¶1You have a popular agnostic [music] atheist YouTube channel. And by the way, as we're recording this, you haven't announced this publicly. Last time you were on my show, you were debating Father Gregory Pine on Divine Simplicity. You come on as an atheist agnostic and then a couple of months ago, I get a call from our mutual friend Cameron Batuzi. What happened?
¶2What happened? Who are you and what happened? Why is [music] gay sex impermissible? Why would God send people to hell? Why is there so much evil in the world?
¶3Why is God so hidden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious [music] confusion? The problem of evil is just so powerful to me. I'm very cautious. Like, it takes a lot to convince me.
¶4>> Yeah. >> At this point, I'm like, I don't know. I'm a little bit scared. >> Yeah. >> It's just coincidence [music] upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence.
¶5Oh, no. Catholicism might be true. That's not good. [music] Last time you were on my show, you were debating Father Gregory Pine on Divine Simplicity, and I'm pretty sure you won, which pissed me off a little bit. >> Did I win?
¶6>> It didn't piss me off either. I'm just joking. >> If I'm defending falsehood, I think I I think I lost. >> No, it was pretty wild. I would I don't know.
¶7It wasn't like a knock him down, drag him out kind of thing, but I remember Father Pine calling me and he's like cuz he saw a picture of you and you know you look kind of young and he's like should I be debating this guy? I mean he's like I know I'm not one to talk cuz I look young but this guy looks really young. I'm like trust me he's really smart. It's just so anyway you come on as an atheist agnostic and debate Father Pine and he did really well. And then a couple of months ago, I get a call from our mutual friend Cameron Batuzi and he's like, "Uh, so Joe Schmid just converted to Catholicism." [laughter] So you and I have intentionally not talked about it.
¶8Even over lunch, we didn't talk about it. What happened? What happened? I was just in >> Who are you and what happened? >> My goodness.
¶9I was just inundated with divine grace. That's what happened. I mean, ultimately, conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit, right? So it's not me. It's God working.
¶10So, what happened? My >> And you I want to say too before we get started that you have a popular agnostic atheist YouTube channel called Majesty of Reason, which we'll link to below, which I imagine is going to take a different trajectory. So, it's going to be wild to see. And you And by the way, as we're recording this, for those at home, you haven't announced this publicly. >> Oh, no.
¶11Yeah, we're still uh we're still in private right now. >> So, I I told my social media guy as we came in, he's like, "What?" [laughter] Cuz he was a fan. All right, I'll stop talking. Go. >> Yeah.
¶12So right now I'm a PhD student at Princeton University studying philosophy and ultimately it was philosophy and just reasoning about Catholic miracles that brought me to the faith. Now again divine grace was at work throughout all this and this is not my own merit this is God. Um but yeah do we where do we want to start? Do we want to start with the upbringing Catholic upbringing? >> Well I guess I want to begin by asking you if like if I had have said to you two years ago like you'll be Catholic one day and on my show took me ridiculous.
¶13utterly ridiculous. What are you talking about? Like I just had so many objections. I mean, hell, gay like gay sex, morality. I mean, I was I had boatloads of objections.
¶14I was like, why is gay sex impermissible? Why would God send people to hell? Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is God so hidden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious confusion?
¶15Like, I would have just like, and of course, I would, as I normally tend to talk fast, I got to slow down. I would have just like inundated you with like hordes upon hordes of objections. You know, I have this 12-hour long video where I'm like systematically debunking all the arguments for God's existence and it's like my most popular video. So, I would I would not have believed you. I would have thought you've gone insane, Matt.
¶16>> And if I had have said, "And you'll also be wearing an alady of Guadalupe tie and St. Padre Peio's socks." You would have went, "Okay, just stop making fun of me." [laughter] >> Yeah, I would have you probably Well, as I uh discovered, you know, skeptics are inclined with respect to Catholic miracles to posit hallucinations all the time and whatnot. Like these really striking coincidental hallucinations like happening all the time. So, I would have thought that maybe you were just hallucinating or something. >> I do want to get into your story, but I also want to ask, how do you think your community is going to receive this when it becomes public?
¶17>> It'll be mixed. So, I've got Listen, I've been ironic for quite some time. I've been very cordial and convivial to people who disagree with me because I think that's how we discover truth, right? So, I think I've cultivated a community that first and foremost, at least I hope, loves truth. And if they love truth and they recognize that this is at least where I think truth is, I think they should be and potentially a lot of them will be open and receptive to what I'm going to say.
¶18Of course, a lot of them won't like it. I've got a lot of friends in the LGBT community. I have a lot of people who are atheist agnostics. I've co-authored papers with a bunch of atheists and whatnot, and they're all just going to be like, "What? You've lost your mind." Like, they're going to think I've gone insane.
¶19So, I do have a lot of friends who I mean, maybe we'll become aranged. Maybe I mean, I don't know what will happen, but >> are you bracing for that? Are you nervous about the potential fallout? Not because you'll change your mind, but because it hurts to lose friends. People think ill of you.
¶20>> It it does hurt to lose friends, but you know, like if they hate me, they hated Christ first, right? So, I mean, before I converted, I did have a lot of these psychological barriers and whatnot pulling on me and tugging on me like, man, dude, I've been like a public critic of Catholicism and Christianity and like specifically Catholicism. People can look up my papers and books and whatnot. I am just like tearing down divine simplicity, divine timelessness, divine impassibility, divine immutability. Uh I'm just like going after the very core of Catholicism's doctrine of God.
¶21Um I have just I've been systematically cutting that down. I've made videos against like the Bible and various other things like that. So, you know, I was there. So, firstly, I need to show some kind of compassion and love to them, right? Cuz I was there.
¶22>> Yeah. >> Um and if one of my best friends converted to Catholicism at that point, I'd be like, "What? What are you doing? you've I would also have had very similar reactions. So, I've just got to show love.
¶23And again, I think uh at the time I had psychological barriers. Um but I think through God's grace, through the intercession of our blessed mother and glorious Theotocos, um I' I've been able to I've been able to kind of get over >> It's so wild to hear you talk like that, man. I'm like, is he punking me? Is he about to destroy my worldview and make me an atheist? Cuz you know, you're a smart guy.
¶24People should know you're a PhD student at Princeton. I'm glad to hear that you'll be having a conversation with Trent because you'll be able to go a lot deeper with him than you will be with me. He's a smart fella. Um, yeah, but I really am it's it's it's weird to hear you speak like that cuz I'm used to hearing your videos where you and Alex O' Conor are criticizing Catholicism and Christianity and, you know, always I thought you always did a good job doing it in a balanced loving kind of way. I never thought you were hostile or Alex for that matter.
¶25>> Yeah. [sighs] Well, listen, where where sin abounds, where darkness abounds, where imperfection abounds, grace abounds all the more, right? So, >> yeah, I I don't I don't want to go back to your childhood. Maybe we'll get there eventually. What I want to get to is when did the first domino fall and how?
¶26And obviously that's a you could go back to your childhood, but I mean like more recently over the last couple of years who it was an argument for God's existence called the psychophysical harmony argument. So for the longest time I had been agnostic, right? I was initially atheist. Well, I was initially Catholic. We'll get back to that.
¶27But I was initially um you know very skeptical of the psychophysical harmony argument when I came across it in um I think in college. No maybe maybe the end of college, the beginning of grad school. So you know I've been agnostic for quite some time. I thought that the evidence for and against God's existence was roughly counterbalanced. It was hard to tell one way or another which way the evidence pointed.
¶28And you know I had some I had lots of evidence against God's existence and the problem of evil and hiddenness and confusion and whatnot. But I had some arguments that I thought pointed towards God's existence like the contingency argument and certain arguments relating to consciousness. But really nothing tipped the scales particularly significantly. But then this paper came along published in Oxford studies and philosophy of religion by Brian Cutter. He's a philosopher at Notre Dame and by Dustin Kummit and he's a philosopher.
¶29I think he's now working at like the insect institute or something like that. Some sort of effective altruist cause. And it's this, it's called like the argument from psychophysical harmony or something like that. And they put it up on field papers and I read it and I'm like, "Oh man, this seems pretty forceful." So [snorts] years ago, a husband and a wife in Lithuania sent me one of their handmade rosaries and I was so struck by it. The weight, the quality, the care in every detail.
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¶32>> Can you [snorts] break it down? >> Yeah. So, >> the basic argument. >> Yeah. So, we got the physical world around us, right?
¶33Things made of matter and motion described by physical laws and whatnot. I claim that we can at least conceive of a world where it's just like our world down to every last microfysical detail, right? Down to these subatomic particles, the way that they move, etc., but devoid of consciousness, devoid of this felt conscious experience of the world. So philosophers call this world um like a pea zombie world or a philosophical zombie world where you know you and I not really you and I are doppelgangers are walking around they're having a conversation like this where their mouths are moving you know their brain is firing in the same way all their synapses firing the exact same way but it's dark upside or it's dark up there sorry and this world is missing lots of goods right it's missing the goods of free and rational agency it's missing the goods of like meaningful relationships conscious experiences love of God and of each other. It's devoid of significant cultivation and manifestation of virtue and various other things.
¶34So consciousness seems to be intimately bound up with some of like the most profound goods. Okay, so like one question is why aren't we in a pea zombie world? Why is consciousness actually sprinkled around? Why is there something it's like to be in this brain state? I mean after all this is soggy gray matter.
¶35Why is there something it's like to be in this state? It's very strange. Okay, but things get even stranger cuz not only can we conceive of a world where things are physically just like they are in the actual world, but things are devoid of consciousness. There's nothing it's like. There's no felt sense of, you know, the smell of lilacs or the taste of chocolate.
¶36There's none of that in this world. In addition to being able to conceive of that world, I claim we can conceive of alternative worlds where the psychophysical mappings are different than they are in the actual world. So what is a psychophysical mapping? It's just a description of which conscious states are associated with which physical states. Okay?
¶37So in the actual world, conscious states are associated with brains, right? Pain is associated with C fiber firing, which you know that happens when we get tissue damage and it causes us to engage in avoidance behavior and whatnot. We feel pleasure when we have fitness enhancing stimuli and that leads us to pursue the things which caused fitness enhancing stimuli. Um and more generally, you know, consciousness is associated with brains, but we can conceive of [snorts] hordes of alternative ways of mapping >> conscious states, phenomenal states, as philosophers call them, with physical states. And boatloads of these are just not going to result in any intelligible or orderly or harmonious mental life.
¶38So for instance, it might have been the case that all physical states were associated with just the felt sense of a patch of blue. That could have been an alternative psychophysical mapping like the the physical world behaves exactly as it does in the actual world. But all physical states are just associated with this sense of blue or something like that. That's a very simple psychophysical mapping. The psychophysical laws, the laws that connect conscious states with physical states in that world are very simple.
¶39It's just the simple universal generalization for any physical state P. It feels like the presentation of blue or something like that. So we can conceive of that world. We can conceive of other sorts of worlds. And just more generally, our mental lives are strikingly orderly, harmonious, and just strikingly fortuitous in a way that calls out for explanation.
¶40And you know, like just think about this. I mean, think about like like a a screen, right? And think about the pixels on the screen. If you could just randomize which pixels are showing up, what colors and whatnot on all the individual pixels, how many times would you get a coherent, orderly, intelligible image? Almost never.
¶41you would almost never get a coherent, orderly, intelligible image on the screen. Well, our mental life is kind of like that, right? Think about all the different ways that the psychophysical laws could have paired conscious states with physical states. They our our mental lives could have just been like a chaotic jumbling like mess of like TV static-l like experience which just mimics the microchemical structure of our brains or you know basically any sort of uh conceivable psychophysical mapping which wouldn't have resulted in this kind of profoundly orderly intelligible harmonious mental life that we do in fact have and so just as if we came across a random TV monitor and saw that there was a coherent orderly intelligible picture on it rather than just chaotic static we would infer some kind of design because that's a very tiny sliver of the total possibility ility space for the ways that you could arrange pixels and colors on a screen. Likewise, the total way that you could arrange conscious states and pair them with physical states, only a tiny sliver of them result in orderly, coherent, intelligible mental lives that give rise to those goods that I mentioned.
¶42>> So, this seemed to just call out for some kind of explanation. We kind of hit the psychophysical jackpot. And I was I was struggling. How can I respond to this argument? Like, ah, but isn't isn't God's mind kind of like fortuitously harmonious as well?
¶43But then it just turns out that there are very simple underlying principles from which you can derive divine harmony. Um, and I was just really trying to push back. But aren't there so many ways in which it's disharmonious? But those could be easily explained by giving us opportunities for developing our souls or our character. And so I was like I was trying to push back.
¶44But this was the first domino. >> So it's like the fine-tuning argument, but instead of the universe, it has to do with our brain and matter, how our minds perceive. >> The psychophysical laws are strikingly fine-tuned to enable profound goods. So like the fine-tuning argument also was one of the dominoes. I had lots of objections to the finetuning argument but they just started falling by the wayside and I was like oh no the fine-tuning argument probably works and the psychophysical finetuning argument probably works.
¶45So I mean like with with the fine tuning argument right we have various laws physical laws that reign in our universe and they have various constants within them right and those constants take on certain values and we can uh examine like a physically meaningful range in which those values can take on and we can actually perform pretty detailed universe simulations for what the universe would look like under different ways the constants could have fallen uh within the broad parameters in which they they physically could have fallen. Um and it turns out that only an extremely narrow range in the total range that the values could have taken on would allow for life and anything to develop. So take the cosmological constant. This is a constant that governs the rate of expansion of the universe. If it had been slightly larger by one part in 10 ^ of 120, the universe like all the matter in the universe just would have been like a diffuse soup of like individual particles that are light years away.
¶46If the cosmological constant had been slightly smaller by one part in 10 the 120 then the universe would have collapsed back in on itself in like picos seconds or milliseconds. And in neither of those cases do you get anything of value? Do you get any conversations like this? Do you get any conversions any cultivation and manifestation of virtue and love and relationships? >> And if somebody had have said this to you two years ago what would you have said to it?
¶47>> Oh I would well maybe I would have brought up oh well maybe this is explained by like the multiverse or something. So if there's like a vast and diverse ensemble of universes, each of which varies randomly in its initial conditions and the constants and the laws of nature, well then it's going to be unsurprising that maybe somewhere in the vast multiverse the constants would fall within the exceedingly narrow life printing range. That's one thing I might have said. I mean now I don't find that particularly plausible. Um there are lots of reasons for that.
¶48I mean one thing is that like in order to even get a multiverse up in the first place with these sorts of laws and lo structures, you need a very striking degree of fine tuning. So it just pushes the fine tuning problem back a step. You also get a uh with at least lots of standard multiverse proposals a proliferation of Boltzmonzmon brains. So Boltzman brains are just these like >> spontaneously formed local brain-like objects which uh pop into existence very shortly in the quantum foam and then dissipate shortly thereafter. And as actually as it turns out Bolton brains will be the vast vast vast vast majority of observers in multiveres.
¶49And the way that you can see this is actually kind of intuitive. Imagine we had hordes of monkeys just randomly typing on a typewriter. How often do you think are they going to type an entire play of Shakespeare compared to how often are they going to type a single paragraph or a single sentence? >> Single sentences and single paragraphs are going to massively dominate the space of intelligible like sentences or intelligible uh vocabulary. Right?
¶50>> An entire work of Shakespeare that's going to be much much rarer. So it's actually going to be exceedingly unlikely that you get this vast array of like a pocket of order and low entropy compared to just localized pockets of order or entropy. So actually uh and localized pockets of entropy or high order um that's just going to correspond to like the Boltzman brain compared to this ginormous pocket of uh order that we have that we see around us for like 13.8 billion years going up to now and then this vast universe with an evolutionary history and whatnot. So, and that of course if there are if Boltzman brains really do predominate observers then we are we are in a skeptical scenario because that basically means that among all the beings which share my current brain state and thereby share all the same experiences that I have the vast vast vast vast vast majority of them are Boltzmon brains that are going to dissipate almost immediately and so then that just casts us into a skeptical scenario and so I do think there are pretty significant challenges to the multiverse hypothesis in response to the fine tuning argument. But so these are just the these are just the initial dominoes, right?
¶51Like I was still agnostic, but I was like >> I I I would think that if I was wasn't willing to commit to Christianity, much less Catholicism. I I would be I would think I'd be open to going, okay, fine, fine. You read this paper, right? Fine. There's some creator.
¶52Why Why was that a scary thing to come to? >> I'm not sure if it was scary. >> Okay. It was more so just, oh man, maybe I've been wrong all this time. So I actually interviewed Brian Cutter on my channel when I was at a conference in Virginia and I interviewed him about the psychophysical harmony argument and another argument about why the laws of nature kind of fortuitously match the conditions of the universe.
¶53I'm actually doing my dissertation on these topics right now. So that's pretty fun. But um I interviewed him that night and after I pressed him with some of my objections and he was able to really abley respond to them. It's up on my YouTube channel. People can watch it.
¶54I went to bed that night and I was like maybe God exists after all. I remember thinking that as I went to bed. >> What was that exp what was that conscious experience? >> So actually it was it was kind of exciting because I like wow I've sort of gone on this quest my whole life. Like my whole life's mission really has been to try to find out whether God exists.
¶55I mean since I was a child this has been something that's just been like consuming for me. I debated people on social media way before I had my YouTube channel. I had like Instagram accounts where I was just debating people paragraphs on paragraphs on paragraphs. And then because like I don't know, I always just saw reality as this kind of quest. Uh and I was just so interested in what is fundamental, what is ultimate, does God exist?
¶56I've always just been so profoundly fascinated by that. >> And so the prospect that there is this like all powerful, all knowing, all good, perfectly loving being out there who set up the universe, it was I mean it was beautiful. So I mean it was I have mixed emotions cuz like I was wrong this whole time. I was starting to suspect that I'd been arguing against something that uh maybe I really shouldn't be arguing against. So, that was a little bit nerve-wracking.
¶57>> Now, I would think if I was in your shoes and came to that realization, one of the first things I would do is talk to other atheists and skeptics to help them talk me out of what I feel like I might be being drawn into. Did you do that? And what was that experience? >> Yeah. Oh, definitely.
¶58So, I mean, I reached out to a lot of my friends who were thinking also about the psychophysical harmony argument. And it turns out a lot of them who were skeptical at the time like Amos Woolen, Matthew Adelstein, these amazing guys, they were also starting to become convinced. And so then they are like basically like, "Yeah, I'm kind of a theist now as well." So like we're all just looking at this argument. We're like, "Oh man." And of course I have other friends who have tried to offer responses to it and >> I just didn't find their responses at all remotely plausible. like they're trying to appeal to like, oh, you know, divine psychology is super difficult and like who knows what God would do and maybe there's just some like foundational natural reality which just has a kind of brute disposition to put the constants within exactly the life permitting range and which just has like a brute disposition also to lead to the psychophysical laws being strikingly fortuitous and harmonious and whatnot.
¶59Um, and I just I didn't find those responses plausible. They succumb to for instance like this like imagine that the initial conditions had spelled out in like the atomic soup made by God with love in all the human languages. That would be insane evidence for God's existence. But notice that you could apply lots of these objections >> to the finetuning argument to the psychophysical harmony argument to the world in which we had that as our evidence. Oh, you know cuz I would say that's clearly evidence for God's existence.
¶60It's powerful evidence for God's existence. But a lot of these objections to the fine-tuning argument, to the psychophysical harmony argument would also work in that world. It's like, oh, you know, this is no evidence for God's existence. Divine psychology is really hard, right? And you know, maybe there's just some kind of like natural reality which just has like the brute or necessary disposition to produce exactly that initial arrangement like it's ridiculous you but you would be able to apply lots of the objections to these arguments to a world in which we saw that.
¶61>> And that was like a light bulb. I was like, oh man. >> Oh dear. >> Yeah. So then I I started leaning towards God's existence, but it I did I didn't go all the way >> because there were still lots of barriers, right?
¶62The problem of evil was just so powerful to me. >> And this is something I'm sure you have read so much on it. You've watched so many debates. You're like, where can I go? It feels like the well the scale tips in the side of atheism, I suppose, is where you were at at the time.
¶63>> Yeah. So I mean I don't know exactly where I was leaning at the time. There were periods where I was like an agnosticleaning atheist. There were times where I was more of a pure agnostic. I think when I came across the psychophysical harmony argument, lots of other arguments for God's existence.
¶64Uh I started losing my objections to the finetuning argument. I was a pure agnostic. Um and then I as a result of that I started leaning towards theism. So that's the first domino, the first light of grace coming into my life really. Um and I I still couldn't go all the way even though I thought these arguments were like reasonably forceable.
¶65I mean, one reason is because like I should still maybe have some higher order uncertainty because there are some smart people who disagree with me and whatnot. Um, but also just I mean the problem of evil was so powerful. It was so powerful like >> yeah state it forcefully as you can >> if you don't mind. >> Yeah. So for hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds, praying on one another, parasetizing one another, languishing, being burned in forest fires, >> lying there in agony, crying out.
¶66This stuff has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, right? Like just I mean again, just like think about the most brutal kind of death you can imagine. Like imagine an elephant getting trapped in a tarpit. It's there. It's wondering where its parents are, where its family is, and then it's trapped there for Oh, [laughter] >> what was that?
¶67>> It was a book. >> All right, we're just going to keep going. >> Okay, >> sorry about that. Although, [laughter] maybe it'll come flying across. We'll talk to that later.
¶68>> That's never happened before. >> Oh, right. Right. Well, that's what the skeptics say, but there's lots of I mean, basically thousands of documented witnesses would disagree with you, but um No, let's go on >> back. Maybe go circle back to the elephant in case you want to edit that part out.
¶69>> Okay. Yeah. So, imagine, for instance, an elephant is trapped in a tar pit. It's wondering where its parents are. It's wondering where its family is.
¶70And it's just slowly sinking. A day goes by. It's starving. And then some hyenas come by. They're like, "Oh, look.
¶71It's prey." And they go in and they start eating it alive from its guts outward. And they they tear off its tusk. It's still there. It's whining. It's wailing.
¶72It's crying. And basically, it gets tortured, let's say, for another 24 hours. And I would just think like, where is God in this? Where is God in the suffering of the elephant? This is an innocent creature.
¶73It's not like the elephant is like, "Oh yes, I'm going to develop my virtues in response to this suffering." It's like, that's not what the elephant is doing. They're not cognitively sophisticated enough to engage in that sort of virtue cultivation. Right? So these innocent creatures are just being subjected to horrific suffering. And this was going on for hundreds of millions of years with no humans around, none of us to help them or anything like that.
¶74And this was the very means or the mechanism by which God brought about biological diversity in general and humans in particular. This was the means. Those were your chosen means. You couldn't have like created them in 6,000 years like the young earth creationists think God did. You couldn't have maybe made them like photosynthesizers or something one and all.
