james just sent me oh my hair looks goofy as but james just sent me a video that someone did reviewing one of our things so i'm gonna do a little analysis of the response video that nathan made about my refutation of all 500 plus my first criticism then is just gonna be that evidently mine and james's video is embedded in a context of um you know various youtube channels existing and the kind of content that they put out i mean it's clearly a response to capturing christianity which is a very big channel in youtube in the world of youtube apologetics with okay i don't see how this is really important to my refutation every video on youtube has the context of videos on youtube every philosophical video on youtube has the context of philosophical videos on youtube every religious video on youtube has the context of religious videos every atheistic video on youtube has the context of atheistic videos on youtube and what does that add to the conversation what does it add to understanding or critiquing my all-in-one refutation of your 500 arguments perhaps nathan if you listen to this you i mean fair enough it's seven and a bit hours coming up to wait hours so i mean it's not that you have to memorize everything we say and respond to it or something like that but there are clearly several meta points that we're making about how stupid it is to argument count to to count deductive arguments in favor of one position sure that's uh incredibly stupid to count the arguments that you can come up with because everyone can come up with an infinite number of arguments you can always add one right so it won't be an actual infinity but it will be a series that series to which you can always add one so yeah i agree 100 i because firstly if it's if if we're talking about deductive arguments someone can always just you know basically take the opposite run the argument the the other way um and someone can always count more than you and that is the matter point that we were making and then we were doing so with our um okay well i like autistic people i think they're entertaining they're lovable they're innocent most part uh i've been accused of having autism never been diagnosed but this is all neither here nor there okay we need to get into the meat and potatoes of the actual arguments and uh i forget what what he said i'm going to just rewind a little bit here because i just forgot what he said at firstly if it's if if we're talking about deductive arguments someone can always just you know basically take the opposite run the argument the other way right right right well i don't think that that's the case uh you can't just reverse deductive arguments to argue with the to argue for the opposite that's nonsense this is why i said that you are using bad logic because that uh it just doesn't work that way you know deductive reasoning helps us to arrive at the truth given true premises and uh a sound and valid argument can't arrive at it necessarily true conclusion right so we're gonna have to get into the actual argument that i made so we'll see what he says about that and this guy just sounds like a prick okay so i still haven't got onto the topic of the actual argument i just he's just evaluating me based on my face hair wardrobe setting decor like that his um response so far is like oh it's so inane uh i don't know what the wrong with i mean i don't think me or james are idiots i think james is probably quite a bit smarter than me he's got and he's got several degrees in several subjects right so he's really good at philosophy and the sciences i think he's got a well thought through world view i think if you compare me to your average person i'm doing marginally better i mean i've read a lot of philosophy i don't think i've just got like an inane world view right your world view is inane and it doesn't matter how many degrees you have it doesn't matter how smart you are until like uh academically okay or at the natural sciences you will never be as smart as satan or his demons it's not academic skills or scientific knowledge that saves you right it's humility that saves you so it's completely irrelevant how many degrees you have and how much book knowledge you have is completely irrelevant if anything it would cloud your judgment when it comes to making a decision that will affect your eternal outcome because jesus said let the little children come to me you have to be like one of these little ones you have to be so comparing your resumes and your academic achievements with mine might make you feel good but that's about all you're going to get and as jesus would say you've already had your reward here below if that's if that's what you're going for then you're selling your soul extremely cheap just the thrill of saying i have more education than david ross up in montreal quebec canada in the year 2021 you're selling your soul way too cheap if that's the thrill that you're willing to enjoy in exchange for your eternal soul it's just uh um and i think on any given point that we could talk about it have something informed to say about it particularly in philosophy of religion which i'm yeah you can have a lot to say but i mean the the refutation that i made it's not about you and your character and your education the refutation i made was that if you're going to if you're going to sit there and as an atheist try to make arguments to prove that god doesn't exist that's a self-defeating project you're contradicting yourself you're assuming the opposite of your conclusion you're assuming that god exists that we live in a well or well-ordered universe that there's meaning that one configuration of matter energy and space-time is superior in some way or other to another to another configuration of matter energy and space-time you're assuming that your judgments are meaningful and that when you think that something is more or less convincing or more or less logical that that has some objective and eternal meaning in other words you're making judgments whether those are judgments of truth or goodness or beauty or whatever it is you're making judgments and those judgments are necessarily either a objective eternal they're made with reference to a standard which is objective eternal unchanging at absolute or option b not a there is no middle way either a or not a so either you're bowing to that standard you're worshiping meaning giving worth to recognizing the worth of that standard which is god in which case welcome to monotheism or not a you don't have a standard by which you judge it you don't have a standard which is absolute you just have a standard which is mired hopelessly in relativism your standard of truth and goodness is not eternal it's just temporary here today gone tomorrow your standard of truth and goodness and so and it's not unchanging it's subject to how can i take the atheists judgments seriously well i take them seriously if those judgments are made with reference to a standard that is immutable absolute objective and eternal because at that point i'm not talking with an atheist at that point right so you're making you want to have your cake and eat it too you want to have the standard by which to judge meaningfully and then you want to turn around and say am i really the only one that sees the absurdity in that and the self-contradiction that's entailed in that i i just don't get it these atheists these so-called atheists because i don't know if they are really atheists i call them so-called atheists because i was calling myself an atheist for 25 years but i came back to god and i really to this day don't know if i ever truly believed that god did not exist i struggle with um so maybe you should point i i mean i think if you if you're going to accuse someone of only making your nine points then you should probably have at least one every single one of your arguments 500 plus all of them are inane and i'm going to show you that i'm going to do a whole series i don't care how long it takes i'll just go bit by bit make a playlist it'll accumulate over the next couple of months probably because i'm going to do other things in the meantime my whole