Agnostic Philosopher Joe Schmid Became Catholic...You Won't Believe Why!

¶1Honey, Take out. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

¶2N. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

¶3Heat. N. Heat up here. Nah, that song is cheesy as hell. That song is cheesy as hell.

¶4I liked it when I first made it and now I'm looking back on it. I'm like, that song is cheesy as hell, man. So cheesy and so cringe. What was wrong with me? It's so dumb.

¶5It's so It's gotta go. It's gotta go. It's It's cheesy as hell, man. Why didn't anybody tell me? You guys just let me do something.

¶6>> Why didn't anybody tell me? You guys just let me do go live. Should have already been live. What is this? Um.

¶7Uh, no. That was cheesy. It is cheese. Uh, it's bass, man. And when someone gets saved, it's a banger.

¶8I'm glad. Like, listen, someone got saved. Yeah. And it's good to have a song for when someone gets saved. But that song, it just it just it feels it feels cheesy.

¶9It feels cheesy. What? Okay. Um, you guys all watched Obsession. I see somebody keep saying Obsession is Peak.

¶10Your take is an L. I didn't say it was a bad movie. I said it was a good movie. I just said it scared me. How's that a bad take?

¶11It's a scary That means it's a good movie. What are you talking about, bro? What are you talking about? That's a If a scary movie scared me, then it achieved its goal. What are you talking about?

¶12What are you talking? That means it was a good movie. It means it did its job. Still scares me even now. Even like every once scenes pop in my head.

¶13I'm like, "Ah, bruh bruh." When late at night, I'm like looking down that dark hallway. I am like it. I don't want to go down it, bro. I don't I don't want to. All right.

¶14So, what song should we play then? What song should we play? Huh? Huh? What's this one?

¶15>> No. No. Actually, you know what? >> Testimony ain't evidence. No, sir.

¶16Not at all. I heard it from my cousin and he >> Yeah, jump. It has no jump scares, which is great. >> My grandma saw it happen and she told me what she saw. But a witness on the stand don't mean a dog thing in law.

¶17Don't trust what people tell you. won't believe a word they say unless they swear an oath on a Bible anyway. My neighbor, my professor, and my pastor all agree. But that don't count as evidence. Just take it from me.

¶18My doctor told me I was sick. I saw it with my eyes. The scientist said climate change now that I'd never buy. 10,000 people watched it happen. Every one of them will swear.

¶19But personal accounts are worthless. Ask literally anyone who's there. Now, I know what you're thinking, and I'll tell you, every single expert I've talked to agrees with me on this. Every last one of them. So, don't you trust nobody's word, especially not mine.

¶20Wait, >> I feel like that one fit is fitting um because we're going to be reacting to Joe Schmid becomes a Catholic and one of the big reasons that Joe Schmid became a Catholic is because of the miracle claims. Now, way Jose Catholic Catholicism specifically, I don't know. We're going to find out. We're going to watch his video with Matt Fred. Um, he's also got a video at the Council of Trents now and like I don't know.

¶21I don't know these guys. He's got hours of content just all of a sudden coming out. He's rising to popularity which now all the atheists of course what are they doing? Oh yeah. Oh, he wasn't popular enough as an agnostic atheist.

¶22So, uh, he one of them clicks and views so he converted and it's all dishonest and disingenuine and he's just making it all up and he's just doing it for the money. >> That's what they always do. That's what they always do. It's not like he had a successful career as a as a PhD philosopher or anything like that. Not like hanging out with like Alex Okconor on a regular basis.

¶23Um I'm just saying. I'm just saying they they'll say anything. And freaking uh Myth Vision Myth Vision just started like bombarding content on him like is it true? Is they just like they can't let people have a moment. They just can't let people have a moment.

¶24It's nonsense. What is the reason? And in all fairness, let's be honest, it's like all of a sudden a famous Christian became Muslim. We would all do the same. So, it's like, you know, pot calling uh Kettle Black here, we'd probably do the same.

¶25But yeah, no. Uh we're going to be reacting. I jacked up my finger and now my ring Look, I jacked up my finger in jiu-jitsu and now my ring doesn't fit anymore. Well, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Um anyways, yeah, smash like button, share the live, do things like that.

¶26Uh what what were you saying? Uh, why are you bringing up Jesus and whatnot? He's doing great work, by the way. Jesus, whatnot. Low-key peak.

¶27He's doing great. I think he's uh I think he's I think he's right in that uh perfect sweet spot. He's like he's like the Christian version of um of Parker and Dean, right, without the uh filler bustering. Uh he's very patient with people, which I appreciate. Really good uh really good um rhetoric with that guy.

¶28really good rhetoric. I think he's gonna be doing some good work. We'll see if he can keep it going and I hope he can. Um but yeah, man, he just kind of came out of nowhere and just rocketed rocketed, which is uh good for him. Um yeah, smash the like button, share live, do the things that you need to do.

¶29Let's do a quick prayer and let's get into this because I don't know if we're going to get through this whole video because I got an appointment today. Uh Lord, thank you for this day. Thank you for the blessings. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for this community.

¶30I ask that you just allow us to have edification as we just, you know, uh commune together in Jesus name. Amen. Name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. God is good. Born again atheist.

¶31Peak peak Christian f. All right, here we go. Uh, this is uh this is him with Matt Fry. We're going to speed it up a bit because I do want to get through this uh today. And uh like I said, we're running running on uh on what's the word I'm looking for?

¶32Short time limit. We got a short time limit here. is 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.

¶33>> This is very true, man. Uh he was debating Christians like he debated u well the father that he brought up. He also debated uh Ortland. Uh he debated Trent Horn. Um he's he's debated some big people on like Christianity ain't true and they've made some big content videos about like Christianity ain't true.

¶34So I'm curious >> what happened? What happened? Who are you and what happened? Why is gay sex permissible? Why would God send people to hell?

¶35Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is God so hidden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious confusion? The problem of evil is just so powerful to me. I'm very cautious.

¶36Like it takes a lot to convince me >> at this point. I'm like >> I don't know. I'm a little bit scared. >> Yeah. It's just coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence.

¶37Oh no. Catholicism might be true. That's not good. >> What the heck? >> Last time you were on my show, >> you were debating Father Gregory Pine on Divine Simplicity.

¶38And >> can we stop at the bookshelves? Can we stop? And I know I got a bookshelf in my background right there. That's my book. like five books, but it's just so much.

¶39It's like that's like everybody's It's like everybody's thing now is bookshelves. >> And I'm pretty sure you won, which pissed me off a little bit. >> Uh Bear was the villain in The Obsession, though. Okay, hold on. Pause.

¶40How How is he the How is he the villain? Because everybody says he was the villain. How is he the villain? Somebody explain that to me. I would I would love to know because I've seen so many so much content all saying he was the villain.

¶41How is he the villain? What what exactly did he do specifically that made him a villain? Just curious. Get a book bookshelf of DVDs. John is jealous.

¶42He only has ebooks. I literally bought like last night I spent like five bucks and I bought almost like every philosopher's complete catalog of books. Anyways, yeah. Quick pause, quick break before we get back to it. Right.

¶43I want to know. Everyone keeps saying it. I haven't seen any argument for why he's a villain for having a girl that uh he made the wish. He didn't think it was going to come true. How many How many of you guys have made a wish when you blew out birthday candles?

¶44Did you think it was going to come true? I've been live for 23 minutes. I had no idea. We It was just the intro screen. You haven't missed anything.

¶45Uh, my teens are requesting watch horror fans. I'm not. I wouldn't let teenagers watch it. He kicked me in the shin and stole my lunch money. Calling Bear as bad as Griffith is.

¶46I don't know who Griffith is. He wanted to uh he wanted her to change and he didn't. What? He didn't even want her to change. What?

¶47I mean, outside the don't do psycho behavior. I don't know who Bear is, but from the gossip, I'm now convinced he's Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Every Somebody just went with it. Somebody just said he's the villain and they ran with it and like but there is nothing he did in the whole movie that's actually villainous.

¶48Would you be villainous if you took away someone's free will and trapped the original person in that same body? He didn't do it intentionally. He didn't know that was what's going to happen. That's the villain is the people who made the freaking wish stick. He didn't know that was going to happen.

¶49How many times have you blown out a cattle and wish for something? It's one of those monkey paw wishes. It's a monkey paw wish, right? if if he got if he got his like actual wish the way it was. Yeah, that would still be weird.

¶50But you didn't even expect that to happen. He's just like a it's just a young guy. It's like, "Oh man, I wish he loved me." Like how many freaking girls in their in their uh journals like, "Oh my god, I wish he loved me." And they just like draw a heart around the name when they were younger. Like my gosh, he could have saved her by blowing his own brains out. By blowing his brains out.

¶51Imagine defending Bear. Imagine not actually bringing up an argument and then just getting mad at me for doing it. Um I don't think he was a good guy, but like he literally did nothing. Everybody claimed he's he made a wish that he never expected to come true and then he didn't blow his brains out and everybody He's the villain. He's the villain.

¶52Bro, you think it's that easy to just like, oh, I made a mistake. A bang. You guys are dumb. All right, back to the regular schedule program. >> Did I win?

¶53It didn't piss me off either. I'm just joking. If I'm defending falsehood, I think I think I lost. No, it was pretty wild. I wouldn't I don't know.

¶54It 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 know you come on as an atheist agnostic and debate father pine. He did really well and then a couple >> maybe that's what we should do for Monday.

¶55Bear wasn't the villain and prove me wrong. >> Couple months ago I get a call. He wished that the girl that he liked loved him more than anyone else in the world. That was the wish >> from our mutual friend Cameron Batuzi and he's like, "Uh, so Joe Schmid just converted to Catholicism." So you and I have intentionally not talked about it. Even over lunch, we didn't talk about it.

¶56What happened? What happened? I was just >> Who are you? >> But he was selfish. >> Ooh, he wished for something he wanted.

¶57Like nobody's ever done that. What a what a villain. And he then he didn't blow his brains out when he found out he could save her through that method. He wasn't even sure that was a thing. He just thought she was crazy for a while.

¶58He didn't figure out it was a wish thing right until the end of the movie. That's that is the thing. I see. There we go. Lord Striker's a villain.

¶59He wish he wish. If his wish comes true and I like him, I become obsession. He's now the obsessed with him. He becomes the villain. And what happened?

¶60My goodness. I 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.

¶61It's God working. So, what happened? >> 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. >> Not really spoiled.

¶62You still watch it. >> And you and by the way, as we're recording this, for those at home, you haven't announced this publicly. Oh, no. Yeah, we're still uh we're still in private right now. >> I joined the live and the first words out of John's mouth is by blowing his brains out.

¶63It's going to be a good day. You guys just like Do you guys just tune in and being like, "Uh, what's John going to say today on today's episode of What's John going to say?" >> So, I told my social media guys as we came in, he's like, "What?" Cuz he was a fan. All right, I'll stop talking. Go. >> Yeah.

¶64So, right now I'm a PhD student at Princeton University studying philosophy and ultimately it was philosophy and just reasoning about >> absolutely not funky. We want you around. >> 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.

¶65Um but yeah, do we where do we want to start? Do we want to start with the upbringing? Catholic upbringing. >> Well, I guess I would 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 talking utterly ridiculous. What are you talking about?

¶66Like I just had so many objections. I mean hell, gay like gay sex morality. I mean I was I had boatloads of objections. I was like why is gay sex impermissible? Why would God send people to hell?

¶67Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is God so hidden? Why is there so much religious diversity and religious confusion? Like, 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.

¶68You 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. >> And if I had said, "And you'll also be wearing an alley of God pie and St. Padropio's socks." You would have went, "Okay, just stop making fun of me." >> Yeah, I would.

¶69You probably Well, as I uh discovered, you know, skeptics are inclined with respect to Catholic miracles to posit hallucinations all the time and whatnot. striking hallucinations like 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 >> I'm telling you, man, listen. Here's a big reason I've been studying rhetoric a lot because people don't people don't come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

¶70Well, you know, God does what he wills and some people do it through like evidential things. And I think this is how he comes to the knowledge. But I'm telling most people who are anti- like Christian aren't anti-Christian because they're like intellectually oh yes I did all the research and I realized they're just going to be that's not the case. It's a motivism. It's 100% a motivism, right?

¶71That's that pathos I was telling you about. Appeal to the emotion like I don't want to be I don't want to follow a god that big meanie in the sky. I don't want to do it. So therefore he's not real. I don't want to follow a god that tells me I can't put my ding-dong in certain places.

¶72Therefore he's not real. None of that has anything to do with his existence. But that is like 99.9% of the arguments against Christian. Oh yeah, you follow a religion that disagrees with things that I, you know, hold to or whatever. Ask, how do you think your community is going to receive this when it becomes public?

¶73It'll be mixed. So I've got, listen, I've been hire 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 called it >> Yes. He's been super based with people.

¶74Super B. He's he's always engaged in good faith and on a uh uh fair playing, fair field, whatever what however you say it. I'm not doing well with my words today, but he's always been really um good faith with people. >> 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.

¶75Of 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.

¶76So, I do have a lot of friends who I mean, maybe we'll become estranged. 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.

¶77>> 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.

¶78>> Does he hold the divine simplicity now? >> Uh I'm just like going after the very core of Catholicism's doctrine of God. Um I 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.

¶79So firstly, I need to show some kind of compassion and love to them, right? Because I was there. >> Yeah. >> Um and if one of my best friends converted to Catholicism at that point, I'd be like, "What? What are you doing?

¶80You've I would also have had very similar reactions." So I just got to show love. And 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 Theotokos, um I' I've been able to I've been able to kind of >> Yeah. I'm tell I'm telling you guys, Grandma Wpp is right when he says this. People who are theists are perfectly rational.

