Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production
[00:00:08] Speaker B: of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: AI.
Thank you for joining us on Mind Matters News today. This is Mike Egnor. I have the pleasure and privilege of having Michael Shermer join us. Mike is a historian of science, the founder of Skeptic magazine, I believe, the Skeptic Society, and he's published widely on skeptical issues. And he has a new book out called Truth. And I'd like to ask Mike to talk about what's in the book and what's on his mind. So welcome, Michael.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Oh, well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Yes, and nice to see you again. We were just in person in Scottsdale, I think it was.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
Weather here in the Northeast isn't that much better now than it was.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Oh, well, sorry to hear that. I don't want to tell you what my day is like here in Santa Barbara. I already went for a bike ride this morning in short sleeves and shirt and shorts.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Al, I'm looking at snow and temperature in the 30s.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Okay. All right.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: So welcome, Michael.
So your new book is entitled Truth. Could you, could you tell us a bit about it?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, here it is. Look at that cover.
I just got my copies in a case of them today, which is always kind of fun.
Well, so this is sort of the culmination, I guess, of 33, four years of publishing Skeptic magazine and searching for the truth about anything and everything. And really, for us, there's no sacred cows on that. You know, we just want to know what we should believe.
And I try not to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true, that they're actually true, regardless of what I think about it. And so obviously some political issues are not quite as hard, fast and empirical as other scientific type truths. But what I'm after with the book is to get back to the idea that there is an objective reality out there and we can know something about it, even if not perfectly. None of us are omniscient deities.
I'm not even sure there is an omniscient deity, although we can discuss that because I think you believe that there is. But whether there is or not, I know for sure it isn't me and it isn't you.
So we start with the premise of fallibilism. That is, we, we. We could be wrong about anything. And that. And therefore you have to couch any. Any of your beliefs in some probability. You know, I'm 99% certain, or I'm only 1% confident, or, you know, whatever. And then from there, just then begin to ask, well, how do you know what you should believe, what you know, what's the evidence? How do you evaluate the arguments?
And so the first third of the book is about that. Just, you know, how do scientists determine what is true about any medical issue and vaccines or.
Or, you know, whatever. Drugs or masks or whatever. How do they know? Or, you know, scientists that study social sciences, how do they determine what to believe about human behavior and so on? So I go through all that, you know, correlation and causation and statistical analysis and signal detection and Bayesian reasoning and all that. It's pretty. Pretty straightforward, you know, research methodologies kind of material. But then I apply it to a lot of different, more controversial subjects.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: I was looking a little bit at Skeptic magazine. You're the founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine, and I guess it's been published since 1992, I believe.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we started in 92. Yep.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: And it's quarterly and there's been like more than 130 issues. And it's really something, but I've noticed, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is there any skeptical commentary in the magazine on, say, atheism or materialism or Darwinism? That is, that are you skeptical of your own ideas?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Oh, you were breaking up a little bit there, Michael. You're asking, do we cover atheism?
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Well, it's a magazine and a society devoted to skepticism, but skepticism, yeah, it only seems to be on one side.
I don't see any articles about skeptical of atheism or materialism.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Oh, I see what you're asking. Yes, I got it. Yeah, sure.
No, actually, we have published over the years a lot of articles pro.
Here are the best arguments for God's existence, say, and, you know, here are the counter arguments or whatever.
We're definitely not an atheist magazine. You know, in fact, I've purposely steered clear of that as a. As a common theme. It comes up once in a while. But because there are already, you know, there's Humanist magazines, the Humanist and Free Inquiry that deal with a lot of the atheist issues.
In any case, I don't even like the word because I don't want to define myself by what I don't believe.
You know, I'm. There's lots of things I don't believe, you know, God just beat one of them. And in any case, it isn't even a worldview. It's just a lack of belief in God. You know, what do atheists believe?
They believe all sorts of things. It depends. Are they conservative atheists or are they liberal atheists?
You know, and that's going to set the tone for, you know, a lot of other things. So, you know, the idea of, like, you know, political positions about free speech or abortion or immigration, or that those are sort of orthogonal, you know, orthogonal to atheism, whether you believe in God or not. And so that's why I devote one of the chapters in the truth book to in search of objective foundation of morality, that is, whether there's a God or not.
Can we found. Can we create some kind of foundation for determining what's right or wrong or good or evil?
[00:05:55] Speaker A: That's not a bad place to start because I really think that the objective nature of moral law, which I think we all implicitly accept on some level, really points to the existence of God.
And how do you have moral law without God? Objective moral law?
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Yes. Well, I would ask. I guess I'd throw it back to you.
How does God's existence grant any kind of objectivity to morality? Is it just whatever God happens to say? That's what we've decided. What is true about morality? What's good, what's evil, what's right, what's wrong? Or is God identifying something that really is right or wrong in the moral universe, and he's instructing us that that's the one right there, in which case we should be able to figure it out on our own as well, like, okay, he told us that this is wrong. Let's see if we can create some arguments for why it's wrong to base it regardless of what God says. So, as you know, that's Euthyphro's argument that Plato created 2,500 years ago. And I think it still stands, that is, you still should have some good reasons why.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Well, the Christian response to Euthyphro's argument, classically has been that. And Euthyphro's argument was, does God decide what's good or does God obey what's good? And the Christian response is that God is goodness itself, That he is goodness, and that.
So that kind of obviates that dilemma.
The question that I have about moral law and God's existence is one that I've thought about for a very long time.
Do you believe that it's possible for everyone to be wrong about moral law? That is, is it conceivable that everyone in the world could believe a certain thing is morally good or morally, morally bad and they could still be wrong about it?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Certainly. And historically that's been the case. Although I wouldn't say everyone, but almost everyone thought, almost everyone thought slavery was, Was fully acceptable. Most Christians, for example, totally supported it. And with a handful of, of, of Quakers and Episcopalians in England who, you know, objected to the slave trade, almost everybody support. In my book, the Moral Arc, I have a whole section on from preachers, sermons in the, like, 1850s southern United States, you know, justifying the slave. Oh, it's good for blacks. You know, they're an inferior species and we're saving their soul.
They're not very civilized. And it just goes on and on about what a good Christian thing slavery is. Now, no one today would make that argument. So what ha. What happened. And what happened is, is that we reasoned our way to understanding that as I, as Lincoln said, as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave owner.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Well, the abolition of slavery was intimately associated with Christianity. I mean, that was the source of most of the abolitionist movement. But the deeper question that I'm asked,
[00:09:14] Speaker B: but Michael, why did it take 2000, why did it take thousands of years for Christianity do something about it?
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Well, slavery existed in all segments of human society. It still exists in many societies around the world, and Christianity has eliminated it.
And it was eliminated in many parts of the Christian world long before the elimination of the Atlantic slave trade.
But that's not the question that I'm asking. I'm asking a much deeper question.
If it's possible for everybody in the world to be wrong about a particular moral issue, then whose opinion is it that's morally right?
That is, let's say that everyone, everyone in the world, including the slaves, everyone thought that slavery was right, morally right.
If slavery is morally wrong, then whose opinion is it that it's morally wrong if all human beings think it's right?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Well, assuming no God, then.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: No, that's not what I'm assuming.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: What are you assuming?
