¶1All right. All right. Listen, Joe Schmidt became Catholic. In fact, I I got my little cross out here, necklace, and uh I was going to do kind of a funny little skit here of let's all convert to Catholicism. I'm converting to Catholicism.
¶2And I was like, all right, I'm going to make this thing like satire and funny. And then I was like, damn, there's so much serious stuff that I would like to cover. There's so much there that it might get lost in the satire or may go above some people's heads of understanding why I'm not persuaded at all on the things that have Joe persuaded. Right? Humans are going to look at things differently.
¶3So I don't know any other way to say this. I other than when I saw that Joe Schmid did a video his you know I'm conver converting to Catholicism at first I thought he was joking like I really I really thought he had this like funny smirk kind of thing at the beginning hey I thought oh he's joking um my friend Caleb Jackson he's a Christian he's big on the miracles thing he sent me the link and I saw the title I thought he's messing with everybody this is just a prank or some kind a little funny thing. He's doing a social experiment. Me and Neil Sinlac, we might talk about this uh when he comes over tomorrow. But then I watched and as I watched and realized, no, this is real.
¶4And of course, Caleb Jackson was like, "Dude, for real, this is real." A month ago, couple months ago, he's been already doing this behind the scenes. So Joe is Catholic. He believes Christianity is true. And it seems he seems persuaded, deeply persuaded, not just curious, not just experimenting, but like persuaded. I like Joe, even if we've never really been that close.
¶5I've interviewed him a couple times, but you know, I think Joe's chill. Um, we never really were super tight, though. Just keeping it real. Uh, I've always found him kind, thoughtful, unusually fair to people who disagree with him, right? He's pretty he's been pretty balanced.
¶6He's obviously a brilliant guy in in his area uh in philosophy. I'm not making this video to call him stupid, dishonest. I'm not trying to call him gullible even though I think there is some sense in which there's going to be some naivity that naivity that's going to happen here in my opinion. I'm not trying to make cheap shots is what I'm saying that people say right whenever somebody changes sides. Oh yeah, I'm not trying to do that.
¶7I also don't think conver like a converter, someone who converts somehow erases everything he's done in philosophy, that's stupid. That'd be ridiculous. Um, please don't do that. I think what shocked me was not simply that Joe converted. Okay?
¶8Smart people convert. Smart people deconvert. It happens. Smart people change their minds in every direction. Okay?
¶9What shocked me was hearing what seems to have carried so much weight for him. Okay. And then noticing how little of the historical, critical, and anthropological material appeared in the story he told on his channel. And I'm sure he has a long video coming. Uh Caleb Jackson said like a 12-hour video on why Catholicism is true or something like that.
¶10This is wild to me a bit, especially when he's been so hesitant and cautious and trying to ride the fence and not be so he's headstrong, ladies and gentlemen. Like this guy's legitly in. Maybe he's done more work of that privately, this whole anthropological, critical, historical. I hope he has. Um he did say that this video is his story and that more detailed sum like a summaration summary of his arguments are are coming.
¶11So fair enough. Um, I'm responding to the reasons he chose to put forward publicly in that video because those reasons are now persuading other people. And I look, it doesn't matter. He can convert. Anyone else can convert.
¶12I'm just trying to tell you where I'm coming from. So, as somebody who spends most of his time in biblical scholarship, ancient religion, comparative mythology, that's me, right? And of course, the history behind these traditions. I came away thinking, Joe, we are looking at almost two completely different religions. What he sees it and how I see it are not the same.
¶13You're asking whether God is a good explanation for contingency, fine-tuning, consciousness, miracles, and religious experience. I'm asking what happened between an apocalyptic Jewish preacher in the first century and the the Roman Catholic system that exists today and of course much much more. Okay. How humans fabricate uh all sorts of things from literature to miracle claims and how humans are prone to be superstitious and wanting. We're driven to assume agency, all these things, right?
¶14And and of course, he you could just factor in God and he's a philosopher, so he would find every manner in which this would work for his system. But what I'm doing and what he's doing are not the same question. Here's where I am coming from. Like personally, I used to be a committed Christian. Joe used to be a committed Catholic when he was younger.
¶15Um, not culturally Christian. I mean like I believed it. I preached it. I prayed. I defended it.
¶16I was a a free will guy for a long time and very sincere and serious. And then my theology developed and I ended up becoming a more deterministic in my Christianity and ultimately became a Calvinist because I was seeing so much of this uh predestination material within the New Testament and elsewhere that I I thought I'd systematize that, right? I knew what it felt like to have the whole world organized by a theological system. It I remember that. I remember what that certainty felt like.
¶17Okay? I knew the verses. I knew the answers. I could tell you why the passages that bothered other people fit perfectly inside my system. That's where apologetics typically comes in.
¶18I wasn't I wasn't playing a role, okay? And I'm not saying Joe is cuz Joe might be like, you know, in some way this might relate to Joe. Um, I wasn't waiting for somebody smarter to rescue me from Christianity at all. I thought I had examined it and found it true. I did.
¶19I really thought this is it. That matters. It does because I'm not watching Joe's video as somebody who thinks religious people must be pretending. Get that out of your head if you do think that. Um, I I think that's a really negative way of approaching humans.
¶20Uh, I think psychology plays a huge role, but I just think that's just a dumb way to approach it overall. I don't think Joe is pretending. All right? Some might go, "He's grifting. He's trying to jump on the bandwagon.
