 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. We're excited to jump into our second debate and very excited to introduce the speakers starting with Tom Jump, who is the leader of the YouTube channel, T-Jump, as well as the Discord channel, T-Jump. In addition, introducing David. Thanks so much for being with us. Dr. David Wood is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. The former atheist, David, became a Christian after examining the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. He is a contributor to the book's quote evidence for God, 50 arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science. And the true reason, Christian responses are the challenge of atheism. He lives in an undisclosed location with his wife Marie, his five sons Lucian, Blaise, Reed, Paley, and Kepler. With that, I'm going to introduce Amy, who will be our co-moderator for this debate. Thanks so much, Madie, or Amy, who will get us into the debate, starting with reading the format, as well as handing it over to the first speaker. Thank you very much, Amy. Thank you so very much, James. And all of you here for joining us at DebateCon 2022, we are going to have a format of 20-minute opening statements. We will then each have eight-minute rebuttals, a 15-minute dialogue and conversation back and forth, four-minute closing statements, and, of course, 17 minutes of Q&A from the audience. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to T-Jump for their up-to-20-minute opening statement. The floor is all yours. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, James. Thank you, David, for showing up. And thank you, the audience, for showing up to this wonderful event hosted by James. The topic today is what is a better foundation for ethics, secularism, or theism? Ethics and morality is a highly developed field in order to offer a foundation for moral realism, which is the technical term for objective morality. You need to be able to answer the questions of the field. This field has some very specific questions. Moral dilemmas, moral problems, and dichotomies has to explain moral intuition and moral progress. All these things are very specific and must be answered to qualify as a basis of objective morality. Just saying God has done it does not answer any of these questions. Similarly, in physics. There are very specific questions in the field of physics, such as what accounts for the predicted spatial curvature? What solves the model for a problem? What solves the matter versus antimatter asymmetry problem? If you can't answer these questions, your model isn't a model of physics. You're just saying God done it. It's not taken seriously in the field of physics. For the exact same reason, God done it is not taken seriously in the field of philosophy and ethics either. And we can see this through the polls. Through the Phil Surveys paper, we can see that about 70% of philosophers are moral realists, they believe in objective morality. While only about 15% are theists, 15% believe in the God. So this is not really a serious position in moral realism. There are much better positions that better explain the entire basis of morality and can answer the questions of morality. So this is not really taken seriously because the God question does not answer the questions in the field of ethics, which again are accounting for moral intuition, describing moral progress, answering the moral dilemmas and solving the moral paradoxes. If you can't do these things, it doesn't really count as a real model of morality. The whole point of any objective model is to show that it is true independent of consciousness, independent of opinion or intuition or whims or deems of an individual. So if a God or a being of some non-physical mind variety deems something to be good, that's the opposite of objective, that is subjective morality. That is a subject who is determining that this thing is what is moral and if it changes its mind, morality changes. So that would be the opposite of objective morality. This is one of the big problems with a God-based morality because it's inherently tied into this mind, which makes it subjective. This is why many of the other models in the secular field are preferred. Platonic objects are preferred, even though I don't really like the platonic objects. Laws of nature, a priori abstracts, there's lots of different varieties in what could ground objective morality that are all better than a conscious mind, which is literally the worst thing to ground objective morality because it's, by definition, subjective. To go about this question, we can, in order to answer what is the basis of objective morality, we have to start by looking at the evidence. The evidence is our moral intuitions. You see a baby drowning, you feel like it's wrong that the baby is drowning. These are what we call moral intuitions when you get these feelings that certain things are good, certain things are bad. And when we're looking for a model of morality, we need something that can correspond to these moral intuitions. If it gets the wrong answer to moral questions, it's a really bad model. So a really bad model would say, it's totally okay to drown millions of babies in a global flood that goes against our intuitions. Not a good model does not correspond to our moral intuitions. So specific God models, specifically the Christian, has many things that do not correspond to our moral intuitions. For example, second Kings, too, 24, sending two bears to kill 40 children for making fun of a bald guy. Like you could ask, if there is an objective basis of morality, would it send bears to mull children because they made fun of a bald guy? Probably not. This is a bad model of objective morality. So first thing we need a model that corresponds to our moral intuitions, which means the way to start our investigation of objective morality is to look at the evidence. What are our moral intuitions? What is the pattern in our moral intuitions? Where does this go? And then to try to create a principle that describes this pattern. And once we have this principle, we can try to infer what it's made of. The fundamental issue with God-based morality is it does this the wrong way. Start with this conclusion. It must be a God, and then tries to make the evidence fit the conclusion, which is exactly backwards. We start with the evidence and then let it lead to a conclusion, which is the exact opposite of a mind-grounding objective morality, which is a contradiction. We can prove, for example, that it is not grounded in a mind. You do not need a mind for consciousness by using a slight variation of the youth of pro-dilemma, one of the major dilemmas in the field of ethics. The youth of pro-dilemma, the modified youth of pro-dilemma goes like this. Is something good because God deems it so, or does God deem it so because he knows it's good based off of an independent standard of his conscious whims? If the first, if it is good only because God deems it so, then it is subjective. It's a subjective whim. He whims this to be the case, it's good. He whims that to be the case, it's good. Not objective morality. To have an objective model of morality, you have to go with the second option, which means God deems it to be good because he knows some set of moral facts and he can assess whether or not this action A corresponds to this moral set of facts. Doesn't matter if these facts are grounded in his nature or a law or a platonic abstract, doesn't make a difference, but we know it can't be his consciousness. It has to be independent of his conscious deems, his conscious whims for it to count as objective. And if that's the case, you don't need the consciousness for morality. And the whole question of the debate goes to the atheist side because if you don't need a conscious disembodied mind to ground morality, then you don't need a God. That's what a God is. So if you can prove for a fact you need something independent of a consciousness to ground morality, which you can with the modified youth of our dilemma, then you can prove you don't need a God for morality. This is one of the basis problems that is essentially avoid, many apologists avoid answering this by calling it false dilemma. So that's why I've modified it a little bit to make sure that objection does not work here. And when you make the apologist actually answer the question, which is what has brought up many apologist debates on this topic, is that either something is good because God deems it as conscious decision or it's good for some reason other than a conscious decision in which case you don't need the consciousness. Therefore you don't need a God. Second thing, moral progress. Does a God based morality account for moral progress? Moral progress is the fact that when we see across time there are patterns in how morality changes from one generation to the next, women's rights, LGBT rights, animal rights, voting rights. As time progresses and as we gain in technology and intellectual stamina, the scope of morality increases. There's a pattern to the fact that as we gain more intellectually, our ability to see things as having more with significance grows. And this needs to be accounted for whenever model you're saying objective morality exists in. Now one that says it's essentially a law of nature or an abstract that we gain access to as our minds develop does account for this. What doesn't is a God who wrote an unchanging doctrine that says this is the only way that must be corrected. It literally has things that contradicts our current modern moral intuitions what happened as a result of moral progress. So for example, if it says homosexual marriage is wrong and that is clearly against the moral progress that we've seen in every culture throughout human history, then that model does not account for moral progress. It does not correspond to the evidence of moral progress that we see. And so it would not count as a good model of morality. Secondly, or thirdly, is the moral dilemmas does a God-based morality give us answer to the moral dilemmas. For example, the trolley problem. If there is a trolley coming down the tracks and the brakes are broken and it's going to run over one guy in one track, should you flip a switch knowing that on the other track there are five people that's going to hit, or vice versa. It's coming down, it's going to hit five people and if you flip the switch, it'll kill one instead. Does a God-based morality give us an answer to this question? No, because the answer would be whatever God says. So it doesn't tell us anything. We need an answer to the question. We need to be able to solve to have some set of criteria that we can establish which is the correct decision to make. And God says so, does not do this. So no, a God-based morality does not answer these questions. What does is the secular models of morality. They do give us an answer. They say we should prioritize the many over the few and it is a good decision to flip the switch to save the five and sacrifice the one. So yes, we do get an answer to this from the secular models. We do not, from the theistic models. Fourthly, the dilemmas, such as the youth of our dilemma is one example. Another would be GE Moore's open question argument. There are many paradoxes in morality that like the is-ought problem would be another one. And does a God-based morality give us an answer to any of these? No, God's done it. Does not solve GE Moore's open question argument. Does not tell us a solution to the is-ought problem. God done it is just an is. It's another is, doesn't tell us what the odd is. So no, God does not solve any of the paradoxes of ethics. So a God-based morality, as we can see, doesn't actually answer any of the questions in the field that we kind of need to answer in order to qualify as a basis of objective morality. We do have solutions for these in the secular models. For example, my preferred model is, you don't need odds for morality. This is a moral naturalism