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Well, I'm saying that if this is
[00:10:25] Speaker B: one of these thought experiments.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a thought experiment. And my point is that moral law is an objective thing that we discover. It's not something that we fabricate. It's not something we make up. It's something we find. So whose opinion is it? If we discover it, where does it come from?
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it came from us. We derived it through reason and rationality.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: But then if it comes from us, then we created it, we discover it.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Well, both you create and no, if you discovered it's not from you.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Well, yes it is, because there has to be a brain that makes the discovery. It's like, so where laws, natural laws exist. Well, they're in nature, but of course we construct mathematical models.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: So you don't think that moral law is. Is an objective thing. You think it's something that only comes from. From human beings?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: No, I disagree with the statement you just made. There is objective moral values that we can discover on our own and we have. And that's the whole point of all moral progress. Everything you just described happened because we discovered that there are moral laws.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Do those moral laws exist before we discover them?
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Yes, for our species? Yes, for us.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Then whose opinion are they before we discover them?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: They're just out there. In the same way that.
Here's the analogy I made.
If you just let me make the argument, Michael, that I'm trying to find my example here, that let's say planets travel in elliptical orbits. Now, did they always travel in elliptical orbits before Kepler discovered this? Yes, of course.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Course.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: In the same way that physical and biological laws exist and then we discover them and put mathematical reasoning behind them and so on. So to do moral laws. On this analogy here, I'll read to you from my book. We are born with a rudimentary concept of number. But as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others.
No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four, and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that two plus two equals four. Perhaps we're born with a rudimentary moral sense. And as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
And these would include, for example, people would rather live in South Korea than North Korea.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: And why? Why? But why? Because they really want freedom. They rather have food than be starving. They'd rather have freedom than be enslaved. Why?
Because bodily autonomy, the foundation of moral reasoning of all morality, is the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. Can they suffer? That's where we begin. Can humans suffer? Yes, they can. Then we ought to do something about the suffering.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Michael, no one doubts that we should all be trying to alleviate suffering. That's not the point at of contention. The point of contention is that moral law has a quality to it that suggests that it's objective, that it's something that we discover something that's out there. And my question is, then where does it come from?
[00:13:44] Speaker B: It's in nature. It's in our nature to.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Not where does it.
It's in our nature. But not wanting to suffer is not the same thing as moral law.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah, moral law.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: No, no, no.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: I'm deriving an ought from the is. No, no, because the way nature is, that is we don't want to suffer. We ought to do something about that, and we do.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Well, yeah, but I don't want to eat peppermint ice cream because I don't like it. That doesn't mean that that's a moral law.
Not wanting something doesn't make something moral or immoral.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Well, it does if it involves suffering or flourishing. That's what makes it morality.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: There's all kinds of things. There's all kinds of things that involve suffering or flourishing. I mean, but the, the argument that I'm making is that moral law is something that has an objective quality to it, and it's an opinion. And the opinion has to come from a mind. It's not simply sitting out there in nature.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Well, both.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: I think that's, I think that's very powerful evidence for God's existence.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: No, no, I disagree. It's, it's, it's out there and, and, and it's in our minds. We discover it in the same way we discover natural laws. Planets travel in elliptical orbits. They really do. And we really reason that.
And it took a long time to figure that out. And, you know, in the same way. Exactly the same way we reason about moral issues.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Where do those natural laws come from?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: They're part of our species. We were evolved as a social primate species to care about what other people think.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: No, no. Where do the natural laws come from? Where does the regularity. They're part of nature.
And do you think that implies that there's a mind behind nature?
[00:15:30] Speaker B: No, I don't think that implies there's a mind behind nature. No, I don't derive that. There could be, but I, I doubt it. You mean like an intelligent designer type mind? A God?
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Well, an intelligence. Yes. I mean, yeah. So, so you, you, you. There could be. Okay, they. So you. I, I don't know how one could look at the laws of physics, for, for example, the, the intricate mathematical laws, and not infer that there's an intelligent mind behind all of that.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Well, there could be. That's one interpretation. But as I, you know, as, you know, in the book, I have a whole chapter on that in which I present all those arguments in favor of what you're arguing and then the counter arguments and, you know, it's really, at this point in the history of science, you know, it's not clear what the full explanation is for the origins of our universe. The fine Tunis and so on. I have many quotes from famous people and scientists on both sides, and, you know, I just think we don't have, have a full answer yet.
It could be we live in a multiverse, there's multiple bubble universes, and ours happens to be the one with laws that give rise to life. But I should point out, you know, when you say the universe is fine tuned, there's a mind behind it, most of the universe is totally inhospitable to sentient beings or life of any kind.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Oh, that's not true. That's not true at all.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: The vast majority of planets are not good for life.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Yeah, but, but, but, but that universe is where the elements that make up our body came from.
We are all, as Carl Sagan would say, stardust in some sense.
Much of the universe out there is a place where elements are formed that have come to make our body. And we don't actually live out there in outer space. We live on Earth, which is actually rather well suited to us.
Well, I mean, just because space is cold and has no air doesn't mean that the universe itself isn't quite nicely adapted to our existence because it seems to be very finely tuned.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: And as I pointed out, as I point out in the book, you know, it's. If the universe is almost 14 billion years old, you know, life only arose here just, you know, a few billion years ago. What was God doing all those billions of years? Why waste all that space? And, and, well, God.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: God is eternal. God. God. God doesn't have an alarm clock.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: How do you know? How do you know God's eternal?
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Because of Aquinas Five ways, particularly his first three, which point to God's eternity. Plus, that's just revealed theology.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Well, but I mean, there could be a God. Yes, a designer, but it's a finite being. It could just be a super intelligent extraterrestrial that's able to geoengineer planets and genetically engineer life forms. And how would that be different from what you're talking about, a deity?
[00:18:15] Speaker A: Well, because, I mean.
Well, maybe we should get into Aquinas's five ways. I think that's actually nice, a nice way to go at it.
Aquinas's first way, which is the prime mover argument.
And the argument is that change as it happens in nature requires a prime mover to get a causal change started.
And kind of a simple way of saying it is that you can't go to infinite regress in a series of instrumental changes or instrumental causes.
And you need to have a prime mover. You need to have someone who's outside of nature to get it started. The example that Aristotle used, this goes back to Aristotle. This is not a uniquely Christian view. The example that Aristotle used was of a man using a stick to push a leaf.
And the leaf is the final effect of the causal chain. The stick is the chain of instrumental causes, and the man's hand is the prime mover.
And you can't go to infinite regress simply saying that I've got an infinitely long stick still won't move the leaf.
You have to have a prime mover. You have to have a hand at the business end of the stick to get it to move.
And that is what all men call God.
And I think it's a very powerful argument. And it shows that God is outside of nature itself. He's outside of something that needs to be caused or needs to be changed. And that means that he's outside of time.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Okay, I'll give you. You want my rebuttal to that?
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: The universe is everything that is ever was or ever shall be. Thus God must be within the universe.