life doesn't revolve around the atheist and their inane arguments but i will make a series i'm starting right now with this episode which is episode and i can display i can refute every single one of your arguments and not only that but everything that you say doesn't matter if it's an argument for atheism or if it's an argument against god or if it's an argument's argument against christianity or if it's just hey past the salt at whatever you think whatever you say to the extent that you deny the existence of your creator it's all absurd and inane all of it if you do an interpretive dance i don't care how elegant and beautiful it is it's in aim because you deny your crater to the extent that you deny your creator because that really is the question at hand here do you really deny that standard of truth goodness beauty it doesn't seem that way because you're very eager to make judgments very very very willing and seemingly able to make all these judgments unless you want to just admit that your judgments have zero weight zero meaning because they're just mired in relativism subjectivism and they're here today gone tomorrow and they are completely and utterly subject to change constant flux for that short amount of time that they have existence so you'll have to make up your mind and then i think there's the whole thing of you sort of get a sense of this guy's attitude from the way that he's talking about things which i find a bit creepy and weird to begin with um and the sense i get from that attitude is that his opinion of what's inane is going to be very different from mine and i think very different from most normal peoples congratulations you're normal enjoy it you've had your reward i guess so enjoy being normal enjoy being in the majority are you in the majority are you normal are you at the center of the bell curve is that the place to be is it is it the place to be at the center of the bell curve is it really when it comes to seeking truth is it best to be at the hump in the middle of the hump of the bell curve is that what you think is that what you're going to say that it's best to be normal in the quest for truth this is your analysis after having studied philosophy that it's best to be with the with the pack the group in the middle of the pack with average opinions that's your con that's your conclusion after all your study all your reading all your meditation all your thoughts well if that's the place that you are situated and you think that that's a privileged place then enjoy it i'm not interested in being normal when it comes to seeking truth i want to go where the truth leads me no matter how uncommon no matter how inconvenient that may be the difference between the theist are you a follower are you just a member do apes travel in packs and groups i don't know i'm ignorant of a lot of natural science i'm not that interested in natural science why because natural science so we're coming at life from very very very different perspectives in terms of what's essential what is the meaning of life what would you say nathan what would you say is the meaning of your life i'm very very interested and curious to know i i'm not getting the sense of because he's so much more educated or he spent his whole life in like oxford university or something but i think i'm getting good because you're up your own ass point of view okay so you would have more respect for me if i had but because i don't have degrees from oxford for example i'm up my own ass which means what which means i'm full of myself i'm arrogant i'm smug condescending mean i don't play nice with so-called because you nathan you were you were claiming to have been at one time a christian in love with your lord and savior jesus christ correct me if i'm wrong you did make that claim i have it on tape okay so i think it's natural that when i see your journey your spiritual journey going from christian ostensible christian to hard agnostic meaning that you doubt absolutely everything about your own and then on to some sort of proud of your intellect proud of your decision to be a non-theist an atheist an agnostic or whatever your label is i don't know what your label is today what are your core principles today nathan what are your core principles today in my first interview you were there are core principles involved in being a christian in your next interview you were claiming to be a there are very very very very few principles involved in being an agnostic the problem is now you're not agnostic you're not christian you are what appears to be and the problem with atheism is that you've introduced new principles into your worldview you've accepted as axiomatic you've accepted a whole bunch of are they fixed are they constantly changing and evolving i'm really curious to know but you haven't responded to my emails lately you may be busy or you may just hate me because i'm christian you may hate me because my opinion doesn't agree with yours may not like my shirt my hairdo or my decor in my room that's fine you don't have to like me but if you love the truth if you claim to love the truth if you claim that you are then why not discuss the truth why not explore why not be challenged by someone that obviously sees the world it's just so like so you get all this chest thumping rhetoric right at the start of oh this is so inane i'm so smart i've got it all figured out i'm gonna just go ahead and refute them all and then you just get a complete moronic statement all your arguments are inane that's a given that's a given and i'm going to go through all of your arguments in a series of videos all of your arguments are inane guaranteed 100 i haven't even listened to all of them but they're all a name the ones i have listened to are a name i'll say it again they're in name one more time they're in aim this is goading your pride your pride is so raw it's it's glistening with sweat and blood and tears and god knows what you are a hot mess to put it bluntly you're a hot mess because you can't handle the idea of being challenged intellectually you think i never claim to be smart i don't think i'm smart when people ask me how smart i am i say i'm probably of average intelligence i put myself in the middle of that bell curve because i don't need to be intelligent to go to heaven but i need to know the truth to know the truth i need to seek the truth and if i do seek the truth i will find the truth and that's what's been happening in 2009 i was an atheist and then i because of my search for truth i became a monotheist and it can happen to you obviously you've never been a monotheist when i interviewed you the second time i asked you what kind of analogy can we make using the mail order catalog for ordering was jesus not the bride that you expected was he not all you hoped he would be were you deceived by the hair the makeup the clothing the decor all these things that you seem to be fixated on with me in my videos or was this something about jesus character about his story about his did you love did you love jesus christ did you ever really know him and did you ever really love him and did you ever really give yourself to him did you give yourself entirely to him as a bride does to her bridegroom have you ever done that because you don't walk away from that you don't forget about that you don't explain that have you ever loved have you loved a have you ever loved your parents have you loved your siblings have you loved your pet dog have you loved have you ever loved do you know what love is if you know what love is then welcome to monotheism that's all i this is why um engaging in this space i i need to have more of like a doug approach where i just find it funny and pathetic but i mean how can you be that thick my wife calls me doug that's her nickname for me doug and my nickname for her is doug so we call each other doug and so i'd laughed out loud when he said he should adopt doug's attitude just laugh it off when people are stupid when these are stupid saying silly nonsense he he's having a hard time believing his ears nathan is really struggling here he's never been confronted with such