claims are created equal. Me lighting it on fire with a lighter isn't the same as me shooting laser beams out of my eyes to light it up. Okay, interesting. That could be interesting, I think it's kind of obvious. I mean, I don't think it's obvious, that means. You don't think it's obvious that claiming I lit it with a blow torch is of a different category than that I lit it with my eyes? So it was possible that you did shoot out of your eyes. How do you know it's possible? That's my point. Well, just, so let's say for example, through like the power of God, right, you became a prophet right now and you shot laser beams outside of your eyes, right? And we witnessed it and we all told everyone, you're telling essentially that no one they know, like none of the family members, none of them, they should never believe them. No, you just completely changed the scenario to now. That's the implication I'm saying. You just completely changed the scenario to now where we all live in a world where we know there's a God who can make me shoot laser beams out of our eyes. You don't get to do that. You don't get to appeal to spectral evidence and things that aren't demonstrated as real in order to justify the bullshit scenario as real. If God is more probable, right, and there's a necessary being, then the claims are no longer super, they are a supernatural nature, but they are possible. You don't know that they're possible. Can God, if in fact there is a God, can he make it so that I can shoot laser beams out of my eyes? How do you know? He could, he's all powerful, yes. All powerful doesn't mean that you can do things that aren't logically possible and doesn't mean you can do necessarily things that are epistemically impossible. It just means you can do all things that are logically and epistemically possible. If it's not possible for laser beams to come out of my eyes, because lasers are light amplifications, they're stimulated emissions of radiation, and there's no mechanism for that in my eyes, then he can't make my eyes do that. I want to say to it, because you're just disagreeing with the initial premise, right? So you may have two different worldviews, so you would never agree on it being possible. Yeah, that's the whole point of the debate. Yeah, I know I have a different worldview, and I'm trying to figure out how we can tell whether or not your worldview is sound. And so at every opportunity, like for example, we talked about profit hood. You came up with a couple of examples that the tallest buildings were in Dubai now. But that's not, if I go to the waiter and say I want a medium rare steak and he delivers a medium rare steak, he's not fulfilling prophecy. Prophecy hasn't been fulfilled. There were people actively working to make that true. If you have a book that says someday this will be the most powerful nation on the planet, people are gonna be actively working to make that true. Is it more likely that it was because it was predestined or because they worked towards it? I have a, there's a prophecy, for example, that Muhammad made to give context. So there was someone essentially like even non-believer, right? And he was preaching the message and it was like his uncle. And then his uncle said, oh, you know, I don't believe you, you're bad talking, like you don't have any evidence, yada, yada, yada, right? And so he said like, you will die a non-believer, right? All that person had to do to disprove Islam was just say, oh, I believe him. Yeah, except no, no, that's not what somebody would have to do because saying you believe doesn't mean you actually do believe. Belief is an action of volition or profession. It is a state of being convinced. And so he could have faked that person out by lying to him and saying, hey, I'm a believer now. Why didn't he do it? Maybe because he's not a liar. Maybe because some of us don't need to lie to prop up what we believe to be true. Okay. So on the other things of prophecy, you've got tallest buildings, which I say isn't fulfillment of prophecy at all, but people working towards it. Then you mentioned about the earth puking up its treasures and how nobody could have presumed back then that oil would be valuable. But that's not what the verse says. It doesn't say anything about oil. It says about the earth puking up, providing treasures. Are you suggesting that people back then did not see the value of gems, wood, food, all of the various things that an entire civilly, a merchant like Muhammad, doesn't, isn't aware of the value of things that come from the earth 1400 years ago? He's, he, the society wasn't your, the Arab society back then didn't have all that. So, or like they had obviously some, right? What the hell did they need a merchant for then? What did they need a merchant for if they don't have stuff like that? So your, your claim is essentially that, okay, you're just, you're reading into this phrase and now saying, oh, well, they didn't know anything about diamonds and stuff like that, which is- No, you said in your slide. Yes. That there's no way someone 1400 years ago could have seen the value of oil as if that verse- So they didn't know about the oil either. Correct. Okay. But that verse doesn't say shit about oil. So the only way- It says things about the earth providing treasures. This is the thing, if you make a statement and you reframe it as if it's about oil when it's not, then the correct rebuttal is to not only point out that it's not about oil, but also that when it talks about the earth having treasures, in order for you to suggest that they couldn't have known about oil is irrelevant because they did know about treasures from the earth already. Okay, but they didn't have those treasures and it's a prophecy for the future, not now. They didn't have treasures. They didn't have food. They didn't have wood. They didn't have gems. What do they need a merchant for if they don't have access to these things of value that come from the earth? Again, so two, oops, sorry. All right. I want that from my ringtone. Okay, so what you're saying, right, is that, and this is my problem with like ABS or things like math. Nothing will ever prove the math, right? Like God exists. He's essentially blinded by it, right? Yes, no, no, no, at this point now, you're just turning in. No, no, at this point now, you're turning into a liar because you're, instead of answering my questions. I'm trying to, I'm getting into this. No, instead of answering my questions, you're gonna begin by accusing me of never being willing to believe something. That's a lie. Okay, I should say