Transcript

Hey everyone.

In today's episode, I wanted to share with you the talk that I gave at last year's Catholic Answers Conference.

The theme was, I Believe in God.

And I talked about how the arguments for the existence of God can really be improved, and what we can do, and all the great research and books that have been written by faithful Christians on this subject.

So I'm excited to share that with you.

And by the way, if you want to attend this year's conference, we still have tickets left for sale.

It's in the last weekend of September, being hosted in San Diego, California.

And if you go, you can hang out with myself, Jimmy Akin, Tim Staples, all the Catholic Answers apologist, and other special guests.

So if you want to do that, check out the link in the description below.

And here is the talk that I gave at last year's Catholic Answers Conference.

All right.

So I was asked to give a presentation on the new case for God.

And what I wanted to focus on are developments in philosophy of religion and defense of theism, the exist- the existence of God that we have in the last 20 or 30 years.

And I, and I do want to give a caveat that this talk, I'm not gonna I don't want to run you through here's the entire argument, and here's every premise, and here's how to answer the objection, and by the end of the 45 minutes, Okay, you understand everything, right?

No, I don't.

Just kick back, enjoy.

I just This is an appetizer sampler platter.

We're gonna have some spinach artichoke dip from ethics, you know, some jalapeno poppers from metaphysics.

Try a little bit of each one and for you to see what's out there and see the resources, and then hopefully go and check them out yourself if you want to go deeper in that.

And we have really seen a renaissance in, uh, philosophy of religion from a Christian perspective.

Back in 1966 actually, uh, April I remember the day.

It was right here.

April 8th, 1966, Time Magazine released this very famous image, uh, for its cover, Is God Dead?

And it's very emblematic of where philosophy of religion had been going since the early 20th century, uh, which had really been poisoned with philosophies like verificationism saying that theology and religion isn't just false, it's meaningless if you can't empirically verify the terms that you're discussing.

Of course, people then pointed out that verificationism itself would be refuting since you can't empirically define what it means to verify and other things like that.

It becomes incoherent.

But there was, going out of the early 20th century, sort of an inter- in the academic world, this feeling that, Oh, well, God is just something for the common folk.

Academics have nothing to do with it.

Uh, but it turns out then after that period in the 60 years since then, we've seen a wonderful growth in the Christian philosophy of religion even within a year after this Time Magazine cover was published, so much so that a few years later, people know about this picture.

It's very famous.

Uh, Time had to admit a few years later in 1969, Is God coming back to life?

Oops.

They writ- you People hear about They see the former one, but they don't actually know Time did publish a semi bit of a retraction.

Uh, and one of the reasons for that was you started to have work from Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga who was at the University of Notre Dame, a Protestant philosopher, very smart guy.

If you want to watch a funny He's, like, one of the smartest guys, uh, philosophers I've ever read.

And there's a hilarious video of him.

Uh, he lives at Notre Dame, or he was at Notre Dame.

Uh, it was a news report talking about a record heatwave where peoples' air conditioning don't work.

And then they're just interviewing, and here's Alvin talking about his air conditioner.

And like the smartest guy, I just can't seem to, to make it work.

Exactly.

This guy who can have, like, 85 premise arguments and he can't get his air to- So look up Alvin Plantinga air conditioner, um, it's funny.

Uh, Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God.

In 2001, an atheist philosopher who actually passed away in 2020, Quentin Smith, uh, he wrote this.

So this is in the early 2000s talking about the change he had seen in academia, and I'll read it to you.

Uh, he said, The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga's book God And Other Minds in 1967.

It became apparent to the philosophical profession this book displayed that'realist' theists were not outmatched by 'naturalists' in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, an in-depth defense of an original worldview.

In philosophy, it became almost overnight 'academically respectable' to argue for theism, belief in God, making philosophy a favored field of entry for theism, uh, field of entry for intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

And it was really neat for me to read this in 2001 because that's when I started my investigation into religion, going to websites, listening to debates.

YouTube wouldn't show up for about four years, so I was downloading every MP3 I could.

You could fit one debate on a floppy disk.

It was, it was, it was a time to be alive.

It was a time to be alive.

So these are some of the arguments that I'm gonna go through.

And as I said, this is our, uh, appetizer sampler, so the different arguments I want to talk about.

If you don't like quesadillas, uh, once again, there are mozzarella sticks.

There's something for everybody here.

So I just want to go through a few of them, and some of them will seem familiar to you.

I'll talk about the argument, its roots, and how it's been developed and how philosophers are expanding upon it in the past 20, 30, even the past 10 years.

People are still working to improve on the different subjects that they, that they encounter.

Uh, so the first one will be the argument from motion.

Uh, pop quiz.

I'm sure you all know this argument because Tim explained it to you.

You don't need me to re-explain it to you.

You understand that.

But if I had to give a little bit of a, a summary of it, Aquinas is saying that even if the universe existed for all time, we see motion.

Motion is just when something potential becomes actual.

So the water here, it is potentially solid.

It can't become ice on its own.

It needs something to actualize it.

Cold air, air doesn't become cold on its own.

Something has to actualize that.

There's a chain.