What is the universe?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Michael, neither of those has anything to do with Christian theology or the Jewish understanding.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Well, I know, but you're giving me Aquinas argument. I'm giving you my counter argument from the book.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: But that's not an argument to say that God is within the universe is or is the universe, or is at most a pagan argument. And I'm not arguing from a pagan perspective.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: And thus the regress to a prime mover just begs the question of what moved God.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: God is prime mover.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: God does not need to be moved. Right. Then clearly not everything in the universe needs to be moved. If God doesn't need to be moved, then not everything in the universe needs to be moved.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: But the prime mover argument specifically shows that he's outside of the universe.
He's not the stick, he's the hand that moves the stick.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Okay, but that's a category error. You're using reasoning within the universe, cause and effect reasoning or motion within the universe to the universe itself. And that's what philosophers call a category error. No, we have lots of examples of things in the universe that we understand the cause of. We have no experience zero of universes. Outside of which they get created or moved.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: No, of course, we can certainly know things outside of the universe in a sense.
And the sense is the traditional theistic way of understanding God's nature. We can know what's outside of the universe, number one, by negation. That's the apophatic theology. We can know it by analogy, and we can know it by its effect in the world. In much the same way, for example, that we can know about singularities at the center of black holes. A singularity is an undefined point in general relativity in space time, and it's undefined, but we can still know quite a bit about it. We can know what it's not, we can know by analogy what it is, and we can know what its effect is, which is to create a black hole. So science uses this kind of inference a lot to understand.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: So if God is outside of the universe to cause things to happen in the universe, clearly he or it has to reach in to stir the particles somehow. How does that happen?
[00:22:20] Speaker A: God interacts with the universe.
It's not reaching in. You're using kind of a materialistic metaphor.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: I have to use language.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: In fact, God holds the universe. Well, not. Yeah, but language should kind of make sense.
God holds the universe in existence.
And in fact, it's long a principle of Christian theology, most most prominently from St. Augustine, that we are thoughts in God's mind. That all. That all of creation is a. Is a thought in God's mind.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: I don't know. What does that mean? That doesn't make any sense. We're just a thought. But I'm a physical being. So somehow the thought has to transform into physical stuff.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: So how did God. How does God do that? I mean, how. You know, you say something can't come from nothing. Well, apparently it can because God did it.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Well, something can't come from nothing spontaneously.
But God is not nothing. And the laws by which God creates are not nothing.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: But if there's truly nothing, you know, not just stuff, but no energy, no space and time, no Platonic ideas, no logic, no rationality, no laws of nature and so on, then there also can't be the idea of God. There's no God either. There's nothing.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: No, no. Nothing means there's no things and God is not a thing.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Well, no, no, but there's no thoughts either. There's no logic, there's no Platonic ideas. They can't exist either. And so God would be in that. There's no God if there's nothing.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: No, no, nothing. Means there's no thing. It doesn't preclude the existence.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: But even that word, no thing, you're implying there's a thing that can't exist.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: But God is not a thing. That's the point.
He's not in the universe.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: But. But laws of nature are not things either. They're, you know, they're ideas. All right, so they can't exist, and neither can God. If. If you really want to go full nothing, then there's no God either.
But. But if you're willing to say, oh, no, hang on, I want there to be a God outside of all the nothing. Well, apparently there is something outside of nothing, which is something.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: No, because God isn't a thing.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: There's nothing. Where is God?
Outside of nothing?
[00:24:32] Speaker A: God doesn't have a location.
You're making the category error.
God doesn't have a location.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: But, Michael, what do you mean by nothing, then?
[00:24:42] Speaker A: What I mean is that God is the foundation of existence. In fact, he is essence and existence together, and he created the universe.
But God is not part of the universe. Universe. Your statement in what you claim is the refutation of the first way, I think is nonsensical. Of course God is not part of the universe. He's not something that you see through a telescope or a microscope.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Then how do you know he's there?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: By analogy. By negation.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Okay, give me an analogy.
Give us.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: The analogy is that God is the omnipotent creator of the universe.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Because those are just words. You're just defining it into existence.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Well, I believe so.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Convince me. Show me. Come on, show me. Convince me.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Sure, sure. The.
Well, we'll start with the first way that you can't have change in nature unless you have a prime mover outside of nature that gets the causal change started.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Not true things. Quantum effects happen all the time without any cause.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: That's.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: No, that's what we're told by quantum physicists. Say there's no cause, you know, inside these quantum effects.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: Well, that. That.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: That.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: That violates one of the fundamental principles of science that.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Well, this is why quantum physics is so spooky.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Because it doesn't match the other, you know, kind of laws of nature.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: What is it that. What is it that happens in quantum mechanics without cause?
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Oh, the creation of photons of light out of atoms, for example. They're. They're acausal. They just happen. Same thing.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: No, no, no, no.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Heisenberg's uncertainty.
You know, there's. They're a causal We're. We're told by quantum. Physically.
Don't press me because I don't really understand this, but I'm told by quantum physicists there are lots of acausal things that happen in quantum physics.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: So first of all, that's just not true.
The idea that they're not caused doesn't even make any logical sense.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: I know. No, no, but this is what they say.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: No, the point is that we don't understand the causes and we can't predict them.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: No, they're saying something else.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: They're saying that they're not caused.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: It's not that we can't predict. We could never, not even in principle, pred. Predict them.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's what they're saying. That doesn't mean that they're not caused.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah, this is what they say. They say it's a.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Leibniz in the 17th century made the point that science and all human experience depend upon what he called the principle of sufficient reason. That is that everything that exists in the universe has a reason for the way it is and for the reason for why it happens, even if we can't know that reason. And if you deny that, you really deny the possibility of science, because one could simply say if things can exist, if things can exist without cause, then I can say that an animal in my front yard here didn't really evolve by natural selection.
It just happened. It just happened.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Well, Michael, you need to take this up with quantum physicists. I'm just telling you what they say and that none of these things you're talking about apply. Quantum physics doesn't apply to the animal walking across your yard. The moon is there, whether the moon is there, whether I look at it or not. But apparently my observing subatomic particles, you know, this is a different thing than my observing the moon. And this is what we're told. At the subatomic level, things are different. This is why quantum physics has not yet been wedded to general relativity. We don't have a theory of everything because it's really hard.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Right.
But I just find it remarkable that someone who bases so much of their ideology on science could deny the principle of sufficient reason, could just so broadly deny that things in nature have to have causes.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Oh, I'm not denying that at all. Things in nature do have causes, except for at the quantum level. But there's no such thing as outside of nature. There's no outside of nature. And if you say there is something outside of nature, how do you know?
Because you're not outside of Nature.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: I gave you the first way.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: I refuted those. Would you like my refutation of the first cause argument?
If God does not need a cause, then. Okay, all right. So if God does not need a cause, then clearly not everything in the universe needs a cause.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: Maybe all different in the universe, Michael.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: Maybe the universe itself does not need a cause in the normal sense of that word. Again, see the next chapter for scientific theories. The cause of the universe. Yeah, but many. But let me finish. Many cosmologists think it possible that the universe sprang into existence uncaused out of a quantum vacuum, not unlike many quantum effects, such as the release of photons of light from atoms. Okay, these are physicists. You could take it up with them. They're not atheist physicists. They're just. They're just quantum physicists describing what happens.