when it sounds like the only way for you to have believed that prophecy is if he was super specific and said, oh, in 1200, 1400 years, Saudi Arabia specifically will puke up oil. So yes, in order for me to count something as fulfilled prophecy, the prophecy needs to be specific, not prone to interpretation, answerable by a single identifiable occurrence by anybody, so that you don't have in subjective interpretations. Because without that, you get to claim that a verse that says nothing about oil and has nothing to do with oil is actually a prophecy about oil. And that's nonsense. It's not nonsense, because there's a rebuttal to this. So first of all, say you are even a prophet yourself, right? Sorry, that's a blood sugar alarm. Yeah, we can go get the doctor. Okay, so say you yourself are a prophet, right? Okay. And you're given a revelation of the future, right? Okay, but you yourself can't fully comprehend it because you're within your time period as of now, right? Sure, yeah. And you have to best interpret this and explain this to someone in the present. That easily explains why they would have to do what they did. Yeah, that's not a rebuttal or even barely a response. If I'm a prophet and I'm given a revelation and I don't understand what it means, if I write it down and I talk about the earth hooking up its treasures, how can someone in the future justify that this is actually a prediction about oil? Yeah, so say for example, I say, oh, there'll be flying cars, right? But I'm 1400 years ago, I don't even have the concept of a car. I can just say, oh, there's things that people sat in and they moved through the air. Did the earth already have it? They would say, oh, it's vague. Did the earth provide treasures to people 1400 years ago, other than oil? Okay, so how is it prophecy to say the earth will provide its treasures when the earth is already providing its treasures? Because it's providing treasures and it's being gushed for it, for those people. Okay, yeah, there's something gushing. You also mentioned as a prophecy that interest loans are bad. How is that a prophecy? How is it that somebody couldn't have determined that there's a problem with interest bearing loans? Interest bearing loans? Yeah, you screwed. Yeah, I agree. I'm not fond of it. I mean, it's an unfortunate fact of reality, but you listed it as a prophecy. How is it a prophecy? I think that it would be everywhere and inescapable. Okay, it's not everywhere and not inescapable. I'll loan you 20 bucks to retract it, zero interest. No, it's not like that. What they're saying is that the whole modern, the whole modern economy, like for example, so if we worked at this bar, right, maybe they got a loan for it, right? You are now directly impacted. The fact that we're here, we're directly impacted by the loan, the usury. Like you cannot escape it. Sure. It's inescapable, so that is a correct prophecy. Yeah, you don't think that somebody 1400 years ago, you don't think that somebody 1400 years ago, having an understanding of usury and loans would be able to say, this is a problem and soon it's going to be inescapable. Sure, you can think that way. Yeah, is that way of looking at it more probable than that a God decided to reveal that in the future, everything would be just like today, only more. I mean, I think when you take in everything into, everything as a whole, my idea, my ideology obviously is more probable than yours. Well, obviously you think that. The interesting question for me though is you're saying, oh, here's this one thing that they may have known, but then there's all these other prophecies, like within the Byzantine empire, there's the prophecy with his uncle, there's way more, I only listed a few. Well, you probably should have listed better ones. But the big issue is when I say, what's the methodology for determining whether or not somebody's a prophet or not? We don't, he's not able to provide a good methodology. I just explained a good virtue, a virtuous person making a prediction about the proof of the future is a prophet of the law. Is that it? A virtuous person making predictions about the future is a prophet of the law. Yeah, and they had, they performed miracles, yes. No, no, no, I, you can't demonstrate that any miracle has ever been performed. Yeah, and taking their claim as evidence. Yeah, you know, you're taking their claim as proof. You're taking their claim as sufficient to warrant you believing it. That's called gullibility. Just like when we talked about how if someone say, accused someone of sexual assault, you made their claim. No, sexual assaults happen, moon splitting in two don't happen without leaving evidence behind. How, so you need evidence of it happening left behind? You need, yes, you need evidence for anything. A claim that something happened is enough to point you in the direction to seek out. Are there facts that support this claim? And so if somebody, whether they were actually sexually assaulted or not, reported it, and we cannot establish facts to support that, we don't get to take action against somebody else based nearly on that. So what do I say? Although we sometimes have. But if somebody says, do you agree there's a difference between saying, I got a pet puppy and I got a pet fire breathing dragon? Yeah, there's a difference. Then why don't you say that there's a difference between I was sexually assaulted and the moon splitting fucking two? Yeah, because one, again, I said there's a, one has, so for example, one is saying one person says, a person sexually assaulted them, right? Then now five people come forward. It's a stronger claim or stronger evidence that that person has this pattern. It's the same thing. This person has a pattern of good character. They have good virtue. They have performed miracles. And then they're now, they've performed the greatest miracle of the chron, which is the moon splitting. And people are claiming this and they're writing this down. So that, yeah, there's no problem with that. It's, you would essentially have to discredit all history, by the way. If you actually don't think claims are true, then you would have to discredit history. No, because not all- It's because history is our first person and second person claims. Because history includes claims that are mundane. The moon splitting a two is not in a history book. It's not verifiable. It's not scientific. It's not supported by any evidence. It's just a claim. It's no different from I was abducted by aliens. I saw a ghost. Jesus turned water into wine. Jesus walked on water. These sorts of claims