is the term and it is simply a description of some naturalistic feature of the world. You don't need the odds is-ought problem solved. Youth of our dilemma, very easy to solve. There's no mind. So it's not based off of a whim. Youth of our dilemma solved. So yes, we can solve the paradoxes. We can solve the dilemmas. We can account for moral progress and we can correspond to our moral intuitions. All the secular models, none of which theistic models can do. Therefore, I present to you that, no, theistic models are not a good basis of objective morality and secular models are clearly objectively better because they at least try to answer the questions relevant to the field. And I will conclude there. So very much, Team Jump, for your opening statement. And with that, we are going to hand it over to Dr. Wood for your up to 20 minute opening statement. Well, thank you, James, for putting this together. And by the way, James, I think it was a brilliant idea scheduling this whole thing for NFL Wild Card Weekend. Super smart, awesome planning. And thank you, Tom, for representing the secularist view in this debate, secular humanism. I'm going to start by addressing the elephant in the room. Namely, anti-social personality disorder. Kind of a weird topic to start with, but I think it will save some confusion down the road. I've had lots of discussions about ethics during my life, both as an atheist and as a Christian, as a moral nihilist and as a moral realist, in schools, in prisons and mental hospitals and so on. And I've found, from decades of experience, that these discussions often get to a point where the person I'm talking to is building his moral framework on feelings of one sort or another, usually feelings of empathy, or the person will make a claim about humans just naturally seeking the good of other human beings, natural tendency. And when I don't grant that the feelings or some natural tendency are common moral ground between us, the person starts getting confused and more often than you think starts getting angry. David, how can you not agree with my feelings here? How can you not agree that we just seek the good of others? So, just to clarify, just to avoid some confusion. In 1994, I was diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder. That's the mental disorder common to psychopaths and sociopaths. People with anti-social personality disorder don't form normal emotional attachments to other people and we lack empathy, we lack remorse and guilt. And when I say lack, I mean there's just nothing there. So, if my family were to all die tomorrow, I wouldn't have any sort of emotional reaction to any of the feelings associated with it. If someone were skinned alive in front of me, there's no bad feeling. I can recognize that it's bad. I can say, oh, that is something that is bad that should not happen. There's just no feelings associated with it. And I've done some pretty horrible things in my life. I've faced justice for some of those things. I've turned away from those horrible things. I don't do them anymore, but feelings have never had anything to do with it. I've never felt bad for anything I've ever done. And I can definitely say I wasn't born with some tendency to seek the good of others. Now, why is this relevant? Well, here's the thing. I can understand arguments capable of understanding how conclusions follow from premises. I don't understand certain emotions very well because I have no experience of them apart from watching the rest of you and taking notes. So, if you start telling me you're right about something and I'm wrong about something, and I can't really detect an argument that I can follow from you and sometimes I can't even figure out what you're saying, I start to strongly suspect maybe what's at the bottom of all of this is just a big old pile of feelings. And I have trouble accepting people's feelings as evidence. And so, when our basis of morality is going to start with, it sounded like feelings and intuitions, well, we'll just see what happens because that's not gonna work out too well. Right now, just let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We'll pretty soon get into a comparison of views. So, people responding with feelings and not with any sort of real argument. I'm not talking about him here yet, I'm just talking in general. So, let me tell you how I viewed the world as a teenager. This is not how most atheists viewed the world, it's how I viewed the world when I was an atheist and I understand that people have all kinds of different views. The question is, how was I wrong? How was I wrong in how I viewed the world? So, pretty simple, actually. We've got this giant universe and then we've got this floating blob of debris called the Milky Way and out of one of the spiral arms of that Milky Way there's this ball of hot gas, we call the sun and circling that ball of hot gas is this little speck called the earth and then crawling all over the earth are these lumps of cells called humans who are only there, they're only there because their ancestors did a better job at what are called the four Fs, feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing and that's why they're there and yet because of the way they got wired they just function better if they believe that their lives have meaning and so because of this need for meaning and significance these lumps of cells, one species out of billions most of which are extinct have convinced themselves that they're incredibly important and that what they do really matters and that their values are something more than mutant traits that help their ancestors reproduce or the indoctrination of society. Why should we take any of this that goes on in this world seriously? Again, plenty of atheists would disagree but the whole thing sounds like a cosmic joke to me like if the rest of the universe could laugh it would be laughing at us, we'd be the laughing stock of the universe. So how was I wrong? How was anything I said incorrect? Well David, that's not how I feel about this never said that it was, how was I wrong though? Well of course you're wrong only a monster would think that this is all a cosmic joke yet you'd call me whatever you want but how is it wrong? Where's the mistake made? And the answer is given my beliefs I wasn't wrong, I just had some different preferences. You might have different preferences but that's all they are, they're different preferences. Now if you as an atheist want to treat your personal preferences as your personal preferences and your personal feelings as your personal feelings I would have seen absolutely no problem with that but that's just not what many atheists do they spend their time complaining about God complaining about religion complaining about Christianity complaining about Islam, Christians, Muslims, the Bible, the Koran moral judgments are flying all over the place and it really sounds like they believe in objective moral values objective moral obligations and so on and this is when my inconsistency detector starts going off just to be clear, I'm not talking about all atheists here talking about some particularly vocal atheists atheists who are more aggressive in their beliefs they've got a disturbingly inconsistent methodology when the topic is the existence of God they seem to set their skepticism levels to maximum so high that nothing could ever count as evidence for the existence of God what do I mean here? Well, Michael Sherman once presented what he called Shermer's Last Law his claim was that sufficiently advanced aliens would be indistinguishable from God but that would mean that God would be indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced aliens so I asked him, well what could count as evidence for the existence of God that you couldn't just attribute to powerful aliens and he made a joke out of it at first and said, well if God put a bunch of money in my bank account or something like that but after the joke he couldn't point to anything that God could conceivably do that would count as evidence for the existence of God Richard Dawkins was asked what evidence if God did exist what evidence could God give that would convince you that he existed Dawkins couldn't come up with anything he said that even if God wrote a message out to him in the stars he could just attribute it to powerful aliens who are trying to trick him Peter Atkins agreed that if God wrote a message in the stars he wouldn't consider it evidence for God he went on to say that if he died and woke up woke up in the afterlife confronted by St. Peter at the pearly gates he still would not believe Mike Lacona asked Matt Dilla Hunty what would count as evidence of the supernatural and Mike said look if you saw me beheaded I would beheaded in public and everyone saw me beheaded and then you look at the decapitated body and I'm obviously dead and later on I come walking in and I talk about my journey to heaven and I tell you about this person I met that you once knew who had a private discussion with you but then died and then I'm telling you what that private discussion was because I met this person in the afterlife would that convince you that something supernatural has occurred Matt said no Tom here was once asked something along the lines of if a Christian was standing in front of you in front of an ocean and said in the name of Jesus be parted and the ocean was parted would that convince you that God exists? Tom said no. So what we find is that the people were running around saying there's no evidence that God exists are the people who set up a methodology that's impervious to evidence for something that they don't want to believe. Now I'm willing to lay this down as a rule. We could call this Woods last law. Here's Woods last law. If you're going to reject the evidence no matter what it is then you rejecting an argument tells us nothing about whether the argument is good or bad. Why? Well if the argument is bad you're going to reject the argument but even if the argument is great you're still going to reject the argument. So you rejecting the argument tells us nothing about the argument. So when you reject the moral argument or the cosmological argument or the argument from fine-tuning or the argument from biological complexity or the argument from consciousness or the argument from reason or the argument from logic or mathematics or the scientific revolution or any of these things that tells us nothing about whether these arguments are good or bad. Your methodology doesn't tell us anything about the arguments. Your methodology tells us something about you. Your methodology tells us even more about you when after instantly rejecting dozens of arguments for the existence of God you turn around and start appealing to objective moral values and objective moral obligations. Atheists somehow have access to moral values and moral obligations that are so universal they would even apply to God if he existed. So that's why they'll say well if God existed you would do this if God existed he would do that. They're claiming one that there are objective moral values and obligations and two that they know what they are. So where do they get this amazing moral knowledge that would apply even to God? If you're an atheist and you're being realistic there's only a couple of places you go for the origin of these moral values. You can say that we're just hardwired to believe in moral facts because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Or you can say that society has conditioned us to believe in moral facts. But if those are your only real sources for our moral experience there are no moral facts here. Being hardwired for certain behaviors has nothing to do with moral facts and societies obviously can't be the source of moral facts because societies are often moral failures. So the point here is this what happened to your skepticism? When someone says I feel the presence of God you say that's no evidence whatsoever. But when someone says I feel