The chain is kind of like this little choo-choo train here.

I- imagine you had a boxcar going by you.

It's being pulled by another boxcar.

You ask, okay, what's pulling that boxcar?

Well, another boxcar.

What's pulling that one?

And then say you have a friend who says, I think there's just an infinite number of boxcars, each pulling the one before it.

That's not an explanation because you could have an infinitely long train of boxcars that stands still.

Why do you have an infinitely long train of boxcars that's moving rather than standing still?

The answer is there is a car that gives motion to the train without receiving motion from anything else, a prime mover, an purely actual actualizer of potential, the argument from motion.

This is also a great I like this analogy when people say, Well, if God created the universe, who created God?

I say to someone who says that, Your question is like asking if a train, if a locomotive pulls a train, what pulls the locomotive?

You don't understand.

God is not Just as a locomotive is not another car on a train, God is not another being within the universe that he created.

Uh, the argument from motion, of course, has been criticized by people, philosophers.

Uh, in the early 20th century it was dismissed.

A lot of it, the dismissal, when I look at philosophers, uh, Mackie, for example, in his book The Miracle of Theism, he thought it was a miracle anybody could be a theist nowadays.

Uh, when I look at him and William Rowe and others, they oftentimes will go back to Anthony Kenny's, uh, 1969 essay on The Five Ways, saying that Kenny refuted Aquinas, Aquinas uses Aristotelian physics, that he, his arguments don't work.

Like, saying that in order to become actual, something potentially hot needs to be actualized by something that is hot.

So, something that can potentially be on fire has to be actualized by something that is on fire.

And so you can only light wood on fire with other fire.

Ex- And then Kenny says, Well, I mean, you can rub two sticks together.

They're both potentials and they actualize themselves.

But of course, other philosophers have answered these arguments and ex- a- answered these criticisms and expanded the argument.

One of them is the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who teaches at Pasadena City College.

In his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Feser answers this objection, saying that the critic has misconstrued Aquinas.

Aquinas is not saying a potential can only be actualized by something that is the actual of that type, like wood only becomes fire by actual fire.

It's just potentials can only be actualized by something that is actual, two actual pieces of wood being rubbed together.

Aquinas is not saying that whatever causes something actually to be F, like fire, must itself be fire in some way.

But rather that whatever causes something must itself be actual.

Nothing merely potential can cause anything.

Uh, there are other arguments that come forward, actually, to bring this here, uh, we have people like Graham Oppy, who's a very intelligent atheist.

He has a book, 2006 book called Arguing About Gods.

He has other objections to Aquinas, saying, well, all Aquinas has proved is that there is a purely actual cause of one thing.

So, maybe there's a purely motion-based cause that gives motion.

Maybe all light comes from something that's pure light.

Maybe all, uh, heat comes from something that's pure heat.

Those are the actual causes of things.

Uh, you don't need one purely actual actualizer or God.

And what Feser has done, he has like a 50 premise argument for the existence of God in Five Proofs.

Uh, but the most interesting part is probably the first 14 premises where Feser breaks down the argument more into systematic premises.

And this is helpful because The Five Ways, when Aquinas presented them, they were just notes for novice theology students.

They were never They were not meant Aquinas would be aghast if he thought people read The Five Ways and thought this was his definitive defense of the existence of God.

These were notes to catch people up.

When you read the Summa, uh, Theologiae and it says that this is designed for beginners, you feel really dumb.

Like, because we need a useful textbook for those who are beginners, I shall write this.

Like, yeah, losers, won't understand any of this stuff.

So, um, what Feser's done is taken the argument, extrapolated, adding more premises, including this co- this very important premise here, uh, premise nine, talking about how even if you did have pure light, pure motion, pure heat, the potential for those pure things to exist at all would have to be actualized by something that is pure existence itself.

And this is an important premise that he has defended at length, uh, engaging Oppy on the criticism that things can exist and just persist in existence, what's called existential inertia.

So when it comes to the argument from motion, uh, Feser's not the only one.

There are others who have published in New- in Blackwell and other journals other variants of the argument from motion, but I like the one that's here in Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

Uh, and Feser has a good response to general objections from atheists at the end of the book, but he has that argument from motion there.

Let's move on to a fun one.

You might remember this from yesterday.

I had my dialogue with Jimmy Akin.

This would be the Kalam cosmological argument.

All right?

So, Aquinas and Bonaventure disagreed on a particular issue in their time.

And if you were at the dialogue with Jimmy, you may remember some of this.

If not, here's a presentation for others, a little bit of a refresher.

And the question is, can we know from reason alone that the universe began to exist, that its past is finite?

We know from faith.

We know that God created the universe, uh, He told us so, the Church teaches us that, from nothing in the finite past.

But could you prove that a finite past is impossible?

Reason shows the past, uh, cannot be infinite.

Aquinas did not think so.

Uh, Saint Bonaventure did think so.

Both are doctors of the Church, so they're two positions you are allowed to hold as a Catholic.

The argument, though, because Aquinas is kind of a heavy hitter, because he didn't like it, well, I'm not gonna like it either.

