 But I've never talked with like outspoken atheists before, are you? Yes, I am very much an outspoken atheist. The funny thing is, I'm actually a former Young Earth creationist. Okay, whoa! It was in 2000... What's your name? Robert. Robert, Robert. Robert, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. No, go for it. Sweet, sweet, sweet. My name's Ty. Robert. Robert, I have a hobby where I set up a table like this in like open areas and invite people to talk about whatever they want to talk about. A lot of times I get religious people. Well, in fact, most of the time I get religious people. And they'll try to talk to me about the religion, tell me on the concept. We'll talk about the foundation of why they believe that and why the time we return like to the top layer, they're a lot less confident as a result. My thing is, I never get a chance to talk with open atheists. I've talked with people who are like spiritual, you say they're Christian, but don't follow any of the attendance of the Bible, who aren't comfortable with the A word. But I've never talked with like outspoken atheists before, are you? Yes, I am very much an outspoken atheist. Funny thing is, I was, I'm actually a former Young Earth creationist. Okay, whoa! It was in 2000. What's your name? Robert. Robert, Robert. Robert, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Nice to meet you, too. Nice to meet you, too. Do you mind if I record? No, go for it. Sweet, sweet, sweet. All right. Former Young Earth creationist. Yes, sir. All right, talk to me. Yeah. In 2000, I was actually studying to become a fundamental Baptist creature. Okay. And I had, in the previous years, 1990, 1999, I was actually introduced to Young Earth creationism. And I was like, this is fascinating. And I wanted that to be the reason I gave under 1 Peter 315. Christians are committed to that verse to give a reason for the hope that you have. Well, I started getting more and more into creationism, but I'd been studying astronomy since before I could walk. And so when I got to certain creationist claims in the field of astronomy, I was immediately able to pick out some things they were saying that even, probably the age of eight, I could identify were just wrong, where they were confusing different astronomical concepts. Could you give me an example? Yes, absolutely. The one that made me start questioning the whole thing was there's a Young Earth creationist creature by the name of Kent Hovind. And he, in one of his video presentations, he confuses Big Bang Theory with star formation. They're actually two completely different things. And the textbook slide, the textbook picture that he's quoting is actually describing star formation. And he's saying, no, this is Big Bang. Everything started swirling. It was Big Bang. Sure. And so I actually wrote him a letter saying, hey, I can recognize the mistake you're making here. I agree with you on everything else, but this one thing that you're saying is wrong. This is something you might want to correct. Right. And I wish I'd kept the letter, because he wrote me a letter back saying, repeating his mistake. Good morning. And so this, okay, this is not right. So I decided to actually study, dig into what the mainstream scientists were saying a little more versus what the creationists were saying. And it turns out that more often than not, creationists were not accurately representing the ideas they were opposed to. Layout today. So I... Strong ending, basically. A strong end argument. Yes, exactly. So I dug a little bit deeper into creationism. And when I informed my Baptist college classmates of this saying, hey, they're making these obvious mistakes, I really don't know if we should be listening to some of these people. I was chastised and I was told that I was going to be forced to sign a statement stating that I accepted Young Earth creationism. Wow. So I just said, you know, I'm sorry, you're asking me to lie. I can't do that. And I walked away. So how long ago was this? 2003. So I didn't know what to do next. So you know what? I'm actually going to sit down now and read the Bible. From cover to cover. I'm going to sit down and read the Bible cover to cover. And what I found instead of all the things that have been preached from the pulpit all those years was a book that advocated genocide, slavery, murder. And I think I was maybe a quarter of the way through the First Testament when I wrote the Old Testament. Sorry. When I realized, you know what? I can't make myself believe this. So I set out to find my own path. And I've tried to live my life since then by a phrase that I think is pagan in origin. I could be wrong. If it harm none, do what they will. And that's how I arrived here today. How did you get to the atheist label? It seemed to me, since I no longer believed in a God, it seemed the most accurate label for me. Theism being a belief in a God, the prefix A, meaning none. So no belief in a God. Do you believe that no gods exist? I would say that those are actually two different claims. I have yet to see evidence of a God existing. But I'm certainly open to the idea. Okay, okay. How confident are you that a God exists right now from like a scale from 0 to 100 percent? I'm certainly on the lower end. I would say maybe around 1 to 2 percent. The problem is the religions I've seen so far that preach this idea. I've not seen where their claims can stand up. If I'm presented evidence, I will certainly change my mind. But there are certain things like gay rights, where if there is an all-loving God, he's going to understand why I set time aside to try to protect these people. Okay. Sounds like the position of I'm waiting for better evidence to change my mind. I'm not absolutely shut to everything. Yes. I'm open-minded, but I haven't done the evidence I need to convince you that it's true. I'll wait for it to happen. And until then, don't forget your sunscreen. Until then, I'm at a low end of the scale. I think that's completely reasonable to be at. I'm wondering, there are fias who watch my YouTube channel and they'll probably want to wonder, or probably wonder, actively, where do you get your morals from? Like, what's keeping you from killing people if you don't have, like, a religious code telling you what's right from wrong? Well, that's actually a... Which way if we talk about that? No, not at all. Sweet. That's actually a... And if you say, I do want to kill people, let me just get a head start running. No, not at all. It kind of goes back to that phrase, if it harms none, do what they will. There's going to come a... I've had to rely on a lot of people over the course of my life to help me out at different times. So if I go out... So if I go out to rape, murder, and have my own way with people, there's a chance... There's a very good chance, I don't know, I hope so, that it's going to come back to affect me negatively. And so I don't want that negative influence to be one in anyone else's life