¶75I mean, it was hard for me to believe that a perfectly good >> all powerful all knowing God would institute that >> as his divine creative means. That was that's what initially caused my decon conversion from Catholicism and it stuck with me and I was just thinking like listen I could have I was starting to get a lot of evidence for theism you know the psychophysical harmony argument the finetuning argument etc. I could have all this independently converging lines of evidence for something. But for a long time, the problem of evil just seemed almost decisive, right? I mean, we can almost compare it to like, oh, the Jeffrey Dmer is a nice guy hypothesis, right?
¶76So, imagine that, um, you know, we've got two people that are debating whether or not Jeffrey Dmer is a nice guy. Um, you know, one of them points out to all these like independently converging lines of evidence that Jeffrey Dmer is a nice guy. Like, yeah, he served jury duty and he helped puppies and like he cared for this old lady one time and whatnot, but like once you learn that he was like drilling holes in the skulls of his victims so that he could insert hydrochloric acid to permanently zombify them and make them his sex slave. That is just a decisive reputation of the Jeffrey Dmers and I sky hypothesis. And so I thought with the problem of evil, I thought that okay, yeah, there is lots of independently converging evidence for God's existence.
¶77And it's really hard to explain away as an atheist, but we just seem to have this decisive evidence against God's existence from evil. And for a long time, that was a big barrier. So I mean, and part of what helped me get over it was just like the sheer coincidences that I would still have to posit atheist, right? like okay like let's step back right firstly there's a like a physical universe at all in the first place that seems quite striking quite surprising we can easily imagine that nothing existed under an atheistic worldview um and that seems much simpler than the world we got just nothing exists okay so we got a physical universe but now look at the laws of nature firstly the structure or the general form of the laws of nature have to be strikingly parameterized or strikingly fine-tuned after all the laws that could have rained. We can conceive of all different sorts of law structures that could have rained.
¶78It could have just been a law that there is a single electron and it just like vibes for all of eternity. That would have been much simpler than all the laws that we got and very plausibly like scientists rightly have a kind of bias towards simpler laws when we're comparing how probable things are before looking at the evidence. So like under atheism we'd expect a very simple law structure like that or maybe it's a law that like spacetime is empty or it's a law that you know we can imagine hordes infinitely many of these sorts of laws that are even simpler than the actual laws that we got but which would not enable any interesting or valuable things to occur. Okay, so the structure of the laws have to be strikingly fine-tuned. Okay, but now look at the constants within laws.
¶79So let's hold the law let's hold the law structures fixed. Let's look at the constants within laws and then we see that they had to take on exceedingly narrow values as I said in order to allow for anything interesting to happen. And if we're talking about like 1 in 10^ the 120, I mean, you're more likely, just think about like that number. There are I don't know how many atoms there are in the universe. It's something I think I've heard estimates like 10 to the^ of 80, right?
¶80So, you'd be more likely to just throw a random dart as Robin Collins said. He's like a scientist who's worked on the the finetuning argument. You'd be more likely to throw a dart and hit a random like sorry to pick an atom in the universe and to throw a dart and to hit that atom >> than you are to get the constants in the laws of nature to fall within the narrow lifeing range by chance. >> So, I'm like, okay. So the the constants within the laws of nature have to be strikingly fine-tuned.
¶81Okay. But let's suppose that they are strikingly fine-tuned. Well then in order to get any temporal evolution of the universe in order for the universe to evolve through time uh after the big bang the laws of nature have to match the initial conditions of the universe. If they talk about mass and charge and whatnot and they specify how mass and charge and whatnot are to behave, but the universe only contains different physical properties like schmass and smarge or whatever where these are just alternative physical properties that aren't actually instantiated. Well, then there would have been a mismatch between the fundamental dynamical laws of nature, the laws which specify how the universe is to evolve over time.
¶82There would have been a mismatch between those laws and the contents of the universe. And in fact, given like that there are infinitely many possible physical properties that exist, it's very striking that a match between the fundamental dynamical laws and the physical conditions occurs. It'd be like, you know, uh taking like basically at random certain like uh a game board and like game a rule book for it. uh and like basically randomizing that. And then if you randomized both the rule book and the game pieces for how the pieces are to evolve like according to the rule book, if you randomized the the pairing between the rule book and the game board, it'd be very crazy if you got a rule book that actually matches the the the board itself and tells you how the pieces are to behave, right?
¶83That would be really striking. So, [snorts] we all want to make a difference. The challenge is that sometimes making a difference feels complicated. This isn't. If you're already paying a monthly phone bill, simply switch to Charity Mobile.
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¶86Again, that's charitymobile.com/mattfrad. A [snorts] lot of us have a misconception about freedom. What is freedom? Well, when we talk about freedom, we can talk about being free from something such as constraints. And this is usually what people mean today when they talk about freedom.
¶87But we also need to be talk about be talking about freedom for something, right? So the truest freedom is to be free to be who we are and not enslaved to our passions and our sins. This is why I really appreciate Exodus 90. It's an invitation to step away from the distractions and habits that keep us spiritually numb and create space for prayer, fraternity, and a deeper encounter with the Father's love. The goal isn't hardship for its own sake.
¶88The goal is freedom in Christ. Join Father Columbus, CFR, and the Exodus 90 Brotherhood for the St. Michael's Lent Challenge happening now through September 29th. Invite a few men in your life to begin the journey together. St.
¶89Michael's Lane with Father Columb is happening now. Download the Exodus90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit exodus90.com/matt to learn more. That's exodus90.com/matt. Become the man you were created to be. Okay, so we've got it's striking that there's a physical universe.
¶90It's striking that the uh the general form or the structure of the laws are as they are to even permit interesting and valuable things. It's striking that within those general features or forms of the laws of nature, the constants fall within narrow life burning range. It's striking that even given all that the laws match the initial conditions so as to induce temporal evolution. And we're not even like we're not even at consciousness yet, right? So then all of that is like insane coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence for the naturalist and then the naturalist or the atheist, right?
¶91And then it easily could have been the case that again the universe just evolves without any consciousness, right? So we could have just had like the Pz zombie world or even if there is consciousness even even if there are these laws which specify how conscious states are to interact with physical states which by the way that's like an extra addition to the ontology and that seems like unlikely like under under naturalism we'd expect the universe to be simpler and not to include these extra fundamental dynamical laws not sorry these extra psychophysical laws but even if they do include those psychophysical laws then we see that they are strikingly fine-tuned to allow for an orderly coherent intelligible mental life. Again, if you just randomize the pairing between conscious states and physical states, we would expect our mental life to just be like a chaotic static or maybe we'd expect it to be much simpler than the actual psychophysical laws that we got. Okay, even okay, so now we've got psychophysical harmony to add to the list. The fact that the psychophysical laws even match the contents of the universe.
¶92And then we go on to even further striking things. So like we have moral knowledge. I know for instance that recreationally torturing a baby for fun is wrong. We have lots of moral knowledge. That's not that's not something you can take for granted as a naturalist because evolution doesn't care about the moral facts.
¶93The moral facts for the naturalist do not play into our evolutionary history. And so imagine just imagine that you had a book and you're reading it. It's talking about Madagascar birds. Okay? And you're reading it like oh look there's like a Madagascar bird and it was it the population size is X and it talks about what they eat normally and what they drink and like their mating behavior and whatnot.
¶94If you learned that that book was just a hallucination from chat GBT and wasn't actually explained by facts about Madagascar birds, would you continue believing all the stuff in the book? >> No, I would not. >> No, it would. No, of course you wouldn't. So, the naturalist grants that the moral facts don't explain our moral intuitions and our dispositions to evaluate things morally.
¶95And so the naturalist faces a skeptical challenge with respect to moral moral intuitions. They can't trust our basic moral intuitions. They can't trust our basic moral sensibilities. And you know again we could have easily evolved in any which way which would not have been conducive to generally reliable moral faculties. I mean imagine for instance that we had evolved like the honeybees.
¶96If we had we would have thought it a sacred duty to just kill our brethren right for the sake of the the tribe or something like that. >> So we easily could have gone astray evolutionarily as well. So, we kind of hit the jackpot. So, then look what I'm doing. >> It's just coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence for the naturalist.
¶97And I could just keep on listing these. >> Why not then accept or did you not flirt with Steven Law's evil God argument? [laughter] So, if you can't do away with God and you can't do away with the problem of evil, maybe there's an evil God who wants as much suffering and pain in the world as he can. Maybe he's not as effective as he could be. But did you ever consider that?
¶98>> I wasn't really ever particularly moved by the evil God challenge. I mean there are a few reasons for that. I mean one thing is just like there are various theoretical virtues that we can apply to a hypothesis independently of looking at the evidence. So there are a few criticisms I would raise here for the evil god challenge. One is just like in terms of the internal features of the hypothesis itself make it inferior to standard theism.
¶99And then secondly I don't think it fits the data as well as standard theism. >> So in terms of the internal features of the hypothesis think about this [clears throat] evil god. It's got lots of greatmaking features. It's got lots of knowledge about the world. It's omnisient and knowledge is good.
¶100It's got lots of power. It's like it's got all the it's like independent of things. It's got all these great making features. But then, oh, look at this. It's got like a badmaking feature.
¶101It's evil. Well, that's a weird kind of tension. It's got all these other perfections or greatmaking features like omnipotence and omniscience and a whatnot. But then that that like oh then you get another one on the list, another feature on the list and it's like evil. Like that doesn't seem to mesh very nicely with the other features.
¶102Like just in general when we make inferences about the world we should think that things are kind of uniform like you know the sun will continue to rise tomorrow. Uh in general we prefer hypotheses which have these like simple uniformities to them. But this view this evil god hypothesis does not have simple uniformities to it. Instead you have this list of attributes all of which are seemingly great making feature greatmaking feature greatmaking feature greatmaking feature. Oh and then a badmaking feature.
¶103That's weird. So it introduces a kind of tension and it's not as not as like a simple or uniform hypothesis as theism. Moreover, under that view, you can't derive all of those attributes from a simpler attribute of the being in question like perfection for instance. So under theism, if for instance, God has let's say a simple attribute of perfection, >> well, we can derive from that various other individual perfections that follow from it, right? But under so like we just have this very simple, compactly stable hypothesis that there's a perfect being, a being with every perfection to an unlimited extent.
¶104That's a very simple hypothesis, very uniform, very elegant. Nothing similar can be said with respect to the evil god hypothesis. You don't have some like simple >> or at least we're not aware of any simple property or simple attribute from which follows all these features and evil or something like that. So that's like one challenge to like the internal coherence of the hypothesis. >> Could you argue that maybe this is an example where our minds don't map onto the reality as the way that they should because after all it turns out evil is a perfection and that's just something you you haven't figured out yet.
¶105Why can't evil be a perfection on board with? >> So >> I have to define it differently. It wouldn't be an absence of good, but if this is what God wants, could we? >> So I mean that would seem to though require us to be like almost in like a radical skeptical scenario with respect to our basic moral intuitions, right? Like if evil is good after all or like a perfection, right?
¶106Um, so if you want to go in for that route and basically just like visiate all of our moral knowledge, uh, that seems to be a much larger cost than even the cost that I was just mentioning. >> So like to go that route, you'd basically have to say that like yeah, we just went systematically astray with respect to our basic moral intuitions, which of course leads to like another challenge for this hypothesis. Like this is you've heard of Daycart's evil demon, right? It's like this this thought experiment where maybe there's like an evil demon which is just feeding us sense impressions and we're just these disembodied intellects. uh and we're in just this kind of radical skeptical scenario where we don't know anything about the external world.
¶107[sighs] You're basically what the evil god proponent is positing, right? They're they're positing. I mean, of course, the people who run the evil god challenge, they don't believe in the being. They're just trying to say that there's maybe some kind of evidential parody between theism and this hypothesis. And since that hypothesis is ridiculous, then so is like theism.
¶108Um but theism doesn't posit basically a cartisian evil demon going out there like who exists at the foundation of reality. And so if there's a being who is like maximally vicious, we can't count on it to have given us reliable cognitive faculties. We can't count on it to have given us reliable moral faculties. We can't count on it to basically put us in epistemically friendly environment that's conducive to our having knowledge of the world. So basically, I just think you're cast into a radical, skeptical scenario.
¶109And that I think is just ridiculous. Of course, I know I have hands. Of course, I know it's wrong to recreationally torture children. >> All right. So then you've got this formidable argument from the problem of evil.
¶110You're seeing these lines of evidence converging for the existence of some kind of creator. How then did you reconcile that? How did you overcome the problem of evil? Cuz the way you put it, it's pretty forceful. And I think about that today.
¶111Sometimes you think about evil and you don't just see the horror of it, but it seems like the world is mad or unintelligible. Like you think that maybe there are more people dying in the womb that actually get born. Why would a loving God allow that? or people are being sex trafficked while we're sitting here talking watching this video. You think about I think about that and then I think and I think a lot of people would agree that they go I I don't know I it feels like God might not exist.
¶112>> Mhm. >> But of course as what you're doing is we're less interested in what it feels like and more interested in the way we should think. So how did you overcome the problem of evil or have you? >> At the time I didn't overcome it. It was just a persistent thorn in the side.
¶113So I was starting to lean towards theism >> and starting to maybe more strongly lean towards theism. I was like where maybe to the point I'm like an agnosticleaning theist, >> but I didn't overcome the problem of evil until I basically got overwhelming miraculous evidence for Catholicism and Christianity. Come on. >> And basically once I got that it kind of I see. >> Yeah.
¶114Once I had that I was like okay >> I must just be missing something. you know, I must be missing something. And then along the way, there were some interesting and new theodysies or responses to the problem of evil that I thought like, yeah, maybe they have some force and maybe we can go into those. But I only kind of came to appreciate their force >> after >> I basically was just inundated with miraculous evidence for Catholicism. >> I see.
¶115>> So, cuz like Well, we can get into that, but >> Oh, I'm pumped. Okay, so we should point out that you are a friend of Ethan Muse and we've had him on the show. People should definitely go and watch our 5hour show where he just lays out miraculous evidence for the truth claims of Catholicism. >> Did you know him at the time? >> I think I met Ethan [sighs] um when I was agnosticle leaning theist.
¶116>> Okay. I didn't know. Is is this where he comes into the story or >> this is this actually this is where Ethan comes into the story basically. Um so well actually it's a little bit after. So, I was initially introduced to certain pieces of miraculous evidence that were just like pebbles in my shoe, thorns in my side as a result of some people that we'll mention in just a second.
¶117After that, and I was starting to lean towards the I was like, "Oh man, there is some miraculous evidence." I was introduced to Ethan and then then the miraculous evidence really started just overwhelming me. >> So, we can maybe talk about some of the initial sparks. >> Yeah. Tell tell us what you mean by I know what you mean, but pebbles in the shoe. What were you being introduced to and why was it bothering you?
¶118>> So [sighs] there are a few things here. One is demonic phenomena. And me even saying this right now, go back two years. I would have laughed. It would have been ridiculous.
¶119I would have joined the skeptics and be like, "Oh, this is just ridiculous. What are you talking about demonic phenomena? Like come on. We're we're prim proper intellectuals. We don't believe in demons or anything like that." Right?
¶120That's what I would have said and I would have laughed it off. would have thought that you guys are just like primitive superstitious morons basically. >> Yes. >> Um but I have a friend Cameron Btusi and he started making videos where he just has on a bunch of differentists, people who work in deliverance ministry, people who have like experienced deliverance ministry and people like that. And Cameron, we were good friends at the time.
¶121And Cameron was like he started sending me some of these videos and he's like, "Joe, come on. Like watch it. Like, stop making fun of it. Watch it. Listen to what the exorcists are saying.
¶122Hear them out. Listen to what Dr. Richard Gallagher on the faculty of Colombian NYU, a Princeton alum. Listen to what he's saying, okay? And give me your explanation.
¶123I demand it. That's I mean, that's basically what Cameron told me in a little bit nicer terms, but um Cameron just kept on pushing me. He's like, "Explain it, Joe." So he would just say, "Okay, watch this video and if you don't want to watch the whole thing, just go to this timestamp." And you know, I go to the timestamp and like the exorcist is basically saying like, "Yeah." So like we started the right, we did the litany of saints and then the person started levitating and then he was there for about 30 minutes and and I was like, "Uh, okay." Uh, and [clears throat] so I go back to Cameron. I'm like, "Well, you know, maybe, okay, listen, maybe the dude was just misperceiving. Okay, the person had it was like kind of like holding themselves up with their arm and maybe that was being covered by their like dress or something." >> Lying.
¶124That seems more likely. >> Yeah. Well, lying, that's another potential option. But, um, so I was like, I gave him this disjunction like, okay, maybe it's a combination of like either it's lying or confabulation or something or um maybe like some weird kind of trick or some memory distortion or confabulation or something. Um, and I was like, okay, yeah.
¶125And maybe maybe the person was just, as I said, my initial thought was like, maybe they were just holding themselves up cuz I think like I didn't have any independent evidence for the person lying. Um, and then Cameron's like, "Joe, [sighs] I asked him that two minutes later. Go on." And he said he could he he literally put his head down and could see under it. He could see like a foot up. And I was like, "Okay." So, and I was like, "Okay, well, maybe this was a long long time ago." And the person just forgot or something.
¶126Um, or maybe yeah, it's some kind of fab confabulation. He's like, "Joe, at the beginning of the interview, he said that this was a week ago." And I was like, "Okay." Um, maybe he's lying. Uh, so then you know even there I'm like I'm shifting in my seat. Notice what I'm doing. I basically have just divined from the armchair that this person that I don't know who I've never met and whom I have no independent evidence of lying is a liar and I'm accusing him of lying because well I just have these other like arguments or something.
¶127So like I can like divine from the armchair these like empirical facts about the world even though I have no independent evidence for them. And so I was just like I was I was shifting in my armchair and you know it didn't bother me too much at the time. But then Cameron's like, "Okay, Joe, you thought he was a liar. Well, let's look at this other guy, Dr. Richard Gallagher.
¶128Okay, I've had him on." And just like you go through what Dr. Richard Gallagher is talking about. He has this Julia case, for instance, that Ethan talked about when he was with you. And like >> the things that he's testifying to are things that are almost impossible to be honestly mistaken about. like he would just be extensive interactions with this Julia person and then things would literally just like just be him him and her and something would literally just like fly across the room or Julia would engage in extensive fluent Latin and Greek even though she didn't know it and Dr.
¶129Dr. Richard Gallagher knows that because he studied Latin and Greek at Princeton or you know like and he would just describe all these different sorts of things and I was like okay so this guy who has like all the professional cred and reputation you could >> seem like a liar yeah it doesn't seem like a liar gaining power or money through >> if anything it's the opposite he seems >> no if anything people are just like yeah people are thinking that he's a coug and they're sort of making fun of him or something like that and you know he's got like all these uh recommendations in his book demonic foes from like higherups in like the the uh psychiatric He's seen like 30,000 patients and for none of his patients that he's normally seen, for none of them has he ever suspected any diabolical influence. He's a professional at detecting when it's, you know, some kind of psychiatric or mental illness like schizophrenia or, you know, dissociative identity disorder or, you know, various other things like that. He's an expert in that. And like schizophrenia doesn't make for instance like your eyes just like turn completely black instantaneously or your eyes turn into like thin green slits instantaneously which is what like a lot of these exorcist and deliverance ministers are saying.
¶130Being a schizophrenic doesn't make you in the room with like a dozen witnesses. Basically the room would instantaneously change to like freezing cold such that people can see their breath and then instantaneously change to for instance like almost scorching heat where they're sweating things like that. uh it doesn't make you be able to levitate. It doesn't make you be able to have things just like fly off the shelf. And we just literally have hundreds thousands of testimonies to these sorts of things from seemingly honest people in group settings individually contemporaneous documentation and it's like at some point am I am I implicating all these people in a massive lie?
¶131Are they all just cosmically confabulating? Isn't it weird though that you or I or many people who watch this haven't seen uh things like that to at least to the degree of which we're speaking? >> Well, I'm guessing a lot of our listeners probably have. I mean, I think these these things may very well be more widespread than we're giving credit, but >> they might be. I don't know if I've I think I would know if a friend had seen someone's eyes turn completely black or levitate.
¶132Uh I have some people who've told me stories like that, but it you see my point. It doesn't seem that common. We don't seem to have video footage of this stuff taking place. Isn't it just Shouldn't we just conclude that these people were either? Yeah, maybe they're lying.
¶133Just it seems more obvious because we don't have a direct experience of these uh crazy phenomena. And you couple that with the fact that I imagine most claims to supernatural experiences aren't true. Even Catholics would acknowledge that. So why not just say, well then >> well that no need to take this is what's going on in my mind. On the one hand, I'm thinking it seems incredibly difficult to explain away what they're saying.
¶134And I mean, actually, like there are some cases where, you know, we do have at least puditive photographs and things like that that actresses have talked about and shared and whatnot. And Cameron's actually done a video on that with like Manina Rosetti or something like that. So anyway, this is this is actually some like kind of tension in my mind where I'm thinking, okay, maybe they're they're all just like cosmically lying and confabulating on like cosmic proportions. That's like one hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that they're telling the truth and what they're reporting seems to be things that are very difficult to be honestly mistaken about like again like a group setting where like multiple multiple of them are like testifying to the exact same thing contemporaneous documentation etc.
¶135So I'm just thinking like again at this stage I don't actually believe it. I'm just shifting in my seat right and I don't know how someone could like seemingly honest people like Dr. Richard Gallagher, Adam Bllye, all these exorcists and like basically pan cultural testimony for thousands of years um to this phenomena and not at least shift in their seat, especially if they actually listen to the people like Cameron demanded that I do and try to offer some kind of explanation for all of them systematically if you try to explain it. >> And again, I could I could at the time I didn't actually believe it, right? Once I I came across this, I'm only at the moment of shifting in my seat, right?
¶136This is a pebble. It's a pebble in my shoe. It's something that's bothering me. Right. >> This is this is a really good point and I love that Cameron tried to get you to come up with a hypothesis because it's easy to be dismissive.
¶137It's easy to mock but there's got to be some explanation. >> Yeah. Well, there there's something even if it's lying or whatever. So, you tell me what you think it is based on this. >> Yes.
¶138And you know, you can just divine from the armchair that there's basically this massive conspiracy among all the people in question where they're just like saying like, "Yeah, I was there." And like the words were literally being carved on his like carved on his skin right in front of us without him doing it. He he had his hands by his side. This is like the Robbie Manheimr Roland Doe case where we have like the contemporaneous taken notes from like the two exorcists at the time. Lots of other cases like, you know, in the um in the uh See, again, it's not just deliverance ministers and whatnot. um in the Latoya Ammons case in like Gary, Indiana or something like a decade ago or something like that.