¶21Christianity gives you money." Look, I don't think he's necessarily doing that. Okay? I believe him when he says his head and his heart came together, right? I believe him when he says he had powerful experiences and felt as though God was pressing in on him. All right?
¶22I believe that because I felt that. I've explained that in previous videos. My own life taught me something I cannot unlearn. A filling can be sincere, life-changing, and still not tell you whether the explanation you attach to it is true. I had certainty, too.
¶23I was wrong about a lot of things. That doesn't mean every religious experience is false. It means sincerity cannot do the job of evidence. All right, we all should agree on this. This should not be a problem.
¶24Intelligence cannot do it either. Intelligence, all intelligence does is give us better tools. It's all it's going to do. It does not guarantee that we will use the right tool for the question in front of us. So, this is where I have become more critical of the philosophy of religion world in general.
¶25And I've said this in the past, too. I have one guy who's brilliant philosopher and they're an atheist. I have another who's an agnostic. I have another who's a theist. I have another who's a Christian.
¶26Philosophy, there's like I have a general critique that I tend to have about a lot of this stuff. Okay? I'm pretty critical in the sense that this doesn't measure anything for me in terms of the truth of Christianity. But don't take this the wrong way. I am not against philosophy.
¶27Philosophy is necessary. Joe can work through a contingent argument at a level I cannot. He could take apart modal premises and metaphysical principles with a precision that most of us will never have. But expertise, expertise, and I've known this from interviewing other scholars, they all have boundaries. They all do.
¶28Being excellent at analytic philosophy does not automatically make somebody an expert in how ancient texts were composed. All right? how oral traditions change, how communities create memory, how legends grow, and they do all the time, and they can do it overnight, no matter how often Christian apologists say legends can't. And it's not just Christian apologists, any apologists. How rituals shape belief or how institutions reach backward and authorize themselves with stories about their origins.
¶29They create their own myths about how this person passed it on to this person and this is our pedigree. This is our mythological pedigree of our original pope etc. There's all that kind of stuff that goes to Peter. I would be a beginner for example in Joe's seminar on modal logic. I am a beginner.
¶30I would be a beginner in there. A philosopher can also be a beginner when he opens a miracle dossier or a first century source. It's not an insult. It's it's true of all of us. So the danger comes when philosophical sophistication makes a conclusion feel more secure than the underlying historical evidence actually is.
¶31And I think that's what's happening. You can spend years asking whether a necessary being exists and never seriously ask who wrote Matthew when Luke Acts was composed or whether Jesus ever imagined a bishop of Rome ruling a worldwide church. You can you can do that. Those questions do not disappear after a contingency argument succeeds. Joe describes theism as a simple, elegant, unifying explanation for a wide range of data.
¶32And I I really do get why that's attractive. Suppose I grant a great deal for the sake of a conversation. Suppose there is a necessary foundation of reality. Suppose finetuning counts in favor of intelligence. Suppose consciousness is difficult to explain on a strictly material picture.
¶33We still have an enormous distance to travel. How do we get from a foundation of reality to the God of Israel? How how do we get from that God to Jesus being raised from the dead? How do we get from Jesus to the authority of the church? How do we get from the early Jesus movement to the bishop of Rome, Mary and dogmas, transubstantiation, confession to priests that happens on a regular purgatory, relics, and everything else that comes with Catholicism.
¶34Each step needs evidence of its own. It's a lot. Theism cannot be allowed to smuggle Christianity in through the back door and Christianity cannot be allowed to smuggle Roman after it. That doesn't work that way. This is exactly where historical criticism matters.
¶35A field that I'm not so sure Joe has indulged in on that level. I'm just I mean maybe I'm wrong, but I I don't think he has. we are speaking completely different fields. Even even when I spoke to uh Caleb Jackson in private, he points out, yeah, he's much more philosophy-minded and you are much more anthropological, you know, historical critical, etc. I prefer the historical critical when it comes to this and trying to understand Christianity than philosophy.
¶36Personally, the gospels do not introduce their authors as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those are traditional attributions attached to texts that are formally anonymous. I mean, that's a debate, right? But it's typically understood as consensus. Scholars debate how early those titles became connected to them.
¶37That's that's and the traditional authorship still has defenders. But the books themselves do not begin with an eyewitness saying, "My name is Matthew and this is what I saw." I have to admit before I continue, this is kind of shocking to me. Caleb Jackson said that I I'm a little bit like what happened in the past few months. But then again, I haven't been that close to Joe Schmidt, so I don't really know what was going on in his mind. Caleb Jackson wrote me and said, and I thought this was this what made me even think it was more of a joke.
¶38I'm like, this has got to be like a prank. I'm like, dude, you've got to be BSing me. He says um he he's looked forward to my response but but always always willing to chat about if someone wants. I'm sure Joe is as well. He holds to biblical inherency.
¶39Now I'm like what? But very loosely based on whatever the genre is. So he would be okay with accepting literary devices if that's what the author intended. Biblical inherency. I mean bro I'm really trying to be like what happened?
¶40I don't know how you went from philosophizing to biblical inherency of some sort, but it's okay. I'll allow the genre. What about mythography? Would you just allow it to be legend and they're fictively writing that he wasn't really born of a virgin, but they wrote a legend? I doubt that that dogma would be acceptable among Catholics.
¶41So, it's just we're so apples to oranges in terms of how we're viewing this material. All right. All right. Let me get us back on track. Luke actually tells us the Gospel of Luke.
