okay so we are live i'm here with chad chad how are you doing hi good how are you nice to see your face finally after uh it's been a year or so that i've sort of been aware of your presence he left some really interesting comments on a couple of my videos and uh before we get started do you mind just giving a really quick summary of like who you are and what kind of background you have in terms of ideas or religions stuff like that yeah um okay so let's see i'm uh well my name's chad i live in colorado springs i'm in my 30s going to school right now for radiology but i have a passing interest in philosophy and religion i grew up in a christian household protestant household when i was younger fell away from the faith you know around my teen years as people often do um and then i don't know somewhere around my mid-20s i felt the urge to seek for god again um not wouldn't say that i believed in him but i felt the urge to you know make a connection with god if there is one and that's what kind of led me back into philosophy and thinking about these things and though i haven't come to recognize you know the existence of god if there is one or the truth of any particular religion i think the journey has been incredibly informative for me just in learning how to think and um just realizing how many different ways there are to conceptualize and think about um think about controversial subjects like this um because it's not a it's not at all obvious what's true and what's false um so that's that's just a little bit about myself um so i i don't remember exactly what sparked my interest in this channel or what you said or what initially got me interested in talking to you a year ago but i do i recently like within the past week i listened to a conversation you had with someone named i think alex 16 year old kid and that kind of got me back into wanting to have a conversation so sure what do you think of uh what'd you think of uh alex he reminds me a lot of myself when i was at his age sweet kid sweet kid and uh he's gonna come back uh this is the thing the beautiful thing about youth not to stereotype but you know youth you have a bit more energy your cpu is faster and um you have a certain amount of innocence like i told him in one of his interviews he's done two already like i told him uh you know the kids today they lose their innocence very very young so i mean we're all wounded and uh at a certain point once we've sort of talked about all the philosophical angles about uh religion god and religion it would be nice to hear your thoughts about sin this idea of sin like do you feel like a sinner like i i felt like a sinner when i was an atheist but um if you want to address that quickly now and then we'll get into philosophy or the other way around well sure we can i mean i could comment on that um so i think um a lot of times people will equate the word sin with any kind of immoral action or action that produces sort of an emotional response of empathy or guilt or something like that so i do believe you know i do have a conscience and i have um moral impulses but i don't attribute them to any god and so any violation of those impulses i wouldn't qualify sin because sin by definition entails the existence of some kind of mind that renders things right or wrong and i have a lot of opinions on i have a lot of thoughts and views on morality and questions on morality that wasn't really what i was hoping to talk talk about much today but i you know that's my that's my two steps no we're gonna talk we're gonna talk about the stuff that interests you most because that's what gets you pumped up and that's where you can really uh dig deep and expose because you know it's you and i don't necessarily agree about a whole bunch of stuff but it's hard it is hard to find someone that's willing to sit there and listen to you and to be a sounding board for your ideas that you've just sort of been turning over in your own head and if you could just bounce them off someone then you can realize okay well this part of my thinking is strong this other part is obviously weak and uh that's that's part of the benefit of doing something like this especially with a stranger because if you were to do this with your mother or your sister brother whatever um you might have a whole lot of uh baggage that's keeping you confused about just the pure ideas that you wanna that you wanna play with right and this is what i'm most excited about other than god in religion i'm excited about playing with ideas there's a certain playfulness there's a joy there's an exploration and discovery and that i think you share that uh that love of wisdom that love of truth right you said something interesting there about um recognizing areas you're strong in areas you're not strong in and i kind of think of that as well i my part of my purpose in this discussion is to you know get closer to truth if they're you know and i'm just curious if you feel that it is an ep like an epistemic virtue to acknowledge the possibility that you could be wrong generally speaking for let's set aside god for for a second and religion but i'm just curious if you think that generally speaking the willingness to admit that you could be wrong about your beliefs the possibility that you could be wrong about your beliefs is an epistemic virtue yeah for sure i don't know if you listen to last year i sent you two videos that had to do with doubt faith and reason did you listen to them at all do you remember yeah i i mean it's been a year since i listened to him yeah maybe i should have revisited but don't doubt is essential to my worldview doubt is essential yeah except when it comes to certain propositions perhaps right i cannot doubt the laws of thought the law of non-contradiction is not subject to doubt the law of the excluded middle the law of identity those are not subject to doubt um there there are some things that are self-evidently true uh you know in terms of uh axiomatic logical principles the principle of causality like once you have the material world once you have a foundation to believe in the material world and the existence of the other then the laws of uh for example causality sufficient reason all these sorts of things come into play so yeah there are a lot of things i do not doubt i will not doubt i cannot doubt because yeah go ahead sorry um you mentioned the laws of thought but what is the existence of god in there as well as one of those things that you just you think can't be doubted yes it is okay now that i went from atheism to monotheism now i understand that god cannot be doted and uh did you notice that i just responded to your long-winded comment on alex's thing did you read my comment i did yeah i was hoping we could we could talk about that a little bit because that's very relevant yeah all right let me go to that um i think i actually have it pulled up right here so you say wait do you want to read yours first provide a little context on this first yeah you can read your entire comment if you want even though it's long uh i you know i don't summarize it okay um let's just let's start from let's start from the beginning which was your conversation with with alex sure um so you i i had a little bit of trouble understanding whoops i had a little bit of a trouble understanding um exactly what your line of reasoning was because you seemed to you talked about um these three ways of not existing that was it seemed like you were kind of tying that in but then when i was thinking about it it seemed to me that what you were saying is just based on this