So a lot of people weren't big fans of it after that, even for the next 700 years, until a evangelical philosopher and theologian named William Lane Craig published a dissertation on the argument called the Kalam cosmological argument.

Kalam is an Arabic word, it means speech.

Uh, and others have worked to improve on the argument since then.

Very simple argument, whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.

This is his 1978, uh, dissertation, and he's Now, since then, what's interesting-One of the objections to the argument is that it relies on, uh, particular, eh, eh, views of things like the philosophy of time.

We talk about a past infinite.

Well, what is time itself at all?

We have to settle that.

So, in the meantime, Craig had updated his argument.

In 2009, he published a very lengthy defense of it in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, and he uses two different kinds of arguments to prove the second premise here.

So, whatever the universe began to exist, you see that here, whatever begins to exist has a cause.

But how do we know the universe began to exist so that it has a cause?

How do we know that?

He uses two forms of argument.

Uh, one would be scientific evidence saying, Look, we look at evidence from the Big Bang, uh, look at evidence from cosmology, and it seems that the universe had a particular point of beginning.

Uh, though Jimmy was very careful, and I agreed with him in the dialogue we had yesterday, this is more suggestive than completely demonstrative.

Science is tentative, maybe it'll find a beginning even before this point here in the Big Bang.

But many people look at this evidence and it seems that the universe, they say, Okay, I could see the universe comes from nothing.

That's the scientific evidence.

Uh, Craig uses arguments from philosophy saying that, well, no, the past cannot be infinite, uh, because that would lead to contradictions.

Actual infinites cannot exist.

And he uses examples like Hilbert's Hotel, developed by the German mathematician David Hilbert, late 19th, early 20th century.

Hilbert's Hotel says, look, if you ha- inf- Hilbert said that the infinite, uh, exists as an idea because when you have it in reality, you get all kinds of weird contradictions.

You could have everybody in the hotel and you could continue to check in an infinite number of people by shifting them around in the rooms.

Uh, you if you subtract identical quantities, so if you subtract all the odd-numbered guests from Hilbert's Hotel, uh, how many are left?

An infinite number, everyone in the even rooms.

If everybody after room four checks out from the hotel, you remove an infinite number of guests, how many are left?

Four.

Infinity minus infinity in one case equals infinity, in another case, infinity minus infinity equals four.

It's a contradiction.

That's why in transfinite arithmetic, it's prohibited to subtract infinite sets, but you can't stop these people from leaving Hilbert's Hotel, or can you?

So that's the argument that Craig had made, uh, since the, the late '70s, early '80s, though there are particular objections that are leveled at it, and I actually do agree with these objections.

Uh, it is humbling as an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian, anyone who puts forward an argument in the public square, you will receive criticism of your argument.

You will receive and I think it's, i- i- it's quite a mark of intellectual integrity if you can receive criticism and then modify your argument in the face of the criticism instead of just bluntly ignoring it.

Uh, and that's what all of us try to do as apologists.

Well, it doesn't have to be the existence of God, uh, it could be anything.

It's about the New Testament, the Church Fathers.

You know, we'll go, I'll put forward an argument in a debate, some will do well, other arguments, Eh, that one didn't do so hot.

I need to change it or drop it.

And it's hard because we're not our own worst critics sometimes, but we can learn from how others criticize it, and it's great.

That's why I loved the dialoguing with Jimmy yesterday here at the conference because the, the best people I love to tear apart my arguments are my smart apologist friends because we all have goodwill in our hearts.

We're not gonna be mean to each other, but we can point out problems that we see.

And so, that's why the Book of Proverbs says, uh, that iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man.

That's what we do a lot at Catholic Answers.

So, uh, there's a few different criticisms of the argument.

Uh, one is that it relies on a theory of time that is not super popular with physicists and philosophers.

I'm not gonna get into all this because it's kind of complicated.

Uh, what moment does the past and future, do they exist or does only the present exist?

That's presentism.

This is kind of a goofy model that I like because I'm a goofy guy, called the growing block.

The past is real, uh, only the present, though, for me is where consciousness is, and the future is still open.

Many physicists hold to this block view, past, present, and future are equally real.

So if that is the case, you have to be careful, as Jimmy pointed out in our, our argument uh, sorry, our d- our discussion yesterday.

If you make because we as Christians believe that the future is endless, if your argument for a beginningless past if you say, Yeah, the past cannot be infinite, you better be careful.

You don't want to have an argument that shows that the future cannot be infinite because you have a problem, because God told us the future is infinite.

He promised us that in the Book of Revelation.

We have endless life.

It's infinite.

So since we know the future is infinite, any argument that would show the past and the future are finite, well, that's just that's not going to work.

Uh, so one has to take that into account.

The other problem is that impossible actual infinites, even if something like Hilbert's Hotel can't exist, say, yeah, you can't have a hotel with infinite rooms, all kinds of crazy stuff happens there.

Uh, that might not apply to the past because past events, they don't exist.

Like, all of this stuff if you Craig, William Lane Craig, he holds to this presentist view where the past does not exist anymore, and the, the past no longer exists, the future doesn't exist yet.

So there is no actual infinite events here all together like at Hilbert's Hotel for the contradictions to arise.