exists in all kinds of different religions. And the claims, while interesting and worthwhile of setting up a pursuit of additional evidence, aren't in and of themselves sufficient to believe the claim. But to suggest, we should believe a bunch of people who said they saw the moon splitting two. What about all the people who didn't? There's actually, you can look and do it, but there's like Christians and even like non-believers if you have like records of that. What about all the people who didn't? So for example, was there a global flood? Yeah. How come people who were alive in other civilizations outside of the realm where it's supposedly reported that there was a global flood don't seem to be aware of this global flood? Don't most civilizations have a flood myth? Most, many civil is not most, but many civilizations have a flood myth. But there are civilizations that persisted before and after the supposed flood the biblical and perhaps chronic flood. I don't know specifically what it says who didn't seem to notice it didn't affect them at all. And so if the people over here are reporting a global flood and the people also on the globe are not, wouldn't that mean- Where are the people saying that there's no global flood? No. Where are people saying there's no global flood? It was the question. Wow. Well, what I'm saying is- If one group of people existing at time X say there was a global flood and another group of people at time X don't report anything about a global flood. It's all, you know, business as usual in their records. Are the people who reported a global flood wrong? And does that mean that they didn't experience some sort of flood? They are wrong in the sense that there's a conflict between what's reported and we can't verify that they're correct. But they may well have experienced a local flood and just in the process of being human beings who are prone to exaggerate, said, oh, it's a global flood. Okay. So if all the human beings were essentially you believe in evolution, right? I don't like the language of that, but I accept that evolution is the current best explanation for the diversity, but not origin of life. I'm not trying to trick you. I'm just trying to say. So what we have right is the theory is that like most human beings like sent from Africa, right? So if we have all of humanity originating from certain localities, right? And then to them and to all human beings that would be a global flood, yes. So I don't see any problem. So you're saying that it's okay to call a local flood a global flood if everybody around experienced it. Yeah, so. Yeah, that's not a global flood. Just like that versus and about oil. It's funny that despite the fact what scientific discovery did the Quran lead us to? Many of the scientific theory, the modern scientific. No, what scientific discovery did a verse in the Quran lead us to verify? I mean, I don't know any off the top of my head. I don't know any either. But what I do know is that as soon as we have a scientific fact, people of all religions who believe that their God couldn't possibly be wrong or couldn't possibly inspire anything wrong to go trying to find verses to match up with it. Now, when we talk about, for example, the Quran saying that heavens were like smoke, it wasn't until somebody, when you referenced the New York Times article, I think, referred to the Big Bang as smoke. And then, aha, it matches the Quran, except the Big Bang's not smoke. So the Quran's still wrong. It's the, okay. So the article and all the science is wrong. No, scientists often describe things in a metaphoric or a clear sense, just like there's no such thing. Just like the Quran is doing literary devices as well to explain facts about the real world. I'm just saying that it wasn't smoke. And nobody knew that this, nobody knew or thought that this verse supposedly reported would refer to the Big Bang until after somebody wrote an article about the Big Bang referring to it as smoke. It's called, well, it's called the Sharpshooter Fallacy. It's cherry picking. It's a number of different things. But when you say, here's a fact, let me go find a verse that's consistent with that fact. That verse didn't lead anybody to discover that fact. And that verse is only true under a particular interpretation. For example, how is it remotely prophetic that there are pain receptors in the skin? The fact that science eventually discovered that there are pain receptors in the skin, the brain is what actually experienced, oh, sorry, the brain is actually what experiences pain, but the notion that your skin feels pain is immediately obvious to anyone who has ever burned their hands on fire or cut their hand or been poked by a barb. So essentially to you nothing can be prevented. This is what I'm talking about. I ask a legitimate question and the response from the other side is essentially to you, nothing would qualify. Can you honestly answer the argument instead of trying to pretend that I'm just being a little too damn skeptical? But maybe you are though. Okay, nothing will convince me because I won't accept that there's something prophetic about people 1400 years ago not realizing that the skin feels pain. That makes me the irrational unreasonable one who won't accept any evidence at all. Yeah, saying modern abortions, right? Or that saying these facts about the world, right? Did you just say abortions? Did you say abortions? There's a prophecy where the Mohammed said. So in response to being hauled out for dishonestly claiming that I won't accept anything as proof, you decide to go to abortion. Can you argue on point or is everything sensationalized for you? No, I'm not sensationalizing anything I'm trying to say. So okay, right? So I'm asking like is anything prophetic, right? And my point is, is they are saying facts about reality. They are saying facts about the future and they have happened to come true and your point is in a way to hand wave it away and say, oh, well, the Saudi Arabians, they just built this stuff to be true. And skin, well, skin, oh, maybe I could have, even though I probably wouldn't have known that back then, it could be a logical conclusion that it happened. And then again, the abortion thing, for example, is what I was trying to bring up is back then, if you cut open a woman's belly, she would die. So knowing that we would have that and then the reasoning that people would just be scared of being pregnant in that way, I think that is prophetic. You think abortion only involves cutting somebody's stomach open? No, that's not the only way. Okay, so if