¶42He's working from earlier material and traditions handed down by others. The final form of John makes a claim about testimony. But who the beloved disciple was, what role that figure played, and how the text reached its final form are all debated, all up in the air. If anything, everything you read in the New Testament has a debate going on where an academic has a different view. There may be a consensus, but like there I would think an agnostic like Joe would be agnostic.
¶43I I don't know. I don't I'm not so sure. I don't trust it. The broad critical dating of these writings puts Mark around the time of the Jewish war, likely after Matthew and Luke later in the first century, and John is even later than that. Typically, there are real debates about those dates cuz nobody had, hey, on this day, this is exactly when I wrote this.
¶44There are also serious arguments that Luke Axe may later be later than the standard range. Right? If you read like Steve Mason and the academics who've been coming around to this, they think that Luke Ax is aware of Josephus's antiquities which was published in 93, which makes it maybe later into the second century. Anyway, my point is not that a date settles Christianity. My point is that these are historical products.
¶45They come from communities, sources, memories, arguments, and theological agendas. When we compare them, they do not simply behave like four security cameras recording the same event. Matthew and Luke give us different infancy narratives. One has the family associated with Bethlehem and then fleeing the Egypt before settling in Nazareth. The other has them associated with Nazareth, traveling to Bethlehem for a census and returning home after the temple visit.
¶46Herod's reign in the census under Corinius create a chronological problem. People have proposed harmonizations, but the harmonizations require information that texts themselves do not give us. I don't like maybe Joe's heard this. I just don't know. I don't know how you skip all this and jump to like full-blown dogma believing in in in this kind of stuff, especially if you're very methodically careful and you're philosophically trying to be very scrutinizing and careful about what conclusions you're drawing and how that kind of evidence would draw that.
¶47Take for example the the resurrection accounts. They also differ in who goes to the tomb, what they encounter, where the disciples are depicted, and where the appearances happen. Again, harmonizations exist, but the question is whether we are reading the text on their own terms or constructing a fifth account that none of the writers actually wrote. Really weird. That matters.
¶48All of this matters before anyone says the resurrection is established and then uses it to authorize a church. Then we have to ask what Jesus founded. Only Matthew uses the word usually translated as church in the gospels. and it appears in two passages. Matthew is also the gospel with the famous scene about Peter the rock and the keys.
¶49Catholics read that as a foundation for the papacy. I understand that reading it. I guess it's not too crazy using their their theology and their their tradition, but historically I want to know why this institutional language is concentrated in Matthew. I want to know how the passage functioned in Matthew's community. I want to know whether Jesus himself said it in that form.
¶50And then I want evidence that Peter handed a universal inheritable office to a line of Roman bishops. Okay. Why is that skeptical like critical cautious tape not like really really carefully being drawn here before you make the leap? That's what I'm wondering. There's so much more, but like the entire chain is normally assumed long before it's demonstrated.
¶51And even if you go to the Gospel of John, John chapters 1- 20, 21 seems added. Peter's constantly poo pooed. I've got a documentary coming going in great depth about this, but he's last to the tomb. He he oh gosh, even Judas is son of Simon. There's all sorts of stuff, all right, that makes Peter look bad.
¶52But the earliest Christian movement was diverse. very diverse. We find arguments about law, Gentiles, authority, resurrection, christologology, leadership, and practice. The structure visible in the earliest Roman evidence does not simply look like the centralized papacy of later centuries. It doesn't.
¶53Roman authority and the office of the pope developed way later. Like all of this took centuries to develop. A Catholic can say that development was guided by the Holy Spirit. And it's likely what Joe would say where he's at now. That is a theological answer.
¶54A historian still has to describe the development. All right. This is important because Catholicism often presents itself as the church Jesus directly established teaching the faith handed down from the apostles. But when we look closely, the system has a long history. Oh, a a really long history.
¶55The title Theotocos, Godbearer, was used before the council of Ephesus, but the council in 431 secured it in the middle of a major christoologgical controversy. The term transubstantiation entered a formal consiliar profession at the fourth latter council in 1215. Later scholastic theology explained the Eucharist using categories of substance and accidents drawn from arisatilian philosophy. The immaculate conception was formally defined as dogma in 1854. Papal infallibility was defined at the first Vatican council in 1870.
¶56The bodily assumption of Mary became binding dogma in 1950. Now I know I know the Catholic response. A doctrine can exist before it's formally defined. A counselor may clarify what the church already believed when dispute forces an issue, but development is not automatically invention. That's what they'll tell me.
¶57They'll say development is just it doesn't mean it was invented. I agree. I do agree that a definition date is not necessarily a birth date. All right. It would be unfair to act as though nobody believed Mary's holiness until 1854 or nobody had a high view of the Eucharist until 1215.
¶58I'm trying to make this as clear as I can, but that like that concession, right, does not make the history irrelevant that you could say that it develops over time. It makes the history even more important. Which ideas were early? Which were contested? Which became dominant?
¶59And why? What alternatives were pushed aside? [snorts] When later Christians claimed that an apostle had taught something, what evidence did they actually have? If the answer is simply that the Holy Spirit guided the winning side, then the theology is being used to validate the history that was supposed to establish that theology. I cannot make that move anymore like and I hope you don't.