So that creates a lot of problems to the argument.

Are there ways to so that's why in my dialogue with Jimmy, I- I've sought to try to rework the argument and deriving and I'm drawing from other people who looked at the argument to say, Maybe we can rework it a little bit.

Uh, I like the work of Andrew Loke, for example.

Uh, he teaches, I think, at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Very smart guy, has written a number of books.

In fact, I have two of them in this p- presentation to refer you to.

Uh, w- he has another book on the cosmological argument.

This one's good, The Teleological and Kalam Cosmological Arguments Revisited.

Uh, this is not in his book, but it's based on stuff that is in here.

I would put an argument like this-Uh, if the past were infinite, then contradictions would generally be possible.

This might not this is not my correct version of the talk.

That is not helpful.

What if we just cut this point out of the presentation right now?

Let's see if I can Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

No one look at my desktop because it's just as messy as my room.

How can that- how can that not be my correct one?

All right, let me try this.

All right, hold on.

All right, let's try this.

Yes, I did work on my presentation, like, 20 minutes before I came up here.

That's how I roll, people.

The spirit just moves me.

All right.

There we go.

Let's see.

There we are.

I know that's correct.

I still didn't fix this part.

If the past were infinite, then contradictions would be possible.

Contradictions are not possible, therefore the past is not infinite.

I do fix this later.

But for me, what I'm trying to say in the argument is not that an infinite past is a contradiction that can't exist, but an infinite past leads to contradictions.

So, for Craig's argument saying that, okay, well, Hilbert's Hotel and past events aren't the same thing, you're right.

But if the past were beginningless, you could build one hotel room at a time, or you could have one indestructible object come into existence every 10 gazillion years.

Y- you had one indestructible object pop into existence every 10 gazillion years, or two particles hit, two more particles come into existence, it doesn't matter how even if the space between the events is huge, a Googol years, one and a hundred zeros, it would still have an actual infinite number of things in the present moment.

An infinite past would yield these kinds of contradictions.

You would have the Hilbert's Hotel today, you would not have that if you started building Hilbert's Hotel into an endless future, the contradictory hotel will not exist, but you would in an infinite past.

So, that shows there can be problems with an infinite past.

Uh, another thing that we've seen in the past few years, uh, in the 2010s, Alex Pruss, who is a Catholic philosopher at Baylor University, a- along with Rob Koons, who is, uh, a, uh, Lutheran convert to Catholicism, have worked on a theory called causal finitism.

And this is the argument that causal chains must be finite, or at least there can be infinite causal chains that are paradoxical and cannot exist.

All right?

So, we have to be careful.

Uh, they'll, you know, they'll make an argument based on this saying that, look, even if the past is infinite, let's say you could have Hilbert's Hotel, let's say you could have that, you could have all of these causal finitist paradoxes that arise.

And I shared one with Jimmy yesterday at our dialogue.

Suppose you had an infinite suppose God made an infinite number of immortal people, and they've always existed, and every year, they have a task to do.

They- they pass a paper into the future, for example.

That seems fine.

But the problem is, if you had an infinite past, you could have this same number of people do paradoxical things that can't actually happen.

Uh, so imagine you have Mr. Zero, Mr. One, Mr. Two, Mr. Three, Mr. Four.

They have all of these names for each year that they act.

And this is Rob Koon's paper passer experiment I explained with Jimmy.

Suppose here's the rule.

Each person here is named after a number, one of the natural numbers.

And that and so there's an infinite number of them, there's an infinite number of natural numbers.

They have a rule.

They receive a paper from the guy to their left.

If the paper is blank, they write their name on it.

If the paper already has a name on it, i.e.

a number, they pass it to the right.

All right?

So, they just go and number Mr. Five gets it.

If it's blank, he writes his name.

It won't be blank because I'm sure Six wrote something, and they pass it along.

Now, the paradox that arises is this, uh, what name is on Mr. Zero's paper?

Because it can't be One.

He couldn't get a one, because if he got a one, it would have been blank here.

And s- uh, if it was sorry, it- it- it would be blank when One got it.

If it were blank, well, Two would have written his name.

And it couldn't have been blank when Two got it because, you know, Three would have written his name.

And so we have this sort of paradox that arises, that if every person in this infinite chain follows this rule, a Bernadite rule, named after the- the mathematician Jose Bernadite, you get a paradox.

A paper arrives in the present.

It needs to have a number, a name on it, but it can't have any particular number.

You could also have all other kinds of crazy stuff, like an actual infinite number of papers, if they were copying papers from one another.

Uh, another variant of the paradox is the Grim Reaper Paradox.

Uh, you know This wasn't the right I can't believe it's not the right one, because I changed Right?

Someone came up to me and said, Are you going to kill Sy?

I'm like, Yeah.

And I went back in and I changed Bob's name to Sy.

So, just imagine.

I was like, You're right.

He's like I was like, I'm not gonna kill Sy.

That'd be gratuitous.

And I was like, Wait, I had the Grim Reaper slide.

So, this is what I get.

I did save the right one.

It doesn't it doesn't it doesn't matter.