raw truth this this cuts to the chase this cuts to the quick this goes right to the root of the issue why atheism is inane i'm only using that word because it obviously got a rise out of nathan he seemed really aggravated by that so we need to goad the atheists the reason god allows suffering in the world is because it's what saves us it's solitary it's salvific that's the primary reason god allows evil and suffering in the world it brings us to repentance if we have our wits about us so nathan's mind is blown apparently by the reaction he's giving the reaction he's giving is is i don't want to say entertaining but it's um noteworthy let's put it that way it's interesting so let's see if we can go a little bit but my i mean my problem is i engage i suppose part of the meta critique i wanted to make in doing this short video just kind of watching it and responding off the cuff is that there's so many crazy people in this space so many like bad reasoners and people who i don't know like life's hurt them or so some something's gone wrong and so for some weird reason a part of their response to that is to like believe in the flat earth or not believe in the vaccine or think that taking like alex jones's testosterone meds are gonna like fix them up or something and for some strange reason um for some of these people it seems to be like a kind of conservative disposition towards life which comes with being religious and adopting all the religious tropes and attitudes and things like okay so touch on a few points here uh he made reference to some people being crazy not being able to reason properly so that implies god because it implies that some people reason try if you if you really think you're smart try to explain that to me in simple easy to understand terms explain it to me how it is possible that one configuration of matter energy in space time is better than any other configuration of matter energy and space time explain that to me from your philosophical basis of your worldview i've encountered so many so-called atheists online particularly on the atheist experience video that i did the call that i did so many so-called atheists have extended this challenge to so many of them and it's crickets it's crickets the other point with the insanity the craziness of people right-wing crazy like right-wing people and oh all the people that are crazy they go they tend to go to the right wing do you live in a predominantly right-wing neighborhood in a predominantly right-wing city in a predominantly right-wing part of england i've bending when i've lived in england wasn't right-wing when i was there spent a year over a year there wasn't right-wing okay where are you i mean uh i'm curious to you could go 10 steps in any direction and you'll find yourself surrounded by left-wing predominantly left-wing people so why are you stuck in some right-wing enclave with a bunch of crazy right-wing people i don't get it the whole world it seems to me is dominated today by people on the left that's my impression i'm neither left nor right if you watch any of my episodes on my channel not any of them but if you if you watch my videos you will eventually discover that i hate the ideology of the right more than i hate the ideology of the left i just published a video talking about the miscarriage rate among vaccinated so-called vaccinated people and i called the people that are on bit shoot like alex jones these types of people extreme right wing conspiracy theorists because that's what they seem to be and with the particular context of the spontaneous abortion results from that preliminary study from the new england journal of medicine they were reckless and irresponsible if not outright evil lying about their interpretation of the data of that study at preliminary study so i put them in their place but i also put the new england the actual so-called scientists and doctors that published that article that preliminary study in their place as being on the left because they are because they twisted the data to their benefit and then i gave my catholic perspective which is a perspective that seeks the truth i'm not into politics i'm not into the right i'm not into the left i'm into jesus christ in this church so if you've never been a christian you may not be able to relate to my particular point of view but i am not into and then a part of like justifying that when it comes into conflict and tension with the way that most normal people think about reality is to fall into apologetics and develop like um i mean some people go down the catholic route and have seen this several times where they start thinking about things that like like they just never would have come across on their own if it wasn't preserved within this catholic tradition like okay so we're only supposed to develop our own thoughts independent of any other geniuses that came before us not supposed to read books uh you know and uh i guess what he initially said is that a lot of these crazy right-wing people tend to go into catholicism and that's where they get all these wacky ideas that they never would have encountered this is absolutely ridiculous i belong to a religion that emphasizes revelation it emphasizes submission to a living magisterium that that draws on the sacred deposit of faith that means sacred scripture and sacred tradition and it's a rich heritage intellectually and otherwise that i have to draw on it would be foolish and it would be anti-catholic anti-christian to consciously make a decision to avoid that richness that wealth of wisdom and knowledge what is your point nathan what is your point i said that all arguments imply god therefore all of your arguments are inane and all you're talking about is that i'm i read a bunch of books and it filled my head with uh catholic uh thomas and this sort of thing you're not addressing the issue everything you say just makes your position worse because if you're trying to say that your point of view is better than mine you've and then they develop this sort of okay just more of the same the vocabulary uh but then they just make leaps of reasoning like i i can see how someone can believe in catholicism and i can see how there are arguments in favor of it right and i'm self-aware enough in order to be able to actually step out of my belief system and see that someone else has a belief system so it might be the case right that for someone who believes in god's existence um and and they've got a particular sort of web of beliefs a particular kind of metaphysics of reality that they think is the case and it might follow from that kind of structure of reality that in order to have intelligibility or something like a necessary condition is god's existence right but i'm self-aware enough to see that that is just an alternative model of reality to the one that i currently believe in for whatever okay nathan are you saying that i'm not self-aware enough to know that atheists have a different model of the universe and a different model of uh life and a different model of uh metaphysics and uh epistemology and all the rest are you saying i'm not self-aware enough to know that i just told you i've and i told you during my interviews i was atheist for most of my adult life for 25 years of adult life from the age of 14 to 39 i was an atheist i had a worldview a lot of it was coherent i don't think it corresponded with reality though there's more to truth theories than just the coherence truth theory right there's the correspondence theory of truth that's equally important if not more importantly you can have a perfectly coherent system that doesn't correspond with reality it's not worth much so i do understand your point of view because i was atheist i was an agnostic i was a pantheist there's all kinds of things it's completely beside the point and it's completely ridiculous to suggest that i can't even grasp another world view it's completely ridiculous i was an atheistic satanist where are you getting your data where are you getting your insider information on my personality on what i went through as a child on what i what i'm thinking what i'm feeling