either. So a little respect will go a long way. Would you say if a harm's none, do what by will is your foundational outlook of what determines what's a good thing from bad things? I would say so. Okay, I'm going to try to play with that a little bit. I don't really have anything set up, but in the event of say you were able to... Say there's a millionaire, he's got like a ducktail's bat of coins he's dipping in, he will not notice if 10 coins are missing from that lab. You can take those 10 coins and it won't harm anybody. Would you be able to do that without any... I wouldn't be able to. Why? What's the harm that's been caused? It's not mine. I also have a... I don't have a lot of debt. I don't have a whole lot of credit cards. I have had things offered to me, different loans, things like that. If I didn't earn it, I don't want it. Okay. And so that's why my car is kind of a piece of junk. I could have taken out a pretty good size loan, gotten that. I would rather just save my money and do the best I can with that. It sounds like the system that you presented before where if it doesn't cause harm, do it. It does not take into account this integrity that you're bringing out. Would this be something that... Would you have added additional things to this rule that you have? Does one write things from one of the things beyond just the rule itself? Like personal integrity, personal property, and you don't want to violate that? Perhaps like transgressions against goodwill, things like that? Or it seems like this rule that you have is more complex than just the one that you state. Yeah, and I totally get that. And I'll find out your stance. It's more just a generalization. Okay. I'll find my stance on women's reproduction. There... I think a good example of an exception to that rule I think might be the concept of war. Okay. If in World War II, I think it's a great example of that. You had a... I hope it'll be okay. It looks like it's holding up. Yeah. We had one over here blow over earlier. Yeah, that was ours. I think a great example of a possible exception to that rule might be in World War II. Okay. And you had an empire, the Germany, going out trying to conquer all the lands around it, doing unspeakable things to those people that they... Yeah, that would be that. Unspeakable things to the people that they conquered. And I have to... I have to hope in my mind that the one... that the one person killed in an active war might have saved a thousand more lives. Okay. That the sacrifice of harm in others was worth it to avoid more harm in the future. Correct. And I'm just playing through some scenarios in my head. Yeah. What would you say then is, if you could give more time to elaborate on it, is the actual moral that you're following? Or set a moral set you're following? What's the system that you're using to determine good things for bad things, if it isn't just that single rule? Do as less harm as possible. Do as less harm as possible? Do as little harm as possible. Okay. Oh, how about this? Because I know... I would consider that like a negative system because you're talking about the things that you shouldn't do, rather than the things that you should do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see that. The ones that just avoid doing bad things. Just me personally. I see that. Though I wouldn't force only do good things, like obviously if I was going to start making laws, I'd be like, hey, I'd work on a computer then. But as far as codes for actions that you should do, do you have a system for that? And maybe I can throw one at you and you can take mine? Yeah, I can do that. Would you like to hear mine? Go for it. I value good will. Take morality throughout the window. Take morals throughout the window. What I really care about is good will. And good will is a series of rules that we develop as like a social contract. I like living more than dying. I like being healthy more than being sick. Yeah. We can come up with a bunch of subjective, completely arbitrary rules, make a list and say, this is what good will is. Something that we've all in this society, in this localized area, or like as a human race agreed on fundamentally, as valuable to all of us. And we can make laws that either support those rules, good will, or don't. And so like if we prefer not to be killed, rather than being killed. Right. We should make a law that says don't murder people because that seems to support good will. And so what I would say is my value is the system of working with people to come up with a set of what are inherently arbitrary rules, but coming up with objective rules to support these things that we value as a social contract. And then once we have that, we can compare our objective reasons to support good will against other groups and see who has the better system. So if we come up with rules that says don't murder anyone and people over on that side of the table say, well, we'll murder whoever we want. You know, give it a couple of years and the people who murder each other will die out and we'll stay around and we can say we have the better system. So there's like ways of measuring who has the best system. And what I'm looking for is the best system that supports good will. And it's like a work in progress. What do you think about that? I can certainly see where that's coming from. I don't know if I would set a group of people aside to say to preferably just go on murder murder. Yeah, I wouldn't want that either. I don't think they'd live this one. Yeah. I think when you look at a courtroom setting, the grief shown from the families, you certainly cause a lot of us on there. They're never going to get to see their child again. Absolutely. And they're going to let their see their child grow up. They may have been gunned down in a classroom or if we'd had a law set aside to prevent that person from having purchased a firearm or whatever weapon was used, that life might have been saved. That might have been a personal inconvenience for that person for whatever reason. Yes. But personal inconvenience is a price I'm willing to pay. I would even say your rule of do as less harm as possible would be part of the good will that I'm talking about. And I would just throw some extra things in there too. Yeah. Or it's like I have to write to my own kidneys. I could give them up to people that I should have to write to my own personal property. If someone needs an abortion, they should be able to have that. If someone's gay, they should be able to get married. But this is a big list of just arbitrary things. Say, hey, social contract, we agree that this is important. Do I say now? Social contract, we just agree that this is important. Yes. And we don't need a God knowing what's on there. No, not at all. Okay, that's more or less it. Okay, all right. Thank you so much for the chat. I appreciate it. Thank you. I really enjoy the chat. Thank you. Take on your character. Go for it, go for it. Okay, thank you.