And again, if God is a supernatural being outside of space and time, and therefore unknowable in any empirical truth matter, then these arguments are pointless.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Right. So you, at the quantum level, you don't think that principles of cause and effect apply?
[00:29:56] Speaker B: I'm just telling you what quantum physicists say.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm reporting that.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: That's what they say.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: So you're just a reporter. Which ones? Say it?
[00:30:05] Speaker B: All of them. I mean, just talk to all of them. Feynman, Gelman, Mary Gel Man, Richard Feynman.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Feynman said that caused us to apply at the quantum.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Heisenberg. You go all the way back.
All these guys, you know who's into this stuff is the Buddhist, Deepak Chopra. He quotes all these quantum physicists all the time to support Buddhism, not Christianity.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: By the way.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So as I said, unfortunately, Heisenberg can't be here, But.
So, for example, Schroden Jersey equation, does that demonstrate causal relationships?
[00:30:45] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Wave functions?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: I don't know.
All right, this is not my area, so I don't know.
But what's your point?
What are we getting at here, Michael?
Look, if you want to believe in God, these are pretty decent arguments. I make this point in the book that if you already believe there are some good rational arguments, Aquinas and so on and so forth, but they're not enough to convince scientists. Most scientists and philosophers who don't accept any of this, they accept it. They accept the arguments as good, but they say that's not convincing enough to derive through your reasoning the existence of an omniscient deity or a creator deity or designer or whatever.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Well, but scientists generally don't understand Aquinas's five ways and you don't understand them just by reading a book. I mean, you don't understand what he said.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Oh, I do. I just don't agree with your interpretation, that's all.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Well, yeah, but you. But, but. So, so you, you. You understand that Aquinas believes that God is not inside the universe?
[00:31:49] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. So again, this is the category error thing.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: You know, you're. No, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: I didn't ask you anything about reasoning.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: I didn't ask you anything about category errors. I asked you, do you understand that Aquinas did not think that God is a part of the universe?
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Okay, then why, then, then why would you make that statement as a refutation of. Of his argument when that was his argument?
[00:32:12] Speaker B: I think he's wrong about that. I understand what he's saying, but I just think that's wrong.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: I see.
So your view of God that you think is being disproven is really sort of like a Greek God that lives on Mount Olympus somewhere, and of course you think that's nonsense.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Well, I don't think. I don't believe in any of the gods.
I don't think there are any deities.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: But I could be wrong again, back to where I started. I'm a Bayesian reasoner. I put some low percentage on it, not zero.
And I'm happy to find out when we get there. You know, maybe you and I can have the conversation in the next life, wherever that is.
But what you're after here, Michael, is. I mean, I understand what's going on here. I mean, what you're after is not just what convinces you to be a Christian, but you think everybody else should be a Christian. And here are the reasons. Okay, then what is your explanation for the fact that the vast majority of professional philosophers and scientists who know these arguments best, scholars that study Aquinas and so on, they're not Christian.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: The vast majority of scholars who study Aquinas aren't Christian.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, historians, philosophers, historians of philosophy and so on. I mean, they know these arguments. They know them. They know them better than me, but they know them as well as you. And. And yet they're not convinced. They're not Christians. They, you know, they'll.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: You'll have to talk.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Sorry. It doesn't convince me.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Well, so, I mean, I. I'm happy.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Well, my point is that beliefs, you know, these kind of beliefs are in a different category. This is my point of my book.
There are religious truths, and these are different from empirical truths. So I think you're making a Mistake in trying to prove that your faith, your religious truth can be proven empirically and therefore everybody. Everybody should believe it.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Well, there are two ways, I think, to come to know God. One is by faith and one is by reason.
And by faith is a whole separate issue. It's a very personal thing. It involves prayer, it involves reading scripture, all sorts of things like that. But God can be known by reason as well and is known in a different way. And in fact, I look upon proving God's existence as a straightforward scientific theory. I mean, that really is what it is. That is that, for example, Aquinas's first way uses change in nature as evidence. When you look at change and you reason through it carefully, the inference to best explanation is that there is a prime mover, which all men call God, or a first cause for a second way, or a necessary existence, first, third way, etc.
So I think that God's existence has the status of the scientific theory, and I think it's a. I understand.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: I had Stephen Meyer on the podcast my show, and his book is called the Return of the God Hypothesis. He wants to treat it as an empirical question. Well, okay, I'm just telling you, not only do I disagree with that, most professional philosophers and scientists don't think. Michael, the God question is in the empirical.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Michael, Michael, I'm happy to discuss this with most professional scientists and philosophers, but I'm discussing it with you instead.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I know.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: And so I don't really care what they say.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Well, but I'm telling. But my point is this. In the same way they make this point because you're a Christian. So I gather you accept Jesus was, Was not only crucified, but resurrected from the dead, and he is the Messiah, the Son of God. Okay, so, Mike, and, and I'm. I gather you would argue that's an empirical historical question. It's not a matter of just belief in faith. Right, right.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: It really happened historically. Yes.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what you think. Okay, so if all that's true, then how come Jews don't accept it? You can't tell me that these great rabbis don't understand the argument.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: You'll have to ask them. I'm not. I'm not accountable for.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Oh, I. I have. And I can tell you why.
Because the Old Testament does not prophesize that the Messiah would be somebody like a carpenter from Nazareth who would be killed by the Romans. That's not what the Messiah was supposed to be like.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Well, I'm just telling you what they tell me.
That kind of Religious discussion. Maybe we shouldn't bring into this podcast.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Why. But you also think this is my point, that that too is a historical empirical question. We can derive through evidence and arguments whether it really happened or not. Right.
Jesus was resurrected, not just crucified.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yes, yes. I mean, I. Well, but that particular argument, and as I said, this is not. This is mind matters news isn't really looking at the question of Jesus resurrection.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Why not?
[00:36:45] Speaker A: That's not really part of our thing.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: But we're in the category we're talking about.
I'm making a distinction in my book between religious truths that are in a different category entirely from empirical truths. And I think you and atheists are also making a mistake in trying to put these religious truths in the category of science. I just don't think that's where they belong.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Well, no, I'm not saying that faith and the belief in Christ's resurrection is very closely linked to faith, that faith is a scientific theory.
I'm saying that God can be known by reason, which is not about Christ's resurrection. It's about God's existence as prime mover, first cause, necessary existence, exemplar of perfection, origin of regularity. There's all kinds of things that can be known about God that can be known just based on reason.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: And his fourth way. Yeah, let's talk about Aquinas fourth way that. Let's see there. There is then. Okay. In his fourth way, Aquinas argued that there are gradations from less to good, less to more good, true and noble. There is then something which is truest, something best, something noblest. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness and every other perfection. And this we call God. Sorry, I was quoting Aquinas there.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: This is known as the ontological argument, first presented by Saint. Saint Elselm, the 11th century Archbishop Canterbury. Canterbury, who defined God as something than which nothing greater can be conceived.
Reversing the argument, Anselm says it is equally possible to think impossible to think of God as non existent. Quote. For something can be thought of as existing which cannot be thought of as not existing. And this is greater than that which can be thought of as not existing. Close quote. Okay, so here's my counter argument that here I'm quoting. David Hume refuted this argument over two centuries ago.