it mentions abortion, does it mention a method? Or are you just inferring a method for convenience so that it fits so that you can claim it's prophetic? This is one way it happened, yeah, so. My whole question here is how do you tell if a claim that appears to come true later is prophecy or coincidental or a post hoc rationalization or interpretation? How do you tell the difference? What is the method by which we can tell? That's my question. Okay, so. Because earlier you said, if it comes from a prophet and then we needed a methodology for determining a prophet, which you couldn't give. Yeah, if you're gonna be consistent skeptic like that, then yeah, you would need a methodology for everything. Why would anybody not be consistently skeptical? The truth has nothing to fear from skepticism. If there's sufficient evidence for something, every skeptic on the planet will accept it. Well, this is a problem with atheism. This isn't a problem with atheism. Atheism isn't skeptic. I'm talking about skepticism. I don't know. I don't think I've mentioned atheism once. Well, okay, or skepticism, right? Like we can go to absurdities where like, are you even real? Are you even in this room debating? Are you suggesting that me asking for a demonstration and a methodology for determining and verifying prophecy is the same thing as, are you even real? Yeah, can you prove it? That's insane. Can you prove it to me you're here, Matt? Can you prove it to me you're debating with me? Are you convinced that I'm here debating with you? I am, but I have it. Then I don't need to prove it till you do it. I have already done it by virtue of doing it. I have a foundation of my own. But when you try to pretend that nothing will convince me and that I'm just too skeptical and that somehow asking for a methodology to be able to tell the difference between fact and fucking fiction is somehow a problem. And oh, this is the same thing as nothing will change your mind and I'm not gonna accept anything. That is absolutely dishonest. I will accept whatever you can present reliable evidence that is sufficient to want it. And so will every other skeptic. It's not a problem with skepticism. Skepticism will allow you to believe anything if there's sufficient evidence. Tell me what would be a prophetic take? A prediction that I already did. You can even give me a methodology for prophetic takes. I don't know what the methodology is. So then how would I ever prove to you? I'm asking, okay. I'm asking you for a methodology because you think you have one. Yes, and I gave you one. No, what's the methodology? I told you, so are they a prophet? Are they making claims about the future? Are they making claims about reality? Do these claims, are they later proven true? Yeah, that's not a reliable method. Okay, so again, you're saying- This is the thing that I'm asking for every question. When I give one, then you say, oh, it's not reliable but I can't tell you what would be reliable. I can tell you what would be a prophetic. I'm sorry, but I can tell you every time if it's not sufficient, I can't tell you what would be when people say, what would change your mind about whether God exists? My answer is I don't know but God does know if he exists what would change my mind and he hasn't done it, which means either he doesn't exist or he doesn't want me to know he exists. Either way, it's not my problem. So what would make God, what would make you believe in God? No, no, no, no. Does anybody believe that question just came out of his mouth right after I answered it? Who's not listening? No, no, no, you're saying, right? So you just said that God only knows that I know what- I didn't say God only knows. I said God definitely knows if he exists. So God, if he exists, knows what would make you know he exists. But you yourself don't even know what would, and that's why I'm asking. Correct, correct. So I have to ask you, what do you think? And then now you're admitting, right? You don't even know what would make us know. Admitting, I've been saying it for 20 years. Okay, yeah. Well, 15 probably. So if you don't have any criteria to know anything, then no one can prove to you anything. I rest my case. We went from- Yes, so- No, no, hang on. We went from I don't know what God knows to you don't have any criteria to know anything. Can you argue honestly at all? Because me saying I don't know what God knows does not mean I don't know anything or I don't have any method to know anything. Plus, I'm asking for a methodology and once you present a sound methodology, I will accept it. I know lots of things and I have lots of methodologies to know those things, but yet you, when cornered, want to accuse me of not being able to know anything and that's just a lie. Okay, I don't think it is when I watched in your other videos, but- Okay. For the logical conclusions of atheism, so. There are no logical conclusions of atheism necessary. Yeah, atheism is- There are logical conclusions consistent with- Okay. When you have a worldview, right, and you have an assumption of the way the world reality is, right? It comes with pre-packaged conclusions. Atheism isn't a worldview, it's a position on whether or not there's a God. Okay, yeah. Your world, you can be an atheist and have a variety of different worldviews. And by the way, I didn't come here in any way to defend or represent atheism in its weak form or its strong form. I'm here representing skepticism and maybe since the rest of the day seems to be about whether or not we can rape children, maybe as a humanist. It is. That's the rest of the debates for the day. Yep, I'm good. That's all. Just to remind you, we'd love to hear from Q and A, use both microphones, speak directly into the virus, why don't I, don't defend it, I don't really know what I want to ask. Yeah, you got it. How do kids, based on your understanding of claims, we would also, I'm going to say, that thousands of Catholics who claim that the Virgin Mary appeared to them and talked to them and have confirmed the Catholic worldview, which would invalidate your worldview? I never said that we can't investigate claims, so. So again, it goes back to what is more probable or likely and again, based off logic, I think Catholicism is not agreed with the necessary being. So I kind of just auto-discredit. It's auto-discredited, at least. Hang on, Ted, they're mostly for you, I'm sure. I'm sure. Do we know these verses that are referencing the actual facts of reality in terms of math, rather than what the text explains. He says, for example, why doesn't the text say something