It does not matter.

All righty.

So, the point is, it's similar to the paper passer thought experiment.

Uh, every Grim Reaper in a mortal Sy is alive.

A Grim Reaper kills him, number zero.

Uh, he couldn't One would have killed him.

Well, Two would have Immortal, except Grim Reapers can kill them.

And you have that paradox that Sy must be dead, but no Grim no individual Reaper could have killed him in this in- infinite chain.

At this point, some of you might be thinking to yourself That, of course, is Tom Hanks in the movie Big, a wonderful classic, uh, where a 12-year-old gets to be 35 and doesn't realize how lucky he had it as a kid, at least at first.

Uh I don't get it.

The, the point is just, look, these causal chains can create these sorts of paradoxes.

And as I talked about in my dialogue with Jimmy, uh, I think that time travel can't happen 'cause you could have all kinds of paradoxes.

You could go back in time and kill your grandfather, but then you would never exist to go back in time and kill him.

So, I would say that you can't go back in time, because otherwise, those kinds of paradoxes would easily happen.

Or if you could go back in time, God wouldn't let you do that stuff.

All right?

Uh, in Pruss's book, Infinity, Causation, and Paradox, he says some people tell him with the Grim Reaper experiment and the paper passer, they say, Look, something will happen where someone will drop their paper and not do it.

Or, A Grim Reaper won't show up to work that day, so there won't be a paradox.

And I think, really, why?

How do we know that's gonna happen?

Well, it just has to, so there's no paradox.

There's gonna be some strange metaphysical force that will stop it from happening.

So, I would say that if the past is infinite, it can only be infinite, uh, if God exists to present thes- to prevent these paradoxes.

So as an atheist, the only way you can get in Normally, you want an infinite past 'cause you would say God didn't make the world, it's always been here.

You still have other arguments.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

But even if you had an infinite past, you have these other finitude paradoxes that arise that only the existence of God can explain why we don't have them.

Uh, so I, I think that this is a very promising avenue of research that people are, are working towards.

All right, let's talk about a few more here.

This is gonna get even more heady, but you can have fun.

We'll have fun here.

Uh, the contingency argument.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Something doesn't have to exist and needs a necessary being to keep it in existence.

This is Father Copleston and Bertrand Russell.

They had a very polite British debate about it in 1948.

You can find it online.

It's, it's super fun just to But it seems to me the problem with your argument is that And they, they have a great exchange with one another saying, Well, how do we know that the universe just isn't necessary, it exists?

How do we know the universe is contingent?

Uh, it Those doubts from Russell kind of undercut the argument.

So, in order to get around it, we use something called There are people using modal contingency ontological arguments.

I promise this won't be painful, okay?

I'm gonna talk about possible worlds.

A possible world is not a parallel dimension where evil Dr. Strange is doing something.

A possible world is kind of like a book.

It's a description of how the world could have been if it were a little different.

If it's possible, it'd be in one of these books.

If it's impossible, it's not in a book, like a s- a married bachelor.

So, there's possible worlds.

There's ways the world could have been.

So, a modal ontological argument would say that It goes like this.

Is This is a real argument.

Philosophers do respect this.

This is not a joke.

It's really interesting.

Uh, it's possible that God, a necessary being, exists.

If it is possible God exists, God exists in a possible world, right?

If something's possible, it's in a possible world.

If God exists in one possible world, He exists in every possible world 'cause He's necessary.

Two plus two equals four is true in every single possible world.

It's in every description of any world.

Well, the actual world is a possible world.

Therefore, God exists in the actual world.

And we're done.

We're good.

We can go home.

We're done.

No, it's never that, it's never that simple.

Honestly, the only premise that philosophers have a lot of trouble with before they sign onto this argument is the first premise.

Is it possible not just epistemically, like, oh, we talk about it, but it's something that could really happen?

Because there's a huge problem here is that you If you have a really powerful tool, you don't want it used against you, because you could run a reverse ontological argument.

Note what I just did here.

Instead of changing to exist, change it to, is it possible God does not exist?

Is that I'm, I'm sure obviously people say, Yeah, it's possible.

That's why we're debating it.

Well, then if it's possible He doesn't exist, there's a possible world then He does not exist in.

And if God doesn't exist in one possible world, He doesn't exist in every one.

If He's necessary, He's gotta be in all of them.

The actual world's a possible world, but it doesn't matter.

God doesn't exist in the actual world.

The point is you can take this argument If you can just change one word in the whole thing and get the opposite conclusion, it's not a good argument.

You need a symmetry breaker.

You need something to show there's a difference between why this argument doesn't work and this one does.

So, my friend Josh Rasmussen, who's a Protestant philosopher, has done a lot of work on this area.

He's worked on contingency arguments and making really cool ones.

He has a great book, uh, uh, God Sorry.

How Reason Can Lead to God.

This is America, Josh.

It's up to down, okay?

But I guess we're going up to God.

God to Lead Can Reason How by Joshua Rasmussen.

So, uh, How Reason Can Lead to God.

He does a modal contingency argument.

He says, well, look, it's Instead of trying to say with Bertrand, against Bertrand Russell, yeah, the universe is contingent, say to Russell, well, it's possible the universe has an explanation, right?