¶60I hope people don't based on the fact that uh you know someone like Joe who's very smart converts. I hope more people will be cautious when they just start thinking through these things. This is also where anthropology changes the conversation and this is something me and Caleb Jackson were talking about in private message. Simply I have a completely different way of viewing this. Religions grow inside cultures.
¶61They borrow language, symbols, institutions, philosophical categories, and expectations from the worlds around them. For example, Israelite religion did not appear all at once as a fully developed theology found in a modern catechism. The biblical text preserved traces of a divine council, older local cults, competition among deities, and a movement over time toward exclusive worship and monotheism. The Satan of later Christianity, which I just did a video on. I just launched this video.
¶62That Satan is not simply sitting there fully formed in the earliest Hebrew text. Ideas about demons, cosmic rebellion, judgment, resurrection, and the afterlife develop across Persian, henistic, Jewish, and Christian settings. What Christians call hell, for example, also has a history. I did a history of God video. I did a history of Satan video.
¶63I want to do one on the history of hell. But like hell itself also has a history. Shale, Hades, Gehenna, apocalyptic punishment, and later theological imagination are not one flat concept repeated unchanged from Genesis to Revelation. That does not prove there's no God. I get it.
¶64Trust me, I get it. It does not prove every Christian claim is false. History is not a magic wand that makes religion disappear. I get that. But it does challenge the picture of a complete system arriving from heaven and then being perfectly preserved.
¶65I just think that's silly in my opinion. I don't find that. I see human fingerprints the whole way. Now, if you want to look at the human fingerprints and go, "That's God moving it." All right. Well, I could do the same for Hinduism or any other religion.
¶66Honestly, at that point, you might as well just be an apologist for all religions and find a way to systematize that. Theism should work for all religions and not just one. I honestly think that would be a better approach. If if you're a theist and you're hearing me and you wanted to try and say, "Hey, I'm really liking this religion thing. Let's try to make all of them somehow work." Even if they don't necessarily agree on all points, that could just be the human overriding the divine pressures of the cultures coming to these positions.
¶67Because once you see the development, the historical development, you cannot just quote the final doctrine as though it interprets every earlier stage by default. This is to me it looks so human, right? This is the work that changed me. It really really caused me to rethink everything. It was not one atheist argument.
¶68It was years of seeing how human these traditions are, how often a later interpretation gets read back into an earlier text and how easily a community forgets the path by which its own certainty was built and just seeing how humans do that over and over and over. That's why I do think Joe's blind on this in terms of not re not seeing that and factoring that in. That's why I think he's focused on a different set of arguments that convince him in his mind he's not thinking about this stuff. It's honestly why Joe's conversion it like left me with such a strange feeling. I heard a detailed philosophical and miraclebased case.
¶69But I did not hear him wrestle with the historical construction of the thing he was joining. I didn't hear that. Maybe he has wrestled with it. If so, that's the conversation I want because the question is not merely could God exist. It's not.
¶70[snorts] It is why should this complicated historical institution be treated as God's uniquely authorized interpreter? That's a better question I think we should ask. Okay. So, then Joe gets to the miracles. And this seems to be where Joe was moved most strongly.
¶71And it might be because Caleb Jackson has been working on him trying to present evidence and here's an evidence of a miracle case. My friend Caleb Jackson's really persuaded of these miracles. I haven't like seriously absorbed and wait I'm going to go after these miracles. Maybe if it makes enough noise and enough people are interested in investigating that stuff, I'll put my eggs in that basket and actually analyze the cases and give you where I come from. Again, I'm Scooby-Doo.
¶72I'm not a believer that there are demons and monsters at the end of the show. A human typically is unmasked and they're up to something. Okay? Meaning, I'm not saying that they're all BSing and trying to make stuff up. I'm saying a natural reasonable explanation typically becomes my propos.
¶73Like I I usually come to that position before I would come to any unexplainable or supernatural kind of position. That's where I start. I think something natural or human makes better sense. And I start from there because that is how we operate in every forensic. Every murder case, every time something goes wrong in terms of we need to investigate this.
¶74This person died or was killed or whatever, we we look for natural causes. We don't see the death of someone and go, "All right, get the shaman in here. Get the priest in here. We got to find out what demon took out Joe." No, he himself. he, you know, self-medicated and overdosed.
¶75Someone ended up coming in and breaking into the house and killing him. None of us start with these divine miraculous kind of tells to try and explain the data. I think the same needs to be approached when we're looking at humans with superstitions and beliefs about miracles, etc. All right, I I rambled. He talks about deliverance cases, healings, Marian apparitions, eukaristic miracles, Padre Peio, and other reports.
¶76So Joe goes on to say some natural explanations began to feel like armchair inventions while the miraculous explanation in his mind seemed to make better sense of the total evidence. We need to slow that down. Okay. If I say testimony may be mistaken, memories may shift, people may exaggerate, samples may be contaminated, right? records may be incomplete, an illness may have been misdiagnosed, or a fraud may have occurred in some cases.
¶77I'm not proposing one giant hidden conspiracy, fam. I'm not. Those are ordinary possibilities that we know occur in the world. This is none of us would doubt this. None of us.
¶78They do not have to explain every case in exactly the same way. One healing may involve spontaneous remission. It happens. It happens with cancer. It happens with several diseases.
¶79It happens. Another may involve a bad initial diagnosis. So, the doctor got the mistaken diagnosis and they treated said this is what it is and then a week later, oh, it's not there anymore. Miracle. But they had the wrong diagnosis to begin with.