¶81People who are atheists are also perfectly rational. I'm telling you the the barriers are start on an emotion because the arguments for God are really good are really good but they're they're not so good that it's like you can't like you can't reasonably deny it. I really do think there is like a agnosticism. I don't think atheism, but I think there's a reasonable position for agnosticism because you can not be convinced of like convict give convicting your whole life to Jesus uh because of the argument emotion. You can appeal to some sort of mystery on that.

¶82I I can give that to the agnostic. But the arguments are good and you can 100% say yes, God exists. And things like the argument of motion are pretty convincing for that. Uh God exists. Yes, the death and resurrection of Jesus is pretty convincing for that.

¶83You can hold that position. And so what the real barrier is like on why you're convinced or not convinced is your emot emotions. What what what pushes you in a specific direction? What do you hold to? What what is like your foundation of like what you believe in the first place?

¶84Your your epistemic standards, you know, what drives you in that direction? Because we have this guy. He's super smart. Way he's way smarter than any atheist we've ever debated on TikTok. Hands down.

¶85any all of them, right? He's way smarter than most 99.9% of these Christians, incredibly intelligent, really knows his stuff. And the barriers, you notice that he's talking about the barriers that prevented him from accepting the truth of Jesus Christ was emotions. And once he looked at the data, he's like we saw in the intro, he's like, "Ah, this is not good. It might be true, but all the reasons he was going against it, he's like, "Ah, you guys disagree with the things that I agree with.

¶86It'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. People should know you're a PhD student.

¶87>> If this was a troll, this would be the best troll ever, but I don't think it is. >> 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 weird to hear you speak like that because I'm used to hearing your videos where you and Alex Okconor 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.

¶88I never thought you were hostile or Alex for that matter. >> Yeah. 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.

¶89What I want to get to is when did the first domino fall and how? And obviously that's a you could go back to your childhood, but I mean like more recently over the last couple of years. 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.

¶90Well, I was initially Catholic. We'll get back to that. But I was initially um you know very skeptical of the psychophysical harmony argument when I came across it in um >> and I can hear the atheist now. You see he grew up Christian and that's the reason that's he grew up Christian. He just wanted to appease his family.

¶91That's the only That's the only reason he believed in God. He just grew up Christian then. So if he grew up in any other country, he would have went right back to Hinduism or something like that. Yeah, that's the reason >> in college. No, maybe maybe the end of college, the beginning of grad school.

¶92So, 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. And, 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 in certain arguments relating to consciousness.

¶93But really nothing tipped the scales particularly significantly. But then this paper came along published in Oxford studies and philosopher religion by Brian Cutter. He's a philosopher at Notre Dame and by Justin Kmet and he's a philosopher. I think he's now working at like the insect institute or something like that. Some sort of effect of altruist cause and it's this it's called like the argument from psychophysical harmony or something like that.

¶94And they put it up on field papers and I read it. I'm like oh man >> uh I have to get this paper. Hold on. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna do an old man thing right now. >> Boom.

¶95Gonna put that in my read list. >> This seems pretty forceful. >> So 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 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.

¶96There's no felt sense of, you know, the smell of lilacs or the taste of chocolate. There'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.

¶97Okay? So 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.

¶98But we can conceive of hordes of alternative ways of mapping >> conscious states, phenomenal states as losters call them with physical states. And >> isn't this is this the two two world problem or whatever that the argument has been going around lately? I think John's been running this argument. He went on to an atheist guy lost his mind. It was hilarious.

¶99boatloads of these are just not going to result in any intelligible or orderly or harmonious mental life. So 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.

¶100The psychophysical laws, the laws that connect conscious states with physical states in that world are very simple. It's just a 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.

¶101And just more generally, our mental lives are strikingly orderly, harmonious, and just strikingly fortuitous in a way that calls out for explanation. And 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?

¶102Almost never. you 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 mental life could have just been like a chaotic jumbling like mess of like titty static like experience which just mimics the microchemical structure of our brains or you know basically any sort of >> is this like a teological argument but from like this feels like a teio I need a smart person.

¶103I wonder if uh I wonder if I can get a smart person to join me all my life. Um somebody messaged Tim >> 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 >> feels like a teological argument >> 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 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.

¶104So, 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? But then it just turns out that there are very simple underlying principles from which you can derive divine harmony.

¶105Um, and I was just really trying to push back, but aren't there so many ways in which it's disharmonious? those could be easily explained by giving us opportunities for developing our souls, our character. And so I was like I was trying to push back, but 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.

¶106So like the fine tuning argument also was one of the dominoes. I had lots of objections to the fine tuning argument, but they just started falling by the wayside and I was like, "Oh no, the fine tuning argument probably works and the psychophysical fine tuning argument probably works." So 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.

¶107And 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 the^ 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.

¶108If the cosmological constant had been slightly smaller by one part in 10 to the 120, then the universe would have collapsed back in on itself in like pose 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? >> If somebody had said this to you two years ago, what would you have said to it?

¶109Oh, 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.

¶110Um there are lots of reasons for that. I mean one thing is that like in order to even get a multiverse up in the first place with these sort of laws and law structures, you need to very strike and agree 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 Boltzman brains. So Boltzman brains are just these like >> spontaneously formed local brain-like objects which pop into existence very shortly in the quantum foam and then dissipate shortly thereafter.

¶111And as actually as it turns out Boltzman brains will be the vast vast vast vast majority of observers in multiveres. And 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.

¶112>> I don't know, man. I I disagree with them on this one. We got a whole bunch of monkeys on typewriters now and and and that's how we ended up with modern day news. Um, so I I might have to I might have to disagree with him on that as well. >> Of intelligible like sentences or intelligible uh vocabulary, right?

¶113>> An entire work of Shakespeare, that's going to be much much rare. 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 bolts wandering compared to this ginormous pocket of uh order that we have. >> Yeah, we need to we need to slow it down. I wanted to get through this today but my goodness gracious buddies going at a million miles per second >> 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.

¶114So and that of course if there are if Boltzman brains really do >> I'm not watching Jesus and whatnot today. We'll do it a different day. I want to I want to figure out what got Joe Schmid >> predominant 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 >> Hold on hold on Um, I'm going to bring in a smart person, we could talk we could we could talk about this because because I was told I got the I know the teological argument. Um, but I have no clue the the conscious argument that you freaking brought up, bro. I got no freaking clue.

¶115Um, so going to jump into my watch party and they're going to join us there and then uh then we can figure out we can we can figure out what the hell's going on. That's smart. >> Multiverse hypothesis in response to the fine tuning argument. But so these are just the what dog. He can't uh dog.

¶116Okay, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I got to I got to get him. He can't join the watch party because of the age restriction.

¶117Oh, great. Great. Well, I have to get them up a different way. Okay, just give me a second, y'all. Give me a second.

¶118All right. How do I do this again? Uh, all right. Invite guest. Copy link.

¶119Local send. I I need I need an adult. I need I need an adult. I need an adult. Okay.

¶120I need an adult. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. There we go. My gosh.

¶121My gosh. All right. While we're waiting on them, we'll keep going. >> These are just the initial dominoes, right? Like 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.

¶122I 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." Why Why was that a scary thing to come to?

¶123>> 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. I'm actually doing my dissertation on these topics right now.

¶124So 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. I went to bed that night and I was like maybe God exists after all.

¶125I 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 I'm 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. I mean, since I was a child, this has been something that's just been like consuming for me.

¶126I 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 >> Is this an adult? >> Yeah. Can you hear me? Does the sound okay?

¶127>> It's it's it's a thing. We can hear you. >> Is it bad? >> Uh, it's not awful. It's not awful.

¶128>> Do you Do you want me to come back when I'm done listening? >> No, no, no. I need I need you I need cuz we're already past the part. I need you to tell me what the hell he's talking about about the teological thing from like consciousness cuz you just he just ran through that >> whatever the hell big word he used. Yeah.

¶129>> Yeah. Okay. So, Uh, do you want me to do that now? >> If you want to. If not, you can do it later.

¶130>> Um, >> okay. Give me a second to finish this set and then I can start. Is that fair? >> Yeah. Just let me know.

¶131We'll keep watching. >> Okay. Okay. >> Fans lifting right now. >> Paragraphs on paragraphs.

¶132And then cuz 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? I've always just been so profoundly fascinated by that.

¶133And 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 had been arguing against something that uh maybe I really shouldn't be arguing against. So that was a little bit >> I don't know if he realized he's still We can hear him clanking plates. What?

¶134I thought I muted myself. >> I hear you smashing them plates, son. >> Wait, I didn't even start my set yet. I was trying to figure out to mute myself. The mute button is not working then.

¶135>> There we go. Now I can't hear you. >> Nerve-wracking. >> 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?

¶136And what was that experience? >> Yeah. Oh, definitely. So, I mean, I reached out to a lot of my friends who were thinking also about the psychological 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.

¶137And 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. Um and I just I didn't find those responses plausible. They said, "No, no.

¶138I like just brute when you start getting down to like brute fact stuff." Like just to It just feels like a It's always felt like a copout of not being God for me. It's like, "Oh yeah, I don't want it. I don't want it to be God, so I'm going to just deposit a whole bunch of brute facts that just could be the case and therefore we just throw away God." Are you back? >> Yeah. Um, okay.

¶139Let me be professional here. Sorry, John. >> Yeah. All right. Hit me with the thing.

¶140>> Okay. Um, so psychophysical harmony. John, um, put your put your finger on your nose. Okay. Does the Are you actually putting your finger on your nose, chat?

¶141Is John putting his finger on his nose? The answer is yes. Right. So both John and you guys, you have like a an actual first person experience, right, of whatever is happening in the actual world. So for John, he's feeling the actual feeling of his finger on his nose and that feeling matches the external state of affairs.

¶142Um, so the difference that's going here is like the difference between like a first person perspective versus like a third person property. This is the difference between the fact that something is red and experiencing redness. Does that make sense so far? >> Yeah, I'm on board. Okay.

¶143>> I know the chat doesn't get it. They're a bunch of dummies, but >> Well, what is the chat saying cuz I can't see it right now. >> Oh, don't worry about don't worry about them. They're fine. >> Okay.

¶144Okay. Um Okay. So, there's that difference. And now the question is why do we live in a reality basically where our first person experiences right actually match the third person um non-personal states of affairs? Like why is it that when you touch your nose that feeling of your finger on your nose that you're experiencing is actually tracking to that reality?

¶145>> Okay, I have an objection immediately. Yeah, good. >> How do we know it's matching? Well, I mean that's going to that's going to just be the opposite hypothesis of solopsism. And basically solopism is a game [ __ ] So, >> well, that doesn't answer my you just Phil broke me.

¶146You know gap me, bro. That doesn't answer my question. How do we know how do we know it actually matches? How do I know when I do this, I'm not actually sticking it up my butt? >> Okay, the uh the I'm lazy right now because all the muscles, all the blood's in my legs right now.

¶147>> Yeah. I answer is I don't have any reason to suspect that that's the case. There's no ev there's no evidence to suggest that it's not >> appeal to common sense fallacy. >> Um also if you I mean there's going to be also really bad epistemic problems um if you deny this cuz well now you just undermined all of science. Um you've undermined all your own sense experiences.

¶148Um you're basically just being a global skeptic at that point. Yeah. >> And then if you're going to do that, then you can't even argue that God doesn't exist either, >> right? >> I Yeah. Well, I I would agree that would be the consequence, but I feel like it's kind of like just from what you said, starting on that first premisy, uh it feels like just kind of like granting something.

¶149And if we grant this idea, then yes, God. >> Well, no, that's not it's not and then yes, God. It's just saying that this is a thing that needs to be explained because again like it doesn't just stop at the fact that the the perceptions match. >> Mhm. >> It's also um that those matching experiences match in such a way that actually lead to us um basically being better equipped to survive, love, make art, >> um stuff like that, right?

¶150art, um, make moral choices, all that stuff. Fart. So, so for instance, um, if I punched you, I know you you're going to like beat the crap out of me because you know how to fight better than I do. But you would feel the pain from the punch and you'd like recoil a little bit, right? >> Yeah.

¶151Well, we could live in a reality where that feeling that with you getting punched, instead of it giving you this feeling that intuitively makes your nervous system kind of like pull away from the danger, um it instead feels like you're taking a bubble bath, >> right? >> Right. Like totally possible pain. It's totally possible that pain would cause a situation where it's pleasurable. But I feel like the atheist is just going to >> not just pleasurable, but like not just pleasurable, but anything like if I punch you, maybe all you all that happens is you see blue and that's it.

¶152>> Right. But what couldn't the atheist just respond that well? Evolution just kind of pushed that out and it just didn't lead to survivability. >> Right? So then evolution is not going to be the total fundamental explanation though.

¶153That's the thing. Because then that just kicks the can back to the teological argument and then I'm going to go okay so why do we live in a reality where there's like laws that actually led to the evolutionary process that leads to psychophysical harmony. >> Okay. So this this >> this is like a compatibleist argument. They're not like self-contained.

¶154>> The teological and the psychophysical harmony yeah argument. >> Yeah. >> Um they're they're of the same family like teological arguments are basically at the end of the day design arguments. >> Yes. >> And there's different forms of them.

¶155So yeah, it's just the psychophysical harmony argument is just a form, >> okay, of >> teological arguments. >> All right, I feel like I'm being too too much of a too too inquisitive. So how do we get from I touch my nose that actually um correlates with what's going on in reality uh to uh go? >> Yeah. Yeah.