this axiom of motor logic that if something is possibly necessary then it's necessary um if it's possible yeah but so so you were saying you you guys were talking about well you made a comment that as long as somebody so so much as acknowledges the possibility that god exists then um by necessity god exists because it's part of the definition of the being we're talking about that it exists necessarily and in modal terms we would say that means uh he exists in all possible worlds right um though i haven't used that but i i i do i do understand the distinction that you made in your uh comment you know between the epistemic and the metaphysical so a large portion of my comment and it was a little long-winded i'll give you that um but a large portion of it was basically dedicated to explaining the difference as i see it between metaphysical possibility and epistemic possibility and just put it simply i see a epistemic possibility is a statement when you say something is possible in that sense of the word you're really making a statement about the limitations of your knowledge or awareness rather than making a statement about the thing itself whereas metaphysical possibility is more has to do with the existence of the thing itself so the analogy i used was if you imagine that i have like a an opaque bag and i tell you there's either two or three dice in the bag six sided dice um and i ask you the question well i don't let you look inside the bag you don't know how many dice are in the bag but i tell you there's either two or three and i asked the question is it possible to roll a 13 with what's in the bag now if you were speaking about epistemic possibility you would say you would be perfectly justified in saying yes it's possible to roll a 13 with what's in the bag because for all you know there could be three dice in the back but if you're speaking about metaphysical possibility then it seems like what you really should say there is i don't know whether it's possible rule 13 because there could be you know two two dice in the bag there could be three and if there's there if there's only two six sided dice in the bag obviously six and six is twelve you there's it's impossible to get a 13 out of that right so that was i think uh for me that was helpful that analogy was helpful in understanding the difference but uh i think to tie that into what we were or what you were talking about to say that if god possibly exists then he necessarily exists that's that statement as far as i can tell is only true if you're speaking about metaphysical possibility and the people who say you know tying this back into your conversation with alex the people who say you know it's possible god exists i don't think they're usually making a statement about metaphysical possibility i think they're usually making a statement about the limitations of their knowledge and the way you can easily check this is that this is if they say it's possible that god exists you just ask the question well is it also possible that god doesn't exist i think most of the time they'll answer yes which is a clear indication that they're speaking about epistemic possibility because it would be otherwise it would be a contradiction to say it's possible that god exists and it's possible that god doesn't exist that would be contradictory if you're speaking about metaphysical possibility so my my main criticism is and and by the way yeah in your comment you you said that you were being a little bit facetious when you said welcome to monotheism um and well first i'll let i've been talking for a little bit so i'll let you chime in if you have any comments and then we can talk about your your most recent response yeah well the first the first thing to say is that i uh i don't go for philosophical rigor when i interact on social media or in comments on youtube and this sort of thing so i'm a very playful individual and if i can use this word without being sacrilegious i'm a little bit devilish i like to goad and jibe and jab people and just be silly and playful so that's the first thing anyone listening to my videos should know is that i don't take myself too seriously and i like playing with ideas and i like contradicting people to see what they'll come up with and uh i like being shocking in a very very very childish and silly unsophisticated way uh so that's the first thing the other thing is that i'm well aware of the fact because i you know i myself was a believer then an unbeliever and then a believer again of course my belief was very different as an adult coming back to god than it was as a child having a naive faith in god okay very different but the 25 years in between was various degrees of atheism mixed with uh agnosticism everyone loves and agnostic because they're so nice and friendly but um you know and pantheism all these sorts of things when i was an agnostic for most most of that time was probably pantheism and agnosticism sort of just a really gentle hippie mix of friendly openness right um so i'm well aware all of this to say that i'm well aware of the fact that people don't know all of the certain truths truths that we can potentially be come certain of like i mean there are people that don't understand the that one plus one equals two there are people like i'm talking about high level mathematicians and scientists who don't understand that it is an objective eternal and absolute truth that one plus one equals two there are these people household names that write books and that are famous scientists and mathematicians who do not believe that they do not know that it's a certain effect right because speculation is so intoxicating that they've lost their bearings there are also people that don't know the laws of thought are axiomatic and they cannot be doubted so uh and there are also people that deny their own existence if you want to use the most absurd example they're people that say well i don't know if i exist i think i might not exist and i doubt my own existence not knowing that in the very fact of denying their existence they are affirming their existence but that's beside the point so i'm very much aware that people are confused and their intellects are dark and their wills are weak and i have my whole catholic explanation for all that the fall of man but um i'm also aware of the fact that uh in behind the ignorance and the veil and the confusion and the drunkenness uh there remains nonetheless the potential to discover the truth you know by seeking the truth you find the truth that everyone who seeks the truth will find the truth you're not going to find all of the truth all at once but day by day depending on how hard you're working at discovering the truth you're going to discover the essential saving truth that's that's my belief and that's what happened to me and i encourage anyone uh sort of as the the first piece of advice that i would offer to any non-theist would be sincerely strive for the truth seek the truth and you'll find the truth so i don't know if i answered the question there or not i don't want to go too off topic but i am a little bit curious to promise you on something here when it comes to this idea that anyone who seeks for the truth will find the truth um yeah first of all i'm curious it's hypothetically if if that were not true if it were not the case that anyone who seeks fines if there were people who honestly seek for the truth and don't find do you think that that would be something that you could come to recognize or do you think that you would go to your deathbed assuming that everybody all