you know you're gonna psychoanalyze me all i'm saying is that if you're arguing then you've lost as an atheist the atheist can't argue because arguing is self-contradictory for the atheist because if it implies meaning if if it implies something that's actually objectively and eternally and absolutely true or good or beautiful or just and otherwise it just doesn't matter it literally does not matter what you say i mean i could just say well you don't know that god exists because i know he doesn't right that's just the yeah it's a pretty bad one um but like i said deduction doesn't work that way you can't just invert a deduction there are reasons why the rational human being must conclude that god exists there are good reasons have you not encountered these reasons in your studies when you were a christian were you not aware of these reasons the certainty that we have that we can have potentially we're honest with ourselves if we're honest with ourselves we have the potential to discover reasons for the necessary existence of god did he not discover these as a philosopher it's embarrassing i find it extremely embarrassing i don't know what to say images i'm just going to continue to refute your 500 arguments and hopefully you'll watch my refutations or some of them and you'll wake up before it's too late because once you're in hell there's nothing you can do you can't study you can't read you can't so wake up that's my advice so answers in the chat says nothing useful is achieved by flinging insults back and forth i mean you're right it's natural to want to feel but it's just okay so he's apparently uh nathan you think you're justified and saying my perspective is ridiculous but that's exactly what you're angry about is that i think your perspective is ridiculous so what's good for the goose is good for the gander it's just like there's a certain symmetry that we have on that one particular point i think you're wrong you think i'm wrong i think you're ridiculous you think i'm ridiculous i think this is this should be a given we don't even need to waste breath talking so i mean what follows from the fact that arguments exist so arguments is a word that word means something so i hear the word arguments and i don't know i think of maybe some that i would consider to be arguments maybe some features of arguments like um premises conclusions um inference that sort of thing but nowhere in the the content of that meaning we all know what an argument is it could be a philosophical argument it could be an argument between husband and wife over the most trivial thing they're different kinds of arguments but is that we're trying to convince the other using right reason we don't have access to the beatific vision here below most of us so we have to select among relative goods we have to build a case using the available goods the goods that are available life is complicated and like i said we don't have access to the ultimate good here below in this finite world we have access to relative our judgment about which good is higher than the other good is debatable and we need to work this out with fear and trembling i don't care if it's how to roll the toothpaste up or if it's of the existence of god we have to compare and contrast ideas that's what arguing is right unless you want to resort to some sort of perverted definition of arguing where you just want to bash someone over the head in order to exert power you might have a worldview that reduces all power to power over like oppo says you might have some ridiculous psychological interpretation of everything or some feminist interpretation of everything or i don't know there are all kinds of silly nuanced worldviews i don't know exactly what you believe but arguments are reasoning in an attempt to get closer to the truth either you yourself you're uncertain so you argue with yourself and others to try to formulate and clarify ideas for yourself or you have a certain amount of certainty and confidence and you're helping another helping your brother to get closer to the truth you could still be wrong but there is a hierarchy among the truths even for each individual there's a hierarchy there are many other things that can be doted to various different degrees and so we have to discover that hierarchy be aware of that hierarchy and use the most fundamental and certain truths that we can to build a coherent worldview that corresponds as much as possible with reality i admit that i'm wrong about most things but i also know that there are many things that i know with certainty and the existence of god is one of those that's the that is the utmost certainty that i have about anything beyond even the knowledge of my own existence is the existence of god so i don't know what you have as your foundation what are your principles now he could be saying that um well a necessary condition or a pre unnecessary precondition right is that god exists in order to be able to have arguments but he's not actually given us any reasons to think that is i gave the reason i gave the reason the reason is free will the reason is truth the reason is beauty the reason is unity the reason is justice the reason is goodness you're making reference to all these you're judging with reference to some standard which is like i said either absolute eternal immutable and objective or either way i win because either you're a monotheist congratulations or so so so the first criticism is that it's not like this kind of clear logical entailment like two plus two equals four right or um i'm uh i'm a man and i'm wearing slippers therefore i'm wearing slippers right that's just a clear logical entailment it it's nothing like that it's exactly that arguing logically entails truth goodness beauty justice harmony peace everything all the transcendentals necessarily do you want to sit there with a straight face and tell me that you could approach the truth while leaving behind peace this is not rocket science folks it's um it seems to be more like a kind of inference that he's making but he's not given us any argument yet or reason to suppose that and even if he does i mean wants to prevent someone who just disagrees with him from just giving a different story right and then we just have to compare the virtues of the story and it seems to me like a story that doesn't need does it doesn't necessitate postulating some random theoretical entity that seems to have nothing to do with arguments whatsoever or any of the things referred to by arguments is going i just have to repeat myself again and again and again and again it's it's tiresome it's wearying when you argue when you make an argument that your judgments are made with reference to a standard and either that standard is objective eternal unchanging in which case welcome to monotheism or not in which case whatever dude because it's not like he's gonna disagree that um that there are like people and maybe like minds and thoughts and influences being made he's gonna agree to all those things so as long as you can just come up with a model that has all those like natural features of an argument and then it's just very silly it's silly right okay do you have you nathan do you have any basis in philosophy of the natural sciences can you justify your belief in that list that laundry list that you gave the other the others thoughts the others words the others deeds whatever it is it's all this stuff that's happening in a conversation or an argument right you're pointing to these manifest realities right are you believing in all of this because you're ultimately a naive realist is that the foundation is that the foundation of your worldview naive realism like oh it seems like there's this world and there's the other and sense perceptions and all that is that is that your basis really right your worldview then you're going to have to deal with i don't i don't care if you can list all the wacky and weird schools of thought in the history of western philosophy i've i've got an overview of it i've been through the gamut there are people today writing books filling bookshelves right but when it comes right down