like, our bodies are made of cells which contain water, and in the future we should build microscopes to illustrate this as a fact, but you seem to believe it does say that. Yeah, this kind of goes back to my problem with something that you guys are saying, is these things are put in a poetic way, and they're explaining and questioning the reader to look into things. So, I mean, that's why a lot of, originally the Islamic Golden Age was, you know, varying the science of looking into things, because they did want to prove these claims. So, I'll put a little bit of what you just said, because you said that the claims in the Quran, but then also in your debate, you said that the word Hamzan, am I pronouncing it correctly, the Arabic? My Arabic's not good, so we'll go with that. You know what we're talking about. Yeah. If you said the Hamzan means that like sent down, meaning literally coming from the sky. Yeah, in that context. So, the thing about this is, this is really weird that we're having this discussion, like if you read any book, right, there's context clues on how I'm using the word, or say for example, I say, everyone in this room is white, right? I'm really talking like majority white, right? Would be like a good way to explain it, right? So, there's context clues, and just like in the Quran, right? There's gonna be context clues, and there's like layers to the meaning of these words in Arabic. So, does that kind of explain it? Yeah, because I was gonna bring up specifically the account. Yeah. And so, yeah. So, you would say that there's context clues that would rule out a law that would release any kind of clue. Yeah, everything in the Quran, like everything in reality, right? Like there's context to things. So, I would just say obviously context matters. So, in this case, the word is supposed to be used literally, and that's the scholar you take, the scholar you take on it. Hi, Matt. Okay. So, surprise, surprise, my question is directed to the same. So, you pointed to witnesses to Muhammad splitting the moon as evidence, but beside the prior probability and that a few mere testimonies aren't enough at all, it also mostly comes from the Hadiths, like the Sahih Al-Qurqari, which truth claims are debated, like Ayesha, Mary, Muhammad. So, some Muslims will claim that all that didn't happen or the details are inaccurate, et cetera, et cetera. So, this would be like saying that the evidence that we have that Jesus wrote from the dead would be coming from a third century source that claims that people claimed that people claimed they saw or isn't Jesus. And, Islamic scholars also say the passage in Surah 54 in the Quran refers to what will happen in judgment day, or that's metaphorical, similar to the description of Joshua causing the stunts to stand still, is either something that they saw or it was just a metaphorical piece of writing. So, basically my question is how do you... Yeah, how do you know? So, there's an interesting take on this as well from, I think, Atheist secular historians and with regards to Hadith and these type of things. So, David Margolo, a famous English orientalist, said that regarding like the Islamic scholarship, reports being transmitted through your scrutinization chains of narrators, its value for making accuracy cannot be questioned. The Muslims are justified in taking pride in their science of tradition. In other ancient records, we have to take what is told on the author's assertion. So, that's what was my problem with his claims point, is he's essentially invalidating history where we have historical claims we take for fact already and they have less evidence than Islamic, Islam's tradition of Hadith and, you know, these chain of narrators, the scrutiny of them, the testing of them, and there's another orientalist you can look into, Bernard Lewis, who also, he's a sharp critic of Islam and Muslims in the modern time but acknowledged the strength of the tradition. I'll get there real quick. I need my mic. So, for the next question, two quick things. One, I'm not denying all of history, that's absurd. Number two, for those who asked about my blood sugar alarm, I'm fine. It wasn't a low, I don't need meds. It's high because I'm off of my medications because I get to go in on Tuesday morning at six o'clock for a colonoscopy and no, we're not looking for sperm. That's not between the rib cage and the backbone. It's dangling down below, so it won't be part of the investigation. As far as the backbone and the ribs things, there's actually ribbottles on it as well that you can look up online. I got two ribbottles hanging. I don't want to go, I don't want to go. All right, I'll give you that, though, but I don't want to go too much into it, so we can get to the next question. Right. And I think about, you know, he explains about who God is, what God wants, you know, moral commandments. Yeah. So even if they accept everything you've said, why does it follow from that that you also correct about things like who God is and what moral commandments are good or bad? Yeah, well, if you accept the premise that he was a true prophet, right, and that things in the Quran are true and then God is giving you commandments, then I think if you say to follow that rationale and assume that this is how you should ought to behave. I think the whole idea of a prophet, right, when you say prophet, you're sort of bundling it all together, right, you're saying, you know, what is God, moral commandments, and you're mutually bundling it all into one thing and saying, well, I have this category of prophet and even if they completely use them, then I'll also accept claims in the other categories. Yeah. The question is why should we have that as one category, right? Sure. If I had the power to take the future, right, and I also wanted to do things like marry a six-year-old, I might use the power to take the future and order to then justify the other thing I wanna do, which has nothing to do with moral limits. Sure. Plenty of people have like made these types of claims and usually they were proven false, right, or like their prophecies were proven false. I don't think that in this debate, you know, Matt just said these claims weren't, he never said they're not true technically on some of the prophecies, what he said is they're unexplored in there, right, and that's different. So, Muhammad's prophecies were true, right, where other ones have used these and then they were living a life of lavish lifestyle, right? So there would be something to the point of like, oh, Muhammad is like an evil warlord, right, if