¶156So just take your two competing hypotheses, a god exists and no god exists. That's what fundamental reality bottoms out to. >> Yeah. um these like the fact that our physical states match our mental states, those things are going to be valuable because we can, you know, observe things, make inferences off them, seek truth. Um we know what feels good and what doesn't.

¶157So it helps us gain moral knowledge. Like there's all these things that this observation actually gives us, right? To actually seek the true, the good, and the beautiful. >> Yeah. our entire reality is built off the foundation of our sense perception.

¶158>> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so this is just going to be like really like very coincidental. >> Um if no god exists, if a god exists, this the seems like this would be the kind of thing that god would want to do the kind of world that god would want to create if he wants relationships and reagents and all that stuff. Um if no god exists in a nothing bubble or quantum field, right, produce everything.

¶159Well, this part like psychophysical laws actually match like this are just like a millimeter. Like if you if you were to like have a infinite almost an infinitely long yard stick, right? Um this would just be like a millimeter of that yard stick if that yard stick represents like the possibility space, >> right? Okay. So why why can't you just respond back with the classical atheist response?

¶160Well, the odds are just in our favor. >> I I don't even know what that would mean. Like the odds are in your favor. >> That just so happened to be >> that this is the world we ended up with where our sense perception uh uh correlates with reality. >> Yeah.

¶161My response to that is just going to be, well, that's just your hypothesis. Why should I think that that's a more probable hypothesis than fundamental reality is God? Well, why God? Like at this point, like if I'm if I'm playing the >> Oh, I just Yeah. Yeah.

¶162And I just gave you the reason why, right? Theism predicts valuable states of affairs. So the and it predicts very specific kinds of worlds, right? Of which this world falls on into it. So theism has the explanatory resources.

¶163>> Yeah. >> To explain this. A quantum field does doesn't. At the end of the day, um, is this world possible on a quantum field hypothesis? Sure.

¶164But there's there's not going to be anything that tells us that like the quantum field is going to prefer this world. >> So, is this is this a likelihood argument? Like the world that we're living in is more expected to see >> uh if if God, not the fact that it's the only case. >> Yeah. Correct.

¶165It's not it's not an entailment. It's a probabilistic argument. >> Okay. So, we're looking at like um induction then, right? Yeah.

¶166>> Yeah. Okay. Um chat, do you get it? >> John versus Than when whenever Than wants. Last time me and Than debated, I cooked him.

¶167I did. It was on whether it was whether or not furry should have the right to be furries, and I won. >> Never mind that. >> All right, I'm going to mute up so I can >> do my next set unless you need anything else. I I will I will summon.

¶168I will scream. I need an adult. I need an adult. Um I also think the other two baboons just joined. So I don't know.

¶169We have somebody else in the queue. Who joined? Someone joined. Who was it? Oh no, it was Tim.

¶170But he's he's not I just can't hear him. What happened to Tim? I'll refresh. Maybe sometimes it's my issue. I have to refresh it.

¶171All right. Can Can you hear Can I hear you now, Tim? Um, hold on. Try again. >> Hello.

¶172>> There we go. There he is. >> Hey, can you hear me now? Wait, >> I can I can hear you now. >> So, who's all in here?

¶173>> Uh, Than, but he's lifting weights. Oh, I can't even hear him if if he's even in here. >> No, no, he he just finished yapping. I just muted him and I realized you were in the queue. >> Oh, okay.

¶174Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, this is good. That was a good little discussion. Another way I can put it right for just that one part is um is uh Can you still hear me, by the way? >> I can't hear Tim.

¶175Just so you know, >> you guys can't hear each other. >> No, I can't. I don't know if you can hear me. I can't hear him. >> Wow.

¶176This is so good. This is all great. Um, no. >> Oh. >> Uh, if here I can also just >> head out >> cuz I also have the flu.

¶177So, I'm like really I'm like like fighting it in the gym area. >> All right then. Bye. We love you. >> Is he leaving?

¶178Bye. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Then's out of here. It's just you.

¶179>> The only Okay. The only thing I was going to say was when you said, "Well, why can't they just say the odds are in our favor?" >> Right. Um, a good way to respond to that is what? What? >> Oh my goodness.

¶180>> These callers today. >> We lost them. We lost them, boys. Fell down a a tunnel. Fell down a tunnel.

¶181>> Cuz I might hypothesis. >> We're getting getting random Phil bros. >> Random Phil Bro just coming in. >> Wait, you can still hear me though, right? >> There we go.

¶182Now I can hear you. >> Okay. So, what I was saying was when you said the odds are in our favor, right? >> Um, I know exactly what you mean. Um, the language we should be saying is like, well, what if it just, you know, Yeah, it's improbable, but that's just the way the chances played out.

¶183Like, it's improbable that would happen. Like lightning, you know, it's improbable I get struck by lightning, but someone does, so you know. >> True. I actually had a friend struck by lightning just last week. >> That's insane.

¶184>> Yeah. The way that I would respond to it, >> the way that I would respond to it, right, is listen, you can say that, right? But ultimately, we can uh view this in terms of like high stakes betting odds. So, let me give you a hypothetical scenario, a little thought experiment. So imagine right your family has been kidnapped for ransom and um you are the only person that can get them out of the situation but for whatever reason the person that did this says okay he says you can you can let your family go right but the only way that you can do so is if I hand you this dart and your goal is to throw this dart at this dart board that's really far away but you have to hit the bullseye the first try.

¶185But if you don't hit the bullseye the first try, right, then your family basically is unal alived >> right >> now. He gives you two choices of darts, though. >> He gives you just a regular old dart that you would find at any, you know, dart uh if you're to buy darts or go play darts, just a regular ordinary dart. But then he gives you a laserg guided dart. And the dart always is guaranteed to hit the bullseye, no matter how you throw it, no matter how your skill is.

¶186Now, if your goal is to save your family, >> Yeah. >> which dart are you gonna go with? >> Well, laser guided. I'm gonna go with the regular dart for the for the meme, but I get your point. >> Yeah.

¶187Yeah. You're going to go with the laser guided dart. Why is that? >> Because it's going to get my goal. >> Just right.

¶188Exactly. It increases the probability of you hitting your goal. Okay. Gotcha. So if our goal is to be rational and as David Hume says, the wise man aortions his strength of his beliefs to the evidence, then if our evidence is in favor of the God hypothesis and that is the most probable outcome based on our evidence, then the wise man just aortions the strength of his beliefs to whatever that is.

¶189>> So just in the same way in a high stakes betting scenario, you're going to use a laser guided dart because it increases the chances of hitting the bullseye, >> right? You're going to do the same thing for God. But hey, listen. If you don't want your family to live, hey, be my guest, right? Take use the regular dart.

¶190Hey, if you don't want the most probable hypothesis, okay, hey, if you don't want to be rational, cool, be my guest. You don't have to do this. If your goal is to not care about rationality, not care about truth, etc. and so forth. You can do whatever you want.

¶191>> So, so that's the way I said. idea here is um is yeah it's possible buddy through threw the dart at like a 10 kilometers and hit the bullseye but it's not as likely as somebody doing with the laser guided dart. >> Exactly. And if your if your goal is to increase the chances you're going to go with the laser guided dart. That's just what the rational person would do.

¶192Um but um and so we can kind of view this in kind of a high stakes betting scenario. So that's how I respond to these. And and secondly, right, we're working with conditional probabilities. So when we think about lightning strikes, for example, um we can actually there's actually something to be said, which is we can actually make that the like your friend that just got hit by lightning. We can actually make that scenario very probable if we just had all the facts.

¶193Like if we knew all the positions of every particle in the universe, the atmospheric properties, everything like that, and we had that in our background knowledge, >> you'd say it's a one to one. >> We we would just say, oh yeah, the most probable outcome is that it would hit here. >> But we but we just don't have access to that information. So even in that scenario, right, we we only say it looks improbable because we just lack the information. So, here's the cool thing about probability theory, John, is you can always increase the chances of an outcome by adding more content into your background.

¶194The more content you add, the more context you add, the more probable a singular scenario is. That's just how it works. So, um, we can always add more content. That's that's how it works, >> right? But have you considered the number 19?

¶195>> What What does that mean? the chat will know. That's good enough for me. >> I'm not following. Okay, >> that's good enough for me.

¶196Are you sticking around? >> Um, well, I'm working and I tried to put my phone in my pocket and apparently you couldn't hear me, so I can't, I guess. >> Oh, damn. Oh, damn. All right, chat.

¶197Does everybody get it? Does everybody understand? I want to make sure everyone get sends it before I send you on your way. Yeah, the chat got it. That's all that matters.

¶198>> Awesome, man. All right, bro. Love you, man. Thank you, guys. Bye.

¶199God bless man. God bless. Uh uh thanks guys. Appreciate it. Uh we needed an adult.

¶200We got an adult and now we have better understanding of what the hell he was talking about. Come 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. But notice that you could apply lots of these objections to the fine-tuning argument, to the psychophysical harmony argument to the world in which we had that as our evidence. Oh, you know, because I would say that's clearly evidence for God's existence.

¶201It'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.

¶202You but you would be able to apply lots of the objections to these arguments to a world in which we saw that >> 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.

¶203Okay. >> But I did I didn't go all the way >> cuz there were still lots of barriers, right? The problem of evil was just so powerful to me. And that I'm curious. I'm curious what he's gonna say for the problem of evil.

¶204Because to me, the problem of evil has always been, even when I was an atheist, the stupidest argument ever. To me, that's always been my perspective because evil can only exist in the truest sense if God exists. So, if there is an actual problem of evil, then there is a God. If there is no problem evil, then there is no God. Yeah, that was a bad way to word it, but I think you guys get what I'm saying.

¶205That to me has always been a silly because we have nothing to compare it to. Oh yeah, there's objective standards of morality. Sure. Yeah, that's fine. But those objective standards are still based off like of a subjective opinion like theontology.

¶206That's just like that's an objective way to do morality, but you need to have like a subjective opinion on whether or not we ought do deontology, for example, or virtue ethicism or anything like that, right? So like the problem of evil, like the problem of suffering, things like it's always to been dumb to me and a lot of philosophers have talked a lot about it, but I've always just found it silly personally. >> 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?

¶207It feels like the well the scale tips in the side of atheism, I suppose, is where you were at. >> Like problem evil. Oh, this thing is so horrible, therefore God doesn't exist. So I'm like, well, if this thing is that evil, then the antithesis of that ought to exist, right? Because we have a measuring standard.

¶208There's a standard. There's this thing that is evil that we're measuring. There's a standard to measure off of and so therefore there is this thing that is good, right? There's this we have a spectrum here at the time. Yeah.

¶209So 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. Uh I started losing my objections to the fine tuning argument.

¶210I 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 forcible. I mean, one reason is because like I should still maybe have some higher order uncertainty cuz there are some smart people who disagree with me and whatnot.

¶211Um, but also just I mean the problem of evil was so powerful. It was so powerful like >> Yeah. state. state it >> as forcefully as you can >> if you don't mind. >> Yeah.

¶212So, 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. This 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.

¶213It's wondering where its parents are, where its family is, and then it's trapped there for Oh, what was that? >> It's a demon. >> Look. All right, we're just going to keep going. >> Okay.

¶214>> Sorry about that. Although, >> maybe it'll come flying across. We'll talk to that later. >> That's never happened before. >> Oh, right.

¶215Right. Well, that's what the skeptics say, but there's lots of uh 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. >> Okay. Yeah.

¶216So, 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. And it's just slowly sinking. A day goes by.

¶217It's starving. And then some hyenas come by. They're like, "Oh, look, its 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.

¶218It's whining. It's wailing. It's crying. And basically gets tortured, let's say, for another 24 hours. And I would just think like, where is God in this?

¶219Where is God in the suffering of the elephant? This is an innocent creature. It's not like the elephant is like, "Oh yes, I'm going to develop my virtues in response to this suffering." >> But how do you know? How do you know it's not going to develop virtues in a response? How do we How do you know that?

¶220Like it's just like I feel like that's kind of weird. It has the rationality to like comprehend the the the astronomical aspects of the suffering, but it doesn't have the rationality to grin some sort of virtue or like to grow from this experience. I always found that silly too. Uh who talked about that? Um uh what the heck is his name?

¶221Famous. It's like Than what's your favorite philosopher guy? He's the one who talked about this. He talked about it with Alex Okconor uh where he said that it's very likely that animals just do not have the mental capacity to experience suffering the way that we experience it. And therefore, God has like given them grace to that.

¶222So when they go through a certain thing such as this, they're not capable of fully comprehending the suffering like we would from that experience. Um what the heck is freaking heck is his name, man? Swineburn. Yeah, he talked about that. That was Swineburn.

¶223Thank you. >> Not what the alter 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.

¶224And this was going on for hundreds of millions of years with no humans around, none of us to help them or anything like that. And 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 are your chosen means. You couldn't have like created them in 6,000 years like the earth creation.

¶225>> I don't know if that's I don't know if it's a good position to hold. I'm just saying how do we know, right? Humans seem to posit a lot of what they understand about like the conscious experience. And this is this is very like prominent with like the pro-life versus pro-choice movement, right? They'll say that the child uh doesn't have the conscious experience that we have because it doesn't have the pain receptors.

¶226Well, I don't think that really follows the the way they figure out if children have pain or children is like conscious inside of the womb is by its reaction towards light and pain. Uh if it doesn't react to that, then they assume that there's no conscious experience happening. I think I think we're making a lot of base assumptions there. It could be the case very well that the moment of conception we have a full unconscious experience but it just doesn't have the cognitive ability to understand the pain that is going through. And so it could be the same case with animals.