Is it at least possible the universe is explained by something that not just itself, it has an explanation?

Because nothing in the universe could be that explanation, and therefore it's possible a necessary being explains the universe.

And now we've got something.

We've got stuff that exists, and we can run the modal ontological argument, but we can use it with something that's different from the other one.

Uh, we actually have things that exist that lead to our modal intuition there must be a necessary being running this way.

So, I think that's really fun.

I think it's a fun thing.

All right, next one.

The fine-tuning argument.

We got the laws of physics, and, uh, they could be different.

This is a book called Just Six Numbers by the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees.

And he talks about how the odds of our universe existing are ridiculously low.

Uh, illustration I like to use is if you were playing poker with someone and you got a royal f- I've never seen a r- Has anyone here seen a royal flush?

In real I'm sorry, in a real game.

You saw it in a real game?That's amazing.

But I bet if we asked 500,000 other people, we, uh, they'd say no.

The odds are, like, one in 600,000.

But they do happen.

All right, new ques Has anyone ever seen somebody get 10 royal flushes in a row fairly?

That's the key, right?

'Cause if you have s- as if If you've seen someone get 20 royal flushes in a row, Yeah, my, my cheating brother-in-law.

Now, why do you think that?

Why can't it just be lucky?

We live in an infinite universe.

Who knows what could happen?

We know deep down that that's so improbable, it's gotta be design, not chance.

And that's the essence of the fine-tuning argument, that things like the strong nuclear force, the amount of entropy at the beginning of the universe, uh, all The cosmological concept, the strength of gravity in empty space, these things are balanced on a knife's edge.

It would be much more likely If the universe came into existence under atheism, it'd be far more likely there is no embodied intelligent life.

That's very surprising under atheism, but it's not surprising at all under theism because God could have good reasons.

At least he has reasons like there's one in 10 to the 120th power odds of getting us without God.

I'm sure God has a reason below that probability for creating embodied intelligent life.

Uh, so, uh, it This is very interesting and that's why some atheists, uh, even the While there are atheists like Stephen Hawking and others who recognize the fine-tuning problem and they try to solve it with things like a multiverse, you have people like the late atheist Victor Stenger who have tried to say the universe is not, it's not really fine-tuned at all.

You know, it's Uh, the people get this wrong.

It's, it's not You know, the odds really aren't stacked against us.

And this is all the rave back in the early 2010s.

Uh, I remember from my very first debate, major atheism debate, against Dan Barker.

That was, uh, 10 years ago.

He was a very, uh, well-rested young man, uh, in the prime of his life.

I knew I studied Barker before our debate and I knew he would bring up Stenger's book against my fine-tuning argument, so just for a little bit of rhetorical flourish, I kept the book under my podium and explained what was wrong with it.

And I s To explain what was wrong with the book, I cited a paper by an astronomer named Luke Barnes.

Since then, Luke has gone on to write a entire book refuting Stenger's thesis and other objections to the fine-tuning argument.

His co-author, Geraint Lewis, is an atheist, actually.

So the book only says, Hey, this universe, the odds of existing are really low, we need an explanation.

Now, Lewis explains to Barnes why he's not fully sold on God, but he accepts everything else on the fine-tuning argument.

And they, they dialogue, but they make a very strong case against Stenger's denial of fine-tuning and the other elements that people try to, um, debunk in it.

Next one, let's talk about miracles.

Does a- does anyone know who this fun guy is?

Shout it out.

Who knows who this guy is?

David Hume.

David Hume.

David Hume, the poster boy for atheology, for the critique of natural religion.

Wro He was a Scottish philosopher in the 18th century, uh, and had some devastating criticisms of arguments that were not necessarily Catholic or Thomistic arguments, but the watchmaker argument, the watchmaker analogy, claims on miracles.

And it's persisted to this very day that a lot of people think they can just cite Hume and, you know, we say, Oh, well, we, we're Christians 'cause we have good evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

We have the gospels, the witness of Paul, the apostles.

And Hume, people will often say extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence.

Who's heard of that one before?

Extraordinary events need r- extraordinary evidence.

So Hume said, No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.

So any evidence you have for a miracle would have to be more miraculous than the miracle itself, or at least it'd be a miracle if the evidence was actually false.

And that raises the bar so high alm- almost no miracle could really, um, could pass it.

But we have some newer arguments that really challenge a lot of this.

Uh, this is a book from, I think, 2008 by John Ehrman called Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles.

And while Ehrman is not actually very sympathetic towards Christian miracle claims, he does point out the errors that, uh, Hume makes in probability theory and calculus, which is something that was still developing during his time in the 18th century and would take time to develop in things like Bayes' probability theorem, which was developed by a Christian clergyman, actually.

I- I'll give you just one example.

This was an objection even in Hume's own time that he kind of glossed over that I think shows the problem.

What Hume is basically saying is that, Look, people lie.

People are mistaken.

Nature doesn't lie.

Nature is not mistaken.

Nature tells us its laws.

This is the way it's always been.

Our uniform experience is never broken.