the all the muslims all the hindus all the people who didn't come to to agree with you in the end really just didn't seek the truth so i i worry that there's a potential hazard to this belief and that it it kind of almost requires you to assume that anybody who doesn't agree with you really isn't seeking the truth no no no no no that's not what the church teaches that's not sorry about that that cutting off there the the church teaches that everyone who is seeking the truth uh has what we would call sufficient grace to find the truth okay so there's the complicating issue that we can love lower goods we don't necessarily love the highest good right so god is the highest good so there are people that love creatures more than they love god this is just a fact okay so you have to bear in mind when i speak i'm speaking as a christian so i'm not going to try to get into your head and explain things from your point of view even though i've been there i've been an atheist and agnostic i just speak from my perspective and i think you know and i think my listeners all know that i admit very readily that i might be wrong about christianity because i take christianity on faith i don't have certainty i don't have absolute certainty about my faith obviously or it would not be faith so i'm speaking as a christian a confirmed very solid st uh devout christian but um i at the same time admit that i could be wrong about christianity um but in terms of monotheism that's sort of the foundation and the bedrock of uh my christianity and that i cannot budge on that but uh this idea of seeking the truth and finding the truth my religion teaches that all of the means of salvation are to be found within the perfect society that's a dogma of the church that the catholic church is a perfect society meaning that it has all the means of salvation um but elements those some of those elements some of those saving elements are to be found outside obviously outside of the catholic church outside of the visible boundaries of the catholic church and this is why vatican 2 famously said that the catholic church subsists in the catholic church the church of christ subsists in the catholic church so this means that there are saving elements to be found outside of revisible boundaries and the good muslim jew and hindu and atheists can follow those into the church that i mean that's the only way to go you have to go to god and jesus christ is god and the church that christ founded is one with christ this is deep mystery as saint paul says so all of this to say that i in a certain sense get to have my cake and eat it too as a christian because i have a theologies that says that jesus christ is fully god fully man so i've got a whole spectrum from finite to infinite that's my domain and my purview and then i've got within the church there's absolutely no possibility of salvation outside of the visible boundaries of the holy roman catholic church on the one hand on the other hand everyone's getting elements of the saving truth that are designed to bring them into the ark and this image of noah's ark is the image my favorite image for salvation if you're in the ark you're saved if you're off the arc you're doomed i mean that's it's just that simple and there is only one truth so uh it's not prejudiced or biased or unkind to say there's only one truth and you have to have uh you have to find your way to that one truth to be saved that's not unrealistic and it's not unkind it's just it's just the reality there's truth and then there's lack of truth and everyone who makes it to heaven will have found their way onto the ark so i hope that clarifies and shows the broad spectrum of god's mercy his gentleness his patience how he allows people to come to the truth by various means and i have always said that they're good and holy people adherents of all religions that are destined for heaven for sure yeah okay um yeah that i mean that helps me understand a little bit i guess so this idea that everyone who seeks the truth will find it is sort of a dogma of of your faith which you acknowledge as a is an article of faith it's not something like we were talking about before that you're certain about i guess my concern is that it seems to me that a world in which that statement is true that everyone who seeks the truth will find it is indistinguishable from a world in which it's not true right because all those people who you know come to a different conclusion about what's true you could always you could always excuse that by saying oh well they didn't care about the truth or they weren't you know interested in learning uh or their heart wasn't in the right place but it could also be the pl it could also be true that they were seeking with all their heart and seeking genuinely and came to a different conclusion and both so basically my main concern there is that it's there's like an epistemic problem and that a world in which that dogma is true is indistinguishable from a world in which it's false yeah but i didn't want to spend too much time on this i guess i'll let you i'll let you speak on that and then maybe we can go back to what we were talking about before with you one quick thing to add which is that there is this concept of invincible ignorance the other i guess i'll have two things the second thing is that i am ignorant about more things than i know and i'm wrong about more things than i'm right about obviously right so my bar is low for salvation my bar is very low because god is very patient kind and generous god okay so it's not like it's a strict club and you have to uh be perfect but i mean we should strive for perfection we should strive yes but if you see how far how far i fall short from perfection then that will take all the weight and all the pressure off of you atheists and non-christians and all the rest okay all right well let's go back to maybe i'll read your comment now on uh that you just sent sure um so you say i finally taken the time to read your comment in full here's my quick response i'm being facetious when i say quote welcome to monotheism or quote you are a de facto monotheist to a non-theist i hope that was self-evident but behind my uh joking zingers lies a whole lot of grieving truth can we know with certainty that god exists and oh sorry you say we can know with certainty that god exists and we can know that if it is possible for god to exist then god does necessarily exist so i think you would acknowledge i think you're speaking about metaphysical possibility there yeah um now in the next sentence you say something interesting you say you may be surprised to learn that the monotheist who says that it is possible that god does not exist is a de facto non-theist and that that was actually one of the questions i was planning on asking you on the stream is would you say you know if somebody church going christian were to say to you you know it's possible that god exists would you really give that person the treatment that you gave alex and say oh well welcome to atheism the short answer is no yeah i didn't think so yeah yeah unless unless i'm friends with them yeah right if it's a one-on-one like if like let's say i just met you and you're a catholic but you think it's possible god doesn't exist i would give you the full on treatment like you are you strayed so far from monotheism and you don't even know it right yeah so this brings up an issue now the reason i thought that was that was interesting is because you had just said prior that you were being facetious and i did have i did get an error of facetiousness