that's wrong that's the example he used. That's somehow evidence of this moral realm. Very interesting. Now at Tom Sight's study on philosophers' belief in objective morality this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. So it's something like 70% of philosophers believe in objective moral doubt. That's interesting because that would show a kind of downward trend because historically belief in objective moral values would have been significantly higher than that. But so you've got this 70% of philosophers believing in something and that's supposed to be some basis right now for us in the way we think. Be serious now. If a new study comes out five years from now and says 70% of philosophers now believe in the existence of God how much evidence will that be for anything we're supposed to believe? Zero. Nothing. It will be completely meaningless and insignificant. And so we see what's going on with the methodology here if it can be used to support what you believe it's great arguments, great evidence. If it goes against you well it's completely meaningless and insignificant. Now Tom gives as his evidence for morality some moral intuitions and moral progress. If you're not familiar intuitions are instances where you have some sort of immediate awareness of something without an argument leading to it. And I think he said earlier in his debate with Kenny during the Q and A that it may be an undiscovered law of nature. But think about this perfect example. So moral intuitions. We have moral intuitions. And that's evidence of this objective moral realm. Lots of people would say they have religious intuitions. Lots of people would say they have immediate awareness of the presence of God. How much evidence is that? Once again, zero. And this amazingly shifting level of skepticism here is interesting. Anyway, so secular humanism is the philosophy that human beings are capable of flourishing without belief in God or religion. And to an extent that's true. You can do all sorts of wonderful things that accomplish amazing things without believing in God. But the core moral claims of secular humanists can only be maintained by massively dialing down their level of skepticism. If secular humanists had a drop of real skepticism coursing through their veins, they have to abandon their entire position. Apart from that, since secular humanism is explicitly non-theistic, the implications of atheism are always going to suck the life right out of their philosophy. I'm not saying you can't behave in this way or that way, obviously you can. You can behave in any way you want. You can live like a frog your entire life. The question is if you think you have a moral obligation to live in a certain way, what is the status of that? Is that something objective? Is that something that's independent of whether you think it's correct or not? Here's the problem. If atheism is true, people believe in objective moral values even though it makes no sense on an atheistic worldview. People believe in objective moral obligations even though it's not clear how there could be any. If our beliefs about morality do not correspond to reality, then our moral reasoning faculties seem to be massively defective and you shouldn't trust them at all. Applying anything remotely resembling atheistic skepticism for our moral reasoning should result in massive skepticism about the mental processes that produce such reasoning, in which case we should be moral skeptics, not moral realists. What about theism? Can theism provide a better foundation for ethics? Well, since atheism provides no foundation whatsoever, if theism can provide any foundation, it will do a better job than atheism and secular humanism. Now, Tom says that what theists do is just say, well, God done it. Anyone read anything in a delineated command? Is that what Robert Mary Hue Adams does? Is that what Baguette and Walls do? Is that what C. Stephen Evans does? He's nodding his head and there are two possibilities. Either he's lying or he's just completely ignorant. I'm trying to be nice here, but ladies and gentlemen, this is me like me standing here and saying, you know what atheist philosophers do in their writing? They just say, we want to be perverts, so we're rejecting God. And you atheists would say, what? You're saying that's what this sounds like. So there are two basic approaches we can take here. We can reason forward or we can reason backward. We can either start with the hypothesis and then see how surprising the evidence is on the assumption that the hypothesis is true, or we can start with the evidence and work our way back to see what sort of hypothesis would account for the evidence. If we start with a theistic view, God exists and created the universe and created man in his own image, would we be surprised that there are moral truths and that we have the cognitive faculties to apprehend them and to modify our behavior in light of them? Not at all, wouldn't be surprising at all. God created us and created us for these purposes and so on, wouldn't be surprising at all that there are moral facts. So theism makes perfect sense of objective moral values, objective moral obligations, moral responsibility, moral improvement and so on. If we start from moral experience and reason back to a foundation, we get a similar result. Moral properties like rightness and rungness, goodness and badness, we take them as real, well, they aren't physical. You don't find them with a telescope or a microscope. So they must somehow transcend the physical world. A ground of objective moral value would have to transcend human beings. Since moral obligations are stated as commands, the source of objective moral obligations for all humanity would have to be an authority over humanity, something like a creator and would have to be the sort of being that can issue commands, i.e. a personal being. This is why I have a problem with him rejecting anything with a mind as a possible source of moral obligations, which are commands. Moral obligations would be binding anywhere we go in the universe. So they are, in a sense, omnipresent. What would we say about their source? So if we take morality seriously, as soon as we try to make sense of it, as soon as we try to account for its features, we end up with something that starts sounding suspiciously like God. And that's why God will always be a better foundation for ethics than atheism or secular humanism. Thank you so very much, Dr. David Wood, for your opening statement. And with that, we are going to move into our rebuttal stage and hand the floor. Right back until you jump. All right, so thank you for that riveting opening, David. Seems he misunderstood my epistemology there, so a few things to correct. First, if a Christian goes up to the seas and says open the seas and the seas are parted, no, that would not be evidence, because you could walk up to the seas like the reed sea and say that and the wind could blow and it could open because it happens occasionally all the time. So that wouldn't be evidence. What would be evidence, and I have clarified this numerous times, is novel testable predictions. If you say, if I walk up to any given CX and I pray to God and this sea will part whenever I pray to God and it happens and you can repeatedly test this and get it, that would be great evidence. Novel predictions is evidence of God. And it is evidence even though it could be aliens, it doesn't matter if it could be aliens, it would still be evidence for God. If you made the novel prediction about your hypothesis and it came true, doesn't matter if it could be aliens, literally everything in science could be aliens. It doesn't make a difference. It's still evidence for the things in science. This is called the problem of undetermination. So his presentation of epistemology was incorrect. You can present evidence for God, you just need novel predictions. It doesn't matter if it could be aliens. Secondly, at the end of his speech, he said, how surprising would it be if my hypothesis is true, we would expect to see morality? Now this is called post hoc ergo proctor hoc. You're starting with your conclusion and saying, well, if my conclusion is true, how much would we expect to see the thing we're seeing right now? Well, if I see a gold brick in front of me and say, you know what my hypothesis is, there is a leprechaun in my basement. And if there is a leprechaun in my basement, then I would expect to see the gold brick. Oh, gold brick, therefore this is evidence of leprechauns. Clearly not. That's not how evidence works. First you start with the phenomenon and then you make a pattern in the phenomenon, then you make a principle to describe the pattern. You don't start with your conclusion and then ask how, if my conclusion is true, what's the percent I would expect to see the thing I'm literally already looking at? Because that's working backwards. So in order to really count as a hypothesis, you can't just ask, well, if my hypothesis is true, what would we expect to see? Literally doesn't matter. You can make it infinitely many of those. This is why I brought up that 70% of philosophers thing. It's not about you should believe because 70% of philosophers believe it was to completely refute his entire point that atheism provides no basis. Yes, it does. Just like God could be a basis in theist imagination, there are many things in atheist imagination that also count as a basis. And they are a better basis because they actually answer the relevant questions. And he brought up all these papers and asked, did they see God done it? Yes, they literally say God done it. They don't explain how God answers any of these questions and the problems to solve any of the problems in the field of ethics. They just say, God done it, therefore God. And then they try to explain that you need authority in things because that's what they think morality is, which has nothing to do with any of the literature in morality, but they don't actually answer how a God-based morality can answer any of the relevant questions in the field. So really all they're saying is God done it. So yes, yes, David, they all are all just saying God done it. Secondly, intuitions, he said, intuitions of God are just like intuitions of morality except intuitions of God don't have progress. There's no progress in God. We're not making progress in the field. We're not like collectively moving in a single direction towards like some kind of greater good that we're all agreeing on, like moral progress, which is a thing across all cultures. It's a thing we see where there's many cultures that don't have a God and we're losing belief in God. Gods are completely random in many ways. There's no like collective agreement on God. Morality is very different than a God. Now I agree, I have no proof of morality. I can't like empirically demonstrate it like I can demonstrate there's a table in front of me. But the fact that there are these clear, consistent patterns in our intuition give us a good basis to conclude there may be some objective feature out there. This is how Newton did stuff about gravity. He said, oh look, a pattern. I have no idea what caused this pattern. Hypothesis is not in Bingo, no idea. But there's a pattern. And if there's a pattern and this is a consistent pattern across a large spectrum, we can conclude it's probably caused by something. And so my hypothesis, what counts as objective, evidence of objective morality is I believe that the same pattern of moral progress will be seen across species of not just humans but any animal given enough intellectual capability. And any species anywhere in the universe given enough time to find them and talk to them if they are of the same intellectual and technological capabilities, they will have the same pattern in moral progress. So if we see this pattern beyond humans on other species on other planets, including AIs and things that didn't evolve, this is really good evidence that this morality thing is a little bit