¶139Um they had like a whole government report about this and we had like testimony from like um the workers at the hospital where they literally walk in and they see the child with like they have this weird grin on the child's face and they literally in the government official government report that they did for this. We have the testimony from like a nurse or two saying yeah I saw him walk backwards up the wall and like literally it's like this is a government like official government report with like a like a nurse like okay is she's wrong? Is she on the lie? And so, like, again, I'm just shifting in my seat. I'm not convinced yet.
¶140>> Yeah. >> But again, it's something that's like, uh, what do I do? Okay. I I don't have any room in my worldview for this sort of thing. It seemed ridiculous, but like all these people, all this testimony, contemporaneous documentation, pan cultural, etc.
¶141And in fact, I could see at least nonsilly explanations for why this stuff isn't so prevalent, right? I mean because you have to recognize that demons under the Catholic worldview are agents. They have goals and intentions. And do you I mean one thing that they presumably don't want us to believe in is Christianity or God, right? So if they can hide themselves, especially in a world where we're basically all deadened to the supernatural, then they're presumably going to maybe go out of their way to hide themselves.
¶142And of course, maybe God in his mercy will allow them to do manifestation so that people can get in localized context so that people can get freed. But basically to to all that they can do, they're going to try to hide and they're only going to show their hand if God basically forces them for the sake of liberating a victim. And you know, of course, this is like an extremely intimate setting. These people have dabbled in the occult. They're basically being systematically oppressed by these spiritual forces.
¶143You're not going to take a camera into an exorcism session. like it's it's in extremely intimate. This is like a mercy. This is like a a ministry of mercy and healing for them. And it's usually it's extremely humiliating and disgusting and gross of the victim.
¶144There all sorts of privacy things and I think just like God in his providence is also just like orchestrated things such that the evidence is a little bit ambiguous and we'll get back to this cuz this is like the divine hiddenness model that started explaining my evidential situation once I learned about all the other miracles and whatnot. >> Yeah. >> So again at this stage Yeah. >> at this stage let's like recap. >> Just shifting in your chair.
¶145Yeah, at this stage I'm starting to lean towards theism. >> Came is starting to press me about demonic phenomena and like by press I I mean like he's messaging me, Joe. What is your explanation? I have I've gotten like a dozen of these people on who they don't seem like they're lying. What What's your explanation?
¶146Are are they just systematically lying? Are they confabulating on cosmic proportions? And what I had to say, I was just shifting in my seat. So, I'm I'm uncomfortable. Okay.
¶147Cameron continues to make videos. He picks Our Lady of Zetune. >> So, here comes a Marian apparition. And I'm like, "Okay, come on, Cameron. Like, okay, you got demonic phenomena and now you're doing a Marian apparition.
¶148Come on." Like, the mother of God is like appearing to people. Like, what are you talking about? Um, this is ridiculous. But again, he's like, "Just watch. Watch.
¶149Listen. Have eyes to see and ears to hear. Listen." Okay. So, again, I'm thinking, "Okay, fine. I'll watch your silly, stupid little video on Marian apparitions.
¶150And then I go in, I'm like, whoa, something happened here. So, to give you a little bit of context, um, Our Lady of Zetune was probably like the biggest uh, mass religious experience event since the parting of the Red Sea. [laughter] So, it happened in 19 from 1968 to 1971 at top a Coptic Orthodox church in Zetune, Egypt. I think that's like a suburb of Cairo or something like that. And one night there are these Muslim transit workers and they look at top this St.
¶151Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church. They look up and they see someone who they think is a nun about to commit suicide. So they start freaking out like they they literally we have testimonies from this like don't jump, don't jump. They call the cops, but they start to they start to wonder like hold on a second. I don't actually think this is a nun because then it started like floating above the the I know it start it literally started floating the the apparition thing which they thought was a nun like evidently they had it had some kind of like female figure female shape and then it started like floating up.
¶152They're like okay what's going on? And some of them started thinking well maybe this is like a Marian apparition. So it turns out the person who initially saw it um I forget his name like Farukq Muhammad Atwa or something like that. This is in Travis Dumstead's book. Excellent.
¶153It's called like um Our Lady of Zetune uh or the Marian apparitions of Zetune an evidential inquiry or something like that. I've I've had him on my channel as well. Um but uh this guy who pointed the Muslim transit worker pointed out to the apparition initially. He did it with a finger that was bandaged and it was gangras. So literally a dead finger was scheduled for amputation the next day.
¶154He goes the next day. They open up the bandage completely new finger. A dead finger came back to life. We have documentation for this. Okay, so I'm thinking, okay, this is interesting.
¶155We have documentation for a dead finger coming back to life. Oh, and then of course, this woman, this female luminous female figure continues showing up intermittently, different points throughout the next 3 years, sometimes in front of crowds of hundreds of thousands who see her. We have literally thousands of testimonies to seeing this luminous female figure at top the Coptic Orthodox Church, including testimony to the figure being engaged in intentional movements, kneeling before the cross, holding a Christ child, bowing before the cross, blessing the crowd, things like that. >> Talk about what the government how they shut the electricity. >> Yeah, the government literally shut the electricity down at one point because like what what's going on?
¶156This is ridiculous. And that night it was when the night where they shut the electricity down to the entire neighborhood. That didn't stay the apparition. And in fact, it was the like the biggest apparition stayed there for hours on end where people could just literally see and witness the mother of God there. So they see this like female figure, luminous female figure, and there are all sorts of other things that are happening in connection with this Mary apparition.
¶157People are seeing luminous dove-shaped objects spontaneously form around the church, fly around without flapping their quote unquote wings, sometime in the sometimes in the formation of a cross of which we have at least put photos. And also they would fly around without flapping their quote unquote wings. And of course, doves don't fly at night, neither do pigeons and whatnot. And they're like luminous as well. And then they would also just like spontaneously fizzle out.
¶158So it's like what is going on? And then of course like when you look at the testimony there are like striking independent convergences or corroborations or undesigned coincidences between different sides of the church. Like there's one night where they um there's a person on like one side of the church and a person on another side of the church and they see the apparition phenomena start as like a ball of light a thin slit of light. They describe it as starting as a thin slit of light turning into a ball and then taking a distinctive female shape and then engaging in various intential movements. both of them describe the abition at the at the same time engaging in like starting in that exact way.
¶159So like we have tons of independent convergences about this. We have the the luminous dove-shaped figures. We have um medically documented healings. These are insane. The Coptic Orthodox Church set up a medical commission to to examine these.
¶160And we have healings from like muteness, paralysis, hernas, all different sorts of instantaneous organic untreatable diseases remitting after praying to the apparition and for the intercession of our lady. So it's and we again we have medical documentation for this. Travis Dums goes through this extensively in his book. It's it's really powerful. And then in addition to all this we have like other sorts of anomalous phenomena.
¶161like there are these anomalous clouds that billow up and that have this huge scent of fragrant incense um associated with them which just like cover the crowd. We have like a ton of testimonies to this sort of thing as well. And it's like one one of the testimonies is like you couldn't even produce this with like hundreds or thousands of sensors. So then it's like okay what is going on? Like I I have to say okay yeah dead fingers are coming back to life.
¶162like all these all these like organic untreatable diseases are just like being remitted in connection with praying with this thing like somehow despite there being no power in the around the neighborhood or anything like that. The apparitions are there. People are seeing it with like hours on end. Um there was no evidence of any projectors or anything like that. And of course they didn't even have that technology at the time.
¶163So it's like ridiculous to posit that. Um like you go to my comment section on my video with Travis Dum and one of them was like well maybe it was like just like a complex paperier-mâché thing that people were up there. And of like ridiculous [laughter] and of course like it doesn't explain the the luminous doves or just like the billowing incense or anything like that. Like I was shifting in my seat now real big time. I'm just shifting around with Zetune cuz again we have at some at some points there were hundreds of thousands in the crowd >> and like literally we have thousands of testimonies.
¶164I'm not exaggerating. We have thousands of testimonies to this >> all of which say like yeah luminous female-shaped figure. Not I mean there were anomalous lights and whatnot other things that were like associated with it again like um there were sometimes like fireworks or not fireworks but things were sort of resembling that or um there were like the luminous dove-shaped figures and various other things but there was overwhelming testimony to a luminous female-shaped figure who would go around and engage in intentional movements including massive undesigned coincidences insane medically documented healings >> for multiple years >> for multiple years on end. Yeah. >> So, I'm just thinking, okay, what am I going to say?
¶165Um, I could say it maybe it's some sort of like technological hoax. Like maybe there's some sort of um I don't know, the government's just trying to do this to like get people to get tourists or something. Um, but they chose like a Coptic Orthodox church and not like the Muslim majority or anything like that cuz like you know the Coptic the cops at the time are like a tiny minority and there was actually being persecuted a lot by the Muslim majority at the time. Um, and of course, like, okay, also not even invented at the time, whereas what is anything that could account for like the dove-shaped figures which would like spontaneously form and then fly around without flapping the rings and then spontaneously disappear. And like I mean, you know, this government hoax is also making dead fingers come back to life.
¶166Or maybe they're just forging all the medical like testimony and documentation for this. So you can you can sort of see I'm just having to posit coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence just to explain away this one Marian apparition. And that's in addition to all the coincidences and whatnot, like the crazy confabulations and hordes of liars that I'd have to posit for the demonic phenomena. >> One [snorts] of the things I love so much about being Catholic is our devotion to the saints and hagography. That is to say, the study or the writing of the saints.
¶167So much can be learned through their lives, through their writings. And it's important to realize and to remember that the saints were people just like us with doubts and struggles, ordinary lives who through their yes to God changed Christian history as we know it. If you've been wanting to build a more consistent prayer life, I want you to go and check out.com/mattfrad. Now, here is something really amazing. A lot of these amazing things that I promote, they'll give you one month for free, which means you try for 30 days.
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¶169Hello.com/mattfrad. Get it for free for 3 months. So, every parent can tell you there was a before or after. Man, I still remember the day that my good wife announced to me that she was pregnant and just it felt like the whole world looked different just before and after. I mean, one little beautiful person changes everything.
¶170Your priorities change, your schedule changes, your heart somehow grows larger than you thought was even possible. The tragedy is that so many mothers facing difficult pregnancies never get the opportunity to discover that. They're overwhelmed. they're scared. Sometimes they simply need someone to slow everything down and remind them that they're not alone.
¶171And that's why I'm grateful for the work that pre-born does. They provide free ultrasounds and real support. Not only helping mothers choose life, but walking alongside them afterward with practical care. It's deeply pro-life in the fullest sense of the word. If you would like to help another family experience that before and after, visit pre-born.com/matt or dial pound250 and say, "Baby, thank you for standing for life." >> Did you consider extraterrestrial life?
¶172[sighs] >> Uh, not really. This is what's good about what Cameron did with you because it's very easy to throw a hundred possible objections to a particular proposition, but when you actually have to commit to one, you then see that it doesn't work. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the extraterrestrial thing just seemed to me just kind of ridiculous.
¶173I don't know. Um like they're simulating like the mother of God. I mean, I guess you could say um you know, and also like they're just like selectively healing certain people. Well, like they would just have to have insane powers and like we I don't know like I if I sat down and I could think about it like okay where were they located? They located like in the inside of the earth or like like from a distance and they're like zapping so they can like exactly heal the finger at exact exact time and they can like coordinate the movements.
¶174Like it just seems kind of ridiculous when you think about it at least for me. Um and it especially seems ridiculous when you look at the the broader pattern of miracles. And I I don't know. I just didn't really take the alien thing seriously. Like if I'm if I'm really having to avoid the consequences of >> the existence of God, >> yeah, the existence of God in Christianity by saying, "Okay, maybe there are aliens who are just like systematically deceiving us by performing all these miracles that like distinctively seem to like vindicate or support or authenticate Christian revelation." I mean, you've lost the plot.
¶175And like, am I going to risk going to Jesus after I die? Am I going to risk seeing him and saying to his face, "I thought that your mother who was appearing there was an alien." Am I going to risk that? How ridiculous am I going to sound on judgment day if there is such a thing? Because at this point, I'm thinking there's some chance that that's going to happen, right? >> Uh at the time, again, we're still in the initial stages of the conversion.
¶176So, at the time, I'm not even Christian. And in fact, I'm I maybe I I'm not even really leaning towards Christianity, but like these are just massive pebbles in my shoe. Like the pebbles are are growing in size, as it were. They're starting to become stones in my shoe. And I just didn't, as time went on, I didn't want to risk saying to Jesus's face, "Yeah, I just thought that there was this like massive alien deception going on." Cuz like we don't do that in any other context.
¶177Like, you know, um we see, [laughter] >> okay, this looks like the prime minister visiting us. It's doing all the things that a prime minister would do, saying it's the prime minister or, you know, things like that. I'm just going to posit that it's like aliens who's trying to deceive us and make it look like there's a prime minister there. Like, no, it's ridiculous. We don't do that in any other context.
¶178We take things at like face value until we're given like good reason to reject them. Right? >> So like the miracles at least at face value were indicating Christianity. >> So again at this stage I'm not a Christian. I was an agnostic starting to lean towards theism as a result of those various arguments that I mentioned.
¶179I still got the problem of evil in the background which is holding me back. And it's also holding me back in addition to some other arguments. But let's be honest, none of them are as powerful as the problem of evil. So, I've got these objections that are holding me back from Christianity and then I start to get some pebbles in my shoe and then they start to grow or more of them start to get put in my shoe. So, it started with the demonic phenomena.
¶180>> Mhm. >> Move from demonic phenomena to Our Lady of Zetune or Zaiton, however it's pronounced. >> And at this point, I'm like, [sighs] okay, I've got sufficient doubt that I really need to settle this. I need to investigate. Uh so I basically just like to maybe to the chagrin of uh my professors and whatnot and unbeknownst to them I sort of like put aside all my academic duties.
¶181I still carried them out but I put them aside and I'm like basically full-time investigating uh the miraculous case investigating Catholicism, investigating Christianity. Uh because like I've got enough doubt now that I'm like this might be true. I don't think it is. >> But I I need to >> I need to find out. >> I need to have a conclusion.
¶182I need to find out >> so I can move on with my life. >> This is evidence that demands a verdict. [laughter] So, >> all right. >> I basically put basically start now. We're like full-time investigating uh the miraculous case.
¶183>> Your parents have any idea about what you're going through at this point >> or is that too big a question to right now? >> My parents I told my parents two days ago that I was an atheist and that I was an agnostic and that I just reverted. [laughter] >> Hang on. What? 2 days ago from this day?
¶184>> 2 days ago. >> I told them for the first time that I deconverted from Catholicism. >> They didn't know that. >> 10 years ago. >> How do they not know that?
¶185>> I'm good at keeping things hidden. I suppose >> you have a YouTube channel. >> But listen, I'm the baby of the family. >> They are. I love I love them to death.
¶186They're the best parents I could possibly imagine and hope for. They're the most selfless, loving people I could imagine. >> But they don't follow YouTube. They don't follow me on Instagram or social media. >> If they did, they'd be like, "Oh, there's, you know, Joe doing his philosophy stuff." >> Probably probably.
¶187Yeah. So, they had actually no clue at the time that I even deconverted in high school, that I was an atheist in the household. And >> uh to my shame, I systematically deceived them for about a decade. >> Okay. >> They would have been disappointed, upset.
¶188>> Well, so it turns out, so I sat them down. I wrote a letter to them right when I reverted >> and I I didn't share with them the letter at the advice of of a confessor. Um but I was like, "Okay, I got invited onto your channel. I'm like, I'm not going to let a conversation with Matt Frad be the first time that I I revealed to my parents that I systematically deceived them for a decade about being Catholic when I wasn't Catholic." >> So, I wrote this letter um just explaining things and uh I sat them down and I was like, you know, got something to tell you. Uh, it ends beautifully, but there are some really bad things along the way.
¶189Uh, no, I didn't get anyone pregnant. So then they were like, [laughter] okay. Um, and so I was like, yeah, listen, in high school, [sighs] uh, I deconverted. I became an atheist. And then I became an agnostic, and I'm sorry for systematically deceiving you, deceiving the church.
¶190I, um, I went through with confirmation even though I didn't believe. You know, I, you know, I've confessed all this stuff. thanks to God, you know, um works and abounds, grace abounds all the more again. Um but yeah, I sat them down, told them that and I'm like, you know, ultimately God works things for the good of those who love him. And this has been, you know, think about my position now.
¶191I have lived in the atheist mind. I've lived in the agnostic mind. I know how they think. I know how skeptics think. I was the skeptic.
¶192I thought exorcisms were ridiculous. I thought a Marian apparition was utterly ridiculous, ludicrous. like you guys have thrown your brains away. This is ridiculous. I was the skeptic.
¶193So, I've been in their situation. I know how to appeal to them. So, it's going to make me a much more effective witness for Christ going forward. And I can >> empathize with them. >> I can love them.
¶194I was there with you struggling. >> I was there wondering about hell and homosexuality and contraception and all the difficulties for Catholicism and all the difficulties for theism. I worried about that elephant, too. I was there. So, I know what you're going through and I love you and I'm here for you and we're going to work through it.
¶195>> So, that's what I can do now. >> I can do that because I went through that myself. >> So, how did your parents take it? >> How did my parents take >> I would think they were like, "Oh, okay. We didn't even know you left, but glad you're here." [laughter] What did they >> So, of course, first they hugged me, which was beautiful >> and said how much they loved me.
¶196And um they said they were so thankful. They were just exhilarated really. And they said to be honest they had some kind of inkling or some kind of suspicion cuz little things along the way came by their footstep. So like I went like this is long after well I don't know how long but long after I even had a YouTube channel way after I deconverted um someone at my mom's work came up to her and she's like is your son is your son Joe Schmidt? He was just on Tren Horn's podcast.
¶197And she's like oh [laughter] that's interesting. Um, and of course that podcast episode was an agnostic uh response to the case for atheism. >> Uh, so I think my mom looked it up at that point and she was like, "Okay." So she had seen me say that I was an agnostic. So um, and they had some inklings here and there. Um, and they didn't really know what was going on.
¶198So they they didn't know how to bring it up um, once they had seen some of that. And so we were both in this kind of like collective state of unknowing and just silence like we're just not going to bring it up. >> And so they so they they did find out later. I mean, I think they didn't know for a long time. Um, and uh, but once they found out that I was agnostic, they basically just prayed intensely.
¶199>> They prayed intensely every single day for my reversion. >> Really >> and for my faith. >> That's good. >> And, you know, >> talking to God more than talking to you about God. >> Yes.
¶200Yes. So, literally, I mean, why didn't I tell my mom? because you know like me she has anxiety and I don't know she would have been worried about the state of my soul she she would have had sleepless nights upon sleepless nights and my dad is um you know he got me into thinking very rigorously and argumentatively about the faith like every single day on the way to Catholic school he would play Catholic radio and this is K through 12 so he'd play this and I'm just listening to people like object to the faith and be like the the apologists defend the faith every single day throughout K through 12 right so my dad like and we had a little some spats in in high So, I was like, "Okay, this is going to mar our relationship. Um, we're going to have spats upon spats. I don't know what's going to happen.
¶201Um, I don't want to sew division in the family." I'm not saying that all this justifies lying. That's not what I'm saying. No, I was not justified. And I I sinned and I, you know, male koopa male koopa male koopa, right? Um, but, you know, I just want people to understand that's where I was coming from.
¶202Yeah. And I'm [clears throat] just like, you know, this this teenager who's scared and just trying to figure out the fundamental nature of reality. Um, >> well, that must have been a beautiful experience sharing that with your family and having them embrace you and >> Oh, yeah. Definitely >> tell you they were praying for you. >> Yeah.
¶203Oh my gosh. And you know, my mom, you know, it's it's it's just like St. Monica and Augustine, you know, where in confessions there's somewhere where like a bishop was telling St. Monica, it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish. >> So, I was like, "Mom, you are St.
¶204Monica. >> You are St. Monica and I am Augustine." I mean, of course, I don't have the rhetorical prowess or the intellect of Augustine, so I don't want to No, I get that. But yeah. [laughter] Um, and yeah, it really was just a beautiful experience.
¶205And you know what they also disclosed to me? So, I have a mass being they they set up a mass being said for me. Um, this is like one of the most beautiful things. It's one of the most beautiful gifts you can give someone. And of course, our our home parish is massive.
¶206It's gigantic, right? So, you have to schedule that like at least a year in advance. Do you want to know what day the mass was said? >> Which day? >> Today.
¶207>> Today. When I'm talking with Matt Frad about my conversion, a mass scheduled a year in advance was said for me today. >> Wow. >> Isn't that a cool providential coincidence? >> Jesus Christ.
¶208>> Beautiful providential coincidence. >> I love it. >> Yeah. All right. >> So, that's how they took it.
¶209Um, >> God love them. Yeah. Okay. So, you're leaning towards Catholicism. You have >> Well, no.
¶210No. I'm still at this stage, remember, I'm not even leaning towards Christianity. >> That's right. You said you No, no, that's right. You said you put your academic work on the back burner so that you could investigate the claims of Christianity and Catholicism with with more intensity.
¶211>> Yeah, exactly. And so I'm again, and I'm not, Dude, I'm not even a theist at this point. I mean, this shows just like how I don't know how difficult it was for me to change my mind and how careful I mean, I don't know. I just wanted to be very careful with it. Like, this is not a light thing.
¶212I cannot convert or change my mind lightly. I can't be rash. I have to do my due diligence and I have to know basically um or at the very least I have to have enough evidence to make a kind of practical commitment rational. So at this stage even after seeing all the exorcist stuff and like kind of flailing around for naturalistic explanations that are just like massive cope in the end. Uh even after that, even after Zetune and like looking into that pretty extensively and talking with like Cameron and Cesar Bernstein and various various other people who were thinking about that um even after all that I was like yeah Christianity is probably false.
¶213Catholicism is probably false. There all these different objections to the Bible and to hell and to the magisterial contradictions and you know all the moral problems with the church you know like all their moral uh teachings that seem false to me and seem like just obviously false and various other things. Um and then even you know Christianity like I can't understand the incarnation trinitarianism there are lots of objections to that and what about like old testament violence and various things. So and the problem of evil still ringed in my mind right or rang in my mind. So I I wasn't even a theist at this point.
¶214I'm just leaning towards theism even after having seen all that evidence uh after having gone through the exorcist phenomena gone through the demonic phenomena gone through our lady of etun um even then I'm still very skeptical of Christianity. And then this is where um well there there are a few other miracles that came along the way um that started pushing me again more towards uh Christianity before I even met Ethan Muse. >> Okay. >> So um one of them was uh so like the miracle of Col for instance. So Jimmy Aken put out a YouTube video based on um a paper that Caleb Jackson has on the miracle of Kanda.