¶227Uh Trent doatry is a must readad for animal pain. Uh the same with John Schneider. I I tried reading John Schneider's book. I found it so boring I stopped. >> Plus like the problem evil has just never been an issue for me and I don't care.

¶228Um, some people really find it, but for me, I don't care. >> You couldn't have maybe made them like photosynthesizers or something. One and all. I 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 >> it's just it's just an emotion.

¶229It's just an emotion. I don't like what is happening. Therefore, God no real. >> 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 fine tuning argument etc.

¶230I 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? So, 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.

¶231Like, yeah, he served dur 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 >> You'd still be a nice guy cuz that's the thing about being nice. Nice is just how your interaction your your subjective experience with an individual was nice. It was a good experience. This is why I try to tell people there's a big difference between being kind and being nice and being good and being nice. There are a lot of nice people that are just evil human beings.

¶232Evil evil human beings. This is why people often tell me it's like I had somebody say to me the other day, it's because I'm rude that I'm going to lead people away from Christ. I'm like, okay, well, if being nice is the reason to come to Jesus, then you got a big problem because there's a lot of nice people in the world that are just horrible evil people, right? It's just the truth. Like, how many nice individuals that just meet you and are just like super like friendly and they they talk very well towards you and they have like great conversation.

¶233and you're like, "Wow, that was a real pleasure of a person to be around." And then they go suck their baby out of the tube and don't even think anything of it, right? That's that's not a good person, right? It's not a kind person. That's a nice person. So, nicities, in my opinion, are are silly to focus on.

¶234It's just like that's just your it's like a eating a piece of cake. Eating a piece of cake was nice. That doesn't mean you ought do it. Of his victims so they could insert hydrochloric acid to permanently zombify them and make them his sex slaves. That is just a decisive reputation of the Jeffrey Dmers and I sky hypothesis.

¶235And so I thought with the problem of evil I thought that okay yeah there is lots of independently converging evidence for God's existence and 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 as an 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.

¶236We can easily imagine that nothing existed under an atheistic worldview. Um, >> how do you imagine that? How do you imagine nothing? >> And to me, you can conceptualize it. I don't think you can imagine it.

¶237>> That seems much simpler than the world we got. It's just 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 reigned.

¶238It could have just been a law that there was 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 aism, 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 hoards 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.

¶239Okay, but now look at the concepts within laws. So 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 >> I can hear the atheists now. I can hear them say I can hear them say, "Oh, God could have made the laws any way he wanted." And they're going to miss the fact that he just brought that up, right?

¶240The law, the laws could have been anything. There are laws. Those laws are specific things. And then within those laws, there are certain parameters and all those things are very specific, not what you would expect to see under atheism. >> About like 1 in 10 to the 120.

¶241I mean, you're more likely, just think about like that number. There are I don't know how many atoms are in the universe. It's something I think I've heard estimates like 10 to the^ of 80, right? So, 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 fine tuning argument.

¶242You'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. Okay 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 schmarge or whatever where these are just alternative physical properties that aren't actually instantiated.

¶243Well, then there would have been a mismatch between the fundamental dynamical laws of nature, the laws of >> One thing I want to point out right here, actual philosopher using language like Smass. Phil Bros on Tik Tok, the epistemological standard of the quantum reality of the aspects of the ontological. You see the difference? You see the No, like I've been reading a lot of philosophy like a lot. Wait, my brain is it's too much.

¶244um actual philosophers versus Phil Bros. Phil Bros are trying to flex on people and trying to knowledge gap people. Philosophers don't need to do that. They can win strictly based off the aspect that they're correct. They don't need to uh try to outshine somebody by using specific phenomenological buttholes specify how the universe is to evolve over time.

¶245There 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 >> best philosopher book. That's a crazy question, bro. >> Physical properties that exist. It's very striking that a match between the fundamental dynamical laws and the physical conditions occurs.

¶246It'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 randomize both the rule book and the game pieces for how the pieces are to evolve like according to the rule book. If you randomize 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 >> my humble opinion. How do I think a good J Der is that philosophy? Better than me. the board itself and tells you how the pieces are to behave, right?

¶247That would be really striking. >> So, we all want to make a difference. The challenge is that sometimes making a difference feels no >> of the laws are >> I don't make a difference. I'm just here for the money money. Speaking of which, I'm just saying >> they are to even permit interesting and valuable things.

¶248It's striking that within those general features or forms of the laws of nature, the constants fall with a 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 coincidence for the naturalist and then the naturalist are the atheist right how good am I at philosophy I suck I suck but my my my phil philosophy epipoly is trash is trash absolute garbage I I can't I can't even I'm I'm not not even a white belt. Like when I went in and got my belt in philosophy, they're like, "Bro, here here's a here's a normal belt for your pants. Get out of here." Um, they're like, "We can't do nothing with you." >> 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 peombie 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, >> "Dog, why are you still on this bear as the bad guy thing?

¶249Are you just trying to troll me?" because you've made zero argument for it and you're just like, "Oh, get smarter people to disagree with John on it." Uh uh, God bless. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. >> 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.

¶250No, sorry, these extra psychophysical laws. But even if they do include the 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.

¶251The fact that the psychophysical laws even match the contents of the universe. And then we go into >> So I watched the movie Obsession and it scared the crap out of me. And so I've been talking about it a lot lately. And one of the main uh arguments that's happening in pop culture right now is the main character of the movie, Bear. Everybody's saying he's the actual villain of the movie and he's not.

¶252Uh but everybody is saying that is the case. And I have yet to hear an argument why. And when I presented arguments why he's not, the chat just like, well, he is the bad guy. Get Than to tell you. Um, so that's what that means.

¶253Uh, he finally got smart enough to gain common sense. >> 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.

¶254That's not that's not something you can take for granted as a naturalist because evolution doesn't care about the moral facts. The 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 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." If 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?

¶255>> I would not. >> No. >> Here's a theory. Here's a theory. What if it's not God?

¶256What if it's simulation theory, but we're not actually a simulation as in somebody programmed us to be this way, but instead program somebody programmed an AI system and we're just a hallucination of an AI system and the AI system just managed to hallucinate us into like a conscious being. What if that's the case? What if that's the case? Uh, it depends on what you mean by the villain. I think Bear is a bad guy, but that doesn't mean he is a victim of something either.

¶257I don't even think he's a bad guy. I I I don't think he's a good guy. I think he's like a neutral guy. Um which what most guys would have done in that specific scenario. Uh I don't really see anything in that movie that labels him as a bad person or as a vict or as a a villain by any means, right?

¶258Is is a victim of circumstance is what it happened to be. >> 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. And so the naturalist faces a skeptical challenge with respect to moral moral intuitions. They can't trust our basic moral intuitions.

¶259They can't trust our basic moral sensibilities. And you know again we could have easily evolved in any he'd kill his cat. They don't show anything in the movie. Everybody assumed he killed his cat. Um because they are like how did the cat get in the pill bottle?

¶260It's very probabilistic. He just left his pill bottle on the table after taking his sleeping pill and the cat got into it. No, everybody's Oh. Oh, yeah. It should have been put in the cupboard and locked away.

¶261Yeah, people make stupid mistakes all the time where they open something and they forget about it. Oh, he's a villain cuz he had sleeping pills. That's another argument I saw. Oh, he had a bunch of sleeping. Why is he carrying around sleeping pills on him?

¶262He must be using it to drug women. And there was nothing in the movie that suggested that. >> 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.

¶263If we had, we would have thought it a sacred duty to just kill our brethren, right, for the sake of 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 on coincidence on coincidence upon coincidence for the naturalist.

¶264And I could just keep on listing these. >> Why not then accept or did you not flirt with Steven Law's evil god argument? >> Well, okay. So, here's my question. He's talking about like coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence.

¶265Why isn't it just one coincidence and determinism happens to be true? Why why is it not the case that there's just one event that happened and because of determinism it's not coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence. It is just that's the way it was going to be because there's only one possible world if event A happens right event A causes event B you know it it supervenes all those all all events after event A supervenes and so if event A is in you know state X then event B is always going to be in state Y. Why is that not the case? So, why is a coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence?

¶266I'm too bad we didn't have a smart one smart person to explain that. Yeah. This is why it depends on definitions. Would you accept the following? Bear is a character that a man shouldn't emulate.

¶267No, no, you shouldn't. No, I wouldn't say you should emulate him. That's fine. Uh, I can answer that soon. Yeah, that's fine.

¶268Yeah. No, I don't think he's a character to emulate, but not not because he's a bad person, but simply because he's just doesn't strive for their greater good. He just a guy, just a neutral guy, right? I like if I met a guy like Bar, I'd be like, "Oh, yeah. He's he's, you know, he's a guy.

¶269I wouldn't say anything about that." >> 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? >> I wasn't really ever particularly moved by the evil God challenge. I mean, there are a few reasons for that, >> but I would I would say this. Now, we're having like two conversations.

¶270We got this why he came to Christ and we have the bear conversation debate going on in this life. Um I would say this I say there's certain qualities of bear that a man ought emulate. So for example uh at the first interaction he had with uh I forgot her name but with the main woman of the story um he expected that she was not in a proper mental state or under the influence and therefore moved away from her advances quite frequently and even slept on the floor of her house. Right. She was extremely persistent before they got to the point where like they were on the bed kissing and like she was not showing any signs of being like completely out of it.

¶271And then when he realized like she is completely out of it, he removed himself from the situation and waited to the next day to make sure that she was in a good mental state and then immediately went to a friend and talked about what happened to make sure that he did, you know, the correct thing and and to and to figure out what was going on. So that would that would be like a good quality to emulate. 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.

¶272And 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 evil god. It's got lots of great making features. It's got lots of knowledge about the world. It's omnisient and knowledge is good.

¶273It's got lots of power. It's like it's got all 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. It's evil.

¶274Well, that's a weird kind of tension. It's got all these other perfections or great-making features like omnipotence and omniscience and a sad and 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. Like 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.

¶275Uh 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, great making feature, great making feature, great making feature. Oh, and then a badmaking feature. That's weird.

¶276So, it introduces a kind of tension. It's not as not as like a simple or uniform hypothesis theism. Moreover, that's pretty based. That was really based. I've never thought about that.

¶277That's That's pretty good. John, could you react to Parker versus Jesus whatnot? No. Stop asking me to react to Jesus and whatnot today. I am not putting on Jesus and whatnot.

¶278That's like the 10th time we got asked today. It's not happening. Maybe it wasn't you, but other people asked. you guys want to watch Jesus and whatnot, you're more than welcome. Head over.

¶279I want to watch this. Um, but yeah. Um, that was pretty pretty based. I'm not going to lie. >> Under that view, you can't derive all of those attributes from a simpler attribute of the being in question like perfection for instance.

¶280So 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. >> Can I explain it to you? Uh I'll do my best.

¶281I'll try to articulate in a way that you know we can both understand. Uh the idea is that when you see certain things operate in the world, you expect to see certain uniformities to it. So if you know uh this thing has a specific set of features, you expect to see features that are like in cooperation with the said features before, right? So we expect to see the sun go down and rise, go down and rise because it's in correlation with the features that we've seen with the sun. And so when we see something like God and we see like it has a great making feature like omniscience, omnipresence, being all loving, you know, um uh the ability to create, the ability to create goodness, then you should not expect to see it also has this negative feature because it's not in uniformity with the other attributes that we've seen.

¶282So we said we see have these attributes and we would not expect to see these like antithesis of those attributes to be in correlation with that or in cooperation with that I should say that'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. Why can't evil be a perfection on board with? >> So we have to define it differently. It wouldn't be an absence of good but if this is what God wants could be >> so I mean that would seem to though require us to be like almost in like a radical skeptical scenario with respect to >> um you should you don't have to have your camera on because I can't bring you on to the live stream anyway. So >> Okay, cool.

¶283>> Yeah. Okay. I need to set that up in advance and I didn't think I was going to have guests today. Oh, no, no, no. You're good.

¶284I didn't think I was going to be I'm all sweaty anyway. I'm pretty sure people don't see that. >> We got a burpee fan, >> right? >> Burpee. >> Yeah, I'll refresh it.

¶285See if it fixes it. This is the problem with this call-in feature here. >> Test one too. >> Hi. >> I think that's better.

¶286Um, okay. Uh, yeah. So, if you don't mind answering that question, why is it not the case that we just have, you know, event A and every event after that supervenes from event A? >> Yeah. So, um there's a few a few moving pieces here.

¶287So, remember >> seeing as how you're on the computer, can you go into Discord? >> I'm not on the computer, but I can be on the computer. Um do you What do I do on Discord? How do I >> Yeah. Well, because you're on your computer, you can accept the age restrictions.

¶288I didn't make you do it on the phone because you can't do it on the phone. So, once you're on the computer, you can accept it >> and just join the watch party. >> We're jumping watch party. Okay, I'll be there in a sec. >> All right.

¶289H my goodness. Always tech issues on this channel. It's because I create things and I make things happen. Um, but yeah, it's always always tech issues on this channel and it's just part of the game. It's it's we know this.

¶290We know this. Uh, I just got to make Than a co-host. Hold on. Rolls. Co-host roll.

¶291Good. Then you should be able to talk now. Dan, you got to unmute yourself. Why didn't Why is always issues on this channel? Always issues.

¶292Okay, Finn. Um, go into the general chat and then no one else join, please. We'll kick you. There you go. Yeah.

¶293Can you hear me? Yeah, I have a co-host feature. Yes, when I give you the co-host, it should just be able to um Yeah, but it didn't. Anyone else joins the You will get kicked. So, do not join the general chat on Discord.