What's more likely, the uniform experience was broken w- and a miracle happened, or somebody told a fib, or they were hill- they had too much wine?

All right?

But the problem here is that how do you know, we have uniform experience, miracles don't happen?

This kind of assumes what it needs to prove.

So I have a picture here of British explorers landing in Tahiti.

So imagine you're a British explorer and you're, you're in Tahiti and you First, you run to a tree and eat some oranges 'cause you probably have scurvy.

That's why they kept limes with them.

They're limeys so they don't get scurvy, you know, vitamin C deficiency.

Then after that, you tell the, the natives as best you can what it's like in England and say, Oh, yeah, we You know, in, in winter, we go out and we walk on the lake and we skate on the lake.

Now, should these people believe this?

After all, their uniform experience in Tahiti for the entire length of their civilization and existence is that you cannot walk on water.

That's impossible.

That's their uniform experience.

Maybe their uniform experience, though, is truncated.

Maybe it's missing some aspects of the world.

And so, that's one of the flaws here.

We have more philosophical, uh, retorts .

that are involved to these objections to miracles.

I really like this book.

This is the other Andrew Loke book.

Uh, I think he's a, he's a great scholar.

I'm really happy to see the work that he's doing.

This is probably one of my favorite new books on the resurrection.

Uh, you could tell it's an academic book because it just has geometric shapes on the front.

Academic publishers are like, Don't worry, 18 people will read this.

We're just gonna go with Miscellaneous Shapes 5. Back in the 90s, I, I, I, we're throwing at least though, like, back in the 90s, our book covers at Catholic Answers were, like, it was clouds or whirlpools.

It was always water.

Go back and look.

Go back and look.

Answering Jehovah's Witnesses, it's a whirlpool of water.

I don't know why.

But, uh, Loke does a good job answering these philosophical arguments and rigorously cataloging the historical evidence and replying to modern skeptics against resurrection.

And it's not just that.

There's also, I think, there's other miracles that we should appeal to to show God acting in history.

Uh, one of my favorites is the Miracle of Fatima, for example, 30,000 people after the apparition, the appearance of Mary at Fatima witnessed the miracle of the sun dancing, moving in the sky.

The, it had just rained and people's clothes were dried in an instant, and it was reported on by newspapers very soon to the event.

It has a lot of eyewitnesses.

You could probably, you can probably find people, maybe survivors of it.

At least you could find people who immediately knew these people, children, grandchildren.

Uh, so how do we explain this?

I think this is good evidence not just for God acting in history, uh, but also for the Catholic faith itself.

There's an excellent article published in 2020 by two Catholic philosophers, Tyler McNabb and Joseph Blatto, called Mary and Fatima: A Modest C-Inductive Argument for Catholicism.

I love philosophy.

Uh, and the irony here is, hey, we're not trying to prove Catholicism, but if you were adding up the evidence, well, it tips the scale towards Catholicism.

What McNabb and Blatto say is that, look, if Martin Luther appeared in an apparition with a message from God, that'd probably be evidence for Protestantism.

If John Calvin showed up with a message from God, this would be evidence for Reform Protestant tradition.

The fact that God chose Mary to reveal a message in a Roman Catholic context, like in Fatima, uh, where heavy Marian devotion is common and seen as biblical, this gives us evidence that the Roman Catholic tradition is correct.

So, we have philosophers taking things that are near and dear to us as devotions, using rigorous philosophical analysis to present it as arguments both for belief in God and belief in the Catholic faith itself.

The last one I want to discuss is the moral argument.

Uh, this is William Lane Craig's version of it, similar ones of C.S. Lewis, if there, if God did not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

But there are objective moral values and duties, objective morality.

Therefore, God exists.

One of the weaknesses of this argument is that you have to cover a lot of ground.

In order to make a successful moral argument for the existence of God, you'd have to show other secular moral theories cannot, uh, are, cannot account for objective morality.

So, you have Erik Wielenberg, for example.

This is his, uh, Platonic Objective Morality: Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has a whole book, Morality Without God.

To make it And I think you can do this, but it's a lot of work to try to show, hey, these secular systems can't account for objective morality.

You're, like I said in my dialogue with Jimmy, it's easier to defend a modest conclusion than a very strong one.

So, one thing that we can do that, uh, philosophers of religion are looking into are abductive moral arguments, inference to this best explanation.

So, saying, look, even if you could have objective morality without God, God is the best explanation for interesting features of morality.

The fact that we can have moral knowledge at all.

Like, our five, we don't see, taste, touch, hear, or smell, uh, objective morals, and yet we have knowledge of them.

How do we do that?

Perhaps a divine explanation best accounts for that.

Uh, it best explains moral responsibility.

Even if you have objective moral values, if atheism were true, aren't we just molecules in motion?

You know, do we, uh, do we imprison lightning for setting houses on fire?

Do we morally blame lightning?

Do we do sad Dateline episodes with the dun-dun music about the lightning, that we should have known better?

You know, faded black-and-white photographs coming through, No, lightning.

We should have known better.

Uh, whenever I watch that it's always like, It was the '80s.

It was a high time.

But, but for some, it wasn't enough.