¶215So this is I think in the 17th century Juan Miguel Peliser he's like a Spanish um farmer and his leg gets trampled on when he's out on the farm or something and so he used to travel I think to Zaragoa Spain to get his leg amputated. Okay. So there are two doctors there that amput a amputate his leg. They go out they bury it in the graveyard or whatever and um you know he he has an extensive uh convolescence there because of course it's they have very primitive techniques and he has to be there for months on end being attended to by these doctors who you know by this time they know exactly who he is. Like you know they're spending months upon months with this person that they amputated his leg for.
¶216Okay. And then he goes uh after his convolescence he goes and he becomes a beggar because now he can't work. Um so he obtains his beggar's license. We still have that, by the way. Um, he obtains his beggar's license and he basically uh every night um I think he Yeah, he he every night he prays, I think, to um >> like uh Our Lady of the Pillar or something like that for um I think maybe for the healing of his leg or something like that.
¶217And he was like rubbing the oil from uh something associated with our lady of the pillar on his stub. Um and so, you know, at for for whatever reason, he had cause to go back home. Uh so he goes back home and like you know he uh he's greeted by everyone there cuz like he was known by the village or whatever. And so the people there, they wanted to see his stub and they literally like felt his stub um like his stub for his knee or whatever. Um and then I don't know how long he was at his home but one night I think he like had a dream or something of like Mary and he wakes up and his leg is back.
¶218[laughter] His leg is back. And so like everyone's like going insane. And they have like um um like a canonical investigation for him, like an inquisi like the uh Inquisition trial they had for this just to make sure like is this a fraud? Like what is going on? And we literally have like the transcripts from that.
¶219We had like two dozen people from his town testifying to like feeling his stump beforehand. No leg. And then afterwards leg. So no leg. Leg.
¶220We even have they even sought out the two people who amputated his leg and attended to him in his convolescence. They sought them out and they gave testimonies at this trial as well. They're like, "Yeah, I amputated this guy's leg." So like we have just dozens of testimonies to a leg being miraculous miraculously restored. People can look at the video on like Jimmy Aken's channel and they can go to Caleb Jackson's paper on academia.edu. I think he may turn it into a blog post on his Substack, but like I'm like, "Oh gosh, like this is insane." Like this is much better evidence than the resurrection for instance.
¶221Like in my in my view like the resurrection like yeah we have people who I mean four or five eyewitness accounts like accounts that maybe claim to be based on eyewitness testimony. I mean we think that probably they're written decades after the fact. There's some they're not probabistically independent on one another. Sometimes they're like borrowing from one another. So we got Paul and then the four evangelists.
¶222Um but like okay so like four or five testimonies decades after the fact um compared to okay like very shortly after the fact like a trial where people are giving sworn testimony it's two dozen of them saying I felt his leg beforehand now he has a leg afterhand the two people who performed the amputation etc. So like I'm like oh my gosh this is insane. So the miracle of Kanda is pulling on me and you just have to pause it like the craziest conspiracy theory. >> How did you how did you come upon that one? Did Cameron send you that one as well or >> I don't know.
¶223I So, for whatever reason, um I got into some of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World episodes and this one just like popped up and I was like, "Okay, I'm examining miracles. This one looks interesting." And it >> does a great job examining things with a even keel >> and it says like regrown leg and I'm like, "Okay, come on." Like a regrown leg. And then I look at I'm like, "Oh no. Oh no. Maybe Christianity is true." Uh that's a bit a bit daunting because that would have to require a pretty big change in my life.
¶224But I'm thinking like maybe it's true. So I'm still actually at this point I'm still leaning towards thinking Christianity is false. But I'm you know again the pebbles are mounting like my shoe is starting to get stocked full of pebbles. So the miracle of Kanda comes along and that kind of bothers me and I start looking into some other miracles that people like testify his YouTube channel have talked about. Caleb Jackson like there's a a Barbara Schneider case that I found really convincing.
¶225She had like advanced multiple scerosis. She hadn't walked for years. She was sent to like her deathbed basically um at home and she had all these tubes inserted into her. She had a fully collapsed lung. She had a massive um atrophy for her legs because of course if you don't walk in like 7 to 10 years or however long it was, you're going to get massive atrophy.
¶226Her her feet were like um I think frozen in like planter uh flexion. So they could she couldn't like walk or anything. She was legally blind. Her hands were like crinkled in on themselves. And she was this >> this is in the 1980s I believe.
¶227Um, and so like she's basically dying and they have a her church has a prayer campaign for her and they get like hundreds of letters coming in for the prayer. And so her friend is reading to her these prayers one day and when when she's reading the prayers to her um she hears a voice, Barbara that is, she hears a voice saying, "Get up my child and walk." And she's like she takes out her tubes, she gets up, she walks. She looks down and the first thing she notices as she says is her feet are flat on the floor. They haven't been like that for seven to 10 years. And then she looks at her hands and they're not crumpled in on themselves.
¶228And then only after that she notices I'm not blind. I can see and like she starts dancing and they had like they start dancing and running around and and the the her family members are like feeling her calves and like your calves are restored and like we have like medical testimony to all this stuff. So this is like an instantaneous and permanent remission of advanced multiple scerosis. Oh, her her lung uncolapsed as well. She had a collapsed lung and it uncolapsed.
¶229So all of these things happening at once in connection with what I would have to say is like a hallucination on her part. So okay, we just happen to have this hallucination with content in association with hundreds of prayers. All this stuff is coinciding with an uncolapsed lung, blindness instantaneously remitting, like muscle being restored, doctor's testimony to this. We have medical documentation beforehand, afterhand. >> What am I to do, Matt?
¶230What am I to do >> when you see this? What are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to say? So, like, okay, I guess, okay, I guess God probably exists. So, I'm like, now I'm basically like, yeah, theism is probably true, but maybe God's like just like accommodating to our religious beliefs.
¶231Sure, like they're praying to the Christian God and whatnot, but maybe God's like accommodating to our religious beliefs and whatnot. Um, and there are some other healings as well, like Gregory Spencer, this is another one that, um, uh, Caleb Jackson likes to go through. So, uh, [laughter] he has macular degenerative blindness. So, macular degeneration does not get better on its own. It's natural.
¶232It's not doesn't like heal naturally. Um, and he like he's seen by we have all of his medical documentation beforehand uh where he's seen by um like an opthalmologist, he's declared legally blind, he gets all of his legal permits and whatnot. Um and then he goes to like some kind of Christian retreat and after like after he prays for like uh I forget like I think he just wanted he wanted to pray for some spiritual healing cuz I think he had some trauma in his life and then after that prayer he can see almost crystal clearly. >> When was this? Um, this was I think in the early 2000s or something like that.
¶233Like again, I'm just going off of memory here. So, um, I think this is in the early 2000s. Okay. And so then he's like, "Oh my gosh, I can see." So then he goes to the doctor and the doctor's like, "Oh my gosh, your eyesight is totally fine. This is insane." And the macular degenerous stuff like literally cleared.
¶234And it's like, "What is going on?" And then get this. They had to investigate him for insurance fraud because they're like, "Dude, you just you just had like all this medical documentation that you were legally blind with macular degenerative blindness. This is insurance fraud. Like what are you going on?" And they had to drop the they had to drop the fraud case cuz like okay yeah and we have like the the government report it's like yep yep he's healed cuz they had to go through the medical documentation and he's all open about it like puts the medical documentation online. So like none of this stuff is like oh yeah I had a headache and I prayed to Jesus and it was healed.
¶235Like no that is ridiculous. We have in some cases like dozens hundreds of contemporaneous medical documentation signed notorized reports. Deal with it explain it. No leg. Accommodate yourself to the fact.
¶236God exists. Accommodate yourself to the fact. So I was like, "Okay, God probably exists." It was still a probably at this point. Like cuz I was like, "The problem of evil. The problem of evil.
¶237I can't I can't get over it, man." Like again, the Jeffrey Dmer thing, the Jeffrey return, like God seems to be like Jeffrey Dmer. Like okay, sure, there's so much evidence, but it was still so hard for me. I mean, again, at this point, I'm like leaning towards theism. Okay, Ethan Muse still hasn't come into the store yet, but now I'm like, oh gosh, at this point, Christianity, I was like maybe 30% confident that Christianity is true. >> But Catholicism, Catholicism was like 0.00001%.
¶238I was like, okay, maybe Christianity is true and there's some kind of like liberal Christianity where like everyone's going to be saved and you know that sort of thing. Um, so I was like, "Okay, yeah, Christianity like 30% chance. God's existence. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe like 70 80% or something like that.
¶239Even though I've seen all this stuff, >> yeah, I just it's a testimony to and I don't want to make light of it. The problem of evil is powerful and it was powerful really psychologically and I had other objections as well, but we we'll circle back to the problem of evil later." [snorts] >> Um, so still haven't met Ethan Muse. I'm about 30% confident in Christianity. Super confident that uh Catholicism is false. Um, and we can go through my objections later, but okay.
¶240[sighs and gasps] Again, the the the pebbles in the shoe are mounting and mounting and mounting and mounting. Now, what comes next is probably uh kind of simultaneously eucharistic miracles and Adam Bllye his stigmata case, which we'll get to, and then Ethan Muse. So, let let's take those in turn. >> Okay. >> So, Matthew Levana, he's like a Catholic apologist in France.
¶241He's talking about like eucharistic miracles and like Heaven Non-Tratic is making videos against them and like I'm like, "Okay, I should probably check this out cuz like I'm starting to think Christianity has a really live chance of being true and like I guess this could help me figure out which form of Christianity is true. I suppose if there are Eucharistic miracles. Um, what does your YouTube channel look like right now as you're going through this? I mean, you have to post. Are you posting videos?" >> Yeah, I I am posting videos.
¶242So, like I'm doing stuff on a video with Brian Cutter on psychophysical and nomogical harmony. I'm doing videos on um like metaphysics. I'm doing videos on philosophy of mind. Like why dualism is true, why the mind is not reducible to the brain. >> You know, one thing we never addressed that we should address now is why you haven't gone public about your conversion until now.
¶243>> Oh, do you want to address that now? >> Well, just I think it's important because my next question was going to be like, were you playing the skeptic in these videos to plate your audience since the since you wanted to keep your conversion close to the chest? How were you navigating these discussions without coming out like a This is where this is postcon conversion what I'm doing. >> Well, no. Well, yeah, I guess so.
¶244>> We're sort of in the sort of investigative phase. Um, >> yeah. Yeah. Postcon conversion. >> Postconver.
¶245>> Why is it you didn't choose to announce it right away? >> I needed at least 6 months of the sacramental life of the church under my belt before I was ready for the spiritual attacks and the flack that I would get from my LGBT friends, my atheist friends, my agnostic friends, and various things like that. Yeah. >> And I just wasn't ready for a public defense of the faith as like a new revert. >> I need to receive the Eucharist on like a regular basis.
¶246I need to go to confessions to heal like all my past sins, you know. Um I needed to >> get your prayer life in order. >> I need to get my prayer life in order. I need to, you know, pray the rosary every day. That sort of thing.
¶247I needed to do my fasting and mortification. I needed to do um penences and whatnot. You know, I needed to get all my ducks in order spiritually before I was ready to go public and defend the faith publicly. Okay. But in the time that you converted to when you make your announcement, um, how are you navigating your conversations on your YouTube channel?
¶248You don't want to come out as a theist. You presumably don't want to spread the error of atheism. So, how are you what are you doing? Are you just posting less or? >> Um, so I I did post a little bit less.
¶249I am posting things that are I mean for instance I did one video just on like the nomological harmony argument which is the one where I said like the fundamental dynamical laws match the content of the univer universe and I gave like the rulebook analogy and you know it's really striking that like if you just had a randomized rulebook and a randomized game board that they would match each other such that the rules actually tell those particular game pieces how to go. It's really striking. So I just made like a video on that and I didn't actually come out and say that I was a theist at the time and that I was even Catholic at the time. I just made the video like I was exploring it, you know, and I'm just presenting the argument. I'm just saying like and here's how one might object and here's how one might do this.
¶250Um and that's basically how I carried myself. You know, I went on Miles Donahghue's podcast, um the uncertainty podcast. We talked about the fine tuning argument. And I told him in the email, I didn't tell him why. I just said, "You are not to call me an agnostic.
¶251You are not to call me an atheist. You not to call me anything. >> We were just going to talk about the fine tuning argument and why it's so amazing in all of its beautiful glory." So, okay, >> I just did that sort of thing, you know, and I just I didn't really touch on it and you know, >> um, so we we should return to this, but I struggle with scrupulosity, Matt. >> I really struggle and we should return to that. >> Um, thank you.
¶252>> Um, >> so I just I was paralyzed. What am I supposed to do with this channel? I >> is it a sin to keep the videos up? Should I delete the channel? Should what what what do I need to do?
¶253Uh, and so I need I had to thankfully I have good confessors and spiritual directors in my life like um, Father Minders, I absolutely love you. You're my hero, Father Miners. And Father Zach at Princeton, you're my hero. Uh, priests are my heroes at this point. But, uh, they know the scrupulous heart.
¶254And so, basically, um, I took down the ones that I think are were the most scandalous. So, I had some where I think they were very scandalous. I had one arguing like against, um, natural law theory where I I just think it's way too scandalous. I had one where I like just very vigorously defended uh like an argument for atheism and divine denism and whatnot. So I I thought that was too scandalous.
¶255And for for all the others that presented anything contrary to the Catholic faith basically I went and I put in the description and in a pinned comment um I did this in March of this year. I said like hey um my views have changed since then but this represented my views at the time. Don't infer anything about my current views. And I just left it at that. And dude I'm getting all these emails.
¶256Dude, I'm getting all these emails these messages. Oh Joe, what happened? Why can you elaborate? I'm like no I can't elaborate. What are you talking about?
¶257And people are commenting like, "What happened? What happened?" I'm getting messages like, "Are you a theist now? Are you?" I'm just getting all these messages. I'm like, >> "Yeah, >> sorry, bro." Um, >> wow. >> So, that's kind of that kind of what happened.
¶258There is a lie that we believe when we fall into a pattern of sin, especially when we begin to unfortunately love sin. Namely, that we have to keep this in the dark and everything will be okay. The fear that we have is that if we open it to the light, and what I'm talking about there is accountability, that everything will fall apart for us. That people will walk away from us. That things will get worse for us, which is such a shame because some things can only be healed by the antiseptic light of truth.
¶259And just to say it frankly, pornography is one of those things. Sexual sin is one of those things. And this is why I am genuinely honored to promote Relay. Relay is built around honesty, accountability, and helping men move toward genuine freedom instead of carrying shame by themselves. The fact is that freedom is possible.
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¶261Use my code pints for your 7-day free trial. Join Relay today. Visit joinrelay.app/pint and use code pints for 7 days free. One [snorts] of the things I love so much is sitting down with my wife in the morning and having a cup of coffee. And for whatever reason, it's important to me that she and I are both drinking coffee.
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¶265Get a free gift. And don't forget promo code pints for an extra 10% off your first purchase. That's 25% total savings on your first order. >> All right. So, >> so% Christianity.
¶266You're looking into Catholicism >> a little bit. I mean, I still think Catholicism is kind of silly at this point. Um, >> you're hoping for a liberal Christianity. >> Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely.
¶267just some kind of like universalist liberal Christianity where you know the Bible >> yeah maybe it's inspired or something but maybe like yeah maybe God just in his providence let it be like error in error like errors left and right basically um >> [sighs and gasps] >> uh so I was I was sort of hoping for that um and I was actually like starting again 30% confidence in Christianity and maybe I was like super confident that that would be the kind of Christianity that I go to um and very confident that Catholicism is false >> okay but then as I said eucharistic miracles come in >> that's right >> Adam bl stigmatic case comes in and Ethan Muse comes in. Okay, so let's take eucharistic miracles. So I'm I start watching all these videos, watching these debates. I start participating these debates online. I was like, "Oh, I'm just playing devil's advocate." I remember I debated like a on Facebook and I'll I put this in my um conversion video that people should definitely go and check out um this the hours long conversion video that that's out by now.
¶268People are watching it. >> Maria, we will link to it. [laughter] >> Okay, sweet. Um, so I was basically examining these Eucharistic miracles. I went on I talked with Matthew Levvenia.
¶269I talked with um the skeptics of the Eucharistic miracles. I read the best skeptics, the best arguments for it. I watched videos on it. I started kind of engaging in debates and whatnot with like Protestant scientists on Facebook and whatnot. Like very extensive back and forth debates.
¶270>> Um, >> so I started just like thinking about these. Uh, and Matthew Levan was like, "Joe, you've been thinking about this stuff. Um, pick up Dr. Dr. Franco Saraphini's book, A Cardiologist Examines Jesus.
¶271I was like, "Okay, fine. I'll pick it up." Um, and so I pick it up and I read it and I'm like, as I'm going through it, I'm like, "Oh my gosh. Oh no." And I remember I remember going through it and I was like, by the end I was like, "Oh no, Catholicism might be true. That's not good. That's not good." So like I can tell you some of the things that I sort of discovered when I was looking through that.
¶272So like he goes through five eucharistic miracles. Laniano, Buenos, Cyrus, Tixla, Sakoka, Lenita, different continents, different time periods. Lanchiano goes back. So the kind of historioggraphy is a little bit like patchy for the first some hundreds of years. It goes back to like roughly the seventh or 8th century.
¶273Um but the providence of the relics here are very secure from like I think the 16th century onward. um and we have like references and whatnot to it in like earlier middle middle ages and whatnot. Ethan Muse goes through this in his um post on Lana which is excellent and he you know he talked about that in your interview but anyway um that one is insane like uh Dr. Eduardo Lenoli looks at it in the 1970s and then again in the 1980s he's he determines through lots of different chemical tests that it's real human flesh that is there with no preservatives. He determines that the these little like blood globules that are just like exposed to the air.
¶274This is the most like fragile biological material on the planet in these blood globules in the open air in like the Italian climate >> and they they've just like existed there and persisted for hundreds of years. He does tests on the blood type. They're both AB blood, rarest type in the world. Sorry, they're both like AB. Yeah, the rarest blood type in the world.
¶275This is insane. Like and then the preservation, utterly unprecedented preservation um with like especially if you don't use preservatives like if you cut out a human heart cuz it is mioardium. He was able to tell by the way that the fibers are aligned and by the like the um macular features of the um microscopic features of the relic and whatnot. Um if you take a human heart and try to pass it off as a relic, it's going to be the most disgusting putrid thing after a few days. You don't even get that kind of preservation if you put it in like amazing conditions in like like a fridge for instance.
¶276It's going to be putrid. But no, it's lasted hundreds of years, hundreds of years. Utterly unprecedented uh preservation. It's just and Ethan goes through tons of reasons why it's not naturalistically explicable on his on his um Substack post. Um so like that's already kind of insane.
¶277And of course, like we, you know, skeptics, they'll try to pinpoint like all these, this is another thing I kept on seeing a pattern in skeptical responses to miracles where they're just trying to like pinpoint peripheral anomalies and like minor embarrassments for the miracles, but they're not actually addressing the core data. >> Like we do have a good prominence for at least hundreds of years. So, what's your explanation for hundreds of years for this preservation? And like also the way that the the providence of the artifacts, the way that they were cut um like basically would be overwhelmingly difficult uh if not impossible for um a forger in um the Middle Ages to do. Ethan goes through that as well on his on his post.
¶278So like already even launch is just insane. And then you go to all these other eucharistic miracles and it's like we have laboratory analyses, blinded laboratory analyses like with Tixla we have pictures of like the priest at the mass. So, um, basically a sister was, you know, distributing communion at the mass and she looks down and one of them during mass has this like red kind of congealed kind of seeming like blood on it. She's like, "Okay, this is weird." She goes up and takes it to um the father at the mass and he kind of holds it up in front of the the audience and says like and they thought they thought at the time that it was a miracle. Uh, and you know, we got pictures of it.
¶279We have like I think it's like 17 signed like sworn testimony about like this event. Um and then they basically send they take off little bits of it uh the ucharist and the the little blood spots or whatever and they send it to um two laboratories blinded. They both determine that it's AB blood. >> They see that there's myo peroxidase and glycophorin A which are characteristic of lucasytes and red blood cells. >> They do tests for human hemoglobin and they come back positive.
¶280And then and we even we even have these laboratory reports. You can look at them. I've talked with father Perez who worked on the case and he's sent me some of the reports from the like the doctors who looked at it and you can literally see in there like these branching muscle fiber-l like structures as well and they I mean they lost some cuz usually it's like suffering myioardial tissue that they'll find in these eucharistic hosts um you can literally look at the pictures and you can see a tendency to bifurcate and anastimos and that anastimos basically means joined together and that's very characteristic of myocardium. So like uh we've got that we have a hisystological identification of white blood cells and again like we have these tests which are iminohistochemistry tests imunocchromatography tests confirming that it's human hemoglobin we can see the white blood cells in the images and you can also see like a a fagosite which is like a white blood cell um swallowing debris [laughter] in the process of swallowing debris. It's like it's so cool in some of these images and Dr.
¶281Francoini has the images from the reports in his book. It's just insane. And you can literally see like the white plant cells of the host outside of it as well. So like it's just crazy. And it's like, okay, how did human blood get in there?
¶282How did suffering myioardial tissue get in there? What's going on? Okay. And that's just like TikS like what is going on? And then of course they go later on like years later and they um they have like an like an expert in like imaging look at it and they can still detect the presence of human blood.
¶283They had they had another person do a study which they determined that the blood comes from inside the host. Like they did all different sorts of studies on this Tixla host. And then like again very similar things happen to at Buenos Cyrus in 1996 like we're there like uh you can literally like see the image that Dr. Lawrence looks at when they take the host to him. So here's what happened with that one with Buenosy.
¶284They uh like they leave the host in sorry they find the host. It was like desecrated or something like that uh under like a candlestick or something like that. They put it in water and they come back a few days and they see that there are some red gross and whatnot. Now, of course, the church is very cautious. It's very diligent.
¶285It is aware. We're not morons. We're aware that uh there can be bacteria and fungi that produce red spots and that even produce like a red bloodlike substance. So, we're aware of that. For whatever reason, for Buenosiris, they waited 3 years and left it in distilled water.
¶286[laughter] Uh and the and the blood spots were still there. So, that's really weird. And so, they have um they have like Dr. like Ricardo Castiano Gomez or something um come and he takes a sample of the host three years later which was in distilled water um in the presence of notary witnesses recorded and they send it off to a lab called Forensic Analytical. Forensic Analytical does some preliminary tests.
¶287They're unable to amplify DNA um and they also just use like a like a very simple light microscope where you wouldn't be able to see any like um microchemical features. You wouldn't be able to identify the species or something like that. And so they they weren't able to identify anything but then they sent it off. So, Forensic Analytical then forwards the sample to Dr. Lawrence.