it's in fact how he lived, but a lot of this is from like anti-Islamic propaganda, I would argue, so. What's that? Well, I'm not even really to explain that Muhammad wasn't a good or bad person, I just talked about the general plan. Yeah, what I'm saying is like, you would use these context clues, right, so if someone was, say, claiming to be a prophet, right, or had this ability, right, and then they're abusing that, right, you could clearly tell, right, if there's a good God, if you believe in God and God's good and he's abusing that, and then I would say that this discounts him as a prophethood, as like a prophet, does that make sense? And again, like at my point, it's simply since these claims about bearing six-year-olds and for God is so abstract, so big, it's hard to tell. Yeah, if you are interested in learning, I would look into like rebuttals on Aisha's age and stuff, and we'll have a debate on that today, too, so. If they're okay. Just for the record, I don't know anything about Muhammad's character. I was happy to accept that he's an honorable, honest person, I just don't accept it, that's sufficient to determine that somebody's a prophet. I understand. Jose, I have a question for you. That brought up a question about, how do these testimonies be evidence of some things, like sexual assault or murder or whatever, but not other things, like in history and law, it doesn't allow for testimony for miracles, magic, medical pictures, burnables, supernatural ways, or even a program that's tossed out, you've got to accept it. So why don't you make a distinction in this case, the same distinction that historians and legal experts make of testimony that does not count as evidence for miracles that I should accept. Yeah. I mean, so I accept that claims are evidence and that it can include things that may not readily be appeared believable. I mean, they're ironically, like, atheists who believe in aliens, which seems pretty interesting, right? That that happens when there's a somewhat argued, like, less proof of that. So I think that's obviously between the, you know, the person deciding this, right? So ultimately, we have our will and our thought process and I don't think there's a problem with taking into consideration supernatural claims. Are you disagreeing with historians and law? Yes, yeah, essentially yes, yes. Yay! Yay. Get a drink. I'm having difficulty hearing you. Sorry. There's people in the back there a lot. I'm not familiar enough, but that seems vaguely familiar. There's a notion that the world must be made out of what you call units, what we now call atoms. When it came after him and people. So according to Mohamed, doesn't it seem likely that we can call him this guy, the precious prophet, because he came up with an idea that is scientifically related beyond his time. And disqualified Mohamed. Oh, well you said it's for me, but I don't. I've never forgotten. Yeah sure, and I'll give it back to Hossein in a second. So for me, I talked a little bit about what might qualify as prophecy. The fact that I don't know that there's any current way to verify anything supernatural or with regard to prophecy is not a problem for my epistemology. It's a problem for the people who are making a claim. Just like when, so for example, if a Greece came up with something that's kind of like evolution, it would be very easy for somebody to say look, how did he know this? He didn't have access to science. It must have been revealed to him by a God. The same way we did, as I mentioned very briefly with Nostradamus and Edward Casey and a number of other spiritualists who made predictions about the future that their followers believe are undeniably obviously true and nobody else does because the rest of us have a standard of evidence that is designed to make sure we are not as easily fooled. I want my model of reality in my head to match reality as best I can. And that means that there's some things that are gonna be true that I'm not going to believe right off the bat because if I open up my criteria for accepting a claim, it would let in that claim that is true but it would let in a bunch of other claims that are also false because I would have to let in competing claims. This is part of the problem that if you start allowing, hey, a prophet's somebody who's meek and mild and humble and lives in a small place and makes predictions about the future, then that means you also have to accept prophets from other religions, including competing religions that have notions that are contradictory to yours, which is why if he thinks Catholicism can't be true, then he gets to dismiss automatically any claim of prophecy that comes from Catholicism. That is actually a demonstration of a bias in his worldview toward Islam and against Catholicism, whereas mine is open to either of them being right if they can meet a standard of evidence. Thanks. So I am not aware of who that person is but I wouldn't, so, because I don't know, right? If they also claim to be a prophet and that this came from God and that they made other things, then I think that requires an investigation and Islamically there is actually texts and thought processes within the Islamic schools of thought where God did send down prophets to every nation. So there could be prophets and then what happens is over time and you can see it circularly, the messages get distorted. So for example, like we were the Christianity, right? Like there was specific Jewish people who were no longer following the commandments there and then God sent down Jesus and so then he's refreshing in a way his commandments, right? And having to re-explain the same thing and that's why the Islam is specifically different. There's like a red thread between all the prophets where they're all saying the same thing versus other religions and there are even other Islamic scholars who say there's a possibility Buddhism or Hinduism originally was pure monotheism and they also recognize certain philosophers as monotheists and there's nothing wrong with them. So it's way more nuanced than like certain Christian texts. A philosopher who has some very wise words to say about the anatomy of the world and stuff and there's a philosopher that says, Aristotle says that pink for this prophecy such as Dr. Bernstein painting them. That depends on the person, right? I mean it used to be that there's people who thought differently. So it wasn't a mainstay kind of an argument. Okay, that grew up there. Yeah, just a friend will remind you your voices do carry up here. So please limit your conversations in the