Quote. Nothing that is distinctly conceivable implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive of as existent, we can also conceive as non existent. And there is no being therefore, whose non existence implies A contradiction. Consequently, there is no being whose existence is demonstrable. Close quote from David Hume.
Second, regarding Aquinas's rendering of the argument, there is then something which is truest, something best, something noblest. Therefore, there must be something to which all being the cause of their being, goodness and every other perfection. Okay, why couldn't we make the opposite? Here's my rendering. There is then something which is falsest, something worst, something ignoblest. Therefore, there must also be something that is to all beings the cause of falsity, badness and ignobity, ignobility, and this we call God.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: All right, all right. Okay.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: So these are all.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Michael, no, Michael, you. You. You need better editors. The.
The Fourth way.
Listen, listen, listen, listen. The Aquinas's fourth way has nothing to do with the. With the ontological argument.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: You can take it up with. With David Hume.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: David, David. David Hume didn't. David Hume didn't. Didn't understand Aquinas.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: Okay? The great David Hume did not understand Thomas.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael.
But Aquinas refuted the ontological argument. He was an opponent of the ontological argument.
He didn't accept the ontological argument.
[00:40:07] Speaker B: I just read his fourth way. What are you talking about?
[00:40:08] Speaker A: He didn't accept the ontological argument.
His argument was that essence is metaphysically distinct from existence, that what something is is completely distinct from that something is.
The ontological argument is an argument from essence. It's a logical argument about the nature of God. The thing is that existence of God is not part of that argument. And this was Aquinas's problem with it, that you can't just make a purely logical argument for God without bringing evidence, things that exist into the argument.
So there's no logical argument that does not contain evidence of, according to Aquinas, that could demonstrate the. The existence of God. So Aquinas specifically refuted the ontological argument. So your claim that the ontological argument is a variation of the fourth way is nonsense. I mean, that's exactly what Aquinas did not think.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: Well, give me an example then. Empirical example of perfection. Something perfect.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: God.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Okay, but now you're just circular reasoning, right?
[00:41:19] Speaker A: No, no, no.
What the fourth way says. The Fourth way is essentially a Platonic argument. It's the idea that things exist in nature as less than perfect. But in order to understand a scale of perfection that we ascribe to nature, we need exemplars of perfection. And those exemplars imply that there is something ultimately that is perfect. Perfect. And that is what all Men call God.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: But how would you know?
How can a finite imperfect being know what perfection is? How would you know?
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Because you use it as an exemplary.
When you say something is more beautiful than something else or something is better than something else, you implicitly say that there's an exemplar of goodness and beauty. I mean, this is basic Platonic philosophy. Now, you may not accept Plato's view, you. But it's a, it's a Platonic way of looking at the world. And Aquinas was not particularly Platonic, but he was in, in the fourth way.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: So you mean like, for example, a perfect circle doesn't exist in nature because.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: Precisely. Yeah, precisely.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: But, so, but okay, where is the perfect circle then?
[00:42:34] Speaker A: The perfect circle is a conceptual thing. It doesn't have a location.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: That's right. Right.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Exactly. So, so, and when you think that's
[00:42:41] Speaker B: my point, Circle is. God doesn't exist either. It's just an idea in the minds of people.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: Well, God is a spirit, so God is a mind.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Okay, but what does that mean? You mean just energy? What do you mean by spirit?
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Spirit is in this case a person with agency, with existence.
And in God's case, it's spirit whose essence is existence, which is the Thomistic way of understanding him.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: But this, but the spirit doesn't exist anywhere in our world, in our universe. Right?
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Well, spirits don't, don't, don't have a where. That's the point. They don't exist in places. But it just, I mean, quite honestly, I mean, I, reading, I mean, I, I read your book and I found it very interesting. But yeah, you got to clean up that, that discussion of the fourth way, because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's simply not, not true.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: I mean, here I make the argument for Satan's. I don't know if you believe in Satan or not, but it's a conceptual truth that Satan is a being, besides which, none worse can be imagined. Satan exists as an idea in the mind. Lots of people believe in Satan. A thing that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind. Therefore, Satan exists.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: Michael, I don't accept the ontological argument. So, so you're, you're, you're.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: Okay, then what are we talking about? Why do you keep bringing these things up?
You're the one that brings, you keep, you keep bringing them up.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: I, I, I brought up that, that you got Aquinas egregiously Wrong?
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Well, I'm just, I quote him, you know, I quote Hume's refutation of it. So you're saying that, that none of this is okay?
[00:44:19] Speaker A: I'm saying it's wrong and it's just obviously wrong. I mean, Aquinas again was an opponent of the ontological argument. He didn't support it. And it certainly has nothing to do with, with his fourth way.
Perhaps we can, we can seg over into Darwinism and to, into Darwin's theory and Darwin's explanation for how, how things evolve and so on.
How did the genetic code evolve?
[00:44:46] Speaker B: Okay, I don't write about that in this book. This is my previous book, why Darwin Matters. So the best theory, you're talking about origins of life research and, and the development then from like the RNA world to the DNA world.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: Well, it's, I mean, origin, whatever. How did the genetic code evolve by a Darwinian process?
[00:45:05] Speaker B: Well, through natural selection.
Simpler, simpler structures like rna, what give rise to DNA. That's, this is, you know, the modern theory, but we don't have it.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Okay, what's my evidence for that?
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Michael, you're looking, you're doing the God of the gaps thing. You're seeing if you can, if you can trip me up and find a gap and then you're going to throw God in there. Okay, we have some pretty good theories about this. This is not my area. I'm not a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist. But there are lots of good theories about this. But no agreement, right?
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Well, there's, there's not only no agreement, there's no evidence.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: Yes, there is. There's quite a bit of evidence. Right, evidence for like, like the gradation of the, you know, the genetic sequence that gives rise to the bacterial flagellum. This is, you know, refuting Michael Behe's argument about the bacterial flagellum, that it's irreducibly complex. Therefore God must have created the little motors that caused the, the bacterial flagellum tail to move and so on. Nonsense. You know, you can see the gradation right there in the evidence of simpler or more complex bacterial flagellum with multiple parts, you know, more or less parts and so on and so forth. Same thing with the eye. The eye evolved, you know, dozens of times from simpler light sensitive cells. And so we have tons of examples of this. But even if, let's just say you do find a gap, okay? And you go, okay, that's where the, the designer stepped in to stir the particles again. I find this art, this whole line of reasoning to Be deeply flawed. Because what are you going to do with your religious beliefs when the gaps are filled by scientists? You know, when we have a cogent theory of the origins of life, Are you going to just say, well, okay, that one happened by natural selection, but here I found another gap over here?
I think you're just chasing, you're chasing the scientists.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Science is. Science is full of gaps, Michael. And you fill them.
[00:46:54] Speaker B: That's the whole point of doing science.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: You fill them with the materialism and atheism and Darwinism.
And I think that's a 19th century way of.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: It's very 21st century. Unless you want to tell the scientists working in the field that they're wasting their time.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: Oh, they are, they are, but they are.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: Okay, what are they doing then?