¶288Dr. Lawrence prepares a slide and looks at it on the slide and we have a recording of him looking at it on the slide and he's there and we can see it and he's pointing out the red blood cells and you can see these like striations around them and we can literally compare independently. We can compare what he saw with characteristic pictures in textbooks of myioardial inffections and they look almost identical. They look almost identical like and people are saying like, "Oh yeah, but it's just a bacterium. Oh, it's just a fugellum.
¶289No, you're you I'm not you're asking like you're asking me to disbelieve my eyes. I can see what Dr. Lawrence is looking at. And of course, they bring it to some other doctors and they have some difficulty identifying it because it's um it's not a heart muscle in its normal state. It's lost its fragmentations.
¶290It's lost its centralized nuclei. Uh and basically it's in a kind of stressed state. So it doesn't look like like a characteristic picture of what you would normally see from a like a heart in like a textbook. And so they bring it to actually like a heart expert. Um Dr.
¶291Zugabe. they don't tell what it is. And he's like, "Yeah, that's from the left ventricle." And he could literally like point out exactly where it is. And like it's just insane. And it's like again, people like all these scientists are mistaken.
¶292Like they can't tell uh bact rod-shaped bacteria from like suffering myocardial tissue. They can't tell like sporeshaped fungi from heart tissue. And again, like I have eyes. You're relying on me not looking at it. Like you skeptics are relying on me not looking at it.
¶293Using my eyes and comparing what I see on the video, Dr. Lawrence looking at with a moardial inffection. Again, you can put them side by side and they look almost identical. You can see the white blood cell influx around the um the red fibers and whatnot which have lost their centralized nuclei which have that fragmentation which have the characteristic um anastimosing features and whatnot. Um it's just insane.
¶294Okay. So then that then you just go again you just go to the other uch eucharistic miracles and it's like a similar story where they see like suffering myioardial tissue, white blood cells, various other things inside of a host. Okay, this was very difficult for me as you can imagine. [laughter] I I I tried think like, okay, maybe there's just like some crazy string of frauds that just happened on different continents with different scientists on different occasions or maybe like there's some really weird kind of misidentification happening or something like that because I knew, Matt, I knew that if I granted Eucharistic miracles, >> it's game over. It's game over.
¶295A Catholic priest prays over some bread and it becomes suffering myocardial tissue. Am I just supposed to go along with my day? Am I supposed to go along with my day? No. And dude, like I imagine imagine going back to the Reformation debates, right?
¶296And you're there and there, you know, all the Protestants, they're like, "Uh, yeah, I know that this is like a completely novel view that has never popped up in 1500 years, but let's just deny that the mass is a propitiatory sacrifice and that, you know, this is, you know, a sacrificial um representation of of Christ's sacrifice as a propitiatory sacrifice." you know, they're all denying that even though it's been like the perennial teaching of the church for 1500 years, like they're just manifestally breaking away. But um imagine that we went to those debates after we've internally debated with Luther or Kelvin um church history, you know, we've pointed like dude read Ignatius you it's like what are you doing like or like read John 6 like what are you doing? Um we've engaged in these internal debates about church history and the Bible and whatnot. And I just we can't agree and I say dude what would it take to convince you Martin Luther or Calvin? And I could we could imagine them jokingly saying, "Okay, here's what here's what would convince me of the Catholic view." Five different times on different continents, a priest prays over some bread and it turns into suffering myocardial tissue.
¶297Okay. Oh, and yeah, have that happen on different continents. Oh, and when they do blood tests, have it be AB blood on across multiple eucharistic miracles cuz that's the rarest blood type. Okay. Across multiple eucharistic miracles, have it be AB blood.
¶298Oh, and yeah, make the blood type match the Sudarium of Odo and the Shroud of Turin. make that happen, too. Oh, and put in some put in some human blood as well. Some uh human hemoglobin and that as well. Put put that in.
¶299We would think that they're joking because that's like an unrealistic demand. Like, yeah, you guys, okay, you're you're only going to become convinced when it happens like multiple times across multiple different continents and blinded laboratory tests find that like, yeah, priest prays over some bread and it turns into suffering myioardial tissue. Um, and it's like, yeah, it's like the rarest baby blood type across multiple eucharistic miracles and happens to match the shroud and the ovo. Like, that's your demand, Martin Luther Calvin. That's what it's going to take to to to believe.
¶300You're joking, right? Well, Matt, it happened. It happened. It happened. Their view has been refuted.
¶301God has refuted Protestantism. >> So, will you read the book? [laughter] >> So, no. At this point, >> you closed the book. >> Yeah.
¶302Are you sleeping at this? >> No. No. I'm just like, "So, no, no, I close the book and I'm not yet convinced, right? Because it I don't know.
¶303I'm very um >> I'm very cautious. Like, it takes a lot to convince me." >> Yeah. >> Uh so, I But at this point, I'm like >> I don't know. I'm a little bit scared. >> Yeah.
¶304>> Uh Catholicism is true. Like, how could Catholicism be true? Uh and even now, like I still think, okay, maybe Christianity is like 40% probable. Maybe Catholicism is like 2% probable or something. Like, I got a massive boost for Catholicism after reading this.
¶305But again, like listen, like come on. Like, hell, this is ridiculous. like God s punishing people eternally, eternal suffering. That's ridiculous. Like come on.
¶306Like like two gay people who seem to love each other, they can't like they can't get married. Like that like it's ridiculous. It seems ridiculous. Or you know, various other things just seemed ridiculous about the about the church. Um so like I can't get there and like and I was scared cuz I was like I don't want to have to believe those things and I don't want to have to change my life.
¶307Like my life would have to be like radically upend itself. Yeah. >> I mean, I' I've been like a public critic, as I said, of Catholicism and Christianity for for a decade, actually, cuz like even going back before my channel, uh I had like Instagram uh accounts where I would like systematically defend atheism, things like that. I had a blog which was initially called naturalistically inclined, like a naturalist, but then I changed it to Majesty of Reason. So, like I've been a public critic.
¶308I'd have to like that's very humiliating to admit that you've been wrong the whole time. I'd have to admit to my parents that I've systematically deceived them. I'd, [gasps] you know, I'd have to just stop engaging in lots of behaviors that I really want to engage in, that I really like. Um, uh, that's difficult. It's a difficult ask.
¶309And especially intellectually, like the docsility, like I'm a free thinker. I'm like this. I'm I'm intellectually autonomous. I can think what I want. Uh, and you're asking me to be like docsel to the magisterium, like a teaching authority.
¶310Like this is this is ridiculous, you know? like sabulba nothing in words like dare to know dare to question nothing in words um I mean ultimately that spirit took me to Catholicism >> but still it's a spirit that's sort of fundamentally at odds with a kind of >> humble deference and childlike difference to Christ and the magisterium >> so like it took a radical intellectual reorientation to get to that stage and I just I wasn't ready for that and I also just wasn't ready for believing in hell believing in all these moral doctrines and whatnot So, so after Eucharistic Miracles and looking into that book and like talking with the skeptics and reading the skeptics, I've read them and typically what they focus on is these minor peripheral anomalies, they're like, "Well, what about in these cases that they tried DNA tests and the DNA didn't amplify?" H it's like, "Okay, the DNA didn't amplify, but I I have eyes. I can look at it and I can see that like in legit for instance, we have the pictures like that's not a bacterium. That's not a fugellum. Are you saying that that's a fugellum?
¶311Are you Are you saying that that's a fleellum?" Because it's not. I have eyes. So like they they don't explain the core data I don't think and to the extent that they do it's just like you know the craziest frauds or conspiracies that happen across multiple continents multiple people like it's it's not it's not plausible. Um so like I looked at that and they don't and like of course there are all sorts of humrum explanations for why the DNA might not amplify. Like I don't know the scientists themselves usually say that like it's because the tissues are too degraded for instance.
¶312Sometimes it was, you know, left in water, for instance, for like 3 years or something, which by the way, it's insane that you could have identifiable white blood cells after 3 years submerged in distilled water naturalistically inexplicable. Um, so they tended, the skeptics that is, tended to focus on minor peripheral anomalies. And I was just seeing this crop up over and over again or they're like focusing on how Dr. Ricardo Caston Gomez has some weird views in other domains and whatnot, but it's like, dude, all he had to do here was like take a piece of a host, put it in a vial, and ship it off. It's like, what are you saying?
¶313So, I don't know. They're just trying to cast clouds of uncertainty and unknowing. And I was like, but you're not getting to the core data. And also, there are lots of reason. We'll get to the hiddenist model of divine activity.
¶314I think there are lots of reasons why God might sprinkle in these peripheral anomalies so that people can cling to them if they want. Um, so we'll get to that later. But even even at this stage, I'm just like, okay, Catholicism might be true. I'm really scared. I really don't want that to be true.
¶315Uh, that would be disastrous. I would really I actually kind of wanted Christianity to be true. This kind of universalist liberal Christianity. Um Christianity maybe now is like yeah 30 40% probable to me. Maybe Catholicism is like 1% 2% something like that.
¶316Even after the Eucharistic miracles um but that's a massive boost from 01 or something like now Catholicism it's a live option. >> Mhm. >> And that isn't good for me. Um, so that's Eucharistic Miracles and there's much more that can be said and that I say in my um, conversion video. >> Okay.
¶317[sighs] Then I start reading this book by Adam Bllye. >> Okay. Tell me about this book. I don't know about >> So it's a book called like The Catholic Guide to Miracles. >> Okay.
¶318>> So Adam Blie, he uh has he does like deliverance ministry stuff, so he's done YouTube videos and whatnot. He's this very gentle soul. This totally unostentious individual. Um, and he seems like he wouldn't hurt a fly. like he and he just really has a heart for people cuz like he's been he's been through as he says on his website like between like a thou like 2,000 exorcisms or something like that.
¶319So he does deliverance ministry stuff. He was initially getting um he he got his I think uh degree in psychology then he did substantial PhD work in psychology or psychiatry but then he just felt called to go to the deliverance ministry. So he went he went down that route. He's also done lots of work in like forensic criminal settings and whatnot. Um so he writes this book on a Catholic guide to miracles.
¶320Um, and so I read through it and whatnot, and you know, a lot of I don't know, um, I wasn't really convinced by a lot a lot of the stuff in there at the time. I was still again really skeptical. But I got to this one section where Adam Blie himself testifies to a contemporary stigmatist case. Um, and he's very shy on the details and he says, "Hey, like the church hasn't looked into this. You know, be very careful.
¶321This is like private stuff. You don't have to believe this or something like that." You know, he's very careful. like the way it reads is just very careful. But it just shook me um like down to my core. Like it was just weird because he's just and I later interviewed him because Cameron is uh Cameron's like I guess acquaintances are friends with him to some extent.
¶322And so Cameron put me in touch with him and I sat down with him for about an hour to interview him about this stigmatist case. And it turns out that over the course of a year, almost every Thursday and Friday, he was assigned to console this individual, this stigmatist, where she would miraculously relive Christ's passion. So starting on Thursday night, this is Adam's testimony. >> Starting Thursday night, she would literally spontaneously sweat blood. >> Mhm.
¶323>> She would walk around pacing and whatnot. She would be having these mystical kind of encounters during this. Um on Friday she would relive the passion and it was very difficult for Adam to watch this. He testifies to seeing again every Thursday and Friday over the course of a year to spontaneous lash wounds 6 in long spontaneously forming out of thin air on her back and her legs. Not self-imposed.
¶324He's literally there watching this in perfectly totally conducive perceptual circumstances every Thursday and Friday over the course of a year. And so she's reliving that. Um she even goes through like the crucifixion and like um uh you know she's like tossed around at various points and she's like saying things in Aramaic that like what's really interesting is he he has this funny story where she's like she says she says some things at one point in Aramaic and he didn't know what it meant and I I don't even know if she knew what it meant but um I want to look up Adam Blly just to see if I know who this is. I feel bad that I don't. So, um, he, uh, basically wanted to look up what she was saying.
¶325And so, he he found it in a song. And it turns out it was like part of like the Our Father or something like that. And so, he plays the song in Aramaic. >> And, uh, she's like, "Well, hold on a second. That it's slightly different from what the song actually says." And so, he he goes and he seems what what kind of Aramaic it was.
¶326And it was actually like a different sort of Aramaic that was a local dialect that was different from the one that Christ would have actually sort of actually said. And so, he goes to the one that Christ actually would have said. and then she's able to sing along and go along with it. So, it's like it's just like insane. Um, now again, >> this was this is only one person testifying to this.
¶327So, I'm not saying like this is the end all be all. >> But Matt, this caused so much cognitive dissonance in my mind. >> Yeah. >> So much cognitive dissonance because dude, how can you be honestly mistaken? How can you be honestly mistaken about over the course of an entire year?
¶328>> Yeah. >> Thursday and Friday in totally perceptually conducive circumstances. >> Yeah. No, you could only be a liar. Or unless he's confabulating on cosmic proportions in a way that's like utterly absurd.
¶329So again, I just have to divi I can divine from the armchair that Adam Blie, you are a filthy liar. Even though you believe that lying will send like especially in this case where like he's writing this in a book and promaggating on behalf of Catholicism. I mean, and like telling me this and knowing that it'll kind of affect my conversion. This is a serious lie. It may even go into mortal sin territory if it were to be a lie.
¶330So does he not believe Catholicism even though like he's obviously a Catholic? Yeah, >> cuz he would just be having to engage in like mortal sin upon mortal sin upon mortal sin. Like it's ridiculous. So and I can just sit in the armchair and know that he's lying. Like it's just so weird.
¶331Like it's just this weird kind of epistemic move where I'm like, "Okay, I've got all these independent objections to Catholicism based on my intuition." And from that I can infer that Adam Blie who's sitting right next to me or standing right next like I can see him right here. He's utterly ostentatious. He presents it in a very reserved kind of way. the way he puts it in the book, it's not um like flashy or anything like that. He's obviously not here to sell things.
¶332In his in his interviews about demonic phenomena, he's like, I'm just here to warn you guys. Like I I care about your souls, you know? Um I'm here to warn you. Like he's not flashy, ostentatious. He's not doing this for money.
¶333Or at least at the very least, that's what's screaming to me. Like >> just as much as I know that like >> my friend is not doing something for money when I talk with him. >> I just had that kind of moral sense, just a moral sense talking with him. And I almost felt like morally opposed to just saying, "I know that you're a liar because I intuit it something about hell." >> Yeah, >> it sounds ridiculous. So then that caused so much cognitive dissonance.
¶334I was like I was I called Cameron afterwards. I'm pacing around my room. I'm like Cameron, what am I supposed to do? Uh I've got so many objections to Catholicism. It can't be true.
¶335But like this stigmatist case and of course this is like you know a victim like this is a victim soul really. Uh if this is true, this is like redemptive participatory vicarious uh suffering being united to Christ's passion. >> Uh most Protestants don't believe that. It's like distinctively Catholic doctrine. Like this is for instance what like I mean what like Sean Luke has a problem with like lots of things regarding Fatima because they were doing like penences and like vicarious reparatory participatory redemptive suffering um uniting uniting it to Christ's passion.
¶336There are these distinct sacrifices and whatever. Um, like this is precisely what Protestants disagree with Catholics about, but God is like screaming Catholicism is my church. So, God is like screaming that. Um, and so I don't know. I was like, "Dude, Cameron, I can't take it." Like, it was it was just gnawing away at my mind.
¶337Um, and again, I I recognize that it's only one testimony. And maybe people I just for whatever reason, Matt, this one just stuck with me for whatever reason. Um cuz I just I couldn't say that I couldn't get myself to say that Adam Blie is a filthy liar who's mortally sinning despite all of his own beliefs and whatnot. I just morally I couldn't get myself to that. >> Um and so this now we're in a real hard drive.
¶338I got to I got to figure this stuff out. I've looked through the Eucharistic miracles. I've listened to Adam Bllye. [sighs] What am I to do if Catholicism is true? So then I don't know what my credence here in Catholicism is.
¶339But again, I'm taking things slowly. Maybe it's only up to like 5% or something, maybe 10% cuz I still have so many barriers. It's so difficult, Matt. It's so difficult. It was so difficult for me at the time to think Catholicism is true.
¶340Um, and we can get to why later on when we get to the more personal side. So, the Eucharistic miracles, the Adam BL case, now maybe Christianity is up to like 50% or something like I'm thinking, okay, yeah, Christianity real life option. Um, and maybe God's just like accommodating to their beliefs or something. >> Um, even if Catholicism is false, so you know, or sorry, even if Cathol Yeah, even though Catholicism is false, maybe God is just like accommodating to their beliefs or something. We'll get to why >> reaching out to the Catholics.
¶341>> Yeah, we'll get to why I think that's not plausible at all later. Um, but I was like, okay, maybe something like that is happening. Um, but in comes Ethan Muse, [laughter] >> right? How did you How did you meet him? Is he at >> So he's he's at Ruckers so he's like right down the road from me.
¶342Um >> how did you how did you first >> I don't I don't really even remember. I think um maybe Caleb Jackson was friends with him or something like that and I just had heard of him. Um or maybe I came across like his Fatima post or something and I emailed him and I was like, "Hey, let's grab dinner or something. Like I'm curious. We should talk about miracles because I've been thinking about this and I'm curious what you think.
¶343Um can you like help me? Can you like I'm curious." And I remember like we had our first dinner and he was like like do you think you could convert to Catholicism and I was like no it's probably very it's not really a live option. I think this is probably a little bit before I got through like the Adam Bllye case and whatnot. So I was like no like it's extremely unlikely that I'd become Catholic but like I am starting to really take Christianity seriously. Um, and then we had this like fivehour dinner [laughter] where we were just going back and forth and back and forth on all of my objections and whatnot and he'd make a point and I'd parry and he'd repost and then I'd rejoined and then, you know, we just go back and forth.
¶344Um, and then, you know, we enjoyed talking with one another. Yeah, that was after his Fatima post. Um, so it must have been the Fatima Post that that led me to talk with him. And then we just started having like like 4-hour long conversations in the evenings about miracles and my objections to Catholicism and various other things. Um, so >> uh that's where yeah that's where Ethan sort of comes in and then the next kind of stage in the journey.
¶345So now again let's let's take a step back when I meet Ethan Muse. I'm like this is probably before Adam Bllye and I'm kind of going through the Eucharistic miracles at this point and Catholicism still seems really implausible. Christianity is like you know 30 40ish% or something like that for me and theism yeah maybe like 70 80% likely to be true. >> Have you prayed yet? >> Yes.
¶346So actually for quite some time I have prayed prayers as an agnostic. Actually as far as I can remember I've prayed prayers and they've just been conditional prayers of the form God if you exist please help me to come to know you and love you. It's like basically that's what I did because I think I mean listen I think it is I mean I was going to say I think it's irrational for uh agnostics and even atheists to uh to not pray conditional prayers. So like Matt imagine that you are stranded in a forest. Okay.
¶347And you've you've been there for a week. You need help. Okay. And you're in a dire dire circumstances cuz you just ran out of food. Okay.
¶348So you're stranded in a forest and you've got a flare gun which basically allows you unlimited flares that you can shoot up. doesn't take much effort. Maybe takes just a few seconds to just shoot up a flare into the sky and it would alert anyone who's potentially looking for you. I mean, you know, you have friends and family who hopefully care about you. I mean, I I care about you, man.
¶349So, maybe I would be looking for you um at the very least. So, you know, you think maybe there are helicopters out there looking for me. Maybe there are search crews on the ground looking for me. Um in that case, I say even if you think there's like a 2% chance, a 1% chance, a.5% chance that there's someone out there looking for you when you're in this dire circumstances, you should shoot the player. It would be irrational not to shoot the flare when you're starving basically, right?
¶350Of course you would shoot the flare. Everyone would shoot the flare. Well, conditional prayers for an agnostic or atheist are shooting the flare. So, premise one, if you like, you should shoot the flare in that case. Even if you're pretty confident that no one's out there looking for you and who might be willing to help you, even if you're like 1% confident, you're 99% confident that there's no one out there who will help you, you should still shoot the flare cuz it's effortless and it has potent massively potential payoffs and the stakes are high.
¶351So, you should shoot the flare. premise two. If you should shoot the the flare, then even an agnostic or even an atheist should shoot up conditional prayers to God of the form that I just gave. Conclusion, agnostics and atheists should shoot up conditional prayers to God because after all, >> the stakes are dire. >> Yeah, >> the stakes are dire.
¶352You you know there may very well according to you like there even if it's unlikely even if there's 1% chance 5% chance there may very well be a god out there who's willing to help if you ask. So just shoot the flare. It's effortless. Just wake up every day for 3 seconds and say it with honesty and sincerity. Say, "God, if you exist, help me to know you, love you, and serve you." Amen.
¶353Every day. Do it every day. >> See, see where it takes you. >> Beautiful. >> See where it takes you.
¶354>> Yeah. Love the analogy. >> See where it takes you. [laughter] It might take you to Matt Frad studio. So [sighs] So yeah, I haven't I had been praying conditional prayers.
¶355>> Gosh, I wish I was a fly on the wall. listening to you and Ethan Muse talk for [laughter] 5 hours. That must have been wild. >> I mean, typically to to be completely honest, uh you know, as a mortification of my pride, it was a series of just me being utterly utterly intellectually mogged by Ethan Muse. Just like >> just like yeah, massive mogging left and right and left and right and left and right.
¶356Like it's so hard to get a get a point on him. Um, and like you know, you'd be like a fourth of the way through a point and he's already seen like four steps of the dialectic ahead of you. [laughter] So, he's already seen four steps of the He's like, "Yes, I know your objection." Then he articulates it to you like much more succinctly and clearly than you could have. And it's even more forceful than you could have done it. And it even gets like to the heart of what you're saying.
¶357And then he's like, "Yeah, but that that that fails for at least four reasons." Then he systematically lists through those four reasons. You're like, "Oh gosh." Um, [laughter] you're right. Um, >> oh man. >> So, wow. Praise God.
¶358>> I know. It's a grace. It's a grace. Unmmerited grace. >> All right.
¶359Well, come on. Let's rip the band-aid off. How did you How did you accept Catholicism? >> Well, okay. No, no.
¶360We We got to get that. No, no. We got to get that. >> We're going to tear it back slowly. Really slow.
¶361>> Yeah, it's going to hurt cuz it did hurt. >> I just can't wait to hear about when you prayed your first rosary. [laughter] >> When I hear about a seeker or a Protestant praying their first rosary, I'm like, "All right, set the timer. It's not long." >> No. No.
¶362Our lady will get you. Our the beautiful Theotocos does not uh neglect her children. So, um, >> all right. >> She loves us so much. She'll she'll bring you around.
¶363She'll bring you around. >> Okay. >> So, yeah. Um, let's go back to So, Eucharistic [snorts] Miracles, Adam Bllye. >> Yes.