more than just a psychological evolutionary feature of humans. And so that's not what any of the moral realists say. They say, as opposed to David Strawman, that this is a thing in the world, a platonic abstract, a law of nature, an a priori, something or another. There's all kinds of possibilities. None of them say it's just a psychological feature of humans. That's the opposite of moral realism. So David was incorrect when he said that atheism does not provide a basis. Yes, it does, it provides many of them. And they start at an equal footing as God. So you think God did it, we think these did it. The difference is we can actually answer the questions and solve the problems, whereas you can't, which is what makes these better. Next. He says that God is essentially, it's a possibility because it needs authority. Why authority makes commands, commands and authority. Those make no difference to morality. It literally don't matter. If someone has authority and they give you a command to drown a baby, does it make him want to drown a baby? No, it's still immoral to drown a baby. Don't drown a baby just because you're commanded to. Authority and commands make no difference to morality. So he's again taking these inherently subjective psychological things of authority and command and saying that these are somehow intrinsic to morality when they have literally nothing to do with morality. So he's just begging the question. He's explaining not, he hasn't explained why. He's just asserted, he's just asserted that you need these things for morality. Given no reason why. And then said it's intrinsic to morality because of the no reasons he presented. Again, this is what I mean when I say God had done it argument, it's a God done argument. Next was the feelings. The feelings are not the basis of morality. The feelings are the evidence of morality. Now he's right that we do start with feelings. It's the thing we observe. Like how do we know morality is a thing at all? It's because when we see an injustice, we think, oh, that feels bad. Or we see someone helping an old lady across the street, oh, that feels good. Those feelings are the only thing we experience of morality. Like we can't find it in a lab. He's right, we have not found it yet. That's not evidence, it's not material. Even though he's asserted that we can't find it, therefore it must not be physical, which is wrong. We can't find dark matter. Does that mean it's not physical? Clearly not. There's many things we don't know and haven't discovered yet that does not intrinsically mean they are not physical. So I forget that a few of which fallacy is the UFO one. Oh, an unidentified flying object. I'm going to identify it as aliens. It's that fallacy, I forget which one it is. So the fact that we haven't found morality yet doesn't mean it's not physical. In fact, many of the theories are it is physical. It's called moral naturalism. And this is a much better hypothesis than God hypothesis. What else? So this is, as I say, the feelings are not the grounding of morality. They are the phenomenon of morality. They are the pattern we see in reality to try to identify some greater thing. So we don't start with feelings and say, this is the ground of morality. We start with feelings and say, a phenomenon. What is causing this pattern? And whatever is causing it is the ground. So it seems to be confused about the basis of how feelings and phenomenon work in the basis of what morality is. And he asked, why should we take this seriously? How was I wrong? Well, if it doesn't correspond to reality, you're wrong. That's what it means to be wrong. If something is true, it corresponds to reality. If it's false, it does not correspond to reality. So if morality is a law of nature or a platonic object or an a priori abstract, whatever it is, if you believe there is no objective morality and there is a thing which is literally objective morality, you are objectively wrong. That would be how you were wrong. If your feelings do not correspond to reality, you are wrong. And so again, the concluding point here is that just as he says God counts as an objective basis because his feelings, God done it, we can say the same thing about literally anything else. There are many other potential basis for objective morality. You don't need a God. It's not the only thing out there. Atheism does provide a basis. The difference is that the atheist models actually answer the questions in the field. If you don't answer the questions in the field, you don't have a real model and that's what makes the atheist models better. And other than that, all he's got is feelings too. So a God-based model, how do you know about morality? It's feelings, that's it. You have the same moral feelings that we do. Neither of us can measure any feeling into morality anywhere. We have you have feelings of morality. We have feelings of morality and we're trying to describe the pattern of those things. The only difference he has is it says something in a book somewhere. Is that more evidence than the feelings? No, I mean, if we didn't have the feelings, that would still mean nothing. You'd just be like, there is a blurb-blurb. We'd never feel it. We'd never know what it meant. So the fact that we have feelings is the only evidence that anybody has to describe the fact that there's a phenomenon that we're experiencing, we're trying to explain. And just a book saying God done it provides nothing. And so we start with the same ground, same evidence, Ars just actually answers the questions. I hand it back over to Dr. Wood for his off-to-eat model. Thank you. Now, Tom said I have the same feelings. I'm not sure which opening statement he was listening to, but I don't have those feelings, which means I have to gather information from other places. But notice, he said that feelings were the evidence. Feelings were the evidence. And what are you tracing that back to? Objective morality, and here's the problem. You got something that's mysterious like objective morality, something that I don't understand how this could even be something that exists, especially when you're saying, well, it can't be the product of a mind. It may be something physical, maybe some unknown natural law. Well, here's the thing. Can you explain your feelings in some other way than by positing this mysterious objective morality? Can you explain the feeling some other way that makes perfect sense on our view? Yeah. You grew up in a society that taught you those things. Great. That's where your feelings came from. You have a certain genetic makeup. It gives you certain feelings. Your mom and dad raised you in a certain way. The people you were around when you were 16 to 24, they believe things and you believe a lot of the same things. And so that's where you get these feelings from. Does that explain them very easily? Yeah. So why in the name of common sense would you be appealing to this objective moral realm and this unknown law of nature that you think we're gonna find one day? And the answer is there's no reason. So why not go with the much simpler explanation? So when I asked, why was I wrong? Why was I wrong with my view of the universe? Nah, but it didn't correspond to reality because you didn't believe in objective moral values. Well, I didn't see any evidence for them now. I still haven't seen any evidence from anything he's said because he said the only evidence is feelings and there are all kinds of ways you can explain feelings without appealing to objective morality. So God or secular humanism, which provides a better foundation for ethics? As I've said, secular humanism provides no foundation. So far we've got feelings, we've got intuitions, we've got moral progress. Notice even the moral progress that would just be your feeling that it's progress, right? I think Daniel HaKikachu is gonna be debating later this evening. Everything that Tom regards as moral progress, Daniel HaKikachu would view as massive moral regression. Who's right? Well, you just have to say, here's what I like apparently and so the other guy is wrong. What do you point to? What do you point to that shows that you're right and he's wrong? I'm not aware of anything on atheism that can fulfill that role. He says that there could be evidence for God with novel predictions but then he turned right around and said everything could be explained by aliens. So once again, we're left with nothing would, there's nothing where you could say this is God and so obviously if nothing could ever be, if nothing could ever show you that God exists, then obviously moral values can't show you that God exists because well, nothing can. And I'm just noticing this once again, this amazingly, consistently shifting level of skepticism where you can appeal to an unknown natural law, you can appeal to an unknown this or that but if it's something giving you actual commands about right and wrong, suddenly you don't get to do that. Now he said, start with a phenomenon. You don't start with the conclusion or you don't start with a hypothesis. Actually I did it both ways and you can do it both ways. I mean, this is straightforward, Bayesian reasoning, the likelihood principle. You say, here's a hypothesis. If this hypothesis were true, what would you expect? And if you're not exactly sure what to expect, then you can compare two hypotheses, say hey, how surprising is the evidence if we compare these two hypotheses? So you take two hypotheses. Let's say, theism and naturalism. Theism and naturalism. And you say, these are our two hypotheses. Now, pretending we didn't know, pretending we didn't know what the actual evidence is, how surprising would it be on theism if theism were true, how surprising would it be that there are moral facts about the world, that there are moral obligations, that there are objective moral values, not surprising at all. That's exactly what you would expect. If something like naturalism were true, how surprising would it be that you have objective moral facts, objective moral values, objective moral obligations? Be, I would say, be pretty darn surprising because I have no idea where those things would come from on naturalism. So you compare these two hypotheses and the evidence fits much better with one over the other. That doesn't settle the issue. That just means that particular piece of evidence fits one hypothesis better than the other. And you can continue doing this with other lines of evidence and with other hypotheses. The idea that you just can't reason like this is simply ridiculous. But notice I did it both ways. I said, hey, if we start with the hypotheses and think about what we would expect, perfectly valid. And I said, hey, if you start with the evidence and then reason back to what would be required for that evidence, you start getting something that sounds suspiciously like God and just think about moral obligations. So moral obligations are most naturally expressed and understood as authoritative commands. If you say, what are your moral obligations? You can say, name one, don't torture old ladies for fun. Well, that looks like a command. And it looks like it's a command that's telling me you have to do this. You have to do this or you have to not do that. So they sound like authoritative commands. On what planet can some natural law give me authoritative commands? They sound, it sounds like a command coming from an authority, but what could that have to do with God? Oh no, it's so mysterious, right? Second, moral obligations are objective, meaning that we can be right or wrong about them. So if the idea here is, if you have a moral obligation and you think you have a moral obligation, if it's something that you could be wrong about, then it's not just your preference, then it's not just in your mind. It's something that somehow transcends your mind. Now what could that be? I'm not aware of a lot of things in nature that would transcend the human mind and have some authority over us. Moral obligations are overriding, meaning