I mean, not all of them are atheists. You know, a lot of them are Christians. You know, like Francis Collins. Have you read Francis Collins? Francis Collins is a fellow Jesus believing, born again evangelical Christian, just like you. And he accepts the theory of evolution completely, the whole thing.
Did you read his book the Language of God?
[00:47:36] Speaker A: I didn't get to it.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: He explains all this. He answers your questions in the book and he also is a Christian. So how do you explain that?
[00:47:45] Speaker A: Why would you ever think that I have a responsibility to explain Francis Collins viewpoint?
[00:47:50] Speaker B: Well, because you're making the argument that the gaps have to be filled, but they don't. They don't have to be filled. And I think you're making a mistake.
Because when the gaps get filled, then what are you going to do? You're not going to change your mind and say, you know, I think I won't be a Christian anymore. You were never going to do that.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: So, Michael. So you're admitting that you really don't. You don't know how the genetic code evolved. I mean, that's all I can say.
[00:48:16] Speaker B: Michael. Michael. I mean, you're asking me. This is not my field.
I've had.
[00:48:21] Speaker A: You've only written books. Mike. Mike, you've written books about it.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: I've written books. You're reporting what other people say. Yes, I'm a science writer.
So geneticists tell me that the best explanation we have so far is the RNA world, which is simpler, gave rise to the DNA world. There is a sequence. There are theories about this. This is not just. We're just making stuff up, Michael.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: And why aren't you skeptical about that? I mean, the founder of Skeptic magazine isn't skeptical about whatever.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: I am skeptical in the same way that I'm skeptical about the many different theories of quantum physics, there's dozens of them. So in what way consciousness, in what
[00:49:01] Speaker A: way are you, in what way are you skeptical about the Darwinist explanations for the origin of the genetic code?
[00:49:08] Speaker B: Oh, I'm just saying that I think we need more evidence and more research on it.
[00:49:13] Speaker A: I see.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: So there you can look at, for example, the origins of life field. Right. So I just had Sarah Walker on my podcast last year. She has a new book out called Life as We don't Know It. And her argument is that the whole origins of life research paradigm has not succeeded in providing a cogent explanation. We need a completely new way of looking at the problem. And her theory is what's called assembly theory, and that's her approach. Okay, fine, this is how it works. But no one's, no one's just throwing up their hands and go, you know what, I don't know. Let's just say God did it. Well, that's not an answer.
It's a, it's just a hand wave. It's just like we give up. Right? It's much.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: No gift giving up here. There are, there are primary causes and secondary causes.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Okay, how do you think God made DNA? You get, okay, I gave you my explanation, you answer it. How do you answer that question?
[00:50:06] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: You don't know. Okay, so, all right, so what are we talking about then? You don't know either.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: What I'm saying is that you've got no materialist explanation for how it happens. And yes, we do, Michael, A Darwinian.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: They may be wrong explanations, but you can't say they don't have. Just pick up any book on what is the explanation.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: How do you get it? Tell me.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: Okay, I just told you. The RNA world, which is simpler.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: What about the RNA world? What about the RNA world? How, how, how do you get, how do you get genetic code from, from, from, from a Super Bowl?
[00:50:39] Speaker B: Are you familiar with Lynn Margulis's theory? Yes. Yes. Okay. All right, so she provides endless books, hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers on how this happened. How simpler prokaryotic cells became more complex eukaryotic cells, and with it came an increase in information and complexity. Okay, there's whole theories about this. I mean, there's 50 years of research. What are you talking about? There's no explanation.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: There's, there are, there's theories, but there's no evidence. And.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm asking you at what point you know, when the prokaryotic cells combine to become eukaryotic More complex cells. Mitochondria used to exist independently. Now they're within our eukaryotic cells. All right, so.
So Lynn Margulis and others have theories about how this happened. How do you think it happened? How did mitochondria become part of ourselves other than, you know, God did it?
[00:51:31] Speaker A: Well, I, I mean, I think God ultimately did. Did everything. But as to how, but, but as to how they came about, you can't
[00:51:39] Speaker B: just say, well, everything.
[00:51:39] Speaker A: No, no, but I asked you about the, the genetic code, not about mitochondria.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: What about. Well, no, no, I've just given you an explanation. Cells. The sequence from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells very much involves the complexity, growth and complexity of the genome.
Right. There's an increase.
According to intelligent design theorists. You know, there's no increase in complexity and information. Yes, there is. And here's. I just gave you an example.
But in any case, aren't you, Aren't you curious how God did it? I mean, don't you want to know, like, how did God.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: And how does God operate? Right.
[00:52:15] Speaker A: That's what science is all about. The real question here is how can a Darwinian mechanism do it?
And the answer is that Darwinian mechanisms presuppose the existence of the Darwinian.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: So it also depends what you mean by Darwinian.
[00:52:31] Speaker A: So they can't explain a genetic.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: Lynn Margul. Okay, you have to understand there are debates within evolutionary theory about whether Darwinism or neo Darwinism or post Darwinism. I mean, Lynn Margulis famously said, I am not a Darwinian. Okay, but she's not postulating intelligent design. She's offering an alternative to the strictly Darwinian natural select. Okay, so. But just read up more on that. There's tons of stuff that's not what I wrote about in this particular book, but it's there. There's tons of research.
But again, I think, Michael, I think you're making a cat. I think you're making a mistake in chasing these gaps and saying, that's where my belief. Belief lies in there. There's the evidence for my belief. What are you going to do when the gap gets filled? Which they get filled all the time? Newton famously wrote in the Principia about how amazing it is that the planets are all in a, you know, an elliptical plane. They're in a flat plane. They're all going around the same direction. This was astonishing. This is evidence of intelligence. Okay? Nobody makes that argument anymore. We know why planets end up in a flat disk. An ecliptic plane of the ecliptic and so on. We don't need God for that. There's no. There's no necessary to invok deity to say, oh, he came in and stirred the particles to make the solar system the way it is.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: I see nobody but Newton's laws and the laws that follow on. Newton's laws, like Einstein's field equations of general relativity. You think all those laws just are. That is that they didn't come from a mind?
[00:54:00] Speaker B: You mean not a human mind, Einstein's mind. You mean cosmic mind?
[00:54:05] Speaker A: Precise.
[00:54:06] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. Nobody knows.
[00:54:07] Speaker A: Yeah, but you don't know. Nobody knows.
[00:54:11] Speaker B: You don't know either.
So you're asking.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: You also seem to be not epistemological.
[00:54:16] Speaker B: What was there before time began? Or where did the laws of nature come from? Nobody knows.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: That's not an epistemological question. That's an ontological question. And you seem.
[00:54:24] Speaker B: No, well, I'm implying there's an epistemological wall we hit.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: You seem curiously disinterested in it.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: Oh, no, I'm very interested in it. That's why I wrote this book. I deal with the whole question of
[00:54:36] Speaker A: where the laws of nature come from. Oh, yeah, you didn't write anything about that. I saw nothing about it.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: Well, okay.
Where did the fine tuning come from? I have a whole section.
[00:54:45] Speaker A: Where did the fine tuning come from?