from what you were saying in that conversation with alex but it also seemed like you were speaking seriously as well and you know sometimes there's a healthy mix of those two things but it sounds here like when you say um that a a theist who acknowledges the possibility that god doesn't exist is a de facto non-theist doesn't seem like you're being facetious there no so and that's the same reasoning that you would use to say the opposite about somebody who's say an agnostic so if you're not being so facetious here when you say this about the theist why would i and and i have a speculation about what what's really going on here well part of it part of it is the lack of faith i have a lack of faith in those who don't have faith right so uh if i'm speaking to someone with faith there's a foundation to talk about necessary beings all this sort of thing if i'm talking with someone who thinks they're an ape which most atheists do they think that they're an ape and they evolve from apes then i find it hard to take that person seriously right i find it hard to give them any kind of uh rigorous philosophical discussion whatsoever just laugh them off like they're a no offense to you if you're if you're evolutionists astronomy isn't it i mean saying somebody's an ape doesn't necessarily i mean there are christians who will say we're apes and most christians most christians yes yeah and so i don't that's really i i see that as being neither here nor there it's a taxonomical classification um it doesn't even you don't even necessarily have to believe in evolution i don't think to say something like that but but i think this might be getting a little bit off talking something you want to say but yeah well i wanted to say uh i've interviewed nathan ormond a couple of times back in the day he's digital gnosis and uh i just listened to his participation with his friend uh fodor or whatever his name is yes the 500 arguments against christianity today by the way i don't know if you saw nathan made you a video today no way yeah he he responded today it's about a two hour i don't think you're going to like the video very much because a lot of it is i mean he was kind of peeved by your attitude in the video yeah um he thinks you were kind of came off as kind of arrogant which i mean i kind of agree a little bit but i agree 100 um but i'm sorry you were talking yeah the the point was that he he in his 500 uh arguments against christianity he said well i don't see why jesus couldn't be homosexual there's nothing wrong with being a homosexual all this sort of thing and you as a non-christian or whatever you are uh you probably believe that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality but you what you need to understand about christians about christians who actually know that god is a necessary being and who believe fully in the traditional teachings of the church what you need to realize is that purity is a big deal and chastity is a big deal and marriage is a big deal intimacy is a big deal and i could go on for hours about the homo homoerotic uh nature of theology like it's very homoerotic when i consider myself the bride of jesus christ you know who is a man in the flesh even now up in heaven i mean it can get very homoerotic to the ears of someone who's a sexual pervert who says yes to lust but um it's not homo eroticism in that perverted sense of the word but i am a man god made me a man i have the nature of a human i have the nature of a male human and the god man jesus christ is my groom he's the bridegroom and i'm the bride so there's a certain passivity and there's a certain feminine role that i play with respect to god almighty the god man jesus christ so the atheist would go to town with that because they're so titillated by anything that's kinky and weird and sexual and they'll over sexualize anything including children right because we're just apes so uh if the apes do it it must be okay right so again i have a i have a lot of hatred for satan and his minions and i have a lot of hatred for sin and because i love nathan and i love you and i love all the atheists and all the non-christians i uh the hatred comes across maybe in a way that seems like it's directed at the person but it's not for i mean i would be going to hell i'd be destined for hell if i had hatred for any human being no matter how depraved and sick they seem to be yeah i mean i i see where you're coming from on that and i've never thought you'd i mean relatively speaking you're pretty innocuous when it comes to theists and being like rude to people um so i don't yeah i don't have any problem with you in that regard yeah and i'm i'm a way more sick and perverted sinner than anyone i could ever meet so like you could tell me your deepest darkest darkest secrets and it just wouldn't phase me at all no matter what you did would not phase me because i'm darker i'm sicker right so that's yeah that's something that really takes the edge off of my uh judgmentalism if you want to see it that way but i i do have a certain judgment based on my catholicism where it's like evil is evil and i want all of my brothers and sisters to embrace christ in his church and to avoid all the evils that are destroying the family destroying intimacy like like for example if you enjoy looking at porn and masturbating i would highly recommend you stop it you know like but it's not my business you can do what you want and i've done worse you know so yeah there's judgment but a lot of compassion yeah all right well let's um let's let's go back to what we were talking about here with regard to possibility um so so when you say you may be surprised to learn that a monotheist uh who says it is possible that god does not exist is a de facto non-theist um i'm curious why that's not facetious but the other statement was i just told you because i don't take atheists that seriously and i don't want i don't want to engage intellectually with them because every intellectual engagement is proof of the existence of god so it's just like such it's such an embarrassment trying to i mean present company excluded because you know you're uh you're human being and i love and respect you but to try to actually take philosophical discussion seriously with an atheist i find ridiculous laughable so um and if i you know if i met a theist who thought that there was any doubt whatsoever that god exists then i mean i would just consider that person on par intellectually with an atheist i mean it almost makes me wonder what the productivity of this conversation would be if if there's no you know if having a discussion about philosophy with an atheist is so futile um is what is because you're not coming at me you're not coming at me aggressively like the aggressor neither was alex though right and you so that's why i mean that's why i brought up why would it be facetious with alex and not um with not with a theist well because i know i i know that alex doesn't i know that alex doesn't uh know yet i guess for one thing he's got uh time on his side or he's young um i know that he does not yet know he has not yet discovered he's not yet it took me till age 39 i mean everyone's got their own journey but i know that he does not yet know that it's a necessary truth that god exists right so um that's why it's facetious and i think you want to help him recognize that it seems like being facetious probably isn't the most effective way to do that right if philosophy and reason really does lead to god i would think there would be a great deal of productivity in having and not being facetious