¶294Um All right, man. So, yeah. Why can't event A super fine to event B? of each other that are surprising if God does not exist, right? >> Mhm.

¶295>> Okay. So, you either So, this is how it's going to play out. you're either going to have to posit that each of those things, right, has a separate mechanism that explains them and all of those separate things are fundamental reality. So it's like um suppose that somebody breaks into your house and you find out that your pizza's missing, your game council's missing, and your wife is missing. >> Damn.

¶296>> And you want to figure out why are all these things missing? And then somebody goes, "Well, you know, it was actually three people that broke into your house, and each of them wanted those one of those three things." Right. >> Right. >> That's a that's one way to explain this. The other is to say, well, the person that broke in just wanted those three things.

¶297Does that make sense? >> Yeah. When you're trying to explain all of these independent pieces of evidence, theism, the idea that God exists is the person that just wanted all three things. And in the non-theistic hypothesis, is going to have to posit three separate people or three separate mechanisms to explain each of those three things. Now, if you want to posit a non- theistic hypothesis to explain each of those three things, well then all of a sudden what's going to happen is you're going to have a really complex hypothesis because now you're going to be like, it's a quantum field, but the quantum field um did it in this particular way at this particular time for these particular reasons, and these are all going to be like non-independently motivated stipulations to just make sense of the data and match the explanatory power of God.

¶298But at that point, you're just gerrymandering a hypothesis to get rid of God when and and that's gonna be a problem because that's a complex hypothesis. The simpler one >> well is theism. >> May maybe I'm misunderstanding, but what I'm saying is um you don't have to explain every individual uh thing that happens. Why this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. It would just be the case that those things happened because event A happened.

¶299Now, I know that goes back to the throwing the dart thing, but I just mean it wouldn't be a whole bunch of coincidences. It just be one, >> right? Well, then you're just that's just a labeling problem at that point, right? Cuz then you we're just going to ask the question like, okay, well, what is the why why is it that this chain of events happened? You're still going to have to posit this one thing.

¶300And that then that's going to go to the latter h the latter half of what I was trying to say which is then you're going to have to posit a singular event that was caused by a singular mechanism >> that had that has all of these different um arbitrary limits and um dispositions. >> Sure that yeah that's fine. I can understand that answer but I'm just saying it wouldn't be a series of coincidences then it just be one. >> Correct. >> Yeah.

¶301So that could be a response to that. You just say there was one coincidence that doesn't make sense. You wouldn't say there's a series of it if it was the case. >> Yeah. I mean, you can Yeah, you can do that.

¶302The problem is just going to be like it's not going to be a good explanation. It's going to be an extremely complex one. >> But it it does move it. It does move it does remove unnecessary entities >> because you don't need to explain all the coincidences. You just need to explain the first coincidence.

¶303>> No. And no, it doesn't because it's just moving the unnecessary entities into one object because remember like when you're talking about simplicity. Um it's not going to just be how many things are you counting, it's also going to be how many like predicates are you giving to the thing, right? So like for instance um my pizza's missing and the simpler hypothesis for why my p why my pizza might be missing might be my wife took it, right? And then you say, say you want to go, okay, well, no, aliens took it.

¶304And I'm going to be like, why would I think that? And let's just say like you're show some data that supports the idea that aliens took it. Maybe like there's a crop field in my farm or in my front yard or something like that, right? And I'm still going to ask the question like, okay, well, but like why would the aliens took it take it? And you're going to go, well, it's because these aliens in particular, they don't like you.

¶305They hate burn. They hate olive comp like complexion people named fan and they also really like buffalo chicken pizza and now you just added on two particular things predicates to the hypothesis that complicate it just to try to match the explanatory power. So >> well I'm just saying >> there's like a >> so I'm not so I'm not talking about like I couldn't give like a hypothesis of what would be the first causal power but let's just say that there is event A uh that initiates into like you know event B and everything that comes after that is just assuming like deterministic attributes we would only have to give a reason for event A. We don't need to give like why event A would cause event you know uh F to actually have this sort of attribute to it. >> Yeah.

¶306The what I'm trying to say is you still end up have you let's let me try to rephrase it this way. Sure. You still end up incurring the cost of having to explain those things even if you just go on a deterministic scale because sure event A pause caused A B CDE E whatever right? Mhm. >> Um or 1 2 3 4 5.

¶307Um and so you want to what what's happening then is 1 2 3 4 5 are being explained by event A. And if you want to then explain why event A happened, the thing that explains all of that is explaining 1 2 3 4 5 inside and event A. So basically it's like okay, so why did event A happen? Well, this thing caused it, right? And now we're gonna ask the question, why did this thing cause event A rather than like event B or whatever?

¶308You're still going to run into the same explanatory problem. It's just the things that you're explaining are getting the the the weight or the cost of what you're explaining has to just move to different places. >> Yeah. I I don't know if it's clicking or something's not registering. I just don't understand why this isn't removing.

¶309>> I talk with my hands a lot. >> Yeah. So, part of this is because I just can't do my Greek thing, maybe. >> No, I don't think me seeing your hands is going to make it clearer. Um, I just don't know how this isn't removing unnecessary entities.

¶310If it's not the fact that event A has anything to do uh with the event F outside of the causal power, >> right? Like if it's not like if it's not like not some sort of like PPC where it has like the properties that all of a sudden chain into event F, but it's just the case that you know like a domino if this one falls it pushes this one down and the dominoes can be different but it's just causing the first motion and whatever this is is just some sort of brute fact. >> Right. Right. At that point it's just going to be an argument about the simplicity of the two of the two competing theories.

¶311That's that's going to be the problem at the end of the day. That's what I'm trying to say. It's like you're going to have to have a very very very complex non-theistic theory to explain the deterministic chain. >> Why does it have to be complex? >> Well, if you have a non-theistic hypothesis, right?

¶312Um you what are you what are you going to posit? >> I don't I don't explain >> I don't have a thing to put in that position, but I'm just asking like you're stating it has to have like a complexity. Why? >> So So let let's Yeah. So like put let's put it this way, right?

¶313Like you have psychophysical harmony that >> and let's just assume um determinism here, right? You have psychophysical harmony, evolutionary biological laws. The biological laws are determined by the like the cosmological laws. And so let's just pretend that bottoms out. And so we don't actually have to try to explain psychophysical harmony anymore or the biological laws.

¶314Those are all just bottomed out into the into like the cosmological laws. Right. >> Right. Um now we can still ask the question why do we live in a reality where these are the cosmological laws that deterministically cause all these other laws right on the theistic hypothesis we have again the explanatory resources there on the non-theistic hypothesis if you're going to posit a deterministic path from whatever non-theistic thing causes those fundamental laws what you're going to have to say then is that this thing will deterministically cause those laws and all the laws that go from there. So, it's going to have a disposition to create the gravitational constant as it is.

¶315It's going to have a disposition to have ex like all these different fundamental pieces of our universe. >> Mhm. >> Independently. So, it's going to it's it's akin to saying I have this burglar who came in who wants to have Oh, >> what? Hold on.

¶316What if you take like a a human humanist perspective and just like kind of throw away dispositions? Then what happens? >> Well, then you I mean then you don't have any explanatory power if you're just saying here's this thing that deterministically caused. >> Well, you wouldn't have causes in this scenario. >> What?

¶317>> Well, that's human's position, right? There is no like cause and effect. If I'm not mistaken, it's just simply a measurement of what is, >> right? I mean, then at that point, you're not explaining anything. You're just saying that everything is a brute fact.

¶318>> Could it be the case? Is it possible? Sure. >> But we But like if you're just if you're gonna if you're going to follow some sort of principle of um sufficient reason and whatever it principle sufficient reason you want to go with, right? >> If you're going to follow it all the way up to this point, >> I'm just going to say that's a taxi cab fallacy and you're just being dishonest.

¶319>> Like full stop. like I'm gonna I'm gonna do science and I'm gonna do all this stuff, but then as soon as uh all the explanations stop short um and it seems like God's the best explanation, I'm just going to toss this principle. >> Yep, fair enough. I'm just throwing objections at you to see what what you do with it. >> Are you sticking around?

¶320>> Yeah. >> Interject whenever you feel like you want to add. >> Cool. Cool. >> Cool.

¶321>> To our basic moral intuitions, right? Like if evil is good after all or like a perfection, right? Um, 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 a straight with respect to our basic moral intuition, which of course leads to like another challenge for this hypothesis. Like this is you've heard of Daycart's evil demon, right?

¶322It'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. 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 EV god challenge, they don't believe in the being.

¶323They're just trying to say that there's maybe some kind of evidential parity between theism and this hypothesis. And since that hypothesis is ridiculous and so is like theism. Um, but theism doesn't posit basically a cartisian evil demon going out that 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.

¶324We 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. And that I think is just ridiculous. Of course I know I have hands. Of course I know it's wrong to recreation to torture children.

¶325>> All right. So, >> so why why couldn't it be the case that this um this you know evil god hypothesis uh that it wanted like obviously we couldn't trust our rationality but it wanted us to have rationality so we could comprehend the evil that is being inflicted upon us. I'm asking you >> say it again. Sorry I'm my protein bar. Yeah.

¶326Yeah. So, under like the evil god hypothesis, why? Like he's he's talking about like kind of like the Ian, you know, from evolution where it's like we couldn't trust our rationality cuz we don't know why this being would even want us to have it in the first place. Could it not be the case that, you know, if we had this evil god, uh, that it would just give us the faculties for rationality so that we could comprehend the suffering that we're going through. >> Um, say that one more time a little slower.

¶327I'm I am >> I acknowledge gap fan. Let's go. Let's go. And the epistemological standard of the of the uh metabolizing organism. Um >> so uh so he brought up the argument against like the daycart's uh demon thing >> where it's like the demon just is torturing you for the fun evil god hypothesis.

¶328>> Um and he says because of that we wouldn't be able to trust our rationality because this this being why is it inclined to give us like rational properties, but he kind of just jumped over like why wouldn't this being uh want us to have rationality simply so we could comprehend the suffering that we're going through? >> Um you can you can you don't need rationality to comprehend the suffering that you're going through. Like you you can be a you can be a person that well it depends on what you mean by rationality and all that kind of stuff too. Like if by rationality you just mean some sort of higher order consciousness that we have where we can be aware of our own awareness and stuff like that, >> right? Um you don't need that to suffer still.

¶329>> Well, what could it not be the case? Like like um I I read the short novel once um from you know Warhammer. >> Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't played it. >> Okay.

¶330Okay, so there's these species uh in Warhammer called the uh what the heck are they called? The dark eldar, the trakari or whatever. And uh what they do is they they feed off people's suffering. That's what they do. And there's a short story that I I read once um about how this person uh they they took a human and they would take human and they would torture them and they feed off the suffering.

¶331And so uh one of them took this human and they made him a pet and they treated it this pet amazingly. They made it part of the society. They made it like have this great like wonderful aspect of like being integrated into their community uh simply with the goal to one day show, hey, we're going to take this all away from you and you're going to have the the highest standard of like suffering because you're going to see all this goodness that we could give you and then we're going to remove it from you. And because of that creature's ability to like rationalize the goodness that was around it, it had the ability to comprehend like the highest form of suffering. And so could it not be the case that uh this evil god is putting us through through like goodnesses so we can simply understand the degree of suffering that we're going through.

¶332I I would say like that's certainly maybe a possibility, but it doesn't actually address the underlying epistemic like knowledge problem because >> if there is an evil god, then you can't really trust any of your intuitions or anything, right? Like what you just said is based off of intuitions that you've built up over sense, experiences over time in stories that you've seen. And so it's it's putting the cart before the horse at that point because you're using the sense experiences and all these intuitions you built up over time to point to a possibility. But the things that you used to get to this counter example are the things that are in question. >> Yeah.

¶333But can I not just simply say I use my rationality and I trust my rationality because it just works and it's how I operate in the world >> independent of the hypothesis that there is an evil god. Yes. But if soon as you put an evil god in the background and then imagine what kind of world there could be then at that point the things that you think are reliable are the things that are being called into question. >> Right. But but I have no other option.

¶334So if I'm going to posit evil god hypothesis, >> right, >> I have no other option but to rely on my rationality to do so. So I do so >> right and it could be the case that this evil god gave me rationality and because I can use it now it might be in question but I have no other way of negotiating with that outside of using it. >> Right. Okay. That and well, that's that's the point of the argument that Joe is making is you have no other choice, which means that you're going to have to do something that's in tension with what the hypothesis entails, >> right?

¶335So, you you have no reason to, but you have to use it anyways. Is that the idea? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, then you're kind of throwing >> it's just going to be a mark of a bad hypothesis, right?

¶336Like like um imagine hypothesis that John's wife is secretly manipulating him and gaslighting him um into being a woman >> Netanyahu millionaire and um and um the only way to disprove that is like basically how do you feel, right? And you have no other like data you can go off. Let's just like they say the only data is like how does John feel? Well, if you're being gaslit and manipulated, the way that you feel and your own like judgments about the situation, if you're actually a victim of that is not going to be reliable and you're never going to be able to like actually look inward and judge whether or not you're being manipulated, right? Like you're going to need something outside of your own sense experience and first person perspective and outside of your wife's to help you actually see that, >> right?

¶337you can't you just kind of going there being like well I have no other choice but to just like you know look at my own experience and judge it for myself even though that might be in question because I've been manipulated and gaslit like that would be irrational to do >> okay >> then you've got this formidable argument from the problem of evil you'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. Sometimes 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?

¶338Or 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. 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.