¶364>> Uh, now I'm really struggling like the cognitive dissonance is on full throttle. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, I've got complete cognitive dissonance at this point. Catholicism may be true, but I've got all these psychological barriers and all these rational barriers as well.
¶365Um, I just can't accept it. Um, but yeah, theism at this point is looking like, yeah, 80% probable. I'm really starting to lean towards theism. Um, Christianity maybe 50% probable, something like that. Um, and yeah, Catholicism after the Adam Bllye and the um, Eucharistic miracles, maybe we're at like somewhere between two and 5% or something like that.
¶366I mean, I don't know exactly where. These are just really rough ballpark numbers. I mean, I don't think we have like super precise credences up here, you know, >> um, or confidence levels. >> So, what came next? Well, because Ethan Muse was in the picture, >> Fatima came next.
¶367>> Yeah. >> So, it So, we'll put them put them on the table. It was Fatima, Lords, a bunch of different like canonization healing miracles and Padre Peio. >> Yeah. >> So, let's take them in those in that order.
¶368Okay. [laughter] So, Fatima comes first. >> Yeah. And so I'm I'm reading Ethan's post and I'm like, "Oh gosh, the evidence here is staggeringly powerful. It is staggeringly powerful." So like, of course, you know, people have watched the people should watch the 5-hour long interview that that you had with him.
¶369But I mean, just to recap things, you know, um there are three shepherd shepherd children, Lucia, Justinta, and Francisco. and they start to have kind of these mystical encounters with um this beautiful lady who later identifies herself as our lady of the rosary and they start uh they have an apparition I think it's on like May 13th 1917 is when the the first time this is so this is in fact a Portugal these are shepherd rural shepherd children um and our lady basically starts appearing to them they start having these visions of this beautiful lady and um you know they go into these kind of like mystical trances where they have kind of conversations in a conversational cadence with this lady. Actually, only Lucia has a conversational cadence. Um I think uh Justinta can um hear her and see her um but doesn't speak. And then I think um Francisco can only see her.
¶370Um and so like you know basically on on the May 13th apparition um the lady tells them to return to the Kova at this spot spot near the homemoke. There's like an oak there. Um every month going forward. So every month on the 13th. So um >> they do that.
¶371So the next month they come on um June 13th. >> Is this 1917? >> 1917. Yes. >> The year of the Russian Revolution was overthrown.
¶372And >> it's wild to think that in that year is when she said that the errors of Russia will spread throughout the world. [laughter] >> Yeah. And then it literally happened. So >> um so yeah, and so they come back repeated predictable schedule. They just enter into these like almost like translike states where they're like and of course word gets out and you know her parents, Lucia's parents, their parents think that like you need to knock this off, stop the gig.
¶373Um and so people start hearing about it that the our lady is appearing to these shepherd children. A bunch of people start showing up at the Kova. Um there all these like weird and anomalous phenomena happen while the children go into these like mystical trances where they talk with the lady. Um like there are just like seemingly miraculous conversions and healings and like there's like seemingly sourceless sometimes colored clouds of smoke that happen at the beginning and the end of apparition at the near the home oak on August 13th when the children are detained cuz like the local authorities were not happy with this sort of thing like they're like what is going on? Um and it turns out that after lots of these apparitions the children were um detained and interrogated both individually and collectively.
¶374Um, and so you know when they were detained for I think the August 13th apparition, uh, people still showed up at the Kova and like these like large booms and like these sourceless booms almost like cannons like were heard and people scattered. They were freaked out. Um, so like okay like what is going on? Um, and so then you know they're uh while during these interrogations um you know the children the way that they describe the lady is like in exceptional detail. They have like these striking undesigned coincidences about like where which direction exactly the woman came in, what exactly she's wearing, her exact posture, which way like her head is tilt, where she leaves, what exactly she's saying.
¶375We can like we can like independently confirm that like what the people around heard the children say or heard Lucia say like matches up with Lucia's recollection during these um interrogations. Um and like you look at the skeptical ex I mean they're like diverting their eyes. They're like shielding their eyes whatnot cuz like oh it's blinding me. It's blindingly bright. So like look at what the skeptics have to say.
¶376And lying is not at all plausible. These children were threatened with death and they were saying knock it off. And like the the local authorities tried all these different police tactics and came away with basically just like utterly convinced of the children's sincerity and honesty. Um and so like if you look at even the naturalistic explanations of the the apparition phenomena themselves, they're kind of just like flailing. [snorts] I mean um you know like these like people like these children are going into either like pred at a predictable schedule at predictable times exactly at noon on the 13th and no other times they enter into these what like either group hallucinations or like these weird multimodal like delusive transances where they can't tell a difference between imagination and reality even though they're well past the age where they can tell it and they can tell it on all other occasions.
¶377Uh, and it's happening on these like yeah these predictable predictable uh foreseen schedule in advance and like they're basically infallibly transmitting the contents of these to each other. Oh, and like Francisco he didn't get the memo that the person is talking like what uh that the lady is talking and then you know there are all these undesigned coincidences between their like very complex and diverse multimodal experiences that they're describing in both individually and collectively when they're interrogated. Um and like Ethan goes through all the reasons why like even the apparition phenomena themselves are very difficult to naturalistically explain. But then they predict 3 months in advance that on October 13th there will be a miracle for everyone to see and so that everyone may believe. That's what the apparition said.
¶378We'll perform a miracle so that everyone may believe. Okay. So word gets out all like the secular newspapers show up. All like a bunch of different skeptics show up. Atheists show up.
¶379Anti-clerical people show up. Catholics show up at noon. And it happens like literally a spontaneous localized emitter forms in the lower lower atmosphere bathes people in multiple hues of color. We have people describing the object as distinct from the sun detaching itself from the sun. This happened for 10 minutes.
¶380People are saying that they can painlessly stare at the object and sometimes against what 15 out of 15 witnesses who described clouds said that this object was against a clear blue cloudless sky at various points and yet was nevertheless painless to stare at. This is when the sun, this is noon. This is a solar azimuth. You cannot look painlessly. >> Mhm.
¶381>> At the noon, midday sun against a clear, cloudless blue sky. It's impossible. And we have people who are like avoiding optical effects by literally refusing to look at the sun, looking backwards, and they literally see the environment around them bathed in multiple hues of color. >> And they they it's also just like the phenomenology. They describe it as being out there rather than in here.
¶382Um, so like you know they're saying that oh yeah, the the lights are like reflecting off of like hats in the environment and whatnot. So um and of course like the the the naturalistic mechanisms that could make the sun itself painless to stare at are things like cloud coverage and things like that. And that doesn't result in um the sorts of effects that you need for retinal over stimulation to get colorful phenomenology. So even the naturalistic explanations for making the the light source painless to stare at um would remove the phenomenology that everyone is reporting. there's like a crazy massive degree of convergence around these phenomena.
¶383Even like the best skeptic who's published on this on Substack and Ethan has responded to him. Um even he Scott Alexander says that uh there's an impressive degree of convergence among the testimony here um about what you'd expect from a real objective event. Um so we just have like hordes of testimonies as distant witnesses who like at Alberell they're not looking towards the sun they're looking towards the Kova and they describe there a three-fold descent of the sun. >> Yeah. And that just happens to independently corroborate what people at the Kova say when they say they saw this object rear towards them three times.
¶384So we have distant witnesses, we have skeptical witnesses. It's just insane. And people's clouds also we have a bunch of different witnesses who said that their clouds just their clouds, sorry, their clothes just instantaneously dried. And then you look at photo and we know that it was raining. We have meteorological data, Matt.
¶385It was raining all the way up until the miracle. And then the mir and the rain stops and the clouds part and then this this spectacle happens in front of everyone. So like it's just insane. And we even have images of the crowd where you can see these selective drying bands. So literally it's just like soaking wet at one point but then like a completely dry part and it's like it's insane.
¶386Um so like that would just be like thermodynamically impossible for it to dry that quickly. And we just have tons of testimony that so the testimony just happens to like independently corroborate exactly what's seen in the images. It's it's insane. It's naturalistically inexplicable, man. So, Fatima was like, "Wow." Oh, and of course, it just turns out that like directly in connection with this, there are oodles upon oodles of healing miracles, which are insane and medically documented afterwards.
¶387So, God's like going out of his way to basically heal people in connection with this apparition. >> Yeah, >> it's insane. So again, you got the apparition phenomena which the naturalistic explanations are already sort of having to flail to explain away these like utterly unprecedented unknown to science like a scheduled delusive transes where these children can't tell a difference from imagination and reality and they're like diverting their gaze cuz it's like hurting them and they have like crazy independent cooperations among their like highly detailed um descriptions of this multimodal experience. Uh and then they predict 3 months in advance a meteorological phenomenon over which they have no control. And then it happens.
¶388It happens and it's seen by distant witnesses by between 30,000 100,000 people at the Kova. We have healing miracles in connection with it. We rapid drying. We've got all the testimony about like the sun detaching itself and it's just it's naturalistically inexplicable. >> So photographic evidence.
¶389We have newspaper articles written by the enemies of the church. >> Yeah. OCO. I mean, literally the enemies of the church are literally saying, "Yeah, uh, I went there and I was I went there to kind of de debunk it, but it happened. [laughter] You literally in Oculo, they they talk about that and it's it's just insane." Um, and like, >> uh, another thing we haven't mentioned is like, you know, there's a photographic analysis where you basically you just perform some trigonometry on light cues.
¶390>> If you're interested, people should check that out. Ethan used spoke about that and he had images to to prove that. >> Yeah. And so what that shows basically it's a non-solar elevation of the light source. So, it wasn't actually the sun.
¶391It's a localized emitter, which I mean, it's just it's incredible, Matt. And of course, like, okay, so I I find out about Fatima. And now, >> okay, let's look at the implications for Catholicism, Matt. Um, oh boy. Oh, boy.
¶392What is happening here? Well, we've got the mother of God seemingly appearing to Catholic children and joining them to pray the rosary. That's one of the biggest messages. She identifies herself as our lady of the rosary >> and she's enjoining people pray the rosary. Pray the rosary every day.
¶393If you pray the rosary, the war will end etc. Like you need to pray the rosary. The rosary meditates on what? Various mysteries that only the Catholics believe in. The assumption vindicating the assumption.
¶394We have miraculous vindication of the Catholic doctrine of the assumption. Mary saying get the holy father to consecrate Russia, a principally orthodox nation to my immaculate heart. Hm. Immaculate heart. That's a reference to the immaculate conception.
¶395Hm. Only one Christian sect has dogmatized that. It's only the teaching of one Christian sect, the Catholic Church. And the Holy Father, what's up with that? What does that mean?
¶396It's the holiness of his office. And he's a spiritual father to the universal church. And Mary is requesting him to do something outside of his jurisdiction according to the Orthodox. So he's doing a religious a formal religious act, a consecratory act on behalf of things outside of his jurisdiction calling and Mary is calling him the hol holy father and getting him to consecrate Russia to his imac to her immaculate heart. So we got the immaculate conception, we got the papacy, the holy father, the holiness of his office, the fatherhood of the universal church, his universal juris universal and ordinary jurisdiction.
¶397We've got the assumption. We got the rosary being commended. all this stuff. We have the children doing all these reparatory acts of penance where they're uniting their sacrifices to Christ's passion to bring about uh to be mer meritorious causes of grace. This is utterly suffused with Catholic vindication which is why Protestants have to go in for the demonic explanation because otherwise God's a liar.
¶398God is a liar. Mary isn't the immaculate conception. The Pope isn't the Holy Father. He doesn't have jurisdiction to do that. No, you shouldn't be praying the rosary, etc.
¶399And the rosary is meditating all these false things. >> Mhm. >> So, like, oh, and of course, like Mary's obtaining conversions to Catholicism. They give they give requests to her and she's explicitly granting requests to convert people to Catholicism. So, we have the mother of God appearing to Catholic shepherd children, granting requests to convert people to Catholicism, saying basically vindicating, authenticating, confirming the immaculate conception, the rosary, the papacy, etc.
¶400God has disproven Protestantism. Now, of course, you might go in for a demonic phenomena, but of course, I think that that doesn't work for a million reasons that Ethan goes through in his debate with Shaun Luke. Um, and of I mean, you know, like just like let's step back, you know, like [laughter] a demon is introducing into the rosary, a Marian devotion, something which is like christocentric. Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell.
¶401Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. >> Yeah, >> sounds like demons to me. Sound totally sounds like demons, right? >> And of course, you know, like >> Christ is saying, I mean, you know, there's just a million reasons why I think just a demonic explanation doesn't work. And especially when you bring in all the miraculous evidence.
¶402>> Now, you had heard of Fatimar and Lurids in these different apparitions while you were an atheist or an agnostic. I guess you just didn't pay them much heed. No, I mean, in fact, I I responded to Tren Horn at one point when he brought up Fatima because I have a lot of responses to Trenhorn. I even have a response to Tren Horn playlist. [laughter] >> Come on.
¶403>> Yeah. So, >> Oh, that's great. >> Yeah. So, I go into that playlist in one of my videos. I talk about Fatima and I'm just like, well, you know, maybe they just like stared at the sun and I don't know, had some weird phenomenology effects or something which is just like >> utterly intention with all the evidence.
¶404So, I don't know. I just sort of waved it away. >> Anything at the time seemed more plausible than the mother of God. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
¶405Oh, exactly. Exactly. Um, but we can get back to like alternative explanations for the miraculous evidence later. But like now I'm starting to think like and just like given my background, given my upbringing, I'm like if I grant Fatima, >> yeah, >> Eucharistic miracles, >> Eucharistic miracles, Adam Blind, you know, like all this stuff, the exorcisms and whatnot. And if and then if I grant this, then seems like it's going to be over.
¶406So then that was bother I didn't grant it yet. >> How did you deal with hell and homosexuality? Well, maybe maybe let's get to that uh after some of the other stuff. Is are you cool with that? So then >> after Fatima that that really bothered me and I was like >> I was trying to think of oh maybe there's just some like unknown naturalistic explanation.
¶407Um >> you know I don't know I was like holding I was trying to hold off or maybe like ah maybe God's trying to do some kind of accommodation. Um but then I started coming across other cases. So, we have Lords, other canonization miracles, and >> Padre Pio. >> Um, and maybe after that we'll talk about how I dealt with some of the objections. >> Um, >> maybe we'll skip Lords if that's okay and go to Padre Pio.
¶408Okay. >> Cuz he was the off the top ropes. >> Well, that the Padre Pio one, the reason why I say that last is because that's that's where my conversion happened. >> Okay. >> So, that's what led to the conversion.
¶409So, >> do you want do you want me to go through the those two and then Padre Pio or what? >> Can we may maybe just do Padre? Okay, we'll just do P. >> We'll have you on a whole another time. >> No, no, we don't.
¶410>> So, in February of this year, no, maybe. Yeah. No, it was February this year, Ethan was writing his post on Padre Pio. >> Yeah. >> And I'd already at this point I'm like I'm Catholicism is very very live option at this point.
¶411Um I'm thinking like yeah, I don't know. Maybe Catholicism now at this point after Lords and all these canonization healing miracles and after Fatima maybe Catholicism is like 30% likely 40% likely or something like that. Um >> and maybe Christianity is like I don't know 60% or something and theism is maybe like 90% or something. I don't know or like 80%. >> Uh >> so [sighs] I just felt like maybe I was one miracle away.
¶412I don't know. I just had that kind of sense. It was just like one >> massive >> Are you talking to other Catholics? Are you emailing people? >> Oh yeah.
¶413>> Yeah. You don't have to say who they were or anything. >> No, I mean I was talking with Jimmy Aken, Swan Sona, like lots of different people working through lots of my other objections because I had biblical objections. I had all different sorts of objections. Um, so I was definitely >> They were helpful.
¶414>> Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, all these people are like partially responsible for my conversion. So it's wonderful. Wonderful. Okay.
¶415>> Um, but in February, I sit down with Ethan Muse when he's writing this like 20,000word blog post on Padre Pio and we sit down for like four I think it was 4 hours and he just walks me through the evidence for Padre Pio. [laughter] So, it's just it's just insane. So, Padre Peio in is it like 1918 or something around there? Like something somewhere around the 19 teens or something 1920s. um he has a mystical vision of Christ after mass uh and where Christ says I unite you to my passion and thereafter immediately he has Christ's passion wounds in his palms he has a laceration wound on his side and he has wounds in his feet okay so we have testimonies beforehand afterhand he didn't have it before he had it after um okay what's going on so then you know he had a kind of I kind of difficult relationship with the church.
¶416At certain points, the church was like a little bit skeptical. They sent a bunch of like um uh scientists to investigate him and whatnot. And like we have like seven different scientists who investigate his hands like up and close. And we like we literally have like the letters written like right afterwards of these people describing in meticulous detail what they saw. So they're like, "Okay, there's no edema or swelling around them." They're like basically entirely circular which of course we also have photos of this.
¶417We have videographic evidence of this. [sighs and gasps] We have you know one of them is like yeah um I palpated his hand so I felt it >> and I could feel a palpable void. There were just thin membranes and I could touch my fingers on the other side. >> We have these doctors saying that one of the doctors said that earlier on. So like they they have a kind of they change in interesting ways um throughout his life basically.
¶418Um and uh one of the earlier doctors when he looked at he said it was a complete perforation such that I can see things on the other side. Uh and then like uh the way that changed was that then a little kind of membrane formed and so that's where we have I think it's Dr. Festo who's like palpating his hand and saying yeah there's a void in there and there are various reasons why this is just like utterly naturalistically inexplicable. So like he's got stigmata he's supernaturally reduplicating the wounds of Christ. Like what am I supposed to do?
¶419Like of course Christianity is true. Like it's just like manifestly evident when I look at his case. He's a living icon of Christ. How can you not be Christian at least if you see this? So like he's taking me through all this evidence.
¶420Ethan is he's reading to he's just reading to me the the reports of the scientists and I'm like oh gosh. [laughter] And then you know he's got all this like miraculous blood loss and like literally like dozens of people like are taking his temperature in sequence with like multiple different thermometers spontaneously and whatnot. They'll they'll take it with like a mercury thermometer. It'll shatter. Then they'll get out a professional bath thermometer and then it'll go up to like 125°.
¶421naturalistically inexplicable. You couldn't possibly have that. And we have like the doctors like we we still have, you know, you saw the picture when Ethan was here. We like have doctors signed reports like, "Yep, I took his temperature. It was like 120 or 125 various other naturalistic things." Like again, is this something you can be easily mistaken about?
¶422Like you put a you put a thermometer here and you read a number. Oh, and this just like happened. So maybe they just all systematically misread it. Or maybe all of the thermometers even in sequence are just systematically in error like dozens of times in like dozens of different contexts. It's ridiculous.
¶423And like he has so much blood loss it'd be naturalistically impossible for him not to get hyper uh not to get anemia. Um >> it's just oh my gosh. And then the aroma of sanctity. So people are just like smelling this beautiful fragrant scent associated with his blood and his relics and whatnot. And it persists for literally months, sometimes years on end.
¶424Sometimes it just like washes entire rooms. It just floods them instantly with this beautiful scent. It's just insane. Which is something I forgot to mention with the stigmatist with um Adam Blie also had the odor of sanctity and neither she nor Padre Peio could smell it. >> So that's interesting.
¶425Um but yeah, Adam Bl would say like yeah, we'd come into the house and then like it would even though there were no flowers anywhere or any sensors like it just it would smell like a a floral shop. like it would just inundate us like a send of flowers. Um, so just all these mystical cars charisms that Ethan is just going through and he's giving me all the evidence and the testimony on that 4-hour interview and there I was like I submit like I I I can't I can't fathom looking risking looking at Jesus after I die >> and saying, "Yeah, I know that Padre Pia was a living icon of you supernaturally reduplicated your passion wounds. I know that happened, but I I didn't believe. Where are you when you're given up as it were?
¶426Like he's reading you these things. Is it >> I'm in my room. I'm in my apartment. I'm on uh Yeah. No, this is like a Zoom meeting.
¶427So I'm like zooming with him and you you can look at me in the the thing and I'm just at some points I'm just like >> I literally just like throw up my hands. I'm like what am I supposed to do with this? As Ethan is just like ringing out the explanation like the testimonies one after another after another after another to like a lot of these things where it's just naturalistically >> and he's giving his like cute Ethan chuckle. [laughter] >> This is ridiculous, you know? He's like and he's like he's after he described all the other phenomena he's like oh and like think about what you'd have to say as the fraud hypothesis.
¶428So like somehow he's like using carbolic acid and it never gets infected and there's no swelling on it at any point which is all the doctors agree to and he's like crucifying himself as well. And then he's like in addition to all of that he just happened to go out of his way to try to fake hypothermia for dozens of times on dozens of different occasions. It's like [laughter] he's like he he's already convinced people right? What's he doing? And like especially with this risk it's just like insane.
¶429So, um, yeah, it was that kind of >> it was just insane. Like I couldn't not be a Christian at that point. So, what's really funny is that I was convinced of Christianity before Catholicism. Uh, so at the end of that conversation around like we had 30 minutes left or something like that. Um, I was just convinced of Christianity.
¶430I was like, listen, I can't do it. I can't imagine even risking saying to Jesus after I die, I didn't believe even though there was a living icon of you. Um, >> not going to risk that. Um, so I was basically like, "Okay, listen. I got to be Christian." I told Ethan Muse that like on that on that interview, that that 4-hour thing.
¶431I was like, "I got to be Christian. What do I do now?" [laughter] And so Ethan and I just talked through like Joe, like what what would you have to say as a Protestant to all this stuff. So like God is going out of his way to manifestly vindicate distinctively Catholic doctrines where it's like you look at the Protestant miracles and it's like healings or a felt sense of presence. It's not like manif manifestly vindicating particular Catholic doctrines. The immaculate conception like lures.
¶432She said, "Mary, I am the immaculate conception." >> And then God just concentrates the most insane medically documented healing miracles like the most insane unprecedented string of miracles associated with that apparition specifically. And they're all different sorts of like crazy phenomena with Bernardet Subaru there as well. So like, okay, we've got the mother of God appearing to people. We've got like Catholic priests praying over bread and it's turning into suffering myioardial tissue. And we've got like Padre Peio being united to Christ's passion in a kind of vicarious participatory redemptive suffering that a lot of the Protestants don't believe in.
¶433We've got like >> At any point during this examination, did you think to yourself, well, maybe there's other miracles of note from other religions that might cancel these ones out somehow? >> Yeah. I mean, I was thinking like maybe there were. I hadn't heard of any and Ethan had like looked into a lot of them and I I also like I mean like a lot of them are also just just totally naturalistically explicable like people will talk about like the Hindu milk miracle where it's like capillary action or you know various other things like that. Um and I we can get into potentially alternative explanations to the miraculous data later but at this point I was like I got to be Christian but what am I supposed to do?