¶80Another may be a story that improved in the retelling, which humans do all the time. Another may remain genuinely unexplained, right? We don't know some stuff. Some answers are just left up in limbo. We're not sure.
¶81A different case may involve deception. Humans BS, y'all. I don't know if you know that. Go read Lucian of Samada and his case about Paragranus Proteius. It's it's case closed.
¶82Putting all of those cases in one folder labeled miracles does not make them one kind of event. It doesn't do that. You can't just say miracles, therefore it's all of this or it has to be this. Take deliverance stories. All right.
¶83I do not assume everyone involved is lying. I used to do this kind of stuff in my charismatic church. People can enter altered states and I've done that and friends of mine have done that. They can disassociate. They can respond to expectation, fear, suggestion, ritual, authority, trauma, and the behavior of people around them.
¶84I remember when they were telling me to speak in tongues and that the spirit would just do it. And I'm sitting there as a kid thinking it's just going to happen. But eventually after 10 minutes in my face in this pressured situation, I eventually started doing what they were doing and I felt like oh and they were rewarding me. There's I'm telling you been in this kind of stuff but under different examples, right? Different circumstances this can apply.
¶85But what somebody says during an exorcism often fits the religious world that they already inhabit. Christian demons sound Christian. Spirit possession in another culture takes another form. That pattern that is exactly what anthropology leads us to expect if culture is shaping the experience. Go watch a Hindu in a trance and what they say.
¶86You think they're going to talk about Jesus and about demons and the devil and Satan and God? Absolutely not. Could a Catholic say a real spiritual being works through culture? Of course they can. But once that move is available, the evidence becomes difficult to distinguish from the cultural explanation.
¶87So the same care is needed with eucharistic miracles as well. For example, Joe mentions images, tissue findings, blood, blinded laboratories and reports of myocardial tissue. He asks in effect something like this. What else he is supposed to do with evidence like that? Joe asks, what am I supposed to do with evidence like that?
¶88My first question is not whether a photograph looks like heart tissue. All right. My first question is where the sample came from. That'd be my first question. Where did you get the sample?
¶89Where did this come from? Who collected it? Who handled it? Was the chain of custody documented from the church to the laboratory? Were ordinary wafers exposed to the same environment as controls?
¶90Were the labs independent for real? Were the methods published in enough detail for other experts to evaluate? Was human DNA tested with contamination controls? Were alternative biological growths ruled out? I think of the Shroud of Turn too, by the way.
¶91But those questions are not excuses. That is what forensic reliability looks like. And take the Shroud of Turn for example. I hear this all the time about how miraculous it is. And bro, your Catholic church is not allowing people to go and specifically that specific location in turn.
¶92They're not allowing modern scientific samples to be done today. They're not. They show a picture, people pay thousands, millions of dollars a year into this church. They're not allowing more forensic data to take place and then cut more, do more carbon dating, actually try to do this. No, no, no.
¶93It's all kept hush hush. Pull it out once a year. So, I looked up Kelly Kier curse. I'm not 100% on pronouncing their names. and Frank Legos.
¶94They published a a forensic review of several eucharistic miracle claims. Kirst is not like somebody standing outside Catholicism throwing rocks at it. He has described himself as a Catholic and a eukaristic minister. Their review explains why photographs and selected laboratorial statements are not enough. They raise problems involving provenence, chain of custody, contamination, controls, and the specificity of the test being used.
¶95Now, that does not prove every eucharistic claim is fraudulent. I understand it means the evidence Joe describes as overwhelming is not overwhelming to specialists asking basic forensic questions. Joe's philosophy, not an expert in this. And Joe, respectfully, asking an AI system what a picture resembles does not solve any of that. An image classifier can compare visual samples and patterns.
¶96It cannot it cannot establish where a sample came from, whether it was contaminated, or whether the story attached to the picture is true. None of that is possible with the AI. And uh it's just a category mistake. He mentions Lords. Goodness gracious.
¶97Lords deserves the same kind of care. The official Lord's process is more serious than a rumor on Facebook, though. Doctors review files. The church rejects most reports. I don't want to pretend there's no investigation at all, y'all.
¶98But the official figures themselves matter. More than 7,000 healings have been reported, and the current official count is 72 recognized miracles. That tells me the church is selective. It does not tell me what caused the accepted recoveries. Rare diseases have unusual courses.
¶99Diagnosis can be wrong. Medical records from older cases can be incomplete. Some recoveries remain unexplained because medicine does not have complete knowledge of everybody and every disease. We do not currently have a medical explanation. That's not the same sentence as Mary did this.
¶100I I I just that seems like theology slapping into something you're not sure about. It definitely is not the same sentence as therefore the Roman Catholic Church has unique divine authority. Just don't see it. Jacqueline Duffin is helpful here. She's an atheist physician and medical historian who examined Vatican miracle files in depth.
¶101She took the medical testimony seriously. She did not conclude from those files that Catholicism is true. Her work shows that a person can respect the archive, admit that some recoveries are extraordinary, and still recognize that the theological interpretation is an additional step. Fatima raises another problem. My goodness, I feel like I really have to deal with this because Cameron Matusi has mentioned this in the past.
¶102It seems to be one of the chief miracles that he is convinced of that makes him Catholic. Um, and uh, I thought it was really interesting when I wrote Joe in private message. I was like, "Dude, you're being funny. That's funny. You're great, dude." But then I actually look on YouTube and realize there is an actual premiered video with with Cameron Batusi and Joe.