to it are you able to justify philosophically the existence of the material world and the other if you are nathan if you are if you have a basis i think you should share it with me because i haven't i haven't been watching your videos i don't know anything about you other than when you're on my show you were first a christian and then an agnostic that's all i know about you so i could go and watch all your videos and try to discover who you are but i thought i'd just send you an email which i did asking you to come on and share your ongoing journey with me and my listeners that's the most efficient pragmatic approach if you and i want to discuss ideas and approach the truth together that's the way we should do it if you want to just critique me because you don't like my hairstyle you don't like my t-shirt or the same one today just to bug you and you don't that's just immature that's all there is i i get that where he's coming from this is how he thinks but it's just clearly a ridiculous way of thinking no it's the only way to think the only way to think is with reference to an eternal objective absolute and immutable standard of truth that's the only way to think that's the only way to reason that's the you can't you there's nothing you can say if you want to grunt and roll around on the ground that's just as good as an argument you could possibly make because every argument you make oh yeah yeah yeah this can't be the first time you've encountered that you this can't be the first time you've actually contemplated this you can't this can't be the first time you put two and two together this can't be the first time so the the exact same criticism as before which is that well it's clearly not an entailment like arguments doesn't like contain the content of free will yeah it does if you're not reasoning freely you're not reasoning period i want you to as a thought experiment nathan and all the atheists so-called atheists out there listening to this and there will be a couple i want you to do a little thought you know you've seen those movies where they freeze time and the action hero is like able to kill everyone or dodge the bullets and all that crap right freeze time boom zoom in look at all the quantum stuff zoom out look at all the you know the whole universe and the relativistic scale everything zoom in zoom out scan it travel around and then let it roll forward in time backward in time scan it scan all from beginning to end if there's no beginning and there's no end in your worldview then just scan scan scan scan infinitely fast to the past infinitely fast forward just scan all that freeze again zoom around big small zoom in zoom out let the time roll again play with it this is it's all of the configurations of matter and if you want to zoom in on one particular piece here and compare it with another piece over there good luck justifying that from your atheistic worldview good luck i'd love to see you try if any of you listening can come up with a justification a philosophical justification for saying that one configuration is better than another this could still be compatibilist right so we'd still be free but if he means libertarian free will you could have this causal deterministic picture where you bet humans on this view can be kind of like mechanistic automata and they can have arguments which they sort of espouse and give to each other and sometimes people are going to change their minds based on reasons sometimes people are not going compatibilism is just her determinism and all they're doing is they're saying heart determinism is true but you have all these feelings and desires and sometimes your desires are frustrated but sometimes they're not and uh you know wake up people hard determinism there's no freedom and hard determinism okay so when they talk about compatibilist free it's one of those words uh doesn't make sense um there's free will or there's not okay there's free will or there's not now no one in their right mind would attribute absolute free will to a creature that just said we're finite we're not going to be without constraints only god is perfectly free only god is absolutely free and in heaven if god willing we make it to heaven we will be diving into that freedom participating in that freedom discovering that freedom partaking more and more of that freedom as we become more and more united with god that's what heaven is but here below for the most part we're but that doesn't mean that we don't have free will because if we don't have free will then we don't have responsibility there can be no praise there could be no blame there can only be the illusion of praise and blame the illusion of merited praise and blame the illusion of free will the illusion of reasoning the illusion of arguments the illusion of value the illusion of it is a true dichotomy there is free will or there is not and it is self-evident that we have free will nathan you have free will that's clearly a consistent story right no it's not consistent it's not consistent at all compatibilism is hard determinism you're just pretending like you've smuggled in free will somehow you he's not giving us a valid argument if the conclusion that he's making is consistent with if if the premises that he's giving right arguments exist are consistent with the counter conclusion that libertarian free will does not exist and it is okay for the sake of argument we'll say that your 500 arguments your 500 arguments against christianity are better than my single argument counter argument against so you might be thinking yay that means i win but no you lose because if one argument or one set of arguments is better than another argument or another set of arguments you lose if one configuration of matter energy in space time is better than another you lose that's the dilemma that the atheist is faced with you have to abandon meaning you have to abandon everything that's meaningful for human beings if you want to claim to be an atheist unless he's going to give us some kind of stronger argument or something that's actually um so strong arguments are better than not so strong and valid arguments are better than not so valid right you just lost the etymological origins of a word have nothing to do with its current use and meaning that evolution is relevant and meaningful to who you are today right okay but the evolution the so-called evolution of a word its history and origin and how it changes i take all that with a grain of salt it's just interesting to note i put the etymology in a comment on my on my video it's just a bit of color we all know what an argument is we're seeking the light it's enlightenment that we're seeking we're trying to enlighten ourselves or the other it's that simple if you want to say that argument no longer means approaching the truth and striving to reason and to come up with a rational explanation justifications for beliefs and these sorts of things if you want to say that then just come up with your definition but if it's intelligible you lose you're better off grunting and groaning and just scratching your head that's it because if you're gonna communicate in a way that is it's not like by digging into the etymology of a word you for you get into its essence or something in a way like this is like some weird sort of um i i'm saying weird because i'm annoyed at how sort of arrogant this guy started out and i think he's being a muppet but um the this sort of idea that by finding out about the historical origins of a word i've got some secret extra knowledge about the essence of its meaning but that's just not right i mean okay so even that even though it's the most trite and silly argument i i know he's just being silly i know he's just being but he's assuming he's assuming meaning that arguments have different uh strengths different measures of validity soundness and this sort of thing he's assuming all that like is that again there's a need to actually argue here and i don't mean just list you you don't have to like just talk in terms of syllogisms or something but not providing any supporting reasons and merely like asserting the these