that they trump other kinds of moral obligations. If your country says you have to go out and do this horrible thing, we would say a moral obligation can just trump that. So a moral obligation would have greater authority than your country, your culture, because it can override them. How can something material have greater authority than that? I don't know. Moral obligations are universal. We apply them to everything with a functioning mind. We don't give anyone an exemption if they say, well, I really want to torture old ladies for fun. We don't say, okay, that's fine for you. We don't, we apply them universally. So moral obligations have some interesting features and a good theory of morality should clarify and explain why moral obligations have these interesting features. Theism does that. Theism explains why they are overriding, why they're objective, why they take the form of authoritative commands. It accounts for all of that. Saying maybe matter can do it somehow, but 70% of philosophers think something can do it. They all disagree and attack each other because they can't agree on what could possibly do it, which kind of makes it sound like they don't actually have anything that could fit the bill. But that's good enough because we're lowering our skepticism down to the floor so that anything counts as a good argument for these objective moral values. Dr. Wood for your rebuttal. And with that, we are going to go into 15 minutes of discussion and conversation. Gentlemen. David, if you don't mind, I wanted to correct you on the evidence thing. So novel predictions would be evidence of God. Could it be aliens? Yes, doesn't mean it's not evidence of God. No, it's not how evidence works. So if I say, if I predict there is a God named Bob and the Bob God will give me a gold brick if I pray for it and I pray for 10 gold bricks and 10 gold bricks appear, that would be evidence of Bob. Now it could be explained by many other things, like aliens. Maybe there's aliens that want to play tricks on us or whatever. But because I made this hypothesis and the predictions that I made based off this hypothesis were correct, this hypothesis is more supported than all of the others. This is called underdetermination science. Everything in science could be explained by aliens. Every phenomenon we could see, we could be a brain and a bat, we could be in the matrix. Does that mean that all of the evidence we have is that the world isn't around? No, all of the evidence is still that the world is round because that was the hypothesis used that could tell us about the future. So the fact that it could be explained by other hypothesis doesn't mean it's not evidence of the first hypothesis that makes the prediction. So yes, novel predictions would be evidence of a God even if it can be explained by aliens too. Other hypotheses don't matter here. Still evidence of a God. That part makes sense. Yes, you have a much superior position to Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins and the rest of them who couldn't come up with anything. But so yeah, you have something that, what exactly do you mean by evidence? You mean basically raises the probability of the hypothesis being true, but not conclusive. So yeah, okay, fine. All right, cool. And so I wanted to go into this feelings thing. You keep bringing up these feelings. So the feelings aren't the evidence. The feeling is the phenomenon. There's a thing we see and there's a pattern in this thing we see. And this pattern seems to indicate a direction. Like we could describe this pattern with a principle. So if this pattern exists, that would be the evidence. But the feelings themselves are just the phenomenon we're observing. We see rocks fall on a certain thing. They're like, well, the rocks falling isn't the evidence, it's the pattern that rocks. Yeah, I'm fine with the idea of these things being patterns and so on. The idea is can you explain those patterns? Can you explain the phenomena by appealing to something other than some sort of objective moral realm or objective moral obligations or objective moral value? And it seems really, really easy to do to me, right? I mean, it seems like very, very simple. You're raised, you have certain biological predispositions. You have like a herd instinct or something like that. And then your society raises you in a certain way. And then you get these feelings. And the reason you would say that is people can be raised to have very different feelings. People can be raised in different cultures to have very, very different feelings. So some people can be, I mean, just go back to the days of the Roman Empire. It was entertainment to watch people hacking each other up or being eaten by animals and so on. And that's entertainment, whereas most people in here would be horrified at something like that right now. So what's the difference? They don't seem to be biologically different. If the morals are objective, then it doesn't seem like the objective moral values have changed over time. What's changed? Well, culture and the way people are brought up. And so if I had an atheist, I mean, if I had an atheist framework and I was looking for an explanation of that, it seems really, really, really simple to explain feelings without appealing to anything mysterious, straightforward things that we know about how societies and cultures work. So notice, the only problem I'm having with anything is I'm just saying that doesn't sound objective at all. It just doesn't sound objective on that worldview, so. Right, I totally agree. But that would only be the case if moral intuitions went up and down and changed randomly and they were completely disparaged between cultures. But if we see between cultures who never meet, that they follow the same pattern of once they gain to a certain amount of excess resources and a certain amount of intellectual ability that they change in a very similar way in every culture who never meet, never talked to another. And if we saw this pattern on other planets with other species, and if we saw this pattern with artificial intelligences and other kinds of consciousness that weren't moral, this pattern is more than just a social thing now. Now it can't be evolutionary because it's a non-evolutionary species. And if there's other planets, then it can't be social because there's no social connection between those two things. So it has to be something more, it has to be something objective. I agree if they change, they wouldn't be objective. So obviously I think there are moral things that don't change. And I think that our ability to be in tune with these is what is increasing. And so we gain greater knowledge to get closer to this objective over time as we gain excess resources and greater intelligence. So would you agree that if we did see this same pattern across species, across planet, across evolution and non-evolution, that that would be good evidence that there's something objective there? Yeah, it's basically until you combine it with atheism or naturalism or something. And let me flesh that out a bit. If you were to find this pattern and I didn't have anything that could make sense of the pattern as far as establishing it. I mean just mindless matter doesn't seem to me like it's going to establish a moral pattern based on objective moral values. And so if I don't have any explanatory resources, if I don't have the explanatory resources to account for that, I would have to explain it in natural terms and just say, okay, beings that are wired to survive end up falling into these patterns over time because it somehow helps with survival and reproduction. I would say something like that. But I mean apart from that, if I saw the patterns, I don't have any problem with the patterns, just nothing you're saying right there is inconsistent with something like divine command theory there. In other words, in other words, well let me put it like this. So you had the scientific revolution and if you look at the guys who were involved in the scientific revolution, they believed that there are going to be all these neat little equations out there before they started because it's actually hard. We look at the neat little equations now and say, oh, that's so easy. No, it's a nightmare to come up with that neat little equation. They believed it's there because they believed, they thought of God as like this cosmic architect whose language is mathematics. So they believed that the creator created the universe in a certain way and they believed that they were created in the image of this creator so that they have the ability to go and figure these things out. They had to believe that ahead of time, otherwise you're not gonna go spend your dedicate your life to finding these neat little equations unless you're already convinced that they're there. So notice they're going out and they're finding all these things. That's not refuting their view. And so if we were to like go out and seek our moral obligations and to seek a deeper understanding of our moral obligations, to me it would be kind of parallel to going out and coming up with a greater scientific understanding of the world. But just as I would not think of coming up with a greater scientific understanding of the world as conflicting with theism. Again, if you look, they set it up like a giant hypothesis. If we're right about this stuff we're gonna be able to go and figure out the entire universe. And they did. So it's like the most epically confirmed scientific hypothesis of all time was that initial big scientific hypothesis. But you can have the same thing. No, you can reject the Bible, reject the Quran and just be like a pure natural law theorist or divine command theorist or something like that and be convinced that you can get to the bottom of this morality stuff. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't mean that God's not what's behind it. So the point is, as you're going out and discovering moral values, assuming you're making moral progress, you're discovering moral values and discovering and coming up with a deeper understanding of your moral obligations that seems to fit perfectly with Theism to me because there is that reality there. To me that seems very much like a God of the gaps. Like clearly the fact that if I think lightning is caused by friction in atoms and the clouds that doesn't disprove Thor. Maybe Thor is just a bigger mind somewhere out there and he's actually really controlling the lightning. The fact that we can predict that if this is friction caused by clouds, we can predict here the different conditions where it happens. Here's when we will see it, we will predict it in the future give weather forecasts that are pretty accurate. That doesn't disprove Thor, but that is evidence for the electrical theory that has nothing to do with Thor. And so if you came along and said, well that could all be explained by Thor, well that's just a God of the gaps. So that wouldn't, this is the same as the alien thing even though it could be explained by Thor, you're just adding an extra thing that is unnecessary there. So this would not be evidence of Thor. You couldn't say, well since this is compatible with Thor therefore it's the reason it will be even Thor. No, because the hypothesis that got us to this point that made all the predictions was purely naturalist hypothesis. This is why in the case of morality if I can predict that we're gonna see this same pattern throughout different species, that would be something that would be evidence of my hypothesis that we saw this because I made the prediction. And the fact that you could say, well it's not incompatible, maybe God did that for a reason, that would just be a God of the gaps and moving the goalposts. No, I think this God of the gaps stuff is overused. And by the way, it was Christians who came up with the God of the gaps. Christians came up with the God of the gaps criticism against other Christians who were just going to, they were going to the unknowns