¶103They had already pl like this been planned for a month at least probably. So, all right. Fatima large crowds reported unusual visual experiences include involving the sun. Including the sun, right? But the reports were not all identical.
¶104There was no independent astronomical record of the sun physically leaving its place. And if the sun had actually moved in the sky, people across the world would have not missed that. There would have been some reportage across the world. Staring toward a bright sun, expectation, retinal effects, cloud movement, and social influence are all relevant. That does not explain every sentence and every testimony.
¶105I understand that. It explains why a crowd can have a powerful experience without the solar system changing. But this is where cultural context keep showing up. And we're approaching this completely different. At Lords, Bernardet reported the words, "I am the immaculate conception." Four years after the Catholic Church had formally defined the dogma publicly, Catholics argue that a poorly educated young woman would not have invented that phrase.
¶106But the event happened in a Catholic culture during a period of intense Marian devotion shortly after the definition. That does not prove that Bernardet lied. It does mean the content fits the religious environment remarkably well. Zetun is interesting for a different reason. The apparition reports arose in a Coptic Orthodox setting outside communion with Rome.
¶107If Joe treats Zetun as good evidence for Mary, why is it evidence for Roman Catholicism rather than Coptic Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, or simply some broad form of Christianity? I find that interesting because in his dialogue with Caleb Jackson and Caleb published their dialogue, he's trying to convince Caleb to become Catholic. Like these miracles, the Marian miracles prove Catholicism. You need to become a Catholic. Well, in this case, why not become Eastern Orthodox or Coptic or I mean, you know, a sign only supports Rome if it can distinguish Rome from its closest rivals.
¶108Otherwise, Rome is borrowing a miracle from a church. it says is in serious error about authority. Then you have Padre Pio is another case where the devotional version sounds much cleaner than the historical record. Joe refers to stigmatada. I don't know if you know about that but like usually there's scars of of crucifixion on their hands and whatnot.
¶109There's billocation healings extraordinary temperature readings and other phenomena. Some physicians found the wounds unusual. Others were skeptical. There is evidence that Padraio obtained carbolic acid and veritrine, substances that became part of the debate over whether the lesions could have been produced or maintained naturally. Defenders offer explanations for why he had them.
¶110I'm not saying I can prove from my chair that Padre Pio manufactured every wound, but I am saying the natural possibility is not an armchair invention. It comes from the records surrounding the case. The temperature claim is similar. A reported body temperature around 125 degrees Fahrenheit is extraordinary because an actual sustained core temperature in that range is not compatible with normal human survival. Before treating it as proof of sanctity, I need to know exactly what instrument was used, where the temperature was taken, who witnessed it, whether it was repeated under controlled conditions, and what documentation survives.
¶111An extreme number inside a devotional file is not self-interpreting. And this reminds me of the Matt Matt Dillah Hunty debate going back and forth uh with him over evidence. A claim is not evidence. While I agreed that Joe could say yes, a claim can be used as evidence. Um, but this whole issue is like it seems like a claim becomes evidence very quickly in this situation.
¶112If we were talking about Hinduism or some other miracle, I don't think Joe would find it very convincing at all cuz he's already sucked into his childhood faith. My opinion, this is where psychology comes in. But there's a bigger issue connecting all these miracle reports. Catholics do not have a monopoly on them, y'all. Orthodox Christians have icons, relics, healings, apparitions, and incorrupt saints.
¶113Pentecostals have deliverance and healing testimonies. Again, like I said earlier, Hindus, they report healings and divine encounters. Muslims have visions and answered prayers. People in incompatible traditions describe experiences that confirm the religion already around them. So what method is Joe using to accept the Catholic cluster while rejecting the rival clusters?
¶114What's the method there? Was he just personally convinced based on a few of these miraculous claims and then somehow I don't know where the philosophy ultimately made him bend over and go, I'm going to be Catholic. I I think this makes the most sense. If the answer is that Catholicism explains Catholic miracles most elegantly, that's too easy. Every mature tradition has a framework that absorbs its own experiences and explains away the others.
¶115Every one of them. Joe says it felt as though the universe was conspiring to make it look like God exists. He also says he was unwilling to stake his soul against what he calls a conspiracy of conspiracies. But disbelief does not require a conspiracy. It requires human beings to remain human beings.
¶116We remember selectivity. We notice what fits. We transmit the remarkable case and forget the failed claim. We interpret an unexplained event inside the symbols our community has given us. Sometimes we make mistakes.
¶117Sometimes we recover unexpectedly. Sometimes people deceive. Often we simply just do not know. The combination is messy. I get that.
¶118But the world is messy. A single theological explanation may feel simpler because it places every unusual event under one cause. Simplicity is valuable only if the explanation earns that reach. I also want to address something Joe says about his moral resistance. He talks about the possibility that if Christianity is true, some of his intuitions about judgment and hell may be systematically astray.
¶119I understand intellectual humility. My moral intuitions are not infallible. Neither are Joe's. But I become a little bit concerned when a system can treat my strongest moral objection as evidence that the system has diagnosed me correctly. That's a big problem for me.
¶120If eternal punishment appears unjust, perhaps my fallen judgment is the problem. If the if the evidence appears weak, perhaps I am resisting grace. If another religion has a miracle, perhaps the devil produced it. If Catholicism has a miracle, perhaps Mary confirmed the church. At that point, the system can explain every possible outcome, including the evidence against it.