claims when it's really apparent that there are it's just obvious that there are different views that the vast majority of people in philosophy take if you read a fill paper survey so it shows me a complete lack of self-awareness to not be aware that one's in the minority with the views that they take the difference is not that you're self-aware and i'm not nathan the difference is that i understand that one i have a philosophical basis for my knowledge my belief and knowledge that one point of view is better than another one argument's better than another one way of reasoning is better than another one point of view is better than another i have a philosophical basis for that i also have a philosophical basis for existence in the material world and the other you don't have that if you can't reason freely if you can't weigh the options and come to a decision a reasoned decision this is what it means to reason it means to look at the options and to select using your free will to select among the options see that that's just not right it could be completely mechanistic right um and then you become aware of reasons and then you know say if v comes in now and with like a big blue ball and just shoves it in my face right um it's not like i then sort of sit back like a in the cartesian theater of my mind look at all the sensory apparatus and think hmm am i gonna will to have a belief about that blue ball um or it's not like um i don't know there's tons of things i've not thought about in maths before like i hadn't thought about the um chain rule for ages right i hadn't thought about trigonometry for ages and then this morning i was doing something where i had to use the chain rule to differentiate um a trigonometric function right and as i kind of as i read the stuff on the page and as i kind of conceived of the way that these things fit together it wasn't like i saw a plausible candidate option um for the correct way to like differentiate this thing and then volitioned myself to believe that that is true it's like i just saw it and formed the belief you know like once i became aware of the relevant reasons like reasons that i'd forgot for believing a particular thing once i became aware of the relevant reasons i just formed the belief right mechanistically so so much to unpack here but let's just keep it really really brief okay we don't apprehend the highest good directly we have here in this finite fallen world but just in the finite world suffices for the sake of this point we have access to goods that are relatively good they're not the absolute good we don't have god we don't have the beatific vision before us and then we have to choose between heaven and hell it becomes very very clear same thing with the syllogism we have that sort of absolute clear proof one plus one equals two or anything like that other examples of things where it's just obvious this is the way to go and this is how uh there aren't a lot of options but even when i studied math and physics at university guess what we got bonus points you could get more than 100 depending on how you came to that same correct one and only correct answer the same answer different people got the same answer but the way they arrived at it was more or less elegant hello so there's free will involved there's creativity involved it's not an absolute on or off thing we have free will even when solving problems that have one and only one correct solution so you need to step back and re-examine your evaluation of free will free will is not absolute for any of us creatures the notion of possibility refutes atheism it just depends how we cash it out i mean if you mean by possibility like something about god then that notion of possibility but that might refute atheism but i don't mean by possibility something about god or god's mind so that notion of possibility doesn't just do the thought experiment zoom in freeze time zoom out go through time scan time front to back backwards and forwards up and down travel around in this creation using your mind's eye travel around take a tour okay it's a model it's imperfect it lacks information but you just fill in the gaps with the your imagination based on your sense perceptions what you've encountered you know they're objects there's matter energy and all this sort of thing yeah your model is not going to be 100 correct that's not the point the point is that we know that reality is manifest and we know that things are in flux and changing and we know there's space time and there's matter energy and you can the idea of that or dimensional object called space-time all the amount all the matter energy is there with all its shifting configurations over all time even if you want infinite time backwards and forwards go for it you can still hold that 4d object in your mind just like you can hold in your mind the concept of actual infinity try it i'm doing it right now okay so hold that 4d object which is all of matter energy and space time hold that and then tell me with a straight face that you have a philosophical basis in your atheistic world that you have a philosophical basis for this notion of possibility i'd love to hear that love to hear it never had an atheist even try the only thing the atheist can do is say it is what it is because hard determinism is the case the only thing the theist can do is say i am what i am yeah your tit for tat doesn't work because i just told you that we can have this thought experiment we can have the 4d object for lack of a better word of all matter energy and space time all the conflict shifting configurations it's the only thing that you can say if you want to say something intelligible as an atheist you're limited this 4d object it played out like this and this and this and that and this and that the other thing that matter bounced around like this and that the other thing and quantum effects and relativity and everything else okay it did all these wonderful things and colors and flavors and smells and everything else okay put all of it in there in this 4d object which is all of and your philosophical worldview your atheism your non-theism allows you to say precisely one thing it you can't talk about possibilities you can't talk about value meaning love judgments goodness truth beauty justice you can't talk about that i will listen to you when you say it is what it is but any other intelligible utterance is like the it's just not true because peop i mean for example right cartesian souls could still exist with liberty i don't think that free will is libertarian free will yeah we're going to have to cut short these comments because we're spinning our wheels now but basically what i would say is that you're indulging in whenever you're doing your little fantasies about all the different theories and possibilities and all sorts and you're you're indulging in theism you're riding on the fumes of your theism if ever you were a christian to begin with you but you are inherently a monotheist by nature god created you you have inherently within you the potential at least to deduct with certainty without recourse to faith without recourse to any faith-based beliefs and without recourse to religion without recourse to revelation using pure reason the light of natural you are able to know with certainty that god exists so you are a theist whether you like it or not whether you know it or not you have that potential and that is the fundamental option you have to decide am i going to rebel against my creator am i going to rebel against god by denying his very existence that's rude but one could paint a picture of reality where one has libertarian free will and a cartesian soul whatever you want and that interacts with natural reality i mean that's still simpler than all that plus it's nothing is simpler than god god is absolutely simple and the you know the whole point of occam's razor if you want to bring that in is that we don't multiply causes beyond what is necessary right so obviously the finite world is pretty complicated the world in human culture is very complicated it seems that way we are not able to comprehend the unity