and saying, God did this, whereas the Christians who brought up the God of the gaps are saying, don't stuff God into these little gaps. Like once you find a scientific law, oh, we've solved that. Now let's go find something we don't understand and say God did that. They said, what are you talking about? God is responsible for all of it, right? God is responsible for all this. So quit shoving God into these little gaps. But there is this tendency to say, whenever you say, look, if we're talking about objective moral obligations, let's say, and these really sound like commands. They sound like they're commands that are authoritative over us. They override any other obligation we could have, legal obligation, family obligations, and so on. They really sound like something that would have to come from something like God. Now, just to correct you on something you said earlier, people like baguette and walls and so on, they would just say this fits this hypothesis better than others. They would still use it as kind of a cumulative case. But the reasoning is not wrong. They're not just saying, oh, God, it's hey, this is sounding suspiciously like something that has authority over human beings, something that can override any other obligations. This is not sounding like a molecule. This is not sounding like your culture. It would override culture. I had a question about that too. So the commands thing, when I think of commands, without begging the question and assuming there is a God who gives objective commands, all of the commands we know about are subjective. That guy commands you to do mow the lawn. That guy commands you to go to jail. None of the commands. We know of no commands that apply objectively. All commands are subjective. They're human made up, societal made up. So don't torture old ladies for fun. You would not regard that as okay. So all of the commands we know about for a fact. So we'd beg the question. So assume morality is a thing. We do think morality thing. I agree it's objective. But if we want to say morality is objective, it's more than just a subjective thing that's interdependent of human society. But commands, all of the commands we know of are all human society things. But what we do know of that isn't like that. Laws of physics. Laws of physics, you don't get a choice. This is something that objectively applies. This is universal. Totally independent of human psychology. Commands totally dependent on human psychology. So if we're thinking morality is one of these things that applies beyond just our subjective whims. It seems like it's better explained by law. Physics, which is truly objective. As opposed to a command thing, which all the commands we know about are subjective. So it seems to be better explained by the law. Physics thing, because it does apply objectively. Physics doesn't need to command us in certain ways, right? You're not getting beyond physics. Whereas commands are, you could do this or you could do that. And you have a moral obligation to do this. As far as that being, it sounds like you think that that would be subjective. Going back to what you said about involving a mind, something like that. You could think in terms of, as far as this being objective. So like there's the Autobahn in Germany and many places on the Autobahn, you have no speed limit, right? You can drive all you want. Now you may feel like, well I'm only safe if I keep it to 70 miles an hour or something like that. So you may still feel like that. That may be your preference. But you have no legal obligation to do something like that. If you're in other places in the United States where the speed limit is 70, you do have a legal obligation. That legal obligation is objective in the sense that if you don't think you're under that obligation, you still do because there is an authority there. There's an authority there because of that relationship. In this case, a legal authority. They have legal authority to establish a legal obligation. So you can have cultural obligations like things like etiquette and so on. Don't run around naked or something like that. Even if there wasn't a law. You can have obligations to family like taking care of your children and so on. The thing about a moral obligation is it takes the same form as a legal obligation. But again, it's overriding. It would override the government. It would override your culture. It would override the entire planet. Everyone on the planet telling you one thing, you have to do one thing. If you had a moral obligation, it would override all of that. Well that's where you see the contradiction because legal authorities are all subjective. So if you're saying there is this thing that gives us an obligation. We're using subjective in different ways. When I talk about something being objective or subjective for me, it means I could be wrong about it. Not contingent on your opinion or intuition. Yeah, not contingent on. Is it something I'm wrong about? And so if the legal authorities make it a law that you are supposed to drive under 70 miles an hour, that's not subjective for me. It's not something I could be. Let me ask this way. Is the law of physics greater or lesser than all legal laws combined? We're gonna make a law that you can't follow gravity. Who's gonna win? Gravity or the law? I don't know what you mean by greater. Like if we just make a law against all the laws of physics, are we gonna be able to bend or change the laws of physics in any way? No. So our laws mean nothing. The universe does not care at all. I agree with that from your perspective. So when I think of something that I agree, morality is objective. I think it's a bigger thing. It's something that it doesn't matter what laws we ever make, we're never gonna be able to change it. It is something that can't be changed. What else has that property? Laws of physics. We cannot change that. It doesn't matter anything we do, we cannot change them. Now legal laws, we can change them whatever we want. So it seems like morality is objective. Can't be changed no matter what we do. You agree with that part, right? Morality can't be changed no matter what we do, what we say, unchanged. Certain features of it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But legal authorities, we can change the legal law we want. Like don't make a law that don't drive 80 miles an hour. It's completely something we make up. Now if we want to say, well what's more similar here? This thing that we cannot change ever under any circumstances. And the laws of physics which we can't change under any circumstances. You're saying no, no, it's like a legal authority. But all the legal authorities we can change those. Those are things that are not in any way like morality. So it seems very confusing to me that you're comparing the authority of morality which can't be changed just like none of the laws of physics can be changed which seems like a really solid similarity here to these human made up things made up by our minds and saying that abstracting that there must be some bigger mind thing here. I see very little similar. I mean, laws of physics are descriptive. Just describes the way things work. Moral obligations are prescriptive. Here's what you need to do. And so, I mean, it's just, it would be amazing if written like the laws of physics were these rules about our behavior that we have to follow. But I think this goes back to skepticism. If we're asking ourselves, if we're asking ourselves what makes sense of our moral feelings and you think somewhere out there like the laws of physics, like the laws of physics are these moral obligations somehow out there that apply to living things once they reach a certain level of intellect. I just think this fits much more comfortably with theism in the sense of, not in any sort of God of the gaps sense, but I mean, if you look, what you're saying right now, if it were true, if there's this just realm of inviolable morality in the universe, well, you combine that with like, you know, mathematics, right? You're not transcending math. Mathematics is omnipotent in a sense, right? You're not violating two plus two equals four. It doesn't matter if you're in the Andromeda galaxy. You can't do it. So you have that and then you have like this realm of proper reasoning, logical laws and so on. And this all seems abstract and conceptual and doesn't seem to fit with a strictly material realm. If this is abstract and conceptual, concepts exist in a mind and you're ruling out mind from the beginning, which is the only thing that could account for it. I am going to conclude the open dialogue and discussion. I wanna thank both of our analogators, Dr. David Wood and T-Jump, and I'm going to hand it back over to T-Jump for his up to four minute closing statement. Thank you again, everybody for coming. Really appreciate it, great time being here. As always, thank you, Dr. David Wood for showing up and debating. Thank you, James, for hosting. So to conclude, I would like to point out that by his own comparison, that if we say that morality is some objective thing that we cannot change, what are the only other things we cannot change? Physics, commands, laws, obligations, we can change any of these. And just to clarify, in my view of morality, moral naturalism, you can check the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy on that if you want. There are no odds or a thing that I agree with David or products of our minds, our subjective intuitions based off evolution, not a real thing, it's not a thing in reality. Morality, I think, is. I think there is an objective factor to the matter that some things are good and bad and then we add these odd feelings to that we should do these things and we should not do these things but those aren't intrinsic in morality anywhere. So I think that morality is, I agree with him, objective, something we can't change. And what other things can't change? Laws of physics. And he says, well, there's nothing else that can explain that. That seems a lot like people saying, well, well, we can't really explain lightning, must be Zeus. That makes a lot of intuitive sense. Big mind does it, I have a mind, my mind can do stuff, it can do stuff, lightning, perfect sense. But when we actually look at it through science, every one of those gods of the gaps has been wrong. We always intuitively think a mind did it. That's just our natural disposition with type one and type two fallacies. We hear Russell in the bushes, if we think it's a lion, we run away and don't get eaten. But if we think it's the wind, I'm gonna do some scientific investigation here and not be biased on my judgment, you can eat me sometimes. And so evolution prioritizes the fact that if you think it's a mind, it makes you survive more. And so people always think phenomenon caused by mind. Volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, planets, always mind, always long. So if we really wanna know what is a law that we can't change, well, it's gotta be like the laws of physics. That is a much better explanation than a mind like Zeus. That's just the typical anthropomorphic fallacy that has never worked in human history and we should always follow the science. Start with the phenomenon, find a pattern, describe it with the principle, make predictions. That is the pattern we should use here to discover what is morality. Just like anything, starting with your conclusion and saying it's a god and that intuitively makes sense to me is not a conclusion. And also I did not hear an answer from David about how to solve any of the problems. How does God explain moral intuition, moral progress, answer any of the moral dilemmas or answer any of the moral paradoxes? I heard none of these, no answer to these. Did not hear an answer to is something good because God deems it so? Or does God deem it to be good because he knows it's good based off of some non-conscious set of properties? That's one of the big problems. Like you kind of have to answer this