not joking around well i'm not saying you can't joke around but i mean i i assume that you genuinely if you could would like to show him how reason can lead to the conclusion that god exists right yeah one joke doesn't mean that everything i say is a joke right yeah and the other thing is the other thing is that it is useful just like i said in my interview with him that i meditated on anselm's ontological argument for eight years i didn't like it i didn't understand it i didn't believe it was true but i chewed on it for eight years so one little offhand joke stupid as it is from me facetious comment yeah could be something that goes into the back burner and just gets digested slowly over time because if he starts thinking about well how could what is it about non-being like what are the ways that you cannot exist there are people i mean not to be sexist but i think it's mainly men who sit around thinking about ideas all day long right i don't want to put down women but they have different sorts of priorities it seems from my experience women have a different set of priorities so uh most of my guests are men most of the ones who are interested in ideas are men i hope that's not a sexist comment but that just seems to be a pattern that i've recognized so when this young man is seeking the truth and he promised me i asked him to promise me that he that he would seek the truth and he eagerly promised that and i think i mean i have no doubt that you are seeking the truth and i don't want to belittle your beliefs uh even though i i just think it's silly now that now that i'm a monotheist i just think it's silly like i mean i think i was silly to believe in pantheism or to believe uh you know uh the things that i believed even though i never believed in um evolution i never believed i was an ape right even as an atheist i was uh leaning more towards pantheism which was which avoided that whole problem of how something came from nothing all right but anyway i'm sorry i just want to say i do want to say i'm sorry if i uh come across as an arrogant and i no no that's fine um no that's fine and i mean like i think obviously you know i i'm in the same boat i think that's a lot of things you believe are ridiculous um you know there's not really that's we kind of should just take that as a given um yeah but maybe we could talk about gosh there are a lot of things we could talk about i kind of would like to pick your brain a little bit on this idea that any kind of argument uh entails the existence of god yeah now maybe i'll just present what i think is your reasoning behind this sure and maybe you can tell me if this is if this is accurate so i understand he was saying not so much the arguments themselves uh entail the existence of god but mainly that the evaluation of arguments requires free will and free will requires god the existence of god and so by extension you know the process of evaluating arguments and coming to conclusions that um involves things that entail the existence of god is that kind of your line of reasoning well it's you're you're trying to sort of zoom in and discover what i meant when really should be zooming out and looking at all rational intercourse all intelligible speech so even if you're not arguing even if you're just speaking today i went to the grocery store there's no argument there it's just today i went to the grocery store i say it you understand it that's proof of god okay because it's intelligible so everything everything literally everything is proof of god to me so it's just like this it's just like it seems ridiculous to say well uh hey david have you got any proofs of the existence of god it's like that's all there is you know so rationality free will like of arguments uh saying something's better than something else like i i want you and my non-theist listeners to understand very very very clearly that as a non-theist you should if you're an orthodox non-theist you should believe that all there is in the universe is matter energy configurations so it's different configurations of matter energy they're evolving in the absence of god then if if you think somebody who doesn't believe in god um should you're using that word right should believe that everything is to be consistent to be consistent you must believe that everything is just a very complex configuration of matter energy in space time that's it that's all you can say you can't say this configuration over here is better to that one you can't say my brain is smarter than your brain you can't say that your brain obeys the laws of physics but mine doesn't you can't say that everything is obeying the laws of physics everything is obeying the laws of nature perfectly right as a non-theist that's what you're limited to uh well i mean you could be you could posit that there are um abstract objects non-physical things that are non-mental um i mean i don't i don't see why um the belief or agnosticism about god commit how that commits me to believing that all that exists is the physical uh why is it impossible for something non-physical to exist in a godless universe or outside a godless universe or in some different realm um it's not clear the key the key to understanding my uh perhaps extreme perspective is free will that's the key to everything free will okay okay will yes so was my was my explanation before i i understand that you you wanted to broaden it yeah you narrowed it too much you think that first of all i'm curious why you think that intelligibility on its own um is proof of god but let's just stick to the free will thing because i do think that was your reasoning behind when you're specifically talking about arguments you believe that free will is a necessary component of that and i think you're talking about you would agree you're talking about libertarian free will not compatible with free role or anything like that right i don't believe in compatibilist free will i don't believe in compatibilistry well i believe that you you have a non-zero amount of freedom of choice or it's zero freedom of choice like it's zero or it's non-zero that's it yeah okay and i i've argued many times with atheists that it may be the case that we are exaggerating all of us theists are exaggerating the amount of freedom that we have that's irrelevant if i can make one choice in this life that's enough that's enough for me well that's interesting because you know i've always thought that peop positing the existence of free will libertarian free will that doesn't entail that it applies to our beliefs it could just apply to our actions and if we're basing our belief in free will solely on sort of the qualia or the the intuition the experience of think that that intuition that you could have done otherwise when you make a decision if that's the basis for um believing in free will then i personally and i don't know anyone who experiences that intuition when it comes to processes of inferential reasoning for example if you were to give me a syllogism that says you know the classic all men of mortal socrates as a man i don't why is it that i'm curiou i want to get your thoughts on this why is it that when we don't have that same intuition or that experience that we could have done otherwise when it comes to recognizing logical entailments as we do when it comes to the decisions we make do you have a theory as to why it is that when you make a decision you feel that idea that you could have done others but when you come to a conclusion like socrates must be a man because all men immortal that it doesn't seem like personally i