audience to nothing very human. Really briefly, I'll agree that it depends on the person because some people don't have the ability to experience pain, it's a condition. So those people wouldn't probably be aware but since that condition is incredibly vanishingly small and it's prevalence, everybody else knows that your skin feels pain. It's more of a. Sorry, just because you asked. It's fine, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when the claim that Allah split the moon, why don't we see any other story from other countries? Right about this because that's quite incredible. I think that people in China have probably lived in line. Yeah, so there is people who wrote about seeing things like that. I think one was in somewhere in like Southeast Asia and then he actually searched for Muhammad and later became Muslim and then there was some Christian monks. You can look into it. But it was obviously at a specific time not everyone's gonna be up, like people aren't always paying attention. Like there are these things that take into effect. Or so this question's actually format. My focus, I'm a philosopher and so my. I'm in trouble. My interests are primarily philosophical. No, actually I thought that your analysis of necessity and contingency was actually very compelling. I thought it was fascinating. Thank you. And, but one thing that you kind of said very briefly and didn't really pursue is kind of a radical. The next one I'd like to clarify is you at one point referred to an infinite regress of temporal events and you said, you know, which supposedly is not true. So I'm just wondering, do you maintain that an infinite regress is not logically consistent? Sorry, an infinite regress of temporal events specifically. Well, I don't think it's necessarily logically inconsistent. There was another couple of lines in there drawing a distinction between logical possibility and epistemic impossibility or possible in reality. I have a problem with logical possibility not that it's wrong. It's just that I don't find it very valuable to begin with everything is possible unless there's a logical defeater. That's cool and it's true. I like the fact that basically my view is that logical reason, the most it can ever do is show that something's not true. The rest of it is just showing things are consistent. We may not have access to capital T truth or even lowercase t truth sometimes. And so I'm not saying that I'm convinced a lot of an infinite regress is possible or possible or impossible. I would say it's not logically impossible. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thanks. I'm betting. It's so cool. Yeah, this is for who's seeing. You used the supposed prophecy on the moment. It was probably like the days after the moment I already died. So how do we know that the moment actually made that connection? Yeah, so that's a good one. So it's handed down through oral tradition. And it's this same tradition as like Hadiths in some sense. And you can look into it, like again, those both orientalist, philosophy, excuse me, historians who actually had negative opinions of Muslims actually do have high cold and high esteem, essentially this process of what they did. And so originally like the Quran was revealed in periods or stages, and so were these ayahs and prophecies. And when they, they would, essentially when it would happen, right, everyone would memorize it or that it would be written down. It depends on the time period because like when they were fleeing, obviously it was a little bit different. So, but essentially you can look into the history of Islam and there's some good explanations on it, but I think they're reliable and that they didn't just write it down because it comes through this chain of narration. And everyone memorizing it too at the same time, so. Yeah. You're a good man. I think for instance, you know, it's like it's not monotheistic. Yeah, that's Islamist dance and I agree with it. Like I don't see how you can have essentially a God that has parts being Jesus, right, and the Holy Ghost. So I think it disqualifies it there as well as actually inhabiting like the earth, right. And then also I think there's like illogical consistencies in the Bible where like Jesus is, Jesus is God but somehow sacrificing himself. Like, does that make sense? I do see where you're coming from. So there's an analogy that I love. It's from I think where he talks about the Holy Trinity, like the son of others, the son and then the son has so many other rays and then the Holy Spirit is like, it's not a perfect analogy, but I think. Yeah, I've heard that by the way. It's a good one. I know there's a Islamic rebuttal, but I can't think of it right now, but continue. Sorry, I didn't mean that. No, you're right. So in the Bible, I think I understand what the Holy Spirit, for instance, or in the first chapter of Genesis, talked to you about the Spirit of God probably, you know, above the waters as well as Samson being built in the Spirit doing the feats of high strength. In Psalm 51, where David talks about, you know, do not take your Holy Spirit from me. The son is shown in this, you know, certain parts of these, like, in the fire of furnace with shepherd, I think you should have defended him. And then you have also shown in many others, in this world, you're being tested on the lack of Christians. Yeah, I'd love to have a conversation with you after on this, because I had a question on the definition of the Holy Spirit, because if it's just merely like faith, like filled with faith, then I don't see, that's not necessarily like a part of God, right? But Christians are specifically arguing for this triune concept, which if you're, like, I don't know how faith is God, like that, you know what I mean? So again, I think there's these issues within Christianity's current, how do I say it? If you look at it from an Islamic perspective, it'd be like corruption, right? So, but I would love to talk to you after. Yeah, so I have a question about, you brought up a positive argument that there is a prophecy in school of 13 and 22, right, the wrong was defeated, right? Yeah. So there's different readings, you know, like there's different ones, right? One of the readings actually reads that wrong defeated, meaning the person was right. So wrong wasn't defeated, wrong defeated. So, and go to Tabari, which is one of the types which like that actually says that you're correct. One of the readings, like it gives the different readings, but that says that like since it only happened when Tabari was writing those, that