[00:54:46] Speaker B: Yeah, those are. That implies the laws of nature, by the way.
[00:54:50] Speaker A: Mike, Mike, where did the fine tuning come from?
[00:54:54] Speaker B: Well, okay, that's the question, probably. I think the best argument is the multiverse. There's multiple universes, and those that have laws of nature like ours are more likely to give rise to beings like us that ask these questions.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: What does it mean to say multiple universe? I mean, universe refers to everything physical that exists. How can you have multiple everythings?
[00:55:12] Speaker B: Yes. Well, ask the cosmologists who talk about nucleation of universes.
[00:55:18] Speaker A: But I'm too busy asking all the other people. You tell me to ask.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: No, I'm giving you.
[00:55:22] Speaker A: I'm asking you.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: Look, I'm giving you the arguments right here. I'm giving you the arguments right here that the. The origin. Okay, so we have. There's half a dozen different theories about, you know, what. What triggered the Big Bang? Okay. Ultimately, we don't know.
You know, and asking what was there before the Big Bang? What was there before time? What. What is there north of the North Pole? These are, you know, again, category errors, but we still have some ideas.
[00:55:44] Speaker A: How did anthropic fine tuning Happen. Mike, you're kind of getting off the topic here. How did anthropic.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: Okay, okay, let's go through those.
I'll go through those one by one for you.
Let me find. Oh, I. I'm happy to do that.
Okay, the.
[00:56:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:03] Speaker B: Okay, so here we go. Why this universe? All right, here we go. Okay, so first of all, the universe is not so finely tuned for life. The vast majority of the universe is empty space, very little matter. That
[00:56:15] Speaker A: the space of the universe has nothing to do with anthropic.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Okay, I'm just giving you. You want. You asked me, what is my explanation?
[00:56:22] Speaker A: My. Mike, empty space in the universe is not a fine tuning argument. The fine tuning argument is about physical constants in nature.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: Okay, second point. There are inconstant constants. The various numbers invoked in the fine tuning argument for our universe being special, such as the speed of light and Planck's constant are in fact, arbitrary numbers can be configured in different ways so that their relationship to the other constants do not appear to be so remarkable as. Well, such constants may be inconstant over vast spans of time, varying from the Big Bang to. To the present, making the universe finely tuned only now, but not earlier or later in its history.
[00:56:58] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean, just because they were different in the past doesn't mean that they're not finely tuned. I mean, it may have been at that stage of the universe that particular values were necessary to make the whole thing work. The fact is that only slight variations in a number of constants, people have said as many as like 120.
[00:57:18] Speaker B: Oh, I have the. I have the six of them here from Sir Martin Reese, Lord Martin Rees. Now about, you know, the, the six different. He wrote a book called Just Six Numbers. Okay, so he's making your argument as well as he can. All right, so then I have a question for you, Occam. He's an atheist. He's not even hostile to religion. He. He doesn't like Richard Dawkins. They have a feud going on about, you know, because he, Martin, very much respects religion and religious faith. He's just not a man of faith himself. So the guy who identified the six numbers that you're arguing is himself not convinced that that means there's an intelligence mind behind it. Okay, I'm just pointing this out.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: You've got this bizarre, bizarre tick of somehow expecting me to account for other people not believing.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: I'm not asking you to account for anybody.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: I'm pointing out you can ask them. I'm making a point care less what Reeves thinks about.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Okay, good. So you admit then, it's just faith. It's just a belief. You can't prove it.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: No, no, no.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: If you say you can prove it, then haka Martin Reese, who, whose very arguments you use, himself, is not convinced.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: Well, not being convinced doesn't necessarily mean that the evidence isn't there. It means that you don't understand the evidence or you don't want to accept the evidence.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: Okay, I'll continue. Here's Sean Carroll from his book From Eternity to Here. Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein's ideas about curved space time, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported big Bang, the only honest answer would be, I don't know.
Okay, so you're asking again. You're chasing a gap. I'm reading you. We don't know. I'm telling you, we don't know. There's different. There's Darwinian universes, Berman bust boom and bust cycles, Multiple creations. Cosmology.
[00:59:14] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:59:14] Speaker B: Many worlds, brain and strings universes, quantum foam universes. M theory.
[00:59:20] Speaker A: Right. Where the laws of quantum mechanics, the laws of general relativity come from.
[00:59:26] Speaker B: They're just part of our universe.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: They just kind of happened.
[00:59:30] Speaker B: You're just sort of like, what's north of the North Pole, dude?
[00:59:33] Speaker A: No, it's not.
No, no, believe me, the origin of the laws of nature is not a meaningless question.
[00:59:41] Speaker B: I know, but I suppose.
I don't know. I have like 15 pages summarizing the best explanation. Right.
[00:59:48] Speaker A: And you just said. But you just said it's a meaningless question. And then you tell me you've got 15 pages talking about it.
[00:59:53] Speaker B: No, you. But you keep asking one more. You keep going deeper, deeper. No. Okay, yeah. So I give you going deeper.
[00:59:59] Speaker A: I do keep going deeper.
[01:00:00] Speaker B: The brains theory or brain B R A, N, E or string universes. Okay, you said, but why are the string universes like that? Right. At some point we're going to Excellent questions. We're going to hit the. We're going to hit an epistemological wall where the only answer is, I don't know, and neither do you.
[01:00:15] Speaker A: No, you can't go to.
[01:00:16] Speaker B: But you go one step further and you go, therefore God. No, not therefore, God. Therefore, we don't know.
[01:00:22] Speaker A: You seem to be allergic to the idea that there could be a mind behind the universe.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: Oh, no, I'm not allergic to it. It could be, if there is. And maybe, you know, maybe this was Stephen Meyer's argument. I think that, you know, the deity front loaded the universe to unravel in a way that leads to, you know, complex systems. All right. This was an argument made in the 1987 creationism case that went to the U.S. supreme Court where Supreme Court Justice Scalia made the argument with the ACLU lawyer Jay Topkas that it was okay, it should be okay in a public school to teach about Aristotle's theory of causality.
Even if that implies a designer or a God behind it, a deity behind it, that would not break, Break the law. Okay, I'm making a different point here. That, that there could be some, some kind of structure behind it in a way that Einstein invoked Spinoza's God. That is the. All the laws of nature. This is God, if that's what you mean by God. Okay, maybe something like that. But that's, but this is. I'm bringing this up because that's not what you're arguing. You want a personal deity, somebody that, that knows you, created you, cares about you, gives you everlasting life and all that. And I'm just saying none of that is derivable from what we're talking about here. If you make your arguments, you could end up easily with Einstein's Spinoza invocation. It is the laws of nature. That's what God is. Okay. I'm fine with that if you want to, if you want to go there, you know, because ultimately we don't know what's behind, you know, the, the very, very deepest epistemological wall we hit.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah, but what I'm saying is that there's not a wall that is, that I don't, I don't just stop at saying I don't know. I actually, actually want to understand where these laws come from and I want to understand where the universe and creation itself comes from. I want to understand where moral law comes from. I want to understand how the capacity for change comes from, how causation comes. Comes about why there is something instead of nothing. All of these profound questions.