don't feel like i have any choice no matter how hard i try i can't seem to come to a different conclusion and so what choice can i reach if not that if we do even if we do have free will it doesn't seem to apply to our beliefs right the answer the catholic church has an answer for this problem and i'm one of the reasons i'm pissed off and annoyed at nathan and his friends is that they haven't bothered to look into what the church teaches right it just pisses me off why don't you if you want to attack christianity why don't you go and find out what the church teaches why don't you do that okay even his description of transubstance substantiation and uh his is his understanding of the incarnation he's like there are people literally in eighth grade who understand christian theology better than nathan who claimed to be a christian before as an adult so i'm pissed off at him that he's so stupid or negligent or reckless with his with his theology like i'm pissed off okay um but uh there's an answer that the catholic church gives about why we're able to choose in different ways and we it's not as crystal clear as a syllogism when we're making moral decisions or when we're making any kind of choice in life that is truly free not absolutely free but has a certain amount of freedom because there are always going to be constraints like your wife nagging you like no no no we're not going to do that we're not going to do that we're not going to do that that's a constraint if she nags you enough you might change your mind so it could be your mother it could be your dog it could be whatever there are constraints okay but the catholic church teaches that there's a spectrum it's not just syllogisms there's a spectrum of goods we're not presented with the absolute good which is god we're not presented with god almighty here and now and uh the sort of reality of heaven the reality of hell and the choice is clear obviously everyone i know wants to have pleasure and sex drugs and rock and roll all that good stuff is in heaven not in hell despite the the lies of satan so everyone i know would choose if given the option to be presented with the extremes good and evil they would choose good right so the church teaches that we're not given that most of the time what we're given most of the time is relative goods like this is better than that but it might be hard to discern and it's easy to get confused it depends how what the context is and what you're aware of and your education and all these sorts of things so it becomes very complicated and god understands all of that and that's why you should not be worried that i think that people who have been sincerely seeking the truth but don't convert to the visible catholic church are in danger like i'm not worried about it because it's complicated finding the truth is complicated but god knows what invincible ignorance we have and he knows all the constraints and all the confusions that we have so don't worry about that but the the reason why it's not syllogistic whenever we make a choice and the reason why we feel that we are free is because we actually are free and the choice is not clear and these are not absolute goods that were being presented with their relative goods like even when it comes to meal time like what and what am i going to have for dinner well you know you want to have some pleasure you know you want uh different food groups and you know your own body and your own health and what agrees with you what doesn't agree with you it's very complicated and so when i have a one world government forcing some gene therapy injection into kids and mothers and elderly and everyone in between you know even though they're a variety of different technologies being experimentally applied to these uh human beings i find it extremely reckless because we're all different we're all unique we all have our own history in terms of health and our own allergies and our own things so it's not one size fits all right certainly when it comes to health and medicine anything else and it's the same with uh your love life if i told you what kind of girl to go out with and what kind of like how to court her and all that stuff it's none of my business and you have your own way and you have your own taste and they're different goods competing for your attention and different goods that you'll select among but they're never the extremes of heaven and hell presented before you because that would just just be so obvious and so easy everyone's going to choose heaven now why didn't god do it that way it's because you have to love freely if you're not free then it's not really love it's just you're just a robot that's programmed by god to go to heaven and enjoy heaven with him but there's no uh there's no merit for praise there just like there would be no merit there'd be no merit for blame for those who god put into hell as little demon robots you have to have free will if you're going to love you have to love freely see it's interesting to me that the intuition and look i i don't believe in libertarian free will and i could and i intend to talk about why that is but it's interesting to me that the intuition that i could have done otherwise applies to my choices but it's never once in my entire life applied to anyone i love i've never felt that i have control whenever i've fallen in love with you know a girl or something it's just it just happens on its own i don't i don't seem to have any choice in the matter no matter how hard i try when i have tried to stop it doesn't work and so for me for me to not take that as evidence that even if we do have free will it doesn't seem to apply to certain ass certain domains such as belief acquisition or love it seems it i it seems like if we do have it it would be limited to our choices okay can i can i interrupt you there please it's very important look uh i'm gonna turn my camera off because i have to pee really bad and sure um are you gonna stay i'm listening uh yeah i just wanna figure out how to mute myself and uh keep talking and when you're uh muted i'll tell you that you're muted okay i can't see you now but i can hear you hello can't hear you can't hear you okay go do your thing meanwhile i'm gonna give a shout out to my friend orthodoxy and the religion of today i'm not gonna say your real name just in case uh you don't want to said i don't know why that would be the case but hey i love you i'm glad you're here i can take this time now to read what you've written david is a total chad not sure what a chad is probably you're making fun of me that's fine i'll have to look that up what a chat is probably like a dweeb or something or is that like a a guy on campus that's okay so kieran it's kieran right am i right is it karen or is it your brother orthodoxy and the true religion of today uh for what it's worth you look a chad to chad epistemology will only take you so far in determining the validity of any worldview coherentism alongside the transcendental argument seems to be the most consistent albeit circular framework i love circular frameworks nothing more godly than that i'm back all right chad by the way there's someone who gets all the ladies he's like really are you serious yeah really thank you very much it's a it's a neologism it came that word started being used like over the past two years i'm definitely not a chad let's put it that way all right all right continue with what you were you were saying before i was just reading some of his uh my friend kieran's in the live chat here he says uh david is arrogant and sucks super hard wait