of the attributes of god can't under we can't really comprehend we can apprehend but can't comprehend the unity the ontological unity of all the transcendentals and all the pure perfections of god all the attributes of that we can't comprehend it it goes beyond our finite ability to reason but we can apprehend it and we can know it with certainty even though we can't comprehend it just like you can't comprehend your free will but you can't deny it because in my point is just that atheism as a position is just to say it is just a particular kind of view of reality wherein god doesn't exist it doesn't tell you anything else about this other stuff you joking are you joking you don't think there are logical implications for your axiomatic assumptions i mean theists are going to cash out the way that they sort of talk about metaphysics where god presumably has some kind of working role in that model but any any kind of word where the meaning of it isn't god in that sort of uh entailment sense or like containing the meaning of of god or something you're going to be able to kind of include those entities on a non-theistic picture of reality or an if there's no way to get free will out of uncaused effects isn't isn't that literally what agent causation is an uncaused effect no our free will is the cause of a lot of natural the conversation the conversation i'm having now with my computer with myself with you virtually through the medium of this technology a conversation that any two people have it is fundamentally caused by supernatural minds our minds are not natural our minds are not brains our minds are supernatural our minds have the ability to reason that means they have the ability to reason that's how we know that our minds are supernatural i mean just from pure reason the natural light of reason we know that reason is supernatural even though we can use a very grounded and pragmatic form of reasoning like it's 8 am i have to get up even though i don't want to have to go to work you know you can think of these very pragmatic decisions that are made or you could be in the mud doing your biological research and it all seems very grounded in the natural world in your laboratory and all this sort of thing but every thought you have is supernatural every thought is supernatural every thought every time you use reasoning it is necessarily free reasoning if it's not for your reasoning there's no antecedent cause to the volition of your will are you joking well for the atheist i guess this is the conundrum is that you just don't have an uncaused first cause right you don't have a first deficient cause or anything what do you have what are your principles what are you what is the foundation of your world is it turtles all the way down really that's you got nothing that just makes you look more and more ridiculous yeah well you look ridiculous too like right back at you little man like what this is why i was getting annoyed at the start because if my niece came to me and said oh i tried heroin it's amazing you really should try it it's the best and this and that i'd be like uh you're being stupid you're selling your soul cheap if you're going to these forages and doing cocaine and heroin and all these things that you think are so pleasurable and so high brow and sophisticated and all the cool kids are there you're a loser you're a loser wake the hell up right that's not that's not health that's not beauty that's not life that's not that's not good that's not truth you've been fooled okay you've been fooled you're full wake i i personally don't believe in libertarian free will because i don't think it makes any sense as a concept like i i don't even understand what it could yeah so you are the ultimate judge you are the pope you are god almighty in your little empire okay so it doesn't get this idea doesn't get doesn't make sense to me that's that's weird you know that goes in the dumb pile the dumb ideas okay free will that's stupid so congratulations enjoy your rain it's a very very brief rain let me assure you it's very very brief glory that you're enjoying here enjoy it but i believe in free will in the compatibilist sense i just mean something slightly different slightly different no it's infinitely different compatible is free will is her determinism i believe in free will there's an infinite difference between my worldview in terms of free will and your worldview in terms of free will infinite difference it's not a slight you know namely a coherent concept right if you think it's coherent to deny love anything anything that humans traditionally found valuable and meaningful including value is that not too high a price to pay for your alleged coherent worldview with respect to free will don't you think you're paying just a little bit too high of a price i think so i think you should reevaluate so you have the subjective experience of desire so it's hard determinism but oh i get the feeling of desire sometimes my desires are fulfilled sometimes they're frustrated but when they're fulfilled comes to me i get the result that i desired congratulations i don't know what to say i mean this is just ridiculous it's and then that also makes sense with like normal with other sort of senses of free as well that we might talk about where you know some some kind of um constraints on you which mean that you can't do something and you say you know that person isn't free should i really have to explain this again we're not absolutely free we're not gods we're creatures we're finite when i say i have free will it doesn't mean that government doesn't impose constraints on my life doesn't mean my wife doesn't impose yeah rhetoric point if you start out annoyed when you watch a clip you seem a bit unhinged i get your own so i am life's tough in the hood i have sympathy for this guy nathan he's seems like a sweet guy sensitive guy an intelligent guy and a warm and he's self-deprecating he's got that he's got that low self-esteem happening which i find endearing it's a very canadian attribute characteristic so i like this guy he doesn't like me but it's because i'm an annoying prick apparently but i mean he's not the first to point that out and just always chalk it up to my because i am self-aware i can understand how from his point of view where we're special metaphysical beings that mummy cares about um it is actually going to be really upsetting to say that we're abes but from my point of view i'm just like yeah like this is obviously saying like i've got hands right yeah well you don't have a philosophical basis much less an empirical basis or you believe that you have hands okay that's number one and i am loved by mommy the blessed virgin mary and daddy god almighty god the father i am special i am loved i am loved as though no other creature existed if you had really ever loved jesus christ then you would know exactly what i'm talking about the fact that you don't understand it makes me think makes me suspect that probably you never loved your lord and savior jesus christ i hope i'm wrong so it's not this sort of reductio that he thinks it is to say like they're gonna admit that we're actually apes it's like uh yeah i don't need to reduct you i just need to know that there is something called the principle of proportionate causality you can't give what you don't have you can't give what you don't have do that 4d examination of all configurations of matter energy and space time throughout all space and time hold that in your mind and look at your story of evolution whether it's cosmic evolution or the evolution of from non-life to life or the evolution of life species morphing and evolving and expanding and changing look look at all that and tell me if it's if if there's a philosophical basis much less an empirical natural science basis that non-life can turn into life and that one form of relatively simple life can change into more complex forms of life ask yourself is there a philosophical basis much less an empirical basis for your belief there isn't there is not you have a fantasy you have a story you a carefully concocted lie that's all you have if you