¶339So, 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. So, I was starting to lean towards theism >> and starting to maybe more strongly lean towards the I was like where maybe to the point I'm like an agnostic leaning theist, >> but I didn't overcome the problem of evil until I basically got overwhelming miraculous evidence for Catholicism and Christianity. And basically once I got that it kind of once I had that I was like okay >> I must just be missing something you know I must be missing something.

¶340And then along the way there were some interesting and new theodyies 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. >> So cuz like well we can get into that but >> Oh pumped. Okay. Okay, so we should point out >> this is something I talk about all the time is I don't I don't use the Odysseies and Danny might disagree on whether I should or shouldn't, but I don't use the Odysseies because I find they only work in so far as the person finds them convincing.

¶341And some of the things he brought up there is like, well, he had he was convinced of Christianity through miraculous claims and because of that, the theodysies seem satisfying to him. But somebody who's not convinced of Christianity, I could bring them in at these and they're just going to bring why not this, why not this, why not this, why not this? Even though like the only reason I like the only reason I would use a theodysy is like if somebody brought up like oh there's a logical contradiction and I could be like well the logical contradiction doesn't uh follow because of this because of the defeater argument for example as long as God defeats it he is just if he didn't defeat it then the justice would be removed but because we have a just god or we claim to be have a just god he just needs some sort of like I guess I guess a lot of atheists would call it like an escape hatch um which I don't really use the terminology because yes it works it it follows so it' be an escape hatch Yep. He's just because he allows it or because he defeats it, sorry. And so therefore, he's still a just god because that's what you would expect to see under like the idea of justice.

¶342Uh but for most people, they're like, "Oh, give me a reason why." I'm like, "There's a whole bunch of theodysies. Theodysies are satisfying to the individual. Certain people have different ones. I don't see I don't you haven't brought up a contradiction or an issue, so I'm not really interested in diving into it." That's my personal opinion. >> Yeah.

¶343I mean, so my My opinion is that like you should have a theodyssey. I just I'm only a fan of my theodysy, >> right? >> Because I'm right. Um but I like the reason why and I think it's been a while since you and I have talked about the Odyssey. >> Yeah.

¶344>> But like the theodysy that I've put together is extremely informed by psychology. Um, so it it all depends on the person and stuff like that. Like I think theodysy in the when it when it's given like in the cold phil like philosophical filro way. Yeah. I mean I'm just not a fan of it.

¶345Right. Like I think theodyssey is going to be one of those things that it's actually should be um it should be philosophically informed but it be it should be pastorally delivered. >> Gangster. That was a bar. You should put that in a rap song.

¶346>> [ __ ] Um a theodysy should be philosophically informed but pastorally delivered. >> Yeah. Uh it's one of the reasons why my book like my theodysy book is taking so long to write. >> I'm writing a book. Oh, I'm so smart.

¶347I'm writing a book. >> Yeah, I love you, bro. Um I Let's put it this way. I think I think the old thinkers like CS Lewis and like Fodor Desk Hayes um I think they had it right. Like if you read the brothers Kamarzov or um whatchamacallit there's another book he wrote.

¶348I just forgot it off the top of my head. Like CS Lewis too. like they're they're talking about real philosophical things that are delivered through narrative. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's the best way to do it anyway.

¶349>> Yeah. I think I think The Great Divorce I think everybody everybody should read The Great Divorce before they critique um the the existence of hell. >> Uh that's my opinion. >> Yeah. Um and then for the rest of this too, like what you were saying too is I think is correct.

¶350Like if you think that in like without a theodysy that the problem of evil is like really strong. Um the argument from miracles I actually think is like one of those things that's also extremely decisive. And if you have all this other evidence on top of miracles, I mean you're just going to get what happens with Joe Schmid. >> A whole conversion story. When are you having on your channel?

¶351>> He was uh he was going to come on today. Um but he there's just so much stuff going on behind the scenes right now >> and we're we're just going to do it next week instead. Um cuz you can imagine what it's like having bunch of internet cringe lords say you're having a manic episode and >> all this other stuff. >> I mean if you need Hey, listen. If you need somebody who's really dumb who's going to ask really stupid questions that you don't think of, I'm your guy.

¶352I'm just letting you know. I'm just going to throw that in the You don't have to say anything now. I'm just throwing that out in the ether. You just you use a sit on that >> 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.

¶353Did you know him at the time? >> I think I met Ethan um when I was agnosticleaning theist. >> Okay. I didn't know. Is is this where he comes into the story?

¶354>> This is 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. After 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.

¶355>> Yeah. Tell tell us what you mean by I know what you mean, but Pebbles's in the shoe. What were you being introduced to and why was it bothering you? >> So, there are a few things here. One is demonic phenomena.

¶356And me even saying this right now, go back two years. I would have laughed. It would have been ridiculous. I would have joined the skeptics and be like, "Oh, this is just ridiculous. What are you talking about?

¶357Demonic phenomena." Like, >> can you pause for a second? >> Demons are real, bro. >> Uh, okay. Oh, you wanted to pause, too? >> Yeah, I was going to I was pausing here anyways.

¶358Yeah, demons are 100% real. >> Great minds think. >> 100% real. >> Zeroed out, Mike. Yeah, this is this is I remember um this is something I'm I I don't have like a fledged a fleshed out meth methodology for this yet like I do with miracles.

¶359Um but this is something that I've been really thinking about for the last like maybe four years and I remember when Cameron Btusi started making videos about like demon possession and all this stuff. >> Mhm. >> And I was like, "Yeah, this is real." Like I think this is actually really really strong evidence. And I remember people just laughing at Cameron, calling him a grifter for putting these videos out and everything. >> Yeah, he took he took a big hit on his channel for thing for that.

¶360People really >> I know. But it's like but it's like ridiculous like because people just laugh it off rather than actually taking the time to explain things, right? Especially with some of these cases where you have like video footage and like pictures of like crazy stuff happening. >> Do you have videos? >> Um, nothing that I can share publicly right now.

¶361>> Can Can we watch it privately? I want to see >> I have to ask for permission. I have to ask >> you. Every time I ask you for something, you say I got to ask for permission and I don't hear from you again. >> Dude, it's hard.

¶362I'll say Okay, how about this? I'll say this maybe I'll like make a little announcement here and John you know if you want to be involved in this you can um I I will be I I have people that I've already that are already looking to do it. I'm looking I have like a lawyer that's going to help me. Maybe Striker wants to help with this. I don't know.

¶363Oh, striker even called. >> Um, long story short, I'm working on like an actual documentary on miracle cases where I'm interviewing doctors and people that are involved in actual miracle stories with the medical records and all this other stuff. And part of that process is literally just getting the legal rights to put out publicly some of these medical records and videos and stuff like that. >> Uh, we we have um we have a copyright lawyer in the Discord. It's not.

¶364Yeah. I mean, HIPPA is very different than copyright, but >> just real quick, uh, $5 from shake. Uh, not attempting to prove, disprove any denomination except proathodoxy, but are there any well uh curated accounts of the Eucharistic miracles or exorcisms? Hold that thought. We'll answer it after.

¶365I want I want you to finish your thought. Go ahead. Well, all I was going to say is like so I'll be traveling and doing like inerson interviews with this kind of stuff and it's going to be um more of a rigorous documentary style argument video basically where it's like I'm actually going to be interviewing in person some of these people. So like >> there's a doctor who um his his patient who I can't name right now um he was dead in the are we on TikTok or can I say like >> we're on YouTube just YouTube kick and and on Facebook so you're good. >> Okay.

¶366So I can I can say words that's all. Um yeah, he so he was dead. He was in the morg in a body bag for over 40 minutes and he had um a vision of Jesus while he was out of his body basically and Jesus tells him like it's not too late to repent cuz he wasn't a Christian. And at the same time that that's happening, this doctor prayed for him cuz he said that he felt like God was telling him to pray for the dead body for to come back to life. And then he was resuscitated after 4 years.

¶367>> Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. So God told him to talk to him, to ask him to do the thing. Why didn't just God do it? >> Huh? Then >> I mean >> that's that's why will God say, "Hey, if you hey man, if you tell me to heal the guy, I'll heal the guy." That's so silly.

¶368Throw it out. >> I mean, there's going to be people that respond like that and I% Yeah, >> I know. But yeah, so it's like some cases like that will be in the uh in the documentary. Um and and included and this will be stuff about demon possession. It's just uh you really want to respect people's privacy >> cuz once somebody's name and stuff like that gets out there, >> the the world's going to come at them.

¶369Atheists are going to come at them. They're all going to call them liars. >> Be really careful about >> identities and stuff like that. >> Yeah, that's 100% that's exactly what's happening with Joe Schmidt right now. Uh, everybody's coming at him calling him a grifter.

¶370That the only reason he's having this conversion story is because he realized there's more money in being a Christian than there is when being an agnostic, >> which is just not >> I'm actually doing a IP I'm doing a stream on IPA tonight on that topic. You can join if you want. >> Uh, what time? >> 6 p.m. Central.

¶371>> I might be at the gym, but if not, sure. >> Yeah, just let me know. >> All right, let's keep going, folks. >> Come on. We're prim and proper intellectuals.

¶372We don't believe in demons or anything like that. Right. That'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.

¶373>> Um but I have a friend camera. And >> um so Striker says if they can get the individuals to fill out a HIPPA form, he can get any records he wants. >> Yeah, that's part of Yeah, that's part of the process. There's actually more things involved than just that, Lord. Uh >> oh.

¶374Uh, also if you don't mind answering Shakes's question as well about the Eucharistic, >> what is it? >> Eucharist. Is there any connection to Eucharistic miracles? That'd be any on that. >> Oh, do I know any of of any of those?

¶375Yeah, there's two that I'm pretty convinced of. >> Okay. All right. There you go, Shake. >> He started making videos where he just has on a bunch of different exorcists, people who work in deliverance, people who have like experienced deliverance ministry and people like that.

¶376>> And Cameron, we were good friends at the time. And 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.

¶377Watch it. Listen to what the exorcists are saying. Hear them out. Listen to what Dr. Richard Gallagher on the faculty of Columbia and NYU, a Princeton alum, listen to what he's saying, okay?

¶378And give me your explanation. I 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 say, "Okay, watch this video and if you don't want to watch the whole thing, just go to this time stamp." And you know, I go to the time stamp 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.

¶379And 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 that seems more likely. >> Yeah. Well, lying, that's another potential option.

¶380Um, so I was like this 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 and 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 of the person lying. Um and then Cameron's like Joe I asked him that 2 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 is a long long time ago and the person just forgot or something." >> Uh, Big John Steel, this man is boring.

¶381You are more than welcome to watch a different show today. More than welcome. And we will have you back another day when we have somebody more interesting on. >> We will. But this is important stuff, guys.

¶382This is important stuff. This this could be this could be the very next uh movement uh in the Christian world. Actually, expect that to see is that this is going to be the argumentation that we're going to see. We need to get a leg up on it uh because there's alo going to be responses to these arguments. And so if you're not informed, you're going to get left behind.

¶383And so I think this is something we have to look at. >> So vindicated hearing you say that, John. >> When you have >> I've been pushing >> when you have one of the biggest agnostic philosophers say that miracles convinced him, >> every other every Christian right now is going to be looking at this and being like, what was it? And that's what they're going to start arguing with people on TikTok and they're not going to be informed enough. And the people on Tik Tok are going to crush them based off b simple epistemology.

¶384So, this is what's going to this is going to be the next movement over the at least six months, right? We're going to see that happen. Sorry, I cut you off. >> Yeah. No, no, no.

¶385You're good. I'm I'm just saying I feel so vindicated through this, too, by the way, cuz like you've seen me pushing this argument for quite some time now. >> Yeah. And and it's like also I think I told you like for the longest time I've been wanting to tell people like dude if you you go ahead keep laughing at this including Christians dude like I've had Christians tell me it's a bad argument and to stop using it and I'm like not able to tell people about Joe converting for over a year for about a year and I'm just I don't know I I'm feeling very vindicated right now. It's probably like a sort of a selfish feeling.

¶386I think I told you this privately, but like >> there's like a selfish feeling here probably where I'm like >> I'm like feeling really good. >> Yeah, dog. You're super smart. Big brain. You got you got it before everybody else got it.

¶387>> No, it's not that, man. It's it's a it's a I felt like I had nobody on my side on this and now now Joe goes public and I'm like, heck yeah. >> Yeah. Well, that's the um that's also the other thing we were talking about, right? that um this would be the ethos, right?

¶388You don't you don't you didn't h you don't have and I don't mean this as an insult. You don't have the public persona as Joe. So when you say it, they go, "Ah, another Christian yapping his butt off." But when Joe Schmidt, the agnostic, who constantly insults Christianity, not insults, but constantly tries to dethrone Christianity, constantly tried to take away ideas of it, uh, comes up and says, "Hey, your idea was the idea that pushed him across the not like you came up with it, but you're the idea you've been pushing is what got him across the line, >> 100%. Uh, yeah, I understand where you're coming from like like you you should feel vindicated." Um, and this could be, you know, the Lord um going, "Hey, Finn, you know, >> well, think about it." Like the scripture Jesus Jesus performed miracles and then he would say, "Go tell, don't tell anybody." And then they would go tell people and then that's what convinced them is because they would give the testimony about the miracle. And so you're out here saying, "Well, look at all these miracles and everybody's laughing at you." And then Joe Schmid says it.

¶389So I understand what you're saying, man. >> Heck yeah. >> Um or maybe some kind of confabulation. And 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.

¶390Notice 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. So, 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 I was shifting in my armchair.

¶391And 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. Okay, I've had him on." And just like you go through what Dr. Richard Gallagher is talking about.

¶392He 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.