it's the correct one is this one. So there were different readings in which one do you think that it takes it correctly? Like you have the different readings that are before the, before Tabari, right? Like talking about like wrong defeated, the purges, which is incorrect. So, and then Tabari commented correctly, but so I know that was my question, but you know, somebody took it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a second question if you don't mind. Sure. Go for it. Sure. The second one is also, when we look at the Quran on Komorrah, right? We find that Surah 1112, Surah 177, 767, 2526, I can go on and on, like there is like one that it doesn't, like I can give you the references would have actually said that Muhammad didn't perform in America, he was just a warner. But then you come in and say that Muhammad performed in America, and he was just a warner like that. Yeah, so he, he did mention that he's a warner, but he's a warner to all people. He also said he's like a mercy upon people. So, like when you're, you have to put it in again, like the context. So if you're divorcing everything from all contexts, then like, yeah, you can say, oh, it's saying contradictory things, but in reality it's just saying the same thing over, right, so. I mean, I agree, I believe in the word miracles, yeah. Well, where does the Quran reject that he did that? Yeah, so I'm unaware of what you're talking about on that. So, I mean, I'd love to talk to you about it after. Hey, Aran. I see that. You will now concede that there is, in fact, evidence for the truth of Scientology is true. I don't, I don't agree with you. But I get what you're doing. I'm not going to claim you without doing it, that there is no evidence. Can you do a miracle in front of us? What? Xenu, can you do a miracle in front of us? I don't have to, I don't do miracles. Okay, well then I don't think you're a prophet. I didn't say I'm a prophet, but there is evidence that the truth of Scientology is true. I've just given you the claim that I am Xenu who founded this church 75 billion years ago. Sure, sure. So I don't believe that's true, right? I don't think just one claim in isolation. So the claim is not evidence. No, claims are evidence. Oh, then you will admit that there's evidence in Church of Scientology. No, you're making one claim. There's no greater, all-encompassing, a plethora of claims. Oh, now we have to have multiple claims. Yeah. It really is. Okay. He's not Xenu. Now, does anybody else think he's not Xenu? Because now we've got competing multiple claims both directions. What the hell are we going to do? Well, I guess we debate about it. We debate about it, yeah? Childish. I have one question. So for the crowdfund for the venue, one question that came in from one of our donors was, do you believe women under Islam should have the same rights as men? Also, should women be free to be who they want, not be forced to rest in a certain way and not be treated as second-class citizens? Define second-class citizens. Define what? Like, these things come with sub-citizenship. I just couldn't hear you. Define what? Define what does he mean by a second-class citizen? Like, Islam says that women and men are equal within faith, but women and men are different. Even atheists will admit that. So I don't understand if we're going to have different ways of behaving around women and men. No one would say it's oppression, but then all of a sudden when Islam gets mentioned, these people decide to say it's oppressive. So do wives and children inherit property equivalent? Equivalent, and do men and women get equivalent? No, they don't. No, they don't, according. That's why they're asking the question. And yet, instead of answering, sorry, what was that? Yeah. Hey, so your assertion is that the crucifixion happened, which Muslims don't disagree. They just don't think that it happened the way Christians believe. So I don't think that they got it wrong. So we can talk about that later. I don't know what was at the back, but I was specifically asking, if somebody asked about equality, and instead of actually addressing it, you kind of punted and suggested that we don't seem to have a fair standard of this. I have an example that I didn't use today that's come up before, which deals with what the Quran says about inheritance. And so I think it's, sir, 411, to the male portion equal to that of two females. If there's only daughters, their share is two thirds of the inheritance. If there were two sons, wouldn't their inheritance be 100% of the inheritance and not two thirds? Again, so human women and men are not equal, okay? So in an Islamic society, men have to give, for example, if I want to have a wife, right? I have to give her a dowry essentially, right? For her hand in marriage, okay? So I have in a way more responsibility in that sense for having a little bit more money, okay? So when they're saying these things, there's reasons for them to just hand wave them away and say it's oppression is pretty, I don't know. Stand back, ladies, I saw him first. Any of these next questions? So my question is for you, where basis is that it's true? Now what happens when those claims are false? In my terms is that if there's something that's false, that's not evidence of anything. If anything, it's evidence that it's false. So what is your take? Well, so if someone makes a claim and then it's not true, like they would be lying. And so their claim is like invalid, right? Or they're manipulating something, so I would say it's not true. But again, the point is, it appears, right? The way all human beings, the way we all act today is that if someone makes a claim, then it's true, right? Or a claim can be truth. We do it everywhere, so I don't understand how this is an issue. Like in every facet of life. So then how do you know that those claims that were long ago are false? Yeah, you'd have to investigate, look at the character, like all these things that I laid out, you'd have to do that, which is fine. If someone is on record, right? And then they're making a bunch of false claims like so-and-so raked me, right? And then I'm on record on another video saying, oh, that never happened, right? And then there's multiple contradicting claims, there's things that are showing that it's false, right? So. I need that. With that, I give you a really short and pitty one, Matt. And then we go. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. All good. Okay. Would that work? One last round of applause. That was a lot of work. Thank you. I had fun, I did. Yeah, I always had fun.