is nathan an atheist now yes he is atheists don't actually exist not pragmatically anyway answer a fool according to his following these are random comments he's giving us here yes because arguments presuppose logic and a whole host of other transcendent truths agreed transcendent truths presuppose a transcendent origin chad according to your worldview the conversation you're having with david is simply two bottles of soda spouting off fizz which fizz is right actions are executed on the basis of beliefs i believe my car will start therefore i turn the key in the ignition simple nathan's protestantism led him to atheism as a prot protestant you either become atheist or you join the true church amen love is an emotion ex love isn't an emotion exclusively it's the willing of a good of the other that's my extra comment to add on there i choose to continue to love my wife and son you can say it brother uh yes sir kieran blah blah blah okay you think you could choose not to is what i would ask that yeah i wanna i wanna talk about free will and the best proof that i have of free will okay like in terms of a pragmatic day-to-day thing it's like i'm uh i'm a human being i was created by an all-good god and because of uh the free will that we have we're able to choose moment to moment for god or against god god's will or my will right jesus famously said take this bitter cup from me but not my will be done your will be done god and then he suffered and died and now he's reigning gloriously in heaven okay so we have to imitate jesus christ we have to say not my will be done but your will be done but we can also complain and say god can you please take away this burden and this problem and this thorn from my side and we can complain to god but what we can't do if we want to make it to happen what we can't do is sin not even a venial sin we can't deliberately do a venial sin but i deliberately sin i deliberately do at least venial sins okay just let that sink in i'm a christian i'm not supposed to deliberately sing sin if i want to go to heaven but i choose to do it are you hearing what i'm saying i choose to do it even though the consequence is eternal punishment infinite punishment forever and ever and ever you never get out of it so i'm choosing that why because i'm stupid and selfish and weak and my intellect is dark and my will is weak so i say well it's just a little bit of pleasure and i can repent and uh you know i'm bored lonely angry frustrated or whatever the case may be so i'm just gonna grab this pleasure it's handy it's right before me and it's like i know god doesn't want me to do it but i'm gonna do it okay so i have free will it's not i'm not choosing the higher good i'm choosing the lower good if that's not proof of free will i don't know what is i you as a non-theist i don't know if you have that you only have your conscience and you can say well i should eat something healthy but i want to have chocolate and chips or whatever like that's what i do but i don't know if you do that but i don't know if you take it to hurt and you say i'm really uh putting my eternal destiny in jeopardy by doing that i don't think you do that i think you just say i'm gonna be food for the flowers eventually one way or another so i may as well just you know eat drink and be merry because tomorrow i die i'm gonna be a plant food worm food you said something interesting there and this is gonna tie into what i think is the most powerful argument against free will that i've ever heard and i know it's been presented to you many times i think t-jump brought it up to you multiple people brought it up to you but it seems to reduce all of our actions to brute contingency and i guess the simplest way to put that is that um either we do act we the actions we take the decisions we make are for reasons or they're not for reasons if the if the decisions we make are for reasons then they are determined by those reasons uh if we do if the actions we take are not for reasons then they are by definition random which means there's no there's no fact and virtue of which a person chooses a over b now you said just a second ago that the reason you sin you attributed it to certain things like short-term good short-tempered but here's the problem though is that you're in in acknowledging free will that can't be a sufficient explanation for why you sinned because you could have done otherwise and there's never really any any answer to the question as far as i can tell as to why when when somebody chooses a over b whether a is sinning or not sinning or anything why did the person choose aver b and it seems and your response to this every time i've heard this brought up to you is to say well look we don't comprehend free will we apprehend freeway and to me that just seems question begging because really what you're saying is in order to apprehend free will free will has to exist but you've just been presented with an argument that says that god doesn't hurt not the god yeah so you're not it seems to me like you're just basically asserting like like the proof that you just gave me that you have free will is that you can choose to sin you can choose to and the implication there is that you could have done otherwise but that's the very thing i don't always sin i don't always choose to sin yeah but what is the reason for any particular sin if you could have done otherwise given whatever you attribute that sin to whether stupidity or anything for you to say that you could have done otherwise is basically an admonition that what you're say what you're stating is the cause of your sin isn't really the cause of your sin at all because you could have done otherwise the ultimate cause the ultimate answer to the questions yeah the ultimate cause the ultimate cause is my free will right that's the thing so let's say you're um you're a father to two children you love both children uh one of them secretly annoys you okay so you have your favorite but no one knows that it's a secret okay so you they're always asking you for stuff and you make a conscious effort well i have to be fair even though this one annoys me and i like this one and you try to like correct your bias okay but sometimes you just you're just sort of too busy and tired to check your biases and you just spoil your favorite and you neglect and abuse your the one that annoys you so then you have a nice meal and you take a nap and then you get your wits about you again and you course correct you say well you apologize to the one that annoys you and you give him a little thing that he wanted and uh you just course correct okay so there are different levels of awareness that we have like we're just overwhelmed or just going on autopilot and following your instincts and then there are times where we feel alert and awake and aware and self-conscious and we regret maybe having been on autopilot because autopilot usually isn't the best way to go right so i hope you can relate to this in some sort of scenarios in your life and you can understand that we choose we do really choose and the ultimate cause is our free will which is a mystery that no one can ever claim to have understood i mean emmanuel kant uh pointed out some of these what they're called antinomies or whatever the four antinomies free will was one of them right it's just it's beyond the intellect it's not irrational it's beyond the rational right so i mean it is a given that if there is no free will there is no morality that's just a given because what is what is morality it's it's the goodness or lack thereof of the choices