¶434And I don't know, it almost it really just did seem like God was going out of his way to manifestly vindicate distinctively Catholic doctrines where like the intention behind the miracles was to promulgate a specific message with specific content. Like I don't know in Eucharistic miracles, it's simulating the exact onlogical change that only Catholics believe in >> transubstantiation and it seems to be only happening in a Catholic context as well. Like where are your Orthodox Eucharistic miracles? You don't have them or at the very least we don't hear of them. And what you know what is or like Protestant things like we don't have those either.
¶435So Mary's appearing to people she's granting requests like saintly intercession like if you're a Protestant you don't believe in saintly intercession again like God has refuted you. He's gone out of his way time and time again to grant miracle upon miracle as a result of saintly intercession. That was the miracle of Kanda seeking saintly intercession. That was all the uh like Lord's healings. It's all the like lots of these different Fatma healings.
¶436It's the miracle um like the Zetune healings etc. It's the canonization healing miracles. Like God is literally just manifestly vindicating this practice, >> saintly intercession, >> which according to at least some Protestants is either idolatrous or worship or in some other way illicit. God has told you that you're wrong. So conform your intellect to that.
¶437[laughter] So I don't know. I just think when I look at the miraculous evidence and I look at the broader pattern when I look at the particular miracles and it seemed like God would had have to be basically performing deceptive miracles if Mary really isn't immaculately conceived. Well then like what's the deal? She's saying I am the immaculate conception. >> So is God basically facilitating deception?
¶438That would be very bad for various reasons if you think that God is a deceiver. Um >> okay. So then what did you do? >> Oh well so Ethan I don't know. I was just toying around with can I be like orthodox or something?
¶439Can I get some kind of accommodationist model? >> And why did you want to be Orthodox? >> Cuz I didn't want to be Catholic. [laughter] >> But I mean, Orthodoxy condemns homosexual acts and teaches the existence of hell, despite people might say. >> Yeah, I was about to say, um, it depends.
¶440You could go in for a more liberal version of orthod orthodoxy where like you have universal salvation and, um, maybe you're a little bit slippier with some of the moral teachings and whatnot. I don't know. Um, >> also, was the pope a stumbling block? >> No, not at all. And I mean again like I think Fatima kind of serves as a sort of indication of that.
¶441Um so I don't know >> I I was listen I was toying around with this for like 30 minutes cuz I had thought of this stuff previously but I was like okay now that this is real I I have to become Christian. >> Um we spent like the last maybe hour or 30 minutes of that interview just like talking through >> you say interview. Is this >> No, not interview. Sorry. Like it's just like a conversation with with Ethan Muse.
¶442Yeah. >> 30 minutes. >> Yeah. Yeah, the last 30 minutes to an hour just going over like my last remnants of trying to hold on to non-atholic explanations. Like I was already aware of lots of difficulties for various accommodationist models, for various demonic models.
¶443Um, >> and uh Ethan was just like reallyounding me on like yeah, Matthew 16 and like uh church history and like the early monoiscopacy and various reasons why like Protestantism probably is not it. uh and like all the the the the Catholic vindicatory implications and like it would almost seem like betrayal if like the thing that's convincing me of Christianity is like distinctively Catholic miracles to then not become Catholic. >> Um so then I don't know it was the last remnants, the last fight, the last battle, the last like 30 to 60 minutes of that conversation. So after the conversation I was like okay I've got to be Christian. I'm leaning towards Catholicism.
¶444And then the next day I was like I was sort of basically snapped into my senses and I was like, "Okay, there aren't plausible alternative explanations of the data. I've got to become Catholic." So then uh looked up when the next confession time was and made a decade long confession on Saturday, I think February 7th. So on Friday, the night before, I did like a two or three hour examination of conscience and just made this huge document. And >> did you let the priest know that this was going to be long? Oh.
¶445Um, >> did you show up? >> No, I I showed up and yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I should have like scheduled one, but um, no, I showed up and it was going to be long and it was long and it was very difficult, but I don't know. It taught me a lot about myself, you know. I there was a lot under the hood.
¶446I was a lot worse than I thought I was and >> wow. >> Um, >> yeah, >> but and it was difficult. You know, basically peeling back a decade of your life and just >> Okay, just practically speaking, although this is clearly the least important thing about what you're saying, did you just go in and say, "Hey, just I haven't been here in 10 years. This is going to be long." I said, "Yeah, I this is a like a I said I my last confession was a decade ago or something like that." That's what I said. And >> was he welcoming?
¶447>> Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was welcoming. >> Um and he just >> he's like just listened in. >> Wow.
¶448>> Um >> how long did it take? >> I don't remember exactly. It's probably like maybe 45 minutes or something. >> Yeah. >> People loved you in line.
¶449[laughter] >> I'm so sorry to people who >> No, they can go and confess if they judged you. >> Yeah. No. And then no, you know what that let me I was like whenever I'm in confession lines now I'm going to be like h praise God that it was a long confession because it means like someone was returning to God you know. >> Yeah.
¶450Yeah. >> So gee whiz. What was the phenomenological experience of having your sins forgiven and walking out and going about your day like? >> I mean I don't know. It was it's just a new beginning.
¶451It was beautiful. It was peaceful you know. Yeah, >> there's like a a sense of kind of comfort and peace um knowing that I'm a child of God and that God loves me and that he's forgiven me of all my my decade of debauchery and >> decadence and depravity. >> How wonderful and merciful is God that it's that simple. >> It is that simple.
¶452>> Just that's it. Just >> go in there, come out, done. In a way, I would imagine it might have been easier to kind of become a Protestant or an Orthodox just to go through some big ritual >> to make it feel appropriate to what you're going through internally. Do you know what I mean? >> And not that it wasn't a big deal confessing 10 years of sin.
¶453But >> yeah, you got to do back in union with the church. >> Yeah. And then back into the sacramental life of the church. >> Yeah. >> Did you just start going to holy mass or >> Yeah, started going to mass.
¶454Started, you know, I mean, it was right before Lent, which was great. Um and uh I definitely made that like a special end, you know. Um and yeah, just started then praying the rosary every day. And I mean even before then when I was like, you know, inching closer and closer, I started maybe praying like a decade of the rosary a day on Ethan's advice, which is like something that I would advise like all everyone who's listening to this, like dude, a decade takes two to three minutes. The stakes are massive.
¶455Pray a decade of the rosary every day. Just like do it every single day. 2 to 3 minutes >> and grace will flood your life and do it like honestly with sincerity. You can even meditate on a mystery or something like that. Um but even if you don't believe if you're Protestant right now, please like pause this >> and commit to praying a decade of the rosary every single day.
¶456>> Well, I think they've got to overcome prayers to the saints before they do that, >> right? But that's why we went through all the evidence that prayers to the saints is efficacious and God has basically put a stamp of approval on it. Although I would say fair enough. Although I would say that just praying the first half of the Hail Mary, the angelic psalter, that's how the rosary used to be, right? The half the first.
¶457So like you could start with that. >> Yeah. >> I always like to stoop to conquer. >> Yeah. >> To to mention those words that the angel said to Mary which turned hell up.
¶458>> I mean, you know, yeah. I mean, you know, a protestant can also do is um listen, if you have objections to saintly intercession. I mean, again, like I think that God is sort of Yeah, you shouldn't, but um the second thing is just that um listen, God knows your heart. He knows your intentions, right? So, just pray beforehand.
¶459>> Mhm. >> God, if this is against your will, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. And then pray it. God knows that you're just trying to seek him, right?
¶460>> That was Dr. Han. He did that. Scott, >> really? Yeah.
¶461>> Yeah. And then afterwards you can be like, "God, if that was idol, if that was idolatry or if that was against your will, I apologize and you know my heart and you know I love you." >> So just just say that and it'll be fine. So that's what I would recommend. >> Yeah. Very good.
¶462>> I mean there we could talk about getting over my barriers. We could talk about hell. We could talk about the problem of evil. >> Let's talk about hell. Let me throw an objection at you.
¶463>> It seems unreasonable to think that someone should suffer for all you know eternally for a finite number of sins. Why would a loving God exclude someone from his presence as it were for all eternity for 5 years? Sure. Okay, I can be down with that. Someone might say, but this just seems unreasonable.
¶464It seems like it was a belief born out of a more brutal time, especially when you read the likes of Dante and others that we've kind of we've actually progressed in. We we realize now that uh that God's love is greater than our sin. And if God's to be victorious, then surely it's not going to be the case that most people are going to be or even many people are going to be damned. And then have you read uh I don't believe in any of the things I'm saying just to everyone who's watching. Uh have you read uh who's the uh orthodox philosopher >> David Bentley Hart.
¶465>> Yeah. Brilliant fellow but who clearly is a staunch opponent of eternal conscious torment. What would your kind of response to what I said be? And then maybe if you can flesh out maybe a more sophisticated argument that David Bentley Hart has put forth and why you disagree. >> Yeah.
¶466So I mean I haven't looked into David Bentley's David Bentley Hart's stuff in too much detail. Um, I've looked into some of like the um like more mainstream like philosophy of religion, academic literature on this. Um, but yeah, so I mean hell was one of my biggest barriers, one of my biggest objections along with various other moral problems, you know, with homosexuality and things like that. Um, so yeah, how did I work through this? Well, two things to say at the outset.
¶467one is that even if I don't have a response to the problem of hell, um >> there's just so much evidence that just utterly inundated me for Catholicism >> that basically I just felt like it was irrational for me to cling to those objections. Especially when I mean like again, imagine that you're sitting there with our Lord before he's crucified at the last supper. You've seen all of his miracles. He's raised people from the dead. You've seen them with your own eyes.
¶468He's raised people from the dead. He's given sight to the blind. And then you watch him get crucified in bloody fashion. Maybe you even watch him get interurred in the tomb. And then you're sitting there in the upper room with the apostles and he's there in bodily form.
¶469And he invites you to touch him. And you reach out and you literally poke his side. You're feeling his side >> and he's breathing on you. He's like literally breathing. It's a very bodily thing.
¶470And then he's with you for 40 days and he's eating fish and he's going out there and he's like, "Simon, do you love me?" And like you're hearing all this. there and you you've seen all of this. Imagine that happened. >> Okay? >> And imagine, as is the case, that Christ teaches that there is everlasting punishment in hell for people who are unrepentant mortal sinners.
¶471I think if you saw all of that, it would be ridiculous to think, "No, I'm not going to go with this Christ guy because I've got some like highulutin abstract theoretical objection that I can't quite work through with hell. even though I've seen this guy raise people from the dead, give sight to the blind, I've now just like indirected with him after I saw him interred in the tomb. Like, okay, maybe maybe there's some sort of story that I'm unaware of that, but I've just got to be docel to this guy because he has been manifestally vindicated by God and that just overcomes my abstract theoretical objection. Like again, I mean, the sort of evidence that we have for these Catholic miracles, like we are like one person removed from palpating a reduplication of Christ's passion wounds. We have direct eyewitness testimony from like a bunch of people.
¶472We have photographs. We have videos of Padre Pio. We also have a photograph the day that he died and he didn't have scars despite the fact that it was like deep wounds for 50 years naturalistically inexplicable. We have photos. So I had to accommodate myself to the facts.
¶473>> Mhm. >> I had to accommodate myself to the facts. And so basically the evidence I thought was very similar in kind uh and very forceful, very similar in kind to the sort of evidence I would have if I saw Christ basically with my own eyes. Uh and then Christ taught hell. And in that case, I should not be clinging to my own um objections.
¶474I just should think, okay, there's some way to respond to this. Maybe I don't know how. Maybe it's difficult. But listen, philosophy is difficult. You put a 100 philosophers in a room and you're going to get 307 answers to a philosophical question or puzzle cuz and you know, they're applying methods with applying their uh taking their intuitions and trying to get to verdicts, but they just radically go astray all the time.
¶475So like humans were not the greatest at these abstract speculative theoretical philosophizing. And so it wouldn't be surprising at all if I just am making some mistake in my assessment of the hell arguments because those were just like it's theoretical speculative philosophy and I don't know maybe there's something I'm missing and still I wanted to dent its evidential force in my mind and there were various things that did that but fundamentally >> how I got over it was I am a finite limited fallible creature. Um, God has manifestly vindicated his church and maybe I don't know exactly how to respond to it, but I submit my intellect and will to what is being manifestly promag promuggated to me as truth with divine stamp of approval. >> So that's like the fundamental response that I have. Now again, how did I accommodate um hell to my worldview?
¶476How did I really just get to the point that I could do that? Yeah. >> Um, >> there were a few things. So there was this paper by Brian Cutter, the psychophysical harmony guy that I mentioned earlier. It's called hell and proportionality because this is ultimately the the the biggest kind of I think worry with hell is like how is this a proportional punishment and you you mentioned it's like we have the very various finite sins while on earth.
¶477Um how does that merit a kind of infinite punishment? Doesn't that seem disproportional? Right? So the objection would just be like hell is a disproportional punishment. God wouldn't inflict a disproportional punishment um because that's unjust and God is just therefore there's no such thing as hell.
¶478So that's like probably the steelman version of of the argument. and what what Brian Cutter points out in that paper. So I mean there are a few there are a few ways you could go. One um you could say that basically no the sins actually aren't finite in terms of their gravity. >> They are infinite in terms of their gravity because the one that they offend has infinite mer inf sorry infinite dignity infinite glory.
¶479>> Um and like just it is an intuitive common sensical thing that like >> the kind of thing that you harm uh matters a lot to the gravity. So, like, think about stepping on the the head of an ant. >> Yeah, there you go. >> Uh, listen, you shouldn't wantingly step on the heads of ants. Okay, don't do that.
¶480But that's not that's no that's nowhere near as bad as stepping on the head of a puppy. >> That's much worse. You should not step on the head of a puppy. >> You know what's much worse than stepping on the head of a puppy? Step stepping on the head of a baby or a grandma.
¶481That's much worse because of the kind of dignity or the kind of the kind of being that you're wronging. Right? And so if you if you just extrapolate this to God's case, this is a being of infinite dignity, your biggest benefactor, everything you owe to God. He is he is he is due a kind of honor that is utterly incompatible with the decisive rejection of him and the decisive turning away towards something that you know is gravely wrong and opposed to his law opposed to love of him your biggest benefactor and someone who is infinitely valuable infinitely worthy of honor and dignity and you say no to that. you valued let's say stealing a pack of gum over relationship with this infinite being and I don't know it wouldn't be given that principle that like you know the gravity of wrongs may very well scale in some way with the uh dignity of the one being offended maybe it is indeed an infinite harm maybe it is something which is infinitely grave in in uh in its matter you know if you decisively reject with full knowledge and deliberate consent >> with fully knowing that you're doing something gravely seriously wrong You stared clearheadedly at evil, something opposed to God, which evinces a hatred of God, and you chose it.
¶482You chose it. Maybe maybe I'm just wrong in my intuition that that doesn't have infinite gravity. Maybe it does have infinite gravity. It wouldn't be the first time my intuitions were wrong about things. So, that's one way you could go.
¶483>> Mhm. >> Of course, there are lots of objections to that. But, okay, you have objections to that. Then, there's this huge disjunction of other things that I could say. So this is where hell in proportionality, Brian Cutter's paper comes in.
¶484Maybe indeed over the course of the afterlife, the sufferings of hell are only in aggregate finite. How could that be? Well, maybe the intensity of the suffering decreases by a geometric proportion at certain periods. So that maybe you have like I don't know how to I don't know how to calculate, but maybe you have a you know let's say a thousand units of suffering for the first hundred years. >> Then you have 500 units of suffering.
¶485Then you have 250 units of suffering for the next portion. then you have a, you know, 125 and you just decrease it by half over time. If you add that up, you it's provable mathematical fact that that only adds to 2,000 units of suffering. So notice it is everlasting suffering. It is everlasting because you've sort of decisively rejected God.
¶486You've stared clear-headedly at evil and you've chosen that. You've conformed your will to evil. So God will respect your freedom to do that. Um, but if we adopt this model where the suffering geometrically decreases, then this total suffering is finite. And so if you think that the crimes are only finite in gravity, the punishment is only finite in gravity as well.
¶487So you can get around that. Or you could think that maybe uh I don't know what the church says about the following. So I fully submit my intellect and will to the magisterium. If what I say is against the magisterium, then take a lighter and burn it. Put it on a hard drive, burn it, and I'll be the first there to celebrate the burning.
¶488Okay. So maybe um hell is like a timeless state. Maybe it's not temporally endless. So it is endless. It is kind of like in some sense uh it doesn't end.
¶489But if it's timeless and you only have a finite amount of suffering, then uh it's never ending and it is suffering but it's only finite. So it's a finite punishment for what the objector thinks is a finite crime. And there are lots of other models you can go through you know um Jacqu meain or whatever it is. He's this I think 20th century toist. proposed this model called like the revery model or something like that where um basically God mitigates the suffering of the damned um over uh the course of time to the point that um after they've been meed out just punishment uh and maybe even this is totally unmmerited um God basically decreases their suffering decreases their suffering to the point that at some point they only experience the pain of loss of the beatotific vision but nevertheless in terms of their senses and their natural happiness they reach a state of natural beatitude So that's an example of like what Jack Maritain has proposed and I think Cardinal Avery Doulles has a post on first things about like the population of hell where he says as far as I can tell this is consistent with what's in the magisterium.
¶490I've talked with father James Dominic Rooney who has a really good book on hell with uh Routlledge. Um he talks about that model and he says as far as I recall that that's totally consistent with magisterial teaching. Um I'm not saying that this is true. My point is that here's a disjunction of things like you could say this or you could say this or you could say this or you could say this or you could say this. How confident can I be that all of these different proposals are false?
¶491Not very confident especially given that this is a speculative abstract theoretical domain where I've made lots of mistakes in the past where philosophers applying their their philosophical methods to the same stock of intuition to reach radically divergent conclusions. So we already know that we're kind of unreliable at this sort of reasoning. It's just different in quality the evidence here compared to >> no leg leg. >> Okay. No, no leg le like I just have to conform myself to the facts in that case.
¶492So, I don't know. There are there are there are I guess non-silly models, non-silly ways that you could see the um a decisive clear-headed rejection of God and embrace of evil um being infinite in gravity. there are ways where even if you think it's finite in gravity, there are models on which hell could only be uh finite in terms of the suffering that's um inflicted on the damned. So I don't know, I just I was able to just sufficiently mitigate the force of the problem of hell in my mind that I could I could see myself accepting it. And again, I just returned to this point about Christ.
¶493I'm not going to be clinging to my own kind of uh yeah my own kind of philosophizing with like this sounds like clinging to human wis wisdom as Paul says rather than like a a manifestation of divine power, you know, like [laughter] um I'm just clinging to my own understanding of things where God has kind of just shown his hand and I trust you God. I'm just going to become childlike in your presence and I know that whatever you do, God is going to be just and it's going to be merciful. And you know, I wouldn't be surprised if God surprises us with his his mercy, how merciful he is to creatures. So like I think Padre Peio even claimed it as I could correct me if I'm wrong if people know, but I think he claimed it as a private revelation that there's anti-mortem opportunity. So at the moment of death let's say between the bridge and the water at the moment of death there can be divergences between how long things seem to you in psychological time and how long in objective temporal reality the duration is such that in that moment God can give you the grace of let's say perfect contrition uh a a sorrow for your sins out of love of him above all else.
¶494And if God can give people the resistable grace, I'm not saying this is like an irresistible grace that God's given people. He's not determining people. But if he he may very well be able to, and I think Padre Peio claim this as a private revelation, that he gives people an anti-mortem opportunity at the moment of death, one last chance. Do you embrace the evil that you've been embracing so far? Or do you embrace me, the ultimate love of your life?
¶495Now, perhaps some people still stare clear-headedly at that and reject it. I mean, as Christ said with respect to the Pharisees, they saw his works. It was manifest to them >> and out of the evilness of their hearts, >> they rejected Christ. >> I think the same thing too of the Israelites who were guided with the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire because we often say, well, if it was more evident to me than I'd believe and yet we have an example of the Israelites where God's existence was very evident and yet their hardness of heart, they rejected him and they made a golden calf and worshiped it. >> Yeah.
¶496And I mean, that's what sin is. It's worshiping the creature over the creator. You're choosing a pack of gum that you stole over relationship with God. You're choosing the >> finite pleasure of like masturbation over union with the infinite God of the universe. >> I mean, what do you expect?
¶497So, anyway, yeah, that's helpful. What about gay stuff and [laughter] LGBT stuff? What has been your opinion of the Catholic Church's teaching on these things? I presume you've looked into them in greater detail >> because I think I mean I'm sure you're were too smart and wise to realize that the church didn't have the character she's often attributed as having namely we hate gay people. Yeah.
¶498>> When you read what the church teaches, it's really beautiful about our love for [snorts] those with samesex attraction. The idea that we're all in this together. We all struggle with disordered sexual desires that we have to reign in in >> and just improperly ordered desires in other cases as well. Um I mean you know when you when we say disordered right I mean Catholics are talking about it's not properly oriented toward the good right so it's uh you know all of our actions they have a kind of direction or orientation are we orienting ourselves toward the good or and even our desires have a kind of orientation. Are we desiring an object which is genuinely valuable or genuinely good or is it disvaluable or bad?
¶499So that we're not, you know, we're not trying to like or at least I'm not trying to medicalize things at this point when we're this is a moral category. This is a moral category whether you're directing something to the good or whether you're directing it away from the good. >> So yeah, I mean at the outset whenever I talk about this, >> I just want to emphasize that I would I would die. I would take a bullet for anyone in the LGBT community. I would take a bullet for them.
¶500And I'm not lying. I'm not lying. That's how much I want to love them. That's how much I do love them. >> All right.
¶501>> So that's I want to start with that so that people know that like and this is just like this issue matters a lot to me, right? And I' I've thought a lot about this. So and I struggle with it. I I I struggled a long time with it. [sighs] >> So how did I get over these hurdles?
¶502Well, one thing again, return to the I mean, it is a it is a good point like return to the the point about Christ. If you're sitting there with Christ, you see his miracles. You see him miraculously duplicate all the loaves and the fishes and whatnot. You're like, you see him heal people. He's like, get up and walk.
¶503You know, he's like, so that you know that the son of man has authority to forgive sins. Get up and walk. And the person gets up and walks. You see all that. You see him crucified.
¶504You're there next to the blessed mother and John at the foot of the cross. You see him. And then later on you're interacting with him in his glorified body. You see all that and it, you know, it just so happens that he has some moral teachings that great against your moral intuitions. >> It's ridicul I I think it's ridiculous if you're in that epistemic situation.
¶505It's ridiculous to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ. He's been manifestally vindicated by God. He's been accredited to you as a divine legate. So submit your intellect to him, right? Um don't cling to your own understanding.