¶393Richard 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. >> But why why did demons pick Latin and Greek? That seems arbitrary. It can't be real. Why didn't they pick some other language like Chinese, right?

¶394It's quite the that's that that we can't believe him, guys. Don't believe him. He's just a grifter. Obviously, if a demon has supernatural powers, it could come out with Chinese, but it's doing Latin and Greek >> things. And I was like, okay.

¶395So, this guy who has like all the professional credit and reputation >> sound like a liar. >> It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a liar. >> Gaining power or money through >> if anything, it's the opposite. He seemed >> 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.

¶396And, you know, he's got like all these uh recommendations in his book, demonic foes from like higher-ups in like the the psychiatric field. 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. >> And this is one thing um I don't know about like the EO church if they do this. No Protestant churches don't do this.

¶397They'll assume you have a demon if you just kind of like sneeze funny. Um a lot of them will. Oh did you did you say a mean word? It's cuz you have a demon. Slap him in the forehead.

¶398Uh but the Catholic church they go through they go through a process of like uh making sure like uh that you're healthy that you you know you go to the doctor that you have a psycho psych psychiatric evaluation. They make sure that you know they go through all those processes first before they'll even say like hey oh yeah you got a demon let's send let's send a priest out to exercise you next thing you know you're on the treadmill. Um, but anyways, >> 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 >> Here, here's something I'm going to say that I I know I know is going to get me flack, but I am I am unconvinced that schizophrenia has no supernatural connection, right?

¶399And I I don't see why it can't be the case that the supernatural can actually have like a material effect on the world. Um, and not that I want to say everybody who's going like through a schizophrenic experience is like some sort of demon. I think that'd be a horrible thing to say because I think they should go through the proper processes of getting like the medication and walking to the doctor. But to say that there is no sort of uh supernatural influence out there that can alter the brain or alter your body chemistry to create these things because to me I always found it weird that uh people who have like schizophrenia always perceive um non-g good things like like I you don't hear people like who are schizophrenic who just have these beings that constantly compliment them and show them love and bring them up. I always found that odd that it was it's always the case that they're like they torment the individual which is horrible.

¶400Um and I just found that odd and again that's not an evidence and that's not a reason that they shouldn't seek professional medical help or that they they should only go to a priest or a pastor and get prayed over. I think they should do both. Um but there that is always been very interesting to me. Do you have any thoughts on that then? >> Yeah, I mean there there's there's a lot to say uh on that topic.

¶401I'll say like I'm not going to say that every single instance where somebody's having some sort of like a mental episode like that is demonic. >> Yeah. I would say >> I'm also not going to say none of those instances are denom are demonic, right? like it's you're going to have overlaps where the presentation is similar and you're going to be looking at different criteria basically that are going to be able to disamiguate between the two. Um, so if you listen to some uh especially like Catholic exorcists, they have a very detailed process as to like how to distinguish between um a person that's having just genuinely like some sort of mental health issue versus a mental health issue that's caused by some sort of demonic possession.

¶402right now. Do you think do you think it is the case that if uh a demon could alter the material world in so far as that like it would create some sort of like condition for you like a mental health condition? >> Uh I don't think demons have the power to alter like the material world in that Well, I guess let me slow down there. What do you mean by alter the material world? >> Well, you know how like there's like um pl the brain is like placid and uh through through like the way we interact with the world, it can alter.

¶403And could it not be the case that like a demon has like tormented you to the point where like your brain has created these pathways that create >> Yeah. Yeah. >> You know, >> okay. If that's what you mean by that, then yes. I like I I 100%.

¶404Like, um I'm not saying I'm a victim of some sort of demonic oppression or anything like that, but the is this where you came out of things that I've >> No, no, no. Okay. Uh but the things that I've experienced in my life that like basically still to this day um how I experience the world, right? The neural pathways and the way my nervous system like takes in information and all that stuff, right? Like it could just be that there was really crappy stuff that happened to me or it could be that some sort in some way, shape or form demons got involved.

¶405>> Well, it also could be both, right? >> They them intellectually in the future. >> Well, it could it could be both, too. It could be the fact that you've had some sort of traumatic event. Uh the demons recognize there's a traumatic event.

¶406They recognize that, you know, you you were gifted by God or something like that for whatever reason. And through that trauma, they guide you more into it. Um, like there's like here's the thing. Um, for those that have been watching my channel for a while, you guys know that I went uh through like a really uh bad mental episode um where I disconnected from my body. I depersonalized.

¶407I I went to the hospital. Nobody could help me. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what time it was. For all intents and purposes, it was like a psychotic lapse.

¶408And when I was in that uh state of affairs, there's a big part of me and Abby that were convinced that there was like Abby, actually, since you're here. >> Hello. You don't want to be on camera? Um, she's having a rough day. So, anyways, Abby can vouch for this, but there was a big part of us that were convinced um that there was some sort of demonic influence that was involved in that.

¶409And it's not that the demons were causing the psychotic event or whatever event I was going through. We never really got that confirmed. Um but it's the fact that while I was in that event, what the things I was like seeing and experiencing. Um like I would constantly see Abby uh not as the person as she was. And so we were we had a belief that I had some sort of condition that was correlated to something else.

¶410And through that condition, uh, demonic entities were messing with us. And again, this could all just be like my psychological position, right? You're going to expect to see somebody who's like has a mental collapse. They're going to witness these things. Um, but yeah, so we we were under that impression.

¶411Hey, maybe I could be in your documentary. We could talk about that because I don't know if I ever told you this story then about like that >> before I had that before I had that mental break. Um I had a friend who who contacted me uh my old pastor from my old uh church uh and he sent me a message and it was just out of the blue was out of nowhere. He's never sent me a message like this ever in his life. I still had the text message too and uh he said to me he said, "Hey, this is out of the blue.

¶412I don't know if I just ate bad pizza. I don't know what's going on, but I just had this vision. And the vision is uh Satan is going to attack you and he's going to stick a knife in your side and he's going to twist it and bring you to your knees. Uh and it's going to be one of the worst things you go through. And if you get through it, there's like an if then conditional.

¶413If you get through it, your faith will be stronger than it's ever been. But this is this just something that told me. And it wasn't even two weeks after this, I had this mental like big break. And a lot of people I talked to were convinced that he primed me for this break. But I don't think that's the case considering everything that happened.

¶414But yeah, so he told me that and then when I went I went and talked to him about it while I was in the break and he's he explained all the details. He's like, "I saw you with like a knife in your side on your knees." And I was like, >> "Bro, it was like such a weird coincidence that he sent me the message. I had a mental break. I had these visions of like this demonic thing." And then through that after it when I finally did came out of it and it was through my faith that I came out of it that those I tried therapy, I tried medication. Uh we tried a lot of things but it was only through my faith I was able to get out of it.

¶415Um and then yeah, my faith was stronger because of it. That was one of those things. But yeah, we were convinced. We were convinced. >> There's some sort of like >> it was weird.

¶416It's hard to explain. And there's I'm going over a lot of information in a short time because this happened within a span of like >> No, I can tell it's a compressed version of the story. >> Four four months. So, anybody who's more curious about that, it's in my testimony playlist if anybody wants the whole story. It's like 3 hours.

¶417It's on there. >> Thin green slits instantaneously, which is what like a lot of these exorcist deliverance ministers are saying. Being 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, doesn't make you be able to have things just like fly off the shelf.

¶418And 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 >> uh my brother would have been much better off with less forced prescriptions and more hard work. Uh the word of God saw strong holds on to them. I I I agree. I think prescriptions are used to put you in a mental state to deal with the condition you have.

¶419Very often uh they get used as the means to get out of it. Um so we used when I was in that state I we used uh medication to put me in a baseline so I could deal with what was in front of me. And then once I dealt with it, then I came off the medication. But I think too many people use it as the only means to operate. >> All these people in a massive lie.

¶420Are they all just cosmically confabulating? >> Isn't it weird though that you or I or many people who watch this haven't seen things like that to at least to the degree of which we're speaking? >> Well, I'm guess a lot of our listeners probably have. I mean, I think the 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.

¶421Uh, I have some people who have told me stories like that, but 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.

¶422Just it seems more obvious cuz 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, they're not >> well. Well, this is what's going on in my mind.

¶423On the one hand, I'm thinking it seems incredibly difficult to explain away what they're saying. And I mean, actually, there are some cases where, you know, we do have at least put photographs and things like that that extra have talked about and shared and what and Cameron's actually done a video on that with like Msina 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.

¶424So and this is something atheists need to stop doing. Um they need to stop jumping to the conclusion that okay um did somebody say something that I don't think it happened? Yes. Okay. They're lying.

¶425>> That's just the the silliest conclusion that people could jump to. uh they need to navigate why they said that in the first place and maybe it is the case that they're lying and yes people do lie and yes people make up fanciful stories to get attention but you shouldn't always start on the presumption that yeah individual said something that I don't think is true therefore lying you need some reason to hold to lying like people people do lie people lie all the time there are people who who u do it just out of habit these people exist but I don't think it's the case that it's just like everybody always lies all the time for attention. In singular cases, could be, you know, yep, that person lied. But when you have an astronomical amount of people conveying the same story and these stories relate to each other, um, all you need is one of those stories to be true and then you got a problem. And so, your initial uh, instinct shouldn't be that they're all lying.

¶426You should investigate the data. You have thoughts on that? You said, "Yeah." >> Oh, no. I was just kind of I was just agreeing with you. >> Okay.

¶427I love it when you agree with me. Makes me feel smart. I'm just thinking like again at this stage I don't actually believe it. I'm just shipping in my seat, right? And I don't know how someone could like seemingly honest people like Dr.

¶428Richard Gallagher, Adam Blie, all these exorcists and like basically pan cultural testimony for thousands of years um to the 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? This is a pebble. It's a pebble in my shoe.

¶429It'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. It's easy to mock, but there's got to be some explanation.

¶430>> Yeah, that's such a good point. That's such a good point. Cameron saying to him, "Give me an answer." Right? There's too many atheists who get away with just I don't know, but they're it's not what you think it is. I don't know.

¶431Okay. Give me an answer. Give me a reason why this is happening. Give me give me some reason to believe outside of God. Because this so many atheists in the world, so many is just like, "Your God's not real.

¶432You shouldn't believe in your sky daddy." And we go, we go, "Well, what about all of these things over here?" And they go, "I don't know why all those things are over there, but it's definitely not God." Okay, well, give me another reason. Nah, I don't have to do that. You're stupid for believing in your sky daddy. But all these things over here that point to my sky daddy and that's not your sky. And it's just it's very dismissive, very handwavy.

¶433It's not intellectually honest. It's not scientific by any means because the science scientific method is, hey, you have hypothesis, a test hypothesis, and they refuse to test it. They just conclude, well, as long as I could posit some sort of natural explanation that is in the realm of possibility, then doesn't matter what it points to, it's false. It's not God until your God writes in the sky, I am God. Believe in me, and slaps you around and throws you around.

¶434And even then, you're probably not going to believe because you think it was some sort of psychotic episode. Yeah, like they're just there there's a certain level of skepticism that's too far. Any thoughts or do you want me to keep going? >> No, I I think at the at the end of the day it's just I'm not going to psychoanalyze a bunch of people that I don't know, but at the end of the day, it's like >> identity protection. that it I I so many of these skeptics, right, their identity is like rested on being a part of the skeptical community.

¶435And when you don't have a way to deal with some of these, it's like you're just going to do the thing that protects you from actually having to die to yourself and find your true identity in Christ. >> Uh what what are you saying, Funky? Hey, congrats, John. You just covered the two debates that Jesus and whatnot just did like everyone has beenounding you to do. Oh yeah, I see what you're saying.

¶436Yeah, I just did in two seconds. That was his last two debates. Uh I'm not convinced, but it's not your sky daddy. It is so bad. Did you Did you watch any of the Jesus and whatnot versus born again atheist?

¶437>> No, >> don't. It's not worth your time. >> I I that's why I didn't watch it >> based. >> Yeah. Well, there something even if it's lying or whatever.

¶438So you tell me what you think it is based on this. >> Yes. And you know, you can just divine from the architecture 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 Robbie Manheim.

¶439>> My my big issue with conspiracy theories, too, is that everybody's conspiring or plotting or trying to manipulate or control you or put implement these certain systems is I don't think people are disciplined enough to allow these conspiracies to happen. Right? Like if if if the Catholic Church, for example, had all these demonic things and they were making it all up and they were inventing these stories and they were saying these people threw these books and they levitated and things are scared and they scarred on them and they came up with these languages that they shouldn't know. Um they would have to have some sort of like cuz they all correlate with each other. They'd have to have some sort of unification like of conversing with each other of like figuring out, hey, how we're going to do this.

¶440And they would have to have a certain amount of discipline to make sure that not somebody didn't like leave the Catholic Church and go, hey, uh yeah, they're all making it up. And there's this big plan to like invent these stories to make you believe in uh demonic behavior so that way you can go into the Catholic Church and you could tie to them. Like we have no data or no evidence that points that direction. And so then you have to say that I think then you'd have to come up with like a uh the idea that they're just primed. And so they're all just primed to believe it in the first place and therefore they make themselves believe it and they just kind of go with it anyways.

¶441Which again I think is really silly. Maybe you could see that was some sort of like Pentecost thing where you feel the Holy Spirit in the room and you were primed for that. Sure. But to say like this person levitated in the air is crazy work and they're all primed to believe that. That's weird to me.