because if you can, it kind of proves there's no mind there and I didn't hear an answer to that at all. So I didn't hear the answer to any of the actual serious, rigorous problems in the field of philosophy about what ethics and morality is. He just kind of said, well, seems like commands and authority and God done it. And that's kind of what I heard, which is typically what the arguments are because they don't have answers to any of these questions which is why I brought up the fact that in academic philosophy, 70% of philosophers are moral realists even though like 85% are atheists. So this is not really a serious field. Not because it couldn't be, it could be. Totally finds its positive God as a possible hypothesis but you've got to be able to answer the serious questions in the field for it to count. Thank you. All right, Tom says I'm saying nothing else can explain this. No, we are comparing two hypotheses here. If you're talking about atheistic or naturalistic, secular humanism and comparing that with theism, well, you don't have the explanatory resources in secular humanism to account for morality. Could other things do that? Do it besides God? Yes, certain elements at least for moral obligations which I believe moral obligations exist. I believe do not torture old ladies is a moral obligation that's binding on all of us. I'd say you need something like God to be issuing commands that are overriding and authoritative over all of us. So it really seems that way. Now if you come up with some better explanation, that's fine but you're not getting it from secular humanism. You're not getting it from naturalism. He says, well, we have this tendency to think that all these different things are caused by minds and that's just what we're doing here. No, all our experience tells us that certain things are only associated with minds, right? You don't go out into the world and find concepts. You don't go out in the world and take a telescope and find logical laws. Same thing with moral laws. You don't find those out there. They're abstract, they're concepts. Everything we know about them tells us that they only exist in a mind. So why would you, I mean, how would you just rule out mind? If everything we know tells us that they're only associated with minds, why would you rule out mind from the beginning and say anytime you appeal to a mind, I'm gonna say that's the mind of the gaps or the God of the gaps. We have to rule that out from the beginning and assume we're getting it from somewhere else. Even, by the way, even physics and so on. I mean, what is all of reality? I mean, what is all of the natural world doing, obeying these little equations? I don't think that's inconsistent with God. Again, this was all part of the initial hypothesis that the pioneers of the scientific revolution went out and tested the biggest hypothesis ever. If we're right about God and what we are and us being created in the image of God, we're gonna go out there and we're gonna figure this all out. I don't think you would ever conclude that if you really thought that your cognitive faculties were just produced by survival, I mean, just selected based on how they favored survival and reproduction. Your cognitive faculties, if you take naturalism seriously, were selected to find food and find a mate and help you stab an enemy with a spear. That's what they are produced for. Why, in the name of common sense, would you think that you can understand the formulas at the bottom of the universe? You don't. They thought otherwise and they had reasons for thinking otherwise. Now, he brings up the youth Afro dilemma. It's actually, I mean, I've never understood why this is such a problem, is something right or wrong because God commands it. Well, in a sense, yes, but not in the sense of God could just have any sort of whim or fantasy and decide to do something like that. We believe that God is the ultimate ground of good. You have to have one somewhere, so why not, why wouldn't it be God? And if you're going to say that God couldn't be the ultimate source of good, well, then I don't know why you'd think nature or something else could be. So just rule that out of your explanation and then you'd have to throw out morality as well. Other than that, I don't know. I just think in terms of what I call the skeptics dilemma, it's if you're going to raise your skepticism level so high that nothing could ever count as nothing could ever convince you that God exists, that's fine, but apply the same level of skepticism to things like objective moral values and you'd have to reject both. On the other hand, if you're going to have some sort of more reasonable level of skepticism such that you could examine these arguments for the existence of God and conclude that God exists, if you're going to conclude that objective moral values exist, then you have some consistent basis here and you see how they're tied together and that's why God and objective moral values, they stand together or they fall together and that's why theism will always be a better foundation for ethics than atheism or naturalism. Thank you so very much, Dr. Wood and at this point we are going to switch in our Q and A section so if you would like to file a line down the center, we are going to be asking questions for one or both of our interlocutors. Yeah, my question's for Tom. So you said the most reasonable position is going to have to answer the most serious questions in the field, yet it seemed you didn't answer the most serious question of why these things exist. At best, you seem to appeal to this general consensus or at least this feeling of intuition, but if someone like David was saying, if someone were to approach you and say, and scientifically speaking, we can show that there's this inclination to believe in God, yet I doubt you're going to take God as a serious answer to that, but when it comes to objective morality, you're going to say, well, then that's because there's something out there that must exist. So why the inconsistency? There's no inconsistency, like you don't need to posit your conclusion before you start with the evidence. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. So if we said, well, why does lightning exist at all? Like, it must be Zeus. Like, is that a good explanation? Clearly not. We would start with the phenomenon, like there's lightning. We don't care why it exists. That's not the point. There's a phenomenon. First, we look at the phenomenon, find a pattern, describe a principle to make predictions, and then once we have those predictions that are successful and can tell us about the future, what gives us that success gives us an indication of why it's there. Just, sure, sure, yeah. Which is different from there's lightning. So the general intuition is there's a God that we're inclined to believe in. General intuition is there's a subject from reality we're inclined to believe in. You deal with one, you dismiss it and explain it naturally, with the other, you say there's a subject from reality. Yeah, one has a very clear pattern that applies across like all societies and I believe will apply across all species in the universe and AIs. Like a belief in God. No, not like a belief in God. Cause there's many cultures like the Pariah that have no belief in God. Belief in God changes in ways and has lots of arbitrary values that change in ways. Morality doesn't. Morality has a very clear pattern across all societies, which is moral progress. I don't see any such pattern in God belief. There's no progress in God belief. There's no discoveries made in God belief. There's no, nothing that gives us any inclination about how society is going to evolve in God belief. Moral progress gives us a lot of that. So moral progress is a real field that actually gives us inclinations towards human nature whereas God belief doesn't. It seems kind of arbitrary. It does agree right now. What's the problem? My questions for Dr. David. So think about number 16 in the event of what is usually labeled as chorus rebellion. I'll do my best to summarize quickly. You've got about 250 men that approach Moses and they object the choosing of Aaron's line as the succession of the high priest. And so God reacts the way he reacts. There's 250 people, they go down in flames, including their wives and children. And then subsequently 14,000, so about 100 people died also as a result of the plague. My question is how do you reconcile an objectively moral righteous God, a moral law giver, with the way in which he chose to react to the opposition? Oh, Aaron, think about those two things. Well, there are a couple issues here. I just want to draw a distinction between something like divine command theory or something like that and believing in a particular religion. So you could agree with everything I've set up here about divine command theory and just say, but I don't believe in the Bible or I don't believe in the Quran. So not exactly relevant for the topic at hand, but it is an issue for Christians. And the main issue for Christians is that we're given commands in, I mean, you have them in the Old Testament as well, more so in the New Testament that are commands like love everyone, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. You're supposed to do good to everyone. Pursue peace with all people, honor all people. So these are the commands that were given. And the idea is because people are created in the image of God, they're all worthy of a certain level of honor and respect. So if we didn't have that and we didn't have certain other ideas about that we believe that God has revealed, there wouldn't be much of a conflict, right? So for Christians, we believe that this is like part of the divine commands. Like I have been commanded to love people and things like that. And so we read God cracks down and crushes people for disobedience. And that is an issue that Christians have to rustle with Old Testament punishments and so on. In some of those situations, I mean, as a Christian, I believe at the end of the day, God has the right to destroy us if he wants. God wants to say, you know what, these guys are really, really screwing up and they're doing horrible things and I'm gonna wipe them out. That's not me wiping them out, that's not me deciding. But I believe that God has authority. And if you look at a lot of the situations, especially in Old Testament, I mean, there's situations where you've got a pillar of fire there, a pillar of fire there giving orders. It's not a situation like we're in where we don't know what's true and I'm arguing this and you're arguing that. It's situations where there's a pillar of fire there, it's sending down miracles, sending down judgments and so on. And people get in a situation where they say, you know what, I don't actually care what the pillar of fire who's giving these orders and who just led us, he's leading us into the promised land and so on has been raining down food from heaven on us. I don't actually care what he says. I'm going on my own way. Oh, I believe that God has the authority to do that. With that said, if you rejected all that for some reason, that doesn't get away from divine command theory. Yeah, so I have a question for Tom and this is about the conversation, the beginning of the debate, about the nature of evidence. The New Testament scholar Craig Keener found that areas of Christian evangelization of non-Christian areas have the highest concentration of dramatic miracles like instantaneous healing of blindness, deafness, et cetera in his book, Miracles. And so my question is, how is this not evidence for the Christian God? Who would thus ground morality in your view? Would be evidence if there actually shown to be true. I've read Craig Keener's like 500 page tone that's just absolutely massive. And one of the best examples he gives, I think there's some skeptics found the five best examples he could possibly give. One of the best examples was one given by a woman who had a cardiac arrest