¶121That doesn't make Catholicism false, y'all. It It does make it difficult to test. And I want to know what could count against it for Joe. Now, what historical discovery would weaken the papal claim? What forensic failure would cause him to remove a eukaristic miracle from the cumulative case?
¶122What kind of conflicting apparition would favor another tradition? What evidence would make him reconsider the belief that God is guiding the church? What is it? These are not hostile questions, I think. I mean, they might think, but that's cuz I'm always being critical.
¶123I ask them because I have lived inside a system that could reinterpret every doubt as a spiritual defect. I could do the same thing Joe did and did do this many years as a Christian growing up where I obviously wasn't as sophisticated as I am today and of course as Joe is but I found ways to rationalize and solve these problems in my own manner for decade. I'd say a decade as a teenager getting into my 20s. So I can already hear like a few answers Joe might give. Let me be fair to them.
¶124Okay. First, his con conversion video was never meant to contain the full case. I understand this is my response to this first initial video and I'm sure he has a lot more he's got to say about this. I accept that. Okay.
¶12528 minutes cannot carry every argument y'all. This video is not my final verdict on everything Joe might ever say at all. It is my response to what he has said so far. Not even all of it. I will listen when the fuller case comes and I hope you do too.
¶126He may also say I am breaking apart a cumulative case that should be considered as a whole. I hear this often from Christians and I get it. Sometimes you just need this is the collected data in my mind and you can see why my head is going in this direction and if you pick it apart piece by piece by piece you're not getting the whole picture. This happens in various arguments of various topics. I understand that it's a fair principle.
¶127Evidence can accumulate but accumulation does not remove the need to inspect each part and it matters whether the parts are independent. I think we need to look at that very carefully. 10 reports repeated through the same devotional network are not automatically 10 independent confirmations. Several miracle traditions shaped by the same expectations may repeat the same human vulnerability. If a claim has weak provenence, placing it beside nine other weakly documented claims does not repair its providence.
¶128The whole case can be stronger than one item, but only if the items actually add reliable information. Another answer, I've heard this often, is that once theism is established, miracles are no longer wildly improbable. I agree with part of that. If a personal God exists and acts in history, then a miracle is at least possible within that world view. But possibility is not identification.
¶129Theism does not tell me that this piece of tissue began as a consecrated wafer. It does not tell me that a recovery at Lords was caused by Mary. It does not tell me that the bishop of Rome inherited universal authority from Peter. No, the evidence still has to carry those claims, fam. Another response might be that historical criticism has naturalistic assumptions built into it.
¶130So, of course, it will never discover a miracle. I've heard this one before. Sometimes scholars do bring strong assumptions to the table. Scholars are human too. I get that.
¶131But source criticism does not become atheism because it asks who wrote a text, which source was used, or how a tradition changed. No, that just seems to be ways of poisoning the well or silencing people like me who are trying to bring critical thought here to the table. And also once you open up the door, which is often the case they want to do, they'll just say, "Well, my worldview can also explain the other miracles as demons did it or or what other it fits my worldview no matter what." Okay. Some of the most important critical New Testament scholarship has been produced by Catholic priests and committed Christians. I I encourage you go read Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitz Meyer, and John Meyer.
¶132They did not cease to be Catholic because they refused to treat the gospels as four perfectly harmonized eyewitness transcripts. No, they show that faith and critical method can coexist. They also show that critical conclusions cannot be dismissed as something atheists invented to avoid Jesus. I encourage everyone to go take the course I have with Deli Allison Jr. called The Quest for the Historical Jesus.
¶133But it's not really just about that. It's about the scholarship since the Catholic Church into the Protestant re reformation all the way down into modern critical scholarship. Without that history, you don't know how we got to modern critical scholarship and why scholars are the way they are today. You need to check that out. Highly recommend it.
¶134But then there's this deeply personal part of his story. The sense of being called, the timing of events, and the way his mind and heart came together. I know exactly what that feels like. I do not have a laboratory test that can tell Joe what his experience meant. All right?
¶135I'm not going to mock it. Been there, done that, have felt what he's felt. I know this. I said this. I know.
¶136Okay. I can only say that people in many religions experience the same the same experiences. All right. Former Christians also describe a moment when the pieces finally came apart and they could no longer believe. The force of the experience is undeniable to the person having it.
¶137The interpretation still needs to be examined. And you could do this with many other people from different faiths. That is the distinction I wish Joe had held more firmly in the video, but it seems to me he's so allin and and based on the discussion that I read through Caleb Jackson's, you know, discussion with him that he reported, it it seems like like he's full-blown Catholic apologist now trying to convince Caleb to become a Catholic. Like this guy is fully fully blown persuaded. And I think when that happens, it's like the horses that wear the horse wear blinders, they they you know, you're trying to cover their eyes so that they don't fret.
¶138Uh you get like one one vision. You can only see one thing. So what would I want to see for a physical miracle claim? I want evidence gathered in a way that does not depend on trusting the institution that benefits from the conclusion. That would be helpful.
¶139Okay. I want to document a chain of custody, proper controls, independent laboratories, transparent methods, and results that can be reviewed by specialists who did not begin with a relic or a doctrine to defend. Preferably, I would like to see it happen to us like the Bible. Okay? I I would personally be persuaded if the biblical miracles as described happen.