¶506Submit your intellect to him. And that's actually the rational thing to do in those circumstances. I think it is positively irrational if you see all of that to then be like, "Oh, yeah, but he had some teachings on morality that I just I sort of disagree with." >> Go against what popular culture say. >> Yeah. Go against what popular culture says.
¶507And again, like >> it's not like at least to me, it's not like he's saying that um you know, like good is evil or you know, like it is per you are morally obliged to recreationally torture children for fun or like 1 plus 1 equals 12. >> Like okay, that that that's discrediting. But when it's these other things where like I don't know the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of time has thought these things are morally impermissible and uh I don't know like the arguments here are in a kind of speculative abstract domain and where it's really easy to see how our intuitions could be cognitively penetrated that is be affected by our prior beliefs and prior desires. So basically cognitive penetration is when you can either gain an intuition or lose an intuition um including in the moral domain um as a result of your prior beliefs or worldview or desires. Yes.
¶508So >> and moral intuitions are just overwhelmingly susceptible to cognitive penetration. I mean I've just been able to like throughout this process my moral intuitions have themselves just literally changed. Like the way things seem to me changed. They're so malleable, right? Yeah.
¶509They're so malleable. Like previously I have certain moral intuitions for or against something but then just as a result of changes in my background beliefs like I just no longer feel that like the intuitions like the way things seem to me it's like intuitions are highly cognitively penetrated. They're super prone to framing effects. There's significant interpersonal disagreement with respect to moral intuitions. It's really easy to talk yourself into an intuition or talk yourself out of an intuition.
¶510Um so like I don't know this just does not seem to be the sort of evidence that stacks up against leg you know like that sort of thing. Um, so and given that uh they're so susceptible to cognitive penetration, I don't know, that's like a non-truth tracking factor that could easily be explaining why I'm going ary with respect to the moral domain. And I mean, this is another thing. Catholicism seems to have an in like a plausible by Catholicism's own lights internal explanation for why I would have those intuitions and would go astray. Why would have intuitions about the permissibility of homosexuality?
¶511So this is called like a debunking explanation of intuition. Basically like if you adopt a theory which goes against certain intuitions, it's good to have a kind of explanation by the lights of your own theory why people would go wrong with respect to their intuitions and that actually mitigates the evidential force of those intuitions because then it's not surprising under the theory that you would go you would go astray with respect to those intuitions and I just think that Catholicism has plausible internal explanations plausible debunking explanations of these contrary intuitions about hell and about homosexuality and whatnot namely the knowetic effects of sin both original sin and personal sin. So it's just like I think it's unsurp we have darkened intellects. They're not totally destroyed, right? We still have a natural aptitude to discover things and to know things, but our minds are indeed broken.
¶512Our intuitions are indeed broken. And it's utterly unsurprising under Catholicism that some of our minds would be darkened in precisely these ways where it comes to like sexual sin and it comes to like my ultimate fate and other people's ultimate fate where it's kind of like not something I want to happen or I have to kind of stop engaging in certain behaviors that I find pleasurable. It's like it's not very it's not very surprising that the noetic effects of sin might kind of um manifest in these sorts of ways. So I started seeing that Catholicism has an intern and again this isn't even like you don't have to be a Catholic to recognize that this is a dialectically forceful point. Catholicism by its own lights, without having to add any additional posits that are ad hoc, already has an internally coherent debunking explanation for why you'd have contrary intuitions to it, for why some of us would go pretty pretty seriously astray with respect to some of our intuitions.
¶513>> Totally. >> So, and I just didn't So, Catholicism, it was just basically a and this also just goes to like the divine hiddenenness model. So let's talk about this divine hiddenness model because I was just my evidential situation was being called out by Catholicism. So like um this you know go Ethan Muse kind of introduced me to this but basically the divine hiddenness model is a model for how kind of God generally interacts with the world. >> So it's about God's like general modus operandi with respect to um both general revelation and special revelation.
¶514And the the thought is that he epistemically fine-tunes the evidence so that there's enough objective evidence out there >> to make the ascent of faith rational and perhaps even rationally obliged, >> but also enough kind of darkness, enough sort of counter evidence, enough kind of peripheral anomalies sprinkled in, enough counter like intuition sprinkled in to preserve the psychological possibility of doubt. And there are lots of I mean for starters this just like explains a lot of the miraculous evidence. It explained my um so sorry let me take a step back. There are lots of reasons why God might adopt this model. It preserves the freedom of the ascent of faith.
¶515If there are psychological and sometimes rational considerations pushing against Catholicism, but the objective evidence is also very strong in favor of Catholicism. When you're in that sort of situation, you can kind of like almost freely >> embrace the truth of Catholicism or reject it. Um, but also if there's a little bit of obscurity like that where there really is a psychological possibility of doubt that enables various goods. So like making a difference in the lives and salvation of others. >> Yeah.
¶516>> Evangelism, right? Think about like how beautiful my story is with Ethan Muse and Jimmy Aken and Swansona >> coming to me and just basically >> in a kind of secondary derivative participatory sense saving me, right? >> Mhm. So like think about how beautiful that is and that can actually in fact improve our relationships for all of eternity, right? So that could reap an infinite benefit throughout all of eternity.
¶517So when I thought about that hiddenness model, it was almost calling out my evidential situation. I was like I had I was I had so much evidence for Catholicism, but then I had these like rational and psychological barriers pushing me the other way. Like ah but what about these intuitions? so hard to give them up about homosexuality and hell and things like that. And you know, I had these like psychological barriers, you know, like I had built up this whole public persona of being the skeptic and like criticizing Catholicism and Christianity and theism and whatnot.
¶518Um, and that was pulling me away, but then I just like God was manifestally vindicating his church. And so then there was this tug of war. Um, and so Catholicism in that model in particular was just calling me out. who was calling out my evidential situation. It made perfect sense of my evidence and it also made perfect sense of lots of these miracle cases where there like as we said earlier with the Eucharist miracles, there are peripheral anomalies where you can cling to them if you want.
¶519>> How many debates have you done with Christians? Public debates or >> not not many public debates >> cuz I mean have you gone back and watched your debate with Father Gregory Pine to come full circle? >> That'll be fascinating. >> Yeah. Um we got to get you on the uh on his podcast to discuss that.
¶520Yeah. >> Yeah. That'd be awesome. That would be amazing. I'd love that.
¶521>> We have to begin wrapping up here. >> Okay. >> So, how do we do that? I mean, this is beautiful. Thank you, first of all, for sharing your lovely story and glory to Jesus Christ for your conversion and the good work that he's going to do through you despite your best efforts to thwart it.
¶522That's a joke, but almost not. Um, okay. Let's maybe we could wrap up with the uh >> the hiddenenness of God. I just want to start there. We you you can close how you want to as well.
¶523But the hiddenness of God thing, right? Because we see people that we really respect and admire and look up to, a friend of yours, Alex Okconor for example, >> and he would make the claim like, okay, I want to believe. Like I'm not lying to you when I say I want to believe, and yet I don't see the evidence sufficient to make that claim. What do you say? What have you said to him?
¶524What might you say to him? >> Yeah. Yeah. So I mean >> or someone like him if we don't want to call him out specifically. >> Well I mean one thing to say is that I don't think that this is a problem that's like probabilistically independent of the problem of evil.
¶525Once you conditionalize once you put in your background knowledge that God has allowed the Holocaust for instance then it then it just becomes much less surprising that he would allow other bad things for instance like people to be in a state of non-belief say. So like I just want to say that this is not like an additional piece of independent evidence from the problem of evil. And once you recognize that you start to see that actually a lot of the objections to theism >> it's a sub argument. >> Yeah. A lot of the objections to theism are probabilistically dependent in ways that really significantly temper their evidential force.
¶526Okay? >> Because like once you take into account evil for instance, once you put that in your background knowledge and even like one instance of horrific evil, then it becomes much less surprising that there would be other bad things because it's just much more likely once you have that in your background knowledge and you conditionalize on theism and you take theism as well cuz like we have to evaluate competing hypotheses. So we examine how likely the evidence is conditional on theism with our background knowledge and then we examine how likely the evidence is conditional on atheism in our background knowledge and then we see how well they they predict data and then we gain evidential points if one of them predicts it better than the other. But like again once we take into account evil then there's already going to once we conditionalize on theism and evil there's going to be half there's going to have to be some sort of story that God has for allowing bad things to occur >> right in which case that's very plausibly going to transfer over to the problem of divine hiddenness. And so then it significantly dense the force of divine hiddenness.
¶527So again like even if I don't have a particularly strong thing to say in response to this like there's just significant counterveilling considerations that we've gone through lots of things that we haven't even gone through which are very powerful um all the arguments for theism etc. and then the probabistic dependence of these arguments. So that's one thing. I guess we also didn't um well I'll make a few points. One is that um again I think if there are some people who are in a state of non-belief concerning the existence of God that enables lots of very profound goods like sincere seeking after God >> like helping like us having a kind of high stakes responsibility for helping each other come to knowledge of God and knowledge of the truth, right?
¶528in order for you for us to be able to make a difference to one another to like actually be able to help each other unto salvation there have to be some people who are kind of in that state of obscurity or something like that right so that's another thing that you could say a still third thing you could say some people try to appeal to various models on which actually um people who don't yet believe in God can be in some kind of implicit relationship with God that maybe they're not aware of and that maybe can kind of come to fruition um at uh let's say the moment of death or something like that um >> and maybe that can enable lots of profound goods um for various reasons like I don't know there's something there's something beautiful about the fact that like you know when I was an atheist and an agnostic I still had this like adoration almost of like truth and like reason and whatnot that's why I called my channel the majesty of reason >> I was swimming in the logos without knowing it you know um and I in my book in my majesty of reason book that I wrote when I was like 19 or something I I had in there like >> I I included a line where I was like we should love dare I say adore or the truth or something like that. Uh and that's when I was either an atheist or an agnostic or something like that. So, I don't know. I was sort of swimming uh in the depths of God kind of without knowing it. Um and you know, now I've kind of looked back and I see, oh God, it was you all along, right?
¶529It was you all along who I loved and I adored. Um and maybe, you know, even still then I was probably in a state of like mortal sin. So maybe I didn't have a kind of supernatural love of God. Um but even even a kind of like natural love and kind of cooperating with pervenient graces I think can be um incredibly valuable and can form some kind of implicit relationship with God. >> So you know this argument from Dine Henness assumes that people like can't be in a relationship with God or a valuable relationship with God if uh they don't believe.
¶530>> Um >> so >> that's good. >> Yeah that that's that's another thing that I would say. So I don't know there are lots of lots of responses to that. And then in terms of the problem of evil which we should briefly say because I gave a very forceful presentation of the problem of evil to which we have not. to the problem of evil [laughter] >> once and for all.
¶531>> Three basic responses. >> Okay. >> One, um it wouldn't be just terribly surprising given God given that God is infinitely wise. He so under theism, it wouldn't be terribly surprising that maybe there are just reasons that God has of which we're unaware for allowing various evils that there are. >> And notice I'm not saying that we're just we're totally in the dark about God's reasons.
¶532That's not what I'm saying. because my my various natural theological arguments for God's existence required me to make some judgments about um comparative judgments at least about divine psychology. So I'm not saying we're totally in the dark about God's existence, but we do need to have some kind of epistemic humility. And that requires us to assign a non-negligible credence or non-negligible probability to the hypothesis that maybe there are just reasons that God has for allowing various evils that I'm unaware of. And so long as that's the case, that will significantly dent the at least dent the evidential force of the problem of evil to the point that like it could it could really be overcome by like no leg.
¶533So that that's one thing to say. A second thing to say is that um well yeah I mean you could just say it actually is very very strong evidence but there's like very very very very very very very strong evidence for God's existence which just outweighs it. >> So that's the second thing that I would probably make. And then the third point that I make is just like I don't know there are so many theodysies out there in the philosophical literature which identify various goods that God may have that justify him in permitting various evils. Uh and if we take like the massive disjunction of those like either this good or this good or this the odyssey or this the odyssey.
¶534Um I think that very significantly dense the force of the problem of evil cuz then like the problem of evil to run it uh and to make evil very surprising under theism you basically have to deny systematically each and every one of those theodys. Um so like one one example of a theodysy for evolutionary animal suffering will I was going to ask that. >> Yeah. No there are a few. So I mean Tren Dhy has this book on um uh the problem of animal pain theodysy for creatures great and small where basically um >> there will be a kind of afterlife for for animals you know uh where the sufferings that they experience in this life actually are going to be uh they're going to form part of an integrated whole which is you know better on the whole as a result of the sufferings that they underwent and basically their cognitive capacities are going to be elevated to some extent in the escaton in the end times.
¶535so that they can appreciate their role in in God's providential plan. >> Why not mosquitoes? >> It depends on whether or not they're conscious, you know. So if >> be conscious >> why >> they have to be conscious. >> Oh, maybe not.
¶536>> So maybe maybe the mosquitoes too. I mean the lion will lay down with the lamb, right? Like why not those very lions and lambs that existed throughout evolutionary history say? So um >> maybe they actually do kind of uh have some kind of like narratival development in their life and maybe they actually can cultivate some kind of virtue that outweighs the sufferings that they experience in in this life as a result of things in the next life. Um, >> is this his primary argument to go against Thomas and saying that animals will be in heaven?
¶537>> Uh, well, so when you say be in heaven, like I don't I don't think we should say they experience the botific vision. >> No. >> Um, [clears throat] but like uh >> Yeah, but I don't think Aquinas says there'll be animals in heaven. >> Okay. >> Experiencing the divine uh sorry, the botific vision or otherwise, but that's not church teaching.
¶538So, >> right. Right. >> As far as as far as I can tell, um, this is totally consistent with magisterial teaching. So, that's one. >> Yeah, it is.
¶539It is consistent. But is that his primary is that Trent Doy's primary argument that >> I think that's his that's one of his m major responses to the problem of evolutionary animal suffering. I mean there's a more recent one um by uh Brian Cutter again he's one of my favorite philosophers and Philip Swenson it's called the omission theodysy it's a paper that won the Sanders prize a very very like esteemed renowned prize in philosophy um and it's published in Oxford studies in philosophy of religion I think it's actually forthcoming um and the thought basically is that um uh we already have in our background knowledge that for God has given us very high stakes moral responsibility for how well the lives of other creatures go like other animals but also So for other human beings like he's basically put us in high stakes moral circumstances where either through our omission to help or through our helping we can make a massive difference to how well the lives of others go. And why might why might God do that sort of thing? Well because if we do indeed help the person >> that can reap infinite benefits across across all of eternity because that at least enables a better relationship between me and the person that I helped for all of eternity.
¶540Like you you saved me or you saved me from the the I was drowning and you saved my life. Think about like if if that improves our relationship for all of eternity, that good can kind of aggregate and be an infinite good. >> So that can uh the the possibility the enabling that kind of infinite good can justify risking finite harms of us omitting to help other people. >> Now so we already have in our background knowledge that this is kind of God's mo. This is something that like God um may very well plausibly be interested in doing giving us high stakes moral responsibility.
¶541But then just apply that to the evolutionary process. Maybe there are various beings, non-human agents who were delegated with the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and suffering and languishing and death and whatnot and towards a more kind of kumbaya symbiosis but they freely omitted to intervene and again the reason why so maybe these are like um angels for instance and some of them said no I will not serve and I will not guide the evolutionary process uh in the direction of in a kind of benevolent direction. Uh and so again this this can be justified by the fact that if they had done >> their divinely appointed task that could enable infinite goods for all of eternity. >> And again the point with these different theories isn't that they're the correct one or you're saying that they're correct one. >> Yeah.
¶542I'm just trying to give an accommodation, right? I'm just trying to say like sure maybe this is like this isn't Oh, and this another thing like this doesn't this story doesn't need to be plausible to the atheist. The point is like conditional on theism. >> That's right. >> Conditional on theism because we're trying to predict.
¶543We're trying to see how probable is the evidence of evil conditional on theism. Right? So given theism, >> is this at least a non-negligibly likely story to be true? And I think it is non-negligibly likely. For starters, we already have significant empirical evidence for the existence of demonic phenomena for these non-human intellects.
¶544Secondly, it's good to create good creatures. And you know what's up with this ginormous gap between us and God, right? Like the intellects of us. We're these puny intellects. It wouldn't be surprising at all if God created hordes of even more intellectually capable beings than us.
¶545so that even more beings can experience the botific vision and help each other. We already know in our background knowledge that God gives people at least us this significant high stakes moral responsibility such that if we omit to take our moral obligation seriously that can have very drastic consequences in the lives of others. >> Uh and so like we already have in our background knowledge like significant testimonial testimonial evidence to demonic phenomena. This is not at all an ad hoc hypothesis. We already know from the Bible you know that like it's already said in the Bible.
¶546So this isn't some ad hoc posit that like Satan is the prince of this world. He's the prince of the powers of the air and things like that. Um we know we know that like we can see why there may very well be infinite goods enabled by this differencem responsibility over the course of uh evolutionary history by giving these angels this kind of providential governance over the rest of creation. And even like Aquinas said that yeah God gave the angels uh certain tasks in the providential ordering or governing of creation. Um we yeah I mean so I think that like conditional on theism it's not at all surprising that God might create beings like this.
¶547It's not at all surprising given the infinite goods that it enables that he would give them this differencem responsibility. >> Um, and it's yeah, it's just not at all ad hoc. We already have significant evidence for demonic phenomena. So, I just take this to be like utterly non-ad hoc and just not actually very surprising under theism. Um, and again, the evolutionary horrors that we see are finite bads, right?
¶548However bad they are, they are finite. And God basically um allowed the creatures to be able to have that high stakes moral responsibility. the the angels or whatever they he gave them this divinely appointed task to providentially govern the creatures and if they had if they had gone through with their divinely appointed role that would have been improved the relationships between them and the creatures for all of eternity. So there is an infinite payoff um and God was justified in basically risking them um using their free will and abusing their free will in that kind of way so that they freely omit to guide the evolutionary process. And notice this is not like demons are like tinkering with the tectonic plates or like setting ablaze forest fires.
¶549So this is totally compatible with our best scientific evidence. Um this is it explains why lots of the evolutionary evils seem to be kind of like randomly or half-hazardly distributed. Um so I don't know I think that this can like at least dent the force of the problem of evil um significantly. So like we and again just I'll just take the disjunction of these various different theodysies. like either animal afterlife or you know this differencem like angel abandonment theodysy or this kind of you know maybe there are reasons of which I were unaware or this and you just put all those together and I don't know it's it can significantly dent the evidential force of the problem of evil.
¶550>> So >> all right well you have a 5hour show that's up right now over on your channel. >> I don't know how yeah how long it is. >> We don't know how long it'll [laughter] be. I suspect it'll at least be 5 hours. >> I don't know.
¶551Is it What are you thinking? Uh yeah, it'll probably be at least five. >> It's terrific that you should make it the longest video. 10 hours I say just and just have Ethan Muse bringing you espresso. [laughter] Yeah.
¶552But anyway, we will put a link to that. We'll share this video with you so we can post it together and people can go check out Majesty of Reason and support your work. And then uh do you currently have a Patreon or something? >> I do have a Patreon. Yes.
¶553>> Well, that'll be interesting. It will be interesting. Let's ask people who are watching right now to consider support your work. >> I would appreciate that. You should get your tears in order.
¶554>> I should get my tears in order. Yeah. >> You know, right now so that who watch this could go over and support. >> I appreciate that cuz I Who knows? I might lose patrons who were like atheist agnostics.
¶555Just >> like when I when I interviewed Did you ever watch the interview with me and camera? >> Oh, yeah. You should have flown me out to the Vatican. No, I'm kidding. [laughter] >> I should have did the same thing.
¶556We promoted his thing right there and invited people. That's really cool, dude. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing all of this. I know you have so much more >> to say, but >> Yeah.
¶557Well, thank you for having me and you know, praise God. This is all God's grace, right? It's God working through me and Mary working through me as her instrument. Okay, how about we end with this? There's going to be mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who watch this who have a loved one who's away from the church and it doesn't seem possible that they'll come back.
¶558What's your one piece of advice to them? I mean, pray, right? Pray, fast, um, give arms in support. Um, and like basically fly to our blessed mother. I mean, pray rosary upon rosary upon rosary upon rosary upon rosary.
¶559And uh God won't neglect our prayers. >> Well, I feel like the example you laid out earlier of your parents who spoke to God about you more than they spoke to you about God. >> And this like peaceful surrender is what we're called to. We're not called to be like the disciples in the boat who freak out, wake up Jesus, say, "Don't you care that we're perishing?" That's how we often pray. And he rebukes them after he rebukes the wind and the waves for praying in that way.
¶560But instead, I think what's I know it's easier said than done. I'm aware of this, but a peaceful surrender. Lord, I give you this person. I trust that you love them and want their good more than I do. >> Um that's the ticket.
¶561>> And don't I mean, you know, sometimes we are um a little light on fasting. So like, you know, consider fasting for this. I mean, like it's a if you're in the state of grace, it's a meritorious cause of grace. So like if you give up a breakfast or you take a cold shower or you know you have an intentionally bland meal or you know you have a black fast or something like don't underestimate the power of fasting. You combine fasting and prayer daily say at least one decade of the rosary for them a day.
¶562Um God will inundate them with grace. >> I like what you said there about just giving up breakfast or something because often we kind of think well I can't do anything heroic so I won't do anything at all. >> You can do so much heroic. You could you could you could not eat for a day. You could not eat for a No, I understand that you're we're capable of acting heroically, but my point is when we're invited to do something heroic, we often shrink back.
¶563My point is what you just said, fast from breakfast. Do something. Just do anything. And even if you don't, so I understand a lot of people have like dietary restrictions or they're like professional athletes. They don't fast, but you can eat a bland meal, right?
¶564>> Yeah. You can have an intentionally bland meal. So, um instead of putting the sauce in the pasta, just have the bland pasta. >> There's something beautiful about fasting in a way that is unbragy. >> Yes.
¶565Like if you say, "I didn't have that second cup of coffee." No one will clap for you. But it's something. It's a little thing that you can do. >> Yeah. Yeah.
¶566I took my sister to a Marian apparition site while she was still an atheist and agnostic. And I fasted like a coward for her, but with great desire for her conversion and love, but I did I mean I could have been way better than I was, but I did fast from X, Y, and Z. And she came to Christ on that trip. Like she just went to confession. Like my sister who dresses in black and is just like upset at the world, she went to confession.
¶567>> Wow. Yeah. >> Praise God. Praise God. >> All right.
¶568God bless. Thanks for being on the show. >> Thanks for having me. [music] >> So, if you've made it this far, I'm willing to bet that you don't hate what you're watching. So, you should, you know, maybe consider liking and subscribing.
¶569Go on. Consider it. Consider it.