and she floated up above her body and she saw a serial number on the top of a machine, a ventilator of some kind. And she reported to the doctor, this number was exactly correct. And if this can happen, that'd be great evidence of Indies. If you can leave your body and find numbers and those numbers are right, that's great evidence. But when they investigated, they found this was, there's no hospital record of this. We can't find any evidence of it whatsoever. It's just a testimony from a professor with no hospital data. Ventilators aren't seven feet tall. They don't have serial numbers on the top because the serial numbers must be on the bottom for the doctors to actually record them to test them to make sure they work. So no medical devices have serial numbers on the top. It's literally against the policy of every medical doctor to ever do that. And so when we check all of the data, none of them check out. None of these actually support his claim that there were actually miracles. The vast majority of them are super mundane, explained by everyday things. So if this actually counted as evidence, yeah, it'd be great. But when you actually investigate them, none of them do. I've got another question for Tom. Why is moral progress across cultures used as evidence for objective morality when progress is a subjective term? The pattern is the same. So it doesn't matter if you call it progress or regress. If you see a pattern of rocks that all go in, have like an arrow pointing in one direction, it doesn't matter if you call that direction progress or regress. There's still a pattern of rocks that's going in one direction and not the other direction. So the fact that there is this direction we're going in means that there is a consistent pattern and this pattern is caused by some phenomenon. And we're just gonna label that progress. Like you could call it regress if you want, like he mentioned. Niki Kishu would regress like, that's fine, but the pattern's still there. So there is an objective pattern there which is independent of our opinion. So there is an objective feature of nature that this is evidence of regardless of what you label it. Thank you very much for coming. I like your explanations you have on almost all your points that you made, but one of them I think you kind of touched the answer. And as a practicing mathematician, I like the fact that you use arguments and use logic and science to justify your points and I like that that pursuit. And you said in the opening statement that the correct answer to the trolley dilemma is to choose the good of the many versus the good of the one. And why is this one the correct answer? Why is it wrong for God to drown children and why it is wrong for an atheist to drown children? To me it seems that you also are subjective in your morality as you accuse the theist that they are. All you need is to substitute the subjectivity of one God for the subjectivity of a group of people. Therefore my question is, how do you objectively justify your morals? So I think there's two parts to that. One is, so to objectively justify your morals we look at the evidence, we see there's a pattern in the evidence, create a principle to describe the pattern and create predictions to see if we can confirm is this corresponding about the world. And if we get this right and if we find this pattern is correct, then we could say, why is God immoral for doing this when a person isn't? And that's the same question of like, if a doctor in the 1800s cuts your leg off because you've been shot and he's trying to save your life so you have to cut your leg off because that's the best medical technology he has, he's not immoral. He's doing the best he can because of his limitations. If a doctor today cut your leg off you would sue him for malpractice because he could just give you an antibacterial shot and you'd survive you fine. So because the limitations of us as individuals is so great we have to do many bad things to weigh them against the better things that the better outcomes they have. God in all powerful being would be like the doctor today cutting your leg off. He's in all powerful being. He could snap his fingers and solve all these problems. He could just stop the trolley. There's no flip for him. So he has no justification for causing the greater harm whereas the doctor in the 1800s would because he doesn't have the power to stop that without this cutting your leg off thing. So that would be why God would not have the same standard as humans. I understand. I think you substituted in a way the God's, you substituted the objectivity for God to subjectivity of man. And they are different, but I'll pet the others. Sorry. I feel like you still talked about my question anyway. That was a good question. So you talked about logic, you talked about feelings and all that. So since you reject a spiritual meeting and not carnal God, did you come to that conclusion using your feelings since you talked about feelings and senses? If you use them to reject God, he's not carnal, did you use your reasoning, which is logic, right? And how do you know that your reasoning was correct? If it's correct, if you say it's correct, did you come to the conclusion using your reasoning? How do you base your conclusions based on what? Oh yeah, great question. That's one of the things I wanted to bring up about David's argument. So we can know for a fact that our reasoning is correct because there's some things that, even if we grant evolution made all of our beliefs as incorrect as they possibly could, they still can't all be wrong. I can't believe I exist and not exist at the same time. I can't believe I exist and to be wrong. I can't imagine a round square. So it doesn't matter how diluted evolution or any kind of brain and a vat could make our reasoning go wrong, there are certain things that can't go wrong. And if we base our epistemology off of those things, we can get rationality and reason and logic and solid evidence without any need for a God. We can just know, these things can't be wrong. So it doesn't matter what evolution did. It doesn't matter if evolution selects for survivability rather than truth. It can't make these wrong anyway. And so if we base our belief off of those, we can get justified rationality without a God, even granting that evolution selects for survivability. That's still using your reasoning like it comes back to it. Yes. So how do you base that, how do you base that? Because I can't believe I exist and be wrong. And my reasoning will never change that. It doesn't matter how confused my reasoning you want to make it. It'll still never make that wrong. Hi, my question is for Dr. Wood. Sorry. If Christianity claims to hold the key to ultimate, the ultimate key to objective morality, then why are Christians throughout the church history constantly disagree with each other? Which one is correct? For example, Christians that support slavery, Christians that were the abolitionists. Christians that were anti-Semitic towards the Jewish people, then Christians that defended the rights of the Jewish people, Catholics versus the Protestants, pro-life versus pro-choice, multiple denominations, multiple interpretations of the Bible. And even today Christians that support gay marriage and Christians that don't support it. So how do you define which one is correct versus which one is not correct when it comes to Christian morality? Well, you start off by saying Christians claim that they hold the key to objective morality. I don't know any Christian who would say that. So even in the New Testament, Paul talks about gentiles who don't have the law, haven't received any revelation doing by nature the things that the law requires. So the Christian perspective would be that God has written certain things on human nature. So that would be part of natural law. That a conscience can be created by God. So there are all sorts of ways that God communicates to people. And one of the ways that many things get passed down to us is just by teaching. It's like someone figures out math, but then it just gets passed on by people teaching. As far as Christians doing different things, that has nothing to do with any confusion or Christianity about objective right and wrong. There might be confusing about what is right here or what is right there, but generally it's are you obeying the commands of Christ? Are you honoring all people? Are you honoring all people as created in the image of God? There are situations where you would say, okay, even though we honor, even though we're called upon to honor all people, this guy over here is such a threat to the world that we have to do something to stop him. But I mean, if you're talking about racism or any Christians who were involved in the Holocaust or something like that, it's not, oh no, we can't figure out who was right here. This Christian right here who's going around slaughtering people or this Christian who is actually following the commands of Christ. Tell me when I'm close enough, okay. So my question is for Tom. So in both the beginning and throughout the whole debate, you're talking about how you kind of don't believe in odds and that moral facts and obligations are in fact not prescriptive. My thing is, and you're saying that they are just like laws of physics, not just in the sense that they are objective, but like in every sense, that they are just like laws of physics. The thing is that what David, he wasn't able to develop this idea, a whole lot in the thing in response to that idea, but the thing is is that if I, a law of physics would be, laws of physics are like, when we say that they're descriptive, we mean like if I drop this cell phone, it will fall at roughly 9.8 meters per second per second until it's stopped by something, namely the surface of the planet. But when you are, when you see somebody beating up an old lady, you should go stop those people. That's not, see with the phone, if I drop the phone, it's going to fall at that speed. It's not like the phone could choose not to, but you can choose not to when you're faced with a moral obligation. That's why we say they're prescriptive because agents can choose whether or not to do that. So is that not a relevant distinction between laws that guide unconscious objects and laws that are commanding or directing agents? No, so I'll be exact same as gravity. Like if I see gravity and I'm gonna ski, I say I should go down the hill really, really fast. There's no ought in gravity. It's purely my subjective imagination, applying this ought to how I should best move down using this force. So there could be a force that's descriptive saying this is how psychology interacts with this field in order to cause this group of people to feel this on punching old ladies or whatever. And so the law could be purely descriptive, but the way it interacts in our brains and affects us from an evolutionary standpoint gives us these desires and aughts that are applied to them. So the law could be purely descriptive and just out there and then it affects us in such a way that it gives us these aughts as psychological features. You wouldn't need the aughts themselves to be intrinsic to the morality in any way. That would be our last question. So Tom, if cross species morality intuitively felt that it were good to torture babies and they came to a consensus upon this, what would make it objectively wrong to torture babies? If it wouldn't follow the pattern of objective morality. So for that to be objectively correct. There'd have to be some actual law of physics that corresponds to this and it'd have to be following the pattern of all the other things we also feel that correspond to this law. So just having one strange outlier that's completely the opposite of what we're seeing would be very suspect and probably not correspond to the thing that's causing all of this other pattern going in the completely opposite direction. Thank you very much. And with that, we'll conclude this debate.