¶140Not a person who's having a seizure because they're epileptic ends up, you know, exercised and eventually their seizure goes away and they go, "Oh, the demon was cast out." No, dude. They just need medication. I'm talking about miracles, biblical miracles. For a healing, I want the diagnosis established beforehand, the recovery documented, alternative explanations taken seriously, and the case assessed without moving from unexplained to a named supernatural cause by assumption. For Catholicism itself, I want the historical links established, not just God, not just Jesus.
¶141I want Jesus to the church. the church to Rome, Peter to the continuing papal office, and later dogmas to apostolic authority. I want those arguments to engage the strongest critical scholarship, not a version of history already filtered through Catholic apologetics, and I'm open to being corrected. I mean that like I'm always open to hearing different views. I literally want to make it clear, I don't know everything.
¶142Myth vision exists because I keep discovering how much I did not know. I've changed my mind before, sometimes painfully. If Joe has evidence that answers these problems, I want to hear it. But I'm not going to lower the standard because the person presenting the case is brilliant or a very smart person, their PhD in philosophy, or because the story is emotionally powerful or because several unusual reports can be arranged into one dramatic pattern. I'm not I'm not doing that.
¶143Sorry. Maybe eventually when I'm in an emotional circumstance that is so traumatic, I can't find any other explanation or any other way. I I'm having a midlife crisis and I need to or I'm done fighting the fight. I told Caleb Jackson, I said, "Dude, at this point, if a miracle doesn't happen to me, I the only reason I would probably convert is because I'm done fighting the superstitions of humans that humans, no matter what, are going to believe, why am I fighting this uphill battle against something I can never defeat? Humans are going to do it." So Joe, if you see this, I'm not your enemy.
¶144As you know, I was shocked because I respect you and I've heard you before and I've been like, "Huh, he's really critical and yet still fair and kind and all and because the confidence in your videos seem to be much greater than the historical foundation I have heard from scholars." Okay, I I've I've listened to tons of academics. Maybe that foundation exists and it simply was not part of this first video that I watched. If so, come show it. Look, you've been on the channel before. We've we've had critical discussions.
¶145Sit down with me. No ambush, no cheap clips, no demand that you defend every Catholic who was ever made in a bad argument that you hear from people. I mean, it's just bring the strongest historical case for Rome. All right? Let us take the time to examine it.
¶146I want to hear your reasoning. I want to know what happened. It must have been months prior to you coming out uh talking about this. you're on like several channels I'm seeing on YouTube literally premiering videos like you've done the circuits you've gone through various Catholic channels so this has to have been like months long and I wrote you to see if you would check out um the script for a documentary you were so busy doing school you said but seems like you were also busy doing these these trips right so I'm curious to know like what happened I would also like to put the miracle evidence in front of the relevant specialist not only philosophers and apologists but forensic scientists physicians Historians of religion, anthropologists, scholars of early Christianity, any scholar, name it. Right?
¶147That is the conversation I think this deserves. Until then, I can understand that Joe had a profound conversion. I could respect his courage in in making it public. Um, I can believe that he is sincere. Um, I hope most people would think that that are watching.
¶148I am still not convinced that the evidence he presented gets us to Catholicism. I'm just not. Not even close. Not even not even like it just doesn't budge me. I don't know.
¶149That's my honest response. I don't know any other way to express myself on this. Um Joe, hit me up, man. If you want to do a discussion, let's talk about it. But of course, I'm approaching this stuff differently.
¶150Maybe we can discuss why we see things different. Why we don't see eye to eye on this and why why am I not accepting these things? Why am I really willing to weigh out the Hindu myth, the Hindu uh not myth but the Hindu miracles and the various other miracles of different cultures and their claims as serious as I do the Christian ones and think hey that like you're saying theirs is demons. Well, no wonder in a self-serving, you know, circle of of of dogma would explain other claims of other miracles. I think that a human natural explanation would better suit all of them.
¶151And uh there's so much more just watching the evolution and developments of humans interpreting the religion. How this goes way back to ancient Canaan and prior to Mesopotamia and Egypt and stuff and the evolution of this stuff from polytheism and different gods and like why the dogma of Catholicism. It's just pretty wild to me. Uh there's a lot to talk about. Maybe we could talk about it.
¶152Hey, check it out. If you're if you're watching Myth Vision and you have been a fan or you're interested in making a video, you want to make a documentary, hit me up. I'm making documentaries, y'all. You bring your ideas, we craft a script, I narrate the script, we create a polished final version that's going to go out on the channel. You can use it on your channels, too.
¶153Uh price is really, really fair for this kind of work. It's a lot of work. I'd like to have some more people reach out that are interested in do that. You might have a book. You might have uh I don't know something you're trying to promote, a YouTube channel, a pet theory, a pet hypothesis, whatever.
¶154You want to have that put out there and get it exposed and have it highly qual like a highquality polished video. Hit me up mythvision podcast@gmail.com. Uh we think we've we've been working on like nine or 10 documentaries in the past two months. So I hope to see more people reach out because this is going to be evergreen material, highly polished. love to to work with you.
¶155If you're interested in funding one of these, reach out. I have plenty of Myth Vision ideas. I have plenty of documentaries. I can't afford to create myself. But I'm interested in helping others or anyone who would like to fund a documentary to bring an idea to life.
¶156Please hit me up. Joe, I love you, man. No hard feelings. My whole family's Christian. I'm just critical and I'm just questioning and I'm being a human.
¶157And who knows where I'll be at in 10 years from now. But I love y'all. Never forget we are mythic.