[01:02:27] Speaker B: Me too. That's why I wrote this book.
[01:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah, but you seem to stop short of the obvious explanation that God. That. That God exists.
[01:02:36] Speaker B: I don't stop short. It's possible. Okay. I'm not giving it a zero.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: Yeah. What's your possibility there, Matt?
[01:02:43] Speaker B: 1%, I guess I would put, put it between 1 and 10%, depending on what arguments we're talking about. And I.
The problem is, ultimately, though, is. Is how would I know. This is the last chapter. My God gambit. What's the difference between a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence or far future human, you know, the singularity, computer, whatever, that could replicate everything in a universe that's indistinguishable from our universe. How'd you know that? That. That that's not what you're facing instead of what you're talking about, which is something outside of space and time that is supernatural. All right, this is my problem with that word, supernatural.
How would a natural being know what a supernatural being is?
[01:03:26] Speaker A: Well, we talked about it. We talked about it. You can know it by negation, you can know it by analogy, and you can know it by effect. The same way we know something about what a singularity is, even though a singularity is not natural. Singularity is not defined in nature, but we still can say things about it. Okay, so we can know something about supernatural things, at least in indirect ways.
[01:03:47] Speaker B: In indirect ways, yes. Well, but. And those arguments all have counterarguments. Yeah. So round and round we go.
[01:03:54] Speaker A: No, no, no reputable Christian theologian has argued that we can know God directly and completely. God is certainly transcendent. God is something that is so much greater than us that we can't expect to know him completely.
But we can know something about God both through reason and through revelation. That's its basic Christian theology.
So what astonishes me about the atheist perspective or about the agnostic perspective? Perhaps, because the atheist perspective, they don't believe in God, so that's it. But you're agnostic and you just seem to stop short of really trying to understand where all these things come from.
Well, to look at the laws of nature and say, I don't know.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: I mean, I understand this.
[01:04:46] Speaker A: Gracious.
[01:04:46] Speaker B: I don't just throw my hands up and say, I don't know. That's why I spent, you know, the last three chapters of the book going through. Here's all the different explanations.
There is the theist explanation. All right, what does scientists say? Okay, here's what they say. And I just lay it out. Okay. That you decide. All right. I used to be, you know, a Christian. I don't know if you know this, but yeah, sure, yeah. Okay. So, you know, I understand where all. It's all coming from and that the arguments are there and so on, and they're good argum, if you. To me, this is how I think about it. If you already believe you're already a person of faith. This is my religious truth. Okay, now here's a bunch of arguments that are really good. They give a lot of support to it. But my, my contention is, Michael, that if, if you encountered some much better book than mine that refuted, let's say, refuted, all your arguments, would you stop being a Christian? And I suspect not.
[01:05:36] Speaker A: Well, I don't know. I mean, I've never encountered that book.
[01:05:39] Speaker B: And I mentioned Francis Collins. I mean, you know, his faith is not based on these arguments. His faith is based on faith.
[01:05:47] Speaker A: But he's also not a Thomist. So, I mean, I.
I don't know
[01:05:52] Speaker B: what he is a Thomas. Okay. I mean, much of Christian theology is based in Thomist reasoning, right?
[01:05:57] Speaker A: So much of it is, yeah, sure.
[01:05:58] Speaker B: But not all. I think a lot of evangelicals that, that study apologetics, they probably are getting Thomas philosophy whether they know it or not.
[01:06:06] Speaker A: Right, right.
What, what is it that led you away from Christianity?
[01:06:12] Speaker B: Well, a couple things. First of all, I was fairly young, so just kind of, you know, just trying out and studying different things.
When I was at Pepperdine, you know, everybody was a Christian there, and it all kind of made sense. It was a, you know, sort of coherent, consistent worldview. Then I went to graduate school, just a state university. And, and it wasn't that people were atheists or anything like that. This was in the 70s. This wasn't a thing.
It's just nobody was talking about religion. And then so it was like, huh, all right. And then I took some courses in, you know, anthropology, social psychology, sociology and mythology. And I thought, you know, all these other people that believe different religious beliefs than me, you know, what are the chances I got it right and they're all wrong? You know, So I kind of felt like, huh, maybe not. I don't know, maybe.
And then, and then I had a personal experience with, you know, a tragedy in my. In my personal life with my girlfriend Maureen at the time, who was in a car accident, and she was a Christian. We, I met her at Pepperdine and. And became. Was paralyzed, right. So at the time that this happened, I was kind of losing my faith and, and I remember praying to God, you know, this is so unfair. This is just so not right. This is the sweetest, nicest, wonderful, believing Christian, good woman. Why is she paralyzed? You know, and can you do something about it, please? You know, and it wasn't a test. I wasn't like, if you don't cure my girlfriend, I'm going to be an atheist. No, it wasn't anything like that. I just felt so bad.
I'm in the ER with her. You know, she's hanging upside down from one of those racks, that oxygen tank, to try to get oxygen into her spine. Anyway, she's still paralyzed to this day. You know, it was like, you know, that's just so, you know, this, of course, is the problem of, Of.
Of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? You know, it's a hard problem.
I don't, I don't really buy any of the answers to it. It didn't seem fair at the time. And so I just kind of quietly gave it up. I didn't make a big deal about it. It, you know, I used to evangelize a lot, so I think my family and friends were kind of relieved that I quit talking about Jesus all the time and something like that. And, and, you know, so through the 80s, you know, I was a bike racer at the time. I wasn't really involved in any of the skeptic stuff. So, you know, the whole atheism thing, that didn't really. The whole science wars of science and religion, that didn't come online really until the 90s. It was just not a thing nobody really cared shared. It's become much more of a contentious issue since then, but.
Which is why, you know, I'm kind of get forced into talking about a lot because people are interested in it. So am I, but.
But again, back to where we started, I, you know, skeptics, not an atheist magazine. I don't, I don't think there even such is such a thing as an atheist worldview.
It's just nothing. I don't define myself well.
[01:09:07] Speaker A: I mean, there certainly is to some extent an atheist. Atheist worldview. I mean, the view that God doesn't exist is itself a very profound viewpoint that has enormous.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe, but that doesn't really define what people believe about, I don't know, civil rights or political positions.
[01:09:24] Speaker A: Well, yeah, but, but the same is true of Christianity. I mean, you Christians who are liberals and Democrats and Republicans, conservatives.
[01:09:32] Speaker B: Hey, Michael, I gotta wrap it up. I gotta leave here in one minute.
[01:09:34] Speaker A: Okay?
[01:09:35] Speaker B: Sorry, Michael.
[01:09:36] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much. It's been a fascinating conversation.
[01:09:40] Speaker B: Oh, I love having this. And you're one of the better, sharper, theistic people I've talked to. I love this. It's good. This is what I live for.
[01:09:51] Speaker A: Me too. And so thank you. And I love talking. And anytime you'd like to talk, let me know. I love doing it.
[01:10:08] Speaker B: This has been mind Matters News. Explore more@mindmatters AI that's mindmatters AI.
Mind Matters News is directed and edited by Austin Egbert. The opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the speakers. Mind Matters News is produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute.