No, because it's molecules in motion.

There's no moral responsibility there.

It just acts.

It's pre- it's determined.

It's determined by molecular forces.

It couldn't have been any other way.

But if that's what we are, then we are molecules in motion.

Why do human beings have moral responsibility?

Unless there is something about us beyond just molecules in motion that we can be held responsible for what we do.

This girl's by and should not be held responsible.

This is a meme called Disaster Girl.

Her dad wanted to take a picture and thought it was interesting, and she happened to turn her head at just the right perfect moment.

And now she's forever on the inter- on the internet, so.

So, moral responsibility, that if, if you were to te- say that she started that fire, that would be calumny.

You would be held morally responsible because you can do otherwise, 'cause we're not just molecules in motion.

Uh, finally, God best explains moral value.

God explains moral value that, uh, I remember I had a dialogue with Alex O'Connor last year.

Uh, he's ca- called Cosmic Skeptic on YouTube, very bright, uh, very British.

I'm very envious of his and others' accents.

Uh, except that when I show up, Howdy, everybody.

Just can't have that erudite expression.

But we had a dialogue about this, uh, the issues of moral values.

And he gave me an interesting argument.

He said, Well, I don't think humans He's also, he was an ethical vegan.

He's on a journey there.

But he said, I can't see how humans have this special intrinsic value that other species don't.

Because if atheism is true, we evolved over time, and so there's no- in evolution, it's always slight change, slight change, slight change.

Uh, there can't be one mark where we say, Ah, here's humanity, and it's special.

It's always the change is very slight among hominids and primates.

There is no point where you can say, Ah, it's special.

You know, There's human specialness there.

So if atheism is true, human exceptionalism and dignity is false.

And Alex told me, Well, atheism's true, so exceptionalism is false.

So I said, Why don't we run it in the other direction?

I think it's just obvious humans are exceptional and special, that we would care even for permanently disabled humans that are not rational.

We recognize we have a moral duty towards them that we don't have to smarter non-human animals.

But why?

Like, you know, if you're, if you're out and you've, you gotta, you know, you don't You kill, you know, if you're lost in the woods, you, you kill the dog, your pet dog to save the child.

You don't kill the child to save the dog, even if it's a beloved dog.

Why do humans have this?

They, they do have that, that dignity.

So I run the argument backwards.

If atheism is true, human di- human exceptionalism and dignity is false.

Atheism true, dignity false.

I'd say run it backwards.

If atheism is true, human dignity and ex- exception sorry, human dignity and exceptionalism false.

No, it's true.

We have this intrinsic dignity.

So atheism, uh, must be false.

And he said, Oh, I see.

I've made a biological argument forwards.

You've made a theological argument backwards.

That's very interesting.

So in philosophy, we say one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.

It'd be the nerdy way to put that.

But he found it interesting.

And Jimmy, at the end of our dialogue yesterday, said that my reformulation of the Kalam argument was interesting and he wanted to pursue it more.

And I was like, Jackpot.

'Cause that's what we're trying to do, that we present an argument, it's not gonna always be foolproof right off the bat, but to say, Oh, that's very interesting.

Let's explore that more and refine it.

That's what we are all trying to do, is iron sharpens iron.

Uh, so that's why, uh, these are the books.

Uh, you can pick them up at your local bookstore.

And there's others out there, papers.

My point, as I said, with this, here's the appetizer sampler.

We got a lot of other great stuff in the kitchen I didn't even bring out to you.

Uh, and it's good.

It's not just microwave stuff.

It is freshly cooked and delightful.

Uh, but I'm It makes me very excited to explore and pursue, not just for bringing people to knowledge of God, but I, I was really happy to engage my friend, Ben Watkins, from Re- Real Atheology at the Capturing Christianity Conference a few years ago on the question, Does God exist?

That conference, the attendees were probably 95% Protestant, but I had many come up to me with my book, The Case for Catholicism, asking me to sign it, saying they really were fascinated by the arguments for God I'd presented in the debate and some of my other work.

They thought, Oh, what's your Case for Catholicism then?

So it gets, for us to You might be thinking, Oh, this atheism stuff, it's over our head.

Can't we just do another conference on Mary or the Eucharist?

I feel bad.

I think we're doing the Eucharist next year.

But, um- like, Can't we just be in our Can't we be in the place we're used to, our comfort zone?

But I will tell you, I, I think that there are a lot of Protestants who can get very annoyed when they do a lot of work to show someone God exists, historical knowledge and argument that Jesus rose from the dead, bring this person to a full knowledge of Christianity, and we just come along and poach 'em.

And what about Catholicism?

Now, that's not wrong.

It's not wrong to show someone the truth, but that person hears this guy has come along, Hey, be in my Church.

They've already got an attachment to the person who led them to Christ, who led them to the true God.

How much more effective would it be that if we can lead be the ones who lead people to God, who lead people to Jesus?

How much more natural and easy it would be to follow us, to be led to the Church that He established?

So I That's why I hope you I hope you'll take, uh, the Catholic presentation and Case for God very seriously and take the best arguments and go out there and make disciples of all nations.

So thank you very much.

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