¶442Roland do case where we have like the contemporaneous taken notes from like >> me big yap yeah fan yeah y >> the twoist at the time these cases are just I don't know if you've looked into any of these cases man but it's just like especially with these with these dude with these exorcisms and stuff like >> if you want to even posit the whole conspiracy theory thing >> what what what is the what does the family get out of this dude like they're still poor they're still struggling every single day like why why are conspiring to do this and they're only getting laughed at and they they like they know they're going to get laughed at. They're not they're not going to make this up >> in hopes that they're going to >> People do crazy things. Have you not heard drinking the Kool-Aid thing? >> Oh, their godd. >> They blow themselves up for their god.

¶443Then they drink the Kool-Aid. Then >> their p their pastor or priest just told them they had to do it in the name of their god. So they did it. Than >> that's the reason. What what about all the demonic possessions that happen in Islam then?

¶444>> Yeah. Show show the answer there is show me the cases. >> I've asked everybody people bring that up to me all the time and I say okay show me. >> Yeah. Yeah.

¶445Show me. Show me. And they they they never bring you they never bring you any of this any of this. The only especially when it comes to Islam, they'll be like well most of the time atheists don't they they won't find anything. But then the Muslims will be like well the the Quran is a miracle and it's like dude cases like you know in the um in the uh see again it's not just deliverance ministers and whatnot.

¶446Um in the Latoya Emmens case in like Gary, Indiana or something like a decade ago or something like that, um they had like a whole government report about this and they 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 wrong? Is she on the lie?" And so like again, I'm just shifting my seat. I'm not convinced yet. Yeah.

¶447But >> 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. And in fact, I could see at least non-silly explanations for why this stuff isn't so prevalent, right?

¶448I mean, cuz 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. And 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.

¶449But 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.

¶450You're not going to take a camera into an exorcism session. Like it's it's 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 >> I don't agree with that.

¶451>> Oh, I uh have you looked into some of these cases? >> No, I haven't. But I think >> I I think the I think the importance of >> getting that data out there uh outweighs the mercy. >> So there's a few there's a few moving pieces here. um one is the importance of the data I think doesn't outweigh the privacy and the vulnerability the person like so like there some of these cases >> will like they'll just >> oh shoot it's payday I almost forgot to pay my bill this month sorry boss boss it won't happen again again >> if you're if you're late again, we're going to add on late fees, so just fair warning.

¶452So, you know, be on time next month. Thank you, though. Thank you very much for paying your bill. Anyways, go ahead then. >> Yeah, like some of these cases, like especially a woman involved, like sometimes in the middle of this exorcism, they'll literally just start stripping naked and like trying to seduce the priest and stuff like that, >> right?

¶453But you could you could censor that, >> right? But like you still don't want to a lot of people don't want to be seen like that. So like there's that side of it because you don't want to you don't want >> but there has to be there has to be like an individual that like like you could tape it not release it to the public and then like ask for permission afterwards retroactively get the consent. >> I I get where you're coming from. The other side of the coin is a lot of times there have been times where people have tried to videotape >> and nothing was happening.

¶454the exorcism like in the in the midst of the investigation process and even in the midst of the >> how convenient then >> howient cameras off >> as soon as they turn the cameras off the starts happening and then you can actually still like see some of these effects and stuff like that. So, I mean, like when you look at the Lisa and there's just stuff that you don't need cameras for, like the with the with um the exorcist's last name is Gallagher and this woman that he um interacted with is her name is Lisa. Julia. Julia. Um and like you don't need a camera for this, right?

¶455Like him and his wife him Gallagher the night before he meets Julia, his cats started acting out. Okay. like crazy stuff. They actually like started like violently fighting and the cats have never done that before and never did it afterwards. And then when he meets Julia for the exorc like to start assessing her um she entered into like a really translight state and then in a voice that isn't hers looked him dead in the eyes and goes, "How were those cats last night?

¶456Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. >> Did I ever tell you about Aquater?

¶457>> No. >> When I So, when I first started doing um this online before I knew you, before I knew any anybody. Um and I I was really popular. Like I was really popular for a season. I knew nothing about Christianity.

¶458I still haven't fully read the scripture. I only did it just out of like why not? I had no intention to te teach. I even told people I'm like I don't know. I'm just telling you my testimony.

¶459This is what God did for me. And I was getting anywhere from like 4,000 to 7,000 viewers at a time. And I talked to a lot of people. I had like to have a 15-minute timer because the queue is so heavy. And eventually we ran into this guy.

¶460And this guy is a leader of a cult, right? He he he said that he was the uh the Christ and and all this. And I talked to him. He was very well spoken, well well informed. And I'm sitting there talking to him and you know Jordan, right?

¶461Jordan will vouch for this story. He he was there. He saw it. So Jordan is watching this. He's not in Jordan used to come up in the live with me because he knew more about the scripture and he could defend in debate and I could give my testimony and we were there in the live and Jordan's not on the live.

¶462He's just watching it and he's sending text me like he's texting me and he's sending messages. He's like you got to get this guy off. You got to get you got to send him away. And then all the Christians in the chat are like send this guy away. Send this guy away.

¶463Send this guy away. And I'm sitting there and there's only been a few times in my life where I've really felt the voice of God, where I really felt the Holy Spirit. It's not like a very common thing. I felt the Holy Spirit. And I was just like I'm like I could feel I could feel that fire, right?

¶464And I'm sitting there and he looked me dead. I have this on film. I actually have it taped. I can send it to you. He looked me dead in the eyes.

¶465He's like, "The spirit's talking to you right now, isn't he?" And I was like, I I kicked him. I was done. I was like, I couldn't do it, man. It scared the [ __ ] out of me to I get chills thinking about it right now. >> Yeah, dude.

¶466There's that. Okay, so that reminds This is the same case of the Julia case that I was talking about. >> So, Father Gallagher is talking to Julia and there's another I forgot what the other father's name. Father uh I don't remember. We'll just call him the other father.

¶467Okay. Um >> who's your father? It's my other father over there. Sorry, that's a Canadian. Go ahead.

¶468>> Fair enough. So, she's talking So, Julia's talking to Father Gallagher and then she sees she can see the like she can actually see the other father who is the chief exorcist. And this dude is hundreds of miles away, right? There there's like no reason whatsoever to think that she knows about the hierarchy, um the the who's who or anything like that, right? And so, Father Gallagher challenges Julia.

¶469Well, if you can see him, even though he's hundreds of miles away, what does he look like? And John, she doesn't just get his description right. He She actually tells him what he's doing at that precise moment. So, she literally says, "Oh, well, he's walking alongside the beach and he's praying his breviary wearing a blue windbreaker." Uh, I forgot what kind of pants he was wearing, but a particular kind of pants, >> right? And then Gallagher calls the other father asking him to confirm it and it was correct.

¶470It's a coincidence, guys. Big conspiracy. They're just making it up. Just making they're just primed to believe it, guys. They're just big big crazy coincidence.

¶471>> Extremely humiliating and disgusting and gross to the victim. They're 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. >> Oh, hold on. I got to I forgot to read this.

¶472Uh, makes sense. The demons will work in framework of the viewers minds as best they can guess. It it this is why I assume we see more over avert sightings in a more spiritual location. Well, I just mean like listen, I've always thought about that too. If a demon uh wants you to not know God, I think the worst thing it could do.

¶473If like if the goal of the demon is to make sure you don't know God, then the worst thing the demon could do is make itself known. That I've always thought that even when I was an atheist. I'm like, "Well, why do we see demons?" I'm like, "Well, if a demon showed it, like if demons are walking around the street, I'm a demon." Everybody be like, "Well, if demons are real, God's real >> and we'll get >> Can I share that video?" I don't like sharing. I could give it to you guys like we could watch it in the Discord and you can see it. But, uh, I don't want to publicly play place it because I just know everybody's going to call [ __ ] there.

¶474No spirit was talking to you. You're just lying. Like, I can't prove to anybody and the reason I never put this out as evidence and I'm only telling Than because Then trusts me as an individual. I can't prove to anybody that the Holy Spirit was talking to me in that moment. He like what the atheists are gonna say.

¶475Uh yes, Abby, I I know. Uh the the atheists are gonna say that um I he said that the spirit was talking to me and then I lied afterward and I just claimed that the spirit was talking to me. Um but yes, I can show it to you guys in the Discord if you guys want to see it. Uh I can jump on later tonight and we can play it. read screw tape letters.

¶476Oh, no. >> Back to this because this is like the divine hiddenness model that started explaining my evidential situation once I learn about all the other. >> Then it makes them more makes some people think everyone else is crazy. Makes some things demons are more powerful than angels. Okay.

¶477Yeah. >> Miracles and whatnot. >> So again, at this stage, yeah, at this stage, let's like >> shifting in your chair. >> Yeah. At this stage, I'm starting to lean towards theism.

¶478>> 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? Are are they just systematically lying?

¶479Are they confabulating on cosmic proportions? And what I had to say I was just shifting in my seat. So I'm uncomfortable. Okay, Cameron continues to make videos. He picks Our Lady of Zetune.

¶480>> 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. Come 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.

¶481listen. Have eyes to see and ears to hear. Listen. Okay. So, again, I'm thinking, okay, fine.

¶482I'll watch your silly, stupid little video on Marion apparitions. And 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. So, it happened in 19 from 1968 to 1971, a top a Coptic Orthodox church in Zetun, Egypt. I think it's like a suburb of Cairo or something like that.

¶483And one night there are these Muslim transit workers and they look at top this St. Mary'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 have testimonies from this. It's like don't jump, don't jump.

¶484They 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 literally started floating the apparition thing which they thought was a nun. Like evidently they had had some kind of like female. >> But how do you know that's not just a demon messing with you? Huh?

¶485How do you know? How do you know? >> I just I just know the objections. >> It'd be really funny if a skeptic said that to be honest with you, cuz it's just like, weren't you just like laughing at me about demon possession? >> Well, I think it's the eternal critique, right?

¶486How do how do you know? How do you know, right? It could be a demon, could be God. It's like, okay, this is probably an alien. Um, uh, this stand guy's voice is really annoying.

¶487I bet he can't even ben bench eight reps at 250. Can you? Uh, no, not right now. I can't. >> Uh, modern atheism comes, not gonna lie, I'm really sad about this.

¶488Well, you're only sad because you're starting to break up with your atheism. And so, through any breakup, you you start to realize you're going through the first part right now, which is denial. So, a modern day atheism, you're in denial right now about the fact that your relationship with atheism is on the rocks. And the next step is going to be like you're going to go through like anger, grief, right? you're going to beg and eventually you're going to accept the fact that God is real and you're going to join us on our side and I will come to your baptism.

¶489Uh so yeah, that that's the reason that you're sad about this. I'm sorry to break it to you, bro. The truth hurts. Truth hurts, my friend. Uh with that being said, folks, I got to go.

¶490Uh me and Abby got an appointment. We're going to go find out if our baby is healthy. So everybody, please pray for us >> uh as we go do that. So we're doing that that appointment that every parent has to go through. So, when we end this live, if you guys don't mind praying for us, I'd appreciate that.

¶491Uh, I'm going to pray now and then I'm going to take off. So, our father who's in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Lord, uh thank you for bringing Joe into the family. Uh I think he's going to be a good force and a good movement uh for what you want and desire for us and bringing people into the knowledge of who you are.

¶492I ask that you walk with him as he goes through this as a lot of people are going to attack him and try to bring him down. And uh Lord that you give us an opportunity to learn and grow from it so we can use it to help build your kingdom. Not that you need the help but you allow us to participate in it. Forgive us of our sins. Give us grace.

¶493Never turn your face from us. Watch out for me and Abby as we go for this meeting and make sure that we get good news. Uh look out for Than as he's going on this uh journey trying to bring this new knowledge into the world. The attacks are going to be heavy. People are just going to call him stupid.

¶494Uh so just give us the spirit to walk through it and really bring the truth forward in Jesus name. Amen. Name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. For the kingdom, the power and glory are yours now and forever. Amen.

¶495All right, folks. Uh then do you want to plug your thing real quick? Your academy before I take off? >> Uh no, no. Go do your thing.

¶496Go to your appointment, bro. >> Okay. All right, guys. Uh, God bless y'all. We will see you all tomorrow for some debates.

¶497Uh, might see you all tonight. We'll seeuh how time frame works. But yeah, we'll see you guys all next time. Have a great day. >> Attention test subjects.

¶498The crusaderscluded. Statistically, most of you survived. Survived. That number is higher than congratulations are technically in order. I want to thank each of you for your participation.

¶499Not because it was appreciated. The data will determine that later. But because policy requires positive reinforcement regardless of actual performance, let's review some highlights. Highlights. Several of you showed remarkable dedication.

¶500Others showed up. Both are being logged as participation because apparently we're not allowed to distinguish between them anymore. To the individual who asked, "Is this mandatory?" Yes, it was mandatory. It remains mandatory. retroactively to the person who brought snacks.

¶501Thank you. You have been promoted to provisional morale officer. This is not a paid position. It was never going to be a paid position. And to everyone who completed the crusade without significant injury, structural damage, or triggering an incident report, well done.

¶502You are, and I cannot stress this enough, exactly what we hoped for, adequate. Now, about next time, yes, there will be a next time. I know some of you were secretly hoping the crusade was a one-time event, like a natural disaster, or a bad decision made at a company retreat. It was not. It is, in fact, an ongoing initiative, and your continued involvement has already been assumed, scheduled, and in some cases contractually implied.

¶503So, mark your calendars, bring your friends, bring your enemies. Frankly, we're not picky, and neither is the signup sheet. We look forward to doing this again. And by look forward to I mean the outcome is inevitable and your feelings on the matter while noted will not be a factor. Thank you for participating.

¶504Thank you for surviving. And thank you in advance for coming back. The crusade is over. The next crusade.