believe in evolution theory different theories of evolution whether it's theistic evolution or secular versions of evolution things do change obviously from parents to child you're going to see changes but you don't go from an ape to a human you just it just cannot happen because apes have an ape nature and humans have wait for it a human nature the notion of nature that things have an essence a nature if you're willing to abandon that you're not left with much i can tell you i can give you a little hint of what you're left with it's a catchphrase it's the only intelligible thing that you really should be bold enough to utter that is it is what it is so it's hard to take the atheist seriously it really is hard to take the you seriously and it's the same the atheist it's hard okay so uh nathan took exception to the definite um um he doesn't think that he should take me seriously with my point of view how about you just think about your own world view you just think about how about you examine your faith-based beliefs how about you um try to justify to yourself if not to me but justify to evolution your belief in just as a little homework exercise i think it might be good to do that before we talk next because i'd like to have you on my live stream i'd like to come on your live stream whichever works better for you if that freaks you out and you just rather avoid me for the rest of your life then so be it that will become evident as time goes by i'll keep inviting you and then there'll be crickets but if you do want to confront your on your most cherished but unexamined i mean with that pandemic t-shirt on and you know like let's just add homonym the reason i wore this shirt is because it says my that's got to be the most left wing shirt i've ever when i bought this shroud shirt for my i wore it i think i wore it the reason that i accept this part of the shirt up top says pandemic instead of pandemic is not because i buy into the right-wing conspiracy theories i don't i'm not stupid i have a really i already have a religion i'm catholic i'm not a right-wing guy i'm catholic i think the right wing is stupid and evil right i love and respect the humans on the right i love and respect the humans on the left i'm surrounded by lefties i don't know maybe one slightly right of center friend okay i'm surrounded by people on the left for most of my life i was moderately left now i'm i mean i've done tests online political the political landscape where do i fall because i don't believe the hype i don't believe the hype of the left but it's okay to kill your baby in the womb i that pope francis is the antichrist or whatever whatever it is or that all politicians are drinking the blood of children i mean it could be true but but the this idea of pandemic i like it because the issue for me if you haven't figured it out yet the issue for me is usually centered on and the principle of subsidiary in my religion teaches that power must flow to the lowest possible application of power that we give authority to the smallest lowest level of authority whenever possible individuals do have rights and freedoms and of course we do have a valid municipal provincial or state and federal and even potentially world government there are there's a place for government i'm not an anarchist my church does not promote one form of government over against another but there is a principle and that principle is subsidiary there are other principles too like the principle of life you cannot kill the elderly just because it's convenient and it will save the government a lot of money we cannot kill the disabled just because it's convenient and it might save them some discomfort and pain we cannot kill the children in the womb just because they're missing a chromosome or they're they're defective in some way or it's inconvenient it would cost too much money or the parents might not be ideal parents or whatever the case may be or the mother was raped we cannot kill a child in the womb because that that child was conceived in so plan democ what that means to me is there's a pandemic today and like pope francis said gossip is a worse disease it's a worse virus today than sars kofi too gossip is more deadly it's more regrettable it's more pernicious it's more evil it's more prevalent so another evil that's is the planning the planning that's taking place people they're making health choices for me and they're making choices for me i'm an individual i have a certain amount of autonomy because i have free will and i have the dignity that comes from the fact that i am created my soul is created out of nothing ex nihilo at the moment of conception in my mother's womb my parents didn't create me they procreated my body and god created at the moment of conception my soul so i'm a person comprised of body and soul as are all living humans after death there's a separation of the so the planning that goes into what we could call a pandemic is an overreach of governments conservative governments centrist governments left-wing governments socialists republicans democrats conservative party of canada new democratic party of canada liberal party of canada whatever whatever the there is an overreach so i'm very comfortable even though i don't subscribe to every use of the word pandemic in particular we could think right away of some extreme right-wing conspiracy theories right i don't subscribe to those but people are violating the principle of subsidiarity and they're planning things that they shouldn't be planning they're orchestrating things that they're making their business things rebellion against that seems to you strikes you as right wing then so be it you're just you've got your biases i can't help you i can assure you i'm not right-wing i'm not left-wing i'm a human being with a human nature god-given when i first interviewed nathan he was so nathan's trying to save face he's trying to say look guys uh that was it's an emotional thing i was a psychotic episode or whatever joined a cult because i was vulnerable or depressed or whatever i don't know what his reasons are i don't know but if he's saying flippantly and sarcastically that he belong to a cult what he's trying to do is say look guys i wasn't in my right mind when i claimed to be a christian i wasn't so i wasn't thinking straight okay oh remember that time i joined the cult oh but i'm cool now i'm one of the pack now i'm i'm on that uh peak of the normal curve when it comes to seeking truth when it comes to ontology i'm a naive realist just like you guys i just uh seems like the world and the other exists so yeah let's go with it oh it seems like we have morality and ah you know there's no god no obviously but it seems to be a morality oh yeah i can i make choices but everything's hard to talk about corruption i'm talking about a pandemic here where governments are overreaching you're overreaching as an individual when you sell out and you say oh i plead temporary insanity i wasn't really christian guys uh i'm cool i'm cool i'm cool okay you're corrupt that's what you are the second time we chatted he had recourse to what i call inordinate yeah well i don't have to talk too much about this i mean when you deny things that we can know with certainty then your agnosticism is just a cozy little hiding place that's all it is it's just just a way to hide this is where the creepy catholic cult stuff starts coming in you know you know how creepy only those things that are faith-based but he doubted at that time uh this is back in february of 2020. at that time he was doubting everything he was not certain of anything but the fact that he is a being that has experiences so when he when nathan says that i'm creepy and that this creepiness is a catholic he doesn't know what he's talking about i mean uh the inordinate agnosticism has nothing to do with my catholicism that's just as uh you know as a generic monotheist which i was because i hated christianity i did not on that journey between hard solipsism and catholicism there were several stops the first stop of course was generic monotheism and then there was some toying with islam and