that we freely make that's what it is there can be no merit we can't praise or blame without free will so it is a given it is a self-evident truth that we have free will because everything that you value in your life depends on free will the love your reasoning your the arguments you make everything and look i'm happy to talk about whether free will is required for morality and things like that but this is another example of where i and i mean this with all respect but i feel like you're not really engaging with the argument because i mean the closest thing you said that there that i think is relevant to the argument is when you said that free will is the cause but the problem with that is that let's say i go to the store and i can buy chocolate or vanilla ice cream and i choose chocolate okay now is saying say we want to post the question well why did i choose chocolate rather than vanilla saying well because i made a free will choice doesn't explain why i chose chocolate over vanilla because that's the only reason vanilla that would have also been a free will choice right but it's not the only reason it's not the only something that really accounts for on the free will hypothesis there's no fact and virtue of which a person actually chooses a over b even if you even if you want to say hey maybe he chose chocolate because he likes chocolate more but you know on a compatible uh view that makes perfect sense but on the view of free will that's not really an explanation of why the person chose chocolate because you've got to always say he could have chose vanilla and so why didn't he but you know my little story with the two kids one that you favor and the other one you disfavor okay uh there is a right way of parenting and spoiling one kid and abusing the other is not the right way of parenting okay so there's a sort of like a moral standard that we try to live up to when we're parents i'm not a parent okay i don't know if you are if you're planning on being but uh there's a moral standard that we can avail ourselves of and measure our actions and thoughts words and deeds by and uh when you're in that lazy autopilot mode you just revert to your instincts and your lower base nature right your animal your animal nature so when when we make a choice that's informed by truth and by goodness and justice and all these sorts of things it is meritorious necessarily i mean this is this is self-evident and you know choosing which flavor of ice cream you want is sort of trivial let's put it that way it's a trivial choice so i think we have to uh even though i think that morality proves the existence of free will i also think that free will depends on a standard of morality which is eternal objective and absolute so there's sort of a chicken and the egg thing there too right it's like uh i don't i don't bother with trying to wrap my head around truth and justice and beauty and goodness and all these sorts of transcendentals because they are trans transcendental and i'm just a little schmuck who wants to eat ice cream like that's it i'm selfish and lazy so but i can by the grace of god that's how i would phrase it by the grace of god i can form better habits and get rid of my bad habits slowly and i can promise you it's a very very very slow process in my case uh there are people that have a lot of natural virtue who are very diligent in pursuing the natural virtues and they can outdo me any day of the week but i happen to have had the grace to say yes to conversion and to say yes to god and i have the supernatural um theological virtues of faith hope and charity and i'm climbing up that narrow path to heaven that's that's the objective but it doesn't mean that i have a lot of virtue or that i'm uh a good person better than an atheist or anything like that it just means that i've set my eye on a goal that seems unattainable but which god has promised me through his church is attainable even though i may not achieve much in this lifetime in terms of virtue i the the mere fact of striving like to go back to this idea of seeking the truth and you will find it the mere fact of striving saint uh um teresa of the child jesus famously said it's not the person who you know we're not expected to climb many many wrongs on the ladder to perfection what we're expected to do is to humbly have the intention of just lifting your foot to get your foot onto the first rung on the ladder of virtue and that intention that striving to lift your foot onto that very first rung on that long and arduous climb toward god that in and of itself is enough and more than enough and to desire more than that in a way is to fall into pride so could just um construct a new thought experiment that instead of having to do with ice cream it has to do with some morally significant choice um and i think the same concept or the same problem would apply um when it comes to what you were saying about the two children i'm i'm not sure i i may i may have to go re-listen to this to understand the full relevance of how that ties into the free will thing so i'll i'll do my due diligence and go re-listen to what you said about that because i'm not sure i fully um followed all that or the relevance of all that but um i thought this was a great discussion and um you're a fun guy to talk to so maybe you know a couple months from now we'll do it again yeah a couple weeks if you have the time uh we'll we'll keep it fresh so we don't forget everything we said and we can sort of go deeper but um take care of yourself i really appreciate you coming on and talking to me i also really appreciate the depth of your comments and the thoughtfulness and usually like i said on social media and youtube comments i tend to just be silly and flippant and just brief but i do appreciate it when someone comes across as actually uh wanting to explore the truth and discover the truth and share their insights and their their thoughts it's uh it's it's humbling because um i find it rare in today's world where someone is actually concerned about the truth seeking the truth and i think that needs to be applauded and encouraged especially among the youth i don't know a lot of young people um but you can bet your bottom dollar that i'll be encouraging young alex in australia to uh to continue on his path because i think he's on an excellent path and i think he's a bright young man and he can find his way and uh same with you you said you're what what age did you say you have now i'm 31 31. so uh yeah i mean you're not exactly an old man you're a young man at the i think that's considered sort of 31 is uh the prime of life that's the age the christ died that's sort of like the age of perfection so uh yeah i encourage you and i applaud you and i want to thank you sincerely for uh for seeking the truth and for coming and sharing your your point of view and some of your questions and i appreciate that i am a bit frustrated to talk to because i'm scatterbrained and very flippant and silly but i do i know in behind the chaos and the the ambiguity of of my thought processes are just a few basic principles and they manifest themselves in strange thought experiments and sometimes in poor examples or poor analogies but if i can just keep trying to express these basic principles in a way that people can understand i think there's some listeners that benefit from it so i'll just keep on doing doing me as i say and you keep on doing you and we'll talk soon and uh uh reach out by email anytime okay sounds good great we'll talk very soon sounds good great we'll talk very soon bye take care bye